"Because you are dreaming," Master Lu said in a reasonable voice.
"Oh, right. So. Do I have to fight you, too?"
"A man cannot fight himself. For there would be no victor-only two defeated ones."
"Gotta remember that."
"I am here to tell you that while our essence may be one and our flesh different, my blood flows in your veins."
"How's that possible? You're Korean and I'm American."
"America was not always. Your ancestors were not always American. Therefore, they were something else."
"They sure as hell weren't Korean," said Remo. But Master Lu only smiled with a thin austerity, and as his face began to recede, Remo thought his eyes looked familiar.
Those knowing eyes were the last things to disappear into the Void.
WHEN HE WOKE UP, Remo was sitting in the back seat and the Bronco had stopped on a block of ice. There was hardly any sunlight, and it was very very cold. A steady wind blew.
"What the hell?" Remo said, opening the door. His foot touched water, and he withdrew it with haste. The water was very cold. He looked out and down. The water was gray and choppy, in addition to being cold.
The block of ice was entirely surrounded by water, confirming Remo's first sleepy impression. And it was moving south.
"Damn it Chiun! Where are you?"
As it turned out, not in the back, which contained only a wad of coarse, woolly blankets, or under the hood, which was full of cold, inert engine.
Remo scoured the horizon with his deep-set eyes. To the north lay cold, impenetrable mist and the fresh scent of snow. To the south he smelled open water and blubber.
Kneeling at the thick end of the floating ice block, Remo tested the water. So cold, it was like touching a live wire. When he pulled his finger free, it instantly acquired a coating of ice, which he knew better than to try to break off. His skin would probably crack off with it.
Sucking on his frozen finger to soften the ice, Remo returned to the Bronco. He got behind the wheel and found no key in the ignition.
Growing up on the streets of Newark had given Remo certain skills that never seemed to age. He hot-wired the ignition and got the engine going. The heater filled the interior with just enough warmth to cause Remo's muscles to relax. Then the engine conked out.
No amount of tinkering could get it going again. The cold settled in the Bronco's interior like a frigid hand. And Remo started shivering uncontrollably. It was a mechanism by which the body warmed itself when necessary.
Remo had been taught not to shiver by the Master of Sinanju, who had pronounced it a waste of energy. But from the way things looked, he was marooned. He would shiver now and when he got bored with shivering, there were Sinanju techniques that ran the gamut from visualizing fire to hibernating that might carry him through this ordeal.
The only question in Remo's mind was why Chiun had put him in this position. It made the Cretan labyrinth look like a pie-eating contest.
Well past midnight, Remo was in the fire-visualization phase of his survival plan. It was working. He felt warm even as a night wind howled against the windshield. Windblown water had rimed the glass with a thick coating of obscuring ice. He couldn't see where he was going, even though at this time of year midnight meant the sun was hanging low to the horizon, giving the world the semblance of dusk.
So it came as a mild surprise when the ice block crashed against something and the Bronco rocked on its springs, while pressing their wet black noses to the windows.
Remo cranked the window down on the passenger's side and saw that his ice block had nudged another ice block.
"Could be my lucky break," he said.
He got out. Instantly his skin shrank over his muscles and bones. The wind was bitter and penetrating. Remo walked over to the adjoining block of ice. It bobbed and fought against his patch, which meant it wasn't land but another chunk of floe ice.
Remo hesitated. The two cakes were clashing, but nothing said they'd stay joined forever. He looked back.
He couldn't afford to lose the shelter of the Bronco, so he went back and released the emergency brake. After that it was easy to roll it onto the other block. Remo reconnoitered the new block. It was flat for a hundred or so yards but soon grew vertical. A peak of snow-dusted ice lifted into the star-touched sky, the top obscured by a mist of ice crystals.
I'm on a freaking iceberg, he decided.
Remo searched his memory for what he knew of icebergs. They broke off from the Arctic ice pack and drifted south, sometimes taking years. This was not an encouraging thought. On the other hand, when they hit warm water below the polar regions, they could melt into nothing. This was even more discouraging to contemplate.
From somewhere in the vicinity of the peak, came a low, mournful growl.
Remo listened. After a while the growl came again. In the course of his reading, the phrase blue growler had stuck with Remo. It was a kind of iceberg that made growling sounds under the stresses of intense wind and cold and water.
Maybe he was on a blue growler.
Except there was nothing blue about the ice and snow. It was definitely whitish. Not bluish. Nothing bluish about it. Maybe they were only blue under strong sunlight.
The growl came again, and this time it sounded organic.
Remo decided he'd look into the growling. Climbing the iceberg meant exposing himself to high, subfeezing winds, but there was no smarter way to do this. He started up on foot, switched to all fours, and to gain the slippery summit he poked fingerholds into the ice with stabbing thrusts of his forefingers.
From the peak Remo saw the polar bears on the other side as plain as day. They looked surreal-as surreal as the animated polar bears in the soft-drink commercial.
Casually they looked up at him with big wet eyes. Remo gave them a friendly little wave, and one, encouraged, tried to clamber up the iceberg after him. He kept losing his purchase, sliding back on his white rump and spinning when he reached flat pack ice.
When they started to walk around the summit, Remo decided he needed to protect his only shelter. Climbing down was harder than climbing up, even with prepunched fingerholds. Halfway down Remo was forced to slide on his stomach in emulation of the bear. He came up on all fours, still sliding, and skated on two legs the rest of the way.
He reached the Bronco one step ahead of the loping bears.
Grabbing the door, Remo tried to open it. Stuck. The lock was frozen. Remo gave the lock a quick knuckle strike and tried again. It came open with only a minor hesitation.
He slid in, and was pulling the door shut when a huge white paw swiped in, holding the door open.
Remo slapped the paw. The bear growled. The others advanced, lumbering and curious. They weighed maybe a quarter ton each and started to clamber all over the Bronco, rocking it and jouncing it on its squeaky springs, while pressing their wet black noses to the windows.
Remo batted at the obstructing paw again and, bonewhite claws extended, it raked the air, narrowly missing his head.
In that interval he got the door shut and the window up.
"Great. Now I'm stuck here."
The bears circled the Bronco for the next hour, testing its sturdiness and making it rock like a cradle. Remo let them have their fun, hoping they would tire soon and leave him alone.
He hoped there would be time to sneak out and try to snag a fish. He was getting hungry, and because his diet was restricted to fish and duck and rice, polar-bear meat was out of the question.
Remo was fishing about the glove compartment for something to use as a line and hook when one of the bears-the big one that had tried to climb up after him before-got his huge front paws on the rear of the vehicle and started pushing.
"You have got to be kidding me," said Remo as the Bronco began creep toward open water on locked tires. The emergency brake was on, but the ice was slippery. The polar bear had his entire weight against the Bronco, and it was inching forward with a prolonged scratching of chain-wrapped rubber against the ice.