by Allan Kaster
One, two, three. Another missed beat.
I am reminded with almost violent intensity that Alison Hargreaves died descending from the summit of K2, leaving a husband and two children behind.
One, two. Skip.
I am up and running through the ship almost before I am aware of moving. Mallory is on the bridge, turns to me as I enter.
I hold out my hand. “Her heart—”
Mallory bids me press my hand against sensors on the board, records what it can. Maggie’s heartbeat translates into waves of data that scroll across the screen. I see the skipped beat, and others that slip and slide just out of rhythm.
On the other screen, the Gorak’s feed shows Maggie curled tight in her sleeping bag, lips parted. Her eyes flicker beneath her closed lids.
I feel that same fluttering rhythm within my chest: the beacon I imagine myself as is dimming and brightening, a dying star.
“I believe that she’s dreaming,” Mallory says.
Her implants are vibrating beneath her skin. She is still broadcasting. “Can you . . . can you see? Her dreams?” I ask.
Mallory’s eyes rest on me for a long moment, unblinking. “I do not see her VIR feed the way humans do. There are occasional images, fractured like breaking glass.” It pauses. “As best as I can tell, she dreams of mountains. Of falling.”
I cradle my right hand against my chest. The pseudo-prosthetic is still locked, my skin white and cold.
Mallory pauses for longer this time. “These are not new nightmares.”
I stare at it. “Nightmares? Maggie doesn’t have nightmares.”
It turns its eyes to the screen. There is silence for a long moment. “She never wanted to worry you.”
We sit in silence, watching Maggie dream, her heartbeat dancing erratically across the screen and beneath my skin.
19
The next morning, Maggie stays in her sleeping bag as the sun rises, staring at the inside of her tent, the light bathing the white nylon red, then gold. Her eyes are hollow, deep shadows beneath.
When she finally rises, all of the Sherpas have returned from their early morning route scans. She watches their feeds, but her eyes are unfocused, and I wonder how much she’s actually seeing as she programs them and sends them off.
When she begins climbing, she veers away from the ropes that the Sherpas have set more than once. Before, when she’s ignored the fixed lines, I could see that it was due to confidence, even a little arrogance. Now, I have the horrible feeling that she simply doesn’t see the ropes at all.
I wish I had remote medical sensors on her. Even monitoring blood pressure could tell me something, if she is beginning to run the risk of snow blindness or altitude sickness.
All I have is her heartbeat. It steadies for a time, then slips and slides again, the arrhythmia growing more pronounced as the day wears on. It feels as though she is fading in and out of existence beneath my skin. I find myself wringing my hands together, wishing that I could physically hold onto her, keep her anchored.
I barely look away from the feed. Mallory has water and food brought to me, but I drink only when Maggie does, eat when she eats. My stomach is empty, my throat parched, the small amounts of food and drink doing little to ease either.
Maggie slides into her sleeping bag and stays awake for a long time that night, staring at nothing.
20
The next night, Maggie fails to reach her Sherpa-set camp for the first time. In the pack she carries are the bare necessities for survival on a mountain: a bivouac bag, a stove, food packets, basic paraphernalia for climbing on ice and rock: crampons, screws and anchors, two ice axes and several lengths of rope. She digs a snow cave, shelters inside. The space is too small for the Gorak, and I sit the bot on a ridge outside, dig its claws hard into the rock to anchor it.
Mallory and I watch as the sky darkens, the stars wheeling above. When Morning Calls come, both of us mouth prayers.
It is late morning before Maggie emerges from the cave. For the first time on her climb, clouds have begun to gather in the sky. They are wispy cirrus clouds, but extremely high in the atmosphere, the larger drifts formed around a darker, denser center. They move around the Mountain, wreathing Maggie in mist.
Maggie melts water, but she takes only a few sips, the liquid in the collapsible cup she holds slowly cooling, frost feathering the edges. It reminds me too much of the water I gave Farah, the way it froze solid, tilted toward the Mountain. I am almost glad when Maggie tips out the water and stashes her gear. She does not climb, just stays where she is, the sky lightening and darkening as clouds pass.
I fly the Gorak to the place where the Sherpas last set camp. It is not so far from where Maggie is: even this late in the day, she should be able to make it. The Sherpas wait there, silent and still. When I return the Gorak to Maggie, she has not moved. Her cheeks are damp. I cannot tell if it is moisture from the clouds or tears.
I’ve never seen Maggie be so still on any mountain. The shadows beneath her eyes are deeper, and her cheeks are hollowing. The Mountain is beginning to eat her alive.
“How could she get so bad so quickly?” I ask Mallory.
Mallory says nothing. It doesn’t need to. I know as well as anyone how quickly illness can strike on mountains, even at much lower altitudes. People can be entirely well then an hour later coughing blood or incoherent. People’s hearts can just stop without warning. And this isn’t just a mountain, but the Mountain. Who knows what else it has in store?
A vague, creeping sense of loss rises in me. I force myself to focus on Maggie’s heartbeat, her face on the screen. She’s still alive. Even if she is succumbing to altitude sickness, she’s still alive.
“You can come down,” I say to Maggie on the screen. “All you need to do is come down. Come home to me.”
Maggie just sits there, watches blankly as the sun sinks toward the horizon, the clouds gathering fire. She turns to the Gorak, red light catching in her eyes. “I know, Aisha,” she says. Her words are slightly blurred on her tongue, soft at the edges, but they are coherent enough. “But I have to see.”
She gets up then, sets off up the Mountain in the waning light. She climbs as strongly as she did lower on the mountain, reaches her last camp quickly. She doesn’t enter the tent, doesn’t eat or melt snow for water. She just crouches before the line of waiting Sherpas, fingers moving over their small screens, programming them. One by one they take flight up the Mountain.
I release a breath I haven’t been aware of holding, seeing Maggie safe in camp. Everything is going to be okay. She’ll rest, and in the morning she’ll be better. If she can climb this strongly, she can make a summit push, be on her way back down before the altitude sickness really takes hold.
But then Maggie turns from the camp, climbs higher again. It is dark, her headlight the only thing lighting her way as she climbs. At a ridge that seems no different to any other, she stops, digs a snow cave, shelters inside. Again, the cave is too small and I rest the Gorak outside.
She stays inside for that night, as well as the span of the next day and night. If it wasn’t for the thready beating of her heart beneath my skin, I would have thought her perished within that cold tomb.
None of the Sherpas return to her.
Later, after everything, when all of the data is returned to us, we learn that Maggie programmed the bots to ascend, to rise up and up, moving up above the Mountain and into the sky. The bots were hardy and built for altitude, but one by one they failed, and fell down to Icefall in a shower of sparks.
21
Sometime during the second night in the snow cave, Maggie’s implants cease broadcasting.
Mallory informs me of the fact, tells me that the people who were clipped into her feed have assumed that she has died during the night. Beneath my skin, Maggie’s heart is sliding, skipping beats, but it’s still beating.
She is taking on the Mountain on her own terms. This isn’t about the competition now; it isn’t about anything
but Maggie and the Mountain.
Maggie emerges into a brilliant sunrise. Those wispy clouds have gathered again, gleaming amber and gold, spinning the whole landscape into something ethereal, otherworldly.
Maggie’s eyes are bright, almost fevered, the skin around them swollen and dark. When she moves, I see that her thermal suit no longer clings to her muscles the way it had, too much weight has dropped from her frame for it to adjust. Despite that, her movements seem stronger as she melts water, brews tea. She even eats a little before she packs up her gear and begins to climb again.
I tell myself that she just needed to rest, even as I know that in the Death Zone, there is no such thing. Every breath feels as though you’re inhaling a world’s worth of air just for a few molecules of oxygen. You’re dying, drowning in thin air.
Mallory and I watch Maggie climb. The sounds of the Wanda R. surround us. There’s an odd hush to the normal white noise, an ebb and flow of sound. As though the ship itself is praying.
22
In the dead of night, my wrist comm buzzes with a message from Cleis Station. I expect to see a receipt of acknowledgement of the hair I sent, but the message says something different. The messenger bot travelled successfully through greyspace, but it arrived with its compartment open and empty. Can I send another sample, they ask?
I delete the message unanswered.
23
A day later, the Gorak’s feed cuts out.
I stare at the empty screen. My right hand is numb, and when I breathe, there isn’t enough oxygen in the room. Adrenaline has my heart skittering, and the inside of my skull prickles, pain building behind my eyes.
As before, Mallory flows its hologram around me, pulls somehow at the back of my skull. The storm recedes long enough for me to medicate.
When Mallory’s hologram reforms in the seat next to me, I nod my thanks. Our hands move together over the board, crossing over from time to time as we sift through the small amounts of information coming from Icefall’s satellites.
There has been a spike of ultraviolet radiation, source unknown. So powerful that it has burned the bot’s sensors to ash.
I stare again at that empty screen, my stomach churning. Ultraviolet radiation strong enough to burn out the Gorak’s sensors could also have affected Maggie. Mountaineers risk skin burns and snow blindness from radiation. I’ve seen for myself how Maggie’s skin and eyes resist burning, but she’s never experienced a spike this strong. She’s climbing alone, and she might now also be climbing blind.
If she’s still climbing at all.
If she’s still alive.
The cerebral storm distracted me from her pulse. I hold my breath, focus on the encapsulated cells.
For a long time there is nothing.
And then one faint, thready beat.
Maggie is still alive. Just.
I am at the shuttle bay when Mallory’s hologram flickers before me, blocking my path. I could easily step through the field, but I stop.
“I can’t let her die,” I say.
“You’ll invalidate her climb if you go down,” Mallory says.
“Did she program you for this, too?”
“You know that I could stop you. Lock you out of the bay, stop the shuttle’s engines from starting, block pilot controls.”
I look at the AI, trying to read the inflections in its voice, the odd look in its eyes. “You could? Or you will?”
Mallory’s hologram dissipates, reforms behind me. “She’ll never forgive you if you go down. Even if you do save her life.”
Maggie’s heart beats again. Is it weaker now? I can’t tell. “She saved my life once. I owe her.” My vision blurs, and I taste salt. The Mountain’s tears are salt, too. They will wash Maggie away if she falls. I have a sudden image of her sitting as Farah did, a frozen cup of water in her hands, her body just stopped. My chest squeezes tight, and I cannot breathe. “What use is the summit if it kills her?”
I expect the AI to reply with “Because it’s there”, but it says nothing. When I turn, it is looking at me, a weighing expression on its face.
“What?” I ask.
“There is another way. A way in which you could see Maggie but wouldn’t invalidate her climb.”
A hatch opens, and a small maintenance bot appears. There’s a box on its back. Inside is Maggie’s old VIR kit, the one she used when she rescued me on Mt. Hargreaves. I thought she had thrown it out long ago. Maggie has never been one to hold onto old things. The white halo has faded to a yellowish color, like old bone.
“I’ve tested it, checked its protocols,” Mallory says. “It still works.”
I reach out to take the kit but stop myself before I touch it. Deliberately, I fist my right hand, the pseudo-prosthetic locking. The pain of it is good, grounding. “I can’t use VIR, remember? And even if I could, there’s nothing to clip into. Maggie deactivated her implants, and I know that not even you can activate them remotely.”
“No, I cannot.”
“Even if the Sherpas had VIR, they’re all gone. There’s only—” I break off, blinking. I suddenly remember silver gleaming against the black of the Gorak’s polymer coating. The maintenance panel had been open before I had taken the shuttle down to Icefall for Farah. I’d assumed that Maggie had been checking something, but there is a look in Mallory’s eyes that tells me she had nothing to do with it. “It was you, wasn’t it? You put VIR into the Gorak. Hid the sensors so they’d be protected from ultraviolet.”
Mallory inclines its head. For a second, shadow obscures its face, but I swear it is grinning.
“Did Maggie ask you to?”
It meets my eyes evenly. “She programmed me to keep you safe. Keeping you safe means doing everything I can to keep her safe, too.”
I pick up the VIR kit. It’s almost weightless. “This still breaks the rules, you know.”
“Not if the field is shielded. It didn’t take much to limit it to just you and Maggie. No one will be able to pick up that anything is being transmitted,” Mallory says. “You will not be able to speak to Maggie, not truly. There was no time to add vocals.”
Mallory follows me to my quarters. I pause, then move into Maggie’s instead. I am acutely aware of the oxygen-thick air, the softness of the bed beneath me as I lie down. Mallory sits next to me, static lapping in waves against my skin.
“I don’t know if I can do this.” I touch one of my scars. “The post-traumatic stress, a cerebral storm . . .”
“I will keep you safe from the storms,” Mallory says. “As for the rest . . .” It touches a finger to the collar around my neck, and for a moment I can almost feel the old weight of my pendant there. “I have faith you will find a way.” It lifts its hand up again, fingers splayed as though inviting me to dance. “With your permission?”
I nod, and it lies down, the holographic field flowing around me. Mallory curls its right hand and my pseudo-prosthetic unlocks. Waves of light and electricity ripple against my skin, slide into the branching passages of my lungs. Waves and fractals, over and over again in the universe. It feels like it should mean something, if I could only look at it in the right way.
I look up, see through my eyes and Mallory’s eyes at the same time. Maggie’s holo projector flickers from the image of Wanda Rutkiewicz to an image of Maggie and me standing on the summit of Mt. Hargreaves. I am looking out into the distance, one hand pressed to the place where my ONE pendant is hidden beneath my suit, a wide smile on my face. Maggie looks only at me.
“Go,” Mallory says, its voice vibrating in my own throat. “Maggie is waiting for you.”
I press the kit against my skull, align the sensors with the scars on my temples. There’s no pain as they burrow in, just a dull sensation of opening, of parting. The pressure at the back of my skull pulls gently, a counterweight.
I breathe in deeply, breathe in the scent of Maggie. Switch the kit on.
Everything is white.
24
I am back in the cave on Mt
. Hargreaves. My right hand frozen solid, and I am dying with every breath.
The dead man watches me. Behind the rime of ice, his irises are blue, lit from within as though by a burning flame. I look closer, see green and blue sparks, a blue and white planet spinning slowly. I want to look away, but cannot. The Mountain comes into view. I feel it pulling against my bones, as though it has twined invisible strings through my marrow, tying itself to the soft meat hidden within the hardest parts of my body.
The dead man blinks.
I can hear each tiny crystal of ice flaking from his corneas. They fall to the frozen ground, chiming in a pattern that rises and falls, rises and falls.
The dead man’s mouth opens. More ice falls away, and cracks open in the corners of his lips. There is no blood beneath his skin, just marble pale flesh shading to blue, then black at its depths. Deep in that darkness, I can sense something moving, tugging on those marrow-strings in a rhythmic sequence I almost, but don’t quite, recognize.
A pulse beats beneath my left ring finger. I pull off my glove with my teeth, raise my hand up, ring finger extended. In contrast to the white of my frozen right hand, the left is flushed red. The ice still falling from the dead man’s eyes melts when it touches my skin.
That pulse comes again, weaker this time. Beneath the red of my skin, that knot of cells is white and hard and cold. My thoughts are slow as a glacier, and it takes me long moments to even recognize what those cells are. Once I have that, everything else falls into place.
Maggie. I am here in VIR for Maggie. To save her as she saved me.
The dead man watches as I unfold my stiffened limbs, pull myself to my feet. Everything hurts, and no matter how deep I breathe, I cannot get enough air. I manage to take a step, and blackness eats the edges of my vision. I stumble, fall painfully to my knees. I taste blue, I taste white. I taste death.
Maggie’s heart beats again, even weaker this time.
