Amelia, having retaken control of the Assisted Migration, spent the next day or two eating and calming down, with just one camera on, and very little commentary, most of it more suited to a cooking show than animal affairs. Her viewers were going to be happy to see she was okay, and they would empathize with her being a bit post-traumatic. Below her the South Atlantic pulsed to the horizon with a blue that reminded her of the Adriatic; it was a sort of cobalt infused with turquoise, quite a bit bluer than most ocean blues, and its glitter of reflected sunlight was behind her now, to the north. They were deep in the Southern Hemisphere, and to the south the blue was a darker blue, flecked only by whitecaps. She was already through the Roaring Forties, and had come into the Flying Fifties, and if she wanted to fly into the Weddell Sea, which she did, she was going to have to angle to the west and run the turboprops as hard as she could all the time, to get any westness in the Screaming Sixties. Here, below the tip of South Africa, down where only Patagonia broke up the ceaseless pour of water and wind ever eastward around the globe, there was a natural tendency for the airship to head east for Australia. Pushing against that caused it to tremble all the time. It felt like being in a ship down on those waves. Because there were waves of air too, and now they were tacking into them, as any craft on this Earth must often do.
She was still waiting for her support team to give her a final destination for the bears. There was some dispute between their geographers and their marine biologists as to where the bears would have the best chance. The eastern curve of the Antarctic peninsula, one candidate, had warmed faster, and lost a greater percentage of its ice, than almost anywhere on the continent, and its winter sea ice grew far out into the Weddell Sea every four-month-long night; and the Weddell Sea was well stocked with Weddell seals.
All this sounded plausible and right to Amelia, so she kept telling Frans to head that way. But there were competing arguments from others in the ecology group that wanted her to head to Princess Astrid Land, on the main body of the continent. Here there would be a steep sea coast, and the world’s largest colony of Weddell seals, plus an upwelling from the depths that made for a rich life zone, including many penguins. And it had such a good name.
A third faction of ecologists apparently thought they should deposit these bears on South Georgia, so Amelia kept the airship on course to pass within sight of that island as she headed south, just in case. This was a much warmer part of the world, not even actually polar, and with much less sea ice, so she judged that the scientists advocating that destination were going to lose the argument. If they were going to defy the natural order so much as to put polar bears in the Southern Hemisphere, it seemed to behoove them to at least put them in a truly polar region.
As the airship passed to the east of South Georgia, which took most of a day, Amelia found herself glad that she had not been directed to drop the polar bears there; the island was huge, steep, and green where it was not covered by snow and ice, or mantled in cloud that whipped over it in a blown cap that reminded her of the jet stream flying madly over the Himalayas. It looked ferocious, and very dissimilar to the western shore of Hudson Bay. Surely the Antarctic peninsula would make a better new home for her bears.
Who seemed to be settled down again, back in their quarters. Their breakout and subsequent fast, not to mention the upending of the airship, and what had sounded like some pretty hard falls, had perhaps subdued them and made them happier to accept their lot. Several of them had been repeat offenders in Churchill and had spent multiple stints in the bear jail there, so their current confinement was probably not in itself what had disturbed them, so much as the airship’s palpable sense of movement, certainly unsettling to any bear that had never flown before. Whatever explained their earlier restlessness, they were now pretty calm in their quarters, and almost all of them had crossed in front of the x-ray machine, and enough images of their skeletons had been assembled to reassure their doctors that there were no broken bones among them. All was well.
Two days after passing South Georgia, they were flying in toward the east side of the Antarctic peninsula. The sea was covered with broken plates of sea ice, and much taller chunks of glacial ice, often a creamy blue or green in color, rearing toward the sky in odd melted shapes. On both the sea ice and the horizontal parts of the icebergs lay scores, even hundreds of Weddell seals. Amelia brought the airship down for a closer look and better images for her show, and from that level they could see streaks of blood on the ice, placental blood for the most part; many of the female Weddell seals, looking like slugs laid out on a sheet of white paper, had recently given birth, and smaller offspring (but not that much smaller) were attached to them, nursing away. It was a peaceful and one might say bucolic scene.
“Wow, check it out,” Amelia said to her audience. “I suppose it’s a bit of a bummer for these seals, us introducing a predator they’ve never encountered before, but, you know, the bears are going to love it. And these seals are getting eaten all the time by orcas, and I think tiger sharks or something like that. Oh, sorry, leopard seals. Hmm, I wonder if the bears will be able to eat leopard seals too. That might be quite a showdown. I guess we’ll find out. We’ll be leaving behind the usual array of cameras, and it will be really interesting to see what happens. A new thing in history! Polar bears and penguins in the same environment! Kind of amazing, when you think about it.”