This side of Infinity (ssc), page 6
“Don’t you ever tire, Whitey? I thought you would have collapsed by now.”
I hitched up the line and climbed further.
“You can’t make it up here, you know.”
“I don’t know,” I grunted.
“Why do you want so badly to climb here? There are other nice mountains.”
“This is the biggest, girl. That’s why.”
‘It can’t be done.”
“Then why all this bother to discourage me? Why not just let the mountain do it?”
As I neared her, she vanished. I made it to the top, where she had been standing, and I collapsed there.
Then I heard her voice again and turned my head. She was on a ledge, perhaps eighty feet away.
“I didn’t think you’d make it this far,” she said. “You are a fool. Good-by, Whitey.’
’ She was gone.
I sat there on the pinnacle’s tiny top—perhaps four square feet of top—and I knew that I couldn’t sleep there, because I’d fall. And I was tired.
I recalled my favorite curses and I said them all, but I didn’t feel any better. I couldn’t let myself go to sleep. I looked down. I knew the way was long. I knew she didn’t think I could make it.
I began the descent.
The following morning when they shook me, I was still tired. I told them the last night’s tale, and they didn’t believe me. Not until later in the day, that is, when I detoured us around the bulge and showed them the pinnacle, standing there like a tapering, branchless tree, ninety feet in the middle of the air.
V
We went steadily upward for the next two days. We made slightly under ten thousand feet. Then we spent a day hammering and hacking our way up a great flat face. Six hundred feet of it. Then our way was to the right and upward. Before long we were ascending the western side of the mountain. When we broke ninety thousand feet, we stopped to congratulate ourselves that we had just surpassed the Kasla climb and to remind ourselves that we had still not hit the halfway mark. It took us another two and a half days to do that, and by then the land lay like a map beneath us.
And then, that night, we all saw the creature with the sword.
He came and stood near our camp, and he raised his sword above his head, and it blazed with such a terrible intensity that I slipped on my goggles. His voice was all thunder and lightning this time:
“Get off this mountain!” he said. “Now! Turn back! Go down! Depart!”
And then a shower of stones came down from above and rattled about us. Doc tossed his slim, shiny case, causing it to slam along the ground toward the creature.
The light went out, and we were alone.
Doc retrieved his case, took tests, met with the same success as before—Le., none. But now at least he didn’t think I was some land of balmy, unless of course he thought we all were.
“Not a very effective guardian,” Henry suggested.
“Weve a long way to go yet,” said Vince, shying a stone through the space the creature had occupied. “I don’t like it if the thing can cause a slide.”
“That was just a few pebbles,” said Stan.
“Yeah, but what if he decided to start them fifty thousand feet higher?”
“Shut up!” said Kelly. “Don’t give him any ideas. He might be listening.”
For some reason, we drew closer together. Doc made each of us describe what we had seen, and it appeared that we all had seen the same thing.
“All right,” I said, after we’d finished. “Now you’ve all seen it, who wants to go back?”
There was silence.
After perhaps half a dozen heartbeats, Henry said, “I want the whole story. It looks like a good one. I’m willing to take my chances with angry energy creatures in order to get it.”
“I don’t know what the thing is,” said Kelly. “Maybe it’s no energy creature. Maybe it’s something—supernatural—I know what you’ll say, Doc. I’m just telling you how it struck me. If there are such things, this seems a good place for them. Point is—whatever it is, I don’t care. I want this mountain. If it could have stopped us, I think it would’ve done it already. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it can. Maybe it’s laid some trap for us higher up. But I want this mountain. Right now, it means more to me than anything. If I don’t go up, I’ll spend all my time wondering about it—and then I’ll probably come back and try it again some day, when it gets so I can’t stand thinking about it any more. Only then, maybe the rest of you won’t be available. Let’s face it, we’re a good climbing team. Maybe the best in the business. Probably. If it can be done, I think we can do it.”
“I’ll second that,” said Stan.
“What you said, Kelly,” said Mallardi, “about it being supernatural—it’s funny, because I felt the same thing for a minute when I was looking at it. It reminds me of something out of the Divine Comedy. If you recall, Purgatory was a mountain. And then I thought of the angel who guarded the eastern way to Eden. Eden had gotten moved to the top of Purgatory by Dante—and there was this angel…Anyhow, I felt almost like I was committing some sin I didn’t know about by being here. But now that I think it over, a man can’t be guilty of something he doesn’t know is wrong, can he? And I didn’t see that thing flashing any angel ID card. So I’m willing to go up and see what’s on top, unless he comes back with the Tablets of the Law, with a new one written in at the bottom.”
‘In Hebrew or Italian?” asked Doc.
“To satisfy you, I suppose they’d have to be drawn up in the form of equations.”
“No,” he said. “Kidding aside, I felt something funny too, when I saw it and heard it. And we didn’t really hear it, you know. It skipped over the senses and got its message right into our brains. If you think back over our descriptions of what we experienced, we each “heard” different words telling us to go away. If it can communicate an emotion, also. You thought of an angel, too, didn’t you, Whitey?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That makes it almost unanimous then, doesn’t it?”
Then we all turned to Vince, because he had no Christian background at all, having been raised as a Buddhist on Ceylon.
“What were your feelings concerning the thing?” Doc asked him.
“It was a Deva,” he said, “a sort of like an angel, I guess. I had the impression that every step I took up this mountain gave me enough bad karma to fill a lifetime. Except I haven’t believed in it that way since I was a kid. I want to go ahead, up. Even if that feeling was correct, I want to see the top of this mountain.”
“So do I,” said Doc.
“That makes it unanimous,” I said.
“Well, everybody hang onto his angelsbane,” said Stan, “and let’s sack out.”
“Good idea.”
“Only let’s spread out a bit,” said Doc, “so that anything falling won’t get all of us together.”
We did that cheerful thing and slept untroubled by heaven.
Our way kept winding right, until we were at a hundred forty-four thousand feet and were mounting the southern slopes. Then it jogged back, and by a hundred fifty we were mounting to the west once more.
Then, during a devilish, dark and tricky piece of scaling, up a smooth, concave bulge ending in an overhang, the bird came down once again.
If we hadn’t been roped together, Stan would have died. As it was, we almost all died.
Stan was lead man, as its wings splashed sudden flames against the violet sky. It came down from the overhang as though someone had kicked a bonfire over its edge, headed straight toward him and faded out at a distance of about twelve feet He fell then, almost taking the rest of us with him.
We tensed our muscles and took the shock.
He was battered a bit, but unbroken. We made it up to the overhang, but went no further that day.
Rocks did fall, but we found another overhang and made camp beneath it.
The bird did not return that day, but the snakes came.
Big, shimmering scarlet serpents coiled about the crags, wound in and out of jagged fields of ice and gray stone. Sparks shot along their sinuous lengths. They coiled and unwound, stretched and turned, spat fires at us. It seemed they were trying to drive us from beneath the sheltering place to where the rocks could come down upon us.
Doc advanced upon the nearest one, and it vanished as it came within the field of his projector. He studied the place where it had lain, then hurried back.
“The frost is still on the punkin,” he said.
“Huh?” said I.
“Not a bit of ice was melted beneath it”
“Indicating?*
“Illusion,* said Vince, and he threw a stone at another and it passed through the thing.
“But you saw what happened to my pick,* I said to Doc, “when I took a cut at that bird. The thing had to have been carrying some kind of charge.*
“Maybe whatever has been sending them has cut that part out, as a waste of energy,* he replied, “since the things can’t get through to us anyhow.*
We sat around and watched the snakes and falling rocks, until Stan produced a deck of cards and suggested a better game.
The snakes stayed on through the night and followed us the next day. Rocks still fell periodically, but the boss seemed to be running low on them. The bird appeared, circled us and swooped on four different occasions. But this time we ignored it, and finally it went home to roost.
We made three thousand feet and could have gone more, but didn’t want to press it past a cozy little ledge with a cave big enough for the whole party. Everything let up on us then. Everything visible, that is.
A before-the-storm feeling, a still, electrical tension, seemed to occur around us then, and we waited for whatever was going to happen to happen.
The worst possible thing happened: nothing.
This keyed-up feeling, this expectancy, stayed with us, was unsatisfied. I think it would actually have been a relief if some invisible orchestra had begun playing Wagner, or if the heavens had rolled aside like curtains and revealed a movie screen, and from the backward lettering we knew we were on the other side, or if we saw a high-flying dragon eating low-flying weather satellites…
As it was, we just kept feeling that something was imminent, and it gave me insomnia.
During the night, she came again. The pinnacle girl.
She stood at the mouth of the cave, and when I advanced she retreated.
I stopped just inside and stood there myself, where she had been standing.
She said, “Hello, Whitey.”
“No, I’m not going to follow you again,” I said.
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“Watching,” she said.
“I told you I wont fall.”
“Your friend almost did.*
“‘Almost’ isn’t good enough.”
“You are the leader, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“If you were to die, the others would go back?”
“No,” I said, “they’d go on without me.”
I hit my camera then.
“What did you just do?” she asked.
“I took your picture—if you’re really there.”
“Why?”
“To look at after you go away. I like to look at pretty things.”
“…” She seemed to say something.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Why not?”
“…die.”
“Please speak up.”
“She dies…” she said.
“Why? How?”
“…on mountain.”
“I don’t understand.”
“…too.”
“What’s wrong?”
I took a step forward, and she retreated a step. “Follow me?” she asked.
“No.”
“Go back,” she said.
“What’s on the other side of that record?”
“You will continue to climb?”
“Yes.”
Then, “Good!” she said suddenly. “I…” and her voice stopped again.
“Go back,” she finally said, without emotion.
“Sorry.”
And she was gone.
VI
Our trail took us slowly to the left once more. We crawled and sprawled and cut holes in the stone. Snakes sizzled in the distance. They were with us constantly now. The bird came again at crucial moments, to try to make us fall. A raging bull stood on a crag and bellowed down at us. Phantom archers loosed shafts of fire, which always faded just before they struck. Blazing blizzards swept at us, around us, and were gone. We were back on the northern slopes and still heading west by the time we broke a hundred sixty thousand. The sky was deep and blue, and there were always stars. Why did the mountain hate us? I wondered. What was there about us to provoke this thing? I looked at the picture of the girl for the dozenth time and I wondered what she really was. Had she been picked from our minds and composed into girlform to lure us, to lead us, sirenlike, harpylike, to the place of the final fall? It was such a long way down…
I thought back over my life. How does a man come to climb mountains? Is he drawn by the heights because he is afraid of the level land? Is he such a misfit in the society of men that he must flee and try to place himself above it? The way up is long and difficult, but if he succeeds they must grant him a garland of sorts. And if he falls, this too is a kind of glory. To end, hurled down from the heights to the depths in hideous ruin and combustion, is a fitting climax for the loser—for it, too, shakes mountains and minds, stirs things like thoughts below both, is a kind of blasted garland of victory in defeat, and cold, so cold that final action, that the movement is somewhere frozen forever into a statuelike rigidity of ultimate intent and purpose thwarted only by the universal malevolence we all fear exists. An aspirant saint or hero who lacks some necessary virtue may still qualify as a matyr, for the only thing that people will really remember in the end is the end. I had known that I’d had to climb Kasla, as I had climbed all the others, and I had known what the price would be. It had cost me my only home. But Kasla was there, and my boots cried out for my feet. I knew as I did so that somewhere I set them upon her summit, and below me a world was ending. What’s a world if the moment of victory is at hand? And if truth, beauty and goodness be one, why is there always this conflict among them?
The phantom archers fired upon me and the bright bird swooped. I set my teeth, and my boots scarred rocks beneath me.
We saw the top.
At a hundred seventy-six thousand feet, making our way along a narrow ledge, clicking against rock, testing our way with our picks, we heard Vince say, “Lookl”
We did.
Up and up, and again further, bluefrosted and sharp, deadly, and cold as Loki’s dagger, slashing at the sky, it vibrated above us like electricity, hung like a piece of frozen thunder, and cut, cut, cut into the center of spirit that was desire, twisted, and became a fishhook to pull us on, to bum us with its barbs.
Vince was the first to look up and see the top, the first to die. It happened so quickly, and it was none of the terrors that achieved it.
He slipped.
That was all. It was a difficult piece of climbing. He was right behind me one second, was gone the next. There was no body to recover. He’d taken the long drop. The soundless blue was all around him and the great gray beneath. Then we were six. We shuddered, and I suppose we all prayed in our own ways.
Gone Vince, may some good Deva lead you up the Path of Splendor. May you find whatever you wanted most at the other end, waiting there for you. If such a thing may be, remember those who say these words, oh strong intruder in the sky…
No one spoke much for the rest of the day.
The fiery sword bearer came and stood above our camp the entire night. It did not speak.
In the morning, Stan was gone, and there was a note beneath my pack.
Don’t hate me, it said, for running out, but I think it really is an angel I’m scared of this mountain. I’ll climb any pile of rocks, but I won’t fight Heaven. The way down is easier than the way up, so don’t worry about me. Good luck. Try to understand. S.
So we were five—Doc and Kelly and Henry and Mallardi and me—and that day we hit a hundred eighty thousand and felt very alone.
The girl came again that night and spoke to me, black hair again black sky and eyes like points of blue fire, and she stood beside an icy pillar and said, “Two of you have gone.”
“And the rest of us remain,” I replied.
“For a time.”
“We will climb to the top and then we will go away,” I said. “How can that do you harm? Why do you hate us?”
“No hate, sir,” she said.
“What, then?”
“I protect.”
“What? What is it that you protect?”
“The dying, that she may live.”
“What? Who is dying? How?”
But her words went away somewhere, and I did not hear them. Then she went away too, and there was nothing left but sleep for the rest of the night.
One hundred eighty-two thousand and three, and four, and five. Then back down to four for the following night.
The creatures whined about us now, and the land pulsed beneath us, and the mountain seemed sometimes to sway as we climbed.
We carved a path to one eighty-six, and for three days we fought to gain another thousand feet. Everything we touched was cold and slick and slippery, sparkled, and had a bluish haze about it.
When we hit one ninety, Henry looked back and shuddered.
I’m no longer worried about making it to the top,” he said. ‘Its the return trip that’s bothering me now. The clouds are like little wisps of cotton way down there.”
“The sooner up, the sooner down,” I said, and we began to climb once again.
It took us another week to cut our way to within a mile of the top. All the creatines of fire had withdrawn, but two ice avalanches showed us we were still unwanted. We survived the first without mishap, but Kelly sprained his right ankle during the second, and Doc thought he might have cracked a couple of ribs, too.
