The Permafrost Waltz

Marcy Webber was thirty-four years old and she was living inside a snow globe. That was how she thought of it, anyway, kneeling on her bunk, three weeks into the contract and finally, finally unpacking the last duffel bag, which sat open in front of her like a wound. Outside the little round window of the Helios Arctic Research Station, the wind was doing its usual thing, which was screaming. Inside, a radiator clicked and a space heater she had definitely not gotten approved hummed under the desk.

Two months since the breakup. Two months since Devin had stood in their kitchen and said the words, "I just think we want different things," like he was reading them off a fortune cookie. Two months since she had thrown everything she owned into her truck and taken a seasonal landscaping contract at the end of the earth because the end of the earth sounded quieter than her own living room.

"Want different things," she said to the duffel bag. "You know what I want? I want to not be here. But here I am!"

Here she was, actually, and the weird part was that she liked it. That was the part she hadn't told anybody back home, because how did you explain that to your sister over the phone? Oh, hey, yeah, the polar night is great, it's like the whole world agreed to leave me alone. The dark didn't ask her how she was doing. The dark didn't care about her "putting herself back out there." The dark just sat there, heavy and honest, pressing on the dome like a hand.

She unpacked methodically, the way she did everything. Work gloves in the left bin. Carabiners hung on the hook. The picture of her and Devin on the mountain went into the bottom of the duffel, face down, and she felt exactly zero guilt about that. Okay, maybe ten percent guilt. Fine, twenty percent, but she wasn't taking it out, and that was what mattered.

A knock at the door made her jump so hard she bit her cheek.

"Marcy? You decent?" It was Samantha Chapman, the station biologist, twenty-nine years old, the only person on base who had volunteered to give her the tour and the only person who hadn't asked a single question about why a landscaper would voluntarily move to Svalbard in October.

"Come in before the cold does!"

Samantha came in carrying two mugs and a grin. "Cocoa. It's the good kind, I hoarded it from the last supply run. How's the unpacking?"

"How's the unpacking," Marcy repeated, gesturing at the duffel with the flair of a game show host. "Look at this. Look at this lifestyle."

"Very chic. Very arctic." Samantha dropped onto the desk chair and blew on her cocoa. "Kenny wanted me to remind you about the all-hands meeting later this week. He's announcing something. Nobody knows what. The kitchen theory is budget cuts. My theory is he finally fixed the sauna."

"The sauna theory is braver than the military," Marcy said, and Samantha laughed the big laugh that had made her easy to like from day one.

They drank cocoa and talked about nothing for a while, and it was nice, but when Samantha left, Marcy sat on the bunk and looked at the duffel bag with the picture in it and thought, well. Here's my life now. A dome on the permafrost, a job keeping the greenhouse beds alive, and a boss named Kenny Connors who was forty-five and wore the same fleece vest every single day like it was a uniform in a movie about a man who owns one vest.

The dark pressed in. She found it comforting and she knew that said something about her and she decided not to examine it. There would be time to examine it in February. Or never.

She turned off the lamp and looked out the little round window, because the dark was easier to look at without her own reflection in the way. The floodlights on the dome reached maybe forty meters across the snow and then simply quit. At the very edge of where they quit, something was standing. Tall. Narrow. No pack, no sled, no headlamp, and nobody on this base would be out in a wind like that at this hour. It stood the way a person stands when they are listening. She blinked, and the wind threw a sheet of snow across the glass, and when it cleared there was only the edge of the light. A survey stake, she told herself. They put them everywhere. The dark had never asked her how she was doing, and she had always liked that, and it was only now that it occurred to her that a thing that never asks you anything might simply be waiting.

***

The knock came at seven the next morning and it was not a friendly knock. It was a knock with paperwork behind it.

Marcy opened the door to James Carlson, thirty-seven, health inspector for the consortium, the man she had privately nicknamed The Auditor within her first week. He was tall, careful, and he wore his clipboard the way other men wore sidearms.

"Morning. Surprise inspection of staff workspaces. Kenny approved it after the merger announcement."

Marcy blinked. "The merger announcement happened eleven hours ago."

"And the inspections started this morning. It's in the email."

"Nobody reads the emails, James, you know nobody reads the emails!"

"Well, you should." He stepped past her before she could decide whether she minded, and she did mind, a little, but she also followed him because she wanted to see him find nothing.

Except he did not find nothing. He found her greenhouse staging room, and he found her ice climbing gear, which she had hung to dry on the rack by the door after yesterday's traverse training, and he found one thing, one single thing, out of place.

He stopped. He made a sound as if he had found a hairline crack in a dam. He clicked his pen.

"Your harness."

"What about my harness?"

"It's stored at ambient temperature. Gear like this should be kept in climate-controlled storage, per the new consortium manual, section nine." He wrote something. The pen made the worst sound in the world.

Marcy stood there with her coffee and her disbelief. "James. It hung there for one night. To dry. It was wet. Are you saying I should have put it away wet? Because I thought mold was also a thing you people cared about."

"Dry it in the gear room. It has a drying cabinet."

"The gear room is across the compound."

"Then plan your evenings better." He said it without heat, which somehow made it worse. He handed her the citation slip like a doctor handing over a bad test result. "It's a minor infraction. It goes in your file."

"In my file." She took the slip. "You know I'm up for the permanent position, right? Kenny said the greenhouse lead job goes to whoever shows the best track record. And now there's this in my file, this, this harness thing."

"I file what I find. That's the job." He looked at her citation slip one more time, then at her, and something in his face flickered, just for a second, like he wanted to say something else. He didn't say it. "Fix the storage and I won't need to cite you again."

"Was that a threat?"

"That was information." And he left, clicking his pen one last time as a parting gift, and Marcy stood alone in her staging room with her coffee going cold and her face going hot, which was a stupid trick to pull in a building heated to sixty-eight degrees.

"Information," she told the empty room. "I'll show him information. I'll reorganize his whole inspection schedule, see if I don't."

She didn't have access to his inspection schedule. But the anger felt good, actually. It felt better than the sad had felt for two months. She hung the harness properly, in the stupid drying cabinet, all the way across the compound, stomping the whole way, and she thought about Devin the whole stomp, which was unfair of her, because Devin had nothing to do with James Carlson. But heartbreak is a landlord, it collects rent on every emotion in the building, and so her fury at the harness citation came out tangled up in fury at the words "want different things," and by the time she got back to her bunk she was mad at everybody she had ever met.

Samantha found her at lunch, sat down across from her uninvited, and studied her face like a slide under a microscope.

"Who died?"

"Nobody. James cited me."

"For what, tidiness?"

"For improper gear storage. One harness, one night, one file entry." Marcy stabbed at her reheated stew. "Does he have a file for everyone? Does he have a file for you?"

"He does. I got cited in September for unlabeled culture samples." Samantha shrugged and stole a piece of Marcy's bread without asking, which was the kind of friendship Marcy could get behind. "He cited Kenny once. Kenny. The manager. For a fire extinguisher being four inches too low."

"Did Kenny cry?"

"Kenny laughed, actually. He said 'good catch, Carlson' and moved the extinguisher. Kenny's unbotherable." Samantha leaned in over her tray. "Look, I know he's infuriating. But he's also the reason the water here is drinkable and the reason nobody got sick at the midsummer barbecue. He's thorough. It's his whole thing."

"It's a terrible thing."

"It's a thing," Samantha agreed. "Anyway, forget him. I want to show you something tonight, if you're not busy being mad."

"Depends what it is."

"There's a room. Storage, off the east corridor. It's locked and officially off limits." Samantha's eyes did the thing they did when she was about to talk about her piano, which was her other whole thing. "But I have a key, and I keep the old upright piano in there tuned, and I go there sometimes when the base gets too small. Nobody knows. You could come. Just don't tell James, or it'll end up in somebody's file."

"A secret piano room," Marcy said slowly. "On an arctic research station."

"A secret piano room on an arctic research station."

"Why is everything here secretly wonderful and openly awful?"

"That's the permafrost," Samantha said sagely. "Everything's frozen on top and complicated underneath."

That night, after the corridor lights dimmed to their night setting and the dome went quiet except for the wind, Marcy lay in her bunk and did her arithmetic. Two months since Devin. Three weeks on station. One citation. One friend. One secret piano she hadn't seen yet. It was not a life she would have picked off a menu. But the dark outside the window was patient, and it wasn't asking her anything, and for tonight that was enough.

Tomorrow she would fight about the harness. Tomorrow she would hear whatever Kenny had to announce, the thing that was going to make everybody fight harder for fewer jobs. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. She fell asleep listing her tomorrows like cargo, and the wind sang the dome to sleep the way it always did, and she did not dream about the picture at the bottom of the duffel even once.

Kenny's all-station meeting was at ten the next morning, which was a bad sign, because Kenny never called meetings before lunch. Kenny believed mornings were for coffee and afternoons were for talking.

The mess hall filled up fast. Forty-some people on benches, everyone pretending they didn't know something was coming, everyone knowing something was coming. Kenny stood up front in his fleece vest, the same vest he wore every day, and he had papers in his hand. Kenny never had papers.

"Morning, everyone," he said, in his big unbotherable voice. "So. News."

Somebody near the back whispered "here we go" and Kenny heard it, because Kenny heard everything.

"Yeah, yeah, rip the bandage off," he said. "The consortium merged with the Nordic group. You've all seen the trucks and the new faces. What it means for us is consolidation. Effective January, this station runs on half the current staff."

The room went very quiet. The wind outside suddenly seemed loud.

"Half," someone said. "Half of what?"

"Half of you," Kenny said gently. "I'm sorry. I fought it. I lost. But here's the part I can control. Nobody gets picked by name from a list in an office I never see. Every one of you submits a proposal. Your role, why it matters, what you bring. I read every proposal myself and I fight for the ones worth fighting for. That's the deal I got. It's the best deal there was."

Marcy sat with her hands flat on the table and did the math like everyone else did the math. Twenty people stay. Twenty go home.

"When are proposals due?" James asked, from the front row, of course the front row.

"Two weeks," Kenny said. "Written, one page, no essays. And Carlson, before you ask, yes, your citation counts against nobody. Proposals stand on their own."

James nodded and wrote something down. Marcy watched him write it and hated how focused he looked, like focus was a competitive sport and he was training for it.

The meeting broke apart into buzz. People clustered and whispered and did their own math. Marcy found herself doing hers out loud with Samantha.

"Two weeks to write one page about why I should get to keep growing vegetables in a dome," Marcy said. "How do I make that sound essential?"

"You make it sound essential because it is," Samantha said. "Nobody eats without the greenhouse. That's your whole page. Also, I have to go, cultures, but hey, tonight? The room?"

"I can't tonight. Proposal brain. Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow. Seven. Don't tell anyone."

Samantha hurried off, and Marcy lingered, which was her mistake, because she heard the next conversation whether she meant to or not.

It was Samantha, stopped in the doorway by another biologist, and their voices carried in the emptying hall.

"You're going to the storage room again? The locked one off the east corridor?"

"Keep your voice down," Samantha said. "Yes, I am. I keep the piano tuned. It's the only sane place on this rock. You should come hear it sometime."

"The off-limits room has a piano in it?"

"An upright. Old. Beautiful. Don't tell anyone, or it ends up in a file. And don't touch the low A. I tune it and by morning it's flat again, always the same flat, like someone's been leaning on it all night. I stopped asking who."

They were gone before Marcy could say anything, and Marcy stood there in the half-empty hall with a whole new set of thoughts. So the piano was real. So it wasn't just a Samantha story. An old upright piano, in a locked room, at the top of the world.

She thought about pianos for the rest of the day, which was a nice change from thinking about citations and proposals and the word half. Her mother had played, badly, when Marcy was growing up, and the sound of a badly played piano was one of the few childhood things Marcy missed. She hadn't touched a key in fifteen years. She was thirty-four and she couldn't remember the last time her hands had been on a keyboard, and somehow that itched worse than the citation did.

By eight that night the itch won.

* * *

The east corridor at night was the quietest place on station. The lights were at their dim setting and the wind did its wind thing and nobody had any reason to be there. Marcy walked the length of it twice, just to be sure, and then stood in front of the locked door feeling like a burglar, which, fine, she technically was.

She had a multitool. She had a paperclip from the mess hall. She had three weeks of watching the station's ancient locks stick and complain, and she had a stubborn streak her mother had called "a feature, not a bug."

It took four minutes. The lock was old and the paperclip was patient and on the fourth minute the bolt gave with a click that sounded enormous in the empty corridor.

"Okay," Marcy whispered. "Okay okay okay."

She slipped in and eased the door shut behind her.

The room was dark and smelled faintly of dust and machine oil, and there it was. The upright piano, pushed against the far wall, a real one, wooden, old, with a scarf draped over the top of it like the piano itself was cold. Somebody had put a bench in front of it. Somebody had put a lamp on the windowsill.

Marcy turned the lamp on and sat down on the bench and lifted the fallboard and the keys glowed yellow in the lamplight.

She didn't play. She just looked. She put one finger on