by Дэн Симмонс
“Three months’ shiptime… how much time-debt?”
“For someone waiting on T’ien Shan?” said the ship. The jungle world was a speck behind us now as we accelerated toward a translation point.
“Five years, two months, and one day,” said the ship. “As you are aware, the time-debt algorithm is not a linear function of C-plus duration, but includes such factors as…”
“Ah, Jesus,” I said, raising my wrist to my clammy forehead in the autosurgeon coffin. “Ah, damn.”
“Are you in pain, M. Endymion? The dolorometer suggests you are not, but your pulse has become erratic. We can increase the level of painkiller…”
“No!” I snapped. “No, it’s all right. I just… five years… damn.”
Did Aenea know this? Had she known that our separation would cover years of her life? Perhaps I should have brought the ship through the downriver farcaster. No, Aenea had said to fetch the ship and fly it to T’ien Shan. The farcaster had brought us to Mare Infinitus last time. Who knows where it would have taken me this time.
“Five years,” I muttered. “Ah, damn. She’ll be… damn, Ship… she’ll be twenty-one years old. A grown woman. I’ll have missed… I won’t see… she won’t remember…”
“Are you sure you are not in pain, M. Endymion? Your vital signs are turbulent.”
“Ignore that, Ship.”
“Shall I prepare the autosurgeon for cryogenic fugue?”
“Soon enough, Ship. Tell it to put me under while it heals my leg tonight and deals with the fever. I want at least ten hours’ sleep. How long until translation point?”
“Only seventeen hours. It is well inside this system.”
“Good,” I said. “Wake me in ten hours. Have a full breakfast ready. What I used to have when we celebrated “Sunday” on our voyage out.”
“Very good. Anything else?”
“Yeah, do you have any record holos of… of Aenea… on our last trip?”
“I have stored several hours of such records, M. Endymion. The time you were swimming in the zero-g bubble on the outer balcony. The discussion you had about religion versus rationality. The flying lessons down the central dropshaft when…”
“Good,” I said. “Cue those up. I’ll look through them over breakfast.”
“I will prepare the autosurgeon for three months of cryogenic sleep after your seven-hour interlude tomorrow,” said the ship.
I took a breath. “All right.”
“The surgeon wishes to commence repairing nerve damage and injecting antibiotics now, M. Endymion. Do you wish to sleep?”
“Yes.”
“With dreams or without? The medication may be tailored for either neurological state.”
“No dreams,” I said. “No dreams now. There’ll be time enough for those later.”
“Very good, M. Endymion. Sleep well.”
PART TWO
15
I am on the Phari marketplace shelf with A. Bettik, Jigme Norbu, and George Tsarong when I hear the news that Pax ships and troops have finally come to T’ien Shan, the “Mountains of Heaven.”
“We should tell Aenea,” I say. Around us, above us, and under us, thousands of tons of scaffolding rock and creak with the weight of crowded humanity buying, selling, trading, arguing, and laughing. Very few have heard the news of the Pax’s arrival. Very few will understand the implications when they do hear it. The word comes from a monk named Chim Din who has just returned from the capital of Potala, where he works as a teacher in the Dalai Lama’s Winter Palace.
Luckily, Chim Din also works alternate weeks as a bamboo rigger at Hsuan-k’ung Ssu, the “Temple Hanging in Air,” Aenea’s project, and he hails us in Phari Marketplace as he is on his way to the Temple. Thus we are among the first people outside the court at Potala to hear of the Pax arrival.
“Five ships,” Chim Din had said. “Several score of Christian people. About half of them warriors in red and black. About half of the remaining half are missionaries, all in black. They have rented the old Red Hat Sect gompa near Rhan Tso, the Otter Lake, near the Phallus of Shiva. They have sanctified part of the gompa as a chapel to their triune God. The Dalai Lama will not allow them to use their flying machines or go beyond the south ridge of the Middle Kingdom, but he has allowed them free travel within this region.”
“We should tell Aenea,” I say again to A. Bettik, leaning close so that I can be heard over the marketplace babble.
“We should tell everyone at Jo-kung,” says the android. He turns and tells George and Jigme to complete the shopping—not to forget arranging porters to carry the orders of cable and extra bonsai bamboo for the construction—and then he hoists his massive rucksack, tightens his climbing hardware on his harness, and nods to me.
I heft my own heavy pack and lead the way out of the marketplace and down the scaffolding ladders to the cable level. “I think the High Way will be faster than the Walk Way, don’t you?”
The blue man nods. I had hesitated at suggesting the High Way for the return trip, since it has to be difficult for A. Bettik to handle the cables and slideways with just one hand.
Upon our reunion, I had been surprised that he had not fashioned a metal hook for himself—his left arm still ends in a smooth stump halfway between his wrist and elbow—but I soon saw how he used a leather band and various leather attachments to make up for his missing digits.
“Yes, M. Endymion,” he says. “The High Way. It is much faster. I agree. Unless you want to use one of the flyers as courier.”
I look at him, assuming that he is kidding.
The flyers are a breed apart and insane. They launch their paragliders from the high structures, catching ridge lift from the great rock walls, crossing the wide spaces between the ridges and peaks where there are no cables or bridges, watching the birds, looking for thermals as if their lives depended on it… because their lives do depend on it. There are no flat areas on which a flyer can set down if the treacherous winds shift, or if their lift fails, or if their hang gliders develop a problem. A forced landing on a ridge wall almost always means death. Descent to the clouds below always means death. The slightest miscalculation in gauging the winds, the updrafts, the downdrafts, the jet stream… any mistake means death for a flyer. That is why they live alone, worship in a secret cult, and charge a fortune to do the Dalai Lama’s bidding by delivering messages from the capital at Potala, or to fly prayer streamers during a Buddhist celebration, or to carry urgent notes from a trader to his home office to beat competitors, or—so the legend goes—to visit the eastern peak of T’ai Shan, separated for months each local year from the rest of T’ien Shan by more than a hundred klicks of air and deadly cloud.
“I don’t think we want to entrust this news to a flyer,” I say.
A. Bettik nods. “Yes, M. Endymion, but the paragliders can be purchased here at the marketplace. At the Flyer’s Guild stall. We could buy two and take the shortest route back. They are very expensive, but we could sell some of the pack zygoats.”
I never know when my android friend is joking. I remember the last time I was under a parasail canopy and have to resist the urge to shiver. “Have you ever paraglided on this world?” I say.
“No, M. Endymion.”
“On any world?”
“No, M. Endymion.”
“What would you think our chances would be if we tried?” I say.
“One in ten,” he says without a second’s hesitation.
“And what are our chances on the cables and slideway this late in the day?” I say.
“About nine in ten before dark,” he says. “Less if sunset catches us short of the slideway.”
“Let’s take the cables and slideway,” I say.
We wait in the short queue of market-goers leaving by cable, and then it is our turn to walk onto the step-off platform. The bamboo shelf is about twenty meters beneath the lowest marketplace scaffolding and it extends about five meters farther out over the abyss than does the rest of P
hari.
Beneath us there is nothing but air for thousands of meters and at the bottom of that emptiness only the ubiquitous sea of clouds that rolls against the ridges of upthrust rock like a white tide spilling against stone pilings. More kilometers beneath those clouds, I know, are poisonous gases and the surging, acidic sea that covers all of this world except its mountains.
The cablemaster gestures us forward and A. Bettik and I step onto the jump platform together. From this nexus, a score or more of cables slant out and down across the abyss, creating a black spiderweb that disappears at the edge of vision. The nearest cable terminus is more than a kilometer and a half to the north—on a little rock fang that stands out against the white glory of Chomo Lori, “Queen of Snow”—but we are going east across the great gap between the ridges, our terminal point is more than twenty kilometers away, and the cable dropping away in that direction appears to end in midair as it blends into the evening glow of the distant rock wall. And our final destination is more than thirty-five klicks beyond that to the north and east. Walking, it would take us about six hours to make the long trip north along Phari Ridge and then east across the system of bridges and catwalks. Traveling by cable and slideway should take less than half that time, but it is late in the day and the slideway is especially dangerous. I glance at the low sun again and wonder again about the wisdom of this plan.
“Ready,” growls the cablemaster, a brown little man in a stained patchwork chuba. He is chewing besil root and turns to spit over the edge as we step up to the clip-on line.
“Ready,” A. Bettik and I say in unison.
“Keep ’ur distance,” growls the cablemaster and gestures for me to go first.
I shake my traveling risers loose from my full-body harness, slide my hands over the crowded gear sling that we call a rack, find the two-bearing pulley by feel, clip it on to the riser ring with a carabiner, run a Munter hitch into a second carabiner as a friction-brake backup to the pulley brake, find my best offset-D carabiner and use it to clip the pulley flanges together around the cable, and then run my safety line through the first two carabiners while tying a short prusik sling onto the rope, finally clipping that on to my chest harness below the risers. All of this takes less than a minute. I raise both hands, grab the D-ring controls to the pulley, and jump up and down, testing both the pulley connection and my clip-ons. Everything holds.
The cablemaster leans over to inspect the double-D-ring attachment and the pulley clamp with expert eyes. He runs the pulley up and back a meter, making sure that the near-frictionless bearings are sliding smoothly in their compact housing. Finally he puts all of his weight on my shoulders and harness, hanging on me like a second rucksack, and then releases me to make sure that the rings and brakelines hold.
I am sure that he cares nothing if I fall to my death, but if the pulley was to stick somewhere on the twenty klicks of braided monofilament cable running out there to invisibility, it will be this cablemaster who will have to clear the mess, hanging from his etriers or belay seat over kilometers of air while waiting commuters seethe. He seems satisfied with the equipment.
“Go,” he says and slaps me on the shoulder.
I jump into space, shifting my bulging rucksack high on my back as I do so. The harness webbing stretches, the cable sags, the pulley bearings hum ever so slightly, and I begin to slide faster as I release the brake with both thumbs on the D-ring controls. Within seconds I am hurtling down the cable. I lift my legs and sit back up into the harness seat in the way that has become second nature to me in the past three months. K’un Lun Ridge, our destination, glows brightly as sunset shadow begins to fill the abyss beneath me and evening shade moves down the wall of Phari Ridge behind me.
I feel a slight change in the cable tension and hear the cable humming as A. Bettik begins his descent behind me. Glancing back, I can see him leaving the jump-off platform, his legs straight ahead of him in the approved form, his body bobbing beneath the elastic risers. I can just make out the tether connecting the leather band on his left arm to the pulley brakeline. A. Bettik waves and I wave back, swiveling in my harness to pay attention to the cable screaming past me as I continue hurtling out over the gorge. Sometimes birds land on the cable to rest. Sometimes there is a sudden ice buildup or braid spurs. Very rarely there is a snagged pulley of someone who has met with an accident or cut away from their harness for reasons known only to themselves. Even more rarely, but enough to fix it in the mind, someone with a grudge or vague psychopathic tendencies will pause on the cable to loop a chock sling or spring-loaded cam around it, leaving a little surprise for the next person to come flying along the line. The penalty for that crime is death by flinging from the highest platform of Potala or Jo-kung, but this is of little solace to the person who first encounters the chock or cam. None of these eventualities materialize as I slide across the emptiness under the ultralight cable. The only sound is the slight hum from the pulley brake as I moderate my speed and the soft rush of air. We are still in sunlight and it is late spring on this world, but the air is always chilly above eight thousand meters. Breathing is no problem. Every day since I arrived on T’ien Shan, I thank the gods of planetary evolution that even with the slightly lighter gravity here—0.954 standard—the oxygen is richer at this altitude. Glancing down at the clouds some klicks below my boots, I think of the seething ocean in that blind pressure, stirred by winds of phosgene and thick CO. There is no real surface land on T’ien Shan, merely that thick soup of a planetary ocean and the countless sharp peaks and ridges rising thousands of meters to the O-layer and the bright, Hyperion-like sunlight. Memory nudges me. I think of another cloudscape world from a few months back. I think of my first day out in the ship, before reaching the translation point and while my fever and broken leg were healing, when I said idly to the ship, “I wonder how I got through the farcaster here. My last memory was of a giant…”
The ship had answered by running a holo taken from one of its buoy cameras as it sat at the bottom of the river where we had left it. It was a starlight-enhanced image—it was raining—and showed the green-glowing arch of the farcaster and tossing treetops. Suddenly a tentacle longer than the ship came through the farcaster opening, carrying what looked to be a toy kayak draped about with a mass of riddled parasail fabric. The tentacle made a single, graceful, slow-motion twist and parasail, kayak, and slumped figure in the cockpit glided—fluttered, actually—a hundred meters or so to disappear in the thrashing treetops.
“Why didn’t you come get me then?” I asked, not hiding the irritation in my voice. My leg still hurt. “Why wait all night while I hung there in the rain? I could have died.”
“I had no instructions to retrieve you upon your return,” said the arrogant, idiot-savant ship’s voice. “You might have been carrying out some important business that would brook no interruption. If I had not heard from you in several days, I would have sent a crawler drone into the jungle to inquire as to your well-being.”
I explained my opinion of the ship’s logic.
“That is a strange designation,” said the ship. “While I have certain organic elements incorporated into my substructure and decentralized DNA computing components, I am not—in the strictest sense of the term—a biological organism. I have no digestive system. No need for elimination, other than the occasional waste gas and passenger effluvium. Therefore, I have no anus in either real or figurative terms. Therefore, I hardly believe I could qualify to be called an…”
“Shut up,” I said.
The slide takes less than fifteen minutes. I brake cautiously as the great wall of the K’un Lun Ridge approaches.
For the last few hundred meters, my shadow—and A. Bettik’s—is thrown ahead of us against the orange-glowing vertical expanse of rock and we become shadow puppets—two strange stick figures with flailing appendages as we work the riser rings to brake our descent and swing our legs to brace for landing. Then the pulley brake sound grows from a low hum to a loud groan as I slow fo
r the final approach to the landing ledge—a six-meter slab of stone with the back wall lined with padded zygoat fleece made brown and rotten by the weather.
I slide and bounce to a stop three meters from the wall, find my footing on the rock, and unclip my pulley and safety line with a speed born of practice. A. Bettik slides to a stop a moment later. Even with one hand, the android is infinitely more graceful than I on the cables; he uses up less than a meter of landing run-out.
We stand there a minute, watching the sun balance on the edge of Phari Ridge, the low light painting the ice-cone summit rising above the jet stream to the south of it. When we finish adjusting our harnesses and equipment racks to our liking, I say, “It’s going to be dark by the time we get into the Middle Kingdom.”
A. Bettik nods. “I would prefer to have the slideway behind us before full darkness falls, M. Endymion, but I think that this will not be the case.”
Even the thought of doing the slideway in the dark makes my scrotum tighten. I wonder idly if a male android has any similar physiological reaction. “Let’s get moving,” I say, setting off down the slab ledge at a trot.
We lost several hundred meters of altitude on the cableway, and we will have to make it up now. The ledge soon runs out—there are very few flat places on the peaks of the Mountains of Heaven—and our boots clatter as we jog down a bonsai-bamboo scaffold walkway that hangs from the cliff wall and juts out over nothing. There is no railing here. The evening winds are rising and I seal my therm jacket and zygoat-fleece chuba as we jog along. The heavy pack bounces on my back.
The jumar point is less than a klick north of the landing ledge. We pass no one on the walkway, but far across the cloud-stirred valley we can see the torches being lit on the Walk Way between Phari and Jo-kung. The scaffold way and maze of suspension bridges on that side of the Great Abyss is coming alive with people heading north—some undoubtedly headed for the Temple Hanging in Air to hear Aenea’s evening public session. I want to get there before them.