by Allan Kaster
The storm dissipated as we descended. We passed fallen climbers, some still attached to the fixed ropes. Where possible, we gave them what burial we could: rolling them out into the abyss, lowering them into crevasses.
As we descended, the cold sank deeper and deeper into my right hand, despite Maggie’s borrowed glove. We paused late in the day, intending to make camp, and I took off the glove to see my hand was frozen solid, white and as hard as wood, the tips of my fingers beginning to turn grey. Maggie looked at it, then began packing up the tent. We climbed through the night, Maggie leading me on a short rope when I stumbled from fatigue, even carrying me part of the way. She did not slow, did not stop, until we were back at base camp, until she had delivered me to the medical tent.
No other climber came down from that storm.
At base camp, the doctors treated my frostbite, assured me they had saved limbs from far worse. As they began rewarming my hand, I heard an avalanche in the distance, and knew that the Mother was watching over me. All would be well.
For the span of three days I was allowed this fiction. In the space between Morning and Evening Calls, everything changed. My fingers swelled and I developed a deep infection that threatened to become sepsis. They evacuated me to a nearby hospital, where I drifted in and out of consciousness for days as they fought to save my hand. In the end there was no choice but amputation.
I woke from the anesthesia to find a ONE priestess in my room. I recognized her immediately: Sarajen, progressed now to a Temple Mother. She said nothing, just smiled at me sadly as she severed my pendant from my collar. I had violated a sacred place and I had been bitten by the Mother. I was no longer fit to be a priestess.
The empty place where my hand once was ached almost as much as the emptiness inside of me. When they gave me the pseudo-prosthetic everything only hurt more.
And then Maggie walked into my hospital room, and when she put her hand in mine, I remembered the feeling of standing atop Mount Hargreaves with her, of being connected to the Mother. I knew that even without being a priestess I could serve the Mother. I could do anything, so long as Maggie was at my side.
Two years to the day after we summited, Maggie and I married in the empty valley where the Mt. Hargreaves base camp had once been, watched over by the ghosts of all who had died on the mountain.
10
The Icefall Station AI instructs me to bring Farah’s body back to the station.
She is heavy, her body frozen through as solidly as the water in the cup still in her hands. By the time I struggle back to the shuttle, I am panting hard, my skin slicked with sour sweat inside my borrowed suit.
As I haul Farah into the shuttle, her elbow hits the side of the hatch. It sounds like hollow wood meeting metal, identical to that my own frozen hand made once when I accidentally hit it against a metal tent strut. It’s a sound that sends cold fingers of terror sliding down my spine. My right hand clenches hard into a fist, and Farah slides from my arms, tumbling amidst the boxes cluttering the shuttle.
The Gorak, seated now on the back of the pilot’s chair, watches me silently. I look down at Farah, frozen still in her posture propped up against the snowdrift. I cannot bear picking her up again, touching that cold flesh, possibly hearing that sound again. Instead I wedge boxes around her as best as I can and fly the shuttle myself back to the station. I could let the AI seed pilot, but I need something to distract me, even if I have to fly one-handed.
At the station, bots take Farah from me, and I copy the medkit data over to the station AI. When I come back to the shuttle, the Gorak is still, Maggie unclipped from its feed.
I return to the Wanda R., to find Maggie in the living space. She’s gutted one of the Sherpas, its insides trailing over the bench like silver streamers. The stench of burning metal and plastic fills the air. Maggie does not look up from her work. I set the Gorak down at the end of the bench, retreat to the bridge.
I access the network, see that Maggie has already flagged the news streams for mentions of Farah and Icefall, as well as her own name. I activate my own flags.
Over the next few days, my wrist comm vibrates over and over as those flags activate. Maggie spends her days tinkering with and stocking the Sherpas, and every evening she spends at least an hour transmitting from the VIR pod.
We do not talk about Farah. We do not talk at all.
The first night after Farah died, only a handful of people clip into Maggie’s feed, most of them newscasters. By the third night, our network is choked by the number of people clipping into her feed.
ONE declares Farah’s survival a miracle, proof of their doctrines.
They report a record number of applicants to their programs.
I contact a doctor specializing in high altitude medicine, send her the medical data I retrieved. Miracle or not, Farah was whole and alive when she washed out in the Mountain’s tears. Until she wasn’t. There is only one conclusion the doctor can make: it was an anomaly, a strange accident. We have never been able to truly perfect cryogenesis. The first wave of human interstellar travel from Earth used a crude form of hibernation that killed as many as it aided. Later, the discovery of greyspace expanded our universe again, but even this was limited, with only some systems possessing greyspace access points.
Several megacons open new cryo development programs, and my wrist comm buzzes almost constantly with requests from these new departments for Farah’s medical data.
I want to reject them all—no, I want to scream at them: the megacons, ONE, even Maggie. It doesn’t matter what miracles you declare, or what brave new world you try to push toward. Farah is still dead.
When I lie down at night and close my eyes, I am acutely aware of the mass of the Mountain pulling at me. The few times I manage to sink down into true sleep, I wake with the same words on my lips: we should not be here at all.
11
In the few hours that Maggie sleeps, it is in the cold, thin air of her quarters. Each night she dials down the pressure and temperature a little more, pushing beyond the Death Zone and into whatever lies beyond.
I lie awake in my own bunk as she sleeps, my fingers pressed against her encapsulated heart cells, counting out the empty spaces that stretch between beats.
12
BEFORE: VIR
Maggie’s VIR recording of our Mt. Hargreaves climb made both her and VIR celebrities. People clamored for the external sets so they could clip in and “climb” the mountain over and over, stand in a place where no one would ever stand again.
Technology progressed, as it does, and permanent internal VIR implants were developed. The small implants sat beneath the skin of the temples, bio-electrodes burrowing through the thin temporal bone to connect to the brain.
Maggie, of course, was one of the first people to opt for the implants.
I was still in rehabilitation learning how to use my pseudo-prosthetic hand when Maggie had her implants inserted. Adapting to the pseudo-prosthetic was supposed to be easy, the doctors said, the only difference between this new hand and the one I had lost was the artificial cage beneath my skin. But though I had full motor control over it, and all of the nerves had connected successfully, the new hand didn’t feel like it was mine. It didn’t even feel like flesh. It felt like ash ready to fall apart at the slightest touch. More than once, I woke to find that I had been worrying with teeth and nails at the place where the cage ended, trying to tear the hand free in my sleep.
By the time I finally graduated from rehab, it seemed as though everyone I saw had VIR implants. The waiting list for implants was now over two years long. Maggie’s name got me bumped up in the queue, but still I had to wait almost a year. A year of watching Maggie’s eyes always half unfocused, watching two worlds at once.
When my appointment finally came, I sat in the clinic chair, Maggie by my side, her hand in mine. Everything was so silent that I could hear the vibration of her implants against the bones of her skull. I wondered what programs she was running, if she
was talking to other people while she was here with me. I felt no jealousy, for I knew that soon I would be part of that world too.
That single moment remains with me, crystalline and perfect. Right then, I’d known that everything was going to be okay. I had Maggie beside me, and I had the pseudo-prosthetic, imperfect though it was. I would never be a priestess again, but Maggie and I would climb, and we would be together, in this world and in VIR.
They put me under, and when I woke, I was in another room, alone. The walls were bare and white, nothing in the room but my bed and a speaker embedded in the wall. It was procedure, a technician informed me via the speaker, and was I ready to have my implants activated for the first time?
I touched the places where the implants had been inserted. Beneath white gauze, the skin felt faintly bruised, but there was no real pain. It felt right to have these small machines beneath my skin, connected to my brain. As though this was how I had always been meant to be.
There was a faint tingling, like electricity crawling beneath the skin of my temples, and I felt pathways in my brain spark into life, connect. When I closed my eyes, I could almost see them, new electric bridges flaring into brilliant life.
There was a sense of pushing, and then the white room was gone.
I sat in a grassy field, green rolling in gentle hills all around me. Above, the sky was a deep, perfect blue. I was wearing a loose white gown, the cotton soft against my skin. In my hands, I held a yellow daisy, the petals still curled into a bud. As I looked down at it, I again felt that electricity moving beneath my skin, and the petals unfurled.
With that simple action, everything seemed to open up around me. I was aware at once of every microscopic detail of the flower in my hands, down to the very cells, and deeper, to the organelles within the cells, down and down to the very atoms that composed everything. As I spiraled in, so my awareness also spiraled out. I could sense the movement of the land around me, the undulations of green that rolled up into mountains that moved like waves through the sky.
Everything was so clear, so crisp. So new, and so real.
“The unfatigued veracity of eternal light,” I said, and my voice was a song, sound waves mimicking the movement of the mountains, of the breath in my lungs, of the beating of my heart.
Everything was connected, and I was a part of it all.
I started to smile.
And then white rolled across the sky, a wave of bright nothing that doused the blue, fell down to smother the green grass, the mountains. The flower in my hands froze solid, cold creeping up through my fingers until my right hand was white and numb.
I was back in that cave on Mt. Hargreaves, everything in whiteout, the dead man watching me with wide, frozen eyes. I could see nothing of wonder in his expression now, just fear.
Everything was white, everything was cold, and I was dying with every breath, every heartbeat.
I waited and I waited, but no one ever came to save me.
13
They tried activating my VIR implants three times, each attempt ending with the same result. I would clip into the feed successfully, and everything would be vivid and bright and wonderful. I would feel that sense of connection, the euphoria of being a part of everything. And then the white would descend.
The last time, they had me clip into Maggie’s feed, to see if her presence would stabilize things. I caught a glimpse of her, hands reaching out to me. I stretched out, but it was too late, the white already falling, washing her away.
That time, it took them three days to wake me from the white. Three days to them felt like three years to me, waiting alone in that cave, feeling like someone should be coming to save me, but nobody did.
When I finally woke, my right hand was a fist, the pseudo-prosthetic web locked tight. It took four days for them to get the web to release, to loosen the frozen muscles and nerves of my right hand, restore the blood flow. I was lucky, they said, congratulating themselves on being able to save my hand. I nodded and smiled when I knew I should, but all the time I was aware that my right hand felt even less like my own. It wasn’t even ash now; it was smoke, it was spindrift, it was thin, Death Zone air.
The doctors removed my implants. I was the first person they had implanted whose mind had rejected VIR.
They know now it’s a result of post-traumatic stress, that it affects less than 0.005% of the population. Memories worn deep into your mind, and something about VIR always leads to those valleys, sends you back into the traumatic memories. I was lucky. Most affected people fall into their memories and never get out, even when their implants are removed. They live out their lives trapped in their minds, trapped in their worst memories.
The nightmares and cerebral storms started soon after, my brain trying over and over to connect to implants which were no longer there. Any time I felt the smallest amount of stress, the pseudo-prosthetic web in my right hand locked hard. I would never be able to climb again.
More than once, I wished that I’d never had the surgery. Not because of the nightmares, not because of the cerebral storms. Not even because of being denied the mountains.
No, I wished it because, having had the implants, I knew what the VIR world was like, how much the real world lacked in comparison.
14
The night before Maggie’s window on the Mountain opens, she comes into my quarters. We have barely spoken since Farah died. Maggie has been constantly working with the bots or transmitting in VIR. I have mostly been lying in my bunk, thinking too much.
Maggie stands in the doorway for a long time. Behind her, maintenance bots are buzzing around her door. They’re dismantling the airlock, metal tearing away from metal with a sound that sets my teeth on edge.
“I thought you’d be in the VIR pod,” I say.
Maggie steps into the room. The door slides closed. She lingers at the bookshelf, runs her fingers over the spines of my collection of old Earth books. She says nothing, just crosses the room and lies down next to me. Her implants hum against her bones. I turn over, face the grey wall.
“I’m not transmitting tonight,” she says. “I’m recording.”
I look back over my shoulder. “Recording what? This, for your fans?”
She shakes her head. “For you. So you can . . .”
I turn over then. I see the lines of worry around her eyes and mouth. This is the first time I have seen Maggie anything but absolutely confident about a climb.
I wrap my arms around her, pull her close. I press my face into her neck, inhale the scent of her. Earthy, but with a crispness beneath, as though she carries a layer of ice beneath her skin.
“It’ll be okay, Aisha,” she says. “I have to see. You understand.”
I do. Mother help me, I do. As much as I don’t want her to go, I understand. I wish I didn’t, but I do.
“This will be the last time,” Maggie says. “After the Mountain, where else is there to go?”
All of the mountaineers say that. There’s always something they reach for—Mallory’s Everest, Mt. Hargreaves, the Mountain—and they always think that if they conquer it, they will finally be content. But they always go back.
George Mallory himself went back to his Everest three times, unable to pull himself away from the dream of the summit, no matter that he left a wife and children behind. I always wonder if he told them each time it would be the last, that this time when he came back, he would stay.
Neither Maggie nor I sleep much that night. An hour before Icefall dawn, Maggie rises, kisses me. Her lips taste like salt. She holds up her left ring finger, that unspoken question: you okay?
Her heartbeat slides beneath my skin, skips a beat. I know then she is afraid, that if I asked her not to go, she wouldn’t. That if I asked, she would stay with me, never climb again.
But who would Maggie be without climbing? It would be akin to tearing her heart out of her chest.
I raise my own ring finger and I nod. “Go and see, my love.”
We eat, thoug
h Maggie does little more than nibble on an energy bar. I help her go through her gear checks, load the shuttle. On the bridge, I clip into the 2-D feed from the Gorak, fly it to perch on the back of the shuttle pilot’s chair. I watch through its eyes as Maggie checks and rechecks her gear. She holds out her hand, and I fly the winged bot to perch on her wrist.
When Maggie comes to the bridge, the Gorak still on her wrist, I see myself through the bot’s eyes. My right hand clenched tight, the fingers bloodless.
The AI hologram shimmers into life beside me. It has been curiously absent since Farah’s death; I’ve only caught glimpses of it here and there, always moving around corners or down corridors. Instead of the modern ship suit it usually wears, it is dressed in gaberdine and hobnailed boots, the gear the flesh-and-blood George Mallory wore to attempt his Everest. The gear George Mallory died in. The AI’s eyes are bright.
It smiles at Maggie. “Because it’s there.”
Maggie looks at me, holds up her left ring finger again. I can’t read the expression in her eyes, and I don’t know if she wants me to stop her or bless her.
I want to fall to my knees. I want to beg her not to go.
I do neither of these things. Instead, I touch the place where my ONE pendant had once rested. I want to pray, to bless her, but I cannot bring myself to speak the blasphemy. All I can give her are the words I have already spoken: “Go and see.” In my peripheral vision, I can see myself on the Gorak’s feed, lips moving just out of sync with mine. My own ghost, repeating my words.
Maggie nods slowly, lowers her hand. “Because it’s there.”
15
I watch through the Gorak’s eyes as Maggie lands the shuttle, sets foot onto Icefall for the first time. It is just before dawn, and the landscape is softened to violet shadows.
Maggie does not look at the Mountain. She stands there, looking down at her white boots pressed into the white snow. There’s an expression on her face I have never seen before. She looks like someone who has lost something.
It hits me then: this is the first time since she had her implants installed that she’s had no input from VIR at all. Even when she’s not actively transmitting or clipped into feeds, there’s always something incoming: local notifications from the Wanda R., ship controls, news streams. On Icefall, for this competition, she has nothing but what her unattenuated human senses can feel.
