Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Val bent over and picked up the biggest boulder she thought she could lift, given the body-blows from the wind, and gestured at X to do the same. She started filling a gap between the tall boulder and a chest-high one nearby, while at the same time clearing all large rocks out of the space on the lee side of them. Carlos saw the plan and pulled his banana sled over to the gap, tipping it on its side to form a windscreen at the bottom of the wall. X hopped around propping it in position with rocks, moving fast, in X overdrive. He could lift rocks none of the others would even think to try. As they lifted and set rocks he and Val banged into each other hard, and they grabbed each other to keep from going down. He looked at her as if asking a question, but masked by sunglasses and clothing they could see nothing of each other’s face, and the roar of the wind made it impossible to talk. They might as well have been on opposite sides of the glacier. She felt stuffed with energy, and went for another rock, mute in the howl of the storm, which if anything was louder here than it had been out on the glacier; shrieking over the rocks, no doubt. They were all cut off from each other. Nine strangers in a storm. Windchill factor must have been a hundred below; it dropped exponentially with the speed of the wind. Too windy to put up any tents. But the rock wall was growing. Had to be careful, though, as the wind would quickly throw any loosely placed rocks down on their heads. The stacking had to be right. It was something to concentrate on, something with which to distract herself; and it was the only thing she could do at this moment to improve the situation. So she set about building the best rock wall she could. X was a big help, it was amazing what heavy rocks he could lift. Carlos and Wade too were helping, as was Ta Shu. Jorge and Elspeth and Jim were getting sleeping bags off the banana sled and out of their stuff sacks, dropping big slabby rocks on them as they pulled them out so that they wouldn’t blow away. The wall was thigh-high now, and beginning to help; though it was still insanely loud, behind Jack’s rock there was some shelter from the blast, and more with each row they managed to stack on the one below, and each foot of curving extension to the sides. The work kept them not warm but at least functional, and there was an endless supply of rocks to choose from. A U-shaped wall to start with, then perhaps a full oval later, to ensure that any more reversals of wind didn’t take them from the rear. After that they might be able to set up one of the tents inside the rock wall and get even more shelter, enough to light a stove. It was actually looking pretty good, Val thought; if it hadn’t been for Jack, huddled at the foot of the largest boulder, she would have considered the situation to be somewhat in hand, given the circumstances. Jim and Jorge were pulling a sleeping bag up over Jack’s legs and torso. When the wall was finished they would all be able to get into bags. They would be all right. Except they didn’t have enough food or stove fuel to wait out a storm of any great length. Hopefully coms would come back and they could get a report on the weather. So odd to have all this happen in the mute solitude of the storm’s roar. And the light was odd too, fluctuating rapidly as thinner or thicker clouds shot overhead; despite all it was a well-lit scene, the sun wheeling about somewhere overhead though it was the middle of the night, Val thought; but it didn’t matter. The flickering made it like being inside an antique film. X put his face against her ear: “It’s good shelter!”

  She nodded to show she had heard. She appreciated the gesture. The others were now sitting in the lee of the rock wall, clustered around Jack to give him more warmth; he looked like he was sinking into hypothermia again, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he was, lying there with a broken collarbone, cut hand, lost blood; in shock, and maybe concussed as well. He was in trouble.

  Which meant she could not rest. The shelter didn’t matter; she had to get to Shackleton Camp, bring back a snowmobile and sled to carry Jack to real shelter, and at least the first aid that the people at Shackleton Camp would be able to provide. Something. To do it she needed a bit of a break in the storm, she judged. And she would need a GPS position to come back to. And perhaps a companion, for safety’s sake; Carlos, though Carlos should probably stay here to take care of the others. X, then. The truth was she didn’t know what to do. The obvious thing was to stay put, but with a failing client on her hands, she wasn’t going to do that. And they were short of food and fuel anyway. Storms here could last over a week. Something more would have to be done. And she had walked in storms like this before, she had climbed in storms like this for that matter; tough work, but not impossible if you kept your head.

  She crouched down to have a shouted consultation with the others. She got X’s attention and he crouched next to her. Ta Shu was still moving about the others, adding rocks to the wall; suddenly they looked to Val like a little huddled pile of bodies, with Ta Shu building a memorial cairn.

  white cloud

  X kept adding rocks to their rock wall until he could find no good candidates for stable stacking in the immediate area. The work had warmed him, although the rocks themselves had been cold, and heavy enough to crush his gloves’ insulation, so that his hands were frozen insensible, and tired. Val gestured him to her and he crouched next to her. She was getting into a sleeping bag next to Wade, and gestured for X to do the same. He struggled into a sleeping bag much too small for him, lay against the rock wall next to Val.

  Down on the pebbles it was remarkably calm. Given the insulating power of their clothing, and the warm red masses of their sleeping bags, and the shelter of this nifty windbreak they had built, X supposed he should have been as comfy as if he were at home in bed; in actuality it was nothing like that, as each howling buffet of wind jolted through him in a kind of mental electrocution. He couldn’t get used to these slaps of wind; they were so hard and distinct they seemed not like wind but the concussions from great explosions, any one of which could knock their wall over. Little lulls, moments of relative calm, and then WHAM, another shock to the system.

  Val was crawling around in her bag, having shouted conversations with Carlos, then Wade. She seemed calm and deliberate, her posture relaxed; she did not seem appalled at the power of the wind, just dealing with it. X however was appalled. He had never been in any Condition One in Mac Town that had been anything like as strong as this wind. He hadn’t known they got this strong.

  Val crawled over to him and sat beside him, leaned into him, one arm around him, and shouted in his ear. “I may have to go down to Shackleton Camp! To get help for Jack!” She gestured at Jack. “I’m worried about him!”

  “What about the storm!” X shouted in her ear.

  She shook her head, shouted “It might last a long time! Too long!”

  “But can you walk in this!” X shouted, amazed at the very idea.

  “If you wear crampons—and lie flat during the worst parts—you can do it! No problem! This stuff we’re wearing is like a spacesuit!”

  X pulled his head away and stared at her. No problem? Was she kidding?

  She was not kidding. She was a mountaineer, and what they thought to do out in the wild boggled the imagination. His heart began to pound hard in his chest. Carlos was the best candidate to accompany her on such a hike. But no doubt she wanted Carlos to stay and care for the people left behind. He leaned over and got her ear. “I’ll go with you!”

  Now it was her turn to pull back and look at him. Sunglasses, mask; who knew what she was thinking. She caught his ear:

  “I’ll be going fast!”

  He nodded that he understood.

  She said: “Carlos is cooking us a meal.”

  So he was. Against and partly under the banana sled the stove was burning, the blue flames wavering somewhat, but burning fiercely nevertheless. That they had in this stupendous howl and rush created a pocket of air still enough to allow the stove to burn was amazing to him.

  “Wade got a GPS fix! He says the system is coming back. His senator has reached him on a military satellite system we can use too. So as soon as we’re done eating we should go!”

  He nodded that he understood. He realized he was goin
g to do it. His heart was still pounding hard.

  Then flickering dark shapes appeared overhead, like killer whales flying horizontally through the storm. X leaped to his feet, astonished, and the wind blew him right out of their shelter and down onto the ground. He pushed up to his knees; yes; blimps were flashing by overhead, colored like the clouds but still undeniably there, sweeping past over them. Harpoons on lines shot down and stuck the ice in little explosions. The blimps swung around on these anchor lines and were pulled right down onto the glacier next to the rubble line, at which point more harpoons shot down, holding the blimps fast to the ice. Three in a row, vibrating in the wind. They had big tail sections at the backs of the bags, containing fans in round housings. Stubby wings protruded from the taut sides of the bags, and underneath the bags narrow gondolas rested right on the ice. Doors in the gondola were shoved open against the wind, and out jumped three people on tethers, dressed in photovoltaic bodysuits much like the trekkers’.

  “Want a lift?” the first person to reach them shouted. Sounded like a southern accent. A short young woman.

  Everyone in the rock shelter was standing; even Jack had lifted his head up to stare. Clearly the woman’s question was rhetorical. Val and Jim got Jack onto the free banana sled and carried him to the nearest blimp and got him into the gondola. Jim followed him in, then Ta Shu.

  “Three in each blimp!” the woman shouted. “We’ll meet up there!” She gestured beyond the rubble line and said something else X couldn’t make out.

  Val looked at X, as if to ask him what they should do, and despite everything his heart warmed. He gestured in reply; what other choice did they have? She nodded and went back to retrieve some of their gear. X joined her, and as they leaned over the banana sled in their wall she shouted, “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know!” X shouted. “But it reminds me of when my SPOT train was robbed!”

  She stared at him, taken aback. “That’s not good!”

  “No, but—” He didn’t know what else to say. “They seem to be rescuing us!”

  “True!”

  They stared at each other.

  They returned to their visitors and helped Carlos and Jorge and Elspeth into the second blimp. Then Wade and Val wedged into the back seats of the third blimp’s gondola compartment, which reminded X of a Squirrel helicopter’s insides, the two front seats looking out big curved windows, the back seats jammed against the back wall of the cabin, with storage underneath for their stuff. X sat in the front seat next to the pilot. She was checking dials and flicking toggles, talking into a headset intercom. She pushed a button and the blimp began to vibrate madly as they rose off the ice on its anchor lines; then she pushed another button and the harpoons must have exploded free or been cut away, because all of a sudden they were off on the wind, spinning up and away, inside the cloud itself, the light flickering from dark gray to spun-glass whiteness and everything in between, changing instant by instant. The noise was terrific at first; then it got a bit quieter, and the ride smoother.

  Their pilot watched screens before her, giving her data in various false color images that X couldn’t interpret. Powerful motors whirred behind them, and between their noise and the howl of the wind it was still too loud to say anything. The pilot indicated headsets hanging from hooks in the ceiling of the gondola, however, just like in a Squirrel, and X put on his set, and over the now-muffled roar heard Val saying “—you taking us?”

  The pilot pointed forward. “Bennett’s Other Platform.” Her voice was clear over the headset, and she definitely had a southern accent. X pulled a folded topographic map out of the open compartment before him and studied it. Bennett Platform was a triangular plateau of bare rock overlooking Shackleton Glacier, across the ice from the Shackleton Camp, underneath a Mount Black. But Bennett’s Other Platform? The pilot did not elucidate, and neither Val nor Wade nor X wanted to bother her any more, as she suddenly seemed completely absorbed in the workings of the blimp, which was tossing wildly in some extra turbulence of the storm. She muttered to herself as she flew with both hands and both feet, looking out the windows more than at her screens, though they could see nothing but mist.

  “Isn’t this dangerous?” X inquired.

  The pilot looked at him briefly. “What, this? What could happen?” A high sweet laugh. Then she was talking to the blimp again, or the clouds: “Ah come on. Y’all stop it. This is ridiculous. Quit it. No way.” And so on.

  “Where are you from?” X asked during a lull in this monologue.

  “Mobile, Alabama.”

  “No,” X said. “I mean down here.”

  The pilot shrugged. Then she became preoccupied by another hard smack of wind. “Give me a break. I mean to tell you. No way.” After a prolonged struggle with the controls she said, “Okay. Here we are. Come on, you beast. Behave yourself for our guests here.”

  “Can you give medical attention to the man in the other blimp?” Val asked.

  “Sure. That’s why we came out in this kind of wind. It looked like you needed help.”

  Below them black rock appeared through the rushing clouds, startling X so much that he jumped back in his seat.

  “Don’t worry!” the pilot said, and laughed again.

  white white

  black

  white white

  X worried. It was frightening to be so close to rock in such a volatile craft. But their pilot merely coaxed the blimp around into the wind, and then began to wrestle the controls to force the thing downward, or so it seemed. Suddenly an orange pole poked up out of the cloud at them, and the pilot broke into the same muttered argument she had had before as she dropped the blimp down behind this mooring mast. She manipulated controls right in front of X, and a metal arm appeared under them, and a claw like an artificial hand clamped on the mast. “Gotcha!”

  After that they descended slowly. The rear of the blimp attached to something else, it seemed to X by the reduced bouncing of the craft; and then they were suspended tautly some ten feet off the flat black rock, frozen mist shooting past on all sides. The pilot reached across X and opened the door. “Out we go!” she shouted, and X unbuckled his seat belt and took off his headset, and made his way down a swinging ladder, the metal rods cold through his mitts and gloves. When he stood on the ground again he found his knees were trembling. He helped Wade and Val down, then the pilot climbed down halfway and let the door slam above her. She jumped down beside them and gestured forward. “Come on in!”

  12

  Transantarctica

  Val followed their pilot through the wind, X and Wade on each side of her. Ahead of them a low escarpment of rust-colored rock loomed out of the needle mist shooting past. They were on a nunatak, or perhaps one of the larger rock ranges. What Val could see actually resembled Bennett’s Platform, as far as she could recall; she had visited the plateau once, with a team of paleontologists who had been using helicopters to pull fossil trees out by the stumps. The rock underfoot was like a rough parquet floor, part rock, part ice.

  Ahead there was a kind of embayment in the rock, about the volume of two Jamesways set side by side. In the embayment the air was clear, and spindrift was bouncing over it and collecting at its foot; the empty space was covered by some kind of clear fabric, very taut and obviously very strong. Tented.

  Inside this clear space, this room in the side of the storm, a number of people were seated on rocks placed like benches against the sidewalls. They were dressed in a great variety of styles, from the glossiest of client chic to thick fur jackets to ratty long underwear that reminded Val of Sherpa yak wool. She wondered again if these were the saboteurs.

  Then she saw the rest of her group emerge out of the flying cloud, and she hurried over to see how Jack was doing. He was flat out in the banana sled, but conscious; trying to crane his neck around to see where they were going, a move which obviously hurt him; he looked cold and miserable. “They say there’s a doctor here,” Val told him, but he just stared at her.
>
  Their pilot reached the tent and unzipped a zipper in the clear fabric next to the rock wall, and waved them into the gap. Inside there was a clear inner wall; they were in a clear lock or vestibule. Their pilots were taking off their parkas and then their boots; two women and a man. Val’s sunglasses were fogging up; she took them off, pulled off her ski mask, then her parka, then her boots. Everyone jostling in the vestibule’s little space. Then one of the other pilots zipped the outer wall, unzipped the inner wall, and they went inside.

  Their arrival was greeted with indifference by most of the occupants. A glance only and then they were back to whatever they had been doing before: eating, working on clothing at a table covered with scraps of cloth and fur, reading, talking around a radio set that appeared to be turned off. The conversation by the radio sounded to Val like German.

  “The doctor?” she said to their pilot.

  “That’s May Lee,” she said. Later Val learned it was spelled Mai-lis. “Mai, we got a patient for you.”

  “I know,” said a short elderly woman. Her round face was remarkably leathered and wrinkly, and Val took her to be an Eskimo. “Bring him over here.”

  They followed the old woman, Jim and Jorge carrying the banana sled. They laid it down on a rough rock bench against the dolerite wall, and Mai-lis pulled over a wooden deck chair and sat down next to Jack. “How are you?” she asked him as she opened a large long bag and attached a monitor to his arm.

  “Broke my collarbone,” Jack said.