Chapter 6

Mt. Everest

Suz rammed her crampon into the snow and forced herself to take another step. Breathe twice, step once. Right foot. Breathe twice, step left foot.

What idiot idea had placed her up on this ridge? Need to prove yourself, Suz. Need to prove to meek little Suzie that anything was possible.

Breathe twice, right foot.

Prove that even the highest mountain in the world could be climbed one step at a time. That nervous, cowering woman had blocked her every move with caution. She blocked Suz’s every decisive action with enough inner fear and sufficient trepidation to bury a wooly mammoth.

At least a mammoth would have more sense than to be up over the Hillary Step of Mount Everest. A mammoth would have taken oxygen as well. But no, not Suz, the inner voice complained. No, she had no sense of proceeding with proper care and foresight.

Suz shook her head to clear it. She was well into the zone where brain cells were dying by the millions each minute. Maybe a few of Suzie’s worried synapses would be among those to go. She blinked her eyes again and looked down at her feet. They were planted firmly in the crusty snow. Neither of them was moving.

The last long ridge to the top stretched before her like a launching sling aimed at the impossibly blue-black sky. The old passenger jets barely flew this high. Her feet were convinced they weren’t going to go up one more step.

Suz wrenched the right foot free and placed it upslope. Using the ice axe like a cane, her right fingers frozen into a permanently firm grip about its head, she wrenched the left foot free and moved it beyond its companion.

Breathe once, right. Breathe once, left.

Alone on the top of the world. The nearest climber fought her own battle many crags behind. On this mountain, such a distance placed her in her own world of pain and hypoxia. Of breathless cold and biting wind. Of stark beauty so powerful it could crush you and toss you a thousand meters to your death and never flinch.

She glanced over her shoulder, but no one was in sight. And the Hillary Step was barely ten paces behind. A quick glance at her watch showed that those ten steps had cost her half an hour of mental aberration.

Once again her feet were planted firmly in the snow like rooted pillars that had grown there since the birth of the world. She ripped the left one free and forced her body uphill. She’d crawl the last ridge as Hillary and Tenzing had so long ago if she had to.

Think of something else. Set the body into mechanical motion and think of something else.

Her data-gathering structure was complete. As complete as any evolving system could be. It had taken six painstaking months to isolate and tap most of the gathering and monitoring systems.

Left. Breathe once. Right.

She’d learned that there really were no secrets from someone with a sufficiently elevated password, a bit of skill, and a lot of perseverance. Another half-year had been needed to filter all the chaff and train the gathering system that had an avalanche-like desire to inundate her with information. She had to repeatedly tune and block data strings. Finally the information she was gathering was down to a nearly comprehensible scale.

Breathe once. Left.

The horrors she had uncovered during that time and the year since were frequently unspeakable. World Council President Melissa Chang’s vivisected body lay moments from death for Celia Wirden to discover. Celia had to smother the breathing corpse of her former lover. The next day her cremated remains were honored, dead of a respiratory disorder. Celia had lost some of her flair and style that day. Her white-blond hair had begun to gray and dark rings showed under her eyes. Suz struggled to find some sympathy for the woman, but there was none.

She shook her left hand fiercely, but there was no feeling. The activity exhausted her and she had to drag more freezing air to burn her nose with its threats of pending frostbite.

Breathe thrice. Right Foot.

And her father’s plan for genetic cleansing. The worst wasn’t that his WEC troops had killed over a hundred million in the last two years. The horror was the six hundred million who had been quietly removed over the two decades since the completion of the Second Human Genome Mapping Project. HGMP II had revealed all of the genetic predispositions to asocial behaviors. With his perfect blinders of cause and effect, the Right Hand had been cleansing humanity to create Homo superior, to force humanity over the next evolutionary threshold.

And he’d kept it secret. He directed the WEC forces through a few carefully selected generals who reported to him and him alone.

Breathe once. Left.

And what could she do about it? People were dying out there, some probably criminal, but most not.

Breathe once. Right. Left. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

That was what had cast her out onto this slope. Two years of research and she had no idea what to do with all of the information she’d gathered. How could she turn the juggernaut that was her father and not be instantly crushed in the process?

Right. Left. Right. Breathe twice.

Like the crusty snow crunching beneath her feet, sagging with each step through the frozen outer skin into the softer layers below, she could find no solid ground from which to launch her attacks.

Maybe that was the problem. She was climbing one step at a time. Not conquering the mountain before it conquered her, but rather conquering the next step.

Left. Breathe.

Maybe little changes could solve the bigger problem.

Right. Breathe.

Suz had focused on the large problems of the world, murder of world leaders, death of millions.

Left. Breathe.

A hundred thousand small steps could conquer a mountain. She just needed to shift her system to find the small steps.

Suz stumbled to a halt when there was no upward slope on which to place her foot. There was no more up to climb. She turned fully around twice seeking the next ridge to climb, the next bit of glacier, before she discovered there was none.

The great rounded top of Everest lay beneath her feet. The mountain had submitted and the jagged Himalayas lay spread out before her. Russian Tibet was a cruel array of impassable peaks looking little different from the Indian state of Nepal.

Once, perhaps twice a year, the everlasting blast of the jet stream didn’t tear at the peak of Everest. Today, in this moment of time, Suz stood at the quiet center of the universe.

Look, Suzie, use our eyes and look clearly at what we can do. Our father is dangerous, but no more dangerous than this mountain if we go one step at a time. And somewhere, further ahead than we can see, is the clear goal in the calm air. We simply must do what we can until then. And we must be ready to strike when the chance comes, in whatever form it arrives.

Together, her past and her present, looked out upon the future with new eyes.