Every day the weather allowed, he skied up through the rock garden to the cross-country trail and down into town, and did some work at the co-op office, and either stayed a night in the BFC office on the couch, or skied back home. Sometimes he went home on the sea ice, around Discovery Point. It depended on how much moonlight he had to work with. On dark nights it was best to go around on the sea ice, on moonlit nights it was fun to stay up on the ridge. He found that a full moon on the snowy land was bright enough to read by, much less ski. During these trips, and on his days off, he worked hard on his snow skills. He decided that he wanted to make a traverse of Ross Island, going over the three volcanoes and down to Cape Crozier, to see the “Return of the Sun” ceremony which George Tremont was planning to stage out there. This would be a big trip for him, X knew that well, and he prepared for it all winter. He found that unlike a lot of sports, mountaineering was mostly a matter of walking. One only had to walk without falling and one was a successful mountaineer. More a matter of navigation than athletic skill—at least at the level he was trying, which was merely to get around Ross Island. And so he had been pleased at his progress. Countless times he had climbed the rock steps from the sea ice up to his hut and back down again, to build his strength and endurance. He had worked on walking up and down steeper and steeper snow slopes; he had practiced with snowshoes on snow, and crampons on ice. He found he liked snowshoes better than skis, even if they were harder work; they were easier, indeed almost identical to walking in boots. He learned to use a GPS, and a crevasse detector. The crevasse detector was critical; without it X wouldn’t have had the courage to attempt hiking around on his own. As it was, whenever it beeped he stopped like Lot’s wife, and carefully figured out where he was, and where the crevasse was, and then he went around it. He would make extravagant detours, hiking miles out of his way, in order not to have to cross a crevasse, no matter how solid any snowbridges in it might appear. No crossing beep-beeps and he would be okay. And so he had gradually ranged farther and farther away, and spent nights out in a tent and sleeping bag, learning slowly to manipulate the gear and to trust in it to keep him alive and warm. The days—the endless succession of sunless hours—had passed quickly.
Back in his little hut the hours had also passed quickly. He had studied Heraclitus, and co-op economics. From time to time he heard from Carlos in Santiago. More often he heard from Wade, who emailed hellos from all over the world, having apparently switched roles with his senator (and X thought he knew why). The senator had returned to Washington, and gotten a rival in trouble with the Senate Ethics Committee about campaign donations, and as an indirect, fifty-dominoes-down-the-line result, it looked like the Antarctic Treaty renewal was going to be ratified soon. Wade seemed cautiously optimistic. The two messages he sent when actually in Washington on visits were brief and ambivalent: “We’re kicking ass,” and “This is not a good place.”
Along with his snippets of news, he sent X a lot of music that X had never heard before; it became clear that he was a rabid closet d.j. and inflictor-of-music-on-friends; but tucked in the little hut for as many hours as X was, he did not complain; on the contrary, he listened to these gifts again and again. Often he listened to them while watching Ta Shu’s latest transmission on his computer screen. These days Ta Shu was taking a boat trip down the Yangtze River. The translation program X used made him sound like a long succession of incoherent fortune cookies, but still it was interesting to see him take on the Chinese equivalent of the Bureau of Reclamation. And when this voyage was over, X was going to try to view a copy of Ta Shu’s Antarctic adventure; that would be even more interesting than the Yangtze, and it seemed almost certain that there would be some film of Val in it, too. There was footage of her in the SAR’s Happy Camper videos, X had found, and once he watched this footage over and over for most of one Sunday. Then he trashed the file and stopped looking for such things. But glimpses of her in Ta Shu’s program would be okay.
Late in the winter, despite X’s warnings and protests, the co-op hired Ron to come back down and run the heavy shop. X cursed when he heard the vote on this: “Damn it, he’s a pirate! He joined the ice pirates!”
“He was desperate,” Joyce said. “It doesn’t matter now. Get used to it.”
Later, thinking it over in his hut, X decided he could get used to it. After all it had not made him comfortable to think of Ron either plotting revenge in Chile or holed up drinking in some Florida beachfront. Certainly he would come back down and try to take everything over, and then there would be a major jerk in their fine new co-op; but at least it would be a jerk that X knew and liked. And X would not have to answer to him. And MacCoop would survive him.
Twice X got email messages from Val, just brief ones; once on his birthday, once on the solstice; but there they were, right there on his screen. Her winter was turning out not all that different from his. Like all the other animals wintering over down here, the ferals had to hunker down in the cold and dark, bunch together like the Emperor penguins. They made some expeditions out, apparently, but no one could stand the winter cold for long. The one interesting thing they had done was to carve a refuge in the ice cap itself, lighting it intensively for half the day, and living in this artificial oasis for several weeks without many trips outside. So Val was hibernating too.
X had replied to her messages carefully, and gone back to his Heraclitus. The same road goes both up and down. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wholeness arises from distinct particulars. All things come in seasons. Character is fate.
And now spring and George Tremont’s celebration were almost here, and so he took off, waving fondly to his battened-down little hut. It was close enough to the year’s first sunrise that there were a few hours of clear twilight bracketing noon every day, and he started in that clear gray light. There was a full moon as well, and after the twilight darkened he could still see the snow underfoot perfectly well in the moonlight. Up onto the ridge of Hut Point, around Castle Rock, and on up the long flank of Erebus. Up and up and up, one step at a time. Higher on the volcano the slope got steeper, but it was always just a matter of walking, and circumventing the beep-beeps. A shield volcano, nowhere precipitous. One step after another. Up and up, one step after another. The end of a circle is also its beginning. Snow-shoes were so wonderful.
He kept track of the time, and after six hours of hard climbing had passed, he stopped and took off his backpack, and pulled out his sleeping bag and tiny bivvy tent, and got in them and cooked a dinner on his little stove. After that he tried to sleep for a while. He was too excited to sleep very well, but after an hour or two he fell into a doze, and when he woke up, face freezing, he started the stove and cooked up some hot chocolate, then oatmeal. He got his boots on, got his backpack repacked, jumped out and repacked his tent. Then off he went again, poling methodically with his ski poles, his snowshoes clicking and squeaking. Left, right, left, right; up the great ghostly white mountain, luminous even in starlight only. Higher and higher.
Up on the highest slopes of the volcano it was very cold, and very still. No wind. He had checked with weather before setting off, and it was supposed to hold good for a week, but the air now was unusually still. In the lack of wind there was no sound; and only starlight illuminating the landscape, which nevertheless was clearly visible, white on black. Nothing moved for as far as the eye could see; as if time itself had frozen, and X the golem impervious to that freezing and left wandering still, tramping through eternity.