The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

by Johnathan Strahan

  He ran down the island and his heart leaped when he saw the concrete walkway washed by white water, surging up from the right. Stuck here, forced to break into the museum or huddle in a corner of the church… but no; the concrete stood clear again. If he ran—

  He pounded down the steps and ran over the rough concrete. There were scores of parallel sandstone ridges still exposed to the left, but the right side was submerged already, and as he ran a broken wave rolled up onto the walkway and drenched him to the knees, filling his shoes with seawater and scaring him much more than was reasonable. He ran on cursing.

  Onto the rocks and up five steps. At his car he stopped, gasping for breath. He got in the passenger side and took off his boots, socks, and pants. Put on dry pants, socks, and running shoes.

  He got back out of the car.

  The wind was now a constant gale, ripping over the car and the point and the ocean all around. It was going to be tough to cook dinner on his stove; the car made a poor windbreak, wind rushing under it right at stove level.

  He got out the foam pad, and propped it with his boots against the lee side of the car. The pad and the car's bulk gave him just enough wind shelter to keep the little Bluet's gas flame alive. He sat on the asphalt behind the stove, watching the flames and the sea. The wind was tremendous, the Bay of Birsay riven by whitecaps, more white than blue. The car rocked on its shock absorbers. The sun had finally slid sideways into the sea, but clearly it was going to be a long blue dusk.

  When the water was boiling he poured in a dried Knorr's soup and stirred it, put it back on the flame for a few more minutes, then killed the flame and ate, spooning split pea soup straight from the steaming pot into his mouth. Soup, bit of cheese, bit of salami, red wine from a tin cup, more soup. It was absurdly satisfying to make a meal in these conditions: the wind was in a fury!

  When he was done eating he opened the car door and put away his dinner gear, then got out his windbreaker and rain pants and put them on. He walked around the carpark, and then up and down the low cliffy edges of the point of Buckquoy, watching the North Atlantic get torn by a full force gale. People had done this for thousands of years. The rich twilight blue looked like it would last forever.

  Eventually he went to the car and got his notebooks. He returned to the very tip of the point, feeling the wind like slaps on the ear. He sat with his legs hanging over the drop, the ocean on three sides of him, the wind pouring across him, left to right. The horizon was a line where purest blue met bluest black. He kicked his heels against the rock. He could see just well enough to tell which pages in the notebooks had writing on them; he tore these from the wire spirals, and bunched them into balls and threw them away. They flew off to the right and disappeared immediately in the murk and whitecaps. When he had disposed of all the pages he had written on he cleared the long torn shreds of paper out of the wire rings, and tossed them after the rest.

  It was getting cold, and the wind was a constant kinetic assault. He went back to the car and sat in the passenger seat. His notebooks lay on the driver's seat. The western horizon was a deep blue, now. Must be eleven at least.

  After a time he lit the candle and set it on the dash. The car was still rocking in the wind, and the candle flame danced and trembled on its wick. All the black shadows in the car shivered too, synchronized perfectly with the flame.

  He picked up a notebook and opened it. There were a few pages left between damp cardboard covers. He found a pen in his daypack. He rested his hand on the page, the pen in position to write, its tip in the quivering shadow of his hand. He wrote, "I believe that man is good. I believe we stand at the dawn of a century that will be more peaceful and prosperous than any in history." Outside it was dark, and the wind howled.

  Muir on Shasta

  "Your goodness must have an edge to it," Emerson had said to him, as if a single week's acquaintanceship in euphoric Yosemite could reveal any of the edges in a man. Still it had been valuable advice, for Muir's edges lay buried under sunny meadows and brook babble, and it could be that the old philosopher had only meant to say, You should let your edges show, or It is all right to have edges. A valuable lesson indeed.

  Shasta was an Emersonian mountain, it occurred to Muir as he sat on its summit pinnacle. In its youth it had leaped toward heaven, rising ten thousand feet above the surrounding plains; now it was ancient, glacier-cloaked, its broad peak rounded and craterless, its creative fires banked. And yet there were still sharp outcroppings of lava on the ridges, and enough fire rising from the depths to boil a muddy spring near the summit; and there was in the end the massive snowy fact of the mountain itself, isolate, powerful, brooding, godlike. Emerson had been just like that.

  Muir hefted a brass barometer. He and an acquaintance, Jerome Bixby, had ascended Shasta that morning to take readings, although really the readings were no more than an excuse to climb the mountain and have a look around. From the peak, one saw mountains everywhere—the Coast Range, the Siskiyous, the Trinity Alps, the northern Sierra, snowy flat-topped Lassen—mountains to every point of the compass, a wild tangle of ridges and peaks.

  As he sat and watched, clouds rose out of the valleys and over the ridges, until everything except Shasta was submerged. He stood on a snow island in an ocean of cloud. To the west a thunderhead billowed up, its bright lobes as solid as marble. He gazed at it with a connoisseur's eye, feeling the wind yank his beard, feeling it rake through the weave of his coat, rapt with his usual peak exaltation—

  But there was Bixby, plodding across the white summit plain, looking like a black ant. He had been waiting below the ultimate peak, but now he huffed up the small remnant of the crater wall that was the mountain's highest point, and once at Muir's side said, "We should go down—a storm is coming!"

  "One more reading," Muir said, irritated. He didn't care about the reading, but he didn't want to descend.

  So they stayed on the peak, and the wind freshened, and then the clear air overhead was suddenly marred by streams of mist like carded wool. Just as he completed the last reading they were enveloped in cloud, and the wind grew stronger; and as he followed Bixby down the knob and onto the summit plain, six-faceted hailstones clattered onto the tortured red rock, and thumped into the packed snow, and onto their backs.

  Then as they forced their way west, past the hissing fumaroles of the hot spring and over big chunks of black lava, snow began to fall in waves so thick that at times they were unable to see even their own feet. Blasts of wind slapped them on the ear, snow crystals stung their faces, and it got so cold so fast that Muir became curious, and stopped to read his thermometer; the temperature had dropped twenty-two degrees in ten minutes, and was now below zero.

  Lightning flicked, dim in the clouds, and thunder began to bang around them, in explosions so violent that they vibrated one's whole body. "Wow!" Muir shouted, inaudible in the barrage. He was grinning. The truth was, he loved storms in the mountains. He had been in them so many times that he was confident no storm could harm him, if he continued to walk in it; the heat engendered by exertion was always enough to counter even the wildest assaults. And so he struggled on through the crashing, howling vortex of snow and wind and thunder, head down, thrusting forward as if wrestling some herculean elder brother, whooping at the storm's high drama and spectacle, its brute strength and godlike grandeur—laughing at its sheer excess—

  But he had entirely forgotten to think of Bixby. Who, in fact, had fallen behind, and was out of sight. Muir crouched in the shelter of a giant lava block that marked the route along their ridge, and waited. After a while Bixby appeared out of the snow, and one look made it clear that he was not having the same sort of fun that Muir was.

  The two men huddled together in the lee of the block. Weird light illuminated them in flashes, and it was almost too noisy to hold a conversation. "We can't go on!" Bixby shouted.

  "What?" Muir said, astonished.

  "We can't go on!"

  "But we must! We have no choice!"
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  "We'll be killed!"

  "No, no—we'll stay on the ridge, I know the way!"

  "It's too exposed!"

  This was the very reason that they must take the ridge. The slopes to either side would be swept by avalanches, and even if they escaped these, they would be likely to wander onto a glacier. The ridge, on the other hand, would be blown clear of snow, providing a rocky road down to safety. It would be windy, but no wind could blow a man from a rock; if gusts threatened to do so, one could always lie flat till they were over.

  Irritably he tried to explain this, but Bixby would have none of it. He just shook his head and shouted again, "We can't go down!" He looked the same as always, face calm, his shouts in a reasonable tone of voice; but there was a stubbornness in him, and when Muir shouted, "I memorized the way down the ridge," he stared at Muir as if confronted with a madman. And the thunder crashed, and the hurtling air roared across the ridge, catching on a million jagged lava teeth and shrieking, keening, howling, drowning out mere human voices.

  "We must go down!" Muir shouted again. "We have no choice!"

  "We can't go down! It's impossible! We'll be killed!"

  "It's stopping will kill us!" Muir replied, getting angry. Stupid man, did he think this block's feeble shelter would be enough to protect them? "We have no choice!" he repeated.

  Bixby shook his head. For an instant he looked like Muir's father, insisting on a point of Bible doctrine. "I won't go on!"

  "We must go on!"

  "I won't go on!"

  And that was that. There is a stubbornness in fear that will balk at even the most perfect logic. Muir tugged furiously at his beard. "What do you propose to do!" he shouted.

  Bixby wiped the snow from his face and looked around, blinking cowlike. "The fumaroles are warm," he said.

  "The fumaroles are boiling!" Muir shouted. Anger spiked through him, he wanted to grab the man by the coat and shake his courage back into him. "Superheated poison gas!"

  But Bixby was trudging back toward the fumaroles, hunched into the wind, staggering as gusts shoved him from side to side. "Fool!" Muir cried, and cursed him roundly.

  He stayed by the block, searching the clouds for a break that he could use as argument to convince Bixby to continue. But none came; the storm raged on; and suddenly he realized that his anger at Bixby was a transitive expression of his own fear. He could not leave his companion behind; and so now they were both in very great danger.

  The fumaroles near the peak were among the last small vestiges of Shasta's volcanic glory. Superheated gases rose through cracks in the long throat, and emerged in a small depression on the western side of the summit, where they heated a mixture of snowmelt, volcanic ash, and sand, creating a patch of boiling black mud.

  Muir approached it. In the storm's cold air the patch steamed heavily, making it look like the clouds were pouring out of the mountain as well as rushing over it: an eerie sight. Bixby was already crouched at the mud's edge. Muir stomped to his side.

  Bixby looked up. "This will keep us safe from frost!"

  "Oh yes, safe from frost!" Muir said sarcastically. "But how will we keep from scalding ourselves? And how will we protect our lungs from the acid gases? And how will we get off the mountain once we soak our clothes? Storm or clear, we'll freeze on our way down! We'll have to stay until morning, and who knows what kind of day it will be!"

  Bixby shivered miserably.

  Muir held his breath, let out a long sigh. There was nothing for it. They were there. He crouched and looked over the roiling snow-rimmed pit. Wind whipped any warmth coming off the mud directly away; their zone of safety was about a quarter of an acre in extent, but only an eighth of an inch thick. Scylla and Charybdis, embracing.

  Muir sighed again and tromped into the mud, sinking immediately to his knees and feeling the heat burn his legs. Jetting bubbles of gas made the mud look like molten lava. But on the windward side of the pool they would probably be safe from the gas. As long as the wind held steady. And it seemed it would; it roared out of the west, cutting through clothing; they couldn't stand in it long. Growling, Muir finished sitting in the shallows of the pool. Hot water seeped out of the mud into his pants, then his shirt and coat. He lay back, his head against the windward snowbank, his body outstretched in the mud. Spindrift ran across his face. His nose, which had no feeling to it, still conveyed to him the stench of sulphur. The warmth of the mud burned his skin, but he had to admit it was a relief from the fierce wind. A laugh burst from him like gas from the mud; then a jet of rising bubbles scalded his back and he yelped, rolled hastily to the side. He elbowed a snow and mud poultice over the hot spot, dizzy with the carbonic stink. Now he was covered with mud, his coat and trousers completely soaked. Bixby was the same. Standing up would have turned them into ice statues of themselves. They were committed.

  It was necessary to shift position frequently, to immerse an exposed limb, or expose a boiled one. The passage of time was marked by pain. The storm continued unabated, and the two men lay isolated by the shrieking wind, so that each might have been there alone except that occasionally Muir would raise his head and cry out, and Bixby would shout something back, and both would subside into solitude again. Snow fell so thickly that they breathed it. It settled on the exposed parts of them, and packed to a rime so hard that they crackled when they shifted.

  The sun had apparently set, and it was dark. Muir could see nothing but blackness. At times the mud seemed blacker than the sky; then the sky would seem blacker than the mud. As black as the world had been during his episode of blindness, so many years before. He saw the file leaping into his eye, the aqueous humor draining into his hand, the swift darkening in his sight on the wounded side, and then, that night as he lay trembling in a strange bed, the relentless darkening on the other. Until he was left in total darkness. That fear had been the worst of his life; this was nothing to it, a natural darkness, a storm in its fury to be watched and loved. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, and see. He had been blind for three weeks, three full weeks of doctor's assurances and secret terror; and when his sight had returned he had walked out of his life and never returned, never looked back, tossing away the destiny that his father and country had thought proper for him, farming, inventing machinery, all that; he abandoned all that and gave himself to the wilderness. So that, properly speaking, it was in fact a blessing to be here boiling in a volcano's caldera with a blizzard thick about his ears. Part of nature's bounty—

  Groans from Bixby broke his thought. He saw the lump of the man, rolling to escape a fumarole, struggling to keep from sinking. In some places the mud was viscid clay, in others black tea, whistling in its pot. Lumps of something, perhaps soaked pumice, floated under the surface, and he tried arranging a bed of the lumps under him to protect him from rising gas jets, but they kept slipping away. The wind still howled, but the clouds were thinning; the snow blowing across their bodies must have been spindrift, for he saw a star. If you can see one star, press on! as the saying had it. But not tonight.

  Soon the clouds scudded off east, and starlight bathed the scene. The familiar patterns sparked the night sky, drawing around him all the other nights he had lain out in the world. The eye is a flower that sees the stars. If they had continued their descent, they would now be down on the snow slopes, where starlight would have made darkness visible, and guided them home. Instead, soaked as they were, and with a mile of wind-ripped ridge to negotiate, they were going to have to spend the night. But he said nothing. It was done. And his fault really, for staying on the peak so long. Besides, the sight of the stars brought it to him that whatever the discomfort, they were likely to survive; so it did not signify. He had spent many a cold night on a mountain. It could even be said that the boiling mud made this night less miserable than some, though—the skin of his back suddenly flaring—none other had been so purely painful. Still, he was used to pain, accustomed to it. He had grown up with it, working a hardscrabble farm for his father, a mean,
small-minded man, a lesson in how not to be a Christian, all those days spent studying the Bible while his boys worked to get his bread, and then beating them with switch, belt—

  His leg was on fire. He pulled his knee up into the icy wind, and for an instant smelled the gas. Once his father had set him to digging wells, and seventy feet down seeping gas had overwhelmed him, he had swooned and had only just come to, only just dragged himself far enough up the rope ladder to breathe good air, and live. He lifted his head and shouted at Bixby. "Still there, Jerome?"

  A croak. Something about the cold. Still there. Muir settled back into the mud. Forget that whole world, that whole life, the way it could make his stomach knot. Look at the stars. The eye is a flower that sees the stars, immersed in primal cold and heat. His left foot squelched in its boot, propped on the snowbank. Wiggle the toes against wet leather, make sure they were still there. No. They were cold past feeling, only a certain vague numbness; while his right foot burned, scalded so that he nearly shouted, and certainly groaned. Leg yanked up; the wind wrapped the wet trouser to his leg and froze his thigh, while the foot still throbbed with the pain of the burn.

  "Are you suffering much?" Bixby called.

  "Yes!" Fool, what did he think? "Frozen and burned! But never mind, it won't kill us!" As long as they weren't overcome by gas. A jet of bubbles pushed at his backbone, he rolled and shoved mud over the scalding spot, hitting at it furiously with a fist gone numb with frostbite.

  Each hour was a year. The stars were in the same places they had been when they first became visible; so not many years could have passed. Concentrating on the stars near the horizon, he tried to see them creep west. That one, nearly occluded by a low wall of lava: focus on it, watch it, watch it, watch it… had it moved? No. Time had stopped. They had continued the descent, perhaps, and died in the attempt, and now they lay in some well-bottom hell of his father's stripe, or in a circle of Dante's inferno, in which heat and cold mingled without moderating the other, creating a pain unfamiliar to those in the simpler circles. He could hear their moans—