Kim Robinson: Antarctica

“Fat chance.”

“But it is a chance! The Ethics Committee might go chaotic and swerve and throw him out. The moment is here, Phil, and it’s important.”

“What I do out on the road is important too.”

“Of course, Phil, of course! But you wouldn’t have to stay off the road for long. Depending. I mean if you picked up some momentum, then maybe you would want to stay. Things are riding in the balance here,” Wade finding it oh so easy to read back some of Phil’s midnight rambling, “we’re at an unstable moment in history, the teeter-totter is wavering there in the middle, co-opification versus the Götterdämmerung , they’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers! The time is ripe, Phil, ripe for you to come falling down out of space onto our side of the teeter-totter and catapult them out of there!”

“Hmm, yes, well. It would be nice to stick a pin in Winston anyway, at least.”

“It sure would! That bastard. Pop him like a balloon.”

“Indeed. Hmm, yes—but I’ve got a lot of commitments out here. I don’t know what I could do about that.”

“I’ll represent you where I can, Phil. I’m thinking of staying in New Zealand a while longer, try to tie up some of the loose ends of this Antarctic business, see what I can do. After that I could cover for you out on the road, and of course keep track of this Antarctic situation for you, and I can keep making reports to you, be your eyes for you so to speak, like I’ve been doing here, while you kick their ass in Washington.”

“Hmm, yes … So you’ve got solid evidence Texacon has been drilling in Antarctica since the last campaign?”

“Photos in color, Sam said. Photos from space that read their phone numbers off the screens on their wrist phones.”

“Cool. Interesting. Drop back in like a bomb. Blow their minds. That would be fun, wouldn’t it? Might even get the Antarctic Treaty ratified. That would be a coup. Although it’s funny—if it works, then you’ve got to say it was those ecoteurs that did it—they found the right part of the system and gave it a whap, it’s admirable in a way.”

“Don’t say that on the floor of the Senate.”

“You don’t think I should?”

“Lawmakers endorsing law-breaking? No. It’s unseemly.”

“Obscene? Come on, Wade. Its lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.”

“Just don’t say that on the floor of the Senate.”

“We’ll see. I never know for sure what I’ll say when the moment comes. But just between you and me, I admire those ecoteur guys.”

“Because they took action.”

“Okay, Wade, okay. I’ll go to Washington. I’ll talk to Glen and Colleen here, and John back at the office, we’ll try to set it up. Getthose photos to me, and we’ll work from there.”

“They’re on their way. I sent them to the office.”

“I’m in Samarkand, Wade. Send them here too. And try to call during business hours. Call me tomorrow, and we’ll continue this.”

“Sure thing.”

Wade sat on his hotel bed, feeling himself vibrate. He liked Phil Chase; he wanted to keep working for him. And co-opification was going to be a long hard campaign. But if he could keep Phil convinced that he was on the edge of winning, or at least in the heart of the battle, then Phil would stay in Washington, and Wade would have to be out on the road, serving as his eyes. Which meant that Wade was going to have to keep finding things big enough to keep Phil in Washington in order to be able to stay out on the road, with the chance of occasionally coming to Christchurch. In short, making Phil save the world in order to create the off chance of returning to Antarctica. It almost made sense.

After a while, feeling time suddenly heavy on his hands, he went out and took the shuttle bus into downtown Christchurch. He looked out the windows at the trees and the low clouds, stunned by the greens and the warm wet air. Sixty Fahrenheit, they said. He couldn’t imagine what D.C. would feel like. Oh but it was October. It would be cold in D.C. Cold, well—it would be cool.

In downtown Christchurch he wandered, overwhelmed at every turn. Smells of coffee, food cooking, Kiwi voices. The faces from Masterpiece Theatre . Next to the Avon River, a statue of Scott, in concrete forever, wearing what Wade saw now was ridiculous gear. On the pedestal: to search, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Tennyson’s immortal concrete. Ta Shu had told him that right around the time Scott had died, his two-year-old son had rushed into his mother’s bedroom in England and said “Daddy’s not coming home.” You could be immortalized in concrete, or see your kid grow up. Better a live donkey than a dead lion, Shackleton had said. Scott hadn’t agreed. But which would the world choose? What story did they like better?

Wade wandered in the huge botanical garden at the south end of the little downtown. There were so many shades of green! And varieties of plants. All these species had evolved out of lichens and mosses, it was amazing what the warm world had generated. He was still vibrating with the props. He saw that there appeared to be people living in these gardens, under the big trees. Ferals here too.

On a complex of soccer fields south of the botanical garden, crowds of people surrounded a group that were inflating enormous bright balloons—like hot-air balloons, only filled from gas cannisters. Some of the balloons reminded Wade of the blimps they had flown in over the Transantarctics. Others were truly huge, their gondolas like three-story Amsterdam houses. A festival atmosphere. People with picnic baskets, waving at the departing flyers.

“Where are they going?” Wade asked one of them.

Wherever the wind took them. Can’t do much else in a balloon. Stocked to live aloft for up to a year, some of them. Take a sabbatical in the clouds, or work up there. Go around the world a few times. Off on a tramp. Sky tramping, they called it.

“Going feral?”

That’s what the Aussies call it.

“Much of that here?”

Yeah sure. Most of the kids off in the wild. The balloons are more family. Like boating. Hook a bunch of them together once they get aloft. We’ve always been a bit like that here. Not very many people. A lot of land. Nothing new to us in these McMurdo Protocols you see in the paper. We redrew all our county lines to match the watershed boundaries, a long time ago.

Then the balloons and blimps were all inflated. One by one, up and up and off into the wind, mingling with the low liquid clouds. It was surprising how clearly you could tell liquid clouds from frozen ones. These were as wet as a bath, and dropping a bit of rain on them all. No one noticed.

When the balloons were gone Wade wandered off. He was aimless, and vibrating still. Christchurch looked like a California town.

That night in his hotel there was nothing on the TV news about the balloon departure. It had to have been a couple hundred people taking off at least. But as far as the news was concerned it had not happened. Wade was puzzled. He channel surfed trying to find mention of it. Good visuals, perfect story for TV. Nothing. It had not happened. But if you’ve seen something with your own eyes and then there is no mention of it on the news, who are you going to believe?

Suspended between worlds. Vibrating on a hotel bed like a Herc engine idling, in front of a muted TV, the images familiar but drained of all meaning. Looking at them Wade was reminded that as he had left McMurdo, Ta Shu had given him a TV chip that would allow him to hook into Ta Shu’s show in China. Now he dug in his briefcase until he found the little plastic minidisk, and went to the TV and inserted the disk into the slot in the TV’s control panel.