Kate only looks at him, and Richard’s flush grows deeper, the set of his jaw a little more stubborn. He reaches for the wine bottle in the center of the table and fills Kate’s glass. I realize then that Richard doesn’t know about the baby, that Kate hasn’t decided what to do about her pregnancy.
I try to change the subject. “In May and June,” I say, “when the continent is preparing to shut ships like ours out for the winter, you can actually hear the ice crystals forming, if you listen closely enough. It almost sounds like the water is singing.”
“Really?” Kate says. “I’d love to be here to see that. Or rather, hear it.”
“It’s interesting, the way you personify nature,” Richard says, looking from me to his wife.
“It beats objectifying nature,” Kate retorts.
“And that’s what I do?”
Kate presses her lips together, her eyes shooting Richard a look that says, Not here, not now.
“We all objectify nature to some extent, don’t we?” says a man sitting across the table. “I mean, if we didn’t feel some sort of distance, we wouldn’t be able to build houses, or put gas in our cars, or turn on the lights. Not to mention food. You can’t think of pigs when you eat bacon or you just don’t eat.”
“Well, according to my wife, we should treat all these animals as humans,” Richard says. “Whales and penguins and even krill.”
“Kate has a point,” I say, in as friendly a way as I can manage. I’m not sure whether my arguing with Richard is better than Kate arguing with him, but it doesn’t feel quite as uncomfortable. “Animals are no less valuable to this planet than humans.”
“Of course they are. There’s a hierarchy involved.”
“A hierarchy developed by humans,” I say. “Take sharks, for example. Most people think of sharks as nothing more than props in a horror movie. But they may well be extinct in the next few decades, and they’re the ones that have been keeping the marine ecosystem in balance for four hundred million years. Once they’re gone, everything changes.”
“It sounds like your idea of a perfect world would be free of people altogether.” Richard’s face is crimson, and his left eye is twitching. He rubs his hands across his eyes.
“That’s not such a bad idea.” This comes from Kate, murmured so low I almost miss it.
“Why does that not surprise me?” Richard says, his voice tinged with bitterness.
“Stop it, Richard,” she says quietly. She pushes her chair back.
Richard grabs her arm. “Wait.”
Kate tries to free herself from his grip, but Richard rises to his feet, upending his chair and tipping a couple of full wineglasses as he pulls her up with him. I look again at the medicated patch behind Richard’s ear and know something’s very wrong. I scan the room, catching Thom’s eye. I can’t tell what he’s seen, but he reads my expression and pushes his chair away from the table, ready to come over if I need him to.
I’m standing up myself when the ship turns hard to port, catching us all by surprise. I grip my chair as plates slide off the table into people’s laps and as the servers, barely managing to stay on their feet, try to keep their trays from crashing to the floor. Spilled wine is spreading across the tablecloth like a bloodstain. Glenn runs past us out of the dining room.
I turn back to Kate and Richard—Richard is on the floor, using one of the chairs to stand. Kate isn’t helping him.
“What happened?” someone asks. “Have we hit something?”
“No,” I say. “We’ve turned around.”
Thom is next to me by now, and when I look at him, he nods, a sickening confirmation that he, too, knows why.
South of the Antarctic Circle
(66°33'S)
According to international maritime law, a passenger ship must be capable of launching all survival craft, fully loaded with passengers and crew, within thirty minutes of the captain’s sounding of the abandon-ship signal.
But there’s a difference between being theoretically capable of a task and accomplishing it. No matter how many times crew members go through the drills, even if they take into account the possibility of rogue waves and tipped icebergs, they can’t predict how long it might take to guide twelve hundred passengers and four hundred crew from a wounded ship in ice-choked waters below the Antarctic Circle, where lifeboats may have nowhere to float.
Nobody can know. It has never happened—until now.
I stand next to Amy among the hastily assembled expedition staff and crew on the bridge, where Glenn is giving us another briefing. As he’d told us earlier, the Australis has struck a submerged object, likely ice, in the Gullet and is taking on water. Glenn and Captain Wylander have been coordinating rescue efforts with the Argentinian Coast Guard, the Chilean Navy, and two other cruise ships.