overrunning the only place on the planet I felt at home. Of all of us, Wyndham was the most pessimistic. When depressed, he would spin scenarios of catastrophes-of floods and cyclones and mass migrations. I wasn’t willing to call him paranoid, as some of the others did. Instead, I chose not to think about it, the way one chooses not to imagine the death of a spouse.
What happens in your ideal world? I asked Rebecca one day.
My interest was entirely selfish, of course, and there may even have been a touch of irritation in it. It should not be possible for a woman to be such a dedicated scientist, such a humble and reliable trader in hard fact, and yet have such a beautiful neck and throat. I was not usually one to notice these things. When it came to the appreciation of female beauty, I had always been strictly an impressionist. But Rebecca taught me to be a detail man. I thought about the elegant and shifting columns of tendon and cartilage. I thought about her way of blinking exactly once whenever I spoke to her, as if capturing my remark like a lattice of crystals for later analysis. I thought about her fingers, slender and tapered, the nails perfectly formed, neatly shaped. Her skin was darker than mine, not quite tawny, and I had to suppress the desire to touch her hands as she typed, despite the wedding band.
My ideal world?
I had spoken to her from the doorway of her office. Only three of the scientists had private offices: Dahlberg, Vanderbyl and Rebecca. In Rebecca’s case, it was a matter of getting her instruments as far from the power shack as possible, because the generator tended to interfere with her readouts. The space was not much bigger than a graduate student’s carrel, but it had a porthole window over which she had hung a towel to keep the glare off her screens.
My ideal world?
She didn’t turn to face me but spoke to my reflection in her radar screen.
In my ideal world, we don’t have a sea station here, a drift station there, we have an international network of cloud observatories: Tiksi, Hammerfest, Alert and Barrow-at least those four. And every day I get to chat with Russians and Danes and Americans about Arctic clouds. And you?
It must be wonderful to be so easily amused.
Now she did turn to face me. Why ask, if you’re only going to make fun? A coordinated network of stations is what we need. It’s going to take a lot more than a drifting dysfunctional family to figure out what’s going on up here.
I didn’t respond, only stood for a few moments reading the Ice Island Regulations that were taped to every door in the facility.
Please appreciate that this camp is in a very remote location. In the event of an accident, every effort is made to evacuate the injured party(s). However, we cannot control bad weather or radio blackouts, which can last up to 10 days. Exercise extreme caution and good judgment in your daily work and activities during your stay on the Ice Island. Thank you for your co-operation and have a pleasant stay.
A few days later, I stopped at her door again. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and there were loud cracks and pops from outside. Ice contracting.
I’ll tell you about my ideal world, I said. My ideal world is one where you turn around the moment you hear footsteps, because you hope it’s me.
She shook her head, not looking. You can’t talk to me that way.
You and Vanderbyl are breaking up. You’ve already broken up.
She shook her head again. You can’t.
But I am. I think you want me to.
She removed her hands from the keyboard and folded them in her lap and looked down at them. When she looked up again, she pointed at her lidar readout. The screen resembled a spray of yellow and red confetti.
You know what that is?
No.
You’ve just come in from outside. How would you rate ground-level visibility?
Right now? If it wasn’t for the curve of the earth, you could probably see Denmark.
Clouds?
None. Not one.
That-she tapped a trim fingernail on the screen-is a cloud. It’s not visible to the naked eye. It’s not visible to a telescope. It’s not even visible to infrared. I’m looking at a cloud here and I have no idea what it’s made of. I’m going to be analyzing these readings for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t want also to be trying to figure out if you love me or hate me. There’s only room in a life for so many mysteries. I couldn’t face coming home to another.
A wave of bitterness took me by surprise. Don’t flatter yourself, I said. I just want to sleep with you.
She gave me one of those single blinks. Data received. There was always the risk with Rebecca that you transmitted more than you knew. She raised her hands once more to her keyboard and resumed typing.
If I thought that was true, she said, it might stand a chance of actually happening.
5
Delorme’s alarm woke her at four a.m. She patted the bedside table to shut it off, cursed, and sat up on the edge of the bed. It was cold in the room and she was wearing nothing but the long T-shirt she slept in. The alarm was on the chair where she had put out her clothes the night before, placed there to ensure she got out of bed.
She hit the button to silence the alarm and closed the window and went still for a minute. Fragments of a dream. A highly graphic scene involving Leonard Priest. “Oh, please,” she said aloud. “Gah.”
Lifting her T-shirt over her head, she caught the fragrance of Ivory soap and resolved to switch brands. She put on the clothes she’d laid out and went to the kitchen, where her coffee was waiting. She poured it into her thermal cup and put the lid on. She ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts standing up and put the bowl in the sink.
She strapped on her Beretta and sat down to pull on her big boots. Then the blazer and finally the big parka. She closed the inner door of her vestibule-her airlock, she called it-and stepped outside into the dark. Black sky, crescent moon, and air so frigid her lungs refused the first breath entirely, making her cough. She locked the door and went down the steps, then went back up and opened the door. She picked up the tool kit she had put there the night before and shut the door again.
Her Volvo was facing the street, the trailer and snowmobile already attached.
Black streets. Empty. Soft roar of the Volvo’s heater.
Ten kilometres north of the city, almost as if she had crossed a border, the world turned white. Snowbanks, shoulder high, lined the highway, and boughs hung down under their burden of snow. Delorme made a left at a sign that announced a series of recreational trails. The parking area was empty. She got out and unloaded the snowmobile. When she climbed on and started it, the noise was shattering. Thirty-five years she’d managed to live in Algonquin Bay without owning a snowmobile, but the previous year she had caved in and bought one. The winters were long in this place, and if you let them imprison you, it could make you crazy. She had joined a club, paid a fee, and got a trail map and a schedule of events. She had attended exactly one. The racket was unbelievable and the entire membership appeared to be twelve-year-old boys.
The trail wound away from the road and past a tiny frozen lake. That was it for open country. Trees and brush whipping by. The ruby numerals of the speedometer showed forty, but being inches from the ground gave a tremendous sensation of speed. Snowmobiling at four-thirty in the morning-it’s crazy in fifty different ways, Delorme thought. Is this how you get a promotion? Or is this how you get a reputation for being a little “funny,” with colleagues rolling their eyes when your name is mentioned?
The Ski-Doo’s headlight threw long shadows shuddering into the woods. The engine’s roar ensured the absence of wildlife. She came to a fork in the trail and kept to the right. The map showed a dotted line, meaning an unofficial trail, coming up. Half a kilometre farther, a small gap opened in the trees. Unofficial indeed. But the snow was packed down and chomped by snowmobile tracks, so she steered up and over the verge and into the woods.
The engine blared louder. The front blades slammed over rougher terrain. Then a steep rise and she crested the old railbed. She had to do a two-pointer to orient the machine, and then followed the railway line. It wasn’t far
