“It’s just play. Everything has its price; where would the thrill come from otherwise? Besides, countries will participate voluntarily. If you don’t want to play, then forget it.”
“You’re the only country that wants to play,” Ilyukhin snorted.
Davey waved a finger back and forth in front of his face. “No, my dear friend, once things have been made clear, I guarantee you that all countries, including yours, will voluntarily take part in these irresistible Olympic Games.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?… Now, let’s discuss which country will host the next Olympics. That ought to be a major agenda item for this meeting. If I’m not mistaken, the next city scheduled to host in the adults’ era was Manchester.”
“Absolutely not!” shouted Green, as if he’d been burned. “Do you really believe England will permit the world’s armed forces to enter its territory and turn it into a battlefield?”
Davey smiled faintly at the prime minister. “So is the British Empire simply abandoning the honor it fought so hard to win in the Common Era?” Then he turned to the Turkish president. “How lucky you are. If I recall correctly, Istanbul received the second-highest number of votes after Manchester.”
“No. We won’t do it!”
Davey looked about him, and then clapped Ilyukhin on the shoulder and pointed down at the prime minister of Canada. “Russia and Canada have the largest uninhabited areas. They’re fully capable of holding the Olympics there.”
“Shut up!” the Canadian prime minister yelled.
“Since you all proposed the war games, the Olympics really ought to be held in America,” Ilyukhin said, to a round of applause.
Davey burst out laughing. “I expected it would come to this. No one wants to hold the greatest Olympics of all time in their own country. But in fact this problem has a simple solution. You’re all forgetting that there’s a place on Earth that doesn’t belong to any country, and is entirely uninhabited. It’s as distant and as empty as the moon.”
“You mean Antarctica?”
“That’s right. And don’t forget, it’s not too cold anymore.”
Huahua said, “That’s a gross violation of the Antarctic Treaty!”
Davey smiled and shook his head. “The Antarctic Treaty? That’s an adult treaty. It doesn’t affect our play. Antarctica was an icebox that would freeze you to death in the Common Era, and that’s the condition underlying the treaty. If it had the climate it has now, hah! The continent would have been carved up long ago.”
The heads of state were silent, their minds racing as they realized the true nature of the question before them. Antarctica had turned into a habitable new continent since the supernova, and that fact had not escaped the world’s attention. For the many countries that had lost sizable portions of land to rising waters, that continent was their last hope.
Davey gazed meaningfully at the young leaders below him. “Once again, I note that participation in the World Games is completely voluntary. Perhaps, as President Ilyukhin said, no one will be willing to attend apart from us. Very well, we’ll go. The American children will go to Antarctica. Now let’s see which country doesn’t want to play!”
No one said anything.
“I told you,” Davey said smugly to Ilyukhin. “Everyone wants to play!”
9
THE SUPERNOVA WAR
ANTARCTICA
A low rumble came across the sea like spring thunder on the horizon.
“The frequency of the breakaways is increasing,” Huahua said, looking in the direction of the sound.
There was another rumble, clearer this time, from a collapse on a mountain of ice close to the shore, and they watched as a chunk of the big silver peak plunged into the ocean, kicking up a high spray. Huge waves quickly reached land and swamped a flock of penguins on the beach; the penguins waddled about in a chaotic scramble once the waves receded.
Lü Gang said, “Last week, Specs and I took the destroyer Huangshan around the barrier, and chunks kept falling off all the time. So much crashing. It’s like the whole continent is melting!”
“Half the shelf over the Ross Sea has melted. At this rate, Shanghai and New York will turn into Venice in two months,” Huahua said with concern.
Huahua, Specs, and Lü Gang were standing on the Amundsen coast of Antarctica. They had arrived on Earth’s southernmost continent a month ago. On that day, after their plane had made its final fuel stop on Tierra del Fuego and crossed the Antarctic coastline for the first time, the pilot had said, “Hey, why does the land look like a panda?” From their high altitude the patchy black-and-white land was vastly different from the expanse of silvery white the children had always pictured in their minds. It was a new face for the continent. A ten-thousand-year-old snowpack was melting, revealing the black stone and dirt of the ground beneath. The patch beside the ocean on which the three children now stood was new ground free from snow. The polar sun hung low on the horizon, casting three long shadows behind them. The wind remained cold, but it had lost its bite, and it carried the damp breath of early spring, a flavor previously unknown here.
“Check this out.” Lü Gang bent down and plucked a small plant from the dirt. It was a weird-looking thing, dark green with thick leaves.
Huahua said, “Those things are everywhere. I’ve heard they’re prehistoric vegetation, extinct everywhere else in the world. Their seeds were preserved in the Antarctic soil, and now they’ve been resurrected after the climate change.”
“Antarctica was warm once, long ago. The world keeps on oscillating,” Specs said.
The armies of the countries taking part in the World Games were assembling in Antarctica. So far, 102 army divisions, with roughly 1.5 million soldiers, had arrived, including twenty-five divisions from the US, twenty from China, eighteen from Russia, twelve from Japan, eight from Europe, and nineteen from other countries. Even if they managed only a single company, practically all of the countries in the world were participating. Troops were still coming in by sea and air, and many countries were shipping materials and troops through waypoints in Argentina and New Zealand.
Since the majority of armies were using Argentina as a transit base and setting off for Antarctica from ports and airports in the southern part of the country, they made landfall across the Drake Passage on the Antarctic Peninsula. But they eventually realized that the peninsula was too narrow for large-scale war games, and so the gaming region was set in the broader region of Marie Byrd Land. In that vast wilderness, countries were at work building their own land bases; to facilitate bringing in supplies directly from the ocean, the bases were clustered near the shore of the Amundsen Sea, along a long, narrow strip between Thurston Island and Cape Dart, spaced anywhere from fifty to a hundred kilometers apart.
The three children watched the breakaways from the shore for a while, and then reboarded one of the three tracked all-terrain vehicles that were waiting. The small convoy set off to the west, heading to the American base for the first meeting of countries participating in the war games. The original plan had been to go by helicopter, but the three young leaders wanted to see the region up close and in person, so they went overland. Passable roads had not yet been cleared between the different countries’ bases, so they had to resort to specialized vehicles originally intended for polar scientific expeditions during the adults’ era.
The scenery was monotonous. The left-hand side fluctuated between black exposed ground and white snow cover, and the terrain was predominantly level with low-lying hills. To the right was the Amundsen Sea and its host of icebergs, and a surface littered with chunks of various sizes broken off from the ice shelf. Farther out were the ships of various countries at anchor. The Ross and Amundsen Seas now held more than fifteen thousand ships, forming the largest fleet ever recorded in human history. They included aircraft carriers and supertankers, like ocean-borne iron cities, as well as fishing vessels of just a few hundred tons. It was this gigantic fleet that had delivered more than a million people and an enormous quantity of material to this desolate continent, and had replaced the loneliness of the Southern Ocean with crowded noise, as if an endless chain of cities had sprung out of the water.