Free Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson Page B

instituted this regime because in situations of severe cold, common sense was one of the first things to go, causing many a deeply hypothermic person to mutter “I’m okay” and soon after fall like a block of ice and die. So they were supposed to remember something slightly out of the ordinary to show they had not done a Paul Revere (and gone a little light in the belfry), and thus when the mountaineer came by, grinning crazily and inquiring how they were, X and Forbes lifted their mittens onto their heads and replied “I AM FINE SIR,” when obviously any group that had to institute such a system was not fine at all, and needed to get to shelter as fast as possible. Not that there was any shelter. They were many miles from shelter of any kind, the beakers’ camp being over in the next valley, and X’s helo pickup not scheduled for hours and hours. Of course they could have huddled in the sunny lee of a boulder and eaten chocolate bars for the caloric infusion of warmth; butno. This Forbes compassed pebble after pebble, section after section, doggedly oblivious to the frigid chill. Of course X had been out in bad cold before, exposed to the bitter winds through the gap just behind the cold workyards of Mac Town. He had been teamed there with old iceheads who sometimes worked on in the teeth of the coldest windy colds, as a kind of icehead rite or contest, punishing themselves to the limit and carrying on anyway, cursing brutally and muscling through everything with a tight hunched savage cold efficiency, so that they could finally finish whatever it was they were doing and stagger down into the galley near dead, take their temperatures and get readings like 93 or 92 and say “Yar” and “Fuck” and thaw themselves out over giant hot meals, and mug after mug of hot coffee and hot chocolate, growling at the beaker girls and their icy hearts, or at friends who passed by, “Grrrrrrrr, grrrrrrrr,” knowing that they were the iciest of iceheads, the hardest Antarcticans of all. Just growl and go, as the old Brit seamen had said. Grin and bear it. It was a real cold macho thing.
    But this guy Forbes wasn’t like that. He seemed oblivious to the cold, and was certainly ignoring it; hunkering down a bit perhaps, pinched, focused on the work to the exclusion of all else; so focused that he might not notice if he precipitated and flashfroze in position, like the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz:
the Ice Beaker, still creaking his numbers through frozen jaws, intent on the rock under him to the point of crystallization and beyond. It was a scary thing to witness. X’s hands were now so cold they felt like insufficiently microwaved steak from the freezer, soft at the edges but stiff underneath. His butt was cold and the ground was cold and the light slanting down the valley was cold in his eyes. The cold air rushed over him, each gust a bitterchill slap pushing into his cold lungs, and though X had to admit that the passage down his cold throat appeared to thaw the air to the point that his chest did not actually freeze from inside, still, as the cold had been filtered on its cold way down, his cold nose had frozen and his cold brain was a frigid white block of hard cold clay, plunging further down the scale of coldness with every cold breath, colder and colder, down toward absolute zero, his cold thoughts numbly syruping from crystallizing synapse to frozen axon, every molecule of mind freezing slowly as it chilled in sad cold viscous thrall to helpless memories of his ice maiden’s cold treatment of him, terrible freezer burn from her brutal cold treatment that had frozen his heart forever. A bronze man in a bronze land. Absolute zero cold. Total frozen immobility. End of timespace. Very cold. Cold cold cold.
    Finally the mountaineer came by and rescued X from his insane master for the day. “His helo’s coming soon,” he told Forbes, “and we need to get back to camp.”
    “All right.”
    X got to his feet, a ten-part