2004 July 10
20:46
To: Billie.Gosling@janusbooks.com
From: cherrywaswaiting@hotmail.com
Subject: Prodigal daughter’s return
B.,
Thanks for all your e-mails. Tell Mom and Dad we’re all okay. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to respond sooner. Once the station shut down, Dwight forbid all personal e-mail, since it took up bandwidth during the satellite fly-bys. Whatever that means. Anyway, looks like this shitshow is coming to an end. We got word last week that Jack Calhoun decided to commit political hari-kari and break with Bayless to end the impasse on the budget committee. I guess once Pavano did that interview with 60 Minutes about the oil consortium, he had to cut his losses. I suppose it helped that NSF says it’s willing to talk about formalizing a process to ensure grant money for “non-traditional scientists.” They’re going to insist on a robust body of “peer-reviewed science” from each applicant, and Sal tells me there is no such thing as “peer-review” in climate denial—but don’t tell the deniers that! So we’re free! (well, free until September when the first plane can fly in.) We’re basically eating nothing but Ry-Krisps and canned tuna now, but we still have a shit-ton of Russian vodka.
C.
By mid-August, nearly everyone knew enough Russian to sing all three refrains of “The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” Cooper had learned how to use the rodwell to melt Antarctic ice for the station’s water supply, learning, too, that the water swishing around in the station toilets might be made from snow that had fallen in the fifteenth century (if you dug down far enough). She had finished nearly everyone’s portrait, except Sal, whom she found she didn’t dare commit to canvas since his countenance burned so brightly and so beautifully in her mind. But it was time, she knew, to do the last portrait—the one of David. The one, she now understood, that she’d come down here to paint. And to do that she had to do something else first.
Cooper found Bozer and the others in the bar the night after the announcement of the sequester’s end. When Bozer glanced up at her and saw the vial she displayed to him in her hand, he nodded and stood up. The ragged crew around him immediately understood. Sal gripped Cooper’s left hand and squeezed.
The entrance tunnel was bathed in red, but outside the sky was black as ink, the cold winds rolling off the East Antarctic Plateau and the southern lights streaming across the sky in refracting sheets of color. When they reached the Pole marker, the crew gathered around its silver globe expectantly, and their reflections swelled and shrank. For an instant, Cooper saw herself just as she’d been that first day when she’d looked into Alek’s mirrored aviators.
“Not here,” Cooper said. She pointed toward the Terra Nova, the geographical marker. “There.”
Bozer looked at her for a moment. “You know if you bury him here, he won’t be here next year. He’ll drift.”
Cooper held his gaze. “I’m counting on it.”
Bozer tucked the ice augur under his arm and they began walking toward the Terra Nova, their flashlights casting milky beams into the darkness. When they reached the marker, Cooper pointed at a spot of ice at its foot, and Pearl and Doc Carla trained their flashlights on it.
Bozer leaned on the ice augur. “We’re all here because of some shit. Everyone’s got it, but you ain’t got to be alone in it.” He grunted. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”
He looked over at Cooper, his balaclava obscuring all but his clear eyes, and she nodded. He drove the blade into the mark. The group watched the auger rotate in silence; to Cooper, the spiraled blade seemed a vision of infinity. It was only when Sal gently nudged her that she realized Bozer had finished coring.
She stepped to the edge of the hole and dropped to her knees. Sal helped pull off the mitten on her right hand. Carefully, he opened the vial and emptied the ashes onto the flat of her mitten. For the first time since that night on the edge of the lake, she looked at the gunmetal gray of her brother’s remains. Her hand trembled. She couldn’t move.
Then the others were kneeling beside her: Dwight, Denise, Floyd, Doc Carla, Pearl, Marcy, Alek, Sal—even the Swedes. Only Bozer stood apart, leaning on the auger. She closed her eyes and released David’s ashes into the deep cut in the continent.
* * *
The sun was warm. The sound of birds had not yet become familiar again, and Cooper was thinking wistfully of the silent song of Bozer’s glacier sparrow. Sal drove the rental like a kid on a learner’s permit, hands at ten and two, his body taut, eyes fixed on the road ahead. As they drove through Palo Alto, the lush lawns—freshly watered and glittering under the sun like sheets of emerald—struck Cooper as about as probable as a McDonald’s on the Divide. The piebald hills seemed ostentatious. The tidy parks were exquisite. The palms fronting the university looked as flamboyant as showgirls, and the occasional appearance of children seemed deeply strange. Cooper and Sal drove through the streets in silence.
They hadn’t even stopped in Christchurch. The others had back-channeled hostel bookings and begun making plans online as soon as the end of the sequester had been announced. Floyd and Bozer sketched out an appeal to the New Zealand government to give the Man Without Country a proper burial; Denise went looking for a thrift-store wedding gown, having agreed, finally, to marry Bozer when they got off the ice. Pearl found Birdie waiting for her at the airport with a bouquet of daisies and a finished manuscript, and Dwight haunted Internet cafés until he found Bonnie in a cosplay chat room. Tucker was still in Washington, helping Alexandra Scaletta and Daniel Atcheson Johnson pick up the pieces, and lobbying for a dismissal of possible federal charges against the occupiers. The support staff arranged to meet in Denver to plead their cases to VIDS. One thing everyone had agreed upon was that they would all be back.
But Sal had to tell Professor Brennan five-sigma. The sixth milestone had been reached. Slithering toward the telescope like an army of infinitesimal Slinkys, the gravitational waves had confirmed what the inflationists had claimed all along: that space was a wild, chaotic place marked by violence, and that humanity occupied a remote pocket universe carried along by eternal inflation. There were no branes, no hidden dimensions, no hints of elegant cosmic evolution—there was only the vacuum, and a planet adrift in a multiverse. And he wanted Cooper with him when he did it.
The rumors continued unabated, of course, and by the time Sal had flown out, even Science was speculating. Sal told Cooper that he’d talked to Sokoloff one last time before leaving Pole, and that he’d told Sal that Lisa Wu had petitioned Kavli to wait on the announcement until Sal had returned stateside, so he could be the one to tell his father that the inflationary theory had been confirmed.
Now they were here, pulled up against the curb, and Sal was staring at the steering wheel.
Cooper put her hand on his shoulder. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”
“All I have to say is ‘five-sigma at point two.’ He’ll understand.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “I hope he will.” Sal looked over at Cooper. She saw fear in his eyes. She leaned over the shift and ran her hand over his now-lush auburn beard.
Sal tapped the steering wheel. “Sokoloff says it might be dust or synchrotron radiation from electrons in the galactic magnetic fields. He thinks Kavli shouldn’t announce until they can rule that out.” Cooper chose not to remind Sal that he’d mentioned this to her several times on each leg of the flight from New Zealand. She knew he wasn’t really talking to her anyway. He chewed on his lip for a moment. “But I won’t say that to him. No, not now. I’ll just tell him.” He looked over at Cooper again. “He was right, you know.”
“Your father?”
“Pavano.”
“Right about what?”
“That I believed. I knew it was wrong to believe, but I did anyway. From the first moment I heard Sokoloff speak, I wanted to believe this was true—I wanted what was beautiful to be true, rather than the other way around. That’s why this hurts so much.”
Sal looked over her shoulder, through the passenger-side window, and up at the house. Cooper turned and saw a figure looking out at the car, moving between panes, made faceless by the reflection of the sun on the front windows of the house. As they watched, the figure disappeared momentarily, and the front door opened. Backlit by the setting sun, the door looked like a portal, the figure like a ghost.
“Let’s go,” Sal said.
Cooper shook her head. “No, you go. I’ll wait here.”
She watched as Sal ascended the steps. When he reached the top, the figure in the doorway held out his arms. Sal fell into them like a little boy.
Yes, Cooper thought, of course. This was what Cherry had strained to see for six months, waiting for the Scott party to return. You waited at One Ton Depot, just you and the dogs, certain the men were just over the rise. You overcame your myopia and you navigated using the faint gleam of the sun. You blamed yourself, wondering if you had only laid better depots, if they would have made it.
And then someone appeared, pulling a sledge.