Antarctica (63 page)

Mr. Smith pursed his lips, his most violent expression so far. “If sufficiency were the true goal then the world’s needs could be met and more, using current and emerging technologies. It’s economic growth and the enrichment of the feudalist-capitalist aristocracy that are the true goals of this society, and the masses do not truly go along with these goals which are against their own interests, but are rather intimidated to accept what they can in an unjust system, or else be fired or jailed or shot. Thus my clients encourage widespread democratic resistance to the current destruction of the Earth, in which a few hundred thousand people benefit excessively while billions suffer, and the coming generations handed a scorched and plundered world.”

“Speaking more particularly,” Sylvia suggested.

“Antarctica is the last clean wilderness,” Mr. Smith
pounced. “As such it stands for what we could do if we lived in a right balance with nature.”

“Antarctica is clean because no one lives here!” Carlos said. “It’s easy to be pure when there are no people around. For the rest of the world, the best possible strategies have to be followed to keep people alive.”

“Gentlemen,” Sylvia said, looking hard at Carlos and Mr. Smith. “We could perhaps debate general principles forever. I’d like to hear what happens if we keep our discussion focused on Antarctica in particular.” She glanced at Geoff, hoping for some help there; but he was staring into infinity, deep in the Pliocene no doubt.

“But they are discussing Antarctica,” Ta Shu said. He had been watching the argument as if at a tennis match, head swiveling side to side, nodding at both speakers with what looked like complete and total approval. Now he said, “People here talk about the ice and the world. As if here we are not in the world. But this is not so. To speak of this place truly, we must bring in everything else. And so these gentlemen are not wrong to speak generally. What they say is simply the basic problem of our time—that the Earth must be allowed to live, while at the same time people must be fed. One emphasizes one, another emphasizes the other. But both must be done.”

“My clients are not just advocating park status for Antarctica,” said Mr. Smith. “The whole world must be treated as a wilderness in which we have to live, with minimum impact everywhere.”

“Like in Manhattan,” Carlos said.

“Even Manhattan can be made a wilderness of a certain kind.”

“And even Antarctica can be inhabited,” said a short old woman by the door.

“Mai-lis!” Sylvia said, surprised. “You’ve come to join us.”

Mai-lis walked into the room, into the circle of chairs. “Yes. I am Mai-lis,” she said. “My colleagues and I live in the Transantarctic Mountains.”

The people in the room stared at her, and she gathered their gazes calmly, like a storyteller readying her start by the fire at night. Sylvia extended a hand, as if to say Speak; and Mai-lis nodded.

“I am here to speak for my colleagues and friends, a group of Antarcticans who have decided to become indigenous to this place. Some call it going feral. It is a mixed-ideology project, in that we do it for different reasons, rising out of different value systems, and we do not always agree among ourselves. But in general terms, I can say that we take Antarctica to be a beautiful sacred landscape, worthy of sacred inhabitation, which is our word for a joyful or worshipful living in a land—to be the land’s human expression and part of its consciousness, along with the rest of its animal and plant consciousnesses.

“To do this in such a harsh climate, it is necessary to use techniques and technologies from many times and places, from the Sami and Inuit and other Arctic indigenous peoples, to the best of communal social theory, to the latest appropriate technologies. We take what seems right to us, from the paleolithic to the postmodern, and most of us do not worry too much about purity. We live democratically. We think it’s important to live off the land as much as possible, but sustainably, without harm to the land. In Antarctica this means keeping our numbers small, and helping the parts of the northern economies which we need to help us in turn. We regard our way of life as an experiment under extreme conditions. If it works here, it should work anywhere, as long
as the number of people trying it is not too large for the land being lived on.”

“So you don’t believe in the Antarctic Treaty either,” Wade suggested.

“We do. We live by the Treaty very specifically. We kill some animals for food, but we study them scientifically before we eat them, and thus we are in technical compliance with the Treaty. We agree with the goals of the Treaty. But most of us have no intrinsic objection to oil and gas extraction, if it is done with no impact to the environment. This is the question; how cleanly can these extractions be made? Can accidents be treated as criticalities? Can the engineering be made redundant to the point where the risks are negligible? And if that kind of engineering is applied, is the extraction still worth it to the extractors? These are questions that need to be answered. It is a matter of doing a true-cost true-benefit analysis, which is to say that all costs and benefits are included, including the so-called exterior costs, while the unpriceable aspects of the situation are also acknowledged and included. We are trying to do this in our own subsistence here, and we often talk about the feasibility of such accounting in the world generally. Environmentally safe technologies, green technologies, applied according to a humane green analysis of the costs and benefits of our various activities—calculating needs and wants, methods and technologies—this is necessary work for people everywhere. It occupies many an evening in our camps, around the table and at the computer. And most of us believe it can be done everywhere, if—and these are big ifs—if human populations were to decline, and if people were everywhere to go feral on the land.”

Sylvia sighed, and made a small steering gesture. “Let’s try to keep the focus on Antarctica in particular
now. Just as an exercise, if nothing else. Perhaps it can serve as a kind of experiment, as you called it. In any case, it’s all we can concern ourselves with for now. It’s an open question whether we can even deal with that, obviously.”

In fact small muttered discussions or arguments were breaking out all around the circle, neighbors jabbering emphatically about permaculture or survival or what-not, and for a moment it looked to Sylvia like some sad red-eyed debate society in a mental ward, going nowhere.

She clapped her hands hard, and they went silent. “Let’s take a break,” she said. “We need to organize what we’re doing here a little more, I think. Go get something to eat, and we’ll reconvene in a while. What I want to do then is work out some specific protocols,” very heavy emphasis, “governing our conduct in Antarctica, that everyone represented here could abide by. Whether that’s possible I don’t know yet, but I want us to try, or this meeting becomes nothing but talk. And I want more than talk. I want a report”—glancing quickly at Wade, who was nodding—“and I want us to come up with a list of suggestions, perhaps even a full protocol. Do you understand me? Mr. Smith, can you speak for your clients here?”

“I can.”

“Please go have a meal with Carlos then, and let him describe for you the engineering of the oil and methane exploration technology. I’d like to have a few of our people at that meeting as well. The rest of you can perhaps meet with Mai-lis, and hear more about how they conduct their settlements. We’ll reconvene when we’re ready, but in any case by tomorrow morning. I’ll keep you informed on all phones and beepers.”

X observed Sylvia’s meeting with a growing sense of alarm. He could see a potential settlement coming, in which the oil consortium altered its practices to conform to standards set by Mr. Smith’s ecoteurs, who became a kind of conscience to the project; and all would continue as it had been before; and no one would ever notice that in their debate both men had been attacking the practices of Götterdämmerung capitalism without seeming to notice the complementarity, and thinking instead that they were attacking each other. And X would be x’ed out of ASL forever, and therefore out of McMurdo, and no doubt he could get back on with Carlos and the oil crews, but then he would be an exile for good, a man without a country for real, and all the hierarchies would remain, and he would never see Val again. After all that he had been through, he might as well have been right back on the floor of the heavy shop. Exiled without having ever been anywhere—nowhere but Antarctica and America, and Antarctica was another planet, while America was a dream. He had no
home; he had no country. If he didn’t want to become The Man Without a Country permanently, wandering the Earth forever exiled, he was going to have to do something about it. He would have to make his home.

So as people poured out of the Chalet into the brisk bright light, most heading over to Crary or the Everest View, he wandered the muddy streets of McMurdo, balked, frustrated, perplexed, at a loss.

Deep in thought, hiking up past the BFC, he ran into the beaker he had worked for in the Dry Valleys. Graham Forbes. X had seen Forbes’s older colleague in the meeting at the Chalet, so now he wasn’t entirely surprised. He remembered the day with Forbes vividly; in all his adventures since he had never been colder. “Hey,” he said, “how are you?”

“Fine. And you?”

“I’m okay. How did your research go out there?”

“It went well, thanks.”

“Make any big discoveries?”

“Well—” Forbes hesitated, looking puzzled as to what to say. “Yes, as a matter of fact.” He held up a hand quickly: “Not anything too definitive, of course.”

“No brass plate saying
PLIOCENE FJORD SLEPT HERE
.”

“No.” Small smile. “But we did find a mat of beech tree litter—leaves and twigs and other organic matter. It’s similar to mats found elsewhere, but new to this area, and very well-preserved.”

“So even the weirdo Dry Valleys were part of your story.”

“Yes, so it appears.”

“That’ll be big news, I guess. Will one of you do a Crary lecture about it?”

“Oh no. Not this season, no. That would be premature.”

X nodded, thinking it over.

Forbes excused himself; he needed to get over to Crary for a meeting. As he was turning away he stopped suddenly, and said “Thanks for your help that day, by the way. That was an awfully cold day.”

“Oh hey,” said X, startled. “My pleasure.”

Forbes veered off toward Crary.

X continued to walk around the streets, thinking harder than ever, but also taking the time to stop and look at what he was walking by. This had been his town, for a while. And in a lot of ways he had liked it. Right there at the mail building the Kiwis came over from Scott Base and held a
hangi
and
haaka
for Mac Town, barbecuing whole pigs and doing a ceremonial Maori war dance—twenty white Kiwi men stripped to the waist and dancing martially to the harsh shouted commands of a Maori woman Kiwi air force officer. That was the kind of thing you saw in Mac Town.

But he had burned his bridges, and now he felt the immense nostalgia of the exile seeing his old home again, briefly. Nostalgia, pain of the lost home; and physically painful, yes. A heartache.

He ran into Randi. “Jesus, Randi, you’re not in the radio shack.”

“They let me out for an hour now that we got everyone home.” Her voice was hoarse, and she had the same wild-eyed red-rimmed insomniac look as everyone else in town. “You look lost, X.”

“I am lost.” It was strange seeing her face again, he was so used to her as nothing but a voice on the radio. Nice. One of Val’s galley gang. You could see how
much she laughed right there in the look on her face. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I know ASL will never rehire me, and so—I’m fucked, I guess.”

She nodded. “You sure are if you have to depend on ASL. But listen, their contract is up for renewal, right? And some of us have been talking about making a bid ourselves.”

“What’s this?”

“Go talk to Joyce, she’ll tell you all about it.”

She shooed him off to the BFC and he hurried over there, remembering as he went that Joyce had mentioned something about this when he had dropped by to say good-bye before leaving for Mohn Basin. He had been so distracted by his distress over Val that he hadn’t really listened; and at that point he was committed anyway, and didn’t want to listen. But now he did. Joyce would give him another tongue-lashing for sure, but he didn’t care. Whatever it took.

Up into the BFC offices.

“Hi, Joyce. I’m back.”

“Yeah, I saw you at the meeting at the Chalet.”

“Oh yeah. What did you think of that?”

“Interesting.” She was staring at him hard. “You want back in, don’t you.”

He dropped onto a chair, held up a palm to forestall her. “Yes, I do, and I know I’m fucked.”

“Yes, you are.”

“But Randi reminded me of this bid thing you tried to tell me about last time. I know I wasn’t listening that time. I’m sorry about that. This time I am, though, so tell me again.”

She nodded, accepting his apology. “NSF makes ASL give subcontracts to some potential competitors, so they’ll know enough to be able to make competitive bids when the contract comes up for renewal. It’s the
same system ASL used to beat out ASA last time. And they’ll be getting strong challenges from PetHelo and GE for the general contract, and I wouldn’t be surprised if PetHelo beats them out, because you know ASL, they’re so efficient that everyone hates their guts, even NSF if the truth be known. In fact there’s a rumor that NSF is trying to get ASA to come back again for a bid, now they see what a good thing they had. Anyway a group of us thought we’d try to form a co-op and make a bid for the coms and BFC subcontract.”

“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.”