Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Oh, pretty quickly, pretty quickly.”

  “Two hundred years?”

  “Ha, no, not quite that long. Preliminary reports next year, then see how the lab work is going … full publication a year or two after that, perhaps.”

  “It’s so slow.”

  “It is rather slow. The samples themselves are going north by ship, you know, and won’t be available for study until next spring.”

  The discipline itself was beginning to imitate geological time scales, Wade thought irritably. While politics whizzed on ever faster, science was slowing down; making the two match was like trying to catch neutrinos with the Earth. Little sparks of blue light, that was all. “But—but, you know—people need to know this stuff soon! It needs to be part of the policy debate that’s ongoing right now.”

  The professor gave him a kindly glance. “But that’s your job, right?”

  Wade thought it over.

  “Listen,” Michelson said, looking at his watch, “I’m supposed to be meeting Mai-lis inside. I haven’t seen her in about twenty years.”

  “Oh, sorry. Of course. I’d like to talk with her too, actually. Her group saved us from the midst of all this, up there on Shackleton Glacier.”

  “Is that right? You were in need of salvation?”

  “Yes. We were pinned down by the superstorm, with one of our group sick. Mai-lis’s people picked us up and took us in.”

  “That sounds like her.”

  “You knew her twenty years ago?”

  “Yes. She was a doctor and biologist in the Norwegian program. Unusual. Sylvia knew her too. Let’s see if we can locate her.”

  They went in the galley. The hallways and dining rooms were all crowded, people in a hurry but moving clumsily, like manic zombies. Mai-lis was at one of the round tables in the main galley. It took a long time for Wade to get a chance to talk to her, but at one point she got up to refill her bowl at the soft ice-cream machine, and Wade followed her over. She greeted him pleasantly and handed him an empty bowl.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Thank you for calling me about this meeting. Out of habit I wanted to keep our distance, but on reflection I think it’s a good idea to have come in, to make our own case for ourselves.”

  “Oh good, good. I agree completely. We need your input here if we want to have more than some kind of stand-off, or a partial, what you might call technical solution.”

  “Yes.” She looked at him closely. “And so …”

  “I’ve been thinking about the situation, and I think Senator Chase might be able to do some things for you, concerning the Treaty renewal and so on, making allowances for the kind of thing you are attempting. As part of that effort, to give him more leverage so to speak, I was wondering if you would put me in contact with the satellite photo analyst you mentioned at your camp—you know, the one that was helping you too.”

  “Tell me what you want from him.”

  He explained his reasons, encouraged to see that Mai-lis was nodding as he spoke. When he was done she continued to nod, thinking it over.

  “I’d especially like to talk to him if it’s Sam,” Wade ventured. “In that case he’s doing analysis for Sylvia as well, and I could come to him with a double reference.”

  “Really!” she said, surprised. “Well. Our contact is confidential, you understand, and he’ll want to keep it that way. But given what you want to do, I think he would be willing to talk to you. I’ll give him a call to make sure first, if you don’t mind. Then if he agrees, I can give you the number we use, and his encryption codes.”

  “Thanks, thanks. I’m sure it will help.”

  Mai-lis went back to her table, and Wade stared at the empty bowl in his hand, then put it back and went over to the line for hot food; suddenly he was starving; but he didn’t think he’d ever again be warm enough to eat ice cream.

  At the end of his meal Mai-lis walked by and gave him a phone chip. “Sam says give him a call.”

  “Thanks, Mai-lis. Thanks for everything.”

  “No problem. We Antarcticans have to stick together.”

  “Yes.”

  Wade finished eating and walked over to his room in Hotel California. He inserted the chip into his wrist phone, then pushed the call button.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, I’m Wade Norton, a friend of Mai-lis’s? I’m an assistant to Phil Chase—”

  “Down in Antarctica, yes. In the Hotel California I take it.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Wade said, looking around at the ceiling. “And you must be Sam. Hi. Listen, I’ve been talking to Mai-lis, and to Sylvia, and thinking about the situation down here, and I’ve got some questions for you.”

  “I’ve got some questions for you too.”

  “Oh good, good.”

  Wade pulled a pad of paper out of his briefcase.

  My friends, we are back in McMurdo, on Observation Hill, but our travels are not yet over. Now we have spaces to get through colder even than Antarctica; the timespace of human history, and our life together in these overshoot years. There are more people on this planet than the planet can hold, and how we act now will shape much of the next thousand years, for good or ill. It is a bottleneck in history; the age beyond carrying capacity; the overshoot years; the voyage in an open boat, weighted down beyond its Plimsoll line. There is the possibility for very great tragedy, the greatest ever known.

  But tragedy is not our business. So now we must learn this Earth as closely and completely as our paleolithic ancestors knew it on the savannah; we must know it in the mode they knew it, as scientist and lover wrapped together in one. The loverknower. We must draw the paleolithic and the postmodern together in a single design. I sense the dragon arteries have knotted together on this promontory in such a way as to allow some early precursor glimpse of this knowerlover knot. Because people come to this place to study it, and in doing so they invariably fall in love with it.

  But why, you may well ask, seeing only the cold images I have been sending you. Why fall in love with it, so stripped and bare as it is. I wish I could explain it more clearly. But truly this place beggars the language.

  Still I must try one last time. You see, the air is so clean. Mountains so distant, yet still focused and detailed; as if your eye had become telescopic. Water lying there glossy and compact, like shot silk in the sun. Never have you seen such clarity before, where the spiritual landscape stuffs the visible landscape until it bursts with luminous presence. Seeing things this clearly makes you wonder what the rest of the world would look like in such clean air. Not that more northerly air could ever be as clean as this, so cold and dry, so dustless—but on certain days, on certain mornings, all the world must once have had this clarity, and we the eyes to see it, and the desire to look. It must have been so beautiful.

  And then also, as you see again from this glorious p’ing-yan vantage point on Observation Hill, it is all so big. Big, huge, vast, stupendous, gigantic—I have said these words many times, I know, and still I must say them over and over, until they react in your heads like paper flowers dropped in water, expanding there to their original size. Really very big! Suggestive of the infinite. Immense simplicity and brio, as in the brush strokes of a bold wise painter. Everything in all five dimensions, all visible at once. This too is so lovely.

  Then the mantle of ice provides such elaboration, on microscales you can barely see in my images, scales of vision you can only experience when you look down at your feet as you walk—visions of the infinitely bedded, planed, crosshatched, and contoured textures of snow and ice, prisming everywhere the colors of the rainbow, spiraling inward all the way to the crystalline patterns in snowflakes, spiraling outward to the massive sculptural bulks of the tabular bergs, each one a masterpiece. Beauty is fractal to infinity in both directions.

  Clean, big, icy, prismatical—somehow I feel that I’m still not capturing it. Surely these are not the attributes that make this place so ravishing. Perhaps all beauty h
as a mystery in it that cannot be explained. For this place is beautiful; and once the whole world was beautiful just like this. Seeing the former, we realize the latter. We understand just how beautiful the whole Earth once was.

  And we can make it that way again. On the far side of our hard time I see a returned clarity, as fewer of us get along ever more cleverly, our technologies and our social systems all meshed with each other and with this sacred Earth, in the growing clarity of a dynamic and ever evolving permaculture. Clean air then, not just so we will live longer, but so we can see again. Big things and small things in their right place. It will come. We are the primitives of an unknown civilization. And here that becomes so clear. This primal icescape brims, with chi’s vital breathing, its winds blow clear every nook in our brains, balloons them as it did in the original coevolution; and so when we’re here love fills us, that’s all.

  Then this love for the landscape that is our collective unconscious, this knowerlover’s apprehension of the land’s divine resonance, blossoms outward and northward to encompass the rest of the planet. Love for the planet radiating from the bottom up, like revolution in the soul.

  So it has always been, loving and knowing together; and thus from the moment humans first arrived on this continent, it was the scientists who stepped up and said This is our place.

  And now they have to decide again if that is really so.

  It’s part of a process that has been going on for a long time. For instance, see the town below us. An American town, as in Alaska. Inhabited for generations. A big part of the Antarctic story.

  But only now is it becoming its own place. Because the Americans who founded the town in the International Geophysical Year, a very great feng shui event, were military men. They were there to support scientists, and they made Antarctic culture a military thing. The soldiers and sailors were young men, taken away from women, commanded by older men who for much of their lives had also been away from women, in a social structure that looked back to the hierarchies of an older time. To put it in its simplest terms, there was too much yang.

  In most histories we think of that world dying in the First World War, and being replaced by our ferociously knowing and hermaphroditic modernity. But in Byrd’s expeditions, and the early American stations, you find men living in a nineteenth-century style, in the Peter Pan world that we saw Scott’s men inhabiting some decades before, but now long after most of the rest of society had given it up.

  And slowly this mode of life became harder to maintain. When Scott’s men came back to the world and described what they had done, people said Wonderful, marvelous. But when the United States Navy men returned to the north they were met with incomprehension, and a neglect like contempt. Why bother? people asked. And the men themselves, coming from the uprooted placeless culture of Cold War America, had no way to talk about their experience of this extraordinary continent. As I have said, in any language it is hard to know what to say. But these men were triply dislocated, in language, space and time; they were like the travelers in space stories who fly so fast that relativity effects come into play, and though they are only away for two years as they see it, return to a world several centuries farther on. They were refugees in time.

  This effect, result of the complete but residual preponderance of yang, perhaps accounts for the coarsening of their culture as the years passed. The walls of all the American Antarctic stations were plastered with photos of naked women. The tabletops in the galleys where they ate were covered with pictures of naked women. The thoughts of the sailors stationed there, as far as one can judge by the few records they left, were somehow limited. Their traditions were simple and brutal. One custom had groups of men descending on newcomers, tearing off their clothes and depositing them in a hole in the snow. The Three Hundred Club, where people rush from a two-hundred-degree sauna into a hundred-degree-below-zero night, also dates from this period, as do the ritual swims in holes cut in sea or lake ice. The best parts of this culture no doubt include these attempts to ritualize the experience of the cold; also to celebrate the experience of isolation, as when the winterover crew at the Pole lined up waving on the runway to welcome the first Herc of the spring, every one of them naked and stained bright purple from a bath of tincture-of-violet crystals. But for the most part the record of their lives is a sad litany of Peter Pans become Rip van Winkles.

  Then came a bifurcation point, where the balance of the pattern tipped in a new direction. This moment began as a symbolic gesture of the Cold War. The Russians had sent one of their women into space, and we in China included six Tibetan women in our summit team on Chomolungma. In that geopolitical context, then, six American women were flown to the South Pole station, thus becoming the first women to go there. November 11, 1969. A day of peace in a year of conflict. For some a political gesture, yes—a symbolic gesture. But the meaning of the symbol bifurcated because of what the women did.

  Recall the wrestling boatload of men who first made landfall on the continent. Farce—lovable in its way, but still farce. On Armistice Day of 1969, however, these six American women had a different solution; they joined hands and walked from the plane to the Pole together, so that no one of them could be called first. This struck them as the best way to do it. This was their new story. And thus they began the end of the yang dominance of Antarctica, so militarized and peterpanized; thus they began the start of Antarctica’s entry into the fully human world, a balance of yin and yang, of men and of women, together surging dynamically this way and that, yes even at the very moment we speak.

  Those six women were Lois Jones, Eileen Mc-Saveney, Kay Lindsay, Terry Lee Tickhill, and Pam Young. Wait, that’s only five. What was the name of the sixth woman? I can’t remember. It will come to me. Even if I don’t remember she is still out there.

  In any case, the continent then began to enter what some have called its golden age, the age of the “continent for science,” when Antarctica must be understood as one version of the scientific utopia—a golden age lasting from the arrival of women and the corresponding withdrawal of the military, until the recent nonrenewal of the Antarctic Treaty, just two years ago. The Treaty was an attempt to describe a scientific and utopian relationship of humanity to land, a relationship in which there was no sovereignty but rather a terra communis, a return of the concept of the commons and of commonality, with scientists of all nations, including nations that were at each other’s throats back in the North, cooperating in peace for the good of all. That was indeed a golden moment in history. And though it was very top-heavy in men at first, as was science itself, it became more balanced in men and women every year that passed.

  Of course the balance is not yet here. Nor is there balance anywhere in human affairs, or in the universe at large. Indeed, if ever you are asked to choose between fixists and mobilists, as the two sides were called during the plate-tectonics controversy—or between the stabilists and the dynamicists in the current Sirius debate—always choose the dynamicists. History is on your side.

  And so here and now, in the relentless surge of time, we confront another bifurcation point in history. They come so often! The people gathered in the Chalet discuss what to suggest to the world, after the events of this unusual week. We will try to tell the world how better to live. An empty exercise, you say! Kick the world, break your foot! But everyone does it anyway, I notice. And this is little America, and America is very big. And as you have heard our new friend Carlos say, whatever is true in Antarctica is also true everywhere else. So we must attend very closely to what we do here now.

  I think it is an open question whether Americans can learn the habits of cooperation and sufficiency quickly enough to avoid catastrophe. We in China, so crowded into our middle kingdom, have had to learn long ago that life is cooperation, that life is helping each other for the good of all, including oneself. We have the experience of thousands of years of history, coherently compiled, to guide us; and we have the direct experience of the last century, both g
ood and bad, in making a communal society work. Much of this last century we owe to the example of Chairman Mao, great master of feng shui that he was. Now I know what everyone says—I say it myself—that what Mao did was sixty percent good, forty percent bad. And I have heard the recent joke of the wags in Beijing, that this slogan will keep juggling the figures downward until it reaches 50.1 percent good, 49.9 percent bad. And I know the other saying too, that what is good in Mao all comes from Tao. We will tell this story in all its different ways forever. Whichever version you believe, it is still true that in part because of Mao we have started a bit earlier than the rest of the world in structured cooperation, and this has given us our great power in the twenty-first century. It has also prepared us to change ourselves for the sake of the Earth; we have lived through three one-child family campaigns already, and are slowly reaping the benefits of the resulting stable, even shrinking population. And we are working at making cleaner technologies; we are aware of the problem of the overshoot as few others can be, seeing it every day so clearly in our jammed streets. This is not to say that we never make mistakes. The dam at Three Gorges on the Yangtze, for instance, is a terrible mistake. We must take that dam down and allow the great Yellow River to flow again, or else the ecology as well as the feng shui of our country will never again be right. That dam poisons our land and clogs our thinking.

  And of course we must give Tibet back to the Tibetans, and let them live on their high plateau in peace. That is worse than a mistake; that is a crime. As I have already told you during our walks together on that sacred roof of the world, we add a hundred karmic lives to our atonement every day that the occupation of Tibet continues; already it will take millions of karmic generations for us to atone for what we have done to them. The sooner started the better.

  And of course there are many other disasters of lesser magnitude as well, some that face us specifically as Chinese, others that belong to all the world together. But we can face them. Everyone has at least part of the habit of cooperation; this too is part of lovingknowing; for science is above all else a community of trust. The true scientist has to be intent on cooperation in a communal enterprise, or it will not work at all. And to the extent that we know well, and love deeply, we are all true scientists. So we will keep inventing that community of trust.