Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Exactly,” Carlos said. “Most scientists have analyzed life scientifically, and realized that sufficiency is all that you really need, and that pursuing money beyond the point of sufficiency only degrades life. So that it is no coincidence that very rich people are often fools or crazed, while scientists are smart people who have carved their little utopia out of the world system, by extending their efforts after knowledge rather than money. They know that knowledge can become power, and with the power that science wields in this world, they control things. Control even the political realm, but without the hassle of politics per se. They just advise the decision makers what is possible and what is advisable, and ask for money, and go out and do what they want.”

  Wade said, “So you’re saying scientists control not just Antarctica, but the whole rest of the world?”

  Carlos got up and took their bowls to the stove for refills. “Exactly true! And this illustrates a very important principle of mine, which is that whatever is true in Antarctica is also true everywhere else in the world. But in Antarctica there are no, no,” he waved at the blank featureless white plain outside the window, “no distractions. No trees or billboards. You can see what really is true, naked out here. So if you come down here and see a continent ruled by scientists for their own convenience, it is true also then on all the other continents as well.”

  Wade said, “Well, but, I don’t know … I’m not used to thinking of scientists actually being the ones in control. I don’t think most of them would agree that’s the case. I doubt they would even want it to be.”

  “Oh no, not explicitly! Of course not! Who would want that, it is obviously such a hassle! Politicians—” he looked at Wade, raised a palm to say, What can you say? “No sane person would want that, apologies to Senator Chase. It violates the principle of sufficiency. But tell me, who do you think rules the world?”

  “Governments,” Wade said.

  “Okay, but not politicians per se. The whole government.”

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning you. I mean, in that the politicians get elected, and they have staff people who actually know how to work the system. And so when they want to get something done, they ask their staff how they can do it, and if the staff likes the project they tell the politician how, and if they don’t like it, they subvert it.”

  “Yes, Minister,” X said. “Great show.”

  Wade had to agree. “I certainly am in complete control of my politician,” he said distinctly toward his wrist phone. “Sir Humphrey has nothing on me.”

  “So,” Carlos said, “but when you make your decisions, who do you consult? Do you call yourself a bureaucrat?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Because they are just functionaries, they do not set policy?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But what about technocrats? What about scientific staff, who tell the politicians what is physically possible and what isn’t? Are you a technocrat?”

  “Perhaps,” Wade said. “But not usually. I have an expertise, I suppose, but I’m no scientist.”

  “A bureaucrat then! Or staff assistant, or political aide. Whatever you call it. Let’s just say government, like you said at first. But you make your decisions by consulting with a technical staff, the technocrats, and they make their decisions by consulting with the scientific bodies, the scientists. And so the scientists call the shots!”

  Wade and X stared at each other in consternation.

  “And now we have overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity,” Carlos went on as he gave them full bowls. “We have maybe two, maybe three billion more people than we can support. And this global warming, the bad weather. It’s an emergency situation. Governments have to guide us through this tight spot in history, if we are going to get through it without supercatastrophes. But how will they do that? Who will tell them how to do it?”

  “Beakers,” X said.

  Carlos nodded.

  “But they’re not even trying!” X objected. “They’ve got their island utopia, like you said, and so they just come down here or wherever else and hang out in the field or the lab and do their thing, and they’re not doing anything to save the world, as far as I can tell. They’re just part of the capitalist machinery.”

  “Yes and no,” Carlos said. “Capitalism is the dominant economic order, and it tends to subsume everything else, it wants to subsume everything else. But the great outsider, the system that capitalism cannot conquer, is science. The two are actually at odds with each other, the one trying to defeat the other. This is the great war of our time!”

  “Capitalism versus science?” Wade said, skeptical.

  “Sure. First it was capitalism versus socialism, and then capitalism versus democracy, and now science is the only thing left! And science itself is part of the battlefield, and can be corrupted. But in essence, in my heart as a scientist, I say to you that it is a utopian project. It tries to make a utopia within itself, in the rules of scientific conduct and organization, and it also tries to influence the world at large in a utopian direction. No, it is true!” he cried, noting the skeptical looks on both Wade’s and X’s faces. “Here, have you seen this book?” He leaned over the lab bench and pulled a book from under a stack of dirty dishes. “Do you know it? This is the Spanish version, it was written by Chileans. Los Elementos Eticos, Políticos y Utópicos Incorporados en la Estructura de la Ciencia Moderna. Recently it has been translated into English, of course, for that is the language of science. In English it is called something like The Ethical, Political, and Utopian Elements Embodied in the Structure of Modern Science. And this book is really having an impact, it is quite a revolution in scientific circles. Because what it demonstrates very clearly is that what we think of as neutral objective science is actually a utopian politics and worldview already. There is a big historical section describing the rise of science, showing that science is self-organizing and self-actualizing, and always trying to get better, to be more scientific, as one of its rules. And there is a big middle section showing how various features of normal scientific practice, the methodology and so on, are in fact ethical positions. Things like reproducibility, or Occam’s razor, or peer review—almost everything in science that makes it specifically scientific, the authors show, is utopian. Then the final section tells what the ramifications of this fact are, how scientists should behave now, once they realize this truth. And the book is a kind of underground bestseller! It goes from lab to lab, the graduate students are all reading it, the senior scientists who are still thinking—everyone! This is the cause of the recent explosion in appropriate technologies, if you ask me, the so-called materials revolution, the ecological-efficiency movement, permaculture, all these scientific movements and strands, all networked together of course, and all vibrating now with the philosophy of this book!”

  “I’d like to read that,” X said, tapping madly at his paperback’s console to see if it was in there already.

  “Me too,” Wade said.

  Carlos nodded. “It should be in most of the e-books like X’s here, unless you have an old one that isn’t getting supplemented. The translation is about five years old now. Anyway, you know, what I have been saying to you is the utopian description of the situation. In reality, there are a great number of scientists who are not interested in the reasons they do what they do. This makes them bad scientists in that way, but there you are. Bad work is done in every field. So, you know, there are some scientists used to the old ways down here, when the technology being deployed was not safe for the environment. Consider the nuclear reactor that American scientists brought down to McMurdo, for instance.”

  “Nuclear reactor?” Wade said.

  “It’s gone now. Along with a big chunk of Observation Hill, which had been contaminated. A hundred thousand tons of dirt, shipped north to the nuclear dump in South Carolina. Nukey Poo, they called it.”

  “You can still set a dosimeter ringing if you stick it in the dirt in the right places,
” X confirmed. “Some people used to do that for fun.”

  “For fun?” Wade said.

  “McMurdo,” X explained.

  “Anyway,” Carlos said, taking their emptied bowls over to a narrow shelf on the wall and stacking them, “when more people realize what we are doing out here—the high safety factor, the need to capture as much methane as we can before it is released as a greenhouse gas—the desperate need for energy in the countries of the consortium—then there will no longer be this ignorant outcry. Meanwhile”—he grinned at Wade, waving at the door—“let us show you something.”

  Hey you, do you read?

  We read.

  Everything ready?

  Everything’s ready. The hardware’s in place, and we have made contact with the friends who are going to clear all personnel from active sites. They’re in position, so we can go on the prearranged schedule.

  Great. They’ve got track of everyone?

  Yes. Everyone’s in their site camps.

  Cool. Okay, we go on schedule then, very good. Everyone have a nice trip home, and remember, no talk ever. Eco radical not ego radical. This is probably the last time most of us will communicate, so for all of us, let me say it’s been nice working with you.

  You too.

  You too.

  Over and out.

  Outside, the other two men prepped three snowmobiles. While Wade watched he called Phil Chase back again; “Did you hear any of that, Phil?”

  “Yes I did. I was asleep when you called, and I may have slipped back under from time to time, but I kept the phone to my ear, and it was very interesting. Sir Humphrey indeed. And I want to read that book. It sounds good. It would be good if what this man said was true. But I don’t think he’s taking into account the true power of power. There’s guns under the table, Wade. There’s a cancer in the social body, and the tumor cells are the brains of these god-damned Götterdämmerung executives, guiding the traffic over the cliff and then flying off to their Caribbean isle. I’d like to figure out a new kind of chemotherapy … it’d look kind of like Eraserhead I guess….” Either the connection broke or Phil had gone back to sleep.

  Then Carlos and X were ready, and Wade was given a one-minute tutorial in operating a Skidoo, which was a little snowmobile with a single broad ski for a front wheel. Then they were off, buzzing over the white surface in a line of three, with Wade in the middle. He had never ridden a snowmobile before, but with a thumb-squeeze accelerator, and no brakes at all, and handlebars for the front ski like a bicycle, it was no great problem to handle. It was like being astraddle a giant clumsy extra-wide Harley Davidson, he supposed, having never been on a motorcycle either. Certainly balancing the thing was no problem, except for occasional lurches into dips he did not see, for which he grossly overcompensated with anxious leans and turns in the other direction.

  But by and large the ride was very close to effortless, especially after he relaxed the viselike grip he had taken on the handlebars, which were heated to keep his hands warm. Both his hands and wrists were inside giant borrowed mitts called bear claws, but without the heat from the handlebars they still would have been cold.

  After several more minutes of roaring over the white firn, he felt free to unlock his gaze from Carlos’s back and look around a bit. Off to their left a black serrated rock ridge broke the horizon. Carlos was following a barely discernible line of green flags, waving limply on top of bamboo poles. At one of these he slowed down, turned to the left and sped on, toward a new manifestation of the black mountains on the horizon, this time straight ahead of them. As they closed on it Wade saw it in more detail, looming up over the white plain: a brown-black spur of rock, lined horizontally. A mountain buried to the neck in ice. Nearer to it he saw that the rock disrupted the ice around it into rings of frozen eddies, and even what looked like frozen breakers, forever almost about to break against the lower slopes of the rock cliff.

  When they stopped, outside the turbulence, Wade pulled off one bear claw to check his wrist GPS. They were in the Mohn Basin, it seemed; the spur of rock appeared to be D’Angelo Bluff; beyond it the black spike of Mount Howe. The ice between these nunataks was lined and cracked with entire cities of blue shatter. Carlos started up again and headed straight for one of these broken zones, finally maneuvering in broad turns until he appeared to be riding right into the open end of a broad ice ravine. Blue gleaming seracs overhung one wall; above those black rock towered high in the sky.

  blue sky

  black rock

  blue ice

  Happily Carlos stopped at this point in the growing chasm, and turned off his snowmobile engine. X and Wade did the same. Suddenly they were out there, in a silence so complete it seemed noisy.

  Except there; a breeze, soughing over the ice. It was Debussy who should have been the composer for this continent, Wade thought. Debussy or Satie, or Sibelius, mystic spirit of snowy Finland. Sibelius the composer and Dalí the artist. Or Escher. Or Rockwell Kent, or Canada’s Group of Seven, or Nisbet of the Antarctic. Only a few could have caught it. Empty blue sky. It was a strange place to be.

  Carlos and X converged on Wade, and Carlos pointed at a big snow block. “See it?”

  Wade stared at the white snow. “See what.”

  They laughed at him. “Come on.”

  Over firn they crunched. It did not give underfoot, and they left no tracks. Quite close to the ice wall, Carlos pointed again. “There, see it?”

  Wade peered. Against the white was a white shape. Then it jumped out at him, like one of those three-D mashes suddenly revealing its pattern: a white metal box on tracks, somewhat like the old Hagglunds he had seen at McMurdo, but smaller; only seven or eight feet tall. One would have to crouch to get in its door.

  “Wow,” Wade said.

  They approached it. The sides were covered by hoarfrost or wind-plastered snow, but under that appeared to be painted white as well. The metal tracks ran over small sprocketed metal wheels. All painted as white as the cab. The three men stood before it. X could look right into one of the wind-drifted windows.

  “What is it?”

  Carlos and X looked at him.

  “It took a long time to answer that question,” Carlos said. “We found it here by accident, while putting out a geophone grid last year. This is nowhere near where anyone has been, you see. And the Americans didn’t have any vehicles missing, not then anyway. In any case, it’s a Weasel, made in England in the 1950s. There was a Weasel used by Edmund Hillary’s group when they drove tractors to the Pole in 1958. Most of their tractors were Fergusons, but they had one Weasel that they ran until it fell apart, and then they left it out on the polar cap.”

  “But …”

  “It must have been completely buried. Perhaps as much as ten meters down in the ice, and out there on the cap, with nothing for hundreds of kilometers in any direction.”

  “Wow. Who could have found it?”

  An expressive shrug from Carlos.

  “Someone with a metal detector,” X said.

  “And a bulldozer,” Carlos added.

  “And the new ice borers.”

  “And familiarity with Hillary’s route,” Wade suggested.

  “That would be easy enough,” Carlos said. “Hillary wrote a book about his trip.”

  “I never heard of this expedition,” Wade confessed.

  “Who has? Driving tractors to the South Pole?”

  “That would be hard,” X noted.

  “Yes, but what is the point? You sit in the driver’s seat, you try to stay warm, you look for crevasses.”

  “That would be hard.”

  “I suppose. But it is not the right kind of method to make people notice. We could drive these snowmobiles to the Pole, eh? But so what?”

  Wade said, “Can we look inside?”

  “Sure, sure.” Carlos went to the door of the cab, and turned a handle—no lock—and pulled open a thin metal door. Clearly the Weasel had not been a warm experience. A box of thin
metal, primitive controls for the driver, benches against the side. The heat of the engine would be all that made it possible.

  “Whoever dug it out doesn’t seem to have refurbished,” Wade remarked, running his hand over a wooden bench.

  “No. Except for the white paint, I think. But there’s no clue to their identity. As if they used it for something and then abandoned it.”

  “Or stored it,” X said.

  “Maybe so. Anyway, here it is.”

  “Does it run?”

  “Yes. Half a tank of gas.”

  “It evaporates through the cap,” X said. “It could have been full not too long ago.”

  They walked out of the shade of the chasm, back into the blazing light. Wade’s sunglasses shifted back to full strength. He looked around; still the empty icescape, the pure blue sky. The Hillary Weasel sat against its ice wall—a white oddity, incongruous, something like the prehistoric man found in the ice in Austria. Thrown up by the ice. Or excavated. Someone was out here doing things, Wade thought. Someone who liked rescuing bits of the past. Salvaging useful tools, giving them a try. Perhaps giving up on them if they didn’t work out, and leaving them around as exhibits in a kind of open-air museum, or art gallery. Or whatever. He shook his head, climbed back on his Skidoo.

  They were running the snowmobiles back over their outgoing tracks, and at a certain point Wade’s Skidoo tilted and veered and he pulled it back on track with accidental ease, and realized that the vehicle was not going to tip over no matter what he did. All of a sudden he forgot all his cares and all the mysteries, and was just riding a big motorcycle-thing, a wonderful bit of Antarctic technology, fit for a museum or an art gallery itself, over the snow at the bottom of the world. He hummed some Wagner and christened this “The Ride of the Valeries,” because he was thinking of her again. This is what she liked, and perhaps this was how she felt when she was out here. This was what she lived for. Exuberance is beauty! And those distant low black mountains on the white horizon, that sky! An exaltation came over him: Wade on ice, humming Wagner through the mesh of his ski mask.