The Doors Of His Face, The Lamps Of His Mouth

by Roger Zelazny

  He took it into his hands and stared at it for a long time, then he started to say something about ball lightning, changed his mind, shook his head and placed the thing back on the blanket.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said, and this time his freckles remained unmashed, except for those at the edges of his hands which got caught as he clenched them, slowly.

  IV

  We planned. We mapped and charted and studied the photos. We plotted our ascent and we started a training program.

  While Doc and Stan had kept themselves in good shape, neither had been climbing since Kasla. Kelly was in top condition. Henry was on his way to fat. Mallardi and Vince, as always, seemed capable of fantastic feats of endurance and virtuosity, had even climbed a couple times during the past year, but had recently been living pretty high on the tall hog, so to speak, and they wanted to get some practice. So we picked a comfortable, decent-sized mountain and gave it ten days to beat everyone back into shape. After that, we stuck to vitamins, calisthenics and square diets while we completed our preparations. During this time, Doc came up with seven shiny, alloy boxes, about six by four inches and thin as a first book of poems, for us to carry on our persons to broadcast a defense against the energy creature which he refused to admit existed.

  One fine, bitter-brisk morning we were ready. The newsmen liked me again. Much footage was taken of our gallant assemblage as we packed ourselves into the fliers, to be delivered at the foot of the lady mountain, there to contend for what was doubtless the final time as the team we had been for so many years, against the waiting gray and the lavender beneath the sunwhite flame.

  We approached the mountain, and I wondered how much she weighed.

  You know the way, for the first nine miles. So I’ll step over that. It took us six days and part of a seventh. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred. Some fog there was, and nasty winds, but once below, forgotten.

  Stan and Mallardi and I stood where the bird had occurred, waiting for Doc and the others.

  “So far, it’s been a picnic,” said Mallardi.

  “Yeah,” Stan acknowledged.

  “No birds either.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “Do you think Doc was right—about it being an hallucination?” Mallardi asked. “I remember seeing things on Kasla… “

  “As I recall,” said Stan, “it was nymphs and an ocean of beer. Why would anyone want to see hot birds?”

  “Damfino.”

  “Laugh, you hyenas,” I said. “But just wait till a flock flies over.”

  Doc came up and looked around.

  “This is the place?”

  I nodded.

  He tested the background radiation and half a dozen other things, found nothing untoward, grunted and looked upwards.

  We all did. Then we went there.

  It was very rough for three days, and we only made another five thousand feet during that time.

  When we bedded down, we were bushed, and sleep came quickly. So did Nemesis.

  He was there again, only not quite so near this time. He burned about twenty feet away, standing in the middle of the air, and the point of his blade indicated me.

  “Go away,” he said, three times, without inflection.

  “Go to hell,” I tried to say.

  He made as if he wished to draw nearer. He failed.

  “Go away yourself,” I said.

  “Climb back down. Depart. You may go no further.”

  “But I am going further. All the way to the top.”

  “No. You may not.”

  “Stick around and watch,” I said.

  “Go back.”

  “If you want to stand there and direct traffic, that’s your business,” I told him. “I’m going back to sleep.”

  I crawled over and shook Doc’s shoulder, but when I looked back my flaming visitor had departed.

  “What is it?”

  “Too late,” I said. “He’s been here and gone.”

  Doc sat up.

  “The bird?”

  “No, the thing with the sword.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Standing out there,” I gestured.

  Doc hauled out his instruments and did many things with them for ten minutes or so.

  “Nothing,” he finally said. “Maybe you were dreaming.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Sleep tight,” and I hit the sack again, and this time I made it through to daylight without further fire or ado.

  It took us four days to reach sixty thousand feet. Rocks fell like occasional cannonballs past us, and the sky was a big pool, cool, where pale flowers floated. When we struck sixty-three thousand, the going got much better, and we made it up to seventy-five thousand in two and a half more days. No fiery things stopped by to tell me to turn back. Then came the unforeseeable, however, and we had enough in the way of natural troubles to keep us cursing.

  We hit a big, level shelf.

  It was perhaps four hundred feet wide. As we advanced across it, we realized that it did not strike the mountainside. It dropped off into an enormous gutter of a canyon. We would have to go down again, perhaps seven hundred feet, before we could proceed upward once more. Worse yet, it led to a featureless face which strove for and achieved perpendicularity for a deadly high distance: like miles. The top was still nowhere in sight.

  “Where do we go now?” asked Kelly, moving to my side.

  “Down,” I decided, “and we split up. We’ll follow the big ditch in both directions and see which way gives the better route up. Well meet back at the midway point.”

  We descended. Then Doc and Kelly and I went left, and the others took the opposite way.

  After an hour and a half, our trail came to an end. We stood looking at nothing over the edge of something. Nowhere, during the entire time, had we come upon a decent way up. I stretched out, my head and shoulders over the edge, Kelly holding onto my ankles, and I looked as far as I could to the right and up. There was nothing in sight that was worth a facing movement.

  “Hope the others had better luck,” I said, after they’d dragged me back.

  “And if they haven’t…?” asked Kelly.

  “Let’s wait.”

  They had.

  It was risky, though.

  There was no good way straight up out of the gap. The trail had ended at a forty-foot wall which, when mounted, gave a clear view all the way down. Leaning out as I had done and looking about two hundred feet to the left and eighty feet higher, however, Mallardi had rested his eyes on a rough way, but a way, nevertheless, leading up and west and vanishing.

  We camped in the gap that night. In the morning, I anchored my line to a rock, Doc tending, and went out with the pneumatic pistol. I fell twice, and made forty feet of trail by lunchtime.

  I rubbed my bruises then, and Henry took over. After ten feet, Kelly got out to anchor a couple of body-lengths behind him, and we tended Kelly.

  Then Stan blasted and Mallardi anchored. Then there had to be three on the face. Then four. By sundown, we’d made a hundred-fifty feet and were covered with white powder. A bath would have been nice. We settled for ultrasonic shakedowns.

  By lunch the next day, we were all out there, roped together, hugging cold stone, moving slowly, painfully, slowly, not looking down much.

  By day’s end, we’d made it across, to the place where we could hold on and feel something—granted, not much—beneath our boots. It was inclined to be a trifle scant, however, to warrant less than a full daylight assault. So we returned once more to the gap.

  In the morning, we crossed.

  The way kept its winding angle. We headed west and up. We traveled a mile and made five hundred feet. We traveled another mile and made perhaps three hundred.

  Then a ledge occurred, about forty feet overhead.

  Stan went up the hard way, using the gun, to see what he could see.

  He gestured, and we followed; and the view that broke upon us was good.

  Down
right, irregular but wide enough, was our new camp.

  The way above it, ice cream and whiskey sours and morning coffee and a cigarette after dinner. It was beautiful and delicious: a seventy-degree slope full of ledges and projections and good clean stone.

  “Hot damn!” said Kelly.

  We all tended to agree.

  We ate and we drank and we decided to rest our bruised selves that afternoon.

  We were in the twilight world now, walking where no man had ever walked before, and we felt ourselves to be golden. It was good to stretch out and try to unache.

  I slept away the day, and when I awakened the sky was a bed of glowing embers. I lay there too lazy to move, too full of sight to go back to sleep. A meteor burnt its way bluewhite across the heavens. After a time, there was another. I thought upon my position and decided that reaching it was worth the price. The cold, hard happiness of the heights filled me. I wiggled my toes.

  After a few minutes, I stretched and sat up. I regarded the sleeping forms of my companions. I looked out across the night as far as I could see. Then I looked up at the mountain, then dropped my eyes slowly along tomorrow’s trail.

  There was movement within shadow.

  Something was standing about fifty feet away and ten feet above.

  I picked up my pick and stood.

  I crossed the fifty and stared up.

  She was smiling, not burning.

  A woman, an impossible woman.

  Absolutely impossible. For one thing, she would just have to freeze to death in a mini-skirt and a sleeveless shell-top. No alternative. For another, she had very little to breathe. Like, nothing.

  But it didn’t seem to bother her. She waved. Her hair was dark and long, and I couldn’t see her eyes. The planes of her pale, high cheeks, wide forehead, small chin corresponded in an unsettling fashion with certain simple theorems which comprise the geometry of my heart. If all angles, planes, curves be correct, it skips a beat, then hurries to make up for it.

  I worked it out, felt it do so, said, “Hello.”

  “Hello, Whitey,” she replied.

  “Come down,” I said.

  “No, you come up.”

  I swung my pick. When I reached the ledge she wasn’t there. I looked around, then I saw her.

  She was seated on a rock twelve feet above me.

  “How it is that you know my name?” I asked.

  “Anyone can see what your name must be.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “What’s yours?”

  “…’ ” Her lips seemed to move, but I heard nothing.

  “Come again?”

  “I don’t want a name,” she said.

  “Okay. I’ll call you ‘girl,’ then.”

  She laughed, sort of.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Watching you.”

  “Why?”

  “To see whether you’ll fall.”

  “I can save you the trouble,” I said. “I won’t.”

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  “Come down here.”

  “No, you come up here.”

  I climbed, but when I got there she was twenty feet higher.

  “Girl, you climb well,” I said, and she laughed and turned away.

  I pursued her for five minutes and couldn’t catch her. There was something unnatural about the way she moved.

  I stopped climbing when she turned again. We were still about twenty feet apart.

  “I take it you do not really wish me to join you,” I said.

  “Of course I do, but you must catch me first.” And she turned once more, and I felt a certain fury within me.

  It was written that no one could outclimb Mad Jack. I had written it.

  I swung my pick and moved like a lizard.

  I was near to her a couple of times, but never near enough.

  The day’s aches began again in my muscles, but I pulled my way up without slackening my pace. I realized, faintly, that the camp was far below me now, and that I was climbing alone through the dark up a strange slope. But I did not stop. Rather, I hurried, and my breath began to come hard in my lungs. I heard her laughter, and it was a goad. Then I came upon a two-inch ledge, and she was moving along it. I followed, around a big bulge of rock to where it ended. Then she was ninety feet above me, at the top of a smooth pinnacle. It was like a tapering, branchless tree. How she’d accomplished it, I didn’t know. I was gasping by then, but I looped my line around it and began to climb. As I did this, she spoke: “Don’t you ever tire, Whitey? I thought you would have collapsed by now.”

  I hitched up the line and climbed further.

  “You can’t make it up here, you know.”

  “I don’t know,” I grunted.

  “Why do you want so badly to climb here? There are other nice mountains.”

  “This is the biggest, girl. That’s why.”

  “It can’t be done.”

  “Then why all this bother to discourage me? Why not just let the mountain do it?”

  As I neared her, she vanished. I made it to the top, where she had been standing, and I collapsed there.

  Then I heard her voice again and turned my head. She was on a ledge, perhaps eighty feet away.

  “I didn’t think you’d make it this far,” she said. “You are a fool. Good-by, Whitey.” She was gone.

  I sat there on the pinnacle’s tiny top—perhaps four square feet of top—and I knew that I couldn’t sleep there, because I’d fall. And I was tired.

  I recalled my favorite curses and I said them all, but I didn’t feel any better. I couldn’t let myself go to sleep. I looked down. I knew the way was long. I knew she didn’t think I could make it.

  I began the descent.

  The following morning when they shook me, I was still tired. I told them the last night’s tale, and they didn’t believe me. Not until later in the day, that is, when I detoured us around the bulge and showed them the pinnacle, standing there like a tapering, branchless tree, ninety feet in the middle of the air.

  V

  We went steadily upward for the next two days. We made slightly under ten thousand feet. Then we spent a day hammering and hacking our way up a great flat face. Six hundred feet of it. Then our way was to the right and upward. Before long we were ascending the western side of the mountain. When we broke ninety thousand feet, we stopped to congratulate ourselves that we had just surpassed the Kasla climb and to remind ourselves that we had still had not hit the halfway mark. It took us another two and a half days to do that, and by then the land lay like a map beneath us.

  And then, that night, we all saw the creature with the sword.

  He came and stood near our camp, and he raised his sword above his head, and it blazed with such a terrible intensity that I slipped on my goggles. His voice was all thunder and lightning this time: “Get off this mountain!” he said. “Now! Turn back! Go down! Depart!”

  And then a shower of stones came down from above and rattled about us. Doc tossed his slim, shiny case, causing it to skim along the ground toward the creature.

  The light went out, and we were alone.

  Doc retrieved his case, took tests, met with the same success as before—i.e., none. But now at least he didn’t think I was some kind of balmy, unless of course he thought we all were.

  “Not a very effective guardian,” Henry suggested.

  “We’ve a long way to go yet,” said Vince, shying a stone through the space the creature had occupied. “I don’t like it if the thing can cause a slide.”

  “That was just a few pebbles,” said Stan.

  “Yeah, but what if he decided to start them fifty thousand feet higher?”

  “Shut up!” said Kelly. “Don’t give him any ideas. He might be listening.”

  For some reason, we drew closer together. Doc made each of us describe what we had seen, and it appeared that we all had seen the same thing.

  “All right,” I said, after we’d finished. “Now you’ve
all seen it, who wants to go back?”

  There was silence.

  After perhaps half a dozen heartbeats, Henry said, “I want the whole story. It looks like a good one. I’m willing to take my chances with angry energy creatures in order to get it.”

  “I don’t know what the thing is,” said Kelly. “Maybe it’s no energy creature. Maybe it’s something—supernatural—I know what you’ll say, Doc. I’m just telling you how it struck me. If there are such things, this seems a good place for them. Point is—whatever it is, I don’t care. I want this mountain. If it could have stopped us, I think it would’ve done it already. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it can. Maybe it’s laid some trap for us higher up. But I want this mountain. Right now, it means more to me than anything. If I don’t go up, I’ll spend all my time wondering about it—and then I’ll probably come back and try it again some day, when it gets so I can’t stand thinking about it any more. Only then, maybe the rest of you won’t be available. Let’s face it, we’re a good climbing team. Maybe the best in the business. Probably. If it can be done, I think we can do it.”

  “I’ll second that,” said Stan.

  “What you said, Kelly,” said Mallardi, “about it being supernatural—it’s funny, because I felt the same thing for a minute when I was looking at it. It reminds me of something out of the Divine Comedy. If you recall, Purgatory was a mountain. And then I thought of the angel who guarded the eastern way to Eden. Eden had gotten moved to the top of Purgatory by Dante—and there was this angel… Anyhow, I felt almost like I was committing some sin I didn’t know about by being here. But now that I think it over, a man can’t be guilty of something he doesn’t know is wrong, can he? And I didn’t see that thing flashing any angel ID card. So I’m willing to go up and see what’s on top, unless he comes back with the Tablets of the Law, with a new one written in at the bottom.”

  “In Hebrew or Italian?” asked Doc.

  “To satisfy you, I suppose they’d have to be drawn up in the form of equations.”

  “No,” he said. “Kidding aside, I felt something funny too, when I saw it and heard it. And we didn’t really hear it, you know. It skipped over the senses and got its message right into our brains. If you think back over our descriptions of what we experienced, we each “heard’ different words telling us to go away. If it can communicate a meaning as well as a psych translator, I wonder if it can communicate an emotion, also… You thought of an angel, too, didn’t you, Whitey?”