Antarctica (57 page)

“You don’t regret losing …” A loud gust of wind drowned him out.

“Losing what?”

“The world!”

That sweet laugh. “What’s to miss? The world’s just a big ASL, you know that. Driving in boxes to go sit in other boxes, and look at little boxes—that’s no way to live. Even building the boxes is no great thrill after the first fifty or so. No, I don’t miss anything about the
world. Except Tahiti of course!” Laugh. “And I go there every winter.”

“You don’t winter over?”

“No way. I’ve done it twice, and that’s at least once too many. Life is too short. Of course I’m committed to wintering over one year every seven, to help keep things going. But I haven’t hit seven yet, and when I do I’ll have to think it over. See if I can buy out. Even quit maybe. Nah, but I’ll think of something. Maybe I’ll take a paired assignment if I find the right guy, that’s the only way to do it, just hibernate and spend the whole winter in bed staying warm.”

“So most of you don’t winter over,” Val said.

“No. Just a maintenance crew, like Mac Town or Pole. We’re Antarcticans, okay, but we aren’t masochists, except for some I could name. We do it ’cause it’s fun. The whole point is to stay flexible. Nomads, you know. That’s how the Eskimos and the Sami do it too. So it’s Tahiti in the winter for most of us, or New Zealand or Alaska or wherever. But hell, I’ll winter here again if I have to, to help things along.”

Below them a rift in the clouds appeared, and they could see parts of a vast broad glacier, flanked by black peaks. “That looks like the Beardmore,” Val said.

“Well, let’s not talk about that. And if you would pass on checking your GPS I would appreciate it,” she added, glancing back at Wade.

“Where are you taking us?” Wade asked.

“Your final destination is Mac Town, of course. But first we’re going to Quviannikumut, to refuel. And I think Mai-lis wants you to see something other than our dark side, so to speak. Dirty laundry—law enforcement.” She shook her head. “Those bastards.”

“It sounds like Mai-lis is really quite an authority,” Wade noted.

“Well, someone’s gotta do it. She’s the big mama, no doubt about that. The democracy stuff can only go so far before it becomes chaos. Someone’s got to have the final word, or the first word anyway, and that’s Mai-lis.”

“I wonder what brought her down here.”

“You’ll have to ask her that. But I think I remember her saying she had gotten mighty sick of Norwegians. They treat the Sami like we treat Indians, you know? Ah—there’s Quviannikumut, see?”

Wade saw nothing but white clouds.

“Means to feel deeply happy. Nice name, eh? Okay, down we go. Come on, you dog. Down boy! Down!”

Val walked into Quviannikumut amazed. It was a big shelter, much bigger than the first refuge they had been taken to: a modular assemblage of clear tenting covering several ragged embayments of a dolerite slope, which ran down gently into an ice surface that then rose up over the shore, so that fingers of rock and ice intertwined. The rock had the mazelike quality of the Labyrinth in Wright Valley, so that little canyons crossed higher on the slope and became sunken rooms. The smooth blue ice peninsulas bulking into the embayments were part of a larger glacier, or the polar cap itself—in the flying mist of the storm it was impossible to say—and the ice too had been incorporated into the shelter, honeycombed with tunnels and open-roofed chambers and long blue galleries. And all under the
keening flight of the flying white cloud, so that it seemed a village under glass. It was beautiful.

All Val’s clients from the other blimps were already gathered in what appeared to be a dining hall; so that was okay, and she relaxed. Or began to relax; it was going to take some time to unwind. They were having another big meal, it seemed, dipping krill cakes in salsa, and talking with other diners around them. Jack appeared to be recovering; he was wearing a sling and regaling one of the feral women, a tall Scandinavian blonde, with the story of their crossing of Mohn Basin. “A matter of pacing yourself.” Jim and Jorge and Elspeth were interrogating the cook. Carlos was talking to another Latino contingent in Spanish; Ta Shu was looking out at the icescape beyond the refuge, nodding enthusiastically. “A very good place!” X and Wade were behind her, crowding in, still chatting with Addie. It was loud; things were turning raucous as they celebrated the exile of the ice pirates.

“Pretty hard,” Val remarked to Mai-lis. “Presumably they liked being down here.”

Mai-lis shrugged. “They brought it on themselves. And it’s not as if we’ve thrown them in prison.”

She took Val and Wade and X around the shelter, and Ta Shu joined them. Several of the little ravines upslope from the ice were in effect greenhouses, sealed off from the rest of the camp by triple lock doors. Inside these canyonettes vegetables and grains covered the floors and walls, most growing hydroponically, some in soil boxes and big glass terraria. The roofs were clear. “On sunny days the fabric goes white. From above no one can see,” Mai-lis said. “We shift this work from place to place to follow the sun. We try to grow as much as we can. Of course it is not enough, but we are
getting closer. It’s wonderful how productive modern greenhouses can be.”

Wade asked a lot of questions, as he had with Addie; he was clearly fascinated by the whole phenomenon. “What are the staples of your diet, then?”

“Fish, of course. And krill cakes. Being indigenous in Antarctica means being coastal and living off the sea most of the time, because there is nothing inland to live on. Fortunately with the Ross Ice Shelf gone the Transantarctics are themselves coastal, which is good. So we can live here as well as around the rest of the coastline. And up on the cap too, in the summer, to cross to the far coasts. Or just to be up there.”

“But why?” Wade said.

“Well, because we like it.” She smiled, for the first time that Val had seen. “You gain a lot by being out in the world. And at this point technology has advanced to the point where we are allowed to practice a very sophisticated form of nomadic existence. Not hunting and gathering, but hunting and doing mobile agriculture. And clothing is so advanced that in most ways it functions as your house. That’s a good thing. It means you can travel very lightly on the land and still be sheltered. It isn’t like being truly exposed. As you found out, yes?”

“It still felt pretty exposed to me,” X said.

“Yes, but it’s partly a matter of getting used to how well it works. Of learning to trust it. Think what it used to be like! Occasionally we remind ourselves of that by going out in the old gear, just so we know what we have now. Also it’s a way of doing honor to the first explorers, to remind us what they endured. They were the first Antarcticans, you see. They loved it too.”

Val said, “You have some of their outfits here?”

“Facsimiles of their outfits, made for adventure
travel groups reproducing the old expeditions in every detail.”

“Ah yes,” Val said. “I know that stuff. I did a couple of those trips.”

“We bought it heavily discounted.”

“I’ll bet.”

Mai-lis led them into the next module of the shelter, rock-walled under a rock-colored tent roof. This was the bedroom; the sleeping chambers were little individual cubicles, curtained off from each other and the hallway down the middle.

“It looks pretty cramped,” Wade noted.

“When we are indoors things are tight,” Mai-lis said. “An exercise in efficiency. But we don’t spend that much time in any one place, so it doesn’t bother us. And it’s a pleasure to design a new way of living. All kinds of possibilities are opening up. These are important to explore in such a world as ours. Lars talks about a Plimsoll line. Do you know this term? It’s the line on a ship’s hull marking the maximum load possible. He says the world has sunk below its Plimsoll line, weighted down by people. He has worked out how much total energy each person alive today could burn and yet the world altogether still remain above its Plimsoll line. It’s not very much. Less than you would think.”

“Is that why you live down here?” Wade asked. “To ease population pressures up north?”

“Oh no. Antarctica can never do that, its carrying capacity is magnitudes smaller than the scale of the problem. People everywhere have to reduce their numbers, that is the only solution at this point. Population reduction and climate stabilization are the same thing now. No, we live here because we like it. And it may
also be a way to think about how people should live everywhere. But we do it because it gives us pleasure.”

“You must burn some fuel to keep this place going,” X said. “I can hear a generator.”

Mai-lis smiled. “You sound like a fundie. What if we fueled it with whale oil, would that make you happy? A local renewable resource?”

X shrugged.

“We have a better way still in some places,” Mai-lis said. “Where they exist we have drilled down into geothermal areas, and we heat those refugia with hot springs. They are the best of all.”

Wade said, “Is that generator we hear the one from old old Pole Station?”

Mai-lis nodded. “It is. And it’s a problem, because its fuel is an antique mixture we have to brew specially. But serviceable, as you hear.”

At the far end of that ravine corridor, the tenting closed to the ground in a vestibule door. Beyond it the rooms continued out into the blue bulk of the glacier, the ice carved into elaborate pillars and ceilings. Their blimp pilot Lars was out there, and when he saw them he waved for them to come out. “Yes, let’s take a look,” Mai-lis said. “We’re dressed warmly enough, it’s kept just below freezing out there, you’ll see.”

They went through the vestibule and out into the ice gallery, and indeed it was not very much colder than the rock-walled rooms had been. As they moved farther out they could see how much of the ice had been carved into rooms and chambers; it looked like an entire lobe of the glacier had been honeycombed, some of it tented, the rest open to the air, and all of it sculpted like one of the great festival ice villages of Scandinavia, but on a truly vast scale, with one immense courtyard entirely devoted to smooth-sided blue ice statuary.

“This is amazing!” Wade exclaimed, pressing up against a clear wall to look out at the untented sculpture garden. “Who—how—”

Lars joined Wade at the wall, more friendly than he had yet been. “This was not just us fooling around. This is the work of one of the artists from McMurdo. He applied to NSF to use the new ice borers to do this to the end of the Canada Glacier in the Dry Valleys, and they refused him. So he spent all his time in McMurdo making snowmen and pretending that that was all he was doing, but in the meantime he made three trips out here to do this. No one pays much attention to what those Woos do once they get in the field, and somehow he found us, and we brought him here when we were building this refuge. I was with him when he did this, and I felt like Rilke with Rodin, I tell you.”

“I can see why,” Wade said, nose pressed into the clear fabric. “What a sense of form.”

“Yes. He was a true artist. The ice borer was like his fingers. And you must understand, the ice did not look like this when he finished with it. He was planning on the ice to sublime away, so that the sculptures would change in time as they ablated. There was no way to be sure exactly how they would diminish, so there is an aleatory element to it. But he wanted to know the prevailing winds, to try to shape what would happen. And this is how it looks now. A few more years and the wind will blow it all away.”

“Wow.”

“He changed the way we thought about ice borers. About what we should be doing out here with the refugia.”

Ta Shu, grinning, thumped himself on the chest. “I too am a Woo.”

“Is that so?” Lars asked, interested.

X pointed across the glacier to the next tented embayment, which appeared stuffed with mist. “What’s that?”

“That’s the sauna,” Mai-lis said. “A way to relax and get warm after a day outside. My next destination, if you don’t mind. Feel free to join me if you want.”

She led them back around and past the sleeping tent, to the door of a big damp changing room, where piles of clothes were stacked neatly or otherwise on a rock bench against a rock wall. She went inside and stripped down to blue smartfabric long underwear, then stepped through a zipdoor in a clear wall, down into a long room stuffed with mist, a steaming pool at its bottom. Most of the people in the shelter appeared already to be down there. The pool floored one long room of the tent, where the rock embayment dipped in a basin that had been filled waist-high with hot water. The clear tent wall came down beyond the pool, just before the ice of the glacier, which curved down like a blue wave about to crash onto them.

Val stripped down to her underwear and jogger top, not looking at X or Wade, who were studiously not looking at her, staggering and crashing into each other as they got out of their clothes too. She went through the inner door into the pool room. Inside it was shockingly hot and wet. Here one could not really see the blue glacier overhanging the far end of the room; that side of the room was simply bluer mist than the mist around her. She walked into the pool and sank to her neck, then sat on a rock bench set a little higher. Hot! Hot! And oh so luxurious. Suddenly it seemed she had been cold for months.

The sauna was above the pool, its benches in a little tent around a steamer. All the air was steam; in there it must have been simply hotter steam. Voices were confined
by the rock walls, and the watery clangor was loud. Val sat and watched the faces. She had not slept in three days, or four—for so long that it was too much trouble to figure out just exactly how long—and so she was deep into the exhausted buzzed insomnia that all Antarcticans experienced from time to time, when for one reason or another you stayed awake for so long that it felt like you would never sleep again. Stunned, detached, disembodied; although there were bodies everywhere in the water and the mist, pink and brown shapes against the blurry blue ice; including her own body, relaxing at last, her hand pulsing pinkly there in front of her face, every detail of it microscopically distinct, the skin very obviously semitransparent. But her consciousness was well detached from that pink thing. Many of the ferals were naked; others were in bathing suits or underwear or longjohns, the smartfabrics so smart that they would dry on the body almost as soon as one got out; even immersed in the pool Val felt a layer of warm dry fabric against her skin, where she was clothed. Looking down at her pink skin from a point of view that seemed distinctly higher than her own head, Val was glad to be somewhat covered; even so she was a shocking sight, she felt, as she had been torn up badly in her two falls, and had had other accidents and surgeries; scars everywhere, so that it seemed to her a very Bride of Frankenstein sort of body, stitched together from various parts that did not match very well. Oh well. X was sitting beside her in his longjohns, making the perfect Frankenstein to her Bride; big, massive, graceless. It was a comfort to have him there. They made a kind of pair, like a couple of football players, linebacker and nose guard, soaking away their bruises after a hard game.