This was their destination, Amelia was told. She flew inland to get a better look at the black peaks, neck deep in ice. They looked like a line of degraded pyramids. There were horizontal striations of red rock in these black triangles, and the red rock had some holes in it. “The black rock is basalt, the red rock is dolerite,” Amelia repeated from her studio feed. She listened to them for a while longer and then said what they had said, but in her own words, this being her usual method. “These peaks are part of the Wegener Range, named after Alfred Wegener, the geologist who pointed out that South America fit into West Africa, which suggested some kind of continental drift must be happening. I always thought that when I was a girl. People laughed at him, but when tectonic plate theory came in he was vindicated. It was like, Duh! Trust your eyeballs, people! So I guess it sometimes pays to point out obvious things. I hope so, since I do it all the time, right? Although I don’t know if I’ll get a mountain range named after me.”
The land reared up before them like a black-and-white photo taken on some colder and spikier planet. “These peaks are about five thousand feet tall, and they’re only a few miles in from the coast. The hope is that our polar bears can use the caves in those dolerite layers. They’ll be at about the same latitude they were in Canada, so the seasonal light cycle should be about the same. And there are Argentineans and Chileans on this peninsula reintroducing the ancient beech forest on the newly exposed land. Mosses, lichens, trees, and insects. And of course the sea is absolutely chock-full of seals and fish and crabs and all. It’s a very rich biome, even though it doesn’t look like it. Which I mean, gosh, actually it looks completely barren! I don’t think I would do very well here! But you know. Polar bears are used to getting by in a polar environment. Pretty amazing really, when you consider that they’re mammals just like us. It doesn’t look possible that mammals could live down here, does it?”
Her techs reminded her that the Weddell seals were also mammals, which she had to admit was true. “Well, mammals can do almost anything, I guess that’s what I’m saying,” she added. “We are simply amazing. Let’s always remember that.”
Having looked at the potential winter dens from as close as the airship could come, Amelia turned back toward the coast. A little bit of katabatic wind pushed them along, and as they floated downslope the airship rocked and quivered. From behind her in the gondola came the muted low roars of bears in distress. “Just hold your horses!” Amelia called down the hall. “We’ll have you down in just a few minutes. And are you going to be surprised!”
Very quickly she was over the coastline, and with some shuddering she was able to turn up into the wind and then descend. This area looked promising; there was an open black lead in the sea ice, clogged with icebergs, then beyond that more sea ice and finally open water, black as obsidian. The sea ice was covered with Weddell seals, their pups, and their blood and pee and poop. Meanwhile the land rose from the sea ice not in cliffs but in lumpy hills, giving the bears places to hide, to dig dens, to sneak up on the seals, and to sleep. It all looked very promising, at least from a polar bear’s perspective. From a human perspective it looked like the iciest circle of hell.
She brought the airship down to the ice, fired anchors like crossbow bolts into the snow, and winched down on them until the gondola was resting on the snow. Now the time had come. She checked the camera array to reassure her techs, and then could not keep herself from gearing up and jumping down onto the snow. After two seconds of thinking it wasn’t so bad, the cold bit deep into her and she shouted at the shock of it. Her eyes were pouring tears, which were freezing on her cheeks.
“Amelia, you can’t be out there when the bears are released.”
“I know, I just wanted to get a shot of the outside.”
“We have drones getting those shots.”
“I just wanted to see what it felt like out here.”
“Okay, but go back inside so we can release the bears and get you back in the air. It isn’t good for the ship to be tied to the ground in a wind like this.”
It wasn’t that windy, she felt, although what wind there was easily cut through her clothes and rattled her bones. “Yikes it’s cold!” she cried, and then for the sake of her audience added, “Okay, okay, I’ll come in! But it’s very invigorating out here! The bears are going to love it!”
Then she climbed the steps back into the little antechamber of the gondola, like an airlock, and with some stumbling got back inside. It was insanely warm compared to outside. She cheered herself, and when she was back on the bridge she informed her crew up north and got to the windows on the side where the door to the bears’ enclosure would open.
“Okay I’m ready, let them out!”
“You are the one controlling the door, Amelia.”
“Oh yeah. Okay, here they go!”
And she pushed the double buttons that allowed the exterior door of the bears’ quarters to open. Between the wind pouring into the door and the bears pouring out, the ship got quite a shaking, and Amelia squealed. “There they are, how exciting! Welcome to Antarctica!”
The big white bears ambled away, foursquare and capable-looking, their fur slightly yellow against the snow, and riffling on the breeze, which they sniffed curiously as they trundled seaward. Not too far offshore, just beyond a narrow black lead, the sea ice was covered with a whole crowd of Weddell seals, with many moms lying around nursing their pups. They looked like giant slugs with cat faces. Alarming really. And yet they didn’t look alarmed by the bears, as why should they? For one thing the bears were now nearly invisible, such that Amelia only caught glimpses of them, like a crab made of black claws, or a pair of black eyes like the coal eyes of a snowman, glancing back her way and then winking out. For another thing the seals had never seen polar bears before and had no reason to suspect their existence.
“Yikes, I can’t even see them anymore. Oh my gosh, those seals are in trouble! Possibly there will have to be some population dynamics shakeout around here! But you know how that goes, fluctuations of predator and prey follow a pretty clean pattern. The number of predators swings up and down a quarter of a curve after their prey species, in the sine wave on the graph. And to tell the truth, I think there are millions of seals down here. The Antarctic coastal life zone seems to be doing well. Hopefully the polar bears will benefit from that, and join the other top predators down here in a happy harmony, a circle of life. For now, let’s get some altitude under this baby and see what we can see.”
She pushed the release button on the anchor bolts and they were freed by the explosives in their tips. Up flew the Assisted Migration, skewing on the wind, bounding up and down on itself and blowing quickly out to sea. She turned it into the wind and had a look below. White shore, black-and-white leads, white sea ice, black open water, all gleaming brassily in the low sun of midday. Hazy horizon, sky white above it, a milky blue overhead. The six bears were completely invisible.
Of course each of them was tagged with a radio transmitter and a few minicams, so Amelia’s viewers would get to see them live their lives on her show. They would join the many other animals she had moved into life zones better able to support them. Amelia’s Animals was a very popular spin-off site in the cloud. She was curious herself to see how they did.
She was headed home, and almost to the equator, when Nicole appeared on her screen, looking upset.
“What’s wrong?” Amelia asked.
“Have you got your bears’ feed on?”
“No, why?” She turned it on and got nothing. “What happened?”
“We’re not sure, but they all went out at once. And in some of them you could see what looked like an explosion. Here.”
She tapped away, and then Amelia was looking at the Antarctic peninsula and the sea ice: then there was a bright white light, and nothing more.
“Wait, what was that? What was that?”
“We’re not sure. But we’re getting reports that it was some kind of a … some kind of an explosio
n. In fact there’s feed coming from someone … the UN? The Bureau of Atomic Scientists? … maybe Israeli intelligence? Anyway, there’s also been a statement released to the cloud, claiming responsibility, from something called the Antarctic Defense League. Oh, that’s it. Some kind of small nuclear incident. Something like a small neutron bomb, they’re saying.”
“What?” Amelia cried. Without planning to she sat down hard on the floor of the bridge. “What the hell? They nuked my polar bears?”
“Maybe. Listen, we’re thinking you should head to the nearest city. This seems to be some new level of protest. If it’s one of the green purity groups, they may go after you too.”
“Fuck them!” Amelia shouted, and started to beat the table leg beside her, then to cry. “I can’t believe them!”
No response from Nicole, and Amelia suddenly realized they were still transmitting her response to her audience. She cursed again and killed the feed, over Nicole’s protest. Then she sat there and cried in earnest.
The next day Amelia stood in front of one of her cameras and turned it on. She had not slept that night, and sometime after the sun had come up, looking like an atomic bomb over the eastern horizon, she had decided she wanted to talk to her people. She had thought it over while eating breakfast, and finally felt she was ready. No contact with her studio; she didn’t want to talk to them.
“Look,” she said to the camera. “We’re in the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. We caused it. Fifty thousand species have gone extinct, and we’re in danger of losing most of the amphibians and the mammals, and all kinds of birds and fish and reptiles. Insects and plants are doing better only because they’re harder to kill off. Mainly it’s just a disaster, a fucking disaster.
“So we have to nurse the world back to health. We’re no good at it, but we have to do it. It will take longer than our lifetimes. But it’s the only way forward. So that’s what I do. I know my program is only a small part of the process. I know it’s only a silly cloud show. I know that. I even know that my own producers keep stringing me out in these little pseudo-emergencies they engineer because they think it adds to our ratings, and I go along with that because I think it might help, even though sometimes it scares me to death, and it’s embarrassing too. But to the extent it gets people thinking about these projects, it’s helping the cause. It’s part of the larger thing that we have to do. That’s how I think of it, and I would do anything to make it succeed. I would hang naked upside down above a bay of hungry sharks if that would help the cause, and you know I would because that was one of my most popular episodes. Maybe it’s stupid that it has to be that way, maybe I’m stupid for doing it, but what matters is getting people to pay attention, and then to act.
“So look. It’s messy now. There’s genetically modified food being grown organically. There’s European animals saving the situation in Japan. There are mixes of every possible kind going on. It’s a mongrel world. We’ve been mixing things up for thousands of years now, poisoning some creatures and feeding others, and moving everything around. Ever since humans left Africa we’ve been doing that. So when people start to get upset about this, when they begin to insist on the purity of some place or some time, it makes me crazy. I can’t stand it. It’s a mongrel world, and whatever moment they want to hold on to, that was just one moment. It is fucking crazy to hold on to one moment and say that’s the moment that was pure and sacred, and it can only be like that, and I’ll kill you if you try to change anything.
“And you know what? I’ve met some of these people, because they come to meetings and they throw things at me. Eggs, tomatoes—rocks. They shout ugly hateful things. They write even worse things from their hidey-holes. I’ve watched them and listened to them. And they all have more money and time than they really need, and so they go crazy. And they think everyone else is wrong because they aren’t as pure as they are. They are crazy. And I hate them. I hate their self-righteousness about their so-called purity. I’ve seen in person how self-righteous they are. They are so self-righteous. I hate self-righteousness. I hate purity. There is no such thing as purity. It’s an idea in the heads of religious fanatics, the kind of people who kill because they are so good and righteous. I hate those people, I do. If any of them are listening right now, then fuck you. I hate you.
“So now there’s a group claiming to be defending the purity of Antarctica. The last pure place, they call it. The world’s national park, they call it. Well, no. It’s none of those things. It’s the land at the South Pole, a little round continent in an odd position. It’s nice but it’s no more pure or sacred than anywhere else. Those are just ideas. It’s part of the world. There were beech forests there once, there were dinosaurs and ferns, there were fucking jungles there. There will be again someday. Meanwhile, if that island can serve as a home to keep the polar bears from going extinct, then that’s what it should be.
“So, yeah. I hate these fucking murderers. I hope they get caught and thrown in jail and forced to do landscape restoration for the rest of their lives. And if people decide it’s best, I’m going to take more polar bears south. And this time we’ll defend them. No one gets to drive the polar bears to extinction just because they’ve got some crazy idea of purity. It isn’t right. Purity my ass. The bears have priority over a creepy, stupid, asshole idea like that.”
Languidezza per il caldo (Languidly, because of the heat)
—Vivaldi’s instruction for the Summer section of his “Four Seasons”
e) a citizen
Winter comes barreling down from the Arctic and slams into New York and suddenly it looks like Warsaw or Moscow or Novosibirsk, the skyscrapers a portrait in socialist realism, grim and heroic, holding blackly upright against the storm, like pillars between the ground and the scudding low clouds. This curdled gray ceiling rolls south spitting snow, the needle sleet shooting down through slower snowflakes that swirl down and melt on your glasses no matter how low you pull your hat. If you have a hat; many New Yorkers don’t bother even in storms, they remain costumed as executives or baristas or USA casuals but always in costume, usually in black, acting their parts, the only concession to the storms being a long wool greatcoat or a leather jacket without insulation, with many a tough guy and gal still in blue jeans, that most useless pretense of clothing, bad at everything except striking that cigarette smoker’s pose which so many appear to value so much. Yes, New Yorkers more than most regard clothing as semiotics only, signaling toughness or disdain or elegance or seriousness or disregard, all achieving their particular New York look in defiance of the elements, the elements being just a dash between subway and building, and thus they not infrequently die in their doorways while trying to get their keys out of their pockets, yes, many a dead New Yorker’s body has emerged when the snowdrifts melt in spring looking startled and indignant as if to say What gives, how could this be?
Those who survive the storms despite their nitwit attire move about the city with their hands thrust deep in their pockets, because only the outdoor workers bother to wear gloves; they keep their bare heads down and hurry from building to building on the hunt for a quick Irish coffee to reanimate their fingers and heat up enough to stop the shivering and fuel a quick trek home. Would take a taxi if they ever took taxis, but they don’t of course, taxis are for tourists or the fucking executives or if you’ve made a dreadful scheduling mistake.
The Hudson on these stormy days is gray and all chopped by whitecaps trailing long lines of foam. It’ll stay that way until it freezes, the clouds low over such a charcoal sky that the white snowflakes stand out sharply overhead, then are visible tumbling sideways outside every window, also visible below as they fall onto the streets and instantly melt. Looking down from your apartment window over the hissing radiator, through the grillework of fire escapes, you see that the trash can lids are the first things to turn white, so for a while the alleys below are weirdly dotted with white squares and circles; then the snow chills the street surfaces enough to st
ick without melting, and everything flat quickly turns white. The city becomes a filigree of vertical blacks and horizontal whites all chopped and mixed together, a Bauhaus abstraction of itself, beautiful even if its citizens never look up to see it, having dressed so stupidly as to make every trip to the corner store a worst journey in the world, with that fatal doorstep result possible for the most foolish or unlucky.
Then after the storms, in the silver brilliance of late winter, the cold can freeze everything, and the canals and rivers become great white floors and the city is transformed into an ice carving of itself. This magical chilly time breaks up and all of a sudden it’s spring, all the black trees tippled green, the air clear and delicious as water. You drink the air, stare stunned at the greens; that can last as much as a week and then you are crushed by the stupendous summer with its miasmatic air, the canal water lukewarm and smelling like roadkill soup. This is what living halfway between the equator and the pole on the east side of a big continent will do: you get the widest possible variance in weather, crazy shit for day after day, and just as the cold is polar, the heat is tropical. Cholera festers in every swallow of water, gangrene in every scrape, the mosquitoes buzz like the teeny drones of some evil genius determined to wipe out the human race. You beg for winter to return but it won’t.
Days then when thunderheads solid as marble rise up until even the superscrapers look small, and the black anvil bottoms of these seventy-thousand-foot marvels dump raindrops fat as dinner plates, the canal surfaces shatter and leap, the air is cool for an hour and then everything steams up again and returns to the usual fetid asthmatic humidity, the ludicrous, criminal humidity, air so hot that asphalt melts and thermals bounce the whole city in rising layers like the air over a barbecue.