The Terror

by Dan Simmons

The captain remembered that even when he was a small boy—before he went to sea at age thirteen—he had carried his deep mood of melancholy within him like a cold secret. This melancholic nature had manifested itself in his pleasure at standing outside the village on a winter night watching the lamplights fade, by finding small places in which to hide—claustrophobia had never been a problem for Francis Crozier—and by being so afraid of the dark, seeing it as the avatar of the death that had claimed his mother and grandmother in such a stealthy way, that he had perversely sought it out, hiding in the root cellar while other boys played in the sunlight.

Four a.m., Crozier knew, was the coldest belly of the night and the hour at which the most ill and wounded men gave up the ghost and were carried away into that true Unknown Country.

Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it’s better for a man to stay inside his own mind.

The sixam ieua knew through their forward-thoughts that when the Tuunbaq’s domain was finally invaded by the pale people—the kabloona—it would be the beginning of the End of Times. Poisoned by the kabloonas’ pale souls, the Tuunbaq would sicken and die. The Real People would forget their ways and their language. Their homes would be filled with drunkenness and despair. Men would forget their kindness and beat their wives. The inua of the children would become confused, and the Real People would lose their good dreams. When the Tuunbaq dies because of the kabloona sickness, the spirit-governors-of-the-sky knew, its cold, white domain will begin to heat and melt and thaw. The white bears will have no ice for a home, so their cubs will die. The whales and walruses will have nowhere to feed. The birds will wheel in circles and cry to the Raven for help, their breeding grounds gone. This is the future they saw.

Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier believes in nothing. Or rather, if he believes in anything, it is in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.