The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He took a few deep breaths. “Plus, well, listen. Kunga Lama has got mystic reasons for wanting to go up there, having to do with his longtime guru Tilopa Lama. Remember I told you back in Chimoa how Tilopa had set a task for Kunga Norbu, that Kunga had to accomplish before the monastery at Kum-Bum would be rebuilt, and Kunga set free to be his own lama at last? Well—the task was to climb Chomolungma! That old son of a gun said to Kunga, you just climb Chomolungma and everything’ll be fine! Figuring that meant that he would have a disciple for just as many re-incarnations as he would ever go through this side of nirvana. But he didn’t count on Kunga Norbu teaming up with his old student Freds Fredericks, and his buddy George Fergusson!”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “I can see you feel very deeply about this, Freds, and I respect that, but I’m not going.”

  “We need you along, George! Besides, we’re going to do it, and we can’t really leave you to go back down the West Ridge by yourself—that’d be more dangerous than coming along with us! And we’re going to the peak, so you have to come along, it’s that simple!”

  Freds had been talking so fast and hard that he was completely out of breath; he waved a hand at Kunga Norbu. “You talk to him,” he said to Kunga, then switched to Tibetan, no doubt to repeat the message.

  Kunga Norbu pulled up his snow goggles, and very serenely he looked at me. He looked just a little sad; it was the sort of expression you might get if you refused to give to the United Way. His black eyes looked right through me just as they always did, and in that high-altitude glare his pupils kind of pulsed in and out, in and out, in and out. And damned if that old bastard didn’t hypnotize me. I think.

  But I struggled against it. I found myself putting on my pack, and checking my crampons to make sure they were really, really, really tight, and at the same time I was shouting at Freds. “Freds, be reasonable! No one climbs Everest unsupported like this! It’s too dangerous!”

  “Hey, Messner did it. Messner climbed it in two days from North Colby himself, all he had was his girlfriend waiting down at base camp.”

  “You can’t use Reinhold Messner as an example,” I cried. “Messner is cuckoo.”

  “Nah. He’s just tough and fast. And so are we. It won’t be a problem.”

  “Freds, climbing Everest is generally considered a problem.” But Kunga Norbu had put on his pack and was starting up the slope above our campsite, and Freds was following him, and I was following Freds. “For one big problem,” I yelled, “we don’t have any oxygen!”

  “People climb it without oxygen all the time now.”

  “Yeah, but you pay the price. You don’t get enough oxygen up there, and it kills brain cells like you can’t believe! If we go up there we’re certain to lose millions of brain cells.”

  “So?” He couldn’t see the basis of the objection.

  I groaned. We continued up the slope.

  14

  And that is how I found myself climbing Mount Everest with a Tibetan tulku and the wild man of Arkansas. It was not a position that a reasonable person could defend to himself, and indeed as I trudged after Freds and Kunga I could scarcely believe it was happening. But every labored breath told me it was. And since it was, I decided I had better psych myself into the proper frame of mind for it, or else it would only be that much more dangerous. “Always wanted to do this,” I said, banishing the powerful impression that I had been hypnotized into the whole deal. “We’re climbing Everest, and I really want to.”

  “That’s the attitude,” Freds said.

  I ignored him and kept thinking the phrase “I want to do this,” once for every two steps. After a few hundred steps, I had to admit that I had myself somewhat convinced. I mean, Everest! Think about it! I suppose that like anyone else, I had the fantasy in there somewhere.

  I won’t bother you with the details of our route; if you want them you can consult my anonymous article in the American Alpine Journal, 1986 issue. Actually it was fairly straightforward; we contoured up from the Hornbein Couloir to the upper West Ridge, and continued from there.

  I did this in bursts of ten steps at a time; the altitude was finally beginning to hammer me. I acclimatize as well as anyone I know, but nobody acclimatizes over 26,000 feet. It’s just a matter of how fast you wind down.

  “Try to go as slow as you need to, and avoid rests,” Freds advised.

  “I’m going as slow as I can already.”

  “No you’re not. Try to just flow uphill. Really put it into first gear. You fall into a certain rhythm.”

  “All right. I’ll try.”

  We were seated at this point to take off our crampons, which were unnecessary. Freds had been right about the ease of the climb up here. The ridge was wide, it wasn’t very steep, and it was all broken up, so that irregular rock staircases were everywhere on it. If it were at sea level you could run up it, literally. It was so easy that I could try Freds’s suggestion, and I followed him and Kunga up the ridge in slow-slow motion. At that rate I could go about five or ten minutes between rests—it’s hard to be sure how long, as each interval seemed like an afternoon on its own.

  But with each stop we were a little higher. There was no denying the West Ridge had a first-class view: to our right all the mountains of Nepal, to our left all the mountains of Tibet, and you could throw in Sikkim and Bhutan for change. Mountains everywhere: and all of them below us. The only thing still above us was the pyramid of Everest’s final summit, standing brilliant white against a black blue sky.

  At each rest stop I found Kunga Norbu was humming a strange Buddhist chant; he was looking happier and happier in a subtle sort of way, while Fred’s grin got wider and wider. “Can you believe how perfect the day is? Beautiful, huh?”

  “Uh huh.” It was nice, all right. But I was too tired to enjoy it. Some of their energy poured into me at each stop, and that was a good thing, because they were really going strong, and I needed the help.

  Finally the ridge became snow-covered again, and we had to sit down and put our crampons back on. I found this usually simple process almost more than I could handle. My hands left pink afterimages in the air, and I hissed and grunted at each pull on the straps. When I finished and stood, I almost keeled over. The rocks swam, and even with my goggles on the snow was painfully white.

  “Last bit,” Freds said as we looked up the slope. We crunched into it, and our crampons spiked down into firm snow. Kunga took off at an unbelievable pace. Freds and I marched up side by side, sharing a pace to take some of the mental effort out of it.

  Freds wanted to talk, even though he had no breath to spare. “Old Tilopa Lama. Going to be. Mighty surprised. When they start rebuilding Kum-Bum. Ha!”

  I nodded as if I believed in the whole story. This was an exaggeration, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but to put one foot in front of the other, in blazing white snow.

  I have read that Everest stands just at the edge of the possible, as far as climbing it without oxygen goes. The scientific team that concluded this, after a climb in which air and breath samples were taken, actually decided that theoretically it wasn’t possible at all. Sort of a bumblebee’s flight situation. One scientist speculated that if Everest were just a couple hundred feet taller, then it really couldn’t be done.

  I believe that. Certainly the last few steps up that snow pyramid were the toughest I ever took. My breath heaved in and out of me in useless gasps, and I could hear the brain cells popping off by the thousands, snap crackle pop. We were nearing the peak, a triangular dome of pure snow; but I had to slow down.

  Kunga forged on ahead of us, picking up speed in the last approach. Looking down at the snow, I lost sight of him. Then his boots came into my field of vision, and I realized we were there, just a couple steps below the top.

  The actual summit was a ridged mound of snow about eight feet long and four feet wide. It wasn’t a pinnacle, but it wasn’t a broad hilltop either; you wouldn’t have wanted to dance on it.

  “Well,
” I said. “Here we are.” I couldn’t get excited about it. “Too bad I didn’t bring a camera.” The truth was, I didn’t feel a thing.

  Beside me Freds stirred. He tapped my arm, gestured up at Kunga Norbu. We were still below him, with our heads at about the level of his boots. He was humming, and had his arms extended up and out, as if conducting a symphony out to the east. I looked in that direction. By this time it was late afternoon, and Everest’s shadow extended to the horizon, even above. There must have been ice particles in the air to the east, because all of a sudden above the darkness of Everest’s shadow I saw a big icebow. It was almost a complete circle of color, much more diaphanous than a rainbow, cut off at the bottom by the mountain’s triangular shadow.

  Inside this round bow of faint color, on the top of the dark air of the shadow peak, there was a cross of light-haloed shadow. It was a Spectre of the Brocken phenomenon, caused when low sunlight throws the shadows of peaks and climbers onto moisture-filled air, creating a glory of light around the shadows. I had seen one before.

  Then Kunga Norbu flicked his hands to the sides, and the whole vision disappeared, instantly.

  “Whoah,” I said.

  “Right on,” Freds murmured, and led me the last painful steps onto the peak itself, so that we stood beside Kunga Norbu. His head was thrown back, and on his face was a smile of pure, child-like bliss.

  Now, I don’t know what really happened up there. Maybe I went faint and saw colors for a moment, thought it was an icebow, and then blinked things clear. But I know that at that moment, looking at Kunga Norbu’s transfigured face, I was quite sure that I had seen him gain his freedom, and paint it out there in the sky. The task was fulfilled, the arms thrown wide with joy … I believed all of it. I swallowed, a sudden lump in my throat.

  Now I felt it too; I felt where we were. We had climbed Chomolungma. We were standing on the peak of the world.

  Freds heaved his breath in and out a few times. “Well!” he said, and shook mittened hands with Kunga and me. “We did it!” And then we pounded each other on the back until we almost knocked ourselves off the mountain.

  15

  We hadn’t been up there long when I began to consider the problem of getting down. There wasn’t much left of the day, and we were a long way from anywhere homey. “What now?”

  “I think we’d better go down to the South Summit and dig a snow cave for the night. That’s the closest place we can do it, and that’s what Haston and Scott did in ’75. It worked for them, and a couple other groups too.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

  Freds said something to Kunga, and we started down. Immediately I found that the Southeast Ridge was not as broad or as gradual as the West Ridge. In fact we were descending a kind of snow-covered knife edge, with ugly gray rocks sticking out of it. So this was the yak route! It was a tough hour’s work to get down to the South Summit, and the only thing that made it possible was the fact that we were going downhill all the way.

  The South Summit is a big jog in the Southeast Ridge, which makes for a lump of a subsidiary peak, and a flat area. Here we had a broad sloping expanse of very deep, packed snow—perfect conditions for a snow cave.

  Freds got his little aluminum shovel out of his pack and went to it, digging like a dog after a bone. I was content to sit and consult. Kunga Norbu stood staring around at the infinite expanse of peaks, looking a little dazed. Once or twice I summoned up the energy to spell Freds. After a body-sized entryway, we only wanted a cave big enough for the three of us to fit in. It looked a bit like a coffin for triplets.

  The sun set, stars came out, the twilight turned midnight blue; then it was night. And seriously, seriously cold. Freds declared the cave ready and I crawled in after him and Kunga, feeling granules of snow crunch under me. We banged heads and got arranged on our butt pads so that we were sitting in a little circle, on a rough shelf above our entrance tunnel, in a roughly spherical chamber. By slouching I got an inch’s clearance above. “All right,” Freds said wearily. “Let’s party.” He took the stove from his pack, held it in his mittens for a while to warm the gas inside, then set it on the snow in the middle of the three of us, and lit it with his lighter. The blue glare was blinding, the roar deafening. We took off our mitts and cupped our hands so there was no gap between flame and flesh. Our cave began to warm up a little.

  You may think it odd that a snow cave can warm up at all, but remember we are speaking relatively here. Outside it was dropping to about 10 below 0, Fahrenheit. Add any kind of wind and at that altitude, where oxygen is so scarce, you’ll die. Inside the cave, however, there was no wind. Snow itself is not that cold, and it’s a great insulator: it will warm up, even begin to get slick on its surface, and that water also holds heat very well. Add a stove raging away, and three bodies struggling to pump out their 98.6, and even with a hole connecting you to outside air, you can get the temperature well up into the 30s. That’s colder than a refrigerator, but compared to 10 below it’s beach weather.

  So we were happy in our little cave, at first. Freds scraped some of the wall into his pot and cooked some hot lemon drink. He offered me some almonds, but I had no appetite whatsoever; eating an almond was the same as eating a coffee table to me. We were all dying for drink, though, and we drank the lemon mix when it was boiling, which at this elevation was just about bath temperature. It tasted like heaven.

  We kept melting snow and drinking it until the stove sputtered and ran out of fuel. Only a couple of hours had passed, at most. I sat there in the pitch dark, feeling the temperature drop. My spirits dropped with it.

  But Freds was by no means done with the party. His lighter scraped and by its light I saw him punch a hole in the wall and set a candle in it. He lit the candle, and its light reflected off the slick white sides of our home. He had a brief discussion with Kunga Norbu.

  “Okay,” he said to me at the end of it, breath cascading whitely into the air. “Kunga is going to do some tumo now.”

  “Tumo?”

  “Means, the art of warming oneself without fire up in the snows.”

  That caught my interest. “Another lama talent?”

  “You bet. It comes in handy for naked hermits in the winter.”

  “I can see that. Tell him to lay it on us.”

  With some crashing about Kunga got in the lotus position, an impressive feat with his big snow boots still on.

  He took his mitts off, and we did the same. Then he began breathing in a regular, deep rhythm, staring at nothing. This went on for almost half an hour, and I was beginning to think we would all freeze before he warmed up, when he held his hands out toward Freds and me. We took them in our own.

  They were as hot as if he had a terrible fever. Fearfully I reached up to touch his face—it was warm, but nothing like his hands. “My Lord,” I said.

  “We can help him now,” Freds said softly. “You have to concentrate, harness the energy that’s always inside you. Every breath out you push away pride, anger, hatred, envy, sloth, stupidity. Every breath in, you take in Buddha’s spirit, the five wisdoms, everything good. When you’ve gotten clear and calm, imagine a golden lotus in your belly button … Okay? In that lotus you imagine the syllable ram, which means fire. Then you have to see a little seed of flame, the size of a goat dropping, appearing in the ram. Every breath after that is like a bellows, fanning that flame, which travels through the tsas in the body, the mystic nerves. Imagine this process in five stages. First, the uma tsa is seen as a hair of fire, up your spine more or less … Two, the nerve is as big around as your little finger … Three, it’s the size of an arm … Four, the body becomes the tsa itself and is perceived as a tube of fire … Five, the tsa engulfs the world, and you’re just one flame in a sea of fire.”

  “My Lord.”

  We sat there holding Kunga Norbu’s fiery hands, and I imagined myself a tube of fire: and the warmth poured into me—up my arms, through my torso—it even thawed my frozen butt, and my feet.
I stared at Kunga Norbu, and he stared right though the wall of our cave to eternity, or wherever, his eyes glowing faintly in the candlelight. It was weird.

  I don’t know how long this went on—it seemed endless, although I suppose it was no more than an hour or so. But then it broke off—Kunga’s hand cooled, and so did the rest of us. He blinked several times and shook his head.

  He spoke to Freds.

  “Well,” Freds said. “That’s about as long as he can hold it, these days.”

  “What?”

  “Well…” He clucked his tongue regretfully. “It’s like this. Tulkus tend to lose their powers, over the course of several incarnations. It’s like they lose something in the process, every time, like when you keep making a tape from copies or whatever. There’s a name for it.”

  “Transmission error,” I said.

  “Right. Well, it gets them too. In fact you run into a lot of tulkus in Tibet who are complete morons. Kunga is better than that, but he is a bit like Paul Revere. A little light in the belfry, you know. A great lama, and a super guy, but not tremendously powerful at any of the mystic disciplines, any more.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I know.”

  I recalled Kunga’s fiery hands, their heat pronging into me. “So … he really is a tulku, isn’t he.”

  “Oh yeah! Of course! And now he’s free of old Tilopa, too—a lama in his own right, and nobody’s disciple. It must be a great feeling.”

  “I bet. So how does it work again, exactly?”

  “Becoming a tulku?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it’s a matter of concentrating your mental powers. Tibetans believe that none of this is supernatural, but just a focusing of natural powers that we all have. Tulkus have gotten their psychic energies incredibly focused, and when you’re at that stage, you can leave your body whenever you want. Why if Kunga wanted to, he could die in about ten seconds.”