Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “We will bring the beech forests back,” Lars said. “The climate is just right for them again. It only needs planting them. Prehistoric and posthistoric. Our children will take refuge in these forests. They can harvest the wood, and make what they need, and set terraria in the protection of each grove. The fjords will come back too.”

  Then the cook set a plate of fish cutlets and rice before Val, and a big salad of mixed lettuce and cut cabbage, and after she had wolfed it down Mai-lis came in and said to her, “We would like to move you on toward McMurdo now.”

  “Now?” She was surprised; it was still storming outside, the clouds right on the ice and very windy. Of course that hadn’t stopped them so far.

  “Yes, now, please. It’s best for us if our involvement in your affairs is over before McMurdo is back to normal. The ecotage has caused them to call in the U.S. Navy. Right now this storm is still keeping flights from Christchurch from coming down, but when they arrive we want to be gone.”

  “Does it matter, now that people know you’re here? Once they start looking they’ll be able to find you for sure.”

  Mai-lis nodded. “We haven’t decided what to do yet. Saving people was more important than staying hidden, that was clear. We don’t think anyone will actually try to evict us, so … well, we will see. But we want to start this next phase with some distance. So if you and your group will suit up, we will fly you to Ross Island.”

  “Sure, sure. Whatever you say.” In fact Val would have loved nothing more than to try to sleep; the idea had come back, which was a sign that if she could just get under the blanket, so to speak, she would stay under for an entire day, maybe two. Not at all a comfortable feeling. But she didn’t want to argue with their hosts.

  She went around the chambers of the refuge, rounding up her group and Carlos, Wade and X. Many of them appeared to be as exhausted as she was; she had to rouse them from the classic Antarctic ten-foot stare, saying, “Come on, come on, they’re flying us to McMurdo.”

  And half an hour later, they and their few possessions were on board two big blimps, Addie again piloting the one Val was in. And then they were off once again, into the clouds on a rush of wind.

  After that Val lost focus a bit. Despite the booming and whistling of the wind, the bouncing of the blimp and the sheer fact of their situation, she was seriously winding down, falling asleep as if making a cliff dive; sooner or later—sooner—she would hit and be gone instantly. Because of their situation she tried to fight this dive, and the strangeness of what was happening helped her, so that eventually what she fell into was a peculiar, struggling, sandy-eyed half-sleep, a kind of waking dream or conscious sleep; the direct contact of reality and her unconscious. In this state she was aware of X and Wade and Ta Shu and Addie talking on the headsets, and aware that they were flying over the Transantarctics in a marvelous blimp; but it was all jumbled together and incoherent. Brief visions of steep mountains, appearing through rents in the cloud as in Chinese landscape painting. Nunataks in a sea of white meringue. Another glimpse of green below. Addie saying Yeah that’s Shangri-la, we won’t be stopping there.

  “Why not fly straight to Mac?” That was X. Her friend.

  “Well, you know, if the ice shelf was still there we might. But now the sea ice is breaking up and there’s lots of open water in the bay, and I still don’t like to fly over open water, even in the blimps. In case a skua pecks a hole in the bag or whatever. So we’ll fly down the range, see the sights. The most beautiful mountains on Earth, anyway. If you could see ’em.”

  “Wake up, Val, there’s another one of their camps.”

  That was Wade. Nice man. She liked him. He was thinking of her.

  “Uhh.”

  She tried to wake. Like struggling under the surface of a syrup sea. She even slapped herself in the face. X regarded this with a curious expression, as if he wouldn’t mind helping out. Part of him. Of course. Though he was fond of her. Shouldn’t have dumped him like that, that was mean. Trolling was mean. The blimp dropped hard and she reswallowed her stomach, looked down blurrily: flying clouds, then a patch of green in spun glass; another refuge. Green valley in the ice. Then white clouds again, and Val shook her head, too groggy to remember properly what she had just seen. A waking dream.

  “That’s Norumbega.”

  “How many live there?” Wade asked.

  “Well, it’s more a crossroads than a town. Johan and Friedrich hold things together there, maybe a dozen others.”

  “Do you mind if I have us on the phone to Senator Chase?”

  “Oh, yeah, not usually, but don’t do it now, okay? I don’t want anyone overhearing us during the approach. Besides you’re the senator, don’t you know that?”

  X and Wade looking at each other round-eyed, in faked alarm at this news. They were friends. Val leaned her forehead against the cold window, looked down without quite seeing. Until she got some real sleep she would not be all there no matter how hard she tried. She closed her eyes and dropped into light sleep and dreams, without being aware of the phase change. The Room of a Thousand Shapes, the corked sledge. Rushing clouds, flying down the Zaneveld, a pile of bodies in the snow. She surfaced briefly, groaning. Then back under.

  There’s Shambhala.

  There’s Ultima Thule.

  There’s Happy Valley.

  There’s the Byrd Glacier, the biggest glacier in the world, look at that mama. That glacier is wider than the longest glacier in Europe is long. What a mighty river.

  A wild interval, swirling around, tossing on a down-draft. That’s Skelton Glacier, sucking down a katabatic as usual. Come on you dog.

  Skelton? That’s the way I came up on the SPOT train.

  Yeah. A hell of a drop.

  So we’re almost there.

  Yeah. But listen, we’re not taking you folks right to Mac Town, understand. We don’t like to go there. Not at the best of times, and especially not now that the Marines have landed.

  So where will you leave us?

  Well, I said Black Island, but Mai-lis is a romantic.

  Through the clouds, a stark black-and-white landscape. The sea black, dotted with brilliant white bergs. An island like a black castle, rising out of black water.

  Then Addie was chivvying the blimp down, down, down, and Val pushed with all her might, and broke back up through the membrane of sleep, groggy and disoriented. Naps were not going to do the job at this point, and she needed to be awake. Addie was clipping the blimp onto a big rust anchor, half-buried in black sand.

  “Okay!” she said. “Your radios ought to get Mac Town no problem now.”

  She popped the gondola door, then handed them a key. “This’ll get you inside the hut. Nice to meet y’all.”

  They climbed down onto the black sand of the beach. The other blimp was anchored to rocks up on Windvane Hill. Val’s group stood around as if they had just gotten off a train together. Then the blimps detached and sailed off downwind, rising quickly into the clouds and disappearing. “Where is this?” Wade asked.

  “Cape Evans,” Val said. “Let’s get inside, out of the wind.”

  Before you, my friends, you see the Cape Evans hut. This is the hut that Scott’s expedition built in the summer of 1910-11. They lived in this hut through the fall and winter of 1911. Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard left from here on their winter journey, and returned. Scott and his men left the following spring for the Pole. Sixteen men started out; five men did not come back. That fall and the next winter, the men surviving lived still in this hut, through the long months of perpetual darkness, knowing their comrades would never return. When spring and the sun came back they went south once more, hoping only to find the bodies of their friends. And they found them—the last three anyway, frozen in their tent, with their gear, and their twenty kilos of geological specimens, and the diaries and letters containing their stories. They had reached the Pole, and found there a tent and a Norwegian flag; Amundsen’s group had gotten there some time before. And
on the way back Evans, Oates, Wilson, Scott, and Bowers all died.

  The survivors left the three bodies they had found in the tent on the ice shelf, and came back to this hut. The relief ship returned at last, and they sailed away forever.

  Now this hut. See inside. They are dead; their stories live. Yet so many questions remain. Why did they come here? How can we live here? How should we live anywhere on this Earth?

  Our places speak for us. Our spaces speak through us. This hut still speaks their story. I will go inside now and be silent, so you can hear it.

  gray light

  brown room

  The nine members of the group gathered before Scott’s gray weathered hut. X took the key Addie had given him, and unlocked the massive padlock on the door. They filed in one by one, all but Ta Shu, who wandered up the slope of Windvane Hill, presumably to get an exterior shot. Val waved to him and he waved back; he would be in soon. She followed the others in.

  She passed through the dark vestibule. The inner door was opened onto the dim main room; the others already inside. This hallway was their version of a lock. Also a storeroom: slabs of seal blubber stacked on the floor. Butchered sheep hanging in a nook. Horse harnesses on the wall.

  Into the big room. The nearer half of it was walled with stacks of boxes, supplies for that fateful expedition of 1911, never used. The farther half narrowed, as wooden bunkbeds stuck out from the walls on both sides. Beyond the big central table were workbenches under the southern window, and on the other side, in the far corner, Scott and Wilson’s nook. Against the far wall, the black closet of Ponting’s darkroom. All dim in the gray light.

  Jack and Jim and Carlos had sat down wearily at the far end of the big table, and seeing them Val was reminded sharply of Ponting’s photo of Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard after their return from the Worst Journey. They had been seated in the same places, at this very same table. After thirty-six days out, in midwinter. Val shivered. It was cold in here, as cold as outside, or colder. They had judged in ignorance.

  “Anyone for some Heinz catsup?” Jorge asked, standing before one of the stacks of boxes.

  Wade joined him. “So strange,” he said, touching one of the bottles arrayed on top of the highest box. “I saw the same catsup bottles at old Pole Station, and the old old station too. The only difference is this one has a cork instead of a screw top.” He left a finger touching the bottle, bemused. These things of ours that carry on, Val thought. Small objects we use. And so the people to come will know we were real too. Because we used Heinz catsup.

  “I’ll radio McMurdo,” she said. She went out into the hall; Ta Shu was coming in, and she waved him past her. Then she tried her wrist phone. “McMurdo, this is T-023, this is T-023, do you read, over.”

  To her surprise an answer came quick and clear. “T-023, this is McMurdo, once again in touch with all the world. Hey Val, where are you?”

  “Hi Randi. We’re at the Cape Evans hut.”

  “Cape Evans! How you’d get there?”

  “We had some help.”

  “Oh I see! Well you’re not the only ones, let me tell you. You got a lift from our back-country residents?”

  “Yeah. Listen, can you send a boat over to collect us? I’m not sure we can walk home.”

  “Oh sure, sure, no problem there. How many of you are there now?”

  “Nine.”

  “How’s that collarbone?”

  “He’s okay.”

  “Good. Okay, I’ll get them to send a Zodiac over right away.”

  Back in the hut Jim was holding a bottle of marmalade up to the light. “I read that once the Kiwis at Scott Base ran out of jam and one of them got on a snowmobile and rode over here and took some of this marmalade back with him. They ate it on their scones.” He smiled at Ta Shu, standing next to him. “Frozen for fifty years or so.”

  “Very tasty.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s any different now.”

  Nevertheless they left the food alone. Jim went on telling Ta Shu and the others about the place: how Scott had had a wall of boxes set across the hut to divide officers from able seamen; how they had had a player piano on which to make music; how the hut had been plundered for souvenirs during the IGY years, and been filled to the roof with drift snow and ice before its restoration.

  Val wandered around restlessly, only half listening. The bench under the south window looked like an alchemist’s laboratory. Little dark bottles, white powders, retorts, all the proud paraphernalia of Victorian science; antique, primitive, handmade. It was the same on the shelf above Wilson’s cot, and in the darkroom. All kinds of things. And everything immaculate; no spiderwebs, no dust. Scott’s bookshelves, actually the framing of the wall over his bed, were empty. There was a dead Emperor penguin lying on its back across his desk table. The space looked like Scott’s, somehow. Blank, private, austere; an empty stuffed shirt; but something more than that.

  Around the corner the bunkbeds seemed to her much more human. Here one over the other had slept her favorites, Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Their magazine pin-ups were still stuck to the wooden wall over their beds: Cherry’s were portraits of Edwardian young ladies, dreamy, impeccably dressed, lace at the throat; not people who were ever going to come to Antarctica. Bowers’s pin-ups were of dogs.

  In the dim light it began to seem to Val as if she had never woken up, but was walking in the dim spacetime of dreams, so that these men might stamp into the outer hallway at any second. But they had died out there. Scott had taken five men on the last leg instead of four, and they had died. If he had sent Seaman Evans back with Lieutenant Evans, all might have been well. That close to survival; one decision; eleven miles out of sixteen hundred. And yet they scorned Scott for his incompetence, they made fun of him. He who had hauled a sledge all that way, and almost made it. One bad call was all it took. No one to fly in to the rescue.

  Now her group sat or stood wandering the room, chilling down in the gray light. The matted reindeer hair of the sleeping bags looked woefully inadequate. Val went back around the corner and sat on Wilson’s cot. She stared at Scott’s empty bed. She had misjudged these men; she had taken other people’s casual superior judgments and accepted them. As if the people who had lived before them in time were somehow smaller because they had lived earlier. Looking through the wrong end of a telescope and saying But they’re all so small. Following their footsteps and then thinking that what they had done was as pointless as following in people’s footsteps. As if they had not been as intelligent and cultured as any living human, and in many ways far more capable. Walk sixteen hundred miles in Antarctica and then judge them, she thought drowsily, head resting back against the wooden wall. She heard the voices of her group as the conversation of those odd Brits, those straightlaced young men, strong animals, complex simplicities, running away from Edwardian reality to create their own. Say it was an escape, say it was Peter Pan; why not? Why not? Why conform to Edwardian reality, why march into the trenches to die without a whimper? In this little room they had made their world. The first Antarctic chapter of the Why Be Normal Club. Happy at the return of some distant party which had been out of touch for weeks or months, out there on one crazed journey after another, pointless and absurd—the pure existentialism of Antarctica, where they made reality, or at least its very meaning. The pathetic fallacy of the Edwardians or the pathetic accuracy of the postmoderns; nothing much to choose between them; certainly no priority, either of heroic precedence or omniscient subsequence. Just people down here, doing things. Flinging themselves out into the spaces they breathed, to live, to really live, in this their one brief life in the world. They had been in no one’s footsteps.

  13

  The McMurdo Convergence

  blue sky

  black water

  The clouds broke up and blew off to the north. Between the last low white stragglers the sun shone brightly, burnishing the gray interior of the hut. Wade followed the others outdoors into the sun,
and blinked up at Erebus. Offshore the sea ice was gone, and waves lined the water. Hungrily Wade gazed at the open sea, at movement in the landscape, such a relief after all the days of snow and ice. The ocean here was black even though the sky overhead was blue; he had never seen anything like it.

  A while later a fast fat-rimmed rubber motorboat came slushing out of the sun-blasted water to the south, and beached below them in a surge of floating ice chunks. The three-person crew of the boat did not appear surprised at Val’s group; their manner made it clear that in the last week they had picked up so many groups in trouble around the shores of the Ross Sea that search and rescue was nothing to them anymore; they were worldly now, and jaded. No one had died, they said, as far as they knew. But there had been a lot of close calls.

  So the nine said quick good-byes to Scott and his men, and locked up the Cape Evans hut, and piled into the boat with their nearly empty daypacks, and off they went purring over the black water. Through the steep riven Dellbridge Islands, past the broken stub of the Erebus Ice Tongue. To the left soared steaming Erebus. To the right, across the black water, the Western Mountains stood two or three times their usual height, raised by a fata morgana into a kind of fantasy range, the super-Himalaya of Ice Planet.

  Wade sat in the bow of the Zodiac, looking around. He was tired, vibrated, spaced out. A bitter wind blew splinters of sunshine. Antarctica had never looked so surreal to him, so sublime; whether this was because he was on the last leg of his adventure or because of the intrinsic beauty of the scene was hard to say. He felt both detached and absorbed at the same time; happy in some Buddhist sense: desiring nothing. Clarified. The buzz of the craft’s engine was loud enough to allow him to hum at full volume without anyone else hearing him, and so without thought or choice he happily hummed his soundtrack to the scene, the music buzzing in him as if transmitted by the landscape, as if he were a mere radio receiver—the end of Beethoven’s 131 quartet, then the bass phrase from the Ghost Trio and the Ninth that Berlioz had termed the work of a madman, Wade humming it over and over and feeling more glorious the more glorious he felt, the muscular tunes bouncing along with the boat over the low waves, melodies so stuffed with meaning that they were landscapes in themselves, landscapes very like the one they hummed through now, vast and clear and clean of line. Could they live up to the greatness of these tunes, to the greatness of this planet, so vast and beautiful?