Page 16 of Under Story

In the conference room, administrators mill between chairs. Laurel smooths a white cloth over the serving table and arranges trays of sandwiches. Nearby, a camerawoman tests the live feed. If the internet allows, the presentation will be streamed to media.

The geologist has locs and square green glasses. When he paces, his clogs thunk emphatically. In the sandstone of the Allan Hills, his team found thirty-seven ancient tree trunks. The petrified wood was smooth, silver, and cold. Over eons, the stumps had become stone, but they were still tied to the soil by their roots.

Fossilized plants, the geologist explains, have been found on the continent before. In 1912, the remains of a five-man party, led by Robert Falcon Scott, were discovered in a tent on the Ross Ice Shelf. More than thirty pounds of specimens lay beside their bodies. The fossils included two thousand animals, four hundred formerly unknown, and the first Emperor penguin eggs ever seen by human beings. But nothing caused so much of a stir as Glossopteris indica, a tree that had been extinct for two hundred million years. Its discovery confirmed that Antarctica had been part of Gondwanaland, a prehistoric region from which modern continents calved—and that it once was warm enough for woody plants to grow.

The fossil forest tells an even earlier story. It lived before history’s greatest mass extinction, when greenhouse gases, spewed by Siberian volcanoes, destroyed 95 percent of the earth’s species.

“Standing there,” the geologist says, “you feel you might be looking at a mirror of the future.”

After the talk, Laurel joins the question line; she wants to ask whether his team searched the site for fungi, wood decomposers that may have coexisted with the forest. The women who queue behind Laurel glance at her quizzically. Others drift toward the catering table for second helpings. Laurel ducks out of line. After all, she’s supposed to be working.

—

The Arc makes the front page of the New York Times. Jules pins the article—two months old by the time it arrives—to the bulletin board. The physicists are treated like celebrities: people stare when they walk into the galley.

Laurel emails Gloria.

Two scientific curiosities for you. First: Did you hear that a fossil forest was discovered in the Dry Valleys? Thirty-seven tree trunks! Two hundred eighty million years later, their roots are still in the ground.

The second one is even stranger, a kind of visual disturbance. We call it the Arc. Have a look at the photo in the Times, if you haven’t already. There it’s pink, which is how it looks in sunlight, but in darkness it turns green, sort of like the aurora, with blue around the edges.

Is it insane to say I feel like it’s communicating something? Maybe I’ve genuinely fallen off the deep end. Still, I envy the physicists. I want to be in the room, to learn what they learn.

One day later, Gloria replies.

Well, you know what I’d say. Make your own observations! When I was a graduate student, I brought a notebook and colored pencils on foraging trips. This was before the age of digital photography, so drawing served a purpose, but it also made me a better observer.

The fossil forest is a marvel. As for your Arc, I’ve never seen anything like it. Is it absurd to imagine some kind of transmission? Academia would tell us to be skeptical. But then I think of fungi—I think of life, webbed whether we’re aware of it or not, messaging whether we listen or don’t—and I wonder if the greater delusion would be to assume we have nothing to say to each other.

Laurel walks back to the triple. It’s a Saturday, free for the afternoon stewards. Charlie is lying in her bunk, holding Parable of the Sower over her head.

“Don’t your arms get tired?” Laurel asks.

Charlie flexes a bicep. “And they say that reading isn’t exercise.”

Laurel laughs. “Listen, I was wondering. Could I borrow your colored pencils? I want to draw the Arc.”

Charlie sets the book down on her chest. “That’s funny. I had the same thought.”

“Do you want to do it together?”

“Sure,” Charlie says. “We can use my drawing pad.”

It becomes a weekly ritual. At the ice pier, bundled in layers, they spread out Charlie’s supplies. The cold functions as a time limit, so they have to be instinctive. Laurel mixes pencils in search of that day’s pink. She never captures it exactly, but she always learns something new. The edges are darker than the interior, and the color swirls like gas.

Laurel and Nita talk constantly. With Charlie, Laurel can be quiet. They make a game of not looking at each other’s work until the end, and the differences always surprise them. Charlie excels at volume. In her hands, the Arc has plumpness and sheen; often it fills the whole page. Laurel sketches it in situ, like a mushroom in the wild.

On the first day of December, Laurel is wiping the counters at the coffeehouse when three men open the door. She squints into the sunlight—the hut’s round walls have no windows—and watches them select an isolated table in the back. Immediately she pegs them as researchers. Some scientists show interest in staff, thanking the stewards during meal service or asking what brought them to the continent; others barely acknowledge them. These three don’t look up while they place their orders, and though they seem to be discussing something sensitive, they don’t stop when she returns.

“—never heard of such a thing,” says the first, as Laurel places a shot of espresso in front of him.

“That’s because it’s physically impossible,” the second man says.

Laurel slides a black coffee toward him and a cappuccino to the third, who counters, “According to the Standard Model, at least.”

“Don’t tell me you’re entertaining the idea,” says the second man.

The third man—the youngest among them—shifts in his chair. “Well, there’s a reason we call it the anomaly, right?”