“You don’t regret losing …” A loud gust of wind drowned him out.
“Losing what?”
“The world!”
That sweet laugh. “What’s to miss? The world’s just a big ASL, you know that. Driving in boxes to go sit in other boxes, and look at little boxes—that’s no way to live. Even building the boxes is no great thrill after the first fifty or so. No, I don’t miss anything about the world. Except Tahiti of course!” Laugh. “And I go there every winter.”
“You don’t winter over?”
“No way. I’ve done it twice, and that’s at least once too many. Life is too short. Of course I’m committed to wintering over one year every seven, to help keep things going. But I haven’t hit seven yet, and when I do I’ll have to think it over. See if I can buy out. Even quit maybe. Nah, but I’ll think of something. Maybe I’ll take a paired assignment if I find the right guy, that’s the only way to do it, just hibernate and spend the whole winter in bed staying warm.”
“So most of you don’t winter over,” Val said.
“No. Just a maintenance crew, like Mac Town or Pole. We’re Antarcticans, okay, but we aren’t masochists, except for some I could name. We do it ’cause it’s fun. The whole point is to stay flexible. Nomads, you know. That’s how the Eskimos and the Sami do it too. So it’s Tahiti in the winter for most of us, or New Zealand or Alaska or wherever. But hell, I’ll winter here again if I have to, to help things along.”
Below them a rift in the clouds appeared, and they could see parts of a vast broad glacier, flanked by black peaks. “That looks like the Beardmore,” Val said.
“Well, let’s not talk about that. And if you would pass on checking your GPS I would appreciate it,” she added, glancing back at Wade.
“Where are you taking us?” Wade asked.
“Your final destination is Mac Town, of course. But first we’re going to Quviannikumut, to refuel. And I think Mai-lis wants you to see something other than our dark side, so to speak. Dirty laundry—law enforcement.” She shook her head. “Those bastards.”
“It sounds like Mai-lis is really quite an authority,” Wade noted.
“Well, someone’s gotta do it. She’s the big mama, no doubt about that. The democracy stuff can only go so far before it becomes chaos. Someone’s got to have the final word, or the first word anyway, and that’s Mai-lis.”
“I wonder what brought her down here.”
“You’ll have to ask her that. But I think I remember her saying she had gotten mighty sick of Norwegians. They treat the Sami like we treat Indians, you know? Ah—there’s Quviannikumut, see?”
Wade saw nothing but white clouds.
“Means to feel deeply happy. Nice name, eh? Okay, down we go. Come on, you dog. Down boy! Down!”
white white white
white green white
white white white
Val walked into Quviannikumut amazed. It was a big shelter, much bigger than the first refuge they had been taken to: a modular assemblage of clear tenting covering several ragged embayments of a dolerite slope, which ran down gently into an ice surface that then rose up over the shore, so that fingers of rock and ice intertwined. The rock had the mazelike quality of the Labyrinth in Wright Valley, so that little canyons crossed higher on the slope and became sunken rooms. The smooth blue ice peninsulas bulking into the embayments were part of a larger glacier, or the polar cap itself—in the flying mist of the storm it was impossible to say—and the ice too had been incorporated into the shelter, honeycombed with tunnels and open-roofed chambers and long blue galleries. And all under the keening flight of the flying white cloud, so that it seemed a village under glass. It was beautiful.
All Val’s clients from the other blimps were already gathered in what appeared to be a dining hall; so that was okay, and she relaxed. Or began to relax; it was going to take some time to unwind. They were having another big meal, it seemed, dipping krill cakes in salsa, and talking with other diners around them. Jack appeared to be recovering; he was wearing a sling and regaling one of the feral women, a tall Scandinavian blonde, with the story of their crossing of Mohn Basin. “A matter of pacing yourself.” Jim and Jorge and Elspeth were interrogating the cook. Carlos was talking to another Latino contingent in Spanish; Ta Shu was looking out at the icescape beyond the refuge, nodding enthusiastically. “A very good place!” X and Wade were behind her, crowding in, still chatting with Addie. It was loud; things were turning raucous as they celebrated the exile of the ice pirates.
“Pretty hard,” Val remarked to Mai-lis. “Presumably they liked being down here.”
Mai-lis shrugged. “They brought it on themselves. And it’s not as if we’ve thrown them in prison.”
She took Val and Wade and X around the shelter, and Ta Shu joined them. Several of the little ravines upslope from the ice were in effect greenhouses, sealed off from the rest of the camp by triple lock doors. Inside these canyonettes vegetables and grains covered the floors and walls, most growing hydroponically, some in soil boxes and big glass terraria. The roofs were clear. “On sunny days the fabric goes white. From above no one can see,” Mai-lis said. “We shift this work from place to place to follow the sun. We try to grow as much as we can. Of course it is not enough, but we are getting closer. It’s wonderful how productive modern greenhouses can be.”
Wade asked a lot of questions, as he had with Addie; he was clearly fascinated by the whole phenomenon. “What are the staples of your diet, then?”
“Fish, of course. And krill cakes. Being indigenous in Antarctica means being coastal and living off the sea most of the time, because there is nothing inland to live on. Fortunately with the Ross Ice Shelf gone the Transantarctics are themselves coastal, which is good. So we can live here as well as around the rest of the coastline. And up on the cap too, in the summer, to cross to the far coasts. Or just to be up there.”
“But why?” Wade said.
“Well, because we like it.” She smiled, for the first time that Val had seen. “You gain a lot by being out in the world. And at this point technology has advanced to the point where we are allowed to practice a very sophisticated form of nomadic existence. Not hunting and gathering, but hunting and doing mobile agriculture. And clothing is so advanced that in most ways it functions as your house. That’s a good thing. It means you can travel very lightly on the land and still be sheltered. It isn’t like being truly exposed. As you found out, yes?”
“It still felt pretty exposed to me,” X said.
“Yes, but it’s partly a matter of getting used to how well it works. Of learning to trust it. Think what it used to be like! Occasionally we remind ourselves of that by going out in the old gear, just so we know what we have now. Also it’s a way of doing honor to the first explorers, to remind us what they endured. They were the first Antarcticans, you see. They loved it too.”
Val said, “You have some of their outfits here?”
“Facsimiles of their outfits, made for adventure travel groups reproducing the old expeditions in every detail.”
“Ah yes,” Val said. “I know that stuff. I did a couple of those trips.”
“We bought it heavily discounted.”
“I’ll bet.”
Mai-lis led them into the next module of the shelter, rock-walled under a rock-colored tent roof. This was the bedroom; the sleeping chambers were little individual cubicles, curtained off from each other and the hallway down the middle.