“I’m flattered that you’d choose me as a subject. Who, would you say, might be easy to capture on the page?”
Cooper thought of the portrait she’d done of Tucker, how she’d sworn to herself that although it was turning out pretty well, it was a one-off, an exercise meant to get her across the bridge and into the land of polar art. After all the mittens she’d produced, she’d resigned herself to painting the standard skyscapes, cloudscapes, glacierscapes, and snowscapes that seemed to be the expected output for a visual artist at Pole. But then she’d started that portrait of Bozer. And then, last week—after Cooper had noticed the two-inch scar above Pearl’s right eyebrow—the one of Pearl.
“No one is easy to capture on the page,” Cooper finally replied.
Pavano gestured toward the sketchpad. “Will this become part of your portfolio?”
Cooper shook her head. “No, I’m here to make grand statements, not portraits. That’s what they want: statements. A face is not a statement.”
“It’s a statement of existence,” Paveno replied.
Cooper set her notebook on the floor of the tent and inched toward Pavano on all fours until she was at his knees. He watched her as she reached up and took the bridge of his glasses between her fingers and pulled them from his face. His pellucid eyes regarded her impassively.
“You want to know if I exist,” he said.
“Yes,” Cooper said quietly. For a long moment, they gazed at each other, and the moment grew taut. The longer Cooper studied Pavano, the more familiar he seemed. He leaned in, drawing closer to her, and the world roared back to life. Cooper moved away, her heart thrumming. A blast of wind shook the tent, sending the Sterno canister into a cartwheel. The time it took Pavano to set it right again gave Cooper a chance to collect herself.
“What did you gather,” Pavano said, “from your peek into my soul?”
“I don’t know anything about souls. They’re a human construct, they’re not real.”
Pavano seemed discomposed, as if he were a translator who’d fallen hopelessly behind. “It’s natural to say such things when you’ve been spending time with scientists,” he finally said. “To them, everything is constructed.”
“But you’re a scientist.”
Pavano hesitated. “I’m also a man of faith.”
“You said you were an atheist.”
“No, I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it.”
His expression softened, and he sat back against his pack. “Yes, perhaps I did. I find implications give me just enough wiggle room to work in peace. May I have my glasses back?” Cooper hadn’t realized that the glasses were still in her hand.
Pavano removed the teapot from the canned heat, and Cooper watched as he carefully selected two teabags from the outer pocket of one of his packs. “Sal says you don’t believe your own research,” she said. “That you do this for the money because your career in academia tanked.”
“Like most of Sal’s theories, that’s only about half accurate. As I’m sure he told you, I made some mistakes in my career that pushed me to the margins of academia. When you’re in the margins, you’re impossible to see. You find new frontiers, and you join forces with the people who live on them.”
“Like Creationists.”
“Theistic science,” Pavano said.
“God.”
“Methodological naturalism is religion.”
Cooper rolled her eyes.
“What I’m trying to say,” Pavano continued, “is that it’s all religion at the end, whether it’s me making the teleological argument at a conference or Sal trying to parse out the beginnings of the universe through his telescope.”
“Sal’s not religious.”
Pavano handed Cooper a mug. “Sal Brennan is one of the most religious people I’ve ever known. For many years he worked on confirming the main model of the cosmos. His work was a kind of chase after his father’s—my wife used to call them Odysseus and Telemachus. Anyway, Sal played a major role in building on Hawking and Penrose’s model and making the inflationary model a widely accepted theory among the general public. Now he rejects it. He thinks he’s found something better. Think about that for a moment, Cooper—here is a man who spent the better part of his career looking at what is essentially the same data he now has before him, coming to a conclusion that he believes is fact, and then changing his mind. And now he is a paragon of nonstandard cosmology, not to mention a cast-out son, and he’s in danger of becoming as marginalized as the proponents of Intelligent Design he abhors. He’s a believer, Cooper. His faith is immense.”
“But he might actually be right,” Cooper said. “There’s no possibility that the earth is six thousand years old, that humans walked with dinosaurs.”
“Forget Young Earthers and dinosaurs. Those are distractions. The compelling argument is that living things are too well designed to have come about by chance.”
Cooper laughed. “The world is the least-well-engineered thing ever.”
“You go too far.”
No, Cooper thought. She hadn’t gone far enough. “Explain suicide.”
“The intelligence I’m talking about doesn’t deal in individual circumstances.”
“It creates a machine only to have it self-destruct?”
“It is an engineer, and it engineered a creature that can intentionally end its life. Maybe in some people, when the wiring has gone wrong, suicide is instinctive. There are countless documented examples of this in nature—mostly birds, as it happens. Petrels that fly into campfires. Mergansers that seek out submerged roots and drown while clinging to them.” He removed his glasses to wipe away condensation, and saw, with a start, that tears were leaking down Cooper’s cheeks.
The welcome sound of an approaching snowmobile allowed Cooper to wipe her eyes while Pavano struggled to his feet and put his goggles on. After he walked out, Cooper leaned over his sleeping bag to peer through the tent door. Hitched to the snowmobile was a large pallet containing a small generator, several winches and cables, three long, skinny blue cylinders, and something that looked like an enormous tampon applicator. The man on the snowmobile looked nervous as Pavano handed him an envelope folded in half. As soon as he unhitched the pallet, he sped off back toward camp.
When Pavano returned to the tent, he was radiant.
“What’s all that?” Cooper asked.
“It’s an agile drill that can retrieve cores up to thirty meters,” Pavano replied. “But since they integrated the new BID-Deep system, it can, theoretically, reach depths of up to two hundred meters.” Cooper was startled to see how happy this made Pavano. “It has been signed out under another team’s name and won’t be missed for about twenty-four hours. Once I extract this core, it’s mine. The lab will be obligated to store it, no matter how it was obtained, and then send it to Denver, where I will analyze it. It shouldn’t take us too long to set up.”
“You did a work-around,” Cooper said.
“I did what I had to do.”
“Let’s get started, then.”
“I’ll only need you to help me erect the tripod and the double sheave. The rest I can handle. You go get dinner.”