Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson Read Free Book Online

religion. She proposed another toast, throat tightening as she did: “To Birdie Bowers, the optimist!” And they cried “Hear hear,” and drank hot chocolate, and Elliot, of all people, teasing her she supposed, cried out, “We’re all right! We’re all right!”
    And so they were, for the moment. Though of course the return home would be a pain in the ass.
    Then later, when she was back up on the ridge cleaning the site of any stray debris (cannister top, foil paper, etc.) Val got a call from Randi on her little wrist radio. “Hey Val, this is the voice of the south coming to you again through the miracle of shaped and directed radio waves, do you read, over?”
    “I read you, Randi. What’s going on?”
    “Did you hear what happened to your sandwich?”
    “Don’t call him that, what happened?”
    “Your ex, then. He’s out with the SPOT train, you know, and he just called in a while ago—he’s been hijacked!”
    “What?”
    “He’s been hijacked. Someone locked him in the lead vehicle during a Condition One, and when he got out there were only nine vehicles instead of ten! Plundered by ice pirates!”
    “Who the hell would do that!”
    “Ice pirates!” Randi laughed. “Who the hell knows. But isn’t that funny it happened to X?”
    “No! Why the hell would that be funny?”
    “Well, because it’s okay! I mean he’s okay, and now he’s finally had the big adventure he came down here looking for!”
    “Maybe,” Val said darkly. Feeling bad about what she had done to X was another reason she was toast.
    “Oh come on,” Randi was saying, “he’ll love it. That’s the kind of dreamer he is.”
    “Maybe.”

2
     
Science in the Capital
    Wade Norton had just solved the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony when his boss Senator Phil Chase called. It was late on a very hot September evening in Washington D.C., part of a heat wave in fact, the temperature 115°F. with humidity near a hundred percent, the roar of the city outside the window damped down as all parts of the metropolis went into Turkish-bath mode, stewing as they waited out the latest EWE, or extreme weather event. Torrential floods, blistering droughts, record highs and lows, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, assorted other superstorms; this year, like all the last several years, had seen everything.
    Wade had been sitting before his overmatched air-conditioning unit, conducting the Fifth for a few hours. He had been working on this version during his snippets of spare time for eight months, studying the score and recording bar by bar, struggling especially with the finale, using the latest Maestro program to manipulate all possible aspects of pitch, tempo, dynamics, color,intonation, vibrato and so forth, all down at the level of the individual soundwaves on the oscilloconductor, working mostly with synthetically generated sound but occasionally with the instruments in a base performance recorded for Maestro by the Vienna Philharmonic. And now he had the version he wanted. And it had been no easy thing, because the last movement was, as Brahms had noted to Tchaikovsky after hearing a performance in Hamburg, somewhat of a mess structurally. In his usual insecure way Tchaikovsky had immediately agreed with Brahms, and it had taken him a couple of months to rally and decide that it was not his Fifth that was deficient but Brahms himself, whose music Tchaikovsky said was “the pedestal without the statue,” a riposte which still made Wade smile, and had even given him a clue to conducting the Fifth, which was to treat it as a statue without a pedestal, floating in the air like a tone poem, the beauty of each component passage different in kind from the other passages; then turn the variously awkward junctures as best he could, exploiting things the Maestro could do that living orchestras would find hard. The home-conducting subculture was of course mostly uninterested in these overplayed warhorses of the concert hall,