THE GLASS SPONGE

The glass sponge is not a species. It is a class of animals found in all oceans, although they are particularly prevalent in Antarctica. A high proportion of the glass sponges found in Antarctic waters are endemic to that environment. The Polar Front of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current helps to isolate the southern biota, and the ecology that builds up in that isolation is one that is unused to incursion and non-polar threats.

#

The Glass Sponge hated when visitors came to Scott Base. She supposed it was ungenerous of her – distrustful, and unwelcoming – but for all her desire to share the science of her days with people who were unfamiliar with it, she could never keep from suspecting their motives.

It was an open secret, more or less, among those who worked down in Antarctica that a southern cache of climate data was stashed nearby the Base, smuggled out of countries whose administrations preferred to purge their science than rely upon it. An open secret, as well, that one of the operatives responsible for that cache worked at the Base, though who she was – and her code name – was unconfirmed, if suspected. And while the Glass Sponge didn’t know all of the dozens of permanent staff there, at least not well enough for confidence, she was confident in enough of them to know that they would have come to her if they guessed anything threatening of their co-workers.

It had happened once before. A meteorologist had pulled her aside late one afternoon, when she was checking dive equipment in preparation for the next day’s work. “The new guy,” the other scientist had said. “The one with the ice core team? I don’t know anything for certain, but there’s something about him. About the questions he’s been asking. I don’t know what he’s after and I don’t care to know … just watch yourself, alright?”

The Glass Sponge had done exactly that, been as vague and as scatty as she could get away with, done everything she could to make herself look too silly to be a threat. The scientists she trusted rolled their eyes and went along, made a game of it – she overheard their made-up complaints, observed with quiet malice the all-too-obvious rolling of the eyes when she entered a room the ice core interloper was already in – and when the season was over that interloper went home, she hoped, with nothing.

“Good bloody riddance,” she said, under her breath, but that minor discretion was undermined when congratulatory beers came her way at dinner and she couldn’t stop herself from smirking.

“You look like you swallowed the canary,” said one of the astronomers, smirking himself.

“A cold and lonely little canary,” said the Glass Sponge. “Too frozen to swallow. Hopped his way off the ice, heading for home.”

But they kept coming, the quiet and the questioning. It was never the ones she could see who bothered her; mostly people weren’t anywhere near as subtle as they thought (and that was a terrifying thought for a woman who prided herself on a certain subtle capacity of her own) and the Glass Sponge could spot them well enough. If she wasn’t certain she treated them as if she were, because that way lay safety and if they were any sort of honest scientist they wouldn’t begrudge her scepticism. It was the ones she couldn’t pick that bothered her – and she knew they were there, worming their way in. Noting who disappeared when and where, narrowing down who was doing the caching.

It could even be one of the people she trusted. The Glass Sponge wasn’t foolish enough to think herself infallible but she had a duty to science above that which saw her examining the polar biota, and she couldn’t let herself be frightened into immobility, couldn’t keep second-guessing loyalties. That and paranoia would drive her mad, so she smiled when the people she trusted took sudden, diversionary trips of their own onto the ice, buggering off for the afternoon with no clear purpose.

“I was just off for a walk,” said Dave, said Lexi and Marama and Bill. “You never know what you can find out there!”

Dave’s shit-eating grin was particularly effective.

“You bloody stirrer,” said the Glass Sponge, after he’d made a target of himself one day in the dining hall. There was snickering over the dinner plates, someone snorting into their cup. “You are all bloody stirrers.”

“I hope they go home thinking everyone here’s in on it,” said Marama. “I hope they’re so damn confused they never come back.” But that was wishful thinking.

Wishful thinking, too, were the dark jokes about not going home at all. “I told him to look out for the leopard seals,” said Bill. “You’ve seen him, contrary bugger. Didn’t pay any attention, thought I was just yanking his chain. Realised just a bit too early he was being stalked.”

“Shame,” said the Glass Sponge, but beneath the bravado she wasn’t sure if she would have celebrated a death. It might have made things easier in the short run, might have smacked of justice, even, that an operative so intent on supporting those who were doing their damnedest to encourage ecological collapse came to a carnivorous end. But there’d have been questions, more of them and less silent than before – and the suspicion that the death hadn’t been accidental, that there was someone down on the Base who dealt in murder as well as espionage.

It disturbed her that her most compelling argument against murder was a practical one. The Glass Sponge wanted to think herself more moral than that, but the disappearances so far were so one-sided – climate scientists she knew only by code names, and from whispers – that her own mental landscape took on ever more of the patina of war.

“Still, it’s only six more weeks he’s here,” she said. “Best he goes back unharmed. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but if people start disappearing on the ice there’s no guarantee it’ll stop at them.”

She’d risk her own life for data, but she wasn’t going to be risking anyone else’s.

“Isn’t that our decision to make?” said Lexi. A conservator assigned to assist in the restoration of historic huts, she understood the need for preservation as well as anybody – and it was a valid question, but not one that the Glass Sponge could answer without confirming that she was the Sand Cat’s southern-most operative. They suspected, on the Base, but they didn’t know – even her friends, the people she most trusted, couldn’t say with absolute certainty that she was the reason the search was drawing closer.

There was no good way to answer, and so she didn’t … but the Glass Sponge knew that silence could also be taken as confirmation, in its way.

#

The glass sponges are community organisms. Their spicules are siliceous, tiny sharp pieces of skeleton that weave together to form spicule mats. These may be as many as several metres deep, and provide structural support for the sponge. The mats are also a protective habitat for many small invertebrates, a locking-together of spongy skeleton that helps to keep marine predators away.

#

She woke the next morning to a confirmation come from silence regardless, a confirmation come with intrusion and shaking and with sound instead of light. A hand on her arm, a whisper in her ear. “Mate,” she heard, “mate, you’ve got to wake up.”

The door was closed very quietly, and there was a small scuffling noise that the Glass Sponge recognised as someone fumbling for a switch. When the light came on she blinked hard, and if the weight in her stomach wasn’t sharp enough for panic yet, it was close, because the Glass Sponge had been waiting for the other shoe to drop for some time now, had fallen asleep every night under the shadow of nets and quiet drawings-in.

Lexi was at the door, her back pressed against it, and her eyes were wide in her face. Dave was crouched down beside the bed, his hands grasping her shoulders. “What?” said the Glass Sponge. “What’s happened?”

“Sinclair’s dead,” said Dave, his mouth set in grim lines, and the Glass Sponge felt cold horror wash over her. Frank Sinclair, the latest visitor, and she was certain in her bones that he’d come looking for climate data – for the person who was hiding it.

“Please tell me it was an accident,” she said, but the clock beside her bed showed it was only a quarter to four, and no accident was likely to befall anyone lying in their bed at that hour.

“Stabbed,” said Dave. “Stabbed outside, too – what he was doing out there I don’t know, but he dragged himself back into the vehicle bay and that’s where he died. There’s blood everywhere. No chance it was natural.”

“Shit,” said the Glass Sponge. “Shit, shit, shit!” It was unmitigated disaster. “Who found him?”

“Evan,” said Lexi, naming the astronomer who had teased the Glass Sponge about canaries and victory, and who had a habit of wandering the station in the early hours. “He saw a door open and went to investigate.”

“Shit,” said the Glass Sponge again, and reached for a shirt. Dave snatched it off her. “Don’t get up,” he said. “Go back to sleep – pretend you have, at any rate,” he amended, seeing her disbelieving expression. “Evan woke Lexi, and he’s giving it ten minutes before he goes to wake the head.”

“He shouldn’t have done that,” said the Glass Sponge. It was a risk to wait; it could only cause suspicion to fall on him if anyone ever found out about the delay.

“He’s doing what he has to,” said Dave, and there was no discussion then of loyalties and consequences, because they could all see the storm that was coming down upon them, the dark and looming shape of it. “Lexi came to get me—”

“He was awake anyway, I could hear him moving around—”

“And we came to warn you. Don’t look like that, Evan knew we would. Look, your poker face is good but it’s not that good.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the Glass Sponge, automatic in her denials, but it impressed neither of them.

“Whatever. There’ll be an announcement in a couple of hours, probably. We didn’t reckon it was a good idea for anyone to catch you off guard.”

“If you were off guard,” said Lexi, and the Glass Sponge stared hard at her with narrow eyes.

“I’ve been in my bed all night,” she said.

“You just keep telling people that,” said Lexi. “We all need to be in our beds right now, and all night is where we’ve been there. Just remember to look shocked in the morning.”

“That won’t be hard,” said the Glass Sponge. “I am shocked. We’re all going to be shocked.”

“Not all of us,” said Dave, and it was only after he left that the implication of his words struck the Glass Sponge, quivering in her nest of blankets with the room closing in around her.

Five of them, when the head began to speak, would not be shocked. Herself, Dave, Lexi. Evan. And whoever it was that killed Sinclair.

She cried a little beneath the blankets, silently, and hoped like hell that it was indeed five people who knew. Five, and not four.

The Glass Sponge was under no illusions that her hands would be seen as clean. She also thought that a significant number of the people who suspected her would frankly not care if she had done it. Murder was a terrible thing, but self-defence was an excuse anyone would cling to and the disappearances, the so-called accidental deaths of climate scientists, were a whispered and half-known thing. She’d had enough veiled warnings, had enough of her colleagues come up to her and pretend casual conversation – some better and some worse at the pretending – in which they made it clear that while they knew nothing, they’d hate to see anything happen to someone who did. The tacit support, while sometimes irritating, had been a comfort. The scientists who turned up unexpectedly to chat while she was alone with Sinclair, or with a Sinclair equivalent, had made it clear that she was being watched out for, that her exposure to danger was being deliberately ameliorated by community, and by community values … but this was an amelioration too far.

The Glass Sponge had been asleep. She had killed no-one. Which meant either that someone had killed on her behalf, or that there was another person here, another one who worked for the Sand Cat, and that person had seen a threat to themselves and removed it.

She almost hoped for that. The Glass Sponge would have been glad to know that she had missed a friend, a shadow-colleague, that she had been so thoroughly hoodwinked. Because if she hadn’t, if she was indeed the only woman at Scott Base smuggling climate data, then she had a friend who had compromised themselves for her, compromised themselves hideously and in more ways than one.

The Glass Sponge did not know how to live with the enormity of such a gift.

#

In some Antarctic waters the increase in glass sponge population is attributed to more than sunlight. Starfish are typical predators of the sponges but this predation is reduced by ocean acidification. The starfish, finding themselves in waters grown too sharp for them, cannot compete. The acid water makes them eat less, makes them grow and spread more slowly. They find it difficult to adapt to the hostile environment around them, and even periods of acclimation are no remedy.

#

“You’re not asking if I did it,” said Lexi.

“I’m not asking if anyone did it,” said the Glass Sponge. “Truthfully, I’m not sure that I want to know.” That was a lie. She did want to know – and so would the Sand Cat, because whoever had done this had exposed them all to a level of scrutiny that would be difficult to manage.

The Glass Sponge supposed that she should have expected it. The climate cache in Antarctica was well suspected. That it was administered by someone out of Scott Base was just as well known. Hell, at least half the Base thought that it was her. They didn’t have any proof of her involvement – she’d never given them any – but stupid people, on the whole, weren’t recruited to the ice. She lived in a small, enclosed community of individuals who had developed the skills to sift evidence, to construct hypotheses and test for fit, and they didn’t suddenly lose those skills when faced with personalities instead of polar geology or hydrodynamics.

So, no proof, but the Glass Sponge believed from her own observations that she was far and away the most likely source. She pretended ignorance on a regular basis, taking on the perception of an uninvolved party, sifting through her colleagues and herself to see who came off most convincingly as someone to be suspected. She imagined herself a newcomer to the Base, and tried to picture that newcomer’s first days, their first interactions, and how they would take the moving pieces of that small community and build them into a picture of responsibility and guilt.

Every time, that construct of innocent personality would finger herself as the person most likely to hide data. The Glass Sponge believed that this conclusion was influenced by the certain knowledge of her own role, but she also knew that this might not account for all of her imaginings. Truth was, she’d been careless. Oh, she’d never admitted anything outright – but she’d never had to. The speculation had been amusing to her, and she’d shown her amusement, knowing all the while that for some it would be evidence enough of complicity.

“Don’t you wonder who it is?” said Lexi.

“We’re all wondering that,” said the Glass Sponge. There were hushed conversations in every corner, conversations that came to a sudden halt when she entered the room. People she had hoped would have known her better were eyeing her speculatively.

“It’s not just you they’re staring at,” said Marama over breakfast.

“Sure feels like it,” said the Glass Sponge, and Marama had put down her spoon, given her a long quiet look.

“Don’t let paranoia make you look guilty,” she said, and while the Glass Sponge could credit the wisdom of that advice she couldn’t help but think that Marama had meant look more guilty.

She was absolutely aware that she looked guilty as hell.

#

A glass sponge can freeze under observation. Some exhibit no measurable growth for over 20 years. This changes with the introduction of a new environmental factor – for instance, when the removal of shading sea ice (the calving of a massive iceberg, the melting of shelves) prompts an increase in phytoplankton. This rise in available food sources is a catalyst for the glass sponge, and its growth moves again from stasis.

#

The one bright spot about one of the first ever murders on Antarctic soil was that there was no lack of publicity. The Base was isolated, somewhat, from the worst of it – there were no journalists turning up at the door, no cameras flashing in anyone’s face – but the news was well and truly out there. This meant that the Glass Sponge didn’t need to contact the Sand Cat to warn her of the coming storm. The Sand Cat, wherever she was, had access to world news and even if she didn’t know the level of her operative’s involvement, or the true role of the victim, she knew that attention would be drawn. Contact between the two women was severed.

The Glass Sponge had an alternate channel, one set up for her to use in the event her first was compromised, but she was reluctant to use it. One way or another, she’d be under investigation and there’d be no more data coming her way, not for the foreseeable future and perhaps not ever again.

There was a certain black humour in her isolation, and it was a humour informed by vocation. The glass sponges of Antarctica were notoriously slow-growing, but with the warming world and the collapse of shading ice shelves they were receiving more sunlight than before and their growth rate had become enormous, a comparative explosion of development.

Unlike her subjects, however, the Glass Sponge had to freeze under sunlight. Daylight was supposed to be a disinfectant for dodgy behaviour and for her, increased scrutiny meant sterilisation and the deliberate removal of anything beneath the surface. All her concerns now had to appear superficial – her biological research, the concern for a murdered colleague.

Even if the people around her didn’t buy it, the people coming to investigate would need to.

“What’s going to happen to me?” she said.

“Don’t think like that.” Dave shook his head. “There’s no proof you did it.”

The Glass Sponge was grateful that he just assumed there was no proof – no fibres, no blood spatter. No murder weapon with her fingerprints on it. No murder weapon at all, for the knife – if it was a knife, or just something sharp and capable of stabbing – had yet to be found.

“What else could there be?” he continued. “Yeah, there are people here who think you’ve been hiding data but that’s all it is. Thoughts. And you’re not the only one people suspect.” They’d put targets on themselves, him and the other three. Her particular friends, going off alone for walks, trying to spread suspicion around. “It could be any of us,” he said. “Don’t admit anything. Play dumb.”

“It’s not going to be hard to play dumb when I don’t know anything,” the Glass Sponge remarked. She hoped it sounded convincing, because the things she knew and didn’t know intersected in difficult and unrewarding ways.

It was the same for others, and she increasingly felt herself as the point of intersection. Relations with McMurdo Station, usually so cordial, came to take on patterns of freeze-thaw. It too was a place of scientists and there should have been sympathy, but Sinclair had been one of theirs in nationality if not in spirit and the Glass Sponge held no illusions that the senior administrators at the other Station hadn’t been placed by those with fundamentally different priorities. There’d be few who had sympathy for caching there, and fewer still who wouldn’t want Sinclair’s killer caught.

McMurdo was only three kilometres from Scott Base, the station of a superpower rather than a small South Pacific nation and she’d never felt the distance so closely before. Not even when she was out at the cache, securing new data in a lockbox hidden in the ice, had the Glass Sponge felt so watched.

“It’s not in my head, is it?” she said to Bill as the investigation continued, hoping for accusations of paranoia. The most laid-back of her friends, the one she always counted on not to panic.

“No,” he said. “Not anymore.” He started to reach out and thought better of it, but his eyes were sympathetic. “Can you get out?” he said.

The Glass Sponge shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. Plausible deniability might have been shot on her own account, but she’d be damned if she’d let the suspicion of new collusion, of shared knowledge, fall on anyone else.

It fell anyway, when Lexi admitted to the murder. “Why’d you do it?” she was asked, and she’d looked them straight back in the eye, those investigators who were as compromised as she was.

“You know why,” she said. It was all she’d say before she was taken away.

Dave came to the Glass Sponge later that night, walking as if there was sickness in him. “It wasn’t her,” he said. “She said she heard me awake, but we were together that night. You know.” He was married, had a wife back home in Whangarei. “It was only the once. But it wasn’t her. It couldn’t have been.”

The Glass Sponge wept bitterly in her bed. There was no use asking why. “You know why,” Lexi had said – had known, too, that without a more obvious culprit it would have been the Glass Sponge who was taken away, and one more front in the climate war would have quietly crumbled.

Against the planet, one person was a small price.

Against herself it was an enormous one.

“I never said it was me,” she said, in the break room, in the station. People left her alone after that, because either she’d taken the credit for something that wasn’t hers or she’d let a friend take credit instead.

She still didn’t know who’d done it.

It was six months before the Glass Sponge returned to the cache. The Sand Cat had re-opened communications – a cautious reaching out that spoke of desperation and limited options, for no-one had heard from Lexi since she’d been taken away and hers wasn’t the only disappearance. There was new data to hide, a copy of a copy in case all the others were hunted down, and the Glass Sponge clutched the small drive to her chest and skittered along the ice, careful in her absence. Trying not to draw suspicion.

She retrieved the lockbox, opened it up for stashing, and the world that was already so frozen around her froze a little more, for it was science in the box beneath her fingers, and truth, the hope for a future world, and its preservation had made her a liar.

“Some scientist you are,” she said, and set the data in the box, covered it over again with ice enough to block out the sunlight.