The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  Though it is spring, the winter-like low-pressure system over Olympus Mons is in place, drawing the wet winds up from the south, creating stable storm conditions on the south and east arcs of the escarpment. The snow is irregular, the winds constant. For the better part of a week the seven climbers left on the face struggle in the miserable conditions. One night at sunset radio hour they hear from Frances and the Sherpas, down at base camp. There is a lot of sand in Martian snow, and their voices are garbled by static, but the message is clear: they are down, they are safe, they are leaving for Alexandria to get Frances’s arm set. Roger catches on Eileen’s averted face an expression of pure relief, and realizes that her silence in the past few days has been a manifestation of worry. Now, looking pleased, she gives the remaining climbers their instructions for the next day, in a fresh, determined tone.

  * * *

  Into camp at night, cold and almost too tired to walk. Big loaded packs onto the various ledges and niches that serve for this particular camp. Hands shaking with hunger. This camp—number 13, Roger believes—is on a saddle between two ridges overlooking a deep, twisted chimney. “Just like the Devil’s Kitchen on Ben Nevis,” Arthur remarks when they get inside the tent. He eats with gusto. Roger shivers and puts his hands two centimeters above the glowing stove ring. Transferring from climbing mode to tent mode is a tricky business, and tonight Roger hasn’t done so well. At this altitude and in these winds, cold has become their most serious opponent. Overmitts off, and everything must be done immediately to get lightly gloved hands protected again as quickly as possible. Even if the rest of one’s body is warmed by exertion, the finger tips will freeze within a few minutes. Yet so many camp operations can be done easier with hands out of mitts. Frostnip is the frequent result, leaving the fingers tender, so that pulling up a rockface, or even buttoning or zipping one’s clothes, becomes a painful task. Frostnip blisters kill the skin, creating black patches that take a week or more to peel away. Now when they sit in the tents around the ruddy light of the stove, observing solemnly the progress of the cooking meal, they see across the pot faces blotched on cheek or nose: black skin peeling away to reveal new skin beneath.…

  * * *

  They climb onto a band of rotten rock, a tuff and lava composite that sometimes breaks off right in their hands. It takes Marie and Dougal two full days to find decent belay points for the hundred and fifty meters of the band, and every morning the rockfall is frequent and frightening. “It’s a bit like swimming up the thing, isn’t it?” Dougal comments. When they make it to the hard rock above, Eileen orders Dougal and Marie to the bottom of their “ladder,” to get some rest. Marie makes no complaint now; each day in the lead is an exhausting exercise, and Marie and Dougal are beat.

  Every night Eileen works out plans for the following day, revising them as conditions and the climbers’ strength and health change. The logistics are complicated, and each day the seven climbers shift partners and positions in the climb. Eileen scribbles in her notebook and jabbers on the radio every dusk, altering the schedules and changing her orders with almost every new bit of information she receives from the higher camps. Her method appears chaotic. Marie dubs her the “Mad Mahdi,” and scoffs at the constant change in plans; but she obeys them, and they work: every night they are scattered in two or three camps up and down the cliff, with everthing they need to survive the night, and get them higher the next day; and every new day they leap-frog up, pulling out the lowest camp, finding a place to establish a new high camp. The bitter winds continue. Everything is difficult. They lose track of camp numbers, and name them only high, middle, and low.

  * * *

  Naturally, three quarters of everyone’s work is portering—carrying heavy loads up the fixed ropes of routes already established. Roger begins to feel that he is surviving the rigors of the weather and altitude better than most of the rest; he can carry more faster, and even though most days end in that state where each step is in ten breaths’ agony, he finds he can take on more the next day. His digestion returns to normal, which is a blessing—a great physical pleasure, in fact. Perhaps improvement in this area masks the effects of altitude, or perhaps the altitude isn’t bothering Roger yet; it is certainly true that high altitude affects people differently, for reasons unconnected with basic strength—in fact, for reasons not yet fully understood.

  So Roger becomes the chief porter; Dougal calls him Roger Sherpa, and Arthur calls him Tenzing. The day’s challenge becomes to do all the myraid activities of the day as efficiently as possible, without frostnip, without excessive discomfort, hunger, thirst, or exhaustion. He hums to himself little snatches of music. His favorite is the eight-note phrase repeated by the basses near the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth: six notes down, two notes up, over and over and over. And each evening in the sleeping bag, warm, well-fed, and prone, is a little victory.

  * * *

  One night he wakes up to darkness and silence, fully awake in an instant, heart pounding. Confused, he thinks he may have dreamt of the Thank God Ledge. But then he notices the silence again and realizes his oxygen bottle has run out. It happens every week or so. He uncouples the bottle from the regulator, finds another bottle in the dark and clips it in place. When he tells Arthur about it next morning, Arthur laughs. “That happened to me a couple nights ago. I don’t think anybody could sleep through their oxygen bottle running out—I mean you wake up very awake, don’t you?”

  * * *

  In the hard rock band Roger porters up a pitch that leaves him whistling into his mask: the gullies have disappeared, above is a nearly vertical black wall, and breaking it is one lightning bolt crack, now marked by a fixed rope with slings attached, making it a sort of rope ladder. Fine for him, but the lead climb! “Must have been Dougal at it again.”

  And the next day he is out on the lead himself with Arthur, on a continuation of the same face. Leading is very unlike portering. Suddenly the dogged, repititious, almost mindless work of carrying loads is replaced by the anxious attentiveness of the lead. Arthur takes the first pitch and finishes it bubbling over with enthusiasm. Only his oxygen mask keeps him from carrying on a long conversation as Roger takes over the lead. Then Roger is up there himself, above the last belay on empty rock, looking for the best way. The lure of the lead returns, the pleasure of the problem solved fills him with energy. Fully back in lead mode, he collaborates with Arthur—who turns out to be an ingenious and resourceful technical climber—on the best storm day yet: five hundred meters of fixed rope, their entire supply, nailed up in one day. They hurry back down to camp and find Eileen and Marie still there, dumping food for the next few days.

  “By God are we a team!” Arthur cries as they describe the day’s work. “Eileen, you should put us together more often. Don’t you agree, Roger?”

  Roger grins at Eileen, nods. “That was fun.”

  Marie and Eileen leave for the camp below, and Arthur and Roger cook a big pot of stew and trade climbing stories, scores of them: and every one ends, “but that was nothing compared to today.”

  * * *

  Heavy snow returns and traps them in their tents, and it’s all they can do to keep the high camp supplied. “Bloody desperate out!” Marie complains, as if she can’t believe how bad it is. After one bad afternoon Stephan and Arthur are in the high camp, Eileen and Roger in the middle camp, and Hans, Marie, and Dougal in the low camp with all the supplies. The storm strikes Roger and Eileen’s tent so hard that they are considering bringing in some rocks to weight it down more. A buzz sounds from their radio and Eileen picks it up.

  “Eileen, this is Arthur. I’m afraid Stephan has come up too fast.”

  Eileen scowls fearfully, swears under her breath. Stephan has gone from low camp to the high one in two hard day’s climbing.

  “He’s very short of breath, and he’s spitting up bloody spit. And talking like a madman.”

  “I’m okay!” Stephan shouts through the static. “I�
��m fine!”

  “Shut up! You’re not fine! Eileen, did you hear that? I’m afraid he’s got edema.”

  “Yeah,” Eileen says. “Has he got a headache?”

  “No. It’s just his lungs right now. I think. Shut up! I can hear his chest bubbling, you know.”

  “Yeah. Pulse up?”

  “Pulse weak and rapid, yeah.”

  “Damn.” Eileen looks over at Roger. “Put him on maximum oxygen.”

  “I already have. Still…”

  “I know. We’ve got to get him down.”

  “I’m okay!”

  “Yeah,” Arthur says. “He needs to come down, at least to your camp, maybe lower.”

  “Damn it,” Eileen exclaims when off the radio. “I moved him up too fast.”

  An hour later—calls made below, the whole group in action—Roger and Eileen are out in the storm again, in the dark, their helmet headlights showing them only a portion of the snowfall. They cannot afford to wait until morning—pulmonary edema can be quickly fatal, and the best treatment by far is to get the victim lower, where his lungs can clear out the excess water. Even a small drop in altitude can make a dramatic difference. So off they go; Roger takes the lead and bashes ice from the rope, jumars up, scrabbles over the rock blindly with his crampon-tips to get a purchase in the snow and ice. It is bitterly cold, and his goggles allow the cold onto his eyes. They reach the bottom of the blank wall pitch that so impressed Roger, and the going is treacherous. He wonders how they will get Stephen down it. The fixed rope is the only thing making the ascent possible, but it does less and less to aid them as ice coats it and the rock face. Wind hammers them, and Roger has a sudden acute sensation of the empty space behind them. The headlight beams reveal only swirling snow. Fear adds its own kind of chill to the mix.…

  By the time they reach high camp Stephan is quite ill. No more protests from him. “I don’t know how we’ll get him down,” Arthur says anxiously. “I gave him a small shot of morphine to get the peripheral veins to start dilating.”

  “Good. We’ll just have to truss him into a harness and lower him.”

  “Easier said than done, in this stuff.”

  Stephan is barely conscious, coughing and hacking with every breath. Pulmonary edema fills the lungs with water; unless the process is reversed, he will drown. Just getting him into the sling (another function of the little wall tents) is hard work. Then outside again—struck by the wind—and to the fixed ropes. Roger descends first, Eileen and Arthur lower Stephan using a power reel, and Roger collects him like a large bundle of laundry. After standing him upright and knocking the frozen spittle from the bottom of his mask, Roger waits for the other two, and when they arrive he starts down again. The descent seems endless, and everyone gets dangerously cold. Windblown snow, the rock face, omnipresent cold: nothing else in the world. At the end of one drop Roger cannot undo the knot at the end of his belay line, to send it back up for Stephan. For fifteen minutes he struggles with the frozen knot, which resembles a wet iron pretzel. Nothing to cut it off with, either. For a while it seems they will all freeze because he can’t untie a knot. Finally he takes his climbing gloves off and pulls at the thing with his bare fingers until it comes loose.

  Eventually they arrive at the lower camp, where Hans and Dougal are waiting with a medical kit. Stephan is zipped into a sleeping bag, and given a diuretic and some more morphine. Rest and the drop in altitude should see him back to health, although at the moment his skin is blue and his breathing ragged: no guarantees. He could die—a man who might live a thousand years—and suddenly their whole enterprise seems crazy. His coughs sound weak behind the oxygen mask, which hisses madly on maximum flow.

  “He should be okay,” Hans pronounces. “Won’t know for sure for several hours.”

  But there they are—seven people in two wall tents. “We’ll go back up,” Eileen says, looking to Roger. He nods.

  * * *

  And they go back out again. The swirl of white snow in their headlights, the buffets of wind … they are tired, and progress is slow. Roger slips once and the jumars don’t catch on the icy rope for about three meters, where they suddenly catch and test his harness, and the piton above. A fall! The spurt of fear gives him a second wind. Stubbornly he decides that much of his difficulty is mental. It’s dark and windy, but really the only difference between this and his daytime climbs during the last week is the cold, and the fact that he can’t see much. But the helmet lamps do allow him to see—he is at the center of a shifting white sphere, and the rock he must work on is revealed. It is covered with a sheet of ice and impacted snow, and where the ice is clear it gleams in the light like glass laid over the black rock beneath. Crampons are great in this—the sharp front points stick in the snow and ice firmly, and the only problem is the brittle black glass that will break away from the points in big jagged sheets. Even black ice can be distinguished in the bright bluish gleam of the lights, so the work is quite possible. Look at it as just another climb, he urges himself, meanwhile kicking like a maniac with his left foot to spike clear a crack where he can nail in another piton to replace a bad hold. The dizzying freeness of a pull over an outcropping; the long reach up for a solid knob: he becomes aware of the work as a sort of game, a set of problems to be solved despite cold or thirst or fatigue (his hands are beginning to tire from the long night’s hauling, so that each hold hurts). Seen this way, it all changes. Now the wind is an opponent to be beaten, but also to be respected. The same of course is true of the rock, his principal opponent—and this a daunting one, an opponent to challenge him to his utmost performance. He kicks into a slope of hard snow and ascends rapidly.

  He looks down as Eileen kicks up the slope: quick reminder of the stakes of this game. The light on the top of her helmet makes her look like a night insect, or a deep sea fish. She reaches him quickly; one long gloved hand over the wall’s top, and she joins him with a smooth contraction of the bicep. Strong woman, Roger thinks, but decides to take another lead anyway. He is in a mood now where he doubts anyone but Dougal could lead as fast.

  Up through the murk they climb.

  * * *

  An odd point is that the two climbers can scarcely communicate. Roger “hears” Eileen through varieties of tugging on the rope linking them. If he takes too long to study a difficult spot above, he feels a mild interrogatory tug on the rope. Two tugs when Roger is belaying means she’s on her way up. Very taught belaying betrays her belief that he is in a difficult section. So communication by rope can be fairly complex and subtle. But aside from it, and the infrequent shout with the mask pulled up to one side (which includes the punishment of a face full of spindrift) they are isolated. Mute partners. The exchange of lead goes well—one passes the other with a wave—the belay is ready. Up Eileen goes. Roger watches and holds the belay taut. Little time for contemplating their situation, thankfully; but while taking a rest on crampon points in steps chopped out with his ice axe, Roger feels acutely the thereness of his position, cut off from past or future, irrevocably in this moment, on this cliff face that drops away bottomlessly, extends up forever. Unless he climbs well, there will never be any other reality.

  * * *

  Then they reach a pitch where the fixed rope has been cut in the middle. Falling rock or ice has shaved it off. A bad sign. Now Roger must climb a ropeless pitch, hammering in pitons on his way to protect himself. Every meter above the last belay is two meters fall.…

  Roger never expected this hard a climb, and adrenaline banishes his exhaustion. He studies the first small section of a pitch that he knows is ten or twelve meters long, invisible in the dark snow flurries above. Probably Marie or Dougal climbed this crack the first time. He discovers that the crack just gives him room for his hands. Almost a vertical crack for a while, with steps cut into the ice. Up he creeps, crab-like and sure-footed. Now the crack widens and the ice is too far back in it to be of use—but the cramponed boots can be stuck in the crack and turned sideways, to stick tenuou
sly into the thin ice coating the crack’s interior. One creates one’s own staircase, mostly using the tension of the twisted crampons. Now the crack abruptly closes and he has to look around, ah, there, a horizontal crack holding the empty piton. Very good—he hooks into it and is protected thus far. Perhaps the next piton is up this rampway to the right? Clawing to find the slight indentations that pass for handholds here, crouching to lean up the ramp in a tricky walk—he wonders about the crampons here … ah. The next piton, right at eye level. Perfect. And then an area lined with horizonal strata about a meter in thickness, making a steep—a very steep—ladder.

  * * *

  And at the top of that pitch they find the high camp tent, crushed under a load of snow. Avalanche. One corner of the tent flaps miserably.

  Eileen comes up and surveys the damage in the double glare of their two headlamps. She points at the snow, makes a digging motion. The snow is so cold that it can’t bind together—moving it is like kicking coarse sand. They get to work, having no other choice. Eventually the tent is free, and as an added benefit they are warmed as well, although Roger feels he can barely move. The tent’s poles have been bent and some broken, and splints must be tied on before the tent can be redeployed. Roger kicks snow and ice chunks around the perimeter of the tent, until it is “certifiably bombproof,” as the leads would say. Except if another avalanche hits it … something they can’t afford to think about, as they can’t move the camp anywhere else. They simply have to risk it. Inside, they drop their packs and start the stove and put a pot of ice on. Then crampons off, and into sleeping bags. With the bags around them up to the waist, they can start sorting out the mess. There is spindrift on everything, but unless it gets right next to the stove it will not melt. Digging in the jumbled piles of gear for a packet of stew, Roger feels again how tired his body is. Oxygen masks off, so they can drink. “That was quite an excursion.” Raging thirst. They laugh with relief. He brushes an unused pot with his bare hand, guaranteeing a frostnip blister. Eileen calculates the chance of another avalanche without trepidation: “… so if the wind stays high enough we should be okay.” They discuss Stephan, and sniff like hunting dogs at the first scent of the stew. Eileen digs out the radio and calls down to the low camp. Stephan is sleeping, apparently without discomfort. “Morphine will do that,” Eileen says. They wolf down their meal in a few minutes.