The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Freds,” I complained. “You said this was a piece of cake.”

  “It is,” he said. “Check out how fast we’re going.”

  “That’s because we’re scared to death.”

  “Are we? Hey, it must be only 45 degrees or so.”

  This is as steep as an icefall can get before the ice all falls downhill at once. Even the famous Khumbu Icefall, which we now had a fantastic view of over to our right, fell at only about 30 degrees. The Khumbu Icefall is an unavoidable part of the standard route on Everest, and it is by far the most feared section; more people have died there than anywhere else on the mountain. And the Lho La is worse than the Khumbu!

  So I had some choice words for our situation as we climbed very quickly indeed, and most of them left Laure mystified. “Great, Freds,” I shouted at him. “Real piece of cake all right!”

  “Lot of icing, anyway,” he said, and giggled. This under a wall that would flatten him like Wile E. Coyote if it fell. I shook my head.

  “What do you think?” I said to Laure.

  “Very bad,” Laure said. “Very bad, very dangerous.”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  We hurried.

  Now I like climbing as much as anybody, almost, but I am not going to try to claim to you that it is an exceptionally sane activity. That day in particular I would not have been inclined to argue the point. The thing is, there is danger and there is danger. In fact climbers make a distinction, between objective danger and subjective danger. Objective dangers are things like avalanches and rockfall and storms, that you can’t do anything about. Subjective dangers are those incurred by human error—putting in a bad hold, forgetting to fasten a harness, that sort of thing. See, if you are perfectly careful, then you can eliminate all the subjective dangers. And when you’ve eliminated the subjective dangers, you have only the objective dangers to face. So you can see it’s very rational.

  On this day, however, we were in the midst of a whole wall of objective danger, and it made me nervous. We pursued the usual course in such a case, which is to go like hell. The four of us were practically running up the Lho La. Freds, Kunga, and Laure were extremely fast and strong, and I am in reasonable shape myself; plus I get the benefits of more adrenalin than less imaginative types. So we were hauling buns.

  Then it happened. Freds was next to me, on a rope with Kunga Norbu, and Kunga was the full rope length ahead of us—about twenty yards—leading the way around a traverse that went under a giant serac, which is what they call the fangs of blue ice that protrude out of an icefall, often in clusters. Kunga was right underneath this serac when without the slightest warning it sheered off and collapsed, shattering into a thousand pieces.

  I had reflexively sucked in a gasp and was about to scream when Kunga Norbu jostled my elbow, nearly knocking me down. He was wedged in between Freds and me, and the rope tying them together was flapping between our legs.

  Trying to revise my scream I choked, gasped for breath, choked again. Freds slapped me on the back to help. Kunga was definitely there, standing before us, solid and corporeal. And yet he had been under the serac! The broken pieces of the ice block were scattered before us, fresh and gleaming in the afternoon sun. The block had sheered off and collapsed without the slightest quiver or warning—there simply hadn’t been time to get out from under it!

  Freds saw the look on my face, and he grinned feebly. “Old Kunga Norbu is pretty fast when he has to be.”

  But that wasn’t going to do. “Gah…” I said—and then Freds and Kunga were holding me up. Laure hurried to join us, round-eyed with apprehension.

  “Very bad,” he said.

  “Gah,” I attempted again, and couldn’t go on.

  “All right, all right,” Freds said, soothing me with his gloved hands. “Hey, George. Relax.”

  “He,” I got out, and pointed at the remains of the serac, then at Kunga.

  “I know,” Freds said, frowning. He exchanged a glance with Kunga, who was watching me impassively. They spoke to each other in Tibetan. “Listen,” Freds said to me. “Let’s top the pass and then I’ll explain it to you. It’ll take a while, and we don’t have that much day left. Plus we’ve got to find a way around these ice cubes so we can stick to the fixed ropes. Come on, buddy.” He slapped my arm. “Concentrate. Let’s do it.”

  So we started up again, Kunga leading as fast as before. I was still in shock, however, and I kept seeing the collapse of the serac, with Kunga under it. He just couldn’t have escaped it! And yet there he was up above us, jumaring up the fixed ropes like a monkey scurrying up a palm.

  It was a miracle. And I had seen it. I had a hell of a time concentrating on the rest of that day’s climb.

  9

  In the late afternoon we topped the Lho La, and set our tent on the pass’s flat expanse of deep hard snow. It was one of the spacier campsites I had ever occupied: on the crest of the Himalaya, in a broad saddle between the tallest mountain on earth, and the very spiky and beautiful Lingtren. Below us to one side was the Khumbu Glacier; on the other was the Rongbuk Glacier in Tibet. We were at about 20,000 feet, and so Freds and his friends had a long way to go before reaching old Mallory. But nothing above would be quite as arbitrarily dangerous as the icefall. As long as the weather held, that is. So far they had been lucky; it was turning out to be the driest October in years.

  There was no sign of either the British team or Arnold’s crew, except for tracks in the snow leading up the side of the West Shoulder and disappearing. So they were on their way up. “Damn!” I said. “Why didn’t they wait?” Now we had more climbing to do, to catch Arnold.

  I sat on my groundpad on the snow outside the tent. I was tired. I was also very troubled. Laure was getting the stove to start. Kunga Norbu was off by himself, sitting in the snow, apparently meditating on the sight of Tibet. Freds was walking around singing “Wooden Ships,” clearly in heaven. “I mean, is this a great campsite or what,” he cried to me. “Look at the view! It’s too much, too much. I wish we’d brought some chang with us. I do have some hash, though. George, time to break out the pipe, hey?”

  “Not yet, Freds. You get over here and tell me what the hell happened down there with your buddy Kunga Norbu. You promised you would.”

  Freds stood looking at me. We were in shadow—it was cold, but windless—the sky above was clear, and a very deep dark blue. The airy roar of the stove starting was the only sound.

  Freds sighed, and his expression got as serious as it ever got: one eye squinted shut entirely, forehead furrowed, and lips squeezed tightly together. He looked over at Kunga, and saw he was watching us. “Well,” he said after a while. “You remember a couple of weeks ago when we were down at Chimoa getting drunk?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And I told you Kunga Norbu was a tulku.”

  I gulped. “Freds, don’t give me that again.”

  “Well,” he said. “It’s either that or tell you some kind of a lie. And I ain’t so good at lying, my face gives me away or something.”

  “Freds, get serious!” But looking over at Kunga Norbu, sitting in the snow with that blank expression, and those weird black eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder.

  Freds said, “I’m sorry, man, I really am. I don’t mean to blow your mind like this. But I did try to tell you before, you have to admit. And it’s the simple truth. He’s an honest-to-God tulku. First incarnation the famous Naropa, born in 1555. And he’s been around ever since.”

  “So he met George Washington and like that?”

  “Well, Washington didn’t go to Tibet, so far as I know.”

  I stared at him. He shuffled about uncomfortably. “I know it’s hard to take, George. Believe me. I had trouble with it myself, at first. But when you study under Kunga Norbu for a while, you see him do so many miraculous things, you can’t help but believe.”

  I stared at him some more, speechless.

  “I know,” Fre
ds said. “The first time he pulls one of his moves on you, it’s a shock. I remember my first time real well. I was hiking with him from the hidden Rongbuk to Namche, we went right over Lho La like we did today only in the opposite direction, and right around Everest Base Camp we came across this Indian trekker who was turning blue. He was clearly set to die of altitude sickness, so Kunga and I carried him down between us to Pheriche, which was already a long day’s work as you know. We took him to the Rescue Station and I figured they’d put him in the pressure tank they’ve got there, have you seen it? They’ve got a tank like a miniature submarine in their back room, and the idea is you stick a guy with altitude sickness in it and pressurize it down to sea level pressure, and he gets better. It’s a neat idea, but it turns out that this tank was donated to the station by a hospital in Tokyo, and all the instructions for it are in Japanese, and no one at the station reads Japanese. Besides as far as anyone there knows it’s an experimental technique only, no one is quite sure if it will work or not, and nobody there is inclined to do any experimenting on sick trekkers. So we’re back to square one and this guy was sicker than ever, so Kunga and I started down towards Namche, but I was getting exhausted and it was really slow going, and all of a sudden Kunga Norbu picked him up and slung him across his shoulders, which was already quite a feat of strength as this Indian was kind of pear-shaped, a heavy guy—and then Kunga just took off running down the trail with him! I hollered at him and ran after him trying to keep up, and I tell you I was zooming down that trail, and still Kunga ran right out of sight! Big long steps like he was about to fly! I couldn’t believe it!”

  Freds shook his head. “That was the first time I saw Kunga Norbu going into lung-gom mode. Means magic long-distance running, and it was real popular in Tibet at one time. An adept like Kunga is called a lung-gom-pa, and when you get it down you can run really far really fast. Even levitate a little. You saw him today—that was a lung-gom move he laid on that iceblock.”

  “I see,” I said, in a kind of daze. I called out to Laure, still at the stove: “Hey Laure! Freds says Kunga Norbu is a tulku!”

  Laure smiled, nodded. “Yes, Kunga Norbu Lama very fine tulku!”

  I took a deep breath. Over in the snow Kunga Norbu sat cross-legged, looking out at his country. Or somewhere. “I think I’m ready for that hash pipe,” I told Freds.

  10

  It took us two days to catch up to Arnold and the Brits, two days of miserable slogging up the West Shoulder of Everest. Nothing complicated here: the slope was a regular expanse of hard snow, and we just put on the crampons and ground on up it. It was murderous work. Not that I could tell with Freds and Laure and Kunga Norbu. There may be advantages to climbing on Everest with a tulku, a Sherpa long-distance champion, and an American space cadet, but longer rest stops are not among them. Those three marched uphill as if paced by Sousa marches, and I trailed behind huffing and puffing, damning Arnold with every step.

  Late on the second day I struggled onto the top of the West Shoulder, a long snowy divide under the West Ridge proper. By the time I got there Freds and Laure already had the tent up, and they were securing it to the snow with a network of climbing rope, while Kunga Norbu sat to one side doing his meditation.

  Further down the Shoulder were the two camps of the other teams, placed fairly close together as there wasn’t a whole lot of extra flat ground up there to choose from. After I had rested and drunk several cups of hot lemon drink, I said, “Let’s go find out how things stand.” Freds walked over with me.

  As it turned out, things were not standing so well. The Brits were in their tent, waist deep in their sleeping bags and drinking tea. And they were not amused. “The man is utterly daft,” Marion said. She had a mild case of high-altitude throat, and any syllable she tried to emphasize disappeared entirely. “We’ve oyd outrunning him, but the Sherpas are good, and he oyy be strong.”

  “A fooking leech he is,” John said.

  Trevor grinned ferociously. His lower face was pretty sunburned, and his lips were beginning to break up. “We’re counting on you to get him back down, George.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Marion shook her head. “God knows we’ve tried, but it does no good whatever, he won’t listen, he just rattles on about making me a stee, I don’t know how to dee with that.” She turned red. “And none of these brave chaps will agree that we should just go over there and seize his bloody camera and throw it into Tibee!”

  The guys shook their heads. “We’d have to deal with the Sherpas,” Mad Tom said to Marion patiently. “What are we going to do, fight with them? I can’t even imagine it.”

  “And if Mad Tom can’t imagine it,” Trevor said.

  Marion just growled.

  “I’ll go talk to him,” I said.

  But I didn’t have to go anywhere, because Arnold had come over to greet us. “Hello!” he called out cheerily. “George, what a surprise! What brings you up here?”

  I got out of the tent. Arnold stood before me, looking sunburned but otherwise all right. “You know what brings me up here, Arnold. Here, let’s move away a bit, I’m sure these folks don’t want to talk to you.”

  “Oh, no, I’ve been talking to them every day! We’ve been having lots of good talks. And today I’ve got some real news.” He spoke into the tent. “I was looking through my zoom over at the North Col, and I see they’ve set up a camp over there! Do you suppose it’s that expedition looking for Mallory’s body?”

  Curses came from the tent.

  “I know!” Arnold exclaimed. “Kind of puts the pressure on to get going, don’t you think? Not much time to spare.”

  “Bugger off!”

  Arnold shrugged. “Well, I’ve got it on tape if you want to see. Looked like they were wearing Helly-Hansen jackets, if that tells you anything.”

  “Don’t tell me you can read labels from this distance,” I said.

  Arnold grinned. “It’s a hell of a zoom lens. I could read their lips if I wanted to.”

  I studied him curiously. He really seemed to be doing fine, even after four days of intense climbing. He looked a touch thinner, and his voice had an altitude rasp to it, and he was pretty badly sunburned under the stubble of his beard—but he was still chewing a whitened cigar between zinc-oxided lips, and he still had the same wide-eyed look of wonder that his filming should bother anybody. I was impressed; he was definitely a lot tougher than I had expected. He reminded me of Dick Bass, the American millionaire who took a notion to climb the highest mountain on each continent. Like Bass, Arnold was a middle-aged guy paying pros to take him up; and like Bass, he acclimatized well, and had a hell of a nerve.

  So, there he was, and he wasn’t falling apart. I had to try something else. “Arnold, come over here a little with me, let’s leave these people in peace.”

  “Good reee!” Marion shouted from inside the tent.

  “That Marion,” Arnold said admiringly when we were out of earshot. “She’s really beautiful, I mean I really, really, really like her.” He struck his chest to show how smitten he was.

  I glared at him. “Arnold, it doesn’t matter if you’re falling for her or what, because they definitely do not want you along for this climb. Filming them destroys the whole point of what they’re trying to do up there.”

  Arnold seized my arm. “No it doesn’t! I keep trying to explain that to them. I can edit the film so that no one will know where Mallory’s body is. They’ll just know it’s up here safe, because four young English climbers took incredible risks to keep it free from the publicity hounds threatening to tear it away to London. It’s great, George. I’m a filmmaker, and I know when something will make a great movie, and this will make a great movie.”

  I frowned. “Maybe it would, but the problem is this climb is illegal, and if you make the film, then the illegal part becomes known and these folks will be banned by the Nepali authorities. They’ll never be let into Nepal again.”

  “So? Aren’t they wi
lling to make that sacrifice for Mallory?”

  I frowned. “For your movie, you mean. Without that they could do it and no one would be the wiser.”

  “Well, okay, but I can leave their names off it or something. Give them stage names. Marion Davies, how about that?”

  “I think that one’s been used before.” I thought. “Listen, Arnold, you’d be in the same kind of trouble, you know. They might not ever let you back, either.”

  He waved a hand. “I can get around that kind of thing. Get a lawyer. Or baksheesh, a lot of baksheesh.”

  “These guys don’t have that kind of money, though. Really, you’d better watch it. If you press them too hard they might do something drastic. At the least they’ll stop you, higher up. When they find the body a couple of them will come back and stop you, and the other two bury the body, and you won’t get any footage at all.”

  He shook his head. “I got lenses, haven’t I been telling you? Why I’ve been shooting what these four eat for breakfast every morning. I’ve got hours of Marion on film for instance,” he sighed, “and my God could I make her a star. Anyway I could film the burial from here if I had to, so I’ll take my chances. Don’t you worry about me.”

  “I am not worrying about you,” I said. “Take my word for it. But I do wish you’d come back down with me. They don’t want you up here, and I don’t want you up here. It’s dangerous, especially if we lose this weather. Besides, you’re breaking your contract with our agency, which said you’d follow my instructions on the trek.”

  “Sue me.”

  I took a deep breath.

  Arnold put a friendly hand to my arm. “Don’t worry so much, George. They’ll love me when they’re stars.” He saw the look on my face and stepped away. “And don’t you try anything funny with me, or I’ll slap some kind of kidnapping charge on you, and you’ll never guide a trek again.”

  “Don’t tempt me like that,” I told him, and stalked back to the Brits’ camp.