At the Edge of the Game (18 page)

Now it sinks.

The kitchen
windows at the other side of the house shatter. The mud has broken through, is
spreading over the kitchen floor.

Heathshade shuts
the kitchen door.

Our world shrinks
to a dark space. Between us and the rest of the Universe, a gulf greedy to suck
our lives away.

John Paul’s head
pops up far from the shifting shore. He struggles to the wall of a flooded
house and grips the drainpipe. He tries to climb, roared on by his red-faced
son. He’s got both elbows onto the roof, and slowly now, his left leg hanging –
swinging – he hauls himself up onto the sloping surface.

It was
night. We were travelling westwards across the North Atlantic. Our next target
was Europe, that great centre of civilization lost to the ice sheets two
centuries before I was born. The full moon rose on the watery horizon, and the
ocean lit up, sparkling in its silver light. The cat and the alien triped came
back from a wander around the Unquiet Spirit's dark corridors, and both
attempted to sleep on my lap at the same time. There was not enough room, and
after a series of protracted struggles Cat eventually resorted to the floor.

We were
flying into the dawn. The engines hummed softly as the twilight of the new day
spread in the eastern sky. We were approaching land – a region of Western
Europe that before the Ice Age had been called Portugal. We saw it as a looming
area of blackness between the lightening sky and the glistening water. We
allowed the computer to take us down, to set the Unquiet Spirit down on a wide,
flat beach, where we would stay for the rest of the night. When the engines
were quiet and the ship secure, we went gratefully, wordlessly to our beds. We
thought not of the unknown, darkened land to which we had just arrived, only of
the sleep for which our bodies yearned. Comforted by the sound of the breaking
waves outside my open window and the cold sea air that blew in and freshened
the room, I felt more at ease than I had done since we had left my island.

I woke in
the afternoon, feeling rested. I went outside to take a look around. The ship’s
landing gear had penetrated a half a metre into the sand. Sea water gurgled in
the holes each time the waves rolled in. It was a cool day, but the effect was
bracing rather than unpleasant. The rocks on the beach retained vestiges of an
encrustation of frost. The vegetation inland was predominantly gorse and fern. Gulls
flew in hundreds over the water.

When I was
some way up the beach, I heard Dexter’s voice. He was calling me back to the
ship. I tried to ignore him, but he continued to call. In the end I gave in and
made my way back to the ship. He could not wait for me to arrive. He approached
me as briskly as his rickety gait would take him.

‘The ship
has made a curious discovery.’

‘Yes?’

‘I had it
send out a bunch of probes this morning to look around the area.’

‘And?’

He pointed
out to sea. ‘Do you see out there? See the iceberg?’

The iceberg
was barely visible, set between the ocean and the cloudy sky. ‘I see it.’

‘There is a
magnetic anomaly in the centre of the berg.’

‘What
exactly do you mean by ‘magnetic anomaly’?’

‘A large
metallic mass stuck in the ice.’

‘How did it
get there?’

‘That’s
what we have to find out. There’s no time to waste. Let’s get moving.’ Dexter
turned and walked back towards the ship. I had no option but to follow him.

We took the
ship out over the iceberg, which was drifting several kilometres offshore. Other
icebergs were visible further out in the ocean, all moving more or less
southwards. It was summer in this hemisphere, and the northern ice sheet was
shedding some of its mass. It seemed as though the general trend in the global
climate in this era was progressive warming, with the ice caps retreating
further each summer. The data the ship’s probes had gathered in the Antarctic
ice had suggested as much. Currently in Europe, the ice extended southwards as
far as what had once been the southern coast of Ireland. In my time it had reached
as far as Gibraltar, and the Mediterranean itself had become icelocked.

The Unquiet
Spirit hovered over the surface of the berg and deployed a swarm of probes, all
that it had, to thoroughly scan beneath the ice. The iceberg was about a
kilometre long and three quarters of a kilometre wide. Underneath the surface
of the water it extended to a depth of several hundred metres. In moments the
ship was able to generate a detailed three-dimensional rendering of the
metallic object buried within.

‘Looks like
a boat,’ I said.

‘Yes,
doesn’t it? Our first proper evidence of the old human civilization.’

‘Incredible.
It must have been stuck inside the ice for thousands of years.’

‘Assuming
it comes from around about our own era, which is probably a safe assumption.’

‘So what do
we do now?’

‘I’ll tell
you, Mr Xian. We get that berg into safe harbour and we wait for it to melt. We
can’t let this opportunity pass us by.’

‘What
opportunity?’

‘To touch
something from our own world. To return, however fleetingly, to the past.’

‘Dexter, it
could take months, or years, for the iceberg to melt.’

‘Are you in
a hurry, Xian? Do you have somewhere to go?’

So it was
that we set about getting the iceberg into a harbour on the Portuguese coast. The
work was done almost entirely by the ship’s computer. It extended a system of
cables down onto the berg, where they attached themselves securely by burrowing
deep inside the ice and spreading tendrils like roots of a tree. The computer
then calculated the precise type of thrust required to pull the iceberg into
the nearest harbour, eight kilometres down the coast. This was a delicate
operation that took an entire day to complete. The slopes of the harbour were
steep and heavily wooded. It looked as though the ground had subsided in
places, perhaps a number of times, sending huge chunks of rock and earth
plunging into the deep water.

With the
iceberg at last safely moored in the harbour, we set the Unquiet Spirit down on
the gravelly shore. We went outside to gaze at the great, shining mass of
frozen water, shoes in the lapping wavelets. Dexter declared that he would use
the Unquiet Spirit's flatboat, which had never been used during the long
intergalactic expedition, to examine the iceberg at close quarters. He ill-temperedly
made it plain that it was all the same to him if I came along. This was all the
excuse I needed, and I opted to stay behind. As I expected, this served
contrarily to annoy him. I helped him load the wide, flat-bottomed craft, and
watched him speed across the water, propelled by the boat's silent underwater
jet engine. Observing through binoculars, I saw him tentatively touch the side
of the iceberg. He chipped away some ice fragments and looked them over for a
while. Then he threw them into the water. He continued on a slow circuit of the
berg.

I slept in
my cool room for a couple of hours, rising in time to see him return to the
Unquiet Spirit. He had a look of manic enthusiasm on his face. He responded to
my questions in short bursts, irked that I was speaking to him, interrupting
his flow of reason, yet at the same time wishing to give voice to his thoughts.
He paced the ship's living space. When I told him he should try to relax, he
left the room. A few minutes later I saw him return across the water to the
iceberg, hunched over, willing the vessel forward. He spent hours sitting in
the boat, simply staring at the wall of ice in front of him.

A sailor came in. He
told us the engine had stopped. We were stuck in the ice… [illegible]… walk to
the land and get help. They didn’t come back.

When Dexter
returned I suggested that we return to the island and rest for a few days. ‘You
look tired,’ I said. ‘I know I am.’

‘No. We
must stay. This is important.’

‘Look,
Dexter,’ I said, ‘it's not that important, really. Try and maintain a sense of
proportion.’

 ‘As you
have already pointed out,’ he said, ‘it could take months or years for the
iceberg to melt naturally. In order to solve the mystery of what is encased
within, it will be necessary for us to increase the rate at which it melts. I
propose that the best way to do this will be to tow the berg into warm southern
waters. In fact, I further propose that we should tow the berg eastwards along
the equator until we get to your lovely island, Mr Xian. By then, I have
calculated, the berg will be substantially melted, and we can ground the ship
on your beach to study at our leisure.’

‘How long
would that take? More particularly, how much fuel would it consume?’

‘That’s not
your concern. It’s my ship.’

There was
madness in his eyes. He was defying me to show dissent. I wondered if he would
physically attack me if I said the wrong thing. I turned and left the room. I
was furious. I was not willing to spend weeks on such a fool’s errand. I was
even less willing to allow him to waste precious fuel in so pointless a
fashion. Without the ship, we would be without hope. It was the one resource we
had that could not be replaced in some form or other. It had enabled me to
explore this world, gave me an exhilarating freedom I had not experienced in
the silent, marooned year before Dexter's arrival. I could not allow my
universe to contract again to a few square kilometres.

I rose not
long after dawn, having slept little. I resolved to act decisively. I found
Dexter sitting on the stairway outside. Evidently, he had not been able to
sleep either. He was nibbling unenthusiastically at a piece of fruit.

‘Good
morning, Dexter.’ My strategy was to appear outwardly conciliatory.

‘Good
morning,’ he said warily.

‘A busy day
ahead.’

‘Yes.’ He
took a few more bites.

‘Do you
need help?’

‘No,’ he
said. ‘Thank you.’ A few more silent moments went by. ‘Don't worry, Xian. If
you don’t want to participate in this project, I'll fly you back to the island
first.’

I did my
best to smile, and said nothing. I watched him gather his equipment together
for another boating trip around the berg. To my dismay, Cat and the alien, who
were both fascinated by the water, leapt into the boat just as he was pushing
out. I had no option but to stand and watch them go. All I could do was hope
that Dexter would treat the innocent creatures well when I was gone. I set to
work without delay. I gathered together some cases of food from the storage
hold and stacked them in the shade of the overhanging trees outside, shielded
from Dexter's line of sight by the bulk of the ship. With some difficulty I
extracted the disassembled parts of a small plastiform habitat and brought
those outside too. I went through the rest of the list I had prepared, locating
and putting outside various other items Dexter would need to live comfortably
in the cove: an air-conditioning unit; a fridge; a small electric stove; some
medical equipment and supplies; a computer with a copy of the ship's database;
half of the ship’s probes; a generator; a camp bed. I hoped it would be enough
for him. I left him no radio or other communication equipment. I didn't want
him to be able to contact me once I was gone.

Then I
wrote him a short note:

Dexter, I am
very sorry, but I cannot allow you to waste the ship’s fuel. I will return in
one week. I hope this will give you enough time to see sense. Perhaps in the
meantime the probes will be able to burn their way inside the ice and enable
you to study the seaship.

I left the
note attached securely to a food crate and quickly went inside. He had seen
nothing. I eased the ship into the air. The ship glided out over the expanse of
water, stirring up high columns of spray. I maintained the ship in a steady
hover for a few seconds. I could imagine Dexter’s speechless shock, his
disbelief, at the sight of the ship lifting off, soaring away without him. I
ascended rapidly and headed north.

The inland
country was beautiful and dramatic, dominated by oak forest that spread over
spectacularly deep, narrow valleys and wide plateaux. I directed the ship north
over France, crossing the edge of the ice sheet at the latitude of southern
England. I passed over the Pole at top speed. Heading south over the Bering
Sea, I encountered stormy weather. To avoid the worst of it I increased
altitude, flying above the thick clouds in the harsh upper-atmosphere sunlight.
In a couple of hours I had reached the tropical latitudes and the archipelago
in which my island was located. Heavy rain was falling near the bay, and I had
to wait until visibility improved before I could sink below the clouds and
follow the coastline to my home, where I touched down on the wet sand of the
beach.

I ran
through the rain to get to the habitat. Everything was as I had left it inside.
I lay down on my bed in deep relief. Without meaning to, I fell into a deep
sleep, and did not wake until mid-morning the next day.