I had hardly anyone to talk to, all my parents having died and all but a couple of the virtual relationships I had restored in the wake of my first divorce having lapsed again during my second marriage, but I did not care. I had lived long enough with my parents to imagine their responses to my new situation, and my imagined responses were far more conclusive than any real ones could have been.

“This is exactly what I feared,” Mama Siorane would have said. “Forever is a long time to be a hermit.”

“It’s because forever is a long time,” I retorted, “that there’s time enough to be a hermit without any fear of waste.”

“I’ve always told you to be yourself,” Mama Eulalie would have said, “but are you really certain that this is the self you want to be?”

“It’s the self I have to be, for now,” I retorted, “if I’m to design better selves for the future.”

“I always knew that you’d end up as a virtualist Utopian,” Papa Domenico would have said. “I was the oldest of your fathers, the one with the real authority.”

“I’m not a virtualist Utopian, Papa Dom,” I replied. “I’m making myself fit for any and all Utopias.”

“You can’t make yourself without making other things,” Emily Marchant said, without requiring imaginative reproduction. “Navel gazing does no good. You have to get involved with something more meaningful, Morty. That’s what I’m doing. I’ve spent too much time in labs designing new kinds of shamirs. Now I have to find out what’s to be donewith them. From now on, it’s hands-on all the way for me.”

It was far less easy to outflank her than my dead parents. “I’ve always been a hands-on historian,” I told her. “My work is going very well.”

“Oh Morty,” she said, refusing to give way as gracefully as my parents, “you don’t even know what hands-onmeans. You never built anything solidin your life.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, retreating to a formula that could always be relied on to stalemate an unwinnable argument. She didn’t—but she wouldn’t ever concede that her failure to understand me was her fault and not mine.

Perhaps it was only as a result of my upbringing in the Himalayas, but I really did feel at homein Antarctica. It made Alexandria, Crete, Lamu, and Adelaide seem so hectic and strange that I could not quite comprehend how I had tolerated any of them for as long as I had.

I often went walking on the cape, but I avoided the dangerously variable shelves of ice that extended across the shallow sea, keeping to the ice sheets that were safely mounted on solid ground. I had been warned that such excursions could be just as hazardous as littoral ventures, but I was never reckless. As the years went by without my ever getting into difficulties I was able to set aside all anxiety. While outside the house I always wore special suitskins whose fast metabolism compensated for the low temperature, and I rarely took off my face mask unless the weather was exceptionally clement. I made sure that my IT had additional reserves for emergency use, and I kept a small company of rescue robots that could be summoned to my assistance if I were caught in a blizzard or slipped into a crevasse. I only had occasion to call them out five times in the 2670s, and they responded with quick efficiency, bringing me home safe and well.

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 realemergency 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 bedded on solid rock is prone to shift, especially under the stress of urgent action. Frozen water cannot drown a man, but it can certainly crush him.

After several hours of merciful anesthesis, courtesy of our kindly IT, Ziru Majumdar and I woke up in adjacent beds at the hospital in Amundsen City. I was fully insulated from pain and could not sense my left leg at all, but the extent of the numbness and the depth of the illusory feeling that my brain had been removed from my head and immersed in a vat of treacle assured me that I would not be up and about for some considerable time.

“I’m truly sorry about your leg, Mister Gray,” Majumdar said. “It was very stupid of me to get lost at all, even in the blizzard—and then to walk over the lip of the crevasse… very, very foolish. I’ve lived here for five years, after all; I thought I knew every last ice ridge like the back of my hand. It’s not as if I’ve ever suffered from summer rhapsody or snow blindness.”