Antarctica

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Wade wandered in the huge botanical garden at the south end of the little downtown. There were so many shades of green! And varieties of plants. All these species had evolved out of lichens and mosses, it was amazing what the warm world had generated. He was still vibrating with the props. He saw that there appeared to be people living in these gardens, under the big trees. Ferals here too.

  On a complex of soccer fields south of the botanical garden, crowds of people surrounded a group that were inflating enormous bright balloons—like hot-air balloons, only filled from gas cannisters. Some of the balloons reminded Wade of the blimps they had flown in over the Transantarctics. Others were truly huge, their gondolas like three-story Amsterdam houses. A festival atmosphere. People with picnic baskets, waving at the departing flyers.

  “Where are they going?” Wade asked one of them.

  Wherever the wind took them. Can’t do much else in a balloon. Stocked to live aloft for up to a year, some of them. Take a sabbatical in the clouds, or work up there. Go around the world a few times. Off on a tramp. Sky tramping, they called it.

  “Going feral?”

  That’s what the Aussies call it.

  “Much of that here?”

  Yeah sure. Most of the kids off in the wild. The balloons are more family. Like boating. Hook a bunch of them together once they get aloft. We’ve always been a bit like that here. Not very many people. A lot of land. Nothing new to us in these McMurdo Protocols you see in the paper. We redrew all our county lines to match the watershed boundaries, a long time ago.

  Then the balloons and blimps were all inflated. One by one, up and up and off into the wind, mingling with the low liquid clouds. It was surprising how clearly you could tell liquid clouds from frozen ones. These were as wet as a bath, and dropping a bit of rain on them all. No one noticed.

  When the balloons were gone Wade wandered off. He was aimless, and vibrating still. Christchurch looked like a California town.

  That night in his hotel there was nothing on the TV news about the balloon departure. It had to have been a couple hundred people taking off at least. But as far as the news was concerned it had not happened. Wade was puzzled. He channel surfed trying to find mention of it. Good visuals, perfect story for TV. Nothing. It had not happened. But if you’ve seen something with your own eyes and then there is no mention of it on the news, who are you going to believe?

  Suspended between worlds. Vibrating on a hotel bed like a Herc engine idling, in front of a muted TV, the images familiar but drained of all meaning. Looking at them Wade was reminded that as he had left McMurdo, Ta Shu had given him a TV chip that would allow him to hook into Ta Shu’s show in China. Now he dug in his briefcase until he found the little plastic minidisk, and went to the TV and inserted the disk into the slot in the TV’s control panel.

  After some flickering the Kiwi images were replaced by a bright white landscape: the Royal Society Range, seen from across the Ross Sea. “Hey!” Wade said, leaning forward from the edge of the bed, staring into the image. That was the view from Observation Hill!

  Ta Shu’s narration was in Chinese, of course, and very rapid and fluid, not at all like his English. Of course. After a minute or two of listening to his voice, Wade’s curiosity grew. He wanted to know what Ta Shu was saying at such length and with such apparent urgency. He got up and went back to his briefcase, and pulled out his laptop, and called up the menu for the translation programs that the laptop contained in its hard drive. He had heard that Chinese-to-English programs were still the worst of all the major language programs, but still it would be better than nothing.

  He put the laptop next to the TV and punched in the code for the translation program. After a short pause the laptop began to speak in English, almost as rapidly as Ta Shu himself, in a mechanical monotone.

  “So my friends we are come to end of our adventure in Antarctica. Soon I will leave this land, I will fly north over the south ocean, to New Zealand. It has been a true event time, I am sure you agree. Many interruptions, many discoveries. Full of lands so powerful, action so strange, you must wonder if I am transmitting you from another world. But I remind you, all this happens on Earth. This too is Earth. A world beyond all telling. For me it has been a profound being, a trip. For you at home in China, watching what I have looked at in facemasks or on television screens, not so there. Without space, without spaciousness, as it must be. Like a story told, or a dream you have had. Of course this must be so. Where then have we been together? In a vision we share a story. Lemon said stories are false solutions to real problems. Lamb added corollary, that stories from other planets hence must be false solutions to false problems. What then have we done together? Look around you. Is it all a dream only? Or are all the worlds one world. Black said, Dreams commence obligation to world. Seashells say poets are the unknown government of the world. And we are all poets. So now we tell the world what next to do.”

  The image on the TV panned left, to an expanse of white ice; the screen was cut horizontally right across the middle, blue above, white below, like a powerful Rothko. The view directly south. Ta Shu spoke again, and after a pause the laptop translator picked it up. “Ah yes. Very nice view. Now we come to the end of our time together, and I ask one thing of you, my friends who have stayed with me long and faithfully. When my transmission has ended, go outdoors. Go take a walk outside in the open air. Wherever you find yourself on the face of this planet, it is a good place. Breathe deeply the breath of the world. Look at the sky over our heads all together. Feel yourself walking; this too is thought. Feel the wind in your face. Feel the way you are animal, breathing in the spirit wind. If our time together gives you no more than this walk, then still yet it has done well. Farewell now my friends, until our next voyage together.”

  The view from Ob Hill disappeared. Cut to a Chinese commercial. “Do you have trouble cleaning kitchen hardware?”

  Wade turned off the TV. He went downstairs. He opened a glass door cautiously, but it was still warm. Out the door, into the hotel’s inner courtyard. It was night, the darkness like a caress to the eyes. He could feel his pupils blooming. Air warm and humid against his skin—so warm, so benign. The caress of the breeze. Maybe it would work after all. He walked over to the lawn by the pool, sat down on the warm fragrant grass. He ran his hands over it. He lay down in it, on his back, and looked up at the stars.

  The next spring X made all his preparations, and took off for a walk across Ross Island.

  It had been a busy winter. The McMurdo Field Services Co-op, usually called MacCoop, won the bid for the field services subcontract. PetHelo won the general contract; ASL was gone. After the initial celebrations, there had been endless hours of organizational meetings and paperwork in Mac Town. In the meantime, friends had helped X to build a little hut on the ledge next to Knob Point, mostly out of parts scavenged from McMurdo’s construction yard Dumpsters: three arches of an old Jamesway frame, essentially, with new insulation, a triple-paned window with two panes cracked, and photovoltaic sheeting tacked to the outside for the coming sunny months. Inside there was a little propane stove for heating and cooking. A bed, a desk, a chair. It was very cozy, but X liked it that way. It was his place. Tucked back against the slope, out of the wind, invisible from below. Especially of course during these sunless months.

  Every day the weather allowed, he skied up through the rock garden to the cross-country trail and down into town, and did some work at the co-op office, and either stayed a night in the BFC office on the couch, or skied back home. Sometimes he went home on the sea ice, around Discovery Point. It depended on how much moonlight he had to work with. On dark nights it was best to go around on the sea ice, on moonlit nights it was fun to stay up on the ridge. He found that a full moon on the snowy land was bright enough to read by, much less ski. During these trips, and on his days off, he worked hard on his snow skills. He decided that he wanted to make a traverse of Ross Island, going over the three volcanoes and down to Cape Crozier, to see t
he “Return of the Sun” ceremony which George Tremont was planning to stage out there. This would be a big trip for him, X knew that well, and he prepared for it all winter. He found that unlike a lot of sports, mountaineering was mostly a matter of walking. One only had to walk without falling and one was a successful mountaineer. More a matter of navigation than athletic skill—at least at the level he was trying, which was merely to get around Ross Island. And so he had been pleased at his progress. Countless times he had climbed the rock steps from the sea ice up to his hut and back down again, to build his strength and endurance. He had worked on walking up and down steeper and steeper snow slopes; he had practiced with snowshoes on snow, and crampons on ice. He found he liked snowshoes better than skis, even if they were harder work; they were easier, indeed almost identical to walking in boots. He learned to use a GPS, and a crevasse detector. The crevasse detector was critical; without it X wouldn’t have had the courage to attempt hiking around on his own. As it was, whenever it beeped he stopped like Lot’s wife, and carefully figured out where he was, and where the crevasse was, and then he went around it. He would make extravagant detours, hiking miles out of his way, in order not to have to cross a crevasse, no matter how solid any snowbridges in it might appear. No crossing beep-beeps and he would be okay. And so he had gradually ranged farther and farther away, and spent nights out in a tent and sleeping bag, learning slowly to manipulate the gear and to trust in it to keep him alive and warm. The days—the endless succession of sunless hours—had passed quickly.

  Back in his little hut the hours had also passed quickly. He had studied Heraclitus, and co-op economics. From time to time he heard from Carlos in Santiago. More often he heard from Wade, who emailed hellos from all over the world, having apparently switched roles with his senator (and X thought he knew why). The senator had returned to Washington, and gotten a rival in trouble with the Senate Ethics Committee about campaign donations, and as an indirect, fifty-dominoes-down-the-line result, it looked like the Antarctic Treaty renewal was going to be ratified soon. Wade seemed cautiously optimistic. The two messages he sent when actually in Washington on visits were brief and ambivalent: “We’re kicking ass,” and “This is not a good place.”

  Along with his snippets of news, he sent X a lot of music that X had never heard before; it became clear that he was a rabid closet d.j. and inflictor-of-music-on-friends; but tucked in the little hut for as many hours as X was, he did not complain; on the contrary, he listened to these gifts again and again. Often he listened to them while watching Ta Shu’s latest transmission on his computer screen. These days Ta Shu was taking a boat trip down the Yangtze River. The translation program X used made him sound like a long succession of incoherent fortune cookies, but still it was interesting to see him take on the Chinese equivalent of the Bureau of Reclamation. And when this voyage was over, X was going to try to view a copy of Ta Shu’s Antarctic adventure; that would be even more interesting than the Yangtze, and it seemed almost certain that there would be some film of Val in it, too. There was footage of her in the SAR’s Happy Camper videos, X had found, and once he watched this footage over and over for most of one Sunday. Then he trashed the file and stopped looking for such things. But glimpses of her in Ta Shu’s program would be okay.

  Late in the winter, despite X’s warnings and protests, the co-op hired Ron to come back down and run the heavy shop. X cursed when he heard the vote on this: “Damn it, he’s a pirate! He joined the ice pirates!”

  “He was desperate,” Joyce said. “It doesn’t matter now. Get used to it.”

  Later, thinking it over in his hut, X decided he could get used to it. After all it had not made him comfortable to think of Ron either plotting revenge in Chile or holed up drinking in some Florida beachfront. Certainly he would come back down and try to take everything over, and then there would be a major jerk in their fine new co-op; but at least it would be a jerk that X knew and liked. And X would not have to answer to him. And MacCoop would survive him.

  Twice X got email messages from Val, just brief ones; once on his birthday, once on the solstice; but there they were, right there on his screen. Her winter was turning out not all that different from his. Like all the other animals wintering over down here, the ferals had to hunker down in the cold and dark, bunch together like the Emperor penguins. They made some expeditions out, apparently, but no one could stand the winter cold for long. The one interesting thing they had done was to carve a refuge in the ice cap itself, lighting it intensively for half the day, and living in this artificial oasis for several weeks without many trips outside. So Val was hibernating too.

  X had replied to her messages carefully, and gone back to his Heraclitus. The same road goes both up and down. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wholeness arises from distinct particulars. All things come in seasons. Character is fate.

  And now spring and George Tremont’s celebration were almost here, and so he took off, waving fondly to his battened-down little hut. It was close enough to the year’s first sunrise that there were a few hours of clear twilight bracketing noon every day, and he started in that clear gray light. There was a full moon as well, and after the twilight darkened he could still see the snow underfoot perfectly well in the moonlight. Up onto the ridge of Hut Point, around Castle Rock, and on up the long flank of Erebus. Up and up and up, one step at a time. Higher on the volcano the slope got steeper, but it was always just a matter of walking, and circumventing the beep-beeps. A shield volcano, nowhere precipitous. One step after another. Up and up, one step after another. The end of a circle is also its beginning. Snow-shoes were so wonderful.

  He kept track of the time, and after six hours of hard climbing had passed, he stopped and took off his backpack, and pulled out his sleeping bag and tiny bivvy tent, and got in them and cooked a dinner on his little stove. After that he tried to sleep for a while. He was too excited to sleep very well, but after an hour or two he fell into a doze, and when he woke up, face freezing, he started the stove and cooked up some hot chocolate, then oatmeal. He got his boots on, got his backpack repacked, jumped out and repacked his tent. Then off he went again, poling methodically with his ski poles, his snowshoes clicking and squeaking. Left, right, left, right; up the great ghostly white mountain, luminous even in starlight only. Higher and higher.

  Up on the highest slopes of the volcano it was very cold, and very still. No wind. He had checked with weather before setting off, and it was supposed to hold good for a week, but the air now was unusually still. In the lack of wind there was no sound; and only starlight illuminating the landscape, which nevertheless was clearly visible, white on black. Nothing moved for as far as the eye could see; as if time itself had frozen, and X the golem impervious to that freezing and left wandering still, tramping through eternity.

  Erebus was still steaming from its cratered summit, however; steaming more than ever, no doubt, in the cold still air. X hiked quickly around the rim of the active crater, keeping well back from the edge, feeling very small, and obscurely frightened—as if it were simply too bold for a lone human to hike around the crest of Erebus in the dark before dawn. But there he was; and really it was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Nothing more than that; and yet so strange! Could this really be him? On Earth? In this present moment of his life? He could scarcely believe it was happening. But there he was. When he reached the far side of the crater, he even turned and went right up to the rim’s edge, to look down into the active caldera. The steam billowing up past him was pinkish orange, lit from below. Under that was burbling orange lava, scarcely glimpsed through the steam. The rising steam roared airily, and boomed in echoey booms. Beginning of the world.

  He hurried on, feeling that he had tempted fate: gases, lava bombs, the spirit of the vasty deep, something ought to get him for taking such a chance for a glance. But he had done it! And now it was all downhill.

  By the time he descended to Mount Terra Nova, and stopped for another brace of meals and
a nap, and gone up and over Mount Terror too, it was getting very near the time of the first sunrise. It was in the midday twilight that X glissaded down the last spine of Mount Terror to Cape Crozier, the sky lightening all the while, as if he were redescending from the dark peak into the world of light and motion and wind. He had traversed Ross Island, from Knob Point to Cape Crozier, over the tops of the three volcanoes! And so he felt marvelous as he glissaded down one of the long snowy chutes between lava ridges, left snowshoe, right, left, right, all the long way down to Igloo Spur.

  He was happy as he came over a final bump, and saw the little knot of people surrounding the rock hut. He walked down and joined them, explaining briefly where he had come from. They congratulated him, then pointed out what they had just recently been surprised to discover, which was that the little museum shelter, built the year before, had disappeared. The structure itself was gone, that was; all the equipment that the three early explorers had left behind was still there, but now relocated in the rock hut itself; the things put back, evidently, where they had been left by the three explorers.

  X went over to have a closer look. A narrow wooden sledge lay across the rock oval, and under it on the floor of the hut, coated with a rime of snow, all the objects lay scattered in the tumble they must have been in when the three had beat their hasty retreat.

  “Good idea,” X opined.

  “George didn’t think so. He practically pulled out his beard.”

  “But he’s getting used to it now, see?”

  “I wonder who did it.”

  “Shh! They’re about to start playing.”