Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  X nodded, wandering the shop and looking at equipment. “What about the sliding of the ice?” He pointed in the direction of the derrick. “It must be moving a little, anyway. How do you deal with that?”

  “The movement is not so big here as to be a problem,” Carlos said. “Here it moves only five meters a year, and does not seem to be speeding up, like so many places on the cap are. So we can simply add length to the pipe, and by the time the methane here is extracted the station will only be a few hundred meters to the north.”

  “What about ice surges?”

  “Don’t say that word! No such thing as ice surges on the polar cap!”

  But ever since the Ross Ice Shelf had detached, and Ice Stream C had come unstuck from the position it had been frozen in for the last few centuries, surges had been common all over the place. The possibility couldn’t be denied that ice anywhere in Antarctica might move with startling speed, as Carlos now admitted: “If it surges, we are done here. But the hole will be capped by the surge, so that there would be no spill, even if we were pumping oil. Maybe the top part of the pipe, but we clean that up, and, I don’t know—go home, probably. We are underfunded as it is, as you probably have noticed. It would be hard to recover from the loss of that much pipe, and if there is one surge, there might be more. No, there can be no surges! They are forbidden here! Come on, let’s go in and get warm. It’s Geraldo’s turn to cook supper, and he is very good.”

  Inside the steamy fragrant beaker box the others were talking about glaciology, and Punta Arenas, and laughing a lot; and X felt another glow of happiness. Carlos and Geraldo explained what X’s first jobs would entail; the ongoing exploratory efforts were still pretty wide-ranging, and though they were sure enough of this deposit to start drilling, they had not yet established the size of the deposit, or the location of others suspected to be nearby. So they were taking trips out from the station on snowmobiles, to do what they called “three-D seismics,” which involved setting out a grid of geophones, to record the shocks from explosions set off in the ice, and in the rock of nunataks to the north. Geologists working for the group would then look for “bright spots” in the record, and map the rock and the stratigraphy of the subsurface. Their well was therefore an early “cost well,” and just one in a giant X pattern of them out on this sector of the cap. Down their well they would send tools to measure the gamma radiation, and take actual looks around with fiber optics, among other new detection methods. “We’re definitely on top of a big methane hydrate deposit,” Carlos said, “and under that is a seal rock, which is a lithologic seal over sedimentary rock that often contains oil. The drill is cutting through the seal rock now, which is a very hard old lava field.”

  X nodded over and over again, happy to hear the confident beakerspeak; and feeling more and more pleased at the growing conviction that no matter what happened here, he would not be contributing to the despoliation of the pure Antarctic. The Man Without a Name, yes, The Man Without a Country, sure; but not The Man Without Environmental Ethics. Which meant he could face Val in his mind. And he would be working, he saw, with people who were sort of a mix of beaker and ASL—something seldom if ever seen in McMurdo, where the two roles were so strictly separated for the sake of “efficiency”—even though the setup here was obviously the way it should be, everyone doing part of the support work, everyone participating also in the science involved, and benefiting from both. No, this was great. He would never run into Val and have the rest of his day ruined; he would spend his season out here under the vast low dark blue sky, with real work to do, surrounded by Spanish and African voices and laughter, with a tent of his own to sleep in. It was a GFA’s paradise. It was X heaven.

  Beep beep. “Hey Wade, are you awake?”

  “No.”

  “Where are you.”

  “… I’m not sure.”

  “That happens to me sometimes too.”

  “—oh yeah! Hotel California.”

  “You’re in California?”

  “Hotel California. McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Wow. I couldn’t remember there for a minute where I was.”

  “That happens to me a lot.”

  “What’s up?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. You know Wade, sometimes I don’t see why half the people in America don’t just walk off their jobs and start up their own companies. I say that right on the floor of the Senate.”

  “Yes, Phil. We read it in the Post and we gnash our teeth. We can’t believe our eyes. Only in California would you have even the slightest chance of getting elected.”

  “I get elected by seventy percent majorities, Wade.”

  “That shows what California can do.”

  “I get almost a hundred percent of the Hispanic vote.”

  “That’s because you’re a Democrat, plus you speak Spanish like a barrio textile worker.”

  “That’s because I was a barrio textile worker. And those girls work hard let me tell you. My fingers are still all scarred from that.”

  Phil had spent three months working in a legal sweatshop with legal aliens, part of his Ongoing Working Education as he called it, the OWE program (pronounced Ow in the office) that he had instituted for himself, in which he spent three months working full-time at a great number and variety of Californian occupations, so many that the list was beginning to look like the dust-jacket copy for a new novelist.

  “I know,” Wade said. He got out of bed and went to the room’s sink and began to clean up. “It’s great what you’ve done. You’re very popular and you deserve it. But only in California. And even there you have high negatives.”

  “How high can they be when I get seventy percent of the vote?”

  “They can be thirty percent, and that’s what they are. A record high negative.”

  “Any time you create a high positive you’re going to get a high negative. Even in California.”

  “Especially in California.”

  “God bless our state.”

  “The most volatile in the nation. Pendulum swings that defy all laws of physics and political science. You’re one of the big left swings, up there with the Browns or Warren or Boxer, but shuffled in with you guys are people like Reagan and Nixon, with no rhyme or reason to it. You’re all the way off the charts anywhere else in America.”

  “So now you’re comparing me to Richard Nixon. You’re waking me up in the middle of the night to compare me to Richard Nixon.”

  “He was great at foreign policy.”

  “Please, Wade. I get elected because people like what I stand for. It’s populism come back again. In California that’s important.”

  “Used to be populism anyway. Now, Phil? A leader in the Democratic Party? Having changed your tune over the years from calling for the complete revamping of everything to advocating legislation to encourage cooperatives?”

  “I’ve grown up in fifteen years, better have or else.”

  “Everyone in the middle of the road says that, it must be like a chorale there on the painted line, you really sing well together.”

  “Hey. Gorz is even worse than me, he went from demanding the impossible to suggesting a thirty-hour work week.”

  “You’ve called for a thirty-hour work week too.”

  “It’s a good idea. Reform by increments, Wade, it’s the only way. You demand the impossible you get nothing. In co-ops people own their work, that’s a very big step right there. After we get that, we can think about further steps.”

  “If you can even get that far. Maybe these days asking for co-ops and a thirty-hour work week is demanding the impossible.”

  “Maybe so. We’ll find out when we try for it, Wade. You can only learn useful lessons by trying things out. I like things you can try, rather than big systems that you can’t figure out how to move toward or test out.”

  “You’re a true Democrat, Phil.”

  “Yes, I am. So what’s next for you down there?”

  “I’m flying to the South Pole today.” It w
as a sentence that felt odd in the mouth.

  “You be careful. How was your trip to the Dry Valleys?”

  “It was interesting. Good background.”

  “How was your mountain guide?”

  “She was very competent.”

  “Ooh.”

  “Please, Phil.”

  “Well, you have fun out there Wade. I’ll be calling you again to get a report from the Pole.”

  “Yes you will.”

  It’s a dog-eat-dog world, especially if you shoot half your huskies and feed them to the rest. This had been the Amundsen expedition’s method of operation; they had started out with fifty-two dogs, and most of those had not only pulled the sledges but somewhere along the way been turned into food, for both dogs and men. Each dog eaten provided about fifty pounds of meat, and therefore saved that much from the sledge loads. It was a classic case of pulling your own weight, or of what the American weapons industry called “dual-use efficiency” when pointing out that their high-heat laser weapons would also make very nice ice borers (which they did). Amundsen however lost a lot of style points for this particular dual use; he was criticized for it ever afterward, especially in Britain.

  Obviously Val’s “In the Footsteps of Amundsen” expedition, the thirteenth to trace Amundsen’s route to the Pole, was not going to be using the same methods the Norwegians had used. For one thing dogs were now banned from Antarctica; for another, the Ross Ice Shelf, the crossing of which had comprised about half of Amundsen’s trek, was no longer there. The ice shelf had been an amazing feature in its time: a stable floating cake of ice nearly a thousand feet thick, covering an area about the same size as California or France, and at its outer edge towering a couple hundred feet over the open sea. As it turned out, however, it had been highly sensitive to small changes in air and ocean temperatures, and the global warming had been enough to break most of it up and carry it off to sea. It had been replaced by a jumble of thinning annual sea ice, remnant iceberg chunks of the shelf, and enormous ice tongues pushing out from the Transantarctic glaciers and the West Antarctic ice streams; with the brake of the shelf gone these outpourings had greatly accelerated, and they slid out onto the sea and floated there, long white peninsulas that occasionally broke off and joined the iceberg armada.

  As a result of all this the Ross Sea was no longer a viable proposition for foot travel. And Val was among those who considered this a great blessing, for to start a trek with three hundred miles of hauling over soft snow, entirely flat but frequently crevassed, was not really how modern wilderness adventure travelers wanted to spend their vacation time. In truth it had been the kind of miserable travel no one would do unless they had to. But of course there had been purists who had insisted on doing it because the early explorers had, and so their guides had had to oblige and lead them across it, bored out of their minds and working to keep the rapidly disillusioned clients from getting surly. Now that option was gone, and no one was happier about it than Val.

  So this Footsteps of Amundsen expedition, like the twelve before it, was taking turns hauling a single ultralight sledge full of their gear, and therefore traveling more like Scott’s party than Amundsen’s. And they started their trip, as had become traditional, a day’s haul out from land, on the sea ice between the ice tongues from the Strom and Axel Heiberg glaciers. This gave everyone a taste of what it had been like to cross the level white waste of the ice shelf, and then without further ado they made landfall where Amundsen and his men had, on the gentle northern slopes of Mount Betty, named after Amundsen’s childhood nurse. After crossing the tidal cracks in the sea ice at the shoreline, and setting a camp a couple hundred meters up the slope, they were also able to visit the cairn that Amundsen and his men had built, on the exposed ridge of Mount Betty called Bigend Saddle. This cairn had marked the only depot Amundsen had made during his trek to the Pole, and now the chest-high stack of big flat stones was also the sole remaining object left by Amundsen’s team anywhere on the continent, their base camp having calved into the sea soon after their departure.

  So this stack of stones was it. Nothing in the century since had disturbed it, for no wind was going to knock it over, and Antarctica had very little in the way of earthquakes. Val’s group stood around it reverently, almost afraid to touch it for fear of accidentally tipping it over. But it had been stacked with the kind of neat skill that marked all Amundsen’s operations, and it would not fall unless someone deliberately dismantled it. And no one who cared enough to visit the site would do that.

  It had first been relocated, Val told her group, by members of Admiral Byrd’s expedition, in 1929. In a hollow in the stack of stones they had found a tiny can containing pages torn from Amundsen’s notebook, informing the world, in case they did not survive the return crossing of the ice shelf, that they had in fact reached the Pole.

  The five clients shook their heads at this bit of information. Incredible that this little stack of stones, in all the empty thousands of square miles of ice and rock, had been relocated at all, much less by men flying around in a little Fokker aircraft just seventeen years after it had been built. The wreckage of the Fokker could still be visited as well, Val told them; it had been destroyed on the ground in a blizzard in March of 1929, and its crew rescued by men in the plane that a few weeks later made the first flight over the Pole.

  All amazing. But it was cold on that exposed ridge, and after a few minutes standing around, the group was ready to get back into the dining tent and eat dinner. It had been a hard day’s haul. No one advocated visiting the wreckage of the Fokker, which was nearly ten kilometers away, and was, when all was said and done, still a plane wreck, never anyone’s favorite subject for archeological tours.

  So they headed down for the tent. But as they were leaving the rock of the ridge and stepping onto the snowy slope of Mount Betty, Elspeth exclaimed, “Look there!”

  She was pointing at another rock cairn, lower and smaller than Amundsen’s. The others followed her over to look at it. It was a little ring of rock, surrounding a snow-plastered black box and a satellite dish wired to it. Scientific instrumentation of some kind.

  “One of the science teams must be doing an experiment of some kind,” Val said. “They’re probably using the Amundsen cairn as a locater.”

  “That’s stupid,” Jim said. “I’m surprised they let them disturb a historical site like this.”

  The others looked noncommittal. Presumably this ring of stones would be dismantled when the experiment was over; and given the vast view they had of the coastal range and the berg-choked frozen sea, it was hard to argue that the site was too disturbed. Still, Jim continued to complain as they hiked back down to their campsite, and Val promised to look into the matter and see whose experiment it was, and what they were doing so close to the Amundsen cairn.

  Then they were at the camp. The big dining tent was still clear on its north side, maximizing its own little greenhouse effect; the fabric would go blue when the temperature inside got to about forty, so that the discrepancy of inner and outer temperatures didn’t get too large. The little sleeping tents were all colorful nylon domes, with snowblock walls protecting them from the possibility of strong downslope winds. The snow here was perfect Antarctic Styrofoam; they had cut it with a big saw into perfect blocks, and lifted them easily for stacking, as the snow was very light, and yet cohered perfectly.

  Now they all took off their crampons and hustled into the dining tent, enthusiastically declaring their starvation. And Val followed them in, taking a last look over the jumbled sea ice, thinking So much for the Ross Ice Shelf. A day’s haul. Amundsen’s group had taken three weeks to get here from their base on the Bay of Whales. So nice to have an excuse to pass on that. The old guys had done stuff that was just too hard, no matter how into it you were. You had to tailor the past a little to make it bearable.

  Not that she meant to be unfair to her clients. They were skiing or walking three hundred miles across Antarctica, after all, and
taking turns hauling the sledge, and hauling it from sea level up to nine thousand feet as well, which was a big up. So a few hundred miles of ice shelf subtracted from the total was not that important, nor were the exact details of the route. It was the spirit that counted.

  Except to some people, who came down with the idea of retracing the historic routes precisely. A particular character type, and one of Val’s least favorite. But even that type had to make allowances when it came to Amundsen’s trip. And really, no matter how closely they tried to reproduce the experience—some expeditions had tried wearing the same clothing and using the same gear, with spectacularly unhappy results—it could not truly be done. Because Amundsen and his group had approached a section of the Transantarctics that no one had ever seen before. It was an unknown mountain range that they had to cross somehow, with food supplies so tight that they had not had the luxury of scouting out alternative routes to find the easiest way to the polar cap, which they only knew was there because of Shackleton’s trek three years before. So as they approached the mountains in their crossing of the ice shelf, watching them rear up day after day into a range as big and ferocious as the Alps, Amundsen had not been amused. He made a sketch in his notebook naming the big peaks Mounts A, B, C, D, E and F. Between the peaks the big glaciers that characterized the range spilled down from the polar cap; but which one should they take? In the end Amundsen thought he saw a rampway next to one of the big glacial openings, a ramp that appeared to rise straight up and straight south to the foot of one of the biggest of the inland peaks, where he hoped he would be deposited on the polar cap with little trouble. There was no way of telling until they tried it; and so up the ramp they had climbed, ignoring the broad glacial opening just a few kilometers to their left.