“It looks pretty cramped,” Wade noted.
“When we are indoors things are tight,” Mai-lis said. “An exercise in efficiency. But we don’t spend that much time in any one place, so it doesn’t bother us. And it’s a pleasure to design a new way of living. All kinds of possibilities are opening up. These are important to explore in such a world as ours. Lars talks about a Plimsoll line. Do you know this term? It’s the line on a ship’s hull marking the maximum load possible. He says the world has sunk below its Plimsoll line, weighted down by people. He has worked out how much total energy each person alive today could burn and yet the world altogether still remain above its Plimsoll line. It’s not very much. Less than you would think.”
“Is that why you live down here?” Wade asked. “To ease population pressures up north?”
“Oh no. Antarctica can never do that, its carrying capacity is magnitudes smaller than the scale of the problem. People everywhere have to reduce their numbers, that is the only solution at this point. Population reduction and climate stabilization are the same thing now. No, we live here because we like it. And it may also be a way to think about how people should live everywhere. But we do it because it gives us pleasure.”
“You must burn some fuel to keep this place going,” X said. “I can hear a generator.”
Mai-lis smiled. “You sound like a fundie. What if we fueled it with whale oil, would that make you happy? A local renewable resource?”
X shrugged.
“We have a better way still in some places,” Mai-lis said. “Where they exist we have drilled down into geothermal areas, and we heat those refugia with hot springs. They are the best of all.”
Wade said, “Is that generator we hear the one from old old Pole Station?”
Mai-lis nodded. “It is. And it’s a problem, because its fuel is an antique mixture we have to brew specially. But serviceable, as you hear.”
At the far end of that ravine corridor, the tenting closed to the ground in a vestibule door. Beyond it the rooms continued out into the blue bulk of the glacier, the ice carved into elaborate pillars and ceilings. Their blimp pilot Lars was out there, and when he saw them he waved for them to come out. “Yes, let’s take a look,” Mai-lis said. “We’re dressed warmly enough, it’s kept just below freezing out there, you’ll see.”
They went through the vestibule and out into the ice gallery, and indeed it was not very much colder than the rock-walled rooms had been. As they moved farther out they could see how much of the ice had been carved into rooms and chambers; it looked like an entire lobe of the glacier had been honeycombed, some of it tented, the rest open to the air, and all of it sculpted like one of the great festival ice villages of Scandinavia, but on a truly vast scale, with one immense courtyard entirely devoted to smooth-sided blue ice statuary.
“This is amazing!” Wade exclaimed, pressing up against a clear wall to look out at the untented sculpture garden. “Who—how—”
Lars joined Wade at the wall, more friendly than he had yet been. “This was not just us fooling around. This is the work of one of the artists from McMurdo. He applied to NSF to use the new ice borers to do this to the end of the Canada Glacier in the Dry Valleys, and they refused him. So he spent all his time in McMurdo making snowmen and pretending that that was all he was doing, but in the meantime he made three trips out here to do this. No one pays much attention to what those Woos do once they get in the field, and somehow he found us, and we brought him here when we were building this refuge. I was with him when he did this, and I felt like Rilke with Rodin, I tell you.”
“I can see why,” Wade said, nose pressed into the clear fabric. “What a sense of form.”
“Yes. He was a true artist. The ice borer was like his fingers. And you must understand, the ice did not look like this when he finished with it. He was planning on the ice to sublime away, so that the sculptures would change in time as they ablated. There was no way to be sure exactly how they would diminish, so there is an aleatory element to it. But he wanted to know the prevailing winds, to try to shape what would happen. And this is how it looks now. A few more years and the wind will blow it all away.”
“Wow.”
“He changed the way we thought about ice borers. About what we should be doing out here with the refugia.”
Ta Shu, grinning, thumped himself on the chest. “I too am a Woo.”
“Is that so?” Lars asked, interested.
X pointed across the glacier to the next tented embayment, which appeared stuffed with mist. “What’s that?”
“That’s the sauna,” Mai-lis said. “A way to relax and get warm after a day outside. My next destination, if you don’t mind. Feel free to join me if you want.”
She led them back around and past the sleeping tent, to the door of a big damp changing room, where piles of clothes were stacked neatly or otherwise on a rock bench against a rock wall. She went inside and stripped down to blue smartfabric long underwear, then stepped through a zipdoor in a clear wall, down into a long room stuffed with mist, a steaming pool at its bottom. Most of the people in the shelter appeared already to be down there. The pool floored one long room of the tent, where the rock embayment dipped in a basin that had been filled waist-high with hot water. The clear tent wall came down beyond the pool, just before the ice of the glacier, which curved down like a blue wave about to crash onto them.
Val stripped down to her underwear and jogger top, not looking at X or Wade, who were studiously not looking at her, staggering and crashing into each other as they got out of their clothes too. She went through the inner door into the pool room. Inside it was shockingly hot and wet. Here one could not really see the blue glacier overhanging the far end of the room; that side of the room was simply bluer mist than the mist around her. She walked into the pool and sank to her neck, then sat on a rock bench set a little higher. Hot! Hot! And oh so luxurious. Suddenly it seemed she had been cold for months.
The sauna was above the pool, its benches in a little tent around a steamer. All the air was steam; in there it must have been simply hotter steam. Voices were confined by the rock walls, and the watery clangor was loud. Val sat and watched the faces. She had not slept in three days, or four—for so long that it was too much trouble to figure out just exactly how long—and so she was deep into the exhausted buzzed insomnia that all Antarcticans experienced from time to time, when for one reason or another you stayed awake for so long that it felt like you would never sleep again. Stunned, detached, disembodied; although there were bodies everywhere in the water and the mist, pink and brown shapes against the blurry blue ice; including her own body, relaxing at last, her hand pulsing pinkly there in front of her face, every detail of it microscopically distinct, the skin very obviously semitransparent. But her consciousness was well detached from that pink thing. Many of the ferals were naked; others were in bathing suits or underwear or longjohns, the smartfabrics so smart that they would dry on the body almost as soon as one got out; even immersed in the pool Val felt a layer of warm dry fabric against her skin, where she was clothed. Looking down at her pink skin from a point of view that seemed distinctly higher than her own head, Val was glad to be somewhat covered; even so she was a shocking sight, she felt, as she had been torn up badly in her two falls, and had had other accidents and surgeries; scars everywhere, so that it seemed to her a very Bride of Frankenstein sort of body, stitched together from various parts that did not match very well. Oh well. X was sitting beside her in his longjohns, making the perfect Frankenstein to her Bride; big, massive, graceless. It was a comfort to have him there. They made a kind of pair, like a couple of football players, linebacker and nose guard, soaking away their bruises after a hard game.