Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [117]
Brentford said nothing, tapping his fork against the table. Had he really come to the point where he had to side with terrorists to save New Venice? He felt ill at ease about the “Blast” metaphor of his book and how now it was striving to get real. He had been asking for it, hadn’t he? Never write anything that you won’t be able to live up to someday, he thought.
“Is it true that you want to share Aqilineq with Inuit?” Uitayok suddenly asked from his end of the table.
Aqilineq. The Old Country. It was what the Inuit still called that ragged, splintered stretch of land where New Venice had been struggling to take root. Brentford met the riumasa’s eyes, intensely staring at him, and from the corner of his own noticed Hardenberg’s little smile.
“That would only be normal, I suppose,” said Brentford, as casually as he could.
Uitayok nodded slowly and returned to his meal.
There was a pregnant pause.
“Do you really want it?” insisted Hardenberg.
“Right,” said Brentford, with all the irony he could muster. “What do we do now? Go back to New Venice and ask the Council of Seven to make room for us? Or do we just start throwing incendiary bombs around?”
“I thought the author of A Blast on the Barren Land would be more of a dreamer,” sighed Hardenberg, putting back his hair behind his ear. “We can actually do both and a little more. We can turn history back to a fairy tale.”
Brentford felt a certain anger swelling up in him.
“Do you realize that at this very moment, while we’re having this interesting little table talk, the Subtle Army is attacking and probably destroying a fistful of defenceless Nunavut independentists? Can you turn that into a fairy tale?”
“Oh yes! I almost forgot! That was our own rear base that was being attacked, and we left the city because we were supposed to defend our Inuit allies who watch over it, weren’t we? You remember that?”
“Ja!” said Schwarz accusingly. “But we had to save all these gentlemen.”
“And now they think we shouldn’t have. What a pity!” added the doctor, shaking his head.
“I do not find this very funny,” said Brentford.
Hardenberg smiled.
“But since we have changed our course and followed the direction indicated by the dogs, we’ve made some … I think serendipity is the word. Do you know where we’re heading right now?”
“No,” admitted Brentford darkly.
“Neither do I. But Herr Torm, our pilot, has noticed that this course seems to be taking us toward some very interesting place.”
“There is no place around here,” said Brentford, still a bit irritated by Hardenberg’s unbreakable self-confidence, his way of thinking that he could will things into existence.
“Which is exactly what makes this one interesting.”
CHAPTER XXVII
The Crystal Castle
“It is no speculation of wild improbability to picture a polar paradise, like some titan emerald in its alabaster setting.” Fitzhugh Green, Popular Science Monthly, December 1923
Hardenberg invited his guests to follow him to the wheelhouse at the fore of the Ariel. The room, fitted on all sides with toughened glass windows, contained the pilot’s and navigator’s seats, the steering wheel, the valve cords, the control wires for rudder and elevators, the instrument panels, a map case, and voice pipes for inside communication. Lit as it was, for the moment, by a single light bulb in the ceiling, its most striking visible feature was the bearded, eye-masked reflection in the windshield of Trom, the pilot. The navigator, introduced as Petersen, was bent over the backlit map, the lead dog on his knees. From where he stood, just behind the navigator’s seat, Gabriel could see that the tinkling medallion around the neck of the dog was quite familiar to him.
“Look, the Nixon-Knox