to prove it.
“Paperwork is destiny,” as Slotkin had been fond of saying.
Oscar thought often of the men who had worked in that light before him, those men and the discoveries they’d made. The same lightbulb shone on Sarno when he speculated about mineral deposits deep under Kamchatka, and when Rudnik proposed Greenland as the ideal location for airfields and refueling stops. While an inspired Dimchas drew up plans for the first shopping center north of the Circle, the lightbulb watched over his shoulder and cast its fatherly glow on his pencil and page. That proud history—and his own modest link in its chain—spurred Oscar forward each morning onto the snowfields and into the storms, toward that vast sheet of paper with pencil in hand. The prognosticators who paved the way had been driven by the dignity of a day’s work well done no less than Peary or Nansen or Franklin had been, navigating the unknown by compass or computer and not giving up until they arrived, and Oscar endeavored to do those men proud.
“A glorious tearoom in the name of the people,” Alexi offered as the day’s first proposal, as he had every morning since his arrival in BIP. The elaborate phrase, the old-fashioned ornament of it, was already a signal between the two men, an indication the junior partner wouldn’t be ready to work until his first cup. He hadn’t looked at the map yet to see where Oscar was working and Oscar didn’t need to look to know that. Slotkin had always been first on the ice, as he’d liked to put it, and tall enough to reach the top of the map without rising onto his toes. He’d carried two extra pencils in his shirt pocket in case one broke while he worked those several steps away from his desk—no time to waste on backtracking, he’d say, you bring what you need to the north.
“Here,” Oscar said, drawing his finger along a jagged coastal outcrop north of Mould Bay on Prince Patrick Island, one of his favorite haunts. “There’s a settlement where an expedition arrived decades ago but their paperwork was never filed. They’ve been living there ever since, cut off and forgotten, generations of birth and of death.”
“But Oscar, last week we agreed that area was impenetrable wilderness. Are we changing our minds?” Alexi hardly peeked at the half-empty spaces, rummaging instead through a plastic bin on the table. His whole stringy body got into the search, hands and arms swimming through elastics and napkins and office detritus, legs dancing along. “But I’m sure there’s a sugar factory in that region, producing packets of sweetener.”
Alexi never stopped moving, keeping his body so lean you’d never imagine his prominent amateur standing as a competitive eater at the national level (a hobby Oscar, for his part, was happy enough to know little about). Alexi burned more calories in a couple of hours than most people do in a day, which had been common once in their line of work. Sedentary as prognosticators tended to be, in the old days Arctic explorers burned thousands of calories daily, honing their bodies into lean angles of muscle sharp as tiny slashes against the ice fields. Exploration had become a softer man’s game.
But Alexi was right about the wilderness: they’d agreed upon it a few days before. Oscar tapped his pencil’s nub of eraser against a faintly sketched line marking the boundaries of a dense forest full of wild beasts filling almost the entire upper region of the wall. It was a tall map and writing up high tired their arms quickly—he was no Slotkin, Oscar had to admit, and Alexi couldn’t reach the top of the map unless he stood on a chair—so for the sake of their shoulders they had agreed on the forest, an unbroken, unchanging forest covering those inaccessible regions. Also to get more work done in a day; efficiency, after all. Efficiency and perseverance.
“We may have made up our minds,” Oscar said, “but the world has remade itself around them. Last week was a long time ago and perhaps that wilderness has been cleared. At least enough for a small settlement. Or perhaps… yes, perhaps when we discovered the forest we weren’t aware yet of the settlement being there because it has been so fully forgotten. It took time for us to find it, hacking our way through the forest.” He swung his pencil like a machete, though a chainsaw might have been more effective as thick as they’d imagined those wilds.
“How’s that?” Oscar continued. “Slotkin always said…,” but Alexi’s attention had wandered. Oscar reminded himself not to pressure his new partner to do things more like his old. He’d have to find his own course, his own manner of mushing, and constant comparisons weren’t going to help.
He knew Alexi wouldn’t be happy about venturing toward the top of the map and wouldn’t appreciate the strain on his body, but Oscar had a feeling that morning, a spark he hadn’t felt in some time—the promise of new land on the horizon. What the Inuit, or so Oscar had read, call iktsuarpok, the feeling that something is going to happen, that someone is about to arrive at your house and you’re distracted by constantly checking for them.
“I’m thinking… yes, I’ve got it: this settlement was just stumbled onto by the settlers at Symmes’ Hole, who made contact on a hunting trip over their mountains and it only now made it onto our maps. Symmes’ Hole is so remote, they’re in touch so rarely, it was their first chance to let someone know.” He stood back for a moment, pencil poised at the angle of a rocket about to launch itself at the Arctic in its paper form. “Trust me on this one, Alexi. I’ll work on it today to see where it goes.”
“I don’t know… it seems pretty far north for a forest. I think it said in my training binder…,” Alexi broke off to push a pile of papers aside on his desk in search of the binder, lost in the year’s worth of rubbish he’d somehow built up in two weeks on a desk Oscar was used to seeing kept clean. As he watched rubble spill to the floor Oscar’s body tensed against the impulse to catch it, to return it to where it belonged. The urge rose to yell at Alexi or just to yell but he clenched his fists and curled his toes and pictured the clean, clear view of the icesheet he’d seen that morning when checking the North Pole web cam on his phone—an unremarkable device, like any other of today’s gewgaws and gadgets, but to which he’d added a plastic case textured and printed to look like a shell of grained wood, to make it look like an object that mattered and was worthy of an Arctic explorer—and with deep breaths of that icy air Oscar came back to himself.
“You said that before,” he told his still-rummaging partner, “but remember what we decided? The not quite dormant volcano, the geothermics… there’s a warm microclimate at the top of the island where the settlements are. That’s always been how Symmes’ Hole succeeds, drawing power and heat from underground. Off the grid. And remember? The forests are different, practically boreal because of that underground heat.”
“I guess it still seems a little unlikely.”
“Oh it is, it is unlikely, Alexi. But even the unlikeliest things have to happen sometimes—that’s the law of probability, right? Or is it the law of coincidence? Either way, a million monkeys and a million typewriters, that sort of thing.”
“I wouldn’t mind one monkey with a donut right now.”
Oscar sighed and strained for the far northern tip of Prince Patrick Island, where he sketched in some building shapes and made a few notes.
The map on the wall, the pencil and paper, were little more than a nod to tradition by now. That’s how they started each morning because prognosticators had always started that way, for as long as there had been a bureau, ever since the US government learned via some intercepted communication the better part of a century ago that the Soviets had a Bureau of Ice Prognostication to make the most of their Siberian exploits. What it did, exactly, no one could say, but rather than sit around waiting for answers they acted and created a BIP of their own, doing just what the words in the translated name of the department suggested and that’s what they’d done ever since. They’d outlasted the era of real expeditions and they’d outlasted the Soviets, too, though Oscar liked to imagine there were still underground agencies like his own hard at work in modern day Russia, still charging across the tundra from their own basement offices toward their old Arctic. He took comfort in having those counterparts, in justifying his own work against theirs as prognosticators had always done. He’d read of a monastery secluded in Siberia, expanded over the centuries to make space for all the secrets and relics of the Tsarist then Soviet then post-Communist Arctic, a museum with no visitors,