"Risking your life,” she adds. “Risking our lives. You're not alone anymore, you haven't been for years. What about me? What about Leila?"
Sitting on bare rock warmed by the sun and looking down on all the snow and ice and jagged rock that stretches out below them, Rafael can still hear Kiyoko's words so clearly, the anger and pain and incomprehension. He can still see the tears, and his heart aches for her, for Leila, and for himself.
All those reasons he's given her over the years ... he realizes now that they are nothing but excuses, and weak excuses at that. Excuses that hide some unidentified discontent that is in fact nothing more than a deep-seated selfishness.
He hopes this realization hasn't come too late.
* * * *
A vast network of jagged unbridgeable crevasses blocked their way. They'd heard an avalanche during the night and the force had shattered the ice bridges that would have provided a way across this portion of the glacier.
"It had looked so promising yesterday,” said Father Dominic.
"Like your God,” Iliana told him.
"God is an easy target for unbelievers,” the priest replied. “For believers as well, actually.” He turned to her, unperturbed. “It isn't helpful."
"Fair enough.” Iliana looked out across the maze of crevasses. “What would be helpful? Besides a helicopter?"
Rafael examined the terrain to their right, to their left, but there seemed little difference in either direction, and little change. Going around was going to be long and arduous and there was no way to tell which way would be better. He looked up toward the summit, but it was once again hidden by clouds and drifting frozen fogs.
"Maybe we could find a way through,” he suggested, although he recognized the absurdity of the words as soon as he spoke them.
Neither of the others replied. The three climbers stood together in the sun studying the glacier, the wide cracks and dark lines of shadow. Almost certainly a maze with no exit. Below the glacier the mountainside presented several potential routes, if they could reach them, then the mountain disappeared in low cloud and haze. Rafael had no idea anymore how far it was to the base camp, or even how much hiking awaited beyond it.
"West,” Iliana finally decided.
Putting the shrouded summit to one side, and the glacier and shrouded lower slopes to the other, they set off toward the west.
* * * *
For the first time in months, Rafael thinks of his father. His father died when he was only fifty-one and Rafael twenty-three. A long and painful death from kidney and liver failure, ravaged lungs, swollen joints, and the cumulative effect of half a dozen other secondary physiological and metabolic malfunctions.
His father had been a veteran of the Vietnam War, serving two tours in the steaming jungles of Southeast Asia. He never talked about those experiences of his own volition, not even when Rafael, as a teenager, asked him several times to tell him what those years had been like. Rafael stopped asking, deciding it wasn't fair to his father. Even when his father lay dying in the V.A. hospital and the doctors admitted that most of his ailments were service-related—frequent contact with Agent Orange being the primary factor—he would not talk about that war.
Rafael's relationship with his mother is and always has been cool and distant, which seems to be what she wants, or needs. He was, however, close to his father, though they really didn't talk much; when they did, it was mostly about sports—football, baseball, college basketball. Rafael has rich and vivid memories of long hot summer afternoons, sitting in the backyard with his father on dirty white plastic deck chairs, drinking cold domestic beer and listening to baseball games on the radio.
He still misses his father.
* * * *
They hiked and climbed and crawled and pulled and dragged each other along for nearly three days until they reached a long gently sloping rock cleft that cut through the glacier, effectively bypassing the crevasses.
Once they'd traversed the glacier, the descent became familiar again, though he'd thought this portion of the route had actually been much higher up on the mountain. But when they came to the nearly vertical face just below the Bamboo Col, they discovered that the tens of meters of fixed rope they'd set on the ascent now hung in shreds, split and frayed and swinging listlessly in the cold breeze or lying scattered in pieces on the snow and rock at the bottom of the face. Sabotage was suggested, or some freak and violent storm, but when they inspected the ropes they found that the fibers appeared worn and rotted, as if the ropes had been hanging on this mountainside for decades.
The fixed ropes would have provided a much easier descent of the rocky face—the three of them could have abseiled down the steep drop in less than an hour. Now that wasn't possible, and they didn't have enough extra rope to fix new lines. With night approaching, they made camp and rested for the next day.
In the morning, Father Dominic took the lead, and Rafael was once again astonished at the priest's technical abilities. He found a path they could all negotiate, and they made it to the bottom of the face with more than an hour of daylight remaining to them. They stood together and watched in wonder as the sun dropped behind the horizon and set the ice and the clouds and the sky on fire.
He remembers ... he remembers....
Kiyoko asleep on the couch with Dante—their new tiny puff-ball of dark gray kitten no bigger than Rafael's hand—snuggled up under her chin....
The rich scent of wood smoke and pine needles....
Weeping as he stands alone in the frigid black night when he is seventeen, suffocating a newborn pup born minutes earlier with its intestines outside its body....
The rush of emotion fountaining in his belly and chest the first time he kisses Kiyoko, holding her as her two cats watch with suspicion....
Trout fishing with his father, hiking along a rocky mountain stream, breath icy in the early gray morning....
A gull hovering almost stationary about the waves, dipping slightly in the breeze....
The smell of sweat on skin on skin.... Leila's days-old fingers gripping his thumb ... the overhead rumble of trucks crossing the bridge spanning a dry creek bed ... the baking heat of summer on the slope of a dune ... the two freckles on Kiyoko's cheek just below her left eye....
He remembers....
* * * *
When he woke that morning, Yusuf wasn't in the tent. Rafael squirmed out of his sleeping bag and crawled out into the gray, cloudy morning.
Yusuf stood a few meters away with his pack on his shoulders, looking up toward the summit.
"What are you doing?” Rafael asked.
"I'm looking for the city,” Yusuf replied. “Kuma-Shan."
Rafael could see nothing above them but cloud and ice and rock. “Do you see it?"
Yusuf shook his head, then turned to gaze down the mountain. “I'm leaving now,” he said.
"Where are you going?"
"Down. To the base of the mountain."
"That's where we're all going,” Rafael said.
Yusuf shook his head. “I'll be getting there a lot sooner than you will."
With that he started down the mountain, walking straight downhill without regard to the terrain, yet never losing his footing. As he went, each stride, while in appearance normal in length, took him increasing distances down the mountainside so that before long each step traversed twenty meters and more.
Down he went, never looking back, his form becoming smaller and smaller, and when he reached the low clouds and fog, they drifted away, slowly but steadily revealing the mountain's lower slopes.
To Rafael's dismay, those slopes went on and on and on.... Yusuf was barely distinguishable now, a moving red spot against a vast expanse of crystalline white mottled with streaks and patches of motionless dark colors. Soon, all the clouds and mist had scattered, and Rafael could see no end to the mountain, only a gradually increasing vagueness as his vision became incapable of distinguishing anything at such great distances.
For some t
ime now, Rafael's great fear had been that, when they completed their second descent of the mountain, they would awaken the next morning to find themselves once again just below the summit, preparing for a third descent. That fear was now gone, replaced by one darker and more terrifying—that the second descent would never end.
A numb exhaustion overwhelmed him, and with weak legs he made his way to a narrow slab of rock and sat, gazing down on that endless expanse.
* * * *
When Leila is five years old, she contracts bacterial meningitis, and for three days lies close to death in the ICU, with the physicians unable to tell Rafael and Kiyoko if their daughter will survive. Rafael and Kiyoko virtually live in the hospital, sleep and eat there, and wander the corridors one at a time like lost somnambulists.
In the evening of the third day, Rafael goes out onto the hospital's rooftop garden and sits on a bench, looking up at the stars. For two days a terrible dread has grown in him, so debilitating that he can barely function. He rarely speaks, thinking is slow and muddy, and even the simplest of movements seems beyond him, for nearly every possible future he contemplates is filled with that dread, and it cannot be dispelled.
The stars glimmer weakly against the muted dark sky so pale in comparison to the bright obsidian night sky above the world's highest mountains. Rafael lets himself fully imagine the different possible outcomes for Leila, and what each would mean for all of them. He imagines first what it would be like if Leila dies, how his grief might take hold of him, tear open a wound in his heart that would never heal, how Kiyoko's grief might manifest, and how their mutual grief and emptiness might impact their own relationship—even there he can imagine several possibilities, almost none of them good.
His jaw aches from clenching, his stomach cramps, and he wipes tears from his face with a trembling hand. Several minutes pass before his breathing is slow and even.
Then he imagines what their lives would be like if Leila survives, but with severe and permanent brain damage....
...or lifelong disabilities....
...or chronic pain....
...or....
He grips the bench to hold himself upright, wrung out, exhausted, and dizzy, as if he sits in a small rowboat out at sea.
Eventually, he lets himself revel in the possibility of a full recovery, the relief and joy and gratitude that brings, along with a greater appreciation for their lives.
Finally, he imagines once again how his life might be if Leila dies, and this time the pain is muted, the dread fainter.
When he has finished with all of these imaginings and re-imaginings, he realizes that the dread has faded from each possible outcome. He isn't at peace with all of those futures, but he feels that he has come to terms with them in an important way, and that he will be able to go on with his life no matter what happens.
Several days later, when Leila has in fact fully recovered and they bring her home, he tries to explain to Kiyoko what happened on that rooftop, and explain his thinking and the state of mind he reached. She doesn't understand, however, and no matter how he words it, or what approach he takes, it always seems to her that he is saying it would have been okay if Leila had died, and that any outcome is just as good as any other.
He tries two or three more times in the next few days, but he cannot get her to understand what he thinks he understands. He stops trying, and they never speak of it again.
* * * *
When Iliana and Father Dominic emerged from their tent and saw Rafael sitting on the rock staring down at the lower slopes of the mountain once again shrouded in low clouds, neither of them said a word. He turned to look at them, and they returned his gaze, but still they didn't speak. Perhaps there was something in his eyes, or the way he held himself.
They packed up the tent, shouldered their packs, checked their boots and gloves and other equipment, then with one last glance at him and a pair of nods, they turned and started down the mountain.
Rafael could not blame them. Why should they speak to him, or expect him to join them? Why would they want to continue with someone who had so clearly given up, why would they want to risk being influenced or infected with his own sense of futility?
As he watches Iliana and the priest move away from him, a thought drifts through his mind, almost insubstantial, yet incandescent, and he grasps at it. A catch of panic halts his breath for a moment as he fears losing this glimmer of insight. He brings it slowly and carefully into focus and considers it for a time, catching fragments of understanding until he finally reaches a growing if incomplete comprehension.
For the first time in days or weeks, Rafael feels a calm within himself. He recognizes that it is impossible to ever know for certain if this new fear of his is true—that the second descent will never end. The one thing he might possibly learn is that it is false ... and the only way he can learn that is to go on. He decides he will not fear or give up to something that he can never, ever know.
Rafael pushes off the rock, breaks down his tent and packs it away, then follows the others as they resume their descent.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Science: Time For Some Change by Pat Murphy and Paul Doherty
Open up your wallet, and take a look at some of those green pieces of paper you carry around.
Money is strange stuff, as strange as any invention of science fiction. A few writers have considered the peculiarities of this strange invention—from Cory Doctorow's exploration of the concept of reputation-based economics in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom to Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle, which deals with the nature of money and includes Isaac Newton as a character.
In the Stephenson series, the King of France sends a counterfeiter to England to destabilize the currency, and England brings in one of the most intelligent persons of the age, Isaac Newton, to combat the threat. Back in Newton's time, “clippers” slyly clipped valuable metal off the edges of coins and then spent the coin at its full value. As master of the mint (yes, he really was), Newton thwarted clippers by milling the edges of coins. If the milling was gone, you knew someone had been snipping off bits of the coin.
Today people don't clip the edges of dollar bills, since the paper of the bill has little intrinsic value. But counterfeiters still come up with clever ways to produce bogus money. On the day that we are writing this column (September 20, 2007), the U.S. Treasury is announcing a new design for the five-dollar bill, one that includes a number of new anti-counterfeiting features.
In this column, we're going to examine those pieces of paper from your wallet and we're going to consider the latest skirmishes in a technological war has been going on for centuries—the ongoing battle between the legitimate minters of money and the counterfeiters. The U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing strives to make currency that's durable, relatively cheap to manufacture, and impossible for anyone else to duplicate. And criminals who want to make a quick buck strive to fabricate convincing counterfeits, pieces of paper that look like the ones the Bureau produces. This battle has led to some significant changes in money you use—and will lead to more changes in the future.
A Twisted History
Counterfeiting has a long and illustrious history, with some great twists and turns.
Back in the mid-1800s, for instance, a clever counterfeiter discovered how to make counterfeit gold sovereigns that had the correct density. To accomplish this, the counterfeiter alloyed platinum (which was then cheaper than gold) with copper to make coins with the correct density but less gold than the real thing. Of course, with the current value of platinum twice that of gold, those fakes are likely to be worth more than the originals today.
Counterfeiting has long been an international business. When the American colonies started printing paper money, copies of that currency were printed in Germany, England, Amsterdam, and Ireland, where manufacturing this bogus American currency wasn't illegal. During the American Revolution, the British counterfeited the dissident colonies’ currency in an effort t
o undermine the new government.
The U.S. didn't have a national currency until 1863. Before that time, each bank issued its own currency. Since each bank had its own designs, it's no wonder people found it tough to identify counterfeits among the 7,000 different varieties of legitimate bills. Estimates indicate that one third of the currency in circulation in the early 1860s was bogus. There was a thriving business in “Counterfeit Detectors,” monthly lists describing the bogus bills and how to identify them.
When a national currency was adopted, counterfeiters didn't hesitate to duplicate the new “greenbacks.” Pat has a favorite counterfeiter: Thomas Peter McCartney, who lectured as Professor Joseph Woods during the period from 1863 to 1868. The learned professor lectured on the art of detecting counterfeits. His talks were illustrated with the nineteenth-century equivalent of a Power Point presentation: large and detailed drawings on which he pointed out defects of many of the better-known counterfeits.
Of course, right after Professor Woods left town, some of Thomas Peter McCartney's confederates would arrive and pass some excellent counterfeits that lacked the flaws that the knowledgeable professor had described. Apparently lecturing alone was not lucrative enough for the good professor.
Just Paper and Ink
Are you still clutching those bills you pulled from your wallet? Before we get into the high-tech innovations that have been introduced in the last twenty years, let's take a look at some of the safeguards against counterfeiting that date back to 1863.
First, examine the paper on which the currency is printed. This paper is produced by Crane & Company of Massachusetts and shipped to Washington, D.C., in armored trucks. Possession of this paper by unauthorized individuals is a federal crime.
Currency paper is made with a special blend of linen and cotton fibers, with three pounds of red and blue fibers for every ten thousand pounds of untinted fiber. If you look at a bill under a bright light with a magnifying lens, you may be able to spot some red and blue fibers in the paper. Those fibers make the paper difficult to duplicate. To be convincing, a counterfeit bill must contain those tiny streaks of red and blue. Some counterfeiters have drawn or printed red and blue lines on their bills; others have glued tiny fibers on.
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