Antarctica Read online

  And then there between them was Birdie Bowers, knocking back a mug as if just back from a walk down to the corner store—looking if anything more refreshed and rested than he had in the departure photo. Bowers! Henry Robert Bowers, God bless him, his beak of a nose profiled like a parrot’s; Birdie Bowers of the Antarctic, who never got cold, never got tired, never got discouraged; Bowers the Optimist, whose only fault appeared to have been an optimism so extreme that it sometimes made his companions want to strangle him. After the hurricane had relented, for instance, he had wanted to make one last visit to the penguins before retreating. And back at Cape Evans he had given a lecture explaining how perfect their Boy Scout equipment was, so perfect that it could not possibly be improved upon in any regard; this from a man wearing a canvas jacket and hat rather than a parka. And when he had been caught with some of their ponies on an ice floe that broke away from the ice shelf, he had refused to save himself until he could save the nags as well. And on the fatal trek to the Pole he had pulled the hardest of all, even deprived of his skis, and had cheerfully done most of the camp work as the other men slowly lost strength and died around him. And never a word of complaint, not right to his death; rather the opposite.

  It must have taken a lot, Val thought darkly as she looked at the photo, to kill Birdie Bowers off. She felt a lot for that little man, she treasured his memory in particular, of all the old boys; because Val was an optimist herself. Or at least people often accused her of it. And indeed she did try to make the best of things. It seemed to her that that was the way one should behave—it was how her mother and grandmother, both dead now, had taught her to behave, by precept and example. And on adult reflection, she approved of the lesson fully. Making the best of things was what courage meant, in her opinion; that was right action in the face of life. And how hard it was, given how dark her thoughts had become, and how dismal everything sometimes appeared to her; how against the grain of her temperament it had become. But she kept at it anyway, as an act of the will. And all it did was get her laughed at, and most of what she said continually discounted or put down, as if being optimistic was a matter of a somewhat obtuse intelligence, or at best the luck of biochemistry, rather than a policy that had to be maintained, sometimes in the midst of the blackest moods imaginable.

  No; the Birdie Bowerses of this world were only regarded as fools. And the world being what it was, Val supposed that there was some truth in it. Why be optimistic, how be optimistic, when there was so much wrong with so much? In a world coming apart it had to be a kind of stupidity. But still Val held to it, stubbornly, just barely. Without even thinking she would say the thing that took the most positive slant on the matter, and get laughed at, and grit her teeth and try to live up to that slant. Such an attitude was an asset for any mountain guide, of course, or should have been. But the way it was received was one of the things that were beginning to turn her into burnt toast. It took an effort to be optimistic, it was a moral position. But no one understood that.

  “Those guys,” Arnold said, looking over her shoulder at the old photos. “They really were crazy.”

  “Yes. They were.”

  Then George was hustling them all around to their various stations, becoming more manic as time passed; for the sun was soon to come up, and they would not be able to film a second take of that. Happily the sky was clear, and the horizon to the northeast a straight line of startling clarity: shiny ice below, pale blue sky above.

  With most of the group gathered in a little knot next to the rock hut, George began by reading the climactic passage from Cherry-Garrard’s book, when the storm had ripped away their tent and hut roof, and left them apparently with only a few more hours to live. Val, uneasy at hearing this passage that struck right to the heart of what she had been thinking, moved back up the ridge beyond the new structure, where she could just hear George’s voice, a reedy tenor wavering on the freshening wind: “‘Gradually the situation got more desperate…. There was more snow coming through the walls … our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks over the door.’” George read in a singsong like a preacher, and though Val could only catch a phrase here and there over the sound of the wind, Cherry’s King James cadences were obvious. “‘Bowers … up and out of his bag continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof … he was magnificent…. And then it went…. The uproar of it all was indescribable.’”

  Val bent her head, trying to imagine the scene; the thunder of the wind lashing the canvas to shreds, the rocks falling in, the snow pouring onto them, the means of return blown away.

  “‘The next I knew was Bowers’s head across Bill’s body. “We’re all right,” he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement was helpful.’”

  Val turned away abruptly and walked up the ridge, feeling a sudden increase in her strange pain. Who were these men? The clients she guided were not like that; and she was not like that either. Could people change so much, century by century?

  “‘Birdie and Bill sang quite a lot of songs and hymns,’” she heard George exclaim. This was the cue for the music, George going a bit over the top in his enthusiasm. But everyone there began to sing except for Val and the film crew, anchored by a quartet of professionals from Wellington. They sang a version of the Tallis Canon, adapted by Benjamin Britten to fit some hymn verses written by Joseph Addison. The sky overhead was now fully light, a pure transparent pale blue, shading to a bright white over the northeastern horizon, where the sun was about to make its reappearance. They could see for many miles over the white sea ice covering the Ross Sea, clotted with icebergs from the old shelf, so that in the growing light the plain turned pewter and shaved silver, a mirror jumble. The quartet took off in the parts of the canon, somehow weaving together the words of the old hymn, George conducting them with great sweeps of his hands:

  “The spacious firmament on high,

  With all the blue ethereal sky,

  And spangled heavens, a shining frame,

  Their great Original proclaim.

  Soon as the evening shades prevail

  The Moon takes up the wondrous tale,

  And nightly to the listening Earth

  Repeats the story of her birth;

  Whilst all the stars that round her burn,

  And all the planets in their turn,

  Confirm the tidings as they roll,

  And spread the truth from pole to pole.”

  And as they sang the last line the sun cracked the horizon to the northeast, the incredible shard of light fountaining over the sea ice and the immense bergs caught in it, illuminating the scene with a blinding glare, the great world itself turning all to light, in a space spacious beyond words. The little group around the rock hut cheered, they hugged each other, they hugged George, and shook his hand, and clapped him on the back, all cameras forgotten; but Elliot and Geena kept filming.

  God knew what the three explorers would have made of it. They had lain there in the midwinter darkness exposed to the hurricane for two more days without food and with very little sleep, before the wind dropped and they could go out and look for the tent, and find it. “Our lives had been taken away and given back to us,” as Cherry wrote. So that this was not an inappropriate site for a spring celebration, now that Val thought of it; the return of the sun, the rebirth, the gift of life.

  So she went down to the others less reluctantly than she might have, and got them all back off the ridge to the team tent, and joined the celebratory meal, and when a toast was offered to the old boys she said “Hear hear” gladly, and with feeling; with too much feeling, really. For those three men were her saints, in a way—the patron saints of all stupid pointless expeditions into the wilderness, the Three Silly Men to match the Three Wise Men, silly men who yet remained gracious in the face of death. Who had made it back to Cape Evans alive, and thus turned all the stupid false stories of their Victorian youth in
to one stupid true story, transforming Tennyson to steel. The Worst Journey in the World! And now this memorializing group had done a proper homage to that best journey in Antarctic history, and made a shrine to craziness and decency that was, in some way she didn’t fully understand, something Val could believe in. Her own brand of religion. She proposed another toast, throat tightening as she did: “To Birdie Bowers, the optimist!” And they cried “Hear hear,” and drank hot chocolate, and Elliot, of all people, teasing her she supposed, cried out, “We’re all right! We’re all right!”

  And so they were, for the moment. Though of course the return home would be a pain in the ass.

  Then later, when she was back up on the ridge cleaning the site of any stray debris (cannister top, foil paper, etc.) Val got a call from Randi on her little wrist radio. “Hey Val, this is the voice of the south coming to you again through the miracle of shaped and directed radio waves, do you read, over?”

  “I read you, Randi. What’s going on?”

  “Did you hear what happened to your sandwich?”

  “Don’t call him that, what happened?”

  “Your ex, then. He’s out with the SPOT train, you know, and he just called in a while ago—he’s been hijacked!”

  “What?”

  “He’s been hijacked. Someone locked him in the lead vehicle during a Condition One, and when he got out there were only nine vehicles instead of ten! Plundered by ice pirates!”

  “Who the hell would do that!”

  “Ice pirates!” Randi laughed. “Who the hell knows. But isn’t that funny it happened to X?”

  “No! Why the hell would that be funny?”

  “Well, because it’s okay! I mean he’s okay, and now he’s finally had the big adventure he came down here looking for!”

  “Maybe,” Val said darkly. Feeling bad about what she had done to X was another reason she was toast.

  “Oh come on,” Randi was saying, “he’ll love it. That’s the kind of dreamer he is.”

  “Maybe.”

  2

  Science in the Capital

  Wade Norton had just solved the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony when his boss Senator Phil Chase called. It was late on a very hot September evening in Washington D.C., part of a heat wave in fact, the temperature 115°F. with humidity near a hundred percent, the roar of the city outside the window damped down as all parts of the metropolis went into Turkish-bath mode, stewing as they waited out the latest EWE, or extreme weather event. Torrential floods, blistering droughts, record highs and lows, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, assorted other superstorms; this year, like all the last several years, had seen everything.

  Wade had been sitting before his overmatched air-conditioning unit, conducting the Fifth for a few hours. He had been working on this version during his snippets of spare time for eight months, studying the score and recording bar by bar, struggling especially with the finale, using the latest Maestro program to manipulate all possible aspects of pitch, tempo, dynamics, color, intonation, vibrato and so forth, all down at the level of the individual soundwaves on the oscilloconductor, working mostly with synthetically generated sound but occasionally with the instruments in a base performance recorded for Maestro by the Vienna Philharmonic. And now he had the version he wanted. And it had been no easy thing, because the last movement was, as Brahms had noted to Tchaikovsky after hearing a performance in Hamburg, somewhat of a mess structurally. In his usual insecure way Tchaikovsky had immediately agreed with Brahms, and it had taken him a couple of months to rally and decide that it was not his Fifth that was deficient but Brahms himself, whose music Tchaikovsky said was “the pedestal without the statue,” a riposte which still made Wade smile, and had even given him a clue to conducting the Fifth, which was to treat it as a statue without a pedestal, floating in the air like a tone poem, the beauty of each component passage different in kind from the other passages; then turn the variously awkward junctures as best he could, exploiting things the Maestro could do that living orchestras would find hard. The home-conducting subculture was of course mostly uninterested in these overplayed warhorses of the concert hall, exactly the material from which computer conducting had freed them; and indeed Wade was coming to this piece from several years’ work on unrecorded music in the opuses of D’Indy, Poulenc, and Martinu; but recently there had been movements, obviously related, to explore both “sensuous surface” and the neglected warhorses, and Wade felt that this performance he had put together was perhaps good enough to justify sending it out, at least to the Tchaikovsky crowd, the finale of the Fifth being somewhat in the nature of Fermat’s last theorem, to which his version might be the Wiles proof.

  But there was the phone beeping. And of course it was Phil, Senator Philip Krishna Chase of California, his boss and friend, calling from the other side of the world and uncertain of the time difference as always. Phil had two years before lost the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and was often spoken of as passé following the Republican retaking of both Senate and House that year; he had seldom been in Washington since (not that he had been here all that often before), and he appeared intent on proving that as the great telesenator he could do his job while on a more-or-less permanent junket/global pilgrimage (depending on who was characterizing it). The pundits were convinced he was wrong, and there were weekly calls for Phil to get back to his job and put his nose to the grindstone like everyone else, etc.; and back home in California Chase had the highest negatives and the highest positives ever recorded. But he had won his last reelection by twenty-three percent, and as Phil often said, California had led telecommuting from the very beginning, even before the technology was there, and most Californians were proud of their senator’s work among the many troubled, overcrowded, starved, flooded, and drought-stricken countries of the developing world which Phil made his specialty—proud also of the breakthroughs he had made in telecommuting itself, working the Senate from all over the world and introducing legislation to make it even easier for people to do likewise on their jobs. So with his power base secure Chase continued to walk and paraglide around the world, pitching in to help local relief work and employee-owned eco-businesses, and doing his Washington work by phone, fax, proxy, an active staff, and the occasional spaceplane blitz on the capital.

  So Wade was used to punching the button on the phone and hearing “Wade! Wade! Time to work!”

  “Hi, Phil.” Wade hit save on the Maestro and reached for a notepad. Typically these conversations would last for half an hour to an hour, and include a dozen commands, two dozen suggestions, and three dozen reflections; he took notes so he would not forget anything in the deluge. “Where are you tonight?”

  “It’s morning, Wade, it’s tomorrow where you are, and I’m in Pakistan, walking up to the sixteenth tee, five under handicap and shooting with the wind all the way home, but let’s get to the point, Wade. I hear that you are the staff expert on Antarctica.”

  “Antarctica?”

  Phil had a wild laugh; it was said to have won him his first election. “Yes, John tells me you had to work it up as part of your Southern Club studies.”

  “Yes, but that was just an overview.”

  “I know, I have it right here onscreen. ‘Complications Attendant on the Non-Renewal of the Antarctic Treaty, an Overview.’ By WN.”

  “Yes.” Wade had researched the Antarctic Treaty System (a complex of treaties, protocols and agreements) the previous year, when Senator Winston, Phil’s replacement as Chair, had directed his majority on the Foreign Relations Committee to vote to sit on the ratification of the Treaty’s scheduled renewal, which had been in negotiation the previous three years. It had seemed clear to Wade that the blockage of the ratification, aside from being part of a general strategy of obstruction of the President on all fronts, had to do with Senator Winston’s ongoing battle with the Southern Club, and for that matter with the southern hemisphere in general, home in Winston’s mind of all ungodly sloth and
indolence. Also the renegotiated treaty continued to contain the bans on oil, mineral, and other resource extraction that it had had since the 1991 environmental protocol had been attached; of course Wall Street had been unhappy about that, as it did not fit with their ongoing campaign to dismantle all remaining global environmental regulations and any other constraints to the full exercise of the free market, etc.

  All part of the ordinary contemporary political battlefield, in other words; and interesting in that respect; but the idea that Wade was therefore an expert on Antarctica was laughable, as Phil was proving at this very moment. Wade had learned what he had needed to know the way one crams for a test, and afterward retained the usual portion of knowledge from such efforts. Antarctica! as he and the staff had often proclaimed at that time—the highest, coldest, driest, iciest, windiest, and least significant of the continents!

  Through Chase’s last chuckles he said, “I didn’t learn that much about it, Phil. I like my ice in Bloody Marys.”

  “You’re very wise in your modesty, Wade. Here, wait a second while I make this drive. Ooh. But you’re my staff expert on the place, Wade, and there’s been some things come up in the last month that I want you to look into for me. It appears the absence of a ratified treaty is beginning to wreak some havoc down there, and if we can find out anything that we could use against Winston, naturally it would be a good thing. Of course I’d go myself to have a look around, it sounds great, but I have—ah come on!—business in Kashmir that can’t wait.”