by Allan Kaster
The third climber, Farah Razak, wore Malaysian colors. Before I knew Maggie, she and Farah had been climbing partners. At home on Demeter, I watched Maggie clip into Farah’s feed as her window opened. Maggie said nothing, just sat there, eyes unfocused, fingers clenched hard together.
Farah barely made it into the icefall before she stepped onto an obvious snow bridge and tumbled into a crevasse. She made no sound as she fell.
Maggie spent that night and the next day clipped into VIR feeds. I assumed she was watching Farah’s feed again, or some kind of analysis of the accidents, but I never asked and she never volunteered the information. When she finally unclipped, the first thing she said to me was that she had applied for a permit for the Mountain’s next season.
Hearing those words, it felt like the floor had given way beneath me—as though I, not Farah, had stepped through that fragile snow bridge, fallen into a crevasse. But I nodded, smiled. Maggie was and is a mountaineer, and I could never ask her to change, not for anything. Not even for me.
I move down the ship to our quarters. We each have our own, mirror images opening off either side of the main corridor. Maggie and I have never been able to share quarters, on- or off-ship. I have too many nightmares, and she sleeps too lightly. Even when we begin the night together in my bed, we always end it in our own separate bunks.
I keep the entrance to my quarters open, while Maggie habitually keeps hers closed. It is an unspoken rule that when Maggie is onboard the Wanda R., her quarters are for her alone. When she is climbing, I often spend my nights sleeping in her bunk. It is a comfort to be able to lie down and surround myself with her scent. To close my eyes, imagine my body burning as brightly as a star, a beacon guiding her home.
In the corridor outside our quarters, I pause. The entrance to Maggie’s quarters is sealed as expected, but all of her belongings are neatly stacked outside. There are few, for her quarters are habitually spartan: sheets and blankets, several spare ship suits, and the holo that always sits next to her bunk. The small projector is old technology, the palm-sized disc cycling through imagery of Maggie’s old Earth mountaineering heroes. Right now, the holo displays the climber our ship is named after, Wanda Rutkiewicz herself, the first woman to summit K2, the second highest mountain on old Earth. The Polish climber hangs from a cliff face, her dark hair moving in the wind as she looks up, presumably toward the summit of the mountain she is climbing. Her eyes have a far-off look, identical to Maggie’s when she talks about climbing. Maggie programmed the holo herself using old photographs; I’ve often wondered if the cliff is on Kangchenjunga, the mountain on which Wanda died.
I press my palm against Maggie’s door control. The door vibrates hard, and for a moment I think she has locked me out, but then it slides open. I blink, for another door now stands a half step beyond. There are heavy seals around it, and when I look back, I see the same have been added to the original door. Maggie has sacrificed part of her quarters and had bots construct an airlock.
That feeling of wrongness moves through me again as I palm the inner control. The door slides closed behind me. Mechanisms click and rattle, and the air thins, my ears popping with a steel-bright pain. My heart races and I breathe deeper, my ribs creaking as they expand.
The inner door opens. I step into Maggie’s quarters, my breath pluming white.
On old Earth, this atmosphere would correspond to what was known as the Death Zone, the place so high, the thin air so devoid of oxygen that the human body dies a little with every minute spent there. In the Death Zone, your blood runs thick as molasses, your brain fills with static, your body eats itself. It is easy to lie down and not get up, to never care about summiting or descending or anything else in the world ever again.
What has Maggie been doing, setting the climate in her quarters to such an extreme? To survive in the Death Zone, the body needs to acclimate slowly. To walk from standard ship atmosphere to this with only a short lock cycle between is almost suicide, or at least a guarantee of developing severe altitude sickness. I try to remember how long it has been since I’ve been in Maggie’s quarters, and fail. Has she been sleeping in here after she leaves my bed? How long has it been like this?
I breathe in, breathe out. The feeling of my body struggling for oxygen is familiar, at once euphoric and frightening. Distantly I’m aware of the pseudo-prosthetic locking hard.
All that remains of Maggie’s possessions is the frame of her bunk, the metal coated with frost. A sleeping bag is unrolled over the bare mattress, Maggie’s pillow tucked into the bag’s mouth. I should leave the quarters immediately, but instead I lie down, press my face into the pillow. In the thin air, I can barely smell Maggie on the fabric. A single strand of her hair twines like liquid gold over the pillow; I pick it up.
My wrist comm vibrates again. I turn my head—even that small motion an effort—thumb the controls and open the message, expecting it to be Maggie.
It’s not Maggie. It’s a message from a medical clinic on Cleis Station. Confirmation of our acceptance into their program.
I squeeze my eyes shut until I see stars. The clinic on Cleis is a fertility clinic, the medics there claiming to be able to produce a healthy child for any individual, couple or group, no matter what geneering, surgery, or defects they have. This clinic is private, and it is well known that they are willing to skirt all laws, so long as you pay their fee. Very little genetic material is required. Not more than a strand of hair.
I close my eyes harder; the stars disappear to darkness.
Maggie was born into climbing. Both of her parents were climbers, and she has been in the mountains almost since she could walk. When Maggie was thirteen, her mother died while seeking the summit of Mt. Young-seok. That year, with her father’s permission, Maggie underwent a full hysterectomy. She never wanted a child to feel as she had, she said, never wanted anyone to know that kind of loss. A year later, her father died on the same mountain as her mother. There’s footage of a young Maggie smiling through her tears as she spoke her thanks to her father and the clinic for saving her potential children from this kind of pain.
As Maggie was born to climbing, so I was born to priestesshood. Along with the worship of mountains, ONE also considers the human body to be sacred, especially the whole and fertile female body. One of my eventual responsibilities as a ONE priestess was to produce children, with my eldest daughter to be dedicated to ONE at birth, just as I had been.
Even once I was no longer a priestess, I still wanted children. Believed it to be a sacred act, the bringing forth of a new person into the universe, nurturing life.
Maggie wanted the mountains. I wanted Maggie.
None of the rest mattered. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make.
Until the Mountain.
Until I heard about the clinic on Cleis, and the work they were doing. I applied. I didn’t tell Maggie.
Always before, I had known Maggie would come back. Had always been able to imagine myself as the beacon bringing her home.
Now, when I look down into myself, I see only darkness. This is the Mountain. No one has ever survived it. And if Maggie falls, what will I have left?
Before I can talk myself out of it, I summon a messenger bot, tuck Maggie’s hair into the compartment on its back and send it off through greyspace to Cleis Station. Just in case.
I curl up in Maggie’s bed, breathe in the cold, familiar air of the Death Zone. Feel myself die with every breath, every beat of my heart.
6
BEFORE: MT. HARGREAVES
The rising sun threw the shadow of Mt. Hargreaves over base camp.
The climbers’ tents were all silent and dark. The only sounds came from the mess tent, where the cooks were beginning to rise to prepare the morning meal. In the ONE tent, we priests and priestesses had been awake for over an hour, bathing our faces and hands with melted snow, donning our white thermal suits. We were silent: our first words for the day were for the Mother alone.
As the light
began to edge over the mountain, three priestesses, myself included, went to the tent antechamber. We stripped off our thermal suits, pulled on white robes, the fabric light and billowing. We walked out together into the clear space in front of the tent, our hands, feet and heads bare. It was a risk, of course, for anyone to be outside without proper thermal gear, to have our bare feet in direct contact with night-cold rock. For us, it was a measure of the trust we had in the Mother. She held our lives in Her hands, and if one of us suffered frostbite, we knew it as the bite of the Mother, that it was a sign that we needed to make amends with Her.
I watched the sun and the sky. At the correct time, I nodded to the younger of the two priestesses beside me. Sarajen was new to this temple, only just raised from acolyte, and this was the first time she had been rostered for formal Calls. Her steps were carefully measured as she crossed to the fire platform. One of our last duties for the night was the laying of the bones of that fire, the careful arrangement of wood into a mandala, the setting of fuel blocks beside it. Sarajen placed the fuel blocks into the spaces left for them, activating them one by one. She waited, hands folded, until the flames were licking at the wood, then sprinkled a handful of salted incense over the fire. The flames leapt high, deep blue and green, and the scent of juniper rose in the air.
As Sarajen rejoined us, the third priestess rang the bell hung on the side of the tent. Once, twice, thrice the bell rang out over the valley, echoing against stone and ice and snow. From somewhere on the other side of Mt. Hargreaves, a distant crack answered—the unmistakable sound of an avalanche. I smiled; the Mother Herself was blessing us with her voice.
We waited until all sound had rolled into silence, and then, as one, we inhaled, holding the cold, crisp air in our lungs. At the exact moment the sun rose over Mt. Hargreaves, we began to sing.
Morning and Evening Calls are wordless chants, each one shaped to a specific mountain. Our voices rose and fell, describing the slopes of the mountain, the way the land around us undulated like waves. From the tent behind us, the other priests and priestesses joined in, their voices pitched low, like the rumbling of the earth itself as it shifts and shakes, pushes up land to create mountains.
By the time our Calls had finished, the valley was filled entirely with light. It illuminated the scattering of tents in the camp, all of them brightly colored except for one on the very edge, which was pure white, almost invisible against the snowbank beyond. That tent had not been there the previous day. Also new was a holo projector in the center of camp which projected an image of a woman I recognized immediately as Alison Hargreaves, whom this mountain was named for. She was the first woman to summit what she thought of as Mount Everest without support or supplementary oxygen, and was infamous for having scaled the north face of the Eiger while heavily pregnant with her first child. Whoever programmed this holo chose to animate a photo of Alison on that Eiger climb, one hand clinging to a rock ledge, the other cradling her stomach.
We went back inside, changed back into our thermal suits. Sarajen’s toes were frosted with white, bitten by the Mother. The Temple Mother frowned at that, sent Sarajen to the medical tent for treatment. The girl scurried away, her eyes downcast. If she healed cleanly, she would remain a priestess. If gangrene set in, if any of her flesh had to be amputated, she would be forced to relinquish her priestesshood, have her pendant severed from her collar. Only those with whole bodies were allowed to remain as priestesses.
One of the cooks delivered tea and wheaten bread to our tent for us to break our fast. I took my tea outside, seeking silence.
And then I saw her.
She was standing next to our fire. The flames were beginning to die down, but still spitting the occasional blue and green sparks. She was tall, her shoulders broad and hips narrow, limbs long and lithely muscled. A climber, no doubt about it. She wore a white thermal suit, her hood drawn back and blonde hair hanging loose to her hips. She was staring into the flames, her forehead furrowed.
The camp was beginning to stir. The mess tent was open, and climbers began to emerge from their tents. All of them stopped short when they saw the woman at the fire, gave her a wide berth on their way to breakfast. Something about the way they held themselves told me it wasn’t out of fear or anger, but respect.
I watched her that day as I went about my duties. By listening carefully, I discovered that her name was Margaret Malleore, that she was a legend in the climbing community. She was one of the purists who chose only to climb on planets terraformed to resemble old Earth before the changes. More, she claimed George Mallory himself as an ancestor. She had no geneering for mountain survival, and always climbed unsupported and without oxygen. She had climbed routes that no one else would dare, and she always climbed alone, always dressed in white. Other climbers habitually adopted bright colors, so as to aid rescue efforts should they get into trouble. Margaret Malleore’s whites would make her impossible to find against the snow. But Margaret Malleore had never needed to be rescued.
That night, I was chosen to set the fire for the following day. The climbing season was officially opening then, and most of the climbers had retired to their tents early in the evening. Only Margaret Malleore remained, sitting on a stone near her white tent, drinking tea. I watched her surreptitiously as I raked the fire platform clean and began arranging the wood.
Margaret Malleore pressed a fuel block into the snow and activated it. She watched the white flames for a long time before she withdrew a small knife from her pocket. The wooden handle was battered and chipped, but the blade shone bright, recently honed. She held the blade in the flames until the metal glowed red, then doused it in the snow. When it was cool, she pointed it at the summit of Mt. Hargreaves. She said nothing, but remained like that, unmoving, for the span of at least five minutes. Then, keeping her eyes on the summit, she slowly sheared off her long hair, leaving only a close stubble on her scalp. She weighed the shorn locks in her hands, then tossed them into the flames. The fire rose yellow and bright.
The bitter black of burning hair thickened the air, smothering the scent of the incense we had used during Evening Calls. Margaret Malleore stared at the flames until they burned down to embers. She stood, kicked snow over the ash. She looked up, and her eyes met mine. As they did, the distant crack of an avalanche came from the mountain above.
At Morning Calls, all of the climbers came to the ONE tent, knelt before our fire as we sang. ONE did not officially approve of them climbing into the sacred heights, but we blessed them all the same. Three acolytes were selected for the blessing ceremony, each of them shivering in their light robes. It was part of their final testing toward rising to full priestesshood, and I could tell that none of these three would pass. They were too aware of the cold, of the flesh, and their eyes did not rise to Mt. Hargreaves once. By the time the day was done, all three would be in the medical tent, their fingers and toes swollen and blistered from the cold. In a month, all would have lost digits, their priestesshood rescinded.
After Morning Calls, the climbers filed past the three acolytes. The first sprinkled them with water, the second touched dry earth to their foreheads, and the last placed a single wheat seed on their tongues. The acolytes and priestesses intoned the blessing over and over: “May the Mother watch over us. May we watch over the Mother.”
All of the climbers kept their eyes downcast as they were blessed, all except Margaret Malleore, whose eyes fixed on me the whole time.
After the blessing, the other climbers chewed or spat their wheat seeds, rubbed the earth from their foreheads. Margaret Malleore did neither but began her climb with her forehead still smeared with earth, and as far as I could tell, the wheat seed on her tongue.
I watched her as she began climbing, her body moving with a grace unlike anything I had ever seen. Several of the other climbers had engaged porters to aid them on their climb, but Margaret Malleore climbed alone. She was like water flowing over the rock, part of the landscape, part of the mountain itself.
“She’s not like the others,” I said. “She has respect for the mountains.”
“None of them have respect,” Sarajen said. “If they had true respect, they would not climb.”
I could think of nothing to say in reply, just ran my thumb over the surface of my ONE pendant, moving from one depression to the next. Earth, seed, and water, the three hearts of the Mother.
Eight climbers attempted Mt. Hargreaves that season. Only Margaret Malleore reached the summit and only Margaret Malleore descended alive. She walked back into base camp as strong as she had been when she left. While most climbers lost weight at high altitude, their reduced appetite forcing their bodies to metabolize muscle and fat for energy, she looked as though she had actually gained weight.
The doctors from the medical tent crowded around her, but she pushed past them, made her way to the ONE tent. To me. She opened her mouth just wide enough for me to see the wheat seed still on her tongue, and then she handed me a small stone. An unremarkable piece of grey rock, warmed from contact with her skin. She didn’t tell me, but I knew that it had been taken from the summit. Something I should have reprimanded her for, but instead I found myself sliding it into my pocket before any of the other priests or priestesses could see.
At the close of the season, we blessed the mountain, burning incense on seven small fires set around the central platform: one for each of the climbers who had fallen on Mt. Hargreaves and would remain there, forever part of the mountain.
