Roger humphs. “Existentialism.”
“Well, whatever you want to call it. It’s part of Sartre’s philosophy of freedom, for sure. He says that the only way we can possess our past—whether we can remember it or not, I say—is to add new acts to it, which then give it a new value. He calls this ‘assuming’ our past.”
“But sometimes that may not be possible.”
“Not for Sartre. The past is always assumed, because we are not free to stop creating new values for it. It’s just a question of what those values will be. For Sartre it’s a question of how you will assume your past, not whether you will.”
“And for you?”
“I’m with him on that. That’s why I’ve been reading him these last several years. It helps me to understand things.”
“Hmph.” He thinks about it. “You were an English major in college, did you know that?”
But she ignores the comment. “So—” She nudges him lightly, shoulder to shoulder. “You have to decide how you will assume this past of yours. Now that Mars is gone.”
He considers it.
She stands. “I have to plunge into the logistics for tomorrow.”
“Okay. See you inside.”
A bit disconcerted, he watches her leave. Dark tall shape against the sky. The woman he remembers was not like this. In the context of what she has just said, the thought almost makes him laugh.
* * *
For the next few days all the members of the team are hard at work ferrying equipment up to Camp 3, except for two a day who are sent above to find a route to the next camp. It turns out there is a feasible reeling route directly up the gully, and most of the gear is reeled up to Camp 3 once it is carried to Camp 2. Every evening there is a radio conversation, in which Eileen takes stock and juggles the logistics of the climb, and gives the next day’s orders. From other camps Roger listens to her voice over the radio, interested in the relaxed tone, the method she has of making her decisions right in front of them all, and the easy way she shifts her manner to accommodate whoever she is speaking with. He decides she is very good at her job, and wonders if their conversations are simply a part of that. Somehow he thinks not.
* * *
Roger and Stephan are given the lead, and early one mirror dawn they hurry up the fixed ropes above Camp 3, turning on their helmet lamps to aid the mirrors. Roger feels strong in the early going. At the top of the pitch the fixed ropes are attached to a nest of pitons in a large, crumbling crack. The sun rises and suddenly bright light glares onto the face. Roger ropes up, confirms the signals for the belay, starts up the gully.
The lead at last. Now there is no fixed rope above him determining his way; only the broad flat back and rough walls of the gully, looking much more vertical than they have up to this point. Roger chooses the right wall and steps up onto a rounded knob. The wall is a crumbling, knobby andesite surface, black and a reddish gray in the harsh morning blast of light; the back wall of the gully is smoother, layered like a very thick-grained slate, and broken occasionally by horizontal cracks. Where the back wall meets the side wall the cracks widen a bit, sometimes offering perfect footholds. Using them and the many knobs of the wall Roger is able to make his way upward. He pauses several meters above Stephan at a good-looking vertical crack to hammer in a piton. Getting a piton off the belt sling is awkward. When it is hammered in he pulls a rope through and jerks on it. It seems solid. He climbs above it. Now his feet are spread, one in a crack, one on a knob, as his fingers test the rock in a crack above his head; then up, and his feet are both on a knob in the intersection of the walls, his left hand far out on the back wall of the gully to hold onto a little indention. Breath rasps in this throat. His fingers get tired and cold. The gully widens out and grows shallower, and the intersection of back and side walls becomes a steep narrow ramp of its own. Fourth piton in, the ringing hammer strikes filling the morning air. New problems: the degraded rock of this ramp offers no good cracks, and Roger has to do a tension traverse over to the middle of the gully to find a better way up. Now if he falls he will swing back into the side wall like a pendulum. And he’s in the rockfall zone. Over to the left side wall, quickly a piton in. Problem solved. He loves the immediacy of problem solving in climbing, though at this moment he is not aware of his pleasure. Quick look down: Stephan a good distance away, and below him! Back to concentrating on the task at hand. A good ledge, wide as his boot, offers a resting place. He stands, catches his breath. A tug on the line from Stephan; he has run out of rope. Good lead, he thinks, looking down the steep gully at the trail left by the green rope, looping from piton to piton. Perhaps a better way to cross the gully from right to left? Stephan’s helmeted face calls something up. Roger hammers in three pitons and secures the line. “Come on up!” he cries. His fingers and calves are tired. There is just room to sit on his bootledge: immense world, out there under the bright pink morning sky! He sucks down the air and belays Stephan’s ascent, pulling up the rope and looping it carefully. The next pitch will be Stephen’s; Roger will have quite a bit of time to sit on this ledge and feel the intense solitude of his position in this vertical desolation. “Ah!” he says. Climbing up and out of the world.…
* * *
It is the strongest sort of duality: facing the rock and climbing, his attention is tightly focused on the rock within a meter or two of his eyes, inspecting its every flaw and irregularity. It is not particularly good climbing rock, but the gully slopes at about seventy degrees in this section, so the actual technical difficulty is not that great. The important thing is to understand the rock fully enough to find only good holds and good cracks—to recognize suspect holds and avoid them. A lot of weight will follow them up these fixed ropes, and although the ropes will probably be renailed, his piton placement will likely stand. One has to see the rock and the world beneath the rock.
And then he finds a ledge to sit and rest on, and turns around, and there is the great rising expanse of the Tharsis Bulge. Tharsis is a continent-sized bulge in the Martian surface; at its center it is eleven kilometers above the Martian datum, and three prince volcanoes lie in a line, northeast to southwest on the bulge’s highest plateau. Olympus Mons is at the far northwestern edge of the bulge, almost on the great expanse of Amazonis Planitia. Now, not even half way up the great volcano’s escarpment, Roger can just see the three prince volcanoes poking over the horizon to the southeast, demonstrating perfectly the size of the planet itself. He looks around one-eighteenth of Mars.
* * *
By midafternoon Roger and Stephan have run out of their 300 meters of rope, and they return to Camp 3 pleased with themselves. The next morning they hurry up the fixed ropes in the mirror dawn, and begin again. At the end of Roger’s third pitch in the lead he comes upon a good site for a camp: a sort of pillar bordering the Great Gully on its right side ends abruptly in a flat top that looks very promising. After negotiating a difficult short traverse to get onto the pillar top, they wait for the midday radio conference. Consultation with Eileen confirms that the pillar is about the right distance from Camp 3, and suddenly they are standing in Camp 4.
“The Gully ends pretty near to you anyway,” Eileen says.
So Roger and Stephan have the day free to set up a wall tent and then explore. The climb is going well, Roger thinks: no major technical difficulties, a group that gets along fairly well together … perhaps the great South Buttress will not prove to be that difficult after all.
Stephan gets out a little sketchbook. Roger glances at the filled pages as Stephan flips through them. “What’s that?”
“Chir pine, they call it. I saw some growing out of the rocks above Camp 1. It’s amazing what you find living on the side of this cliff!”
“Yes,” Roger says.
“Oh, I know, I know. You don’t like it. But I’m sure I don’t know why.” He has a blank sheet of the sketchbook up now. “Look in the cracks across the gully. Lot of ice there, and then patches of moss. That’s moss campion, with
the lavender flowers on top of the moss cushion, see?”
He begins sketching and Roger watches, fascinated. “That’s a wonderful talent to have, drawing.”
“Skill. Look, there’s edelweiss and asters, growing almost together.” He jerks, puts finger to lips, points. “Pika,” he whispers.
Roger looks at the broken niches in the moat of the gully opposite them. There is a movement and suddenly he sees them—two little gray furballs with bright black eyes—three—the last scampering up the rock fearlessly. They have a hole at the back of one niche for a home. Stephen sketches rapidly, getting the outline of the three creatures, then filling them in. Bright Martian eyes.
* * *
And once, in the Martian autumn in Burroughs, when the leaves covered the ground and fell through the air, leaves the color of sand, or the tan of antelopes, or the green of green apples, or the white of cream, or the yellow of butter—he walked through the park. The wind blew stiffly from the southwest out of the big funnel of the delta, bringing clouds flying overhead swiftly, scattered and white and sunbroken to the west, bunched up and dark dusky blue to the east; and the evergreens waved their arms in every shade of dark green, before which the turning leaves of the hardwoods flared; and above the trees to the east a white-walled church, with reddish arched roof tiles and a white bell tower, glowed under the dark clouds. Kids playing on the swings across the park, yellow-red aspens waving over the brick city hall beyond them to the north—and Roger felt—wandering among widely-spaced white-trunked trees that thrust their white limbs in every upward direction—he felt—feeling the wind loft the gliding leaves over him—he felt what all the others must have felt when they walked around, that Mars had become a place of exquisite beauty. In such lit air he could see every branch, leaf and needle waving under the tide of wind, crows flying home, lower clouds lofting puffy and white under the taller black ones, and it all struck him all at once: freshly colored, fully lit, spacious and alive in the wind—what a world! What a world.
And then, back in his offices, he hadn’t been able to tell anyone about it. It wouldn’t have been like him.
Remembering that, and remembering his recent talk with Eileen, Roger feels uncomfortable. His past overpowered that day’s walk through the park: what kind of assumption was that?
* * *
Roger spends his afternoon free climbing above Camp 4, looking around a bit and enjoying the exercise of his climbing skills. They’re coming back very quickly. But the rock is nearly crack-free once out of the Gully, and he decides free climbing is not a good idea. Besides, he’s noticed a curious thing: about fifty meters above Camp 4, the Great Central Gully is gone. It ends in a set of overhangs like the ribs under the protruding wall of a building. Definitely not the way up. And yet the face to the right of the overhangs is not much better; it too tilts out and out, until it is almost sheer. The few cracks breaking this mass will not be easy to climb. In fact, Roger doubts he could climb them, and wonders if the leads are up to it. Well, sure, he thinks, they can climb anything. But it looks awful. Hans has talked about the volcano’s “hard eon,” when the lava pouring from the caldera was denser and more consistent than in the volcano’s earlier years. The escarpment, being a sort of giant boring of the volcano’s flow history, naturally reflects the changes in lava consistency in its many horizontal bands. So far they have been climbing on softer rock—now they have reached the bottom of a harder band. Back in Camp 4 Roger looks up at what he can see of the cliff above and wonders where they will go.
* * *
Another duality: the two halves of the day, forenoon and afternoon. Forenoon is sunny and therefore hot: a morning ice and rock shower in the Gully, and time to dry out sleeping bags and socks. Then noon passes and the sun disappears behind the cliff above. For an hour or so they have the weird half-light of the dusk mirrors, then they too disappear, and suddenly the air is biting, bare hands risk frostnip, and the lighting is indirect and eerie: a world in shadow. Water on the cliff-face ices up, and rocks are pushed out—there is another period when rocks fall and go whizzing by. People bless their helmets and hunch their shoulders in, and discuss again the possibility of shoulder pads. In the cold the cheery morning is forgotten, and it seems the whole climb takes place in shadow.
* * *
When Camp 4 is established, they try several reconnaissance climbs through what Hans calls the Jasper Band. “It looks like orbicular jasper, see?” He shows them a dull rock and after cutting away at it with a laser saw shows them a smooth brown surface, speckled with little circles of yellow, green, red, white. “Looks like lichen,” Roger says. “Fossilized lichen.”
“Yes. This is orbicular jasper. For it to be trapped in this basalt implies a metamorphic slush—lava partially melting rock in the throat above the magma chamber, and then throwing it all up.…”
So it was the Jasper Band, and it was trouble. Too sheer—close to vertical, really, and without an obvious way up. “At least it’s good hard rock,” Dougal says cheerfully.
* * *
Then one day Arthur and Marie return from a long traverse out to the right, and then up. They hurry into camp grinning ear to ear.
“It’s a ledge,” Arthur says. “A perfect ledge. I can’t believe it. It’s about half a meter wide, and extends around this rampart for a couple hundred meters, just like a damn sidewalk! We just walked right around that corner! Completely vertical above and below—talk about a view!”
* * *
For once Roger finds Arthur’s enthusiasm fully appropriate. The Thank God Ledge, as Arthur has named it (“There’s one like this in Yosemite”), is a horizontal break in the cliff-face, and a flat slab just wide enough to walk on is the result. Roger stops in the middle of the ledge to look around. Straight up: rock and sky. Straight down: the tiny tumble of the talus, appearing directly below them, as Roger is not inclined to lean out too far to see the rock in between. The exposure is astonishing. “You and Marie walked along this ledge without ropes?” Roger says.
“Oh, it’s fairly wide,” Arthur replies. “Don’t you think? I ended up crawling there where it narrows just a bit. But mostly it was fine. Marie walked the whole way.”
“I’m sure she did.” Roger shakes his head, happy to be clipped onto the rope that has been fixed about chest high above the ledge. With its aid he can appreciate this strange ledge—perfect sidewalk in a completely vertical world: the wall hard, knobby, right next to his head—under him the smooth surface of the ledge, and then empty space.
* * *
Verticality. Consider it. A balcony high on a tall building will give a meager analogy: experience it. On the side of this cliff, unlike the side of any building, there is no ground below. The world below is the world of belowness, the rush of air under your feet. The forbidding smooth wall of the cliff, black and upright beside you, halves the sky. Earth, air; the solid here and now, the airy infinite; the wall of basalt, the sea of gases. Another duality: to climb is to live on the most symbolic plane of existence and the most physical plane of existence at the same time. This too the climber treasures.
* * *
At the far end of the Thank God Ledge there is a crack system that breaks through the Jasper Band—it is like a narrow, miniature version of the Great Gully, filled with ice. Progress upward is renewed, and the cracks lead up to the base of an ice-filled half-funnel, that divides the Jasper Band even further. The bottom of the funnel is sloped just enough for Camp 5, which becomes by far the most cramped of the campsites. The Thank God Ledge traverse means that using the power reels is impossible between Camps 4 and 5, however. Everyone makes ten or twelve carries between the two camps. Each time Roger walks the sidewalk through space, his amazement at it returns.
* * *
While the carries across the ledge are being made, and Camps 2 and 3 are being dismantled, Arthur and Marie have begun finding the route above. Roger goes up with Hans to supply them with rope and oxygen. The climbing is “mixed,” half on rock,
half on black ice rimmed with dirty hard snow. Awkward stuff. There are some pitches that make Roger and Hans gasp with effort, look at each other round-eyed. “Must have been Marie leading.” “I don’t know, that Arthur is pretty damn good.” The rock is covered in many places by layers of black ice, hard and brittle—years of summer rain followed by frost have caked the exposed surfaces at this height. Roger’s boots slip over the slick ice repeatedly. “Need crampons up here.”
“Except the ice is so thin, you’d be kicking rock.”
“Mixed climbing.”
“Fun, eh?”
Breath rasps over knocking heartbeats. Holes in the ice have been broken with ice-axes; the rock below is good rock, lined with vertical fissures. A chunk of ice whizzes by, clatters on the face below.
“I wonder if that’s Arthur and Marie’s work.”
Only the fixed rope makes it possible for Roger to ascend this pitch, it is so hard. Another chunk of ice flies by, and both of them curse.
Feet appear in the top of the open-book crack they are ascending.
“Hey! Watch out up there! You’re dropping ice chunks on us!”
“Oh! Sorry, didn’t know you were there.” Arthur and Marie jumar down the rope to them. “Sorry,” Marie says again. “Didn’t know you’d come up so late. Have you got more rope?”
“Yeah.”
The sun disappears behind the cliff, leaving only the streetlamp light of the dusk mirrors. Arthur peers up at them as Marie stuffs their packs with the new rope. “Beautiful,” he exclaims. “They have parhelia on Earth, too, you know—a natural effect of the light when there’s ice crystals in the atmosphere. It’s usually seen in Antarctica—big haloes around the sun, and at two points of the halo these mock suns. But I don’t think we ever had four mock suns per side. Beautiful!”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection Page 76
