Year’s Best SF 18

by David G. Hartwell

  I switched off my microphone and said, “We have to get them back for their connection to the mainland.”

  “Don’t be boring, Krish. I just want a quick look-see.”

  “It’s a science camp. Or some prospecting outfit.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  We were flying down a broad valley with a U-shaped profile, typical of glacial erosion. The glacier that had once occupied it was retreating toward the upper elevations of the peninsula’s mountainous spine. On either side raw cliffs stood up from cones of talus, and rocky slopes ran down to a broad shallow river that flowed swiftly around and over wet black rocks. As we passed over a small lake dammed with boulders and till, I glimpsed three small geodesic domes perched on a low hill beyond, and then the tilt-rotor made a sharp, dipping turn, slowing to hover about fifty meters above the camp.

  Dan said, “See what I see?”

  I leaned forward against my harness and followed the line of his gloved forefinger. I saw green plants growing inside the domes, saw a blue figure moving away from one of them, saw more figures trekking up a path through a boulder field, and felt as if the tilt-rotor had hit an air-pocket.

  “Tell me those aren’t avatars,” Dan said.

  “So it’s a tourist camp.”

  We were shouting at each other over the clatter of the rotors.

  “With gardens in those domes?”

  “A tourist camp with a spa.”

  I was trying to keep things light.

  Dan was staring out of the bubble canopy and making small movements on the yoke and pedals to keep the tilt-rotor in place.

  He said, “Maybe I should land and ask those fuckers.”

  Two people had stepped out of a kind of airlock attached to the side of one of the domes. They were framing their eyes with their hands as they stared up at the tilt-rotor.

  I said, “This isn’t our business.”

  “Can’t a man scratch an itch?”

  “We have to get our clients back to town.”

  “I know.”

  “Their flight leaves in three hours.”

  “I know.”

  The nose of the tilt-rotor dipped for a moment, then began to rise. A clear measure of relief welled up inside me.

  Dan said over the comms, “A top-secret installation run by robots, ladies and gentlemen. Definite proof that we’re living in the future.”

  One of the executives wanted to know what the avatars were doing out here.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Dan said.

  Sunlight flashed on his sunglasses as he glanced sideways at me. I knew that this would not be the end of it.

  * * *

  I HAD HOOKED up with Dan Grainger soon after I started to work for a tour company on the mainland, my first summer in Antarctica. Both of us had run away from the circumstance of our birth, and both of us had served in the armed forces of our respective countries. Dan had been born in some miserable post-industrial town in the English Midlands, was the first in his family to go to university, on an RAF scholarship. He’d wanted to be a fighter-jet pilot, but had ended up flying transport planes in one of the oil wars in Greenland. I’d skipped out of a career in the family data-mining business and had flown a medivac helicopter in and out of hot spots along the border between Kashmir and Pakistan before being wounded and invalided out, and after I had recovered I had cashed in my small army pension to buy a one-way ticket to Antarctica.

  Dan, an old Antarctic hand, had taught me a great deal as we took parties of tourists on routine hikes up the Byrd and Beardmore Glaciers and through the Dry Valleys, and escorted a party of climbers in the Organ Pipe Peaks. He was cheerful and patient with the clients, but he worked only so he could take off on expeditions of his own once the season had ended. He’d spent six winters on the ice. He had no desire to go back to the world.

  Like many English people who’d hauled themselves up from humble backgrounds, he had what they call a chip on his shoulder. A class thing, I believe, compounded by resentment toward those who had been born into better circumstances and a defensive hostility unsheathed whenever he felt uncomfortable. A sarcastic bluster that hid his true feelings, which could be surprisingly tender. On our second trip together, we came across an Adélie penguin heading south, more than a hundred kilometers from the sea. It was happening more and more, Dan explained to our little flock of tourists; the birds were confused by finding cliffs and cobbled beaches where once there had been ice shelves. A couple of the tourists wanted to rescue it, but he told them that it was doing what it wanted to do. We all watched it for a long time as it ploughed onward with that comical gait, diminishing into the vast whiteness.

  At bottom, Dan was an old-fashioned romantic. The kind of Englishman who believed that the deaths of Scott and his party, their calm acceptance of their fate, was the ultimate affirmation of values that Amundsen, with his skis and dogs, his Arctic experience and single-minded ambition, had conspicuously lacked. The plucky stoicism of Scott’s party was more important than the trivial matter of reaching the South Pole first, their deaths a claim stronger than any first footprint or flag. Dan had a deep admiration for those early explorers, who’d set out on punishing routes with primitive equipment and little idea about what they might encounter. One of his party tricks was to quote passages from the journal of William Lashly, a Navy stoker who had proved his worth amongst Scott’s gentleman explorers.

  In the heroic age of Antarctic exploration Dan would have been man-hauling sledges over crevasse-filled glaciers into new territory; in the scientific age he’d have been flying geologists in and out of remote camps, dropping them on to mountain-top ledges next to fossil-bearing strata. His tragedy was that he’d been born too late to be a part of that. Too late to serve in some remote part of the Empire. Too late to see the Antarctic as it had been before the big melt had begun, before people had begun to live there permanently, the oil and mining companies had moved in, and the tourists had started coming in earnest, hundreds of them in person, thousands more riding avatars.

  At the end of that first season, Dan and I flew out to Cape Royds. We planned to hike up Mount Erebus, a three-day ascent, through ice- and rock-fields and the alien ice-sculptures chimneyed up around fumaroles, to the volcano’s steaming crater. But things went wrong before we’d even unpacked our equipment.

  There was a small settlement at Cape Royds: a scattering of prefab cabins, an icecat garage, an airfield, and a hotel catering to the tourists who wanted to explore Mount Erebus and the shoreline of the Ross Sea, or follow the route of Scott and his companions up the Ferrar Glacier.

  Dan told me that he had done that route at the end of his first summer in Antarctica.

  “Not as easy as you’d think,” he said, with the nonchalance he affected when talking about something really dangerous. “The front end of the glacier is bloody rough. Rotten ice, big blocks heaved up, boulders sitting on pedestals of ice waiting to fall on your head, you name it. And when you do get on top, there are crevasses everywhere. I fell in one, did I tell you about that?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “We were roped together, and I nearly pulled the next bloke in. One minute you’re slogging along, the next you’re plunged into this beautiful blue light. It was a trip. Like being directly translated to Heaven.”

  There was an Adélie penguin colony at Cape Royds, much reduced from its original size but still popular with tourists, and the hut where Shackleton’s expedition had overwintered in 1908. Dan wanted me to see it. As soon as we landed at Cape Royds, he borrowed a jeep from a mechanic he knew at the airfield, and we drove straight through the town and up a steep, winding road.

  The interior of Antarctica was still a deep freeze, but its edges were thawing. The Ross ice shelf was reduced to a thin fringe every summer; moss and grass had colonized rocks revealed by the ice’s retreat. The lake next to Shackleton’s hut melted to its bottom in summer and had more than doubled in size, and the hut had been moved to hig
her ground, and covered with a weather-proof tent. When we arrived, a small gaggle of avatars were stalking about. Skinny figures with ball-jointed limbs and stereo cameras mounted above blue plastic torsos emblazoned with the iceberg logo of a rival tour company, operated by virtual tourists out there in the world. I thought they were mostly harmless, but Dan actively loathed them. As far as he was concerned, they epitomized everything that had been lost. Moving graffiti on the blank white page of the continent. Electric cockroaches. Worse even than the cruise-ship parties who came ashore at McMurdo and climbed Observation Hill for the splendid panorama of the Transantarctic Mountains and photographed each other in front of the replica of Scott’s hut and bought souvenirs in the mall. At least their boots were on the ground, and they were breathing chill Antarctic air and feeling it pinch their faces. And the extreme tourists like those we escorted endured hardships that, even if they weren’t as bad or as life-threatening as those experienced by the first explorers, were real enough. But any slob with a credit card could rent an avatar for an hour or a day and explore Antarctica from his living room. It was no better than wanking or watching TV, according to Dan.

  “They’re banned in most places, but not on the Ice,” he’d say. “Know why?”

  No use telling him that avatars were vulnerable to being turned into walking bombs by terrorists, or that they violated various religious laws, or enabled human-rights activists to poke and pry in places where they were not welcome. He had a thesis.

  “They’re allowed here because Big Business wants to normalize Antarctica. To turn it into a tourist destination anyone can visit. To prove that it’s as accessible as everywhere else on Earth. They let people gawp at a few beauty spots, but they don’t give them any idea about what the ice is really like. How it changes you. You’ve been out there, Krish. You’ve experienced the silence of the place. Standing all alone after ten days’ hard hiking to somewhere no one has ever been before, hearing nothing but the wind and your heartbeat, it’s the most profound thing you can do. It shows you what’s really real. The muppets riding those things, they’ll never know that. They think they’re out on a day trip to fucking Disneyland.”

  Well, I did tell you he was a romantic.

  Shackleton’s hut, a primitive construction of packing cases and tin sheeting, the place where the first men to climb Mount Erebus and to reach the South Magnetic Pole had overwintered, was a shrine to that Platonic ideal. Dan wanted me to experience its holiness, and here was a gang of avatars clattering about it. Clumsy puppets operated by stay-at-home slobs who didn’t know or care anything about the reality in which they were intruding. Several of them turned to watch us as we climbed toward the hut; when one of them wandered too close, Dan grabbed it in a bear-hug and lifted it clean off the ground and strode down the stony slope toward the lake. The avatar was beeping a steady alarm call. A woman in an orange-red jacket came around one side of the tent and shouted at Dan, but he ignored her, wading out into the shallows and dropping the avatar into the freezing water. Its beep cut off at once and Dan gave it a kick that propelled it further out.

  The supervisor shouted again, and broke into a run. I ran too, caught in the moment, Dan chasing after me as I jumped into the jeep and started the motor. He vaulted into the seat beside me and I threw the jeep into reverse and swung around in a spray of gravel and accelerated past the supervisor, forcing her to jump out of the way. Dan gave her the reverse Churchillian salute used by the English to signify their extreme displeasure; both of us were whooping and laughing.

  When we got back to the airfield, the settlement’s policewoman was waiting for us. We were locked in a hotel room overnight and put on the next plane to McMurdo, where the supervisor of the tour company made it clear that we wouldn’t work for her again, and the owners of the avatar rental business hit us with a fine that wiped out most of our savings. It didn’t much matter. We made the money back that winter, flying roughnecks and engineers out of Matienzo on the Antarctic Peninsula to the big platforms in the Weddel Sea, flying in the teeth of gales that tore the sea into flying lumps, flying through whiteout snowstorms, and at the beginning of summer we pooled our earnings, leased a long-range tilt-rotor, and started our own tour company.

  This was our third year as independent guides. Matienzo was a working town and there was a big gas terminal south of it and miners and wildcatters were moving inland as the ice retreated above the two hundred meter contourline. But much of the Peninsula was still unspoiled, casual tourists didn’t much bother with it, and the small number of avatars available for hire were mostly rented by executives too busy to make the trip to the bottom of the world. Our clients were serious hikers, mountaineers, and wild skiers, and like Dan wanted to spend as much time away from civilization as possible.

  The sight of those avatars working in the remote camp had woken his old resentments, but he did not talk about it, and neither did I. Frankly, I was hoping that he would forget about that strange little camp, and for a little while it seemed that he had. We spent the rest of the summer guiding clients in the back country. After the last trip of the season, through the Devil’s Playground and over Desolate Pass in the Eternity Range, we went our separate ways. I flew to Auckland for three weeks of R&R. The day after I returned to Matienzo, Dan called me.

  I was in my favorite bar in Sastrugi Mansions. The Mansions had once been one of the biggest buildings in Matienzo, a six-story block that was dwarfed now by hotels, offices, and the Antarctic Authority building, its roomy apartments mostly subdivided into single rooms, or amalgamated into cheap guest houses used by merchants and other entrepreneurs, refugees and illegal immigrants trying to secure permanent visas, back-country miners, sex workers, scam artists, and extreme tourists who thought it was a badge of honor to stay in a tiled cubicle where the toilet was next to the bed and the shower was over the toilet. Half past ten in the evening, and people from two dozen nations crowded the little bars and food stalls in the market on the first floor, ambled past electronics emporia, shops selling fossils and polished granites and gemstones, places that sold foul-weather clothing and camping and climbing gear, Chinese wholesalers, a fab shop, the Thai supermarket, a Nigerian clothing stall that did most of its business with tourists, who probably thought they were buying Hawaiian shirts. Dry hot air that smelt of fry-grease and old sweat. The subliminal flicker of fluorescent lighting that burned 24/7/365. Piped Nepalese pop music. A babel of languages.

  I’d been renting a small apartment in Sastrugi Mansions ever since we’d pitched up in Matienzo, but Dan had refused to visit me there. He said that the Mansions was everything that had gone wrong with Antarctica. No use telling him that its vivid multicultural stew was as real as his beloved mountains and glaciers. He wouldn’t even visit the curry houses on the ground floor, even though he loved a good curry—his definition of “good” being the macho British version, as fiery as possible and sluiced down with liters of sugary lager.

  “I suppose you’re conveniently situated if you fancy a taste of home cuisine,” he’d said, just after I’d moved into my apartment. “But I can’t think of anything else to recommend it.”

  “I prefer Thai food, Dan. Or Mongolian barbeque. Come and visit, I’ll treat you.”

  “It reminds me of the market back home. Sad, horrible little place, that was. There was a butcher’s sold horse meat. You ever eaten horse meat? Horse rogan josh?”

  “I’ve eaten zebra, in Kenya.”

  “Was it striped all the way through, the zebra?” But Dan wasn’t interested in my reply. Saying, “We went to Wales, once, me and the lads. Ran down a sheep up in the mountains and butchered it on the spot. It was Christmas and we couldn’t afford turkey and we were tired of horse meat. It’s sweet, horse meat. My mother used to grind it up and make a pie topped with mashed potato. Jockey pie, we called it.”

  Another time, he said, “Did I ever tell you about the time I ate whale? Whale sushi. This client, very rich, Japanese. I asked him if he was Yakuza, for
a joke, and he didn’t like it. Pulled off his shirt to show me he didn’t have any tattoos. Anyway, we got on pretty well after that, and the last day of the trip he thawed out this meat he’d been carrying and sliced it very thin with his ceramic knife and served it with boil-in-the-bag rice and this eye-watering horseradish dip. Didn’t tell me it was whale until after I’d eaten it. Thought the joke was on me, but I would have eaten it anyway. You can get serious worms from raw whale meat. Acorn worms a foot long. Imagine.”

  When he called, I was nursing a pint of Guinness in a tiny bar run by an old Australian woman. I was keeping an eye on the cricket match playing on the big TV and chatting to a Malaysian trader who dealt in semi-precious stones, making a small profit by flying them out to be cut in Nigeria, and shipping them back to the Ice as tourist souvenirs. I knew a few back-country miners, but it turned out he had never dealt with them. Bought his consignment from one of the Chinese traders and made a small profit as long as he got his stones through customs without having them confiscated or slapped with an unrealistically high import charge.

  He was a nice guy, young and hopeful. It was his third trip to the Ice. Six or seven more, he said, and he could set up business back home in Sandakan. “I love my country,” he said, “but at this moment I have to live in the world because that is where you can make money.” He was explaining about how hard it was to deal with the Chinese when my phone rang, and Dan said, “Come on over. There’s something you need to see.”

  I asked him if it could wait until morning, but he had already rung off.

  At that time, Dan was renting a duplex at a place called the PenguInn, a two-story motel wrapped around a heated swimming pool. I paid the taxi driver and walked past the pool, where a dozen people were splashing and shouting under a layer of fog, and a sound system set on the diving board was playing chiming Balinese temple music and projecting smears of shimmering pastels that probably looked deep and mysterious if you were wired on the correct psychotrophic. As I climbed the stairs to the first floor, a FedEx widebody passed low overhead, so low I could see the treads on its tires, filling the cold night air with the scream of its turbines and the sweet stink of spent aviation fuel.