Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Her screen data and the view above made it clear they were reaching the foot of the icefall proper. Up there out of sight, sixteen hundred meters higher than they now stood, the ice fell off the polar cap, down a funnel-like head section, channeled between the triangular mass of Mount Don Pedro Christophersen—Amundsen’s financial savior—and the high southern end of the Herbert Range, called Mount Fridtjof Nansen—Amundsen’s patron and friend. With a rock bump in the middle of the funnel, which Amundsen’s group had christened Mount Ole Engelstad, after the Norwegian naval officer who had been Amundsen’s second-in-command until killed by lightning while still back in Norway. Being in good with Amundsen had meant getting some quite amazing peaks named after you, Val thought as she studied the map on the screen.

  The Norwegians had been pushed ever rightward in their ascent by the crevasse fields of their time, until they had been forced to climb the funnel on the right side of Mount Engelstad, and only then turn left and south. But Val could see on the screen that the glacier had changed in the last century; there was a makable route leading off to the left, straight up the more southerly slope. If they went that way it would save them several kilometers, and also save them the ascent of the right side of the funnel, which appeared to be quite a bit more broken up than it had been a century before.

  So she waited for everyone to catch up to her, and declared a rest stop. While they were drinking the meltwater out of their arm flasks—which were on the outside of their upper arms, and wired to the photovoltaic elements in their suits so that they melted a pint of water per hour in good sunlight—she showed them what she had seen on her screen. “Maybe we should go left here, directly to Butcher’s Spur.”

  “Oh, come on,” Jack said, panting a little—red-faced, dried sweat streaking his cheeks, grinning handsomely at her. “We’ve been sticking to their route through all the other really hard parts, and once we get up to the plateau it’ll be easy from there on to the Pole. Why wimp out now, with just this last stretch to go?”

  The others shrugged uneasily, looking at the cracked ice above. Both ways looked bad, to tell the truth. Elspeth muttered something. No one seemed to care that much one way or another.

  It was Val’s call, she knew. If conditions in the icefall had changed, enough to make the right-hand route too dangerous, they should go left, and that was it. No one tried to repeat any particular route up an icefall, that would be absurd; icefalls changed every month, and one had to react to that.

  Irritated, she looked at the screen again. Hard to tell what it would be like on either side, really, until they tried it. “Let’s set camp for today,” she said finally. “This might be the last flat spot in a long time, and it’s too late to take on another hard pitch. And I’ll need to think about the route a bit more.”

  “Why?” Jack said.

  “To see if it will go,” Val said shortly, and went to the sledge and started the work of making camp.

  That night in the dining tent they ate for the most part in silence. They were tired, and the crux of their entire trek would be in tomorrow’s climb; and camped right under the slope the foreshortening made the icefalls seem very steep indeed, so that every time they looked outside they were confronted with what they had taken on. Even inside the tent the great broken white wall seemed to be visible to them. It reminded Jack, he said, of the night he had spent at the Hornlihutte on the side of the Matterhorn, looking up at that great spike overhanging them and wondering what he had gotten himself into. “And then we started while it was still dark, and we couldn’t see a thing. I climbed the first hour with my flashlight hanging from my teeth so I could use both hands. But in the end it turned out to be a piece of cake.”

  People nodded. It was curious anyone ever boasted, Val thought, considering that no one was ever taken in by it.

  “Have you climbed the Matterhorn?” Jack asked her.

  “Uh, yeah. Long time ago.”

  “The Normalweg?”

  “What—the ridge from the hut? No no. We did a traverse that time.”

  “Oh yeah—up the Zmutt and down the Lion? I’ve heard that’s great.”

  “No, that time we went up the north face and down the south face.”

  Jack was taken aback, and he colored a little. “Whoa,” he said. “That must have been radical!”

  “Yeah. My partner was five months pregnant at the time, so it was kind of nerve-racking.”

  People laughed, and Jack did too, coloring some more as he watched her.

  “Like Alison Hargrove!” Elspeth exclaimed, eyes smiling wickedly.

  “That’s right. In fact Meg called it doing her Hargrove.”

  Like many women climbers Val honored the memory of Hargrove, a Brit who had climbed the north face of the Eiger in a single day while five months pregnant. Later on she had been killed on K2 when her kids were four and six years old, which was a shame. But certainly after that it was hard to do anything as a woman climber that seemed unmaternal in comparison.

  Jack abandoned the Matterhorn, and the conversation wandered as they shifted from chili to chocolate, and began to wash the dishes. At one point Elspeth said to Ta Shu, “Butcher’s Spur is where they shot half their dogs, you see.”

  “Ah! I see.”

  The Norwegians had of course become fond of their dogs by the time they reached this point: each one a hardworking eager enthusiast, like a furry Birdie Bowers. So it had made them melancholy to shoot so many of them. Each man had shot the weakest half of his team, meaning two or three dogs apiece. And so despite the incredible accomplishment of climbing the icefall, the accomplishment that Val’s party still faced—despite making it from sea level to the polar cap in only four days, taking a difficult route never seen before by humankind—they had still had a very, very melancholy evening of it. Not that that had kept them (or the surviving dogs) from feasting on steaks carved out of their late companions.

  “Kind of like cannibalism,” Elspeth said.

  “The British killed dogs too,” Jack reminded her. “They wanted to use dogs, they just couldn’t figure out how.”

  “And all the while hammering Amundsen for it,” Jim said, shaking his head ruefully. “You know the British Royal Geographical Society finally held a dinner in Amundsen’s honor, years afterward, and the man introducing him ended the introduction by saying ‘I propose three cheers for the dogs!’”

  “You’re kidding!” Elspeth said.

  “I am not kidding. Lord Curzon, as Amundsen recalled when he wrote about it in his autobiography. He was really pissed off.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He left after the dinner and went to his hotel, and asked for an apology but never got one. And so he quit the Royal Geographical Society, and never went back to England again.”

  “Incredible.”

  “There’s no one ruder than the British when they want to be.”

  They ate in silence for a while, thinking about it. Val tried to imagine it: the roar of laughter from the British audience, Amundsen furious and humiliated, sitting on the stage unable to move. Quite a scene.

  Ta Shu finished a chocolate bar. “These dogs deserved three cheers,” he observed.

  “But it was Amundsen who should have toasted them,” Elspeth said.

  “He did not get a chance, not then. But other times he always told their importance.”

  They sat eating, resting, thinking it over. It was strange, Val thought, how heavy a mark those first expeditions had left on the people in Antarctica; they composed the continent’s only shared culture, really. No one knew what had happened here in the International Geophysical Year, no one knew what the U.S. Navy years had been like, no one knew the history of the Australian sector, or the Kiwis up at Lake Vanda, or the steady trickle of solo crossings and the like. Nothing remembered but the beginning.

  Now Jim said to Ta Shu, “I’ve been thinking about what you said last night, about how all our stories have colored lights on them. I know what you mean, and to
a certain extent it’s true, of course. But what good historians are trying to do, I think, is to see things in a clear light—see what really happened, first, to the extent possible, and then see how the stories about the events distorted the reality, and why. And when you’ve got all those alternative stories together, then you can compare them, and make judgments that aren’t just a matter of your own colored lights. Not just a matter of temperament. They can be justified as having some kind of objectivity.”

  Ta Shu nodded, thinking it over as he jammed down a second helping of chili and camp crackers. He ate, Val thought, like a man who had been seriously hungry at some time in his life.

  “A worthy goal,” he remarked between gulps. He got up and went over to the faintly roaring stove to refill his bowl. The others looked at each other.

  Under his breath Jack announced, “And there’s your fortune cookie for the day.”

  The next morning Val decided to agree to follow the Norwegians’ route. She could see, on both her screen and when looking up at the ice fall, a makable route to the very far right of the funnel, up and under a small nunatak on the edge of the polar cap called Helland Hansen Shoulder. So she told the others, and Jack nodded complacently, and they packed the camp into the sledge and took off.

  It should have been easier than it was. It was the least steep part of the funnel, after all; Val could see why the Norwegians had trended to this side. But something—perhaps the slight lowering in the height of the polar cap, reducing the thickness of the glacier’s upper section—had caused the ice across the whole chute to break up. Possibly it was crossing an underice rock ridge between Mount Engelstad and the Hansen Shoulder, for it looked on the map like they might be two exposed parts of a curved saddle overrun by ice.

  In any case, it was very hard going. They zigged and zagged, from one narrow ramp or block of ice up to the next, sometimes crossing snow bridges over narrow crevasses, other times physically hauling the sledge over even narrower breaks in the ice, all of them pulling together. In sections like these the Norwegians had each dealt with their own sledges and dogs, and reported in their journals that they had become quite calloused to the incessant danger below; they photographed each other straddling crevasses to look down into them, or eating lunch with their feet hanging over the edges of them. But the NSF would not of course sanction any such cavalier approach, and in zones as fractured as these Val’s group had to rope up and treat it like any other serious climb, which was only appropriate. So Val went ahead and screwed in ice screws, and belayed the others up and over any serious exposure; then they hauled up the sledge; then she went back down to remove the ice screws, and climbed back up again and carried on. It was slow work, and hot and cold in turns, depending on whether they were making adrenalated climbing moves or standing around stamping their feet waiting for the others to do the same. Even the smartfabrics were not up to that kind of alternation, and as the sun wheeled over and stood right at the top of their route, blazing down at them in a photon deluge, the temperature differentials became more and more extreme and uncomfortable; a hundred degrees of subjective difference between sun and shade, one’s face and one’s back; and nearly two hundred degrees’ difference between work and rest. Even Val was uncomfortable, and this was really what she loved doing above all else. If she had been without clients, alone or with other climbers, she would have been in that state of hyper-alert attuned-to-landscape no-mind that was the zen of climbing, the great joy of it, the source of the addiction. As it was, however, the objective dangers underfoot were great enough to put her in a high state of apprehension for her clients’ sake. A guide was only as happy as her least happy client, and right now she was surrounded by a bunch of frost-flocked insect-eyed mute people, Ta Shu and Jack enjoying themselves, the rest really eager for this part to be over.

  And yet as it got higher it got steeper, and they had to go slower. It was as if they were trapped in Zeno’s paradox, and halving the distance to the top in increments of time that remained the same. Burning and freezing; waiting for Val to screw in ice screws, or screw them out; looking or not looking at the blue gaping fissures in the ice underfoot, each one a potential deathtrap.

  Thus it was nearly three in the afternoon when they finally came under the Hansen Shoulder, where a narrow ramp of ice led them right under its exposed rock, up toward the polar plateau. There was a wide bergschrund gap between their ice ramp and the dolerite of the shoulder, smoothed into a vertical wall by the ablation of the wind. There was also, unfortunately, a tumble of big broken seracs to the left of the ramp as they climbed, cleft with deep crevasses that ran out across the first great drop of the icefall. So they had no room for maneuvering on either side, and could only press onward up the ramp, their crampons sticking in the blue ice as they labored up the slope. But the screen image showed that it would go all the way.

  Before they topped out, however, they had to pass a single tall block of ice filling the bergschrund to the right and overhanging their ramp—a smooth bluish fang of ice, a chunk of a serac which must have fallen from higher on the Hansen Shoulder, or across the ramp from the serac field to their left. The width of the ramp as it curved under this serac was just a bit wider than the sledge itself, because a crevasse curved out of the serac field and ran parallel to the ramp on the left. Val saw that this crevasse was a deep one. So they were on an ice bridge, in effect, running up the slope between bergschrund and crevasse. Where the crevasse ran out across the icefall, it was soon filled at its top by a snowbridge, leaving an opening under the snowbridge that was a very considerable ice tunnel. Not an unusual sight, but it added a certain frisson to the narrowness of the ramp, suggesting as it did the depths on each side of them.

  Val stopped her group. It looked like the ramp ran all the way around the overhanging block without obstruction, after which it widened again. Very workable, but narrow enough that a fixed line would be appropriate. So she uncoiled one of the ropes, flaking it out neatly so that it would come up after her without knotting. From her gear sling she took an ice screw—a hollow metal tube, screw-threaded on the outside, with a sharp point on the driving end, and holes in the other end to insert an ice axe for easier turning—and chipped a hole about a quarter-inch deep with the sharp end of the screw, then got it set and rotated it in squeaking at every turn, the first half by hand, the second half with the leverage of her ice axe, until it was almost completely buried. A bombproof belay. She asked Jack to clip onto the screw with a runner, which was a looped piece of webbing, and belay her as she went on up. Then she took off up the ramp, Jack feeding out just enough rope that Val could feel it tugging back on her a bit. Jack somehow always ended up doing this job, and it was true he was good at it; a tight belay, with just the right slack in it, so that the middle of the rope scarcely touched the ice.

  Around the corner and above the ice block, Val stopped and screwed in two more ice screws, connecting them by a sling attached to each through carabiners, so that any force that came on them would be equalized. She tied a figure eight in the end of the belay rope, and attached it to the sling with another carabiner.

  Before returning to the others she reattached herself to the belay rope with a prussik loop. This was a small loop of rope, tied to the belay rope in a simple knot that tightened and held position when you put weight on the loop, but could be loosened and slid up or down the belay rope by hand when there wasn’t weight on it.

  She got back to the others. “Okay, up we go.” She lined the clients along the rope, made sure they were attached to both the rope and their harness, and sent them ahead. They cramponed up the ramp, hunched over a bit. Jack stayed behind to help her haul the sledge up.

  The others had all gone around the ice block to the higher belay and gotten off the rope, and Val and Jack had clipped their harnesses onto the belay rope and were just beginning to pull the sledge into line, when the ice block above them leaned over with a groan and fell. Val leaped into the crevasse to the left, her only escape f
rom being crushed under falling ice. She hit the inner wall of the crevasse with her forearms up to protect her. The rope finally caught her fall and yanked her up by her harness; then she was pulled down again hard as Jack was arrested by the same rope below her. For a second or two she was yanked all over the place, up and down like a puppet, slammed hard into the wall. The rope was stretching almost like a bungee cord, as designed—it was very necessary to decelerate with some give—but it was a violent ride, totally out of her control.

  But the belay above held, and the belayers too. As soon as she stopped bouncing, however, she twisted and kicked into the ice wall with both front point crampons, then grabbed her ice axe and smacked the ice above her with the sharp end to place another tool.

  A moment’s stillness. Nothing hurt too badly. She was well down in the crevasse, the blue wall right in front of her nose. Ice axe in to the second notch, but she wanted more. Below her Jack was hanging freely from the same rope she was, holding onto it above his head with one hand. No sign of the sledge.