This was the tricky part. He was willing to take the risk. He wasn’t afraid. But he wasn’t alone. If something did go wrong, if it did, Gunjita would be left holding the bag.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“You’re always thinking.”
“We can eliminate the risk.”
“How?”
He hesitated.
“Spit it out.”
It wasn’t easy, but he took a stab. Started with a preamble, then backtracked, preambling the preamble, laying the groundwork, which couldn’t be rushed, was occasionally hard to follow, and went on forever.
“You’re making me nervous,” she said.
This was plain to see, and the opposite of what he intended.
Then it hit her. “You can’t be serious.”
“You won’t have a dead body on your hands.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“Try to be open-minded.”
“Are you crazy? It should have never happened. It was wrong from the start. It was sick. Nothing’s changed.”
“We didn’t make them.”
“You didn’t.”
“You didn’t, either.”
“I set the stage.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“What does that mean? I accept responsibility for the role I played. That doesn’t mean I need to rub my face in it.”
“If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else.”
“That’s enough.”
“It wasn’t you.”
“I said enough.”
“I have to smell it, Gunjita. I have to touch it. You of all people should understand.”
“I do understand. But my answer is no.”
“Please reconsider.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Just do.”
The air between them thickened.
A thought occurred to her, darkening her face. “Are you blackmailing me?”
He didn’t reply.
“You are, aren’t you?”
She was furious, though in a way she had herself to blame. She had opened the door to him, ushered him into the world of smell and all things related. A true believer, she had made him one, too.
“This is fucked,” she fumed.
“One other thing. I want to look underneath it. Peel it back if we can. If we can’t, I want to look inside.”
Finally. Some good news. It was what she’d been wanting from the start.
“You’re ready to cut into it?”
“Not me. Look at these hands.” They shook like a martini.
“You want me to do it? Fine.”
“You’re a researcher, Gunji.”
“You’ve noticed.”
“You’ve got great hands. Great hand-eye coordination. Great technique.”
“But?”
“Mice, rats, rabbits … there’s no one better. But I’m thinking someone with a slightly different take on things. Someone geared to preserving life. Not so accustomed to sacrifice as the end result.”
“You want a surgeon.”
“I do.”
Not the strangest request, considering that he’d once been one himself.
“Does Gleem know?”
“They do. I made the request.”
“Did they agree?”
“They did. Laura Gleem personally. Turns out she knows the surgeon I have in mind. The two of them have had dealings in the past.”
“What sort of dealings?”
“No idea.”
“Who is she?”
“He. An old colleague of mine. Yours, too.”
She felt a quickening inside. Touch of fire, flood of ice. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’m not.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“He’s the best.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Who was this man lying next to her? What could he possibly be thinking? How could he be so dense?
The more important question, and the one that wormed its way into her brain: Why hadn’t he consulted her first?
–FOUR–
He hovered, and stayed still, striking on the crumbling columns of air… fixed like a barb in the blue flesh of sky… turned towards the ground and… for a thousand feet he fell… and another thousand feet… but now he fell sheer, shimmering down through dazzling sunlight, heart-shaped, like a heart in flames.[1]
The cliff was several hundred meters high, and from a distance appeared unclimbable. Dashaud knew from experience that this wasn’t necessarily true. From a distance the great Vatnajökull looked like a cozy white blanket, when in fact it was a minefield of crevasses, icefalls, and sudden, blinding storms.
There were small clumps of green and some stunted shrubs scattered on the cliff, meaning there was soil. Cracks and ledges to hold the soil, meaning potential hand-and footholds. A large colony of fulmars nested on the cliff, but they had bred, and were gone. He wouldn’t be disturbing them, or the other way around.
The cliff had been a lifelong dream of his. It spoke to him in the language of dreams, larger than life, unreal, seductive, forbidding. He’d been wanting to climb it since boyhood, but one thing or another had gotten in the way. When he finally found the time, was finally ready, he couldn’t do it. He was old, and physically incapable of something so arduous and demanding. Now he was young again, and could do anything he wanted.
He crossed the road, then picked his way through a field of weathered basalt to the face. He saw a faint trail and took it. When it petered out, he blazed his own trail, which quickly steepened. He passed an abandoned fulmar nest made of grass. Then another in a shallow rock depression. An unseasonably late-to-migrate bird glided by, squawked at him, then disappeared.
The climb grew steeper and more difficult, but his arms and legs were strong, and his balance, a must, gymnastic. He had his father’s Nordic build, long limbed and wiry, and his mother’s sturdiness and endurance, and was halfway up the face before he had to stop to catch his breath.
Below him, stretching east as far as he could see, was a narrow strip of lush green farmland, bracketed between glacial moraines and the windswept sea. He could just make out the red-topped silo of his grandparents’ ancient horse and sheep farm, where he’d spent much of his youth. To the west was the Gray Lagoon, fed by melt from one of Vatnajökull’s once mighty tongues, now thinned and shrunken. The lagoon, by contrast, was vast, as large as it had ever been, home to an equally vast quantity and diversity of brackish life.
This pleased him, and he was already pleased: with the climb, with his fine new body, with his supple, firing-on-all-cylinders, ready-for-anything brain. The world was not just a beautiful place, it was a playground, or anything else a man with his gifts dared it to be.
He felt a mild breeze on his face. He wore gloves, not for warmth, but for protection. Since his recent enhancement he was careful to keep his hands covered at nearly all times. He’d added a second layer for the climb, and on a whim removed both.
His fingertips seemed to waken. They whispered to him of a hidden world, swarming and newly minted. The breeze was like a chorus of secrets. He noticed subtle variations in its pressure—peaks, lulls, eddies—that translated sometimes into words (swift, strong, retreating), sometimes sound (warble, bellow, screech), mostly neither, but rather the pleasant, informative, highly personal, and often electric feeling that came from being touched. Present previously, now so much richer and more complex.
He touched his lips, traced their faint corrugations, felt their turgor: firm but not too firm, pliant but not too much of that. He nudged a blade of grass, aware of its own pressure. He could feel it in the way it resisted and opposed his applied force, stubbornly but easily overwhelmed. A friendly, compliant blade, eminently floppy; a pushover, though not to a small ant that was climbing on one of its neighbors. To the ant the blade was strength itself, bending only the slightest amount, and springing quickly back to attention when the ant moved on.