sure she hadn't wandered too far off course. She tried to keep to a straight line.
She had been pulling for most of the day when a wedge of sky appeared ahead of her. First it was just a cup-shaped hole through which she was able to glimpse a few weak stars, but then the fog parted around it, spreading open as though someone had unfastened a giant zipper, and the moonlight came pouring through. She propelled herself forward with a dozen driving jabs of her poles, hurrying toward the light. The fog dissolved into clear air around her. The weight of the sledge seemed like an unnecessary burden. She would have thrown it off if she could have – just thrown it off and run. She saw the ice that lay above the crevasse, a thin sheet of brittle shining glass, a split second before she was on top of it. But there was no time for her to stop.
She said something out loud – 'Wait!' she thought it was, though maybe it was 'Shit!' – and then the ice made a splintering noise, shattering into a thousand fragments, and she felt herself falling.
She was caught by the straps of her harness. Her neck wrenched backward, the air rushed out of her lungs, and she heard a clattering sound. She saw white shapes like moths or butterflies floating across her vision in the darkness.
After a few seconds, she began to breathe again. She was dangling inside her harness. She kicked at the air, casting about for a ledge, a foothold, anything. The walls must have been ten feet apart. Her legs kept pinwheeling between them. Whenever she managed to touch one, her feet would slide loose, and she would start swaying back and forth again. Finally she brushed up against what felt like a pressure cleft or an indentation, but before she was able to anchor herself to it, she began sliding down again.
It took her a moment to realize what was happening: the sledge was being pulled toward the fissure. She dropped five feet in a matter of seconds, then halted for a moment, spinning in her harness, before she dropped another two.
She waited until she was sure she had stopped. Then she looked up. The effort of craning her neck made her dizzy, but she forced herself to ignore the feeling. She could see one of the flippers projecting over the edge of the cut. It was outlined against the sky, a stream of stars contained between the solid black walls of the crevasse. The other flipper was not visible to her. The sledge must have lodged against a ridge or a snowdrift, twisting the runners off center. That had to be what was holding it in place. Temporarily.
Delicately, she reached for the wall. She was closer to it now by perhaps a foot. The rope held steady. The ice was hard and slick, with none of the snow that had given her traction when she was making her way across the shelf. She prodded it gently with her mitts. She could not feel any irregularities there. She was afraid that if she moved too suddenly, she would give the sledge enough momentum to skip off whatever obstruction it had lodged against and her weight would pull it into the gap. The walls were too wide for the flippers to be effective, which meant that the sledge would either crush her as it fell or go plummeting past her body and yank her into the void. How deep did the crevasse go? She wouldn't be surprised if it bottomed out at the ocean itself, that thin band of water that had somehow managed to remain liquid beneath the pressure of the ice: barely moving, home to absolutely nothing.
So she could freeze to death, or she could fall and break her neck, or she could drown. Those were the possibilities.
And then there was a fourth possibility, the only other one she could think of. She could climb the rope and lift herself out of the crevasse. She could save herself.
Or not. She had to admit she was tempted to undo the harness and simply let herself drop. It would be a thousand times easier that way. She would never have to pull a sledge again, never have to struggle or wish or remember again. She imagined death as a wonderful melting. The cold would pass out of her blood. She would be so much warmer. No one would ever find her or know what had happened to her, no one would ever see her again, and what difference would it make? The world was over anyway. She would never meet another living soul.
But in the end, she knew, she couldn't let herself do it, couldn't let herself fall. She had to keep struggling, for the same reason everybody else kept struggling, or at least they always had in the past. She felt that to let go of the rope would be cheating.
She looked up again. The nipper was still hanging over the edge of the fissure. She understood that if she was going to make it to the surface, she would have to start now, before she fell asleep and the rest of her strength drained away. She had given herself a fifteen-foot lead on the sledge, so the climb couldn't be any farther than that. She brought her hand to her pocket to put her flashlight away, but realized she was no longer carrying it. She must have dropped it when she fell. She looked between her boots to see if she could spot a pinprick of light twinkling somewhere below her, but there was nothing there to see.
The flashlight was gone. But she couldn't worry about that now.
She tried to take hold of the rope, folding her mitts stiffly around it. They crunched and crackled as the ice inside them snapped loose. At first she thought she had gained a grip on the rope, but as soon as she attempted to lift herself, her hands slipped free. She tried once more, and the same thing happened. Her mitts were too rigid. It was obvious that if she was going to climb out of the crevasse, she would have to use her bare hands. She took her mitts off, stuffing them deep in her pockets. The lining had adhered to her skin, and she had no choice but to leave it in place for now. She took hold of the rope again. Immediately, the tips of her fingers began to sting, as though she had plunged them into a mass of thorns, but within seconds they were numb. She managed to pull herself a few fists higher. Her muscles threatened to burst apart in a hundred limp strings, but the sledge stayed in place. So far, so good. She hoisted herself another few inches and then her strength gave out and she lost her grip again.
Once more, she was swaying at the end of her harness, her head spinning. She took the rope in her hands and began to climb again. All of the ice inside her snowsuit had cracked loose when she fell into the crevasse, and now, as she tried to lift herself free, she could feel the debris shifting around inside her clothing, two heavy bulges around her ankles and a third around her waist. They reminded her of the rings that formed around giant planets.
Which would make her the giant planet, she supposed. Saturn, maybe.
She had heard somewhere that if you lowered yourself into a well, most of the sunlight would be sapped from the circle of sky that lay between the stones, and the constellations would shine through like steel rivets, even in the middle of the day. If only the reverse were true, she thought. If only the sun could burn through the sky in the middle of the night. When she gazed out of the crevice, though, all she saw were the same stars she had seen the last time she looked, along with the trailing thread of the aurora.
There was no feeling at all in her hands. She knew she had taken hold of the rope only by the strain of the line against her bones and the dimmed-out evidence of her eyes. She made her way up inch by inch, refusing to let go. A great loop of rope went slack beneath her as she climbed. Once, halfway to the top, she made the mistake of placing her foot in the loop and trying to use it for leverage. The rope was yanked out of her grasp, and she slipped once more to the full length of the harness. She began climbing again. Every sound she made seemed to rattle around between the walls like a rock inside a tin can. She must have been on her fourth or fifth attempt when her foot grazed the pressure cleft she had noticed earlier. She worked at it until she could fit the toe of her boot inside.
It was a relief to feel something solid beneath her, no matter how precarious it might be. She paused there for a moment. Then she sank her weight onto her boot and gave the biggest leap she could manage.
The maneuver gained her almost a foot. The rope swung in a long curve that propelled her against the wall, and she almost lost her grip, but she held on as she waited for the line to fall still. The end of the climb was within reach. She lifted herself another few inches, took a deep breath, then lifted herself again. Five more handholds and she was at the lip of the crevasse, taking hold of the side. But before she could scramble onto level ground, the ice she was clutching calved off in her fingers. She dropped all the way back down into the fissure.
Again she lost her breath, and again she saw the white shapes meandering across the darkness, and she listened as the sledge sawed closer to the edge of the crevasse and then scraped to a stop.
She rested for a long time, slowly spinning in her harness. She didn't want to die there – she had decided not to die there – and so, limp and freezing and numb, she began making her way up the rope again.
Finally, after two more tries, and with the assistance of the pressure cleft, she was able to scale the rope and thrust herself onto the snow. She crawled away from the brink of the fissure before it could collapse again. Then she lay on her back and stared at the sky. She began to cry. The tears froze to her cheeks, but she couldn't stop herself. She was just so relieved to feel the ground beneath her. There was one particular star in the sky, fat and
