Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They looked at him, nonplussed.

  “Thomas Huxley?” Jim ventured.

  “Al-dous Huxley. English explorer. Explorer of higher states of consciousness. Mescaline, LSD. He take LSD in last hours of his life, to see what would happen. Very brave! One of your great British explorers, like Scott or Shackleton. And in one of his books there is very profound scene. A man and a woman are in a hotel room, making love. Out their window there is a neon sign that changes colors, from red to green to red to green. Over and over. And that light comes in their window and falls on them. And when the red light is shining on them, all is rosy. Full of life. Mysterious and beautiful. And then the light change, and the green light shine on them, and all becomes ghastly and pale. Mechanical. Like a nightmare of insects. And the lights keep changing, back and forth, back and forth. Red to green to red. Lovers don’t know what to think.”

  “Like Huntford and Cherry-Garrard,” Val said.

  Ta Shu nodded.

  Jack yukked: “Cherry red and Hunt green!”

  “But it isn’t just a matter of interpretation,” Jim objected. “Some things happened and some things didn’t. And the point of history is first to try to determine what really happened, and not just tell lies about it. The heroic Scott is a lie, for the most part. When you really look at what really happened—that’s when you get away from black and whites and into the grays. And then when you find something admirable, as Huntford did with Amundsen, and later with Shackleton, then it’s really worth your admiration. It’s a real accomplishment, rather than just lies and wishes.”

  “Yes,” Elspeth said, “but Huntford went too far. I mean, to say that Scott made up Oates’s last words—how could he possibly know? He wasn’t in the tent.”

  “No, but we have Oates’s diary. He was totally disgusted with Scott.”

  “So? Do you think Scott would have lied about something like that? Say that Oates got up and said, ‘You bloody fool, you’ve doomed us all with your stupidity, and now I’m going to go out and kill myself because it’s obvious you want me out of the way’—Would Scott then have written down in his diary, ‘Oates said, “I am just going out and may be some time”’? What if the three men remaining had made it back, what then? Wilson and Bowers would have known it was a lie!”

  “Neither of them mentioned the incident in their diaries,” Jim pointed out.

  “That proves nothing. Wilson wasn’t even keeping his diary anymore at that point, as I recall. No, I’m sure Oates said something just like that—probably those precise words. These were men at the end of their tethers, you have to remember. They were starving and frostbitten and gangrenous. They were in desperate straits. Oates was only the worst of them. Scott would probably have lost his feet as well, if they had gotten home. In times like that it’s the old stories you were talking about that kick in more than ever, the public-school ethos and the military code. You don’t break down and shout accusations at each other—you live out the deepest scripts in you.”

  “Maybe,” Val said, remembering South Georgia Island.

  “No, you see it time after time,” Elspeth insisted. “Men going to their deaths for some idea or other. Following a script, living out an ideology—there are a lot of ways of putting it.”

  “Some people break under stress,” Val said despite herself.

  “Yes they do. But that’s another story—that’s Lord Jim, a story that all these men knew very well. It was a cautionary tale to them—break down once, and your honor is lost forever. That’s why so many of them died in the trenches, going to certain death to make sure that they didn’t look like a shirker.”

  Jim shook his head. “World War I killed that story for good.”

  “I know what you mean by that,” Elspeth said. “But I’m not so sure it did.”

  Ta Shu spoke again. “All stories are still alive,” he said. “All stories have colors in them.” He looked around at them, an older man from a different culture, weathered and strange, incongruous in his red parka. “This present moment—this is clear.” Although actually the light in the tent was its usual virulent blue; but they took his point. “The past—all stories. Nothing but stories. All colored. So we choose our colors. We choose what colors we see.”

  Soon after that the big loads of food in them and the exhaustion of the day’s climb both hit at once, and they groaned through the icy brilliant air to their tents, to fall in their bags and sleep deeply, no matter the incandescent brightness lasting through the night. And the next morning they got up and ate breakfast in silence, contemplating no doubt the day ahead of them. They broke camp and got it stuffed into its bags and into the sledge, and then they were off again. Val hauled the sledge by herself, starting slow so that people could get warmed up gradually. The hard field of firn covering the head of the Sargent Glacier was pretty easy going.

  Then they had to climb into the saddle between Bell Peak and the high ridge of the Herbert Range to their right, and this proved to be a mean little wall; it took three hours of hard hauling to get the sled up it.

  Finally they made it, however, and Val took the sledge and pulled it across the saddle until she reached the far side, where they had a full view of the Axel Heiberg. It would make a dramatic lunch spot.

  She pulled up the final slope to a little snow-covered knob she had camped on during a previous expedition, and gestured to the others as they straggled up after her, waving at the view ahead. “Lunch time!” she cried.

  While she waited for them she goggled at the view. A good two thousand feet below them, down the steep snow-blanketed slope of the glacier’s sidewall, lay the great ice river itself, the Axel Heiberg, pouring down from the polar cap in a truly frightening icefall, like an immense waterfall that had frozen to stillness and broken to shards. Then below them it flattened out and curved around the shoulder they stood on. It was easy to see that they could have taken the flat, broad, curving road of the lower Heiberg glacier in from where it poured onto the Ross Sea, and avoided every difficulty they had overcome in the previous two days, also the tricky work of successfully descending the slope leading back down to the glacier.

  What also became suddenly clear to the understanding was just how huge and strange the Transantarctic Mountains were. This stupendous ice stream had torn a trench in the range so clean in its lines that it was hard to grasp how big it was; but it was almost as deep as the Grand Canyon, and considerably wider, and when one’s sense of scale came into focus, so to speak, it was hard not to feel a bit frightened, like a speck on the side of the abyss. It was clear also from this vantage point that the mountain range was a dam holding back the polar ice, the ice pouring down these giant spillways ten thousand feet to the sea. There was nothing like it anywhere else in the world, and standing there it was easy to feel the truth of that.

  Ta Shu, the first one to join Val on the knob, needed no time to make his feng shui analysis. “This a very big place,” he declared, puffing and grinning at Val.

  Jorge and Elspeth arrived and just stared at the scene, looking appalled. Jim arrived and was stunned. Jack arrived and said “God damn!” and hooted a few times. “Wow! Will you look at that!”

  “God damn is right,” Jim said, checking out the precipitous slope they now had to descend. “Why didn’t Amundsen just follow the dogs!”

  7

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  blue sky

  white snow

  The South Pole was cold. At first when Wade climbed out of the Herc and saw the white glare and the dark blue sky, it was familiar enough to make him think it was going to be like McMurdo or the Dry Valleys. Then the cold shot up his nostrils into his head and his snot froze, with a tickling sensation that was only a little painful. After that there were icicles inside his nose. This seemed to stabilize the nasal situation, and after that his nose stayed relatively warm—warm, with icicles inside it!—and the sensation of cold shifted elsewhere, to the various joints in his clothing: between boots and pants, and at his
wrists, neck and eyes. Cold!

  By this time he had rounded the nose of the Herc, and was walking across the smashed snow of the runway. He passed a little glass-walled booth topped by a big sign: “South Pole Pax Terminal.”

  Beyond it stood the new Pole Station, gleaming in the sun like a blue spaceliner stranded on the snow. Actually like three spaceliners, all standing on thick blue pylons, and linked by blue passage tubes. At the end of the leftmost module a cylindrical blue control tower stood overlooking the scene. Farther across the glittering white plain, past heaped mounds of snow and a line of yellow bulldozers, he could see just the tops of a little sunken village of antique Jamesways. Farther still, a pale blue geodesic dome stuck out of snow that appeared to be in the process of burying it entirely; the old station, apparently.

  A man approached Wade and introduced himself: Keri Hull, NSF rep for the Pole. He led Wade to the spaceliner and up metal grid stairs like those Wade had seen in ski resorts. From here the new station looked like a segmented flying wing, aerodynamic in the polar winds. They went through the usual meat-locker doors, inset into the curved blue wall.

  Keri led Wade down a hall to a bright warm galley. They sat down at a long table with a few other people; one of them got him a mug of hot chocolate, and he held the mug in both hands gratefully. The inside of his nose began to defrost. The room was full of people eating and talking. It was steamy.

  “First a few words about the station,” Keri said. “We’re supposed to do this for everyone. We’re at 9,300 feet here, and because of the Earth’s spin the atmosphere is thinner at the poles than at the equator, so our nine three is the equivalent of about 10,500 feet at the equator. It’s a hard ten thousand, too, because of the cold and the dryness. So stay hydrated and don’t run around too much in the first days of your stay. And if you have a persistent headache or loss of appetite, see the station doctor and she’ll fix you up. Officially we recommend avoiding caffeine and alcohol, but, you know—moderation in all things.” He grinned and sipped from a giant coffee mug with his name painted on it. “Just pay attention to your body signals and behave accordingly. Okay? Good. Now—how can we help you down here at ninety degrees south, Mr. Norton?”

  “I’d like to have a look at the whole station, with the idea of going through the various, um, incidents that have been reported, kind of step by step.”

  Keri frowned. “You mean going into the old station?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. That’s against regulations, I’m afraid.”

  “Of course. But it seems that it will be necessary, given that some of the, the removals, have been happening there.”

  Keri raised his eyebrows. “Necessary?”

  “I’m down here to investigate the incidents,” Wade said firmly.

  The other man’s look made it clear he thought this was a waste of time. “It’s potentially dangerous,” he warned. “The snow accumulation is crushing down the dome.”

  “But the archway next to the dome is still in use, as I understand it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So the approach is safe.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “So we could go down the archway, and just have a quick pop in to see under the old dome, and hope that it won’t collapse at that very moment.”

  Keri didn’t appreciate that way of putting it. “You’ve talked to Sylvia about this?”

  Wade nodded.

  “All right. We’ll take you in tomorrow, okay? We’ll have to get some gear and people together to do it safely.”

  “Fine.”

  So he had a day to kill. Keri appeared to be done with his orientation, and for some reason miffed at him. A young woman named Lydia took him down the hall and showed him what would be his room—like a nice hotel room, greatly miniaturized—and gave him his room key. He was free to do what he wanted.

  But it quickly became clear that the South Pole was not a place where there was much to do. He went back outside to snap some photos of the station. There were not many places he was allowed to walk, as the snowy plain surrounding the station to all horizons was forbidden ground in three of four quadrants: the dark sector for astronomy, the quiet sector for seismography, and the clean sector for incoming air from the prevailing wind, which almost always came from that particular north. He was left with the area between the station and the runway, where a short barber pole with a mirror ball on its top stood inside a curve of flags. This was the ceremonial South Pole, there for photo purposes. He walked over to the mirror ball and looked at the bulbous reflection of his hooded face. In the tiny reflected image of his mirrored sunglasses he could make out two little mirror ball-topped poles, marked by even tinier reflections of himself. An infinite regress of person and place. He tried to take a photo, but nothing happened; it seemed his camera battery had frozen.

  Well. This was not the actual geographical pole anyway, which was located somewhere inside the forbidden old station, Keri had said; it would be moving through the station for another couple of years, until the station had been carried over it by the ice cap as it made its slow flow north to the sea.

  There seemed little else to do outdoors but freeze. Wade gave Phil Chase a call on the wrist, and was a bit surprised when he answered. “Phil, it’s Wade! I’m at the South Pole!”

  “That’s good, Wade. Is it cold? Is it bright?”

  “It’s cold. It’s bright.”

  “That’s good. Here it’s warm, and dark. I’m asleep, Wade. Call me back when it’s daytime here. I want to hear more about it.”

  So much for outdoors. Wade retreated inside, grateful for the spaceliner’s sudden warmth. He looked out a tinted window at the view: a snowy plain in all directions, to a horizon which was about six miles away, Keri had said; Wade found it hard to tell. The surface snow was marked by sastrugi; these hundreds of small waves, and the chiselled sandlike snow that lay between them, must make skiing hard work indeed. He tried to imagine what it would be like to ski across such a plain plane of a plain, day after day for hundreds of miles, a whole continent, like walking from New York to LA, all the while pulling a heavy sledge, and often against the grain of the sastrugi, no doubt. And yet there were people out there doing it at that very minute, the Herc pilot had said, crossing the continent for fun, some of them following the SPOT route from the Pole to McMurdo. It must have been a disheartening sight to see a train of giant yellow tractors clumping past them on autopilot. But presumably their motivations had nothing to do with practicality.

  It was not for him. And as he walked down the hall to his cubicle, to rest from his half-hour trip outside, he thought, What if there was no indoors? What if one had to stay out in this cold all the time, day and night, fresh in the morning or sweat-soaked (if one could sweat) in the afternoon? He didn’t think he’d last more than a few hours.

  Although indoors required a different sort of fortitude. How long could one stand to stay locked up in a motel? Wade did not think of himself as an outdoor person, but he did like to be able to go places. Here there was no there there, and scarcely a here here. He went to the galley and had a leisurely lunch, and watched the inhabitants of the station come in and go through the food line, and sit down and eat in small groups, talking busily, not paying too much attention to the other people in the room. When he was done himself he cleared his plate and went down the main hall of the southernmost module to the library; then the games room; then the gym; then the coms rooms, first the official use room, filled with big radios and other machinery, then the personal use room, filled with computers and video screens. Most of the terminals in the room were occupied, by off-duty personnel making contact with the world.

  The second module of the station was mostly private quarters and bathrooms, with some lounges, mostly empty. Every hall window had the same view, of course. And the third module was locked. Wade retreated to the first module to ask about that, and Keri looked up from his computer screen (distracted) and said “Oh, it’s empty, didn’t you
know?” In the fluctuating vagaries of Congressional funding, he went on, keeping his face carefully blank, the money to complete all of the station had been cut, and NSF had decided to use what they had to build the outer shell of the third module, leaving the completion of the inside to some flusher or more southerly-thinking Congress. The Japanese were willing to contribute the money to complete it if part of it were turned into a small hotel, but so far NSF was resisting the temptation.

  “Interesting,” Wade said. “I’d like to see that too.”

  Keri held his eyebrows in position, and merely rooted in a drawer and handed Wade a large key. “Be sure to lock it when you leave,” he said, and went back to his screen.

  Wade looked at him curiously, then shrugged and went back down the halls to the closed door of the third module. The door was heavy. Inside, he saw the empty shell of a building; vertical struts were all that broke the expanse of a room which looked both larger and smaller than he would have expected. The view out the windows was the same as everywhere else.

  He went back to the first module and returned the key, then sat down in the library, which had two walls covered with books, most looking very well-read indeed. A captive audience. It was all very interesting; but not. Only the idea that all these rooms were at the South Pole made them other than a weird cross of military base, airport lounge, lab lounge, and motel. It was, to his surprise, extremely boring; boring in a way that contrasted very strongly to his experience in Antarctica so far.

  So the next morning, when Wade put on his heavy clothing and clumped down the hall after Keri and another man named George, he was greatly relieved, so anxious was he to do something. He followed the other men watchfully.

  Outside on the landing the cold gave him its pop on the nose. They descended to the snow and walked past the little sunken village of Jamesways, and a small blue dorm on stilts that looked like a model for the big station, and then down a long slope in the snow, like one half of a funnel placed on its side. Tracks in the dry snow made it clear that the depression had been cut by bulldozers. At the thin end of the funnel was a dark corrugated metal arch, the opening of a tunnel that was about ten meters below the surface of the plain.