by John Barnes
"Giraut it's B-Betsy s-sorry I c-c-can't talk w-well f-fighting Valerie for control of her voice." The last words came out in a rush. "Trying to calm her. Uh, I think Anna is d-dead, looks l-like a broken neck. She wasn't belted in got thr-thr-thrown against the r-roof. I-we're the only ones not hurt b-bad m-media people were in b-back sounded like stuff back there shifted can't open the door there too much weight against it the other voice you can h-hear is P-Paul and I think his b-b-b-b—" There was a long, raspy breath, a sound like an asthmatic seizure, and when Betsy spoke again her command of Valerie's voice was complete. "Giraut, Paul's back is broken, maybe a kidney ruptured, certainly some internal injuries, he's in a lot of pain. I think Valerie has passed out or something, I seem to be alone in the body right now. I've gotten out the first-aid kit and put a neurostat on Paul, and the foam is forming around him right now to hold him still. We have power here and the cabin's warm."
"Keep talking, Betsy," I said, "and try to hang onto Valerie's body. I'm going to need your help."
Margaret had returned and had been listening.
"Get the rappelling gear from the tail-end cat," I told her. "I'm going to have to go down there. Bring up the cat to about here; looks like it's solid almost to the edge, and I'm going to need something to work the belay from."
Betsy's voice broke in again. "Giraut, I'm sorry, I've checked with the neuro-read, and Anna is really dead. I think besides breaking her neck the impact fractured her skull. And there's still no movement or noise from the rear cabin."
"How's Paul?" I asked. Deu, deu, all we had to do was get him to any modern hospital and they could have him on his feet in a week, but if he stayed here in that condition he could just as easily die—
"Blood pressure is steady but low now. Maybe just shock; the instruments don't show hemorrhage. I c-can feel Valerie stirring now; I'll t-try to keep her calm—I'm s-sorry but if I try to use neural pacifiers I might—"
"Don't even think about that," I said. "You could wipe your psypyx by accident. You're just as important as anyone else, Betsy; Valerie will just have to deal with the situation."
Back home I wouldn't have even bothered with the rappel equipment—it would have been easy enough to get down there with simple threepoint climbing, and that's what I did most of the way, but as the only experienced climber in the party, I was taking no chances. It took me a good ten minutes to reach the cat, all the same, and by the time I did Valerie was back in charge of the body, sitting on the ceiling of the upside-down cat sobbing and being completely useless. I could see her in there, but she didn't even move to help when I tried to open the outer heatlock door and found I couldn't.
The sun had probably never penetrated here, and it was unbelievably cold now that I was no longer doing hard physical work; when I got home, I promised myself, I would spend the first week sleeping in the sand on the beach by day, then taking the hottest showers I could bear, and then sleeping under a down comforter...
I had just worked up the meal that Margaret and I would order in Pertz's, and a few details about the backrubs we'd give each other in front of the fire in my parents' guest house, when they finally managed to get the line lowered to where I could grab it. Right now I was wishing for Johan and Rufeu and a dozen others like them from the old club.
Once I had the line, though, it was pretty simple; they passed me down the drilling equipment and I got a good, secure powered zipline running between me and them. Margaret came down, and a couple of others, with power tools, and shortly we had Valerie out of there and riding back up; from the way she shut her eyes and clutched herself into the bosun's chair, she was going to have a prize case of acrophobia for a while, but I suppose she was entitled.
Paul seemed to be stable, and in a real pinch I suppose we could have moved him—the foam had hardened and now you'd have needed a power saw to budge his shattered spine one millimeter—but until there was something better up there than we had down here, there was no reason to take chances on injuries that our limited equipment couldn't spot.
The biggest nightmare by far was the two media people, who turned out to be dead when we finally got to them; we had all gotten very lax about securing gear, and a couple of tonnes of their stuff had landed on top of them, crushing them horribly.
By the time Dark was falling, we had a couple of people sitting with Paul in case he might wake up, Valerie/Betsy under a chemical sedative, Anna and the media people lay outside the cat so that the cold could preserve their bodies— and no response at all from Utilitopia. Not even "channel unavailable." The gear for reaching the secret receiving stations was hopeless hash; Prescott Diligence, and one or two others, were slowly picking through the mess, trying to figure out what kind of transmitter we might be able to rig.
"We have plenty of power," I pointed out to Prescott as he, I, and Margaret huddled in the back of our cat that night. "And Utilitopia still uses broadcast for a lot of voice channels. Why can't we just rig up a radio transmitter and scream for help on some frequency close to a commercial station, so that people scanning through the voice frequencies are bound to pick it up."
"Because Nansen doesn't have a Heaviside layer worth speaking of," Prescott said. "Radio won't go over the horizon."
It took a long moment for that to sink in. "So you mean ... we can't talk to them at all?"
"It looks like we're right between places where we could hail synchronous satellites," he said, with a coldness in his voice that took me a moment to place; he had been brooding about this for hours and would rather have talked about anything else. "The mountains block a lot of angles and the whole planet really only has two clusters of satellites, both over on the other side, above Utilitopia and above Novarkhangel. If we sent one cat back about one Light's journey or so, they might be able to raise one of the satellites, but chances are they'd have to go farther if they wanted to get it for sure."
I doubt anyone slept that night, but we all pretended to for each other's sake. I heard Prescott rattling and banging around in the radio gear and parts all night, and suspected he might be disturbing people in the narrow confines of the cat, but I didn't have the heart to tell him to stop.
Next morning I was glad I hadn't. He'd come up with a simple stunt that at least offered some hope. The moon was big and a good radio reflector; we knew our position, and Utilitopia's position, and we had a couple of dish antennas available. With a string of amplifiers it was possible to put out a reasonably high-powered signal to bounce off the moon as it passed through the right part of the sky every ten hours or so, on a frequency where anyone scanning between the weather and the news would be bound to run into it. The windows during which the technique would work were around twenty minutes long; shortly we had a five-minute recording giving all the necessary information put together, arid a robot detailed to keep our calls for help going out. Allowing for bureaucratic inertia, within a few hours of the first message they should get an antenna swung around to us, or a temporary satellite up, so that we could work out what would have to be done.
I had too much time to think while this was going on. Whatever I'd thought of her work, Anna Terwilliger had been these people's poet, and now she was lying under a tarp next to the smashed cat, frozen stiff. And she had been both popular and on the right side.
It was not just through dueling that the traditional Occitan culture had wasted lives. Until the springer and Central Rescue, hikers and climbers, skimmer pilots and sailplaners, had died in astonishing numbers, now that I thought of it. Serra Valor was a crowded place for a culture with a deliberately small population and only a few centuries of existence; we were the culture of the Canso de Fis de Jovent because we slaughtered our young, not merely by exposing them to terrible dangers, but also by teaching them to love those dangers, to seek after them, to hold themselves cheap if they did not constantly risk throwing themselves away.
Had I brought that idea here, like a virus?
I knew that if I voiced the idea around any of my Caled
on friends they would tell me no, never, not at all ... and I would still wonder. I wished desperately for some offworlder, Aimeric or Bieris, or even Garsenda or Ambassador Shan, to talk the idea over with.
At last the time came for the signal. I had nothing to do with it; Prescott played the recorded message six times through, beginning early and ending late in case of errors in calculation or navigation, and the bright white moon hung in the east just as it always had, its light making the snow and ice glow and turning the folds and crevices of the raw mountains into bottomless black pools.
I carried crates and tried not to think too much about it. In case bouncing the radio signal didn't work, I had started the process of clearing out one of the three remaining cats so that it could make a dash—well, so it could hurry—down to the flat country where we could com Utilitopia. Doing that without a backup cat following would mean running a great deal of danger, we knew now.
I had volunteered to drive it as automatically as I breathed or walked, and thought grimly that there was this to be said for the Occitan tradition—we did not let our friends run our risks for us, and however enseingnamen might lead us into foolishness, once there it kept us from behaving like fools.
The hours crept by, Mufrid came up in its fiery yellow glory, a sleet storm battered the huddled cats and drove everyone inside, and the time neared for the next transmission. There was no response from Utilitopia.
"It could be the radio didn't work as I thought it did," Prescott said, huddled with me and Margaret, his skin a translucent white against the blazing red of his hair, dark circles under his eyes. He gulped coffee and added, "The sensors did pick it up at the right strength about two hundred meters away, but all that means is we have the right sidelobes, not that the main signal was doing what we wanted. We're going to try to get a sensor up on an extensible pole right into the main signal path this time. But it's past the middle of Second Light in Utilitopia—there won't be many people listening— the last time was much more likely to turn something up."
"You're doing great work," Margaret said. "Once you've got it established that the main signal is doing what it should, you're going to get some rest. And no, you aren't going with Giraut in the cat, and neither am I, though we'd both like to. You've got to tend the radio and somebody's got to be in some kind of charge here."
Prescott nodded gloomily. "What I'm afraid of is that we're getting through loud and clear, and that there've been big changes in Utilitopia. That they're just going to leave us out here because we don't matter anymore. If we still had the secret com and tried to contact the Center, I wonder who would answer?"
"Thorwald," I said firmly, because Prescott had voiced my own fears.
As he began transmitting, this time in bright daylight, the sun and moon came out together and two overlapping rainbows formed in the canyon above usto the west, a vividly bright one from the sun and a ghostly pale one from the blazing sliver of the moon. I stood there on the stony ledge, yet another crate of supplies straining at my arms, looking around at the immense walls of rock and ice, at the torn and battered cat below us, and at our little party, currently all outdoors shaking out bedding and trying to let enough fresh air into the two remaining cats to make them smell marginally better, and for the first time since I'd been sixteen stanyears old such a scene did not summon one line of poetry or measure of music to my mind.
SEVEN
Again, the message had brought no response after some hours, though Prescott said the main signal was even stronger than he had planned for it to be. The cat that was to go for help was almost ready, but I was so sleepy I was in no shape to drive, and in any case it made more sense to depart right at the beginning of the next Light, especially since the Moon would be waxing at the beginning of the Dark that would follow, which would extend our light by about two hours before it set in the east. So I lay down to try to get ten badly needed hours of sleep, and Susan and Robert, two of our surviving alternate drivers, did the same, though with luck we'd be down out of the mountains before either of them needed to take over.
I actually got seven hours, and then woke unable to sleep any more. Margaret was sound asleep beside me, and must have gotten into the bunk we were sharing sometime fairly recently, so I didn't disturb her, but got up and dressed and went outside for air and thought.
There were lights on in the wrecked cat, so I took the zipline down there and relieved Petra, who was sitting up with Paul. She seemed grateful, which was not surprising since the two of them had never liked each other and now that Paul had recovered consciousness, he tended to wake at odd hours and to be alternately truculent and pathetically dependent. Part of the problem was that the pain was leaking through the neurostat unpredictably, often as a ferocious itching in the immobilized parts of his body.
He was asleep when I got there but woke up shortly after, in much better spirits than I had seen him in the last couple of days. For a while we just talked of things in Utilitopia, and what meals he would order when he got to the hospital and which ones we'd have to smuggle in to him, and he joked a lot about the damage to the image of his business that this was going to cause. "Maybe I should let someone else launch the expedition and outfitting business, and instead start Paul Parton's Remote Springer Ambulance Service."
"It really might not be a bad idea," I said. "But you Caledons aren't very superstitious, and most of you won't dismiss the whole idea because of one freak accident no matter how bad it was. I don't think the idea of these trips is gone forever, and as soon as you get ambulance service and a reliable com link available, you'll be able to start running regular tours. And I'm really glad you all made psypyx recordings just before we left. With a little luck Anna will have nothing more than what feels like mild amnesia, and she'll be able to look at a lot of recordings of her last few days so that the gap will be minimal."
He grunted; Paul was used to punctuating everything he said with emphatic head motions, and every time he tried he was reminded that he was now locked in the hardened support foam. "If her psypyx takes. I've never seen anything like Valerie and Betsy before." We had slowly and carefully re-rigged him into a reclined sitting position with appropriate spaces for bodily functions, but we hadn't set him up with any way to nod or shake his head, and it frustrated him as surely as it would an Occitan asked to talk with his hands tied down.
"Er—Giraut."
"I'm right here."
"Sorry to do this while you're here, but I really have to urn, defecate. At least that's usually what it means when it feels like the backs of my shins have severe athlete's foot."
"Fine—not a problem. Just a half second—" I moved a waiting bucket under the hole in his chair. "Coming up now."
What made it humiliating for Paul was that there was a limited override on the neurostat that let us control those functions, leaving fewer places for pain to leak through, but also giving him the odd situation of being unable to go unless someone pulled a switch for him. We usually did it a couple of times per day whether he felt the need or not; it was probably a good sign that he could feel the need in any form.
The process was not at all one of fine control. When I threw the switch he emptied completely and violently, and I was glad that he could only feel a pale ghost of the experience. The smell was overpowering as well. Probably we hadn't been giving him enough peristalsis, so I made a note and cranked that up a notch or two. "I'll drain your bladder, now, too, if it will make you more comfortable," I said.
"Sure."
I slipped the drain tube over his penis and turned on the gentle suction, then turned back to the neurostat's controls.
"Think you could get that machine to give Val lessons?" he asked.
It was so unexpected that I all but fell over laughing, then said, "It might be easier to teach Betsy, and let Valerie profit by her experience."
He snorted agreement. "Unfortunately they have a deal. Valerie runs the body with me, Betsy with everyone else." Rumor had it that that second part w
asn't true at all, but I saw no reason to mention that to Paul, "And they both claim they never peek. Okay, Giraut, let 'er rip." _ I tripped the switch and an astonishing quantity of urine vanished up the tube; he must have really been sucking down a lot from his drinking tube. I refilled the reservoir there while he finished—"At the moment I seem to be mostly a device for contaminating water," he commented—and then when he was done set about the job of cleaning up.
A little bit from the bucket went into the medkit's stool analyzer, and the rest I flushed down the toilet we'd taken from the now upside-down water closet and gotten working again; there was a soft splashing as the water recycled, and the quiet thud of the sanitized block dropping into the hopper.
Of course what he had really been embarrassed about, other perhaps than my having to handle his penis, was that I now had to douche out his rectum and clean his anus. It wasn't such a terrible job, really, but I could imagine how he must feel about it. As I was doing it—the angle was very awkward, so I ended up with my face closer to it than either of us might have chosen—Paul spoke again. "Giraut?"
"Right here, companhon."
"I'm really glad you came to Caledony. Even with everything that's happened." I thought for a while that he had fallen asleep after saying that, and finished wiping and cleaning and started to dry him off, but then he said, "We were headed for much worse things than this. Saltini would have taken over eventually and when he did there'd have been no escape, not even any thought of resistance. Most of us would have just killed ourselves as unfit." He gave a long sigh. "God, that's better. You wouldn't think ordinary discomfort could leak through the neurostat so much more than the real pain, but it does. You'll see, anyway. Anna will come right back from the psypyx, and they'll have me up and walking in no time."
I wasn't sure about the former, and if we didn't get help soon there might be degeneration so that his spine simply wouldn't regrow as well as it should, but I didn't argue with him. I finished drying him off carefully.