“And so we’re here,” one of them said, “with our own Captain Nemo!”
“Yes,” Art replied easily. “But without his brooding, or so I hope.” This said with a lightning glance Mary’s way. “I hope I’m more like Passepartout. Passing by all, you know, with the least amount of difficulty.”
The green and gray masses of Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro loomed over them to the south, one very flat-topped, the other a little flat-topped. Neither had glaciers, nor any sign of snow. No such thing as the snows of Kilimanjaro. Something they could only hope for in distant times to come.
But the great plains of east Africa were still populated by animals. Yes, they were now doing a safari from the air. Elephants, giraffes, antelopes, great herds of all these, migrating from river to river. Some of the streams’ water was now piped in, Art said quietly. Desalinated at the seashore and then piped up to the headwaters and released to keep the streams flowing, the herds alive. They were in their twelfth straight year of drought.
Then Madagascar. The reforestation of that big island had been happening for well over a generation, and such was the fecundity of life that its rugged hillsides already looked densely forested, dark and wild. It had changed during Art’s time aloft, he said, and now the people of Madagascar were joining with Cubans and other island nations to help similar restoration efforts all over the world. Indonesia, Brazil, and west Africa were teammates in this effort. Rewilding, Art called it. They were rewilding down there.
That night when Mary joined Art in his understudy, Madagascar was already behind them, but the air still seemed to carry its spicy scent. Art sat looking back at the island, bulking like a sea creature with thick napped fur. He seemed content. They sipped their whiskies for a while, enjoying a companionable silence. Then they talked about other voyages they had made. He asked about her escape on foot over the Alps, apparently a famous story of her professional life, and she made it brief, talked about the Oeschinensee, and Thomas and Sibilla, and the Fründenjoch. Have you flown your Clipper over the Alps? she asked.
Once or twice, he said. It’s a bit much. They’re too high. And the weather is just so variable.
I love the Alps, she said. They’ve caught my affection.
He regarded her with a little smile. A shy Irishman. She knew that type and liked it. She had always liked those men who kept to themselves, who had only a sidelong look for her. Probably there was something back there in his past, some event or situation that had made him so aloof; but the island world he had made for himself was one that she was coming to like. Or she could see why he liked it. He was younger than she was, but old enough that they were in that temporal space that felt roughly contemporaneous.
These were fleeting thoughts. Mostly she just watched the ocean and the great black island behind them, slowly receding. But they were thoughts that led in a certain direction. She tried to track them as if they were shy animals. Desire stirring in her, maybe that was like a tracker’s curiosity. On the hunt. A hope for contact. Then in the midst of her musing he stood, saying he was feeling tired. Time for bed. He led the way up to the main gallery, said good night and turned toward his cabin.
Not a mind reader, she thought. Recalling that in her youth she had seemed to be able to reach out telepathically. Or maybe it had been a matter of looks, of pheromones. Animals in heat. Not at their age. But there was no rush.
Nothing more than that happened between them for the rest of that voyage. They still met on some nights in the viewing chamber to chat, but no more Madagascars; they were too far south.
Over the endless ocean, angling west to fight the great shove of the westerlies. Their pushback caused the Clipper to tremble and rock more than earlier in their voyage. Then one morning she woke and went to the viewing chamber, and there to the south lay Antarctica. Everyone was standing at the forward window to see it. The ocean was distinctly darker than before, almost black, which itself was strange, and faintly ominous; then to the south a white land like a low wall, white flecked with a black blacker than the strangely black sea. This great escarpment of ice and rock extended from east to west for as far as they could see.
Antarctica. It was early autumn, the sea ice minimal, although as they flew south they saw that there were icebergs everywhere. These made no pattern, just white chunks on black water. An occasional misshapen iceberg of jade or turquoise hue. Flocks, or it seemed rather shoals, of tiny penguins dotted some of these icebergs. Once they flew over a pod of orcas, sleek-backed and ominous. On tabular bergs they sometimes saw Weddell seals, looking like slugs splayed on the ice, often with smaller slugs attached to their sides like leeches. Mother and child. Their cousins, down here thriving on ice. If they were thriving.
Then Antarctica itself, white and foreboding. Ice Planet.
It was surreal in that icy desolation to come on six giant aircraft
