Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Here in McMurdo, however, enough people had been burned by the one-company town syndrome to make for a huge pool of talent waiting for a chance to move. Enough had had enough. And Joyce and Debbie and Alan and Randi and Tom, who had been here forever and seen it all, and had worked so hard to make little communities under the umbrella of their responsibility, humanizing their zones despite the pressure from above to downsize and rationalize—they were poised to act. And now was the time. X was just a messenger.

  And how he enjoyed it. He seemed to have lost the need to sleep, or the ability, one or the other; as far as he recalled he had not slept since their return to McMurdo, and for a good long time before that; it must have been nearly a week all told, and all that time in the perpetual sunlight, hurtling sandy-eyed from one crisis to the next, spending the town’s brief downtime around 3 A.M. on the phone to the States talking to the Co-op Aid Co-op, as well as to any other groups and agencies that could help them in the preparation for their bid, talking until the sunlight sprayed over Erebus and the galley was opened and X ravenous for breakfast, no different than the sleepless day before except his eyes were twenty-four hours sandier and his mind twenty-four hours more sleep-deprived, in a hyperlucid derangement of high hopes and apprehension.

  And that was the state he was in when he ran into Val as he left the galley, feeling the possibility of the return of sleep into his life: vastly tired; bone tired; completely wasted. But there she was, staring at him with a funny expression. After the retreat down Shackleton Glacier and the time with the ferals, he felt he knew her much better than he had during the weeks they had gone out together—better than he knew the members of his own family, if the truth were known. As Cherry-Garrard had said, in Antarctica you get to know people so well that in comparison you do not seem to know the people in civilization at all. But X hadn’t had much chance to speak with Val since their return, and now, he saw, there was something on her mind.

  “How’s it going?” she said unsteadily.

  “Okay! I think we’ve got the people we need to make a good bid for the field services. How about you?”

  “Oh, I’m all right.”

  They stood looking at the mud of McMurdo under their feet.

  “So you think there’ll be a co-op?” she asked.

  “I do! I sure hope so, anyway. It’s my only chance of staying.”

  She nodded.

  “What about you, Val? Do you think you’ll join?”

  She shook her head. X felt it like a blow. He began to go blank inside, like he had when she had first broken up with him.

  She put a hand to his arm. “I’m going out with the ferals.”

  “Oh Val.”

  He didn’t know what to say. To him the ferals had seemed like aliens.

  “I can’t stay here, X. Even if the co-op works, my job would still be guide. And I can’t do that anymore. Those trips always reduce me to the level of the person having the worst time.”

  “To the Jack level.”

  “Yeah, exactly. But it isn’t just him. It’s always something. I’m a shitty guide.”

  “You are not!”

  “I am. I am not a good guide. You don’t know.”

  “I do know, I’ve seen you! You shouldn’t let that guy get to you, he was a jerk. Hiding the fact that he was hurt, that was bullshit. He was setting you up.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not him. I mean it is, but there are always people like him on these trips. Listen to me, X. I don’t like the clients anymore. I think the Footsteps thing is bullshit. I’m not even seeing Antarctica anymore when I’m guiding. I might as well not be here! I Gould get the same hassles and live in Jackson Hole. I’m toast, X. Burnt toast. But I want to be in Antarctica. I want to want to be here. I want to live here and work, but not as a guide.”

  “What about search and rescue, couldn’t you do that?”

  She shook her head, giving him a hard look. “The rescues don’t always work. A lot of times you’re going out to collect bodies. Have you ever gone out to a crash site where everyone has burned to death?”

  “No,” X said, shocked.

  “I have. I don’t want to do search and rescue, I don’t want to lead expeditions, I don’t want to be a guide. I just want to live in the mountains. And I liked the look of the ferals, I really did. I’d like to try what they do, try living here.”

  “Ah.”

  He thought it over. Listen to me, she had said, so sharply, as if he never had. She had always been one of the mountaineers, ever since he met her; crazy to be out in the frigid landscape, clambering around. He wasn’t like that, but now he wanted to understand her, really understand her; and that meant understanding that wild urge, that craziness in her that he wasn’t sure he even approved of. He had to get that or he wouldn’t get her.

  “What about you?” she asked, suddenly intent, squeezing his arm. “You could come too, you know. You could join.”

  “Join the ferals, or join you?”

  “I don’t know! Who knows how things will be out there! I don’t know at all. But if we were both out there, then …”

  Then they would have a chance. Or at least she would have company among all those strangers.

  “Ah, Val,” he protested. “I wouldn’t know what to do out there. I barely know what to do here. And I’m—I’m interested in what’s happening here now.” He waved around—muddy old Mac Town, raw cold under a lowering sky, and the usual wind through the Gap—it was a hard place to make a case for even at the best of times. And this morning was not the best of times.

  They looked at each other. Wistful: full of wishes.

  “I’ll stay here,” he said finally. “But, you know. Maybe you’ll come in from time to time. If the ferals—” He saw it—“If Sylvia makes a deal that includes the ferals, and if the ferals tell her that they would prefer to deal with a co-op here rather than ASL, then maybe it’ll help us win a bid, and we’ll be here, and we’ll need to have a liaison with the ferals, at least, to discuss what they’re doing out there. And so …”

  She nodded. She smiled; there even seemed to be tears in her eyes, though that could have been the wind ripping by. She stepped into him, hugged him hard. Then they were kissing, just like they had on the Bealey Spur, the only woman he had ever kissed where he did not have to do his hunchback routine or lift her up bodily from the ground. Someone his size.

  “I’ll talk to Mai-lis,” she said when they broke it off. “Oh X—it’ll work. It’ll work somehow.”

  He nodded, too full for speech. They would make it work, they would take back the world from the overlords, they would make a decent permaculture from the bottom up. Well; or at least work on their moment, here, now, in McMurdo.

  With a few more incoherencies they parted.

  X walked away. He had forgotten where he had been going, if indeed he had had a destination. He was on another plane now, wasted but exhilarated. Mac Town was not enough at a moment like this. He could walk out to Discovery Point and sit in the old hut, as he had many times before, but that would not be right either. Those old ghosts and their Keystone Kops routines were not what this was about. To strive, to seek, to yield … something like that. But not now. He could see why Val wanted out of that whole Footsteps game, out and back onto the land as it had been before Scott arrived, Antarctica itself all bare of history, ready for a new start.

  So. Wasted, happy, nowhere to go. His room was not his room, and this town was not his town. He tried to see what it might be if they did it right, all Hut Point inhabited by some new aesthetic, so that it mattered what it looked like and how they lived there. Not just recycling their junk, but making a place that looked like a home. Those towns in Greenland and Lapland were like little works of art, the houses painted bright primary colors, lined out in rows and diagonals…. Make the town itself a work of art. NSF might be receptive. They had changed before as a result of activists, as for instance after Greenpeace dumped McMurdo’s trash on the floor of the Chalet. N
SF was a reasonable outfit; a bunch of scientists, bureaucrats, technocrats, whatever; reasonable people, committed to reason, trying to make a community of trust in the universal chaos. The scientific project; ethics, politics, all embedded in the very enterprise. Who knew what they might do next?

  But meanwhile, in this very moment, here he was. And he wanted out somehow—to fly, to celebrate! Perhaps a trip up the coast. A trip to Cape Royds, to see how Val’s hero Shackleton had done it. Snug little cabin up the coast—

  Suddenly he saw it. A vision: he could do it too, like Shackleton or Val, only his own way. A McMurdo feral. An indigenous Ross Islander. With a job making things work for the beakers, sure, but living in his own place, just as clean and neat and low-impact as anyone could ask; a tent house somewhere, something really snug and small. Nothing but footprints. It would have to be closer to Mac than Cape Royds, for sure, closer to town and work. Perhaps around the corner of Hut Point, facing the north and thus the sun. Val could visit sometime. Or he could go out with the ferals on vacations. Live like them, but help reorganize McMurdo as well.

  He went to the BFC and said to Joyce, “Can I take a Zodiac around to the Dellbridges?”

  “No way, X. The penguin cowboys are using them. Why do you want to go?”

  Then the phone rang, and she gestured at him to wait and picked it up. “Oh hi, Ta Shu. Uh huh …” She glanced at X. “Well, yeah, now that you mention it. I think we can do that. Sure, no problem. X will take you. He’ll meet you down at the dock.”

  She hung up. “You’re in luck. Ta Shu is in short-timer mode, and he wants to see Cape Evans and Cape Royds one more time before he leaves.”

  “Great!”

  “Must be meant to be.”

  “Yes yes yes.”

  black

  rock black water

  Meant to be. X grabbed his parka and boots and went down to the docks, downed another cup of terrible coffee, got a Zodiac ready. Ta Shu showed up, and X called weather and got clearance, and they took off.

  Over the puttering of the engine, and the slap of the windchopped black waves, X told Ta Shu about his plan, and Ta Shu listened impassively.

  Finally Ta Shu said, “Good idea. Let us look for a place for you now, shall we?”

  “You really want to?”

  Ta Shu squinted at him. “My job, you know.”

  “Of course.”

  So now he had a world-famous geomancer situating his house according to ancient feng shui principles. Meant to be!

  They turned the corner of Discovery Point, and began slowly to run down the long straight northern coast of the Hut Point Peninsula, toward the stub of the Erebus Ice Tongue. The entire peninsula jumped out of the water pretty steeply; the black peaks sticking out of the snow along its top were a couple hundred meters above sea level. Looking back as they puttered along, they could see a shiny new radio sphere on top of the last peak, which overlooked McMurdo on its other side. The slopes dropping into the sea were about half black rock, half crusted snowfields.

  They motored slowly past Arrival Heights, then Danger Slopes, where Scott’s seaman Vince had slipped to his death during one of the icecapades in the first year there. Then they passed a rocky knob called Knob Point; beyond it there was a mostly rocky section of the peninsula, smoothbacked, its side like a giant berm sloping into the ice-fringed water. There appeared to be a couple of indented ledges halfway up this section of the slope, like raised beaches from ages when sea level had been higher, though X had no idea if that was really what had formed them. From the water they appeared to be very narrow, lines only, but Ta Shu was pointing at them; and indeed, they looked to be the only flat land on this whole side of the peninsula.

  So they puttered in to the icy shore, and landed on a steep black pebble strand. “You could keep boat here,” Ta Shu said as they got out over the bow. “Row to town when it is water. Bicycle on ice when it is frozen. Or ski. Or walk.”

  “True,” X said.

  They climbed. The black rubble was steep and loose, but an inconspicuous path of stabilized steps in the rubble could eventually be tromped out.

  When they reached the first ledge they found that it was much wider than it had looked from below; perhaps fifty yards wide; a long and level terrace in the steep slope; one could have fit several big houses on it, in fact. And something little and snug could be tucked at the back of the terrace and not even be visible from the water below. And out of the wind.

  Looking over the sea to the north, they saw the ridgy little Dellbridge Islands, and beyond them the dark points of Cape Evans and Cape Royds. “That was another volcanic cone,” Ta Shu said, pointing at the Dellbridges. “See how the islands make the pieces of a circle?”

  “Ah,” X said. “Yeah.”

  He wandered around, looking at the ground. Under the layer of rubble was cracked volcanic basalt, as solid as could be. Bedrock. He stood with his back to the slope and looked north again. To his left he could see over the black water of McMurdo Sound to the mountains of the Dry Valleys. To his right Erebus rose like a white castle, steaming from its top as usual. Behind him, if he went up onto the crest of the peninsula, he would be near Castle Peak, in the area called the Japanese rock garden. There was a flagged cross-country ski trail running from Castle Peak to McMurdo.

  Ta Shu sat crosslegged on the edge of the great ledge, and appeared to be deep in meditation. Finally he came out of his trance and turned to X. “This is a good place.”

  After that they had a lovely day, puttering slowly through the Dellbridges up to Cape Evans and Cape Royds. Ta Shu like Val had a great admiration for Shackleton, and at Cape Royds he walked around Shackleton’s hut exclaiming at its location, its size—everything about it was apparently perfection in the feng shui sense. Meanwhile X wandered out to take a look at the rookery of Adelie penguins at the end of the cape, and while he was there one of the males stuck his head at the sky and squawked wildly as he tried, it appeared, to fly straight up, without ever getting even an inch off the ground. Ecstatic display, as the beakers called it. X knew just how he felt.

  And at the end of the day X coasted the Zodiac back into the docks at McMurdo, noticing that a big contingent of red-parkaed people was standing at the entrance to the mall; the investigators from the north, no doubt.

  Ta Shu squinted up at the town:

  gray sky

  brown dirt

  “This could be a good place,” he said.

  1. The Antarctic Treaty should be renewed as soon as possible, after whatever renegotiation is necessary to get all parties to agree to terms and sign. Some law needs to be in place. Paraphrasing the original proposal for an Antarctic Treaty, written by people in the American State Department in 1958: “It would appear desirable to reach agreement on a program to assure the continuation of fruitful scientific cooperation in that continent, preventing unnecessary and undesirable political rivalries, the uneconomic expenditure of funds to defend individual interests, and the recurrent possibility of misunderstanding. If harmonious agreement can be reached in regard to friendly cooperation in Antarctica, there would be advantages to all other countries as well.”

  2. In this renewed Treaty, and by a more general proclamation of the United Nations, Antarctica should be declared to be a world site of special scientific interest. Some may wish to interpret this to mean also that Antarctica is a sacred ritual space, in which human acts take on spiritual significance.

  3. Oil, natural gas, methane hydrates, minerals, and fresh water all exist in Antarctica, sometimes in concentrations that make their extraction and use a technical possibility. (Oil in particular, to be specific about the most controversial resource, is located in no supergiant fields but in three or four giant fields and many smaller ones, totalling approximately fifty billion barrels). Given that this is so, and that world supplies of some of these nonrenewable resources are being consumed at a rapid rate, the possibility of extraction needs to be explicitly considered by not only the Antarctic Tr
eaty nations, but the United Nations as well.

  Non-Treaty nations, in the Southern Hemisphere in particular, think of the possibility of oil extraction from Antarctica as one way of solving energy needs and dealing with ongoing debt crises. At the same time current oil extraction technology presents a small but not negligible risk of environmental contamination as the result of an accident. Technologies are likely to become safer in the future, and world oil supplies are decreasing so sharply that any remaining untapped supplies, left in reserve for future generations who may need oil for purposes other than fuel, are likely to be extremely valuable. These trends point to the idea of caching or sequestering certain oil fields for future use. Southern Hemisphere nations in need of short-term help could perhaps make arrangements modeled on the debt-for-nature exchanges that have already been made; in this case, the World Bank or individual northern countries might buy future rights to Antarctic oil from southern nations, with the payments to start now, but the oil to be sequestered, with extraction to be delayed until the extraction technology’s safety and the need for oil warrant it.

  At the same time, demonstrably safe methane-hydrate drilling could proceed, providing a less concentrated but still valuable source of fuel and income to the drillers, while serving also as a training ground for drilling technologies that could be considered for later use in oil extraction.

  4. The Antarctic Treaty suspends all claims of sovereignty on the continent, at the same time that it specifies free access to all, and a ban on military presences for anything but unarmed logistical support. The continent is land without ownership, terra communis; it is not property but commons, in the stewardship of all humanity. It is also the largest remaining wilderness on this planet. As such it exists in an experimental legal state which cannot ban visitors. Therefore if people desire to live in Antarctica, and take that responsibility and that cost on themselves, this is their right, even if all governmental and other official organizations disapprove and withhold all support.