The Walk Up Nameless Ridge (Kindle Single)

1

It was difficult to sleep at night, wishing good men dead.
This was but one of the hurtful things I felt in my bones and wished I could
ignore. It was an ugly truth waving its arms that I turned my gaze from, that I
didn’t like to admit even to myself. But while my bag warmed me with the last
of its power and my breath spilled out in white plumes toward the roof of our
tent, while the flicker of a whisperstove melted snow for midnight tea, I lay
in that dead zone above sixty thousand feet and hoped not just for the failure
of those above me, but that no man summit and live to tell the tale. Not before
I had my chance.

It was a shameful admission, one I nearly raised with
Hanson, my tentmate, to see in the wrinkles of his snow-beat face whether this
was a guilt shared. I suspected it was. In the mess tents and around the yellow
craters we dubbed latrines, the look among us was that only one would be
remembered. The rest would die alone in the snow or live a long life
forgotten—and not one of us would’ve been able to explain to a child the
difference. Frozen to death by altitude or by time was all the same. The truth
was this: History remembers the first, and only the first. These are the
creeping and eternal glaciers, the names etched across all time like scars in
granite cliffs. Those who came after were the inch or two of snowdrift that
would melt in due time. They would trickle, forgotten, into the pores of the
earth, be swallowed and melt snow at the feet of other forgotten men.

It was a quarter past Eno’s midnight and time to get up.
If Shubert and Humphries were to make it to the top, they likely would’ve by
now. If any of their gear still worked, they would be radioing in their
victory, taking the first pictures of starlit peaks wrinkling far past the
limits of sight. By now, they would know how many fingers and toes it cost
them, how much oxygen left in their tanks, whether or not they would live to
speak of the mountain’s conquest.

The faint odor of tea penetrated my dark thoughts. It
must’ve been a potent brew to smell it at all. We had already scaled beyond the
heights where taste and scent fade to oblivion. One had to remind himself to
eat and drink, for the stomach is one of those organs that knows when to quit.
It is the first, in fact, to go. The mind of the climber is the last.

Hanson brought me tea. I wormed a single arm out into the
cold, though my heating bag had become a feeble thing. I did not want to lose
what little it held. I coughed into my fist, that persistent cough of the dead
zone, and accepted the steaming mug.

There were no words spoken as we forced ourselves to
drink. Every twitch was an effort at those altitudes. We were sleeping higher
than all the fabled peaks of Cirrus VII. Our fourth camp along the Slopeson
Ridge, at 42,880 feet, was higher than any speck of dirt on Hanson’s home
planet. And when we arrived on this wasteland of a frozen ball, out here in a
corner of the galaxy where men go either to not be found or to be remembered
for all times, we set up a basecamp very near to the highest peak of the place
I grew up: Earth. Where men were first born and first began to scale to deadly
heights.

I sipped my tea, burning my numb lips, and told myself it
would be an Earth-born who scaled Mt. Mallory first. This was a distasteful
idea that I and many others were willing to share. The secret I kept to myself
was that others could die if they dared climb her before me.

2

Two other private teams were making a go of it that
season. Government expeditions and collectives of alpine clubs had given up
decades ago. They now watched as men such as I took leave of our day jobs and
with borrowed funds and the best of gear and medicine at hand, set out to prove
what was possible.

The window of opportunity for a summit was but a bare
sliver of a crack. Half a day at most when the fearful winds of that dizzy
world slowed to a manageable gale and before the monsoons buried the rock under
drifts a hundred meters deep. The problem, of course, was in not knowing when
that half day would fall. Every climber across thirteen worlds studied the weather
charts like daytraders. As the season neared, predictions were logged on the
net, men in their warm homes with their appetites intact and the feeling still
in their fingers and toes would make guesses, watch reports from the satellites
left behind by those government expeditions, and make bold claims.

I had been one of those prognosticators until
recently.  But now, after spending a night at camp 7 beneath the Khimer
Ridge, I felt as though I had graduated to one who could sneer at the antics of
those at lesser heights. By dint of my travel between the stars and my arduous
climb thus far, I was now an expert. It lent Hanson and I the illusion that our
guess was far more refined than the others.

Or perhaps it was the lack of oxygen that made us crazy
this way. In the middle of that terrible night, rather than spend my last
morning thinking of my wife and kids or dwell further on the debts incurred to
travel to frontier stars and hike up a murderous peak, I thought of all my
fellow climbers who were safely ensconced in their homes as they followed our
every move.

Right now, they likely followed Shubert and Humphries, two
strong climbers who had knocked out all else the galaxy had to offer. They
would also be keeping an eye on Hanson and I. And then there was the pairing of
Ziba and Cardhil, who were also making a bid that year.

Ziba was an enigma of a climber, a small woman who looked
far too frail in her heatsuit and mask. When first I saw her navigating the
Lower Collum Ice Falls above basecamp, I mistook her oxygen tanks for
double-oughts in size, such as they dwarfed her frame. The consensus was that
there was little to fear in her attempt that year. I had done some digging
before my uplink succumbed to the cold, and read that Ziba had knocked out the
peaks of her home planet, none of which top thirty thousand feet, but she had
at least done them in style. No oxygen and swiftly, one of those modern
climbers. It had been a private joy to watch her give in to the true
mountaineering methods necessary on Mallory’s great face. The methodical lift
of crampons, the bulging tanks of air, the fogging and frosted masks. These
were the ways of the true climber. Mallory is an instructor to all, and Ziba
did not seem too full of herself to submit, learn, and adapt.

Cardhil, I figured, was the great unknown. Ziba had chosen
an odd tentmate in the android. And if it were a manchine that was the first to
summit great Mallory, the consensus across the alpine forums was that nothing
would have occurred at all. There would not even be an accomplishment to
asterix. And anyway, I had sent notes a week ago to an old climbing buddy,
telling him not to worry. The cold was worse on the manchine’s joints than our
own. Hanson and I had left camp 6 while Ziba was chipping away at Cardhil’s
frozen ankles. And please don’t tell me that a man’s memories counted for the
man himself, that the android lived because he remembered living. I have had
many a conversation with Cardhil around basecamp and watched him with the
Sherpas. He is no different than the droid who cleans my pool or walks my dog.
A clever approximation, but with movements too precise, too clean, to pass for
human. The other day, Hanson nudged me in time to turn and catch Cardhil taking
a great spill on the East Face. The way he did even this was unnatural.
Supremely calm and without a whimper, the manchine had slid several hundred
feet on his ass, working his climbing axe into the deep snow, with all the
false grace of an automaton.

Nobody feared this duo as long as they were behind and
below us. There, off our ropes and out of our way, they had only themselves to
kill.

3

Hanson and I left our flapping tent in utter darkness. The
driven snow blocked out all but a few of the twinkling stars. Near the tent, a
pile of spent oxygen bottles gathered a drift. They glowed bright in Hanson’s
headlamp. Debris such as this would be left for all time. They were an addition
to the landscape. The local Ha-Jing, whose lands included half of great
Mallory, made good money selling permits to aspiring climbers, and this litter
came with the riches. The south face of Mallory, which some climbers posited
would make for an easier ascent, was governed by the irascible Hiti. Great
climbers by all accounts, but miserable at governing. The only assaults on that
face have been clandestine affairs. There had been some arrests over the years,
but like many who come to Eno hoping to etch their name in the history books,
most simply disappeared.

Hanson broke snow for the first hour, his head down in a
stiff breeze. We had radios in our parkas but rarely used them. Good tentmates
had little need for words. Roped in to one another, the union becomes
symbiotic. You match paces, one staring at a flash-lit patch of bright snow,
the other staring at a man’s back, illuminating a spot in a sea of darkness.
Boots fell into the rapidly filling holes of the climber ahead, each lifting of
a crampon some new torture, even with the springs of the powered climbing pants
taking most of the strain.

I’d lost count of the number of peaks we’d climbed
together. It was in the dozens across a handful of planets, most of those
climbs coming over the past five years. Climbers tend to orbit one another long
before they share tents. The first time I met Hanson was back on Earth on a new
route of Nanga Parbat, a small mountain, but notorious for gobbling souls.
Climbers called her “Man Eater,” usually with knowing and nervous smiles.
Tourists from other planets came to exercise on its west slope or to make an
attempt on its south face while preparing for harsher climbs. Some took the
tram to Everest to hike up to the top and join the legions who made that yearly
pilgrimage only to walk away wondering what the fuss was about.

I tended to bite my tongue during such diminishing talks
of my planet’s highest peak. My twenty-year partnership with Saul, my previous
tentmate, had ended on a harmless run up Everest. There was a saying among the
Hiti sherpas:
Ropes
slip through relaxed grips
. The nearest I ever came to death was while climbing indoors, of all
things. It wasn’t something I told anyone. Those few who had been there and the
doctors who tended to me knew. When anyone noticed my limp, I told them it
happened during my spill on Kurshunga. I couldn’t say that I’d failed to double
back my harness and took a forty foot spill on a climb whose holds had been
color-coded for kids.

Saul had also fallen prey to a relaxed grip. He had died
while taking a leak on Everest’s South Col. It was hard to stomach, losing a
good man and great friend like that. Hanson, who trudged ahead of me, had lost
his former tentmate in more glorious fashion the same year Saul died. And so
mountains brought couples together like retirement homes. You look around, and
what you have left is what you bed down with. Ours, then, was a marriage of
attrition, but it worked. Our bond was our individual losses and our mutual
anger at the peaks that had taken so much from us.

As Hanson paused, exhausted, and I rounded him to break
snow, I patted the old man on the back, the gesture silent with thick gloves
and howling wind, but he bobbed his head in acknowledgement to let me know he
was okay. I coughed a raspy rattle into my mask. We were all okay. And above
us, the white plumes and airborne glitter of driven ice and snow hid the way to
glory. But it was easy to find. Up. Always up. One more foot toward land that
no man had ever seen and lived to tell about.

4

At sixty thousand feet—the height of two Everests
stacked one on top of the other—man and machine alike tended to break
down. We were at the limit of my regimen of steroids. The gears in my hiking
pants could be heard grinding against one another, even over all that wind. And
the grease smeared over the parts of my face not sheltered by the oxygen mask
had hardened until it felt like plaster, like blistered and unfeeling skin, but
to touch it and investigate it was to invite exposure and far worse.

Batteries meant to last days would perish in hours up
there. The cold was death for them. And so our suits gave up as we moved from
the death zone to a land that begged for a name far more sinister. The power left
in struggling batteries went to the pistons and gears, routed away from the
heaters. Fingers and toes went first. They would grow numb; the blood would
stop flowing through them; the flesh would necropsy and die right there on the
bone.