Dead, you mean?

Spread-eagle on that strange white surface which lay beneath the inclement Antarctic sun, Dengue Destroyed saw everything flash by in no more than a second. What of life is there to look back on in the space of a few instants when a boy, a girl, a destroyed void, believes it is about to die? Might it think of its dear mother, lament the father it never knew, or perhaps recall, some humorous or traumatic anecdote involving its classmates? Truthfully, not much else had happened during her brief time on Earth. However (for the mind works in mysterious and unpredictable ways, especially the mind of a mutant mosquito), Dengue Destroyed did not think about any of these people, but rather about a story her mother used to read her at bedtime, the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She remembered the opening by heart:

“Once upon a time, on a frozen, windy winter’s night, there lived a queen. This queen was watching the snow fall as she knitted by the window. Through the window, the snowflakes fell slowly and rhythmically in unpredictable patterns, like feathers from an infinite pillow. As she gazed in wonder at the falling snow, she accidentally pricked one of her fingers with the needle. Three drops of blood fell onto the snow. And the queen thought to herself: if only I could have a daughter who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as beautiful as winter!”

This opening always unsettled Dengue Boy (as he was back then). Among other things, he didn’t understand half the words: what the heck was winter, what was cold, what was snow, and why did they cause such fascination?

A daughter as cherished as snow, as beautiful as winter . . .

The mystery of those words, whose meanings had always escaped him, aroused an even greater suspicion: does this mean that I, the aberrant Dengue Boy, with my green and yellow blotches, must be as white as snow and as beautiful as winter for my mommy to truly love and cherish me?

It was impossible to know, and in this future in which cold, winter, and snow had disappeared from the earth, there was no empirical way of experiencing their effects (at least not for a wretched boy from Victorica). Naturally, his mother, who had also spent all her miserable life in Victorica, wasn’t much help. All she knew (or intuited so strongly that she believed she knew) was that snow was soft and beautiful, and the skin of beautiful children had the same color and pleasant texture, unlike her Dengue Child, whose epidermis was furry, harsh, a greenish-yellowy color. Because of this, Dengue Boy, like some kind of Kabbalistic rabbi, convinced himself that, if he could access the mystifying meaning of cold, winter and snow, he would open the sacred chest of its mysteries, and the secret of how to obtain his mother’s affection.

Because there was nothing the insect wished for more than to be white like snow, beautiful like winter, and cherished by his mother!

The desire to access the enigmatic material hidden by these words took hold of the poor insect, and he pored over every dictionary and encyclopedia he could find in search of the answers. He read the definitions again and again:

Winter. Noun. Obs. Extinct season in the terrestrial year which used to occur between autumn and spring, also extinct.

E.g.: “Winter was the coldest time in the year.”

Cold. Noun. Obs. Bodily sensation produced by low temperatures, characteristic of ancient winter.

E.g.: “It was cold during winter, especially if there was snow.”

Snow. Noun. Precipitation in the form of small white ice crystals formed directly from the water vapor of the air at a temperature of less than 32°F, which used to occur during the terrestrial winter, and which still occurs on other planets or on Earth via artificial means.

E.g.: “There was so much snow during winter!”

The poor boy read these definitions, and reread them, and then read again, but, to his great disappointment, understood nothing. Was it because (as his classmates always claimed) he was a halfwit? Winter, cold, snow. Mere words. Words! And worse still, words which had to be explained using other words, whose definitions were even more vague and imprecise.

W-i-n-t-er, c-o-l-d, s-n-ow.

Hermetic hieroglyphs which the boy relished phoneme by phoneme, under the illusion that by doing so the flesh that had once lain beneath their vibrant skin would not evaporate before his eyes. But, removed from the meaning that had once breathed life into them, all that remained was a hollow carcass of meaningless sound.

W-i-n-t-er, c-o-l-d, s-n-ow.

Atmospheric phenomena which so many humans and other species had suffered and endured over millennia, and which were now a mere planetary mystery, speculative prose written by fossils, the empty scriptures of the water and the soil, the geological imprint of nothingness!

The only season the Pampas and Antarctic Caribbean knew was summer, scorching, unrelenting, homogenous. So when Dengue Void, her body still numb from the poison, believed she was going to die, and saw a drop of her own blood (to be precise, the blood she had indiscriminately sucked from the children and office workers of Victorica), yes, when she saw that blood trickling across the strange, white surface she had fallen onto, she remembered that snow was white, which immediately reminded her of the opening to the story his mother used to tell him (back when he was a boy), the perplexing fable of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

And indeed, the memory she believed her last was fitting, for her poisoned body had in fact landed on the ice-skating rink of the Great Winter Cruise, the cruise company’s flagship, which traveled along the coast of the Antarctic Caribbean, recreating for its visitors the cold season, now vanished from the earth, and its elemental materials: snow, glaciers, and icebergs. On these luxury cruise ships, run using AIS’s state-of the-art technology, tourists could experience the unique delights of winter for themselves, including one of its greatest attractions, the biggest ice rink on the planet!

And that was precisely where Dengue Dying had landed, ruining the tourists’ fun. Picture the scene: on this imposing slab of ice, one-hundred-twenty-one feet long and fifty-five wide, which crowned the terrace of the twenty-floor cruise ship with a direct view of the pristine, burning sea, huge crowds of visitors had flocked to try out a unique experience, quite possibly for the first time—a journey through time to another geological era, since these spectacular landscapes did not exist naturally anywhere on Earth. It was not only an opportunity to skate with the unmistakable and elegant stride of ice skates on a frozen sheet, but to do so at sub-zero temperatures, since the atmosphere in which the rink had been installed recreated the feel of the harsh winters of old New York, long flooded and submerged beneath the waves. On top of that, it was Christmas, international tourism’s busiest and most eagerly awaited season. And so, as the carols rang out, enthralled tourists clad in heavy coats moved like swans gliding over a terra incognita, this white rectangle whose temperature was sustained by the herculean efforts of extremely powerful refrigerating machines, a surface of artificial ice decorated with flags of all the countries from before the Great Thaw, opposite a monumental, pure gold statue of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, for the rink was an imitation of the long-vanished one at Rockefeller Center, in old New York, also many leagues under the sea now.

Naturally, the sculptor hired by the cruise ship had been astute enough to replace the flame in Prometheus’s right hand with an enormous block of pure ice, which the titan was robbing from the abyss of planetary time so that these wealthy tourists could recover (for as long as the cruise lasted) a geological era now permanently eclipsed on Earth: the Holocene. In fact, this was the cruise company’s slogan: “12,000 years of history in one place, The Great Winter Cruise”, as it promised to perfectly recreate that lost planetary terrain which winter as humans had known it was born and had died. Thus, “hibernation” (as the company called the cruise experience in its advertisements) progressed upward from the bottom floors, narrating twelve thousand years of the history of winter in ascending order. It began on the bottom deck, where they had recreated the end of the Pleistocene in an enormous fridge with robotic mammoths and mastodons, including a family-friendly game in which you had to start a fire with sticks and stones before prehistoric mammals attacked. The higher levels offered a variety of experiences from the old winter: the historical ones included invading Scandinavian cities with a Viking ship, with the ability to kill, sack and rape, or crossing the Andes on General San Martín’s white horse, while on the floors dedicated to general entertainment there were ski slopes, cold chambers in which the auroras borealis and australis were recreated using lasers, and others in which you could experience all different kinds of wintry precipitation, including snow, hail, and sleet. There was also an enormous igloo with an open-air cinema, casino, spa, carousel, cocktail bar, and a sushi and BBQ restaurant, among other “hibernation” attractions, which, the cruise ship’s advertisements assured visitors, recreated winter in perfect detail. The ancient, frozen delights of ice, snow, and cold were an authentic treasure of the gods, stolen by Prometheus himself for the exclusive enjoyment of visitors to the cruise: a true paradise in which you could access a secret mystery that was now irretrievably lost. The skaters slid across the rink in an atmosphere of pure jubilation, helped along by the Christmas carols, and people laughed as they crashed hilariously into one another and danced, beaming at one another in shared bliss. A true, unforgettable celebration that would be forever recorded onto the tourists’ retinas, an authentic dream, had it not been for the mosquito landing violently and abruptly on the ice rink and ruining everything.

This extract is reproduced with permission from the novel Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva (translated by Rahul Bery), out now with Serpent’s Tail. North American edition available from Astra House. This novel is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here

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