Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Voices from above. “We’re okay!” she shouted up. “Hold the belay! Don’t move it!” Don’t do a thing! she wanted to add.

  “Jack!” she called down. “Are you okay?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Can you swing into the wall and get your tools in?”

  “Trying.”

  He appeared to be below a slight overhang, and she above it. A very pure crevasse hang, in fact, with the rest of the group on the surface several meters above them, belaying them, hopefully listening to her shouts and tying off, rather than trying to haul them up by main strength; it couldn’t be done, and might very well end in disaster. Val didn’t even want to shout up to tell them to tie off; who knew what they would do. Not wanting to trust them, she took another ice screw from her gear sling, chipped out a hole in the wall in front of her, set the screw in it, then gave it little twists to screw it into the ice. Its ice coring shaved out of the aluminum cylinder. A long time passed while she did this, and it became obvious that they were underdressed for the situation; it was probably twenty below down here, and no sun or exertion now to warm them; and sweaty from adrenaline. They were chilling fast, and it added urgency to her moves. She had to perform a variant of the operation called Escaping the Situation—a standard crevasse technique, in fact, but one of those ingenious mountaineering maneuvers that worked better in theory than in practice, and better in practice than in a true emergency.

  The screw was in, and she clipped onto it with a carabiner and sling attached to her harness, then eased back down a bit. Now both she and Jack had the insurance belay of the screw.

  From the surface came more shouts.

  “We’re okay!” she shouted up. “Are the anchor screws holding well?”

  Jim shouted down that they were. “What should we do?”

  “Just hold the belay!” she shouted up anxiously. “Tie it off as tight as you can!” More times than she cared to remember she had found herself in the hole with the clients up top, and they had often proved more dangerous than the crevasse.

  She tied another prussik loop to the belay rope, then reached up and put her right boot into it. Then she stood in that loop, jack-knifing to the side, and unclipped her harness from the ice screw, then straightened out slowly as she slid the prussik attached to her harness as high on the rope as it would go. When she was standing straight in the lower loop, she tightened the upper prussik, then hung by the waist from it, and reached down and pulled the lower one up the rope, keeping her boot in the loop all the while. There was the temptation to pull the lower loop almost all the way up to the higher one, but that resulted in a really awkward jackknife, and made it hard to put weight on her foot so she could move the higher one up. So it was a little bit up on each loop, over and over; tedious hard work, but not so hard if you had had a lot of practice, as Val had, and didn’t get greedy for height.

  “Jack, can you prussik up?”

  “Just waiting for you to get off rope,” he said tightly.

  “Go ahead and start!” she said sharply. “A little flopping around isn’t going to hurt me now.”

  Soon enough she reached the edge of the crevasse, and the others on top helped haul her over the edge, where she was blinded by the harsh sunlight. She unclipped from the belay rope and went over to check the belay. It was holding as if nothing had ever even tugged on it. Bombproof indeed.

  Then it was Jack’s turn to huff and puff. Prussiking was both hard and meticulous, accomplished in awkward acrobatic positions while swinging in space all the while, unless you managed to balance against the ice wall of the crevasse. Jack appeared to be making the classic mistake of trying for too much height with each move of the loops, and he wasn’t propping himself against the wall either. It took him a long, long time to get up the belay rope, and when he finally pulled up to the point where the others could haul him over, he was steaming and looked grim.

  “Good,” she said when he was sitting safely on the ramp. “Are you all right?”

  “I will be when I catch my breath. I’ve cut my hand somehow.” He showed them the bloody back of his right glove, a shocking red. The blood was flowing pretty heavily.

  “Shit,” she said, and hacked some firn off the ramp to give to him. “Pack this onto it for a while until the bleeding slows.”

  “A sledge runner caught me on its way down.”

  “Wow. That was close!”

  “Very close.”

  “Where is the sledge?” Jorge said.

  “Down there!” said Jack, pointing into the crevasse. “But it got knocked in and past us, rather than crushed outright by the block. I gave it a last big tug when I jumped in.”

  “Good work.” Val looked around. “I’ll go back down and have a look for it.”

  “I’ll come along,” said Jack, and Jim, and Jorge.

  “You can all help, but I’ll go down and check it out first.”

  So she took from her gear sling a metal descending device known as an Air Traffic Controller, and attached it to the rope, then to her harness using a big locking carabiner. She leaned back to take the slack out of the rope between her and the anchor, then started feeding rope through the Air Traffic Controller as she walked backward toward the crevasse, putting her weight hard on the rope. Getting over the edge was the tricky part; she had to lean back right at the edge and hop over it and get her crampon bottoms flat against the wall, legs straight out from it and body at a forty-five-degree angle. But it was a move she had done many times before, and in the heat of the moment she did it almost without thinking. After that she paid the rope slowly up through the descender, one hand above it and one running the rope behind her back for some extra friction. Down down down in recliner position, past the ice screw she had placed, down and down into the blue cold. She was keeping her focus on the immediate situation, of course, but her pulse was hammering harder than her exertion justified, and she found herself distracted by an inventory that part of her mind was taking of the emergency contents of everyone’s clothing. This was no help at the moment, and as she got deeper in the crevasse she banished all distracting thoughts.

  Just past the tilt in the crevasse that blocked the view from above, there was a kind of floor. Her rope was almost entirely paid out, and she had not tied a figure-eight stopper knot in the end of the line, which was stupid, a sign that she wasn’t thinking. But it got her down to a floor, and it was possible to walk on this floor, she saw, still going down fairly steeply; and as she saw no sight of the sledge, but a lot of chunks of the broken ice block leading still onward, she called up that she was going off rope, then unclipped, and moved cautiously over the drifted snow and ice filling the intersection of the walls underfoot—a floor by no means flat, but rather a matter of Vs and Us and Ws, the tilts all partly covered by drift. There was also no assurance at all that it was not a false floor, a kind of snowbridge in a narrow section, with more open crevasse below it; she would have stayed on rope if there had been enough of it. As it was she crabbed along smack against the crevasse wall, hooking the pick of her axe into it as she went, testing each step as thoroughly as she could and hoping the bottom didn’t drop out from under her.

  She moved under the snowbridge she had noted from above, and the crevasse therefore became a tall blue tunnel. She moved farther down into it. Sometimes ice roofed the tunnel, other times snowbridges, their white undersides great cauliflowers of ice crystal, glowing with white light. The view from below made it clear why snowbridges over crevasses were such dangerous, things, so tenuous were they and so fatally deep the pits below them. But that was why people roped up.

  The tunnel turned at an angle, and then opened downward, into a much larger chamber. Val kept going.

  This new space within the ice was really big, and a much deeper blue than what she had come through so far, the Rayleigh scattering of sunlight so far advanced that only the very bluest light made it down here, glowing from out of the ice in an intense creamy translucent turquoise, or actually an u
nnamed blue unlike any other she had seen. The interior of the space was a magnificent shambles. Entire columns of pale blue ice had peeled off the walls and fallen across the chamber intact, like broken pillars in a shattered temple. The walls were fractured in immense translucent planes, everything elongated and spacious—as if God had looked into Carlsbad Caverns and the other limestone caverns of the world and said No no, too dark, too squat, too bulbous, I want something lighter in every way, and so had tapped His fingernail against the great glacier and gotten these airy bubbles in the ice, which made limestone caves look oafish and troglodytic. Of course ice chambers like these were short-lived by comparison to regular caves, but this one appeared to have been here for a while, perhaps years, it was hard to tell. Certainly all the glassy broken edges had long since sublimed away in the hyperarid air, so that the shatter was rounded and polished like blue driftglass, so polished that it gleamed as though melting, though it was far below freezing.

  Val moved farther into the room, enchanted. A shattered cathedral, made of titanic columns of driftglass; a room of a thousand shapes; and all of it a blue that could not be described and could scarcely be apprehended, as it seemed to flood and then to overflood the eye. Val stared at it, rapt, trying to take it all in, realizing that it was likely to be one of the loveliest sights she would ever see in her life—unearthly, surreal—her breath caught, her cheeks burned, her spine tingled, and all just from seeing such a sight.

  But no sledge. And back at the entrance to the blue chamber, there was a narrow crack running the other way, not much wider than the sledge itself; and looking down it, into an ever-darkening blue, Val saw a smear of pale snow and ice shards, and below that, what appeared to be the sledge, wedged between the ice walls a hundred feet or more below; it was hard to judge, because the crevasse continued far down into the midnight-blue depths below. There was no way she could get down there and get back up again; and even if she could have, the sledge was corked, as they said. Stuck and irretrievable. In this case crushed between the walls, it looked like, and broken open so that its contents were spilled even farther down. A very thorough corking. No—the sledge was gone.

  9

  Big Trouble

  Wade slept through the flight to Shackleton Glacier Camp, and sleepwalked his way through the transition from Herc to helo, then fell asleep again. The next time he woke he found himself suspended above the upper reaches of Shackleton Glacier, in the clear plastic bubble of a little Squirrel helicopter. The ice curved down to the sea in a broad sweep, with long lines of rubble marking very clearly the direction of the flow, and tributary glaciers pouring in and merging in just the way the water of rivers would, although here the eddies and cross-currents were indicated by rippled blue crevasse patches, or even in some places gnashed into fields of turquoise blades.

  The Kiwi helo pilot pointed down at one such field. “Ever seen one of those close up?”

  “No.”

  They dropped like a shot bird, tilting forward and to the left as they spiralled tightly downward. Wade gritted his teeth. Kiwi pilots were scary, as he had begun to learn on his flight down from Christchurch. The young American pilots working for ASL moved their big beasts around the air like trucks, and like good truck drivers they were impressive; but the Kiwis, older and wiser, flew as if their helos were extensions of their bodies, like dragonflies. This man looked unconcerned as he brought the helo swooping down to hover, in dragonfly style, well down inside an avenue of serac skyscrapers; Wade was shocked at their size, as from a thousand feet up they had looked like waist-high ripples. “Wow.”

  The pilot pulled back up and continued without comment. Back at cruising height, the crevasse patches again looked like ice cubes; but now, knowing how big they really were, Wade’s sense of scale popped like one’s ears did, and he realized that the glacier and the mountains flanking it were all huge, huge, huge. The helo buzzed along like a bee up a winter canyon. It was a big planet.

  Ahead a rusty rock island grew. A spill of glacier poured over a low point in its outermost ridge, and fell down toward a bowl of rock that it never even reached, much less filled. As they passed the island Wade could now see the polar cap, extending to the south forever. On the southernmost point of the island clustered a tiny knot of green square roofs, like Monopoly houses. Vertigo of scale: it was as a gnat or a microbe that he watched the tiny structures recede behind them, and the nunatak get lower and smaller, until they were out over the ice of the polar cap, and it was ice as far as they could see, on a world grown as big as Jupiter, or the sun itself. Then the helo began to drop again. They were landing on the ice.

  The complex of buildings they descended on was of course bigger than it had appeared from above. As Wade got out of the helicopter the complex looked entirely deserted, in the usual Antarctic way; everyone indoors. The empty continent indeed.

  Then one of the doors opened, and out of it appeared the big man Wade had met back in McMurdo, on Ob Hill. It seemed a very long time ago; in actuality, less than two weeks.

  “Hi!” Wade said.

  X looked closer, then recognized him as well. “Hi. Welcome to the ice.”

  Wade nodded, looking around at the brilliantly lit scene. Flat white to the horizon in all directions; much like the Pole in that regard. A gentle breeze cut deep into him. The main building of the complex was a small meat locker/mobile home, behind it a gleaming oil derrick or something like, resting on broad pontoons that were only slightly snowdrifted on their south sides. Metal grid stairs led up to the usual locker door, and after a brief look around they went inside.

  The interior of the room was like the bridge of an invisible ship, the walls banked with the consoles of anonymous machinery. From this height expansive shallow basins and low hills were discernible on the ice plain.

  “Nice,” Wade said.

  “Yes,” said X, and called into the next room. A man entered. “This is Carlos, the leader of the group here.”

  “Good to meet you,” Wade said to the bearded man. They shook hands.

  “And you too,” Carlos said. “Nice to have you here. Here, let’s have some lunch, and then we’ll take you out and show you around.”

  “That would be nice.”

  Lunch was a spicy Chilean shrimp and scallop stew. There were other men in the room, Latinos and Africans, eating the stew and talking in Spanish or English. Then they left in a group for the machine shop, and Carlos and X and Wade sat at a lab table under one of the end windows, and talked looking out at the view. Wade described his mission to Antarctica, and told them some of what he had discovered at the South Pole and back at McMurdo. Carlos nodded, then expressed his admiration for Phil Chase. “He is very important now, very important.”

  Wade said, “Do you mind if I try to transmit our conversation to him? He’d like to hear this, I’m sure.”

  “Oh no problem, no problem.”

  Wade tapped the Congressman’s button on his wrist phone, hoping it was not the middle of the night wherever Chase was now; or that he was feeling insomniac again. Voices in the night: that was how Phil spent many a sleepless hour.

  “First,” Wade said, “can you tell me if your hovercraft has ever been out to the South Pole, either with you, or piloted by someone else?”

  Carlos looked surprised. “To the Pole? It’s more than two hundred kilometers away.”

  “Couldn’t the hovercraft get there?”

  “Not without refueling.”

  “Couldn’t fuel caches be out there?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. I mean there are, at our field stations. But they are all located over this basin under the ice that we are investigating, the Pothole as we call it. We don’t go toward the Pole much.”

  “And no one else could have used the hovercraft?”

  “No way.”

  Wade nodded, thinking it over. “Tell me more about this place.”

  Carlos described the nature of the work going on at the station, emphasizing its exploratory n
ature, the new fail-safe technologies being employed in the hunt, and the fact that the main quarry at this point was methane hydrates, which if burned as fuel rather than released into the atmosphere would actually help the overall picture concerning global warming. He listed the points of the suspended Antarctic Treaty, and described how they were in fact conforming to all of them: “especially at this point, when the drilling is being done for science only.”

  Wade nodded throughout this description, then said, “It’s very interesting, but you must agree that there is a lot of criticism and opposition to your project.”

  “This is political in nature.”

  “Well, some from Antarctic scientists too. If the project is as harmless or as beneficial as you say it is, then why are they making these objections?”

  Carlos rolled his eyes. “Unfortunately there are a fairly large number of scientists who are not completely scientific. Not good scientists when it comes to life outside their own field of study. It’s part of a more general crisis ongoing among scientists worldwide, concerning how to behave in the world outside their field. You have been down here long enough to notice, I hope, that this continent is run by scientists, and mostly for their own benefit. They are funded by governments to come down here, and they generate the only export of the continent so far, which is scientific papers. Knowledge, you can say, but say also papers, careers, livings.”

  X was nodding deeply as Carlos said this, and Wade looked to him to invite him to explain why.

  “That’s the way it looked in McMurdo,” X said. “Beaker utopia. And the rest of the people down here making things nice for them, freeing up their time, but just making wages for themselves. It’s a caste system.”