Seed, p.22
Seed, page 22
With the infinitesimal win I took stock and realised I could hear Frances screaming somewhere behind me. That meant she was alive. Conscious. But I wouldn’t be able to pull her up by myself. I had to get the rope off me and onto the bike. I had to hook my legs around the body of the bike and trust they’d hold me to it so I could get my hands free.
With both arms I managed to get the carabiner onto an awkward part of the back tray. All I wanted was to collapse but it wasn’t even close to over. The gaping hole was about fifteen metres behind me. That was good. That meant Frances would only be five metres down. I sprinted over and slowed near the edge. Dropped to my belly. Crawled forward.
‘Frances!’ I yelled, almost at the side.
‘Mitch!’ she screamed.
‘I’m coming.’
I looked over the edge. It was difficult to understand how white and blue could fade to such black. The light-soaked world was just a crust resting above this subterranean maw. And there, dangling between me and freezing oblivion, was my friend.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Nothing broken,’ she called back. ‘But I don’t have any equipment. I’ve lost everything.’
‘Wait. I’m going to lower down the crevasse pack.’
I returned to the trailer and found the survival kit. Slammed down on my stomach back at the edge.
‘Can you pull me up?’ she begged.
My chest seized with guilt. How could she think I was that strong? ‘I can’t. You have to climb. I’ll help. I’m lowering the spikes for your boots. Frances, we’re going to do this together. But you cannot drop these things. Do you understand? We only have one of everything we need.’
‘Okay.’
It was agony going so slowly. Making sure neither of us panicked.
‘It hurts,’ she said, getting the crampons over her boots.
‘What hurts?’ I was worried I’d lose her if she had a concussion.
‘The vest. It’s cutting into my thighs.’
‘Once you’re climbing that pressure will ease. Now, I’m lowering your picks, one by one. We’re going to keep these tied to the rope, okay? Just don’t get tangled.’
‘Okay.’
I was lowering them carefully – they were basically weapons – when a large piece of ice was dislodged. ‘Look out!’ I yelled.
She screamed. I felt something hit the picks and tightened my grip. Silently begging her to continue screaming, so I knew she was still with me.
She did, and I ignored the screaming and kept lowering the picks. I didn’t hear the ice block hit the bottom.
‘Stop!’ she called.
I moved sideways by a metre and looked over the edge again. ‘Okay, let’s climb. Right foot, left pick.’
She swung sideways on the rope when shifting her weight and screamed again.
‘It’s okay, the rope will hold. Just breathe. Try again. Right foot, left pick.’ This time she screamed in effort. I watched her struggle. She banged her knee when she tried to raise it up to plant the crampon in the ice. ‘Try to keep your knees angled outwards!’ I called, but she responded with yet another cry.
‘I can’t.’
‘You have to.’
It took her three goes to get her left crampon to hold fast, but she was better with her arms. The rope began to loosen.
‘Keep it tight!’ she begged.
How? I tied the gear line to the main rope and ran back to the bike. Pulled the rope hard and looped it around the seat. She’d made it a metre.
‘You’re doing great,’ I called, hoping she’d be able to hear me. ‘Keep going!’
The rope snapped taut and she screamed again. I scrambled back to the edge.
‘Mitch, my legs… I can’t.’
‘Look here,’ I called. ‘Your left, one more metre. A small ledge. Go one more metre and you can stand there. Get to the ledge.’
‘I can’t!’ She started to cry.
‘Frances, don’t leave me with this letter!’
‘No!’
‘Tell her yourself.’
She groaned and slammed her right foot into the ice. I watched it shower crystals down into the black below. It was mesmerising. The darkest dark I’d ever seen.
‘The rope,’ she called out again.
‘Yes.’ I hurried to loop it around the seat again.
When I returned to the edge she’d got a knee on the ledge. ‘Yes! Now stand up.’
She was so much closer to me now. I could see her face when she looked up, squinting. Blood coming down one side of her head. Her arms were shaking.
‘Do you think this ledge will hold?’
‘Yes.’
She was about to deflate. If the adrenaline subsided now we’d be stuck.
‘Frances, you need to keep going. One more metre and I’ll be able to reach you.’
I ran to the bike, took the free end of the line and clipped it to myself, just in case. It was anchoring both of us now.
‘Mitchell, I’m scared.’ She put her forehead against the wall of the crevasse.
‘Me too. But I think you can do one more metre if you try.’
‘Okay.’
I watched her compose herself. She put a gloved hand, holding a pick, over her breast and took a deep breath in, and when she breathed out and looked upwards I saw her face and knew she’d make it.
Every time she hit her knees she groaned, but I leaned over as far as I dared, and I got one of her wrists in my hand. ‘One more leg on each side, that’s it. Now pull one out and, on three, the other. One… two… three!’
We both screamed and clung to each other, her legs struggling for purchase underneath her, my arms burning, and I felt it the millisecond her centre of gravity came back up onto the surface. We fell backwards onto the ice, both of us pushing away from the edge, getting clear a metre, two, and collapsing.
Frances yelled into the air – loud – and undid the straps at her thighs. Tears and blood were collecting and dripping off the bottom of her chin.
‘We need to rest,’ I said.
‘Get me away from that hole.’ Her eyes were wide.
‘Okay,’ I said.
* * *
I did most of the set-up. Frances tried to help but she was obviously in pain.
‘Should I do an ice wall in case?’ I asked. It was a clear day, but that could change.
‘Let me rest. Just an hour. Then I’ll help.’
‘Okay.’
Inside the tent she peeled her pants off. I gasped. Red bands circled her thighs and her knees were raw. Her elbows, too.
‘I’ll get the first-aid kit.’
By the trailer, I paused and looked back at the crevasse. My bike must have weakened the snow bridge, just enough for it to then collapse under her. We had enough in my trailer for both of us to get either to McMurdo or back to the tanks but we didn’t have enough to have to go all the way to the sound and then for some reason turn around. For any reason. Depending on what we found.
I rustled through the food sack and found the rat packs marked Dessert. Grabbed a spare insulated water bottle.
‘Thank you,’ Frances said, drinking. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been this thirsty in my life.’
‘What about hungry?’ I held out the pack.
‘Ha.’
‘Let’s do your head first.’ I crouched over her. ‘Can you pull your hair back more? Clip it or something?’
‘Mitchell,’ she said, pausing to look at me. ‘You saved my life. Thank you.’
* * *
I thought about that later as we got into our sleeping bags for the night. It was the best I’d felt about myself in years. It would be good if somehow Frances could tell Kate what I’d done. I imagined Frances saying to her, ‘He saved my life.’ It was so solid. So astonishingly real.
Frances’s voice came quietly from her side of the tent. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
I sighed. ‘Honestly, I’ve told you everything.’
‘Would you change anything?’
I turned to look at her, both of us with only our faces out of the bags. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I know it’s not the same, but… I was angry at my mother for a long time. For making the choice for me. And I still feel angry. But now I know Mary and I love her. So I can’t say I would change anything because then she wouldn’t exist. I guess, if you could go back, would you do it differently?’
‘Are you kidding me?’ I shook my head. ‘I would give anything.’
1 MARCH
The wind eased around two in the morning. We lay in our sleeping bags, facing each other, debating whether or not to set off in the twilight or wait for dawn.
‘I suppose if we go down another crevasse it’s over anyway,’ I said finally.
Frances grimaced and nodded, nibbling the edge of a protein bar. Neither of us could stomach real food.
‘So let’s go.’
It was another two hours of driving and braking in the twilight. In a strange way it was liberating to no longer have the safety coil. If we went now, we went. Done.
On our third stretch I noticed the air was gradually growing less clear up ahead.
‘Is that snow?’
‘No way.’ She pulled her binos out and looked through them. ‘You’re right. Real, from-the-sky snow.’
‘Wow.’
‘How much longer?’ I asked her.
‘Not long.’
We drove on.
The most rugged thing I’d ever done before this was when Kate took me on a week-long hike around Tasmania. We’d just returned from Phase One. Readjusting to society together. More difficult for me than her, it seemed. The federal government had announced an extension to a park near Cradle Mountain, and in gratitude for her services to the national search-and-rescue program she’d been offered a trial run of the new trails. There had been a touch of snow at one of the peaks.
‘Isn’t it amazing,’ I’d said when we were setting up our tent, ‘to think of how few people have ever set foot here.’
‘More amazing to think of how many people will after us.’
I must have made a face.
‘You don’t want people to come camping? Mitch, you’re too far gone sometimes. People can’t love nature unless they can see it. Be in it. Get passionate about it.’
I shook out her sleeping bag. ‘I know.’
‘Do you?’
‘Well, it just would be a bit nicer, don’t you think, to leave some places human-free.’
She kneeled by our packs and put her hands on her hips, jutted out her chin. ‘You’re like a fourteen-year-old who thinks he’s discovered Nietzsche, you know that?’
‘Hey…’
‘Oooh, I’m so dark and edgy I think all the humans should die, blah blah blah.’
We’d both laughed at that.
Later, we’d made love tenderly on the hard floor of the tent, lots of kissing and touching. Afterwards she said to me, ‘People have to care about the planet if they’re going to do better on it. If we ever have –’
‘Stop!’ Frances yelled in my ear and hit my sides. I squeezed the brakes. ‘Look!’
The mountains were dropping away up ahead. The glacier was becoming the sound.
‘Pull in here near this ridge – we’ll be able to see the station and the airfield.’
We jogged and scrambled up, binos in hand.
‘There’s a plane on the airstrip!’ she almost screamed in my ear, pointing inland. ‘We’ve made it, Mitch. And the sound is still covered in ice!’
But I wasn’t looking at the airfield. I was looking out at B-33. Where it had smashed into the side of Ross Island.
Frances must have followed my gaze. ‘Oh, shit.’
I skimmed the length of the giant berg from where it protruded out and then all the way back to where the white of its edge melded with the ice of the land.
‘Look at all that new obsidian near the top of Erebus.’
‘Oh my God, no.’ Frances dropped her binos and put her hands over her mouth.
‘What?’
She let out a groan like a wounded animal. ‘Look out to sea.’
It was another massive iceberg. But this one was so big it was difficult to comprehend. I looked through my binos and realised it was further away than I’d thought, and therefore even bigger again. My throat closed up. It was two, maybe three times as long as B-33. This was bigger than anything any of us had feared. The sunrise held it in a golden-white silhouette, sitting quietly out there on the silver-black ocean. Even through my binos I could barely make out the thousands of horizontal lines running along it, like rings of a tree, recording its centuries of formation. Its colossal vertical edges were jagged and flinty. A piece could carve off this berg and sink a cruise ship. Somewhere along the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf we’d find the negative of this puzzle piece. The place where this new island broke right off of its continental mother. Even here in its home, in its natural environment, among all its fellow ice, it was wrong. The sheer size of it made it wrong. Dangerous. It seemed caught against the northernmost edge of Ross Island, and it spanned far out, covering the entry to most of the sound. It was like a giant tombstone.
Frances was wiping her eyes. ‘That’s big enough to change the entire ecosystem here,’ she said, sad.
It was big enough to change the entire world. This glowing blue beast would roam the oceans, swallowing up life as it melted. It was the Maldives. It was Tuvalu and Kiribati. The Starbuck Island daisy, Bidens Kiribatiensis, with its little yellow flowers in the spring.
‘What’s that beside Hut Point?’ she asked.
I raised my binos to my face again. ‘Is that the LIDAR?’
The colossal green laser pointed at the sky was usually only used in winter. Only clearly visible in the dark. But the lime bolt was catching on the snow falling through the atmosphere. Catching in a pattern.
‘That’s morse,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The LIDAR is flashing on and off in morse code. It’s an SOS.’
A whine came out of Frances.
Did the icebergs explain everything? Were they even related to all the other things? We’d long ago stopped referring to things like droughts and pandemics as ‘natural’ disasters, but it was impossible to order the cascade of terrible events going on here. Did B-33 hitting Ross Island take the comms down? Was there some immediate catalyst for this new ice island? If Vostok was a mining operation maybe they thought we were mining at Anarctos too. My mind raced with the terrible possibilities for a pregnant woman. War. Disease. Power loss. Surely they’d get her out first. She was a pilot. She could get herself out. But I knew Kate. You’d never met a person so suited to her job. She wouldn’t get herself out. She’d get other people out. She’d be the last person out.
‘But there’s still a plane there.’ Frances tugged at my sleeve like a child. ‘We haven’t missed the last plane.’
‘This ice, though. Do we go around or over?’
‘The ice is good.’
I shook my head. ‘You don’t know that.’
‘I know we don’t have time to go around. Mitch, please – be brave.’
I turned to look at her properly. Her face was awash with desperation. The LIDAR blinked. Dot dot dot. Dash dash dash. Dot dot dot. Kate had been here at McMurdo four weeks ago and something had gone wrong. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t sent Nansen to me. It didn’t matter if she went home to someone else.
Frances gasped and grabbed my elbow again, eyes wide. ‘The radios.’
‘The radios aren’t –’
She was darting back to our one remaining pack. ‘The shortwave!’
Of course. We were finally within range for a regular radio signal. The dread of the berg and the memory of the helicopter and Nansen and the dead Adélie all roiled inside me, building into a need for answers.
Frances found the radio in the pack, yanked the antennas all the way up and switched it on.
‘This is McMurdo to Anarctos.’
‘Kate!’ I cried. Her voice rippled through the waters of my body, a molecular recognition. Wild hope surged up from my gut and through my arms and throat. I launched for the receiver.
Frances wouldn’t let go. ‘Wait –’
‘Give it to me!’ I yelled at her.
‘It’s thirty-two weeks –’
‘It’s a recording,’ Frances said loudly, over Kate’s voice. ‘It’s not for you.’
But I knew. ‘It is for me!’
‘Just listen!’ Frances had a hand against my heaving chest, holding me off.
‘This is McMurdo search and rescue, trying to reach the Anarctos team. I repeat, this is McMurdo to Anarctos. It is February twenty-eight. You are the last research party still out in the field. McMurdo Station has followed mandatory Erebus event evacuation procedures. But –’
It was scratchy. Some words were lost in static.
‘… before that. We had no protocol for it. A massive solar storm. We were cut off –’
More static.
‘… chaos. People panicked. The Vostok choppers started doing surveillance. I’m seeing strange activity. Don’t do any hitchhiking, okay?’
That laugh.
‘They’ve left me a plane to get us back to Australia. But I can’t fly it to you. There’s nowhere to land. You have to get back to McMurdo. You have to come to me. I will wait here for another fortnight.’
This is McMurdo to Anarctos.
It is February 28.
A long pause.
‘Mitch. I know you love it out there but I’m here, Mitch. I’m waiting for you. But I –’
Another pause.
‘It’s thirty-two weeks. Please.’
Her small voice.
‘Please don’t make me choose. Please come home.’
There was a click and the loop began again.
‘This is McMurdo search and rescue, trying to reach the Anarctos team.’
