The Terror

by Dan Simmons

I have to say that the Boy was Brave at his end. He showed no Fear at all that Morning. His last words before the Pistol’s Explosive Discharge were, You can go to Hell. I only wish that my End would be so Brave. But I know now for a Certainty that it Will Not.

He will always be the captain who let all his men die.

But this is not what dissuades him from heading east or south. The woman next to him is carrying his child. Of all his failures, it is Francis Crozier’s failures as a man which hurt and haunt him the most.

Every morning now and often in the night he awakens next to Silence after sharing her dreams, knowing that she has shared his, feeling her warmth against him, feeling himself responding to that warmth.

If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the arctic night under a sky gone mad, toward a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilized hearth?

She would. Crozier knows this as surely as he knows anything. She would follow him there.

Fur dripping like a priest’s wet and clinging white vestments. Burn scars raw amid the white. Teeth. Black eyes not three feet from his own and looking deep into him, predator’s eyes searching for his soul… searching to see if he has a soul. The massive triangular head bobs lower and blots out the throbbing sky.

Surrendering only to the human being he wants to be with and to the human being he wants to become—never to the Tuunbaq or to the universe that would extinguish the blue flame in his chest—he closes his eyes again, tilts back his head, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue exactly as Memo Moira taught him to do for Holy Communion.

I will see you in a few minutes, Crozier signed to Silence. She actually smiled. Do not be stupid, she signed. Your children and I are coming with you.

Then he carried theodolite and books below and tossed them aside, knowing that fixing this ship’s position one last time was perhaps the most useless thing he’d ever done in a long life of doing useless things. But he also knew he’d had to do it.

Limping like the old man he was sure he would soon be, Crozier walked out onto the ice to join the others.

The Francis Crozier inua still alive and well in Taliriktug had no illusions about life being anything but poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But perhaps it did not have to be solitary.

His arm around Silna, trying to ignore the raucous snores from the shaman and the fact that baby Kanneyuk had just pissed on her father’s best summer parka, while also ignoring the petulant swats and mewling noises from his squirming son, Taliriktug and Crozier continued walking east across the ice toward solid ground.