“How d’you fancy collecting an iceberg?”
Vikram stared at them both.
“What time is it?”
“Dunno. ’bout nineteen o’clock?”
“Shit.” He’d slept right through the day. He rubbed his eyes, replaying Drake’s previous words. “Iceberg? You mean?”
“I mean there’s a space on the boat if you want…”
She wiggled the flashlight helpfully. Vikram located the water bucket. It was still a quarter full. He splashed his face, pulled his own coat out of the bedding and slung it over his shoulders. “I’m in.”
Twenty minutes later, they were aboard a motor boat in pursuit of three industrial barges. Above them, the Moon moved in and out of its cloud cover. The sea was calm and dark. Vikram stayed by the rail with Nils, keeping out of the way of the crew. There were six of them including Drake, but no one else he recognized.
“Can you hear it?” Nils whispered.
Vikram listened. Beyond the engine motor, he heard a metallic susurration, like the sound of pooling chains. Ahead of them, high above sea level, a line of green lights stretched to left and right. He nudged Nils and pointed. It had been years since either man had passed the ring-net, but Vikram knew that Nils was thinking the same thing as him, that those were no lights: they were the glowing eyes of the dead.
The net was invisible in the darkness, but the windows of one of its watchtowers shone. The fleet of barges approached. Heavy clanking told Vikram that a curtain of the ring-net was lifting. The barges slid past the watchtower, slipping under the gap in the net. The smaller western boat followed in the swell. As they passed beneath, Nils’s and Drake’s faces were bathed in the green glow from the capping beacons. Vikram held up his hands. His gloves were tipped with the same green. The chains clinked in a tug of wind. Then they were through, the other side of the boundary.
Osiris waters lay behind them.
Vikram felt suddenly hollow. Who knew what had really happened to all those boats that left the city and disappeared? If only they had left a trail, a length of string that could be followed, hand over hand, by those that might wish to go after. Vikram leaned forward, straining his eyes. The Moon had gone behind a cloud.
The boats drove out for twenty minutes before they began to slow. Everyone on board fell silent. There was no noise except the sea, the humming motor, and a dull creaking.
Ahead, the sea turned entirely white.
“Is that…?” Vikram murmured.
“Yeah,” said Drake. “That’s it.”
The phosphorous island stretched away beyond the barges’ searchlights. The boats continued cautiously and came to rest at a point where the ice cut away smoothly, a sloping three metre cliff rising from the waves. Searchlights trained upon it. The air filled with the whirr of gears and engines.
Two platforms extended horizontally from the first of the boats. They were crowded with men and machinery. When the platforms reached the ice field, the workers clambered onto it, unloading their equipment with practised efficiency. Against the ice they looked like busy black insects.
Vikram watched in fascination as the process he had heard explained but never seen began. The crew dragged giant lasers into position. Through the night they would cut the ice sheet into many separate pieces, then tow them inside the ring-net. The freshwater bergs would relieve the load of the desal plants, which guzzled energy.
The lasers began their work, with a noise like metal plates scraping together. A shout went up on Drake’s boat.
“That’s it! That’s our bit!”
Everyone on board ran to the rail. The boat keeled. The deck juddered underfoot as two small harpoons, trailing cables, fired across the water and embedded in the ice.
“Who’s first?” yelled the skipper.
Drake gave Vikram and Nils a harness and a head-torch each. “Go on,” she said. “I’ve done this before. Don’t let go unless you fancy a dunking.”
They exchanged grins. Vikram fastened the strap of the head-torch and switched it on. A pale beam illuminated the rail and the cables. Another member of the crew showed him how to hook his harness onto the cable. Vikram climbed over the rail and pitched forward.
A shove sent him swinging across the gulf. Air rushed at his face; he was flying. The head-torch picked out the wave trenches and the foam-flecked caps. His boots dipped the water. He brought his knees to his chest. The ice loomed. He stuck his feet out in front and landed with a crunch.
Nils’s boots thudded down a second later. Vikram reached over and grabbed his friend’s hand. Holding onto the cables, they clambered up the remainder of the slope, and stopped.
It was as though they had stepped onto the surface of the Moon. The ice was pitted and cracked, sheer blank slates giving way to hillocks and gaping craters. Fifty metres away, the laser beams were working their way across the sheet, a flicker of lightning marking their progress. The noise was phenomenal.
Vikram stamped on the ice. It was rock hard. Beneath the groan of the severing pack, he heard water lapping against its edges. Land must sound like this.
Others had joined them. Drake took a running leap and skidded eight metres before landing on her arse. Vikram whooped. They moved, at first cautiously, then throwing themselves around the ice. Their head-torches made peculiar shadows of the uneven surface and their own figures. They twisted to make even weirder, eldritch shapes. The ice glinted pale blue. The Moon came out from behind a cloud and turned it greenish yellow. It smelled raw and new, of the untouched and the untouchable. It had never held human imprints before.
Nils shouted. He’d found a long, sheer slope. The three of them sat in a row at the top, Vikram in front, then Drake, then Nils. They yelled a countdown.
“Three — two — one — go!”
They flew down the slope, as one, then as three, as Drake lost her grip and Vikram shot on ahead. At the bottom they curled up, toppled on their backs, helpless with laughter. The sky above was a jigsaw of cloud and stars. They regained their breaths slowly.
For as long as Vikram had known, since the beginnings of Osiris, the ice had come. Legend told of a land beneath it, a land free from storms and safe from flooding. It had a name, so rare, so precious, it was never spoken above a whisper. ’Tarctica. The southern land. It would cast off its frozen shell and one day, when all the ice had gone, the Citizens of Osiris would find a new home. So the legend went.
The laser rays continued their work. At last, with an ear splitting crack, the segment claimed by Drake’s boat broke away. A fissure yawned, then it was a chasm, then a valley of ocean. Drake’s boat was already towing away the section of ice, heading back inside the ring-net and leaving the flotilla of barges to continue their dismantling work until dawn.
The ice was moored between two towers on the outskirts of the western quarter and that night there was a carnival. Westerners came out in droves. People danced and performed theatrical charades. A band of acrobats tumbled, stood on their hands, and walked across a tightrope that had once been somebody’s clothesline and still had a pair of leggings pegged to it. Statues, crude and artistic, were sculpted out of the hillocks. Fry-boat kitchens chugged out of the city to set up shop around the edge of the ice. The vendors leaned out of their hatches, shouting their wares of squid or saufish in amicable rivalry. Other westerners arrived in tiny skiffs, hacking off blocks of ice with pickaxes and towing them back into the west.
Nils produced a bottle of raqua and the three of them wandered about the ice, passing the bottle back and forth and admiring the spectacles. They settled at the edge of a crater where a crowd had gathered around a group of musicians. In the centre, a heater was wedged into a small pit. The smell of frying saufish and kelp dispersed through the foreign scent of the ice and skinny dogs came to lap at the meltwater.