Chapter 10 - Shivering
The Man pulled, then curled slowly to the catch, then stopped. The sweat-hiss on his arm cut faded. He waited with ear cocked to the window. The Phaen must have heard the slower blowing of his spinner flywheel; it scurried down the corridor. Its talons scrabbled and its beak screeched all the way. It poked its head into the spinning room. It screeched at The Man. He slashed a hand through the air, and the screech dropped to a warble.
But for The Phaen’s scared sound and the furnace’s drone, both shell and sky were silent. Not a breeze stirred the air.
The Man waited. He listened.
The sound came as if in ambush. A crackle sounded for three or four seconds, like a sparking electric cable. The Man had been hearing it for an hour, four or five times a minute. This time The Man heard an accompanying noise, one he knew. On the heels of the crackle came the death screech of a slain Staegon.
The Man pulled hard at the oar. The sting flared up from his cut again, the bandage capturing salty sweat and rubbing it in the wound. The Phaen’s birdcall rose an octave. It darted from the room to resume its screaming, scrabbling sprint in the corridor. The Man tried to ignore the stinging pain on one side and the noisy bird on the other. He pulled, but with his eyes fixed on the window.
The Engi had changed. The Man’s eyes roamed no more from crag, to hill, to valley. Now, his eyes could only descend. The packed dirt and ice dropped away in sharp cliffs. The shell passed along the striation through a narrow channel, like a mountain pass.
On these steep slopes, few plants grew. Nothing sprouted close enough for The Man to gather as fuel. The dense pack of ice and the narrowness of the passage meant also that little starlight fell over the Engi. The Man’s eyes, so used to nighttime light that it seemed day to him, could barely see the pack’s rugged edges. When he followed the slope down, which he did as far as his eyes would go, the ice disappeared into a sightless void.
The Man did see some things upon the slope. Jagged spines hung from the hardest ice. They were narrow and long. They weren’t plants, but icicles. They made fantastic shapes. Some went down as straight, lumpy cones. Others curved slightly like fangs of a primordial beast. Still others twisted as they tapered, forming ropey animal. The icicles were mostly water, little dust, so that even in the dark they stood out on the glacial surface like white-blue hair.
As The Man fixed stares with this still, spiny face of the Engi, a nearby icicle exploded. Without warning or reason, one of the straight dropping cones evaporated into fast flying shrapnel. It connected with nearby icicles, and a brief chain reaction burst of splintering, flying ice made a barren tract upon the slope.
The sound made by the explosion was the crackle The Man had been hearing. This time the fast flying ice struck his shell. The bullet reverberations through the metal, the force of the flying ice, at once doused any thoughts The Man might have harbored of going outside.
It was a storm formed like none The Man had seen - not on sky or sea or land. Long seconds passed between each erupting crackling, like pauses between thunder. Only here, the pauses were motionless and silent. Every second that passed without eruption was calm, the same kind as comes before hurricanes.
The actual crackles were quicker and more vicious than any thunder. No matter how distant, they never started as a rumble. Each one burst suddenly upon the ear, like the static of a radio switched suddenly on to dead space, then vanished with the same abruptness.
The Man chose to call the storm a ‘Shivering’ after its effect on his spinning. The fracturing sound took him by surprise each time. He couldn’t get accustomed to it. Without a rhythm, each one made The Man’s hands jerk and the oar line tremble.
And yet, the seconds between were so sickly calm, that The Man felt as if his blood ran thick. The furnace fire sounding through the vents and the electric hum of the shell heart still droned, their volume unchanged. The shell, however, seemed to roll slower with each explosion of crystal spires.
And the shell was rolling slower.
The crackle once again took The Man by surprise. He twitched, glanced at the Engi. The field of ice right beside the spinning room erupted. The flying chunk ice struck the window.
The window shattered.
The Man turned his face away just in time. Ice and glass blasted across his right side. A wave of immensely bitter air gushed in on the heels of the shrapnel. The fragments scattered and settled in the insulation.
The sweat on The Man’s body crystallized. He loosened the ropes fixing his boots to the spinner’s heel plates. He scrabbled quickly off the seat and toward the curtain. His boots crunched over ice and glass. Before exiting, the painting caught The Man’s eye; She Crawled in Stars with Elder Bugs. None of the shrapnel had struck the canvas. The Man stepped over and, with fast-numbing fingers, pulled loose the nails attaching it to the wall. He carried the painting with him as he left.
The Phaen backed away quickly as The Man emerged into the corridor. Its beak opened for a pitch-shifting crow. The sound was like a breach alarm on a ship of the liquid sea.
The Man reached and felt the side of his head. His fingers came away with frozen crimson flakes. One of the pieces of glass or ice had cut his temple. The Man hoped the wound wasn’t serious. He had other small cuts on his arm and leg, but otherwise had escaped the window’s shattering unharmed.
Another crackle of fracturing ice sounded somewhere outside. The noise was crisp now, louder through the hole in the shell. The Phaen continued shrilly behind him.
The Man ignored the Phaen. Even with the window open, the sky was quiet between explosions. There was tension in the night as well, yet an exceptional calm seemed to suffuse The Man. He knew the window needed replacing; he could see the replacement in his mind, secured behind a shelf in the furnace chamber. The night outside stole precious heat with each passing moment. Despite the need, The Man turned away from the furnace chamber.
The wide viewing window in the study, cracked though it was, let in a greater share of the limited starlight. As The Man entered, he could see that the cuts on his arm and leg were only scratches.
The Man set the portrait beside the door and crossed to the desk. From the top central drawer he pulled his daily logbook. He took a pencil as well. He flipped the notebook to a dry pair of pages. He turned to the cracked window and squinted at the night.
The Man held the book by its spine in one hand, splaying it open with the other. At the top of the left page, in large letters, The Man wrote, ‘Shivering in the Glaciers’. He left space beneath for notes. He thought, perhaps, the vibrations made by his rolling shell were causing the reactive eruptions. He hovered the pencil over the opposite page and began a sketch. He kept glancing up and down between page and window. Every so often he paused to hear the crackle of fracturing icicles.
The Man wanted to log this storm while it was fresh in his mind. He didn’t know how long this ‘shivering’ would last. The Man still heard the alarm of the Phaen, and he knew the value of heat, and that the window needed to be fixed soon. But The Man could always don his feathered suit. The Man knew he could endure whatever weather the Wind threw.
The Man shaded the sides of the page to represent slopes. The sullen, steep, massive ice deserved the name of glaciers. The silhouettes had loomed larger and larger in the northern horizon for many nights, yet never seemed to come any closer. Then, as if they’d appeared with the first crackle of shivering, the glaciers had swallowed him in their depth.
The Man drew harder shapes across the lightly-shaded slopes for the icicles. He glanced up as another shiver echoed across the sky; it seemed to The Man to be his viewing window, cracking all over again.
The tiny stars in their narrow strip seemed especially far tonight. They seemed to shy back from such massive weight of ice. The Man imagined the ice were creeping closer, the walls closing in.
And the ice was closing in.
The Man felt a ghostly touch upon the hairs of his neck. He looked up from the page and turned toward the curtain. No one stood behind him. But, The Man grew conscious of the heat-stealing air. The chill had crept all the way to his study chamber. The Man listened. He heard the furnace still pushing life-giving heat through the shell vents. The Phaen had gone silent.
The Man set his book and quill upon the desk. He left the dark, cracked-glass scene of the closing glacier walls, and pushed through the draping plastic into the corridor.
The plastic curtain was rigid to his touch, and the corridor air made goose pimples on his arms. As he stepped further the cold became worse. The Phaen was nowhere in sight.
At his spinning room The Man poked his head through the plastic drapes. He pulled it back at once. It had been like dunking his head in ice water; worse than ice water - like plunging into a vat of flame. He hadn’t had time even to look over the room, his eyes had burned with freezing water.
The Man now realized the cold’s depth. He’d underestimated the Engi. The air outside, within which the icicles exploded; that air was not negative fifty. It wasn’t negative seventy-five. That air must have been negative one-hundred; perhaps colder. The Man could only guess at the temperature. The Man had never felt anything so unutterably inimical to heat. It wasn’t ‘cold outside’; the air without the shell was entropic.
The Man retreated a step from the spinning room. He thought for a quick second, then stomped toward the furnace. The corridor floor had little insulation covering its gritty metal texture. The Man’s climbing and the Phaen’s back-and-forth clawing had stripped it. Now the studs in his boots resounded off the metal, echoing in the stillness of the glaciers.
Oil flooded The Man’s vision as he entered the furnace chamber. He felt for a lantern kept on a hook by the curtain. He found it, and six cranks lit the cavernous hollow.
The Man saw his Phaen huddled by the furnace door. This room was still acceptable to The Man’s bare skin, but the bird seemed to sense the coming chill. Its pupils narrowed in the sudden lantern light. It hovered its beak just above the floor insulation, and trembled as it beheld The Man.
He arched his light over the shelves. Behind one he saw a glimmer. The Man stepped over and pulled a framed-glass window from behind the shelves. This glass had a greenish tint of age. He’d kept it as a spare, after cutting the shape in the spinning room wall for its twin. The window was thick, with a vacuum between an inner and an outer pane.
The metal frame could be welded to the metal shell. But, The Man had no welder. He’d drilled four holes into the frame before embarking on his voyage, however, and could bolt it into place.
The Man grabbed an A4 wrench and box of A4 bolts from the cheesegrater shelf above the window.
The shivering crackled again. The eruption must have been close; the ice chunks pelted the shell in a brief, drumming spell. The Man twitched. He nearly dropped the window.
The Man took a second look at the glass, and reconsidered. He set the window and the bolt box back in their places on the shelves. The storm might just as easily break this second window.
The Man stepped half-a-dozen meters along the shelves. The heat had begun to drain faster from even this warm space. The Phaen lifted its head to watch him.
The Man stopped before a stack of shelves holding an assortment of shell-metal plates. The plates were of different sizes. All were curved. He selected one piece, put it back, then selected another. The curve seemed to match that of the spinning room wall. The piece seemed large enough to cover the opening.
There was a box beneath the lowest shelf. The Man dragged it out. It was heavy, and tore up the insulation as The Man pulled. He flipped open two silver buckles on the front.
Inside the box was a sealing coil and three spare canisters of bonding pulp. The pulp was simply tar mixed with shredded texel fibers. The bond it made was impermanent, and might easily break, but The Man only needed it for the shivering.
Tucking the plate under his good arm and hefting the sealing coil box with the same, The Man returned the lantern to its hook. The Phaen rose and shuffled behind him as he left the room.
Another crackle broke the silence. The Man heard the clink of ice inside his shell, and saw the stiff plastic curtain of the spinning room wave. Another shot had flown through the broken window. As The Man drew toward the curtain, the cold sapped warmth off his silk-clad skin. It was intolerable.
The Man set his plate by the door, and backed away with the sealing coil box. He recognized that he couldn’t get the plate over the break. Not before the cold overcame him. Not dressed as he was. In all likelihood, the bonding pulp would freeze in its canister.
Running now, The Man returned to his study. He rushed to the clothing chest and the feather lined suit draped over it. Quick as possible The Man donned an extra sweater and pants of thicker texel cloth. He pulled on a second set of the same. Over these he layered his feather lined coat and feather lined pants. He tied down all the openings.
The Man pulled the sealing coil from the box and loaded a canister. He gave the crank some test spins to make sure it functioned. The canister connected the back of the tool, as a kind of gun stock. The Man opened two of the ties in his coat and tucked the canister inside, so that it sat under his armpit.
Through the curtain. Back to the spinning room. The furnace vents, uselessly blowing. Like a specter of unknowable ability and nature, the cold air seemed to ignore all attempted to resist its press. It forced its way sharply through the corridor now.
Taking a deep breath, The Man fastened the leather mask over his face, grabbed the plate, and stepped into the spinning room.
The goggle-hood allowed him to keep his eyes open this time. They still watered with the chill. Beyond the window The Man watched the icicles slide by. He saw one quiver. He held the plate before him and ducked just as another hail pelted into the room.
When the crackle had passed, The Man acted. He stepped over the spinner rail, where his fallen sweat had crystallized, and up to the broken window. He didn’t waste time with the old frame. Already numbness crept through his mitts and prickling his fingers. The Man laid the plate across the opening and pressed. Broken glass crunched away from the bent metal. The fit of the curve wasn’t perfect, but The Man thought he could seal it with pulp.
He pulled the plate slightly back on one side and tried to crank the sealing coil with his free hand. The hold on both was clumsy. The pulp on the tip of the tool had already frozen. And The Man’s other hand was going numb just holding the metal to the wall.
For a moment, The Man wondered if he’d have to retreat. He didn’t want to seal his spinner off entirely. The Man began to wonder if the sky around the glaciers was ever ‘warm’, like the sky around the Engi.
With a sudden gush of frozen pulp, the sealing coil spurted. The Man brought it quickly to the gap between the window frame and the metal. The Pulp froze almost instantly, but The Man was able to press the plate down in time to meet the bonding sealant. He worked his way around the edge of the metal, as quick as his hands could crank the tool, forming a frozen bond between the loose plate and the rest of the shell. When the plate held fast on its own, The Man did another layer around the curved edge of the metal. He dribbled out another layer after that, until the canister offered no more pulp.
The Man stepped back and stared at the plate for a moment. He half-expected it to fall. Another crackle, and the sound of ice rebounding directly off the temporary seal, and the feeling of needing to sneeze in the bergish air, all convinced The Man to fall back.
The Man retreated to the corridor. He returned to the furnace chamber. The Phaen followed him, still with an agitated air, but quiet now. The Man walked across to the furnace without bothering to grab the crank lantern. He walked blindly until he felt its hot metal door with his mitts. The Man opened the door, letting out heat and light. He knelt down before the opening fully dressed, and let its heat bath him. The Phaen, tentatively, knelt at his side.
The Man’s thoughts became clearer as warmth returned to his body. The cold-stupor waned. He decided, in the future, to address problems of heat before anything else, even before food. This glacial region of sky was especially hostile.
As yet another sharp crackle broke the distant silence, The Man hoped the striation led a straight path through the glaciers. He hoped to leave the region soon.
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