Antarctica

13 The McMurdo Convergence

blue sky

black water

The clouds broke up and blew off to the north. Between the last low white stragglers the sun shone brightly, burnishing the gray interior of the hut. Wade followed the others outdoors into the sun, and blinked up at Erebus. Offshore the sea ice was gone, and waves lined the water. Hungrily Wade gazed at the open sea, at movement in the landscape, such a relief after all the days of snow and ice. The ocean here was black even though the sky overhead was blue; he had never seen anything like it.

A while later a fast fat-rimmed rubber motorboat came slushing out of the sun-blasted water to the south, and beached below them in a surge of floating ice chunks. The three-person crew of the boat did not appear surprised at Val’s group; their manner made it clear that in the last week they had picked up so many groups in trouble around the shores of the Ross Sea that search and rescue was nothing to them anymore; they were worldly now, and jaded. No one had died, they said, as far as they knew. But there had been a lot of close calls.

So the nine said quick good-byes to Scott and his men, and locked up the Cape Evans hut, and piled into the boat with their nearly empty daypacks, and off they went purring over the black water. Through the steep riven Dellbridge Islands, past the broken stub of the Erebus Ice Tongue. To the left soared steaming Erebus. To the right, across the black water, the Western Mountains stood two or three times their usual height, raised by a fata morgana into a kind of fantasy range, the super-Himalaya of Ice Planet.

Wade sat in the bow of the Zodiac, looking around. He was tired, vibrated, spaced out. A bitter wind blew splinters of sunshine. Antarctica had never looked so surreal to him, so sublime; whether this was because he was on the last leg of his adventure or because of the intrinsic beauty of the scene was hard to say. He felt both detached and absorbed at the same time; happy in some Buddhist sense: desiring nothing. Clarified. The buzz of the craft’s engine was loud enough to allow him to hum at full volume without anyone else hearing him, and so without thought or choice he happily hummed his soundtrack to the scene, the music buzzing in him as if transmitted by the landscape, as if he were a mere radio receiver—the end of Beethoven’s 131 quartet, then the bass phrase from the Ghost Trio and the Ninth that Berlioz had termed the work of a madman, Wade humming it over and over and feeling more glorious the more glorious he felt, the muscular tunes bouncing along with the boat over the low waves, melodies so stuffed with meaning that they were landscapes in themselves, landscapes very like the one they hummed through now, vast and clear and clean of line. Could they live up to the greatness of these tunes, to the greatness of this planet, so vast and beautiful?

As they skimmed in toward the hollow end of Hut Point, overrun with McMurdo’s clutter of buildings, Wade found himself uncertain. The court was still out, no doubt about it. But the tunes kept fountaining out of him. A sort of plan was beginning to take shape in his mind.

They passed a big chunk of broken sea ice, a flat iceberg almost awash in the waves. A crowd of Adelie penguins was standing on it watching the Zodiac pass, some waving their flippers. Wade waved back at them. He saw that other penguins were shooting up out of the water and landing on their stomachs on the ice, sliding over it like big hockey pucks and sometimes colliding with other penguins already up there. Sudden explosions of sundrenched water, and then a slick gleaming penguin suspended in the air over the ice; yet another Escher moment to add to the rest, fish-to-bird, metamorphosis. Wade laughed to see it.

McMurdo now looked like a big town to him, a metropolis, as big and tawdry as any freeway strip in the United States. No; hard to feel the glory there. Hard not to feel a sense of diminution, looking back at the fata morgana to the west, and then forward to Mac Town. He would have to figure out how to hold on to this moment of grace.

The pilot idled in to the dock, the crew tied the Zodiac to the claws. The members of the expedition stepped back into Little America.

Each reality is followed by one stranger than the last. After this trip away, which had lasted only—well—Wade was too tired to calculate it, but it couldn’t have been more than a week or so—the sheer weirdness of McMurdo shot in his eyes like the overexposed sunlight, image after image knocking him back on his heels. Scott’s Discovery hut, looking much like the Cape Evans hut, dwarfed and empty out on its point beyond the docks and the mall. The buildings of the little town scattered over the volcanic rubble, all snow-plastered by the recent storm; but the snow was thawing at this very moment, and all the streets were filled with frozen runnels of ice-crusted mud.

The Zodiac crew led the nine travelers into a big building at the back of the docks, next to the minimall. Inside a group of U.S. Navy officers greeted them with paper cups of hot chocolate and coffee, asked them to sit down on folding chairs, and with tape recorders and clipboards ran through their story, asking question after question. They answered everything as clearly as they could, told them the whole story, though it was clear from the inconsistencies, repetitions and confusions that they were tired. But the Navy men were businesslike and friendly, and soon they were hustling Jack into a pickup truck for a ride up to the medical clinic for a check-up on his shoulder and general condition. The others they asked apologetically to check in at the Chalet, where Sylvia and her team would ask them many of the same questions before they could go to their rooms and get some rest. Those who had given up their room on leaving for their trip were given keys to new rooms, and off they went.

Beeker Street, Crary Lab, the Chalet. The eight remaining travelers slowed, then bunched in the muddy open area above the Chalet.

Wade turned to Val, who was looking around at the town as spaced as any of them, or more so. “Why don’t I go check in at the Chalet for us, and tell them the rest of you will come down after you’ve had a chance to clean up.”

“Sure,” Val said.

Ta Shu was circling slowly, baffled. “This place,” he said. Jorge and Elspeth headed toward Hotel California. X led Carlos off to the BFC. Jim took off for the Holiday Inn. Wade drifted over to the Chalet, climbed laboriously the steps onto the porch. He looked back; without further ado the group that had traveled together so far, the group that had huddled on Shackleton Glacier bare to the storm, had dissipated in all directions.

Wade pulled back the heavy door of the Chalet. Inside things looked just as they had when he had last seen them, and he realized ruefully that he had expected everything everywhere to be changed.

But of course not. Paxman led him across the main room to Sylvia’s office. She was standing behind her desk, listening to a short man speak to her in a low voice. She saw Wade and waved him into the office without ever taking her attention from this man, who talked on in a low monotone, not acknowledging Wade’s appearance with even a glance. Something in Sylvia’s look told Wade that she had been listening to him for quite some time.

“My clients are not associated with Earth First! or the Sea Shepherds or the Arctic Peoples’ Defense League, or the Antarctic World Park Emergency Rescue Action, or the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, or any of the mainstream environmental groups, or any of the underground groups.”

“Okay,” Sylvia said. “Who are they then?”

“They don’t tell me,” the man replied levelly. “They’ve given me to know that they are private individuals, of no affiliation, who have decided to practice civil disobedience and direct action in the form of targetted nonlethal ecotage, to resist and hopefully bring to an end all transgressions of the Antarctic Treaty, which was until its expiration the only law this continent had. They feel that the other environmentalist groups allied with their cause can provide the arguments, the legalities, the publicity, and all the rest of the apparatus of resistance, all important, and their function is to take direct action, and then to stay out of sight and remain undiscovered. In this particular case only, they’ve gone so far as to hire me to speak for them here to you, because none of the other groups they contacted would agree to do that.”

Sylvia looked at him closely; Wade would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of that flinty gaze. She could not have been at all happy that the Navy was back in town, Wade thought. And this man was representing the people who had gotten them there.

The man did not seem to notice her gaze. Sylvia said, “Mr. Smith, this is Wade Norton, an assistant to Senator Chase from California.”

“Hello,” Mr. Smith said, shaking Wade’s hand. “I admire many of the things Senator Chase has done.”

Sylvia nodded, as if to say Of course. “Wade, this is Mr. Smith. He has shown up here in McMurdo by sea, unannounced.”

“I came privately,” Mr. Smith explained. “I’m from Smith, Jones and Robinson, environmental law.”

“I see,” Wade said.

“Wade has been out in the field, and I believe he has witnessed the impact of your clients’ actions. Is that right, Wade?”

Wade nodded. “We survived,” he said.

Mr. Smith was dressed in standard trekker’s garb, which meant he was too warm in the Chalet. In spite of the prisming blue photovoltaic suit he looked innocuous, like a small-town lawyer; he had so well practiced the semiotics of the nonconfrontational that he had become nearly invisible. A puppet only, his appearance said; a spokesman for his clients and that was all; no views of his own, no thinking, nothing but a medium of transmission, like a walking telephone, or a microwave signal repeater.

Of course that had to be a front, and a front Wade was quite familiar with; in fact it was a popular style in Washington these days, usually practiced by very sharp lawyers indeed. He said, “How do you communicate with your clients?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. I can say I have never met any of them in person.”

“So some of them might be down here among us, and you wouldn’t know.”

“That’s correct.”

“I might be one of them, and you wouldn’t know.”

“That’s correct.”

The bland little man looked closely at Wade for the first time, as if trying to ascertain whether this were the case.

Wade thought it over. He said to Sylvia, “Senator Chase has suggested to me that since we have all the players involved in the recent events here at hand, you might consider meeting to discuss the issues involved openly, with the idea of making a report to the investigators who no doubt are on their way to join us, or are already here.”

“Most of them will get here tomorrow, weather permitting,” Sylvia said. “The storms have held them up in Christchurch.”

“The senator wonders if we could even make some recommendations for future policy which would help to avoid any repetitions of incidents like this one. And I think Mr. Smith’s presence here means this meeting could have even wider representation than Senator Chase imagined. I could also invite some friends into town to participate as well—the people who helped us get back here.”

“Ferals?” Sylvia asked sharply.

“Why yes,” Wade said. “So you do know about them.”

She met his gaze calmly. “I’ve heard rumors. I’d be interested to hear what they had to say. I’ve tried to make contact with them before. But never any reply.”

“No. But now they may be willing to come in. Given what has happened.”

Sylvia nodded, thinking it over.

“If anything positive is to come out of all this,” Wade said, “it will have to happen here, I think. Up north it will sink into the mass of everything else.”

“Possibly,” Sylvia said. “Although SCAR, and the Treaty negotiating committee, and now it looks like a UN committee, will all be considering the matter, along with our Congress and other governments.”

“No doubt. But the fuller our report, the more they’ll have to work with.”

“My clients would welcome such a meeting,” Mr. Smith said.

“How do you know?” Wade and Sylvia said together.

Mr. Smith returned their stares blandly. The role of the spokesperson was an ambiguous one, as Wade very well knew, having just put words into Phil Chase’s mouth. Walking telephone or mastermind? There was no way to tell.

“Have you gotten all stranded parties back to safety?” Wade asked Sylvia. “I mean, is it appropriate to start holding such a meeting?”

Sylvia nodded. “S-375 have been heloed back from the Dry Valleys, and I’ve just heard from Palmer and Pioneer Hills that all the affected oil personnel have been recovered. Everyone’s in.”

“Nobody was hurt by my clients’ actions,” Mr. Smith noted.

“That was luck,” Wade said. “That was sheer luck, I can tell you that personally. If it weren’t for the help of people your clients don’t even know about, a good number of us would have died. Destroying life support systems on the polar cap is very, very dangerous. Reckless endangerment at the very least.”

“Nevertheless,” Mr. Smith said. “The fact remains.”

“Let’s not get into that now,” Sylvia said. “The fact is that Mr. Smith’s clients committed serious criminal acts, very dangerous to people down here, and that will be taken into account I’m sure.” She looked at the man. “I hope you’re prepared to answer for what these clients of yours have done, Mr. Smith. It could come to contempt of court and more, I imagine, if you choose to shield them from the law.”

“I’ve never been cited for contempt, and don’t plan to be now,” Mr. Smith said. “Of course I’m prepared for anything. I brought my toothbrush.”

Sylvia and Wade looked at each other.

“I have to get cleaned up,” Wade said. “Get some food, and see if I can contact the ferals. And talk to the senator.” Or not. He too was a spokesperson. You’re the senator, as they kept saying at the Pole. Or wherever it had been.

Sylvia said, “I’ll talk to some of the others. Let’s meet again after dinner with whomever is available, for starters. As you say, there’s no time to lose.”

Val kicked the muddy snow off her boots and stomped up the stairs of dorm 308, then dragged down the hall to her room on the top floor. She opened the door and went inside, and sat down heavily on the bed. Everything in its place, same as always. A functional little space, like a ship’s cabin. It appeared that Georgia, her roommate for the season, was out on a trip of her own; her bags were gone, her closet doors shut. They had barely even met.

She felt utterly drained. Hollow. McMurdo looked terrible. Her trekking group had dispersed with barely a word, off to dorm or hotel, no plans for a final dinner together that night, nothing. She had got them all home after losing the sledge in the crevasse, but it hadn’t really been her doing. If it weren’t for the ferals Jack very possibly would have died on Shackleton Glacier, and none of them could be sure they would have survived that storm; weather said it was still going strong out there. Besides, back home without anyone dead wasn’t exactly how you wanted to characterize a trip, given that it had been an expedition undertaken for pleasure. There needed to be more than “Got home alive.”

Better luck next time, she always said to herself after the bad trips. There were bad ones and good ones. There had been good trips too. And there would be more of them in the future. No doubt about it.

Still she couldn’t shake the low feeling. Postexpedition blues, sleep deprivation, polar T-3 syndrome, whatever; she felt bad. Right on the edge of tears. It was a mood she hated. Whenever she saw it coming she fought it tooth and claw, she would not allow it. The antidote was action. She stood up and left the room, which at this moment seemed a black trap. She pulled on her parka and stumped back down the metal stairs at the end of the dorm, went back outside into the bitter wind.

Funky old Mac Town. There was nowhere to go. She was weary to the bone, her muscles stiff and sore—a feeling she usually liked, but not now. It had gone beyond that. She was hungry but the galley was closed. She went by the Chalet but it was after hours, and Sylvia and Wade had already left. There would be friends to talk to at the BFC, although they would no doubt still be busy sorting out the mess caused by the ecoteurs.

But by now the Erebus View would be open. She walked past the Holiday Inn and up the stairs to the private restaurant, stomach growling, almost faint with hunger. She walked through the door, into an ambrosia of food smells. Looked around for an empty table.

And there were Jim and Jack and Jorge and Elspeth, having dinner. Jack saw her and quickly looked away, scowling. Elspeth saw him turn his head, and glanced over her shoulder: “Oh hi Val,” riding over any awkwardness, “come join us.”

But Jack was glowering still, and after glancing at him, Jim would not meet her eye. Elspeth and Jorge, necks craned to look at Val over their booth back, didn’t see the other two.

Val waved a hand: “I’m looking for Joyce right now, I’ve got to talk to her. I’ll come back and catch you for dessert maybe.” And she retreated out of the restaurant.

Standing outside in the chill of McMurdo. Cloud shadows flitting through town. Blindly she stumped down the street behind the docks, helplessly thinking of all the bad expeditions she had ever been on, the ones people had walked away from furious or ashamed or sick at heart. It happened, oh yes it happened; under the stress of some of these radical endeavors people cracked, and the truth came out. And sometimes it was ugly. That ugly scowl on Jack’s face—Val had seen it before. One time she had been on the receiving end of that look for a whole week, on the ship returning them to the Falklands from South Georgia Island. After the one and only “In the Wake of Shackleton” expedition.

It had been one of the groups that had worn period clothing, a particularly crazy idea when repeating the boat journey, as the stuff the old guys had worn was ridiculously inadequate, and they could not have been more soaked, cold, and miserable. If they had been in a boat like the James Caird they would have died many times over; and even though their twenty-two-foot ultramodern boat had resembled a floating submarine more than Shackleton’s little lifeboat of the same length, and thus kept them afloat even in horrifying seas, it had still been a complete nightmare: everyone seasick, always lost unless they turned on the emergency GPS, cold and wet in the terrible gear, hurting with an accumulation of injuries as the result of being hammered relentlessly by huge waves. By the time they made their GPS-aided landfall on South Georgia Island, they were all wasted.

With the hardest part yet to go. For Shackleton and his men had been forced to land on the west side of the island, when all the Norwegian whaling stations were on the east side. And the island was a mountain range sticking up out of the South Atlantic.

Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had made it over, however, and Val’s three clients were stubbornly determined to do the same. So they had set off from King Haakon Bay to make the thirty-six-mile crossing of the island’s spine in a single push. It was a long way given the shape they were in, and over a steep range five thousand feet high, no small height when both ends of the trip were at sea level, and the island right in the Furious Fifties storm track. And they were minimally equipped for the hike, carrying only what Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had carried in 1916. It was a radical trip; a real test.

As they ascended and began to cross the island’s high empty glaciers, however, struggling through the deep snow, Eve had begun to tire fast. She had been the most seasick on the boat journey, and it became clear that she just didn’t have any gas left in the tank. The two men were almost as weak, and even Val was not feeling the usual dynamo effect that a hard hike had on her; it really hurt to give it her usual push. So they were in bad shape as they approached the crux of the journey, a ridge called The Trident directly blocking their way. There were four high passes to choose from, between the five tines so to speak. Shackleton and Worsley and Crean had started at the right and climbed up to each of the passes in turn, looking down the other side of each and finding them cliffs too steep to descend; then traversing under the towers to the next pass, each time with a terrible effort.

Without discussion Val’s group gave up on following this precise route and went straight for the fourth pass, the one Shackleton and his men had finally forced their way over. By the time they got close, the weather was degenerating. They had no tent or sleeping bags with them, and little food or clothing. And darkness was coming on fast, with the strong possibility of losing the moonlight to cloud cover, and perhaps even being stormed in. And then on the final approach to the pass, very steep even on that side, Eve had slipped and had to be arrested by Val, and in the jolt Eve somehow twisted her ankle pretty badly.

So when they finally reached the fourth pass, it had been a horrible shock to look over the other side and find that the slope there was insanely steep. The drop fell away so sharply that there was a big section in the middle they couldn’t see at all, which could have been a sheer cliff for all they could tell. The precipice only levelled off a full two thousand feet below them.

Shackleton, a careful man, had only decided to risk descending this slope because at that point they had no other choice. The three had therefore sat down in a line on their rope, legs around the man in front, and fired down the slope on their bottoms; two thousand feet in a matter of seconds, a drop that certainly could have killed them, as they had no idea what the hidden section below them would bring. Worsley said later he had never been more scared in his life, and he had done a lot of scary things. But they had lived.

Now, looking down this cliff, Eve had lost it. She refused to try the jump. This is crazy, she cried, this is crazy. Snow conditions might be different now, it might be icier! This must not be the right pass, we must have read the map wrong! We’ll be killed going down this!

Entirely possible. But this was the right pass, and it was getting dark, and a storm was coming. And they had gone so far that the only way out was forward—an all-too-common mountaineers’ dilemma. And Eve was shivering as well as crying, going into shock perhaps from her fall and the twisted ankle. And they had no tent, nor much food—yes, they were in the same fix as Shackleton—this was the plan after all, to put themselves in the same fix! They had engineered it this way! They too had no choice.

But Eve refused. Her boyfriend Mike begged her to try, he yelled at her; she yelled back at him, crying harder; their friend Brett tried to reason with her, but got nowhere. Whimpering in straightforward animal fear of death, she refused to make the leap. And while they sat there arguing it got darker and darker, and they were chilling down in a truly dangerous way.

Finally Val had snapped. She said “Look we’ve got to do this,” and grabbed up Eve, who kicked and screamed like a child in a tantrum, and pulled her around in front of her and jumped over the cornice, shouting back at Mike and Brett to do the same.

The slide quickly accelerated to something like free fall. Val crushed Eve to her hard, and they skidded down on Val’s backside, airborne at times, going faster and faster until Val was sure they were doomed; it would only take one rock in their path. But they never caught on a rock, never lost balance and tumbled into a bone-shattered bloody mass…. And some timeless interval later, probably less than a minute, they skidded out onto flat thick snow at the bottom of the slope and came to a halt. Mike and Brett arrived seconds later. Val’s pants were shredded, her legs and butt bloodied.

After that they had had to help Eve, who was crying helplessly all the while; one on each side of her taking turns, though mostly it was Mike and Brett who did that, while Val found the way in the dark, through most of that night. And they reached Stromness just before a giant storm hammered the island.

Great adventure. But Eve never spoke to her again.

Now Val looked around McMurdo, remembering Jack’s quick look away at the restaurant table, his scowl. Or that wounded look, when he was hunched out on the ice. She had done it again.

“I am not a good guide,” she told the empty town. “I am toast.”

Even though she was very near tears, the word toast reminded her of how hungry she still was. She moved off shakily toward the BFC. She could break into a box of camp crackers there, and hear stories of the other SARs of the last week, and huddle over the space heater to try to get herself warm. “I am the coldest burnt toast in town,” she said, and stopped and let herself cry for a minute before going on.

“Hello, Phil?”

“Yeah, who is it? Wade is that you? Where are you?”

“It’s me, Phil. I’m in Antarctica.”

“Where? Oh yeah. I was asleep, Wade.”

“Good.”

“What’s that you say?”

“Were you dreaming, Phil? What were you dreaming about?”

“What? What’s this, you call me up to wake me to ask me what I’m dreaming about?”

“You’ve had me do that a lot, remember?”

“Yes—no—I’m not having you do that now, am I?”

“You don’t remember what you were dreaming about?”

“Well, let’s see. Let me think. No, I guess it’s gone. Wait, something about bicycling. No, it was a unicycle. I was riding a unicycle down the Capitol steps, that was it—no, the Lincoln Memorial, because I could see the Capitol down the Mall. People were there like I was giving a speech, a big crowd, giant, but actually I wasn’t giving a speech, I was unicycling up and down the steps, making the hops in both directions and getting a lot of applause. It was great. No one could figure out how I was hopping back up the steps, and I couldn’t either. It was mystifying but fun. All the Republicans I like were there going Shit, Phil, how are we gonna beat that when you can hop up steps on a unicycle.”

“Mark and Colin?”

“Yeah, they were pissed. Then all the Republicans I hate were down there getting tossed in the reflecting pools.”

“A crowd scene.”

“Like the guppy tank at the pet store. I was planning to ride the unicycle right across their backs once they were all in, keeping my balance no matter what they did. Then you woke me up, bummer, that was going to be fun.”

“You enjoy your dreams, don’t you Phil.”

“I do, yeah. Unless I don’t. But most dreams are wish-fulfillment fantasies, I think you’ll find.”

“Maybe for you. Mine are usually terribly complex problems I can’t possibly solve.”

“That’s too bad, Wade. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks. So where are you now?”

“I’m in Kirghiz, I think. Yes. I’m seeing the Kirghiz light.”

“Very nice. Well. I should let you go back to sleep.”

“I’d like that Wade.”

“All right. Thanks for calling, Phil.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Oh, and by the way, just one thing?”

“… yeah?”

“I’m going to make some suggestions and the like down here in your name in the next day or two, Phil, I’m just going to go into ambassador mode because things are moving so fast here and I’m not sure I’m going to have time to check with you but I want to use your name as if everything I suggest is coming from you okay? Is that okay?”

“How is this different from the way we usually operate?”

“It isn’t, I just wanted to confirm.”

“Confirmed. Night night.”

“Night, Phil.”

The Antarctic Treaty had always been a fragile thing, a complex of gossamer and blown glass which had spun in the light of history like a beautiful mobile—a utopian project actually enacted in the real world, a model for how people ought to be treating the land everywhere—until it got caught in the pressures of the new century, and at the first good torque shattered into a thousand pieces.

Now Sylvia presided over the wreckage, hoping still to patch it back together. She was operating on as big a sleep deficit as anyone in town, perhaps even the largest of all; she had spent almost every hour of the crisis in her office or up at Search and Rescue, trying to deal with the multiple emergencies. It had been a trouble-shooter’s nightmare. But at the same time, a part of her began to think (no doubt the part most affected by sleep deprivation) that it was also the ultimate trouble-shooter’s challenge, or even an opportunity: not just to keep plugging away at the succession of little stopgaps that formed her ordinary work, but actually to consider the rehaul of everything.

She stood at the front of the big central room of the Chalet, watching people file in. A lot of people wanted to talk to her, and she had told them all to come on over to the Chalet. She was curious to hear them, in part to help her to clarify her own thinking about the situation. What would happen next, what should happen next? Without laws, without sovereignty, without a military, without police, without economy, without autonomy, without sufficiency—without any of the properties needed in the world to make life real … It was as if they were a small group of travelers in space, marooned on Ice Planet and now forced to invent everything from scratch.

Except the world was still there, of course. Sylvia had been juggling calls from all over, now that communications were restored; most importantly from NSF’s head offices in Virginia, asking for a quick accounting of the last week, identification of the ecoteurs if possible, and, luckily for her, any recommendations she might have for avoiding such events in the future. Also, the home office clearly wanted to contain the problem as much as she did, to minimize it and declare it an isolated anomaly, a sport in biological terms, so that the military was not called back in for good, and the Antarctic taken out of NSF’s hands. All perfectly appropriate in Sylvia’s opinion; but one Navy plane had made it down already, at great risk, and a big task force would soon follow to investigate the ecotage, naturally; and what would happen then was anyone’s guess. The big storm (inevitably termed a superstorm in the U.S. popular press) had stalled all these outsiders in Christchurch, however, and so she had this little window of opportunity to conduct her own investigation.

Now here they were, filing into the big room. The ASL managers; Geoff Michelson and some of his colleagues, just returned from the Dry Valleys; several Kiwis from Scott Base; Ta Shu; Mr. Smith; Wade Norton; Carlos and X, and some of Carlos’s colleagues from the SCAG consortium; Val and some of her clients. Others were standing in the loft or in the offices off the main room. The Chalet had seldom seen such a crowd.

“Thanks for coming,” Sylvia said. “We’re here to discuss what’s happened in the past week, to see if we can make any recommendations to our various contacts in the north concerning where we might go from here, and how we can avoid any repetitions of this kind of thing. My notion is to conduct it like a small and informal scientific conference, with short presentations followed by questions and discussion, with the hope that at the end we could perhaps collaborate on a general statement. This of course will all be merely an addendum to the full official investigations, but I hope it will be useful. Ta Shu has suggested that for a meeting like this we should move our chairs into a circle formation, so that we can all see each other when we’re talking—among other no doubt valid reasons,” waving Ta Shu down, “and I think that’s a good idea, it will save us craning our necks to see who’s talking. So why don’t we do that first, and then begin.”

When they were rearranged in a rough circle, chairs all the way back to the walls, everyone able to see everyone else (it had been a good idea), Sylvia went on. “Mr. Smith here has arrived privately by boat, and he says he represents the, the ecoteurs who disrupted operations here and in various outlying camps. Without granting him priority, or in any way legitimating those attacks—in fact I condemn them here and now as criminal, dangerous, and useless—still I think we might start by hearing what Mr. Smith has to say concerning their actions.”

Mr. Smith nodded and rose to his feet. “My clients are private individuals, allied in some senses with the Antarctic World Park Emergency Rescue Action, and with more than a hundred other mainstream and grassroots environmental groups concerned at the nonrenewal of the Antarctic Treaty and the flagrant violations of its principles in the last two years. Other than that my clients wish to remain anonymous. They undertook to temporarily impair certain of the most egregious examples of Treaty breaking, to protest these operations and draw the world’s attention to them. They wish no harm to anyone, they took great pains to ensure that no one would be injured or killed, and they were successful in that goal, for which they are thankful, aware that in Antarctic the destruction of property will always bring some risk to life.”

“That’s for damn sure,” someone said, among other various mutterings. There were a lot of fierce looks directed at Mr. Smith from Carlos’s contingent especially, but Sylvia kept her focus on him, and he looked at her as he continued, oblivious to the others.

“Now of course they are aware that they are the subjects of a vast manhunt on the part of governmental authorities, and this does not surprise them, but they would like to point out that this is typical of law enforcement, to pursue very vigorously individuals performing civil disobedience or other protest actions, while allowing hundreds or even thousands of corporate executives to comprehensively break the laws without obstruction, or even with so-called law enforcement’s help and protection. Corporations and governments from many countries have been despoiling this last wilderness continent in complete contempt for international law, and so for the U.S. Navy and the FBI now to come here searching for my clients is a travesty, the equivalent of arresting the protesters of a crime while the criminals stand right at hand. It makes them not a police but rather a private security force, which might as well take its pay directly from the foreign governments and transnational corporations it is serving. As private security for corporations it makes sense to overlook gross malfeasance while brutally pursuing small individual protest actions, which to corporations are indeed the more dangerous of the two. The small spontaneous protests of individuals suggest after all that democracy might be a real thing, rather than just a cover story told to people to keep them in their places in the economic hierarchy. And of course the idea that democracy might be real is much too dangerous a notion to allow it to spread very far, for if it did, and if everyone acted on truly democratic principles, including protesting obvious crimes against the law, then social control would be impossible and the gross inequities of the current economic order, in which five percent of the world’s population own ninety percent of the world’s wealth, would be revealed for the hypocritical environment-devastating injustice that it is. Democracy in the United States and most of the rest of the industrial West is therefore a false front on a rich man’s mansion, a sham in which people are given a political vote but then clock in each day to an economic system in which their entire lives are regimented by a small group of executives busily downsizing whatever workplace rights people had gained in centuries of struggle. So people can vote, yes, but for politicians all funded by the corporations in control of the system, meaning you can either vote for the part of the owner class that believes in treating its employees well, or for the part that believes in taking as much as possible from its employees, but in any case you have to vote for the continuation of the system and therefore of the owner class. So the right to vote is meaningless. And in such a situation, a nondemocratic situation, civil disobedience and direct nonlethal resistance are the only true options to co-optation within the owner system. And thus as the only true options for resistance these are of course ruthlessly extirpated by the authorities wherever they appear, with the idea of discouraging the spread of protest by rank intimidation. And in the past this has usually worked, for very few want their lives shattered in order to protest an injustice that is massively entrenched and made to appear the natural order of things, and unlikely to fall to any individual act.

“So the only answer at this point is to use modern technology to act at a distance, and with perfect anonymity. And that is the course my clients have taken. The way they have structured their action makes it impossible for them to be identified, and you can be sure that I will keep their confidentiality, not only as a matter of legal ethics but also from the practical consideration that I myself do not know who they are. I only know that they wish to announce to you that in the current state of materials science, and the balkanization of communication technology, the means now exist to act in ways that encrypt and sequester the identity of the actors so watertightly that no one will ever know who they were. And this will be true in future protest actions as well, if they happen. That being the case, the views of the disenfranchised are going to have to be listened to again, and the environment and the world’s disenfranchised people are going to have to be re-enfranchised by the dominant order, which is going to have to change, or else anonymous and untraceable nonviolent protests and ecotage will crash the system. The last week in Antarctica is an announcement and demonstration of this fact.”

He paused to take a breath and Sylvia held up a hand. “Thank you, Mr. Smith! Perhaps we can give someone else a chance to speak now, in response perhaps for a moment or two, and then we’ll get back to you.”

“Fine,” Mr. Smith said, unperturbed. He sat down.

“Carlos? You and your colleagues in the Southern Club Antarctic Group were the people most affected by Mr. Smith’s clients’ ecotage. Would you like to make a response to Mr. Smith’s, um, remarks?”

Carlos popped to his feet. “My pleasure to speak! Contrary to what Mr. Smith has been saying, although there are some of his general remarks that I can agree with, there is no question that our oil and gas exploration, and the extraction of oil and methane hydrates from the polar cap, is both legal and environmentally safe!”

He waved a finger at Mr. Smith, who was a most unlikely-looking object of anyone’s scorn. “The Antarctic Treaty forbade mineral exploration, yes, but Japan and Russia never ratified the 1991 environmental protocol, and oil companies based in Treaty countries have looked for oil anyway. And now the Antarctic Treaty has expired and renewal has been held up, as everyone knows, mostly because of opposition to the Treaty from corporations based in the United States, using their allies in the American government to hold off approval of the Treaty until it has been altered to allow some exploration rights to them. So for the last two years we have been operating in a vacuum. And the Southern Club Antarctic Group, a group composed of nations in the southern hemisphere who never signed the Antarctic Treaty, and were never invited to join the Treaty conferences—they decided unanimously to pursue the path of clean extraction of important resources, especially methane hydrates, whenever this was deemed technically possible without harming the Antarctic environment in any way. There has been some protest from environmentalist groups in the North about this policy, but these protests come from nations who are using up the world’s resources at five to twenty times the rate of the members of the Southern Club Antarctic Group, so I personally feel that it is very presumptuous for these people of the North to protest when in effect the North has historically conquered the South, taken everything portable back to the North with them, destroyed the southern landscape and left the people of the South in misery, thus prospering so greatly that they can afford to have an upper class at leisure to order the environmental ethics of the countries that they have so shattered and left behind! The hypocrisy of the North, on this as on so many other issues, is endless, and beyond defense. It has beggared our language. It is the major fact in the history of the world in the last five centuries, colonialism that has never really ended, but merely changed formats.”

Mr. Smith said, “The risk of oil extraction—”

“No no no no no! The risk has been made so small,” Carlos exclaimed, squeezing his finger and thumb together till they went white, “so very small, as to be completely insignificant in the real world! This is what modern extraction technology allows, as we have explained to anyone prepared to listen. If we had not been bombed nothing bad ever would have happened. This isn’t the twentieth century after all. There has not been a significant oil spill in the last thirty years, and this is not because of chance, but because the technology and procedures employed by the oil industry have made them a thing of the past.”

“Panama Canal,” Mr. Smith said. “San Francisco. Djakarta.”

“Those were all sabotage!” Carlos cried, hopping up and down a little to try to contain himself. “These were spills because of your clients, not because of us!”

“My clients were involved in none of these incidents,” Mr. Smith said quickly.

“How can you be sure,” Wade asked, “if you don’t know who they are?”

“I asked them.”

“People like your clients,” Carlos went on, grimacing, “are people driving around the industrial North in their BMWs dreaming of killing tigers with their teeth and eating them raw and then telling the rest of us what to do, it is the most ridiculous fantasy possible, there are ten billion people on this Earth and half of them are starving, and it is not some rich well-fed aristocrat son-of-a-bitch hunter-gatherer Disneyland wilderness advocate that is going to feed those people or their children! We have to provide them with food and the energy to make food and shelter and clothing and schools and hospitals and you cannot do it with your deep-ecology wilderness dream. I hate your hypocrites for this holier-than-thou antihuman nonsense!”

Mr. Smith replied calmly, “Oil men always hate environmentalists. It means nothing except that your own brain has been overdetermined by your structured position in the global hierarchy. In fact you can’t sustainably provide energy and food and clothing, and the other means of existence, without the Earth. It is not the values of deep ecology that are causing the problem, but the exploitative economy of a world system in which a tiny aristocracy-of-the-wealthy stripmines the world’s natural and human resources, and retreats with the loot to its fortress mansions and islands, leaving the rest to survive as we may in the wreckage they have escaped. This is Götterdämmerung capitalism, this is our moment, and just as you say colonialism never ended, this feudalism has never ended, and it has nothing whatever to do with the so-called democratic values used to palliate the masses. Indeed all the armies of the world are now employed in enforcing this system against any group that takes the idea of democracy seriously.”

“There was nothing democratic about this sabotage,” Carlos said. “There are just a few of these ecoteurs, and most people condemn what they do, but they do it anyway. If they were for democracy they would have abided by the majority view on the matter, and people want electricity, they want light at night, they want refrigeration so their children don’t get sick from bad food.”

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

“Speaking more particularly,” Sylvia suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

“Like in Manhattan,” Carlos said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can.”

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