Lander has a compass strapped to his left wrist. In a corridor of visibility momentarily appearing in the snowfall, we can see Sweden. The lights of Tarba;k. And, as lighter, floating spots in the dark, two ships at anchor between the shore and the central navigation channel. Northwest of Flakfort.

"The starboard one is Kronos."

I'm having a hard time separating Lander from his office, his liquor, his high heels, his elegant clothes. The authority with which he maneuvers the boat between the swells, which get bigger the farther we are from shore, is unexpected and foreign.

I try to orient myself. It's one sea mile out to the channel. Two shoal markers along the way. The channel lights to Tuborg Harbor. To Skovshoved Harbor. The masthead lights on the hills above Strand Drive. A container ship on its way south.

When the snowfall blocks out the view, I correct his course twice. He gives me a searching glance, but he obeys. I don't try to explain anything to him. What would I say?

A slight wind comes up. It blows cold, hard drops of salt water into our faces. We huddle in the bottom, leaning against each other. The heavy Zodiac dances on the choppy waves. He puts his mouth to my balaclava hood, which I've pulled up.

"Føjl and I were in the navy together. In the Seals. We were in our early twenties. If you're a thinking person, then you have to be that age to put up with that kind of shit. For six months we would get up at 5:00 a.m. and swim half a mile in ice-cold water and run for an hour and a half. We had parachute jumping at night over the sea, three miles off the coast of Scotland, and I'm practically nightblind. We dragged that crappy rubber boat around on our heads through the Danish woods while the officers pissed on us and tried to rearrange our psyches to make fighting men out of us."

I put my hand on his arm holding the throttle and correct the course. Five hundred yards ahead the container ship cuts across our course in the form of a green starboard light and three running lanterns up high.

"It's usually the small ones who do best. Guys my size. We were the ones who could keep it up. The bigger guys could manage one lift and then they were finished. We had to put them in the rubber boat and carry them along. But Føjl was different. Føjl was big. But as fast as if he were small. They couldn't wear him out. They never cracked him in the interrogation courses. He would just give them that friendly stare; you know how he is. And then he wouldn't budge an inch. One day we were diving under ice. It was winter. The sea was frozen solid. We had to dynamite a hole in it. There was a strong current that day. On my way down I passed through a cold belt. That happens sometimes. The condensed water from the exhaled air freezes to ice and blocks the small valves in the air tank. I hadn't attached the safety line yet. That's how you can find your way back to the hole in the ice. That's what diving under ice is like. From six feet away the hole is a dark edge. From fifteen feet away you can't see it any longer. So I'm seized with panic. I lose the line. I don't think I can see the hole anymore. Everything is green and brilliant and neon-colored under the ice. I feel as if I'm being sucked into the realm of the dead. I can feel the current grabbing me and carrying me down and away. They tell me that Føjl was watching. So he picks up a lead belt in one hand and jumps into the water without any oxygen tank. With only a line in his hand. Because there wasn't time. And he dives down to me. He catches me forty feet down. But he's diving in a dry suit. This means that the water pressure presses the rubber against his skin. With an additional one atmosphere of pressure for every thirty feet. About thirty feet down the rubber edge cut through the skin of his wrists and ankles. What I remember about our passage up to the surface was clouds of blood."

I think about the scars around his wrists and ankles. "He was also the one who forced the water out of my lungs. And gave me artificial respiration. We had to wait a long time. They only had a little gas turbine helicopter, and the weather was bad. He gave me heart massage and artificial respiration all the way back."

"Back to where?"

"To Scoresbysund. We were on exercises in Greenland. It was cold. But that suited him fine."

The snow closes around us in a chaotic gridwork, a wild confusion of slanted stripes.

"He's disappeared," I say. "I tried to call him. Some stranger answered the phone. Maybe he's in jail."

One minute before the ship appears, I can sense its presence. The pull of the hull against the anchor chains, the slow shifting of the entire vast, floating hulk.

"Forget about him, honey. That's what the rest of us have had to do."

On the port side there is a short floating platform at the bottom of a steep ladder beneath a single yellow light. He doesn't turn off the motor but steadies the boat by holding on to an iron girder.

"You can go back with me, Smilla."

There's something touching about him, as if he hadn't realized until now that we stopped playing games a long time ago.

"The thing is," I say, "that I don't have anything in particular to go back to."

I sling the box onto the platform myself. When I step up onto it and turn around, he stands there for a moment, gazing at me, a small figure, rising and sinking, the big rubber boat lending him a dancing movement. Then he turns away and pushes off.

Part One

The Sea

1

My cabin is 8 by 10 feet. But they've still found space for a sink and mirror, a closet, a bunk with a reading light, a shelf for books, a chair, and under the porthole a little desk with the big dog on top.

He stretches from one bulkhead all the way across to the bed and is about six feet long. His eyes are sad, his paws dark, and with every list of the ship, he tries to touch me. If he succeeds, I will instantly disintegrate. My flesh will fall off my bones, my eyes will run out of their sockets and evaporate, my intestines will force their way out through my skin and explode in clouds of methane.

He doesn't belong here. He doesn't belong in my world at all. His name is Aajumaaq and he's from East Greenland, and my mother brought him home from a visit to Ammassalik. After seeing him once down there, she realized that he must have always been present in Qaanaaq, too, and after that she saw him regularly. He never touches the ground, and here, too, he floats a little above the desk. He's here because I'm on a ship.

I've always been afraid of the sea. They never got me into a kayak, even though it was my mother's greatest wish. I have never set foot on the deck of Moritz's Swan. One of the reasons I'm fond of ice is that it covers the water and makes it solid, safe, negotiable, manageable. I know that, outside, the waves and the wind have picked up, and far forward the bow of the Kronos is pitching through the waves, splintering them, and sending loud cascades of water along the gunwale until, outside my porthole, they disperse into a whistling mist shining white in the night. On the open sea there are no landmarks, there is only an amorphous, chaotic shifting of directionless masses of water that loom up and break and roll, and their surface is, in turn; broken by subsystems that interfere and form whirlpools and appear and disappear and finally vanish without a trace. Slowly this confusion will work its way into the chambers of my inner ear and destroy my sense of orientation; it will fight its way into my cells and displace their salt concentrations and the conductivity of my nervous system as well, leaving me deaf, blind, and helpless. I'm not afraid of the sea simply because it wants to strangle me. I'm afraid of it because it will rob me of my orientation, the inner gyroscope of my life, my awareness of what is up and down, my connection to Absolute Space.