Antarctica

14 From the Bottom Up

X observed Sylvia’s meeting with a growing sense of alarm. He could see a potential settlement coming, in which the oil consortium altered its practices to conform to standards set by Mr. Smith’s ecoteurs, who became a kind of conscience to the project; and all would continue as it had been before; and no one would ever notice that in their debate both men had been attacking the practices of Götterdämmerung capitalism without seeming to notice the complementarity, and thinking instead that they were attacking each other. And X would be x’ed out of ASL forever, and therefore out of McMurdo, and no doubt he could get back on with Carlos and the oil crews, but then he would be an exile for good, a man without a country for real, and all the hierarchies would remain, and he would never see Val again. After all that he had been through, he might as well have been right back on the floor of the heavy shop. Exiled without having ever been anywhere—nowhere but Antarctica and America, and Antarctica was another planet, while America was a dream. He had no home; he had no country. If he didn’t want to become The Man Without a Country permanently, wandering the Earth forever exiled, he was going to have to do something about it. He would have to make his home.

So as people poured out of the Chalet into the brisk bright light, most heading over to Crary or the Everest View, he wandered the muddy streets of McMurdo, balked, frustrated, perplexed, at a loss.

Deep in thought, hiking up past the BFC, he ran into the beaker he had worked for in the Dry Valleys. Graham Forbes. X had seen Forbes’s older colleague in the meeting at the Chalet, so now he wasn’t entirely surprised. He remembered the day with Forbes vividly; in all his adventures since he had never been colder. “Hey,” he said, “how are you?”

“Fine. And you?”

“I’m okay. How did your research go out there?”

“It went well, thanks.”

“Make any big discoveries?”

“Well—” Forbes hesitated, looking puzzled as to what to say. “Yes, as a matter of fact.” He held up a hand quickly: “Not anything too definitive, of course.”

“No brass plate saying PLIOCENE FJORD SLEPT HERE.”

“No.” Small smile. “But we did find a mat of beech tree litter—leaves and twigs and other organic matter. It’s similar to mats found elsewhere, but new to this area, and very well-preserved.”

“So even the weirdo Dry Valleys were part of your story.”

“Yes, so it appears.”

“That’ll be big news, I guess. Will one of you do a Crary lecture about it?”

“Oh no. Not this season, no. That would be premature.”

X nodded, thinking it over.

Forbes excused himself; he needed to get over to Crary for a meeting. As he was turning away he stopped suddenly, and said “Thanks for your help that day, by the way. That was an awfully cold day.”

“Oh hey,” said X, startled. “My pleasure.”

Forbes veered off toward Crary.

X continued to walk around the streets, thinking harder than ever, but also taking the time to stop and look at what he was walking by. This had been his town, for a while. And in a lot of ways he had liked it. Right there at the mail building the Kiwis came over from Scott Base and held a hangi and haaka for Mac Town, barbecuing whole pigs and doing a ceremonial Maori war dance—twenty white Kiwi men stripped to the waist and dancing martially to the harsh shouted commands of a Maori woman Kiwi air force officer. That was the kind of thing you saw in Mac Town.

But he had burned his bridges, and now he felt the immense nostalgia of the exile seeing his old home again, briefly. Nostalgia, pain of the lost home; and physically painful, yes. A heartache.

He ran into Randi. “Jesus, Randi, you’re not in the radio shack.”

“They let me out for an hour now that we got everyone home.” Her voice was hoarse, and she had the same wild-eyed red-rimmed insomniac look as everyone else in town. “You look lost, X.”

“I am lost.” It was strange seeing her face again, he was so used to her as nothing but a voice on the radio. Nice. One of Val’s galley gang. You could see how much she laughed right there in the look on her face. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I know ASL will never rehire me, and so—I’m fucked, I guess.”

She nodded. “You sure are if you have to depend on ASL. But listen, their contract is up for renewal, right? And some of us have been talking about making a bid ourselves.”

“What’s this?”

“Go talk to Joyce, she’ll tell you all about it.”

She shooed him off to the BFC and he hurried over there, remembering as he went that Joyce had mentioned something about this when he had dropped by to say good-bye before leaving for Mohn Basin. He had been so distracted by his distress over Val that he hadn’t really listened; and at that point he was committed anyway, and didn’t want to listen. But now he did. Joyce would give him another tongue-lashing for sure, but he didn’t care. Whatever it took.

Up into the BFC offices.

“Hi, Joyce. I’m back.”

“Yeah, I saw you at the meeting at the Chalet.”

“Oh yeah. What did you think of that?”

“Interesting.” She was staring at him hard. “You want back in, don’t you.”

He dropped onto a chair, held up a palm to forestall her. “Yes, I do, and I know I’m fucked.”

“Yes, you are.”

“But Randi reminded me of this bid thing you tried to tell me about last time. I know I wasn’t listening that time. I’m sorry about that. This time I am, though, so tell me again.”

She nodded, accepting his apology. “NSF makes ASL give subcontracts to some potential competitors, so they’ll know enough to be able to make competitive bids when the contract comes up for renewal. It’s the same system ASL used to beat out ASA last time. And they’ll be getting strong challenges from PetHelo and GE for the general contract, and I wouldn’t be surprised if PetHelo beats them out, because you know ASL, they’re so efficient that everyone hates their guts, even NSF if the truth be known. In fact there’s a rumor that NSF is trying to get ASA to come back again for a bid, now they see what a good thing they had. Anyway a group of us thought we’d try to form a co-op and make a bid for the coms and BFC subcontract.”

“Really?” X said, feeling his heartbeat accelerate.

“Yes, really.” She laughed at his expression. “I take it you’re interested this time.”

“Oh God.”

She laughed again. “Right. And you’re our big social theory guy. So there are some people on the fence I think it might be safe to try you on. You can explain the theories behind what we’re doing to some people I’ll direct you to.”

“I sure the hell can! Just let me at ’em.”

“Okay, okay. But beyond them you should mellow out, X, I don’t want you going too far, okay? Don’t do a Mr. Smith on people, please God. We don’t want to scare anyone or it’ll just reduce our chances to win the bid. But we’ve got a lot of people already, and in coms and field services it’s really experience that matters. ASL has always threatened us by saying they can hire new people to take our place, which they can, but if we all walk at once and make a bid, then we’re the ones with the on-site experience, and ASL will only have their Seattle experience and a bunch of fingies to show the NSF. The actual people NSF has been working with the last few years will mostly be on our side. So it might work. And the more the better.”

“Oh sure, it makes sense,” X said. “NSF is just hiring a group to run their own infrastructure. So it removes the problem of competing with the old company’s capital, to an extent.”

“Right.”

“This is great,” X exclaimed. “Why didn’t I hear anything about this? Why didn’t you tell me until I was already on my way out of here?”

“Well, you know. It’s not the kind of thing that GFAs are usually let in on.” She shrugged. “That’s just the way it is. It’s been kind of touchy talking about it, since we’re all still ASL employees at this point. Mutiny, you know. Breach of contract. People were afraid of getting singled out and fired. So we only talked about it among people we trusted, which meant we had to know them real well. So, you were coming along, people were talking about asking you in on it, because we knew you were into that kind of thing. But then you were gone. We figured you’d gotten fed up with ASL too fast, and in bad with Val, and that was that.”

“But now I’m back.”

“Now you’re back. So tell you what, why don’t you go talk to Nancy, and Spec, and Harold, and George … I know there’s a few more—oh yeah, Mac; see him first, he’ll tell you what we’ve got worked up, and then you can talk to the others about joining. Tell them about co-ops and how great they are, and see if you can get them to commit. They say they’re thinking it over, but I think they’ll join if it’s put to them right. And if we get all the people we want to get, I think we’ve got a really good chance.”

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll try to think who else would be good to have.”

She nodded, patted his arm. “Check with me first on that. Remember to stay calm, X. This is business. It’s going to take a lot of planning and hard work, and it’ll be a while before we know anything.”

“Oh yeah, sure. Very calm. Total business.”

He grinned at her and she had to laugh. And then he was off.

Sleep was forgotten, although in fact he hadn’t tried to remember. They were all fried for that matter, firing around McMurdo like droplets of water on a hot griddle, insomniac to the point of insanity; but when had it ever been any different? Mac Town was a hyper place in the summers. X went to the galley to stuff himself yet again, to fuel himself for the next lap of wakefulness. While in there he spotted Spec and Harold, and he went over and ate with them, and at the end of the meal he brought up the co-op idea, which they had heard of. They had feelings both ways. So they talked it over for a while, X arguing for employee ownership as a general principle, not bothering to talk about the particulars of their situation in McMurdo, which these two knew a lot better than he did. After that he was off to make his rounds, visiting all the offices that he had visited before as a Good For Anything, talking to the people Joyce had mentioned and others he had liked, asking them to think about joining.

A lot of people shook their heads as they listened to him, and he began to understand that because of his rants in the past, and his recent disappearance, he was regarded as a crank—or, more accurately, as an innocent. Of course what he said was true, the old iceheads’ looks said, of course they’re screwing us, but to think there could be a change in the system was silly. The current method of business, the hierarchy of employer and employees, was all part of the Bad Design of Reality, their looks said; it was unfixable, there would always be owners and workers, no matter how vehemently one denounced them. Certain people owned the businesses, the capital, the governments, the laws, the armies; and that was all it took to back the present system up, no matter how bad it was. This was what their looks said, X decided as he walked from office to shop, looks fond and indulgent or irritated and contemptuous though they otherwise might be. A lot of the old iceheads thought he was full of shit. Or, at best, a dreamer hopelessly out to lunch.

X nodded at this judgment and learned as he went. He tried to get more particular, to stick to the specifics of what they could change right there on Hut Point. He described the other co-op complexes he knew about, usually the Basque town of Mondragon, where everything was a co-op. He enjoyed these conversations more, but they were hard, too. He was fomenting revolution, and saving his chance at having a country, and a home, and it was incredibly exciting and all that, but the devil was in the details…. So. He had to describe the co-op that would come to be, a co-op of people who had had years and years of Antarctic experience and expertise, using that expertise to organize a better way of running things in field service; they could be competitive with ordinary companies; NSF would have to agree they were the best even according to NSF criteria; and then they would keep it among themselves, not go public with stock, arrange for profit-sharing without being greedy, thus allowing them to make a low bid and still make a living, because not paying a big profit to shareholders in the world would save money for them and their needs.

It made perfect sense. The basic sensibleness of the co-op system: it was more just, and therefore would increase employee motivation and loyalty, and thus make for better work, leading to more efficiency, even by the standards of the downsizers. X found it very easy to make a case for this. It meshed coherently with what most Americans were taught as kids to be the basic values, fairness, justice, democracy—it was easy to defend using those base values. So he described to his old friends and acquaintances a McMurdo that had become a kind of miniature Mondragon, every business structured as an employee-owned co-op in an interlocking system of co-ops, including the banks. In a McMurdo like that, X would say, emphasizing this point very heavily, people would finally be able to take control of their careers in Antarctica, and not have their lives fatally split between their love of the place and the whim of the one boss in town.

That got them thinking. And though there were a lot of skeptics, a lot of other people nodded and said “Sounds good, count me in.”

Returning from the latest of these meetings he ran into Wade, and they stopped to confer without having to say a word about it, like two brothers crossing paths in a city. “Listen,” X said, “you ought to try talking to Professor Michelson about what they found out in the Dry Valleys this season. That Graham Forbes told me they found something good—he wouldn’t say more, but it seems to me that your senator ought to be able to use this dynamicist scenario to make it clear just how dangerous global warming is, and then press his program that much harder.”

“I’ve been thinking that myself,” Wade said. “I’ll ask Michelson as soon as I see him, thanks. How’s it going otherwise?”

“Pretty good. I’m helping Joyce and Randi and some of the other folks here to mount a bid for the field services subcontract. We’re forming a co-op of all the people in town that we think would do well, and it’s a lot of the best people here.”

“Phil will love that too, that’s one of his current obsessions. Keep at it, and I’ll see how I can help from my end.”

“Okay I will.”

A brief hand to shoulder and they were off, each in his own direction.

Wade for his own part was working the town almost as hard as X was. Soon after the first meeting was over he went back into the Chalet and found Sylvia on the phone in her office, and tapped on her open door. She gestured him in and he went to the big wall map of Antarctica, looking at Sylvia’s system of dots. He had forgotten her code, and the patterns the colored spots made still suggested nothing to him.

She got off the phone. “That was Christchurch. The storm is finally clearing off Cape Adare, and so they should be sending down the whole crowd any time now.”

“So we have eight hours more on our own?”

“Yes.” She didn’t look happy at the prospect of all the official investigators who would soon be descending on them.

He gestured at the map. “So do the dots match with the ecotage events, as far as you can tell?”

“Some of them correlate with the satellite dishes that were disrupting communications,” she said, coming around the desk and pointing to some of the orange dots, all over the continent. “Then others would appear to mark camps of the ferals whom you met.”

“Hard to see patterns when there’s more than one thing going on.”

“True.”

“Are you confident that your satellite photo analyst is giving you all the sightings that he’s making?”

She looked surprised. “Not confident, no. I suppose I was assuming as much, but I don’t have the wherewithal to check him.”

“Would you mind if I gave him a call and asked him some questions? I’d like to discuss some ideas I’ve had with him, and if you give me a reference, perhaps he would agree to talk with me.”

She looked at him, making an unspoken question.

“I’d like to help if I can,” Wade explained. “Help the Treaty process. Help keep NSF in control of the American Antarctic program. And so on. It all fits with what Phil Chase is trying to do. With what I’m trying to do.”

She thought it over. “I don’t see how it could hurt. He’s in the security agencies, some kind of split position, but he can always take a call and then make his own decision. I’ll get you his phone number,” she said, going to her desk to look it up and write it down.

“And his name?”

“Ask for Sam.”

Wade nodded. “Thanks. Now about the ecotage. Can you tell me the …?”

“I have an overview from Search and Rescue here.” She plucked another piece of paper from her desk. “Apparently everything was synchronized to start on October 15th—let’s see, just six days ago, my. It feels like longer.”

“So true.”

“Whether they waited for a Condition One storm to hit or it was just a coincidence, I can’t say. Automated satellite tracking dishes coupled with powerful radios—we’ve found seventeen of them, stretching from the Peninsula down the length of the Transantarctics to Cape Adare, with five more out on the polar cap beyond the Pole. The assumption is there are more we haven’t found yet. They appear on initial investigation to be chop-shop compilates with east Asian source materials from the turn of the century. The dishes were pointed at carrier satellites, mostly Ku-band fourteen gigahertz, the report says, and some twenty gigahertz hub satellites; unmodulated signals were sent at frequencies that captured these satellites. When the captured satellites’ traffic was rerouted, dishes then found and captured the new carriers. All that activity ended after forty-eight hours of disruption. At its start, however, seven of the SCAG consortium’s test drilling sites were destroyed, as were the base camps at Roberts Massif and Pioneer Hills. The bombs appear on initial investigation to be home brewed and contain no taggants. Before they exploded all occupants of the oil stations were rounded up at gunpoint by masked teams carrying assault weapons, and they were taken by snowmobile or blimp,” raising her eyebrows, “to the nearest scientific field camps. Most of them to Shackleton Glacier, some to Byrd, some to the Italian camp in the Ellsworth Range.”

“Except they missed us, because we were out on a trip,” Wade said.

“Yes. They appear to have gotten everyone else, however, and no casualties have been reported. No identification of the kidnappers made so far.”

Wade explained what he had seen with the ferals. “So, you know, as far as I can tell, which isn’t all that far, the ferals who are still out there didn’t have anything to do with this, and the ones who did are somewhere in South America.”

“Hmm.”

“So do I take it that no NSF property was damaged, then?”

“No no, we took our share. Small hits but carefully placed, and quite debilitating. There are some lessons to be learned, no doubt. A small bomb on the roof of the radio building, and another at the repeater on Crater Hill, augmented the satellite failure. And lastly sixteen fuel tanks, including all the big ones up in the Gap, and several outlying helo fuel bladders, were contaminated with a variant of one of the oil-eating bacteria designed to clean up oil spills on water. This particular species grew into thousands of small clumps until it died, so that it was dangerous to use the fuel remaining in those tanks. That was a real nightmare—we had to figure out how to filter the fuel, and then test it for reliability.”

“It must have been quite the forty-eight hours here.”

“Yes.”

“The FBI’s going to be here for a long time.”

“Yes. They’ll have several avenues of investigation, of course. The satellite hardware, the bombs, the bacteria, these exiled ice pirates wandering around Chile, Mr. Smith himself … I wonder if he’s right to be so confident his clients will remain anonymous. It’s clear they were being careful, but still …”

“Yeah. Depends how careful they were. I could imagine a group with experience and forethought making it difficult. And since no one got killed, and the FBI’s plate is overfull with more violent and lethal terrorist activities back in the States, they may not put years of effort into this case.”

“Hmm.”

The two of them sat there, staring at the desk. The amount of sleep they had gotten between them in the last week wouldn’t have covered a single night. Wade found himself blinking out unexpectedly and then coming to with a start; he stood up abruptly before he fell asleep right in front of her. “Thanks for all the information. I’ll convey what I’ve learned to Senator Chase, and we’ll do what we can to help.”

Sylvia nodded, still thinking things over.

Back outside Wade cringed at the raw sting of the wind through the Gap, then stumbled over the muddy wasteland toward the galley and a few mugs of coffee. Just outside the big building he ran into Professor Michelson, going the same way.

“Professor! Hello!”

“Ah hello,” Michelson said, recognizing him. Then after a closer look, he said, “You’ve visited us during interesting times, I see.”

“Very interesting. What did you think of the meeting in the Chalet?”

“Well, obviously it’s important to discuss these matters. There will be many such discussions in the wake of what happened this week.”

“Including within SCAR?”

“Oh, most definitely.”

“Yes. I suppose that makes sense. So … How did your work go in the Dry Valleys?”

“Well, we continued to work.”

They stood in the sun, protected from the wind by the galley itself. Michelson stared at him curiously. Finally Wade said, “My friend X spent a day out with your team working for Graham—he tells me that Graham told him that you made a significant discovery out there.”

“Did he? Well, yes, I suppose. All discoveries are significant really, aren’t they? When you consider the vast realm of nondiscovery?”

“Yes, I’m sure. But—” Wade tried to figure out how to say it. “But if you’ve made a discovery that will confirm the dynamicist position unequivocally, then that will demonstrate that the East Antarctic ice sheet is unstable, and wasn’t there three million years ago, and possibly will go away again if global warming continues. Right? So it’s important, and, you know. Maybe if you have a kind of smoking-gun piece of evidence then you should share it immediately, so that policy can begin to take it into account?”

That little V of a smile, under the moustache. “I don’t think we need to be quite as dramatic as that.”

Maybe you don’t, Wade thought.

“I’m not sure there is even the possibility of what you call a smoking gun. What we found has to be studied and interpreted, and fitted into a much larger pattern. It means nothing by itself. Its meaning can be disputed, and will be disputed, believe me. Dating Sirius is no easy thing. Particularly since different Sirius outcroppings may in fact date from different warm periods. So we must proceed cautiously.”

“So it’s not really a smoking gun.”

“No, it’s a mat of beech leaves. Beech leaves and other associated litter, from a forest floor.” He shrugged. “It’s more evidence, we hope.”

“But you’re becoming more convinced, yourself, that the ice sheet was gone in the Pliocene?”

“Oh yes, you can say that. What we’re finding now in Sirius formations resembles the coastline biome of southern Chile. The beech forests, the insect life, the microscopic life, it all fits together. And it becomes clearer that it can be dated to around two to three million years ago. So we will toil on, and see what happens.”

“So no press conferences about this season’s discoveries.”

Michelson laughed briefly. “No, no press conferences. Not much drama, I’m afraid. Just evidence.”

“Which you will introduce when?”

“Oh, pretty quickly, pretty quickly.”

“Two hundred years?”

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

“It’s so slow.”

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

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

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

Wade thought it over.

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

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

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

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

“That sounds like her.”

“You knew her twenty years ago?”

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

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

“Thanks,” he said.

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

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

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

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

“Tell me what you want from him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“Hello.”

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

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

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

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

“Oh good, good.”

Wade pulled a pad of paper out of his briefcase.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This effect, result of the complete but residual preponderance of yang, perhaps accounts for the coarsening of their culture as the years passed. The walls of all the American Antarctic stations were plastered with photos of naked women. The tabletops in the galleys where they ate were covered with pictures of naked women. The thoughts of the sailors stationed there, as far as one can judge by the few records they left, were somehow limited. Their traditions were simple and brutal. One custom had groups of men descending on newcomers, tearing off their clothes and depositing them in a hole in the snow. The Three Hundred Club, where people rush from a two-hundred-degree sauna into a hundred-degree-below-zero night, also dates from this period, as do the ritual swims in holes cut in sea or lake ice. The best parts of this culture no doubt include these attempts to ritualize the experience of the cold; also to celebrate the experience of isolation, as when the winterover crew at the Pole lined up waving on the runway to welcome the first Herc of the spring, every one of them naked and stained bright purple from a bath of tincture-of-violet crystals. But for the most part the record of their lives is a sad litany of Peter Pans become Rip van Winkles.

Then came a bifurcation point, where the balance of the pattern tipped in a new direction. This moment began as a symbolic gesture of the Cold War. The Russians had sent one of their women into space, and we in China included six Tibetan women in our summit team on Chomolungma. In that geopolitical context, then, six American women were flown to the South Pole station, thus becoming the first women to go there. November 11, 1969. A day of peace in a year of conflict. For some a political gesture, yes—a symbolic gesture. But the meaning of the symbol bifurcated because of what the women did.

Recall the wrestling boatload of men who first made landfall on the continent. Farce—lovable in its way, but still farce. On Armistice Day of 1969, however, these six American women had a different solution; they joined hands and walked from the plane to the Pole together, so that no one of them could be called first. This struck them as the best way to do it. This was their new story. And thus they began the end of the yang dominance of Antarctica, so militarized and peterpanized; thus they began the start of Antarctica’s entry into the fully human world, a balance of yin and yang, of men and of women, together surging dynamically this way and that, yes even at the very moment we speak.

Those six women were Lois Jones, Eileen Mc-Saveney, Kay Lindsay, Terry Lee Tickhill, and Pam Young. Wait, that’s only five. What was the name of the sixth woman? I can’t remember. It will come to me. Even if I don’t remember she is still out there.

In any case, the continent then began to enter what some have called its golden age, the age of the “continent for science,” when Antarctica must be understood as one version of the scientific utopia—a golden age lasting from the arrival of women and the corresponding withdrawal of the military, until the recent nonrenewal of the Antarctic Treaty, just two years ago. The Treaty was an attempt to describe a scientific and utopian relationship of humanity to land, a relationship in which there was no sovereignty but rather a terra communis, a return of the concept of the commons and of commonality, with scientists of all nations, including nations that were at each other’s throats back in the North, cooperating in peace for the good of all. That was indeed a golden moment in history. And though it was very top-heavy in men at first, as was science itself, it became more balanced in men and women every year that passed.

Of course the balance is not yet here. Nor is there balance anywhere in human affairs, or in the universe at large. Indeed, if ever you are asked to choose between fixists and mobilists, as the two sides were called during the plate-tectonics controversy—or between the stabilists and the dynamicists in the current Sirius debate—always choose the dynamicists. History is on your side.

And so here and now, in the relentless surge of time, we confront another bifurcation point in history. They come so often! The people gathered in the Chalet discuss what to suggest to the world, after the events of this unusual week. We will try to tell the world how better to live. An empty exercise, you say! Kick the world, break your foot! But everyone does it anyway, I notice. And this is little America, and America is very big. And as you have heard our new friend Carlos say, whatever is true in Antarctica is also true everywhere else. So we must attend very closely to what we do here now.

I think it is an open question whether Americans can learn the habits of cooperation and sufficiency quickly enough to avoid catastrophe. We in China, so crowded into our middle kingdom, have had to learn long ago that life is cooperation, that life is helping each other for the good of all, including oneself. We have the experience of thousands of years of history, coherently compiled, to guide us; and we have the direct experience of the last century, both good and bad, in making a communal society work. Much of this last century we owe to the example of Chairman Mao, great master of feng shui that he was. Now I know what everyone says—I say it myself—that what Mao did was sixty percent good, forty percent bad. And I have heard the recent joke of the wags in Beijing, that this slogan will keep juggling the figures downward until it reaches 50.1 percent good, 49.9 percent bad. And I know the other saying too, that what is good in Mao all comes from Tao. We will tell this story in all its different ways forever. Whichever version you believe, it is still true that in part because of Mao we have started a bit earlier than the rest of the world in structured cooperation, and this has given us our great power in the twenty-first century. It has also prepared us to change ourselves for the sake of the Earth; we have lived through three one-child family campaigns already, and are slowly reaping the benefits of the resulting stable, even shrinking population. And we are working at making cleaner technologies; we are aware of the problem of the overshoot as few others can be, seeing it every day so clearly in our jammed streets. This is not to say that we never make mistakes. The dam at Three Gorges on the Yangtze, for instance, is a terrible mistake. We must take that dam down and allow the great Yellow River to flow again, or else the ecology as well as the feng shui of our country will never again be right. That dam poisons our land and clogs our thinking.

And of course we must give Tibet back to the Tibetans, and let them live on their high plateau in peace. That is worse than a mistake; that is a crime. As I have already told you during our walks together on that sacred roof of the world, we add a hundred karmic lives to our atonement every day that the occupation of Tibet continues; already it will take millions of karmic generations for us to atone for what we have done to them. The sooner started the better.

And of course there are many other disasters of lesser magnitude as well, some that face us specifically as Chinese, others that belong to all the world together. But we can face them. Everyone has at least part of the habit of cooperation; this too is part of lovingknowing; for science is above all else a community of trust. The true scientist has to be intent on cooperation in a communal enterprise, or it will not work at all. And to the extent that we know well, and love deeply, we are all true scientists. So we will keep inventing that community of trust.