Ким Робинсон - The Ministry for the Future

Then Madagascar. The reforestation of that big island had been happening for well over a generation, and such was the fecundity of life that its rugged hillsides already looked densely forested, dark and wild. It had changed during Art’s time aloft, he said, and now the people of Madagascar were joining with Cubans and other island nations to help similar restoration efforts all over the world. Indonesia, Brazil, and west Africa were teammates in this effort. Rewilding, Art called it. They were rewilding down there.

That night when Mary joined Art in his understudy, Madagascar was already behind them, but the air still seemed to carry its spicy scent. Art sat looking back at the island, bulking like a sea creature with thick napped fur. He seemed content. They sipped their whiskies for a while, enjoying a companionable silence. Then they talked about other voyages they had made. He asked about her escape on foot over the Alps, apparently a famous story of her professional life, and she made it brief, talked about the Oeschinensee, and Thomas and Sibilla, and the Fründenjoch. Have you flown your Clipper over the Alps? she asked.

Once or twice, he said. It’s a bit much. They’re too high. And the weather is just so variable.

I love the Alps, she said. They’ve caught my affection.

He regarded her with a little smile. A shy Irishman. She knew that type and liked it. She had always liked those men who kept to themselves, who had only a sidelong look for her. Probably there was something back there in his past, some event or situation that had made him so aloof; but the island world he had made for himself was one that she was coming to like. Or she could see why he liked it. He was younger than she was, but old enough that they were in that temporal space that felt roughly contemporaneous.

These were fleeting thoughts. Mostly she just watched the ocean and the great black island behind them, slowly receding. But they were thoughts that led in a certain direction. She tried to track them as if they were shy animals. Desire stirring in her, maybe that was like a tracker’s curiosity. On the hunt. A hope for contact. Then in the midst of her musing he stood, saying he was feeling tired. Time for bed. He led the way up to the main gallery, said good night and turned toward his cabin.

Not a mind reader, she thought. Recalling that in her youth she had seemed to be able to reach out telepathically. Or maybe it had been a matter of looks, of pheromones. Animals in heat. Not at their age. But there was no rush.

Nothing more than that happened between them for the rest of that voyage. They still met on some nights in the viewing chamber to chat, but no more Madagascars; they were too far south.

Over the endless ocean, angling west to fight the great shove of the westerlies. Their pushback caused the Clipper to tremble and rock more than earlier in their voyage. Then one morning she woke and went to the viewing chamber, and there to the south lay Antarctica. Everyone was standing at the forward window to see it. The ocean was distinctly darker than before, almost black, which itself was strange, and faintly ominous; then to the south a white land like a low wall, white flecked with a black blacker than the strangely black sea. This great escarpment of ice and rock extended from east to west for as far as they could see.

Antarctica. It was early autumn, the sea ice minimal, although as they flew south they saw that there were icebergs everywhere. These made no pattern, just white chunks on black water. An occasional misshapen iceberg of jade or turquoise hue. Flocks, or it seemed rather shoals, of tiny penguins dotted some of these icebergs. Once they flew over a pod of orcas, sleek-backed and ominous. On tabular bergs they sometimes saw Weddell seals, looking like slugs splayed on the ice, often with smaller slugs attached to their sides like leeches. Mother and child. Their cousins, down here thriving on ice. If they were thriving.

Then Antarctica itself, white and foreboding. Ice Planet.

It was surreal in that icy desolation to come on six giant aircraft carriers, arranged in a rough hexagon like a coven of city-states, surrounded by smaller craft—icebreakers, tugboats, shore craft—it was hard to tell what the smaller craft might be, they were so small.

Apparently aircraft carriers made excellent polar stations, being nuclear powered, and outweighing ordinary icebreakers by a thousand times or more. Sea ice stood no chance against such behemoths, they were icebreakers from God and could leave anytime they wanted to; but they didn’t. They made a little floating city, anchored by the shore of Antarctica, supporting various inland encampments, all of which had been airlifted upcountry from here.

They passed over the carrier city and landed on the snowy surface of the continent itself. Out of the Clipper onto flat snow. Very bright and very cold, although no colder than Zurich on a windy winter’s day.

Around them cloth-walled huts, blue-glassed boxes. The camp managers were happy to meet Mary, seemed to consider her their patroness, which made her laugh. And they were well-acquainted with Captain Art, a frequent visitor.

The glacier slowdown operation had been a success. Ice fields had therefore also slowed. All this would have been impossible without the navies helping. Aircraft carriers were mobile towns. Deploying them like this was a chance to make use of the huge amounts of money that had been spent building them. Swords into plowshares kind of thing.

“Like the Swiss,” Mary observed. “Can we see a pumping site?”

Of course. Already scheduled. For sure a feature of interest.

All of Art’s passengers occupied only a corner of one of their giant helicopters. Helmets on, sit sideways looking out through a small window, then up, straight up, not like the Clipper ’s rise. Then over endless white snow, listening to the pilot and her crew discuss things in a language she didn’t recognize. Black sea behind them receding from view.

“Why is the ocean black down here?” she asked into her helmet’s microphone.

“No one knows.”

“I heard one guy say it’s because the water is so clean down here, and the bottom so deep starting from right offshore, that you’re seeing down to the dark part of the ocean where the sunlight doesn’t penetrate. So you’re seeing through super-clear water to the black of the deeps.”

“Can that be right?”

“I heard the plankton down here are black, and they color the water.”

“Lots of days it looks as blue as anywhere, I think.”

“No way!”

Then they were descending. Snow or ice as far as they could see. Then a cluster of black dots. Around the dots black threads, like a broken spider web. These dots and lines held civilization suspended over the abyss.

“How many stations are there like this one?” she asked.

“Five or six hundred.”

“And how many people does that add up to?”

“The stations are mostly automated. Maintenance and repair crews fly in as needed. There are caretakers in some of them. But mainly it’s construction crews, moving around at need. I don’t know, twenty thousand people? It fluctuates. There were more a few years ago.”

The helo landed with a foursquare thump. They unbelted, stood awkwardly, filed down the narrow gap between seats and wall and down metal steps to the ice.

Cold. Bright. Windy. Cold.

Light blasted around the edges of her sunglasses and blinded her. Tears were blown off her eyes onto her sunglasses, where they froze in smears. She tried to see through all that. Blinking hard, she followed the others toward this settlement’s main hut, like a blue-walled motor home on stilts.

“Wait, I don’t want to go inside yet,” she protested. “I want to see.”