by Paul Melko
I have to keep my face up to follow the tracks, and when I do, the wind freezes my nasal passages. The cold is like a headache. There is no smell on the wind, no trace of Hagar Julian.
The woman has walked across a slide of broken slate. Her footprints end on the jagged mounds of rock. I pause, knowing I am close to their campsite; they had been no farther than five hundred meters when I’d spied them.
I turn my back to the wind and tuck my head a moment. Still the snow finds a way into my eyes. The weather is worsening. I take a moment to memorize the feeling, the sting, the sound for later. I take comfort in knowing I will share this all with my pod in the warmth of the tent in a few minutes.
I trudge on across the slate, slipping once and falling to one knee. The slate ends in a river of grey snow. I don’t remember seeing this before. Then I realize it is new. The snowbank above has collapsed, burying Hagar Julian’s campsite in an avalanche.
I stand there, ignoring the cold.
I take one step onto the snow and it crunches under my boots. An hour ago this area was clear and now it is under a flood of rocks and snow. I look up at the mountain, wondering if more will follow, but swirling snow obscures it.
I climb up the side of the hill of snow. Ten meters into the slide, I see a flap of cloth, half covered. I pull at it, but the rest is buried too deep for me to extract it.
“Julian!” Sifting flakes muffle my voice. I yell again for my classmate.
I hear no reply, though I doubt I would have heard anything unless the speaker was next to me.
I pull my hands out of my pockets, hoping to catch a whiff of something on the pads on my palm. Nothing but needling cold. I am cocooned in a frozen, white mask. As isolated as the one part of Julian who made it to our camp.
I turn back. We will need digging equipment and many people to find Julian’s corpses. I do not see how they could have survived. Except for the one.
But then I see something black against the grey of the swept snow. Just a smudge that catches my eye as I turn.
I stop and take one step up the slope, and I see that it is an arm. I am clawing at the ice, snow, and rock, hoping, praying that below is a breathing body.
I scoop huge armfuls of snow behind me and down the slope, tracing the arm down, reaching a torso, and finding a hooded head. I try to pull the body out, but the legs are still trapped. I pause, and slowly pull back the hood. Male, a part of Julian, face and cheeks splotchy pink, eyes shut. The snow swirls around his mouth and I think it means he’s breathing, but I can’t be sure. I pass my palm at his neck, tasting for any pheromone, but there is nothing. I feel for a pulse.
Nothing.
My mind struggles to remember how to revive a victim with a stopped heart. Moira would know. Quant would know. They all would know. Alone I know nothing.
I panic and just grab the body about its torso and heave backward, trying to free it from the snow. I pull but the body remains embedded. I sweep at the man’s hips, feeling the futility of it. I’m useless here. Strength is useless now. I don’t know what to do.
But now he is free to his knees, and I pull again. He comes free in a cascade of snow. I stagger under his weight, then lay him down.
I kneel next to him, trying to remember. My hands are red and stinging, and I stuff them into my pockets, angry at myself. I am useless alone. Moira would … Then it comes to me as if Moira has sent it to me in a ball of memory. Compressions and breathing. Clear the throat, five compressions and a breath, five and a breath. Repeat.
I push at the man’s coat, unsure if I am doing anything through the bundles of clothing. Then I squeeze his nose and breathe into his mouth. It’s cold, like a dead worm, and my stomach turns. Still I breathe into his mouth and then compress again, counting slowly.
The cycle repeats, and his chest rises when I breathe into him. I stop after a minute to check the pulse. I think I feel something, and I wonder if I should stop. Is that his own diaphragm moving or just the air I’ve forced into him leaving his lungs, like a bellows?
I can’t stop, and bend to the task again.
A cough, a spasm, but a reaction, and then he is breathing.
Alive!
The pulse is fast and reedy, but there.
Can he move? Can I get him back to the tent to warm him?
Then I hear the whine of the aircar, and realize I won’t have to carry him. Help is on the way. I fall back into the snow. Alive!
The whine of the car rises, and I see its lights coming up the valley, louder, too loud. I wonder at the fragility of the layers of snow on the ridges above and if the shrill engines will cause another wave of snow.
I can do nothing but wait. The aircar reaches the edge of our camp and lowers itself behind the trees.
The engines die, but the sound does not. I see another flash above me, and I think it another aircar’s searchlights, but then I realize the sound is not the whine of a hydrogen-burning turbine. There is a deep rumble all around me, and I know what is happening. I know that the snow is coming down the mountain again. The first avalanche has weakened the ledge of snow.
I stand, unsure. Then I see the wave of white in the first aircar’s spotlights.
“No!” I take one step toward the camp, then stop. The Julian here will die if I leave him.
The snow slams into my pod’s campsite, flies up where it strikes the trees surrounding the tent. I see the twirling lights of the aircar thrown up into the air. My pod! My body tenses, my heart thudding. I take one step forward.
The rumble is a crashing roar now. I look up at the snowbank above me, fearing that ice is about to bury us. But the outcropping of snow that fed the first avalanche has uncovered a jagged ledge that is shielding us. The river of snow flows twenty meters away, but comes no nearer. If it had taken me, I would not have cared. My pod is in the torrent, and my neck tightens so that I can barely breathe.
I see something snaking on the ground and think the snow is chasing me uphill. I am jerked off my feet.
Dragged across the rock and ice, I realize it is the line attached to my waist. The other end is attached to our tent and it is dragging me down the mountain. Five, ten, twenty meters, I struggle to untie the rope, to find the nodule that will untwine the knot, but my chafed, useless hands can grip nothing.
I fall on my face, feel something smash into my nose, and in a daze I slide another few meters, closer to the avalanche. I thought it was slowing, but this close it seems to be a cascade of flying rock and snow.
I stand, fall, then stand again and lunge toward the avalanche, hoping to slacken the rope. I run, and I see a tree, at the edge of the river. I dive at it, haul myself around it once, then once more, wedging the line.
I pull and brace, and then the line is steel-taut.
My legs are against the trunk and I am standing against it, holding on, or else I’ll be sucked into the vortex with my pod.
For a moment, the desperation whispers the question: how bad would that be? Is it better to die with my pod together or live on alone, a singleton, useless? A moment before, I had been ready for the avalanche to take me too.
But I cannot let go. A part of Julian still needs my help. I hold on, listening for the rumble to lessen.
Seconds, and then a minute, then two. Still I hold on, and the storm of snow slows, and the pull on my arms decreases. Sweat rolls down my cheeks, though the air is frigid. My arms shake. When the rope finally falls limp, I lie below the tree, unable to move. I am spent, and it takes minutes for me to recover enough to remove the rope. My fingers are raw and weak, and the spider-silk will not separate. Finally the end unknits.
I stand and fall.
I shove my face into the snow to cool it, then realize how foolish that is. I stand again, and this time I make several steps before my legs shudder out from beneath me.
The snow is as soft as a feather bed, and I resolve to rest just a few moments.
It would be easy to sleep. So easy.
But I don’t. The
man is still on the mountain. A singleton just like me. He needs me. He needs someone strong to carry him down the mountain.
I glance at the rope. At the other end is my pod. How could they have survived the torrent? I stand and take one step onto the debris, but a cascade of tumbling snow drives me back. The snow ridge above is still unstable. I wipe my eyes with my raw hands, then turn and follow the trail I made as I was dragged down the mountain. It is easy to see the trail of blood I have left. I touch my lip and nose; I hadn’t realized I’d been bleeding.
The Julian is still there, still breathing. And I cry aloud to see him alive, bawling like a child. I am anything but strength.
“What … what are you … crying for?”
The Julian is looking up at me, his teeth chattering.
“I’m crying because we’re alive,” I say.
“Good.” His head drops back into the snow. His lips are blue and I know the chattering is a response to the cold and a precursor to hypothermia. We need to get him medical attention. We …
I am thinking as if I am still a pod. I cannot rely on Manuel to help me lift him. I cannot rely on Quant to show me the quickest way down. I am alone.
“We need to go.”
“No.”
“You need to get to warmth and medical aid.”
“My pod.”
I shrug, unsure how to tell him. “They’re buried under here.”
“I smell them. I hear them.”
I sniff. Maybe there’s a trace of thought on the wind, but I can’t be sure.
“Where?” I ask.
“Nearby. Help me up.”
I pull him to his feet and he leans against me, groaning. We take a step; he points.
I see the cloth buried in the snow I had noticed before.
He had survived several minutes in the snow. Perhaps his pod is trapped below. Perhaps they are in an air pocket, or in their hollowed-out snow cave.
I kneel and begin to scoop away the snow around the cloth flap. He rolls next to me and tries to help clear. But he slumps against a mound of snow, too weak, and watches me instead.
The cloth is a corner of a blanket and it seems to go straight down.
For a while the going is all ice and I claw at it with my numb fingers, unable to move more than a handful at a time. Then I am through that and the digging is easier.
Clods of snow bounce off my hood, and I am leery of more snow falling on top of us. I take a moment to push away all the snow from around us.
Two more scoops and suddenly the snow gives way, and I see a cavern of ice and snow and canvas, and within the cave two bodies, two more of Julian. They are alive, breathing, and one is conscious. I pull them each out of the cave and next to their podmate.
The two that are conscious cling to each other and lie there, gasping for breath, and I am so tired I want to collapse into the hole.
I check each one for hypothermia, for breaks and contusions. The unconscious one, a female, has a broken arm, and she winces as I move her. I have a loop of rope on my belt, not spider-silk, and I bind her arm across her chest.
“Wake up,” I say. “Come on.” The third, with the broken arm, is still unconscious. I gently slap her face. She comes awake and lunges, then gasps as the pain hits her. Her pod, what is left of it, surrounds her, and I step back, fall back on the snow, looking up into the sky. I realize that the snow is coming down harder.
“We have to get down the mountain,” I say. If another aircar comes, it will start another avalanche. If another avalanche comes, we are doomed.
They don’t seem to hear me. They cling together, their teeth chattering.
“We have to get down the mountain!” I yell.
Despair floods the air, then a stench of incoherent emotions. The three are in shock.
“Come on!” I say and pull one of them up.
“We can’t … our … podmates,” he says, words interspersed with chemical thoughts that I don’t understand. The pod is degenerating.
“If we don’t go now, we will die on this mountain. We have no shelter, and we are freezing.”
They don’t reply, and I realize they would rather die than break their pod.
“There’s three of you,” I say. “You are nearly whole.” Three of five is better than one of five, don’t they see?
They look among themselves, and I smell the consensus odor. Then one of them turns away angrily. They can’t do it. No consensus.
I collapse onto the snow, head down, and watch the snow swirl between my legs. I am one who was five. The fatigue and despair catch me, and my eyes burn.
I do not cry. But still my face is washed with tears for my pod, buried in the snow. My face is fire where the tears crawl. A splash falls into the snow and disappears.
We will sleep here in despair and die before the morning.
I look at them. I must get them down the mountain, but I don’t know how to do it. I wonder what thoughts Moira would pass me if she were here. She would know what to do with these three.
They are three. Mother Redd is a three. Our teachers are threes. The Premier of the Overgovernment is a three. Why do they cry when they are no worse off than our greatest? I am allowed to cry, but not them.
I stand up.
“I’ve lost my pod too, and I am only one!” I shout. “I can cry, but you can’t! You are three. Get up! Get up, all of you!”
They look at me like I am mad, so I kick one, and she grunts.
“Get up!”
Slowly they rise, and I grin at them like a maniac.
“We will reach the bottom. Follow me.”
I lead them across the snow to the spill of the other avalanche. With the nanoblade on my utility knife, I cut a length of the rope that disappears into the snow. At the other end of the rope is my dead pod. I take a step onto the grey avalanche; perhaps I can dig them out as I have dug out Hagar Julian. I hear a rumble as the snow shifts beneath me. More snow tumbles down the mountain. It has not settled yet; more snow could fall at any moment. And I know it has been too long now. If they are trapped under the snow, their air is gone. If I had turned at once, if I had followed the rope when the avalanche had stopped, perhaps I could have saved them, but I did not think of that. Quant wasn’t there to remind me of the logical choice. Bitterness seeps through me, but I ignore it. There are the three who are left to take care of.
I hand each of them a section of the rope, looping us together. Then I lead them down the mountain. It is nearly black, save the light reflected by the muted moon that splashes upon the snow in between dark snow clouds. The ledge and gaping holes are obvious. It is the hidden crevasses that I fear. But every step we take is better than lying asleep in the snow.
Our path leads to a drop, and I back us up quickly, not wanting the three to gaze into the abyss. I begin to wonder if there is no way down. We were dropped off in aircars that morning. Perhaps the location was so remote that aircars alone could reach it. Perhaps there is no path down the mountain. Or worse, we will pass through the path of an avalanche and die under the piles of snow.
The snowfall is steady now, and in places we are up to our hips. But the effort is warmth. To move is to live, to stop is sleep and death.
The trees all look alike, and I fear we are stumbling in circles, but I know that if we continue downward we will reach the bottom. I see no signs of animal or human. The snow is pristine until we tramp through.
The line jerks and I turn to see the last of Hagar Julian, the one with the broken arm, has fallen.
I go to her and lift her onto my shoulder. The weight is nothing compared to the ache I already feel. What is another sixty kilograms? But our pace is slower now.
Still the others lag, and I allow rests, but never enough to let them sleep, until the fatigue is too much and I let my eyes droop.
Oblivion for just a moment, then I start awake. To sleep is to die. I rouse the three.
The three. I am thinking of them no longer as a pod, but as a number. Will they
refer to me as the singleton? The one? There may be a place for a trio in society. But there is no place for a singleton.
After the Exodus of the Community—their sudden and complete abandonment of the Ring and the Earth—it was the pods who had remained in control. The pods are now the caretakers of the Earth, while the normal humans who are left—the singletons—are backward and Luddite. The pods, just a biological experiment, a minority before, are the ones who survived cataclysm. Only now I am no longer a pod; I am a singleton, and the only place for me is in the singleton enclaves. Alone I cannot function in pod society. What could I contribute? Nothing. I look at the three. There is one thing I can contribute. These three are still a pod, still an entity. I can bring them to safety.
I stand up. “Let’s go,” I say, but gently. They are too empty to protest. I show them how to put the snow to their lips and drink it as it melts.
“We need to go.” The one with the broken arm tries to walk. I walk beside her with a hand on her good arm.
The pine forest gives way to denser deciduous trees, and I feel warmer, though the temperature cannot have risen much. But the trees think it’s warmer, so I think so too. The snow is less heavy here. Perhaps the storm is letting up.
“This mountain,” I say, “is less than seven kilometers high. We can walk seven kilometers easily, even in the cold. And this is all downhill.”
No one laughs. No one replies.
The wind is gone, I notice, and with it the snow. The sky is grey still, but the storm is over. I begin to think that we might not die.
Then the last in our line steps too close to a ravine, and he’s down the side, sliding from sight. The next in line, unable or unwilling to let go, slides after him, and I watch the slithering rope.
Again, I think. Again with this damn rope pulling me away. I let go of it, and the rope disappears into the grey below. The woman at my side doesn’t even know what is happening.
The ravine is three meters down, lined by a steep, but not vertical, slope. I see the two who have fallen at the base. I have no way to get them out, so I must follow.
