It was clear there was a kind of domesticity here: a world whose creatures felt, after however many millennia, somewhat at home with what surrounded them. Cloud like burial shrouds, frozen rivers, somewhere beneath the skin of snow, like a skein of veins, vast piles, beneath, of minerals, here reconstituted, fabricated into everything close at hand: our badly upholstered, chafing seats, the cup in front of me holding cold coffee, the metal walls around us – it was all very familiar to them, even to some of those whose children dashed up and down the aisle, shouting their heads off. Lord alone knows how humans should come to a place like this, or why, when they had left, they would make any kind of homecoming. I squinted out the window, rimmed with ice around the edge – hell, most of the plate – but heated, for convenience, in the centre. Beneath, the undulating crests of snow – mere hillocks in comparison to some of the smaller mountains, and they in turn were mere hillocks to the larger crags – waved onwards, seemingly limitlessly. I had to turn away, as I was warned to, after a few seconds – the sheer expanse of pure, undifferentiated white can make you feel as if falling into a void, pulled out by some awful magnetism. The shipline have had some folk scrabbling at the windows, shrieking to drop through. I looked over the wings – heated, naturally, to some Godforsaken temperature – watching the constant onrush of ice particles blister and burn over the aerofoils, pointillistic designs of sparks popping and vanishing.
We were heading in towards the runway. It was the cold season – if that can be believed – but we knew that the staff were on these things; that, though whipped about by the wind, they had it under control. I pondered idly on how exactly they adapted themselves to their environment. These weren’t just humans with particularly woolly coats; they had been living out here for centuries – no-one, after the loss of their archives, really knew how many – and had acquired bodily accoutrements to suit the place. I had never gotten close enough to see for myself, but I would be forced into doing so pretty soon. Horror stories had reached me, as they are wont to do, about transparent skin-flaps used to shield the eyes from snow-storms, hands grown into the approximate shape of shovels, even extremely thick, downy hair, growing on those parts of the body – the upper throat, the cheeks, around the eyes – where no protection could be afforded. They were hopefully that, just stories. But this turned my mind again to my purpose – scientific, yes, but hardly very important – in coming here. Was I just a freak-show gawker on a planetary scale? How exactly would it matter if I was, given this place’s feeble backwater status? It wasn’t as if it had any dignity to be ruined by my snooping.
I could see, by the GPS on my phone – I didn’t trust the ‘line to be straight on this matter – that we were coming up to the edges of the capital’s airfields. They were located far out on the rim of the vast, low-lying – near-subterranean, in fact – conurbation, an enormous field of metal that differed from the snow only in its colour – gun-metal grey – and the odd jag here and there. Far to the south, literally on the other side of the planet, in what was laughingly referred to as ‘warmer climes’, there were corrugated-iron shanty-towns that tended to get blown away every winter, due to the poverty of their construction, with plenty more jagged edges for the wind to catch. Nothing of that here. My eyes cast about for a sign of the runways’ shimmering grey, the ice constantly being burnt and blown off of it. There was nothing. The plane was banking, but I could discern nothing that it might be heading towards, only more snow. There was a crackle on the tannoy, the sound of the pilot’s wearying voice: Ladies and gentlemen, we are coming towards Ixtlan airport now. Due to inclement weather conditions, our arrival will be subject to a short delay. Please seat yourselves, buckle your harnesses.
I was baffled. I searched the landscape below me, twisting, as the plane banked in slowly-descending circles. After a minute of fraught spying, I spotted a long, straight, shallow depression in the snow, looking, from this height, a mere dog-sled track. Good Lord. How the hell had this happened: the runway hidden so thoroughly in snow? I remembered a scene, borderline-farcical, in an Earth moving-image I had seen in the archives years ago: an old-fashioned ‘plane kept up in the air, seemingly perpetually, by ne’er-do-wells on the ground. We would have to wait until the snow had been cleared, the surface blasted clean. I turned for my coffee, panned my eyes to the others. No-one showed even a trace of panic. Calm, waiting for us to land on a land at that moment trapped under they did not know what depths of snow – 6 feet, 10, 12. We would be sat, I reflected, for some time.
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