In any case, Amelia had visited New Copenhagen before and was pleased when Frans guided the Assisted Migration down to the long line of masts at the southern end of the city, where a short fjord cut north to the island’s center, giving the island and city the shape of a horseshoe. The docks of the city protruded into the iced-over fjord, and behind them stood the downtown. Its buildings were mostly in the Greenland style, steep-pitched roofs on cubical shapes painted in bright primary colors, lit by hundreds of brilliant streetlights, which turned the darkness of the northern midwinter into a space far brighter than the interior of any room. The concert hall at the apex of the U was an enormous cube set on one point, homage to the similar concert hall in Reykjavík, and a famous locus for the New Arctic movement in long-duration opera and instrumental music. Some pieces played in this hall lasted all winter.
When her airship was secured, Amelia took a bus to the head of the fjord, where the biggest pedestrian district was located. The brilliantly lit cobblestone streets, blown clear of snow, were nearly empty, but then again it was very cold, and the few people out were mostly hurrying from one building to another. Despite the warming of the Arctic, midwinter here was still frigid, and sea-raw, as in any other coastal town. It reminded Amelia of Boston.
Inside a pub called Baltika it was steamy warm and loud with people enjoying a Friday evening. Amelia’s local friends from the Wildlife Migrators Association had gathered there to commiserate with her over her disastrous voyage south, to drink the memory away, and to discuss new plans. Some of them had helped her in Churchill, and they were as angry as she was at the wicked reception her bears had gotten in Antarctica.
One of them, Thorvald, was not as sympathetic as the others. “Antarctic Defense League includes almost every person down there, and they’re way worse than Defenders of Wildlife. People are only down there because they really want to be there. It’s like here, but more so. They really believe in it.”
“I know that,” Amelia said sulkily. “So what? Antarctica is huge, and if a few polar bears were living in a bay or two down there, so what? They could have shipped them back north in a few generations or a few hundred years. Round them up when things get cold enough again up here, send them home. It was a refuge!”
“But we didn’t consult them,” Thorvald said. “And they’re very caught up in their idea of Antarctica. The last wilderness, they call it. The last pure place.”
“I hate that shit,” Amelia said. “This is a mongrel planet. There’s no such thing as purity. The only thing that matters is avoiding extinctions.”
“I agree with you. But they don’t. So, you needed more than just people like me.”
He stared intently at her, and despite his rebukes, Amelia began to get the idea that he was coming on to her. Nothing new there, but in the mood she was in, it was somewhere between a comfort and an irritation. She might take him up on it. She still felt chilled right down to the bone, days after her dunking. It wasn’t just that anyway. Something had to change. Although the style he was using, as if by being rude he could boss her into bed, didn’t appeal to her.
“So what should we do?” she demanded. “My friends in New York were saying that if I kept it secret I could move some bears down there on the sly.”
They all shook their heads at this. Thorvald said, “You can see every polar bear on Earth from satellites. The Antarcticans would see them too. And we don’t want to get any more of them killed.”
“Maybe if we made a deal with them,” Amelia said.
But they shook their heads at this too.
“They won’t compromise,” Thorvald said. “If they were the kind of people who would compromise, they wouldn’t be there.”
Amelia sighed gloomily.
Thorvald said, “Maybe the thing to do is find new places around Greenland. There should be some newly opened bays where polar bears and their prey animals will do well.”
“It’s too warm up here now,” Amelia said. “That’s the point.”
Thorvald shrugged. “If you’re saying global temperatures have to drop for polar bears to survive, you would need to pull about a thousand gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere.”
“So what? Couldn’t we do that?”
“If that were our main project, yes. You would only have to change everything.”
“Oh come on. Everything?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like that. It’s too much. So we have to do what we can. I mean, isn’t that what assisted migration is about?”
“Sure, fine. You need refugia in the hard times. But they are only stopgaps. You are the queen of stopgaps.”
“Stopgaps?”
“That’s what they are. Because in the long run, only a system fix will work. Until then, we try our stopgaps. We do what we can with the handouts of the rich. We try to save the world with their table scraps.”
Amelia found this depressing. She drank more aquavit, knowing that would only make her more depressed, but so what; that was how depressed she was. She didn’t care if she was being stupid. She wanted to be stupid right now. Because she had lost any thought of going to bed with this guy Thorvald. And in fact it might not have occurred to him anyway. He was in a heavy mood himself, or else he was that way all the time. Too much reality in him, and some kind of anger, maybe like her own anger, but they weren’t complementary. She needed a little fantasy to get off, and she thought everyone else did too. Maybe. She didn’t really know, but she could see that guys were fantasizing when they were with her, it was as clear as the gleam in their glassy eyes. They interacted with some fantasy Amelia in their heads, a mix of her show’s persona and her actual presence, and she played to that, and it made things easier in some ways. But it wasn’t really her. The real her was getting really, really mad.
“Meanwhile we don’t have to be rude,” she said primly.
At which he just rolled his eyes and polished off his drink.
She was too mad to go into the cloud and talk to her people, too mad to go home. Things were not right, and it was beyond her power to fix them. Ever since she had rescued baby birds who had fallen from their nests and started working at the local bird sanctuary to get away from her mom—a sanctuary that had been filled with birds who could be saved and put in some situation or other—she had been working on the unexamined assumption that she would continue to do that work all her life, at bigger levels, until all was right. And for a long time it had seemed to be working. Now, not. Now she was the queen of stopgaps.
She told Frans to take the blimp home the long way round.
“Did you say, the long way around?”
“That’s right.”
“New York is about five thousand kilometers southwest of us. The long way around would have us go over the North Pole, down the Pacific, across Antarctica, and back up the Americas. Estimated distance, thirty-eight thousand kilometers. Estimated time of flight, twenty-two days.”
“That’s fine.”
“Estimated food on board will last for eight days.”
“That’s fine. I need to lose some weight.”
“Your weight is currently two kilos below your last five years’ average.”
“Shut up,” she explained.
“I calculate the food shortage to be worse than a diet.”
Amelia sighed. She went to the corner of the bridge and looked at the globe floating there between two magnets, saw what Frans was talking about. She didn’t want to go back to Antarctica anyway. “Okay, make it a great spiral route instead of a great circle route. Head from here to Kamchatka, then across Canada and home.”
“Estimated time of trip, ten days.”
“That’s fine. That’s what I want.”
“You will get hungry.”
“Shut up and drive!”
“Ascending to bottom of jet stream to try to speed our journey home.”
“Fine.”