Breathing Holes

by McCaffreyan Science Fantasy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Forty-one centimetres, said the tape, and Aarni Peltola knelt on the ice of Suurvesi in the blue before sunrise and practised saying it.

He did not practise aloud. That came later, in the survey hut, with Maija Korpela waiting and Hannu Rautavaara not waiting. Out here he practised with two fingers on his thigh, the way the speech woman on the transport ship had taught him when he was nine: one tap to a syllable, steady as a clock. For-ty. One. For-ty. One. The taps carried the words the way a sledge carries a load. Without them the words jammed in his throat like logs at a weir.

He tapped the last syllable on the auger housing instead of his leg, out of plain boredom, and the ice under his knees knocked back.

Three knocks. Not loud. He felt them more than heard them, through the padding of his trousers, a hollow tok, tok, tok from somewhere under forty-one centimetres of black ice.

For-ty. One.

Aarni sat back on his heels. The lake was very quiet. Fourteen kilometres of it lay between Saarenpää on its island and the mill-town of Rautio on the mainland, and all of it was white and grey and staked with black-needle saplings every fifty metres to mark the winter road, and nothing on it moved but the wind.

The ice made noises. Everyone on Saarenpää knew that. It boomed when the cold deepened at night; it twanged and sang when the sledges ran on it, a high falling note like a stone skipped across a roof. The children called it the lake talking. In forty years of colony nobody had thought it was talking about anything.

He put his knuckle to the ice and knocked three times.

Nothing. Then, slowly, from underneath: tok. Tok. Tok.

And a fourth.

---

He did not say anything about it in the hut. He did not, if he was honest, say very much in the hut at all.

"Forty-one at stake two-ninety," he got out, tapping his thigh under the table, and then the rest jammed: thirty-eight at three hundred, thirty-six at the Narrows, all of it stuck somewhere behind his teeth while his face went hot.

"Thirty-six at the Narrows," Hannu said for him, reading it upside down out of Aarni's notebook. Hannu was the sledge-boss, a big cheerful man with frost in his beard, and he finished Aarni's sentences the way other men held doors, without thinking, believing it a kindness. "It's always the Narrows. Thin as a biscuit."

Maija Korpela did not look up from her chart. She was the lake surveyor, small and square and fifty, and she had laid the winter road every year for twenty-two years; the road was hers the way a garden is someone's. She had never once finished Aarni's sentences. He was not sure she had noticed he had trouble with them. She simply waited, chewing the end of her stylus, until whatever he was saying had arrived.

"Thirty-six," she said. "And the turbine sledge comes across in nineteen days, and the turbine weighs four tonnes on its cradle. I want sixty at the Narrows. I'll not get it from the frost alone, not by then." She tapped the chart where the road ran between the two long fingers of the reed islands. "Flood it. Pumps out on Thursday, when the new hoses come over from Rautio: ten centimetres a night, a week of that. And Hannu: plug the seal holes first. They'll weaken the flooded ice."

"Already doing it," Hannu said. "Did nine yesterday."

Aarni had seen them. The lake-seals were the only big animal Suurvesi had: long grey bodies, rarely seen except as a shape under clear ice in early winter, with a bony crest across the brow and two stubby fore-claws they used to scrape their breathing holes open from beneath. The holes showed on top as little domes of ice under the snow, the size of a dinner plate. The road crews kicked them in, poured a bucket of lake-water into each, and let the night freeze it solid.

They'll find another hole, everybody said. And they did, mostly.

He opened his mouth to say something, and did not know what, and shut it again.

---

He went back that night with a lantern and his good gloves, and walked out three kilometres in the cold to the Narrows, where the reed islands came close and the pumps stood ready in a row with their hoses coiled, and the snow was printed with the boots of Hannu's crew.

Nine of the plate-sized domes near the stakes had been kicked in and plugged. He found a tenth, untouched, twenty metres off the road among the reeds. He knelt beside it, set the lantern down, took off one glove, and put his bare knuckles to the ice.

His name. He did not decide to do it; his hand did it, the way it had done everything for twenty-five years. AAR-ni PEL-to-la. Long, short. Long, short, short.

He waited. The cold came up through his knees. A long way off the ice boomed and settled.

Then, under his hand, so close that he jerked: TOK-tok. TOK-tok-tok.

His own name, back. Long, short. Long, short, short. Exact.

He laughed out loud, a cloud of white in the lantern-light, and it did not stick in his throat at all.

He tried the counting again, because counting was a thing ice could not do by settling. One knock. Pause. One came back, and then two. He gave three. It gave four. He gave five, and there was a long silence, and he was beginning to think he had imagined the whole of it when six knocks came up through the ice, slow and careful, the way a child counts on its fingers.

"You c-c—" said Aarni, and stopped, and put his fingers back on the ice and tapped as he spoke. "You. Can. Count."

Something moved under the dome. He saw it through the thin skin of ice over the hole: a dim grey shape, and then, for a moment, the pale blade of a brow-crest pressing up against the underside, and two dark eyes the size of his palm, looking at the light.

Then it gave him its own name.

He was sure afterwards that that was what it was. It was not his rhythm and not a count. It was four knocks, long, short, short, long, and then a fifth very soft, almost a scratch, like an afterthought or a breath. It gave it three times, and then waited.

Aarni tapped it back. He got the soft fifth knock wrong and it corrected him, gave it again, softer, until he had it, and then it gave him his own name once more, TOK-tok, TOK-tok-tok, and pressed its brow-crest against the ice where his hand was, and stayed there.

Nobody in his whole life had waited for him like that. Not the speech woman, who had been kind but was paid by the hour. Not his mother, who had loved him and finished every sentence he ever started. Not Hannu. Under the ice, in the dark, the seal waited for every knock as if it had all the winter in the world and nothing else it would rather spend it on, and when he got a rhythm wrong it did not sigh. It simply gave it to him again.

He knelt there until he could not feel his hand. Then he put his glove back on and knocked once more, through the leather, softly.

Tomorrow.

He did not know if it understood. It knocked back.

---

He went every night after that, and he learned three things.

The first was that the seal, whose name he could not say aloud and so said in his head as a shape, long-short-short-long-and-breath, would come to any dome he knocked at near the Narrows, and that there were others like it. He heard them answer one another, far off, rhythms he did not know passing from hole to hole under the ice like gossip down a street.

The second was that the plugged holes were not empty. On the fourth night he knelt by one of the domes Hannu's crew had kicked in, and knocked, and from under it came a rapid frantic scraping, claws on ice, on and on, and then nothing, and then the scraping again from the next plugged hole along.

They'll find another hole. They did. They were finding them. But the flooding would pour water down into every hole from above and freeze it solid from the top, ten centimetres a night on top of the thirty-six, and the seals would have to scrape every centimetre of it from beneath with two blunt claws.

The third thing he learned was from his own notebook. He counted the domes along the Narrows, plugged and unplugged, on the reed side of the road and the open side. Twenty-three. He walked a kilometre in each direction along the road and found four more, and then none. The seals did not live everywhere under Suurvesi. They lived here, where the reed islands came together and the water ran a little warmer and quicker between them, and the Narrows was thin not because of bad luck but because the seals had been keeping it so for longer than there had been a road across it.

The pumps would start on Thursday. Maija Korpela was going to flood every breathing hole on the lake.

---

He could have written it down. He thought about it, sitting up in his bunk with the notebook on his knee. A page of it, clear and plain, slid across the table to Maija.

He did not, in the end, because he had spent twenty-five years writing things down instead of saying them, and the seal had never once asked him to.

He waited until the hut was full on Thursday morning: Maija at her chart, Hannu and two of the pump crew drinking tea by the stove, the radio-girl from Rautio on the bench with her headset round her neck. Then he stood up, which he never did, and put his right hand flat on the table, and began to tap.

"The. Seals. At the Narrows," he said, one tap to each syllable, slowly. The room went quiet. He felt his face burn, and kept tapping. "Are not. An-i-mals. Not. Like that. They count. They know. Their names. They know mine."

Hannu opened his mouth. Aarni tapped harder and did not stop.

"There are. Twen-ty-sev-en holes. All in. Four kil-o-me-tres. They live. There. Only there. If you flood. The Narrows. The wa-ter fills. Ev-ery hole. From a-bove. They can-not. Scrape. That fast. I have. Heard them. Try."

He ran out. Not out of words; out of breath. He had never in his life said so many words in a row in front of other people, and his legs were shaking.

"Aarni," Hannu said, quite gently, "it's the ice. It settles. It knocks. My father used to say there was a man under it with a hammer—"

"Does it count?" said Maija Korpela.

She had put down her stylus. She was looking at Aarni, not at Hannu, and her face was the face she wore over the chart: patient, measuring, giving nothing away.

"Yes," Aarni said. No tap. It just came out.

"To what?"

"N-nine. Last night. It takes. A long time. After six."

Maija looked at him for a while longer. Then she reached for her coat.

"Hannu," she said, "the pumps wait a day."

---

It was a bad night for it. The wind had got up from the north, and it came down the lake with nothing to stop it for fourteen kilometres and cut through every layer of wool Aarni owned. Maija walked beside him with her chin tucked into her collar and did not speak the whole three kilometres. Behind them, at a distance that he supposed Hannu thought was tactful, came Hannu.

Aarni chose the dome among the reeds, the first one. He knelt. He took off his glove. He knocked his own name.

Nothing came back.

He knocked it again, and waited, with the wind tearing at the lantern flame and Maija's boots creaking on the snow behind him, and the silence went on and on, and the old heat came up in his face, the jammed-word heat, the feeling of everyone in the room waiting for something that was not going to come.

Don't, he told himself. It waits for you. You wait for it.

He put his hand flat on the ice, and stayed there.

It came after what Maija said later was four minutes. He would not have believed it was less than an hour. A scrape, first, under the dome, the sound of claws clearing new ice. Then, very soft, as if from something that had come a long way in a hurry and was out of breath: TOK-tok. TOK-tok-tok.

Maija Korpela's breath went out of her in a long white plume.

He gave it one. It gave him two. He went up through the numbers, slowly, as he always did, and at seven the seal stopped, and he thought not tonight, not with her watching, and then it gave him eight, and nine, and, after a long pause, ten.

It had never gone past nine. He found that he had stopped breathing, and made himself start again.

"Let me," Maija said.

She knelt beside him, stiffly, and pulled off her own glove, and looked at him. He showed her, tapping on his own thigh: one knock, then wait. She put her knuckles to the ice and knocked once.

Nothing came. She waited. She was, after all, a woman who had waited out twenty-two winters of ice.

Then two knocks came up under her hand, and then, unasked, a rhythm Aarni had never heard: short, short, long. Short, short, long. Over and over, faster, a little anxious. He did not know what it meant. He did not have to. He tapped his own name, and then the seal's, long-short-short-long-and-breath, and the anxious rhythm stopped, and the seal gave his name back to him, and then its own, and then, slowly, as if trying it out, short, short, long, very quietly, under Maija's hand.

"That's me," Maija said. "Isn't it."

"I th-think. It's. Asking."

Hannu had come up behind them at some point. He stood with the wind in his beard and his hands in his armpits, looking down at the little dome among the reeds, and for once in his life he finished nobody's sentence.

---

The pumps did not run at the Narrows.

Maija Korpela re-staked the road herself over the following three days, with Aarni and the auger beside her, two kilometres west round the outer reed island and over the shoal, where the water was shallow and still and the ice was already fifty-two centimetres and freezing well. It added twenty minutes to the run to Rautio. Hannu complained about that at length, every morning, in the hut, and then went out with his crew and flooded the shoal stretch to sixty-four centimetres, and the turbine came across on its cradle on the nineteenth day without so much as a crack, with the ice singing its high falling song under the runners all the way.

The plugged holes at the Narrows were unplugged. Hannu did that himself, with an ice-chisel and a bad temper, and Aarni knelt beside him and listened to the claws come scraping up to meet the chisel from below, and showed him where.

And on the chart in the survey hut, in Maija's small square hand, a ring went round the Narrows, and inside it a word: Inhabited.

---

He still went out at night. Some nights Maija came, and some nights the radio-girl from Rautio, who had started writing the rhythms down in a notation of her own invention, dots and dashes in columns, and had thirty-three of them within the month, and was going to have a great deal to say about them on the radio to the mainland in the spring.

Mostly, though, it was just Aarni and the seal.

He talked to it. That was the strangest thing, and the best. He knelt by the dome among the reeds with his bare hand on the ice and talked to it aloud, and tapped as he talked, a tap to a syllable, and the words came out of him in an easy steady stream, like water that has found its way round a stone. It did not understand the words. He was sure of that. It understood the knocking, and the waiting, and that the knocking came from him.

On the last night of the year he knelt there and tapped out something he had been working on for a week. It was not his name and not a count and not anything the seal had given him. It was a new rhythm, his own, short-long, short-long, long, which in his head meant the road, the line of black stakes, the way the sledges ran.

He gave it three times, and then put his hand flat on the ice, and waited.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Simulācrō McCaffreyānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

McCaffreyan Science Fantasy Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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