Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson

Author:Kim Stanley Robinson [Robinson, Kim Stanley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf

9. Big Trouble

Wade slept through the flight to Shackleton Glacier Camp, and sleepwalked his way through the transition from Here to helo, then fell asleep again. The next time he woke he found himself suspended above the upper reaches of Shackleton Glacier, in the clear plastic bubble of a little Squirrel helicopter.

The ice curved down to the sea in a broad sweep, with long lines of rubble marking very clearly the direction of the flow, and tributary glaciers pouring in and merging in just the way the water of rivers would, although here the eddies and cross-currents were indicated by rippled blue crevasse patches, or even in some places gnashed into fields of turquoise blades.

The Kiwi helo pilot pointed down at one such field. "Ever seen one of those close up?"

"No. "

They dropped like a shot bird, tilting forward and to the left as they spiralled tightly downward. Wade gritted his teeth. Kiwi pilots were scary, as he had begun to learn on his flight down from Christchurch.

The young American pilots working for ASL moved their big beasts around the air like trucks, and like good truck drivers they were impressive; but the Kiwis, older and wiser, flew as if their helos were extensions of their bodies, like dragonflies. This man looked unconcerned as he brought the helo swooping down to hover, in dragonfly style, well down inside an avenue of serac skyscrapers; Wade was shocked at their size, as from a thousand feet up they had looked like waist-high ripples. "Wow. "

The pilot pulled back up and continued without comment. Back at cruising height, the crevasse patches again looked like ice cubes; but now, knowing how big they really were, Wade's sense of scale popped like one's ears did, and he realized that the glacier and the mountains flanking it were all huge, huge, huge.

The helo buzzed along like a bee up a winter canyon. It was a big planet.

Ahead a rusty rock island grew. A spill of glacier poured over a low point in its outermost ridge, and fell down toward a bowl of rock that it never even reached, much less filled. As they passed the island Wade could now see the polar cap, extending to the south forever. On the southernmost point of the island clustered a tiny knot of green square roofs, like Monopoly houses. Vertigo of scale: it was as a gnat or a microbe that he watched the tiny structures recede behind them, and the nunatak get lower and smaller, until they were out over the ice of the polar cap, and it was ice as far as they could see, on a world grown as big as Jupiter, or the sun itself. Then the helo began to drop again. They were landing on the ice. The complex of buildings they descended on was of course bigger than it had appeared from above. As Wade got out of the helicopter the complex looked entirely deserted, in the usual Antarctic way; everyone indoors. The empty continent indeed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.