Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Cloud-mountains, mountain-clouds. It is the gift of the world to offer such winds, it is a gift to travel in such a storm. How the blood races! How the mind awakes! Sometimes it seems that only in storms am I truly alive, as if the winds indeed carried my spirit, and filled my body with joy.

  Onward we move, cast on the wind. How eerily this voyage resembles the experience of the Endurance expedition. I think of those men so often now. Like them we have had a leader who has held true through all. Like them we have been lucky; taken all in all, circumstances have been kind to us. They have allowed us our opportunity!

  For Shackleton’s men, when the pack ice under their camp finally began to break up, they were forced into their three boats, as we into three blimps. But they were in seas crowded with ice, sailing in narrow leads, and hauling the boats back onto floes when it seemed they would be crushed between colliding bergs. Frantic days of insane effort, with never a moment’s sleep; inspired seamanship, and always do or die. Sometimes life is like that!

  And at the end of that week’s sail, they landed on Elephant Island. Better than drowning, for sure; but it was an uninhabited ice-covered rock at the end of the Antarctic Peninsula, rarely visited by anyone. No one would look for them there, and in the winter they would likely die of starvation. So after some time to rest, and do carpentry on their biggest boat, Shackleton and Worsley and four other men sailed for South Georgia Island, where the Norwegians manned a year-round whaling station. It was twelve hundred kilometers away, roughly downwind, and in the direction of the prevailing currents—but across the ocean in the high fifties of southern latitude, where there is only water the whole world round, and the great rollers of the perpetual groundswell are gnawed and chopped by the windiest storms on the planet.

  Their boat journey across this sea was a superb achievement of being-in-the-world. The man whose skill at sea made it possible was Frank Arthur Worsley. Shackleton had never made a small boat journey of any length. On the second day out he said to Worsley, “Do you know I know nothing about boat sailing?” And Worsley said, “All right, Boss. I do, this is my third boat journey.” And Shackleton was ruffled and said, “I’m telling you that I don’t.” He was saying that even though he was the boss, it was Worsley who was now responsible for their success or failure; Shackleton was now the student, Worsley the teacher, and Shackleton wanted Worsley to know that he knew it.

  And Worsley rose to the challenge. He navigated them across twelve hundred kilometers of empty ocean to a small solitary island less than a hundred kilometers long: British feng shui in its highest manifestation.

  Not because of the technical aspects of navigation, you understand, which involve mathematical formulas that can be mastered by anyone; a child’s first wristwatch could do the calculations now. But before the calculations have to come the data, and this involves taking a reading with a sextant to determine how far above the horizon the sun is at a particular time of day. With that knowledge one can then calculate one’s latitude and longitude. But the calculations rely crucially on getting accurate data in the first place. The sextant has to be level with the circle of the horizon; tangent to a point on a giant sphere. One has to see and feel the world, and one’s body in it, with exquisite accuracy! And Worsley had nowhere to make his readings but on his knees, on the bucking canvas deck of their wave-tossed boat, held upright in the grasp of his companions, as both his hands were needed for the sextant. All this in the very few moments of the journey when the sun was shining through the clouds, and in continuously wild seas. What is level when dancing on a cork that is shooting up and down such a violent sea? I might as well be asked to do it here, spinning about in the clouds like a bird! This is the aspect of Worsley’s navigation that is so astonishing and beautiful. He had to feel his place on the planet, he had to make himself sensitive to the gravitational pull to the point where he could tell, with only a bucketing horizon to help him, when he was upright and the sextant level. At that moment he “shot a reading” as they put it, with a quick glance at the device’s curved scale. This number then went through the elementary formulas, along with the precise time of day—note that their clock was a life-or-death item for them, essential for locating themselves in the flow of timespace—and the figures were matched with a book of tables to produce a latitude and longitude. All this in mist and fog and cloud and rain and sleet, flying up and down on the coiled surface of the water.

  And yet they made landfall. Worsley wrote, “Wonderful to say, the landfall was quite correct, though we were a little astern through imperfect rating of my chronometer at Elephant Island.” Ha! Because of the chronometer! But happily we must grant him this one touch of pride, so well-earned. Wonderful to say “wonderful to say” in these circumstances, where the achievement saved their lives. Sometimes we are given opportunities, and we take them and make something fine, and the story of that will live forever; and so we have our boddhisattva moment.

  After their wonderful landfall, then, and the incredible crossing of South Georgia Island, the Norwegians there took the six men to the Falklands, and Shackleton went into a rage of negotiations, there in the middle of the First World War when few people cared what happened to twenty men; he obtained the aid of no less than four ships before one was finally able to penetrate the pack ice, and save the marooned men before winter came down on them. And so the greatest engagement with Antarctica in all of history came to a close.

  And then these men returned to a world tearing itself apart. They never made it back to their lost paradise. Where we go next we never know; plans are only plans. I remember vaguely a story I seem always to have known, encountered perhaps in the heavy colored pages of some old children’s book—about a party of travelers lost in polar regions, who after struggling over icy passes stumble on a valley green amid glaciers, warmed by a hot springs; and they find the oasis is home to people descended from Eskimo and Norse, living in peace cut off from the world; and they leave the valley, why I can’t recall, perhaps to bring back family and friends—but can never afterward retrace their lost steps. And only the story survives.

  Now we in this moment are off through space, whirled by the wind to our next landfall, so soon having left that bubble of peace; so sure that a path thus traversed would never be lost to us. But glaciers and peaks are never the same glaciers and peaks. Even if we look and look all the rest of our lives, bubble of peace, how to tell? Where to find?

  “Wade! Are you there Wade!”

  “I’m here, Phil. Speak up if you can, it’s kind of loud here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in a blimp.”

  “A blimp! Whose blimp?”

  “Addie’s blimp. We’re in a cloud right now, Phil, it’s kind of windy. You’ll have to really speak up if you want me to hear you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Speak up!”

  “Where are you, Wade? Where is this blimp?”

  “We’re somewhere in Antarctica, Phil. More than that I can’t say. We tried to take the hovercraft down to Shackleton Camp, but it fell into a crevasse. Then we tried to walk to Shackleton Camp, but we were overtaken by a storm. A very windy storm. You can hear what that’s like. Then we took refuge in a rubble line, and after that we got rescued by some people who are living out here in the Transantarctic Mountains, living on their own.”

  “Jesus, Wade, it sounds great! Are these the people who did the ecotage and took all the stuff that’s been missing?”

  “They say not. Apparently there are factions out here—”

  “Not there too!”

  “—yes, inevitably, and the group that rescued us claims another faction has been stealing stuff, and they claim ignorance of the ecotage, though apparently the other faction helped the ecoteurs somehow. We still don’t know what’s really happened.”

  “Well you’re big news, Wade, let me tell you that. I’ve been calling you every five minutes for the past day!”

  “Sorry I’ve been out of
touch.”

  “Not your fault! So where are you headed now? What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know where we’re headed, but I think we are being taken to witness the exiling of this rogue faction from Antarctica.”

  “Uh oh. That sounds like it could be trouble, Wade. You watch out.”

  “I will.”

  “Tell me what you’re seeing now, then, if you don’t know where you are.”

  “Well, we’re in Addie’s blimp, and right now we’re above the clouds. It’s very sunny up here. We’re looking down on cloudtops that cover the land as far as I can see. It’s windy. There are some peaks sticking out of the clouds to our right.”

  “All right!” Addie said over the intercom. “Let’s go get ’em.”

  Wade stuck his wrist phone under the right side of his headset. “How are you going to kick people out of Antarctica?” he asked Addie.

  “Oh we have our ways.”

  “Which are?”

  “We find them and ambush them.”

  “Is this going to be dangerous?” Val asked from beside Addie, sounding surprised.

  “Dangerous? Oh no, not dangerous at all!” Again Addie’s sweet laugh. “Nothing we do down here is dangerous, oh my no!”

  Val said sharply, “I don’t want my group taken into a fight.”

  “No no. It’ll all be over by the time we get there. Mai-lis just wants you to see the results, so you can be her witnesses if it comes to that in McMurdo. She’s a very practical lady that way.”

  “She seems to be an authority,” Wade ventured.

  “Yeah, she’s the local chief, no matter what she says about democracy. Lars is pretty much right about that.”

  “How did she reach that status?”

  “Well, she’s been down here the longest, and she knows how to do more things than anyone else. She knows how to survive down here. The Sami know about snow and weather. And she’s very up-to-date technically. She’s good with the photovoltaics and the batteries and the hydroponics. All of it. Better than most of us, anyway. We all have our specialties, but you know, it’s a work-in-progress sort of thing. An experiment, like she said. So nobody’s all that good at everything. It can be a little dangerous, actually.”

  Wade said, “Like flying these blimps in a storm?”

  “Oh no. No danger there at all.” She grinned. “Actually it’s not bad. These things float really well, it’s hard to drive them down. So it’s almost the opposite of a helo in that respect.”

  “What about getting blown into mountainsides?”

  “Well, you have to look out for that, but if you stay above them you’re fine. These are great machines. Top speed of three hundred k an hour, so even if you have to go straight into a full-force gale you can make progress, usually. Turbulent, as you saw, but not impossible. No, blimps are the only way to go down here. Getting around on foot is just too hard, as you must know. The air is the way. But planes and helos are too much of a hassle. Much more dangerous than these.”

  “Who makes them?” X asked.

  “A Japanese company.”

  “How do you pay for them?” Wade asked.

  “Money.”

  “But how do you make the money? You’re not selling mawsoni cutlets and seal fur coats.”

  “No. Some of us winter in the world and make money there. Some of us do northern jobs from here, just like any other telecommuter.”

  “Is that what you do?” Wade asked.

  “Me? No, no way. I’m no telecommuter. I’m all right here. Real time real space, twenty-four hours a day.”

  Then she tilted the blimp down. Wade saw out the windows that there were other blimps ahead and behind, dropping just as fast as they were. He sat back in his seat and extricated his wrist phone from his headset.

  “Did you catch any of that, Phil?”

  “Some of it—I couldn’t hear you, but I heard some of the others. But it’s pretty windy there, hey? There’s quite a background noise.”

  “Yes. Hey Phil, we’re back in the cloud, on our way down. Do you want to stay on the air or not?”

  “Oh on, on! Just keep the line open, this is great! What I want to know is why these folks have factionalized, I mean that’s really the problem, isn’t it, you have people of like mind and they still end up at each other’s throats, I can never understand that—”

  “Hey Phil, sorry, we’re, it’s getting kind of busy here, I can’t really focus—”

  “Oh hey you do what you need to, I’m just thinking out loud here!”

  The blimp was being driven down by its big fan, and it jounced up and down on gusts. Addie began arguing with the wind again. Wade was starting to feel a bit airsick when suddenly the blimp was rushing down at a blue glacial slope, firing its harpoon anchors into it and then reeling itself down in a final convulsion. As soon as they were secured Addie took off her headset and opened her door and leaped down. “Wait here a minute,” she shouted at them, and was off running toward a big clear-roofed gap, cut into a giant lobe of glacial ice—no doubt a refuge like the one they had left earlier. Several other blimps were already anchored, and their crews were out standing in front of this refuge, pointing some kind of instrument at it. “What are they doing to them!” Val exclaimed, and she was opening her door when X grabbed her arm.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to the side. “Whatever they’re doing they haven’t got all of them in there, see?”

  “Wade, you watch out,” Phil’s tinny voice said from his wrist, “you keep your eye peeled, I don’t like the sound of this, watch out all directions, that’s what I always say….”

  White slips of movement; tiny black dots against a field of blue seracs; those were darkened sunglasses, Wade saw, and realized that their ferals were being ambushed, perhaps by people from the refuge who had slipped outside.

  “Come on,” Val said, and opened her door and jumped down. X followed, and after a split second’s scared hesitation, Wade too jumped out of the blimp.

  Val ran to one of the blimp’s anchors and picked up two big chunks of ice lying beside it. She tossed one of them at the ferals outside the refuge entrance, to get their attention; the other she fired at the white figures coming up on them. This drew the attention of the white figures, and one of them pointed their way—aiming guns at them, Wade saw with a jolt. In a panic he ran forward and dove into Val and X at the ankles, knocking their feet out so that they fell on him. Little snapping sounds in the wind caused his stomach to shrink to the size of a walnut; gunshots! He hugged the ice, looked up in time to see the ferals at the refuge entrance turn their odd-looking weapon on their ambushers. The figures in white staggered spastically, fell like marionettes whose strings have been cut.

  For a moment nothing moved but the wind. Phil’s voice chirped from Wade’s wrist like a cricket. Only a few moments had passed but to Wade time had distended, ballooned by his panic; he could have given a long and detailed account for every second that had just passed. His heart was pounding like the fastest tympani roll in the Maestro basic sounds set.

  Val and X were getting off him. They were both big people.

  Finally there was movement at the front of the refuge’s clear tent. Mai-lis and Addie emerged and walked over to the latecomers. Wade put his wrist to his mouth. “Listen to this, Phil.”

  By the time Mai-lis and Addie got to them everyone was standing again. Angrily Val exclaimed, “You said this wouldn’t be dangerous! What the fuck were you doing?”

  “Sorry,” Mai-lis said shortly, with a glance at Addie that Addie ignored. “You weren’t supposed to get here until the operation was over. Thanks for helping us.”

  Others from her group were collecting the fallen figures, hauling them unceremoniously across the ice to the largest blimp. More people, unconscious or paralyzed, were dragged out of the refuge itself. Perhaps a dozen or fifteen all told. The blimp they were being loaded into was considerably bigger than the others, but still, it would be stuffed.

>   Addie’s face was flushed bright pink. “That’s a lock-able gondola,” she explained to Wade and Val and X. “There’s nothing they can do in there. It’s a remotely operated vehicle, and this one’s programmed to fly to a base in the Peninsula, refuel, then fly across the Drake Strait to Chile.”

  “What did you do to them?” Val said.

  “We shot ’em with a thing made for Japanese banks that get robbed or whatever. It messes up muscle control, with ultrasound or taser, I don’t know. A stun gun.”

  “That’s not what they were using,” X pointed out.

  “No, those were real guns they were shooting! Glad they didn’t get you! Nice move there on the senator’s part. Here, come on over, Mai-lis is going to pronounce the verdict and send them on their way.”

  Around the big blimp the whole group had gathered. Carlos was shouting abuse at the people locked behind the gondola’s windows, shaking a finger at them. As they walked over Wade said into his wrist, “Getting this, Phil?”

  He put the phone to his ear. “Hard to hear, Wade, but stay on the air.”

  Some of the captured outlaws had recovered from their neuromuscular incapacitation, and were standing at the windows shouting down at Carlos and the others, red-faced and furious; one crying; one screaming; one pounding the window as hard as she could—she would have put her fist right through the glass if she could have, and damn the consequences. And all unheard through the glass, in the wind and the sound of the blimps’ fans.

  “That’s Ron!” X exclaimed, pointing at the gondola window. “That’s Ron Jasper in there! He joined the ice pirates!”

  Mai-lis was now using a handset walkie-talkie, presumably to speak to those inside on their radio. Wade hurried to her and put his wrist phone right up next to her walkie-talkie’s mouthpiece. Mai-lis nodded at him as she continued to speak.