by Дэн Симмонс
Suddenly A. Bettik swerves to the left, chips flying as he bites deep with the curved blades of both long and short axes—it makes no sense, such a move will send him—both of us!—bouncing off the inner wall, the vertical ice wall, and then screaming out into black air—but I trust him, making the decision in less than a second, and slam the blade of my large axe down, pounding hard with my ice hammer, feeling my heart in my throat as I skid sideways and threaten to slide right instead of left, on the verge of spinning and spiraling off the narrow ice ledge at 140 kilometers per hour—but I correct and stabilize and flash past a hole in the ice floor where we would have been sliding except for this wild detour, hurtling onto a broken-away ledge six or eight meters wide, a trapdoor to death—and then A. Bettik rackets down off the inner wall, catches his slide with a flash of ice-axe blades in the moonlight, and then continues hurtling down the Abruzzi Spur toward the final series of turns onto the Hua Shan ice slopes.
And I follow.
On the Flower Mountain, we are both too frozen and shaken to rise from our sleds for several cold minutes. Then, together, we get to our feet, ground the piezoelectric charges in our sleds, collapse them, and fold them away in our packs. We walk the ice path around the shoulder of Hua Shan in silence—I in awe of A. Bettik’s reactions and courage, he in silence I cannot interpret but fervently hope is not anger at my hasty decision to return via this route.
The final three cableway flights are anticlimax, noted only for the beauty of the moonlight on the peaks and ridges around us, and for the difficulty I have in closing my frozen fingers on the D-ring brakes.
Jo-kung is ablaze with torches after the moonlit emptiness of the upper slopes, but we avoid the main scaffolds and take the ladders to the fissure pass. Then we are surrounded by the shadowed darkness of the north face, broken by sputtering torches along the high walkway to Hsuan-k’ung Ssu. We jog the last kilometer.
We arrive just as Aenea is beginning her early evening discussion session. There are about a hundred people crowded into the little platform pagoda.
She looks across the heads of the waiting people, sees my face, asks Rachel to begin the discussion, and comes immediately to where A. Bettik and I stand in the windy doorway.
16
I admit that I was confused and a bit depressed when I first arrived on the Mountains of Heaven.
I slept in cryogenic fugue for three months and two weeks. I had thought that cryogenic fugue was dreamless, but I was wrong.
I had nightmares for most of the way and awoke disoriented and apprehensive.
The translation point in our outbound system had been only seventeen hours away, but in the T’ien Shan System we had to translate from C-plus out beyond the last icy planet and decelerate in-system for three full days. I jogged the various decks, up and down the spiral staircase, and even out onto the little balcony I’d had the ship extrude. I told myself that I was trying to get my leg back into shape—it still hurt despite the ship’s pronouncement that the doc-in-the-box had healed it and that there should be no pain—but in truth, I knew, I was trying to work off nervous energy. I’m not sure that I remembered ever being so anxious before.
The ship wanted to tell me all about this star system in excruciating detail—G-type yellow star, blah, blah, blah—well, I could see that… eleven worlds, three gas giants, two asteroid belts, a high percentage of comets in the inner system, blah, blah, blah. I was interested only in T’ien Shan, and I sat in the carpeted holopit and watched it grow. The world was amazingly bright.
Blindingly bright. A brilliant pearl set against the black of space.
“What you are seeing is the lower, permanent cloud layer,” droned the ship. “The albedo is impressive. There are higher clouds—see those storm swirls in the lower right of the illuminated hemisphere? Those high cirrus causing shadows near the north polar cap? Those are the clouds that would bring weather to the human inhabitants.”
“Where are the mountains?” I asked.
“There,” said the ship, circling a gray shadow in the northern hemisphere. “According to my old charts, this is a great peak in the northern reaches of the eastern hemisphere—Chomo Lori, “Queen of Snow”—and you see these striations running south from it? See how they stay close together until they pass the equator and then spread farther and farther apart until they disappear into the south polar cloud masses? These are the two great spine ridges, Phari Ridge and K’un Lun Ridge. They were the first inhabited rock lines on the planet and are excellent examples of the equivalent early Cretaceous Dakotan violent upthrust resulting in…”
Blah, blah, blah. And all I could think of was Aenea, and Aenea, and Aenea.
It was strange entering a system with no Pax Fleet ships to challenge us, no orbital defenses, no lunar bases… not even a base on the giant bull’s-eye of a moon that looked as if someone had fired a single bullet into a smooth orange sphere—no register of Hawking-drive wakes or neutrino emissions or gravitational lenses or cleared swaths of Bussard-jet drones—no sign of any higher technologies. The ship said that there was a trickle of microwave broadcasting emanating from certain areas of the planet, but when I had them piped in, they turned out to be in pre-Hegira Chinese. This was a shock. I had never been on a world where the majority of humans spoke anything but a version of Web English.
The ship entered geosynchronous orbit above the eastern hemisphere. “Your directions were to find the peak called Heng Shan, which should be approximately six hundred and fifty kilometers southeast of Chomo Lori… there!” The telescopic view in the holopit zoomed in on a beautiful fang of snow and ice leaping through at least three layers of cloud until the summit gleamed clear and bright above most of the atmosphere.
“Jesus,” I whispered. “And where is Hsuan-k’ung Ssu? The Temple Hanging in Air?”
“It should be… there,” said the ship triumphantly.
We were looking straight down at a vertical ridge of ice, snow, and gray rock. Clouds broiled at the base of this incredible slab. Even looking at this through the holo viewer made me grab couch cushions and reel in vertigo.
“Where?” I said. There were no structures in sight.
“That dark triangle,” said the ship, circling what I thought was a shadow on one gray slab of rock. “And this line… here.”
“What’s the magnification?” I asked.
“The triangle is approximately one-point-two meters along the longest edge,” came the voice I’d grown to know so well from my comlog.
“Pretty small building for people to live in,” I pointed out.
“No, no,” said the ship. “This is just a bit of a human-made structure protruding from under what must be a rock overhang. I would surmise that the entire so-called Temple Hanging in Air is under this overhang. The rock is more than vertical at this point… it pitches back some sixty or eighty meters.”
“Can you get us a side view? So that I can see the Temple?”
“I could,” said the ship. “It would require repositioning us in a more northerly orbit so that I can use the telescope to look south over the peak of Heng Shan, and go to infrared to look through the cloud mass at eight thousand meters which is passing between the peak and the ridge spur on which the Temple is built, I would also have to…”
“Skip it,” I said. “Just tightbeam that temple area… hell, the whole ridge… and see if Aenea is waiting for us.”
“Which frequency?” said the ship.
Aenea had not mentioned any frequency. She had just said something about not being able to land in a true sense, but to come down to Hsuan-k’ung Ssu anyway. Looking at this vertical and worse-than-vertical wall of snow and ice, I began to understand what she meant.
“Broadcast on whatever common frequency we would have used if you were calling a comlog extension,” I said. “If there’s no answer, dial through all the frequencies you have. You might try the frequencies that you picked up earlier.”
“They were coming from the southernmost quadr
ant of the western hemisphere,” said the ship in a patient voice. “I picked up no microwave emanations from this hemisphere.”
“Just do it, please,” I said.
We hung there for half an hour, sweeping the ridge with tightbeam, then broadcasting general radio signals toward all the peaks in the area, then flooding the hemisphere with short queries. There was no response.
“Can there actually be an inhabited world where no one uses radio?” I said.
“Of course,” said the ship. “On Ixion, it is against local law and custom to use microwave communication of any sort. On New Earth there was a group which…”
“Okay, okay,” I said. For the thousandth time, I wondered if there were a way to reprogram this autonomous intelligence so that it wasn’t such a pain in the ass. “Take us down,” I said.
“To which location?” said the ship. “There are extensive inhabited areas on the high peak to the east—T’ai Shan it is called on my map—and another city south on the K’un Lun Ridge, it is called Hsi wang-mu, I believe, and other habitations along the Phari Ridge and west of there in an area marked as Koko Nor. Also…”
“Take us down to the Temple Hanging in Air,” I said.
Luckily, the planet’s magnetic field was completely adequate for the ship’s EM repulsors, so we floated down through the sky rather than having to descend on a tail of fusion flame. I went out to the balcony to watch, although the holopit or screens in the top bedroom would have been more practical.
It seemed to take hours, but actually within minutes we were floating gently at eight thousand-some meters, drifting between the fantastic peak to the north—Heng Shan—and the ridge holding Hsuan-k’ung Ssu. I had seen the terminator rushing from the east as we descended, and according to the ship, it was late afternoon here now. I carried a pair of binoculars out to the balcony and stared. I could see the Temple clearly. I could see it, but I could not quite believe it.
What had seemed a mere play of light and shadow beneath the huge, striated, overhanging slabs of gray granite was a series of structures extending east and west for many hundreds of meters. I could see the Asian influence at once: pagoda-shaped buildings with pitched tile roofs and curling eaves, their elaborately tiled surfaces gilded and glowing in the bright sunlight; round windows and moon gates in the lower brick sections of the superstructure, airy wooden porches with elaborately carved railings; delicate wooden pillars painted the color of dried blood; red and yellow banners draped from eaves and doorways and railings; complicated carvings on the roof beams and tower ridges; and suspension bridges and stairways festooned with what I would later learn were prayer wheels and prayer flags, each offering a prayer to Buddha every time a human hand spun it or the wind fluttered it.
The Temple was still being built. I could see raw wood being carried up to high platforms, saw human figures chiseling away at the stone face of the ridge, could see scaffolding, rude ladders, crude bridges consisting of little more than some sort of woven plant material with climbing ropes for handrails, and upright figures hauling empty baskets up these ladders and bridges and more stooped figures carrying the baskets full of stone back down to a broad slab where most of the baskets were dumped into space. We were close enough that I could see that many of these human figures wore colorful robes hanging almost to their ankles—some blowing in the stiff wind that blew across the rockface here—and that these robes looked thick and lined against the cold. I would later learn that these were the ubiquitous chuba, and that they could be made of thick, waterproof zygoat wool or of ceremonial silk or even of cotton, although this last material was rare and much prized.
I had been nervous about showing our ship to the locals—afraid it might cause a panic or a laser lance attack or something—but did not know what else to do. We were still several kilometers away, so at most we would be an unusual glint of sunlight on dark metal floating against the white backdrop of the northern peak. I had hoped that they would think us just another bird—the ship and I had seen many birds through the viewer, many of them with wingspans several meters across—but that hope was dashed as I saw first a few of the workers at the Temple pause in their labors and stare out in our direction, then more, and more. No one panicked.
There was no rush for shelter or to retrieve weapons—I saw no weapons in sight anywhere—but we had obviously been seen. I watched two women in robes run up through the ascending series of temple buildings, hanging bridges, stairways, steep ladders, and penultimate construction scaffolding to the easternmost platform where the work seemed to consist of cutting holes in the rock wall. There was some sort of construction shack there, and one of the women disappeared into it, coming out a moment later with several taller forms in robes.
I increased the magnification of my binoculars, my heart pounding against my ribs, but there was drifting smoke from the construction work and I could not make out for sure if the tallest person there was Aenea. But through the veils of swirling smoke, I did catch a glimpse of blond-brown hair—just shorter than shoulder length—and for a moment I lowered the binoculars and just stared out at the distant wall, grinning like an idiot.
“They are signaling,” said the ship.
I looked through the glasses again. Another person—female, I think, but with much darker hair—flashing two handheld semaphore flags.
“It is an ancient signal code,” said the ship. “It is called Morse. The first words are…”
“Quiet,” I said. We had learned Morse Code in the Home Guard and I had used it once with two bloody bandages to call in medevac skimmers on the Iceshelf.
GO… TO… THE… FISSURE… TEN… KLICKS… TO… THE… NORTH… EAST.
HOVER… THERE.
AWAIT… INSTRUCTIONS.
“Got that, Ship?” I said.
“Yes.” The ship’s voice always sounded cold after I was rude to it.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I think I see a gap about ten klicks to the northeast. Let’s stay as far out as we can and come in from the east. I don’t think they’ll be able to see us from the Temple, and I don’t see any other structures along the cliff face in that direction.”
Without further comment, the ship brought us out and around and back along the sheer rock wall until we came to the fissure—a vertical cleft dropping several thousand meters from the ice and snow far above to a point where it converged about four hundred meters above the level of the Temple, which now was out of sight around the curve of rockface to the west.
The ship floated vertically until we were just fifty meters above the bottom of the fissure. I was surprised to see streams running down the steep rock walls of the sides of this gap, tumbling into the center of the fissure before pouring off into thin air as a waterfall. There were trees and mosses and lichens and flowering plants everywhere along this cleft, fields of them rising many hundreds of meters alongside the streams until finally becoming mere streaks of multicolored lichen rising toward the ice levels above. At first I was sure that there was no sign of human intrusion here, but then I saw the chiseled ledges along the north wall—barely wide enough to stand on, I thought—and then the paths through the bright green moss, and the artfully placed stepping stones in the stream, and then I noticed the tiny, weathered little structure—too small to be a cabin, more like a gazebo with windows—which sat under wind-sculpted evergreens along the stream and near the high point of the fissure’s verdant pass.
I pointed and the ship moved up in that direction, hovering near the gazebo. I understood why it would be difficult, if not impossible, to land here. The Consul’s ship was not that large—it had been hidden in the stone tower in the old poet’s city of Endymion for centuries—but even if it landed vertically on its fins or extendable legs here, some trees, grass, moss, and flowering plants would be crushed. They seemed too rare in this vertical rock world to destroy that way.
So we hovered. And waited. And about thirty minutes after we arrived, a young woman came around the path from the direction of
the rock ledges and waved heartily at us.
It was not Aenea.
I admit that I was disappointed. My desire to see my young friend again had reached the point of obsession, and I guess that I was having absurd fantasies of reunion—Aenea and I running toward one another across a flowered field, she the child of eleven again, I her protector, both of us laughing with the pleasure of seeing one another and me lifting her and swinging her around, tossing her up…
