The ghosts and oracles of rare earth

Nuutti exhaled hotly onto the window and began urging it to transparency with the rough cuff of his jumper sleeve. Beyond, through the thick and yellowing plastic-glass composite, he could just make out the stiff, grey slopes of Kvanefjeld rising from the dark mirror of the Tunulliarfik Fjord. Nuutti squinted suddenly, thinking he saw movement at the base of one of the hills. No, not movement. It was a slip of some fluorescent mineral, probably tugtupite or chkalovite, reflected in the beam of the surveyor’s searchlight as it made its morning scan of the landscape surrounding the mine's entrance.

Nuutti turned to the job screen on the far wall, broadcasting an endless list of tasks in scrolling green neon. Today, he was scheduled to work in Zone 3, following the all-clear from the site augurist. Ever since the new troubles began four years ago, the day’s work could not proceed until the augurist had satisfied herself of the burgeoning caprices and fortunes of the mine, and the mountains that cradled it. Nuutti had glimpsed the augurist only three times, but these had been enough to impress upon him the fierce strangeness and brawny sorcery of this woman. Her body small and coiled, her thick, grey hair loose and ropey about her shoulders. Her eyes pale and vitreous, as if capable of diffracting light.

Whispered versions of the augurist's divination ritual had been shared between Nuutti and the other Category C workers. Naja, who claimed to have witnessed the ritual in error when assigned to cleaning duties in the augurist’s chambers, described it as a mix of atmospheric science (various meteorological tools were consulted) and a form of magic that beckoned to an essentialist vision of nature (which is to say that it involved feathers, blood, and the very minerals that Nuutti would pluck from the ground of Kvanefjeld each day). According to Naja, the augurist concluded the ritual with a chant, gradually swelling in cadence and intensity: the mountain wants its share.

Occasionally and with increasing frequency, the augurist would declare the refusal of the mine to be worked that day. For Nuutti and the others, this would mean lighter chores at the base camp, for which, Nuutti supposed, he should be grateful. Physically punishing and perilous as it was, though, he preferred to be out in the thin air of Kvanefjeld, his hands sifting through its silted earth, his eyes searching for bright mineral barbs in the grey soil. There, in the thrall of the rhythmic labour of work, he could imagine himself returned to an undivided nature; no fortified shield closing him off from an inhospitable landscape, no longer a prisoner of atmosphere, of breath.

A heart-shaped symbol now blinked, loudly, on the job screen, indicating a favourable augury. The mine would admit workers today. Nuutti sighed more-or-less happily. Moving to the edge of his bed, he began to lace up his thick, lead-lined boots; his fingers tracing the red and white Greenlandic flag stamped on their heels, wondering, softly, about how this had all come to be.

It begun, he guessed, with the launch of the mine, when Nuutti was still a boy. Once this cavernous mouth to the earth had been opened, Kvanefjeld soon revealed itself as the world's largest repository of rare earth elements. For a short while, life, for Nuutti, was exceedingly good. His father, a business-minded local politician, had prospered under the mining industry's favour. Calcified mineralogic finds decorated the shelves of Nuutti's home like bright teeth.

A mute backdrop to this geologic activity, the ice sheet that tugged at the contours of the coastline nonetheless continued its slow melt. With the steady dissolution of its form, the ice found its voice; each crack rent in this glacial corpus sounding itself out as an agonised howl that even Nuutti had been able to hear from his bedroom in a corner of the city. As the rising heat etched ever-widening fissures into this body of ice, a new and ruinous transpolar sea route was formed, a shipping channel that established the city as a major international trade port. Kvanefjeld swelled, its carnal mouth opened ever wider. Do you see what fortune this warming has delivered to us? the politicians had shouted, clapping their hands in glee. Do you see?

Narrative conceits persist in history too, and so the region's rapid claim to wealth augured an equally vertiginous fall. As if caught in the inescapable teleology of colonial hubris, this sudden resource-richness had triggered a proliferation of violence – written both as geopolitical war, and as the ruination of landscape. The opening of Kvanefjeld, this auspicious gift, had instead signalled the start of the troubles which had written Nuutti's world anew.

~

The mood in the transport vehicle was calm, as it was on most days. It was too costly to install windows on the vehicle’s sides, so the workers sat in darkness in the back, swaying gently as the vehicle bobbed in the low, steady swell of the fjord. Beside him, another Category C worker, Malik, began to hum a mutated version of an old sea shanty. None of the other workers joined him; over decades of disuse, the tune had drifted too far from the original to be recognisable, like the geographic displacement of a songbird’s melody. Eventually, a ragged thump signaled that they had reached the ramp on the other side of the fjord. The vehicle dredged itself from the water like a drowned animal, heaving its human cargo up the slope toward the mine’s entrance. As the vehicle’s motor idled to a stop, Nuutti picked up his heavy helmet and began to fasten it to the steel collar of his suit.

The Category C workers spaced themselves along the mountain’s base, threaded together, loosely, with nylon rope knotted to carabiners at their waist. At Zone 3, the prize upon which Nuutti and the other workers were fixed was the black rock, lujavrite. A curio when first discovered, the elements arrested in lujavrite’s lithic folds had since become the northern world’s most valuable material currency. Its rare-earth-oxides were now incorporated into the battery cells powering the perpetual atmosphere machines that rendered spaces habitable, breathable. And, Nuutti had heard, it was lujavrite that would drive the new weapons system the northerners were developing; an aggressive bulwark against the persistent threat of the new troubles.

The shadow of the new troubles hung over them like a noxious fog, choking the mine's material ambition. Worked by unseen hands and orchestrated by an unnamed foe, the new troubles hobbled the work of Kvanefjeld through weird contrivances and strange conceits of nature that ruined machinery or triggered spontaneous landslides. Witchcraft!, people had hissed, their eyes widening in horror, in the next breath arguing the primitivism of those who would practice magic, as if to diminish its power over them. It’s the ghost of the old troubles, Naja said. Nuutti wondered whether these troubles were spectral, supernatural, or simply material. Wasn’t it possible that something, some very real element of the old revolution had persisted, even now?

As he worked his way along his section of earth, Nuutti found something like joy in the physical and iterative arc of the search: swing, sift, release. He paused. A trick of movement again caught his eye, a rush of motion whose afterburn stained his retinas like a white ghost. He blinked, pointedly. His imagination was conjuring a phantom; no polar bears had been sighted in the wild since the great melt, and nothing else he could bring to mind might explain this vision. Still, Nuutti couldn’t escape the feeling that some other agency or presence was tapping him, begging his attention. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was that flash that he had seen earlier this morning, from the other side of the fjord. Gathering slack into the rope belted to his waist, he moved, slowly, in the general direction of this slippery lure.

He knelt before a small mound at the mountain’s base. The earth in this spot was unremarkable, littered with thin fragments of crystalline bedrock. Leaning closer, Nuutti ran his fingers through the silt, feeling something long and thin carve itself out of the ground and resolve in his fingers. A short tug and it had released itself, lying bare, now, in his gloved hand. A necklace. Silver, he guessed. A remnant from the community at Narsaq, perhaps, before the ocean had risen to swallow that town whole. Nuutti lifted the necklace to the light. From its centre hung a heavy pendant, taking the same heart shape that the augurist used to signal Kavenefjeld’s acquiescence to their presence. Nuutti slipped the object, quietly, into the pocket at the front of his suit.

~

Seated again at the edge of his bed, Nuutti’s fingers restlessly worried the necklace in his pocket. He had managed to conceal it from the inspectorate at handover, folding it into the small of his cheek, holding it there with his tongue until he had returned to the safety of his room. He pulled it out now and held it under the incandescent bulb that hung, low and stout, from the ceiling. Under this sallow light, Nuutti could now make out the small clasps tracing the edges of the pendant that swung from the chain's centre; the pendant was, in fact, a locket. Sliding his fingernail into the gap between its two faces, Nuutti prised it open.

Folded into the curve of its form was a photo; old, but seemingly unaffected by both time and weather. Nuutti squinted impatiently as his eyes loosened and the contours of the image began to resolve themselves. At the centre of the photo was a dark-haired girl, the photographer seemingly pinioned by the arrow of her gaze. Behind her, in soft focus against the looming form of Kvanefjeld’s hills, a chorus of people caught in a blur of agitated activity. They were shouting, it seemed to Nuutti, some clutching pale placards. Protest banners, he guessed, recalling the more timid demonstrations that had preceded the opening of the mine, before the terror had caught everything in its grip. This image traced to the start of the old troubles, when the battle still had an edge to it that could be resolved, when the stakes made some sort of sense, when the protagonists were still visible to one another.

Nuutti leaned closer, narrowing his gaze again as if to sharpen it against deceit. A sharp intake of breath. He recognised the eyes in that photo, whose burnished ferocity had not dimmed over time. It was the augurist who stared back at him. A ghost, resolved.