Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  [Great, Mo!] Alice’s voice cheered me, [It’s not far once you get there.]

  I turned on my instrument lights and checked my suit’s power: twenty per cent. Not good, but it might be enough to get me down. I fought the ice a few more meters until my feet touched rock. “This is it, I’m down! I’m down on the ledge.” I looked down at my feet. “No, wait—” I stood on a narrow slab of rock, bordered by blackness. I looked for the rest of the ledge—it was wide, covered with scree and talus, I remembered. I thought maybe the snow was just too thick in the air for me to see very far, that the blackness of the night was swallowing up the light from my headlamp. It took me a long time to accept that I had only reached the upper, narrow ledge, that I still had twice as far to go as I had already come to reach the lower one.

  “Oh, Shiva.”

  [What’s wrong?]

  “It’s—It’s not the—I’m on the upper ledge. The narrow one.”

  Alice’s voice fell, [Oh.]

  The wind just kept beating at me as I tried to think. Fortunately, Steel came online and did my thinking for me:

  [Mo, you’re going to have to bivouac where you are.]

  “Yeah, I guess so.” She’s writing me off, I thought. She’s gonna let me freeze and re-boot me on the way back up. “I guess this is it, huh?”

  [No. Listen. You have to tie yourself in. Now.]

  “Right. Right.” This wasn’t going to be fun. Freezing. Jesus.

  [Do it now, while you still have power. Tie yourself in and then power down.]

  “Yeah, all right.” I was pretty lethargic about the whole thing, but I set a couple of bolts. What was better, I thought, freezing? Or just taking a dive into the night and logging off quick and clean? It takes the same three months to re-boot, either way.

  And Steel was going to re-boot me. I wondered if she would leave me my past. She had to take the recent stuff, my memories of her, of Alice, Neuschwanstein, Kindu—I understood that, security and all, but I wondered if she’d leave me the rest, or if she’d just make a clean sweep, just to be safe. Mary. Sheila. “Don’t take my wife ...” I mumbled.

  [What?]

  “Nothing. Nothing.”

  [Mo. I don’t want you to hurry, but I want you to keep moving. Tie yourself in.]

  “Okay, okay.” I clipped into both of the bolts, turned around and sat down on the ledge, my feet dangling into the flurried void.

  [Are you tied in?]

  “Yeah.”

  [I want you to lie down on the ledge, on your side, with your feet into the wind and your back to the cliff. Do you understand?]

  “Why?”

  [Don’t hurry, but do it quickly. Now.]

  “Okay.”

  [Your air intake is on your backpack, right between your shoulder blades. Your CO2 vent is back there, too. It lets out a good bit of heat. The air between you and the cliff should get a good bit warmer than the air around you. We need to take as much stress off your heating system as we can.]

  “Right. Good idea.”

  [I want you to lie on your side, with your right arm under you. Your right side, facing out from the cliff.]

  “I got it, I got it.” I leaned over and pulled my legs back up on the ledge.

  [Put your arm between your body and the rock. It will help insulate you. The less surface area you have touching the ledge, the better.]

  “Yeah, okay.” She was right: rock is a great heat-sink. I squirmed the rigid arm of the suit under me.

  [Are you lying down?]

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’m there.”

  [All right, now cinch yourself in tight. As tight as you can.]

  “What?”

  [You’re tied into the bolts, right? Cinch up the ropes as tight as you can.]

  “Oh. Right. No, yeah, I did that already.”

  [Now I want you to pull your arms out of the suit sleeves and into the trunk.]

  Another good idea, if I could pull it off. “Uh, right,” I said as I struggled to squirm my arms up through the sleeves without dislocating my shoulders. “How the heck am I supposed to do this?”

  [It might help to turn your suit off.] That wouldn’t have been my first choice. [Turn off the servos. With the suit rigid, it gives you something to push against.]

  “Oh. I see.” I powered down. All that was left on now was the heater, the air compressor, and my headlamp. I hadn’t gotten up the nerve to turn that off yet; it made me feel better being able to see.

  With the suit rigid it did give me some leverage; it didn’t make it easy, but it made it possible. After a good bit of struggling I got my arms in and folded across my chest. That pushed my back right up against the back of the suit, but I did feel warmer. In fact it made my legs, each isolated in a leg of the suit, feel colder by contrast.

  “Done,” I said.

  [Good. Now close your waste exhaust valves.]

  “What?”

  [Your urine and fecal exhausts. It may get uncomfortable, but we need to do everything we can to conserve heat.]

  Great. I liked her use of the term ‘we.’ She wasn’t going to be lying in her own waste all night. I wondered if I could hold it till morning, if I lasted that long.

  “Okay.”

  [You did it?]

  “I did it. I did it.”

  [What else is left on?]

  “Well, my headlamp—”

  [Turn it off.]

  “Right.” I didn’t want to, but I did it.

  Click.

  The dancing flakes vanished into thick, heavy blackness, blackness so palpable it pressed on my eyes and made it difficult to breathe for a moment. I felt like I was falling off the ledge. I couldn’t tell. My heart pounded and my breathing got heavy and ragged as I waited for the vertigo to pass.

  [Are you all right?]

  “Yeah. Yeah, it’s just ... pretty intense.”

  [What is?]

  “Nothing. I’m fine.” I didn’t feel fine.

  A small red indicator flared briefly on the miniature instrument panel in my helmet, then winked out. “Wait a minute. What was that? I got an indicator—”

  [I just locked you out of your suit.]

  “What? Why? What are you—”

  [Mo. Listen to me. You may go into hypothermia before we can get to you. Your thinking may get impaired.] I could hear that beautiful, ironic smile come into her voice. [We can’t afford to have you squirming off that silly ledge now, can we?]

  “Right.” I still didn’t like it. Lying on a tiny ledge in a high wind on a huge cliff in the middle of the night on a planet full of religious fanatics ... and now I was trapped in my own space suit. How could things be better? “What if something falls on me?”

  [Like what?]

  “I don’t know, a rock or something.” I was wondering if I’d loosened anything up on the ledge above me that was now just teetering in the wind. It was a silly thought, but I thought it anyway.

  [Well, if that happens I guess we’re screwed and tattooed, Hmm?]

  “Yeah, I guess.” The blackness was still a solid thing engulfing me. I kept waiting for my eyes to adjust, but there was nothing for them to adjust to. Starlight, or even moonlight, couldn’t penetrate this storm; I was in a lightless environment. It was all the more disconcerting because the level of noise was quite high. The wail of the wind and the percussive hiss of dry snow hitting my suit had the endless, chilling quality of arctic surf.

  Alice spoke to me. [Mo, do you have any food left?]

  “Uh, yeah, I do. I have, let’s see, five energy bars and some dried fruit.”

  [We’re eating down here. Maybe you should eat something, too.]

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.” I turned my head and pulled a bite of energy bar out of its slot beside my face plate. Then I turned the other way and took a drink of water from the tube on the water tank. I figured that I should drink as much as I could before it froze—and then I thought that drinking a lot would make me have to urinate and I sure didn’t want to do that. Eventually
my thirst won the argument, but what a weird argument to be having.

  For a long time things were just kind of boring, in a hyper-tense, terrifying sort of way. Alice would talk to me pretty regularly, and everyone on the Lightdancer would check in as well. I’d start to relax a little and then a titanic gust would hammer me and I’d jerk into full, adrenaline-soaked, utterly pointless readiness. I tried to do a couple of Realities on Steel’s system, but I couldn’t concentrate: I was always popping out to check some sound or sensation. Time slowed down as I checked it more and more often; dawn was still a long way off. Sometime after midnight my suit ran out of power and it started to get cold. Really cold. Doing isometrics kept my body heated up for a while, but I couldn’t keep doing them for very long. I was already exhausted from the day, and, anyway, how long can you exercise, even when you’re fully rested? My feet got cold first, because they were facing into the wind. The cold turned to numbness and started creeping up my legs. After a while I started trembling uncontrollably, and then I got too exhausted even for that. It occurred to me that if I didn’t completely freeze and have to re-boot, I might lose some fingers or toes. Well, toes anyway.

  I started to wonder how Sheila was doing back on Vesper. I wondered how Shaughnessy’s show was going; they would have finished the run on Heaven by now. I couldn’t remember where they were going next. It didn’t matter, but I wondered where they were.

  I wondered if my tax auditor was sleeping soundly, the bastard.

  After a while it didn’t feel so cold.

  Chapter 21

  I woke up in the hut. I knew it was the right one because I could see Archie sleeping in a bunk half a meter away from me. I was out of my suit, lying under soft cotton sheets. I wiggled my toes—they felt fine. Nobody missing, no frostbite. Everything in order.

  I realized that I wasn’t alone in the bunk. Arms were wrapped around me and a very warm body was pressed against me, breathing softly, regularly. When I turned to see who it was she opened her eyes sleepily—cat-eyes.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She yawned a feline yawn and said, “How are you feeling?”

  “Better than I have any right to feel,” I responded, hopefully with suave, sexual undertones. I really did feel great. I didn’t understand it. “What happened?”

  Steel rubbed my arms and chest and pressed herself into my side. “You lost a lot of body heat. We thought we were going to lose you there for a while.”

  “What time is it? What day is it? I thought—”

  “Shh. Let’s let Archie sleep. She needs it.”

  “But—”

  “Shh.” She snuggled closer. “You need it, too.”

  I didn’t get the whole story till everyone was awake. The short and long of it was that Steel and Alice had rescued me. They’d had to stay with Archie while she went through the operation and then stabilized, and they’d had to wait for their suits to recharge, but as soon as they could—which turned out to be a couple of hours before dawn—they’d suited up again and headed back out into the storm. The ropes had been completely iced up; they’d had to chip their way back up to me. I guess I’d been delirious or unconscious all the way down. I must have been a handful.

  When they got me back to the hut they got me out of my suit and both climbed into bed with me, warming me with their bodies. After I stopped trembling Alice moved over to her own bunk and Steel stayed with me the rest of the night.

  I didn’t know what to say. They’d both taken incredible risks to keep me from going offline, to keep me from freezing. Alice had risked ... everything. I was overwhelmed.

  My discomfort was brief, however, as we had to attend to Archie. Poor Archie. The ice ax had bent an interior flange in the shoulder joint of her suit and the flange had pinched closed the main artery going into her arm. By the time they’d gotten her to the hut all they could do was let the nano-doc amputate it. She’d have to wait until we got her to a real hospital before she could get a new one. It made her look smaller. You don’t realize how much of someone an arm is until it’s missing.

  And yet, we’d been incredibly lucky. No one had gone off line. More importantly, Alice was safe.

  We took two extra days to make it the rest of the way down. No more goofing around; we were very, very careful. We had to assist Archie in various ways. Anything that took two hands needed one of our hands to accomplish, but we made it.

  Our shelter at the bottom was actually a little Buddhist shrine, a destination for pilgrims from a small enclave in the lowlands. It was the first structure pertaining to one of the old religions that I had seen in centuries. Built of flat stones quarried from the talus, it was a small, rude hut—barely more than a pile of rocks—that had been painstakingly covered with illustrations and calligraphy. A large, painted eye gazed benignly from each of the four sides of the base of a small spire on the roof. Small, brightly colored scraps of cloth clinging to lines that radiated from the tip of the spire fluttered in the constant breeze. Archie told me that each one had a prayer written on it.

  This struck me profoundly. The people on Eden still asked supernatural beings to intercede for them, to ease the suffering and struggle of their brief lives. They had chosen to eschew physical immortality in their need to maintain their traditional relationship to anthropomorphic spirits, the Godhead, Allah, God. They had chosen to continue dying. They had chosen it. All of the studying I had done on the ship had not prepared me for the experience of this one tiny shrine, this little labor of devotion, this place of powerless beseeching, of humble acceptance.

  We still had about fifty klicks to hike out before we got to the plateau, still descending steeply but now on the pilgrim’s trail that wound down through the eroded piedmont: piled detritus that had broken off the escarpment over the eons. Looking up at that colossal wall I had no idea how we’d ever get back up to the Lightdancer, but Archie, Steel and Alice had done it before.

  Breakfasting outside, we polished our plans for getting to Nazareth, the little town where Alice had been ... born. The sun shone in a vivid sky and shattered on the spray of a snow-fed torrent that bounded and raced in the gully beside us. We had stowed our space suits in a small, camouflaged cache a couple of hundred meters up the slope. It was marvelous to be out in the air again.

  “My arm will actually help us, I think,” Archie was saying to me, lifting a mug of tea to her lips with her remaining hand. “I’d been thinking that we all looked too healthy.”

  Alice and Steel had finished eating and were off putting their packs together. I glanced over at them working, thinking how lucky I was to be online, let alone healthy. “I hope you didn’t lose it on purpose,” I said.

  Archie smiled grimly. “I’m dedicated, but not that dedicated. Still, we’re going to have to degrade our skin on the way down. Alice is okay, she’s supposed to look young, but the rest of us need to pick up some sun damage.”

  “Sun damage?”

  “Farmer tans. These folks work outside a lot, and none of them are on the net.”

  “Hmm.” Nobody told me this place wouldn’t be strange. “I’m just glad to be down and still functioning. I think I’ve misjudged our Captain.”

  Archie sipped at her tea. “How so?”

  This was hard to say, but I felt I needed to say it to somebody. “I think I short-changed her.” I looked at my hands. Two hands. “When I was up on that ledge ...”

  Archie was looking at me, her mug halfway to her lips. When I didn’t go on she said, “Thanks, by the way.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s ...” I started again, “But ... I didn’t think—I thought ...” It seemed so unjust to even voice the accusation then, sitting in the sunshine, listening to the rush of the stream, watching the prayer flags flutter urgently in the unaffected wind. Archie waited for me to go on, her remaining hand holding a mug of tea.

  “I thought she’d leave me up there, you know? I thought she would just ... pick me up later. Re-boot me when it was convenient. After she was through he
re. Or something.”

  Archie watched me for a moment, then gazed out at the sky. “People like Steel are hard to judge,” she said finally. “I think we fail to appreciate how profoundly the net affects us.”

  Steel walked up with her pack already on. “No more talk about banned technology,” she admonished. “From here down we could meet natives at any point.”

  “Sorry,” Arch acknowledged.

  “There’s a small settlement where this trail joins the main road between Nazareth and New Jordan. We should be able to buy a car there.” She handed me a small, flat, folded leather envelope filled with ornately decorated paper. “Here’s the money. Christian men keep these in their hip pockets.”

  “Right. Wallets,” I remembered. A funny word. It seemed like it should mean ‘little walls,’ but it didn’t.

  Archie rinsed out her mug in the stream. We had to help her get it into her pack. She was working on a technique of using her teeth as a second hand, but she hadn’t mastered it yet. Fortunately she had enough shoulder left to keep her pack on.

  Steel surveyed us all, “From now on, we’re in character.” She ended her sweep at me.

  “Oh, right,” I said, getting her implication. This was it. We were now entering the strange, isolated society that was Eden—a society that had been cut off from the rest of civilization for almost a thousand years. A place of bizarre rituals and ancient crimes: marriages, funerals, births, rapes, murders. I settled the pack on my shoulders, took a stronger bearing, breathed. “Sister-in-law, are you ready?” I asked Archie.

  “Yes, Brother-in-law,” she replied.

  “Niece?”

  Alice nodded, “Yes, Uncle.”

  I looked at Steel. The word stuck in my mouth for an instant, but I don’t think it was noticeable. I hoped. “M-mother? Are you ready?” She would be posing as my wife, but I used the higher honorific, just to practice it.

  She dipped her head respectfully. “Yes, Father.” She returned the gesture.

  I bowed my head. “May God protect us on our journey. In Jesus’ name we pray.” The three women murmured “Amen.” I raised my head, looked at my family. “Let us begin,” I said.