DAN SIMMONS
A writer of considerable power, range, and ambition, an eclectic talent not willing to be restricted to any one genre, Dan Simmons sold his first story to The Twilight Zone magazine in 1982. By the end of that decade, he had become one of the most popular and bestselling authors in both the horror and the science fiction genres, winning, for instance, both the Hugo Award for his epic science fiction novel Hyperion and the Bram Stoker Award for his huge horror novel Carrion Comfort in the same year, 1990. He has continued to split his output since between science fiction (The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man) and horror (Song of Kali, Summer of Night, Children of the Night), although a few of his novels are downright unclassifiable (Phases of Gravity, for example, which is a straight literary novel, although it was published as part of a science fiction line), and some (like Children of the Night) could be legitimately considered to be either science fiction or horror, depending on how you squint at them. Similarly, his first collection, Prayers to Broken Stones, contains a mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and “mainstream” stories, as does his most recent collection, Lovedeath. His most recent books confirm his reputation for unpredictability, including The Crook Factory, a spy thriller set in World War II and starring Ernest Hemingway, Darwin’s Blade, a “statistical thriller” halfway between mystery and horror, Hardcase, a hardboiled detective novel, and, most recently, A Winter Haunting, a ghost story. His stories have appeared in our First, Eleventh, and Thirteenth
Annual Collections. Born in Peoria, Illinois, Simmons now lives with his family in Colorado.
In the suspenseful and relentlessly paced story that follows, he takes us to the future and then straight up the side of a mountain—in some very odd company.
If we hadn’t decided to acclimate ourselves for the K2 attempt by secretly climbing to the eight-thousand-meter mark on Everest, a stupid mountain that no self-respecting climber would go near anymore, they wouldn’t have caught us and we wouldn’t have been forced to make the real climb with an alien and the rest of it might not have happened. But we did and we were and it did.
What else is new? It’s as old as Chaos theory. The best-laid plans of mice and men and so forth and so on. As if you have to tell that to a climber.
Instead of heading directly for our Concordia Base Camp at the foot of K2, the three of us had used Gary’s nifty little stealth CMG to fly northeast into the Himalayas, straight to the bergeschrund of the Khumbu Glacier at 23,000 feet. Well, fly almost straight to the glacier; we had to zig and zag to stay under HK Syndicate radar and to avoid seeing or being seen by that stinking prefab pile of Japanese shit called the Everest Base Camp Hotel (rooms US $4,500 a night, not counting Himalayan access fee and CMG limo fare).
We landed without being detected (or so we thought), made sure the vehicle was safely tucked away from the icefalls, seracs, and avalanche paths, left the CMG set in conceal mode, and started our Alpinestyle conditioning climb to the South Col. The weather was brilliant. The conditions were perfect. We climbed brilliantly. It was the stupidest thing the three of us had ever done.
By late on the third afternoon we had reached the South Col, that narrow, miserable, windswept notch of ice and boulders wedged high between the shoulders of Lhotse and Everest. We activated our little
smart tents, merged them, anchored them hard to ice-spumed rock, and keyed them white to keep them safe from prying eyes.
Even on a beautiful late-summer Himalayan evening such as the one we enjoyed that day, weather on the South Col sucks. Wind velocities average higher than those encountered near the summit of Everest. Any high-climber knows that when you see a stretch of relatively flat rock free of snow, it means hurricane winds. These arrived on schedule just about at sunset of that third day. We hunkered down in the communal tent and made soup. Our plan was to spend two nights on the South Col and acclimate ourselves to the lower edge of the Death Zone before heading down and flying on to Concordia for our legal K2 climb. We had no intention of climbing higher than the South Col on Everest. Who would?
At least the view was less tawdry since the Syndicate cleaned up Everest and the South Col, flying off more than a century’s worth of expedition detritus—ancient fixed ropes, countless tent tatters, tons of frozen human excrement, about a million abandoned oxygen bottles, and a few hundred frozen corpses. Everest in the twentieth century had been the equivalent of the old Oregon Trail—everything that could be abandoned had been, including climbers’ dead friends.
Actually, the view that evening was rather good. The Col drops off to the east for about four-thousand feet into what used to be Tibet and falls even more sharply—about seven-thousand feet—to the Western Cwm. That evening, the high ridges of Lhotse and the entire visible west side of Everest caught the rich, golden sunset for long minutes after the Col moved into shadow and then the temperature at our campsite dropped about a hundred degrees. There was not, as we outdoors people like to say, a cloud in the sky. The high peaks glowed in all their eight-thousand-meter glory, snowfields burning orange in the light. Gary and Paul lay in the open door of the tent, still wearing their thermskin uppers, and watched the stars emerge and shake to the hurricane wind as I fiddled and fussed with the stove to make soup. Life was good.
Suddenly an incredibly amplified voice bellowed, “You there in the tent!”
I almost pissed my thermskins. I did spill the soup, slopping it all over Paul’s sleeping bag.
“Fuck,” I said.
“God damn it,” said Gary, watching the black CMG—its UN markings glowing and powerful searchlights stabbing—settle gently onto small boulders not twenty feet from the tent.
“Busted,” said Paul.
Two years in an HK floating prison wouldn’t have been as degrading as being made to enter that revolving restaurant on the top of Everest. All three of us protested, Gary the loudest since he was the oldest and richest, but the four UN security guys in the CMG just cradled their standard-issue Uzis and said nothing until the vehicle had docked in the restaurant airlock-garage and the pressure had been equalized. We stepped out reluctantly and followed other security guards deeper into the closed and darkened restaurant even more reluctantly. Our ears were going crazy. One minute we’d been camping at 26,000 feet, and a few minutes later the pressure was the standard airline equivalent of 5,000 feet. It was painful, despite the UN CMG’s attempt to match pressures while it circled the dark hulk of Everest for ten minutes.
By the time we were led into the Hillary Room to the only lighted table in the place, we were angry and in pain.
“Sit down,” said Secretary of State Betty Willard Bright Moon.
We sat. There was no mistaking the tall, sharp-featured Blackfoot woman in the gray suit. Every pundit agreed that she was the single toughest and most interesting personality in the Cohen Administration, and the four U.S. Marines in combat garb standing in the shadows behind her only added to her already imposing sense of authority. The three of us sat, Gary closest to the dark window wall across from Secretary Bright Moon, Paul next to him, and me farthest away from the action. It was our usual climbing pattern.
On the expensive teak table in front of Secretary Bright Moon were three blue dossiers. I couldn’t read the tabs on them, but I had little doubt about their contents: Dossier #1, Gary Sheridan, forty-nine, semiretired, former CEO of SherPath International, multiple addresses around the world, made his first millions at age seventeen during the long lost and rarely lamented dot-com gold rush of yore, divorced (four times), a man of many passions, the greatest of which was mountain climbing; Dossier #2, Paul Ando Hiraga, twenty-eight, ski bum, professional guide, one of the world’s best rock-and-ice climbers, unmarried; Dossier #3, Jake Richard Pettigrew, thirty-six (address: Boulder, Colorado), married, three children, high-school math teacher, a good-to-average climber with only two eight-thousand-meter peaks bagged, both thanks to Gary and Paul, who invited him to join them on international climbs for the six previous years. Mr. Pettigrew still cannot believe his good luck at having a friend and patron bankroll his climbs, especially when both Gary and Paul were far better climbers
with much more experience. But perhaps the dossiers told of how Jake, Paul, and Gary had become close friends as well as climbing partners over the past few years, friends who trusted each other to the point of trespassing on the Himalayan Preserve just to get acclimated for the climb of their lives.
Or perhaps the blue folders were just some State Department busywork that had nothing to do with us.
“What’s the idea of hauling us up here?” asked Gary, his voice controlled but tight. Very tight. “If the Hong Kong Syndicate wants to throw us in the slammer, fine, but you and the UN can’t just drag us somewhere against our will. We’re still U.S. citizens … .”
“U.S. citizens who have broken HK Syndicate Preserve rules and UN World Historical Site laws,” snapped Secretary Bright Moon.
“We have a valid permit … ,” began Gary again. His forehead looked very red just below the line of his cropped white hair.
“To climb K2, commencing three days from now,” said the Secretary of State. “Your climbing team won the HK lottery. We know. But that permit does not allow you to enter or overfly the Himalayan Preserve, or to trespass on Mount Everest.”
Paul glanced at me. I shook my head. I had no idea what was going on. We could have stolen Mount Everest and it wouldn’t have brought Secretary Betty Willard Bright Moon flying around the world to sit in this darkened revolving restaurant just to slap our wrists.
Gary shrugged and sat back. “So what do you want?”
Secretary Bright Moon opened the closest blue dossier and slid a photo across the polished teak toward us. We huddled to look at it.
“A bug?” said Gary.
“They prefer Listener,” said the secretary of state. “But mantispid will do.”
“What do the bugs have to do with us?” said Gary.
“This particular bug wants to climb K2 with you in three days,” said Secretary Bright Moon. “And the government of the United States of America in cooperation with the Listener Liaison and Cooperation Council of the United Nations fully intend to have him … or her … do so.”
Paul’s jaw dropped. Gary clasped his hands behind his head and laughed. I just stared. Somehow I found my voice first.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
Secretary Betty Willard Bright Moon turned her flat, dark-eyed gaze on me. “Why?”
Normally the combination of that woman’s personality, her position, and those eyes would have stopped me cold, but this was too
absurd to ignore. I just held out my hands, palms upward. Some things are too obvious to explain. “The bugs have six legs,” I said at last. “They look like they can hardly walk. We’re climbing the second tallest mountain on earth. And the most savage.”
Secretary Bright Moon did not blink. “The bu—The mantispids seem to get around their freehold in Antarctica quite well,” she said flatly. “And sometimes they walk on two legs.”
Paul snorted. Gary kept his hands clasped behind his head, his shoulders back, posture relaxed, but his eyes were flint. “I presume that if this bug climbed with us, that you’d hold us responsible for his safety and well-being,” he said.
The secretary’s head turned as smoothly as an owl’s. “You presume correctly,” she said. “That would be our first concern. The safety of the Listeners is always our first concern.”
Gary lowered his hands and shook his head. “Impossible. Above eight thousand meters, no one can help anyone.”
“That’s why they call that altitude the Death Zone,” said Paul. He sounded angry.
Bright Moon ignored Paul and kept her gaze locked with Gary’s. She had spent too many decades steeped in power, negotiation, and political in-fighting not to know who our leader was. “We can make the climb safer,” she said. “Phones, CMGs on immediate call, uplinks …”
Gary was shaking his head again. “We do this climb without phones and medevac capability from the mountain.”
“That’s absurd … ,” began the secretary of state.
Gary cut her off. “That’s the way it is,” he said. “That’s what real mountaineers do in this day and age. And what we don’t do is come to this fucking obscenity of a restaurant.” He gestured toward the darkened Hillary Room to our right, the gesture including all the revolving Top of the World. One of the marines blinked at Gary’s obscenity.
Secretary Bright Moon did not blink. “All right, Mr. Sheridan. The phones and CMG medevacs are not negotiable. I presume everything else is.”
Gary said nothing for a minute. Finally, “I presume that if we say no, that you’re going to make our lives a living hell.”
The secretary of state smiled ever so slightly. “I think that all of you will find that there will be no more visas for foreign climbs,” she said. “Ever. And all of you may encounter difficulties with your taxes soon. Especially you, Mr. Sheridan, since your corporate accounts are so … complicated.”
Gary returned her smile. For an instant it seemed as if he were
actually enjoying this. “And if we said yes,” he said slowly, almost drawling, “what’s in it for us?”
Bright Moon nodded, and one of the lackeys to her left opened another dossier and slid a slick color photograph across the table toward us. Again all three of us leaned forward to look. Paul frowned. It took me a minute to figure out what it was—some sort of reddish shield volcano. Hawaii?
“Mars,” Gary said softly. “Olympus Mons.”
Secretary Bright Moon said, “It is more than twice as tall as Mount Everest.”
Gary laughed easily. “Twice as tall? Shit, woman, Olympus Mons is more than three times the height of Everest—more than eighty-eight thousand feet high, three hundred and thirty-five miles in diameter. The caldera is fifty-three miles wide. Christ, the outward facing cliff ringing the bottom of the thing is taller than Everest-thirty-two thousand eight hundred feet, vertical with an overhang.”
Bright Moon had finally blinked at the “Shit, woman”—I wondered wildly when the last time had been that someone had spoken to this secretary of state like that—but now she smiled.
Gary said, “So what? The Mars program is dead. We chickened out, just like with the Apollo Program seventy-five years ago. Don’t tell me that you’re offering to send us there, because we don’t even have the technology to go back.”
“The bugs do,” said Secretary Bright Moon. “And if you agree to let the son of the mantispid speaker climb K2 with you, the Listeners guarantee that they will transport you to Mars within twelve months—evidently the transit time will be only two weeks each direction—and they’ll outfit a mountain-climbing expedition up Olympus Mons for you. Pressure suits, rebreathers, the whole nine yards.”
The three of us exchanged glances. We did not have to discuss this. We looked back at the photograph. Finally Gary looked up at Bright Moon. “What do we have to do other than climb with him?”
“Keep him alive if you can,” she said.
Gary shook his head. “You heard Paul. Above eight thousand meters, we can’t guarantee even keeping ourselves alive.”
The secretary nodded, but said softly, “Still, if we added a simple emergency calling device to one of your palmlogs—a distress beacon, as it were—this would allow us to come quickly to evacuate the mantispid if there were a problem or illness or injury to him, without interfering with the … integrity … of the rest of your climb.”
“A red panic button,” said Gary, but the three of us exchanged glances again. This idea was distasteful but reasonable in its way. Besides,
once the bug was taken off the hill, for whatever reason, the three of us could get on with the climb and maybe still get a crack at Olympus Mons. “What else?” Gary asked the woman.
Secretary Bright Moon folded her hands and lowered her gaze a moment. When she looked up again, her gaze appeared to be candid. “You gentlemen know how little the mantispids have talked to us … how little technology they have shared with us—”
“They gave us CMG,” interrupted Gary.
“Yes,” said Bright Moon, “CMG in exchange for their Antarctic freehold. But we’ve only had hints of the other wonders they could share with us—generation starflight technology, a cure for cancer, free energy. The Listeners just … well, listen. This is the first overture they’ve made.”
The three of us waited.
“We want you to record everything this son of the speaker says during the climb,” said Secretary Bright Moon. “Ask questions. Listen to the answers. Make friends with him if you can. That’s all.”
Gary shook his head. “We don’t want to wear a wire.” Before Bright Moon could object, he went on, “We have to wear thermskins—molecular heat membranes. We’re not going to wear wires under or over them.”
The secretary looked as if she was ready to order the marines to shoot Gary and probably throw Paul and me out the window, not that the window could be opened. The whole damned restaurant was pressurized.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
Gary and Paul looked at me in surprise. I admit that I was also surprised at the offer. I shrugged. “Why not? My folks died of cancer. I wouldn’t mind finding a cure. You guys can weave a recording wire into my overparka. Or I can use the recorder in my palmlog. I’ll record the bug when I can, but I’ll summarize the other conversations on my palm-log. You know, keep a record of things.”
Secretary Betty Willard Bright Moon looked as if she were swallowing gall, but she nodded, first to us and then at the marine guards. The marines came around the table to escort us back to the UN CMG.
“Wait,” said Gary before we were led away. “Does this bug have a name?”
“Kanakaredes,” said the secretary of state, not even looking up at us.
“Sounds Greek,” said Paul.
“I seriously doubt it,” said Secretary Bright Moon.
I guess I expected a little flying saucer—a smaller version of the shuttle craft the bugs had first landed near the UN nine years earlier—but they all arrived in an oversize, bright red DaimlerChrysler CMG. I saw them first and shouted. Gary and Paul came out of the supply tent where they had been triple-checking our provisions.
Secretary Bright Moon wasn’t there to see us off, of course—we hadn’t spoken to her since the night at the Top of the World three days earlier—but the Listener Liaison guy, William Grimes, and two of his aides got out of the CMG, as did two bugs, one slightly larger than the other. The smaller mantispid had some sort of clear, bubbly backpack along his dorsal ridge, nestled in the V where its main body section joined the prothorax.
The three of us crossed the boulder field until we were facing the five of them. It was the first time. I had ever seen the aliens in person—I mean, who ever sees a bug in person?—and I admit that I was nervous. Behind us, above us, spindrift and cloud whirled from the ridges and summit of K2. If the mantispids smelled weird, I couldn’t pick it up since the breeze was blowing from behind the three of us.
“Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Hiraga, Mr. Pettigrew,” said the bureaucrat Grimes, “may I introduce Listener Speaker Aduradake and his … son … Kanakaredes.”
The taller of the two bugs unfolded that weird arm or foreleg, swiveled the short forearm thing up like a praying mantis unlimbering, and offered Gary its three-fingered hand. Gary shook it. Paul shook it. I shook it. It felt boneless.
The shorter bug watched, its two primary eyes black and unreadable, its smaller side-eyes lidded and sleepy-looking. It—Kanakaredes—did not offer to shake hands.
“My people thank you for agreeing to allow Kanakaredes to accompany you on this expedition,” said Speaker Aduradake. I don’t know if they used implanted voice synthesizers to speak to us—I think not—but the English came out as a carefully modulated series of clicks and sighs. Quite understandable, but strange, very strange.
“No problem,” said Gary.
It looked as if the UN bureaucrats wanted to say more—make some speeches, perhaps—but Speaker Aduradake swiveled on his four rear legs and picked his way across the boulders to the CMG’s ramp. The humans scurried to catch up. Half a minute later and the vehicle was nothing more than a red speck in the blue southern sky.
The four of us stood there silent for a second, listening to the wind
howl around the remaining seracs of the Godwin-Austen Glacier and through niches in the wind-carved boulders. Finally Gary said, “You bring all the shit we e-mailed you about?”
“Yes,” said Kanakaredes. His forearms swiveled in their high sockets, the long mantis femur moved up and back, and the third segment swiveled downward so that the soft, three-fingered hands could pat the clear pack on his back. “Brought all the shit, just as you e-mailed.” His clicks and sighs sounded just like the other bug’s.
“Compatible North Face smart tent?” said Gary.
The bug nodded—or at least I took that movement of the broad, beaked head as a nod. Gary must also have. “Rations for two weeks?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Kanakaredes.
“We have the climbing gear for you,” said Gary. “Grimes said that you’ve practiced with it all—crampons, ropes, knots, weblines, ice axe, jumars—that you’ve been on a mountain before.”
“Mount Erebus,” said Kanakaredes. “I have practiced there for some months.”
Gary sighed. “K2 is a little different from Mount Erebus.”
We were all silent again for a bit. The wind howled and blew my long hair forward around my face. Finally Paul pointed up the glacier where it curved near Base Camp and rose toward the east side of K2 and beneath the back side of Broad Peak. I could just see the icefall where the glacier met the Abruzzi Ridge on K2. That ridge, path of the first attempt on the mountain and line of the first successful summit assault, was our fallback route if our attempt on the North-East Ridge and East Face fell behind schedule.
“You see, we could fly over the glacier and start the climb from the base of the Abruzzi at eighteen-thousand feet,” said Paul, “miss all the crevasse danger that way, but it’s part of the climb to start from here.”
Kanakaredes said nothing. His two primary eyes had clear membranes, but the eyes never blinked. They stared blackly at Paul. The other two eyes were looking God knows where.
I felt that I should say something. Anything. I cleared my throat.
“Fuck it,” said Gary. “We’re burning daylight. Let’s load ‘em up and move ’em out.”
They call K2 “the savage mountain” and a hundred other names—all respectful. It’s a killer mountain; more men and women have died on it in terms of percentage of those attempting to climb it than on any other peak in the Himalayas or the Karakoram. It is not malevolent. It is simply the Zen-essence of mountain—hard, tall, pyramidal when seen from the south in the perfect child’s-drawing iconic model of the Matterhorn, jagged, steep, knife-ridged, racked by frequent avalanches and unearthly storms, its essentially airless summit almost continuously blasted by the jet stream. No contortion of sentiment or personification can suggest that this mountain gives the slightest shit about human hopes or human life. In a way that is impossible to articulate and politically incorrect even to suggest, K2 is profoundly masculine. It is eternally indifferent and absolutely unforgiving. Climbers have loved it and triumphed on it and died on it for more than a century.
Now it was our turn to see which way this particular prayer wheel turned.
Have you ever watched a mantispid bug walk? I mean, we’ve all seen them on HDTV or VirP—there’s an entire satellite channel dedicated to them, for Christ’s sake—but usually that’s just quick cuts, long-lens images, or static shots of the bug speaker and some political bigshots standing around somewhere. Have you ever watched them walk for any length of time?
In crossing the upper reaches of the Godwin-Austen Glacier under the 11,000-foot vertical wall that is the east face of K2, you have two choices. You can stay near the edges of the glacier, where there are almost no crevasses, and risk serious avalanche danger, or you can stick to the center of the glacier and never know when the snow and ice underfoot is suddenly going to collapse into a hidden crevasse. Any climber worth his or her salt will choose the crevasse-route if there’s even a hint of avalanche risk. Skill and experience can help you avoid crevasses; there’s not a goddamn thing in the world you can do except pray when an avalanche comes your way.
To climb the glacier, we had to rope up. Gary, Paul, and I had discussed this—whether or not to rope with the bug—but when we reached the part of the glacier where crevasses would be most probable, inevitable actually, we really didn’t have a choice. It would have been murder to let Kanakaredes proceed unroped.
One of the first things all of us thought when the bugs landed almost ten years ago was “Are they wearing clothes?” We know now
that they weren’t—that their weird combination of chitinous exoskeleton on their main body section and layers of different membranes on the softer parts serve well in lieu of clothing—but that doesn’t mean that they go around with their sexual parts showing. Theoretically, mantispids are sexual creatures—male or female—but I’ve never heard of a human being who’s seen a bug’s genitals, and I can testify that Gary, Paul, and I didn’t want to be the first.
Still, the aliens rig themselves with toolbelts or harnesses or whatever when necessary—just as Kanakaredes had shown up with that weird bubble-pack on his back with all his climbing gear in it—and as soon as we started the ascent, he removed a harness from that pack and rigged it around that chunky, almost armored upper section of himself where his arm and midleg sockets were. He also used a regulation-size metal ice axe, gripping the curved metal top in those three boneless fingers. It seemed strange to see something as prosaic as a red nylon climbing harness and carabiners and an ice axe on a bug, but that’s what he had.
When it came time to rope up, we clipped the spidersilk line onto our ’biners, passing the line back in our usual climbing order, except that this time—instead of Paul’s ass slowly slogging up the glacier in front of me—I got to watch Kanakaredes plod along ten paces ahead of me for hour after hour.
“Plod along” really doesn’t do bug locomotion justice. We’ve all seen a bug balance and walk on its midlegs, standing more upright on those balancing legs, its back straightening, its head coming up until it’s tall enough to stare a short human male in the eye, forelegs suddenly looking more like real arms than praying mantis appendages—but I suspect now that they do that just for that reason—to appear more human in their rare public appearances. So far, Kanakaredes had stood on just two legs only during the formal meeting back at Base Camp. As soon as we started hiking up the glacier, his head came down and forward, that V between his main body section and prothorax widened, those mantis-arms stretched far forward like a human extending two poles ahead of him, and he fell into a seemingly effortless four-legged motion.
But, Jesus Christ, what a weird motion. All of a bug’s legs have three joints, of course, but I realized after only a few minutes of following this particular bug up the Godwin-Austen Glacier that those joints never seem to bend the same way at the same time. One of those praying mantis forelegs would be double bent forward and down so that Kanakaredes could plant his ice axe in the slope, while the other bent forward and then back so that he could scratch that weird beak of
a snout. At the same time, the midlegs would be bending rather like a horse’s, only instead of a hoof, the lower, shortest section ended in those chitinous but somehow dainty, divided … hell, I don’t know, hoof-feet. And the hind legs, the ones socketed at the base of the soft prothorax … those are the ones that made me dizzy as I watched the bug climbing through soft snow in front of me. Sometimes the alien’s knees—those first joints about two-thirds of the way down the legs—would be higher than his back. At other times one knee would be bending forward, the other one back, while the lower joints were doing even stranger things.
After a while, I gave up trying to figure out the engineering of the creature, and just began admiring the easy way it moved up the steep snow and ice. The three of us had worried about the small surface area of a bug’s feet on snow—the V-shaped hoof-things aren’t even as large as an unshod human foot—and wondered if we’d be tugging the mantispid out of every drift on our way up the mountain, but Kanakaredes managed quite well, thank you. I guess it was due to the fact that I guessed at that time that he probably only weighed about 150 pounds, and that weight was spread out over four—and sometimes six, when he tucked the ice axe in his harness and scrambled—walking surfaces. To tell the truth, the bug had to help me slog clear of deep snow two or three times on the upper reaches of the glacier.
During the afternoon, with the sun blazing on the reflective bowl of ice that was the glacier, it got damned hot. The three of us humans damped our thermskin controls way down and shed our parka outer layers to cool off. The bug seemed comfortable enough, although he rested without complaint while we rested, drank water from his water bottle when we paused to drink, and chewed on something that looked like a shingle made of compressed dog poop while we munched our nutrient bars (which, I realize now, also looked a lot like a shingle made of compressed dog poop). If Kanakaredes suffered from overheating or chill that first long day on the glacier, he didn’t show it.
Long before sunset, the mountain shadow had moved across us and three of the four of us were raising our thermskin thresholds and tugging on the parka shells again. It had begun snowing. Suddenly a huge avalanche calved off the east face of K2 and swept down the slope behind us, boiling and rolling over a part of the glacier we had been climbing just an hour earlier.
We all froze in our tracks until the rumbling stopped. Our tracks in the shadowed snow—rising in a more-or-less straight line for a thousandfoot elevation gain over the last mile or so—looked like they had been rubbed out by a giant eraser for a swath of several hundred yards.
“Holy shit,” I said.
Gary nodded, breathing a little hard since he had been breaking trail for most of the afternoon, turned, took a step, and disappeared.
For the last hours, whoever had been in the lead had probed ahead with his ice axe to make sure that the footing ahead was real and not just a skim of snow over a deep crevasse. Gary had taken two steps without doing this. And the crevasse got him.
One instant he was there, red parka glowing against the shadowed ice and the white snow on the ridge now so close ahead of us, and the next instant he was gone.
And then Paul disappeared as well.
No one screamed or reacted poorly. Kanakaredes instantly braced himself in full-belay posture, slammed his ice axe deep into the ice beneath him, and wrapped the line around it twice before the thirty feet or so of slack between him and Paul had played out. I did the same, digging crampons in as hard as I could, fully expecting the crevasse to pull the bug in and then me.
It didn’t.
The line snapped taut but did not snap—genetically tailored spidersilk climbing rope almost never breaks—Kanakaredes’s ice axe stayed firm, as did the bug holding it in the glacier ice, and the two of us held them. We waited a full minute in our rigid postures, making sure that we weren’t also standing on a thin crust over a crevasse, but when it was obvious where the crevasse rim was, I gasped, “Keep them tight,” unclipped, and crawled forward to peer down the black gap.
I have no idea how deep the crevasse was—a hundred feet? A thousand? But both Paul and Gary were dangling there—Paul a mere fifteen feet or so down, still in the light, looking fairly comfortable as he braced his back against the blue-green ice wall and rigged his climbing jumars. That clamp and cam device, infinitely lighter and stronger but otherwise no different than the jumars our grandfathers might have used, would get him back up on his own as long as the rope held and as soon as he could get the footloops attached.
Gary did not look so comfortable. Almost forty feet down, hanging headfirst under an icy overhang so that only his crampons and butt caught the light, he looked as if he might be in trouble. If he had hit his head on the ice on the way down …
Then I heard him cursing—the incredible epiphets and shouts almost muffled in the crevasse, but still echoing deep as he cursed straight into the underbelly of the glacier—and I knew that he was all right.
It took only a minute or so for Paul to jumar up and over the lip,
but getting Gary rightside up and then lifted up over the overhang so he could attach his own jumars, took a bit longer and involved some manhauling.
That’s when I discovered how goddamned strong this bug was. I think that Kanakaredes could have hauled all three of us out of that crevasse if we’d been unconscious, almost six hundred pounds of dead weight. And I think he could have done it using only one of those skinny, almost muscleless-looking praying mantis forearms of his.
When Gary was out and untangled from his lines, harness, and jumars, we moved carefully around the crevasse, me in the lead and probing with my axe like a blind man in a vale of razor blades, and when we’d reached a good site for Camp One just at the base of the ridge, offering only a short climb in the morning to the crest of the northeast ridge that would eventually take us up onto the shoulder of K2 itself, we found a spot on the last patch of sun, unhooked the rope from our carabiners, dumped our seventy-five-pound packs, and just gasped for a while before setting up camp.
“Fucking good beginning to the goddamned motherfucking expedition,” said Gary between slugs on his water bottle. “Absolutely bastardly motherfucking brilliant—I walk into goddamned sonofabitching whoremongering crevasse like some pissant whoreson fucking day tripper.”
I looked over at Kanakaredes. Who could read a bug’s expression? That endless mouth with all its jack-o’-lantern bumps and ridges, wrapped two-thirds around its head from its beaky proboscis almost to the beginning of its bumpy skullcrest, always seemed to be smiling. Was it smiling more now? Hard to tell, and I was in no mood to ask.
One thing was clear. The mantispid had a small, clear device out—something very similar to our credit card palmlogs—and was entering data with a flurry of its three fingers. A lexicon, I thought. Either translating or recording Gary’s outburst which was, I admit, a magnificent flow of invective. He was still weaving a brilliant tapestry of obscenity that showed no sign of abating and which would probably hang over the Godwin-Austen Glacier like a blue cloud for years to come.
Good luck using this vocabulary during one of your UN cocktail parties, I thought to Kanakaredes as he finished his data entry and repacked his palmlog.
When Gary finally trailed off, I exchanged grins with Paul—who had said nothing since dropping into the crevasse—and we got busy breaking out the smart tents, the sleeping bags, and the stoves before darkness dropped Camp One into deep lunar cold.
I’m keeping these recordings for the State Department intelligence people and all the rest who want to learn everything about the bugs—about the mantispids’ technology, about their reasons for coming to earth, about their culture and religions—all the things they’ve somehow neglected to tell us in the past nine and a half years.
Well, here’s the sum total of my recording of human-mantispid conversation from last night at Camp One—
GARY: Uh … Kan … Kanakaredes? We were thinking of merging our three tents and cooking up some soup and hitting the sack early. You have any problem keeping your tent separate tonight? There’s room on this snow slab for both tent parts.
KANAKAREDES: I have no problem with that.
So much for interrogating our bug.
We should be higher tonight. We had a long, strong day of climbing today, but we’re still on the low part of the northeast ridge and we have to do better if we’re going to get up this hill and down safely in the two weeks alotted to us.
All this “Camp One” and “Camp Two” stuff I’m putting in this palmlog diary are old terms from the last century when attempts at eight-thousand-meter peaks literally demanded armies of men and women—more than a two hundred people hauling supplies for the first American Everest expedition in the 1963. Some of the peaks were pyramid-shaped but all the logistics were. By that I mean that scores of porters hauled in uncounted tons of supplies—Sherpa porters and high-climbers in the Himalayas, primarily Balti porters here in the Karakoram—and teams of men and women man-hauled these tons up the mountains, working in relays to establish camps to last the duration of the climb, breaking and marking trail, establishing fixed ropes up literally miles of slope, and moving teams of climbers up higher and higher until, after weeks, sometimes months of effort, a very few of the best and luckiest climbers—say six or four or two or even one from the scores who started—were in a position to make an attempt on the summit from a high camp—usually Camp Six, but sometimes Camp Seven or higher—starting somewhere in the Death Zone above eight-thousand-meters.
“Assault” on a mountain was a good word then, since it took an army to mount the assault.
Gary, Paul, the bug, and I are climbing alpine style. This means that we carry everything we need—starting heavy and getting lighter and lighter as we climb—essentially making a direct bid on the summit, hoping to climb it in a week or less. No series of permanent camps, just temporary slabs cut out of the snow and ice for our smart tents—at least up until whatever camp we designate as our summit-attempt jumping-off point. Then we’ll leave the tents and most of the gear there and go for it, hoping and praying to whatever gods we have—and who knows what gods Kanakaredes prays to, if any—praying that the weather won’t turn bad while we’re up there in the Death Zone, that we won’t get lost coming down to our high camp in the dark, that nothing serious happens to any us of during that final attempt since we really can’t help each other at that altitude—essentially just praying our asses off that we don’t fuck up.
But that is if we can keep moving steadily up this hill. Today wasn’t so steady.
We started early, breaking down Camp One in a few minutes, loading efficiently, and climbing well—me in the lead, then Paul, then the bug, then Gary. There’s a bitch of a steep, razor-edge traverse starting at about the 23,300-foot level—the hardest pitch on the northeast ridge part of our route—and we wanted to settle into a secure camp at the beginning of that scary traverse by nightfall tonight. No such luck.
I’m sure I have some of Kanakaredes’s comments recorded from today, but they’re mostly monosyllables and they don’t reveal any great bug secrets. They’re more along the lines of—“Kana … Kanaka … hey K, did you pack the extra stove?” “Yes” “Want to take a lunch break?” “That would be fine.”—and Gary’s “Shit, it’s starting to snow.” Come to think of it, I don’t believe the mantispid initiated any conversation. All the clicks and sighs on the palmlog chip are K replying to our questions. All the cursing was ours.
It started to snow heavily about noon.
Until then things had been going well. I was still in the lead—burning calories at a ferocious rate as I broke trail and kicked steps in the steep slope for the others to follow. We were climbing independently, not roped. If one of us slipped or caught his crampons on a rock rather than ice, it was up to that person to stop his slide by self-arrest with his ice axe. Otherwise one had just bought a really great amusement-park ride of a screaming slide on ice for a thousand feet or so and then a launch out over the edge to open space, dropping three or four thousand feet to the glacier below.
The best idea is not to think about that, just keep points attached to the snowslope at all times and make damned sure that no matter
how tired you were, that you paid attention to where you kicked your crampons into the ice. I have no idea if Kanakaredes had a fear of heights—I made a fatigued mental note to ask him—but his climbing style showed caution and care. His “crampons” were customized—a series of sharp, plastic-looking spikes lashed to those weird arrowshaped feet of his—but he took care in their placement and used his ice axe well. He was climbing two-legged this day, his rear legs folded into his elevated prothorax so that you wouldn’t know they were there unless you knew where to look.
By 10:30 or 11:00 A.M., we’d gained enough altitude that we could clearly see Staircase Peak—its eastern ridge looks like a stairway for some Hindu giant—on the northeast side of K2. The mountain is also called Skyang Kangri and it was beautiful, dazzling in the sunlight against the still-blue eastern sky. Far below, we could see the Godwin-Austen Glacier crawling along the base of Skyang Kangri to the 19,000-foot pass of Windy Gap. We could easily see over Windy Pass now, scores of miles to the browning hills of what used to be China and now was the mythical country of Sinkiang, fought over even as we climbed by troops from the HK and various Chinese warlords.
More pertinent to our cause right now was the view up and westward toward the beautiful but almost laughable bulk of K2, with its wild knife-edge ridge that we hoped to reach by nightfall. At this rate, I thought just before looking up at it again, it shouldn’t be any problem … .
That was precisely the moment when Gary called up, “Shit! It’s starting to snow!”
The clouds had rolled in from the south and west when we weren’t watching, and within ten minutes we were enveloped by them. The wind came up. Snow blew everywhere. We had to cluster up on the increasingly steep slope just to keep track of one another. Naturally, at precisely this point in the day’s climb, our steep but relatively easy snow slope turned into a forbidding wall of ice with a band of brittle rock visible above for the few minutes before the clouds shut off all our view for the rest of the day.
“Fuck me,” said Paul as we gathered at the foot of the ice slope.
Kanakaredes’s bulky, beaked head turned slowly in Paul’s direction, his black eyes attentive, as if he was curious as to whether such a biological improbability was possible. K asked no questions and Paul volunteered no answers.
Paul, the best ice climber among us, took the lead for the next half hour or so, planting his axe into the near-vertical ice wall, then kicking hard with the two spike points on the front of his boot, then pulling
himself up with the strength of his right arm, kicking one foot in again, pulling the axe out, slamming it in again.
This is basic ice-climbing technique, not difficult, but exhausting at almost twenty thousand feet—twice the altitude where CMGs and commercial airlines are required to go to pressurized O2—and it took time, especially since we’d roped up now and were belaying Paul as he kick-climbed.
Paul was about seventy feet above us now and was moving cautiously out onto the rock band. Suddenly a slew of small rocks came loose and hurtled down toward us.
There was no place for us to go. Each of us had hacked out a tiny platform in the ice on which we could stand, so all we could do was press ourselves against the ice wall, cover up, and wait. The rocks missed me. Gary had a fist-size rock bounce off his pack and go hurtling out into space. Kanakaredes was hit twice by serious-size rocks—once in his upper left leg, arm, whatever it is, and again on his bumpy dorsal ridge. I heard both rocks strike; they made a sound like stone hitting slate.
“Fuck me,” K said clearly as more rocks bounced around him.
When the fusillade was over, after Paul had finished shouting down apologies and Gary had finished hurling up insults, I kick-stepped the ten or so paces to where K still huddled against the ice wall, his right mantis forearm raised, the ice axe and his toe points still dug in tight.
“You hurt?” I said. I was worried that we’d have to use the red button to evacuate the bug and that our climb would be ruined.
Kanakaredes slowly shook his head—not so much to say no, but to check things out. It was almost painful to watch—his bulky head and smiling beak rotating almost 270 degrees in each direction. His free forearm unlimbered, bent impossibly, and those long, unjointed fingers carefully patted and probed his dorsal ridge.
Click. Sigh. Click—“I’m all right.”
“Paul will be more careful on the rest of the rock band.”
“That would be good.”
Paul was more careful, but the rock was rotten, and there were a few more landslides, but no more direct hits. Ten minutes and sixty or seventy feet later, he had reached the crest of the ridge, found a good belay stance, and called us up. Gary, who was still pissed—he liked few things less than being pelted by rocks set loose by someone else—started up next. I had Kanakaredes follow thirty feet behind Gary. The bug’s ice technique was by the book—not flashy but serviceable. I came up last, trying to stay close enough that I could see and dodge any loosened boulders when we all reached the rock band.
By the time we were all on the northeast ridge and climbing it, the visibility was close to zero, the temperature had dropped about fifty degrees, the snow was thick and mushy and treacherous, and we could hear but not see avalanches roaring down both the east face of K2 and this very slope somewhere both ahead of us and behind us in the fog. We stayed roped up.
“Welcome to K2,” Gary shouted back from where he had taken the lead. His parka and hood and goggles and bare chin were a scary, icicled mass mostly obscured by horizontally blowing snow.
“Thank you,” click-hissed K in what I heard as a more formal tone. “It is a great pleasure to be here.”
Stuck here three full days and nights, fourth night approaching. Hunkered here useless in our tents, eating nutrient bars and cooking soup that can’t be replaced, using up the heating charge in the stove to melt snow into water, each of us getting weaker and crankier due to the altitude and lack of exercise. The wind has been howling and the storm raging for three full days—four days if you count our climb from Camp Two. Yesterday Gary and Paul—with Paul in the lead on the incredibly steep ridge—tried to force the way across the steep climbing traverse in the storm, planning to lay down fixed rope even if we had to make the summit bid with only whatever string remained in our pockets. They failed on the traverse attempt, turning back after three hours in the howling weather and returning ice-crusted and near frostbitten. It took more than four hours for Paul to quit shaking, even with the thermskins and regulated smart clothing raising his body temperature. If we don’t get across this traverse soon—storm or no storm—we won’t have to worry about what gear and supplies will be left for the summit bid. There won’t be any summit bid.
I’m not even sure now how we managed the climb two days ago from Camp Two to this narrow patch of chopped out ridgecrest. Our bug was obviously at the edge of his skill envelope, even with his extra legs and greater strength, and we decided to rope together for the last few hours of climbing, just in case K peeled loose. It wouldn’t do much good to push the red panic button on the palmlog just to tell the arriving UN CMG guys that Kanakaredes had taken a header five thousand feet straight down to the Godwin-Austen Glacier.
“Mr. Alien Speaker, sir, we sort of lost your kid. But maybe you can scrape him up off the glacier ice and clone him or something.” No, we didn’t want that.
As it was, we ended up working after dark, headlamps glowing, ropes ’binered to our harnesses and attached to the slope via ice screws just to keep us from being blown into black space, using our ice axes to hack a platform big enough for the tent—there was only room for a merged cluster of the smart tents, wedged ten feet from a vertical drop, forty feet from an avalanche path and tucked directly beneath an overhanging serac the size of a three-story building—a serac that could give way any time and take us and the tent with it. Not the best spot to spend ten minutes in, much less three days and nights during a high-altitude hurricane. But we had no choice; everything else here was knife-ridge or avalanche slope.
As much as I would have preferred it otherwise, we finally had time for some conversation. Our tents were joined in the form of a squished cross, with a tiny central area, not much more than two feet or so across, for cooking and conversation and just enough room for each of us to pull back into our small nacelles when we curled up to sleep. The platform we’d hacked out of the slope under the overhanging serac wasn’t big enough or flat enough to serve all of us, and I ended up in one of the downhill segments, my head higher than my feet. The angle was flat enough to allow me to doze off but still steep enough to send me frequently lurching up from sleep, fingers clawing for my ice axe to stop my slide. But my ice axe was outside with the others, sunk in the deepening snow and rock-hard ice, with about a hundred feet of spidersilk climbing rope lashed around it and over the tent and back again. I think we also used twelve ice screws to secure us to the tiny ice shelf.
Not that any of this will do us a damned bit of good if the serac decides to go or the slope shifts or the winds just make up their minds to blow the whole mass of rope, ice axes, screws, tent, humans, and bug right off the mountain.
We’ve slept a lot, of course. Paul had brought a softbook loaded with a dozen or so novels and a bunch of magazines, so we handed that around occasionally—even K took his turn reading—and for the first day we didn’t talk much because of the effort it took to speak up over the wind howl and the noise of snow and hail pelting the tent. But eventually we grew bored even of sleeping and tried some conversation. That first day it was mostly climbing and technical talk—reviewing the route, listing points for and against the direct attempt once we got past this traverse and up over the snow dome at the base of the summit
pyramid—Gary arguing for the Direct Finish no matter what, Paul urging caution and a possible traverse to the more frequently climbed Abruzzi Ridge, Kanakaredes and me listening. But by the second and third days, we were asking the bug personal questions.
“So you guys came from Aldebaran,” said Paul on the second afternoon of the storm. “How long did it take you?”
“Five hundred years,” said our bug. To fit in his section of the tent, he’d had to fold every appendage he had at least twice. I couldn’t help but think it was uncomfortable for him.
Gary whistled. He’d never paid much attention to all the media coverage of the mantispids. “Are you that old, K? Five hundred years?”
Kanakaredes let out a soft whistle that I was beginning to suspect was some equivalent to a laugh. “I am only twenty-three of your years old, Gary,” he said. “I was born on the ship, as were my parents and their parents and so on far back. Our life span is roughly equivalent to yours. It was a … generation-ship, I believe is your term for it.” He paused as the howling wind rose to ridiculous volume and velocity. When it died a bit, he went on, “I knew no other home than the ship until we reached Earth.”
Paul and I exchanged glances. It was time for me to interrogate our captive bug for country, family, and Secretary Bright Moon. “So why did you … the Listeners … travel all the way to Earth?” I asked. The bugs had answered this publicly on more than one occasion, but the answer was always the same and never made much sense.
“Because you were there,” said the bug. It was the same old answer. It was flattering, I guess, since we humans have always considered ourselves the center of the universe, but it still made little sense.
“But why spend centuries traveling to meet us?” asked Paul.
“To help you learn to listen,” said K.
“Listen to what?” I said. “You? The mantispids? We’re interested in listening. Interested in learning. We’ll listen to you.”
Kanakaredes slowly shook his heavy head. I realized, viewing the mantispid from this close, that his head was more saurian—dinosaur/ birdlike—than buggy. “Not listen to us,” click, hiss. “To the song of your own world.”
“To the song of our world?” asked Gary almost brusquely. “You mean, just appreciate life more? Slow down and smell the roses? Stuff like that?” Gary’s second wife had been into transcendental meditation. I think it was the reason he divorced her.
“No,” said K. “I mean listen to the sound of your world. You have fed your seas. You have consecrated your world. But you do not listen.”
It was my turn to muddle things even further. “Fed our seas and consecrated our world,” I said. The entire tent thrummed as a gust hit it and then subsided. “How did we do that?”
“By dying, Jake,” said the bug. It was the first time he’d used my name. “By becoming part of the seas, of the world.”
“Does dying have something to do with hearing the song?” asked Paul.
Kanakaredes’s eyes were perfectly round and absolutely black, but they did not seem threatening as he looked at us in the glow of one of the flashlights. “You cannot hear the song when you are dead,” he whistle-clicked. “But you cannot have the song unless your species has recycled its atoms and molecules through your world for millions of years.”
“Can you hear the song here?” I asked. “On Earth, I mean.”
“No,” said the bug.
I decided to try a more promising tack. “You gave us CMG technology,” I said, “and that’s certainly brought wonderful changes.” Bullshit, I thought. I’d liked things better before cars could fly. At least the traffic jams along the Front Range where I lived in Colorado had been two dimensional then. “But we’re sort of … well … curious about when the Listeners are going to share other secrets with us.”
“We have no secrets,” said Kanakaredes. “Secrets was not even a concept to us before we arrived here on Earth.”
“Not secrets then,” I said hurriedly, “but more new technologies, inventions, discoveries …”
“What kind of discoveries?” said K.
I took a breath. “A cure to cancer would be good,” I said.
Kanakaredes made a clicking sound. “Yes, that would be good,” he breathed at last. “But this is a disease of your species. Why have you not cured it?”
“We’ve tried,” said Gary. “It’s a tough nut to crack.”
“Yes,” said Kanakaredes, “it is a tough nut to crack.”
I decided not to be subtle. “Our species need to learn from one another,” I said, my voice perhaps a shade louder than necessary to be heard over the storm. “But your people are so reticent. When are we really going to start talking to each other?”
“When your species learns to listen,” said K.
“Is that why you came on this climb with us?” asked Paul.
“I hope that is not the result,” said the bug, “but it is, along with the need to understand, the reason I came.”
I looked at Gary. Lying on his stomach, his head only inches from the low tent roof, he shrugged slightly.
“You have mountains on your home world?” asked Paul.
“I was taught that we did not.”
“So your homeworld was sort of like the south pole where you guys have your freehold?”
“Not that cold,” said Kanakaredes, “and never that dark in the winter. But the atmospheric pressure is similar.”
“So you’re acclimated to about—what?—seven or eight thousand feet altitude?”
“Yes,” said the mantispid.
“And the cold doesn’t bother you?” asked Gary.
“It is uncomfortable at times,” said the bug. “But our species has evolved a subcutaneous layer which serves much as your thermskins in regulating temperature.”
It was my turn to ask a question. “If your world didn’t have mountains,” I said, “why do want to climb K2 with us?”
“Why do you wish to climb it?” ask Kanakaredes, his head swiveling smoothly to look at each of us.
There was silence for a minute. Well, not really silence since the wind and pelting snow made it sound as if we were camped behind a jet exhaust, but at least none of us humans spoke.
Kanakaredes folded and unfolded his six legs. It was disturbing to watch. “I believe that I will try to sleep now,” he said, and closed the flap that separated his niche from ours.
The three of us put our heads together and whispered. “He sounds like a goddamned missionary,” hissed Gary. “All this ‘listen to the song’ doubletalk.”
“Just our luck,” said Paul. “Our first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, and they’re freaking Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“He hasn’t handed us any tracts yet,” I said.
“Just wait,” whispered Gary. “The four of us are going to stagger onto the summit of this hill someday if this fucking storm ever lets up, exhausted, gasping for air that isn’t there, frostbitten to shit and back, and this bug’s going to haul out copies of the Mantispid Watchtower.”
“Shhh,” said Paul. “K’ll hear us.”
Just then the wind hit the tent so hard that we all tried digging our fingernails through the hyper-polymer floor to keep the tent from sliding off its precarious perch and down the mountain. If worst came to worst, we’d shout “Open!” at the top of our lungs, the smart tent fabric would fold away, and we’d roll out onto the slope in our thermskins and grab for our ice axes to self-arrest the slide. That was the theory. In fact, if
the platform shifted or the spidersilk snapped, we’d almost certainly be airborne before we knew what hit us.
When we could hear again over the wind roar, Gary shouted, “If we unpeel from this platform, I’m going to cuss a fucking blue streak all the way down to impact on the glacier.”
“Maybe that’s the song that K’s been talking about,” said Paul, and sealed his flap.
Last note to the day: Mantispids snore.
On the afternoon of day three, Kanakaredes suddenly said, “My creche brother is also listening to a storm near your south pole at this very moment. But his surroundings are … more comfortable and secure than our tent.”
I looked at the other two, and we all showed raised eyebrows.
“I didn’t know you brought a phone with you on this climb, K,” I said.
“I did not.”
“Radio?” said Paul.
“Not.”
“Subcutaneous intergalactic Star Trek communicator?” said Gary. His sarcasm, much as his habit of chewing the nutrient bars too slowly, was beginning to get on my nerves after three days in this tent. I thought that perhaps the next time he was sarcastic or chewed slowly, I might just kill him.
K whistled ever so slightly. “No,” he said. “I understood your climbers’ tradition of bringing no communication devices on this expedition.”
“Then how do you know that your … what was it, creche brother? … is in a storm down there?” asked Paul.
“Because he is my creche brother,” said K. “We were born in the same hour. We are, essentially, the same genetic material.”
“Twins,” I said.
“So you have telepathy?” said Paul.
Kanakaredes shook his head, his proboscis almost brushing the flapping tent fabric. “Our scientists think that there is no such thing as telepathy. For any species.”
“Then how—?” I began.
“My creche brother and I often resonate on the same frequencies to the song of the world and universe,” said K in one of the longest sentences we’d heard from him. “Much as your identical twins do. We often share the same dreams.”
Bugs dream. I made a mental note to record this factoid later.
“And does your creche brother know what you’re feeling right now?” said Paul.
“I believe so.”
“And what’s that?” asked Gary, chewing far too slowly on an n-bar.
“Right now,” said Kanakaredes, “it is fear.”
The fourth day dawned perfectly clear, perfectly calm.
We were packed and climbing across the traverse before the first rays of sunlight struck the ridgeline. It was cold as a witch’s tit.
I mentioned that this part of the route was perhaps the most technically challenging of the climb—at least until we reached the actual summit pyramid—but it was also the most beautiful and exhilarating. You would have to see photos to appreciate the almost absurd steepness of this section of the ridge and even then it wouldn’t allow you to feel the exposure. The northeast ridge just kept climbing in a series of swooping, knife-edged snow cornices, each side dropping away almost vertically.
As soon as we had moved onto the ridge, we looked back at the gigantic serac hanging above the trampled area of our Camp III perched on the edge of the ridge—the snow serac larger and more deformed and obviously unstable than ever after the heavy snows and howling winds of the last four days of storm—and we didn’t have to say a word to one another to acknowledge how lucky we had been. Even Kanakaredes seemed grateful to get out of there.
Two hundred feet into the traverse and we went up and over the blade of the knife. The snowy ridgeline was so narrow here that we could—and did—straddle it for a minute as if swinging our legs over a very, very steep roofline.
Some roof. One side dropped down thousands of feet into what used to be China. Our left legs—three of Kanakaredes’s—hung over what used to be Pakistan. Right around this point, climbers in the twentieth century used to joke about needing passports but seeing no border guards. In this CMG-era, a Sianking HK gunship or Indian hop-fighter could float up here anytime, hover fifty yards out, and blow us right off the ridge. None of us were worried about this. Kanakaredes’s presence was insurance against that.
This was the hardest climbing yet, and our bug friend was working hard to keep up. Gary and Paul and I had discussed this the night before, whispering again while K was asleep, and we decided that this section was too steep for all of us to be roped together. We’d travel in two pairs. Paul was the obvious man to rope with K, although if either of them came off on this traverse, odds were overwhelming that the other would go all the way to the bottom with him. The same was true of Gary and me, climbing ahead of them. Still, it gave a very slight measure of insurance.
The sunlight moved down the slope, warming us, as we moved from one side of the knife-edge to the other, following the best line, trying to stay off the sections so steep that snow would not stick—avoiding it not just because of the pitch there, but because the rock was almost always loose and rotten—and hoping to get as far as we could before the warming sun loosened the snow enough to make our crampons less effective.
I loved the litany of the tools we were using: deadmen, pitons, pickets, ice screws, carabiners, jumar ascenders. I loved the precision of our movements, even with the labored breathing and dull minds that were a component of any exertion at almost eight thousand meters. Gary would kick-step his way out onto the wall of ice and snow and occasional rock, one cramponed boot at a time, secure on three points before dislodging his ice axe and slamming it in a few feet further on. I stood on a tiny platform I’d hacked out of the snow, belaying Gary until he’d moved out to the end of our two-hundred-foot section of line. Then he’d anchor his end of the line with a deadman, piton, picket, or ice screw, go on belay himself, and I would move off—kicking the crampon points into the snow-wall rising almost vertically to blue sky just fifty or sixty feet above me.
A hundred yards or so behind us, Paul and Kanakaredes were doing the same—Paul in the lead and K on belay, then K climbing and Paul belaying and resting until the bug caught up.
We might as well have been on different planets. There was no conversation. We used every ounce of breath to take our next gasping step, to concentrate on precise placement of our feet and ice axes.
A twentieth-century climbing team might have taken days to make this traverse, establishing fixed lines, retreating to their tents at Camp Three to eat and sleep, allowing other teams to break trail beyond the fixed ropes the next day. We did not have that luxury. We had to make this traverse in one try and keep moving up the ridge while the perfect weather lasted or we were screwed.
I loved it.
About five hours into the traverse, I realized that butterflies were fluttering all around me. I looked up toward Gary on belay two hundred eet ahead and above me. He was also watching butterflies—small motes of color dancing and weaving 23,000 feet above sea level. What the hell would Kanakaredes make of this? Would he think this was an everyday occurrence at this altitude? Well, perhaps it was. We humans weren’t up here enough to know. I shook my head and continued shuffling my boots and slamming my ice axe up the impossible ridge.
The rays of the sun were horizontal in late afternoon when all four of us came off the knife-edge at the upper end of the traverse. The ridge was still heart-stoppingly steep there, but it had widened out so that we could stand on it as we looked back at our footprints on the snowy blade of the knife-edge. Even after all these years of climbing, I still found it hard to believe that we had been able to make those tracks.
“Hey!” shouted Gary. “I’m a fucking giant!” He was flapping his arms and staring toward Sinkiang and the Godwin-Austen Glacier miles below us.
Altitude’s got him, I thought. We’ll have to sedate him, tie him in his sleeping bag and drag him down the way we came like so much laundry.
“Come on!” Gary shouted to me in the high, cold air. “Be a giant, Jake.” He continued flapping his arms. I turned to look behind me and Paul and Karakaredes were also hopping up and down, carefully so as not to fall off the foot-wide ridgeline, shouting and flapping their arms. It was quite a sight to see K moving his mantisy forearms six ways at once, joints swiveling, boneless fingers waving like big grubs.
They’ve all lost it, I thought. Oxygen deprivation lunacy. Then I looked down and east.
Our shadows leaped out miles across the glacier and the neighboring mountains. I raised my arms. Lowered them. My shadow atop the dark line of ridge shadow raised and lowered shadow-arms that must have been ten miles tall.
We kept this up—jumping shouting, waving—until the sun set behind Broad Peak to the west and our giant selves disappeared forever.
No conversation or talk of listening to songs now. No jumping or shouting or waving. Not enough oxygen here to breathe or think, much less fuck around.
Almost no conversation the last three days or nights as we climbed the last of the broadening northeast ridge to where it ended at the huge snow dome, then climbed the snow dome itself. The weather stayed calm and clear—incredible for this late in the season. The snow was deep because of the storm that had pinned us down at Camp Three, but we took turns breaking trail—an exhausting job at 10,000 feet, literally mind-numbing above 25,000 feet.
At night, we didn’t even bother merging our tents—just using our own segments like bivvy bags. We only heated one warm meal a day—super-nutrient soup on the single stove (we’d left the other behind just beyond the knife-edge traverse, along with everything else we didn’t think we’d need in the last three or four days of climbing)—and chewed on cold n-bars at night before drifting off into a half-doze for a few cold, restless hours before stirring at three or four A.M. to begin climbing again by lamplight.
All of us humans had miserable headaches and high-altitude stupidity. Paul was in the worst shape—perhaps because of the frostbite scare way down during his first attempt at the traverse—and he was coughing heavily and moving sluggishly. Even K had slowed down, climbing mostly two-legged on this high stretch, and sometimes taking a minute or more before planting his feet.
Most Himalayan mountains have ridges that go all the way to the summit. Not K2. Not this northeast ridge. It ended at a bulging snow dome some two thousand feet below the summit.
We climbed the snow dome—slowly, stupidly, sluggishly, separately. No ropes or belays here. If anyone fell to his death, it was going to be a solitary fall. We did not care. At and above the legendary eight thousand-meter line, you move into yourself and then—often—lose even yourself.
We had not brought oxygen, not even the light osmosis boostermask perfected in the last decade. We had one of those masks—in case any of us became critically ill from pulmonary edema or worse—but we’d left the mask cached with the stove, most of the rope, and other extra supplies above Camp Four. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Now all I could think about was breathing. Every move—every step—took more breath than I had, more oxygen than my system owned. Paul seemed in even worse shape, although somehow he kept up. Gary was moving steadily, but sometimes he betrayed his headaches and confusion by movement or pause. He had vomited twice this morning before we moved out from Camp Six. At night, we startled awake after only a minute or two of half-sleep-gasping for air, clawing at
our own chests, feeling as if something heavy were lying on us and someone were actively trying to suffocate us.
Something was trying to kill us here. Everything was. We were high in the Death Zone, and K2 did not care one way or the other if we lived or died.
The good weather had held, but high wind and storms were overdue. It was the end of August. Any day or night now we could be pinned down up here for weeks of unrelenting storm—unable to climb, unable to retreat. We could starve to death up here. I thought of the red panic button on the palmlog.
We had told Kanakaredes about the panic button while we heated soup at Camp Five. The mantispid had asked to see the extra palmlog with the emergency beacon. Then he had thrown the palmlog out the tent entrance, into the night, over the edge.
Gary had looked at our bug for a long minute and then grinned, extending his hand. K’s foreleg had unfolded, the mantis part swiveling, and those three fingers had encircled Gary’s hand and shaken it.
I had thought this was rather cool and heroic at the time. Now I just wished we had the goddamned panic button back.
We stirred, got dressed, and started heating water for our last meal shortly after 1:30 A.M. None of us could sleep anyway, and every extra hour we spent up here in the Death Zone meant more chance to die, more chance to fail. But we were moving so slowly that tugging our boots on seemed to take hours, adjusting our crampons took forever. We moved away from the rents sometime after three A.M. We left the tents behind at Camp Six. If we survived the summit attempt, we’d be back.
It was unbelievably cold. Even the thermskins and smart outer parkas failed to make up the difference. If there had been a wind, we could not have continued.
We were now on what we called Direct Finish—the top or bust—although our original fallback plan had been to traverse across the face of K2 to the oldest route up the northwest Abruzzi Ridge if Direct Finish proved unfeasible. I think that all three of us had suspected we’d end up on the Abruzzi—most of our predecessors climbing the northeast ridge had ended up doing so, even the legendary Reinhold Messner, perhaps the greatest climber of the twentieth century, had been forced to change his route to the easier Abruzzi Ridge rather than suffer failure on the Direct Finish.
Well, by early afternoon of what was supposed to have been our summit day, Direct Finish now seems impossible and so does the traverse to the Abruzzi. The snow on the face of K2 is so deep that there
is no hope of traversing through it to the Abruzzi Ridge. Avalanches hurtle down the face several times an hour. And above us—even deeper snow. We’re fucked.
The day had started well. Above the almost vertical snowdome on which we’d hacked out a wide enough bench to lodge Camp Six, rose a huge snowfield that snaked up and up toward the black, starfilled sky until it became a wall. We climbed slowly, agonizingly, up the snowfield, leaving separate tracks, thinking separate thoughts. It was getting light by the time we reached the end of the snow ramp.
Where the snowfield ended a vertical ice cliff began and rose at least 150 feet straight up. Literally fucking vertical. The four of us stood there in the morning light, three of us rubbing our goggles, looking stupidly at the cliff. We’d known it was there. We’d had no idea what a bitch it was going to be.
“I’ll do the lead,” gasped Paul. He could barely walk.
He free-climbed the fucker in less than an hour, slamming in pitons and screws and tying on the last of our rope. When the three of us climbed slowly, stupidly up to join him, me bringing up the rear just behind K, Paul was only semiconscious.
Above the ice cliff rose a steep rock band. It was so steep that snow couldn’t cling there. The rock looked rotten—treacherous—the kind of fragile crap that any sane climber would traverse half a day to avoid.
There would be no traverse today. Any attempt to shift laterally on the face here would almost certainly trigger an avalanche in the soft slabs of snow overlaying old ice.
“I’ll lead,” said Gary, still looking up at the rock band. He was holding his head with both hands. I knew that Gary always suffered the worst of the Death Zone headaches that afflicted all three of us. For four or five days and nights now, I knew, Gary’s every word and breath had been punctuated by slivers of steel pain behind the eyes.
I nodded and helped Paul to his feet. Gary began to climb the lower strata of crumbling rock.
We reach the end of the rock by midafternoon. The wind is rising. A spume of spindrift blows off the near-vertical snow and ice above us. We cannot see the summit. Above a narrow coloir that rises like a chimney to frigid hell, the summit-pyramid snowfield begins. We’re somewhere above 27,000 feet.
K2 is 28,250 feet high.
That last twelve hundred feet might as well be measured in light-years.
“I’ll break trail up the coloir,” I hear myself say. The others don’t
even nod, merely wait for me to begin. Kanakaredes is leaning on his ice axe in a posture I’ve not seen before.
My first step up the coloir sends me into snow above my knees. This is impossible. I would weep now, except that the tears would freeze to the inside of my goggles and blind me. It is impossible to take another step up this steep fucking gully. I can’t even breathe. My head pounds so terribly that my vision dances and blurs and no amount of wiping my goggles will clear it.
I lift my ice axe, slam it three feet higher, and lift my right leg. Again. Again.
Late afternoon. It will be almost dark when we reach the summit. If we reach the summit.
Everything depends upon the snow that rises above us toward the impossibly dark blue sky. If the snow is firm—nowhere as mushy and deep as the thigh-high soup I broke trail through all the way up the coloir—then we have a chance, although we’ll be descending in the dark.
But if it’s deep snow …
“I’ll lead,” said Gary, shifting his small summit-pack on his back and slogging slowly up to replace me in the lead. There is a rock band here at the top of the narrow coloir, and he will be stepping off it either into or onto the snow. If the surface is firm, we’ll all move onto it, using our crampons to kick step our way up the last couple of hours of climb to the summit—although we still cannot see the summit from here. Please God, let it be firm.
I try to look around me. Literally beneath my feet is a drop to the impossibly distant knife-edge, far below that the ridge where we put Camp Two, miles and miles lower the curving, rippled river of Godwin-Austen and a dim memory of base camp and of living things—lichen, crows, a clump of grass where the glacier was melting. On either side stretches the Karakoram, white peaks thrusting up like fangs, distant summits merging into the Himalayan peaks, and one lone peak—I’m too stupid to even guess which one—standing high and solitary against the sky. The red hills of China burn in the thick haze of breathable atmosphere a hundred miles to the north.
“OK,” says Gary, stepping off the rock onto the snowfield.
He plunges in soft snow up to his waist.
Somehow Gary finds enough breath to hurl curses at the snow, at any and all gods who would put such deep snow here. He lunges another step up and forward.
The snow is even deeper. Gary founders almost up to his armpits. He slashes at the snowfield with his ice axe, batters it with his overmittens. The snowfield and K2 ignore him.
I go to both knees on the pitched rock band and lean on my ice axe, not caring if my sobs can be heard by the others or if my tears will freeze my eyelids open. The expedition is over.
Kanakaredes slowly pulls his segmented body up the last ten feet of the coloir, past Paul where Paul is retching against a boulder, past me where I am kneeling, onto the last of the solid surface before Gary’s sliding snowpit.
“I will lead for a while,” says Kanakaredes. He sets his ice axe into his harness. His prothorax shifts lower. His hind legs come down and out. His arms—forelegs—rotate down and forward.
Kanakaredes thrusts himself into the steep snowfield like an Olympic swimmer diving off the starting block. He passes Gary where Gary lies armpit deep in the soft snow.
The bug—our bug—flails and batters the snow with his forearms, parts it with his cupped fingers, smashes it down with his armored upper body segment, swims through the snow with all six legs paddling.
He can’t possibly keep this up. It’s impossible. Nothing living has that much energy and will. It is seven or eight hundred near-vertical feet to the summit.
K swims-kicks-fights his way fifteen feet up the slope. Twenty-five. Thirty.
Getting to my feet, feeling my temples pounding in agony, sensing invisible climbers around me, ghosts hovering in the Death Zone fog of pain and confusion, I step past Gary and start postholing upward, following K’s lead, struggling and swimming up and through the now-broken barrier of snow.
We step onto the summit together, arm in arm. All four of us. The final summit ridge is just wide enough to allow this.
Many eight thousand-meter-peak summits have overhanging cornices. After all this effort, the climber sometimes takes his or her final step to triumph and falls for a mile or so. We don’t know if K2 is corniced. Like many of these other climbers, we’re too exhausted to
care. Kanakaredes can no longer stand or walk after breaking trail through the snowfield for more than six hundred feet. Gary and I carry him the last hundred feet or so, our arms under his mantis arms. I am shocked to discover that he weighs almost nothing. All that energy, all that spirit, and K probably weighs no more than a hundred pounds.
The summit is not corniced. We do not fall.
The weather has held, although the sun is setting. Its last rays warm us through our parkas and thermskins. The sky is a blue deeper than cerulean, much deeper than sapphire, incomparably deeper than aquamarine. Perhaps this shade of blue has no word to describe it.
We can see to the curve of the earth and beyond. Two peaks are visible above that curving horizon, their summit icefields glowing orange in the sunset, a great distance to the northeast, probably somewhere in Chinese Turkistan. To the south lies the entire tumble of overlapping peaks and winding glaciers that is the Karakoram. I make out the perfect peak that is Nanga Parbat—Gary, Paul, and I climbed that six years ago—and closer, the Gasherbrum. At our feet, literally at our feet, Broad Peak. Who would have thought that its summit looked so wide and flat from above?
The four of us are all sprawled on the narrow summit, two feet from the sheer drop-off on the north. My arms are still around Karakaredes, ostensibly propping him up but actually propping both of us up.
The mantispid clicks, hisses, and squeaks. He shakes his beak and tries again. “I am … sorry,” he gasps, the air audibly hissing in and out of his beak nostrils. “I ask … traditionally, what do we do now? Is there a ceremony for this moment? A ritual required?”
I look at Paul, who seems to be recovering from his earlier inertia. We both look at Gary.
“Try not to fuck up and die,” says Gary between breaths. “More climbers die during the descent than on the way up.”
Kanakaredes seems to be considering this. After a minute he says, “Yes, but here on the summit, there must be some ritual …”
“Hero photos,” gasps Paul. “Gotta … have … hero photos.”
Our alien nods. “Did … anyone … bring an imaging device? A camera? I did not.”
Gary, Paul and I look at each other, pat our parka pockets, and then start laughing. At this altitude, our laughter sounds like three sick seals coughing.
“Well, no hero photos,” says Gary. “Then we have to haul the flags out. Always bring a flag to the summit, that’s our human motto.” This
extended speech makes Gary so light-headed that he has to put his head between his raised knees for a minute.
“I have no flag,” says Kanakaredes. “The Listeners have never had a flag.” The sun is setting in earnest now, the last rays shining between a line of peaks to the west, but the reddish-orange light glows brightly on our stupid, smiling faces and mittens and goggles and ice-crusted parkas.
“We didn’t bring a flag either,” I say.
“This is good,” says K. “So there is nothing else we need to do?”
“Just get down alive,” says Paul.
We rise together, weaving a bit, propping one another up, retrieve our ice axes from where we had thrust them into the glowing summit snow, and begin retracing our steps down the long snowfield into shadow.
It took us only four and a half days to get down, and that included a day of rest at our old Camp Three on the low side of the knife-edge traverse.
The weather held the whole time. We did not get back to our high camp—Camp Six below the ice wall—until after three A.M. after our successful summit day, but the lack of wind had kept our tracks clear even in lamplight, and no one slipped or fell or suffered frostbite.
We moved quickly after that, leaving just after dawn the next day to get to Camp Four on the upper end of the knife-edge before nightfall … and before the gods of K2 changed their minds and blew up a storm to trap us in the Death Zone.
The only incident on the lower slopes of the mountain happened—oddly enough—on a relatively easy stretch of snowslope below Camp Two. The four of us were picking our way down the slope, unroped, lost in our own thoughts and in the not-unpleasant haze of exhaustion so common near the end of a climb, when K just came loose—perhaps he tripped over one of his own hindlegs, although he denied that later—and ended up on his stomach—or at least the bottom of his upper shell, all six legs spraddled, ice axe flying free, starting a slide that would have been harmless enough for the first hundred yards or so if it had not been for the drop off that fell away to the glacier still a thousand feet directly below.
Luckily, Gary was about a hundred feet ahead of the rest of us and
he dug in his axe, looped a line once around himself and twice around the axe, timed K’s slide perfectly, and then threw himself on his belly out onto the ice slope, his reaching hand grabbing Kanakaredes’s three fingers as slick as a pair of aerial trapeze partners. The rope snapped taut, the axe held its place, man and mantispid swung two and a half times like the working end of a pendulum, and that was the end of that drama. K had to make it the rest of the way to the glacier without an ice axe the next day, but he managed all right. And we now know how a bug shows embarrassment—his occipital ridges blush a dark orange.
Off the ridge at last, we roped up for the glacier but voted unanimously to descend it by staying close to the east face of K2. The earlier snowstorm had hidden all the crevasses and we had heard or seen no avalanches in the past seventy-two hours. There were far fewer crevasses near the face, but an avalanche could catch us anywhere on the glacier. Staying near the face carried its own risks, but it would also get us down the ice and out of avalanche danger in half the time it would take to probe for crevasses down the center of the glacier.
We were two-thirds of the way down—the bright red tents of Base Camp clearly in sight out on the rock beyond the ice—when Gary said, “Maybe we should talk about this Olympus Mons deal, K.”
“Yes,” click-hissed our bug, “I have been looking forward to discussing this plan and I hope that perhaps—”
We heard it then before we saw it. Several freight trains seemed to be bearing down on us from above, from the face of K2.
All of us froze, trying to see the snowplume trail of the avalanche, hoping against hope that it would come out onto the glacier far behind us. It came off the face and across the bergeschrund a quarter of a mile directly above us and picked up speed, coming directly at us. It looked like a white tsunami. The roar was deafening.
“Run!” shouted Gary and we all took off downhill, not worrying if there were bottomless crevasses directly in front of us, not caring at that point, just trying against all logic to outrun a wall of snow and ice and boulders roiling toward us at sixty miles per hour.
I remember now that we were roped with the last of our spidersilk—sixty-foot intervals—the lines clipped to our climbing harnesses. It made no difference to Gary, Paul, and me since we were running flat out and in the same direction and at about the same speed, but I have seen mantispids move at full speed since that day—using all six legs, their hands forming into an extra pair of flat feet—and I know now that K could have shifted into high gear and run four times as fast as the rest of us. Perhaps he could have beaten the avalanche since just the south edge of its wave caught us. Perhaps.
He did not try. He did not cut the rope. He ran with us.
The south edge of the avalanche caught us and lifted us and pulled us under and snapped the unbreakable spidersilk climbing rope and tossed us up and then submerged us again and swept us all down into the crevasse field at the bottom of the glacier and separated us forever.
Sitting here in the secretary of state’s waiting room three months after that day, I’ve had time to think about it.
All of us—everyone on the planet, even the bugs—have been preoccupied in the past couple of months as the Song has begun and increased in complexity and beauty. Oddly enough, it’s not that distracting, the Song. We go about our business. We work and talk and eat and watch HDTV and make love and sleep, but always there now—always in the background whenever one wants to listen—is the Song.
It’s unbelievable that we’ve never heard it before this.
No one calls them bugs or mantispids or the Listeners anymore. Everyone, in every language, calls them the Bringers of the Song.
Meanwhile, the Bringers keep reminding us that they did not bring the Song, only taught us how to listen to it.
I don’t know how or why I survived when none of the others did. The theory is that one can swim along the surface of a snow avalanche, but the reality was that none of us had the slightest chance to try. That wide wall of snow and rock just washed over us and pulled us down and spat out only me, for reasons known, perhaps, only to K2 and most probably not even to it.
They found me naked and battered more than three-quarters of a mile from where we had started running from the avalanche. They never found Gary, Paul, or Kanakaredes.
The emergency CMGs were there within three minutes—they must have been poised to intervene all that time—but after twenty hours of deep-probing and sonar searching, just when the marines and the bureaucrats were ready to lase away the whole lower third of the glacier if necessary to recover my friends’ bodies, it was Speaker Aduradake—Kanakaredes’s father and mother, it turned out—who forbade it.
“Leave them wherever they are,” he instructed the fluttering UN bureaucrats and frowning marine colonels. “They died together on your
world and should remain together within the embrace of your world. Their part of the song is joined now.”
And the Song began—or at least was first heard—about one week later.
A male aide to the secretary comes out, apologizes profusely for my having to wait—Secretary Bright Moon was with the president—and shows me into the secretary of state’s office. The aide and I stand there waiting.
I’ve seen football games played in smaller areas than this office.
The secretary comes in through a different door a minute later and leads me over to two couches facing each other rather than to the uncomfortable chair near her huge desk. She seats me across from her, makes sure that I don’t want any coffee or other refreshment, nods away her aide, commiserates with me again on the death of my dear friends (she had been there at the memorial service at which the president had spoken), chats with me for another minute about how amazing life is now with the Song connecting all of us, and then questions me for a few minutes, sensitively, solicitously, about my physical recovery (complete), my state of mind (shaken but improving), my generous stipend from the government (already invested), and my plans for the future.
“That’s the reason I asked for this meeting,” I say. “There was that promise of climbing Olympus Mons.”
She stares at me.
“On Mars,” I add needlessly.
Secretary Betty Willard Bright Moon nods and sits back in the cushions. She brushes some invisible lint from her navy blue skirt. “Ah, yes,” she says, her voice still pleasant but holding some hint of that flintiness I remember so well from our Top of the World meeting. “The Bringers have confirmed that they intend to honor that promise.”
I wait.
“Have you decided who your next climbing partners will be?” she asked, taking out an obscenely expensive and micron-thin platinum palmlog as if she is going to take notes herself to help facilitate this whim of mine.
“Yeah,” I said.
Now it was the secretary’s turn to wait.
“I want Kanakaredes’s brother,” I say. “His … creche brother.”
Betty Willard Bright Moon jaw almost drops open. I doubt very much if she’s reacted this visibly to a statement in her last thirty years
of professional negotiating, first as a take-no-prisoners Harvard academic and most recently as secretary of state. “You’re serious,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Anyone else other than this particular bu—Bringer?”
“No one else.”
“And you’re sure he even exists?”
“I’m sure.”
“How do you know if he wants to risk his life on a Martian volcano?” she asks, her poker face back in place. “Olympus Mons is taller than K2, you know. And it’s probably more dangerous.”
I almost, not quite, smile at this news flash. “He’ll go,” I say.
Secretary Bright Moon makes a quick note in her palmlog and then hesitates. Even though her expression is perfectly neutral now, I know that she is trying to decide whether to ask a question that she might not get the chance to ask later.
Hell, knowing that question was coming and trying to decide how to answer it is the reason I didn’t come to visit her a month ago, when I decided to do this thing. But then I remembered Kanakaredes’s answer when we asked him why the bugs had come all this way to visit us. He had read his Mallory and he had understood Gary, Paul, and me—and something about the human race—that this woman never would.
She makes up her mind to ask her question.
“Why …,” she begins. “Why do you want to climb it?”
Despite everything that’s happened, despite knowing that she’ll never understand, despite knowing what an asshole she’ll always consider me after this moment, I have to smile before I give her the answer.
“Because it’s there.”