The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The hutkeepers outfitted her with warm clothing, with climbing boots and crampons, and an outerwear suit like a pair of overalls but lined with down. A kind of spacesuit, it seemed to her. Also a climber’s helmet, and a harness to wear around her waist and thighs.

  I don’t think I like this plan, Mary said.

  It will be all right, Priska said. The Fründenjoch is not that hard.

  I don’t like the sound of that, Mary said. She knew that not that hard, when talking about the Alps, was Swiss-speak for fucking hard. And she knew that joch meant pass. Meaning probably the low point at the head of their basin, up there above the glacier they had visited the day before. There had been a notch up there in the cliff over the ice, the cliff which was a walled-off section of the crest of the great Berner Oberland. Once you knew to look for it, the notch was visible even from the hut. But the day before, she had seen that the black rock below the notch had looked completely vertical. Not that hard— right!

  At 2 AM they went out into the frigid night. There was no moon, but illuminated by stars the basin walls glowed as if with a black interior light of their own. Their headlamps speared the night and illuminated variable circles and ellipses of rough stone ground ahead of them. Mary was roped up between Thomas and Priska, with Sibilla and Jurg on another line beside them. They all had headlamps on their climbing helmets, so no one looked at each other as they spoke.

  After a couple hours of walking up the stony slope, Mary huffing and puffing and warming up throughout her body, all except for her nose, ears, toes, and fingertips, they came to the foot of the glacier remnant. After that they scrambled up the left lateral moraine, which was composed of loose boulders held poorly in ice-crusted sand. Then Mary had to focus on getting up onto the ice side of the glacier itself. The slope of white ice they were proposing to ascend was tilted at about forty-five degrees, maybe more; it was therefore crampon work, a hard little climb. She had never done anything like it. They sat her down and helped her strap the crampons onto her boots, and handed her an ice ax, and after that, when she kicked the ice of the glacier, the front points of her crampons bit into it very nicely. With a good kick it became like standing on the step of a ladder, a step which was really just her stiff-bottomed boot, stuck in place. Rather amazing. Up the side of the glacier she went, kick, kick, kick. With the rope extending up from her to Thomas, who was already up on the flatter top of the glacier, it was almost simple.

  Then she was walking on the glacier’s top with the rest of them, and feeling her crampon’s downward-pointing points stick into the ice surface with every step. Sometimes she sank a bit and then stuck, piercing a layer of hard snow. That was firn, Priska told her. Good to walk on. In fact it was quite strange. Mary found she preferred the bare ice, where she stuck instantly with each step, remaining almost a full crampon tooth’s height above it. She had to free her feet with little jerks at each step, then step a little high when moving her feet forward, or she would catch a spike and trip. After she stepped and stuck, she couldn’t have slid her foot even if she wanted to. That was reassuring. The boots they had equipped her with were a little too large for her feet, she thought; sliding around inside the boots was the only give in the whole process.

  None of this was comfortable for her, it wasn’t her kind of thing. She wondered if the whole adventure was even necessary, but didn’t want to ask about that, as it would sound like a criticism. And if she was in danger, they were in danger, and yet of course they were sticking with her, it was their job. So she did what they told her to without any commentary of that sort. The fact that they thought this was necessary was quite frightening, actually, if she allowed herself to think about it. Which she didn’t. She focused on the ice underfoot, on her breathing.

  They crunched up the high glacier at a steady pace. The creak and scritch of their crampon straps and points were the only sounds. Once they heard the clatter of a rock falling. Other than that, windless silence. Black sky, filled with stars. Milky Way almost setting in the west, like a noctilucent cloud. Thomas was following a series of flags that flew from wooden sticks, set into cans filled to the top with cement. Mary shuddered to think of carrying the cans up here, they had to weigh twenty kilos at least, but now they stayed put, and guided the way up to the pass. Priska said they were threading some crevasse fields. They would move the flags when the glacier’s ice moved, she said, although that wasn’t such a problem on this one, which had melted up to a kind of minimum remnant, an almost stationary ice field. Priska and Sibilla tried to point out some crevasses to her as they passed them, but Mary couldn’t see them. Slight depressions in the snow blanketing the ice; maybe firn rather than ice; she would have walked right over them. A bad idea. Walking by one of the flags, she saw by her headlamp glare that both cans and flags were painted orange. By starlight they were gray.

  After two hours of this ascent, they came to the top of the glacier and faced the black rock of the pass. There was a short and steep-sided gap between the ice of the glacier and the black rock. This gap was the bergschrund, they told her. Famous for presenting a problem in getting from glaciers onto headwalls, sometimes a terrible problem. Happily this bergschrund had a staircase of sorts hacked into the ice side under their feet, its shallow irregular steps much punctured by crampon tips, leading down to the black rock and ice blocks junking up the bottom of the dark little ravine. Tricky work, once they got down there; Priska and Thomas actually took her by the hands and watched her footwork with her, and she took their support gratefully. I’m fifty-eight years old, she wanted to tell them. This isn’t my kind of thing. I’m a city gal. From the bottom of the slash it was eerie to look up and see just a narrow band of stars overhead.

  On the rock side of the bergschrund they climbed by spiking their crampon tips into cracks in the rock. This seemed like a bad idea, but in fact her boots stuck on the rock even more firmly than they had into ice. And the rock wall proved to have setbacks in it, almost regular enough as to have been cut by and for people, though Priska said they weren’t.

  Then they topped the wall, and were hiking scratchily, as if on tiny stilts, over almost flat slabs of black rock, leading them slightly up between vertical black walls to each side of them. It looked like a roofless hallway, carved by Titans. Priska, in full tour guide mode despite or because of the surreal weirdness of it all, told her that joint faults in the rock had allowed the glacier, when it had been so high as to cover this entire section of the ridge, to pluck and shift loose blocks out of this passage, pushing them probably to the south, as they would see shortly. Now the missing fault block made a break in the ridge, the notch they had seen from below, as squared off as if drawn by a plumbline and carpenter’s level. Very surreal. Not to mention the thought of an ice sea so high that it had covered this part of the range, and presumably all the rest of the Alps, all except for even higher ridges and peaks. Just another Swiss alpine pass, Thomas and the others seemed to suggest by their attitudes, but Priska was obviously proud of it. Each pass in the Alps had its own character, she said. Most were well known since the middle ages, or perhaps long before, back to the time when people had first come to these mountains thousands of years ago. Like the Ice Man, found emerging from a glacier in a pass to the east of here. He had crossed his pass five thousand years before. Or failed to cross, Mary thought but did not say.

  So they walked through the notch of the Fründenjoch. It was like passing through a hallway from one world to another. It only took about five minutes. They were just thirteen meters short of a three-thousand-meter pass, Priska said. People often jumped up to pretend to touch that three-thousand-meter height above the oceans. Swiss people, Mary thought. She couldn’t have jumped an inch off the ground.

  When they came to the far end of the notch, dawn was flooding the Alps to the south. The raw yellow of morning. A new world indeed. Alpenglow stained east-facing peaks pink; slopes facing the other points of the compass were mauve or purple or black. The ice below them was a rich
creamy blue, the sky overhead a clear pale gray, tinged by the yellow light in the air. Peaks extended to the horizon in all directions, and to the south another great range paralleled the one they were crossing. Below them a long sinuous glacier was flanked by black lateral moraines. The Kanderfirn, Priska told her. Not bare ice but firn, which gave it its velvety look. A dark turquoise velvet, very strange to see.

  Directly below them lay a drop of empty air, then a slightly tilted mass of bare ice, which served as a kind of terrace, making a long run down to the firn much farther below. The last drop at the end of the ice terrace to the firn was invisible to them from their angle, indicating something obviously steep: a cliff. Mary gritted her teeth as she looked down at it. It was a long way down, and she was already tired, her calves and Achilles tendons aching, an exhausted feeling in her muscles everywhere.

  She said nothing. She followed them, step by step. Down, then down, then down again. They helped her in places. Hiking on rock in crampons was awkward as hell, but it was solid too, in that her boots kept sticking in place, not the worst sensation to have, given what a slip might do. Priska confirmed what she felt in her feet; you could spike right into a crack on purpose, and hold firm in a way that bare boots wouldn’t have. That meant the pressure on her ankles was tremendous, and often she found herself right at the edge of her strength, right on the brink of a fall, feet tilted this way and that in ways she never would have chosen. A couple of times her only recourse was to give way and step down another step, too fast, unconsidered, desperate. Every time that happened her feet stuck in some new crack, an unexpected salvation. Fuck! she said, time after time. Fucking hell. It couldn’t last like that. Some step was bound to go wrong. Her heart was pounding, she was sweating, nothing else existed but this steep broken staircase of cracked black rock.

  After an endless spell of this work, they got to the ice terrace she had seen from the pass above, which now sloped down as far as they could see, then ended in mid-air. Obviously some kind of cliff out of sight down there, ice or rock, it didn’t matter, it was going to be bad, wickedly bad.

  We wait here, Priska told her.

  We wait? Mary repeated. For what?

  Priska said, They are coming here for us. We’re going to catch a ride.

  Thank God, Mary said.

  Far, far below, where they could see a different glacier’s surface, on the far side of the firn, she spotted a teeny line of flags. Now there was enough light to see they were orange. After fifteen or twenty minutes, they heard a thwacking from down the valley. Up to them rose a helicopter, with the Swiss white cross on red painted on its side. It took a while to get up to them; it really was a long way down. And the air was thin, she could feel that right in her bones, a weakness she didn’t like to feel.

  The helicopter landed loudly and with a great rushing of air, some fifty meters away, on an almost flat stretch of ice. With its rotors still blurring over it in a roar, a helmeted and flight-suited person opened a door in its side and got down and gestured them over to the craft. They ducked and cramponed over to the helo, sat down on the ice and unstrapped their crampons (the others unhooked Mary’s for her), then climbed up metal steps into the cabin of the thing. Here it was just as loud as outside, but after they sat down in the big central chamber, and were strapped into their webbing seats by a crew member, and got their climbing helmets off, they were given earmuff headsets. With those on, the world became very much quieter. And there were voices in her ears.

  The discussion over the headset was in Swiss German, so Mary just relaxed and flexed her calves and feet. Right on the verge of cramping, they were, in several different places. Thighs too. She was thrashed and no denying it.

  They had put her next to a little window, and as the helicopter rose she looked out: steep black mountains, vast swathes of white snow. Then out over an even deeper valley, immensely bigger, mostly green-walled, and floored by a river, and freeways, train tracks, miniature villages with church steeples and square towers and rooftops, and vineyards rising in rows contouring the sides of the great valley walls, especially the south-facing side to their right. The Rhone River, Mary assumed. If she was right, this was the Valais, one of the biggest valleys in Switzerland.

  Down this immense canyon they flew, lower than the mountains to left and right. Then they turned left, southward, and flew up a narrow valley. Mary knew that the Matterhorn stood at the top of one of these southerly valleys, but she couldn’t imagine they would go to Zermatt to hide; and it seemed to her they had flown farther west than that anyway. In the brilliant horizontal morning light, these side valleys were still dark in shadow. She lost her sense of where they were.

  Eventually the narrow canyon they were ascending closed on them, and the helicopter descended onto a concrete pad underneath a concrete dam, a dam very tall and very narrow, incurved like dams often were. A surreal sight, a comic-book dam it seemed, exaggerated to caricature.

  They got out of the helo, went into a building by the landing pad. Here they sat and ate a quick meal, went to the bathroom, changed out of the snow boots and into more conventional hiking boots.

  Not done walking yet, Priska explained. Another short walk.

  How short? Mary said, annoyed and fearful; she was tapped out, she could feel that in her legs.

  Six kilometers, Priska said. Not so far.

  And two hundred meters up, Thomas added, as if correcting Priska. Full disclosure kind of thing.

  Mary bit her tongue and said nothing. She was wasted. This was going to be bad.

  They left the building. By now it was late morning. The sun stood just over the top of the dam hanging over them. It was the tallest dam in Switzerland, they told her, the fifth tallest on Earth. Nearly three hundred meters tall.

  Happily a cable car was strung up the slope to the west of the dam. They got in a car and rose swiftly, getting an excellent view of the concrete incurve of the dam. Ear-poppingly tall. Hard to imagine someone saying Let’s put a dam here, let’s fill the air of this deep narrow valley with a concrete wall a thousand feet high.

  At the upper station of the cable car they got out and walked through a long tunnel, a tunnel with open gallery sections on its left side that gave views down onto the reservoir behind the dam. Water the color of radiator antifreeze.

  Then they were out of the tunnel and in a high shallow valley, headed west. Another narrow glacial valley, with a trail that ran up its floor next to a chuckling brook. Mary tromped up this trail wearily. It was a lot easier than hiking in crampons and snow boots, she had to admit, but she was out of gas. Knackered. It was a little embarrassing that her guards didn’t even seem to register it as effortful. Fucking Swiss and their fucking mountains. She had been outskied by three-year-olds who weren’t even using ski poles, zipping by her not even seeing her; why should she be surprised now, they were like the ibexes up here. Home ground. Rocky dusty trail. Green grassy slopes bordering the creekbed, rocky walls above the grass, high on the left, low on the right. Up and up, and up again. Grinding. She felt weak in her bones.

  Then she noticed that the creek to her right was a dark brown color. Its clear water riffled quickly over a reddish-brown streambed. She looked closer; the creek was floored almost entirely by rusty nails. Nails, bolts, washers, nuts, L joints, other bits of small metal hardware, all of it a dark rich rusty brown, carpeting the creek bottom in a dense tangle, like mussels or sea urchins. It was like a vision in a dream, surreal such that she could scarce believe her eyes. She actually wondered if in her exhaustion she was seeing things.

  What the hell’s that? she asked her minders, pointing.

  They shrugged.

  From the old days, Priska said.

  What old days?

  You will see.

  Then they topped a rise and found themselves in a round high basin, a mountain wall to their left, green alp to their right. Grass covered the floor of the basin, along with rocks of all size, from small to house-sized, the big ones like dol
mens in Ireland— and then she saw that some of these really were buildings, blank-walled cubes of concrete, doorless and featureless.

  Then, as she looked around again, Mary saw that the cliff that walled off the basin to the south had inlaid into it three massive concrete doors, giant ovals perhaps fifteen or twenty meters high, and almost as wide. Like the blockhouses on the basin floor, these walls in the cliff were as blank as concrete could be.

  What is this? Mary asked.

  Military, Sibilla told her curtly.

  Air force, Priska added, gesturing at the giant doors in the cliff as if that explained what she meant.

  Civilians not actually allowed in this basin, they told her. No one comes here.

  But we did? Mary said.

  And then a small concrete door under the giant ones, so small Mary had not noticed it, opened from the inside. Her minders led her up and into it.

  She followed them right into the mountain. One of the Swiss air force’s secret bases, she gathered; Priska had gone uncharacteristically silent. Mary had heard rumors about these places, everyone had. A rocket-launched jet facility, remnant of the Cold War, designed to repel Soviet invasion. If the Soviet tanks had rolled, these big doors in the mountainside would have opened and Swiss jets would have shot out like bolts from Wilhelm Tell’s crossbow. Swiss defense craziness: it wouldn’t be the first time.

  And in fact the jets were still there, racked on their launch slides. Little things like cruise missiles with stubby wings and bubble cockpits. Obviously outdated and old-fashioned, like weapons from the set of a James Bond movie. New cruise missiles made these things look like rowboats in a marina. Like shillelaghs in a museum.

  It was a newer kind of warfare, she thought wearily, that had gotten her invited into this hidden fortress. They weren’t just protecting her now, she guessed, nor her ministry; it was Switzerland itself under attack. This she gathered from the people there to greet her. The assault on the ministry had been part of a larger attack, one of them confirmed to her. Viruses had sabotaged not just the ministry’s computers but other UN agencies based in Switzerland, and more importantly, their banks. So it was an emergency; they were on a war footing now, but for this new kind of war, invisible and online for the most part, but also including the possibility of drones, and of fast targeted missiles.