Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “I can see why,” Wade said, nose pressed into the clear fabric. “What a sense of form.”

  “Yes. He was a true artist. The ice borer was like his fingers. And you must understand, the ice did not look like this when he finished with it. He was planning on the ice to sublime away, so that the sculptures would change in time as they ablated. There was no way to be sure exactly how they would diminish, so there is an aleatory element to it. But he wanted to know the prevailing winds, to try to shape what would happen. And this is how it looks now. A few more years and the wind will blow it all away.”

  “Wow.”

  “He changed the way we thought about ice borers. About what we should be doing out here with the refugia.”

  Ta Shu, grinning, thumped himself on the chest. “I too am a Woo.”

  “Is that so?” Lars asked, interested.

  X pointed across the glacier to the next tented embayment, which appeared stuffed with mist. “What’s that?”

  “That’s the sauna,” Mai-lis said. “A way to relax and get warm after a day outside. My next destination, if you don’t mind. Feel free to join me if you want.”

  She led them back around and past the sleeping tent, to the door of a big damp changing room, where piles of clothes were stacked neatly or otherwise on a rock bench against a rock wall. She went inside and stripped down to blue smartfabric long underwear, then stepped through a zipdoor in a clear wall, down into a long room stuffed with mist, a steaming pool at its bottom. Most of the people in the shelter appeared already to be down there. The pool floored one long room of the tent, where the rock embayment dipped in a basin that had been filled waist-high with hot water. The clear tent wall came down beyond the pool, just before the ice of the glacier, which curved down like a blue wave about to crash onto them.

  Val stripped down to her underwear and jogger top, not looking at X or Wade, who were studiously not looking at her, staggering and crashing into each other as they got out of their clothes too. She went through the inner door into the pool room. Inside it was shockingly hot and wet. Here one could not really see the blue glacier overhanging the far end of the room; that side of the room was simply bluer mist than the mist around her. She walked into the pool and sank to her neck, then sat on a rock bench set a little higher. Hot! Hot! And oh so luxurious. Suddenly it seemed she had been cold for months.

  The sauna was above the pool, its benches in a little tent around a steamer. All the air was steam; in there it must have been simply hotter steam. Voices were confined by the rock walls, and the watery clangor was loud. Val sat and watched the faces. She had not slept in three days, or four—for so long that it was too much trouble to figure out just exactly how long—and so she was deep into the exhausted buzzed insomnia that all Antarcticans experienced from time to time, when for one reason or another you stayed awake for so long that it felt like you would never sleep again. Stunned, detached, disembodied; although there were bodies everywhere in the water and the mist, pink and brown shapes against the blurry blue ice; including her own body, relaxing at last, her hand pulsing pinkly there in front of her face, every detail of it microscopically distinct, the skin very obviously semitransparent. But her consciousness was well detached from that pink thing. Many of the ferals were naked; others were in bathing suits or underwear or longjohns, the smartfabrics so smart that they would dry on the body almost as soon as one got out; even immersed in the pool Val felt a layer of warm dry fabric against her skin, where she was clothed. Looking down at her pink skin from a point of view that seemed distinctly higher than her own head, Val was glad to be somewhat covered; even so she was a shocking sight, she felt, as she had been torn up badly in her two falls, and had had other accidents and surgeries; scars everywhere, so that it seemed to her a very Bride of Frankenstein sort of body, stitched together from various parts that did not match very well. Oh well. X was sitting beside her in his longjohns, making the perfect Frankenstein to her Bride; big, massive, graceless. It was a comfort to have him there. They made a kind of pair, like a couple of football players, linebacker and nose guard, soaking away their bruises after a hard game.

  Wade on the other hand was very slim and lithe. Now swimming around the hot bath like an otter. A good-looking man. Lars too was very attractive, in Norse god style; a face that reminded her of Sting. No fat on him. The ferals’ bodies showed they worked hard out here, which did not surprise Val in the least.

  Mai-lis stood in the center of the bath, round and wrinkled, listening to Carlos and Ta Shu. The big mama. The three of them were circulating slowly, and coming toward Val and X through other knots of conversation. Living out here. Making their living out here. X leaned into Val, gestured at the three approaching them. “We’re so damn lucky. Here’s a Chilean and a Chinese and a Laplander talking, and they use English to do it.”

  “You can thank the Brits for that.”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s true,” Carlos was insisting to Ta Shu and Mai-lis, “and if it is true in Antarctica then it is true everywhere, this is what I say!”

  Ta Shu squinted, uncertain. “Colder here. People cannot so easily live off land.”

  “True,” Carlos said, “but people can’t easily live off the land anywhere! So true here, true there, just like I said! Where in the world could a person be put outdoors and find an easy time living off the land? It’s not so easy!”

  “I suppose not,” Ta Shu said, thinking it over. “Savannah, maybe.”

  “But if we can do it here,” Mai-lis said, “then everywhere else it can only be easier. That’s why I don’t agree with the fundies that we should use only things we can make down here. There is no reason for an artificial exercise like that. It’s the latest technologies that make what we do here possible. When your clothes are your house, and your tent is your farm, then you can go where you please. Even Antarctica can be inhabited, as you see.”

  Higher voices cut through the clangor, and Carlos looked at the door. “Are those kids I hear? Hey, look! Some boys and girls!”

  Indeed it was true; a pack of kids like wild animals crashed down into the water and started splashing each other, oblivious to the adults in the bath.

  “I did not know this!” Carlos said. “You didn’t tell us about this!”

  “Oh yes,” Mai-lis said. “We have quite a few families down here, and they tend to clump together so the kids will have company. This refuge is a big family camp.”

  “Now this is what you need!” Carlos exclaimed. “These are Antarcticans, you see? This is all they know. This is how I was brought up—we didn’t have a spa like this of course, I wish we had, but there were fifteen kids in Bernardo O’Higgins when I grew up there, I could name them all to you and tell you everything about them, right up to this very day! They are my brothers and sisters, I tell you. X, X, this is how I grew up, look at them!”

  “I am,” X assured him.

  “You must have many memories of that place,” Ta Shu said.

  “Oh my God. My God yes. One time in Bernardo,” Carlos said, talking to them all now, including Jim, who had joined them and was regarding him very closely: “One time I was four years old, and I was fascinated by the bulldozer we had for snowplowing, I liked to sit with the driver and drive it, you know. And one day I went out there by myself and climbed up into it, just to pretend, and you know how a bulldozer will start with just a push of the ignition when the key is left in—well, I pushed the button and the engine started, and it had been left in low gear, and it took off. I didn’t know what to do, I was too scared to move. And the bulldozer had been parked pointed toward a cliff that fell directly down into the sea ice, which was thin. So the bulldozer ran toward that cliff, and I could see it coming but I couldn’t figure out what to do, and someone inside the dining hall saw me out the window and they all came running out, and they were running for me as hard as they could, my father in front, I saw his face so clearly, I can still see it. And yet they would not have reached me in tim
e, because the bulldozer was very close to the cliff. But then the bulldozer stopped. The engine conked out, you know, it misfired and died. They looked at it later, and it had fuel and ran smoothly and everything. But it stopped at the edge of the cliff! And everyone carried me back inside. It’s practically the first thing I can remember.”

  “You are a true Antarctican,” Ta Shu declared.

  “Yes, yes yes yes yes. Antarctica said to me, Okay, you can live, Carlos. But you must remember. You must serve me.”

  Then a bunch of people from the sauna were rushing through the pool toward the lock at the end of the tent, the lock leading outside. “Come on!” Addie said to them as she passed (stuffed in a flowery swimsuit, pink, sexy), “come on y’all, it’s a hundred fifty Fahrenheit in the sauna and fifty below outside if you count windchill! You can join the Two Hundred Club with an asterisk, not quite the Three Hundred Club but very exclusive nevertheless!”

  “Oh God,” X said, not moving.

  “I’ve heard of this,” Val said. “It’s like the polar dip at Mac Town.”

  “A heart attack waiting to happen.” He glanced at her. “You want to try it?”

  “No…. Ah hell, why not. I’m so spaced, it might wake me up.”

  He grinned. “If it doesn’t then nothing’s going to.”

  They stood, and in that movement Val saw suddenly that he was relaxed. As they sloshed down the pool she thought disjointedly about this. It had been true pretty much since she had run into him and the others at Roberts. Not hangdog and accusatory as in McMurdo. Not that he hadn’t had cause! Because he had. And still did. But he seemed to have forgiven her. And she hadn’t even apologized. She clutched his arm for balance as they kicked into cold tennis shoes next to the lock, clutched it hard as they crowded into the lock with others. “Keep a hand on the safety line,” Val said to him. “It could be extra windy in the slot between the tent and the ice.”

  “Do you think they’ll have a safety line?”

  “Shit.”

  They crowded out the door with the others.

  Instant cold, a brutal slam of it everywhere at once. The wind poured right through her and her skin snap-froze. Everyone was shouting, and she realized she was too. Steam was erupting off them and flying downwind; they were pink firecrackers, exploding steam! The cold was astonishing. Val felt a moment of pure fear, as it occurred to her that this is what the end would feel like in Antarctica; this was death; then she was laughing at the insanity of it, people trying to dig snowballs out of a snowbank hard as concrete, screaming, all the steaming pink skin glowing in the dim omnidirectional light; seeing it all without sunglasses, through a torrent of tears freezing on her cheeks; her underwear and jogger top freezing solid. Brass bra like an amazon. Amazed laughter.

  Then all at once they were jostling back into the lock, then crashing desperately down into the water and shrieking even louder at the heat. Val’s skin was blasted all over again by the hot/cold assault on her stunned capillary system, the two sensations of freezing and boiling merged into a single burn. Shrieks and hollers all around. She had to laugh. “What a rush.”

  After that sensory detonation everything was rendered hyperlucid. Her skin needled and burned; she saw everything in a kind of twenty-ten vision. Sleepiness had vanished utterly, she felt like she would never sleep again. All her muscles were melting inside her but her mind remained alert, as hypersensitive as her skin.

  And so a very strange state indeed, as she observed the ferals and their refuge. She got out of the pool before she melted entirely, and put on undershirt and pants, and wandered around just looking, free from all responsibility. All the rooms were warmer now, and people were dressed in various degrees of clothing, many still in their drying long underwear. Some rooms looked like they were shooting a special Antarctic issue of the Victoria’s Secret catalog, and Jack had found one of these, and was telling a couple of the Scandinavian women about something. Jim was at the dining room table conversing with Ta Shu and Carlos, intent about something or other: I do social law, but that’s where you can see that unless the system itself changes … Jorge and Elspeth were back talking to the cook, Jorge taking notes on a little pad of paper. Recipes for an article. The ferals were not going to be hidden very much longer.

  There were about as many women as men among them, Val noted as she walked around. If that were true generally then it would be a first in Antarctic history. So there were some firsts left after all.

  And the women there were a capable-looking crowd, reminding her in many ways of her lunch group in Mac Town. Scandinavians, Japanese, Eskimo, Kiwi, whatever. Muscled or round, tall, short, scarred and beat up, underfed or nicely blubbered; very few classic beauties in this crowd, though there were a few analogs to Lars there too. All of them looked good to Val. They liked to spend their time out in the wilderness, working hard. And they were doing that without being part of the tourism industry. Some kind of high-tech polar hunter and farmer life. What do you do for a living? I hunt and farm. I farm the ice. She had to laugh.

  And when she stopped and asked one of the women about it, about the way they lived, the woman was instantly friendly. She had a German accent; she said, “Come with us now, we’re going to empty traps in the bay.” Val was still sloshing around inside her skin, her muscles turned to Jell-O; but this was her chance to do this, and another might never come.

  So she told Ta Shu and Jim where she was going, and geared back up, and left the tent with a group of five women. Back into the rush of frozen mist; but in her clothes it was not so bad, the spacesuit effect very distinctly felt after their exposed wet foray outside; she was in the wind but protected, warm, disconnected. Geared up! It was pretty remarkable how protected they were. And it was by no means as windy as it had been on the Shackleton Glacier.

  They followed a rope line, an Ariadne thread the woman called it, down the glacier to a very broad ice staircase, cut into the side of an ice slope with one of the laser borers. They were on a piedmont glacier, Val saw, or a remnant of the Ross Ice Shelf itself. So this camp was located where the Transantarctics dropped into the Ross Sea, tucked into some rock outcrop like Mount Betty. Iceberg fragments of the old shelf dotted the misty sea ice offshore, like a vast city of white buildings slowly dispersing into the distance. Visibility fluctuated in the cloud; sometimes she could see a few meters, other times a few kilometers, but all within the rushing cloud.

  Down on the cracked surface of the sea ice there was a little fish hut, beside a round hole that had refrozen. They took turns breaking the new ice with a crowbar, Val taking a single whack and then passing the bar along, as she judged she was a danger to them all. Then she helped haul up on a chain, her mitted hands chilling swiftly, first throbbing with dull cold pain, then numbing to the point they became only big fat gloved things at the ends of her arms. She did windmills to return feeling to them, then helped the other women lift up the metal trap at the end of the chain. Out of the hole it came, splashing water that froze on the ice in seconds. Inside was a big mawsoni, and they stood back and watched as it thrashed out its life, everyone silent and intent. “What a dragon,” one said emphatically after it was dead. They opened the trap; it was like an elongated lobster trap, with a door people could unhook. They hauled out the dead monster and laid it on a banana sled. Val took one end of the sled, and helped the Germanic woman who had invited her out to carry the sled up the steps cut into the broken slope of the ice shelf. She could feel the exhaustion of the long walk across Mohn Basin in her legs; she was tired, very tired.

  Then they hauled the fish over the ice, tromping back up to the camp slow step after slow step. In harness and pulling a sled again. It felt like a long way, going uphill and into the wind. The cloud flew right at them over the ice; everything white; not a classic whiteout, in the sense of losing all horizon and distance, but a blustery needle mist flowing right on the white glacier. Val was beat, her legs quivering and tweaking, on the edge of cramps. But her mind was sharp, nee
dling inside her like her thawing hands. She felt full. The haul through the white wind suddenly ballooned: it took forever, it was the whole world, and she there in it completely, seeing it all in exquisite detail, the surface of the glacier as textured and semitransparent as her skin in the pool, everything flowing but still, everything in its place. She hit her stride and pulled forever.

  Back in the refuge she sat again in the dining room, warming up by the stove, listening to the people around her talk. “All the Eskimos I’ve seen have had to learn snowcraft all over again, they’ve been living in pickup trucks or off their government grants. Either too poor or too rich. But what stayed with them was their values. Eskimos think it’s important to be happy. You’re supposed to react to difficult situations cheerfully. A happy person is considered a capable person, a good person. Unhappy people are thought to be deficient in some significant respect. It isn’t acknowledged to be an appropriate response. You have to face up to Naartsuk, that was their storm spirit, the biggest god in their pantheon. They don’t seem religious anymore, but they definitely still believe in Naartsuk.”

  Carlos was telling people at Val’s table about arrowheads found on the Peninsula, indicating visits by prehistoric peoples in boats, no doubt from Chile. Also ancient maps which showed a surprisingly accurate Antarctic coastline, some of them even appearing to map what the deglaciated coastline would be, as if the civilization had been ancient beyond knowledge. Ta Shu was shaking his head at this, murmuring “No, no. Von Daniken, very bad. We are first here, we have that obligation.” Wade too seemed dubious about the possibility of previous Antarctic humans: “Is not possible,” he repeated more than once. “Is not possible.”

  Many of the ferals, however, seemed to disagree. “There were beech forests here for millions of years,” one of the German women said. She had pulled a foot-powered sewing machine over to the table, and with Lars’s help was sewing together pieces of what looked like seal fur. “Who knows what else might have lived here?”