Antarctica

15 Shackleton’s Leap

When the next meeting convened in the Chalet, X still had not slept. A lot of the people there hadn’t, he could tell as they trickled in. There were not as many people as before, and many were still hunched together discussing specific issues, but after Sylvia got them seated in the big circle, and went through a description of some of the smaller meetings that had occurred since the session the previous evening, X raised a hand (sudden schoolboy nervousness, engendered by just that gesture alone).

When Sylvia called on him in her strict schoolteacher style, he said, “Sylvia, I want to emphasize that what we’re talking about here is not just a question of what technologies we use in Antarctica, or of whether we’re abiding by the strict letter of the Treaty or not. The treatment of Antarctica will never be respectful and environmentally aware if the people living down here continue to be organized in the same way they always have been—that is to say, in hierarchies where the majority of the workers have no power or responsibility, and are merely doing what they’re told to do, for wages and nothing else. As it stands now, we’re hired and fired at the whim of people back in the world, and the people who love Antarctica the most end up suffering the most, because they keep coming back here when that wrecks the overall shape of their lives, back and forth with no continuity or security, no career advantage so to speak. So there’s a feeling of helplessness that creates a carelessness, which a lot of us wouldn’t have if we were more in control of our destinies down here. I know this because I was a General Field Assistant down here, and you can’t be more powerless than that and still be here. I know very well from that experience that ASL uses us to make their profits—we’re paid poorly and we have no job security, and if we don’t like it they just hire someone else. And, excuse me, but those employee practices have led to a hell of a lot of employee abuse here, right under the NSF’s nose, and to a certain extent with NSF approval—the suspension of the forty-hour work week, for instance, among many other such practices. NSF’s attitude has been to turn its head and let the contractor do whatever it had to do to keep the beakers running smoothly, while still making a profit for the contractor’s owners back in the world. And employees have taken the brunt of that kind of looking away for years. No way can people pay proper attention to Antarctica as a project or a life under those conditions. We can’t call our jobs ours, or this place home, so naturally we treat it like strangers.”

Sylvia was watching him very closely now, X saw; it had not been a bad thing to implicate NSF in ASL’s sweatshopping. “What are you suggesting, specifically?” she asked.

“The service contract comes up for bid again soon,” X said. “You could hire new contractors, either general or sub. Hire a company made up of ex-ASL employees reorganized as an employee-owned co-op, dedicated specifically to enacting a really rigorous environmental policy. As Mai-lis said about her group’s efforts, it could be seen as an experiment—a scientific experiment in seeing how a co-op with no profit beyond salaries and so forth could compete with a standard company, in terms of the services provided down here, combined with environmental improvements and the like.”

“We already expect our Antarctic service contractors to conform to NEPA and all the specific regulations we’ve made,” Sylvia said. “As to the type of company, it would be less clear that we could decide that ourselves—I mean one type of company compared to another. Congress directs us there, I’m afraid, and the budgetary constraints are very tight.”

X nodded. “Sure, I understand that. But without the need to generate a profit for shareholders, an employee-owned co-op should be able to do the same job for less money. So Congress would have no objections there.”

Sylvia nodded doubtfully.

Wade said, “Some relevant laws are up for review by the Congressional ways and means committees, and by the administration. Government contract preferences for employee-owned co-ops is an idea that has been introduced by Senator Chase many times before, and while there is resistance to the idea, there is also considerable support. Growing support.”

Mr. Smith said, “Resistance from the owner class, support from the people. The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—”

“Yes yes,” Sylvia said, cutting him off before he got rolling. “But in our situation here, specifically? With the contracts for service organizations coming up for renewal …”

Wade said, “NSF might be able to make their decisions based on their current environmental regulations, so that it won’t have to wait for the ultimate decisions Congress makes concerning private contractor preferences. Especially in situations where the infrastructure is owned by NSF, as is the case here. This would be an area where a new employee co-op might be able to avoid the problems of capitalization. And if they could include a solid plan for increased environmental sensitivity as part of their bid, at a lower price, I should think it would be easy for NSF to support the more socially responsible organization.”

“The two are the same,” X insisted, pounding his knee. “Social justice is a necessary part of any working environmental program.”

“Yes,” Sylvia said slowly. “Well. At least we can include that as one of the recommendations in our little report here.”

X sat back in his folding chair. His heart was pounding fast; it felt like a penguin was flapping its wings in there. Find those ruby slippers, put them on, click them three times together, and maybe then you’ll get to go back, to the home that has never yet existed.

Val found herself proud of X, watching him make his pitch to the Chalet meeting; he was serious, intent; it was hard to ignore him or what he was saying.

Nevertheless, she could see how things would be. Sylvia would try to broker a settlement, no matter how absurd that goal appeared in the light of the world. Washington and the other capitals would call the shots. The hunt for oil and coal and methane hydrates and fresh water would go on, buffered by all the latest hardware science could offer, with Mr. Smith’s invisible clients hovering offstage, watching, judging, no doubt striking again if they were displeased. McMurdo would go on, perhaps with new companies running the services, perhaps some of them co-ops that treated their employees right; but always the same, even as everything changed; still tour groups coming in on ships and planes, and adventure trekkers packaged and taken out into the back country to see things, guided by their guides.

Guiding would never change.

And meanwhile the ferals would continue to move around out there in Transantarctica, living their lives. Trying to wrest a living from this bare land. Working toward a kind of self-sufficiency, even if it were backed by the invisible world beyond the horizon; self-sufficiency not of means but of meaning.

Val thought about this as the second meeting broke into several smaller groups working on specific issues, and she went back to her room, and did laundry, and took a shower, and went to the galley and ate a big meal. Finally she flicked open her wrist phone and got Joyce on the line. “Joyce, where did you put the visiting ferals?”

“Nowhere. What, you think they’re going to stay at Hotel California, or maybe the Holiday Inn?”

Of course not. “Where are they then?”

“I think they’ve set up a couple tents on Ob Hill, just under the peak. Can you see them from where you are?”

Val looked up at the pointed cone standing over the town. Yes, there was the round curve of a tent. “Thanks, Joyce. I see them.”

She walked up the road to the BFC building. As she neared it Wade joined her, huffing and puffing.

“Hi, Val.”

“Oh hi.”

“What do you think of the meetings?”

“Very interesting.”

They stopped outside the BFC.

“What do you think of Mr. Smith?”

Val raised her eyebrows. “I think he’s the one, myself.”

“The mastermind?”

“Yeah. Or for that matter even the whole operation. At least he could be. It only took a few bombs and radios and satellite dishes to do everything they did, after all. He could have done it from New Zealand, or his boat.”

“I don’t know,” Wade said. “It would be a lot of places to get to.”

“I suppose. Probably he has some friends working with him, sure. But he’s not just a lawyer, I don’t think.” She shrugged. “Or maybe he is. I doubt we’ll ever find out for sure.”

“No.”

He was looking up at her, intent and serious; considering whether to say something to her. He hesitated; gestured at Ob Hill. “Going up to take a look around?”

“To see the ferals,” she said.

“Ah.”

He registered immediately that he wasn’t invited. A lot of men would have taken a lot longer to see that. Oh well. She liked him; but he would be leaving any day now, and then he would be back in the world, where who knew what would happen. So now she watched his face framed in its furs, that owl look hiding all.

He said, “You know, we’re going to need to have people who know Antarctica well, back in Washington. To work out a protocol that stands a chance of being accepted by all the parties involved. No matter what happens here at the Chalet, there will still be a lot of work to do.”

“Yes. I’m sure you’ll do very well for us on that.”

But that wasn’t what he had meant, she saw immediately.

“Oh,” she said stupidly.

He saw that she understood him, and stared at her. Wind whistled through the gap and down onto them.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t,” she said. Then: “I like you a lot.” He blinked, smiled just a little. “But I wouldn’t be happy in Washington, you know. And then, well …”

He frowned. “It’s no worse a bureaucracy than here. You could live outdoors—my boss already does.”

She shook her head. “I’m going to ask the ferals if I can join them.”

“Ah.”

She said, somewhat mischievously, “You could join them too! You could do your job from down here, telecommute like your boss does.”

He had to smile, just for a second. They both laughed, briefly.

“I take your point,” he said. Then: “Can I walk up with you part of the way?”

“Sure. I’d like that.”

They hiked up the spine together, crisscrossing over the broken lava steps of the ridgeline. A couple hundred feet below the summit Val stopped, and Wade caught up with her. She took a step down and around, so that he was on the spine just above her, where she did not have to lean down to give him a kiss. Two cold mouths and noses. He put an arm around her to steady himself. She had learned long ago that there were certain times when you knew it was only going to be a single kiss; and that knowing that made it different. He was a good kisser.

He let her go. His face was flushed. He looked at her like it was the last chance he was ever going to have.

“That was nice,” she said. Ice around her hot heart.

“You’ll have to come north sometimes,” he said, “even if you do join the ferals.”

“Maybe. Sometimes.”

“You’ll visit?”

“I don’t know. I’ll make it to New Zealand, I guess. I don’t know.” Again she tried turning the tables. “You’ll be one of the Antarctic experts in Washington—you’ll have to come down to DV things from time to time, right?”

“Right. Very true.”

She nodded. “We’ll stay in touch.”

He nodded, thinking it over. Looking wan. She shrugged. He nodded again. A last brief hug. Then he was off, back down the rough trail, heavy-footed, looking out at the Ross Sea and the Western Mountains: the perfect way to trip and go flying. But he managed not to. Val turned around and hiked up the final section, going hard. She nearly tripped herself.

She stood outside the ferals’ little tent, a patched old Northface mountaineering dome, blue nylon faded almost to white. The familiarity of it brought her up short. Scavenging for one’s means of subsistence: was she ready for that?

“Hello?” she said.

A head popped out. Lars.

“Is Mai-lis here?” Val asked.

“Moment.”

He moved aside, and Mai-lis appeared in the doorway.

Val said, “I wondered if I could join you.”

Mai-lis saw what she meant. “One moment,” she said, and the tent door closed. Rustles inside; she was getting dressed. Val looked down at McMurdo spread below her, feeling bleached. She realized that Mai-lis’s face reminded her of her grandmother Annie. They looked nothing alike, but still.

Mai-lis unzipped the tent door and crawled out. She stood, gestured at the peak above them. They climbed together in silence, like pilgrims. On the peak they stood under the old wooden cross, in the wind.

“You have a great view here,” Mai-lis observed, looking across the sea at Mount Discovery and the Royal Society Range; Black Island, White Island; the giant bergs of the collapsing shelf.

“Yeah.”

They stood looking at it.

“It is no easy life,” Mai-lis said.

“I know. That’s not what I’m looking for.”

“What are you looking for?”

Val tried to express it. She waved down at McMurdo. “I want to be free of all that. All but my friends. I want to be in Antarctica, but not like that. I want to try it your way.”

“It is no easy life,” Mai-lis warned again. “It’s not like expeditioning. You would have a lot to learn, even with all you know already.”

“That’s good.”

“It is not all good.”

“No, I know that. I’m ready for that.”

“It is no easy life.” Three times, as in some ritual, some rite of acceptance.

“I know,” Val said. “I’m ready.”

Mai-lis nodded then. “All right. We talked about you already. We hoped you might be interested. We were going to ask you.”

“Really?”

Mai-lis nodded. “You’re a mountaineer.”

“Yes.”

“We need more mountain people. There are never enough of them.”

Mai-lis took up Val’s gloved hand, and put it against the post of the cross. “They said, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Not to yield. Like Annie climbing her ladder. Val swallowed, tried to smile at Mai-lis. Off with strangers, into the icy wilderness: a strange fate to choose, really. She knew that.

“Go back down and arrange your affairs,” Mai-lis said. “See if this feels right to you. No one will be angry if you decide this was a mistake. This is a hard road for a life to take.”

“I know. I want it. I’ve always wanted something like this, really. Guiding was just the closest thing I could find. I’ll be ready in a day or two, I guess.”

“We’ll be here still. There is a lot to talk about with the people in the Chalet.”

“True.”

And so Val started back down Observation Hill.

Energized by the possibility of return, of a home at last, X continued to make the rounds of his little town, talking to one acquaintance or friend after the other. He took breaks in the Coffee Hut, and downed quadruple espressos while talking at the bar with whomever was in there, even trying darts at the dart board when asked. He was declared the worst dart player who ever lived, a danger to people in the full 360 degrees around him. No one minded this, however, except for the one that bled; rather it was cause for celebration. “You know I’m the worst basketball player in the world too,” X said, happily tossing darts into the wall or the side of the espresso machine. “A biathlete I guess you have to call me.” And the players talked on through all the games and the shift changes, fueled by caffeine, and sleep deprivation, and frustrated hatred of ASL, and frustrated love for Antarctica, until it began to seem to the giddy and hoarsening X that they would certainly be able to count on the support of most of the caffeine addicts in town; and that was everybody, right? They might even consider making a bid for the whole contract and not just part of it. Although that would be a logistical nightmare. But he thought they could make a compelling case that they had the best people and the best system for the field ops, thus augmenting the pure economic rationality of their expertise and efficiency with what X was now calling the Antarctic factor—not the magnitude-order leap in Murphy’s Law that people used to mean by the phrase, but rather the ecological issues that the new co-op could address better than ASL, because of increased worker tenure, involvement, satisfaction, awareness, esprit de corps, and so on. Treating people like free adult human beings: NSF could indeed consider it a kind of experiment.

Of course not everyone was interested, even after word got around about Sylvia’s approval, and it became clearer that they were going to have a shot at it. Some had prospered in ASL and become part of its management, or at least they thought they were, though since they were in McMurdo rather than Seattle they were certainly mistaken about that. Others had their lives focused back in the world and were on the ice simply to make as much money as fast as they could, and they didn’t want this project complicated by the responsibility and risk of any newfangled nonprofit system. And there were others still who had complained endlessly about ASL but were too chicken to try a coop, as Joyce put it, or too cynical to think it would make any difference. And lastly there were those who did not want to see change of any kind, because they did not like change. Or else for no reason at all, at least as far as X could tell. Four months ago this attitude would have shocked him; but he had been young then, and had not fully grasped how completely people could act in contradiction to their own best interests.

Here in McMurdo, however, enough people had been burned by the one-company town syndrome to make for a huge pool of talent waiting for a chance to move. Enough had had enough. And Joyce and Debbie and Alan and Randi and Tom, who had been here forever and seen it all, and had worked so hard to make little communities under the umbrella of their responsibility, humanizing their zones despite the pressure from above to downsize and rationalize—they were poised to act. And now was the time. X was just a messenger.

And how he enjoyed it. He seemed to have lost the need to sleep, or the ability, one or the other; as far as he recalled he had not slept since their return to McMurdo, and for a good long time before that; it must have been nearly a week all told, and all that time in the perpetual sunlight, hurtling sandy-eyed from one crisis to the next, spending the town’s brief downtime around 3 A.M. on the phone to the States talking to the Co-op Aid Co-op, as well as to any other groups and agencies that could help them in the preparation for their bid, talking until the sunlight sprayed over Erebus and the galley was opened and X ravenous for breakfast, no different than the sleepless day before except his eyes were twenty-four hours sandier and his mind twenty-four hours more sleep-deprived, in a hyperlucid derangement of high hopes and apprehension.

And that was the state he was in when he ran into Val as he left the galley, feeling the possibility of the return of sleep into his life: vastly tired; bone tired; completely wasted. But there she was, staring at him with a funny expression. After the retreat down Shackleton Glacier and the time with the ferals, he felt he knew her much better than he had during the weeks they had gone out together—better than he knew the members of his own family, if the truth were known. As Cherry-Garrard had said, in Antarctica you get to know people so well that in comparison you do not seem to know the people in civilization at all. But X hadn’t had much chance to speak with Val since their return, and now, he saw, there was something on her mind.

“How’s it going?” she said unsteadily.

“Okay! I think we’ve got the people we need to make a good bid for the field services. How about you?”

“Oh, I’m all right.”

They stood looking at the mud of McMurdo under their feet.

“So you think there’ll be a co-op?” she asked.

“I do! I sure hope so, anyway. It’s my only chance of staying.”

She nodded.

“What about you, Val? Do you think you’ll join?”

She shook her head. X felt it like a blow. He began to go blank inside, like he had when she had first broken up with him.

She put a hand to his arm. “I’m going out with the ferals.”

“Oh Val.”

He didn’t know what to say. To him the ferals had seemed like aliens.

“I can’t stay here, X. Even if the co-op works, my job would still be guide. And I can’t do that anymore. Those trips always reduce me to the level of the person having the worst time.”

“To the Jack level.”

“Yeah, exactly. But it isn’t just him. It’s always something. I’m a shitty guide.”

“You are not!”

“I am. I am not a good guide. You don’t know.”

“I do know, I’ve seen you! You shouldn’t let that guy get to you, he was a jerk. Hiding the fact that he was hurt, that was bullshit. He was setting you up.”

She shook her head. “It’s not him. I mean it is, but there are always people like him on these trips. Listen to me, X. I don’t like the clients anymore. I think the Footsteps thing is bullshit. I’m not even seeing Antarctica anymore when I’m guiding. I might as well not be here! I Gould get the same hassles and live in Jackson Hole. I’m toast, X. Burnt toast. But I want to be in Antarctica. I want to want to be here. I want to live here and work, but not as a guide.”

“What about search and rescue, couldn’t you do that?”

She shook her head, giving him a hard look. “The rescues don’t always work. A lot of times you’re going out to collect bodies. Have you ever gone out to a crash site where everyone has burned to death?”

“No,” X said, shocked.

“I have. I don’t want to do search and rescue, I don’t want to lead expeditions, I don’t want to be a guide. I just want to live in the mountains. And I liked the look of the ferals, I really did. I’d like to try what they do, try living here.”

“Ah.”

He thought it over. Listen to me, she had said, so sharply, as if he never had. She had always been one of the mountaineers, ever since he met her; crazy to be out in the frigid landscape, clambering around. He wasn’t like that, but now he wanted to understand her, really understand her; and that meant understanding that wild urge, that craziness in her that he wasn’t sure he even approved of. He had to get that or he wouldn’t get her.

“What about you?” she asked, suddenly intent, squeezing his arm. “You could come too, you know. You could join.”

“Join the ferals, or join you?”

“I don’t know! Who knows how things will be out there! I don’t know at all. But if we were both out there, then …”

Then they would have a chance. Or at least she would have company among all those strangers.

“Ah, Val,” he protested. “I wouldn’t know what to do out there. I barely know what to do here. And I’m—I’m interested in what’s happening here now.” He waved around—muddy old Mac Town, raw cold under a lowering sky, and the usual wind through the Gap—it was a hard place to make a case for even at the best of times. And this morning was not the best of times.

They looked at each other. Wistful: full of wishes.

“I’ll stay here,” he said finally. “But, you know. Maybe you’ll come in from time to time. If the ferals—” He saw it—“If Sylvia makes a deal that includes the ferals, and if the ferals tell her that they would prefer to deal with a co-op here rather than ASL, then maybe it’ll help us win a bid, and we’ll be here, and we’ll need to have a liaison with the ferals, at least, to discuss what they’re doing out there. And so …”

She nodded. She smiled; there even seemed to be tears in her eyes, though that could have been the wind ripping by. She stepped into him, hugged him hard. Then they were kissing, just like they had on the Bealey Spur, the only woman he had ever kissed where he did not have to do his hunchback routine or lift her up bodily from the ground. Someone his size.

“I’ll talk to Mai-lis,” she said when they broke it off. “Oh X—it’ll work. It’ll work somehow.”

He nodded, too full for speech. They would make it work, they would take back the world from the overlords, they would make a decent permaculture from the bottom up. Well; or at least work on their moment, here, now, in McMurdo.

With a few more incoherencies they parted.

X walked away. He had forgotten where he had been going, if indeed he had had a destination. He was on another plane now, wasted but exhilarated. Mac Town was not enough at a moment like this. He could walk out to Discovery Point and sit in the old hut, as he had many times before, but that would not be right either. Those old ghosts and their Keystone Kops routines were not what this was about. To strive, to seek, to yield … something like that. But not now. He could see why Val wanted out of that whole Footsteps game, out and back onto the land as it had been before Scott arrived, Antarctica itself all bare of history, ready for a new start.

So. Wasted, happy, nowhere to go. His room was not his room, and this town was not his town. He tried to see what it might be if they did it right, all Hut Point inhabited by some new aesthetic, so that it mattered what it looked like and how they lived there. Not just recycling their junk, but making a place that looked like a home. Those towns in Greenland and Lapland were like little works of art, the houses painted bright primary colors, lined out in rows and diagonals…. Make the town itself a work of art. NSF might be receptive. They had changed before as a result of activists, as for instance after Greenpeace dumped McMurdo’s trash on the floor of the Chalet. NSF was a reasonable outfit; a bunch of scientists, bureaucrats, technocrats, whatever; reasonable people, committed to reason, trying to make a community of trust in the universal chaos. The scientific project; ethics, politics, all embedded in the very enterprise. Who knew what they might do next?

But meanwhile, in this very moment, here he was. And he wanted out somehow—to fly, to celebrate! Perhaps a trip up the coast. A trip to Cape Royds, to see how Val’s hero Shackleton had done it. Snug little cabin up the coast—

Suddenly he saw it. A vision: he could do it too, like Shackleton or Val, only his own way. A McMurdo feral. An indigenous Ross Islander. With a job making things work for the beakers, sure, but living in his own place, just as clean and neat and low-impact as anyone could ask; a tent house somewhere, something really snug and small. Nothing but footprints. It would have to be closer to Mac than Cape Royds, for sure, closer to town and work. Perhaps around the corner of Hut Point, facing the north and thus the sun. Val could visit sometime. Or he could go out with the ferals on vacations. Live like them, but help reorganize McMurdo as well.

He went to the BFC and said to Joyce, “Can I take a Zodiac around to the Dellbridges?”

“No way, X. The penguin cowboys are using them. Why do you want to go?”

Then the phone rang, and she gestured at him to wait and picked it up. “Oh hi, Ta Shu. Uh huh …” She glanced at X. “Well, yeah, now that you mention it. I think we can do that. Sure, no problem. X will take you. He’ll meet you down at the dock.”

She hung up. “You’re in luck. Ta Shu is in short-timer mode, and he wants to see Cape Evans and Cape Royds one more time before he leaves.”

“Great!”

“Must be meant to be.”

“Yes yes yes.”

black

rock black water

Meant to be. X grabbed his parka and boots and went down to the docks, downed another cup of terrible coffee, got a Zodiac ready. Ta Shu showed up, and X called weather and got clearance, and they took off.

Over the puttering of the engine, and the slap of the windchopped black waves, X told Ta Shu about his plan, and Ta Shu listened impassively.

Finally Ta Shu said, “Good idea. Let us look for a place for you now, shall we?”

“You really want to?”

Ta Shu squinted at him. “My job, you know.”

“Of course.”

So now he had a world-famous geomancer situating his house according to ancient feng shui principles. Meant to be!

They turned the corner of Discovery Point, and began slowly to run down the long straight northern coast of the Hut Point Peninsula, toward the stub of the Erebus Ice Tongue. The entire peninsula jumped out of the water pretty steeply; the black peaks sticking out of the snow along its top were a couple hundred meters above sea level. Looking back as they puttered along, they could see a shiny new radio sphere on top of the last peak, which overlooked McMurdo on its other side. The slopes dropping into the sea were about half black rock, half crusted snowfields.

They motored slowly past Arrival Heights, then Danger Slopes, where Scott’s seaman Vince had slipped to his death during one of the icecapades in the first year there. Then they passed a rocky knob called Knob Point; beyond it there was a mostly rocky section of the peninsula, smoothbacked, its side like a giant berm sloping into the ice-fringed water. There appeared to be a couple of indented ledges halfway up this section of the slope, like raised beaches from ages when sea level had been higher, though X had no idea if that was really what had formed them. From the water they appeared to be very narrow, lines only, but Ta Shu was pointing at them; and indeed, they looked to be the only flat land on this whole side of the peninsula.

So they puttered in to the icy shore, and landed on a steep black pebble strand. “You could keep boat here,” Ta Shu said as they got out over the bow. “Row to town when it is water. Bicycle on ice when it is frozen. Or ski. Or walk.”

“True,” X said.

They climbed. The black rubble was steep and loose, but an inconspicuous path of stabilized steps in the rubble could eventually be tromped out.

When they reached the first ledge they found that it was much wider than it had looked from below; perhaps fifty yards wide; a long and level terrace in the steep slope; one could have fit several big houses on it, in fact. And something little and snug could be tucked at the back of the terrace and not even be visible from the water below. And out of the wind.

Looking over the sea to the north, they saw the ridgy little Dellbridge Islands, and beyond them the dark points of Cape Evans and Cape Royds. “That was another volcanic cone,” Ta Shu said, pointing at the Dellbridges. “See how the islands make the pieces of a circle?”

“Ah,” X said. “Yeah.”

He wandered around, looking at the ground. Under the layer of rubble was cracked volcanic basalt, as solid as could be. Bedrock. He stood with his back to the slope and looked north again. To his left he could see over the black water of McMurdo Sound to the mountains of the Dry Valleys. To his right Erebus rose like a white castle, steaming from its top as usual. Behind him, if he went up onto the crest of the peninsula, he would be near Castle Peak, in the area called the Japanese rock garden. There was a flagged cross-country ski trail running from Castle Peak to McMurdo.

Ta Shu sat crosslegged on the edge of the great ledge, and appeared to be deep in meditation. Finally he came out of his trance and turned to X. “This is a good place.”

After that they had a lovely day, puttering slowly through the Dellbridges up to Cape Evans and Cape Royds. Ta Shu like Val had a great admiration for Shackleton, and at Cape Royds he walked around Shackleton’s hut exclaiming at its location, its size—everything about it was apparently perfection in the feng shui sense. Meanwhile X wandered out to take a look at the rookery of Adelie penguins at the end of the cape, and while he was there one of the males stuck his head at the sky and squawked wildly as he tried, it appeared, to fly straight up, without ever getting even an inch off the ground. Ecstatic display, as the beakers called it. X knew just how he felt.

And at the end of the day X coasted the Zodiac back into the docks at McMurdo, noticing that a big contingent of red-parkaed people was standing at the entrance to the mall; the investigators from the north, no doubt.

Ta Shu squinted up at the town:

gray sky

brown dirt

“This could be a good place,” he said.

1. The Antarctic Treaty should be renewed as soon as possible, after whatever renegotiation is necessary to get all parties to agree to terms and sign. Some law needs to be in place. Paraphrasing the original proposal for an Antarctic Treaty, written by people in the American State Department in 1958: “It would appear desirable to reach agreement on a program to assure the continuation of fruitful scientific cooperation in that continent, preventing unnecessary and undesirable political rivalries, the uneconomic expenditure of funds to defend individual interests, and the recurrent possibility of misunderstanding. If harmonious agreement can be reached in regard to friendly cooperation in Antarctica, there would be advantages to all other countries as well.”

2. In this renewed Treaty, and by a more general proclamation of the United Nations, Antarctica should be declared to be a world site of special scientific interest. Some may wish to interpret this to mean also that Antarctica is a sacred ritual space, in which human acts take on spiritual significance.

3. Oil, natural gas, methane hydrates, minerals, and fresh water all exist in Antarctica, sometimes in concentrations that make their extraction and use a technical possibility. (Oil in particular, to be specific about the most controversial resource, is located in no supergiant fields but in three or four giant fields and many smaller ones, totalling approximately fifty billion barrels). Given that this is so, and that world supplies of some of these nonrenewable resources are being consumed at a rapid rate, the possibility of extraction needs to be explicitly considered by not only the Antarctic Treaty nations, but the United Nations as well.

Non-Treaty nations, in the Southern Hemisphere in particular, think of the possibility of oil extraction from Antarctica as one way of solving energy needs and dealing with ongoing debt crises. At the same time current oil extraction technology presents a small but not negligible risk of environmental contamination as the result of an accident. Technologies are likely to become safer in the future, and world oil supplies are decreasing so sharply that any remaining untapped supplies, left in reserve for future generations who may need oil for purposes other than fuel, are likely to be extremely valuable. These trends point to the idea of caching or sequestering certain oil fields for future use. Southern Hemisphere nations in need of short-term help could perhaps make arrangements modeled on the debt-for-nature exchanges that have already been made; in this case, the World Bank or individual northern countries might buy future rights to Antarctic oil from southern nations, with the payments to start now, but the oil to be sequestered, with extraction to be delayed until the extraction technology’s safety and the need for oil warrant it.

At the same time, demonstrably safe methane-hydrate drilling could proceed, providing a less concentrated but still valuable source of fuel and income to the drillers, while serving also as a training ground for drilling technologies that could be considered for later use in oil extraction.

4. The Antarctic Treaty suspends all claims of sovereignty on the continent, at the same time that it specifies free access to all, and a ban on military presences for anything but unarmed logistical support. The continent is land without ownership, terra communis; it is not property but commons, in the stewardship of all humanity. It is also the largest remaining wilderness on this planet. As such it exists in an experimental legal state which cannot ban visitors. Therefore if people desire to live in Antarctica, and take that responsibility and that cost on themselves, this is their right, even if all governmental and other official organizations disapprove and withhold all support.

However, because Antarctica is such a delicate environment, individuals like countries should be required to adhere to the principles of the Antarctic Treaty in its current form, and to respect the continent’s status as wilderness. This adherence and respect puts severe limits on the number of indigenous animals that can be legally killed under international convention and law; thus the natural carrying capacity of the continent for human beings is very low. People interested enough in Antarctica to consider living there should keep this in mind, and a scientifically established “human carrying capacity” should be ascertained for Antarctica and for its local bioregions, and the human population of the continent and the bioregions should not exceed carrying capacity. Current preliminary calculations of the human carrying capacity of the continent suggest it is on the order of three to six thousand people, but human carrying capacity in general is a notoriously vexed topic, and estimates of capacities both local and global range over many orders of magnitude, depending on the methods used; for instance, for Antarctica figures have been cited ranging from zero to ten million. Possibly work on this issue in Antarctica could refine the concept of human carrying capacity itself.

5. If people do decide to try to become indigenous to Antarctica, special care will have to be taken to avoid polluting the environment, because the Antarctic serves as a benchmark of cleanliness for studies of the rest of the world, and in the cold arid environment many forms of pollution are very slow to break down. Some would wish to add that as sacred space, cleanliness of treatment is our obligation to this place.

Again the entire continent must be considered a site of special scientific interest, in this case becoming an ongoing experiment in clean technologies and practices, including sufficiency minima, recycling, waste reduction and processing, etc. The goal should be a zero-impact lifestyle, and the reality cannot stray very far from that goal.

The Treaty’s ban on the importation of exotic plants, animals, and soils means that any local agriculture attempted by inhabitants will have to be conducted hydroponically or aquaculturally, in hermetically sealed greenhouses and terraria or in well-controlled aquaculture pens containing only indigenous sealife. This constraint will be one aspect of the carrying capacity calculations, and suggests also that self-sufficiency for any indigenous Antarctic society or societies would be impractical and risky for the environment, and should not be considered a goal of such societies. The reliance on outside help should be acknowledged as a given.

Anthropogenic reintroduction of species that used to exist in Antarctica is an issue that we leave to further discussions elsewhere.

6. The achievement of clean appropriate zero-impact lifestyles in Antarctica is not merely a matter of the technologies employed, but of the social structures which both use these technologies and call successor technologies into being, as a function of the society’s desires for itself. This being the case, all inhabitants of Antarctica should abide by the various human rights documents generated by the United Nations, and special attention should be given to cooperative, nonexploitative economic models, which emphasize sustainable permaculture in a healthy biophysical context, abandoning growth models and inequitable hierarchies which in Antarctica not only degrade human existence but also very quickly impact the fragile environment.

7. In such a harsh environment all attacks against person or equipment constitute a threat to life and cannot be allowed. All those interested enough in Antarctica to come here must forswear violence against humanity or its works, and interact in peaceable ways.

8. What is true in Antarctica is true everywhere else.

Back into the antique interior of a Herc, like something out of Jules Verne, rocketing them back in howling vibration to planet Earth, twenty-first century. Out the bathyscaphe windows the endless blue sea and its scrim of white cloud, thirty thousand feet below and closing fast. A very big world. Wade slept through what he could.

As he slept he dreamed of his last conversation with Sylvia, the dream’s day residue in this case only a slightly skewed replay or continuation of their quiet talk, there in her office looking out at Beeker Street. He had told her about his conversation with Sam, and described his plan, and she nodded thoughtfully. Two bureaucrats, deciding the fate of a continent. An empty continent of course, the least significant of the continents; but still. A continent ruled by scientists, Sylvia said. Bound not to last. Scientific government. Trying to catch neutrinos. We try to study things, she said. Do what’s best for the long haul. The ferals, the oil people—both look to the scientists for their answers. Both use the scientists’ mode of being in Antarctica as their ideal. A way of living on the land. Wanting nothing from it but questions to be asked. Maybe it will work, Wade said again in his dream, maybe technocrats have taken over the world, maybe scientists have taken over the world. Maybe the highest, dryest, coldest, least significant of the continents would show the way. We’ll see, Sylvia said. The weather has cleared. The FBI is on its way, and past the point of safe return. We are all past the point of safe return.

Then an image of Val in her long underwear lighting a Coleman stove knocked him awake. Reluctantly he looked around at the other sleeping passengers in their heavy parkas, heads on strangers’ shoulders, knees enjambed for balance, bunny boots thrust unceremoniously between other people’s legs. Antarctica had crushed them together and made them all family, body space abolished as a concept, all sleeping together in the Victorian roar like cubs in a litter.

Then the plane’s crew were walking through, waking people, gesturing at seat belts. They were landing. There was some kind of trouble again, someone shouted in Wade’s earplugged ear: the wheels wouldn’t come down, or the skis wouldn’t come up, he couldn’t hear which. In any case they were going to have to land on the skis.

Wade groaned. The passengers looked at each other, rolling their eyes. Landing on skis on a concrete runway did not sound good. But what could you do. They were in a Herc, anything could happen. Wade rose up a little to look out the window above him one last time: blue ocean, white cloud. Descending to Earth.

Presumably they were lubricating the runway with that emergency foam. Planes had bellied down on that stuff without problems; skis no doubt would be fine. Piece of cake. If they had been here the Kiwi helo crew would be cackling. They even had flaps this time. Could fly in like a stunt plane no doubt.

Touchdown, bounce, down again, run out. No taxiing afterward, but other than that, no different than any other landing. People grinned, made the thumbs-up gesture. The family had survived another Herc trip. Wait your turn to get out.

Then out, into the shocking heat of a spring day in Christchurch. Maybe fifty degrees Fahrenheit, even sixty—incredible. Standing on the runway. They had indeed foamed it. A bus to take them over to the airport buildings. They had their own building, and no one was there to tell them what to do.

Wade followed the others as they hauled their orange bags through the building, then down the road to the Antarctic Centre. He was sweating as he walked. The smell of grass, so strong. The greens everywhere, so vivid. Low clouds which were clearly made of liquid water. Coming at him were children, laughing. A little girl in a blue dress, her older brother teasing her. Their high voices in the humid grassy air.

Inside the clothing center Wade stripped off his Antarctic gear, inspecting it item by item as he dropped it on the floor: the glove with the ripped finger seam which had made that finger colder than the rest everywhere he went; the parka zipper that would not zip all the way up past the throat. Shimmery blue overalls, red parka, his springy white bunny boots. All piled on the concrete floor, as he slowly pulled on the street clothes he had left behind, his limbs sticky with sweat. That life was over. A young Kiwi checked off all his gear and gave him a pink receipt. Back in the world.

NSF had him scheduled for a flight home the next day. So he checked into the airport hotel, and sat there vibrating on the bed for a while, thinking things over. Back to Washington; back to his life.

He got on the phone and called Phil Chase.

“Hello, Wade! Where are you now?”

“Christchurch.”

“Good flight back?”

“It was interesting.”

“Good. Hey I got the report you sent on the ecotage, also those protocols, I thought those were great. Those could be made into a more global program very easily, I’m very excited, I’d like to try to do something further with those. I see your hand in that document, Wade.”

“Only in asking for it, and that was you. It was mostly Sylvia’s doing. With input from everybody, of course. She got the most help from Ta Shu, I’d say.”

“Whatever. She may have made her mark with that, though, I’m telling you.”

“I think she just thinks of it as a report.”

“Doesn’t matter what she thinks. It’s out of her hands now.”

This struck Wade as a more general truth, and he did not reply.

“So, Wade, you sound tired. You’re back from your big adventure.”

“Yes. But listen, Phil—I think it’s your turn.”

“My turn for a big adventure? That’s my whole life, Wade. It’s just one big adventure after another.”

“I know that. But this time you’ve got to try something new. You’ve got to go to Washington.”

“Ha ha.”

“No I mean it. The time is right. Listen, you know the ferals in Antarctica had a helper in the American security community, right? A satellite photo analyst who gave them information, and covered for them a bit up there, you know.”

“That’s right, I think I remember you telling me that. You kept calling me when I was asleep.”

“Well I’ve been talking to him. He’s a split position between NOAA and one of the security agencies, and a hard man to reach, but I had introductions from both Mai-lis and Sylvia, so he agreed to talk to me.”

“He knows Sylvia too?”

“He’s the same photo analyst she was using.”

“Is this good?”

“Definitely good. I had a long talk with him, and he was very interesting. He has solid photographic evidence that he would be willing to forward to us, that the Southern Club’s oil group has not been the only party down in Antarctica looking for oil this season. He says he can prove without a doubt that some of the big American-based companies have been down there as well. They’ve been using the southern cartel as a cover, basically, counting on them to distract attention and take the heat, while they’re down there too, very unobtrusively, making quick spot checks to look for the supergiant field rumored to be in the Bransfield Strait or the Weddell Sea. And one of them is Texacon.”

“Uh huh. Are we surprised at this, Wade?”

“No no, of course not, but it’s not known, it’s been hidden, and this guy is offering us proof. And you know Texacon is one of Winston’s biggest campaign contributors.”

This had been a seven-hour wonder in Winston’s last campaign; despite the latest campaign finance recomplication campaign, The Washington Post had managed to publish an exposé identifying overlarge contributions to Paul Winston from Texacon, among several other major corporations. It was true that the contributions had been laundered sufficiently to be in compliance with the recomplication, and Winston’s poll ratings had climbed rather than dropped after the exposé, but the allegations were there, and Winston himself had never denied them.

“Hmmmm,” Phil was humming, “hmmm, hmmmmm, and so you’re saying?”

“Winston gets big campaign contributions from Texacon, only marginally legal. He blocks Antarctic Treaty reratification in committee. The Treaty’s ban on mineral extraction goes into limbo. Then Texacon is found down in Antarctica drilling for oil!”

Phil started to laugh. He interrupted himself: “You know there’s no linkage there, Wade, you know that. They’re totally innocent. Winston is blocking the Treaty because he wants to harass the President, and Texacon contributed money to him because he’s the kind of guy they like to support. And they’re drilling in Antarctica because they drill everywhere. I’ll bet no one on either side of that equation is explicitly working a quid pro quo. It’s just business as usual, guys on the same team doing their thing.”

“But the appearance.”

“Yeah sure. Big favors for big money. Bribery, we’ll call it. I’ll say that right on the floor of the Senate. I can press that issue hard being so clean myself. All my contributions come in coin rolls.”

It was true that Phil had once financed a campaign by asking all his supporters to send the coins piling up in their houses, a move that had brought in a lot of money as well as sparked a million jokes and political cartoons about spare change, etc., all the more pointed in that Phil had indeed in one of his OWE stints spent three months living as a street beggar.

“It gives you a crowbar to pry at him with,” Wade said.

“Yes.” Silence as Phil thought it over. “Bad timing though I must say, given how busy I am here.”

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

“Fat chance.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don’t think I should?”

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

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

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

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

“Because they took action.”

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

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

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

“Sure thing.”

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

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

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

Wade wandered in the huge botanical garden at the south end of the little downtown. There were so many shades of green! And varieties of plants. All these species had evolved out of lichens and mosses, it was amazing what the warm world had generated. He was still vibrating with the props. He saw that there appeared to be people living in these gardens, under the big trees. Ferals here too.

On a complex of soccer fields south of the botanical garden, crowds of people surrounded a group that were inflating enormous bright balloons—like hot-air balloons, only filled from gas cannisters. Some of the balloons reminded Wade of the blimps they had flown in over the Transantarctics. Others were truly huge, their gondolas like three-story Amsterdam houses. A festival atmosphere. People with picnic baskets, waving at the departing flyers.

“Where are they going?” Wade asked one of them.

Wherever the wind took them. Can’t do much else in a balloon. Stocked to live aloft for up to a year, some of them. Take a sabbatical in the clouds, or work up there. Go around the world a few times. Off on a tramp. Sky tramping, they called it.

“Going feral?”

That’s what the Aussies call it.

“Much of that here?”

Yeah sure. Most of the kids off in the wild. The balloons are more family. Like boating. Hook a bunch of them together once they get aloft. We’ve always been a bit like that here. Not very many people. A lot of land. Nothing new to us in these McMurdo Protocols you see in the paper. We redrew all our county lines to match the watershed boundaries, a long time ago.

Then the balloons and blimps were all inflated. One by one, up and up and off into the wind, mingling with the low liquid clouds. It was surprising how clearly you could tell liquid clouds from frozen ones. These were as wet as a bath, and dropping a bit of rain on them all. No one noticed.

When the balloons were gone Wade wandered off. He was aimless, and vibrating still. Christchurch looked like a California town.

That night in his hotel there was nothing on the TV news about the balloon departure. It had to have been a couple hundred people taking off at least. But as far as the news was concerned it had not happened. Wade was puzzled. He channel surfed trying to find mention of it. Good visuals, perfect story for TV. Nothing. It had not happened. But if you’ve seen something with your own eyes and then there is no mention of it on the news, who are you going to believe?

Suspended between worlds. Vibrating on a hotel bed like a Herc engine idling, in front of a muted TV, the images familiar but drained of all meaning. Looking at them Wade was reminded that as he had left McMurdo, Ta Shu had given him a TV chip that would allow him to hook into Ta Shu’s show in China. Now he dug in his briefcase until he found the little plastic minidisk, and went to the TV and inserted the disk into the slot in the TV’s control panel.

After some flickering the Kiwi images were replaced by a bright white landscape: the Royal Society Range, seen from across the Ross Sea. “Hey!” Wade said, leaning forward from the edge of the bed, staring into the image. That was the view from Observation Hill!

Ta Shu’s narration was in Chinese, of course, and very rapid and fluid, not at all like his English. Of course. After a minute or two of listening to his voice, Wade’s curiosity grew. He wanted to know what Ta Shu was saying at such length and with such apparent urgency. He got up and went back to his briefcase, and pulled out his laptop, and called up the menu for the translation programs that the laptop contained in its hard drive. He had heard that Chinese-to-English programs were still the worst of all the major language programs, but still it would be better than nothing.

He put the laptop next to the TV and punched in the code for the translation program. After a short pause the laptop began to speak in English, almost as rapidly as Ta Shu himself, in a mechanical monotone.

“So my friends we are come to end of our adventure in Antarctica. Soon I will leave this land, I will fly north over the south ocean, to New Zealand. It has been a true event time, I am sure you agree. Many interruptions, many discoveries. Full of lands so powerful, action so strange, you must wonder if I am transmitting you from another world. But I remind you, all this happens on Earth. This too is Earth. A world beyond all telling. For me it has been a profound being, a trip. For you at home in China, watching what I have looked at in facemasks or on television screens, not so there. Without space, without spaciousness, as it must be. Like a story told, or a dream you have had. Of course this must be so. Where then have we been together? In a vision we share a story. Lemon said stories are false solutions to real problems. Lamb added corollary, that stories from other planets hence must be false solutions to false problems. What then have we done together? Look around you. Is it all a dream only? Or are all the worlds one world. Black said, Dreams commence obligation to world. Seashells say poets are the unknown government of the world. And we are all poets. So now we tell the world what next to do.”

The image on the TV panned left, to an expanse of white ice; the screen was cut horizontally right across the middle, blue above, white below, like a powerful Rothko. The view directly south. Ta Shu spoke again, and after a pause the laptop translator picked it up. “Ah yes. Very nice view. Now we come to the end of our time together, and I ask one thing of you, my friends who have stayed with me long and faithfully. When my transmission has ended, go outdoors. Go take a walk outside in the open air. Wherever you find yourself on the face of this planet, it is a good place. Breathe deeply the breath of the world. Look at the sky over our heads all together. Feel yourself walking; this too is thought. Feel the wind in your face. Feel the way you are animal, breathing in the spirit wind. If our time together gives you no more than this walk, then still yet it has done well. Farewell now my friends, until our next voyage together.”

The view from Ob Hill disappeared. Cut to a Chinese commercial. “Do you have trouble cleaning kitchen hardware?”

Wade turned off the TV. He went downstairs. He opened a glass door cautiously, but it was still warm. Out the door, into the hotel’s inner courtyard. It was night, the darkness like a caress to the eyes. He could feel his pupils blooming. Air warm and humid against his skin—so warm, so benign. The caress of the breeze. Maybe it would work after all. He walked over to the lawn by the pool, sat down on the warm fragrant grass. He ran his hands over it. He lay down in it, on his back, and looked up at the stars.

The next spring X made all his preparations, and took off for a walk across Ross Island.

It had been a busy winter. The McMurdo Field Services Co-op, usually called MacCoop, won the bid for the field services subcontract. PetHelo won the general contract; ASL was gone. After the initial celebrations, there had been endless hours of organizational meetings and paperwork in Mac Town. In the meantime, friends had helped X to build a little hut on the ledge next to Knob Point, mostly out of parts scavenged from McMurdo’s construction yard Dumpsters: three arches of an old Jamesway frame, essentially, with new insulation, a triple-paned window with two panes cracked, and photovoltaic sheeting tacked to the outside for the coming sunny months. Inside there was a little propane stove for heating and cooking. A bed, a desk, a chair. It was very cozy, but X liked it that way. It was his place. Tucked back against the slope, out of the wind, invisible from below. Especially of course during these sunless months.

Every day the weather allowed, he skied up through the rock garden to the cross-country trail and down into town, and did some work at the co-op office, and either stayed a night in the BFC office on the couch, or skied back home. Sometimes he went home on the sea ice, around Discovery Point. It depended on how much moonlight he had to work with. On dark nights it was best to go around on the sea ice, on moonlit nights it was fun to stay up on the ridge. He found that a full moon on the snowy land was bright enough to read by, much less ski. During these trips, and on his days off, he worked hard on his snow skills. He decided that he wanted to make a traverse of Ross Island, going over the three volcanoes and down to Cape Crozier, to see the “Return of the Sun” ceremony which George Tremont was planning to stage out there. This would be a big trip for him, X knew that well, and he prepared for it all winter. He found that unlike a lot of sports, mountaineering was mostly a matter of walking. One only had to walk without falling and one was a successful mountaineer. More a matter of navigation than athletic skill—at least at the level he was trying, which was merely to get around Ross Island. And so he had been pleased at his progress. Countless times he had climbed the rock steps from the sea ice up to his hut and back down again, to build his strength and endurance. He had worked on walking up and down steeper and steeper snow slopes; he had practiced with snowshoes on snow, and crampons on ice. He found he liked snowshoes better than skis, even if they were harder work; they were easier, indeed almost identical to walking in boots. He learned to use a GPS, and a crevasse detector. The crevasse detector was critical; without it X wouldn’t have had the courage to attempt hiking around on his own. As it was, whenever it beeped he stopped like Lot’s wife, and carefully figured out where he was, and where the crevasse was, and then he went around it. He would make extravagant detours, hiking miles out of his way, in order not to have to cross a crevasse, no matter how solid any snowbridges in it might appear. No crossing beep-beeps and he would be okay. And so he had gradually ranged farther and farther away, and spent nights out in a tent and sleeping bag, learning slowly to manipulate the gear and to trust in it to keep him alive and warm. The days—the endless succession of sunless hours—had passed quickly.

Back in his little hut the hours had also passed quickly. He had studied Heraclitus, and co-op economics. From time to time he heard from Carlos in Santiago. More often he heard from Wade, who emailed hellos from all over the world, having apparently switched roles with his senator (and X thought he knew why). The senator had returned to Washington, and gotten a rival in trouble with the Senate Ethics Committee about campaign donations, and as an indirect, fifty-dominoes-down-the-line result, it looked like the Antarctic Treaty renewal was going to be ratified soon. Wade seemed cautiously optimistic. The two messages he sent when actually in Washington on visits were brief and ambivalent: “We’re kicking ass,” and “This is not a good place.”

Along with his snippets of news, he sent X a lot of music that X had never heard before; it became clear that he was a rabid closet d.j. and inflictor-of-music-on-friends; but tucked in the little hut for as many hours as X was, he did not complain; on the contrary, he listened to these gifts again and again. Often he listened to them while watching Ta Shu’s latest transmission on his computer screen. These days Ta Shu was taking a boat trip down the Yangtze River. The translation program X used made him sound like a long succession of incoherent fortune cookies, but still it was interesting to see him take on the Chinese equivalent of the Bureau of Reclamation. And when this voyage was over, X was going to try to view a copy of Ta Shu’s Antarctic adventure; that would be even more interesting than the Yangtze, and it seemed almost certain that there would be some film of Val in it, too. There was footage of her in the SAR’s Happy Camper videos, X had found, and once he watched this footage over and over for most of one Sunday. Then he trashed the file and stopped looking for such things. But glimpses of her in Ta Shu’s program would be okay.

Late in the winter, despite X’s warnings and protests, the co-op hired Ron to come back down and run the heavy shop. X cursed when he heard the vote on this: “Damn it, he’s a pirate! He joined the ice pirates!”

“He was desperate,” Joyce said. “It doesn’t matter now. Get used to it.”

Later, thinking it over in his hut, X decided he could get used to it. After all it had not made him comfortable to think of Ron either plotting revenge in Chile or holed up drinking in some Florida beachfront. Certainly he would come back down and try to take everything over, and then there would be a major jerk in their fine new co-op; but at least it would be a jerk that X knew and liked. And X would not have to answer to him. And MacCoop would survive him.

Twice X got email messages from Val, just brief ones; once on his birthday, once on the solstice; but there they were, right there on his screen. Her winter was turning out not all that different from his. Like all the other animals wintering over down here, the ferals had to hunker down in the cold and dark, bunch together like the Emperor penguins. They made some expeditions out, apparently, but no one could stand the winter cold for long. The one interesting thing they had done was to carve a refuge in the ice cap itself, lighting it intensively for half the day, and living in this artificial oasis for several weeks without many trips outside. So Val was hibernating too.

X had replied to her messages carefully, and gone back to his Heraclitus. The same road goes both up and down. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wholeness arises from distinct particulars. All things come in seasons. Character is fate.

And now spring and George Tremont’s celebration were almost here, and so he took off, waving fondly to his battened-down little hut. It was close enough to the year’s first sunrise that there were a few hours of clear twilight bracketing noon every day, and he started in that clear gray light. There was a full moon as well, and after the twilight darkened he could still see the snow underfoot perfectly well in the moonlight. Up onto the ridge of Hut Point, around Castle Rock, and on up the long flank of Erebus. Up and up and up, one step at a time. Higher on the volcano the slope got steeper, but it was always just a matter of walking, and circumventing the beep-beeps. A shield volcano, nowhere precipitous. One step after another. Up and up, one step after another. The end of a circle is also its beginning. Snow-shoes were so wonderful.

He kept track of the time, and after six hours of hard climbing had passed, he stopped and took off his backpack, and pulled out his sleeping bag and tiny bivvy tent, and got in them and cooked a dinner on his little stove. After that he tried to sleep for a while. He was too excited to sleep very well, but after an hour or two he fell into a doze, and when he woke up, face freezing, he started the stove and cooked up some hot chocolate, then oatmeal. He got his boots on, got his backpack repacked, jumped out and repacked his tent. Then off he went again, poling methodically with his ski poles, his snowshoes clicking and squeaking. Left, right, left, right; up the great ghostly white mountain, luminous even in starlight only. Higher and higher.

Up on the highest slopes of the volcano it was very cold, and very still. No wind. He had checked with weather before setting off, and it was supposed to hold good for a week, but the air now was unusually still. In the lack of wind there was no sound; and only starlight illuminating the landscape, which nevertheless was clearly visible, white on black. Nothing moved for as far as the eye could see; as if time itself had frozen, and X the golem impervious to that freezing and left wandering still, tramping through eternity.

Erebus was still steaming from its cratered summit, however; steaming more than ever, no doubt, in the cold still air. X hiked quickly around the rim of the active crater, keeping well back from the edge, feeling very small, and obscurely frightened—as if it were simply too bold for a lone human to hike around the crest of Erebus in the dark before dawn. But there he was; and really it was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Nothing more than that; and yet so strange! Could this really be him? On Earth? In this present moment of his life? He could scarcely believe it was happening. But there he was. When he reached the far side of the crater, he even turned and went right up to the rim’s edge, to look down into the active caldera. The steam billowing up past him was pinkish orange, lit from below. Under that was burbling orange lava, scarcely glimpsed through the steam. The rising steam roared airily, and boomed in echoey booms. Beginning of the world.

He hurried on, feeling that he had tempted fate: gases, lava bombs, the spirit of the vasty deep, something ought to get him for taking such a chance for a glance. But he had done it! And now it was all downhill.

By the time he descended to Mount Terra Nova, and stopped for another brace of meals and a nap, and gone up and over Mount Terror too, it was getting very near the time of the first sunrise. It was in the midday twilight that X glissaded down the last spine of Mount Terror to Cape Crozier, the sky lightening all the while, as if he were redescending from the dark peak into the world of light and motion and wind. He had traversed Ross Island, from Knob Point to Cape Crozier, over the tops of the three volcanoes! And so he felt marvelous as he glissaded down one of the long snowy chutes between lava ridges, left snowshoe, right, left, right, all the long way down to Igloo Spur.

He was happy as he came over a final bump, and saw the little knot of people surrounding the rock hut. He walked down and joined them, explaining briefly where he had come from. They congratulated him, then pointed out what they had just recently been surprised to discover, which was that the little museum shelter, built the year before, had disappeared. The structure itself was gone, that was; all the equipment that the three early explorers had left behind was still there, but now relocated in the rock hut itself; the things put back, evidently, where they had been left by the three explorers.

X went over to have a closer look. A narrow wooden sledge lay across the rock oval, and under it on the floor of the hut, coated with a rime of snow, all the objects lay scattered in the tumble they must have been in when the three had beat their hasty retreat.

“Good idea,” X opined.

“George didn’t think so. He practically pulled out his beard.”

“But he’s getting used to it now, see?”

“I wonder who did it.”

“Shh! They’re about to start playing.”

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

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

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

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