“Ah. So you have. Are you hypothermic?”
“I’m cold. Not as cold as before. My lungs hurt.”
“I will check them.” She was getting his clothes away from his upper body; Jim helped her. It was warm in the tented chamber, so that would not be a problem. The wind was still loud, but it was muffled inside just enough so that they could hear each other talk. “I will inject anesthetics around the clavicle,” the old woman said, “then reset the bone. After that you cannot move that arm. We will get you a sling for it.” As she spoke she was unwrapping a hypodermic needle, and after gently swabbing the skin over the broken bone she injected a syringe’s contents into him. Then another one. Val was so happy to see this evidence of bona fide medicine that she could hardly stand.
After that the woman checked the readings on the monitor, and listened to Jack’s lungs with a stethoscope. “Your right lung is a little full. Have you coughed up any blood?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ll keep an eye on it. It may be a touch of pneumonia. Your temperature is low, but you’re not badly hypothermic any longer.”
“I’m cold.”
“No doubt. Let’s check your feet. Hmm … perhaps a little frostbite in the toes. We can help that.” She worked on his feet for a while, applying patches from her kit. “Now, can you feel your clavicle?”
“No.”
“Okay. I’m going to reset it. You will feel the contact for sure, but tell me if it hurts and we’ll give you another shot.”
“It’s okay,” Jack said. He stared at her face impassively as she put both hands to his shoulder. “Addie,” she said to Val’s pilot, “help me here.”
“Sure thing, Mai.”
“Hold his shoulder down, right there. Don’t look, young man. Head the other way. Twist your left shoulder to the left. That’s it. Okay. Now I’m going to inject some muscle relaxants. You will have a bump for good in your clavicle, but if you can keep it in this position, it will heal all right. Ah good, here is hot chocolate, for all of you. Now you should rest, young man. We will keep a watch on your lungs. If you have some pneumonia we will give you antibiotics. But we should wait and make sure. Sleep now, but stay flat on your back. Addie and Elke will help you into a sleeping bag. Be careful,” she said to the two women attending. Then she led Val and Jim to the back of the chamber, where delicious smells were steaming out of a big pot on an ordinary green Coleman stove. “Let’s eat,” she said.
They sat on doubled-up sleeping pads on the ground, staring up at the cook. The smells of cooking food struck Val and she realized she was ravenous. “We appreciate what you’re doing for us,” she said to Mai-lis.
“Oh, Addie and Lars and Elke, they enjoyed the opportunity. They like to do crazy things like flying the blimps in storms, but it’s a bit too dangerous, so in the ordinary course of things they don’t get to. So a rescue situation is just an opportunity to them. They loved it.”
“And you knew we were in trouble?”
“Well, we heard your radio, and looked and saw you coming down the glacier. And then the storm hit, and it didn’t seem like you had much in the way of shelter. So they went to get you.”
The cook, a big man with tattooed arms, tossed slabs of white fish steak into a giant frypan. As they sizzled Addie came over and laughed at Val and her companions’ intent expressions. “You got an appreciative audience, Claude!”
“I can see.”
“What’s cooking?” Ta Shu asked, coming over to look into the frypan. He appeared happy and comfortable, as if he had met these people before and was feeling at home already.
“Mawsoni,” Claude said. “Mawsoni fried in seal fat, and seasoned with herbs grown in local greenhouses. An all-indigenous main course, see? And local krill cakes too. Then vegetable stew, that’s not so local,” indicating the pot.
Killing fish and seals was illegal under the Antarctic Treaty, as Val recalled. But she decided it was not a good time to mention it.
“Mawsoni?” she said instead. She had heard of the big Antarctic fish, but never seen one. Now Addie opened a box and hauled out the head of a big gutted fish.
“Oh don’t show them that, it’ll spoil their appetite.” Claude laughed. And indeed the fish face was a monstrously spiked, big-eyed, misshapen thing. “Antarctic cod!” Claude said facetiously. “That’s what they call it in the grocery stores, even though it has no relation at all to real cod. They call all the real ugly fishes cod so they can sell them. No one will buy Dissotichus mawsoni or Pagotenia borchgrevinki, but Antarctic cod! Yum yum!”
“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.”
“You took away the generator with a blimp?”
“Yes. We have salvaged equipment from Siple Dome, Vostok, the Byrd stations, the Point of Inaccessibility station, and so on. All abandoned and buried in the ice. But the new ice borers are very powerful. Also the new remote sensing devices. We even know where the tent is that Amundsen left at the Pole. That we have left in place. Other things, more useful and less—less historical—we have dug.”
She took another bite, swallowed. “But all of this is salvage. And salvage is not theft. Theft we do not like. The people down here who steal say it is all the same. They call everything we salvage and they steal ‘obtainium.’ But this is just their insolence. They defy us all.” She scowled, looking ferocious for a moment. “And so they endanger us all. Because it very well might happen that some military come down here to clear up this matter of the ecotage, and kick us all off the ice because of these people. And we cannot allow that to happen.”
“But how can you stop them?” Wade asked.
“Well, this is the question. We have very little political organization down here. This is what they have endangered also. To the extent that we have any at all, we are a pure democracy.”
“Mai-lis thinks it’s a democracy,” Lars interjected from behind her with a jagged grin. “Actually it’s a matriarchy, and she is the high priestess.”
“And Lars is court jester,” Mai-lis said, without looking at him. “Actually I am just the doctor, but that is enough power out here. Anyway, we try to agree on everything. And a few seasons ago, we agreed together that if any feral hurt any other feral, or anyone else in Antarctica, then they could be judged in absentia by the rest of us.”
“So these are the people who sabotaged my camp?” Carlos asked.
Several of the ferals sitting around listening shook their heads, and Mai-lis said “No,” though she looked uncertain. “We don’t know who did the ecotage. I wish we did, but we don’t. Oil camps took most of the attacks, and the communications system was disrupted. And McMurdo’s fuel tanks were contaminated. But who did this, we do not know. We know it was not the anarchist ferals we are quarreling with, because we have informants among them. So we know this was not their idea. But some of them were in contact with these ecoteurs, apparently, and they did help the ecoteurs to empty the oil camps of people before they were destroyed. They think we do not know this. They think that they are free to do what they want. But we know, and we know where they are. And we have judged them and voted, and agreed that they are to be punished, to the maximum in our system.”
“Which is?” Wade asked, in a serious silence; this was the first some of the ferals had heard about the decision, Val could see.
“Exile from Antarctica.”
Mai-lis looked around at all the members of her group, as if to defy any challenge to this judgment.
“About time,” Addie opined. “They’ll kick us all out if we don’t get rid of these jokers soon.”
Mai-lis nodded. “We have been listening to McMurdo, and from what we have heard, we know the U.S. Navy is coming. We want them and the NSF to be clear about what has happened up here. That we are not the ecoteurs nor the thieves. And that the thieves among us are gone.”
“Who do you think the ecoteurs are?” Val asked.
Mai-lis shrugged. “I suppose some radical environmentalist group from the north. People who have gone beyond Greenpeace-style protests to direct resistance, like Earth First! or Sea Shepherds. People who think Antarctica should be a pure wilderness, with no people at all. Many world park advocates don’t even like scientists down here.”
“So your group would not be something these people approve of,” Val said.
“Not at all. We have very little in common with them.”
“Deep ecologists,” Lars said scornfull
y. “Very deep! And we are so shallow!”
Mai-lis shrugged. “Their philosophy is good. There should be fewer humans on Earth, using fewer resources. We try to do that ourselves. But to make some parts of the Earth precious wilderness, while the parts we live on can be trashed as usual—no. There is not sacred land and profane land. It is all just land. All equally valuable.”
Ta Shu, watching Mai-lis closely (to Val they looked like cousins) nodded at this. “All sacred,” he said.
Mai-lis shrugged. “We try to find a different way here,” looking at Ta Shu. “We say the land is sacred, yes. Then we live on that sacred land. And theft is no part of that.”
Lars shook his head vehemently. “To glorify property like this, to kick people off the ice just because of property—”
“Their thieving will get us all kicked off the ice,” Mai-lis said sharply.
Lars got up and stalked away, which drew some supporters in his wake.
“And the Antarctic Treaty?” Wade said.
“Yes?”
“Aren’t you breaking it by being here?”
Some rude noises from the ferals still listening.
Mai-lis shrugged again. “Aren’t you too breaking it by being here?” She stood up. “We don’t bother anyone, and we live very lightly on the land. We don’t change Antarctica even one-tenth as much as McMurdo Station alone. So we will argue the particulars of the Treaty before the World Court, if you like. But now we have to clean our own house.” She glanced after Lars: “Because I am a pragmatical, and I want to be allowed to stay here.” She scowled. “So I want you to witness this.”
Sometimes life gives us such opportunities. In moments of pressure things flow quickly in a new direction. Through a mountain opening, and here we are in a new land. Source of the peach blossom stream, green valley in an ice world, like our pale blue dot in space. My friends, I hope I am reaching you now, but cannot be sure. I am saving often just in case. If you are with me, note please how quickly we leave this little refuge notched in the rock, where people were making a home in the ice. It seemed to me a cave from the paleolithic. The minds in there were fully engaged. They were no longer sleepwalking. I could have stayed there a long time, and never wanted for anything else. And yet my companions have agreed to leave, and I am going with them. Perhaps there was no other choice.