Sunday, February 10, 2008

A Sojourn in Iceland

Katherine strolled through the flower strewn meadow in her soft leather boots. Insects buzzed and fluttered around her voluminous skirts, the chirrups and calls a gauze of life in the brief, vivid summer. What they lacked in variety of species they made up in number. In the hazy distance the birch forests shimmered in the heat. She'd seen the country denuded by the Vikings, the winds whipping away the topsoil and the sheep cropping the rock bare but this Iceland had escaped such depredations. Laki towered above her, it was obviously still to explode. The observatory, perched on its top, glinted prettily in the sun. She could have told them, but she didn't have the heart. A sea eagle soared lazily over Grímsvötn, this was such a beautiful spot, but isn't beauty always perched on the edge of desolation?


The discovery of the lights, blinking back from the ecliptic, in 1859 had excited much comment. A chance observation, made with the sun directly behind the earth, had revealed strings of pearls reflecting back like cats eyes. Theories of huge diamond asteroids, and public subscriptions for funds to explore ways to mine them, had been reluctantly abandoned as the practicalities had asserted themselves. With the first heavier than air flight having taken place only twenty years before, trips to the minor planets were fanciful to say the least. Her suggestion, a week after her arrival on a battered whaling schooner in Reykjavík, that the 'lights of laki' might be artificial in nature, solar reflectors, built by alien colonists of the belt, had been met with scorn in the papers but an invitation from one Erasamus Hindley, the somewhat eccentric visiting English professor at the observatory, had been the result. It seemed self evident that a space faring species would become accustomed to zero gravity, regardless of their origins, through their long sojurns between the stars. That they would prefer to mine the volatile rich asteroids and drink in the golden bounty of the sun, while eschewing the gravity wells and no doubt noxious atmosphere of the inner planets seemed self evident to her.

She had accepted the note in her hotel more in the hope that the errant Professor had fortified the observatory with some proper tea and perhaps seed cake, the native's fondness for rotten shark and whale meat had not grown on her. She was stunned by the beauty of the women here, although she'd often been struck by the disparate and constant beauty of the women of all four corners of the earth. Perhaps rotten shark meat was good for the skin. It was strange, she'd often thought that a vigorous mixing of the races produced the most lovely women, hybrid vigour if you will, yet here in Iceland, long the most isolated people on earth, every girl was a princess, carved fresh from the white of the ice and the blue of the skies in her eyes. Despite the ravages of the implacable ice, the ashfall and smallpox and famine never more than a wet summer away, a vibrant common beauty bloomed as sweetly in the bars of Akureyri as it did in the meadowlands here. She gathered herself and pressed forward through the meadowsweet and dandelions. Her ribs felt tight in her tightly laced bodice. The silk of her shirt was sheened with sweat beneath her arms. It had, to coin a phrase, been quite a while.

The slight breeze was still cold as it cut from the ocean. The cart road up Laki, over five thousand feet high, twisted yellow and white through birch, flower speckled grass and finally tumbles of glacial rubble as barren as the moon. She waved to the waiting coach driver, as his two tough little ponies cropped at the verge. Katherine already loved the tough, piebald little horses. Dwarfed by the conditions, toughened by the winters, wild as the wind and beautiful as the flowers, no two were the same. She loved their ragged coats, their eyes dark as the northern winter, their reluctance to take even sugar from her hand. She clambered aboard the cart, in truth it was little more than that, and the tough little ponies clipped off without needing the husky driver's bidding.

She attempted to engage the driver in a little conversation. Her Icelandic was ignored, as was her Danish. She didn't stoop to attempting her few words of Faroese. It was hard to break the ice with the locals, so to speak, but friendships once established would endure while even the lava wore away. She liked it here, she could see herself riding wild horses, making chains of wild flowers and climbing the glaciers with gangs of wild eyed boys. She would have stayed if she could but, of all her myriads of possibilities, that was her only closed option. She sighed and arranged her layers of heavy skirts over her knees. It didn't do to push things. The mighty great geyser itself would soon be blocked by tourists throwing in stones to trigger its eruption. All they'd had to do was wait a little while and soon one would be waiting forever. Still, the Gullfoss Waterfall was as beautiful as ever. She imagined bathing in its bracing waters, still fizzing from the tumult, and the face of whoever might be waiting by its side.

She raised her opera glasses. A man of comfortably upholstered dimensions was waiting in the high domed observatories small gravel courtyard. A fine set of mutton chop whiskers, the heavy tweed of the alpine adventurer and a spindly set of eyeglasses impressed themselves upon her eye as they clopped ever closer. The horses were almost cantering now, strong as pit ponies, she wondered if they had names. The cart slewed to a halt, only then did it strike her how rough the ruts had been on her back.
"Miss Barley?"
"Professor Hinley I assume."
The Professor held out a hand to help her down. It was quite uncessesery yet still she appreciated the gesture. Politeness and manners are all that keep strangers from each other's throats, even here. They retired to his study for refreshments. She was encouraged to see a full tea tray, scones, lemon cake, a little sharp cheddar. She realised she hadn't eaten all day.
"A most singular theory, Miss Barley." He proffered a china cup of English Breakfast tea. A professor's stipend clearly didn't run to a butler.
"The merest trifle Sir, I trust I merely echo your more considered imaginings."
"Indeed. There can be no doubt. We have visitors." He plumped for the fruit cake, she a slice of lemon curd.
"Some are calling them Angels." She had no idea if the idea had yet occured to the populace at large, but the public's desire to see Angels in the clouds was surpassed only by their fondness for the devils beneath their beds.
"No doubt, perhaps that's what they are."
"Should we persue this?" She was serious. "Won't the populace fear invasion?"
"Perhaps to unite against a common enemy would still the hand on the swords which lie between us."
"Perhaps." She knew better but it was too wearying to say. "My feeling is, if they wanted our planet they would have taken it long before our first cart wheel bit in the clay. They are happy where they are, mining the minor planets and the sun. We too should be..content."
"How many would you put their number?"
"There is no way of knowing how many lights are inhabited, or how many might inhabit each one. Perhaps a billion?"
The Professor was taken aback. Katherine was surprised. Had he genuinely not considered that the visitors, infinitely more advanced in the ways of natural science and possessed of far greater materials and energy than the trifle which accrued to the earth, might already far outnumber the inhabitants of earth. The visitors might have worked their for a million years, there simply was no way of telling.

There was barely an hour of darkness at this time of year. Katherine and the Professor, fortified by a small glass of port his comely visitor had politely declined, waited patiently for the limpid sky to reveal their quarry. As luck would have it the clouds were few and the great refractor, now pinned in its position, revealed the pearly strings. As the earth completed an orbit of the sun over the course of a year so the entire plane could be surveyed. Perhaps three thousand of the lights had been catalogued by the Professor. She wondered if the visitors were aware how their solar arrays reflected the light of the sun back to the third planet in the system when she sun was directly behind. She remembered the eyes of sugar gliders in the forests of Australia, reflecting her miner's lamp back at her as the Doprodonts scratched in the clearings. Perhaps they were waiting for mankind to venture out to them, alerted to intelligence if only by Mr Marconi's radiophonic dabblings. Perhaps they were entirely artificial. Perhaps they just didn't care.

The Professor took his photographic plates, absurdly heavy in their frames, while Katherine tweaked the crank to stare at Saturn, at Jupiter, at Europa herself. She imagined twirling the focus dial until she could see her own bare footprints up there. Other worlds, other times, she felt ragged as a spider's web strung between two waving branches. She returned the mighty mirror to its previous settings relinquished the worn leather seat. Though the Professor seemed eager to share his theories through the night she elected to retire as soon as seemed proper. Her travelling had tired her and four days of drift without food in that leaking lifeboat before her rescue had played merry havoc with her skin.

She breakfasted with the professor, although kippers were never entirely to her taste at so early an hour, and cadged a lift down to the nearest town. There she bought a paper, some necessary toiletries and made the acquaintance of one Ljósadís Jónsdóttir. The girl wore clogs and a hessian dress and worked canning fish and sewing through the winter. Katherine hired her as her chamber maid on the spot. The observatory, after all, could do with a dusting. On the way back to the Observatory Katherine told her a little of the stars while they named all the horses together. As the weeks passed, as Katherine's plans for an exothermic drive took shape upon the professor's easel, as funding was arranged from Her Majesties private funds through the usual channels, Katherine and Ljósadís became friends.

Tiptoeing into their room after a long autumn night at the eyepiece, Katherine lay carefully beside her and watched her sleep. It was the tiniest details which mattered ever more to her, the candlelight flickering through her flaxen hair, her chemise still carelessly open. She slipped out of her clothes, easier now as she'd gradually sloughed the restrictive fashions of the day in favour of the boy's work clothes she felt most at home in, and snuggled down around the sleeping girl. Ljósadís smiled in her dreams and Katherine's fingers longed to wake her. She bit her lip and for a moment her heart was cold as the heart of Europa. She knew the ship was little more than a futile gesture, there were three years left here, little more. She knew they'd both die in the breathless void between Mars and Jupiter some little time after. Was it worth it? When the Visitor's sleek mechanical pods began to land in the ice, burrowing in like ticks, their ariels upstanding like bloodworms in the ooze, the priests and the dreadnoughts would be as helpless as eachother. She brushed a stray strand of her from the blonde girl's temple, then kissed the spot. She slept but her dreams were strange to her and she woke unrefreshed.


The second bench tests of the improved Exothermic drive were an outstanding success, thanks in no small amount to the dedication and precision of Pearson's detachment of Naval engineers. Ljósadís, still nominally in Katherine's employ out of the generous bursary Her Majesty had seen fit to bestow her, heard the whoops as she tended to their horses. She felt the ground shimmer around her. Miss Barley had said she would show her every star in the sky and she knew she'd be as good as her word. And when Katherine ran out of new stars to point to her, when the single porthole iced over and the canary died, when the only warmth left lay in each other's thin arms, when the oxygen pumps fell silent and the last of their water dried on her lips, Ljósadís would tell her their stories.

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