“You saw him. He was nearly eaten alive.”
I was suddenly stunned. What he was telling me. In a rush, I understood.
Breathless, a sound in the underbrush farther down the canal, my truss, come to take me home.
“The tree did that?”
“We’re their property,” he spat. “Why shouldn’t they do whatever they like?”
“Binam. Baby.”
“Don’t—” He drew away from me. “Your truss is coming.”
“I didn’t know.”
He was gasping now, looking up at the tree.
“Come with me.” Though I knew better. He never answered.
The truss pulled up nearby, the rider astride its back for the moment, legs under the stump-wings.
“Binam—”
The truss-rider asked if I was ready to leave and Binam drew back, frightened. “Good-bye,” he said, moisture leaking from his eyes.
“I’ll come back.”
He nodded his head.
“Binam. I swear.”
“Go,” he hissed, gesturing, turning away.
The truss rider, sensing disturbance, decided not to linger. I could think of nothing at all to say and only hung onto that basket as it began to bounce. I was trying to look backward, to watch him to the last moment. Instead, I saw Itek across the canal, staggering down from his tree again, and, chilled, I turned away.
Most genetic alterations can be reversed; the long process that makes a tree-sym can’t be. The meld that binds a sym to a tree is for life, with no release. Both these decisions were made by the Hormling and the Dirijhi long ago. The sym, once sold to a tree, is unable to feed itself or even to be apart from its host tree for very long. Unable even to change hosts. These are well known facts, though the language used to describe the relationship is rarely as blunt as to call a sym a slave. I had never thought about what kind of life the trees allowed. One thinks of the sym as a fresh-faced cherub living in paradise, the image of the sym recruitment poster, as facile as that.
So I headed home. Seeing Binam’s face.
Nine
Surely I was not the first person to witness this kind of event among the syms. But when I looked in the Hormling data mass, there was nothing to be found about protections for the syms, nothing about abuses on the part of the trees, nothing about the legal relationship at all. No documentation in the public domain, nothing in the harder-to-access private data, though this was easy enough to explain, in part. The Hormling stat system doesn’t extend to Greenwood. Nothing from the syms has ever been uploaded. The few people who visit Greenwood either record little about the experience or else the files are purged of any references unflattering to the trees; everything in the public database supports the same myth of Greenwood as paradise.
Even in Binam’s letters, when I read them again on the boat, not a hint. But I could see his face, hear the dread in his voice.
I worked part of this out on the crossing boat, heading toward the central city, though I had to wait to get to Dembut for access to the data mass. My pilot on the first leg of the trip was the usual brown-haired brown-eyed Aramenian, but when I changed boats to head south, the pilot was Erejhen, and by luck, the boat was half empty. In the night, late, I shared the remains of some whiskey in my bag, never once touched while I was with Binam, and the Erejhen grew relaxed and voluble, to the point that she leaned toward me, her big hand squeezing my shoulder. “My real name’s Trisvin. You can call me that.”
“Your real name’s not Kristen, or whatever you told me?”
“No. We never give our real names, not at first, it’s bad luck.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Irion.”
“No, really. Where do you come from?”
“I was born in Jarutan. But my parents come from Irion.”
“Sure they did.”
She laughed, grabbing the whiskey bottle from me. “Everybody has to come from somewhere. Where do you come from?”
I told her. I told her why I was visiting, that my brother was a sym; that’s all I said.
She looked at me for a long time. “I’m glad nobody can do that to me.”
The same genetic difference that prevents the Erejhen from cross-breeding with the Hormling makes them ineligible for most re-engineering, too. “Do what? Make you into a sym?”
She nodded. “I like the trees, don’t get me wrong. But I wouldn’t want to belong to one.”
Language I had heard, and not heard, all my life.
Ten
In Dembut, I looked up Tira, who had given me her access for the return journey, and we met for a drink in a vid parlor. I asked her, point blank, if she had ever seen her brother mistreated.
She blinked, and looked at me. “What do you mean?”
I described Itek, and what I had seen.
She shook her head. Something vehement in it. “I never saw anything at all like that.” Not a bright girl, I was taxing her. But I wanted to tell her. To ask, first, Did you know the trees do things to punish the syms? Infest their skin with parasites, refuse to feed them, burn them in the sun, alter their chemistries to make them docile; I had begun to imagine all sorts of possibilities. Did you know your brother might feel like a slave? But over us, beyond the walls of glass, was the shadow of Greenwood, and I bit my tongue, not certain whom to trust.
“Ask him if he’s happy, sometime,” I told her. We paid for the drinks and parted, though we’d planned to stay the night together.
It would be easy to forget the look on Binam’s face, to ignore his voice, what freedom do you need? To let this go and continue to negotiate with the Dirijhi. It’s clear to me that with their support, our movement could have the leverage to bring self-government here. But days ago in my dream, Binam held my hand and dropped the bread crumbs one by one, so maybe we would be found again, when we were children and lost; only a dream, but he’s still my brother.
Tomorrow, when I wake up, after copying this recording and sending it to the organization I work with, People for a Free Aramen, I’m booking passage on public putter to Jarutan, where I’ll buy a plane ticket to Byutiban. I’ll decide what to do next when I get there. Knowing something now that won’t let go of me. The issue is still freedom, but not mine.
I am face to face with the facts, and they frighten me, because they tell me that my whole life has been based on wrong assumptions.
We believe she won’t say no to us. If we’re wrong, we have other means. Something hidden in the forest, something that only begins with this issue, the way the syms are treated; something is hidden there because it’s the only place in the known worlds where the Prin don’t come. Maybe that’s too big a thought, maybe I’m only being dramatic. Maybe it’s only that I know, much as I have chafed in their presence, that the Prin would learn what was happening to the syms if they were allowed on Ajhevan. So is that the only reason to keep them out, or is there more?
Beyond the river, they are brooding, the dark shapes of trees against the night sky. I watch for a long time, remembering years ago, when my father sat me down at our kitchen table and told me that Binam was gone for good. Later, I would miss Binam, become angry about his “enrollment,” as they called it; later, I would raise all kinds of questions about what my parents had done; later, I would only call my father by his name, but that night when he sat back, having explained everything, a chill ran through me. “Are you going to sell me, too?” I asked.
“It’s a bounty, we didn’t sell him,” Kael waving her thick hand at me.
“Are you?” I asked Serith.
“No,” he said, but could not meet my eye. “Why don’t you go to bed?”
It was a long time before I believed him. Looking at the trees now, I feel that same chill, as if the recruiter is at the door with the contract. I lie awake long into the night, as I did that first night, as if I am still waiting for my own disappearance. When I sleep, I dream I am being lowered into the tank of liquid to begin the transformation,
the virus already in my blood, my breasts vanishing, my vagina drying to a flake, but I wake up whole, if covered with sweat, since for me it is only a dream.
ON K2 WITH
KANAKAREDES
DAN SIMMONS
The south Col of Everest, 26,200 feet
IF WE HADN’T DECIDED to acclimate ourselves for the K2 attempt by secretly climbing to the 8,000-meter mark on Everest, a stupid mountain that no self-respecting climber would go near anymore, they wouldn’t have caught us and we wouldn’t have been forced to make the real climb with an alien and the rest of it might not have happened. But we did and we were and it did.
What else is new? It’s as old as Chaos theory. The best-laid plans of mice and men and so forth and so on. As if you have to tell that to a climber.
Instead of heading directly for our Concordia Base Camp at the foot of K2, the three of us had used Gary’s nifty little stealth CMG to fly northeast into the Himalaya, straight to the bergeschrund of the Khumbu Glacier at 23,000 feet. Well, fly almost straight to the glacier; we had to zig and zag to stay under HK Syndicate radar and to avoid seeing or being seen by that stinking prefab pile of Japanese shit called the Everest Base Camp Hotel (rooms US $4,500 a night, not counting Himalayan access fee and CMG limo fare.)
We landed without being detected (or so we thought), made sure the vehicle was safely tucked away from the Icefall, seracs, and avalanche paths, left the CMG set in conceal mode, and started our Alpine-style conditioning climb to the South Col. The weather was brilliant. The conditions were perfect. We climbed brilliantly. It was the stupidest thing the three of us had ever done.
By late on the third afternoon we had reached the South Col, that narrow, miserable, windswept notch of ice and boulders wedged high between the shoulders of Lhotse and Everest. We activated our little smart tents, merged them, anchored them hard to ice-spumed rock, and keyed them white to keep them safe from prying eyes.
Even on a beautiful late-summer Himalayan evening such as the one we enjoyed that day, weather on the South Col sucks. Wind velocities average higher than those encountered near the summit of Everest. Any high-climber knows that when you see a stretch of relatively flat rock free of snow, it means hurricane winds. These arrived on schedule just about sunset of that third day. We hunkered down in the communal tent and made soup. Our plan was to spend two nights on the South Col and acclimate ourselves to the lower edge of the Death Zone before heading down and flying on to Concordia for our legal K2 climb. We had no intention of climbing higher than the South Col on Everest. Who would?
At least the view was less tawdry since the Syndicate cleaned up Everest and the South Col, flying off more than a century’s worth of expedition detritus—ancient fixed ropes, countless tent tatters, tons of frozen human excrement, about a million abandoned oxygen bottles, and a few hundred frozen corpses. Everest in the 20th Century had become the equivalent of the old Oregon Trail—everything that could be abandoned had been, including climbers’ dead friends.
Actually, the view that evening was rather good. The Col drops off to the east for about 4,000 feet into what used to be Tibet and falls even more sharply—about 7,000 feet—to the Western Cwm. That evening, the high ridges of Lhotse and the entire visible west side of Everest caught the rich, golden sunset for long minutes after the Col moved into shadow and then the temperature at our campsite dropped about a hundred degrees. There was not, as we outdoors people like to say, a cloud in the sky. The high peaks glowed in all of their 8,000-meter glory, snowfields burning orange in the light. Gary and Paul lay in the open door of the tent, still wearing their thermskin uppers, and watched the stars emerge and shake to the hurricane-wind as I fiddled and fussed with the stove to make soup. Life was good.
Suddenly an incredibly amplified voice bellowed, “You there in the tent!”
I almost pissed my thermskins. I did spill the soup, slopping it all over Paul’s sleeping bag.
“Fuck,” I said.
“God damn it,” said Gary, watching the black CMG—its UN markings glowing and powerful searchlights stabbing—settle gently onto small boulders not twenty feet from the tent.
“Busted,” said Paul.
Hillary Room, Top of the World, 29,035 ft.
Two years in an HK floating prison wouldn’t have been as degrading as being made to enter that revolving restaurant on the top of Everest. All three of us protested, Gary the loudest since he was the oldest and richest, but the four UN security guys in the CMG just cradled their standard issue Uzis and said nothing until the vehicle had docked in the restaurant airlock-garage and the pressure had been equalized. We stepped out reluctantly and followed other security guards deeper into the closed and darkened restaurant even more reluctantly. Our ears were going crazy. One minute we’d been camping at 26,000 feet and a few minutes later the pressure was the standard airline equivalent of 5,000 feet. It was painful, despite the UN CMG’s attempt to match pressures while it circled the dark hulk of Everest for ten minutes.
By the time we were led into the Hillary Room to the only lighted table in the place, we were angry and in pain.
“Sit down,” said Secretary of State Betty Willard Bright Moon.
We sat. There was no mistaking the tall, sharp-featured Blackfoot woman in the gray suit. Every pundit agreed that she was the single toughest and most interesting personality in the Cohen Administration, and the four U.S. Marines in combat garb standing in the shadows behind her only added to her already imposing sense of authority. The three of us sat, Gary closet to the dark window wall across from Secretary Bright Moon, Paul next to him, and me farthest away from the action. It was our usual climbing pattern.
On the expensive teak table in front of Secretary Bright Moon were three blue dossiers. I couldn’t read the tabs on them, but I had little doubt about their contents: Dossier #1, Gary Sheridan, 49, semi-retired, former CEO of SherPath International, multiple addresses around the world, made his first millions at age seventeen during the long lost and rarely lamented dot-com gold rush of yore, divorced (four times,) a man of many passions, the greatest of which was mountain climbing; Dossier #2, Paul Ando Hiraga, 28, ski bum, professional guide, one of the world’s best rock-and-ice climbers, unmarried; Dossier #3, Jake Richard Pettigrew, 36, Boulder, Colorado, married, three children, high-school math teacher, a good-to-average climber with only two 8,000-meter peaks bagged, both thanks to Gary and Paul, who invited him to join them on international climbs for the six previous years. Mr. Pettigrew still cannot believe his good luck at having a friend and patron bankroll his climbs, especially when both Gary and Paul were far better climbers with much more experience. But perhaps the dossiers told of how Jake, Paul, and Gary had become close friends as well as climbing partners over the past few years, friends who trusted each other to the point of trespassing on the Himalayan Preserve just to get acclimated for the climb of their lives.
Or perhaps the blue folders were just some State Department busywork that had nothing to do with us.
“What’s the idea of hauling us up here?” asked Gary, his voice controlled but tight. Very tight. “If the Hong Kong Syndicate wants to throw us in the slammer, fine, but you and the UN can’t just drag us somewhere against our will. We’re still U.S. citizens . . .”
“U.S. citizens who have broken HK Syndicate Preserve rules and UN World Historical Site laws,” snapped Secretary Bright Moon.
“We have a valid permit . . .” began Gary again. His forehead looked very red just below the line of his cropped, white hair.
“To climb K2, commencing three days from now,” said the Secretary of State. “Your climbing team won the HK lottery. We know. But that permit does not allow you to enter or overfly the Himalaya Preserve, nor to trespass on Mt. Everest.”
Paul glanced at me. I shook my head. I had no idea what was going on. We could have stolen Mt. Everest and it wouldn’t have brought Secretary Betty Willard Bright Moon flying around the world to sit in this darkened revolving restaurant just to
slap our wrists.
Gary shrugged and sat back. “So what do you want?”
Secretary Bright Moon opened the closest blue dossier and slid a photo across the polished teak toward us. We huddled to look at it.
“A bug?” said Gary.
“They prefer ’Listener,”’ said the Secretary of State. “But mantispid will do.”
“What do the bugs have to do with us?” said Gary.
“This particular bug wants to climb K2 with you in three days,” said Secretary Bright Moon. “And the government of the United States of America in cooperation with the Listener Liaison and Cooperation Council of the United Nations fully intend to have him . . . or her . . . do so.”
Paul’s jaw dropped. Gary clasped his hands behind his head and laughed. I just stared. Somehow I found my voice first.
“That’s impossible,” I said.
Secretary Betty Willard Bright Moon turned her flat, dark-eyed gaze on me. “Why?”
Normally the combination of that woman’s personality, her position, and those eyes would have stopped me cold, but this was too absurd to ignore. I just held out my hands, palms upward. Some things are too obvious to explain. “The bugs have six legs,” I said at last. “They look like they can hardly walk. We’re climbing the second tallest mountain on earth. And the most savage.”
Secretary Bright Moon did not blink. “The bu . . . the mantispids seem to get around their freehold in Antarctica quite well,” she said flatly. “And sometimes they walk on two legs.”
Paul snorted. Gary kept his hands clasped behind his head, his shoulders back, posture relaxed, but his eyes were flint. “I presume that if this bug climbed with us, that you’d hold us responsible for his safety and well-being,” he said.
The secretary’s head turned as smoothly as an owl’s. “You presume correctly,” she said. “That would be our first concern. The safety of the Listeners is always our first concern.”
Gary lowered his hands and shook his head. “Impossible. Above eight thousand meters, no one can help anyone.”
Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 Page 31