Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The larger fleet jockeyed until their navigators linked up and devised a kind of spiral galaxy formation, centered on the pole and rotating clockwise if seen from above. Everyone thus sailed west together, following the two simple rules that birds use when flocking in a gyre: change speeds as little as possible, keep as far apart from everyone else as possible.

  Senator Phil Chase smiled happily when the flocking rubric was explained to him. “That’s the Senate for you,” he said. “Or maybe it’s all you need to get by in life.”

  By a happy coincidence, the North Pole itself, as determined by GPS, was marked for the day by a tall aquamarine iceberg that had drifted over it. In the immediate vicinity of this newly-identified “Pole Berg” idled many of the largest ships in the fleet, ranging from small cruise ships to huge private yachts, with a few old icebreakers on hand as well, looking overweight and unwanted.

  This was the fifth midsummer festival at the Pole. Every year since lanes of water had opened in the summer Arctic ice, a larger and larger group of sea craft had sailed or motored north to party at the pole. The gatherings had a Burning Man festival aspect to them, the sybaritic excess and liberal shooting off of fireworks leading many to call it Drowning Man, or Freezing-Your-Butt-Man.

  This year, however, the party had been somewhat taken over by the Inuit nation Nunavut, in conjunction with the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, who had declared this “The Year of Global Environmental Awareness,” and sent out hundreds of invitations, and provided many ships themselves, in the hope of gathering a floating community that would emphasize to all the world the undeniable changes already wrought by global warming. The organizers were willing to accept the risk of making the gathering look like a party, or even God forbid a celebration of global warming, in order to garner as much publicity as possible. Of course a whole new ocean to sail on was no doubt an exciting thing for sailors, but all that missing winter ice was floating down into the North Atlantic at that very moment, changing everything. IPCC wanted people to see with their own eyes that abrupt climate change was already upon them, and that it could soon cast the entire world into thousands of years of bad weather, as it had during the Younger Dryas just eleven thousand years before.

  But of course there were many people there who did not regard the polar party in its official light, just as there were many in the world who did not worry overmuch about entering the Youngest Dryas. On the sail up to the festival, some of them had encountered an oil tanker, only slightly smaller than the ULCCs (Ultra Large Crude Carriers) of the late twentieth century, double-hulled, as was legally required, and making a dry run on a great circle route from Japan to Norway that passed near the pole. This voyage was demonstrating that the Northwest Passage was open for business at last; and better late than never. Oil could be shipped directly from the North Sea to Japan, cutting the distance by two-thirds. Even if oil was passé, post-peak, old paradigm and all the rest, Japan and the North Sea oil countries were nevertheless awfully pleased to be able to move it over the Pole. They were not ashamed to admit that the world still needed oil, and that while it did, there would be reasons to appreciate certain manifestations of global warming. Shipyards in Glasgow, Norway, and Japan had been revitalized, and were now busy building a new class of Arctic Sea tankers to follow this prototype, boldly going where no tanker had gone before.

  And here at the Pole itself, on Midsummer Day, things looked fine. The world was beautiful, the fleet spectacular. In danger or not, human culture seemed to have risen to the occasion. It was noon, summer solstice at the North Pole, with a glorious armada forming a kind of sculpture garden. A new kind of harmonic convergence, Ommmmmmmm.

  On one of the bigger craft, an aluminum-hulled jet-powered catamaran out of Bar Harbor, Maine, a large group of people congregated around Senator Phil Chase. Many of them were bundled in the thick red down jackets provided to guests by the National Science Foundation’s Department of Polar Programs, because despite the black water and brilliant sun, the air temperature at the moment was 28 degrees Fahrenheit. People kept their hoods pulled forward, and their massed body warmth comforted them as they watched the group around Chase help him into a small rainbow-colored hot-air balloon, now full over the top deck and straining at its tether.

  The World’s Senator got in the basket, gave the signal; the balloon master fired the burners, and the balloon ascended into the clear air to the sound of cheers and sirens, Phil Chase waving to the fleet below, looking somewhat like the Wizard of Oz at the moment when that worthy floats away prematurely.

  But Phil was on a line, and the line held. From a hundred feet above the crowd, Phil could be seen grinning his beautiful grin. “Here we are!” he announced over the fleet’s combined radio and loudspeaker array; and of course millions more saw and heard him by satellite TV. A big buoy clanged the world to order as Phil raised a hand to still the ships’ horns and fireworks.

  “Folks,” he said, “I’ve been working for the people of California for seventeen years, representing them in the United States Senate, and now I want to take what I’ve learned in those efforts, and in my travels around the world, and apply all that to the work of serving the people of the United States, and all the world, as its president.”

  “President of the world?” Roy Anastophoulus said to Charlie, and began to laugh.

  “Shh! Shh!” Charlie said to Roy. They were watching it on TVs in different parts of the city, but talking on their phones as they watched.

  “It’s a crazy thing to want to do,” Phil was conceding. “I’m the first to admit that, because I’ve seen what the job does to people. But in for a penny in for a pound, as they say, and we’ve reached a moment where somebody who can handle it needs to use the position to effect some good.”

  Roy was still giggling. “Be quiet!” Charlie said.

  “—there is no alternative to global cooperation. We have to admit and celebrate our interdependence, and work in solidarity with every living thing. All God’s creatures are living on this planet in one big complex organism, and we’ve got to act like that now. That’s why I’ve chosen to announce my candidacy here at the North Pole. Everything meets up here, and everything has changed because of changes that started here. This beautiful ocean, free of ice for the first time in human existence, is a sign of a clear and present danger. Recall what it looked like here even five years ago. You can’t help but admit that huge changes have already come.

  “Now what do those changes mean? Nobody knows. Where will they lead? Nobody knows. This is what everyone has to remember; no one can tell what the future will bring. Anything can happen. Anything at all. We stand at the start of a steep ski run. Black diamond for sure. I see the black diamonds twinkling everywhere down there. Down the slope of the next decade we will ski. The moguls will be on us so fast we won’t believe it. There’ll be no time for lengthy studies initiated by political administrations that never actually do anything, that hope for business as usual for one more term, after which they will take off for their fortress mansions and leave the rest of us to pick up the pieces. That won’t work, not even for them. You can get offshore, but you can’t get off planet.”

  Cheers and horns and sirens echoed over the water. Phil waited for them to quiet back down, smiling happily and waving. Then he continued:

  “It’s all one world now. The United States still has its historical role to fulfill, as the country of countries, the mixture and amalgam of all humanity, trying things out and seeing how they work. The United States is child of the world, you might say, and the world watches with the usual parental fascination and horror, anxiety and pride.

  “So we have to grow up. If we were to turn into just another imperial bully and idiot, the story of history would be ruined, its best hope dashed. We have to give up the bad, give back the good. Franklin Delano Roosevelt described what was needed from America very aptly, in a time just as dangerous as ours: he called for a course of ‘bold and persistent experimentation.’ Th
at’s what I plan to do also. No more empire, no more head in the sand pretending things are okay while a few rich guys wreck everything. It’s time to join the effort to invent a global civilization that we can hand off to all the children and say, ‘This will work, keep it going, make it better.’ That’s permaculture, as some people call it, and really now we have no choice; it’s either permaculture or catastrophe. Let’s choose the good fight, and work so that each generation can hand to the next one the livelihood we are given by this beautiful world.

  “That’s the plan, folks. I intend to convince the Democratic Party to continue its historic work of helping to improve the lot of every man, woman, child, animal and plant on this planet. That’s the vision that has been behind all the party’s successes so far, and moving away from those core values has been part of the problem and the failure of our time. Together we’ll join humanity in making a world that is beautiful and just.”

  “We’ll join humanity?” Roy said. “What’s this, Democrats as aliens?” But Charlie could barely hear him over the ship horns and cheers. On the screen he could see they were beginning to reel Phil in like a big kite.

  LIVING OUTDOORS THE SEASONS WERE HUGE, simply huge. Talk about abrupt climate change—housebound people had no idea. Shorter days, cooler air, dimmer light slanting through the trees at a lower angle: you might as well be moving to another planet.

  It was one of the ironies of their time that global warming was about to freeze Europe and North America, particularly on the eastern seaboard down to around Washington, D.C. Kenzo predicted a few weeks at least of severe, record-shattering lows: “You’re not going to believe it,” he kept saying, although it was already beginning in Europe, where a cool drought had prevailed all summer. “The winter high will park over Greenland and force the jet stream straight south to us from Hudson Bay. Sometimes from the Yukon, but mostly from Hudson Bay.”

  “I believe it,” Frank replied. Although, in another irony, the weather at that very moment was rather glorious. The days were still hot, while the cold between two A.M. and sunrise was sharp and bracing. Here they were, only a few weeks past the depths of their Congolese summer, and already there was frost on the leaves at dawn.

  For Frank these chill nights meant the deployment of his mountain gear, always a pleasure to him. He basked in that special warmth that hominids have enjoyed ever since they started wearing the furs of other animals. Clothes made the man—and therefore one of the earliest instances of the technological sublime, which was to stay warm in the cold.

  Waking up in his treehouse, Frank would wrap his sleeping bag around him like a cape and sit on the plywood edge, arms over the railing, swinging his heels in space, looking at the wall of trees across the gorge. The leaves were beginning to turn, the autumn spectrum invading the green canopy with splashes of yellow and orange and red and bronze. As a Californian Frank had seldom seen it, and had never imagined it properly. He had not understood that the colors would be all mixed together, forming a field of mixed color, like a box of Trix spilled over a lawn—spelling in its gorgeous alien alphabet the end of summer, the passing of time, the omnipresence of mortality. To all who took heed it was an awesome and melancholy sight.

  He let down Miss Piggy, descended into this new world. He walked absorbed in the new colors, the mushroomy smells of decay, the clattering susurrus of leaves in the wind. The next hard frost would knock most of these leaves down, and then his jungle treehouse would be exposed to the gaze of those below. Lances of sunlight already reached parts of the forest floor they hadn’t before. The park was still officially closed, but Frank saw more and more people out there, not just the homeless but also the ordinary citizens of the city, the people who had used the park before the flood as a place to run or walk or bike or ride. Luckily the creekside roads and trails were irreparable, and few would venture up the gorge past the giant beaver dam, which had started like a beaver dam and now really was one. You had to bushwhack to get around the pond’s unstable shore. Still, the treehouse’s exposure to view would exist.

  But that was a problem for another day. Now Frank walked north on the deer’s trail by the creek, observing how the variegated colors of the leaves altered the sense of space in the forest, how there seemed to be an increase in sheer spaciousness, as his depth of field now took in a vast number of individual leaves in complete clarity, be they ever so small.

  And so when he ran with the frisbee guys, these leaves all functioned as referent points, and he seemed to be engaging a new GPS system that locked him more than ever into the here-and-now. He saw just where he was, moment to moment, and ran without awareness of the ground, free to look about. Joy to be out on days so fresh and sunny, so dappled and yellow. Immersion in the very image and symbol of change; very soon there would come an end to his tenuously established summer routines, he would have to find new ones. He could do that; he was even in a way looking forward to it. But what about the gibbons? They were subtropical creatures, as were many of the other ferals. In the zoo they would have been kept inside heated enclosures when temperatures dropped.

  Native species, and the ferals from temperate or polar regions, would probably be all right in that regard. Very often playing frisbee they spotted white-tailed deer; these would generally survive the winter without much trouble. But there were many different feral species out there. Once when they were up in the thickets of the northwest corner of the park, coming back from the ninth hole, Spencer stopped in his tracks and everyone else froze instantly; this was one of the subgames they had invented, and very useful if they wanted not to spook animals they sighted.

  “What in the fuck is that,” Spencer whispered urgently to Frank.

  Frank stared. It was a big ox, or a small bull, or. . . .

  It was huge. Massive, heraldic, thick-haunched, like something out of a vision; one of those sights so unbelievable that if you were dreaming it you would have woken up on the spot.

  Frank got out his FOG phone, moving very slowly, and pushed the button for Nancy. How many times had he done this in the past weeks, moving the phone as slowly as he could, whispering, “Nancy—hi, it’s Frank— can you tell me what I’m looking at?”

  Pause, while Nancy looked at his phone’s GPS position and checked it on her big board.

  “Ah ha. You’re looking at an aurochs.”

  “A what?”

  “We’re pretty sure it’s an aurochs. North Europe, Ice Age—”

  Suddenly it looked familiar to Frank.

  “—some Polish researchers took frozen DNA from one and cloned it a few years ago. Birthed from a sheep or something. They had an enclosure in their southern forest with a herd running around it. We don’t know how these we’re seeing got here, actually. They’re mostly up in Maryland. Some kind of private act of dispersion, I think, like that guy who decided to transplant all the bird species mentioned in Shakespeare to North America, and gave us the starling infestation among other problems. . . .”

  Frank took the phone from his ear, as Spencer’s face was contorting grotesquely to convey to him the question WHAT WHAT WHAT.

  “Aurochs,” Frank whispered loudly.

  Spencer’s face shifted again, into the mask for The Great AH-HA of Comprehension, then Delight, his blue eyes blazing like Paul Newman’s. He looked at the beast, foursquare on the ridge, and in slow motion crumpled to his knees, hands clasping his frisbee before him in prayer. Robin and Robert held their frisbees before them as well, grinning as they always did. Robin stretched his hands palm out over his head to indicate homage, or express the bigness of the animal.

  Its proportions were strange, Frank saw, the rear legs and haunches big and rounded. A creature from the cave paintings, sprung live into their world.

  Spencer stood back up. He held his frisbee out to the other guys, waggled his eyebrows, mimed a throw at the aurochs: make it a target? Eyes ablaze, on the edge of a shout: never before had Frank seen the shaman in Spencer so clearly. Of course they had already disc
ussed throwing at animals many times before. It would be the greatest thing in the world to make targets of the ubiquitous white-tailed deer, for instance. The stalk, the throw, the strike—exhilarating. Like catch and release fishing, only better. No one disputed this. The animals would not be hurt. It would be hunting without killing.

  But really, as Spencer himself had argued when they discussed it, they were hunting without killing already. And sometimes, if they threw at them, animals would get hurt. If they wanted the animals to prosper in the park, which after all was not so big—if they wanted animals to inhabit the world with them, which also was not so big—then they oughtn’t harass them by whacking them out of the blue with hard plastic disks. Best dharma practice was compassion for all sentient beings, thus using them for targets contra-indicated. So they had refused the temptation.

  Now, Spencer’s point seemed to be that this was a magical occasion, outside all everyday agreements. There stood an icon from the Ice Age—a living fossil, in effect, sprung to life from out of the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira—so that they really had to abandon their ordinary protocols to do justice to the beast, to enter the sacred space of the paleolithic mind. Make this magnificent creature their target as a sort of religious ritual, even a religious obligation one might say.

  All this Spencer conveyed by mime, alternating the hands-in-prayer position with the throwing motion, making faces as contorted and clear as any demon mask. Holy activity; tribute to Homo erectus; form of nature worship.

  “All at once,” Frank whispered. The others nodded.

  Frank aimed and threw with the rest of them, and four disks flashed through the forest. One hit a tree and startled the aurochs a step forward, then another struck him on the flank, causing him to bolt up the ridge and away, out of sight before they were even done screaming. They high-fived each other and ran to collect their frisbees and play on.