Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [92]
The permanent ice shelf, starting roughly—in every sense of the term—where the city ends, is first signalled by a glacial fringe that is nothing but a tumbled-down great wall of white china. The Arctic Ocean crashes and crushes relentlessly into it, but the frozen waves it throws up form an ever-changing maze of rolls and ridges that complicate or block the way. Brentford’s first position at the Arctic Administration had been Chief Administrator for City Access, which simply meant that his job was to supervise and maintain the roads people used to come and go. It had been one of his first assignments to make sure that the seldom-used Northern road to New Venice remained somewhat open and practical. It must have been some kind of initiation ritual, for this was a job that it was simply not possible to carry out. Brentford had been happy when he was eventually promoted to Striated Space and given work that could actually be done.
Once this chaotic expanse of tidal ice is crossed, you come to an ice field that is supposed to go all the way to the pole, but as has been often remarked, this remaining icescape is actually little more than a jigsaw puzzle with blank pieces all badly mixed up by a very mischievous child. Still, depending on weather conditions, it is more or less level and cohesive. Had the fall and winter been more windy that year, Brentford would not have even dreamed of going there by ice yacht, but it was his luck that the dark season had been rather calm before the recent snow storms. That meant, he hoped, that he would find stretches of relatively smooth and even ice for the Kinngait to run a steady course over the frozen ocean, right in the middle of which stood, like a movie monster, the dreaded, carnivorous North Pole.
Brentford, as a former Navy Cadet and as a regular regatta runner (he had even once won the Cape Durmont d’Urville Challenge), knew the ropes as far as ice-sailing was concerned, and knowing them as he did, he knew very well why ice yachtsmen seldom attempted to go all the way to the pole, and why those who did rarely came back whole or alive. Pressure ridges, ice boulders, and water leads just took the fun out of it (just try hauling a two-ton ice yacht over a jagged hill in temperatures under -60°F), and should an accident happen—crushed hull, broken mast or split runners—then, in the best of cases, the trip back home would be very lonely. Of course, like most New Venetians rich enough to own an ice yacht, he had a personal “farthest north,” and a rather honourable one, around 85°, but that was still wide of the mark.
Going solo in wintertime did not exactly tip the scales his way: if it meant that water leads would be rare due to constant subzero weather, it also meant there would be little or no visibility. People had received psychiatric care for less absurd ideas than this. His best bet was simply that Helen would not have sent him lightly to his being crushed, frozen, drowned, or starved. He trusted her more than he trusted himself.
An engineer by trade, and a survivor at heart, he had nevertheless prepared rigorously and, he hoped, cleverly. If he could not allow himself to forget the least detail (in a zone where, if God doesn’t lie in the details, then Death certainly does), he also did not want to overburden his ship with useless junk—for, when all was numbered, weighed, and divided, the Kinngait was his best asset. At first an amaryllis-class three-hull sailing ice yacht, she had been upgraded in every possible way. Since Alexander Graham Bell’s recent groundbreaking trials with his Ugly Duckling in Nova Scotia, propelled fanboats were thought to be the future in the Arctic, as they allowed travel on water leads as well as on ice fields, and Brentford had been one of the first to take the costly step of making an airboat out of his ship. Now,