by M M Buckner
After I introduced them, Dr. M. linked her arm in Jin’s and led him off into a corner. They talked for a solid hour. I saw Judith Merida’s large, scarlet mouth working nonstop. I saw them laugh and flirt with each other, and when I looked again, they’d grown solemn and strangely intense. This time, Merida hadn’t scared off her prey. But I couldn’t eavesdrop. I had work to do.
Luc and I were fitting the clients in surfsuits and helmets and boots, showing them how to seal the gaskets, and answering their questions—always the same questions. Luc was good with people. Cher petit Luc. Milk white, dimple-cheeked, he looked like a skinny cherub. Only seventeen, already he knew how to say the right thing.
“Ah oui, it’s possible to survive on the surface without a suit, but only for a little while, and you must get the therapy right away. Out, monsieur, the winds can lift you many kilometers into the sky. That is why we use a safety tether. Ah oui, we’ve done this before.” Luc spoke Net English with a quaint Fragñol accent that everyone adored. Me, I’d worked hard to lose my Euro twang. Ironic, huh.
When everyone else had been dealt with, I called Jin by name. “Mr. Sura. It’s time for your fitting.”
Jin lifted his shapely dark head and glanced my way with an air of distraction. So patently aristo. Mes dieux, but he set me on fire.
I said, “Luc, you take care of Mr. Sura.” And I stalked out to the toilet.
The truth was, Jin Sura embarrassed me. He made me conscious of my broken fingernails. We were the same age, he and I, but in his twenty-five years, he’d lived like a prince, whereas I’d had to claw and fight just to eat. Now here he was, glittering with high Com polish, a movie star no less, whereas I bad nothing to show but a pile of used gear and an overabundance of cheekiness. He made me feel raw.
Luc was measuring him for boots when I returned. Watching them, I drew myself a glass of beer and drank most of it—Rennie’s Bar was strictly self-serve. Jin shifted in his seat and gave me another view of his perfect profile. Then he glanced at me as if he were seeing my face for the first time. I could tell he was noticing the five-point star tattooed around my left eye like a violet bruise.
He said, “May I ask a question?”
I shrugged and drained my glass.
“Will we see the carvings at Belahan?” He spoke Net English with the soft sibilant accent of the Pacific Rim.
His question caught me off guard, so I didn’t answer at once. Hardly anyone knew about those ancient icons carved in the Javanese rocks. That site had been flooded decades ago. I enjoyed browsing the history of surface places, but few people did that anymore.
He went on in what I took to be a patronizing tone. “The Belahan carvings date back to the eleventh century. That’s before global warming, before the sea level rose. There was once a coastal kingdom. It could have been paradise—”
“No,” I interrupted him. “In the first place, that’s in Java. We’re going to Irian Jaya, which is a completely different island. In the second place, those carvings are way underwater.”
“I thought perhaps a side trip?” He slipped his elegant foot into the boot Luc held. “I’d be willing to pay.”
“That’s a custom-order tour. You’d need insulated dive gear. That ocean is hot. If you wanted that kind of trip, you should have said so earlier.”
Luc grimaced at me and made signs that I should take Jin’s offer. But I grimaced back and shook my head. I wasn’t in the mood.
“Have you seen the carvings yourself?” Jin asked, in that damned polite tone.
“No.” I took another swallow but found my glass empty.
“That’s good,” he said to Luc, who had just finished tightening his boots.
I said, “Walk around, Mr. Sura. Make sure. We don’t want you getting blisters.”
Jin got up and gracefully stamped around in the surf boots. He glanced at me with that melancholy smile. “The inscriptions commemorate one of my ancestors. I wanted to see them firsthand. It’s a whimsical idea, I know. As if that would change anything.”
With a slight shrug, he crossed to the bar where I was standing and lifted the beer nozzle and refilled my glass. “Here’s to making the right choices, Mademoiselle Sauvage.” He flashed his dazzling white teeth and winked at me. Then he took my glass and put his lips just where mine had been, and he drank till the glass was empty.
2
Puncak Jaya
THE NEXT DAY, we flew to our drop point in a chartered plasma jump-jet. About midmorning, our pilot—Rebel Jeanne Sabat—touched down on a narrow, irregular rock shelf. It was maybe twenty meters wide, and it stuck out halfway down a palisade on Mt. Puncak Jaya’s southern face. The shelf had a high cliff on one side and a sheer drop-off on the other. I’d found that the cliffs angle usually protected this shelf from the vicious Sudirman wind shears, so I called it Tranquility Base. We’d used it before.
Our six guests trooped out of the small fuselage. They were stiff and sullen. Even though we’d outfitted them in the newest lightweight gear, they moved awkwardly. Except for Jin Sura—naturellement, he moved like a dancer. The giddy young widow from Greenland.Com slipped and fell and started singing the most eloquent lullaby of curses. Jin helped her up.
The wind was flinging sheets of grit along our shelf, but far out on the horizon, the sun had turned the smog blanket a lustrous amber. Wisps of smoky dust stirred up in delicate vortexes and cast blue shadows over the denser clouds below. To the south, a herd of rose-colored thunderheads seemed to be galloping toward us in slow motion. I had to stop and stare.
As usual, Luc and I off-loaded the baggage while the clients toddled around aimlessly. We had to hustle because Rebel Jeanne Sabat was antsy to lift off. Rebel Jeanne survived on amphetamines. She never could settle down. We had arranged that Rebel Jeanne would return to this spot in exactly one week to pick us up.
The guests wore helmets equipped with interference-resistant, line-of-sight radios. I ordered everyone to stay close. Wouldn’t you know, the bodybuilder couple dug out their little geology hammers and started wandering down the shelf, chipping at rocks. Before I could yell an order, Luc touched my arm. I saw him wink at me through his faceplate.
“Relax, ma chérie. I take care of those two.”
Petit Luc. That kid had more savvy about handling people than I ever would. I nodded, and he sauntered off to nursemaid the amateur geologists.
Rebel Jeanne doesn’t handle baggage, so I had to finish offloading the heavy cases by myself. Jin offered to help, but I fussed and said he was getting in my way. He stepped back obediently.
“This is Puncak Jaya, yes? Irian Jaya’s tallest mountain?” he asked. “Mademoiselle Sauvage—or may I call you Jolie?”
“Whatever.”
“Imagine, Jolie, one short century ago, this mountain rose over five kilometers above sea level. What’s the altitude now? It’s seventy meters less I think.”
He sounded like some balmy narrator on the History Channel. “Puncak Jaya’s still plenty high,” I grunted, heaving a crate out of the jet’s cargo hold.
“Yes, it’s lovely,” he said. “I can’t decide whether to be glad about global warming or disappointed. We’ve gained and lost, yes? It’s hard to know which is better. This island used to be the second largest on the planet, second only to Greenland. Now it’s mostly underwater.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Perhaps you know,” he crooned on in that professorial tone, “this island was home to the mythical Bird of Paradise, a creature who spent its entire life flying through the air because it was born without feet.”
“That I didn’t know.” I had to grin despite myself. “You’ve done your homework, Mr. Sura. A-plus. Now why don’t you go gaze at the view for a while. Give my other guests a history lesson. I don’t want one of these crates to land on your toe by accident.”
Maybe fifteen minutes later, right after Rebel Jeanne blasted off, I realized Luc and the amateur geologists had disappeared around an outcropping at the far end of the
shelf. And the winds were picking up. This did not improve my mood.
Whenever I led tour groups back then, I wore a full-function miniature Net node strapped to my left forearm. It was hardened against solar radiation, and its beam could find a Net satellite from anywhere on the planet. On my trips, having a dependable link to the Net was mandatory. So I ripped back the cover flap on my sleeve, activated the cybernails in my right glove, and started tapping the small screen. On Earth’s open surface, you can’t use voice commands. You have to tap. Anyway, I patched a signal through the Net to Luc’s helmet radio to let him know I was trying to reach him. Luc had a Net node on his wrist, too, so he could tap a reply. I signaled for a full minute, but Luc didn’t respond. Hell.
“Are they in trouble?” Jin surprised me. He was standing really close. I realized he was touching his helmet to mine so he didn’t have to speak through the radio. He’d had the foresight not to disturb the other guests. That should have softened my opinion of him, but I was agitated.
I chinned the radio switch in my helmet. “Get on the tether now! Everyone! Now!”
Then I realized I hadn’t unpacked the tether yet, so I did that. Jin helped me shake out the tangles. All the time, I kept checking my Net node screen for Luc’s reply. A simple malfunction, it had to be. I unclipped the piton gun from my belt and fired titanium spikes into the rock cliff, then secured the tether in place with carabiners.
“Over here,” I motioned impatiently. My Net screen was still not showing Luc’s reply, and the winds were getting stiffer, blowing up billows of smog from below. I switched to meta-vision. That’s the adaptive optics that use laser and infrared tomography and magnetic resonance plus a few other tricks to help our feeble human eyes penetrate the smog. Through my metavisor, I saw Jin helping the other guests clip their carabiners to the tether.
“You too!” I yelled.
“What should we do first, secure the gear or break out the safety beacon?” Jin pointed to where the wind was rolling an air cylinder down the rocky shelf.
“I know my job!” I just barely managed not to spit
I clipped Jin to the tether, then chased the cylinder down. We would need that air. Next, I wrestled the big cargo net out of its bag and flung it over the pile of cases. I’m plenty strong for my size. Gusts were toying with some of the lighter items, so I had to run around kicking them under the net as I fastened the edges down with more pitons. Going by the book for once, I set up a beacon laser. Its bright red beam shot straight up through the whirling smog like a pencil-thin pillar of fire.
A real gale was brewing. My Net screen still showed no response from Luc, and the guests were demanding information. “Stay on the tether,” I warned them in my gruffest voice. “If you move from this spot, I will personally beat you to bloody gore.”
Luc would have said something nicer. Cher enfant. I’d met him in Paris, when he was twelve and I was twenty. An orphan like me, he’d been following me around ever since. I swallowed my worry and headed toward the outcropping.
The atmosphere was getting murkier by the minute. Suddenly a gust lifted me off my feet and sailed me several meters along the shelf. I landed sliding, grabbing for a hold. My left glove caught in a cranny. I knew I couldn’t risk another flight like that. Our climbing gear was still packed in its case under the cargo net, but I carried a spool of emergency monothread for just this sort of occasion. Monothread is tough enough to bear more than twice my weight. The spool at my belt had thumb levers for brake, release, and rewind. I’d used it plenty of times. Lying flat on my face, I shot a piton into the rock, close enough to shower chips against my faceplate. I’m used to working in gloves, even with tiny monothread, so I knotted a couple of quick half hitches around the piton to make a belay.
With this security, I belly-crawled farther along the shelf and eased around the outcropping, reeling out thread and shooting more pitons as I went. The shelf narrowed to a mere ledge beyond the outcropping, maybe a meter wide, and the winds were regularly lifting me off the rock, fluttering me like a kite. Who knows how much time passed before I heard one of the bodybuilders moaning? Metavision is sort of low-resolution, so I didn’t see his gloves grasping the ledge till I was right on top of him.
The guy was practically hanging by his thumbs. His bulging muscles had locked up so tight, he couldn’t move. The wind had saved him. After flinging him over the edge, it had pressed him into a small declivity in the rock face. He was a big, brawny guy, and it took all my strength to haul him up. He was too numb to speak clearly. I secured him to a piton—the last one I had with me—and I peered down over the ledge for the others.
Hell and double hell. His significant other was hunkered on another narrow ledge maybe eight meters below, cradling his ankle in both hands and rocking back and forth, oblivious to the fact that the wind could blow him away any second. The background rustle in my radio turned out to be his whimpering. About then, a hard, muddy ram pelted us like a hail of golf balls. The drops carried more grit than moisture, and one of them pitted my faceplate with its force. Thank the Laws, the mud rain stopped as quickly as it had begun.
“Where’s Luc?” I yelled into my helmet radio.
“My leg,” the guy panted. “It’s broken. I fell. It hurts like mad.”
Ça va. So much for manly men. Both these guys sported the muscle-bound physiques of hard-core weight lifters. They must have been taking supplements for years.
“Where is Luc?” I articulated each word separately.
The guy with the broken ankle pointed down, indicating Luc was below him, beyond my sight I think my heart missed a beat.
Funny how fast a situation can get out of hand. There must be another ledge below, and Luc is safe—that’s the first thing I told myself because I wanted to believe it My hands were shaking as I eased over the ledge, and the wind was rushing so hard I could hear it whistling up the face of the palisade, even through my helmet. All sorts of feminine feelings surged through my brain. Motherly love and panic and ferocity. I had to force myself to forget about Luc and to concentrate on making clean, controlled moves down the cliff.
I reached the injured man and clipped him to my belay. Then I couldn’t wait any longer. I hung out over the ledge to look for Luc. Oh God O God I can hardly breathe as I record this now. The memory is so strong. A dozen meters below, Luc was clinging to the sheer rock wall with his gloved fingers. The kid was skilled. He’d found tiny handholds where no one else would have found them. I imagined I could see him gazing at me. But his faceplate was cracked, and moisture had condensed inside. Only one thing caused that—hot Earth atmosphere mixing with the breathable refrigerated air inside a surfsuit. Luc was breathing poison.
The cliff dropped sheer as glass into a crevasse maybe a kilometer below. All I could think was, if Luc blacks out, he’ll fall. In a heartbeat, I unclipped the injured bodybuilder from my belay. The monothread would support only two. I would have to spool myself down to Luc and haul him up, then come back for this guy later. There were no more pitons to anchor the guy in place, so I told him just to sit tight. The Laws of Physics had protected him so far, and anyway, I didn’t worry about that. I leaped over the ledge and rappelled down fast toward Luc.
Monothread slid through my gloves—and then jerked me to a halt. I’d come to the end of the spool! Mes dieux, but I had to stop myself from screaming. About then, a sharp gust swung me out and dashed me back against the cliff. I took the impact with my wrists and dangled for a minute. The bodybuilders were whining complaints in my helmet. I gathered my wits.
Two, maybe three meters below me, Luc lay flat against the cliff. It wasn’t that far. I started feeling for handholds and footholds in the rock. If I could just find a position that would support my weight, then unclip from the spool and free-climb down to Luc, and then somehow shove or drag his semiconscious body back up this cliff, three meters, with no belay…
The crevasse yawned below. Even with metavision, I couldn’t see its bottom. Ideas assaulte
d me from many directions. Could I reach Luc in time? Could I haul his body up that sheer cliff, fighting the wind, without a belay?
As the muddy rain started pelting us again, a vision of the six trusting clients passed briefly through my mind. If I should the trying to rescue Luc, they would survive for maybe half a day. Six people versus one. Maybe I should have thought through the logic of that, but I’m a doer, not a thinker. What I’ve learned is, if you want to survive, you have to make up your own logic—sometimes out of thin air. No matter what the chances, I would not give up on Luc.
Gritting my teeth, I rammed fingers into a tiny crevice, pressed my toes against rock and squeezed the carabiner to free myself from the belay. And I started free-climbing down.
“Sauvage! Stay where you are!”
That’s when I saw Jin rappelling from above. He was wearing my bright yellow climbing harness. He must have found it among the gear. I learned later that he’d followed the trail of my monothread. He descended steadily, like an expert, and as he dropped past me, I let my body collapse against the cliff. I saw nun clip a safety line to Luc’s belt, and I heard him say, “It’s okay. We’re coming up.”
I cried then. But no one ever knew that.
3
People Say a Lot without Words
FOUR HOURS LATER, we were waiting in a Sydney medical clinic, while a cyberdoctor injected Luc with molecule-sized robots to clean the toxins out of his cells. Luc was unconscious. Mucus oozed from his eyes and nose, and his skin had turned an ugly color, but the cyberdoc said his prognosis looked hopeful.
Me, I felt like a piece of garbage. I’d bungled everything. It was Jin who took the time to think things through, to unpack the climbing gear, to call the Australian rescue squad. It was Jin who saved Luc’s life. I sat across from him in the clinic cafeteria, resting my elbows on the plastic table, huddling over a cup of horrible cold tea. All around, people were murmuring about the exotic celebrity, but me, I felt ashamed to meet his eyes. Through my negligence, my cher Luc had nearly… I had to bite the insides of my cheeks to keep from shaking.