She moved under the snowbridge she had noted from above, and the crevasse therefore became a tall blue tunnel. She moved farther down into it. Sometimes ice roofed the tunnel, other times snowbridges, their white undersides great cauliflowers of ice crystal, glowing with white light. The view from below made it clear why snowbridges over crevasses were such dangerous, things, so tenuous were they and so fatally deep the pits below them. But that was why people roped up.
The tunnel turned at an angle, and then opened downward, into a much larger chamber. Val kept going.
This new space within the ice was really big, and a much deeper blue than what she had come through so far, the Rayleigh scattering of sunlight so far advanced that only the very bluest light made it down here, glowing from out of the ice in an intense creamy translucent turquoise, or actually an unnamed blue unlike any other she had seen. The interior of the space was a magnificent shambles. Entire columns of pale blue ice had peeled off the walls and fallen across the chamber intact, like broken pillars in a shattered temple. The walls were fractured in immense translucent planes, everything elongated and spacious—as if God had looked into Carlsbad Caverns and the other limestone caverns of the world and said No no, too dark, too squat, too bulbous, I want something lighter in every way, and so had tapped His fingernail against the great glacier and gotten these airy bubbles in the ice, which made limestone caves look oafish and troglodytic. Of course ice chambers like these were short-lived by comparison to regular caves, but this one appeared to have been here for a while, perhaps years, it was hard to tell. Certainly all the glassy broken edges had long since sublimed away in the hyperarid air, so that the shatter was rounded and polished like blue driftglass, so polished that it gleamed as though melting, though it was far below freezing.
Val moved farther into the room, enchanted. A shattered cathedral, made of titanic columns of driftglass; a room of a thousand shapes; and all of it a blue that could not be described and could scarcely be apprehended, as it seemed to flood and then to overflood the eye. Val stared at it, rapt, trying to take it all in, realizing that it was likely to be one of the loveliest sights she would ever see in her life—unearthly, surreal—her breath caught, her cheeks burned, her spine tingled, and all just from seeing such a sight.
But no sledge. And back at the entrance to the blue chamber, there was a narrow crack running the other way, not much wider than the sledge itself; and looking down it, into an ever-darkening blue, Val saw a smear of pale snow and ice shards, and below that, what appeared to be the sledge, wedged between the ice walls a hundred feet or more below; it was hard to judge, because the crevasse continued far down into the midnight-blue depths below. There was no way she could get down there and get back up again; and even if she could have, the sledge was corked, as they said. Stuck and irretrievable. In this case crushed between the walls, it looked like, and broken open so that its contents were spilled even farther down. A very thorough corking. No—the sledge was gone.
9
Big Trouble
Wade slept through the flight to Shackleton Glacier Camp, and sleepwalked his way through the transition from Herc to helo, then fell asleep again. The next time he woke he found himself suspended above the upper reaches of Shackleton Glacier, in the clear plastic bubble of a little Squirrel helicopter. The ice curved down to the sea in a broad sweep, with long lines of rubble marking very clearly the direction of the flow, and tributary glaciers pouring in and merging in just the way the water of rivers would, although here the eddies and cross-currents were indicated by rippled blue crevasse patches, or even in some places gnashed into fields of turquoise blades.
The Kiwi helo pilot pointed down at one such field. “Ever seen one of those close up?”
“No.”
They dropped like a shot bird, tilting forward and to the left as they spiralled tightly downward. Wade gritted his teeth. Kiwi pilots were scary, as he had begun to learn on his flight down from Christchurch. The young American pilots working for ASL moved their big beasts around the air like trucks, and like good truck drivers they were impressive; but the Kiwis, older and wiser, flew as if their helos were extensions of their bodies, like dragonflies. This man looked unconcerned as he brought the helo swooping down to hover, in dragonfly style, well down inside an avenue of serac skyscrapers; Wade was shocked at their size, as from a thousand feet up they had looked like waist-high ripples. “Wow.”
The pilot pulled back up and continued without comment. Back at cruising height, the crevasse patches again looked like ice cubes; but now, knowing how big they really were, Wade’s sense of scale popped like one’s ears did, and he realized that the glacier and the mountains flanking it were all huge, huge, huge. The helo buzzed along like a bee up a winter canyon. It was a big planet.
Ahead a rusty rock island grew. A spill of glacier poured over a low point in its outermost ridge, and fell down toward a bowl of rock that it never even reached, much less filled. As they passed the island Wade could now see the polar cap, extending to the south forever. On the southernmost point of the island clustered a tiny knot of green square roofs, like Monopoly houses. Vertigo of scale: it was as a gnat or a microbe that he watched the tiny structures recede behind them, and the nunatak get lower and smaller, until they were out over the ice of the polar cap, and it was ice as far as they could see, on a world grown as big as Jupiter, or the sun itself. Then the helo began to drop again. They were landing on the ice.
The complex of buildings they descended on was of course bigger than it had appeared from above. As Wade got out of the helicopter the complex looked entirely deserted, in the usual Antarctic way; everyone indoors. The empty continent indeed.
Then one of the doors opened, and out of it appeared the big man Wade had met back in McMurdo, on Ob Hill. It seemed a very long time ago; in actuality, less than two weeks.
“Hi!” Wade said.
X looked closer, then recognized him as well. “Hi. Welcome to the ice.”
Wade nodded, looking around at the brilliantly lit scene. Flat white to the horizon in all directions; much like the Pole in that regard. A gentle breeze cut deep into him. The main building of the complex was a small meat locker/mobile home, behind it a gleaming oil derrick or something like, resting on broad pontoons that were only slightly snowdrifted on their south sides. Metal grid stairs led up to the usual locker door, and after a brief look around they went inside.
The interior of the room was like the bridge of an invisible ship, the walls banked with the consoles of anonymous machinery. From this height expansive shallow basins and low hills were discernible on the ice plain.
“Nice,” Wade said.
“Yes,” said X, and called into the next room. A man entered. “This is Carlos, the leader of the group here.”
“Good to meet you,” Wade said to the bearded man. They shook hands.
“And you too,” Carlos said. “Nice to have you here. Here, let’s have some lunch, and then we’ll take you out and show you around.”
“That would be nice.”