Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Two k. Good for you.” Spiff upped the pace.

  “How’d you get the name Spiff?” Hoping to slow him down.

  “Well, the original name was Spliff, but I was going through New Zealand so often I had to change it.” He grinned over his shoulder at Wade.

  “The dogs, you mean?”

  “Yeah. Insane. It’s an alcoholic nation, basically, so they do the dog thing to convince themselves that they’re really all right. But it can be damned inconvenient. Once I flew down straight after a going-away party without changing my clothes, and the dogs in Auckland went off like a smoke alarm.”

  “Scary.”

  “Oh yeah. It took hours to get through customs after that, I missed my flight to Christchurch and everything. And I was sweating it anyway, because I had three big spliffs inside sealed pipettes floating in the shampoo in my shampoo bottles, and I couldn’t be sure the damned dogs wouldn’t smell them even so. They’re very good. It would have ruined my thesis. After that I gave it up. Too stressful. Now I just knock back two shots of Scotch and try to imagine it’s a decent buzz. So much noise to signal though. Terrible drug, alcohol. So now I’m Spiff.”

  “I see. Was it you thought up this AMANDA experiment?”

  “Oh no, no. It’s an old idea. Pretty neat, but I’d rather be doing the cosmic background stuff. Phase-change vortices in the first second of the universe. That’s what we are, man. Flaws in the fabric. Eddies in the whirlpool. Pattern dustdevils.”

  “Hey, aren’t we here?”

  Spiff was walking past the big blue station.

  “No, the dance is in the old summer camp. They tried doing it in the empty module, you know, and it’s a good space, but the windows meant you could never really get away, if you know what I mean. It’s a lot more fun out here.” He led Wade through rows of low mounds, the tops of buried Jamesways, and then down a slope cut by bulldozers into an area like a sunken plaza, where a dozen Jamesways and some blockhouses were still sitting on top of the ice. “This is the old summer camp, where they kept the summer overflow crowd before the new station was built.”

  “They meant to pull it out but never got around to it.”

  “Right. Besides there’s always a use here for sheltered space. Nothing ever gets pulled out, you’ll see. It’s like hermit crabs moving from one shell to the next.”

  The Jamesways they passed had names over their doors: Larry, Curly, Moe, Shemp. “Just say Moe!” Spiff exclaimed, heading for a somewhat larger Jamesway. “Sounds like they’ve started. Yow!”

  He stopped outside the door of a longer Jamesway, pulled a flask from his parka, unscrewed the top and handed it to Wade. Wade took a swallow of cold fiery whisky and gave it back to Spiff, who did the same. Then Spiff opened the door—a simple metal handle, Wade noted, on an ordinary wooden door—and walked into loud darkness.

  Wade followed him in, through a second door. Inside it was dark and hot. The whole Jamesway was a single long space—half a cylinder, just like a Quonset hut. A band at the far end was playing loud rock and roll. Red stage lights and some strings of ancient Christmas tree lights were the only illumination. A cloth sign spread behind the band said “The Polecats.”

  Wade took off his parka and hung it on a rack crowded with them, watching the band as he did. The lead guitarist was good, that was instantly obvious; the rest of the band was like that in any other garage band, or worse. One of the astronomers Wade had seen in the Dark Sector was being urged onto the stage to play sax. He had sheet music in hand, and the bass player clipped it to a mike stand, and then as they began to play, paused to stick the mike right down into the sax bell, after which Wade could just hear a few strangled honks cutting across the grain of “Louie Louie.” Wade himself could have done better; anyone in the room could have done better. The astronomer’s eyes bugged out as he tried to read his music.

  But the bass player, after replacing the mike on the stand, was solid; the drummer was solid; the rhythm guitarist was inaudible; and the lead guitarist was great. He was a balding man wearing wire-rims, which windowed an intense abstracted expression. Wade waded into the thick press of dancers to see the man’s hands better, then jounced up and down with everyone else, and found that near the front it cleared out a bit for some real dancing. Here the women of the station were performing a very complicated dance indeed, like that of high schoolers or bees, the social tangle of their minority numbers problematizing matters pretty severely, so that they were dancing with each other a lot, and also with any number of the men around them, but seldom with any one man, except for Viktor. Everyone knew everyone, Wade saw; and even in pantomime he could see example after example of rude or bumptious invitations to dance, the shy awkward men trying to get one of their female friends from daily life to turn into something else, for one dance or even part of one. Many of the women were solving the problem by dancing with three or four men at a time. It probably did not help the awkward interactions going on all over the floor when Spiff and Andrea broke into some very blatant dirty dancing, and both very good at it, having a lot of fun, Spiff making exaggerated pelvic thrusts and holds, Andrea straddling his outstretched thigh and wiggling over it, all without touch or eye contact, all in time to the music, in their own private world but very public too, of course, and peculiar when the music was “Summertime Blues,” but perfect for “Wild Thing.”

  Wade got into the rhythm at the edge of the crowd, enjoying the lead guitarist’s work, which just kept getting better and better as the band warmed, playing solo after solo that stung, ripped, howled, soared. The crowd became one big group creature as it followed him outward, singing all the lyrics for the hapless singer/rhythm guitarist, whose guitar was completely inaudible in every song no matter how fast he strummed; he might as well have been unplugged, and possibly was. So it was lead guitar, bass, and drums, and the bassist and drummer were rising to the task of laying a groundwork for their leader on his explorations.

  Spiff drifted over at one point to shout in Wade’s ear: “—used to play in five bands at once! Club bands—never recorded—every night of the week—New Hampshire, Vermont—” He gestured at the guitarist, shaking his head in awe. “Not possible!”

  Wade nodded to show he had heard. He took another couple of swallows from Spiff’s flask. They danced and danced. Someone turned on black lights, and even a strobe, apparently damaged, so that it changed frequency rapidly. Whenever the mass of dancing bodies overheated the room someone would open the door at the back and in about twenty seconds the room would chill so far that all the sweaty moisture in the air fell to the floor and lay there, a white dust that never melted. At floor level it was always below freezing, Wade realized as he watched the swirls underfoot. “Great air conditioning,” he shouted at Spiff.

  Time passed in its own uneven strobe, with some long patches of timeless dancing thrown into the mix of quick choppy impressions. The band finished everything in their repertory and threatened to quit, but the crowd refused to let them; Andrea and Lydia and two or three other women kneeled at the lead guitarist’s feet as if begging him to continue, though it also seemed clear that if he refused they might tear him to pieces. Briefly he smiled, his only expression of the night as far as Wade saw, and looked back at the band and started up again. In the interval the bass player had taped his right fingers with duct tape, and he played on with a happy expression.

  Then they started up “Little Wing,” which Wade had not heard in the first set, and after a strangled vocal from the singer, the lead guitarist hammered out the powerful succession of minor chords that Hendrix had laid down, and slowly but surely cast loose from the rest of the band, and, from the look in his eye, from the rest of the universe as well—away from the song, away from the hut, out into some private space of his own, drawing the entire Jamesway along with him, out to that distant place of pain and suffering that was the world, all those nights playing unheard in those bars while he played about the ice, his blues and the South Pole Blues become
one and the same, the blues of someone who had come back down to the ice for the nth time after swearing he never would again, drawn down here away from the bars and bands and women and friends, seduced away again by the ice and then stuck down here in its cold boredom. First you fall in love with Antarctica and then it wrecks your life, breaks it in half year after year, every year the same, going north and not knowing where you are or where your home is or what you’re going to do next, swearing never to return and then returning anyway, over and over, to work all day in the frigid sub-biological chill, talking a mile a minute until people actually would say No Robbie no be quiet don’t say a word for at least ten minutes, okay but I’m only saying one millionth of what I’m thinking and then shutting up, zooming in silence, working in solitude—until suddenly here’s a chance to play the guitar and speak all those thoughts, no matter that it was all in music, better that way, for this was the language that meant more than any other even though no one could quite understand it. The awestruck Wade, who had not known until now how much he had been missing music, stopped dancing just to listen to it, and watch those two hands fly about speaking such beautiful untranslatable sentences. Many other dancers had already done the same, standing stock-still as if hearing the national anthem or some great hymn; they all shared this guy’s situation, they all knew what he was feeling, they felt it themselves, and this “Little Wing” was deep, better than Jimi’s or Eric’s or Duane’s or Stevie Ray’s—bigger, darker, more profound. Wade found himself next to Spiff, and tried to convey to the astronomer this perception that had struck him again so forcefully, that music was the language simultaneously the deepest and the most incomprehensible, and the swaying Spiff nodded and cried back in Wade’s ear, “It means the whole project of science is backwards, the more you understand something the less it moves you, my goal now is to reverse that, to do antiscience, to know less, to understand less and thus feel it all more, I want less understanding. Come with us after this and I’ll show you what I mean.” Wade nodded, fell back into the guitarist’s infinite traveling. Far away from Earth, far away from Ice Planet, out to the far reaches of their shared inescapable predicament …

  At the end of this great solo the guitarist bowed his head, crushing the last brutal chords, shoving the guitar next to the amp for some shrieking feedback. It seemed to Wade that he was not only done for the night, but could justifiably hang his guitar up forever. He would never play better than that; no one could.

  But then the women were on him again, like sirens or succubi, laughing as they tugged his arms and wrapped around his knees, begging him to play another one, demanding it; which, after a big sigh, and a single shake of the head at their greed and lack of understanding, he did. He played “Gloria,” singing the words himself this time, and he led the hoarse crowd through a singalong that lasted many, many, many choruses, clearly intending to bludgeon them all into insensibility so that they would let the band quit before they died. During this eternal “Gloria” Wade was pulled by Andrea into the middle of the network of women, and he was passed from one sort-of partner to another for a few score choruses, soaking in what he could of these women, who were so obviously tough strong people, wearing greasy Carhartts, sweaty and wild-eyed, a lot of them big and tall and so reminding him of Val, fluid in their stocking feet, working-class Americans with a lot of bar hours in their dance moves and their dangerous sharklike smiles, their sidelong glinting private expressions which told Wade they were wild people who had done wild things, so wild that the South Pole was a terrible confinement to them. Watching them Wade could not stop thinking of Val, and he wished like anything she were there; he would have danced with her, not diffusely as he was with these sirens spelling G-l-o-r-i-a over and over, but directly and, in some much less blatant way, like Spiff and Andrea had been dancing before. If only she were here!

  As “Gloria” ended the lead guitarist hurried around pulling all the plugs out of the amps. Abruptly the music halted. The grinning bassist held up his bleeding right hand, the duct tape long gone. Someone turned off the strobe and black lights, leaving them in a dim Christmas-tree glow.

  Wade was surprised to see that Spiff and Andrea were still there; he had figured they would be hustling off to one of their rooms given the incendiary nature of their dancing, but here they were coming over to him, and Andrea took his arm. “Come on,” she said under the noise of the applause, “get your coat.” Struggling into his parka Wade followed them out the door.

  Brilliant sunlight exploded in his head. The cold slammed into him like a great side of frozen beef, nearly knocking him down. He was wet under his parka, and the cold hurt right to the bone. It was a relief when the others started running and he could run too, blinded by a flood of cold-induced tears. Running brought freezing sweat in contact with various parts of him as he moved.

  He followed Spiff and Andrea and some others down the ramp into the archway of the old station. In the tunnel it was black as the pit, and by the time his sight returned he was past the geographical pole’s pole and being led into the center of the domed area. Next to the box that had held the old galley there was a round railing and a round trapdoor, like the cover of a giant sewer hole. “This is the old utilidor,” Spiff said up to Wade. “Follow me.”

  Wade climbed down a metal ladder so cold he had to yank on his hands to get them to detach from the rungs. At the bottom of the ladder a flashlight beam revealed that ice-crystal flowers had covered everything to the point that it was impossible to tell what was under them. It was like spelunking in a white cave. Spiff brushed off a handful of crystals, and jammed it in his mouth after a swallow from his flask. “Scotch snow-cone,” he mumbled. “Real good. This is the utilidor.”

  “Which is?” Wade said, watching their breath freeze and fall to the floor.

  “It was the passageway they used to work on the guts of the old station. Cold down here.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Sixty-six below, all the time.”

  “Sixty-six below?”

  “Fahrenheit. That’s right. You can imagine the guys working down here on some busted plumbing or broken wiring or the like. And this was before heated gloves.” Now they were moving along at a good speed, crouched under a ceiling of ice chrysanthemums, and when Wade slowed down Andrea pinched him in the butt. “Now here’s the start of the tunnel to the rest of the underground complex.”

  “Complex?”

  “That’s right. Did they tell you about old old station?”

  “No.”

  “Not possible! Those guys. The old station above us here is not the oldest station. The old old station is the one they built back in the IGY, in 1956. It’s about thirty meters under the surface now. The buildings are all getting squished, but there’s a fair amount of space down there still, and a lot of stuff.”

  They ducked through a hole at the end of the utilidor, and stepped into a tunnel walled by crystal-coated plywood, which was bowed in at the sides, and down from the ceiling, and up from the floor, and in places even shattered. “It’s okay,” Spiff said. “It’s a slow-motion process. Now we don’t even mess with plywood, because we can remelt the holes so easily with the new laser melters.”

  “So you cut this tunnel?”

  “Parts of it were cut by a number of different people. Here, look here.” He gestured in a side door at what looked like a closet, with a mattress on the floor and some boxes next to it. “This is really old. There was a winterover when one guy started only showing up for dinners, and no one knew where he was the rest of the time. Then several seasons later the seismograph crew came through and found this place. He must have brought in a lamp, and maybe a space heater. But when they found it there was only a single page from a Playboy, and this stuff here.”

  “Wow,” Wade said, peering into this memorial to mental illness.

  “They keep it on the route to remind people to be more active in their resistance. See, NSF and ASL think they own this station, they think it’s here
for beakers like me, but the people who work here, they know better. They know a lot that NSF doesn’t know about this place.”

  They moved on in the frigid tunnel, past a side tunnel that ran, Spiff said, to a crashed Herc buried at the end of the landing strip; then down a branch tunnel that led into the quiet zone, where Spiff shouted out “Hey Ed, come on, we’re going to go sliding!”

  No response, so they went down and pounded on the door. It opened, and a pony-tailed head stuck out. “Six of you, three in bunny boots, three in tennis shoes.”

  “Right again. This is Wade. Ed can identify the number and footwear of his visitors by reading his seismographs.”

  “As well as Chinese nuclear tests, oil exploration blasts anywhere in the southern hemisphere, rocket launches from Canaveral, arguments my ex gets into with her new victims, and dropped bowling balls in Iowa.”

  “Sensitive instrumentation,” Wade ventured.

  “You bet.”

  Ed scribbled an explanation for the sudden explosion of squiggles on the paper rolls slowly emerging from his machines, and followed them down the tunnel.

  Another half hour’s freezing walk, and then they climbed down a ladder set in a crack, into another station. Wade looked around, amazed.

  This station was crystallized entirely. The walls were buckled, the ceiling in some places only waist high. In the flashlight gleams it looked like a museum exhibit of artifacts from the 1950s, shattered and crystallized. Thick wires looped down like strings of jewels, or the long-sunken rigging of a shipwreck. “Don’t worry, there’s no power here anymore.”

  “So you say.”

  “No electricity, then. Here, let’s go to the galley. See, look in here.”

  Wade noticed that no one was behind them anymore. “Where are the others?”

  “Oh, they’re setting up the slide. Here, take a look.”