The 2014 Core

The cryolab door takes both hands. Galina sets her tea on the steel bench outside, undoes the latches in their order — top, bottom, center — and pulls. The seal lets go with the same wet inhalation it has made for twelve years, the same drop in pressure she feels behind her sinuses.

Inside it is minus twenty-three. She does not bother with the light at first. She knows the room by the cold.

The 2014 series came up the column in early February and went straight to storage. She has not been here since November. Six weeks at her sister’s in Petropavlovsk, a funeral, the slow flight back. She closes the door behind her, switches on the overheads, and waits the four seconds for the tubes to warm to a usable white.

The cores are racked by depth and date. She walks the 2013 aisle first, out of habit, and counts the tubes against the manifest taped inside the cabinet door. Eighty-one. Correct. She walks the 2014 aisle and counts. Seventy-six. Correct. She does not write this down. She has never had to write it down.

She pulls the first 2014 segment — 3,538 meters, near the ice-water interface, the depth at which everything interesting either is or is not — and lays it in the cradle on the inspection bench. She turns on the underlight. The core glows the color of weak vodka, the way they all do, with the diagonal striations of the accretion ice running through it like cursive.

For thirty seconds she sees nothing. Then she sees it.

It is not biological. She has been told what biological looks like. In 2007 there was a thing in the 3,624 segment that the institute eventually agreed to call a contaminant, and she remembers the shape of it — soft, fibrous, brownish, asymmetric. This is not that.

This is geometric. It sits eight centimeters in from the outer wall of the core, suspended in the clear band between two striations. It is small, perhaps four millimeters across, and it has six sides, and the six sides are equal. It is the color of the ice around it, only very slightly more so, the way a magnifying glass over a page is the same white as the page and also not.

She rotates the cradle a quarter turn. The shape rotates with it, because of course it does, it is inside the ice. From the side it is not a hexagon but a short cylinder with hexagonal caps. From above it is a hexagon again. It is a perfectly regular hexagonal prism, four millimeters tall, four millimeters across, suspended in ice that was sealed from the surface for somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five million years.

She stands up. Her knees pop. She walks to the 2013 aisle and pulls the equivalent depth — 3,541, close enough — and lays it in the second cradle and turns on the underlight. The 2013 core glows. She rotates it slowly through three hundred and sixty degrees. There is a hairline fracture at one end and a bubble train near the middle. There is nothing else.

She goes back to the 2014 core. The hexagonal prism is still there. She had, in some part of her, expected it not to be.

She pulls the next 2014 segment. 3,541. She lays it in the cradle. There are two of them in this one, eleven centimeters apart, the same size, the same orientation. She pulls 3,544. There are four. She pulls 3,547 and stops counting at nine and puts the core back in its sleeve.

She sits down on the stool by the bench and drinks the tea, which is now the temperature of the room. She thinks about Mikhail Andreyevich, her supervisor in Saint Petersburg, who has not opened one of her quarterly reports since the third quarter of 2011. She knows this because she began, in 2012, embedding a small request at the bottom of each report — please confirm receipt by return — and the returns stopped coming in October of that year and have not resumed. The reports themselves are filed. She has the acknowledgment emails from the institute’s document system. They are filed, and they are not read, and the funding continues.

She gets the camera from the cabinet. She photographs the 3,538 segment from three angles, with the scale bar, with the date card. She photographs 3,541 and 3,544. She does not photograph 3,547.

At her desk in the outer room, with her coat still on, she opens the quarterly template and types the heading: Q1 2014, accretion ice, anomalous inclusions, depths 3,538–3,547 m. She writes for forty minutes. She is precise. She uses the word prismatic and the word regular and the phrase not consistent with known crystallographic processes in glacial ice. She attaches the photographs. She files the report.

Then she goes back into the cryolab and racks the cores in their proper order, and she logs the manifest, and she locks the door, top, bottom, center, and she goes to dinner.