The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [57]
During my first decade in Antarctica I did not meet a single human being in the flesh. In summer I could see distant ships from my eyrie as they tentatively probed the waters of the gulf, but they rarely came close enough to the shore for me to discern crewmen working on their decks. Most of them would, in any case, have been fully automated craft taking their carefully measured harvest of krill from the rich waters. I was a thousand kilometers south of the latitudes in which liquid artificial photosynthesis systems could be economically deployed, and four hundred from the nearest marine farms. The local ecosystem had to be measured and managed as carefully as any, but it was equipped with species that were very little different from those that had flourished here before the twenty-first-century ocean dereliction, which some ecologists still reckoned to be the root cause and most significant aspect of the Crash.
As time went by, the probing ships became more numerous and more various, but not in any troublesome sense. Inland, it was a different story. The initial relocation of the UN’s central administration to Amundsen City had provided a golden opportunity for streamlining, but as soon as the new setup was in place the perverse logic of bureaucracy had begun to reassert itself, and the organization had begun to expand again, growing and mutating.
The original plan had been to maintain a relatively small and austere presence in Amundsen City while conducting the bulk of UN business in virtual space. There was no practical reason why the world’s government could not have been run like its economy, from widely scattered tiny cells like the one hidden by Shangri-La, but government is not entirely a practical matter. As soon as a certain prestige and status was attached to an “Antarctic position” Amundsen City became a sociopolitical Klondyke, and the subsequent population rush inevitably spread outward like a creeping infection.
Eventually, as I had known it would, it reached Cape Adare.
THIRTY-ONE
By 2680, my nearest neighbors on Cape Adare were no longer out of sight. Although the nearest towns, Leningradskaya and Lillie Marleen, were still at a safe distance, the burgeoning Cape Hallett colony gradually extended itself along the Barchgrevnik Coast to the very edge of my own promontory. It became increasingly common for me to meet other walkers in the northern reaches of the cape. The people in question were scrupulously polite and not at all intrusive, but the very concept of neighborhood implies a certain moral obligation that cannot be set aside.
The first time I had to send my rescue robots out to someone else’s aid I knew that my eremitic existence was under threat and that my solitude would soon be at an end. The embrace of Earthbound humanity was now total. How could I possibly complain? The southern extremity of Cape Adare had been welcomed into that embrace on the day I had moved there; I was an agent of human infection myself.
I was by this time an old hand, a proven Antarctican: the kind of man who had to respond to a real emergency in person. When one of my new neighbors from Hallett, Ziru Majumdar, fell into a crevasse so deep and awkward that all the slothful robots on the Ross shore could not extract him by means of Artificial Intelligence alone, I was one of the people who felt obliged to fly to his aid.
Human intelligence being what it is, it only required five of us—and seventy-five tons of equipment—to pull Mister Majumdar out of the hole, and only two of us ended up more seriously injured than he was before the operation began. Even ice that is