Melville's Geologist

It seemed almost sacrilegious. But given the time, given the place, it could have been deemed the final act of the Divine Comedy.

“Last bit of ice in all the world that didn’t come out of a machine,” he said softly so as to enjoy the sound of the rocky chunk of ice rattling around the glass. It tinkled merrily, the sound the last vestigial echo of a hundred thousand year journey. Extinction events, the rise and fall of species, and finally here to the shadow of the mountain in Iceland.

He put the glass down on the simple folding camp table and wandered back into the tent. The fuel cell hooked up under the cot kept the mylar bubble warm, if not exactly toasty, but it was enough to make him sweat under his parker. Rummaging through what little personal effect’s he’d been able to trek out into the wilderness, he soon found the bottle and brought it back outside. Putting the bottle down next to the glass and its off white shard of ice, he pondered which of the two was more expensive.

A sample of ice from an ice cap that was more threadbare than there, or a bottle of whisky from an island that was now submerged beneath the Irish Sea?

Heavily he sat down, leant back into a chair and pressed his head against the warm shell of the tent. The sky above was glorious, no doubt about it: the entire Milky Way had come out in all its glory. A sea of stars so thick they blotted out the trillions hiding in the folds, a banquet for poets and socialised Net junkies.

He turned his head and regarded the bottle for a moment. A gift from an old friend who wanted more for him than where he’d ended up. What better way to toast that failure, than by its maiden voyage be made on the back of the old world? The seal broke easily enough, even with thick gloves. Though it did take two hands to pour the single malt whisky into the glass.

But he didn’t spill a drop.

Stopper back in the bottle, he carefully took the glass and gave it a long, sombre appraisal. The sweet, peaty aroma of the whisky was joined by something he couldn’t define. The part of his mind that had been raised in the dense urban sprawls of the Western nations noted the smell did not seem dangerous. Probably trace amounts of ammonia and other soil by-products. Wouldn't be the first time he’d drunk something that wouldn't have passed a sanitation test for one of the middle-class towers blocks.

He drank in the scent again, and for a moment that distant echo arose to his mind: warm fields, plentiful game, and the very present knowledge that good times do not last. And that was why he was out here, in the shadow of a cold lonely mountain, on an island nation best known for gaoling bankers. A yearning for place remote, drawn to the barbarous isle by that same echoing song that wound up through glacial layers of ice, to a single shard.

He tipped the glass back, and warming fire cascaded down his throat in a rush that took his breath away. He sat for a long moment, letting the whisky warm his bones, his eyes looking up into that grey ocean above. Here and there stars zipped across the heavens on rails, with a few brighter spot moving at a more distant and sedate pace.

Maybe for his father the time hadn’t been right, the time not quite yet. But now?

A brilliant emerald star lit up in the sky, and for long seconds all it did was glower down at the lonely man and his warm tent. It mocking highlighted the fragile nature of life on Earth, of all the chances squandered and passed over by the teeming billions. But slowly the light began to stretch, forming a minuscule tail that pushed out behind it.

And didn’t he just look like a taunting rejoinder: Catch me if you can.

He looked back at the glass, and then tossed the remains of the ice back into the rocky ground of his camp site. As a second thought, he got onto his feet and scooped up the ice, careful to only touch it lightly. He then took a few shaky steps until he found a suitably large boulder, a piece of volcanic ejecta just larger than a HouseAuto. It was in the northern shadow of that rocky epitaph that he lodged the icy shard into a crack on its lower side, hidden from the sun. There the ice could hide, and in time perhaps grow with condensation runoff and the minuscule chance of snow.

If the ice could make it here, then so could a few egotistical primates on the lonely road to the stars.

And with that he returned to his tent, to dream the dream of man’s early past, and of the glorious future they might still squander.

“I am tormented, by an everlasting itch. For things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” he quoted from old memories and gave one last look up to the still bright drive plume of the departing starship. “Godspeed you restless souls.”