The Ice People Read Online Free PDF Page B

‘because it gets in the way’. In the way of what? She was going somewhere.
    Meanwhile I was online whenever I was able, to update on the latest tech data. Teaching for me had been a temporary plan; now it was time to move back into research, where there was more money, and freedom, and travel. The room seemed smaller when we were both working, two screens like two extra living things in the space, two busy, whispering, hurrying voices. Even so, it felt companionable. I was sure we were working towards the same end, the imagined future of shared freedom. A beach, sanddunes, small feet running.
    She made the food; I ate it, gratefully. She washed the clothes; I put them on. I never really noticed that she was doing more (but she could have spoken; she could have complained) until one day we had our first quarrel.
    She was standing by the window, drying her hands, preparing to sit down to work after supper. I remember there was a bright sunset. I couldn’t see her face, but the new short shape of her hair made her head sharp and black against the scarlet light.
    Something was beginning, something very important, but I didn’t understand it, nor anything else. ‘There’s some weird data here from the Antarctic,’ I said. I was reading from the net about the rate of melting of the icecaps, and the various tech fixes trying to slow it down. ‘Some of these results are coming out skewed.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘They seem to show the ice is getting thicker. I wish I were out there. This woman must’ve left out some of the variables.’
    ‘What if it’s true?’ she interrupted. ‘I’m sick of this heat. I wish it were true. Imagine it. Having fires in winter like my grandmother did on the island … This cold fog used to roll in from the sea, it was like walking through clouds, it was marvellous.’ After Sarah’s violent father left, she’d been sent to stay quite often with her grandma in the Hebrides. Her memories of Coll were absurdly romantic.
    ‘Or else they’re taking samples from the wrong place,’ I continued. ‘There has to be some obvious error. Why do these people always screw up?’
    ‘Wrapping up in
coats
,’ Sarah went on, ‘like they did in the last century. Not every day the same in this godawful heat. And this godawful baking city.’
    That brought me up short. ‘But you like the heat, don’t you?’ She turned and stared. I knew her. I loved her. My mind went back to the data again. ‘It’s curious. Her reports seem to show the icecap thickening in different places. You’re right, it would be amazing, wouldn’t it? I mean, imagine, if global warming ended.’
    But a new, unlikeable expression stiffened her face into a righteous mask. ‘I wasn’t serious, Saul. If it’s anything, it’s some kind of fraud by business interests. Trying to prove global warming’s slowed up. So they can go ahead and crash the planet.’
    ‘It’s just a few data, Sarah. Not enough for a fully fledged conspiracy theory. I don’t believe it either. We agree.’
    ‘You always think we agree about everything. And could you wipe the bloody table, for once? I’ve got a headache …
Must I do everything around here?’
    I sat and gaped. That was just the beginning. She hated our room, and the heat, and the city, and living together, and wished I would die, so she could live in the country, and have a big house, and a life, and a baby, and another man who really loved her, unlike me. By the end she was yelling. Then she was sobbing. She was wildly unreasonable, then contrite.
    It didn’t mean anything, or so I thought. I made love to her, and her headache went away, and so did that first queer flurry of awareness, light as the first little flutter of snow.
    But the ice didn’t go away for long. It returned quite soon, like the nerve in my tooth, the ticking of a faulty electric current.
    As Sarah had expected, the industrial lobbies were quick to make use of the discrepant data. ‘GLOBAL WARMING