Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

“Good way to get in shape.”

  “Oh, there are better ways, I assure you.” Laughing at her. “Better ways indeed. Not enough to eat, you see. But it made me strong. Now I am old, but that kind of strength, ha—you must sit many years before it is all gone:”

  Val nodded. She knew what he meant; she had often seen that kind of strength in Nepal, where people had an endurance that no Westerner could touch. A couple of Sherpas she knew had walked from Everest Base Camp to Kathmandu in three days, just to see how fast they could do it—a trek that even the best Western mountaineers took two weeks to do, back when they had walked it at all. No, Val had walked many miles with the Sherpa and Rawang porters, and she had seen that although they had mostly been very cheerful people, they were pack animals, really, like draft horses or donkeys—that was how they made their living, as beasts of burden, working hard, tired in the afternoons, eating like starved dogs every evening. Val had admired a lot of those guys for the way they worked, loved them dearly even though she had towered over them and hadn’t spoken their language. It hadn’t been the kind of love that had any real connection in it. But sometimes watching them she had wanted a big Western man to have that kind of spirit, that cheery toughness, something like Ta Shu’s. These were the kind of people she wanted to walk with.

  Instead this little group of clients, with only one Ta Shu in it, and the rest slowly losing steam. In fact Jack and Jim were falling behind faster than ever. Puzzled, Val stopped and watched them closely for a while. It was not Jim who was slowing them down: Jack had hit the wall, it looked like. “Fuck,” she said. He had gone out too fast, perhaps, and burnt out. Or was feeling the loss of blood from the cut in his hand. Or both. Anyway he was slowing down markedly.

  Val called an early break, and waited for the two men to catch up, cursing to herself. They joined the group twenty minutes after Jorge and Elspeth came in, and during that time the others had eaten and drunk their flasks and refilled them, and were beginning to freeze. This was a serious problem, and she couldn’t help thinking that it was Jack’s fault. So often it happened that men like him took off too fast, on an adrenaline rush, thinking their emergency energy would be inexhaustible, and then they were the first to hit the wall. Pacing took a lot of self-discipline. And big muscular men were generally not so good in ultra-longdistance events: they had too many muscles to feed, and when they ran out of the day’s carbo load, they had too little body fat to throw on the fire.

  So when Jim and Jack clumped into the group, Val suggested that they have a bite of their belts to give themselves more energy. Jim nodded, and pulled out some of his belt and tore it off and stuffed it under his ski mask into his mouth before it froze.

  Jack just shook his head irritably. “I’m just pacing myself,” he snapped. “Like you said to do. Don’t get neurotic about it, that’s the last thing we need. Let people go what pace they want.”

  “Sure sure. Try eating some food, though. We need the group to stay more or less together, or the people in front will freeze waiting for the ones behind.”

  “Don’t wait then!”

  She stared at him. “You should eat,” she said finally. “And drink your arm flasks and refill them, for God’s sake.”

  And after a little while more she had taken off again, and was soon leading the way. No beeps, thank God; they were out on the big ice cube itself now, a solid mass with very little cracking, and thank God for that. Just a matter of walking. Pacing oneself, yes, and walking. Hour after hour. She shifted them to a ten-minute break every hour, which was exactly Shackleton’s pattern. Frequently she glanced back over her shoulder. Jack was still falling behind, perhaps even more rapidly than before; and Jim was sticking with him.

  At some time when she was not looking the sun was touched by a thin film of cloud, which had appeared out of nowhere. A white film, but heavily polarized by her sunglasses, so that it was banded prismatically.

  As usual, it only took the slightest cloud cover for the day to go from blinding and hot to ominous and chill. Already they were pulling their ski masks down over their faces, and zipping up their parkas; and as they did the cloud thickened further, into a thin rippled patch thrown right over the sun, as if someone had tried to place it there. So often it happened that way; the cloud could have appeared anywhere in the sky, but ended up right between Val and the sun. It happened so frequently that she figured it must be some trick of perspective rather than a real phenomenon. In any case, there it was again.

  Which was bad, bad news. The immediate effects were that their suits wouldn’t be as warm, and worse, their arm flasks would be much less efficient at melting snow and ice. It would take twice as long to melt snow now, maybe three times. So they were going to get thirsty.

  The mental effect of the cloud was also bad. What had been a blazing plain was now shadowed and malign. Underfoot the beautifully elaborate crosshatching in the snow was revealed better than ever, a granulated fractal infinity of sharply cut microterracing. This complex world underfoot was as prismatic as any cloud whenever it flattened enough, and now when she looked in the direction of the sun Val saw diaphanous icebows, curving both in the cloud and across the snow itself. They walked forward into a geometry of rainbows. Val looked back at Ta Shu, and he raised a ski pole briefly, to let her know he had noticed the phenomena, and appreciated her thinking to bring them to his attention.

  A beautiful sight; and yet still the world seemed dim and malignant. Clouds of any kind on the polar cap often presaged even worse weather, of course, which perhaps was part of the mood it cast. Hopefully her clients did not know that and so wouldn’t be affected as much. They were still many hours’ walk out from Roberts, and a lot could happen to Antarctic weather in that amount of time.

  Nothing to do but forge on, of course, into a landscape turned alien; the awesome become awful, and all in the few minutes it had taken for a thin cloud to form. After which they were mere specks on a high plateau on Ice Planet, a place where humans could not live except in spacesuits. And they could feel that palpably, in the penetrating cold.

  At the next rest stop they drank and ate in silence. There was no point, Val judged, in trying to cheer them on. She could have pointed out to them again that they were having an adventure at last, after trying so many times and paying so much money. But she doubted that would go over very well now. One of the distinguishing marks of true adventures, she had found, is that they were often not fun at all while they were actually happening. And in one of their camp conversations Jim had quoted Amundsen to the effect that adventure was just bad planning. So that if she called it that, they might blame her for it. Jack was certainly ready.

  And she blamed herself. It had been a mistake to take the righthand route, as it turned out. Although still—as she walked on thinking about it, trying to cheer herself up—it seemed that what had happened showed that Amundsen was wrong, and that adventures could also be a matter of bad luck as well as bad planning. You could plan everything adequately, and still get struck down by sheer bad luck. It happened all the time. Chance could strike you down; that was what made these kinds of activities dangerous. That was what made all life dangerous. You couldn’t plan your way out of some things. You had to walk your way out, if you could.

  In any case, while there was no obvious way to cheer them up during the rests, there was also no great need to urge or cajole them along. The situation was plain; they either walked on or died. The intense cold they were living in reminded them of that at every moment.

  She tried her GPS and it gave her a reading, showing them on the 172nd longitude. About the halfway mark of their hike. Not bad at all, except that they were getting very tired. They had hiked around thirty miles, after all, and were beginning to run out of gas; she could see it in the way they moved. Jorge was limping slightly. Elspeth was letting her ski poles drag from time to time, no doubt to give her arms a rest. Jack was doing the same, and moving like a pallbearer. Jim was trying to keep to his friend’s slow pace, thoug
h often he pulled ahead and then stopped and waited, not a good technique. Only Ta Shu still had the contained efficiency of someone with some strength left in his legs, placing each step precisely into her bootprints, using his ski poles in easy short strokes. He looked like he could stump along for a long time.

  Val herself was feeling the work, but was well into her long-distance rhythm, a feeling of perpetual motion that was not exactly effortless but a kind of contained low-level effort, one that she could sustain forever; or so it felt. Obviously there would come a time when that feeling would wear away. But she had seldom reached it, especially when guiding clients, and right now it was still a long way off.

  Her endurance, however, was not the point. They could only go at the speed of the weakest members of the team, and there was nothing she could do for them. Well; she could give them her meltwater. And so at the next break she did that, giving one cup to Jack and another to Elspeth, over their objections. “Drink it,” she ordered, her tone peremptory in a way she had not let it be until now. “I’m not thirsty.”

  But of course after that she was. The parching in her mouth and throat reminded her of multiday wall climbs back in the world, when they had only carried a quart or two a day for days on end, and spent the last couple days hanging on sunny granite faces sick with thirst, hauling themselves up despite that, their sweat white. Dry mouth, dry throat, the tongue thickening until it became a foreign object lodged in the mouth, obstructing the breathing; the physical reality of being a water creature drying out, therefore losing substance; getting thin. One could dry up and die, parch to death. It was a feeling more painful than cold by far, though down here it often combined with the cold, allowing it to penetrate more quickly, so that one ended up freeze-dried, like the mummified seals in the Dry Valleys.

  Well, fine. But just as she had done on the big walls, she gritted her teeth, bit the inside of her cheek lightly, and powered on. She would drink one arm of her next melt, and then alternate after that. She was fine. She could walk forever. But the clients couldn’t.

  The little cloud was thickening, a white blanket thrown right over the sun, holding its position with maddening fixity. You could laugh at the Victorians for talking about a battle with Nature, but when you saw a cloud hold its position like that, in the freshening wind now striking them, it was hard not to feel there was some malignant perversity at work there, a Puckish delight in tormenting humans. It might be the pathetic fallacy, but when you were as thirsty as Val was it felt tragic.

  She slowed down to hike with each of the others in turn, inquiring after them. Except for Ta Shu, and perhaps Jim, they were hurting; nearly on their last legs, it appeared, with more than thirty kilometers to go. Well, she would shepherd them there. Bring them on home. Give them her water, give them her mental energy. There was something about taking care of clients in such a way that felt so good. Others before self. The Sherpas’ business Buddhism, their ethic of service. Being a shepherd, or a sheepdog. Husbanding them along.

  At the next stop, however, she tried again to give Jack her water, and suggested that he eat, and he refused the water and yanked the power bar out of his belt and tore off a piece savagely, muttering “Lay off, for Christ’s sake. We’re doing the best we can.”

  Jim and Elspeth and Jorge all nodded. “This is hard for us,” Elspeth said to Val wearily.

  “Of course,” Val said. “I know. Hard for anyone. You’re doing great. We’re making a very long walk, in excellent time. No problem. Let’s just keep taking it easy, we’ll get there.”

  And as soon as possible she had them moving again, despite Elspeth’s suggestion that they take a longer break. That would only allow muscles to stiffen up; besides, the sheer impact of the cold made it impossible. They had to move to stay warm.

  So she took off, trying to tread the fine line between going too fast and tiring them or going too slow and freezing them. She lost the glow she had felt during the previous march about the ethic of service and all that; in fact another part of her was taking over, and getting angry at these people for getting so tired so fast. Sure, she should have kept anything like this from happening. But they had no business coming down here to trek if they were not in shape. Even these so-called outdoor-speople were still very little more than brains in bottles—weekend warriors at best, exercising nothing but their fingertips in their work hours, the rest of their bodies turning as soft as couch cushions. Watching computer screens, sitting in cars, watching TV, it was all the same thing—watching. Big-eyed brains in bottles. These clients of hers were actually among the fittest of the lot, they were the best the world had to offer! The best of the affluent Western world, anyway. And even they were falling apart after walking a mere seventy kilometers. And thinking they were doing something really hard.

  But in their spacesuit gear the level of raw suffering was not that great, if they could just learn to thermostat properly. Indeed the whole idea of Antarctic travel as terrible suffering which required tremendous courage to attempt struck Val as bullshit, now more than ever. It was all wrapped up with this Footsteps phenomenon—people going out ill-prepared to repeat the earlier expeditions of people who had gone out ill-prepared, and thinking therefore that you were doing something difficult and courageous, when it was simply stupid, that was all. Dangerous, yes; courageous, no. Because there was no correlation between doing something dangerous and being courageous, just as there was no correlation between suffering and virtue. Of course if you went at it with Boy Scout equipment like Scott had, then you suffered. But that wasn’t virtue, nor was it courage.

  In fact, Val decided as she stomped along, most of the people who came to Antarctica to seek adventure and do something hard, came precisely because it was so much easier than staying at home and facing whatever they had to face there. Compared to life in the world it took no courage at all to walk across the polar cap; it was simple, it was safe, it was exhilarating. No, what took courage was staying at home and facing things, things like talking your grandma out of a tree, or reading the want ads when you know nothing is there, or running around the corner of the house when you hear the crash. Or waiting for test results to come back from the hospital. Or taking a dog to the vet to have it put down. Or taking a bunch of leukemic kids to a ball game. Or waiting to see if your partner will come home drunk that night or not. Or helping a fallen parent off the bathroom floor at four in the morning. Or telling a couple that their kid has been killed. Or just sitting on the floor and playing a board game through the whole of a long afternoon. No, on the list could go, endlessly: the world was stuffed with things harder than walking in Antarctica. And compared to those kinds of things, walking for your life’s sake across the polar ice cap was nothing. It was fun. It could kill you and it would still be fun, it would be a fun death. There were scores of ways to die that were immeasurably worse than getting killed by exposure to cold; in fact freezing was one of the easiest ways to go. No, the whole game of adventure travel was essentially an escape from the hard things. Not necessarily bad because of that; a coping mechanism that Val herself had used heavily all her life; but not something that should ever be mistaken for being hard or heroic. It was daily life that was hard, and sticking it out that was heroic.

  Val shuddered at this dark train of thought, stopped in her tracks. She looked back; she had been going too fast, and the people she was caring for had fallen far behind. “Come on, God damn it!” she said at them. “You are so fucking slow. This is fun! This is your adventure! Are we having fun yet?” Almost shouting at them. But they were so far back there was no chance they would hear her.

  They had too little energy and she had too much. And one thing about walking for hours and hours like this; it gave one an awful lot of time to think. Sometimes that was good, sometimes bad. When it was bad, it took a bit of an effort to remain the cheerful optimistic person that one was.

  She checked her watch, and found that half an hour had passed; her arm flask was almost melted. She walked back
to the others, pulling herself together to do the cheerleader thing, very hard now. My God, was she toast! No one could have been less in guide mode than she was at that moment, feeling parched but strong, well into her long-haul groove, and immensely irritated that these people had no long-haul groove to fall into. The back of her throat was so dry that it hurt to talk; but if she was that thirsty, then it was certain the clients were in worse shape; in need of her help; and in this situation that meant her words, as there was little else she could do. So she pulled up her ski mask so they could see her smile, and said, “Roberts Massif, coming over the horizon any minute now! We’re almost there!” Which, as they were still at least twenty-five kilometers from the oil camp, no doubt took the long-distance record for saying We’re almost there even in her own notorious career of misuse of the phrase. But it needed to be said, she judged; and so she said it. And it helped them to keep moving.

  Except it wasn’t working for Jack. When he dragged up to the rest he only stared at Val and her good news, and after they started off he quickly fell behind again.

  Then Val looked back and saw him squatting on his haunches, a terrible position for rest, as it trapped so much blood below the knees. It looked as if he had gone faint. Jim was hurrying forward, trying to get her attention.

  She met Jim on the way back to Jack, and gave him the crevasse detector and told him to keep walking with the others. It might very well have come time to do the fascist guide number on Jack, she judged, and drive him on by snapping him with the whip of his own machismo, for his own sake and the sake of the whole group; and serve him right. But she didn’t want any witnesses.

  She reached Jack and stood over him. He glanced up, looked back down.

  “Well,” she said, “how’s it going?”

  He waved a hand: go away. Leave me alone.

  “Come on,” she said sharply. “We can’t go away. We can’t leave you behind. We’re with you, and you’re with us, so let’s get together. Otherwise everyone’s in trouble. Tell me what you need to feel better. Are you hurt?”