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.
After some flickering the Kiwi images were replaced by a bright white landscape: the Royal Society Range, seen from across the Ross Sea. “Hey!” Wade said, leaning forward from the edge of the bed, staring into the image. That was the view from Observation Hill!
Ta Shu’s narration was in Chinese, of course, and very rapid and fluid, not at all like his English. Of course. After a minute or two of listening to his voice, Wade’s curiosity grew. He wanted to know what Ta Shu was saying at such length and with such apparent urgency. He got up and went back to his briefcase, and pulled out his laptop, and called up the menu for the translation programs that the laptop contained in its hard drive. He had heard that Chinese-to-English programs were still the worst of all the major language programs, but still it would be better than nothing.
He put the laptop next to the TV and punched in the code for the translation program. After a short pause the laptop began to speak in English, almost as rapidly as Ta Shu himself, in a mechanical monotone.
“So my friends we are come to end of our adventure in Antarctica. Soon I will leave this land, I will fly north over the south ocean, to New Zealand. It has been a true event time, I am sure you agree. Many interruptions, many discoveries. Full of lands so powerful, action so strange, you must wonder if I am transmitting you from another world. But I remind you, all this happens on Earth. This too is Earth. A world beyond all telling. For me it has been a profound being, a trip. For you at home in China, watching what I have looked at in facemasks or on television screens, not so there. Without space, without spaciousness, as it must be. Like a story told, or a dream you have had. Of course this must be so. Where then have we been together? In a vision we share a story. Lemon said stories are false solutions to real problems. Lamb added corollary, that stories from other planets hence must be false solutions to false problems. What then have we done together? Look around you. Is it all a dream only? Or are all the worlds one world. Black said, Dreams commence obligation to world. Seashells say poets are the unknown government of the world. And we are all poets. So now we tell the world what next to do.”
The image on the TV panned left, to an expanse of white ice; the screen was cut horizontally right across the middle, blue above, white below, like a powerful Rothko. The view directly south. Ta Shu spoke again, and after a pause the laptop translator picked it up. “Ah yes. Very nice view. Now we come to the end of our time together, and I ask one thing of you, my friends who have stayed with me long and faithfully. When my transmission has ended, go outdoors. Go take a walk outside in the open air. Wherever you find yourself on the face of this planet, it is a good place. Breathe deeply the breath of the world. Look at the sky over our heads all together. Feel yourself walking; this too is thought. Feel the wind in your face. Feel the way you are animal, breathing in the spirit wind. If our time together gives you no more than this walk, then still yet it has done well. Farewell now my friends, until our next voyage together.”
The view from Ob Hill disappeared. Cut to a Chinese commercial. “Do you have trouble cleaning kitchen hardware?”
Wade turned off the TV. He went downstairs. He opened a glass door cautiously, but it was still warm. Out the door, into the hotel’s inner courtyard. It was night, the darkness like a caress to the eyes. He could feel his pupils blooming. Air warm and humid against his skin—so warm, so benign. The caress of the breeze. Maybe it would work after all. He walked over to the lawn by the pool, sat down on the warm fragrant grass. He ran his hands over it. He lay down in it, on his back, and looked up at the stars.
The next spring X made all his preparations, and took off for a walk across Ross Island.
It had been a busy winter. The McMurdo Field Services Co-op, usually called MacCoop, won the bid for the field services subcontract. PetHelo won the general contract; ASL was gone. After the initial celebrations, there had been endless hours of organizational meetings and paperwork in Mac Town. In the meantime, friends had helped X to build a little hut on the ledge next to Knob Point, mostly out of parts scavenged from McMurdo’s construction yard Dumpsters: three arches of an old Jamesway frame, essentially, with new insulation, a triple-paned window with two panes cracked, and photovoltaic sheeting tacked to the outside for the coming sunny months. Inside there was a little propane stove for heating and cooking. A bed, a desk, a chair. It was very cozy, but X liked it that way. It was his place. Tucked back against the slope, out of the wind, invisible from below. Especially of course during these sunless months.