Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “I’m going to try bringing the tub down into contact,” X said nervously, thinking it would act as a brake. He put his weight on the stiff lifters.

  “Don’t,” Carlos said. “The ice is too rough.” As he spoke the craft began to chatter and jounce horribly underneath them.

  X hastily yanked the lifters back up.

  “What about in a smooth patch?” he asked.

  “That was a smooth patch.”

  “Oh. Well, what about when we’re over snow.”

  “Sure.”

  But the glacier was gleaming blue ice for as far as they could see in all directions: like a giant racing spill-way, with all its waves and turbulence frozen in place for them to observe as they slid farther down into it.

  “When I get it straight backwards put both outriggers down,” Carlos said. “Then if we turn left accelerate the left one, right if we drift right. I’ll do the same with the steering.”

  “Okay.”

  “Then if we slow down enough, bring the tub down fast.”

  “Okay.”

  “God damn, you guys,” Val said, looking downslope. “You’re headed for a crevasse field.”

  “We know that.”

  Carlos began to spin the steering wheel again. He was getting the hang of it, and after a bit he held the craft going directly backward down the slope, long enough for X to engage both outriggers on the ice and set them running, which gave them a bit more stability. Unfortunately the slope of the ice grew even steeper at this point, and they crunched over a set of rubble lines and the right outrigger snowmobile snapped off and went spinning out of sight, boom and all. The hovercraft too was spinning again, dropping from time to time as they flew over crevasses at terrifying angles, hitting the tub then billowing up again on the skirts; if they hit one of those lengthwise they would shoot right down into it and be swallowed. Carlos struggled to get them oriented backward again. Out the front window they could see back up the glittering blue flood they had so far descended, all completely still and yet receding away from them at great speed. It was a steep slope. “We’re still headed for that crevasse field,” Val said. Behind them the whoops and hollers from the passenger cabin had been replaced by dead silence.

  Carlos looked over his shoulder and then spun the steering wheel to the right. “Full left outrigger,” he said to X. “We need to go hard left.” He shoved the prop fan throttle to full power and took the steering wheel in both hands, standing before it with his head swiveling around in an attempt to see all directions at once. And then they were jetting sideways across the slope of the ice, sliding downhill still but making tremendous progress across the slope as well. If they went into a spin now they would be doomed to slip down into the crevasse field and crash. X ran the left outrigger motor faster or slower depending on the craft’s yaw, and Carlos did the same with the steering wheel, and suddenly it seemed as if they were two parts of a mind that actually knew what it was doing, shooting a traverse across the Zaneveld Glacier like an Everglades fan boat going full speed, jiggling their controls minutely, absolutely locked onto the scene rushing at them, the glacier surface here a smoothly curving drop, with some small crevasses straight ahead; they flew right over them; to their right and below, a veritable Manhattan of blue seracs was flashing by. They were rounding Wiest Bluff at about ninety miles an hour.

  But then as they rounded the great turn, another chaos of blue ice reared up directly before them, across all the glacier they could see. Without a word Carlos brought the hovercraft around so that it was facing uphill again, and X stabilized as much as he could with just a single outrigger; they were still working together with perfect coordination, and the craft held its rear to their destination and with the fan at full power slowed, slowed, slowed; but the shear zone was coming up at them so fast that Val hissed. X leaped onto the lift fan throttles and muscled them down with all his strength, and the skirts puffed out and collapsed and the tub slammed down onto the ice, and they were all thrown about as in a giant earthquake, Carlos and X holding on hard to try to keep the craft pointed uphill. They slowed, slowed, slowed. Then with a huge metallic crash the craft fell backward into the first crevasse of the shear zone and smashed to a halt, tilted up at about forty-five degrees.

  X pushed himself off the floor. Carlos had already leaped back to the controls to kill the engines. The craft remained tilted up at the sky. The rear of the hovercraft was stuck down in a crevasse, which fortunately for them was both narrow and shallow. Not that they would ever get the craft out; but at least they had not fallen all the way into an abyss. Carlos and X and Val looked at each other, white-faced and round-eyed.

  “Everyone all right back there?” Val called to the others.

  Moans, curses. “What the fuck was that!” Jack said.

  “Glad to hear you’re feeling better,” Val said.

  “We are fine!” Ta Shu called up. “This is a good place!”

  More curses.

  “Let’s get off this thing before it falls all the way in,” Val said. “It’s back to walking for us.”

  No one could object. The hovercraft was obviously out of commission. And it had, as Val pointed out when they staggered back to the cabin door, gotten them down the steepest section of the glacier. “We’re only about twenty miles from Shackleton Camp, and it’s only a few hundred meters lower than we are here. Easy sailing all the way! It’s going to be fine! We’re almost there.”

  “If you had missed this crack we would have been there in about half an hour,” Jack said.

  Val’s jaw clenched so hard that X could see all the muscles on that side of her face bulge out. Carlos and X merely looked at each other. They shook hands. “Let’s get going,” Carlos said.

  white sky

  white ice

  Val ran around at full speed until they all stood on the ice beside the tilted hovercraft: nine people encased in full extreme weather gear, crampons on their boots, two of them pulling banana sleds piled with equipment and bags. They had skis and ski poles tied to the sleds, but they were on bare ice here, and crampons were mandatory. High thin clouds covered the sky, and down the broad glacier, between its cliff-sided mountain walls, a bloom of thick cumulus cloud sat right on the ice. It was windy, although fortunately the wind was from above, and so would be behind them as they walked. It was cold. No one looked happy.

  Val surveyed the group one more time before starting out. “We’ll walk down to Shackleton Camp and take breaks every hour on the way,” she said. “It’ll be fine.”

  No response. Jack had not said a word since they had climbed off the hovercraft back into the frigid blast. Probably they should have been hauling him in one of the banana sleds right from the start, but he had refused to cooperate, and the sled was there if needed; and anyway it was a good sign that he was still well enough to be himself. All the clients looked weary and tense, she thought, except for Ta Shu, who was wandering away from the rest and turning in slow circles, talking rapidly in Chinese. The others were huddled around her. Wade and X stood beside each other, watching her like a little Greek chorus. Wade had not gotten any further calls, either in or out. He seemed resigned to whatever happened next, pinched by the wind but resolute. X stoical as always. At least those two were fresh compared to her clients, who had already walked farther than their ordinary strength would have taken them. To tack on twenty more miles was a hard thing. But they needed to get Jack to the med clinic in McMurdo, and they were still very short on food. So there was no choice but to walk the remainder of the way.

  Val took off, hauling the banana sled and keeping her pace down so that she would not get too far ahead of the rest. Carlos pulled the other sled; between the two of them they had everything they thought they might use on the hike.

  Despite the sleds, the other seven were much slower than she and Carlos. Her clients were stiff and exhausted; and Wade and X not very good on the nobbled blue ice. Jim walked next to Jack, giving him something to grab onto if he slipped. A ma
n who had hidden the fact that he had a broken collarbone, the fool. If he had known. Val sighed and shook her head. Lots of climbers were heavily psyched to do the hero thing, they knew all the great injury stories, Doug Scott getting off the Ogre with two broken legs, Joe Simpson smashed like a doll and crawling back to his partner in Patagonia; the stories were endless; but why not tell your companions you were hurt? What did that accomplish, except perhaps to make them feel guilty afterward for wondering why you were going so slow? Which was stupid. She was not going to feel guilty. It was so stupid that, combined with his periods of unconsciousness, she had to worry again about how hard he had been hit in the crevasse. Get stunned and go silent, like a hurt animal. It happened. Sad in a way.

  But she was pulling too far ahead again, even ahead of Carlos. She waited while the others staggered to her. The worst part was the wind. Back in the world they said (way too often) It’s not the heat it’s the humidity. And in Antarctica they said just as frequently It’s not the cold it’s the wind. And it was just as true. On a windless day the proper clothing made it possible to withstand the coldest temperatures Antarctica had to offer—even to overheat in them. But with even the slightest breeze that warmth was ripped out and flung away. Even the best of the new spacesuit gear was not much shield against its bitter power. And if a wind rose to gale force, it became unbearable. You simply couldn’t face it.

  Unfortunately, she could see that that kind of a wind was very possibly approaching them from downglacier. It was like being in a train wreck in slow motion; the wind was behind them, strong but at their backs, so that they could hunch over and endure it, and in some ways it even helped a little, pushing their legs forward as they lifted them; a wind at one’s back was not such a bad thing, no matter how cold. But despite this katabatic wind, the cumulus cloud lying on the glacier down near the NSF camp was coming their way, in what appeared to be utter defiance of the laws of physics. “God damn it,” Val said to herself as she watched it come. Something different was going on down there, of course; the cloud was impelled by some other wind, a northerly coming off the Ross Sea it looked like, pushing up and under the katabatic. Or whatever. Storms in Antarctica could do almost anything. In the ordinary course of things she would have been checking satellite photos on her wrist to see what was up, maybe calling Mac Coms for a detailed weather report, and if the forecast was bad she would probably be ordering her group to stop and put up their tents. As it was, she continued to watch the cloud come at them, hoping it would slow down, swearing at its apparent ability to move against the wind. “God damn it. There is a curse on this trip.”

  She took a look back. Getting too far ahead again. Carlos was behind her, hauling the other banana sled. Then X and Wade. Behind them Ta Shu, still looking around every few steps, still talking to his distant audience, or presumably taping a talk. Then Jorge and Elspeth, obviously wasted; and Jim hanging back with Jack, who was holding his right elbow with his left hand. All eight moving in slow motion, as far as Val was concerned. The wind was getting gusty, hard buffets interspersed with dead air. She found it hard not to feel for Jack, who was certainly a jerk, but whose collarbone must have hurt with every misstep on the ice. He was definitely angry at Val for spurring him on, back on Mohn Basin. And X was angry at her too for that matter, for the Mac Town stuff. Of course. There really was a curse on this trip.

  Wade was holding his wrist to his mouth and shouting into it, in yet another fruitless attempt to reach the world; or maybe he had heard a ring and was trying to respond. Then he slipped, and hastily started using that ski pole again. Anyway there would be no help for them from the outside now, no matter if he made contact or not. Val took off again, very chilled, happy to stop facing the wind. The glacier here was nearly flat, only a slight tilt downhill. The blue ice was dimpled as usual, but other than that easy going. A rubble line of black and rust-colored rocks paralleled them to the left. The black cliffs walling the glacier on both sides had clearly been shaved smooth by earlier higher versions of the glacier, which must have run a thousand feet higher by the looks of it, for the cliffs were shaved that high, right to the feet of ramparts which then jumped up, scaling to peaks in the sky far above them. It was not as tight and deep a canyon as the Axel Heiberg’s, but something about the vast breadth of it was even more impressive; as if they were ants. Everything was enormous. Shackleton Field Camp was about seventeen miles ahead of them, down where the McGregor Glacier poured into the Shackleton, in a giant confluence under Mount Wade. But all that was invisible under the massed clouds rolling up the canyon, except for Mount Wade lofting high over all—white snow over white cloud. Storm coming.

  This group was not going to be able to hike in a storm of any severity. Despite herself Val recalled Krakauer’s searing account of the notorious Everest debacle, ten people killed in a single day, and mostly because the guides had gotten a bit overconfident; they had been taking complete amateurs to the top of Everest for hefty fees, and had dealt with all kinds of problems shepherding them up and down, including hauling comatose ones from the peak all the way back down the mountain, so that they thought they had all possible situations in hand; but had never been on the summit ridge in a storm. And so when the inevitable happened and a storm struck on summit day most of the clients had died, and the lead guide had stayed high on the peak trying to save one of them and had died too. Near the end his base camp had patched his radio link into their satellite phone so that he had been able to have a final talk with his pregnant wife back in New Zealand. An early example of the total com age’s mixed blessings.

  When Val had read Krakauer’s account, early in her guiding career, she had vowed never to make the same sort of mistakes. And she hadn’t, at least so far. She had never guided on the eight-thousand-meter peaks, or on any other radically dangerous climbs or tours. Other guides were still taking amateur clients up Everest, of course, and people were still dying up there on a regular basis; these days the southeast ridge resembled a cemetery cracked down the middle and thrust into the stratosphere, the bodies (a couple hundred now) spilling down both sides of the slope. But she had refused all such work. She had only taken on competent clients, she had never pushed the outside of the envelope when she was with clients, she had paid very respectful attention to the weather. In Antarctica you had to. She had sat out storms many many times, sometimes for up to two weeks straight, resisting all pleas to forge on from the (mostly bored) clients. And so on. She had been a safe guide!

  But here she was. There really did seem to be a curse on this trip, a malignant combination of problems. Well, that was what had struck down Hall’s group on Everest too. But here there was the added factor, unprecedented as far as she knew, of human sabotage. From what Carlos and X and Wade had said, it sounded like the saboteurs had tried to destroy the oil camps without causing any loss of life. But if anything went even slightly wrong down here, then the danger from the cold was immediate.

  The wind stopped. Val stopped too. It shifted onto her left cheek, like a slap to the head; went dead, though the howl of it was all around them; then hit her again from the right. Then it struck her full in the face, the hardest blow of all. And suddenly they were hiking into the wind instead of away from it.

  Val cursed into her ski mask. Already her sunglasses were icing up, and even at their lightest coloration their polarization dimmed the world to various shades of brilliant or dull gray. Still she could see quite clearly that the cloud that had been coming up the glacier was now upon them.

  She took a sharp turn to the left, toward the rubble line, looking back and waving to make sure that everyone was following. She had almost left it too late, she saw, in her desire to get down to Shackleton Camp before the storm hit. Carlos had grasped the situation, and was actually running for the rubble. Bad weather changed everything. On a windless sunny day they could have marched down to Shackleton in style. But not today.

  Then they were fully in the cloud. The wind shrieked. Visibility dropped to
a few score yards—not a classic whiteout by any means, but a blizzard. The ice dust that composed the cloud was driven horizontally into them, it was like having an industrial sand-blaster shot into one’s face. Val’s clothes plastered against her, the wind penetrating right through the fabric. What she could see in the cloud was a kind of rapidly fluctuating bubble which appeared lit from below, as the glacier seemed brighter than the dark cloud rushing by. Her face hurt, and she had to drive each leg forward to take steps. Buffets of wind struck like blows from an invisible heavyweight. The noise of the shriek was incredibly loud, like jet engines on all sides, krkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrkrr.

  But she reached the rubble line. She turned and waved to the others. They staggered in one by one. She went back to help Jim help Jack over the remaining fifty yards or so, fighting to keep her balance. Jack was hunched, and couldn’t throw his right arm over her shoulder. She walked on the windward side of him with an arm around his waist, trying to protect him from the blasts. Any injury would be bound to hurt in this frigid wind, and a collarbone was much too close to the center of things. The noise was like a fleet of jet engines, it was too loud to talk.

  They reached the rubble line and Val got Jack sitting down in the lee of a boulder that was a foot or two taller than she was. As good a start for their shelter as any she could see at a quick glance, and so she made her way around to the others, and using hand signals got them all to move to the huddled Jack. The rubble line was a big collection of rocks, from chunky boulders to pebbles and sand, all piled in a surprisingly well-defined line on the ice, resting in a shallow depression. Startling features at first sight, they were often found many kilometers away from the rock banks that fed them; they were something like the lines of debris that collected around the eddies in a stream, Val wasn’t clear on the dynamics, but she seemed to recall they marked the quickest-moving parts of the ice. And as befitted one of the largest glaciers on Earth, this rubble line was big too, a kind of pebble road studded with boulders and dolmens.