She picked herself up and brushed the snow from her body, collecting the crystals in her palms and pouring them into the fountain over the thousands of silver coins, which shimmered in the light of the atrium. The still water reflected the scarves and curtains of the aurora. She watched them snap and flicker above the coins. Then she set off down the corridor that connected the atrium to the public relations building. The marbles were still rolling along in formation, though the air in the corridor was dead-motionless, even in the wake of her body, and she could no longer be sure what was driving them forward. Plainly it wasn't the wind.
There were doors to either side where she heard the routine sounds of business being conducted, sounds so familiar to her that they had long since lost all meaning. A woman was dictating a report into her computer's voice-recognition speaker. A man was pacing the floor of his office as he spoke on the telephone. A copy machine was processing a stack of papers, its armature sliding back and forth beneath the glass with a zippered halting noise. All the doors in the corridor were closed, and when Laura tried to open them, she found them locked.
She kept walking down the hallway. She passed by a bank of elevators and through an empty reception area where the water cooler beside the couch gave up a wobbling bubble of oxygen. It was hard for her to believe that she had spent so much of her life in this building, or in other buildings just like it, walking around inside rooms that were thirty or forty or fifty feet above the earth, whose walls and floors and ceilings had been constructed around spaces where no human being had ever set foot just a few years before.
The lead marble – she had forgotten its name – turned down a corridor that led toward an open flight of stairs, and the other marbles flocked around behind it. Without hesitation they took the stairs toward the roof, bumping from step to step like a colony of ants fording a stream across one another's backs. She began to climb up after them. It was twenty flights or more before she and the marbles reached the building's top floor, but she made the climb with surprising ease. She couldn't speak for the marbles, but she herself felt strong and vigorous, she might even say athletic. There was so much power in her body, more than there had been at any time since her adolescence. It was as though all her months in the Antarctic had never happened at all. She pushed at the fire door that was positioned at the top of the stairs and stepped out onto the roof.
The building beneath her was water. All its rooms were water, and all its hallways were water, and she was sailing across it on a great raft of ice. The fire door slowly shut behind her, drawing back with a long, hissing exhalation. She heard it lock into place. The marbles were all huddled together at the leading edge of the ice floe. They looked like passengers peering over the rails of a ship. Every so often, the wind would send one of its ligaments whipping up at them from the ocean, and two or three of them would go soaring up over the others to land at the back of the crowd.
Laura adjusted the sails on the ice floe and took hold of the wheel. When she spun it to starboard, the floe nosed out toward the stars and the open water, so she swung it back to port, and the floe drifted smoothly and slowly back toward the pack ice that skirted the land mass. It was several hours before she finally docked, sliding into the hollow between two loosely joined sheets of ice, at which point she let go of the wheel and walked off the end of the floe without dropping anchor. The new ice rocked slightly beneath her weight. But it remained afloat, and after a few steps, she found herself walking on a more solid foundation. The marbles were following her now, coasting and whirling over the snow, above and between the staggered lines of her footprints. Occasionally they would roll against the backs of her feet – a quick cold tap. And every now and then one or two of them would go slewing out in front of her in a fishhooking sort of curve, but they never ventured too far ahead.
The sun and the moon had been resting at opposite ends of the sky for so long that it was impossible for her to tell what time of day it was, but she decided she would call it afternoon, so afternoon it was. Late afternoon, she would guess. She had heard once that late afternoon – three-thirty or four o'clock – was when the human body temperature was at its coolest, and sure enough, when she pressed her palm to her forehead, she found that she was freezing. Her skin threw off the dry chill of a metal serving tray left outside on a winter night. She was cold enough to feel the contours of her skeleton inside her body. Yet she was perfectly at ease, peaceful even, with a wonderful looseness in her hands and toes and her blood completely still inside her. She felt as though she were sleeping in her bed at home.
When the ice sheet she was crossing fell off into the water, crumbling to pieces along the left side, she skipped over the margin onto the ice floe bobbing next to it. She was a dancer of sorts. She had always wanted to be a dancer. The gap where the ocean lay was an orchestra pit, and she could see the violinists sawing away beneath the water, the percussionist pounding on his big bass drum, the limb of the trombone sliding out, then consuming itself, then sliding out again. She rose onto her toes to leap over a chunk of broken ice. The music blossomed from the water to carry across the frozen bay. For a moment, she thought she was going to lose herself in it, in the sway of the strings and the reverberations of the horns – she had always known that she could lose herself in a piece of music – but then the breaking noise of a cymbal became the crack of a gunshot, and a flock of birds lifted noisily up from the ice, and she watched them take off and bank toward the ocean in a geyser of wings.
How long had she been walking toward the sun? It seemed like weeks since she had found the ruins of the hut alongside the rookery and fallen asleep inside her tent and then woken in a pool of red threads and shed her clothing and set off after the marbles.
Though perhaps it had been only a few minutes.
What was clear was that something had happened. Her sense of time had broken apart into two equal halves and fallen away from her like the shell of a walnut.
She found herself forecasting the colors the sun would make on the ice. A gold like the pollen of ragweed flowers. A pale green like the green of Easter-egg dye. At first the colors seemed to blossom open just an instant or two before she was able to put a name to them, but a little experimentation convinced her that the process was exactly the reverse: the thought preceded the color. It was a game. She pictured the creamy off-yellow of her bathroom walls, and a half second later there it was on the ice. Seven shades of blue poured into her head, and a moment later she was threading her way right through the center of them. She could shuffle the colors at will. It was like her word association game – one word, one color, leading inexorably to the next, by a process that was largely but not wholly within her control, a process of whim and chance and improvisation. Everything depended on the fluctuations of her mind, and her mind was not entirely her own.
Those were the rules. She was beginning to understand them.
When she looked up from the colors on the ice, she saw something standing in the distance, just to the left of the sun: a glittering city, with buildings of glass and stone and steel that rose high above the streets. She saw the clean line of a river cutting through the center, wooden docks piercing the water and grass and trees growing along the banks. A suspension bridge spanned the river from one bank to the other, resembling from this distance the torn silver web of a spider. She was too far away to see how much traffic was on the streets, or indeed whether there was any traffic at all, but the spokes of a railway station shone unmistakably beneath the blue sky. Parks and arcades lay sprinkled between the buildings. An immense cloud of birds wheeled in the air.
She lost sight of the city when she dipped beneath a hill. By the time she climbed to the top and was able to see to the horizon again, it had disappeared. She turned a full circle, but still she couldn't find it anywhere.
It must have been a mirage. She had forgotten about mirages.
The sun was bigger than it had been when she started her walk, a terrible white sphere that took up half the sky. It was so bright that she imagined she could hear it sizzling. It gave off the sound of an egg sputtering in a frying pan, an egg that was just beginning to go crisp at the edges, and because she was hungry she poured the egg off onto a plate and ate it with a knife and fork, but she did not eat the sun, and she did not stop walking.
The marbles were some twenty or thirty yards ahead of her now, a hundred teetering balls, so very small inside the sealed arc of the sun. Their shadows seemed to burn themselves into the air. They were right on the verge of disappearing.
How far she must have come to make the sun so large.
How close she must have drawn to the horizon.
Most of the ice had already melted away, and soon she was leaping from one chunk to another, resting barely long enough to feel the pieces bob beneath her. Then the ice was gone altogether, and she was traveling directly across the surface of the water. Plants with long green fronds composed slow figure eights beneath her feet. Small fish darted past in the crimped light.
She had finally hit her stride. She imagined she could walk forever.
