Antarctica Read online

  Praise for Kim Stanley Robinson

  ANTARCTICA

  “It’s rare that a novelist coming off one masterwork can so soon produce another, but Antarctica may well be the best novel of the best ecological novelist around.”

  —Locus

  RED MARS

  WINNER OF THE NEBULA AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL

  “A tremendous achievement.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “An absorbing novel … a scientifically informed imagination of rare ambition at work.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  GREEN MARS

  WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL

  “Dense as a diamond and as sharp; it makes even most good novels seem pale and insignificant by comparison.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Has the breathtaking scope, plausible science and intellectual daring that made Red Mars a hit.”

  —Daily News of Los Angeles

  BLUE MARS

  WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL

  “If I had to choose one writer whose work will set the standard for science fiction in the future, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson. Blue Mars represents a breakthrough even from his own consistently high level of achievement…. Beautifully written … A landmark in the history of the genre.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A complex and deeply engaging dramatization of humanity’s future … Exhilarating.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  BOOKS BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  FICTION

  The Mars Trilogy

  Red Mars

  Green Mars

  Blue Mars

  The California Trilogy

  The Wild Shore

  The Gold Coast

  Pacific Edge

  Escape from Kathmandu

  A Short, Sharp Shock

  Green Mars (novella)

  The Blind Geometer

  The Memory of Whiteness

  Icehenge

  The Planet on the Table

  Remaking History

  Antarctica

  The Martians

  NONFICTION

  The Novels of Philip K. Dick

  “The land looks like a fairytale.”

  —ROALD AMUNDSEN

  Contents

  1. Ice Planet

  2. Science in the Capital

  3. In the Antarctic Grain

  4. Observation Hill

  5. A Site of Special Scientific Interest

  6. In the Footsteps of Amundsen

  7. Down the Rabbit Hole

  8. The Sirius Group

  9. Big Trouble

  10. Roberts Massif

  11. Extreme Weather Event

  12. Transantarctica

  13. The McMurdo Convergence

  14. From the Bottom Up

  15. Shackleton’s Leap

  1

  Ice Planet

  First you fall in love with Antarctica, and then it breaks your heart.

  Breaks it first in all the usual sorry ways of the world, sure—as for instance when you go down to the ice to do something unusual and exciting and romantic, only to find that your job there is in fact more tedious than anything you have ever done, janitorial in its best moments but usually much less interesting than that. Or when you discover that McMurdo, the place to which you are confined by the strictest of company regulations, resembles an island of traveler services clustered around the offramp of a freeway long since abandoned. Or, worse yet, when you meet a woman, and start something with her, and go with her on vacation to New Zealand, and travel around South Island with her, the first woman you ever really loved; and then after a brief off-season you return to McMurdo and your reunion with her only to have her dump you on arrival as if your Kiwi idyll had never happened. Or when you see her around town soon after that, trolling with the best of them; or when you find out that some people are calling you “the sandwich,” in reference to the ice women’s old joke that bringing a boyfriend to Antarctica is like bringing a sandwich to a smorgasbord. Now that’s heartbreak for you.

  But then the place has its own specifically Antarctic heartbreaks as well, more impersonal than the worldly kinds, cleaner, purer, colder. As for instance when you are up on the polar plateau in late winter, having taken an offer to get out of town without a second thought, no matter the warnings about the boredom of the job, for how bad could it be compared to General Field Assistant? And so there you are riding in the enclosed cab of a giant transport vehicle, still thinking about that girlfriend, ten thousand feet above sea level, in the dark of the long night; and as you sit there looking out the cab windows, the sky gradually lightens to the day’s one hour of twilight, shifting in invisible stages from a star-cluttered black pool to a dome of glowing indigo lying close overhead; and in that pure transparent indigo floats the thinnest new moon imaginable, a mere sliver of a crescent, which nevertheless illuminates very clearly the great ocean of ice rolling to the horizon in all directions, the moonlight glittering on the snow, gleaming on the ice, and all of it tinted the same vivid indigo as the sky; everything still and motionless; the clarity of the light unlike anything you’ve ever seen, like nothing on Earth, and you all alone in it, the only witness, the sole inhabitant of the planet it seems; and the uncanny beauty of the scene rises in you and clamps your chest tight, and your heart breaks then simply because it is squeezed so hard, because the world is so spacious and pure and beautiful, and because moments like this one are so transient—impossible to imagine beforehand, impossible to remember afterward, and never to be returned to, never ever. That’s heartbreak as well, yes—happening at the very same moment you realize you’ve fallen in love with the place, despite all.

  Or so it all happened to the young man looking out the windows of the lead vehicle of that spring’s South Pole Overland Traverse train—the Sandwich, as he had been called for the last few weeks, also the Earl of Sandwich, the Earl, the Duke of Earl (with appropriate vocal riff), and the Duke; and then, because these variations seemed to be running thin, and appeared also to touch something of a sore spot, he was once again referred to by the nicknames he had received in Antarctica the year before: Extra Large, which was the size announced prominently on the front of his tan Carhartt overalls; and then of course Extra; and then just plain X. “Hey X, they need you to shovel snow off the coms roof, get over there!”

  After the sandwich variations he had been very happy to return to this earlier name, a name that anyway seemed to express his mood and situation—the alienated, anonymous, might-as-well-be-illiterate-and-signing-his-name-with-a-mark General Field Assistant, the Good For Anything, The Man With No Name. It was the name he used himself—“Hey Ron, this is X, I’m on the coms roof, the snow is gone. What next, over.”—thus naming himself in classic Erik Erikson style, to indicate his rebirth and seizure of his own life destiny. And so X returned to general usage, and became again his one and only name. Call me X. He was X.

  The SPOT train rolled majestically over the polar cap, ten vehicles in a row, moving at about twenty kilometers an hour—not bad, considering the terrain. X’s lead vehicle crunched smoothly along, running over the tracks of previous SPOT trains, tracks that were in places higher than the surrounding snow, as the wind etched the softer drifts away. The other tractors were partly visible out the little back window of the high cab, looking like the earthmovers that in fact had been their design ancestors. Other than that, nothing but the polar plateau itself. A circular plain of whiteness, the same in all directions, the various broad undulations obscure in the starlight, obvious in the track of reflected moonlight.

  As the people who had warned him had said, there was nothing for him to do. The train of
vehicles was on automatic pilot, navigating by GPS, and nothing was likely to malfunction. If something did, X was not to do anything about it; the other tractors would maneuver around any total breakdowns, and a crew of mechanics would be flown out later to take care of it. No—X was there, he had decided, because somebody up in the world had had the vague feeling that if there was a train of tractors rolling from McMurdo to the South Pole, then there ought to be a human being along. Nothing more rational than that. In effect he was a good-luck charm; he was the rabbit’s foot hanging from the rearview mirror. Which was silly. But in his two seasons on the ice X had performed a great number of silly tasks, and he had begun to understand that there was very little that was rational about anyone’s presence in Antarctica. The rational reasons were all just rationales for an underlying irrationality, which was the desire to be down here. And why that desire? This was the question, this was the mystery. X now supposed that it was a different mix of motives for every person down there—explore, expand, escape, evaporate—and then under those, perhaps something else, something basic and very much the same for all—like Mallory’s explanation for trying to climb Everest: because it’s there. Because it’s there! That’s reason enough!

  And so here he was. Alone on the Antarctic polar plateau, driving across a frozen cake of ice two miles thick and a continent wide, a cake that held ninety-five percent of the world’s fresh water, etc. Of course it had sounded exciting when it was first mentioned to him, no matter the warnings. Now that he was here, he saw what people had meant when they said it was boring, but it was interesting too—boring in an interesting way, so to speak. Like operating a freight elevator that no one ever used, or being stuck in a movie theater showing a dim print of Scott of the Antarctic on a continuous loop. There was not even any weather; X traveled under the alien southern constellations with never a cloud to be seen. The twilight hour, which grew several minutes longer every day, only occasionally revealed winds, winds unfelt and unheard inside the cab, perceptible to X only as moving waves of snow seen flowing over the white ground.

  Once or twice he considered gearing up and going outside to cross-country ski beside the tractor; this was officially forbidden, but he had been told it was one of the main forms of entertainment for SPOT train conductors. X was a terrible athlete, however; his last adolescent sprout had taken him to six foot ten inches tall, and in that growth he had lost all coordination. He had tried to learn cross-country skiing on the prescribed routes around McMurdo, and had made a little progress; and sometimes it was a tempting idea to break the monotony; but then he considered that if he fell and twisted an ankle, or stunned himself, the SPOT tractors would continue to grind mindlessly on, leaving him behind trying to catch up, and no doubt failing.

  He decided to pass on going outside. Monotony was not such a bad thing. Besides there would be some crevasse fields to be negotiated, even up here on the plateau, where the ice was often smooth and solid for miles at a time. Although it was true that the Army Corps of Engineers had mitigated all crevasses they didn’t care to outflank, meaning they had blown them to smithereens, then bulldozed giant causeways across the resulting ice-cube fields. This process had created some dramatic passages on the Skelton Glacier, which rose from the Ross Sea to the polar plateau in less than thirty kilometers, and was therefore pretty severely crevassed in places, so much so that the Skelton had not been the preferred route for SPOT; the first trains had crossed the Ross Ice Shelf and ascended the Leverett Glacier, a gentler incline much farther to the south. But soon after SPOT had become operational, and quickly indispensable for the construction of the new Pole station, the Ross Ice Shelf had begun to break apart and float away, except for where it was anchored between Ross Island and the mainland. The Skelton route could make use of this remnant portion of the shelf, and so every year the Corps of Engineers re-established it, and off they went. X’s nighttime ascent of the Skelton, through the spectacular peaks of the Royal Society Range, had been the most exciting part of his trip by far, crunching up causeway after causeway of crushed ice concrete, with serac fields like dim shattered Manhattans passing to right and left.

  But that had been many days ago, and since reaching the polar plateau there had not been much excitement of any sort. The fuel depots they passed were automated and robotic; the vehicles stopped one by one next to squat green bladders, were filled up and then moved on. If any new crevasses had opened up across the road since the last passing of a train, the lead vehicle’s pulse radar would detect it, and the navigation system would take appropriate action, either veering around the problem area or stopping and waiting for instructions. Nothing of that sort actually happened.

  But he had been warned it would be this way, and was ready for it. Besides, it was not that much different from all the rest of the mindless work that Ron liked to inflict on his GFAs; and here X was free of Ron. And he wasn’t going to run into anyone he didn’t want to, either. So he was content. He slept a lot. He made big breakfasts, and lunches, and dinners. He watched movies. He read books; he was a voracious reader, and now he could sit before the screen and read book after book, or portions of them, tracking cross-references through the ether like any other obsessive young gypsy scholar. He made sure to stop reading and look out the windows at the great ice plain during the twilights bracketing noon, twilights that grew longer and brighter every day. Though he did not experience again anything quite as overwhelming as the indigo twilight of the crescent moon, he did see many beautiful predawn skies. The quality of light during these hours was impossible to get used to, vibrant and velvet beyond description, rich and transparent, a perpetual reminder that he was on the polar cap of a big planet.

  Then one night he got some weather. The stars were obscured to the south, the rising moon did not rise on schedule, though clearly it had to be up there, no doubt shining on the top of the clouds and, yes, making them glow just a little, so that now he could see them rushing north and over him, like a blanket pulled over the world; no stars, now, but a dim cloudy rushing overhead; and then through the thick insulation of the cab he could for once hear the wind, whistling over and under and around his tractor. He could even feel the tractor rock just a tiny bit on its massive shock absorbers. A storm! Perhaps even a superstorm!

  Then the moon appeared briefly through a gap, nearly a half moon now, full of mystery and foreboding, flying fast over the clouds, then gone again. Black shapes flicked through the clouds like bats. X blinked and rubbed his eyes, sure that he was seeing things.

  A light tap tapped on the roof of his vehicle. “What the hell?” X croaked. He had almost forgotten how to talk.

  Then his windshield was being covered by a sheet of what looked like black plastic. Side windows and back window also. X could see gloved fingers working at the edges of the plastic, reaching down from above to tape the sheets in place. Then he could see nothing but the inside of the cab.

  “What the hell!” he shouted, and ran to the door, which resembled a meat-locker door in both appearance and function. He turned the big handle and pushed out. It didn’t move. It wouldn’t move. There were no locks on these tractor doors, but now this one wouldn’t open.

  “What-the-hell,” X said again, his heart pounding. “HEY!” he shouted at the roof of the vehicle. “Let me out!” But with the vehicle’s insulation there was no way he would be heard. Besides, even if he were …

  He ran down the narrow low stairs leading from the cab into the vehicle’s freight room. On one side of the big compartment were two big loading doors that opened outward, but when he twisted the latch locks down, and turned the handles and pushed out, these doors too remained stubbornly in place. They were not as insulated as the cab doors, and when he pushed out on them hard, a long crack of windy darkness appeared between them. He put an eye to the thin gap, and felt the chill immediately: fifty degrees below zero out there, and a hard wind. There was a plastic bar crossing the gap just below eye level; no doubt it was melted or bonded to the doo
rs, and holding them shut. “Hey!” he bellowed out the crack. “Let me out! What are you doing!”

  No answer. His face was freezing. He pulled back and blinked, staring at the crack. The bar was welded or glued or otherwise bonded across the doors, locking them in place. No doubt it was the same up there on the outside of the cab door.

  He recalled the emergency hatch in the roof of the cab, there in case the vehicle fell through sea ice or got corked in a crevasse, so that the occupants had to make their escape upward. X had thought it a pretty silly precaution, but now he ran back and pulled that handle around to the open position, a very stiff handle indeed, and shoved up. It wouldn’t go. Stuck. He was trapped inside, and the windshield and cab windows were covered. All in about two minutes. Ludicrous but true.

  He thought over the situation while putting on the layers of his outdoor clothing: thick smartfabric pants and coat, insulated Carhartt overalls, heavy parka, gloves and mittens. He would need it all outside, if he could get outside, but now he began to overheat terribly. Sweating, he turned on the radio and clicked it to the McMurdo coms band. “Hello McMurdo, McMurdo, this is SPOT number 103, SPOT calling Mac Town do you read me over over.” While he waited for a reply he went to one of the closets of the cab, and pulled a brand new hacksaw from a tool chest.

  “SPOT 103, through the miracle of radio technology you have once again manipulated invisible vibrations in the ether to reach Mac Coms, hey X, how are you out there, over.”

  “Not good Randi, I think I’m being hijacked!”

  “Say again X, I did not copy your last message, over.”

  “I said I am being hijacked. Over!”

  “Hey X, lot of static here, sounded like you said say Hi to Jack, but Jack’s out in the field, tell me what you mean, if that’s what you said, over.”

  “Hi-JACKED. Someone’s locked me in the cab here and taped over the windows! Over!”