Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “—ninety percent voted on exile, and exile it is. You are not to return on pain of death. Remember this lesson in your new life in the north.” She stared up at them. The look in her little Sami eyes was cold. She made a gesture, and one of her group manipulated another handset, and the big blimp cut away from its anchors and shot up on the wind, spinning its prisoners into the clouds.

  After that Val and X and Wade and Carlos were led inside the pirate’s lair, as Addie called it. It was much deeper than the refuge they had been taken to, extending far back into the ice, in a gigantic tunnel of the purest blue. There they found box after box stacked against the walls, and gear of all kinds. At the rear of the tunnel squatted a big yellow vehicle that reminded Wade of a road construction earthmover.

  “That’s it!” X yelled. “That’s my SPOT train’s caboose!”

  “Told you,” Addie said. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll give you the GPS coordinates for this place, so Mac Town can recover this stuff.”

  When they were airborne again she said over the intercom, “Whew! I’m glad that’s over! Thanks for helping us out. Sorry to get you there early, but I wanted to be in on it to tell you the truth. I hate those bastards, them and their obtainium. As if they could do whatever they wanted.”

  “So will you kill them if they return?” Wade asked.

  “Nah. Unlikely. I suppose it could happen, but in reality we’d probably just try to zap them and ship them out again. The truth is they probably won’t come back. They wouldn’t get any help from anyone else, and you need to be part of the whole feral scene down here to make a real go of it. So even if they did come back they’d just be like those trekker guys, out wandering on their own. It’s not the same as making your living down here.”

  “But I don’t see how you do it,” Wade insisted. “The gear you have here must cost a lot more money than you can make.”

  A long pause, filled by the sounds of the wind and the fan’s buzz. “Well, you know,” Addie said. “We have our audiences, just like most of the groups down here. Sponsor audiences I mean. Weren’t any of your clients sending out reports on their trek?” she asked Val.

  “Yeah sure,” Val said. “Ta Shu was. Still is, I suppose, if he can transmit.”

  “Well, we do a bit of that too. And some of the companies that make this stuff like the prototypes tested hard. So we have some alliances.”

  “But the Antarctic Treaty,” Wade said again. Once again he had his wrist phone wedged between his right ear and the headset, and he was trying to imagine what Phil would want to ask. He supposed Phil could even have asked his own questions, but he was keeping quiet, and Wade could see how that might be the easiest way to do things.

  “Yeah yeah, the Treaty. In suspension now, right? And even when it was active it was only paper. Its values were so pure because the stakes were so small! As soon as oil exploration’s become economical, non-Treaty nations are down here sniffing around, and the Treaty governments are jockeying for position above them. There was never any enforcement to the Treaty, see? No one was going to come down here and zap offenders and ship them out like we just did. The French, they signed the Treaty and then bulldozed a big airstrip right through a penguin rookery near their station. Greenpeace went down there and stood right at the bottom of the slope where the bulldozers were pushing rocks, and the bulldozer drivers just kept on driving. Nearly killed a few Greenpeacers. That was the most dangerous thing they did, I think, worse than driving Zodiacs in front of those Japanese mama whalers. Greenpeace did some great things down here if you ask me, they really made a difference. And without blowing people up, like these whoevers we’re dealing with now. But they couldn’t do it all, because everyone was breaking the Treaty. The Russians broke the treaty, the Poles broke the Treaty, the Americans broke the Treaty, you should see the bottom of the bay off McMurdo! We were as bad as anybody until Greenpeace went down there and poured trash from the dump onto the floor of the Chalet right in the middle of a big meeting. That was so great. The NSF rep went nuts and forbade any of us from talking to any Greenpeacer, and retired end of that season. But it got NSF to think things over. And at the same time the Environmental Defense Fund was suing them back in Washington for breaking NEPA. It was a pincer attack, really. So NSF got religion then, but it was Greenpeace that did it, Greenpeace and EDF. No, the Treaty’s been abused, you take my word for it! There was too much else going on in the world for anyone to risk making anyone mad over a little thing like Antarctica. So the Treaty was there, but no one paid much attention to it except for when it suited them. So, you know. Mai-lis keeps us in compliance with the Treaty like a kindergarten teacher, better than most countries when you actually look at what the thing says. We register all the animals we kill for food and do science on them so we’re no different than the scientists really, except we eat the data when we’re done with it. And Art Devries does that too. So, you know. You can’t expect us to take the Treaty too seriously.”

  “Unless it gets you kicked off the continent.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.” She shook her head. “That’s why these bastards we shipped out, and whoever it was blowing up the oil stations and messing with coms …” A gust of wind swirled the blimp around, and Addie wrestled with the controls and did not finish the thought. “Come on.”

  “What brought you down here?” Wade asked her.

  “Airplane.” Another laugh. “No no, I know. I’m from Alabama, right? I never had a thought about Antarctica in my life. If you’d of asked me I’d have said it was some kind of radiator fluid. But I was selling some land, and a man came to look at it, we talked for a while. I’ve been a plumber since I was ten, and a carpenter, electrician—my daddy was a contractor, and I did it all. And then after my Army days I was flying helos for Louisiana Pacific. So I was telling this man about all that, and showing him a well and pumphouse we built, and telling him about us, and he said, Did you ever think of working in Antarctica? And I said, Why no—I never did.” Laugh. “It turned out he was from ASL, and he thought I’d make a good Carhartt. Which I did, for a while.”

  “In McMurdo?” X asked.

  “And the Pole. Five summers and two winterovers. Then my second winter at the Pole, I was shown some things….”

  “Like the water slide?” Wade asked.

  “Yeah, how do you know about that? Who are you again? Oh yeah, the senator.”

  “I’m not actually the senator.”

  “Water slide?” X said. He and Val were looking around at Wade.

  “So you went feral,” Wade prompted Addie.

  “Yeah. One day I was out emptying a Herc, completely toast, and I looked up and there was a skua flying around. They get blown in to the Pole occasionally, but I didn’t know that then, and when I saw it I thought it was, I don’t know. God. And that very night Herb asked me if I was interested in lighting out for the territory, and I thought of that skua and said you bet, and never looked back.”

  “You don’t regret losing …” A loud gust of wind drowned him out.

  “Losing what?”

  “The world!”

  That sweet laugh. “What’s to miss? The world’s just a big ASL, you know that. Driving in boxes to go sit in other boxes, and look at little boxes—that’s no way to live. Even building the boxes is no great thrill after the first fifty or so. No, I don’t miss anything about the world. Except Tahiti of course!” Laugh. “And I go there every winter.”

  “You don’t winter over?”

  “No way. I’ve done it twice, and that’s at least once too many. Life is too short. Of course I’m committed to wintering over one year every seven, to help keep things going. But I haven’t hit seven yet, and when I do I’ll have to think it over. See if I can buy out. Even quit maybe. Nah, but I’ll think of something. Maybe I’ll take a paired assignment if I find the right guy, that’s the only way to do it, just hibernate and spend the whole winter in bed staying warm.”

  “So most of you don’t
winter over,” Val said.

  “No. Just a maintenance crew, like Mac Town or Pole. We’re Antarcticans, okay, but we aren’t masochists, except for some I could name. We do it ’cause it’s fun. The whole point is to stay flexible. Nomads, you know. That’s how the Eskimos and the Sami do it too. So it’s Tahiti in the winter for most of us, or New Zealand or Alaska or wherever. But hell, I’ll winter here again if I have to, to help things along.”

  Below them a rift in the clouds appeared, and they could see parts of a vast broad glacier, flanked by black peaks. “That looks like the Beardmore,” Val said.

  “Well, let’s not talk about that. And if you would pass on checking your GPS I would appreciate it,” she added, glancing back at Wade.

  “Where are you taking us?” Wade asked.

  “Your final destination is Mac Town, of course. But first we’re going to Quviannikumut, to refuel. And I think Mai-lis wants you to see something other than our dark side, so to speak. Dirty laundry—law enforcement.” She shook her head. “Those bastards.”

  “It sounds like Mai-lis is really quite an authority,” Wade noted.

  “Well, someone’s gotta do it. She’s the big mama, no doubt about that. The democracy stuff can only go so far before it becomes chaos. Someone’s got to have the final word, or the first word anyway, and that’s Mai-lis.”

  “I wonder what brought her down here.”

  “You’ll have to ask her that. But I think I remember her saying she had gotten mighty sick of Norwegians. They treat the Sami like we treat Indians, you know? Ah—there’s Quviannikumut, see?”

  Wade saw nothing but white clouds.

  “Means to feel deeply happy. Nice name, eh? Okay, down we go. Come on, you dog. Down boy! Down!”

  white white white

  white green white

  white white white

  Val walked into Quviannikumut amazed. It was a big shelter, much bigger than the first refuge they had been taken to: a modular assemblage of clear tenting covering several ragged embayments of a dolerite slope, which ran down gently into an ice surface that then rose up over the shore, so that fingers of rock and ice intertwined. The rock had the mazelike quality of the Labyrinth in Wright Valley, so that little canyons crossed higher on the slope and became sunken rooms. The smooth blue ice peninsulas bulking into the embayments were part of a larger glacier, or the polar cap itself—in the flying mist of the storm it was impossible to say—and the ice too had been incorporated into the shelter, honeycombed with tunnels and open-roofed chambers and long blue galleries. And all under the keening flight of the flying white cloud, so that it seemed a village under glass. It was beautiful.

  All Val’s clients from the other blimps were already gathered in what appeared to be a dining hall; so that was okay, and she relaxed. Or began to relax; it was going to take some time to unwind. They were having another big meal, it seemed, dipping krill cakes in salsa, and talking with other diners around them. Jack appeared to be recovering; he was wearing a sling and regaling one of the feral women, a tall Scandinavian blonde, with the story of their crossing of Mohn Basin. “A matter of pacing yourself.” Jim and Jorge and Elspeth were interrogating the cook. Carlos was talking to another Latino contingent in Spanish; Ta Shu was looking out at the icescape beyond the refuge, nodding enthusiastically. “A very good place!” X and Wade were behind her, crowding in, still chatting with Addie. It was loud; things were turning raucous as they celebrated the exile of the ice pirates.

  “Pretty hard,” Val remarked to Mai-lis. “Presumably they liked being down here.”

  Mai-lis shrugged. “They brought it on themselves. And it’s not as if we’ve thrown them in prison.”

  She took Val and Wade and X around the shelter, and Ta Shu joined them. Several of the little ravines upslope from the ice were in effect greenhouses, sealed off from the rest of the camp by triple lock doors. Inside these canyonettes vegetables and grains covered the floors and walls, most growing hydroponically, some in soil boxes and big glass terraria. The roofs were clear. “On sunny days the fabric goes white. From above no one can see,” Mai-lis said. “We shift this work from place to place to follow the sun. We try to grow as much as we can. Of course it is not enough, but we are getting closer. It’s wonderful how productive modern greenhouses can be.”

  Wade asked a lot of questions, as he had with Addie; he was clearly fascinated by the whole phenomenon. “What are the staples of your diet, then?”

  “Fish, of course. And krill cakes. Being indigenous in Antarctica means being coastal and living off the sea most of the time, because there is nothing inland to live on. Fortunately with the Ross Ice Shelf gone the Transantarctics are themselves coastal, which is good. So we can live here as well as around the rest of the coastline. And up on the cap too, in the summer, to cross to the far coasts. Or just to be up there.”

  “But why?” Wade said.

  “Well, because we like it.” She smiled, for the first time that Val had seen. “You gain a lot by being out in the world. And at this point technology has advanced to the point where we are allowed to practice a very sophisticated form of nomadic existence. Not hunting and gathering, but hunting and doing mobile agriculture. And clothing is so advanced that in most ways it functions as your house. That’s a good thing. It means you can travel very lightly on the land and still be sheltered. It isn’t like being truly exposed. As you found out, yes?”

  “It still felt pretty exposed to me,” X said.

  “Yes, but it’s partly a matter of getting used to how well it works. Of learning to trust it. Think what it used to be like! Occasionally we remind ourselves of that by going out in the old gear, just so we know what we have now. Also it’s a way of doing honor to the first explorers, to remind us what they endured. They were the first Antarcticans, you see. They loved it too.”

  Val said, “You have some of their outfits here?”

  “Facsimiles of their outfits, made for adventure travel groups reproducing the old expeditions in every detail.”

  “Ah yes,” Val said. “I know that stuff. I did a couple of those trips.”

  “We bought it heavily discounted.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Mai-lis led them into the next module of the shelter, rock-walled under a rock-colored tent roof. This was the bedroom; the sleeping chambers were little individual cubicles, curtained off from each other and the hallway down the middle.

  “It looks pretty cramped,” Wade noted.

  “When we are indoors things are tight,” Mai-lis said. “An exercise in efficiency. But we don’t spend that much time in any one place, so it doesn’t bother us. And it’s a pleasure to design a new way of living. All kinds of possibilities are opening up. These are important to explore in such a world as ours. Lars talks about a Plimsoll line. Do you know this term? It’s the line on a ship’s hull marking the maximum load possible. He says the world has sunk below its Plimsoll line, weighted down by people. He has worked out how much total energy each person alive today could burn and yet the world altogether still remain above its Plimsoll line. It’s not very much. Less than you would think.”

  “Is that why you live down here?” Wade asked. “To ease population pressures up north?”

  “Oh no. Antarctica can never do that, its carrying capacity is magnitudes smaller than the scale of the problem. People everywhere have to reduce their numbers, that is the only solution at this point. Population reduction and climate stabilization are the same thing now. No, we live here because we like it. And it may also be a way to think about how people should live everywhere. But we do it because it gives us pleasure.”

  “You must burn some fuel to keep this place going,” X said. “I can hear a generator.”

  Mai-lis smiled. “You sound like a fundie. What if we fueled it with whale oil, would that make you happy? A local renewable resource?”

  X shrugged.

  “We have a better way still in some places,” Mai-lis said. “Where they ex
ist we have drilled down into geothermal areas, and we heat those refugia with hot springs. They are the best of all.”

  Wade said, “Is that generator we hear the one from old old Pole Station?”

  Mai-lis nodded. “It is. And it’s a problem, because its fuel is an antique mixture we have to brew specially. But serviceable, as you hear.”

  At the far end of that ravine corridor, the tenting closed to the ground in a vestibule door. Beyond it the rooms continued out into the blue bulk of the glacier, the ice carved into elaborate pillars and ceilings. Their blimp pilot Lars was out there, and when he saw them he waved for them to come out. “Yes, let’s take a look,” Mai-lis said. “We’re dressed warmly enough, it’s kept just below freezing out there, you’ll see.”

  They went through the vestibule and out into the ice gallery, and indeed it was not very much colder than the rock-walled rooms had been. As they moved farther out they could see how much of the ice had been carved into rooms and chambers; it looked like an entire lobe of the glacier had been honeycombed, some of it tented, the rest open to the air, and all of it sculpted like one of the great festival ice villages of Scandinavia, but on a truly vast scale, with one immense courtyard entirely devoted to smooth-sided blue ice statuary.

  “This is amazing!” Wade exclaimed, pressing up against a clear wall to look out at the untented sculpture garden. “Who—how—”

  Lars joined Wade at the wall, more friendly than he had yet been. “This was not just us fooling around. This is the work of one of the artists from McMurdo. He applied to NSF to use the new ice borers to do this to the end of the Canada Glacier in the Dry Valleys, and they refused him. So he spent all his time in McMurdo making snowmen and pretending that that was all he was doing, but in the meantime he made three trips out here to do this. No one pays much attention to what those Woos do once they get in the field, and somehow he found us, and we brought him here when we were building this refuge. I was with him when he did this, and I felt like Rilke with Rodin, I tell you.”