Studio Note
The first page: return water at 2,104 metres
Friday, 21 August
Three weeks out
Three weeks to The Oxygen Wound. The opening is below. Two notes on it. First: it opens on an instrument reading, not on a person. The conductivity of the return water starts climbing thirty-six metres above the lake bed, where there is nothing dissolved in the ice worth measuring, and a technician watches the number go from fourteen point one to fourteen point four in the time it takes to say so. That is the book's method. Nothing arrives in it that does not arrive first as a quantity on a screen in front of somebody whose job is to know what the quantity should be. Second: the eleven years, four permits, the hydrogen peroxide loop and the filtration train are not decoration. There are two ways into a subglacial lake and only one of them is legal, and the legal one is the whole reason this book has a plot. You cannot put anything down the hole you cannot account for. Not a cell. Not a spore. Not a gram of grease off a thread. Hold that rule in your head. Everything that follows is what it costs to keep it. Sixty-one chapters. Each one ends on a fact or a decision. From The Oxygen Wound, chapter one: The conductivity of the return water started climbing at two thousand one hundred and four metres, and it had no business climbing at all. I was standing at the drill console in a shipping container with one wall cut out of it, in a wind that had been doing thirty knots since Tuesday, watching a number that was supposed to sit flat until we hit the lake. Twelve microsiemens per centimetre. Thirteen. Fourteen point one. We were still thirty-six metres above the bed, which meant thirty-six metres of ice that had been sitting there since the Pleistocene without anything dissolved in it worth measuring, and my return water was getting saltier by the minute. Cal put his head round the door with his goggles pushed up and his cheekbones burned red. "Yeva. The nozzle pressure's fine." "I didn't ask about the nozzle pressure." "You were about to."
The Oxygen Wound
Ivar Halstrom