Now Val looked around McMurdo, remembering Jack’s quick look away at the restaurant table, his scowl. Or that wounded look, when he was hunched out on the ice. She had done it again.
“I am not a good guide,” she told the empty town. “I am toast.”
Even though she was very near tears, the word toast reminded her of how hungry she still was. She moved off shakily toward the BFC. She could break into a box of camp crackers there, and hear stories of the other SARs of the last week, and huddle over the space heater to try to get herself warm. “I am the coldest burnt toast in town,” she said, and stopped and let herself cry for a minute before going on.
“Hello, Phil?”
“Yeah, who is it? Wade is that you? Where are you?”
“It’s me, Phil. I’m in Antarctica.”
“Where? Oh yeah. I was asleep, Wade.”
“Good.”
“What’s that you say?”
“Were you dreaming, Phil? What were you dreaming about?”
“What? What’s this, you call me up to wake me to ask me what I’m dreaming about?”
“You’ve had me do that a lot, remember?”
“Yes—no—I’m not having you do that now, am I?”
“You don’t remember what you were dreaming about?”
“Well, let’s see. Let me think. No, I guess it’s gone. Wait, something about bicycling. No, it was a unicycle. I was riding a unicycle down the Capitol steps, that was it—no, the Lincoln Memorial, because I could see the Capitol down the Mall. People were there like I was giving a speech, a big crowd, giant, but actually I wasn’t giving a speech, I was unicycling up and down the steps, making the hops in both directions and getting a lot of applause. It was great. No one could figure out how I was hopping back up the steps, and I couldn’t either. It was mystifying but fun. All the Republicans I like were there going Shit, Phil, how are we gonna beat that when you can hop up steps on a unicycle.”
“Mark and Colin?”
“Yeah, they were pissed. Then all the Republicans I hate were down there getting tossed in the reflecting pools.”
“A crowd scene.”
“Like the guppy tank at the pet store. I was planning to ride the unicycle right across their backs once they were all in, keeping my balance no matter what they did. Then you woke me up, bummer, that was going to be fun.”
“You enjoy your dreams, don’t you Phil.”
“I do, yeah. Unless I don’t. But most dreams are wish-fulfillment fantasies, I think you’ll find.”
“Maybe for you. Mine are usually terribly complex problems I can’t possibly solve.”
“That’s too bad, Wade. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks. So where are you now?”
“I’m in Kirghiz, I think. Yes. I’m seeing the Kirghiz light.”
“Very nice. Well. I should let you go back to sleep.”
“I’d like that Wade.”
“All right. Thanks for calling, Phil.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Oh, and by the way, just one thing?”
“… yeah?”
“I’m going to make some suggestions and the like down here in your name in the next day or two, Phil, I’m just going to go into ambassador mode because things are moving so fast here and I’m not sure I’m going to have time to check with you but I want to use your name as if everything I suggest is coming from you okay? Is that okay?”
“How is this different from the way we usually operate?”
“It isn’t, I just wanted to confirm.”
“Confirmed. Night night.”
“Night, Phil.”
The Antarctic Treaty had always been a fragile thing, a complex of gossamer and blown glass which had spun in the light of history like a beautiful mobile—a utopian project actually enacted in the real world, a model for how people ought to be treating the land everywhere—until it got caught in the pressures of the new century, and at the first good torque shattered into a thousand pieces.
Now Sylvia presided over the wreckage, hoping still to patch it back together. She was operating on as big a sleep deficit as anyone in town, perhaps even the largest of all; she had spent almost every hour of the crisis in her office or up at Search and Rescue, trying to deal with the multiple emergencies. It had been a trouble-shooter’s nightmare. But at the same time, a part of her began to think (no doubt the part most affected by sleep deprivation) that it was also the ultimate trouble-shooter’s challenge, or even an opportunity: not just to keep plugging away at the succession of little stopgaps that formed her ordinary work, but actually to consider the rehaul of everything.
She stood at the front of the big central room of the Chalet, watching people file in. A lot of people wanted to talk to her, and she had told them all to come on over to the Chalet. She was curious to hear them, in part to help her to clarify her own thinking about the situation. What would happen next, what should happen next? Without laws, without sovereignty, without a military, without police, without economy, without autonomy, without sufficiency—without any of the properties needed in the world to make life real … It was as if they were a small group of travelers in space, marooned on Ice Planet and now forced to invent everything from scratch.
Except the world was still there, of course. Sylvia had been juggling calls from all over, now that communications were restored; most importantly from NSF’s head offices in Virginia, asking for a quick accounting of the last week, identification of the ecoteurs if possible, and, luckily for her, any recommendations she might have for avoiding such events in the future. Also, the home office clearly wanted to contain the problem as much as she did, to minimize it and declare it an isolated anomaly, a sport in biological terms, so that the military was not called back in for good, and the Antarctic taken out of NSF’s hands. All perfectly appropriate in Sylvia’s opinion; but one Navy plane had made it down already, at great risk, and a big task force would soon follow to investigate the ecotage, naturally; and what would happen then was anyone’s guess. The big storm (inevitably termed a superstorm in the U.S. popular press) had stalled all these outsiders in Christchurch, however, and so she had this little window of opportunity to conduct her own investigation.
Now here they were, filing into the big room. The ASL managers; Geoff Michelson and some of his colleagues, just returned from the Dry Valleys; several Kiwis from Scott Base; Ta Shu; Mr. Smith; Wade Norton; Carlos and X, and some of Carlos’s colleagues from the SCAG consortium; Val and some of her clients. Others were standing in the loft or in the offices off the main room. The Chalet had seldom seen such a crowd.
“Thanks for coming,” Sylvia said. “We’re here to discuss what’s happened in the past week, to see if we can make any recommendations to our various contacts in the north concerning where we might go from here, and how we can avoid any repetitions of this kind of thing. My notion is to conduct it like a small and informal scientific conference, with short presentations followed by questions and discussion, with the hope that at the end we could perhaps collaborate on a general statement. This of course will all be merely an addendum to the full official investigations, but I hope it will be useful. Ta Shu has suggested that for a meeting like this we should move our chairs into a circle formation, so that we can all see each other when we’re talking—among other no doubt valid reasons,” waving Ta Shu down, “and I think that’s a good idea, it will save us craning our necks to see who’s talking. So why don’t we do that first, and then begin.”
When they were rearranged in a rough circle, chairs all the way back to the walls, everyone able to see everyone else (it had been a good idea), Sylvia went on. “Mr. Smith here has arrived privately by boat, and he says he represents the, the ecoteurs who disrupted operations here and in various outlying camps. Without granting him priority, or in any way legitimating those attacks—in fact I condemn them here and now as criminal, dangerous, and useless—still I think we might start by hearing what Mr. Smith has to say concerning their actions.”