Antarctica

12 Transantarctica

Val followed their pilot through the wind, X and Wade on each side of her. Ahead of them a low escarpment of rust-colored rock loomed out of the needle mist shooting past. They were on a nunatak, or perhaps one of the larger rock ranges. What Val could see actually resembled Bennett’s Platform, as far as she could recall; she had visited the plateau once, with a team of paleontologists who had been using helicopters to pull fossil trees out by the stumps. The rock underfoot was like a rough parquet floor, part rock, part ice.

Ahead there was a kind of embayment in the rock, about the volume of two Jamesways set side by side. In the embayment the air was clear, and spindrift was bouncing over it and collecting at its foot; the empty space was covered by some kind of clear fabric, very taut and obviously very strong. Tented.

Inside this clear space, this room in the side of the storm, a number of people were seated on rocks placed like benches against the sidewalls. They were dressed in a great variety of styles, from the glossiest of client chic to thick fur jackets to ratty long underwear that reminded Val of Sherpa yak wool. She wondered again if these were the saboteurs.

Then she saw the rest of her group emerge out of the flying cloud, and she hurried over to see how Jack was doing. He was flat out in the banana sled, but conscious; trying to crane his neck around to see where they were going, a move which obviously hurt him; he looked cold and miserable. “They say there’s a doctor here,” Val told him, but he just stared at her.

Their pilot reached the tent and unzipped a zipper in the clear fabric next to the rock wall, and waved them into the gap. Inside there was a clear inner wall; they were in a clear lock or vestibule. Their pilots were taking off their parkas and then their boots; two women and a man. Val’s sunglasses were fogging up; she took them off, pulled off her ski mask, then her parka, then her boots. Everyone jostling in the vestibule’s little space. Then one of the other pilots zipped the outer wall, unzipped the inner wall, and they went inside.

Their arrival was greeted with indifference by most of the occupants. A glance only and then they were back to whatever they had been doing before: eating, working on clothing at a table covered with scraps of cloth and fur, reading, talking around a radio set that appeared to be turned off. The conversation by the radio sounded to Val like German.

“The doctor?” she said to their pilot.

“That’s May Lee,” she said. Later Val learned it was spelled Mai-lis. “Mai, we got a patient for you.”

“I know,” said a short elderly woman. Her round face was remarkably leathered and wrinkly, and Val took her to be an Eskimo. “Bring him over here.”

They followed the old woman, Jim and Jorge carrying the banana sled. They laid it down on a rough rock bench against the dolerite wall, and Mai-lis pulled over a wooden deck chair and sat down next to Jack. “How are you?” she asked him as she opened a large long bag and attached a monitor to his arm.

“Broke my collarbone,” Jack said.

“Ah. So you have. Are you hypothermic?”

“I’m cold. Not as cold as before. My lungs hurt.”

“I will check them.” She was getting his clothes away from his upper body; Jim helped her. It was warm in the tented chamber, so that would not be a problem. The wind was still loud, but it was muffled inside just enough so that they could hear each other talk. “I will inject anesthetics around the clavicle,” the old woman said, “then reset the bone. After that you cannot move that arm. We will get you a sling for it.” As she spoke she was unwrapping a hypodermic needle, and after gently swabbing the skin over the broken bone she injected a syringe’s contents into him. Then another one. Val was so happy to see this evidence of bona fide medicine that she could hardly stand.

After that the woman checked the readings on the monitor, and listened to Jack’s lungs with a stethoscope. “Your right lung is a little full. Have you coughed up any blood?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’ll keep an eye on it. It may be a touch of pneumonia. Your temperature is low, but you’re not badly hypothermic any longer.”

“I’m cold.”

“No doubt. Let’s check your feet. Hmm … perhaps a little frostbite in the toes. We can help that.” She worked on his feet for a while, applying patches from her kit. “Now, can you feel your clavicle?”

“No.”

“Okay. I’m going to reset it. You will feel the contact for sure, but tell me if it hurts and we’ll give you another shot.”

“It’s okay,” Jack said. He stared at her face impassively as she put both hands to his shoulder. “Addie,” she said to Val’s pilot, “help me here.”

“Sure thing, Mai.”

“Hold his shoulder down, right there. Don’t look, young man. Head the other way. Twist your left shoulder to the left. That’s it. Okay. Now I’m going to inject some muscle relaxants. You will have a bump for good in your clavicle, but if you can keep it in this position, it will heal all right. Ah good, here is hot chocolate, for all of you. Now you should rest, young man. We will keep a watch on your lungs. If you have some pneumonia we will give you antibiotics. But we should wait and make sure. Sleep now, but stay flat on your back. Addie and Elke will help you into a sleeping bag. Be careful,” she said to the two women attending. Then she led Val and Jim to the back of the chamber, where delicious smells were steaming out of a big pot on an ordinary green Coleman stove. “Let’s eat,” she said.

They sat on doubled-up sleeping pads on the ground, staring up at the cook. The smells of cooking food struck Val and she realized she was ravenous. “We appreciate what you’re doing for us,” she said to Mai-lis.

“Oh, Addie and Lars and Elke, they enjoyed the opportunity. They like to do crazy things like flying the blimps in storms, but it’s a bit too dangerous, so in the ordinary course of things they don’t get to. So a rescue situation is just an opportunity to them. They loved it.”

“And you knew we were in trouble?”

“Well, we heard your radio, and looked and saw you coming down the glacier. And then the storm hit, and it didn’t seem like you had much in the way of shelter. So they went to get you.”

The cook, a big man with tattooed arms, tossed slabs of white fish steak into a giant frypan. As they sizzled Addie came over and laughed at Val and her companions’ intent expressions. “You got an appreciative audience, Claude!”

“I can see.”

“What’s cooking?” Ta Shu asked, coming over to look into the frypan. He appeared happy and comfortable, as if he had met these people before and was feeling at home already.

“Mawsoni,” Claude said. “Mawsoni fried in seal fat, and seasoned with herbs grown in local greenhouses. An all-indigenous main course, see? And local krill cakes too. Then vegetable stew, that’s not so local,” indicating the pot.

Killing fish and seals was illegal under the Antarctic Treaty, as Val recalled. But she decided it was not a good time to mention it.

“Mawsoni?” she said instead. She had heard of the big Antarctic fish, but never seen one. Now Addie opened a box and hauled out the head of a big gutted fish.

“Oh don’t show them that, it’ll spoil their appetite.” Claude laughed. And indeed the fish face was a monstrously spiked, big-eyed, misshapen thing. “Antarctic cod!” Claude said facetiously. “That’s what they call it in the grocery stores, even though it has no relation at all to real cod. They call all the real ugly fishes cod so they can sell them. No one will buy Dissotichus mawsoni or Pagotenia borchgrevinki, but Antarctic cod! Yum yum!”

“Long as they keep the heads hidden,” Addie said.

“Tastes just like chicken,” someone else joked.

“It tastes like fish, actually, but not as fishy as penguin eggs. And big. Catch one and it’ll feed this group for a week.”

“So that’s what you eat?” Val asked, looking around again at the people. Seal fur, perhaps, in that parka. Local fish …

“It’s one of the protein staples, sure. Mawsoni, penguin egg whites—the yolks are vile, like rotten fish—sometimes seal steak. Then cereals and vegetables from the greenhouses and terraria, though there isn’t enough. We ship in a lot still.”

“From where?”

“New Zealand, just like anyone else.”

Claude wielded spatula and fork like a short-order maestro, and soon everyone was eating speechlessly, stuffing it in. Many of their hosts appeared to be as hungry as Val and her group. The fried mawsoni was good, the meat firm and flaky; better than cod, despite the kraken face of the creature. Cod weren’t that good-looking either, now that she thought of it.

When they were done she sat slumped next to Wade against the rock wall. Over on the bench Jack was lying in his sled. “He’s going to be all right?” she asked the doctor.

The woman nodded, swallowed. “He is in no danger, as far as I can tell.”

“He was acting really strange. In shock, or concussed, I thought.”

“He might well have been. But his vital signs are strong.”

Val felt a wave of relief pass through her, as warm and tangible as the burn of the food. Jack was going to live; they were all going to live; she was going to get home with all her clients alive, and at that moment she cared not at all that it was not her doing, nor that the expedition was still a fuck-up. Neither their accident nor the rescue had been her doing, really; but if one of her clients had died she never would have forgiven herself. For she should not have let them go up toward the Hansen Shoulder.

But now it looked like it was not going to be a fatal error, and for that she was so relieved she could barely think about it. She began the process of forgetting what it had felt like; she let her head loll against the rock, feeling the exhaustion in every muscle of her body. Wade looked similarly relaxed, staring around him bright-eyed with interest.

Then Mai-lis sat down before them with her plate full, and without moving his head Wade said, “So who are you people?”

“I am Mai-lis,” the old woman said. “That’s Addie, that’s Lars….”

“Yes. But what are you doing out here?”

“Why do you ask?” Lars said aggressively from across the tent. “We rescue you from the storm, you think you can interrogate us?”

“Just asking.”

“Be quiet,” Mai-lis said to Lars. “This is a new situation now, because of these attacks.” To Wade and Val she said, “We are a long-term research group.”

“And what do you study?”

“We study how to live here.”

Val said, “On your own?”

“We have some help from the north, of course, like everyone down here.”

“But you live here. In the Transantarctics.”

“Yes. We are nomadic, actually. We move around.”

Wade said, “How many of you are there?”

“It varies year to year. About a thousand, this year.”

“A thousand!” Val exclaimed.

“Yes. Not so many for a continent.”

“No, but … A lot for no one to know about. People in McMurdo don’t know you’re out here?”

“A few do. We have some helpers there. But most, no.”

“Aren’t you seen from the air? From satellite photos?”

“Yes, we are visible if you look very closely at photos. But there are many scientific camps, and oil groups, and trekking groups. Very few photo analysts are looking for groups where we are, and we hide as much as we can. We have some analyst friends, too. And we move around with the seasons, sometimes at night, when there is night, or under cloud cover, like today. So there is little to see.”

“Where are you from?” Wade asked.

“Where from? In the north? We come from all over. I am from Samiland.” Seeing Val and Wade stare at her, she explained: “Lapland, you perhaps call it. The north of Scandinavia.” She gestured at the others. “Addie is American, as you know. She used to work for ASL. Lars is Swedish, Elke German. Anna is Inuit, from Canada. There are other Eskimos as well. John is a Kiwi. We have lots of Aussies and Kiwis. And so forth.”

“And you live down here,” Wade repeated.

“That’s right. Some call it going feral. I don’t like that word. I say we are studying how to become indigenous to this place. Antarcticans. It’s a new thing. Like the Arctic cultures, but not. Not all of us agree what we are doing.” Her face darkened as she said this, and she looked to the lock door, where another group was coming in. “Excuse me,” she said, and went over to them.

Val sat in the center of her group, Wade on one side, X on the other. The clients were looking well-fed, warm, sleepy. Except for Ta Shu, who was conversing with another Asian man. And Carlos was talking animatedly in Spanish to a small group of ferals. Jack was asleep on his sled bed. Val was feeling so relieved, so pleased, really, that she could scarcely keep a smile from her face.

But when Mai-lis came back, she still had that dark look on her face. “These saboteurs have changed everything,” she said, half to herself. “Endangered everything.” She looked at Val. “I must ask you to prepare to leave.”

“Now?” Val asked, surprised.

“Soon. We are going to deliver justice. I want you to witness this, so you can tell the people in McMurdo what is happening up here.”

She sat down on her pad, picked up her plate, continued eating. Between bites she explained. “You see, there are many divisions among us down here. Some of them are normal. We have what we call the fundies and the prags, fundies meaning fundamentalists, who want to live down here with no help from the north, using Eskimo and Sami methods to make our food and clothing and shelter. The prags are pragmaticals, and willing to try out all the latest things from the north, to see if they can be useful down here. As you can see we are mostly prags here, but like most of the feral groups we are a mix of the two. Most of us are individually a mix of the two. This is normal, as I say. Part of inventing the Antarctican way of life.”

She paused to eat a bite or two, shaking her head as she thought things over. “Other divisions are more dangerous. There are some among us who despise all the other people in Antarctica—the oil teams, the adventure trekkers, even the scientists. They never help these people. Sometimes they impede their work. And they feel no objections to steal from them.”

“My SPOT train,” X said.

She nodded. “Yes, a SPOT vehicle was taken by one of these groups, the most extreme of them all.”

“Did they take the old generator from the buried South Pole station?” Wade asked.

“No.” She looked at Wade, somewhat surprised. “That was us. We make a distinction between salvage and theft. A lot of perfectly good equipment has been abandoned in Antarctica, and if it is never going to be used by anyone else, and we can use it, then we excavate it from the ice and make use of it. The old Pole generator is now heating a greenhouse farm on one of the nunataks near here.”

“And the Hillary expedition’s Weasel,” Wade said, nodding with satisfaction, as at a mystery solved.

“That’s right. We used it to haul things, and may use it again, in situations in that area where blimps wouldn’t be better.”

“You took away the generator with a blimp?”

“Yes. We have salvaged equipment from Siple Dome, Vostok, the Byrd stations, the Point of Inaccessibility station, and so on. All abandoned and buried in the ice. But the new ice borers are very powerful. Also the new remote sensing devices. We even know where the tent is that Amundsen left at the Pole. That we have left in place. Other things, more useful and less—less historical—we have dug.”

She took another bite, swallowed. “But all of this is salvage. And salvage is not theft. Theft we do not like. The people down here who steal say it is all the same. They call everything we salvage and they steal ‘obtainium.’ But this is just their insolence. They defy us all.” She scowled, looking ferocious for a moment. “And so they endanger us all. Because it very well might happen that some military come down here to clear up this matter of the ecotage, and kick us all off the ice because of these people. And we cannot allow that to happen.”

“But how can you stop them?” Wade asked.

“Well, this is the question. We have very little political organization down here. This is what they have endangered also. To the extent that we have any at all, we are a pure democracy.”

“Mai-lis thinks it’s a democracy,” Lars interjected from behind her with a jagged grin. “Actually it’s a matriarchy, and she is the high priestess.”

“And Lars is court jester,” Mai-lis said, without looking at him. “Actually I am just the doctor, but that is enough power out here. Anyway, we try to agree on everything. And a few seasons ago, we agreed together that if any feral hurt any other feral, or anyone else in Antarctica, then they could be judged in absentia by the rest of us.”

“So these are the people who sabotaged my camp?” Carlos asked.

Several of the ferals sitting around listening shook their heads, and Mai-lis said “No,” though she looked uncertain. “We don’t know who did the ecotage. I wish we did, but we don’t. Oil camps took most of the attacks, and the communications system was disrupted. And McMurdo’s fuel tanks were contaminated. But who did this, we do not know. We know it was not the anarchist ferals we are quarreling with, because we have informants among them. So we know this was not their idea. But some of them were in contact with these ecoteurs, apparently, and they did help the ecoteurs to empty the oil camps of people before they were destroyed. They think we do not know this. They think that they are free to do what they want. But we know, and we know where they are. And we have judged them and voted, and agreed that they are to be punished, to the maximum in our system.”

“Which is?” Wade asked, in a serious silence; this was the first some of the ferals had heard about the decision, Val could see.

“Exile from Antarctica.”

Mai-lis looked around at all the members of her group, as if to defy any challenge to this judgment.

“About time,” Addie opined. “They’ll kick us all out if we don’t get rid of these jokers soon.”

Mai-lis nodded. “We have been listening to McMurdo, and from what we have heard, we know the U.S. Navy is coming. We want them and the NSF to be clear about what has happened up here. That we are not the ecoteurs nor the thieves. And that the thieves among us are gone.”

“Who do you think the ecoteurs are?” Val asked.

Mai-lis shrugged. “I suppose some radical environmentalist group from the north. People who have gone beyond Greenpeace-style protests to direct resistance, like Earth First! or Sea Shepherds. People who think Antarctica should be a pure wilderness, with no people at all. Many world park advocates don’t even like scientists down here.”

“So your group would not be something these people approve of,” Val said.

“Not at all. We have very little in common with them.”

“Deep ecologists,” Lars said scornfully. “Very deep! And we are so shallow!”

Mai-lis shrugged. “Their philosophy is good. There should be fewer humans on Earth, using fewer resources. We try to do that ourselves. But to make some parts of the Earth precious wilderness, while the parts we live on can be trashed as usual—no. There is not sacred land and profane land. It is all just land. All equally valuable.”

Ta Shu, watching Mai-lis closely (to Val they looked like cousins) nodded at this. “All sacred,” he said.

Mai-lis shrugged. “We try to find a different way here,” looking at Ta Shu. “We say the land is sacred, yes. Then we live on that sacred land. And theft is no part of that.”

Lars shook his head vehemently. “To glorify property like this, to kick people off the ice just because of property—”

“Their thieving will get us all kicked off the ice,” Mai-lis said sharply.

Lars got up and stalked away, which drew some supporters in his wake.

“And the Antarctic Treaty?” Wade said.

“Yes?”

“Aren’t you breaking it by being here?”

Some rude noises from the ferals still listening.

Mai-lis shrugged again. “Aren’t you too breaking it by being here?” She stood up. “We don’t bother anyone, and we live very lightly on the land. We don’t change Antarctica even one-tenth as much as McMurdo Station alone. So we will argue the particulars of the Treaty before the World Court, if you like. But now we have to clean our own house.” She glanced after Lars: “Because I am a pragmatical, and I want to be allowed to stay here.” She scowled. “So I want you to witness this.”

Sometimes life gives us such opportunities. In moments of pressure things flow quickly in a new direction. Through a mountain opening, and here we are in a new land. Source of the peach blossom stream, green valley in an ice world, like our pale blue dot in space. My friends, I hope I am reaching you now, but cannot be sure. I am saving often just in case. If you are with me, note please how quickly we leave this little refuge notched in the rock, where people were making a home in the ice. It seemed to me a cave from the paleolithic. The minds in there were fully engaged. They were no longer sleepwalking. I could have stayed there a long time, and never wanted for anything else. And yet my companions have agreed to leave, and I am going with them. Perhaps there was no other choice.

Cloud-mountains, mountain-clouds. It is the gift of the world to offer such winds, it is a gift to travel in such a storm. How the blood races! How the mind awakes! Sometimes it seems that only in storms am I truly alive, as if the winds indeed carried my spirit, and filled my body with joy.

Onward we move, cast on the wind. How eerily this voyage resembles the experience of the Endurance expedition. I think of those men so often now. Like them we have had a leader who has held true through all. Like them we have been lucky; taken all in all, circumstances have been kind to us. They have allowed us our opportunity!

For Shackleton’s men, when the pack ice under their camp finally began to break up, they were forced into their three boats, as we into three blimps. But they were in seas crowded with ice, sailing in narrow leads, and hauling the boats back onto floes when it seemed they would be crushed between colliding bergs. Frantic days of insane effort, with never a moment’s sleep; inspired seamanship, and always do or die. Sometimes life is like that!

And at the end of that week’s sail, they landed on Elephant Island. Better than drowning, for sure; but it was an uninhabited ice-covered rock at the end of the Antarctic Peninsula, rarely visited by anyone. No one would look for them there, and in the winter they would likely die of starvation. So after some time to rest, and do carpentry on their biggest boat, Shackleton and Worsley and four other men sailed for South Georgia Island, where the Norwegians manned a year-round whaling station. It was twelve hundred kilometers away, roughly downwind, and in the direction of the prevailing currents—but across the ocean in the high fifties of southern latitude, where there is only water the whole world round, and the great rollers of the perpetual groundswell are gnawed and chopped by the windiest storms on the planet.

Their boat journey across this sea was a superb achievement of being-in-the-world. The man whose skill at sea made it possible was Frank Arthur Worsley. Shackleton had never made a small boat journey of any length. On the second day out he said to Worsley, “Do you know I know nothing about boat sailing?” And Worsley said, “All right, Boss. I do, this is my third boat journey.” And Shackleton was ruffled and said, “I’m telling you that I don’t.” He was saying that even though he was the boss, it was Worsley who was now responsible for their success or failure; Shackleton was now the student, Worsley the teacher, and Shackleton wanted Worsley to know that he knew it.

And Worsley rose to the challenge. He navigated them across twelve hundred kilometers of empty ocean to a small solitary island less than a hundred kilometers long: British feng shui in its highest manifestation.

Not because of the technical aspects of navigation, you understand, which involve mathematical formulas that can be mastered by anyone; a child’s first wristwatch could do the calculations now. But before the calculations have to come the data, and this involves taking a reading with a sextant to determine how far above the horizon the sun is at a particular time of day. With that knowledge one can then calculate one’s latitude and longitude. But the calculations rely crucially on getting accurate data in the first place. The sextant has to be level with the circle of the horizon; tangent to a point on a giant sphere. One has to see and feel the world, and one’s body in it, with exquisite accuracy! And Worsley had nowhere to make his readings but on his knees, on the bucking canvas deck of their wave-tossed boat, held upright in the grasp of his companions, as both his hands were needed for the sextant. All this in the very few moments of the journey when the sun was shining through the clouds, and in continuously wild seas. What is level when dancing on a cork that is shooting up and down such a violent sea? I might as well be asked to do it here, spinning about in the clouds like a bird! This is the aspect of Worsley’s navigation that is so astonishing and beautiful. He had to feel his place on the planet, he had to make himself sensitive to the gravitational pull to the point where he could tell, with only a bucketing horizon to help him, when he was upright and the sextant level. At that moment he “shot a reading” as they put it, with a quick glance at the device’s curved scale. This number then went through the elementary formulas, along with the precise time of day—note that their clock was a life-or-death item for them, essential for locating themselves in the flow of timespace—and the figures were matched with a book of tables to produce a latitude and longitude. All this in mist and fog and cloud and rain and sleet, flying up and down on the coiled surface of the water.

And yet they made landfall. Worsley wrote, “Wonderful to say, the landfall was quite correct, though we were a little astern through imperfect rating of my chronometer at Elephant Island.” Ha! Because of the chronometer! But happily we must grant him this one touch of pride, so well-earned. Wonderful to say “wonderful to say” in these circumstances, where the achievement saved their lives. Sometimes we are given opportunities, and we take them and make something fine, and the story of that will live forever; and so we have our boddhisattva moment.

After their wonderful landfall, then, and the incredible crossing of South Georgia Island, the Norwegians there took the six men to the Falklands, and Shackleton went into a rage of negotiations, there in the middle of the First World War when few people cared what happened to twenty men; he obtained the aid of no less than four ships before one was finally able to penetrate the pack ice, and save the marooned men before winter came down on them. And so the greatest engagement with Antarctica in all of history came to a close.

And then these men returned to a world tearing itself apart. They never made it back to their lost paradise. Where we go next we never know; plans are only plans. I remember vaguely a story I seem always to have known, encountered perhaps in the heavy colored pages of some old children’s book—about a party of travelers lost in polar regions, who after struggling over icy passes stumble on a valley green amid glaciers, warmed by a hot springs; and they find the oasis is home to people descended from Eskimo and Norse, living in peace cut off from the world; and they leave the valley, why I can’t recall, perhaps to bring back family and friends—but can never afterward retrace their lost steps. And only the story survives.

Now we in this moment are off through space, whirled by the wind to our next landfall, so soon having left that bubble of peace; so sure that a path thus traversed would never be lost to us. But glaciers and peaks are never the same glaciers and peaks. Even if we look and look all the rest of our lives, bubble of peace, how to tell? Where to find?

“Wade! Are you there Wade!”

“I’m here, Phil. Speak up if you can, it’s kind of loud here.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in a blimp.”

“A blimp! Whose blimp?”

“Addie’s blimp. We’re in a cloud right now, Phil, it’s kind of windy. You’ll have to really speak up if you want me to hear you.”

“What’s that?”

“Speak up!”

“Where are you, Wade? Where is this blimp?”

“We’re somewhere in Antarctica, Phil. More than that I can’t say. We tried to take the hovercraft down to Shackleton Camp, but it fell into a crevasse. Then we tried to walk to Shackleton Camp, but we were overtaken by a storm. A very windy storm. You can hear what that’s like. Then we took refuge in a rubble line, and after that we got rescued by some people who are living out here in the Transantarctic Mountains, living on their own.”

“Jesus, Wade, it sounds great! Are these the people who did the ecotage and took all the stuff that’s been missing?”

“They say not. Apparently there are factions out here—”

“Not there too!”

“—yes, inevitably, and the group that rescued us claims another faction has been stealing stuff, and they claim ignorance of the ecotage, though apparently the other faction helped the ecoteurs somehow. We still don’t know what’s really happened.”

“Well you’re big news, Wade, let me tell you that. I’ve been calling you every five minutes for the past day!”

“Sorry I’ve been out of touch.”

“Not your fault! So where are you headed now? What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know where we’re headed, but I think we are being taken to witness the exiling of this rogue faction from Antarctica.”

“Uh oh. That sounds like it could be trouble, Wade. You watch out.”

“I will.”

“Tell me what you’re seeing now, then, if you don’t know where you are.”

“Well, we’re in Addie’s blimp, and right now we’re above the clouds. It’s very sunny up here. We’re looking down on cloudtops that cover the land as far as I can see. It’s windy. There are some peaks sticking out of the clouds to our right.”

“All right!” Addie said over the intercom. “Let’s go get ’em.”

Wade stuck his wrist phone under the right side of his headset. “How are you going to kick people out of Antarctica?” he asked Addie.

“Oh we have our ways.”

“Which are?”

“We find them and ambush them.”

“Is this going to be dangerous?” Val asked from beside Addie, sounding surprised.

“Dangerous? Oh no, not dangerous at all!” Again Addie’s sweet laugh. “Nothing we do down here is dangerous, oh my no!”

Val said sharply, “I don’t want my group taken into a fight.”

“No no. It’ll all be over by the time we get there. Mai-lis just wants you to see the results, so you can be her witnesses if it comes to that in McMurdo. She’s a very practical lady that way.”

“She seems to be an authority,” Wade ventured.

“Yeah, she’s the local chief, no matter what she says about democracy. Lars is pretty much right about that.”

“How did she reach that status?”

“Well, she’s been down here the longest, and she knows how to do more things than anyone else. She knows how to survive down here. The Sami know about snow and weather. And she’s very up-to-date technically. She’s good with the photovoltaics and the batteries and the hydroponics. All of it. Better than most of us, anyway. We all have our specialties, but you know, it’s a work-in-progress sort of thing. An experiment, like she said. So nobody’s all that good at everything. It can be a little dangerous, actually.”

Wade said, “Like flying these blimps in a storm?”

“Oh no. No danger there at all.” She grinned. “Actually it’s not bad. These things float really well, it’s hard to drive them down. So it’s almost the opposite of a helo in that respect.”

“What about getting blown into mountainsides?”

“Well, you have to look out for that, but if you stay above them you’re fine. These are great machines. Top speed of three hundred k an hour, so even if you have to go straight into a full-force gale you can make progress, usually. Turbulent, as you saw, but not impossible. No, blimps are the only way to go down here. Getting around on foot is just too hard, as you must know. The air is the way. But planes and helos are too much of a hassle. Much more dangerous than these.”

“Who makes them?” X asked.

“A Japanese company.”

“How do you pay for them?” Wade asked.

“Money.”

“But how do you make the money? You’re not selling mawsoni cutlets and seal fur coats.”

“No. Some of us winter in the world and make money there. Some of us do northern jobs from here, just like any other telecommuter.”

“Is that what you do?” Wade asked.

“Me? No, no way. I’m no telecommuter. I’m all right here. Real time real space, twenty-four hours a day.”

Then she tilted the blimp down. Wade saw out the windows that there were other blimps ahead and behind, dropping just as fast as they were. He sat back in his seat and extricated his wrist phone from his headset.

“Did you catch any of that, Phil?”

“Some of it—I couldn’t hear you, but I heard some of the others. But it’s pretty windy there, hey? There’s quite a background noise.”

“Yes. Hey Phil, we’re back in the cloud, on our way down. Do you want to stay on the air or not?”

“Oh on, on! Just keep the line open, this is great! What I want to know is why these folks have factionalized, I mean that’s really the problem, isn’t it, you have people of like mind and they still end up at each other’s throats, I can never understand that—”

“Hey Phil, sorry, we’re, it’s getting kind of busy here, I can’t really focus—”

“Oh hey you do what you need to, I’m just thinking out loud here!”

The blimp was being driven down by its big fan, and it jounced up and down on gusts. Addie began arguing with the wind again. Wade was starting to feel a bit airsick when suddenly the blimp was rushing down at a blue glacial slope, firing its harpoon anchors into it and then reeling itself down in a final convulsion. As soon as they were secured Addie took off her headset and opened her door and leaped down. “Wait here a minute,” she shouted at them, and was off running toward a big clear-roofed gap, cut into a giant lobe of glacial ice—no doubt a refuge like the one they had left earlier. Several other blimps were already anchored, and their crews were out standing in front of this refuge, pointing some kind of instrument at it. “What are they doing to them!” Val exclaimed, and she was opening her door when X grabbed her arm.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the side. “Whatever they’re doing they haven’t got all of them in there, see?”

“Wade, you watch out,” Phil’s tinny voice said from his wrist, “you keep your eye peeled, I don’t like the sound of this, watch out all directions, that’s what I always say….”

White slips of movement; tiny black dots against a field of blue seracs; those were darkened sunglasses, Wade saw, and realized that their ferals were being ambushed, perhaps by people from the refuge who had slipped outside.

“Come on,” Val said, and opened her door and jumped down. X followed, and after a split second’s scared hesitation, Wade too jumped out of the blimp.

Val ran to one of the blimp’s anchors and picked up two big chunks of ice lying beside it. She tossed one of them at the ferals outside the refuge entrance, to get their attention; the other she fired at the white figures coming up on them. This drew the attention of the white figures, and one of them pointed their way—aiming guns at them, Wade saw with a jolt. In a panic he ran forward and dove into Val and X at the ankles, knocking their feet out so that they fell on him. Little snapping sounds in the wind caused his stomach to shrink to the size of a walnut; gunshots! He hugged the ice, looked up in time to see the ferals at the refuge entrance turn their odd-looking weapon on their ambushers. The figures in white staggered spastically, fell like marionettes whose strings have been cut.

For a moment nothing moved but the wind. Phil’s voice chirped from Wade’s wrist like a cricket. Only a few moments had passed but to Wade time had distended, ballooned by his panic; he could have given a long and detailed account for every second that had just passed. His heart was pounding like the fastest tympani roll in the Maestro basic sounds set.

Val and X were getting off him. They were both big people.

Finally there was movement at the front of the refuge’s clear tent. Mai-lis and Addie emerged and walked over to the latecomers. Wade put his wrist to his mouth. “Listen to this, Phil.”

By the time Mai-lis and Addie got to them everyone was standing again. Angrily Val exclaimed, “You said this wouldn’t be dangerous! What the fuck were you doing?”

“Sorry,” Mai-lis said shortly, with a glance at Addie that Addie ignored. “You weren’t supposed to get here until the operation was over. Thanks for helping us.”

Others from her group were collecting the fallen figures, hauling them unceremoniously across the ice to the largest blimp. More people, unconscious or paralyzed, were dragged out of the refuge itself. Perhaps a dozen or fifteen all told. The blimp they were being loaded into was considerably bigger than the others, but still, it would be stuffed.

Addie’s face was flushed bright pink. “That’s a lock-able gondola,” she explained to Wade and Val and X. “There’s nothing they can do in there. It’s a remotely operated vehicle, and this one’s programmed to fly to a base in the Peninsula, refuel, then fly across the Drake Strait to Chile.”

“What did you do to them?” Val said.

“We shot ’em with a thing made for Japanese banks that get robbed or whatever. It messes up muscle control, with ultrasound or taser, I don’t know. A stun gun.”

“That’s not what they were using,” X pointed out.

“No, those were real guns they were shooting! Glad they didn’t get you! Nice move there on the senator’s part. Here, come on over, Mai-lis is going to pronounce the verdict and send them on their way.”

Around the big blimp the whole group had gathered. Carlos was shouting abuse at the people locked behind the gondola’s windows, shaking a finger at them. As they walked over Wade said into his wrist, “Getting this, Phil?”

He put the phone to his ear. “Hard to hear, Wade, but stay on the air.”

Some of the captured outlaws had recovered from their neuromuscular incapacitation, and were standing at the windows shouting down at Carlos and the others, red-faced and furious; one crying; one screaming; one pounding the window as hard as she could—she would have put her fist right through the glass if she could have, and damn the consequences. And all unheard through the glass, in the wind and the sound of the blimps’ fans.

“That’s Ron!” X exclaimed, pointing at the gondola window. “That’s Ron Jasper in there! He joined the ice pirates!”

Mai-lis was now using a handset walkie-talkie, presumably to speak to those inside on their radio. Wade hurried to her and put his wrist phone right up next to her walkie-talkie’s mouthpiece. Mai-lis nodded at him as she continued to speak.

“—ninety percent voted on exile, and exile it is. You are not to return on pain of death. Remember this lesson in your new life in the north.” She stared up at them. The look in her little Sami eyes was cold. She made a gesture, and one of her group manipulated another handset, and the big blimp cut away from its anchors and shot up on the wind, spinning its prisoners into the clouds.

After that Val and X and Wade and Carlos were led inside the pirate’s lair, as Addie called it. It was much deeper than the refuge they had been taken to, extending far back into the ice, in a gigantic tunnel of the purest blue. There they found box after box stacked against the walls, and gear of all kinds. At the rear of the tunnel squatted a big yellow vehicle that reminded Wade of a road construction earthmover.

“That’s it!” X yelled. “That’s my SPOT train’s caboose!”

“Told you,” Addie said. “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll give you the GPS coordinates for this place, so Mac Town can recover this stuff.”

When they were airborne again she said over the intercom, “Whew! I’m glad that’s over! Thanks for helping us out. Sorry to get you there early, but I wanted to be in on it to tell you the truth. I hate those bastards, them and their obtainium. As if they could do whatever they wanted.”

“So will you kill them if they return?” Wade asked.

“Nah. Unlikely. I suppose it could happen, but in reality we’d probably just try to zap them and ship them out again. The truth is they probably won’t come back. They wouldn’t get any help from anyone else, and you need to be part of the whole feral scene down here to make a real go of it. So even if they did come back they’d just be like those trekker guys, out wandering on their own. It’s not the same as making your living down here.”

“But I don’t see how you do it,” Wade insisted. “The gear you have here must cost a lot more money than you can make.”

A long pause, filled by the sounds of the wind and the fan’s buzz. “Well, you know,” Addie said. “We have our audiences, just like most of the groups down here. Sponsor audiences I mean. Weren’t any of your clients sending out reports on their trek?” she asked Val.

“Yeah sure,” Val said. “Ta Shu was. Still is, I suppose, if he can transmit.”

“Well, we do a bit of that too. And some of the companies that make this stuff like the prototypes tested hard. So we have some alliances.”

“But the Antarctic Treaty,” Wade said again. Once again he had his wrist phone wedged between his right ear and the headset, and he was trying to imagine what Phil would want to ask. He supposed Phil could even have asked his own questions, but he was keeping quiet, and Wade could see how that might be the easiest way to do things.

“Yeah yeah, the Treaty. In suspension now, right? And even when it was active it was only paper. Its values were so pure because the stakes were so small! As soon as oil exploration’s become economical, non-Treaty nations are down here sniffing around, and the Treaty governments are jockeying for position above them. There was never any enforcement to the Treaty, see? No one was going to come down here and zap offenders and ship them out like we just did. The French, they signed the Treaty and then bulldozed a big airstrip right through a penguin rookery near their station. Greenpeace went down there and stood right at the bottom of the slope where the bulldozers were pushing rocks, and the bulldozer drivers just kept on driving. Nearly killed a few Greenpeacers. That was the most dangerous thing they did, I think, worse than driving Zodiacs in front of those Japanese mama whalers. Greenpeace did some great things down here if you ask me, they really made a difference. And without blowing people up, like these whoevers we’re dealing with now. But they couldn’t do it all, because everyone was breaking the Treaty. The Russians broke the treaty, the Poles broke the Treaty, the Americans broke the Treaty, you should see the bottom of the bay off McMurdo! We were as bad as anybody until Greenpeace went down there and poured trash from the dump onto the floor of the Chalet right in the middle of a big meeting. That was so great. The NSF rep went nuts and forbade any of us from talking to any Greenpeacer, and retired end of that season. But it got NSF to think things over. And at the same time the Environmental Defense Fund was suing them back in Washington for breaking NEPA. It was a pincer attack, really. So NSF got religion then, but it was Greenpeace that did it, Greenpeace and EDF. No, the Treaty’s been abused, you take my word for it! There was too much else going on in the world for anyone to risk making anyone mad over a little thing like Antarctica. So the Treaty was there, but no one paid much attention to it except for when it suited them. So, you know. Mai-lis keeps us in compliance with the Treaty like a kindergarten teacher, better than most countries when you actually look at what the thing says. We register all the animals we kill for food and do science on them so we’re no different than the scientists really, except we eat the data when we’re done with it. And Art Devries does that too. So, you know. You can’t expect us to take the Treaty too seriously.”

“Unless it gets you kicked off the continent.”

“Ain’t that the truth.” She shook her head. “That’s why these bastards we shipped out, and whoever it was blowing up the oil stations and messing with coms …” A gust of wind swirled the blimp around, and Addie wrestled with the controls and did not finish the thought. “Come on.”

“What brought you down here?” Wade asked her.

“Airplane.” Another laugh. “No no, I know. I’m from Alabama, right? I never had a thought about Antarctica in my life. If you’d of asked me I’d have said it was some kind of radiator fluid. But I was selling some land, and a man came to look at it, we talked for a while. I’ve been a plumber since I was ten, and a carpenter, electrician—my daddy was a contractor, and I did it all. And then after my Army days I was flying helos for Louisiana Pacific. So I was telling this man about all that, and showing him a well and pumphouse we built, and telling him about us, and he said, Did you ever think of working in Antarctica? And I said, Why no—I never did.” Laugh. “It turned out he was from ASL, and he thought I’d make a good Carhartt. Which I did, for a while.”

“In McMurdo?” X asked.

“And the Pole. Five summers and two winterovers. Then my second winter at the Pole, I was shown some things….”

“Like the water slide?” Wade asked.

“Yeah, how do you know about that? Who are you again? Oh yeah, the senator.”

“I’m not actually the senator.”

“Water slide?” X said. He and Val were looking around at Wade.

“So you went feral,” Wade prompted Addie.

“Yeah. One day I was out emptying a Herc, completely toast, and I looked up and there was a skua flying around. They get blown in to the Pole occasionally, but I didn’t know that then, and when I saw it I thought it was, I don’t know. God. And that very night Herb asked me if I was interested in lighting out for the territory, and I thought of that skua and said you bet, and never looked back.”

“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!”

white white white

white green white

white white white

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.

Wade on the other hand was very slim and lithe. Now swimming around the hot bath like an otter. A good-looking man. Lars too was very attractive, in Norse god style; a face that reminded her of Sting. No fat on him. The ferals’ bodies showed they worked hard out here, which did not surprise Val in the least.

Mai-lis stood in the center of the bath, round and wrinkled, listening to Carlos and Ta Shu. The big mama. The three of them were circulating slowly, and coming toward Val and X through other knots of conversation. Living out here. Making their living out here. X leaned into Val, gestured at the three approaching them. “We’re so damn lucky. Here’s a Chilean and a Chinese and a Laplander talking, and they use English to do it.”

“You can thank the Brits for that.”

“I guess so.”

“It’s true,” Carlos was insisting to Ta Shu and Mai-lis, “and if it is true in Antarctica then it is true everywhere, this is what I say!”

Ta Shu squinted, uncertain. “Colder here. People cannot so easily live off land.”

“True,” Carlos said, “but people can’t easily live off the land anywhere! So true here, true there, just like I said! Where in the world could a person be put outdoors and find an easy time living off the land? It’s not so easy!”

“I suppose not,” Ta Shu said, thinking it over. “Savannah, maybe.”

“But if we can do it here,” Mai-lis said, “then everywhere else it can only be easier. That’s why I don’t agree with the fundies that we should use only things we can make down here. There is no reason for an artificial exercise like that. It’s the latest technologies that make what we do here possible. When your clothes are your house, and your tent is your farm, then you can go where you please. Even Antarctica can be inhabited, as you see.”

Higher voices cut through the clangor, and Carlos looked at the door. “Are those kids I hear? Hey, look! Some boys and girls!”

Indeed it was true; a pack of kids like wild animals crashed down into the water and started splashing each other, oblivious to the adults in the bath.

“I did not know this!” Carlos said. “You didn’t tell us about this!”

“Oh yes,” Mai-lis said. “We have quite a few families down here, and they tend to clump together so the kids will have company. This refuge is a big family camp.”

“Now this is what you need!” Carlos exclaimed. “These are Antarcticans, you see? This is all they know. This is how I was brought up—we didn’t have a spa like this of course, I wish we had, but there were fifteen kids in Bernardo O’Higgins when I grew up there, I could name them all to you and tell you everything about them, right up to this very day! They are my brothers and sisters, I tell you. X, X, this is how I grew up, look at them!”

“I am,” X assured him.

“You must have many memories of that place,” Ta Shu said.

“Oh my God. My God yes. One time in Bernardo,” Carlos said, talking to them all now, including Jim, who had joined them and was regarding him very closely: “One time I was four years old, and I was fascinated by the bulldozer we had for snowplowing, I liked to sit with the driver and drive it, you know. And one day I went out there by myself and climbed up into it, just to pretend, and you know how a bulldozer will start with just a push of the ignition when the key is left in—well, I pushed the button and the engine started, and it had been left in low gear, and it took off. I didn’t know what to do, I was too scared to move. And the bulldozer had been parked pointed toward a cliff that fell directly down into the sea ice, which was thin. So the bulldozer ran toward that cliff, and I could see it coming but I couldn’t figure out what to do, and someone inside the dining hall saw me out the window and they all came running out, and they were running for me as hard as they could, my father in front, I saw his face so clearly, I can still see it. And yet they would not have reached me in time, because the bulldozer was very close to the cliff. But then the bulldozer stopped. The engine conked out, you know, it misfired and died. They looked at it later, and it had fuel and ran smoothly and everything. But it stopped at the edge of the cliff! And everyone carried me back inside. It’s practically the first thing I can remember.”

“You are a true Antarctican,” Ta Shu declared.

“Yes, yes yes yes yes. Antarctica said to me, Okay, you can live, Carlos. But you must remember. You must serve me.”

Then a bunch of people from the sauna were rushing through the pool toward the lock at the end of the tent, the lock leading outside. “Come on!” Addie said to them as she passed (stuffed in a flowery swimsuit, pink, sexy), “come on y’all, it’s a hundred fifty Fahrenheit in the sauna and fifty below outside if you count windchill! You can join the Two Hundred Club with an asterisk, not quite the Three Hundred Club but very exclusive nevertheless!”

“Oh God,” X said, not moving.

“I’ve heard of this,” Val said. “It’s like the polar dip at Mac Town.”

“A heart attack waiting to happen.” He glanced at her. “You want to try it?”

“No…. Ah hell, why not. I’m so spaced, it might wake me up.”

He grinned. “If it doesn’t then nothing’s going to.”

They stood, and in that movement Val saw suddenly that he was relaxed. As they sloshed down the pool she thought disjointedly about this. It had been true pretty much since she had run into him and the others at Roberts. Not hangdog and accusatory as in McMurdo. Not that he hadn’t had cause! Because he had. And still did. But he seemed to have forgiven her. And she hadn’t even apologized. She clutched his arm for balance as they kicked into cold tennis shoes next to the lock, clutched it hard as they crowded into the lock with others. “Keep a hand on the safety line,” Val said to him. “It could be extra windy in the slot between the tent and the ice.”

“Do you think they’ll have a safety line?”

“Shit.”

They crowded out the door with the others.

Instant cold, a brutal slam of it everywhere at once. The wind poured right through her and her skin snap-froze. Everyone was shouting, and she realized she was too. Steam was erupting off them and flying downwind; they were pink firecrackers, exploding steam! The cold was astonishing. Val felt a moment of pure fear, as it occurred to her that this is what the end would feel like in Antarctica; this was death; then she was laughing at the insanity of it, people trying to dig snowballs out of a snowbank hard as concrete, screaming, all the steaming pink skin glowing in the dim omnidirectional light; seeing it all without sunglasses, through a torrent of tears freezing on her cheeks; her underwear and jogger top freezing solid. Brass bra like an amazon. Amazed laughter.

Then all at once they were jostling back into the lock, then crashing desperately down into the water and shrieking even louder at the heat. Val’s skin was blasted all over again by the hot/cold assault on her stunned capillary system, the two sensations of freezing and boiling merged into a single burn. Shrieks and hollers all around. She had to laugh. “What a rush.”

After that sensory detonation everything was rendered hyperlucid. Her skin needled and burned; she saw everything in a kind of twenty-ten vision. Sleepiness had vanished utterly, she felt like she would never sleep again. All her muscles were melting inside her but her mind remained alert, as hypersensitive as her skin.

And so a very strange state indeed, as she observed the ferals and their refuge. She got out of the pool before she melted entirely, and put on undershirt and pants, and wandered around just looking, free from all responsibility. All the rooms were warmer now, and people were dressed in various degrees of clothing, many still in their drying long underwear. Some rooms looked like they were shooting a special Antarctic issue of the Victoria’s Secret catalog, and Jack had found one of these, and was telling a couple of the Scandinavian women about something. Jim was at the dining room table conversing with Ta Shu and Carlos, intent about something or other: I do social law, but that’s where you can see that unless the system itself changes … Jorge and Elspeth were back talking to the cook, Jorge taking notes on a little pad of paper. Recipes for an article. The ferals were not going to be hidden very much longer.

There were about as many women as men among them, Val noted as she walked around. If that were true generally then it would be a first in Antarctic history. So there were some firsts left after all.

And the women there were a capable-looking crowd, reminding her in many ways of her lunch group in Mac Town. Scandinavians, Japanese, Eskimo, Kiwi, whatever. Muscled or round, tall, short, scarred and beat up, underfed or nicely blubbered; very few classic beauties in this crowd, though there were a few analogs to Lars there too. All of them looked good to Val. They liked to spend their time out in the wilderness, working hard. And they were doing that without being part of the tourism industry. Some kind of high-tech polar hunter and farmer life. What do you do for a living? I hunt and farm. I farm the ice. She had to laugh.

And when she stopped and asked one of the women about it, about the way they lived, the woman was instantly friendly. She had a German accent; she said, “Come with us now, we’re going to empty traps in the bay.” Val was still sloshing around inside her skin, her muscles turned to Jell-O; but this was her chance to do this, and another might never come.

So she told Ta Shu and Jim where she was going, and geared back up, and left the tent with a group of five women. Back into the rush of frozen mist; but in her clothes it was not so bad, the spacesuit effect very distinctly felt after their exposed wet foray outside; she was in the wind but protected, warm, disconnected. Geared up! It was pretty remarkable how protected they were. And it was by no means as windy as it had been on the Shackleton Glacier.

They followed a rope line, an Ariadne thread the woman called it, down the glacier to a very broad ice staircase, cut into the side of an ice slope with one of the laser borers. They were on a piedmont glacier, Val saw, or a remnant of the Ross Ice Shelf itself. So this camp was located where the Transantarctics dropped into the Ross Sea, tucked into some rock outcrop like Mount Betty. Iceberg fragments of the old shelf dotted the misty sea ice offshore, like a vast city of white buildings slowly dispersing into the distance. Visibility fluctuated in the cloud; sometimes she could see a few meters, other times a few kilometers, but all within the rushing cloud.

Down on the cracked surface of the sea ice there was a little fish hut, beside a round hole that had refrozen. They took turns breaking the new ice with a crowbar, Val taking a single whack and then passing the bar along, as she judged she was a danger to them all. Then she helped haul up on a chain, her mitted hands chilling swiftly, first throbbing with dull cold pain, then numbing to the point they became only big fat gloved things at the ends of her arms. She did windmills to return feeling to them, then helped the other women lift up the metal trap at the end of the chain. Out of the hole it came, splashing water that froze on the ice in seconds. Inside was a big mawsoni, and they stood back and watched as it thrashed out its life, everyone silent and intent. “What a dragon,” one said emphatically after it was dead. They opened the trap; it was like an elongated lobster trap, with a door people could unhook. They hauled out the dead monster and laid it on a banana sled. Val took one end of the sled, and helped the Germanic woman who had invited her out to carry the sled up the steps cut into the broken slope of the ice shelf. She could feel the exhaustion of the long walk across Mohn Basin in her legs; she was tired, very tired.

Then they hauled the fish over the ice, tromping back up to the camp slow step after slow step. In harness and pulling a sled again. It felt like a long way, going uphill and into the wind. The cloud flew right at them over the ice; everything white; not a classic whiteout, in the sense of losing all horizon and distance, but a blustery needle mist flowing right on the white glacier. Val was beat, her legs quivering and tweaking, on the edge of cramps. But her mind was sharp, needling inside her like her thawing hands. She felt full. The haul through the white wind suddenly ballooned: it took forever, it was the whole world, and she there in it completely, seeing it all in exquisite detail, the surface of the glacier as textured and semitransparent as her skin in the pool, everything flowing but still, everything in its place. She hit her stride and pulled forever.

Back in the refuge she sat again in the dining room, warming up by the stove, listening to the people around her talk. “All the Eskimos I’ve seen have had to learn snowcraft all over again, they’ve been living in pickup trucks or off their government grants. Either too poor or too rich. But what stayed with them was their values. Eskimos think it’s important to be happy. You’re supposed to react to difficult situations cheerfully. A happy person is considered a capable person, a good person. Unhappy people are thought to be deficient in some significant respect. It isn’t acknowledged to be an appropriate response. You have to face up to Naartsuk, that was their storm spirit, the biggest god in their pantheon. They don’t seem religious anymore, but they definitely still believe in Naartsuk.”

Carlos was telling people at Val’s table about arrowheads found on the Peninsula, indicating visits by prehistoric peoples in boats, no doubt from Chile. Also ancient maps which showed a surprisingly accurate Antarctic coastline, some of them even appearing to map what the deglaciated coastline would be, as if the civilization had been ancient beyond knowledge. Ta Shu was shaking his head at this, murmuring “No, no. Von Daniken, very bad. We are first here, we have that obligation.” Wade too seemed dubious about the possibility of previous Antarctic humans: “Is not possible,” he repeated more than once. “Is not possible.”

Many of the ferals, however, seemed to disagree. “There were beech forests here for millions of years,” one of the German women said. She had pulled a foot-powered sewing machine over to the table, and with Lars’s help was sewing together pieces of what looked like seal fur. “Who knows what else might have lived here?”

“We will bring the beech forests back,” Lars said. “The climate is just right for them again. It only needs planting them. Prehistoric and posthistoric. Our children will take refuge in these forests. They can harvest the wood, and make what they need, and set terraria in the protection of each grove. The fjords will come back too.”

Then the cook set a plate of fish cutlets and rice before Val, and a big salad of mixed lettuce and cut cabbage, and after she had wolfed it down Mai-lis came in and said to her, “We would like to move you on toward McMurdo now.”

“Now?” She was surprised; it was still storming outside, the clouds right on the ice and very windy. Of course that hadn’t stopped them so far.

“Yes, now, please. It’s best for us if our involvement in your affairs is over before McMurdo is back to normal. The ecotage has caused them to call in the U.S. Navy. Right now this storm is still keeping flights from Christchurch from coming down, but when they arrive we want to be gone.”

“Does it matter, now that people know you’re here? Once they start looking they’ll be able to find you for sure.”

Mai-lis nodded. “We haven’t decided what to do yet. Saving people was more important than staying hidden, that was clear. We don’t think anyone will actually try to evict us, so … well, we will see. But we want to start this next phase with some distance. So if you and your group will suit up, we will fly you to Ross Island.”

“Sure, sure. Whatever you say.” In fact Val would have loved nothing more than to try to sleep; the idea had come back, which was a sign that if she could just get under the blanket, so to speak, she would stay under for an entire day, maybe two. Not at all a comfortable feeling. But she didn’t want to argue with their hosts.

She went around the chambers of the refuge, rounding up her group and Carlos, Wade and X. Many of them appeared to be as exhausted as she was; she had to rouse them from the classic Antarctic ten-foot stare, saying, “Come on, come on, they’re flying us to McMurdo.”

And half an hour later, they and their few possessions were on board two big blimps, Addie again piloting the one Val was in. And then they were off once again, into the clouds on a rush of wind.

After that Val lost focus a bit. Despite the booming and whistling of the wind, the bouncing of the blimp and the sheer fact of their situation, she was seriously winding down, falling asleep as if making a cliff dive; sooner or later—sooner—she would hit and be gone instantly. Because of their situation she tried to fight this dive, and the strangeness of what was happening helped her, so that eventually what she fell into was a peculiar, struggling, sandy-eyed half-sleep, a kind of waking dream or conscious sleep; the direct contact of reality and her unconscious. In this state she was aware of X and Wade and Ta Shu and Addie talking on the headsets, and aware that they were flying over the Transantarctics in a marvelous blimp; but it was all jumbled together and incoherent. Brief visions of steep mountains, appearing through rents in the cloud as in Chinese landscape painting. Nunataks in a sea of white meringue. Another glimpse of green below. Addie saying Yeah that’s Shangri-la, we won’t be stopping there.

“Why not fly straight to Mac?” That was X. Her friend.

“Well, you know, if the ice shelf was still there we might. But now the sea ice is breaking up and there’s lots of open water in the bay, and I still don’t like to fly over open water, even in the blimps. In case a skua pecks a hole in the bag or whatever. So we’ll fly down the range, see the sights. The most beautiful mountains on Earth, anyway. If you could see ’em.”

“Wake up, Val, there’s another one of their camps.”

That was Wade. Nice man. She liked him. He was thinking of her.

“Uhh.”

She tried to wake. Like struggling under the surface of a syrup sea. She even slapped herself in the face. X regarded this with a curious expression, as if he wouldn’t mind helping out. Part of him. Of course. Though he was fond of her. Shouldn’t have dumped him like that, that was mean. Trolling was mean. The blimp dropped hard and she reswallowed her stomach, looked down blurrily: flying clouds, then a patch of green in spun glass; another refuge. Green valley in the ice. Then white clouds again, and Val shook her head, too groggy to remember properly what she had just seen. A waking dream.

“That’s Norumbega.”

“How many live there?” Wade asked.

“Well, it’s more a crossroads than a town. Johan and Friedrich hold things together there, maybe a dozen others.”

“Do you mind if I have us on the phone to Senator Chase?”

“Oh, yeah, not usually, but don’t do it now, okay? I don’t want anyone overhearing us during the approach. Besides you’re the senator, don’t you know that?”

X and Wade looking at each other round-eyed, in faked alarm at this news. They were friends. Val leaned her forehead against the cold window, looked down without quite seeing. Until she got some real sleep she would not be all there no matter how hard she tried. She closed her eyes and dropped into light sleep and dreams, without being aware of the phase change. The Room of a Thousand Shapes, the corked sledge. Rushing clouds, flying down the Zaneveld, a pile of bodies in the snow. She surfaced briefly, groaning. Then back under.

There’s Shambhala.

There’s Ultima Thule.

There’s Happy Valley.

There’s the Byrd Glacier, the biggest glacier in the world, look at that mama. That glacier is wider than the longest glacier in Europe is long. What a mighty river.

A wild interval, swirling around, tossing on a down-draft. That’s Skelton Glacier, sucking down a katabatic as usual. Come on you dog.

Skelton? That’s the way I came up on the SPOT train.

Yeah. A hell of a drop.

So we’re almost there.

Yeah. But listen, we’re not taking you folks right to Mac Town, understand. We don’t like to go there. Not at the best of times, and especially not now that the Marines have landed.

So where will you leave us?

Well, I said Black Island, but Mai-lis is a romantic.

Through the clouds, a stark black-and-white landscape. The sea black, dotted with brilliant white bergs. An island like a black castle, rising out of black water.

Then Addie was chivvying the blimp down, down, down, and Val pushed with all her might, and broke back up through the membrane of sleep, groggy and disoriented. Naps were not going to do the job at this point, and she needed to be awake. Addie was clipping the blimp onto a big rust anchor, half-buried in black sand.

“Okay!” she said. “Your radios ought to get Mac Town no problem now.”

She popped the gondola door, then handed them a key. “This’ll get you inside the hut. Nice to meet y’all.”

They climbed down onto the black sand of the beach. The other blimp was anchored to rocks up on Windvane Hill. Val’s group stood around as if they had just gotten off a train together. Then the blimps detached and sailed off downwind, rising quickly into the clouds and disappearing. “Where is this?” Wade asked.

“Cape Evans,” Val said. “Let’s get inside, out of the wind.”

Before you, my friends, you see the Cape Evans hut. This is the hut that Scott’s expedition built in the summer of 1910-11. They lived in this hut through the fall and winter of 1911. Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard left from here on their winter journey, and returned. Scott and his men left the following spring for the Pole. Sixteen men started out; five men did not come back. That fall and the next winter, the men surviving lived still in this hut, through the long months of perpetual darkness, knowing their comrades would never return. When spring and the sun came back they went south once more, hoping only to find the bodies of their friends. And they found them—the last three anyway, frozen in their tent, with their gear, and their twenty kilos of geological specimens, and the diaries and letters containing their stories. They had reached the Pole, and found there a tent and a Norwegian flag; Amundsen’s group had gotten there some time before. And on the way back Evans, Oates, Wilson, Scott, and Bowers all died.

The survivors left the three bodies they had found in the tent on the ice shelf, and came back to this hut. The relief ship returned at last, and they sailed away forever.

Now this hut. See inside. They are dead; their stories live. Yet so many questions remain. Why did they come here? How can we live here? How should we live anywhere on this Earth?

Our places speak for us. Our spaces speak through us. This hut still speaks their story. I will go inside now and be silent, so you can hear it.

gray light

brown room

The nine members of the group gathered before Scott’s gray weathered hut. X took the key Addie had given him, and unlocked the massive padlock on the door. They filed in one by one, all but Ta Shu, who wandered up the slope of Windvane Hill, presumably to get an exterior shot. Val waved to him and he waved back; he would be in soon. She followed the others in.

She passed through the dark vestibule. The inner door was opened onto the dim main room; the others already inside. This hallway was their version of a lock. Also a storeroom: slabs of seal blubber stacked on the floor. Butchered sheep hanging in a nook. Horse harnesses on the wall.

Into the big room. The nearer half of it was walled with stacks of boxes, supplies for that fateful expedition of 1911, never used. The farther half narrowed, as wooden bunkbeds stuck out from the walls on both sides. Beyond the big central table were workbenches under the southern window, and on the other side, in the far corner, Scott and Wilson’s nook. Against the far wall, the black closet of Ponting’s darkroom. All dim in the gray light.

Jack and Jim and Carlos had sat down wearily at the far end of the big table, and seeing them Val was reminded sharply of Ponting’s photo of Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard after their return from the Worst Journey. They had been seated in the same places, at this very same table. After thirty-six days out, in midwinter. Val shivered. It was cold in here, as cold as outside, or colder. They had judged in ignorance.

“Anyone for some Heinz catsup?” Jorge asked, standing before one of the stacks of boxes.

Wade joined him. “So strange,” he said, touching one of the bottles arrayed on top of the highest box. “I saw the same catsup bottles at old Pole Station, and the old old station too. The only difference is this one has a cork instead of a screw top.” He left a finger touching the bottle, bemused. These things of ours that carry on, Val thought. Small objects we use. And so the people to come will know we were real too. Because we used Heinz catsup.

“I’ll radio McMurdo,” she said. She went out into the hall; Ta Shu was coming in, and she waved him past her. Then she tried her wrist phone. “McMurdo, this is T-023, this is T-023, do you read, over.”

To her surprise an answer came quick and clear. “T-023, this is McMurdo, once again in touch with all the world. Hey Val, where are you?”

“Hi Randi. We’re at the Cape Evans hut.”

“Cape Evans! How you’d get there?”

“We had some help.”

“Oh I see! Well you’re not the only ones, let me tell you. You got a lift from our back-country residents?”

“Yeah. Listen, can you send a boat over to collect us? I’m not sure we can walk home.”

“Oh sure, sure, no problem there. How many of you are there now?”

“Nine.”

“How’s that collarbone?”

“He’s okay.”

“Good. Okay, I’ll get them to send a Zodiac over right away.”

Back in the hut Jim was holding a bottle of marmalade up to the light. “I read that once the Kiwis at Scott Base ran out of jam and one of them got on a snowmobile and rode over here and took some of this marmalade back with him. They ate it on their scones.” He smiled at Ta Shu, standing next to him. “Frozen for fifty years or so.”

“Very tasty.”

“I don’t suppose it’s any different now.”

Nevertheless they left the food alone. Jim went on telling Ta Shu and the others about the place: how Scott had had a wall of boxes set across the hut to divide officers from able seamen; how they had had a player piano on which to make music; how the hut had been plundered for souvenirs during the IGY years, and been filled to the roof with drift snow and ice before its restoration.

Val wandered around restlessly, only half listening. The bench under the south window looked like an alchemist’s laboratory. Little dark bottles, white powders, retorts, all the proud paraphernalia of Victorian science; antique, primitive, handmade. It was the same on the shelf above Wilson’s cot, and in the darkroom. All kinds of things. And everything immaculate; no spiderwebs, no dust. Scott’s bookshelves, actually the framing of the wall over his bed, were empty. There was a dead Emperor penguin lying on its back across his desk table. The space looked like Scott’s, somehow. Blank, private, austere; an empty stuffed shirt; but something more than that.

Around the corner the bunkbeds seemed to her much more human. Here one over the other had slept her favorites, Birdie Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Their magazine pin-ups were still stuck to the wooden wall over their beds: Cherry’s were portraits of Edwardian young ladies, dreamy, impeccably dressed, lace at the throat; not people who were ever going to come to Antarctica. Bowers’s pin-ups were of dogs.

In the dim light it began to seem to Val as if she had never woken up, but was walking in the dim spacetime of dreams, so that these men might stamp into the outer hallway at any second. But they had died out there. Scott had taken five men on the last leg instead of four, and they had died. If he had sent Seaman Evans back with Lieutenant Evans, all might have been well. That close to survival; one decision; eleven miles out of sixteen hundred. And yet they scorned Scott for his incompetence, they made fun of him. He who had hauled a sledge all that way, and almost made it. One bad call was all it took. No one to fly in to the rescue.

Now her group sat or stood wandering the room, chilling down in the gray light. The matted reindeer hair of the sleeping bags looked woefully inadequate. Val went back around the corner and sat on Wilson’s cot. She stared at Scott’s empty bed. She had misjudged these men; she had taken other people’s casual superior judgments and accepted them. As if the people who had lived before them in time were somehow smaller because they had lived earlier. Looking through the wrong end of a telescope and saying But they’re all so small. Following their footsteps and then thinking that what they had done was as pointless as following in people’s footsteps. As if they had not been as intelligent and cultured as any living human, and in many ways far more capable. Walk sixteen hundred miles in Antarctica and then judge them, she thought drowsily, head resting back against the wooden wall. She heard the voices of her group as the conversation of those odd Brits, those straightlaced young men, strong animals, complex simplicities, running away from Edwardian reality to create their own. Say it was an escape, say it was Peter Pan; why not? Why not? Why conform to Edwardian reality, why march into the trenches to die without a whimper? In this little room they had made their world. The first Antarctic chapter of the Why Be Normal Club. Happy at the return of some distant party which had been out of touch for weeks or months, out there on one crazed journey after another, pointless and absurd—the pure existentialism of Antarctica, where they made reality, or at least its very meaning. The pathetic fallacy of the Edwardians or the pathetic accuracy of the postmoderns; nothing much to choose between them; certainly no priority, either of heroic precedence or omniscient subsequence. Just people down here, doing things. Flinging themselves out into the spaces they breathed, to live, to really live, in this their one brief life in the world. They had been in no one’s footsteps.