Aureliano

[Jubal]

Aureliano
By James Baillie

Note: this is a repost of the story I wrote for the 2024-25 Exilian winter competition, on the theme Icebound. I wanted to have a separate post of it here so I could add some author's notes, and so I could share it separately to the rest of the competition entries.


The minister stepped delicately off the aircraft, and onto Antarctic soil.

It had taken some effort to get here: his party were deep in another round of discussions with their Colorado allies, and going all the way south seemed like a frivolity when the coalition was on the line.

When the invitation had come, though, he knew he had to go. And he did not care very much, in any case, for politicking.

He wrapped his scarf around his face, and set his goggles down over his eyes. This was as far south as the planes went, well inland from the city-states dotting the Antarctic coast. It was peaceful here, but the sort of peace that comes with weather better suited for some ancient monk railing at the heavens than a settlement of human beings.

Two local functionaries came to meet them, along with a couple of scientists, a very small lady with big mouse-wide eyes and a gaunt man with dry, weatherbeaten skin and close-curling white hair. Along with his bodyguard and his interpreter – none of these Anties spoke god's own Spanish tongue – the minister plodded along behind them.

Much of the settlement was built below ground level, or constructed in heavy rock and concrete shaped to protect buildings and people alike from the elements. The one hotel was mostly below ground, but they stumbled through some ground-level streets to get there. The place was busy: the minister was far from the only person who had been invited. He caught glimpses of an Aegean emissary trying to mix fur coats with official regalia, a tall man who spoke so boldly he must have been Californian, and even a figure with clearly green-hued skin. He knew about Europans, but they were few in number, and he was surprised to see one here.

He looked down from the street to the hotel's yard. The various dignitaries and doctors and diplomats perambulated around the garden below, a simple square of grass, herbs, and bay-trees that had been dug into an indentation in the rock to protect it from the brutal south polar winds. They kept circling it, walking in thought or conversation: it was as if, sped up, they could have formed some sort of particle collider, one of them eventually whirring round and round until, reaching escape velocity, they shot out and across the little town's marketplace with its buzzing light tubes and yelling traders.

They did not accelerate: indeed, they seemed to get ever slower with time, more isolated. The Minister watched them for a moment, and then was ushered down the steps.

"Are you looking forward?" the little mouse-eyed lady asked through the interpreter. "To seeing it?"

The minister answered a polite yes, and only then pondered the question itself. He was glad not to be home, and he had felt oddly drawn to this - this promise of a thing he had never seen. It would probably feel like nothing, though: a trip was a trip, ministers went on trips all the time, and – having nodded at this curiosity he had been brought here to witness – he could return to a post that he performed adequately but not spectacularly, done for a party he served but did not believe in at the behest of an electorate he smiled at every campaign season without it ever quite reaching his eyes.

He looked back at the mouse-eyed lady, who was checking a clipboard to see who else would be on tomorrow's journey. She looked back, and her eyes smiled. The minister wondered if his eyes had done the same: but he suspected that they had not. He went and ordered a glass of muscat, and joked to his interpreter about the food.

~

The next morning, they set out: a party of five dignitaries and their entourages, one of several groups who would come and see what the government of Port Emperor and their scientists were finally ready to unveil. The tall, gaunt man drily pattered some facts as three tracked buggies rattled up the cold, rocky slopes where frost clung under the rocks and only occasional hardy mosses grew.

"He says that they've done nothing to create it: it's a feature of the old landscape, and they're just seeing how well it grows."

Their destination was not the pole itself: they turned from that trail, well worn by the occasional wealthy tourists, after an hour, and headed into the mountains. They turned up and over a ridge – now firmly off-road – and down a gulley, the buggy shuddering a little on the pebbles and loose rocks as it rolled down the way.

A white bird soared down the fast polar wind, calling blue murder. The minister's bodyguard glanced up at the curdling noise, and crossed himself. The buggy kept on down the valley, as the largest of the peaks soared above them. In some parts of the continent the mountains were rumbling volcanoes but here they stood still, sharp, and silent against the howling of the air around them. They were like solitary gravestones for worlds neither they, nor the minister, had ever seen.

Now, they stood watch. The mountains guarded their memory and birth-child, there where the buggies stopped and the minister set foot in front of a thing he had never known how to imagine.

There it was, filling the valley floor, shimmering in what little sun reached this darkened place.

It stood in front of him, the sign of a world that was lost. An expanse ten times the size of the dry football fields that dotted his homeland, where the rains and waters had formed, just in the last ten years, a sheet that did not melt in the summer, here in the mountain shadow where it never unfroze.

The minister did not care very much for politicking: he had been born, he had grown up in a battered manor full of old books and newly salvaged technology, and he had inevitably gone into politics as the correct vocation for a man of skill who did not believe in god and had no head for numbers. And so he had come here, where the dry wit and dry wine of that life were taken from him.

The ice stretched out before him, unbroken. He knelt, and reached a hand out to the cold edge of the sheet, and muttered some questions to the interpreter.

It was growing, they said! Four times as large as it was when they had first discovered it, here in a valley too remote for anyone to have noticed. A decade of this, and it would fill the valley. A century left alone, and it might reach the sea, rolling out of the valley's mouth to embrace the world.

He stood there, and cared. He remembered why it had seemed to him strangely necessary that he should come. His name echoed in the damp-smelling of a particular book half-remembered, a tattered old paperback from before the wars that his grandfather had given him.

And so he had taken himself to see ice.

In some years to come, in the run-up to the elections of 2287, he would dutifully credit all of his whirlwind successes to his team, his wife, and to the people of his country. He would not credit this moment with his success, or his drive: it would not do to remind people that he had been there, at that moment. He would not credit the beauty and the magic of seeing that lost expanse, his dream of its growth, with his drive to see his own world grow again, the push back toward the irradiated zones, the stabilisation of the flooded coastlines. And he would certainly not credit his name, or an author long since dead, or his grandfather, with changing the land he governed forever.

But today, he had taken himself to see ice: and he would forever remember what it meant to look outwards across it.

"Long live the Liberal Party," he whispered.


Author's Notes

This is the first story I think I've ever written and completed in a setting called Solaria 2290 which I've somewhat had in my back pocket for years. If Guns, Swords, and Steam is my early modern fantasy collage setting, Kavis my early medieval fantasy collage, and Cepheida my alien-heavy SF collage, Solaria is the near-future equivalent, set on our own earth in an imagined future with a mixture of post-apocalyptic, solarpunk, SF, cyberpunk, and superhero elements, though with a bunch of stuff that dips into other speculative fiction traditions and/or bits of satire.

This story is very much in dialogue with another genre, magical realism - and in particular with One Hundred Years of Solitude, where its famous opening line provides the story's root point: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Another line from the novel, "Long live the Liberal Party! Long live Colonel Aureliano Buendía!" is also notably present in the last line.

Nobody, of course, and certainly nobody who isn't Latin American, can really 'deal with' a work like One Hundred Years of Solitude, and my use of 'dialogue' above shouldn't be taken to constitute much of a conversation any more than a toddler has useful things to say to a quantum physicist about their work. What I've done is just a reframing of a few totemic lines, but hopefully one that nonetheless says something of its own. It's probably worth noting that the liberalism of our Aureliano and that of Garcia Marquez are quite different beasts: the futility of the Colonel's revolutionary wars against the Conservative government has, in Solaria, long since passed through the utter destruction of that system by itself - perhaps a more pessimistic end even than the original novel, where the possibility of a more socialist future without the insularity of the Buendías is held out as a possibility. The echoes of that insularity appear in our character nonetheless - and his realisation of purpose in the story is one necessarily closer to my own feelings about liberalism and what it can yet mean than was the case for the Colombian novelist.

Environmentalism is an important theme for Solaria, especially given its placement in a world in which global warming has been catastrophically disruptive as has nuclear war, with a much smaller human population recovering after a couple of centuries of enormous dislocations between our own time and theirs. This was the other major driving force behind this story, a reframing of that discovery of ice as a rediscovery of a relationship with landscape and planet - an immeasurable loss, but with a realisation of hope at its end, the last bit of Pandora's box through which, unlike the Buendías, our future Aureliano has a hope of breaking the cycles of cynicism and fate.

I don't know if I'll ever get time to write another Solaria story - but I hope this one was worth writing.

[The Seamstress]

*thumbs up*

[Jubal]

*thumbs up*

Thank:)