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Description
The geologist Alex Ostrovsky and marine biologist Nemo Hovsepian explore the icy terminator of a tidally locked planet. Nemo takes his recorder/journal with him everywhere he goes, so he speaks about events as they unfold in real time.
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Beacons

Night of the second day…I’m taking the boat out to the Crossbones tomorrow. The ice formation juts out from the sea. When viewed from the right angle, it makes the shape of an X, or crossed fingers perhaps, like it’s telling a lie. I’ve got my fingers crossed that we won’t slip on the ice and fall into the frigid waters. These jackets may be warm, but they are not waterproof. Besides, I have it on good authority that with our oxygen tanks strapped to our backs, we’d sink like stones.
…
Morning of the third day…got Alex Ostrovsky to come with me. He wants to take a look at the structure and composition of the ice to explain the atypical cleavage. It looks like chipped obsidian, and ice doesn’t normally fracture that way. I just need a place where I can look out across the coast and find a good location to set up my fishnets and traps.
…
And we’re off…we’re doing some good old fashioned manhauling until Grant can get the snow buggy and sled assembled. Yuzo’s back at camp helping him out, or maybe he’s doing something with those boulders, he didn’t say. The rest are following the tracks of some sort of large animal, like the hunter-gatherers of days past. Wayne Kim is, of course, manning the satellite probes from orbit. They’re following the tracks of a storm system that is headed in our direction.
…
The other part of the Crossbones, the part that makes up the index finger, is farther away than it looked from below. How deceptive. The tip of the finger catches the red light of the rising sun…it is beautiful beyond words.
…
The view from here is incredible! To the east, great figures of striped ice stand in a near-perfect ring. It looks like Stonehenge…if anything were to convince me that this place harbors intelligent life, it’s this…but Alex is adamant that the shapes are completely natural. Northeast of here, across the land, the tortured ice stretches for miles. Southwest, out onto the ocean, the pack ice jostles about and throws up pressure ridges. Their speed is glacial but the collisions are unimaginably powerful.
…
Climbing to the tip of the pointer finger…that was not the sun’s light that made the ice glow red. There is life here. Dozens of small, hairy critters are nesting on this spot. Each individual has a stalk growing out of its head, and this is where the light is coming from. Maybe they act as beacons to keep the nesting site visible through a snowstorm…I wish we’d thought of that ourselves. Too bad Alex O’Hearn isn’t here to see this…I’d take one back for him, but I don’t want to separate them from their babies. I’ll take this instead…it’s an egg, covered in skin and fur but frozen solid, lost to the elements.

- Nemo Hovsepian
_____________________________________________
More from Odyssey [link]
Read Odyssey here [link]

Watercolor

Description
The geologist Alex Ostrovsky and marine biologist Nemo Hovsepian explore the icy terminator of a tidally locked planet. Nemo takes his recorder/journal with him everywhere he goes, so he speaks about events as they unfold in real time.
______________________________________________
Beacons

Night of the second day…I’m taking the boat out to the Crossbones tomorrow. The ice formation juts out from the sea. When viewed from the right angle, it makes the shape of an X, or crossed fingers perhaps, like it’s telling a lie. I’ve got my fingers crossed that we won’t slip on the ice and fall into the frigid waters. These jackets may be warm, but they are not waterproof. Besides, I have it on good authority that with our oxygen tanks strapped to our backs, we’d sink like stones.
…
Morning of the third day…got Alex Ostrovsky to come with me. He wants to take a look at the structure and composition of the ice to explain the atypical cleavage. It looks like chipped obsidian, and ice doesn’t normally fracture that way. I just need a place where I can look out across the coast and find a good location to set up my fishnets and traps.
…
And we’re off…we’re doing some good old fashioned manhauling until Grant can get the snow buggy and sled assembled. Yuzo’s back at camp helping him out, or maybe he’s doing something with those boulders, he didn’t say. The rest are following the tracks of some sort of large animal, like the hunter-gatherers of days past. Wayne Kim is, of course, manning the satellite probes from orbit. They’re following the tracks of a storm system that is headed in our direction.
…
The other part of the Crossbones, the part that makes up the index finger, is farther away than it looked from below. How deceptive. The tip of the finger catches the red light of the rising sun…it is beautiful beyond words.
…
The view from here is incredible! To the east, great figures of striped ice stand in a near-perfect ring. It looks like Stonehenge…if anything were to convince me that this place harbors intelligent life, it’s this…but Alex is adamant that the shapes are completely natural. Northeast of here, across the land, the tortured ice stretches for miles. Southwest, out onto the ocean, the pack ice jostles about and throws up pressure ridges. Their speed is glacial but the collisions are unimaginably powerful.
…
Climbing to the tip of the pointer finger…that was not the sun’s light that made the ice glow red. There is life here. Dozens of small, hairy critters are nesting on this spot. Each individual has a stalk growing out of its head, and this is where the light is coming from. Maybe they act as beacons to keep the nesting site visible through a snowstorm…I wish we’d thought of that ourselves. Too bad Alex O’Hearn isn’t here to see this…I’d take one back for him, but I don’t want to separate them from their babies. I’ll take this instead…it’s an egg, covered in skin and fur but frozen solid, lost to the elements.

- Nemo Hovsepian
_____________________________________________
More from Odyssey [link]
Read Odyssey here [link]

Watercolor