Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [43]
“Nice to see you. I do not have much time, however. We’re under considerable pressure, here.”
“I hope I won’t detain you too long,” said Gabriel, who was sincerely in a hurry to get between sheets that would not be made of ice. “It’s really kind of you, anyway.”
The entrance hall and the darkened corridor that curved toward the main rotunda were a dusty mess indeed, carpeted with crumpled blankets and tarpaulins, littered with dismantled iron scaffolding and boxes of greasy nuts and bolts.
“You’ve heard about Bob?” asked Kelvin, to strike up a little conversation, as they made their way through the obstacles.
“No,” Gabriel answered, realizing that since he had met Stella, he’d felt no interest or curiosity about anything or anyone else.
“His Polar Kangaroo has been stolen. Well, it has disappeared, while we were at the Kane Clinic. He’s not the happiest boy in New Venice, as you can imagine.”
“Oh,” said Gabriel, trying to look surprised. But when you started fiddling about with the Polar Kangaroo, no surprise would be the real surprise. He could well imagine the statue hopping away on its powerful hind legs. Generally, any manifestation of that wonder or freak of Nature, fictitious, real, or anything in between or beyond, was an omen of trouble threatening the city. Gabriel had a hunch he would hear about it again.
“Here, you see,” said Kelvin, indicating a blue glow running along the base of the curved corridor walls, “these are Geissler tubes full of argon. We were trying to imitate the light just as it appears over the horizon, so it’s a bit like being outside.”
“A bit, yes. Great idea,” said Gabriel, who appreciated the effort to simulate those sensations but who could not help thinking that a -30°F temperature would have been a more efficient way to produce a real Arctic feel, if that was truly the point. Then you might get some notion of what being an Inuk was all about.
But when the corridor ended and they entered the Hall, he was struck dumb. It was towering and vast and looked bigger than a normal panorama, perhaps because one entered it at floor level and not upon a mid-level platform. A painted roll, maybe forty-five feet in height, circled the entire rotunda, showing snowy peaks and icebergs adrift in the sea. A fjord, part paint, part real water, extended right to the middle and blended into a shore scene in the hall, where about twenty igloos were scattered on the blinding white floor. A few stuffed seals lounging on floes or peeping out of ice holes completed the picture, and Gabriel wondered if the Polar Kangaroo would not have felt indeed more at home here than in the Musheum.
This cardboard sublimity, as it tricked his senses into accepting that inside was outside, left him rocking uneasily between belief and disbelief. The light was dim, with a Sunday afternoon heaviness to it that felt barely comfortable. A frayed film of mist, probably made from dry ice, hovered above the ground, curiously at odds with the rather warm temperature around them. The scene in its entirety produced a strange sensation of frozen movement and epileptic clarity that was, Gabriel felt, slightly oppressive.
“It’s a panorama but also a diorama,” explained Kelvin, pointing at the painted scenery. “The canvas is actually transparent linen, with a few other layers behind. There are light rigs and filters behind the paintings and in the ceiling, over those fake clouds, so we can make the whole scene look like it’s day or night, and imitate sun dogs or mock moons. We can even do northern lights. I can’t show you now, but it’s quite something. I’m devising a trick that can synchronize them with electromagnetic sound waves. Right now, you can hear the wind, I suppose, as we’re testing the loudspeakers.”
There was an ominous hiss, in fact, but since nothing moved, not even the mist, except a few stray workers here and there installing props in the igloos, it just worsened the feeling of uncanny stillness.