The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  In the evocative story that follows, we watch people adapt to life in a de-iced Antarctica, evolving new customs—and even new superstitions and legends—along the way.

  Mike Torres saw his first elf stone three weeks after he moved to the Antarctic Peninsula. He was flying helos on supply runs from Square Bay on the Fallieres Coast to kelp farms in the fjords to the north, and in his free time had taken to hiking along the shore or into the bare hills beneath Mount Diamond’s pyramidal peak. Up there, he had terrific views of the rugged islands standing in the cold blue sea under the high summer sun, Mount Wilson and Mount Metcalf rising beyond the south side of the bay, and the entirety of the town stretched along the shore below. Its industrial sprawl and grids of trailer homes, the rake of its docks, the plantations of bladeless wind turbines, and the airfield with helos coming and going like bees, two or three blimps squatting in front of their hangars, and the runway where a cargo plane, an old Airbus Beluga maybe, or a Globemaster V with its six engines and tail tall as a five-storey building, might be preparing to make its lumbering run towards the sky. All of it ugly, intrusive and necessary: the industrial underbelly of a project that was attempting to prevent the collapse of Antarctica’s western ice sheet. It was serious business. It was saving the world. And Mike Torres was part of it.

  He was a second-generation climate change refugee, born into the Marshall Islands diaspora community in Auckland. A big, quiet guy who’d survived a tough childhood—his father drinking himself to death, his mother taking two jobs to raise him and his sisters in their tiny central city apartment. Age sixteen, Mike had been part of a small all-city crew spraying tags everywhere on Auckland’s transport system; after his third conviction for criminal damage (a big throwie at Remuera Railway Station), a sympathetic magistrate had offered him a spell of workfare on a city farm instead of juvenile prison. He discovered that he loved the outdoor life, earned his helicopter pilot’s licence at one of the sheep stations on the high pastures of North Island, where little Robinson R33s were used to muster sheep, and five years later went to work for Big Green, one of the transnational ecological remediation companies, at the Lake Eyre Basin project in Australia.

  Desalinated seawater had been pumped into the desert basin to create an inland sea, greening the land around it and removing a small fraction of the excess water that had swollen the world’s oceans; Big Green had a contract to establish shelter-belt forests to stabilise and protect the edge of the new farmland. Mike loved watching the machines at work: dozers, dumper trucks and 360 excavators that levelled the ground and spread topsoil; mechanical planters that set out rows of tree seedlings at machine-gun speed, and truck spades that transplanted semi-mature fishtail, atherton and curly palms, acacia, eucalyptus and she-oak trees. In one direction, stony scrub and fleets of sand dunes stretched towards dry mountains floating in heat shimmer; in the other, green checkerboards of rice paddies and date and oil palm plantations descended stepwise towards the shore of the sea. The white chip of a ferry ploughing a wake in blue water. A string of cargo blimps crossing the sky. Fleets of clouds strung at the horizon, generated by climate stations on artificial islands. Everything clean and fresh. A new world in the making.

  Mike hauled supplies to the crews who ran the big machines and the gangers who managed the underplanting of shrubs and grasses, brought in engineers and replacement parts, flew key personnel and VIPs to and fro. He sent most of his pay packet home, part of it squirrelled into a savings account, part supporting his mother and his sisters, part tithed to the Marchallese Reclamation Movement, which planned to rebuild the nation by raising artificial islands above the drowned atoll of Majuro. A group of reclaimers had established a settlement there, occupying the top floors of the President’s house and a couple of office buildings they had storm-proofed. Mike religiously watched their podcasts, and liked to trawl through archives that documented life before the flood, rifling through clips of beach parties, weddings, birthdays and fishing trips from old family videos, freezing and enlarging glimpses of the bustle of ordinary life. A farmer’s market, a KFC, a one-dollar store, a shoal of red taxis on Majuro’s main drag, kids playing football on a green field at the edge of the blue sea. Moments repossessed from the gone world.

  He watched short films about exploration of the drowned ruins, feeds from web cams showing bright fish patrolling the reefs of sunken condos and shops. The reclaimers were attempting to construct a breakwater with fast-growing edited corals, and posted plans for the village of floating houses that was the next stage of the project. Mike dreamed of moving there one day, of making a new life in a new land, but places in the reclaimer community were fiercely contested. He’d had to dig into his savings to get his mother the stem cell therapy she needed for a heart problem, and one of his sisters became engaged, soon there would be a wedding to pay for.… So when the contract at Lake Eyre finished, Mike signed up for a new project in the Antarctic Peninsula.

  Lake Eyre had created a place where refugees from the drowning coasts could start afresh. The engineering projects run out of the Antarctic Peninsula were part of an attempt to preserve the continent’s last big ice sheet and prevent another catastrophic rise in ocean levels, the loss of half-drowned cities and land reclaimed from previous floods, and the displacement of more than sixty per cent of the world’s population. Factories and industrial plants on the peninsula supported a variety of massive geoengineering projects, from manufacturing fleets of autonomous high-albedo rafts that would cool ocean currents by reflecting sunlight, to creating a thin layer of dust in the lower stratosphere that would reflect a significant percentage of the sun’s light and heat back into space. One project was attempting to cool ice sheets by growing networks of superconducting threads that would syphon away geothermal heat. Another was attempting to protect glaciers from the heat of the sun by covering them in huge sheets of thermally reflective material.

  Square Bay’s factories used biomass supplied by the kelp farms to manufacture the tough thin material used in the thermal blanket project. As a bonus, the fast-growing edited strains of kelp sequestered carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, contributing to attempts to reverse the rise in levels that had driven the warming in the first place. It was good work, no doubt, the sharp end of a massive effort to ameliorate the effects of two centuries of unchecked industrialisation and fossil carbon burning, but many thought that it was too little, too late. Damage caused by the great warming was visible everywhere on the Antarctic Peninsula. Old shorelines drowned by rising sea levels, bare bones of mountains exposed by melting snow and ice, mines and factories, port cities and settlements spreading along the coast … There were traces of human influence everywhere Mike walked. Hiking trails with their blue markers and pyramidal cairns, scraps of litter, the mummified corpse of an albatross with a cache of plastic scraps in its belly, clumps of tough grasses growing between rocks, fell field meadows of mosses and sedge—even a few battered stands of dwarf alder and willow. Ecopoets licensed by the Antarctic Authority were spreading little polders and gardens everywhere as the ice and snow retreated. They had introduced arctic hares, arctic foxes and herds of reindeer and musk oxen further south. Resurrected dwarf mammoths, derived from elephant stock, grazing tussock tundra in steep valleys snaking between the mountains.

  Change everywhere.

  One day, Mike followed a long rimrock trail to a triangulation point at a place called Pulpit Peak, fifteen kilometres south of the town. The pulpit of Pulpit Peak was a tall rock that stood at the edge of a cliff like the last tooth in a jaw, high above the blue eye of a meltwater lake. There was the usual trample of footprints in the apron of sandy gravel around it, the usual cairn of stones at the trail head, and something Mike hadn’t seen before, a line of angular characters incised into one face of the rock, strange letters or mathematical symbols with long tails or loops or little crowns that reminded him of something he couldn’t quite recall. And the triangulation point, a brass plate set in the polished face of a gr
anite plinth, stated that it was thirty metres due north of its stated location “out of respect to local religious custom.”

  “I checked it with my phone’s GPS,” Mike told his friend Oscar Manu that evening. They were at the Faraday Bar ’n’ Barbeque after a six-a-side soccer match, sitting on the terrace with their teammates under an awning that cracked like a whip in the chill breeze. “Sure enough, it was exactly thirty metres north of where it was supposed to be. And that writing? It’s elvish. A guy I knew back home, old roustabout there, had a tattoo in the same kind of script. Back in the day, he was an extra in those old fantasy movies, had it done as a memento.”

  Mike’s phone had translated the inscription. The Place of the Meeting of Ice and Water. A reference, maybe, to the vanished glaciers that had flowed into Square Bay.

  “One of the sacred elf stones is what it is,” Oscar said.

  Oscar was from Tahiti, which had had its own share of troubles during the warming, but was in better shape than most Pacific Islands nations. One of its biotech firms had engineered the fast-growing, temperature-tolerant strain of staghorn coral the reclaimers were using to rebuild the reefs of Majuro. He was drinking Pangaea beer; Mike, who knew all too well that he was his father’s son, was on his usual Lemon & Paeroa, saying, “You’re telling me there are people here who believe in elves?”

  “Let’s put it this way: the road between Esperanza and O’Higgins has a kink where it swings around one of those stones,” Oscar said.

  “You’re kidding,” Mike said, because Oscar was famous for his patented wind-ups.

  “Go see for yourself the next time you’re up north,” Oscar said. “It’s just past the twenty kilometre marker.”

  Adi Mara chipped in, saying that a couple of Icelanders she knew took that kind of shit very seriously. “They have elves back home. The Huldufólk—the hidden people.”

  “Elf elves?” Oscar said. “Pointy ears, bad dress sense, the whole bit?”

  “They look like ordinary people who just happen to be invisible most of the time,” Adi said. “They live under rocks, and if you piss them off they can give you bad frostbite or sunburn, or cause accidents. Icelanders reckon some big rocks are actually disguised elvish churches or chapels. Building work and road construction can be held up if someone discovers that a place sacred to elves is right in the way.”

  “They don’t sound that scary,” Oscar said.

  “Scary isn’t the point,” Adi said. She was their goalie, smaller than Mike, Oscar and the other guys, but fearless in the goal mouth. She punted every save way down the field, regardless of the positions of her teammates, and would tear you a new one if you didn’t make good use of her passes. “The point is, Iceland is pretty bleak and tough, so it’s only natural that Icelanders believe in forces stronger than they are, try to humanise the landscape with stories about folk who own it. And it’s the same here.”

  Mike said that maybe it was the other way around. “Maybe the stones are reminders that Antarctica isn’t really a place where ordinary people should be living.”

  “Back in the day that might have been true,” Oscar said. “But look around you, Torres. We have Starbucks and McDonald’s. We have people who are bringing up kids here. And we have beer,” he said, draining his glass and reaching for the communal jug. “Any place with beer, how can you call it inhospitable?”

  The talk turned to rumours of feral ecopoets who were supposed to be living off the land and waging a campaign of sabotage against construction work. Roads and radio masts and other infrastructure damaged, trucks and boats hijacked, sightings of people where no people should be. Freddie Aata said he knew someone who’d seen a string of mammoths skylighted on a ridge with a man riding the lead animal, said that the Authority police had found several huts made of reindeer bones and antlers on the shore of Sjörgen Inlet, on the east coast.

  “Maybe they’re your elves,” Freddie told Mike. “Bunch of saboteurs who want to smack us back into the Stone Age, chiselling rocks with runes to mark their territory.”

  Mike still hadn’t seen much of the peninsula. After arriving at O’Higgins International Airport he’d been flown directly to Square Bay in the hold of a cargo plane, catching only a few glimpses of snowy mountains rising straight up from the sea. There were vast undiscovered territories beyond the little town and the short strip of coast where he tooled up and down on service runs. Places as yet untouched by human mess and clutter. He found a web site with a map and a list of GPS coordinates of elf stones, realised that it gave him a shape and purpose to exploration, and started hitching helo and boat rides out into the back country to find them. There really was a stone, The Church of the Flat Land, on the road between Esperanza and O’Higgins, the two big settlements at the northern end of the peninsula. There was a stone at the site of an abandoned Chilean research station on Adelaide Island. The Embassy of the Sea Swimmers. There were stones standing stark on hilltops or scree slopes. A boulder in a swift meltwater river. A boulder balanced on another boulder on a remote stony shore on the Black Coast. The Land Dances. A stone on a flat-topped nunatak in an ice field in the Werner Mountains, the most southerly location known. The Gate to the Empty Country.

  They were all found pieces, incised with their names but otherwise unaltered. Markers that emphasised the emptiness of the land in which they stood, touching something inside Mike that he couldn’t explain, even to himself. It was a little like the feeling he had when he paged through old images of the Marshall Islands. A plangent longing, deeper than nostalgia, for a past he’d never known. As if amongst the stones he might one day find a way back to a time not yet despoiled by the long catalogue of Anthropocene calamities, a Golden Age that existed only in the rearview mirror.

  He had quickly discovered that visiting elf stones was a thing some people did, like birders ticking off species or climbers nailing every hard XS route. They posted photos, poems, diaries of the treks they had made, and fiercely squabbled about the origin of the stones and their meaning. No one seemed to know how old the stones were or who had made them, if it was a single person or a crew, if they were still being made. Most stoners agreed that the oldest was a tilted sandstone slab just a short steep hike from a weather station on the Wilkins Coast. The House of Air and Ice. It was spattered with lichens whose growth, according to some, dated it to around a century years ago, long before the peninsula had been opened to permanent settlement. But others disputed the dating, pointing out that climate change meant that lichen growth could no longer be considered a reliable clock, and that in any case establishment of lichen colonies could be accelerated by something as simple as a yoghurt wash.

  There were any number of arguments about the authenticity of other stones, too. Some were definitely imitations, with crudely carved runes that translated into mostly unfunny jokes. Gandalf’s Hat. Keep Out: Alien Zone. Trespassers Will Be Shot. There was a stone with a small wooden doorway fitted into a crack in its base. There was a stone painted with the tree-framed doorway to the Mines of Moria. There was a miniature replica of Stonehenge. There were miniature replicas of elf stones hidden on roofs of buildings in O’Higgins and Esperanza.

  And even stones that most stoners considered to be the real deal were disputed by the hardcore black-helicopter conspiracy freaks who squabbled over the precise dimensions of runes, or looked for patterns in the distribution of the stones, or believed that they were actually way points for a planned invasion by one of the governments that still claimed sovereignty over parts of Antarctica, or some kind of secret project to blanket the peninsula with mind-controlling low-frequency microwaves, so forth.

  Oscar Manu found a web site run by some guy in O’Higgins who looked a bit like a pantomime elf, with a Santa Claus beard and a green sweater, sitting at a desk littered with books and papers, a poster-sized photo of The Gate to the Empty Country on the wall behind him. Apparently he gave a course in elven mythology that included a visit to the stone set on the shoulder of a pebble bar north
of the town’s harbour, and awarded certificates to his pupils.

  “Maybe he knows who made the things,” Oscar said. “Maybe, even, he made them. You should go talk to him, Torres. You know you could ace that test and get yourself certified.”

  But as far as Mike was concerned, it wasn’t really about elves, the whole fake history of aboriginal inhabitants. It was the idea that the essence of the land had survived human occupation and climate change, ready to re-emerge when the warming was reversed. The stones were an assertion of primacy, like the pylons set by the reclaimers around the perimeter of Majuro, marking the atoll’s shape in the rolling waves that had drowned it. One of those pylons had Mike’s name engraved on it, near the top of a list of sponsors and donors.

  Despite their isolation and the stark splendour of the stones’ settings, people couldn’t help despoiling them. “Robbo” had carved his tag at the base of The Church of the Flat Land. When Mike visited Deception Island, a three-day trip that included a stopover in O’Higgins (he ticked off the stone north of the harbour, but didn’t visit the elf university), there was a cruise ship at anchor in the natural harbour of the island’s flooded caldera, and he had to wait until a tourist group had finished taking selfies and groupies in front of a gnarled chimney of lava carved with a vertical line of runes, Here We Made With Fire, before he could have a few minutes alone with it. Someone had planted a little garden of snow buttercup and roseroot around The Embassy of the Sea Swimmers. There’d been some kind of party or gathering at The Land Dances, leaving a litter of nitrous oxide capsules and actual tobacco cigarette butts, illegal on three continents. And people had tucked folded slips of paper, prayers or petitions, amongst the small pyramid of stones, each marked with a single rune, of Our High Haven, on an icy setback high in the Gutenko Mountains.