Antarctica (71 page)

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.”

As George had organized the ceremony, there was of course music to be played; and, of course, mikes and cameras to record it. Quite a lot of people, in fact, clustered on the lee side of the ridge under the rock hut.

X walked a short distance back up Igloo Spur, to get some distance from the fuss. Then they all waited. George was apparently timing the start of the music so that the piece would end during the arrival of the sun. X stood with his back to the wind, looking up the jagged coastline north of Cape Crozier. I live on this island, he thought. I just walked across my island. I live in this world. A gust of wind peeled over the ridge. The sky was getting lighter by the second. George raised his baton and jerked it down, and his little orchestra began to play what one of the celebrants had informed X was Jean Sibelius’s “Night Ride and Sun Rise.” Although it was clear immediately to X that the night ride referred to in the title had been a train ride, it was still easy to imagine the strings’ rhythmic rise and fall to be a stylized version of the winds pouring over this place, rather than of a train crossing Finland; the wind and the music in fact fit together very nicely, it was hard at times to
tell which was which. Of course no matter what the musicians had tried in their attempt to keep warm, their instruments and fingers and lips had inevitably frozen, and the little ensemble had a windy cracked untuned sound, somewhat like an early music ensemble using period instruments; but music nevertheless, with strings and brass and woodwinds pulsing up and down and up and down, just like the wind.

And George had timed things so well, conducting with many an anxious glance at his wristwatch, that the clarinet made its sudden flight up the stave at the exact moment that the sun cracked the horizon, a very beautiful synchrony, which had George hopping with triumph as he conducted the thawing orchestra through the final rich chords, the whole white world now ablaze with brassy light, beaming outward from the blinding chip of sun on the horizon; the celebrants on the ridge rapt, then cheering as the musicians finished the song. Then one of them pointed south and cried, “Look! Look!”

Black dots in a pale sunwashed sky. Could be a flock of distant skuas; could be blimps, even farther away. Could be Val, come to give him a ride back over the island, come to see his new home. X’s heart leaped inside him. First you fall in love. Then anything could happen.

I went to Antarctica in 1995 courtesy of the National Science Foundation, as part of the U.S. Antarctic Program’s Artists and Writers’ Program. My thanks to the members of the NSF and the U.S. Antarctic Program who gave me the opportunity, and especially to Guy Guthridge of the U.S. Antarctic Program for his help throughout the process.

Thanks also to Donald Blankenship, Christopher McKay, Bud Foote, John Clute, Fredric Jameson, Lou Aronica, and Arthur C. Clarke.

In McMurdo, thanks to Lisa Mastro, Kristen Larson, Robin Abbott, Mimi Fujino, Ethan Dicks, Tim Meehan, Steven Kottmeier, Tom Callahan, Cheryl Hallam, Cathy Young, Melissa Rider, George Blaisdell, Sridhar Anandakrishnan, and Jesse.

In the Dry Valleys, thanks to Paula Atkins, John Schindler, Karen Lewis, Robert Collier, Peter Doran, Ray Kepner, and Jeffrey Schmok.

At the South Pole, thanks to Ellen Mosely-Thompson, John Paskievitch, Bjorn Johns, Frank Brier, Tim
Coffey, and Harry Mahar; also to Paula, Karl, Jaime, Gloria, Tim, Sparky, Mark, and all the rest of the
1995-96
Pole crew who welcomed me to a wonderful Thanksgiving.

In the Shackleton Glacier area, thanks to Allan Ashworth, Michael Hambrey, Derek Fabel, Lawrence Krissek, and David Elliot.

Thanks to the wormherders Ross Virginia, Page Chamberlain, Melody Brown, Mary Kratz, and Rich Alward, for a memorable trip to Cape Crozier. Thanks also to the Kiwi helo crew Jim Finlayson, Jon Moore, and Lisa Frankel, for that trip and several others.

On Erebus thanks to Philip Kyle, Ray Dibble, Kurt Panter, and U.S. Navy helo pilot Greg Robinson.

Thanks to my fellow Woos Jody Forster, Peter Nisbet, Anne Hawthorne, and Sara Wheeler.

Back at home thanks to Charles Hess, Patsy Inouye, Steve Mallory, Peter Dileanis, Nigel Worrall, Sharma Gapanoff, Ricardo Amon, Terry Baier, Victor Salerno, Jennifer Hershey, and Ralph Vicinanza.

Special thanks to Stephen Pyne, Robert Wharton, Tom Carver, Peter Webb, and Buck Tilley.

Also to Lisa Nowell, David and Tim Robinson, and Don and Gloria Robinson.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
is the author of the Nebula and Hugo award-winning Mars trilogy,
Red Mars, Green Mars
, and
Blue Mars
, as well as
The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge, A Short, Sharp Shock
, and other novels. He lives in Davis, California.

Bestselling, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson returns with the first in a trilogy of near-future novels set in our nation’s capital, inspired by scientific and environmental research that is making headlines today
.

FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN

A novel

Kim Stanley Robinson

Probing the hot topic of global warming,
Forty Signs of Rain
presents a compelling view of our nation’s governmental and scientific headquarters in the face of a looming cataclysmic disaster. Global warming is happening. And in the halls of Congress, Charlie Quibler, environmental aide to a charismatic senator, knows it. Ice caps are melting and lowland countries are slowly drowning in floods. But a distracted and skeptical government won’t listen.

In the halls of the National Science Foundation, a startling proposal appears for a revolutionary new technology that could provide an answer to the problem of global warming—if it can be recognized in time, and if the public good can be put ahead of private gain.