Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [87]
And the wedding dress was empty.
The crew jumped out to stabilize the ship, mooring it to the crystal pillars.
Book Three
No Earthly Pole
But suddenly a perfect veil of rays showers from the zenith out over the northern skies; they are so fine and bright, like the finest of glittering silver threads. Is it the fire-giant Surt himself, striking his mighty silver harp, so that the strings tremble and sparkle in the glow of the flames of Muspelheim? Yes, it is harp music, wildly storming in the darkness; it is the riotous war-dance of Surt’s sons. And again at times it is like softly playing, gently rocking, silvery waves, on which dreams travel into unknown worlds.
Farthest North: Being a Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship Fram 1893-96, and of a Fifteen Months’ Sleigh Journey by Dr. Nansen and Lieut. Johannsen
CHAPTER XXI
Qivigtoq
So swift, so pure, so cold, so bright,
They pierced my frame with icy wound;
And all that half-year’s polar night,
Those dancing streamers wrapp’d me round.
George Crabbe, Sir Eustace Grey, 1807
That was it. Gabriel had gone pillortoq, now he was going qivigtoq.
He had seen it all and done it all. He had lost his love and forsaken his friend. Stella, he would love forever (especially now that forever was simply the next couple of hours), but his love for her had drained him of his will to live. By going crazy at Brentford’s wedding, he had severed the last tie that had linked him to a city where in the past week he had seen nothing anyway but hypocrisy, violence, and injustice. His friend’s efforts to ameliorate it now made him snigger at his well-meaning naivety. Gabriel would never come across a better allegory of society, he thought, than the one he had been privy to at the Ingersarvik: orgy under hypnosis for the benefit of old vicious vampires.
His mind was lucid as ice crystal, and about as brittle. But he had taken his decision, or, as with every true decision, it had taken him. Dying in the cold was the coolest thing to do. In the time-honoured Inuk tradition of the qivigtoq, he would lose himself in the polar wilderness, and if he ever came back as one moody, melancholy ghost, he would not be very different from what he had been, anyway.
Easier said than done, though. The Air Architecture, even in its present state, precluded almost all amateur attempts at hypothermia within the city limits. Technically, the city temperatures were such that the trick could be tried if you were determined and had time on your hands. But the numerous examples of people who had been found frostbitten by the Health Angels and brought back to life to be amputated without their consent were enough to make one consider alternative schemes.
Still, getting beyond the city limits was a boring business. Gabriel trudged directly from the hotel, on rather slippery slopes, to the top of Icy Heights and then eastward toward the Black Cliffs, where he knew he could slip beyond the pale. He had to walk atop the precipitous crag, along a narrow path where greasy black rocks emerged from under the snow.
On his right, beyond a wire fence, an immense field of indistinct, spectral wind vanes roared loudly in the darkness, while narrow light beams coming from the mills at their base caught in their pale white glare the slow flakes of a lazy snow. Gabriel had the feeling, which occurred frequently, that he was living out a scene lifted from a book, but usually that was a sensation that soothed him more than