Exodus Nebula

Chapter Eighteen

Land to Gireiah was indistinguishable from the jagged plane of sea ice extending omnidirectionally, meeting all horizons, except, as Cheung had suggested some days ago, particular regions of ice moved and others didn't, the fast ice.

Before they had even finished deploying the anchors to the land and the seafloor, before the storm-clotted sun had fully arisen, the mysterious, unnamed woman vanished. Eulliam had supplied her with the necessary provisions--edibles, camping gear, navigation tools, and one of their living suits--and then left her to her own devices. Gireiah had thought that the nature of the Kinsuo ship and technologies would startle or surprise the woman as they had himself when he first came to experience them, though, as Eulliam explained the living suit's function to her, she seemed entirely unmoved in even the slightest. It was then that he had wondered the woman's true nature and origin. The few times he had interacted with her, she seemed detached from the world around her, as if its ideas and events--perhaps even her own death--were trivial and inconsequential aspects of some other experience she concurrently lived. He wondered if the woman was, in some way, associated with the people they were attempting to contact. Against his better judgement, he speculated; perhaps she was a member among this unknown civilization.

He rather hoped that was not the case. He rather did not want to meet any others like the woman.

The last he saw her, she pulled at a sled of provisions, disappearing over a ledge of ice.

Their own journey began later in the day, when their ship proved truly settled with respect to the pack ice and shifting ocean currents, and when their preparations and provisions had been completed and gathered.

The southern continent, since its common discovery and charting, has been accorded many manner of descriptor: chthonic, uninhabitable, hellish, starless, merciless, forbidding, inhospitable, and so on. It is among the oddest of natural, worldly paradoxes, a desert--the driest, most glacial desert--entirely made of water.

A desert... of water.

The landscape here would likely remain immortal and everlasting, unchanged through the end of time itself when their home sun either becomes extinguished or Vanished beside all other stars. Then, the landscape would stroke and grope its entropic, deadening tendrils northward, to enshrine, entrench, and eventually embody the remainder of the world in its ancient ices.

The first three days of travel on the ice was brutal. Fatigue in such a lifeless cold sets about rapidly. Their living suits were not immune to the extreme temperatures. In actuality, they were dying. Periodically, in intervals of a mere handful of hours, they were forced to stop, both to allow themselves and their suits to rest and regain strength. Gireiah was not fond of the idea of pushing a living being to near-death. "They feel no pain," Eulliam had explained. "They are not truly animals insofar that they were adapted and designed to survive the natural world. They are without the subsequent modes and facets of nature which necessitate instinctual impulses such as predatory inclinations and experiences of pain. They are biological machines thought to have been created for humankind's use."

Each round of respite, they pitched a small, hexagonal tent, just large enough for the three of them--as well as with their suits which they hardly ever removed--to cohabit with relative comfort. That is, with enough space for each of them to lie. The tent had the capability to heat its interior to above freezing, but not much greater than that. A haven of warmth. The outside air, not regarding windspeed, periodically dipped to below negative one-hundred Celsius. Collapsing and repacking the tent was always more difficult than assembling and setting it, for as they rested, windborne snow and ice particles constantly worked to encase them.

Step after step, step after step, a million uncounted steps. Time for Gireiah passed in intervals of intermissions, followed by nearly unregistered stretches of unrelenting terrain, step after step. Chills seep through their suits. The wind-blasted ices of the surface were hardened and stone-like, though, when met with force, shatter with brittleness. All about them, juttings and shelves of ice rose meters above their heads. The ice near the coast was subject to the changes of temperatures and humidities associated with the ocean. Sea water, despite often being frozen, is responsible for cycling heat into the southern continent, which thus drives the maddening storms inland as well as the extensions of storms which reach out to sea, distorting the coastline's topology and glaciology with their erratic winds and windborne abrasions. "Our troubles will be lessened once we surpass the coast. We will then, however, be entering the heart of this infernal world."