Reading the news became a kind of self-flagellation. Things looked so dire. The world’s population was over ten billion and the Dow Jones average was over ten thousand. Global average temperatures were ten degrees higher than a century before, and extreme weather events were a weekly occurrence, causing untold destruction and suffering. About four billion people had no access to electricity, while at the same time whole bioregions were already collapsing; and still the ruthless extraction of the world’s natural resources continued apace. One of his eco friends with experience in the markets laughed blackly one night as he railed at this destruction, and explained to him what was happening. Say a company owned a forest that it had harvested selectively for generations, delivering its shareholders a consistent ten percent return. Meanwhile the world financial markets were offering bonds with a fifteen percent return. Lumber prices dropped, and the company’s returns dropped, so the traders dropped it and its shares plummeted, so the shareholders were angry. The management, on the edge of collapse, decided to clear-cut the forest and invest the profits from that lumber sale immediately into bonds that yielded a higher return than the forest had. In effect the money that the forest represented was more valuable than the forest itself, because long-term value had collapsed to net present value; and so the forest was liquidated, and more money entered the great money balloon. And so the inexorable logic of Götterdämmerung capitalism demolished the world to increase the net present values of companies in trouble. And all of them were in trouble.
His friend stared at him, laughed at the no doubt sick look on his face, lifted his hands; that’s the way things were. That was the explanation for the Götterdämmerung; not suicidal murderers in high places, but simply the logic of the system.
He had walked home through the smog and traffic noise, unaware of any of it. Seeing the world in his mind’s eye, all falling apart.
Then one day he was reading the news again, helplessly, using print newspapers picked up in coffee houses so that his reading could not be monitored by any hypothetical surveillance, and he came across a long article on the current situation in Antarctica. The Senate’s hold-up of the renewal of the Antarctic Treaty was causing a circling for advantage among the Treaty nations; and some Southern Hemisphere nations, never party to the Antarctic Treaty, had seen this happening and recently formed a consortium called the Southern Club Antarctic Group, to begin oil explorations all over Antarctica. They were going to do it there too. The last pure wilderness on Earth.
When he walked out of the coffee house he went to the university library to use a public monitor, with the knot back in his stomach, and the Berkeley noise and smog like some final conflagration. The last pure wilderness in the world, fouled and wrecked, and for nothing more than the hope of perhaps five more years of the world’s oil consumption; and, more importantly, many billions of dollars.
He read up on the situation. The USGS estimated that Antarctica held perhaps fifty billion barrels of oil; only a couple more decades’ worth, at current consumption rates. But at twenty dollars a barrel, that was a trillion dollars. Which was only a year of the U.S. government’s budget, and only a year of the world’s military budgets; but more than enough to pay off all the debts that had the southern nations lashed to the harshest austerity programs the World Bank and IMF could devise. He could see how the logic of the system might drive them to it.
He walked over to the house of one of his ecoteur friends, the one who had introduced him to the movement, and who coordinated a cell about the same size as his. Look, he said to his friend. Something’s got to be done. There are no locals down there to defend the place. We need to do something a bit out of the ordinary this time. Something that might stop them for good.
3
In the Antarctic Grain
Within hours of his arrival at the South Pole, X was on a Herc back to McMurdo. His welcome at the Pole was wary at best; no doubt he was regarded as some kind of Jonah; and as there was a plane on the skiway waiting to take off, he was whisked onto it without seeing a thing of the celebrated new station. Ninety degrees south, bye-bye.
Back in McMurdo he was taken directly from the Herc to the Chalet, where he was questioned intensively by his ASL bosses and many NSF people, as well as investigators brought down especially from the north; a big meeting, to which X was able to contribute very little, and indeed after telling his story he was soon ignored by the others while they discussed a number of other odd incidents of which he had been heretofore unaware. The nature of some of these incidents made it clear that his trip as conductor of the SPOT train had not been anywhere near as straightforward as he had been led to believe, a fact which no one at the meeting noticed, of course. He was just part of the train’s software, in an oversized package. A kind of organic robot.
In fact, he thought as he watched the others talk things over, his entire job as General Field Assistant was in effect to be doing the robot work that robots could not yet do. He had come to Antarctica to seek adventure and here he was stuck in Mac Town, shoveling snow, cleaning bathrooms, washing galley ovens, humping loads, yes, even peeling potatoes. Every day a different mindless labor. Good For Anything indeed.
As if to illustrate this thought, he was excused from the meeting to answer a call from Ron to report to the heavy shop. There he found that a forklift operator had accidentally forked through a wall and struck the frame of some shelving in the next room, knocking it onto the floor along with all its bins and cups and drawers full of nuts, bolts, screws, nails, clips, cotter pins, washers, and other assorted small hardware, now all strewn on the floor in a big heap.
Ron came in and smiled cruelly. “Clean this up, X.”
As head of Mac Town maintenance Ron was often X’s boss; also president of the local chapter of the Why Be Normal Club, which in McMurdo was saying a lot. He was one of several old iceheads who had been around so long they thought they were secret masters of McMurdo, and Ron was more correct in this opinion than most. But his charm for X, such as it was, had long since worn off.
“Yes, boss,” X said to the now-empty doorway. Clearly it was robot work of the worst sort, except that robots were still too stupid to distinguish between a nut and a bolt. So X sat down heavily on the chilled concrete floor and started sorting, trying to treat it like some kind of Zen exercise, but fuming more and more as the hours passed: it was not human work. And it did not help that at every meal break he shambled into the galley black-fingered and smelling of motor grease and concrete floors, to contemplate over his meal the beakers at their round tables chatting away, completely oblivious to him. Of course there was no such thing as class in America, which was why the beakers here could be outfitted in red parkas with their names on their lapels, while the ASL folks generally wore tan Carhartt overalls with labels on the lapels that said Small, Medium, Large or Extra Large—pick your size!—and yet no one noticed this distinction or commented on it. The beakers wandered over to the galley from the Crary Lab, on their own schedules, clearly having the time of their lives; they were on fast career tracks by being down here doing whatever they were doing, mostly wandering the landscape and knocking off bits of it, as far as X could see, and then dating the bits. And this was their work; people paid them money for this; they had nice upper-middle-class homes and families and lives and careers, all from doing this kind of thing. This was how they earned their paychecks! While fraternizing with them in the same galley were people working for hourly wages, on seasonal contracts—lifting loads, freezing their butts, losing fingernails crushed under metal objects, running machinery, crawling in utilidors, gaining no career credits to speak of—all to keep the infrastructure and services going which allowed the beakers to gallivant about fishing or watching penguins, or deciding whether their bits of rock were old or real old.
So X fumed as he returned from the galley to his concrete floor and resumed sorting ironmongery. No, it was a class system, no doubt about it. Watching the scene in Mac Town, X’s reading was f
inally beginning to coalesce for him; it was all beginning to fall into place. Back in the world the overwhelming flood of information clouded the certainty of any analysis, there was just so much of everything that any description of it might be true. But here they were living in a stripped-down microcosm, “Little America” as one precursor base had been named; and X saw that it was the global class system in miniature, everything clearly laid out, and shockingly similar to accounts he had read of Tsarist Russia, not to mention pharaonic Egypt: a ruling caste and an underclass, aristocrats and serfs, with a few middlemen thrown in. The red parkas and tan Carhartts only color-coded it, as if ASL and NSF knew all about it and knew also that they could shove it in people’s faces and no one would protest, not in this the globally downsized postrevolutionary massively fortified stage of very late capitalism. The in-your-face effrontery of it made X even angrier, and as he continued to pluck up nuts and washers from the concrete and drop them in their proper bins, he fantasized images of slave revolts, Spartacus, general strikes—in short, revolution. Guillotines on Beeker Street!
Except with a little more thought—and sitting on that cold concrete, he had a lot of time for thought—the image of the guillotine made it clear how impossible these fantasies were. Not in the practical logistical sense, as the heavy shop could probably bang together a guillotine in a day—but in the problem of all the fraternizing, the small numbers, the close quarters, the common galley. The common workout on the ice. All that meant that he and the rest of the Carhartts met a lot of beakers at least briefly, and 90% of them were very nice people—or say 80%—or at least 75%—but wait, there he was going into beaker mode himself, got to watch out for that, it was catching—anyway, they were just people. Lucky to have good jobs, and often kind of eccentric, but nice—the young women very nice, in fact, and seldom at all standoffish, nicer often than the ASL women in fact, counting on the red parka to protect them perhaps—but nice smiles, very friendly, and often very smart. But also quite often deeply spaced, in classic beaker absent-minded-professor mode; all the ASL folks cherished their various stories of beaker spaciness, the latest going the rounds being the one about a beaker who had decided to end thumb fatigue on snowmobiles by tying the throttle lever tight to the handlebar and then starting the engine with a pull start while standing beside it, so that the snowmobile had taken off solo across the sea ice never to be seen again, no doubt ending up down on the bottom of the bay next to the motor tractor the Scott party had mishandled over the side of their ship, an early example of beaker incompetence—
Ron appeared in the door, breaking this train of thought with a rude snort. “Still picking this shit up, X? You’ve been at it for three days now!”
“Yes.” Through clenched teeth.
“Well now you’re needed elsewhere. Get down to the helo pad real quick, you needed to be there ten minutes ago, and finish this off soon as you get back. Du musst schon gegangen sein!”
“Jawohl, Herr Commandant.”
And suddenly he was down at the helo pad, earplugs in, then wedged in the back of a helo with a bunch of equipment, no view, no headset, feeling the thing chuntering over the Sea ice to somewhere in the Dry Valleys, he didn’t even know where. He was dropped with some equipment in brilliant low sunshine and frigid cold, in a brown shadow-crossed windy valley like a freeze-dried Nevada.
After the helo had dragonflied away and the vast windy silence had descended on him, a group of beakers hiked over to the pile of dropped gear and shook gloved hands with him, and introduced themselves: an older man, Geoffrey Michelson, no doubt the principal investigator; and three somewhat younger men, one the group’s mountaineer. X’s boss for the day was a Kiwi named Graham Forbes. A grad student had gotten sick and been medevacked out, and so on this day Forbes needed some help writing down figures he would be reading off the landscape. It would make the work go a lot faster. He looked to the side as he told X about this, almost as if embarrassed, although otherwise he showed no sign of any emotion at all; on the contrary he exhibited what X had come to think of as the pure beaker style, consisting of a Spocklike objectivity and deadened affect so severe that it was an open question whether he would have been able to pass a Turing test.
So: writing down numbers. “Fine,” X said. It had to beat picking nails off the floor.
And at first it did. Forbes wandered away from the other beakers, and X followed, and they got right to work. But it was a windy day, the katabatic wind falling off the polar ice cap and whistling down the dry valleys, making all outdoor work miserable indeed, especially if you were just sitting on the ground writing figures in a notebook. Forbes was doing fabric samples, he explained as he wandered around looking at the ground through a box. That meant measuring the compass orientation of fifty random elongated pebbles in a particular area. So he was looking at pebbles through the compass box and calling out “351 … 157 … 18 … 42,” and so on endlessly, and X was writing the numbers down in columns of ten. Fine.
Over and over they did this. As they worked and the day passed it got windier, and the chill factor went plummeting far below zero—down, down, down—into the minus 40s, X reckoned, even perhaps the 50s. Between samples he tried first all the gloves in his daypack, then all the mittens, then all the mittens over the gloves, his cold hands so numbed inside the thick masses of cloth that he could scarcely grip a pencil, much less write legibly—nose and eyes running—his face getting so numb that he could barely answer the group’s mountaineer’s questions when the mountaineer came by, barely even remember to conform to the mountaineer’s protocol, which consisted of answering him by putting both hands on one’s head and exclaiming “I AM FINE SIR!” The mountaineer had instituted this regime because in situations of severe cold, common sense was one of the first things to go, causing many a deeply hypothermic person to mutter “I’m okay” and soon after fall like a block of ice and die. So they were supposed to remember something slightly out of the ordinary to show they had not done a Paul Revere (and gone a little light in the belfry), and thus when the mountaineer came by, grinning crazily and inquiring how they were, X and Forbes lifted their mittens onto their heads and replied “I AM FINE SIR,” when obviously any group that had to institute such a system was not fine at all, and needed to get to shelter as fast as possible. Not that there was any shelter. They were many miles from shelter of any kind, the beakers’ camp being over in the next valley, and X’s helo pickup not scheduled for hours and hours. Of course they could have huddled in the sunny lee of a boulder and eaten chocolate bars for the caloric infusion of warmth; but no. This Forbes compassed pebble after pebble, section after section, doggedly oblivious to the frigid chill. Of course X had been out in bad cold before, exposed to the bitter winds through the gap just behind the cold workyards of Mac Town. He had been teamed there with old iceheads who sometimes worked on in the teeth of the coldest windy colds, as a kind of icehead rite or contest, punishing themselves to the limit and carrying on anyway, cursing brutally and muscling through everything with a tight hunched savage cold efficiency, so that they could finally finish whatever it was they were doing and stagger down into the galley near dead, take their temperatures and get readings like 93 or 92 and say “Yar” and “Fuck” and thaw themselves out over giant hot meals, and mug after mug of hot coffee and hot chocolate, growling at the beaker girls and their icy hearts, or at friends who passed by, “Grrrrrrrr, grrrrrrrr,” knowing that they were the iciest of iceheads, the hardest Antarcticans of all. Just growl and go, as the old Brit seamen had said. Grin and bear it. It was a real cold macho thing.
But this guy Forbes wasn’t like that. He seemed oblivious to the cold, and was certainly ignoring it; hunkering down a bit perhaps, pinched, focused on the work to the exclusion of all else; so focused that he might not notice if he precipitated and flashfroze in position, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz: the Ice Beaker, still creaking his numbers through frozen jaws, intent on the rock under him to the point of crystallization and beyo
nd. It was a scary thing to witness. X’s hands were now so cold they felt like insufficiently microwaved steak from the freezer, soft at the edges but stiff underneath. His butt was cold and the ground was cold and the light slanting down the valley was cold in his eyes. The cold air rushed over him, each gust a bitter chill slap pushing into his cold lungs, and though X had to admit that the passage down his cold throat appeared to thaw the air to the point that his chest did not actually freeze from inside, still, as the cold had been filtered on its cold way down, his cold nose had frozen and his cold brain was a frigid white block of hard cold clay, plunging further down the scale of coldness with every cold breath, colder and colder, down toward absolute zero, his cold thoughts numbly syruping from crystallizing synapse to frozen axon, every molecule of mind freezing slowly as it chilled in sad cold viscous thrall to helpless memories of his ice maiden’s cold treatment of him, terrible freezer burn from her brutal cold treatment that had frozen his heart forever. A bronze man in a bronze land. Absolute zero cold. Total frozen immobility. End of timespace. Very cold. Cold cold cold.
Finally the mountaineer came by and rescued X from his insane master for the day. “His helo’s coming soon,” he told Forbes, “and we need to get back to camp.”
“All right.”
X got to his feet, a ten-part movement with lots of care necessary to balance all the frozen components. As they creaked back to the helo rendezvous he tried to concentrate on the figures he had written rather than his painful fingers. “Looks like the average of this last fifty will be about a hundred or so,” he noted.
Forbes looked up from the ground which he was still inspecting, hunched forward as they walked. “That’s not what we do.”
He explained that the figures had to be run through a sophisticated analysis, which only then would tell one how randomly the pebbles had fallen. If there were patterns of a certain kind, then a stream had probably run over them and sorted them lengthwise to the flow, while a completely random orientation indicated deposit through the still water of a lake or pond.
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