The Terror

by Dan Simmons

“The shore ice making noise,” said Sir John. “Perhaps the wind.” “Oh, aye, yes, sir, Sir John,” said Best. “Only there weren’t no wind. But the ice… could’ve been that, m’lord. Always could be that.” His tone explained that it could not have been.

Young Francis did not believe in Second Sight. It was about that same time that he realized that he also did not believe in God. He went to sea. He believed in everything he learned and saw there, and some of these sights and lessons were strange indeed.

Crozier hurts to the cavity in the center of his self where he is sure his soul had resided until it floated away on a sea of whiskey over the decades.

Old men below the rank of captain or admiral rarely were allowed on Discovery Service expeditions, so it was with some good humour that both crews learned that John Bridgens’s age on the official ship’s muster had been reversed—either by accident or by a purser with a sense of irony—and listed as “26.” There had been many jokes made to the grey-haired Bridgens about his youth and callowness and presumed sexual prowess. The quiet steward had smiled and said nothing.

The sun had disappeared. Rose shadows faded into the pale yellow gloom that had preceded its rising. Now that the sun was gone, Peglar hardly believed he had seen it.

“You are my loved one, Harry,” said Bridgens. “The only man or woman or child left in the world who cares whether I am alive or dead, much less what I may have thought before I fell or where my bones will lie.”

A Million years of Man’s Medicinal Progress will never reveal the secret Condition and sealed Compartments of the Human Soul.

He knew it was not merely some metaphor of his determination. Nor was it optimism, as such. The blue flame in his chest had burrowed toward his heart like some alien entity, lingered like a disease, and centered in him as an almost unwanted core of conviction that he would do whatever he had to do to survive. Anything.

“Life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’” the captain had intoned.

If there is a Hell—in which I no longer Believe, since this Earth and some of the People in it are Hell enough for any Universe—I would be and should be Cast Down to the Worst Bolgia of the Lowest Circle.