Antarctica (65 page)

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?”

“Oh, pretty quickly, pretty quickly.”

“Two hundred years?”

“Ha, no, not quite that long. Preliminary reports next year, then see how the lab work is going … full publication a year or two after that, perhaps.”

“It’s so slow.”

“It is rather slow. The samples themselves are going north by ship, you know, and won’t be available for study until next spring.”

The discipline itself was beginning to imitate geological time scales, Wade thought irritably. While politics whizzed on ever faster, science was slowing down; making the two match was like trying to catch neutrinos with the Earth. Little sparks of blue light, that was all. “But—but, you know—people
need
to know this stuff soon! It needs to be part of the policy debate that’s ongoing right now.”

The professor gave him a kindly glance. “But that’s your job, right?”

Wade thought it over.

“Listen,” Michelson said, looking at his watch, “I’m supposed to be meeting Mai-lis inside. I haven’t seen her in about twenty years.”

“Oh, sorry. Of course. I’d like to talk with her too, actually. Her group saved us from the midst of all this, up there on Shackleton Glacier.”

“Is that right? You were in need of salvation?”

“Yes. We were pinned down by the superstorm, with one of our group sick. Mai-lis’s people picked us up and took us in.”

“That sounds like her.”

“You knew her twenty years ago?”

“Yes. She was a doctor and biologist in the Norwegian program. Unusual. Sylvia knew her too. Let’s see if we can locate her.”

They went in the galley. The hallways and dining rooms were all crowded, people in a hurry but moving clumsily, like manic zombies. Mai-lis was at one of the round tables in the main galley. It took a long time for Wade to get a chance to talk to her, but at one point she got up to refill her bowl at the soft ice-cream machine, and Wade followed her over. She greeted him pleasantly and handed him an empty bowl.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Thank you for calling me about this meeting. Out of habit I wanted to keep our distance, but on reflection I think it’s a good idea to have come in, to make our own case for ourselves.”

“Oh good, good. I agree completely. We need your input here if we want to have more than some kind of stand-off, or a partial, what you might call technical solution.”

“Yes.” She looked at him closely. “And so …”

“I’ve been thinking about the situation, and I think Senator Chase might be able to do some things for you, concerning the Treaty renewal and so on, making allowances for the kind of thing you are attempting. As part of that effort, to give him more leverage so to speak, I was wondering if you would put me in contact with the satellite photo analyst you mentioned at your camp—you know, the one that was helping you too.”

“Tell me what you want from him.”

He explained his reasons, encouraged to see that Mai-lis was nodding as he spoke. When he was done she continued to nod, thinking it over.

“I’d especially like to talk to him if it’s Sam,” Wade ventured. “In that case he’s doing analysis for Sylvia as well, and I could come to him with a double reference.”

“Really!” she said, surprised. “Well. Our contact is confidential, you understand, and he’ll want to keep it that way. But given what you want to do, I think he would be willing to talk to you. I’ll give him a call to make sure first, if you don’t mind. Then if he agrees, I can give you the number we use, and his encryption codes.”

“Thanks, thanks. I’m sure it will help.”

Mai-lis went back to her table, and Wade stared at the empty bowl in his hand, then put it back and went over to the line for hot food; suddenly he was starving; but he didn’t think he’d ever again be warm enough to eat ice cream.

At the end of his meal Mai-lis walked by and gave him a phone chip. “Sam says give him a call.”

“Thanks, Mai-lis. Thanks for everything.”

“No problem. We Antarcticans have to stick together.”

“Yes.”

Wade finished eating and walked over to his room in Hotel California. He inserted the chip into his wrist phone, then pushed the call button.

“Hello.”

“Hello, I’m Wade Norton, a friend of Mai-lis’s? I’m an assistant to Phil Chase—”

“Down in Antarctica, yes. In the Hotel California I take it.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Wade said, looking around at the
ceiling. “And you must be Sam. Hi. Listen, I’ve been talking to Mai-lis, and to Sylvia, and thinking about the situation down here, and I’ve got some questions for you.”

“I’ve got some questions for you too.”

“Oh good, good.”

Wade pulled a pad of paper out of his briefcase.

My friends, we are back in McMurdo, on Observation Hill, but our travels are not yet over. Now we have spaces to get through colder even than Antarctica; the timespace of human history, and our life together in these overshoot years. There are more people on this planet than the planet can hold, and how we act now will shape much of the next thousand years, for good or ill. It is a bottleneck in history; the age beyond carrying capacity; the overshoot years; the voyage in an open boat, weighted down beyond its Plimsoll line. There is the possibility for very great tragedy, the greatest ever known.

But tragedy is not our business. So now we must learn this Earth as closely and completely as our paleolithic ancestors knew it on the savannah; we must know it in the mode they knew it, as scientist and lover wrapped together in one. The loverknower. We must draw the paleolithic and the postmodern together in a single design. I sense the dragon arteries have knotted together on this promontory in such a way as to allow
some early precursor glimpse of this knowerlover knot. Because people come to this place to study it, and in doing so they invariably fall in love with it.

But why, you may well ask, seeing only the cold images I have been sending you. Why fall in love with it, so stripped and bare as it is. I wish I could explain it more clearly. But truly this place beggars the language.

Still I must try one last time. You see, the air is so clean. Mountains so distant, yet still focused and detailed; as if your eye had become telescopic. Water lying there glossy and compact, like shot silk in the sun. Never have you seen such clarity before, where the spiritual landscape stuffs the visible landscape until it bursts with luminous presence. Seeing things this clearly makes you wonder what the rest of the world would look like in such clean air. Not that more northerly air could ever be as clean as this, so cold and dry, so dustless—but on certain days, on certain mornings, all the world must once have had this clarity, and we the eyes to see it, and the desire to look. It must have been so beautiful.

And then also, as you see again from this glorious
p’ing-yan
vantage point on Observation Hill, it is all so big. Big, huge, vast, stupendous, gigantic—I have said these words many times, I know, and still I must say them over and over, until they react in your heads like paper flowers dropped in water, expanding there to their original size. Really very big! Suggestive of the infinite. Immense simplicity and brio, as in the brush strokes of a bold wise painter. Everything in all five dimensions, all visible at once. This too is so lovely.

Then the mantle of ice provides such elaboration, on microscales you can barely see in my images, scales of vision you can only experience when you look down at your feet as you walk—visions of the infinitely bedded,
planed, crosshatched, and contoured textures of snow and ice, prisming everywhere the colors of the rainbow, spiraling inward all the way to the crystalline patterns in snowflakes, spiraling outward to the massive sculptural bulks of the tabular bergs, each one a masterpiece. Beauty is fractal to infinity in both directions.

Clean, big, icy, prismatical—somehow I feel that I’m still not capturing it. Surely these are not the attributes that make this place so ravishing. Perhaps all beauty has a mystery in it that cannot be explained. For this place
is
beautiful; and once the whole world was beautiful just like this. Seeing the former, we realize the latter. We understand just how beautiful the whole Earth once was.

And we can make it that way again. On the far side of our hard time I see a returned clarity, as fewer of us get along ever more cleverly, our technologies and our social systems all meshed with each other and with this sacred Earth, in the growing clarity of a dynamic and ever evolving permaculture. Clean air then, not just so we will live longer, but so we can see again. Big things and small things in their right place. It will come. We are the primitives of an unknown civilization. And here that becomes so clear. This primal icescape brims, with
chi’s
vital breathing, its winds blow clear every nook in our brains, balloons them as it did in the original coevolution; and so when we’re here love fills us, that’s all.

Then this love for the landscape that is our collective unconscious, this knowerlover’s apprehension of the land’s divine resonance, blossoms outward and northward to encompass the rest of the planet. Love for the planet radiating from the bottom up, like revolution in the soul.

So it has always been, loving and knowing together;
and thus from the moment humans first arrived on this continent, it was the scientists who stepped up and said This is our place.

And now they have to decide again if that is really so.

It’s part of a process that has been going on for a long time. For instance, see the town below us. An American town, as in Alaska. Inhabited for generations. A big part of the Antarctic story.

But only now is it becoming its own place. Because the Americans who founded the town in the International Geophysical Year, a very great feng shui event, were military men. They were there to support scientists, and they made Antarctic culture a military thing. The soldiers and sailors were young men, taken away from women, commanded by older men who for much of their lives had also been away from women, in a social structure that looked back to the hierarchies of an older time. To put it in its simplest terms, there was too much yang.

In most histories we think of that world dying in the First World War, and being replaced by our ferociously knowing and hermaphroditic modernity. But in Byrd’s expeditions, and the early American stations, you find men living in a nineteenth-century style, in the Peter Pan world that we saw Scott’s men inhabiting some decades before, but now long after most of the rest of society had given it up.

And slowly this mode of life became harder to maintain. When Scott’s men came back to the world and described what they had done, people said Wonderful, marvelous. But when the United States Navy men returned to the north they were met with incomprehension,
and a neglect like contempt. Why bother? people asked. And the men themselves, coming from the uprooted placeless culture of Cold War America, had no way to talk about their experience of this extraordinary continent. As I have said, in any language it is hard to know what to say. But these men were triply dislocated, in language, space and time; they were like the travelers in space stories who fly so fast that relativity effects come into play, and though they are only away for two years as they see it, return to a world several centuries farther on. They were refugees in time.