“Long as they keep the heads hidden,” Addie said.
“Tastes just like chicken,” someone else joked.
“It tastes like fish, actually, but not as fishy as penguin eggs. And big. Catch one and it’ll feed this group for a week.”
“So that’s what you eat?” Val asked, looking around again at the people. Seal fur, perhaps, in that parka. Local fish …
“It’s one of the protein staples, sure. Mawsoni, penguin egg whites—the yolks are vile, like rotten fish—sometimes seal steak. Then cereals and vegetables from the greenhouses and terraria, though there isn’t enough. We ship in a lot still.”
“From where?”
“New Zealand, just like anyone else.”
Claude wielded spatula and fork like a short-order maestro, and soon everyone was eating speechlessly, stuffing it in. Many of their hosts appeared to be as hungry as Val and her group. The fried mawsoni was good, the meat firm and flaky; better than cod, despite the kraken face of the creature. Cod weren’t that good-looking either, now that she thought of it.
When they were done she sat slumped next to Wade against the rock wall. Over on the bench Jack was lying in his sled. “He’s going to be all right?” she asked the doctor.
The woman nodded, swallowed. “He is in no danger, as far as I can tell.”
“He was acting really strange. In shock, or concussed, I thought.”
“He might well have been. But his vital signs are strong.”
Val felt a wave of relief pass through her, as warm and tangible as the burn of the food. Jack was going to live; they were all going to live; she was going to get home with all her clients alive, and at that moment she cared not at all that it was not her doing, nor that the expedition was still a fuck-up. Neither their accident nor the rescue had been her doing, really; but if one of her clients had died she never would have forgiven herself. For she should not have let them go up toward the Hansen Shoulder.
But now it looked like it was not going to be a fatal error, and for that she was so relieved she could barely think about it. She began the process of forgetting what it had felt like; she let her head loll against the rock, feeling the exhaustion in every muscle of her body. Wade looked similarly relaxed, staring around him bright-eyed with interest.
Then Mai-lis sat down before them with her plate full, and without moving his head Wade said, “So who are you people?”
“I am Mai-lis,” the old woman said. “That’s Addie, that’s Lars….”
“Yes. But what are you doing out here?”
“Why do you ask?” Lars said aggressively from across the tent. “We rescue you from the storm, you think you can interrogate us?”
“Just asking.”
“Be quiet,” Mai-lis said to Lars. “This is a new situation now, because of these attacks.” To Wade and Val she said, “We are a long-term research group.”
“And what do you study?”
“We study how to live here.”
Val said, “On your own?”
“We have some help from the north, of course, like everyone down here.”
“But you live here. In the Transantarctics.”
“Yes. We are nomadic, actually. We move around.”
Wade said, “How many of you are there?”
“It varies year to year. About a thousand, this year.”
“A thousand!” Val exclaimed.
“Yes. Not so many for a continent.”
“No, but … A lot for no one to know about. People in McMurdo don’t know you’re out here?”
“A few do. We have some helpers there. But most, no.”
“Aren’t you seen from the air? From satellite photos?”
“Yes, we are visible if you look very closely at photos. But there are many scientific camps, and oil groups, and trekking groups. Very few photo analysts are looking for groups where we are, and we hide as much as we can. We have some analyst friends, too. And we move around with the seasons, sometimes at night, when there is night, or under cloud cover, like today. So there is little to see.”
“Where are you from?” Wade asked.
“Where from? In the north? We come from all over. I am from Samiland.” Seeing Val and Wade stare at her, she explained: “Lapland, you perhaps call it. The north of Scandinavia.” She gestured at the others. “Addie is American, as you know. She used to work for ASL. Lars is Swedish, Elke German. Anna is Inuit, from Canada. There are other Eskimos as well. John is a Kiwi. We have lots of Aussies and Kiwis. And so forth.”
“And you live down here,” Wade repeated.
“That’s right. Some call it going feral. I don’t like that word. I say we are studying how to become indigenous to this place. Antarcticans. It’s a new thing. Like the Arctic cultures, but not. Not all of us agree what we are doing.” Her face darkened as she said this, and she looked to the lock door, where another group was coming in. “Excuse me,” she said, and went over to them.
Val sat in the center of her group, Wade on one side, X on the other. The clients were looking well-fed, warm, sleepy. Except for Ta Shu, who was conversing with another Asian man. And Carlos was talking animatedly in Spanish to a small group of ferals. Jack was asleep on his sled bed. Val was feeling so relieved, so pleased, really, that she could scarcely keep a smile from her face.
But when Mai-lis came back, she still had that dark look on her face. “These saboteurs have changed everything,” she said, half to herself. “Endangered everything.” She looked at Val. “I must ask you to prepare to leave.”
“Now?” Val asked, surprised.
“Soon. We are going to deliver justice. I want you to witness this, so you can tell the people in McMurdo what is happening up here.”
She sat down on her pad, picked up her plate, continued eating. Between bites she explained. “You see, there are many divisions among us down here. Some of them are normal. We have what we call the fundies and the prags, fundies meaning fundamentalists, who want to live down here with no help from the north, using Eskimo and Sami methods to make our food and clothing and shelter. The prags are pragmaticals, and willing to try out all the latest things from the north, to see if they can be useful down here. As you can see we are mostly prags here, but like most of the feral groups we are a mix of the two. Most of us are individually a mix of the two. This is normal, as I say. Part of inventing the Antarctican way of life.”
She paused to eat a bite or two, shaking her head as she thought things over. “Other divisions are more dangerous. There are some among us who despise all the other people in Antarctica—the oil teams, the adventure trekkers, even the scientists. They never help these people. Sometimes they impede their work. And they feel no objections to steal from them.”
“My SPOT train,” X said.
She nodded. “Yes, a SPOT vehicle was taken by one of these groups, the most extreme of them all.”
“Did they take the old generator from the buried South Pole station?” Wade asked.
“No.” She looked at Wade, somewhat surprised. “That was us. We make a distinction between salvage and theft. A lot of perfectly good equipment has been abandoned in Antarctica, and if it is never going to be used by anyone else, and we can use it, then we excavate it from the ice and make use of it. The old Pole generator is now heating a greenhouse farm on one of the nunataks near here.”
“And the Hillary expedition’s Weasel,” Wade said, nodding with satisfaction, as at a mystery solved.
“That’s right. We used it to haul things, and may use it again, in situations in that area where blimps wouldn’t be better.”