For a while this had been her favorite dinner party story, the one she told whenever anyone mentioned teeth or psychiatry or the presumptuous suggestions of practical strangers.
But it had been months since she had thought about it.
And months since she had thought about her dentist.
Who was almost certainly dead now.
Dentist. Doctor. Braces. Eraser. Abrasive.
She could not expect to come across another shelter before she reached the sea. Once, not so long ago, hundreds of small, temporary settlements had dotted the plateaus of Antarctica, but that time had come to an end almost thirty years ago, when it became clear that the ice cap was beginning to melt. True, less glaciation meant easier access to the mineral resources of the land. But it also meant legal liability for the rising sea levels and climate changes the thaw was expected to bring, and most of the countries of the world had weighed the financial benefits against the financial risks and decided to relinquish their stake in the continent. The whole of Antarctica was purchased just a few years later by a trio of corporations – Coca-Cola, Bertelsmann, and FCI – after both South Africa and Argentina, the last of the thirty-seven countries that had once held claim to it, suffered financial collapse. Immediately the number of polar and scientific expeditions had fallen to almost zero – in part, and undeniably, because the corporations had denied many of the scientists access, but also because the original settlements had not really been established as research stations in the first place. They were markers of a national interest that had now been exhausted, like the flags planted all those years ago on the beaten gray deserts of the moon. The shelters and heavy equipment were broken down and hauled out inside a fleet of cargo planes. The people were evacuated. Laura was aware of two other research parties that had been granted entry to the continent around the same time she was sent there by Coca-Cola. One of them was located on the far side of the Pole, toward Madagascar, and the other at the very tip of the Antarctic peninsula. But both had been abandoned before the onset of winter.
She would have to rely on her own tent for shelter, on her own momentum for warmth. When she first began sledging, the stars had been hidden behind a thick lid of clouds, so that even with her flashlight it was impossible for her to see more than a few yards in front of her. But by the time a couple of hours had passed, a broad patch of sky had become visible to the northeast. She could see hundreds of stars and satellites, and between them the shifting waves and folds of the aurora, in green and red and gold, flaring up, fading away, and sending out dozens of slowly extending streamers and ribbons. The ice was still dark, though, and there were few landmarks for her to steer by, only the occasionally discernible black rock of the mountain that lay to the east.
Every so often, when she sensed that she might have veered off course, she would fish her compass out of her pocket and check her bearings. She was so close to the Pole that the needle would drift and spin for a full minute before it came to rest, and even then only if she stood absolutely still. It was difficult for her to get moving again. She only had to pause for a minute and the sledge would take on the weight of its own stillness. The carriage would sink to its belly in the snow, and the runners would fix in place, taking hold of the ice like roots.
She had never known a person could be so tired. Sometimes she didn't see how she could possibly keep going. But she did, she always did.
The snow blew off the rises, leaving bald patches of slippery ice, but long drifts built up in the depressions and made the shelf seem more level than it really was. There were multitudes of people in her thoughts, multitudes walking behind her. Her mother and father. Her extended family. The friends she had known growing up, and in college and graduate school, and in her life as a working adult. Her lovers and all the close friends of her lovers. The people she saw every few days at the grocery store or at the bank, and the people who lived in her apartment building and the buildings surrounding it. The woman who sold the tickets at the movie theater. The man who worked the toll booth outside the Coca-Cola complex. The people she was used to passing on the street but with whom she had never actually spoken. She would think of them, and they would give her the strength to carry on, and then she would remember the virus and the newspaper article and the thousand cities of the dead, and her stomach would buckle, and she would start counting her words again.
Though she knew she was alone, there was a part of her that refused to accept it. Otherwise, she thought, why not just stop where she was, settle onto her knees, and let the snow accumulate around her? It would be so much easier that way – so much easier than all these exhausting footsteps, one after another, footsteps in their endless thousands.
But, she reminded herself, she was not alone, or at least she couldn't be certain she was. Somebody, somewhere, must have survived the virus. And what about Puckett and Joyce? They were still out on the ice somewhere, looking for her. For all she knew, she had already crossed paths with them on her way across the bay. The air was so black, and the wind so deafening sometimes, that they might have come within yards of one another and never even known it.
When the wind was blowing hard, in fact, it seemed to be the only sound in the world, but when it fell still, she could hear the snow creaking beneath her feet, the sledge shushing behind her, even the occasional shotlike report of distant slabs of ice contracting in the cold. The darkness made everything seem louder than it really was. And then there was the crushed-glass sound of her clothing moving against her body. Her sweat did not evaporate in the cold, but soaked directly into the fabric, where it quickly froze through. By the time she had been sledging for fifteen minutes her shirt and pants would be stiff with frost, and within half an hour they would be frozen into a thousand different angles and creases. It became difficult for her to bend her joints, and when she did, fragments of ice would come raining down her chest and legs, piling up at her beltline and the cuffs of her pants where she had tucked them into her boots. She made the mistake of taking off one of her mitts to reach for her compass once and ended up with frostbite on all five fingertips. At night, in her tent, she had to wait for her clothes to thaw before she took them off, and afterward she would watch as they lay on the floor steaming and collapsing fold by fold, rustling quietly as the heat softened them. They were not always dry by the time she woke up, and sometimes, when she stepped outside, the fabric would freeze together again. She made sure to take down the tent with her body already arranged in its sledging posture, a lesson she learned the morning her shirt hardened around her, locking into a position that left her head tilted awkwardly to the left for the rest of the day. There was no way for her to remove the clothing to adjust herself, and so she had had to walk that way until she stopped some eight hours later to set the tent up again.
The bay had been shaped and broken by the pressure of countless freezings. It followed the gradually rising and falling motion of a meadow cut by occasional streams. The streams were crevasses, and while some of them were narrow enough for her to cross, others were not. Each time she came to one, she would lengthen her trace and take her skis off and look to see whether she could make the leap. If she couldn't (and she often couldn't) she would walk toward the tapering end until the crevasse sealed itself off – sometimes in solid ice, sometimes in a bridge of packed snow.