by Дэн Симмонс
Aenea was awake, dressed, and ready to leave when I arrived. She had on her thermal anorak, climbing harness, and climbing boots.
A. Bettik and Lhomo Dondrub were dressed similarly, and both men carried long, heavy-looking, nylon-wrapped packages over their shoulders. They were going with us. Others were there to say good-bye—Theo, Rachel, the Dorje Phamo, the Dalai Lama, George Tsarong, Jigme Norbu—and they seemed sad and anxious. Aenea looked tired; I was sure that she had not slept either. We made a tired-looking pair of adventurers. Lhomo walked over and handed me one of the long, nylon-wrapped bundles. It was heavy, but I shouldered it without question or complaint. I grabbed the rest of my own gear, answered Lhomo’s questions about the condition of the ropes to the ridgeline—everyone evidently thought that I had unselfishly reconnoitered our route—and stepped back to look at my friend and beloved. When she gave me a searching look, I answered with a nod. It’s all right. I’m all right. I’m ready to go. We’ll talk about it later.
Theo was crying. I was aware that this was an important parting—that we might not see one another again despite Aenea’s assurances to the other two women that everyone would be reunited before nightfall—but I was too emotionally numbed and worn out to react to it. I stepped away from the group for a moment to take deep breaths and focus my attention. It was probable that I would need all of my wits and alertness in the next few hours just to survive. The problem with being passionately in love, I thought, is that it deprives you of too much sleep. We left by the east platform, moved in a fast trot down the icy ledge toward the fissure, passed the ropes I’d just descended, and reached the fissure without incident. The bonsai trees and fell fields looked ancient and unreal in the shifting ice fog, the dark limbs and branches dripping on our heads when they suddenly loomed out of the mist. The streams and waterfalls sounded louder than I remembered as the torrent slid over the last overhang into the void to our left.
There were old, less reliable fixed ropes on the easternmost and highest folds of the fissure, and Lhomo led the way up these, followed by Aenea, then A. Bettik, and finally me. I noticed that our android friend was climbing as quickly and competently as he always did, despite the missing left hand. Once on the upper ridgeline, we were beyond my farthest point of my nighttime travels—the fissure acted as a barrier to ridgeline travel the way I had gone. Now the difficulty began in earnest as we followed the narrowest of paths—worn ledges, rock outcroppings, the occasional icefield, scree slopes—on the south side of the cliff face.
The ridgeline above us was all serac of wet, heavy snow and icy overhang, impossible to travel on. We moved silently, not even whispering, aware that the slightest noise could trigger an avalanche that would sweep us off these ten-centimeter ledges in a second. Finally, when the going got even tougher, we roped up—running the line through carabiners and attaching a doubled line to our web-sling harnesses—so that now if one fell he or she would be caught, or we would all go over. With Lhomo leading as strongly as ever, stepping confidently over foggy voids and icy crevasses that I would hesitate to attempt, I think that we all felt better about being connected. I still did not know our destination. I did know that the great ridge that ran east from K’un Lun past Jo-kung would run out in a few more kilometers, dropping suddenly and dramatically into the poisonous clouds several klicks below. During certain weeks in the spring, the tides and vagaries of the ocean and clouds dropped the poisonous vapors low enough that the ridge emerged again, allowing supply caravans, pilgrims, monks, traders, and the simply curious to make their way east from the Middle Kingdom to T’ai Shan, the Great Peak of the Middle Kingdom, and the most inaccessible habitable point on the planet.
The monks who lived on T’ai Shan, it was said, never returned to the Middle Kingdom or the rest of the Mountains of Heaven—for untold generations they had dedicated their lives to the mysterious tombs, gompas, ceremonies, and temples on that most holy of peaks. Now, as the weather worsened for us, I realized that if we started descending, we would not know when we left the roiling monsoon clouds and entered the roiling vaporous clouds until the poison air killed us. We did not descend. After several hours of all but silent travel, we reached the precipice at the eastern boundary of the Middle Kingdom. The mountain of T’ai Shan was not visible, of course—even with the clouds having cleared a bit, little was visible except for the wet cliff face ahead of us and the twisting fog and cloud patterns all around.
There was a wide ledge here at the eastern edge of the world, and we sat on it gratefully as we dug cold handmeals out of our packs and drank from our water bottles. The tiny, succulent plants that carpeted this steep fell field were becoming tumescent as they gorged themselves on the first moisture of the monsoon months.
After we ate and drank, Lhomo and A. Bettik began opening our three heavy bundles. Aenea zipped open her own pack, which looked heavier than the duffels we men had carried. It did not surprise me what was wrapped in these three parcels—nylon, alloy struts and frames, rigging, and in Aenea’s packet, more of the same as well as the two skinsuits and rebreathers that I’d brought with me from the ship and all but forgotten.
I sighed and looked to the east. “So we’re going to try to make T’ai Shan,” I said.
“Yes,” said Aenea. She began stripping out of her clothes. A. Bettik and Lhomo looked away, but I felt my heart pound with anger at the thought of other men seeing my lover naked. I controlled myself, laid out the other skinsuit, and began peeling out of my own clothes, folding them into my heavy pack as I doffed each layer. The air was cold and the fog clammy on my skin.
Lhomo and A. Bettik were assembling the parawings as Aenea and I dressed—the skinsuits were just that, almost literally a second skin, but the harness and rigging for the rebreathers allowed us some modesty. The cowl went over my head tighter than a scuba headpiece, folding my ears flat against my head. Only the filters there allowed sound to be transmitted: they would pick up the comthread transmissions once we were effectively out of real air.
Lhomo and A. Bettik had assembled four parawings from the parts we had transported. As if answering my unasked question, Lhomo said, “I can only show you the thermals and make sure you reach the jet stream. I can’t survive at that altitude. And I do not want to go to T’ai Shan when there is little chance of returning.”
Aenea touched the powerful man’s arm. “We are grateful beyond words that you will guide us to the jet stream.”
The bold flyer actually blushed.
“What about A. Bettik?” I asked and then, realizing that I was talking about our friend as if he weren’t there, I turned to the android and said, “What about you? There’s no skinsuit or rebreather for you.”
A. Bettik smiled. I had always thought that his rare smiles were the wisest things I had ever seen on a human countenance—even if the blue-skinned man was not technically human.
“You forget, M. Endymion,” he said, “I was designed to suffer a bit more abuse than the average human body.”
“But the distance…” I began. T’ai Shan was more than a hundred kilometers east and even if we reached the jet stream, that would be almost an hour of rarified air… far too thin to breathe.
A. Bettik fastened the last rigging to his parawing—a pretty thing with a great blue delta wingspan almost ten meters across—and said, “If we are lucky enough to make the distance, I will survive it.”
I nodded and made to get into the rigging of my own kite then, not asking any more questions, not looking at Aenea, not asking her why the four of us were risking our lives this way, when suddenly my friend was at my elbow.
“Thank you, Raul,” she said, loudly enough for all to hear. “You do these things for me out of love and friendship. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
I made some gesture, suddenly unable to speak, embarrassed that she was thanking me when the other two were ready to leap into the void for her as well. But she was not finished speaking.
“I love you, Raul,” said Aen
ea, leaning on her tiptoes to kiss me on the lips. She rocked back and looked at me, her dark eyes fathomless. “I love you, Raul Endymion. I always have. I always will.”
I stood, bewildered and overwhelmed, as we all locked in to our parawing rigs and stood at the ultimate edge of nothing. Lhomo was the last to clip on. He moved from A. Bettik to Aenea to me, checking our riggings, checking every fastened nut, bolt, tension clip, and instaweld of our kites. Satisfied, he nodded respectfully toward A. Bettik, clipped into his own red-winged rig with a speed born of infinite practice and discipline, and moved to the edge of the cliff. Even the succulents did not grow in this last meter stretch, as if terrified of the drop. I knew that I was. The last rocky ledge was steeply pitched and slick from the rain. The fog had closed in again.
“It will be hard to see each other in this soup,” said Lhomo. “Keep circling to the left. Stay within five meters of the one in front of you. Same order as our march—Aenea after me in your yellow wing, then the blue man in blue, then you, Raul, in the green. Our greatest risk is losing one another in the clouds.”
Aenea nodded tersely. “I’ll stay close to your wing.”
Lhomo looked at me. “You and Aenea can communicate via your skinsuit comthreads, but that will not help you find one another. A. Bettik and I will communicate via hand signals. Be careful. Do not lose sight of the blue man’s kite. If you do, keep circling up counterclockwise until you clear the cloud tops and then try to regroup with us. Keep the circles tight while inside the clouds. If you loosen them—which is the tendency with parawings—you will strike the cliff.”
My mouth was dry as I nodded.
“All right,” said Lhomo. “I will see you all above the clouds. Then I will find the thermals for you, read the ridge lift, and get you to the jet stream. I will signal like this”—he made a fist and pumped his arm twice—“when I am leaving you. Keep climbing and circling. Get as deeply into the stream as you can. Rise into the upper atmospheric winds until you think that they will tear your wing apart from above you. Perhaps they will. But you will have no chance to reach T’ai Shan unless you get into the center of the stream. It is a hundred and eleven klicks to the first shoulder of the Great Peak where you can breathe true air.”
We all nodded.
“May the Buddha smile on our folly today,” said Lhomo. He seemed very happy.
“Amen,” said Aenea.
Lhomo turned without another word and leaped out over the cliff’s edge. Aenea followed a second later. A. Bettik leaned far forward in his harness, kicked off the ledge, and was swallowed up by clouds within seconds. I scurried to catch up. Suddenly there was no stone under my feet and I leaned forward until I was prone in the harness. Already I had lost sight of A. Bettik’s blue wing. The swirling clouds confused and disoriented me. I pulled on the control bar, banking the hang glider as I had been taught, peering intently through the fog for a glimpse of any of the other kites. Nothing.
Belatedly I realized that I had held the turn for too long. Or had I released it too soon? I leveled off the wing, feeling thermals pushing at the fabric above me but not being able to tell if I was actually gaining altitude because I was blind. The fog was like some terrible snowblindness.
Without thinking, I shouted, hoping one of the others would shout back and orient me. A man’s shout hurtled back to me from just a few meters dead ahead. It was my own voice, echoing off the vertical rock of the cliff face I was about to strike.
Nemes, Scylla, and Briareus move south on foot from the Pax Enclave at the Phallus of Shiva. The sun is high and there are thick clouds to the east. To travel from the Pax Enclave to the Winter Palace at Potala, the old High Way southwest along the Koko Nor Ridge had been repaired and widened, and a special cable platform had been built where the ten-klick wire ran from Koko Nor southwest to the palace. A palanquin specially rigged for the Pax diplomats now hangs from pulleys at the new platform. Nemes pushes to the front of the line and steps into it, ignoring the stares from the little people in thick chubas who mill on the stairway and platform. When her clone-siblings are in the cage, she releases the two brakes and sends the palanquin hurtling across the gap. Dark clouds rise above the palace mountain.
A squad of twenty Palace Guard carrying halberds and crude energy lances greets them at the Great Terrace Steps on the west side of Yellow Hat Ridge where the palace drops away down the east face for several vertical kilometers. The captain of the Guard is deferential. “You must wait here until we bring an honor guard to escort you into the palace, Most Honored Guests,” he says, bowing.
“We prefer to go in alone,” says Nemes.
The twenty Guardsmen crouch with lances at port arms. They make a solid wall of iron, zygoat fur, silk, and elaborate helmets. The Guard captain bows lower. “I apologize for my unworthiness, Most Honored Guests, but it is not possible to enter the Winter Palace without an invitation and an honor guard. Both will be here in a minute. If you will be so kind as to wait in the shade under the pagoda roof here, Honored Guests, a personage of the proper rank to greet you will arrive in only a moment.”
Nemes nods. “Kill them,” she says to Scylla and Briareus and walks forward into the palace as her siblings phase-shift.
They shift down during the long walk through the many-leveled palace, shifting into fast time only to kill guards and servants. When they exit by the main steps and approach the Pargo Kaling, the great Western Gate on this side of the Kyi Chu Bridge, they find Regent Reting Tokra blocking the way with five hundred of his finest Palace Guard troops. A few of these elite fighters carry swords and pikes, but most hold cross bows, slug rifles, crude energy weapons, and railguns.
“Commander Nemes,” says Tokra, lowering his head slightly but not bowing so much as to lose eye contact with the woman in front of him. “We have heard what you did at Shivling. You can go no farther.” Tokra nods at someone high up in the gleaming eyes on the Pargo Kaling tower and the black chrome bridge of Kyi Chu slides silently back into the mountain. Only the great suspension cables remain far above, ringed about with razor wire and frictionless gel.
Nemes smiles. “What are you doing, Tokra?”
“His Holiness has gone to Hsuan-k’ung Ssu,” says the thin-faced Regent. “I know why you travel that way. You cannot be allowed to harm His Holiness the Dalai Lama.”
Rhadamanth Nemes shows more of her small teeth. “What are you talking about, Tokra? You sold out your dear little boy-god to the Pax secret service for thirty pieces of silver. Are we bartering here for more of your stupid six-sided coins?”
The Regent shakes his head. “The agreement with the Pax was that His Holiness would never be hurt. But you…”
“We want the girl’s head,” says Nemes. “Not your boy lama’s. Get your men out of our way or lose them.”
Regent Tokra turns and barks an order at his row upon row of soldiers. The men’s faces are grim as they raise their weapons to their shoulders. The mass of them blocks the way to the bridge, even though the roadway of the bridge is no longer there. Dark clouds boil in the chasm.
“Kill them all,” says Nemes, phase-shifting.
Lhomo had trained us all in the hang-glider controls, but I had never had the opportunity to fly one before. Now, as the cliff rose out of the fog in front of me, I had to do the correct thing immediately or die.
The kite was controlled by manipulating the control bar that hung in front of me as I dangled in my harness, and I leaned as far left and put as much weight on it as the rigging allowed. The parawing banked, but not steeply enough, I realized at once. The kite was going to intercept the rock wall a meter or two away from the outer apex of its arc. There was another set of controls—handle grips that spilled air from the dorsal surface at the leading edge of each side of the dorsal wing—but these were dangerous and tricky and for emergency use only.
I could see the lichen on the approaching rock wall. This was an emergency.
I pulled hard on the left panic handle, the nylon on the le
ft side of the parawing opened like a slit purse, the right wing—still catching the strong ridge lift here—banked up steeply, the parawing turned almost upside down with its useless left wing spilling air like so much empty aluminum frame, my legs were flung out sideways as the kite threatened to stall and plummet into the rocks, my boots actually brushed stone and lichen, and then the wing was falling almost straight down, I released the left handle, the active-memory fabric on the left leading surface healed itself in an instant, and I was flying again—although in a near vertical dive.
The strong thermals rising along the cliff face struck the kite like a rising elevator and I was slammed upward, the control bar swinging back against my upper chest hard enough to knock the wind out of me, and the parawing swooped, climbed, and tried to do a lazy loop with a radius of sixty or seventy meters. I found myself hanging almost upside down again, but this time with the kite and controls beneath me and the rock wall dead ahead again.
This was no good. I would conclude the loop on the cliff wall. I yanked the right panic handle, spilled lift, tumbled sideways in a sickening drop, sealed the wing, and tugged handles and control bar while shifting my weight wildly to establish balance and control. The clouds had parted enough for me to see the cliff twenty or thirty meters to my right as I fought the thermals and the kite itself for a clean line. Then I was leveled and flying the contraption, spiraling around to my left again, but carefully this time—ever so carefully—thankful for the break in the clouds that allowed me to judge my distance from the cliff and leaning hard left on the control bar.
Suddenly a whisper in my ear said, “Wow! That was fun to watch. Do it again!”
I jumped at the voice in my ear and then looked up and behind me. The bright yellow triangle of Aenea’s parawing circled above me, the clouds close above it like a gray ceiling.
“No thanks,” I said, allowing the comthreads on the throat of my skinsuit to pick up the subvocals. “I guess I’m through showing off.”
