The god was already traveling through the great-leafed forest.
“Let us go now,” they said.
“Did you ever think of staying? Of watching to see what the monster god does?” asked Ryllik bitterly.
“Enough of your blasphemies! Come along!”
Ryllik followed them.
“We grow fewer every year,” he said. “One day we shall no longer have any sacrifices left to offer.”
“Then that day we die,” said the others.
“So why prolong it?” he asked. “Let us fight them—now, before we are no more!”
But the others shook their heads, a summary of that resignation Ryllik had watched grow as the centuries passed. They all respected Ryllik’s age, but they did not approve of his thoughts. They cast one last look back, just as the sun caught the clanking god upon his gilt-caparisoned mount, his death-lance slung at his side. Within the place where the smokes were born the maiden thrashed her tail from side to side, rolling wild eyes beneath her youthful brow-plates. She sensed the divine presence and began to bellow.
They turned away and lumbered across the plains.
As they neared the forest Ryllik paused and raised a scaley fore-limb, groping after a thought. Finally, he spoke:
“I seem to have memory,” said he, “of a time when things were different.”
COLLECTOR’S FEVER
“What are you doing there, human?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Good, I like long stories. Sit down and talk. No—not on me!”
“Sorry. Well, it’s all because of my uncle, the fabulously wealthy—”
“Stop. What does ‘wealthy’ mean?”
“Well, like rich.”
“And ‘rich’?”
“Hm. Lots of money.”
“What’s money?”
“You want to hear this story or don’t you?”
“Yes, but I’d like to understand it too.”
“Sorry, Rock, I’m afraid I don’t understand it all myself.”
“The name is Stone.”
“Okay, Stone. My uncle, who is a very important man, was supposed to send me to the Space Academy, but he didn’t. He decided a liberal education was a better thing. So he sent me to his old spinster alma mater to major in nonhuman humanities. You with me, so far?”
“No, but understanding is not necessarily an adjunct to appreciation.”
“That’s what I say. I’ll never understand Uncle Sidney, but I appreciate his outrageous tastes, his magpie instinct and his gross meddling in other people’s affairs. I appreciate them till I’m sick to the stomach. There’s nothing else I can do. He’s a carnivorous old family monument, and fond of having his own way. Unfortunately, he also has all the money in the family—so it follows, like a xxt after a zzn, that he always does have his own way.”
“This money must be pretty important stuff.”
“Important enough to send me across ten thousand light-years to an unnamed world which, incidentally, I’ve just named Dunghill.”
“The low-flying zatt is a heavy eater, which accounts for its low flying… “
“So I’ve noted. That is moss though, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Good, then crating will be less of a problem.”
“What’s ‘crating’?”
“It means to put something in a box to take it somewhere else.”
“Like moving around?”
“Yes.”
“What are you planning on crating?”
“Yourself, Stone.”
“I’ve never been the rolling sort… “
“Listen, Stone, my uncle is a rock collector, see? You are the only species of intelligent mineral in the galaxy. You are also the largest specimen I’ve spotted so far. Do you follow me?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to.”
“Why not? You’d be lord of his rock collection. Sort of a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind, if I may venture an inappropriate metaphor.”
“Please don’t do that, whatever it is. It sounds awful. Tell me, how did your uncle learn of our world?”
“One of my instructors read about this place in an old space log. He was an old space log collector. The log had belonged to a Captain Fairhill, who landed here several centuries ago and held lengthy discourses with your people.”
“Good old Foul Weather Fairhill! How is he these days? Give him my regards—”
“He’s dead.”
“What?”
“Dead. Kaput. Blooey. Gone. Deeble.”
“Oh my! When did it happen? I trust it was an esthetic occurrence of major import—”
“I really couldn’t say. But I passed the information on to my uncle, who decided to collect you. That’s why I’m here—he sent me.”
“Really, as much as I appreciate the compliment, I can’t accompany you. It’s almost deeble time—”
“I know, I read all about deebling in the Fairhill log before I showed it to Uncle Sidney. I tore those pages out. I want him to be around when you do it. Then I can inherit his money and console myself in all manner of expensive ways for never having gone to the Space Academy. First I’ll become an alcoholic, then I’ll take up wenching—or maybe I’d better do it the other way around…
“But I want to deeble here, among the things I’ve become attached to!”
“This is a crowbar. I’m going to unattach you.”
“If you try it, I’ll deeble right now.”
“You can’t. I measured your mass before we struck up this conversation. It will take at least eight months, under Earth conditions, for you to reach deebling proportions.”
“Okay, I was bluffing. But have you no compassion? I’ve rested here for centuries, ever since I was a small pebble, as did my fathers before me. I’ve added so carefully to my atom collection, building up the finest molecular structure in the neighborhood. And now, to be snatched away right before deebling time, it’s—it’s quite unrock of you.”
“It’s not that bad. I promise you’ll collect the finest Earth atoms available. You’ll go places no other Stone has ever been before.”
“Small consolation. I want my friends to see.”
“I’m afraid that’s out of the question.”
“You are a very cruel human. I hope you’re around when I deeble.”
“I intend to be far away and on the eve of prodigious debaucheries when that occurs.”
Under Dunghill’s sub-E gravitation Stone was easily rolled to the side of the space sedan, crated, and, with the help of a winch, installed in the compartment beside the atomic pile. The fact that it was a short-jaunt sport model sedan, customized by its owner, who had removed much of the shielding, was the reason Stone felt a sudden flush of volcanic drunkenness, rapidly added select items to his collection and deebled on the spot.
He mushroomed upwards, then swept in great waves across the plains of Dunghill. Several young Stones fell from the dusty heavens wailing their birth pains across the community band.
“Gone fission,” commented a distant neighbor, above the static, “and sooner than I expected. Feel that warm afterglow!”
“An excellent deeble,” agreed another. “It always pays to be a cautious collector.”
THIS MORTAL MOUNTAIN
I looked down at it and I was sick! I wondered, where did it lead? Stars?
There were no words. I stared and I stared, and I cursed the fact that the thing existed and that someone had found it while I was still around.
“Well?” said Lanning, and he banked the flier so that I could look upward.
I shook my head and shaded my already shielded eyes.
“Make it go away,” I finally told him.
“Can’t. It’s bigger than I am.”
“It’s bigger than anybody,” I said.
“I can make us go away… “
“Never mind. I want to take some pictures.”
He brought it around, and I started to shoot.<
br />
“Can you hover—or get any closer?”
“No, the winds are too strong.”
“That figures.”
So I shot—through telescopic lenses and scan attachment and alias we circled it.
“I’d give a lot to see the top.”
“We’re at thirty thousand feet, and fifty’s the ceiling on this baby. The Lady, unfortunately, stands taller than the atmosphere.”
“Funny,” I said, “from here she doesn’t strike me as the sort to breathe ether and spend all her time looking at stars.”
He chuckled and lit a cigarette, and I reached us another bulb of coffee.
“How does the Gray Sister strike you?”
And I lit one of my own and inhaled, as the flier was buffeted by sudden gusts of something from somewhere and then ignored, and I said, “Like Our Lady of the Abattoir—right between the eyes.”
We drank some coffee, and then he asked, “She too big, Whitey?” and I gnashed my teeth through caffeine, for only my friends call me Whitey, my name being Jack Summers and my hair having always been this way, and at the moment I wasn’t too certain whether Henry Lanning qualified for that status—just because he’d known me for twenty years—after going out of his way to find this thing on a world with a thin atmosphere, a lot of rocks, a too-bright sky and a name like LSD pronounced backwards, after George Diesel, who had set foot in the dust and then gone away—smart fellow!
“A forty-mile-high mountain,” I finally said, “is not a mountain. It is a world all by itself, which some dumb deity forgot to throw into orbit.”
“I take it you’re not interested?”
I looked back at the gray and lavender slopes and followed them upward once again, until all color drained away, until the silhouette was black and jagged and the top still nowhere in sight, until my eyes stung and burned behind their protective glasses; and I saw clouds bumping up against that invincible outline, like icebergs in the sky, and I heard the howling of the retreating winds which had essayed to measure its grandeur with swiftness and, of course, had failed.
“Oh, I’m interested,” I said, “in an academic sort of way. Let’s go back to town, where I can eat and drink and maybe break a leg if I’m lucky.”
He headed the flier south, and I didn’t look around as we went. I could sense her presence at my back, though, all the way: The Gray Sister, the highest mountain in the known universe. Unclimbed, of course.
She remained at my back during the days that followed, casting her shadow over everything I looked upon. For the next two days I studied the pictures I had taken and I dug up some maps and I studied them, too; and I spoke with people who told me stories of the Gray Sister, strange stories…
During this time, I came across nothing really encouraging. I learned that there had been an attempt to colonize Diesel a couple centuries previously, back before faster-than-light ships were developed. A brand-new disease had colonized the first colonists, however, wiping them out to a man. The new colony was four years old, had better doctors, had beaten the plague, was on Diesel to stay and seemed proud of its poor taste when it came to worlds. Nobody, I learned, fooled around much with the Gray Sister. There had been a few abortive attempts to climb her, and some young legends that followed after.
During the day, the sky never shut up. It kept screaming into my eyes, until I took to wearing my climbing goggles whenever I went out. Mainly, though, I sat in the hotel lounge and ate and drank and studied the pictures and cross-examined anybody who happened to pass by and glance at them, spread out there on the table.
I continued to ignore all Henry’s questions. I knew what he wanted, and he could damn well wait. Unfortunately, he did, and rather well, too, which irritated me. He felt I was almost hooked by the Sister, and he wanted to Be There When It Happened. He’d made a fortune on the Kasla story, and I could already see the opening sentences of this one in the smug lines around his eyes. Whenever he tried to make like a poker player, leaning on his fist and slowly turning a photo, I could see whole paragraphs. If I followed the direction of his gaze, I probably could even have seen the dust jacket.
At the end of the week, a ship came down out of the sky, and some nasty people got off and interrupted my train of thought. When they came into the lounge, I recognized them for what they were and removed my black lenses so that I could nail Henry with my basilisk gaze and turn him to stone. As it would happen, he had too much alcohol in him, and it didn’t work.
“You tipped off the press,” I said.
“Now, now,” he said, growing smaller and stiffening as my gaze groped its way through the murk of his central nervous system and finally touched upon the edges of that tiny tumor, his forebrain. “You’re well-known, and… “
I replaced my glasses and hunched over my drink, looking far gone, as one of the three approached and said, “Pardon me, but are you Jack Summers?”
To explain the silence which followed, Henry said, “Yes, this is Mad Jack, the man who climbed Everest at twenty-three and every other pile of rocks worth mentioning since that time. At thirty-one, he became the only man to conquer the highest mountain in the known universe—Mount Kasla on Litan—elevation, 89,941 feet. My book—”
“Yes,” said the reporter. “My name is Gary, and I’m with GP. My friends represent two of the other syndicates. We’ve heard that you are going to climb the Gray Sister.”
“You’ve heard incorrectly,” I said.
“Oh?”
The other two came up and stood beside him.
“We thought that—” one of them began.
“—you were already organizing a climbing party,” said the other.
“Then you’re not going to climb the Sister?” asked Gary, while one of the two looked over my pictures and the other got ready to take some of his own.
“Stop that!” I said, raising a hand at the photographer. “Bright lights hurt my eyes!”
“Sorry. I’ll use the infra,” he said, and he started fooling with his camera.
Gary repeated the question.
“All I said was that you’ve heard incorrectly,” I told him. “I didn’t say I was and I didn’t say I wasn’t. I haven’t made up my mind.”
“If you should decide to try it, have you any idea when it will be?”
“Sorry, I can’t answer that.”
Henry took the three of them over to the bar and stalled explaining something, with gestures. I heard the words ”… out of retirement after four years,” and when/if they looked to the booth again, I was gone.
I had retired, to the street which was full of dusk, and I walked along it thinking. I trod her shadow even then, Linda. And the Gray Sister beckoned and forbade with her single unmoving gesture. I watched her, so far away, yet still so large, a piece of midnight at eight o’clock. The hours that lay between died like the distance at her feet, and I knew that she would follow me wherever I went, even into sleep. Especially into sleep.
So I knew, at that moment. The days that followed were a game I enjoyed playing. Fake indecision is delicious when people want you to do something. I looked at her then, my last and my largest, my very own Koshtra Pivrarcha, and I felt that I was born to stand upon her summit. Then I could retire, probably remarry, cultivate my mind, not worry about getting out of shape, and do all the square things I didn’t do before, the lack of which had cost me a wife and a home, back when I had gone to Kasla, elevation 89,941 feet, four and a half years ago, in the days of my glory. I regarded my Gray Sister across the eight o’clock world, and she was dark and noble and still and waiting, as she had always been.
II
The following morning I sent the messages. Out across the light-years like cosmic carrier pigeons they went. They winged their ways to some persons I hadn’t seen in years and to others who had seen me off at Luna Station. Each said, in its own way, “If you want in on the biggest climb of them all, come to Diesel. The Gray Sister eats Kaslas for breakfast. R.S.V.P. c/o. The Lodge, Georgetown. W
hitey.”
Backward, turn backward…
I didn’t tell Henry. Nothing at all. What I had done and where I was going, for a time, were my business only, for that same time. I checked out well before sunrise and left him a message at the desk: “Out of town on business. Back in a week. Hold the fort. Mad Jack.”
I had to gauge the lower slopes, tug the hem of the lady’s skirt, so to speak, before I introduced her to my friends. They say only a madman climbs alone, but they call me what they call me for a reason.
From my pix, the northern face had looked promising.
I set the rented flier down as near as I could, locked it up, shouldered my pack and started walking.
Mountains rising to my right and to my left, mountains at my back, all dark as sin now in the predawn light of a white, white day. Ahead of me, not a mountain, but an almost gentle slope which kept rising and rising and rising. Bright stars above me and cold wind past me as I walked. Straight up, though, no stars, just black. I wondered for the thousandth time what a mountain weighed. I always wonder that as I approach one. No clouds in sight. No noises but my boot sounds on the turf and the small gravel. My goggles flopped around my neck. My hands were moist within my gloves. On Diesel, the pack and I together probably weighed about the same as me alone on Earth—for which I was duly grateful. My breath burned as it came and steamed as it went. I counted a thousand steps and looked back, and I couldn’t see the flier. I counted a thousand more and then looked up to watch some stars go out. About an hour after that, I had to put on my goggles. By then I could see where I was headed. And by then the wind seemed stronger.
She was so big that the eye couldn’t take all of her in at once. I moved my head from side to side, leaning further and further backward. Wherever the top, it was too high. For an instant, I was seized by a crazy acrophobic notion that I was looking down rather than up, and the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands tingled, like an ape’s must when, releasing one high branch to seize another, he discovers that there isn’t another.
I went on for two more hours and stopped for a light meal. This was hiking, not climbing. As I ate, I wondered what could have caused a formation like the Gray Sister. There were some ten and twelve-mile peaks within sixty miles of the place and a fifteen-mile mountain called Burke’s Peak on the adjacent continent, but nothing else like the Sister. The lesser gravitation? Her composition? I couldn’t say. I wondered what Doc and Kelly and Mallardi would say when they saw her.
The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth Page 13
