Beyond the Ice Limit

22

ELI GLINN DIMMED the lights in his stateroom and began undressing for bed. He slipped off his shirt and paused to examine his left arm. It was the one most injured during the sinking of the Rolvaag; the limb had taken the brunt of the explosion. Despite the low light he could still see smooth, shiny areas that had once been knotted burn scars, along with rills and ridges of wounds and shrapnel cuts. He flexed his arm and the muscles rose under the skin, their power slowly returning, helped along by his daily workouts.

The bones in his arm had fractured into dozens of pieces, which the doctors had to reassemble, like jigsaw pieces, screwing everything back together with plates and rods. Most of the metal had now been removed—a few fresh scars attested to that.

He raised his hand and stared at it. It amazed him how that awful claw, which he’d thought he would never use again, was now almost normal. He held it up and moved his fingers. He’d never be a concert pianist, but at least he could now dine at table like a human being instead of an animal, spilling his food and barely able to dab his own lips with a napkin.

He flexed his fingers, then his arm again, rotating it this way and that, enjoying the freedom of movement, the lack of stiffness or pain. He turned with a sigh. This was unlike him; he was not the kind of person to admire his own body, to take pleasure in it. At least, he hadn’t been. But now, with his injuries almost healed, he was far more aware of—and grateful for—his healthy limbs. Somehow, that gratitude made him recall those who hadn’t survived—one in particular—and he felt the old guilt and sadness come creeping back in, like the tide.

Stripping down to his underwear, he went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth before the mirror. His face looked better, the bad eye healed up. Strangely enough, its color was a slightly different shade of gray: just a touch darker. Fresher. Younger.

The lotus root he’d ingested, on that strange distant island two months before, had performed nothing less than a miracle.

He washed his face, dried it, combed his thinning hair, and returned to his stateroom. From his closet he removed a silk dressing gown, slipped it on, then went to the nearest porthole. Undogging it, he pulled it wide and breathed in the fresh, incoming air—the scent of salt and ice. A nearby berg was a mere gray shape in the darkness, dimly illuminated by the lights of the ship. The sea was calm, the moonless night full of stars.

With a sigh he moved away from the porthole and lay on the bed, putting his hands behind his head, his thoughts, like water in a well-worn groove of rock, inevitably going back to the terrible events of the sinking of the Rolvaag.

He reached out and slid open the bedside drawer and removed a slim volume: Selected Poems of W. H. Auden. Turning the well-thumbed pages, he arrived at the poem titled “In Praise of Limestone.” He did not need to read the poem; he knew it by heart; but still he took a measure of comfort from the printed words.

After a long time of reading and re-reading the poem, he laid the book aside and rose from the bed. Once again he went to the window and breathed in the sea air, and then, tightening the belt of his dressing gown, he put on slippers. He went to his desk, took a spare flash drive out of a drawer, slipped it into his pocket, and quietly left the room.

It was one forty-five: almost two hours into the midnight watch. The ship was quiet, motionless, all but the watch sleeping. He made his way noiselessly down the corridor, up a set of stairs and down another, until he arrived at mission control. It was locked, but he had the key. The room was, as he’d hoped, empty. Going to the central station, he flicked on the main screen, pulled up a series of menus, hit some additional keys. Moments later a video started: the feed from Gideon’s mini sub as it entered the Rolvaag’s hold. He fast-forwarded to the point where the deck plates and pipes were cut away—and the DSV’s headlights illuminated the corpse of the captain. Sally Britton.

He stopped the video, inserted his flash drive into a USB slot, typed in a few commands, then resumed the video as he copied it to the drive.

There it was again: that swirl of blond hair; the body’s arms thrown out as if in surprise; the uniform, still neat and clean despite years in the water. Slowly the face turned to him once again, those sapphire eyes wide open, the lips parted, the neck and throat so real, so white, so life-like…

He abruptly stopped the video. The download was complete and he removed the flash drive and made his way back to his cabin. Lying down again on the bed, he pulled his laptop over, inserted the USB stick containing the video, and replayed it, slower this time, and then again, frame by frame, finally freezing the image as the face turned to the point where the eyes were looking straight into the camera. He stared at it for a very long time.

He was still staring at it when the blood-red light of the rising sun speared through the porthole into his stateroom, signaling the start of another day.

Now he closed the notebook, pulled out the flash drive, and went to the porthole window. He stood there a moment, watching the day rise out of the calm ocean, and then took the flash drive and flung it as far as he could into the deep-blue water, where it made a tiny splash. And then something incredible happened: one of the many seagulls hanging around the ship swooped down and grabbed it from the water before it could sink and flew away with it, growing smaller and smaller until it vanished into the brilliant orange sky.