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“It’s like Antarctica out there,” Nile says as she walks backwards to close the door behind her. Her arms are full of firewood. “Total whiteout.”
“Nah,” says Andy, who is lying on the floor in front of the wood burner, paging through an old National Geographic; this cabin has a whole stash of them. Joe has another one in front of him, with an article on Cambodia. He’s sitting at the table, entertaining himself by recreating Angkor Wat in ballpoint in the margins of a three-day-old newspaper. “Nothing’s like Antarctica except Antarctica.”
“Oh, you’ve been, huh?”
Joe is halfway up when Nicky gets to Nile first, taking half of the wood; Joe sits back down.
“Getting cold in here,” he says. Nicky rolls his eyes—according to him, Joe is always too cold—but opens the wood burner to poke around at it while Nile stacks the wood to her satisfaction.
“Of course,” Andy responds to Nile’s question. “We’ve been everywhere. More or less.”
“Space is still waiting,” says Nicky.
Nile pulls one mitten off with her teeth. “Not a lot of wars in Antarctica.”
“No,” Andy agrees. “That was usually the point.”
“You want to hear about it?” Joe asks.
Nile laughs. “I think I’m about to hear about it whether I want to or not.”
“You have somewhere else to be right now?” Nicky says, amused.
“No.” Nile finishes stripping off her outdoor gear and curls up on the couch. “Go on. Tell me the story.”
*
They argued for months about whether it was a good idea. In 1911, it seemed like every nation that considered itself a world power was sending men to Antarctica; and the Norwegians, of course, who prided themselves on their polar exploration. The world’s eyes were on its final, unknown continent.
That had been the attraction for Joe, the mystery of it. They’d wandered almost everywhere by now, back and forth across the globe, war to war and land to land. Not so much by sea, after Quỳnh—but sometimes it was the only way to go where they meant to.
(“So when did you start flying places instead?” Nile asks. “Oooh, was it in biplanes?”
“Our first flight was a zeppelin, not an airplane—but let Joe keep going,” Andy says.)
That was why Andy had finally decreed they’d do it, Joe knew, even if she didn’t say it. Mawson’s expedition, setting out from Australia, was going to do as much oceanographic work as exploration of the icy land. She wanted to know how things lost at sea might be found.
(Andy does not protest this description, though her eyes darken. Nile has told them of her new dreams.)
Douglas Mawson was a white Australian with a receding hairline, deep-set eyes, and a fervent passion for bringing science to humanity’s last frontier. The team that was wintering over were going to do it all; meteorology, geology, biology. And he’d brought along someone to document it. That was dangerous, so Joe became Frank Hurley’s best friend, learning how to operate the cameras. There was only one photo with any of them in it. Maybe two.
(“Oh, I’ve seen that one, it’s in Copley’s collection,” Nile says.
“There’s more than two,” Andy says. “Joe was just head-over-heels for a new way of making pictures, don’t let him tell you anything else.”)
The compromise had been that while they’d talked their way onto Mawson’s crew, they’d stay with the ship, the Aurora. It was the wintering-over team who would get the real attention. Nicky had deeply resented this, because it had meant two return trips over the wild southern ocean. His tolerance for ships went back and forth, and it was on a downward swing in 1911.
His complaints had stopped, however, when—
(“I did not complain,” Nicky says.
“If that’s how you remember it, babe.”)
—when they had finally reached the edge of the ice. It was like nothing any of them had ever seen before. White mountains, sailing on the sea; the urgent cries of the birds, thousands on thousands; the languid bulk of seals and sea lions at rest. At a distance, they almost looked human, but this wasn’t a human world. Paradoxically, it was a reminder of how human they all were, despite their inexplicable gift.
“The edge of the world,” Booker said, exhaling out a cloud of steam into the icy air. “When did you find out that the world didn’t have one? I’ve never asked.”
“Didn’t really think about it until I went to Vinland,” Andy told him.
“Never,” said Joe, “we knew it was round. We just hadn’t been around it.”
“What about Columbus?”
Nicky scowled. “That idiot—and he was wrong about the size of the globe, besides what he did in the Caribbean—”
“Oh, now you’ve got him started,” Joe said to Booker, who looked alarmed, “That was a mistake.”
“But of course Andy and Joe have heard this all before,” Nicky said, virtuously, “so I will hold my tongue today.”
“At least this time they’re exploring something that probably nobody else has seen yet,” said Andy. “Instead of crowing about ‘discovering’ somewhere that thousands of people live.”
“It’s like a jigsaw,” Joe said, rubbing his hands together. “Stitching all the bits of coastline together. Turning it into a real place, and not a ghost on the edge of the map.”
“Maybe one day we’ll die here too,” Booker said. “What do you think?”
“What is there to fight over?” Nicky shrugged. “Only ice. And seals.”
“Plenty of whales. They’re short of those in the North Atlantic nowadays. Or glory. Most of them are here for glory, anyway. The Japanese, when we met them—they want to prove they’re on the same playing field as everybody else.”
“We’re here for science,” said Joe. “Or, Mawson is. I like that. And the Japanese crew had a scientist, too.”
“If people come here, war will, eventually,” said Andy. “It’s how it goes.”
“What would we even do with ourselves, without it?” Booker asked. Joe thought he meant it rhetorically. He answered anyway.
“Many things. We don’t have to kill to help people. We’re just good at it.”
“Then maybe this can be a new start.” Booker, for a minute, sounded hopeful.
Three years later they had all been in the trenches, of course, first at the Dardanelles and then in the mud of Belgium, but it had not seemed inevitable, not then. Especially not then, with the great southern ocean calm around them, punctuated with mountains of ice; a reminder that for all the technological advances of humanity, there were still places where they were small.
*
It had been thirty-six years before they’d come back. This time they’d known what they were in for, and it had been—not a fresh start, but an escape. Europe was blood and ash, worse than anything any of them had ever seen. East and South Asia weren’t much better. The echoes carried. At least on the ice, they were distant.
They hadn’t known it at the time, but the Ronne Expedition had been the last great private quest to the Antarctic, mapping the final truly unknown stretch of the continent.
(“It got tricky after that,” Andy adds. “Once the governments took over, after the Second World War…too many questions, too many records, not enough chaos.”)
Technology had advanced dizzyingly fast in less than forty years. They’d come this time with airplanes—although the weather had meant they didn’t get used half as much as anybody had hoped. There was something else new this time, too: two women, one married to the captain and one to the pilot. And Andy, of course, but she was calling herself Andrew.
That had worked for the men, but the women—not so much. Joe had come into the medical bay one afternoon between Valparaiso and Antarctica to find Andy smoking a cigarette with a moody expression, while Nicky sorted bandages. Nicky was traveling as the doctor—he’d gone to medical school again between the last two wars, and spent a lot of time during the second one with the Red Cross.
“You look like you’re hiding from something,” Joe said to Andy.
“Fuck off,” Andy said amiably, and then sighed. “It’s Mrs. Darlington. She thinks she’s figured me out, and she’s all…excited.”
“Figured you out how?” Nicky asked. Joe had been still getting used to Nicky then, but like Joe it had stuck during the war, and maybe it was better for them to be other people on the other side, anyhow.
“That Andy isn’t actually short for Andrew. She wants us to be all girls together, you know.” Andy made a face. “Along with Jackie Ronne. And she’s not wrong? But she’s not right. I don’t know how to be her kind of girl. God, they’re young.”
“I know that feeling,” said Joe, because he did; sometimes it still hit him full in the face, the stuff he was supposed to do or like or say or not say because he was a man, in this time, in this place. Nicky had been called a queer in London for wearing a pink shirt, two years ago; what did that even have to do with anything?
“Is it going to be a problem?” Nicky was finished sorting the bandages; he closed the box.
“Nah.” Andy blew out a ring of smoke. “They’ve both promised to keep quiet. I told them a story about my brother dying in the war and taking his place. Fuck, they’re good people. Just makes me feel old all over again.”
“That’s because you’re a crone,” Joe said, “practically—what’s that Russian witch—Baba Yaga.” Andy feinted at him with her cigarette; he ducked it, laughing.
(“Wait,” Nile says. “You were smoking in the medical bay?”
“It was 1948!” Nicky protests. “We didn’t know!”)
Andy wasn’t caught out, which was better for everybody, but the journey was much less of an escape than any of them had hoped. The world had been creeping closer and closer, with radio connecting every corner of the globe. This was the last truly unexplored area, and it wasn’t going to stay that way. The ship had sailed out of Texas, and people were already talking about whether there might be oil in Antarctica, or gold, whether it would be worth coming to the ends of the earth for those. Scientists had followed Mawson and his men, but now, so had soldiers. Even the eighteen-year-old Scout on this mission was a Marine veteran.
(“Marines aren’t soldiers—”
“I know, Nile, I know.”)
Oddly, it was Booker who seemed the happiest in the endless dark of the Antarctic winter. Maybe it was just that there was less to tell between Booker there and Booker the rest of the time. He’d been enthralled, when the endless night was clear, by the stars. That was how you really knew you were at the end of the earth. There were constellations Joe had never seen until he’d been two or three hundred, stars that had no names he knew, and once upon a time he’d known almost all of them. It really was a different world.
“How long is it until your comet?” Nicky asked him one evening. “We saw it just before we came here last, didn’t we?”
“Joe’s comet?” Booker said.
“It came by the year I was born,” Joe told him. “And then the year Nicky and I met Andy and Quynh, and—they called it after an Englishman, when they worked out it was the same one, coming back. Halley’s.”
“The year of the Siege of Belgrade,” Nicky said. “And again after the Malê revolt.”
“I like that one.” Andy smiled, with a hint of nostalgia. “It’s a good way to keep time. Comes back almost as soon as you start to wonder about it. Way back, it used to remind me how long I’d been somewhere.”
“It must be another forty years or so,” Joe said, counting in his head. “You’re right, it was last just before we sailed on the Aurora.”
“That has to be one thing that stays the same, right?” Booker said, as they all looked up. “The stars. No matter how long you live. That’s something to hold on to.”
“No,” Andy said, abruptly weary. “No. Some things stay a while, but give it long enough, and even the stars change.”
Booker had laughed, like she’d made a mild joke. Looking back, Joe could tell he hadn’t found it funny.
*
“Have you ever been back?” Nile asks, when Joe doesn’t continue. “On a cruise ship? Wintering over at McMurdo?”
“No, never.” Nicky shakes his head.
“I’m gonna put it on my list.” Nile smiles. “Of places I can go, because I’ve got time.”
“That’s the spirit,” Joe tells her. “Nicky, where are you going?”
Nicky is standing up and pulling on his coat. “The wind has died down. I’m going to go see if the stars are out. We spend too little time in places you can see them.”
“Oooh, I’m coming,” Nile says, scrambling up, and Joe stands up too. Even Andy does, stretching.
They bundle up and troop out. It’s still, the quiet that only comes after something has swept through. The stars, ah, the stars are glorious. Joe cranes his head to pick out the familiar shape of the Great Bear, and the Mother Camels next to it.
“What do you think about, when you look at them?” Nicky asks Nile.
“That thing you said Andy said. About them changing.”
“They’re not going to change for me anymore,” Andy reminds her. “It’s kinda…peaceful. Weirdly.” The corners of her eyes crinkle. “But you, kid, they’re going to change for you.”
“More than one way, I hope.”
“What’s that mean?” Joe asks.
Nile shrugs. “Space, right? We have time. People have been to the moon, since you were in Antarctica last. We live long enough, I reckon we’ll go out there. See the stars change because we’re moving through space, not just time.” She laughs. “Isn’t that something to think about?”
“It certainly is,” says Nicky. He puts an arm around Joe, and the other one around Nile. Andy wraps hers around Nile’s shoulders.
They stand there in the quiet cold, the great arc of the heavens above them, looking up, looking out, looking on.