While dark and even greater cold enveloped the ship in the lonely frozen fjord, and the brave yellow gleam from its portholes was the only light, the only sign of life for a hundred miles across the crackling icy wastes, other themes flourished symphonically: what was to be done, what treaties were to be made between the quarrelsome nations, what concessions, what gifts should the rich world self-interestedly make to the poor? In the mess room’s humid after-dinner warmth, it seemed to the owners of full stomachs sealed with wine that it was only reason that could prevail against short-term interests and greed, only rationality could draw, by way of warning, the indistinct cartoon of a calamitous future in which all must bake, shiver or drown.
The statehood-and-treaty talk was worldly in comparison with another leitmotiv that summoned a cooling measure of austere plainsong, a puritanical air from the old conservation days, distrustful of technological fixes, determined that what was required was a different way of life for everyone, a lighter tread on the precious filigree of ecosystems, a near-religious regard for new rules of human fulfilment in order to flourish beyond supermarkets, airports, concrete, traffic, even power stations – a minority view, but heard with guilty respect by all who had steered a stinking snowmobile across the pristine land.
Listening, as he usually did, with Jesus at his side from their corner of the mess room, Beard interjected only once, on the last evening when a gangling novelist called Meredith, appearing to forget there was a physicist present, said that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which stipulated that the more one knew of a particle’s position, the less one knew of its velocity, and vice versa, encapsulated for our time the loss of a ‘moral compass’, the difficulty of absolute judgements. Beard was peevish in his interruption. It was worthwhile to be correct, he told this crop-haired fellow with rimless glasses. What was at issue was not velocity but momentum, in other words, mass times velocity. At such hair-splitting there were muted groans. Beard said that the principle had no application to the moral sphere. On the contrary, quantum mechanics was a superb predictor of the statistical probability of physical states. The novelist blushed but would not give way. Did he not know who he was talking to? Fine, yes, OK, statistical probability, he insisted, but that was not certainty. And Beard, just finishing his eighth glass of wine and feeling nose and upper lip elevate in contempt for an ignorant trespasser on his field, said loudly that the principle was not incompatible with knowing precisely the state of, say, a photon, so long as one could observe it repeatedly. The analogy in the moral sphere might be to re-examine a moral problem a number of times before arriving at a conclusion. But this was the point – Heisenberg’s Principle would only have application if the sum of right plus wrong divided by the square root of two had any meaning.
The silence in the room was not so much stunned as embarrassed. Meredith stared helplessly as Beard brought his fist down hard on the table. ‘So come on. Tell me. Let’s hear you apply Heisenberg to ethics. Right plus wrong over the square root of two. What the hell does it mean? Nothing!’
Barry Pickett intervened to move the discussion on.
That was an isolated discordant note. What was memorable and surprising came every evening, usually late on, in the bright tones of a marching brass band, or the sound of massed voices in unison, elated in common purpose and obliterating for a while all disappointment, all bitterness. Beard would not have believed it possible that he would be in a room drinking with so many seized by the same particular assumption, that it was art in its highest forms, poetry, sculpture, dance, abstract music, conceptual art, that would lift climate change as a subject, gild it, palpate it, reveal all the horror and lost beauty and awesome threat, and inspire the public to take thought, take action, or demand it of others. He sat in silent wonder. Idealism was so alien to his nature that he could not raise an objection. He was in new territory, among a friendly tribe of exotics. Those sentinel snowmen guarding the foot of the gangplank, the recorded sound of the wind moaning through the rigging, the disc of polished ice that refracted the day-long setting sun, Jesus’s penguins, thirty of them, and three polar bears, marching along the ice beyond the ship’s bow, the harsh, impenetrable fragment of a novel punctuated with expletives that Meredith read, or shouted, aloud one evening – all these demonstrations, like prayers, like totem-pole dances, were fashioned to deflect the course of a catastrophe.
Such was the music and magic of ship-bound climate-change talk. Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall he had learned to call a bulkhead, the boot room continued to deteriorate. By midweek four helmets were missing along with three of the heavy snowmobile suits and many smaller items. It was no longer possible for more than two thirds of the company to be outside at the same time. To go out was to steal. The state of the boot room, the gathering entropy, became a subject of Barry Pickett’s evening announcements. And Beard, oblivious to his own vital role, his generous assistance in setting the initial conditions, could not help reflecting expansively on this post-lapsarian state. Four days ago the room had started out in orderly condition, with all gear hanging on or stowed below the numbered pegs. Finite resources, equally shared, in the golden age of not so long ago. Now it was a ruin. Even harder to impose order once the room was strewn with backpacks and stuff-bags and supermarket plastic bags half filled with extra gloves and scarves and chocolate bars. No one, he thought, admiring his own generosity, had behaved badly, everyone, in the immediate circumstances, wanting to get out on the ice, had been entirely rational in ‘discovering’ their missing balaclava or glove in an unexpected spot. It was perverse or cynical of him to take pleasure in the thought, but he could not help himself. How were they to save the earth – assuming it needed saving, which he doubted – when it was so much larger than the boot room?
On the last morning they ate their breakfast to the din of the entire snowmobile fleet warming up outside. They went out onto the ice, many of them missing pieces of their equipment. Beard was without a helmet. While he waited for the signal to leave, he warmed his goggles on the engine, and wound a scarf round his head. The low orange sun was unhindered, there would be a useful tailwind, and it looked like the journey back to Longyearbyen might even be pleasant, if one were fully clothed. There was a shout from the deck. Between them, Barry Pickett and one of the crew were manhandling down the gangplank a huge plastic and fibre sack of the sort that builders use to store sand in. Lost property. They gathered around the treasure and poked about in it. Beard found a helmet that fitted and knew it must be his. No one was ashamed, or even faintly embarrassed. Here was their stuff. Where had it been hiding all this time?
They said their goodbyes to the crew, and set off in loud and poisonous single file across the fjord towards Longyearbyen, keeping to a stately twenty-five kilometres per hour to avoid the cutting headwind. Hunched low over his machine, trying to draw a little of its heat onto his face, Beard found himself in a mellow state – an unfamiliar cast of mind for the morning. He was not even hung-over. On the frozen shores of the fjord they slowed to walking pace to navigate deep ruts, trenches, in the ice. He could not remember them from the outward journey. But of course, he had been asleep behind Jan’s back. Then they were on a long straight snowy track, passing a hut where, the guides had told them, a great eccentric once lived a lonely life.
If, Beard thought, he ever travelled by spaceship to another galaxy, he would soon be fatally homesick for these, his brothers and sisters up ahead of him, for everyone, ex-wives included. He was suffused with the pleasant illusion of liking people. Entirely forgivable, all of them. And somewhat cooperative, somewhat selfish, sometimes cruel, above all, funny. The snowmobiles were passing through the narrow, high-sided gully, scene of his shame, a moment best buried. He preferred to recall his cool escape from a murderous bear. But yes, he felt unusually warm towards humankind. He even thought that it could warm to him. Everyone, all of us, individually facing oblivion, as a matter of course, and no one complaining much. As a species, not the best imaginable, but certainly the best, no, the most interesting there was. But what about the general disgrace that was the boot room? Evidently, a matter of human nature. And how were we ever going to learn about that? Science of course was fine, and who knew, art was too, but perhaps self-knowledge was beside the point. Boot rooms needed good systems so that flawed creatures could use them properly. Leave nothing, Beard decided, to science or art, or idealism. Only good laws would save the boot room. And citizens who respected the law.
These fondly forgiving and self-forgiving thoughts sustained him until they reached the hotel for lunch. How long ago, it seemed, since they had been there. They handed over their snowmobile suits and the rest, said their goodbyes to Jan, and within the hour they were on their plane to Trondheim. Beard was booked with a different airline for the onward flight to Oslo. The others had four hours to wait. In the confines of the small airport, they seemed reluctant to leave each other’s company. They took over the bar and soon started up their music again, the songs, the laments of global calamity, over lunchtime beers and hotdogs. This was where Beard went to find them to say goodbye. He passed twenty minutes in email swaps and embraces. Stella Polkinghorne kissed him on the lips, Jesus gave him his business card. There was a loud hurrah as Beard was leaving the bar. In all, he was reminded that by way of running undemanding errands on the ice and pretending to care about wind turbines, he had attained a degree of unfamiliar popularity. Even the spindly novelist had clasped him to his narrow chest. Beard was still smiling to himself thirty minutes later as his twin-propeller plane bounced down the freezing
