Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Really?” X said, feeling his heartbeat accelerate.

  “Yes, really.” She laughed at his expression. “I take it you’re interested this time.”

  “Oh God.”

  She laughed again. “Right. And you’re our big social theory guy. So there are some people on the fence I think it might be safe to try you on. You can explain the theories behind what we’re doing to some people I’ll direct you to.”

  “I sure the hell can! Just let me at ’em.”

  “Okay, okay. But beyond them you should mellow out, X, I don’t want you going too far, okay? Don’t do a Mr. Smith on people, please God. We don’t want to scare anyone or it’ll just reduce our chances to win the bid. But we’ve got a lot of people already, and in coms and field services it’s really experience that matters. ASL has always threatened us by saying they can hire new people to take our place, which they can, but if we all walk at once and make a bid, then we’re the ones with the on-site experience, and ASL will only have their Seattle experience and a bunch of fingies to show the NSF. The actual people NSF has been working with the last few years will mostly be on our side. So it might work. And the more the better.”

  “Oh sure, it makes sense,” X said. “NSF is just hiring a group to run their own infrastructure. So it removes the problem of competing with the old company’s capital, to an extent.”

  “Right.”

  “This is great,” X exclaimed. “Why didn’t I hear anything about this? Why didn’t you tell me until I was already on my way out of here?”

  “Well, you know. It’s not the kind of thing that GFAs are usually let in on.” She shrugged. “That’s just the way it is. It’s been kind of touchy talking about it, since we’re all still ASL employees at this point. Mutiny, you know. Breach of contract. People were afraid of getting singled out and fired. So we only talked about it among people we trusted, which meant we had to know them real well. So, you were coming along, people were talking about asking you in on it, because we knew you were into that kind of thing. But then you were gone. We figured you’d gotten fed up with ASL too fast, and in bad with Val, and that was that.”

  “But now I’m back.”

  “Now you’re back. So tell you what, why don’t you go talk to Nancy, and Spec, and Harold, and George … I know there’s a few more—oh yeah, Mac; see him first, he’ll tell you what we’ve got worked up, and then you can talk to the others about joining. Tell them about co-ops and how great they are, and see if you can get them to commit. They say they’re thinking it over, but I think they’ll join if it’s put to them right. And if we get all the people we want to get, I think we’ve got a really good chance.”

  “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll try to think who else would be good to have.”

  She nodded, patted his arm. “Check with me first on that. Remember to stay calm, X. This is business. It’s going to take a lot of planning and hard work, and it’ll be a while before we know anything.”

  “Oh yeah, sure. Very calm. Total business.”

  He grinned at her and she had to laugh. And then he was off.

  Sleep was forgotten, although in fact he hadn’t tried to remember. They were all fried for that matter, firing around McMurdo like droplets of water on a hot griddle, insomniac to the point of insanity; but when had it ever been any different? Mac Town was a hyper place in the summers. X went to the galley to stuff himself yet again, to fuel himself for the next lap of wakefulness. While in there he spotted Spec and Harold, and he went over and ate with them, and at the end of the meal he brought up the co-op idea, which they had heard of. They had feelings both ways. So they talked it over for a while, X arguing for employee ownership as a general principle, not bothering to talk about the particulars of their situation in McMurdo, which these two knew a lot better than he did. After that he was off to make his rounds, visiting all the offices that he had visited before as a Good For Anything, talking to the people Joyce had mentioned and others he had liked, asking them to think about joining.

  A lot of people shook their heads as they listened to him, and he began to understand that because of his rants in the past, and his recent disappearance, he was regarded as a crank—or, more accurately, as an innocent. Of course what he said was true, the old iceheads’ looks said, of course they’re screwing us, but to think there could be a change in the system was silly. The current method of business, the hierarchy of employer and employees, was all part of the Bad Design of Reality, their looks said; it was unfixable, there would always be owners and workers, no matter how vehemently one denounced them. Certain people owned the businesses, the capital, the governments, the laws, the armies; and that was all it took to back the present system up, no matter how bad it was. This was what their looks said, X decided as he walked from office to shop, looks fond and indulgent or irritated and contemptuous though they otherwise might be. A lot of the old iceheads thought he was full of shit. Or, at best, a dreamer hopelessly out to lunch.

  X nodded at this judgment and learned as he went. He tried to get more particular, to stick to the specifics of what they could change right there on Hut Point. He described the other co-op complexes he knew about, usually the Basque town of Mondragon, where everything was a co-op. He enjoyed these conversations more, but they were hard, too. He was fomenting revolution, and saving his chance at having a country, and a home, and it was incredibly exciting and all that, but the devil was in the details…. So. He had to describe the co-op that would come to be, a co-op of people who had had years and years of Antarctic experience and expertise, using that expertise to organize a better way of running things in field service; they could be competitive with ordinary companies; NSF would have to agree they were the best even according to NSF criteria; and then they would keep it among themselves, not go public with stock, arrange for profit-sharing without being greedy, thus allowing them to make a low bid and still make a living, because not paying a big profit to shareholders in the world would save money for them and their needs.

  It made perfect sense. The basic sensibleness of the co-op system: it was more just, and therefore would increase employee motivation and loyalty, and thus make for better work, leading to more efficiency, even by the standards of the downsizers. X found it very easy to make a case for this. It meshed coherently with what most Americans were taught as kids to be the basic values, fairness, justice, democracy—it was easy to defend using those base values. So he described to his old friends and acquaintances a McMurdo that had become a kind of miniature Mondragon, every business structured as an employee-owned co-op in an interlocking system of co-ops, including the banks. In a McMurdo like that, X would say, emphasizing this point very heavily, people would finally be able to take control of their careers in Antarctica, and not have their lives fatally split between their love of the place and the whim of the one boss in town.

  That got them thinking. And though there were a lot of skeptics, a lot of other people nodded and said “Sounds good, count me in.”

  Returning from the latest of these meetings he ran into Wade, and they stopped to confer without having to say a word about it, like two brothers crossing paths in a city. “Listen,” X said, “you ought to try talking to Professor Michelson about what they found out in the Dry Valleys this season. That Graham Forbes told me they found something good—he wouldn’t say more, but it seems to me that your senator ought to be able to use this dynamicist scenario to make it clear just how dangerous global warming is, and then press his program that much harder.”

  “I’ve been thinking that myself,” Wade said. “I’ll ask Michelson as soon as I see him, thanks. How’s it going otherwise?”

  “Pretty good. I’m helping Joyce and Randi and some of the other folks here to mount a bid for the field services subcontract. We’re forming a co-op of all the people in town that we think would do well, and it’s a lot of the best people here.”

  “Phil will love that too, that’s one of his current obsessions. Keep at it, and I�
�ll see how I can help from my end.”

  “Okay I will.”

  A brief hand to shoulder and they were off, each in his own direction.

  Wade for his own part was working the town almost as hard as X was. Soon after the first meeting was over he went back into the Chalet and found Sylvia on the phone in her office, and tapped on her open door. She gestured him in and he went to the big wall map of Antarctica, looking at Sylvia’s system of dots. He had forgotten her code, and the patterns the colored spots made still suggested nothing to him.

  She got off the phone. “That was Christchurch. The storm is finally clearing off Cape Adare, and so they should be sending down the whole crowd any time now.”

  “So we have eight hours more on our own?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t look happy at the prospect of all the official investigators who would soon be descending on them.

  He gestured at the map. “So do the dots match with the ecotage events, as far as you can tell?”

  “Some of them correlate with the satellite dishes that were disrupting communications,” she said, coming around the desk and pointing to some of the orange dots, all over the continent. “Then others would appear to mark camps of the ferals whom you met.”

  “Hard to see patterns when there’s more than one thing going on.”

  “True.”

  “Are you confident that your satellite photo analyst is giving you all the sightings that he’s making?”

  She looked surprised. “Not confident, no. I suppose I was assuming as much, but I don’t have the wherewithal to check him.”

  “Would you mind if I gave him a call and asked him some questions? I’d like to discuss some ideas I’ve had with him, and if you give me a reference, perhaps he would agree to talk with me.”

  She looked at him, making an unspoken question.

  “I’d like to help if I can,” Wade explained. “Help the Treaty process. Help keep NSF in control of the American Antarctic program. And so on. It all fits with what Phil Chase is trying to do. With what I’m trying to do.”

  She thought it over. “I don’t see how it could hurt. He’s in the security agencies, some kind of split position, but he can always take a call and then make his own decision. I’ll get you his phone number,” she said, going to her desk to look it up and write it down.

  “And his name?”

  “Ask for Sam.”

  Wade nodded. “Thanks. Now about the ecotage. Can you tell me the …?”

  “I have an overview from Search and Rescue here.” She plucked another piece of paper from her desk. “Apparently everything was synchronized to start on October 15th—let’s see, just six days ago, my. It feels like longer.”

  “So true.”

  “Whether they waited for a Condition One storm to hit or it was just a coincidence, I can’t say. Automated satellite tracking dishes coupled with powerful radios—we’ve found seventeen of them, stretching from the Peninsula down the length of the Transantarctics to Cape Adare, with five more out on the polar cap beyond the Pole. The assumption is there are more we haven’t found yet. They appear on initial investigation to be chop-shop compilates with east Asian source materials from the turn of the century. The dishes were pointed at carrier satellites, mostly Ku-band fourteen gigahertz, the report says, and some twenty gigahertz hub satellites; unmodulated signals were sent at frequencies that captured these satellites. When the captured satellites’ traffic was rerouted, dishes then found and captured the new carriers. All that activity ended after forty-eight hours of disruption. At its start, however, seven of the SCAG consortium’s test drilling sites were destroyed, as were the base camps at Roberts Massif and Pioneer Hills. The bombs appear on initial investigation to be home brewed and contain no taggants. Before they exploded all occupants of the oil stations were rounded up at gunpoint by masked teams carrying assault weapons, and they were taken by snowmobile or blimp,” raising her eyebrows, “to the nearest scientific field camps. Most of them to Shackleton Glacier, some to Byrd, some to the Italian camp in the Ellsworth Range.”

  “Except they missed us, because we were out on a trip,” Wade said.

  “Yes. They appear to have gotten everyone else, however, and no casualties have been reported. No identification of the kidnappers made so far.”

  Wade explained what he had seen with the ferals. “So, you know, as far as I can tell, which isn’t all that far, the ferals who are still out there didn’t have anything to do with this, and the ones who did are somewhere in South America.”

  “Hmm.”

  “So do I take it that no NSF property was damaged, then?”

  “No no, we took our share. Small hits but carefully placed, and quite debilitating. There are some lessons to be learned, no doubt. A small bomb on the roof of the radio building, and another at the repeater on Crater Hill, augmented the satellite failure. And lastly sixteen fuel tanks, including all the big ones up in the Gap, and several outlying helo fuel bladders, were contaminated with a variant of one of the oil-eating bacteria designed to clean up oil spills on water. This particular species grew into thousands of small clumps until it died, so that it was dangerous to use the fuel remaining in those tanks. That was a real nightmare—we had to figure out how to filter the fuel, and then test it for reliability.”

  “It must have been quite the forty-eight hours here.”

  “Yes.”

  “The FBI’s going to be here for a long time.”

  “Yes. They’ll have several avenues of investigation, of course. The satellite hardware, the bombs, the bacteria, these exiled ice pirates wandering around Chile, Mr. Smith himself … I wonder if he’s right to be so confident his clients will remain anonymous. It’s clear they were being careful, but still …”

  “Yeah. Depends how careful they were. I could imagine a group with experience and forethought making it difficult. And since no one got killed, and the FBI’s plate is overfull with more violent and lethal terrorist activities back in the States, they may not put years of effort into this case.”

  “Hmm.”

  The two of them sat there, staring at the desk. The amount of sleep they had gotten between them in the last week wouldn’t have covered a single night. Wade found himself blinking out unexpectedly and then coming to with a start; he stood up abruptly before he fell asleep right in front of her. “Thanks for all the information. I’ll convey what I’ve learned to Senator Chase, and we’ll do what we can to help.”

  Sylvia nodded, still thinking things over.

  Back outside Wade cringed at the raw sting of the wind through the Gap, then stumbled over the muddy wasteland toward the galley and a few mugs of coffee. Just outside the big building he ran into Professor Michelson, going the same way.

  “Professor! Hello!”

  “Ah hello,” Michelson said, recognizing him. Then after a closer look, he said, “You’ve visited us during interesting times, I see.”

  “Very interesting. What did you think of the meeting in the Chalet?”

  “Well, obviously it’s important to discuss these matters. There will be many such discussions in the wake of what happened this week.”

  “Including within SCAR?”

  “Oh, most definitely.”

  “Yes. I suppose that makes sense. So … How did your work go in the Dry Valleys?”

  “Well, we continued to work.”

  They stood in the sun, protected from the wind by the galley itself. Michelson stared at him curiously. Finally Wade said, “My friend X spent a day out with your team working for Graham—he tells me that Graham told him that you made a significant discovery out there.”

  “Did he? Well, yes, I suppose. All discoveries are significant really, aren’t they? When you consider the vast realm of nondiscovery?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. But—” Wade tried to figure out how to say it. “But if you’ve made a discovery that will confirm the dynamicist position unequivocally, then that will demonstrate that the East Antarctic ice
sheet is unstable, and wasn’t there three million years ago, and possibly will go away again if global warming continues. Right? So it’s important, and, you know. Maybe if you have a kind of smoking-gun piece of evidence then you should share it immediately, so that policy can begin to take it into account?”

  That little V of a smile, under the moustache. “I don’t think we need to be quite as dramatic as that.”

  Maybe you don’t, Wade thought.

  “I’m not sure there is even the possibility of what you call a smoking gun. What we found has to be studied and interpreted, and fitted into a much larger pattern. It means nothing by itself. Its meaning can be disputed, and will be disputed, believe me. Dating Sirius is no easy thing. Particularly since different Sirius outcroppings may in fact date from different warm periods. So we must proceed cautiously.”

  “So it’s not really a smoking gun.”

  “No, it’s a mat of beech leaves. Beech leaves and other associated litter, from a forest floor.” He shrugged. “It’s more evidence, we hope.”

  “But you’re becoming more convinced, yourself, that the ice sheet was gone in the Pliocene?”

  “Oh yes, you can say that. What we’re finding now in Sirius formations resembles the coastline biome of southern Chile. The beech forests, the insect life, the microscopic life, it all fits together. And it becomes clearer that it can be dated to around two to three million years ago. So we will toil on, and see what happens.”

  “So no press conferences about this season’s discoveries.”

  Michelson laughed briefly. “No, no press conferences. Not much drama, I’m afraid. Just evidence.”

  “Which you will introduce when?”