Antarctica (70 page)

“You need to go to Washington with this,” Wade said firmly. “You need to drop into town like a bomb and take it to Winston, see if you can use this oil stuff to put the heat on enough to get him to let the Treaty out of committee. Hell, maybe even drive him out of the chair. Maybe even out of the Senate!”

“Fat chance.”

“But it is a chance! The Ethics Committee might go chaotic and swerve and throw him out. The moment is here, Phil, and it’s important.”

“What I do out on the road is important too.”

“Of course, Phil, of course! But you wouldn’t have to stay off the road for long. Depending. I mean if you picked up some momentum, then maybe you would want to stay. Things are riding in the balance here,” Wade finding it oh so easy to read back some of Phil’s midnight rambling, “we’re at an unstable moment in history, the teeter-totter is wavering there in the middle, co-opification versus the
Götterdämmerung
, they’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers! The time is ripe, Phil, ripe for you to come falling down out of space onto our side of the teeter-totter and catapult them out of there!”

“Hmm, yes, well. It would be nice to stick a pin in Winston anyway, at least.”

“It sure would! That bastard. Pop him like a balloon.”

“Indeed. Hmm, yes—but I’ve got a lot of commitments out here. I don’t know what I could do about that.”

“I’ll represent you where I can, Phil. I’m thinking of staying in New Zealand a while longer, try to tie up some of the loose ends of this Antarctic business, see
what I can do. After that I could cover for you out on the road, and of course keep track of this Antarctic situation for you, and I can keep making reports to you, be your eyes for you so to speak, like I’ve been doing here, while you kick their ass in Washington.”

“Hmm, yes … So you’ve got solid evidence Texacon has been drilling in Antarctica since the last campaign?”

“Photos in color, Sam said. Photos from space that read their phone numbers off the screens on their wrist phones.”

“Cool. Interesting. Drop back in like a bomb. Blow their minds. That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Might even get the Antarctic Treaty ratified. That would be a coup. Although it’s funny—if it works, then you’ve got to say it was those ecoteurs that did it—they found the right part of the system and gave it a whap, it’s admirable in a way.”

“Don’t say that on the floor of the Senate.”

“You don’t think I should?”

“Lawmakers endorsing law-breaking? No. It’s unseemly.”

“Obscene? Come on, Wade. Its lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.”

“Just don’t say that on the floor of the Senate.”

“We’ll see. I never know for sure what I’ll say when the moment comes. But just between you and me, I admire those ecoteur guys.”

“Because they took action.”

“Okay, Wade, okay. I’ll go to Washington. I’ll talk to Glen and Colleen here, and John back at the office, we’ll try to set it up.
Get
those photos to me, and we’ll work from there.”

“They’re on their way. I sent them to the office.”

“I’m in Samarkand, Wade. Send them here too. And try to call during business hours. Call me tomorrow, and we’ll continue this.”

“Sure thing.”

Wade sat on his hotel bed, feeling himself vibrate. He liked Phil Chase; he wanted to keep working for him. And co-opification was going to be a long hard campaign. But if he could keep Phil convinced that he was on the edge of winning, or at least in the heart of the battle, then Phil would stay in Washington, and Wade would have to be out on the road, serving as his eyes. Which meant that Wade was going to have to keep finding things big enough to keep Phil in Washington in order to be able to stay out on the road, with the chance of occasionally coming to Christchurch. In short, making Phil save the world in order to create the off chance of returning to Antarctica. It almost made sense.

After a while, feeling time suddenly heavy on his hands, he went out and took the shuttle bus into downtown Christchurch. He looked out the windows at the trees and the low clouds, stunned by the greens and the warm wet air. Sixty Fahrenheit, they said. He couldn’t imagine what D.C. would feel like. Oh but it was October. It would be cold in D.C. Cold, well—it would be cool.

In downtown Christchurch he wandered, overwhelmed at every turn. Smells of coffee, food cooking, Kiwi voices. The faces from
Masterpiece Theatre
. Next to the Avon River, a statue of Scott, in concrete forever, wearing what Wade saw now was ridiculous gear. On the pedestal: to search, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Tennyson’s immortal concrete. Ta Shu had told him
that right around the time Scott had died, his two-year-old son had rushed into his mother’s bedroom in England and said “Daddy’s not coming home.” You could be immortalized in concrete, or see your kid grow up. Better a live donkey than a dead lion, Shackleton had said. Scott hadn’t agreed. But which would the world choose? What story did they like better?

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 the “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.