But the cables had not worked, Aenea said. They took too much maintenance to keep clear and functioning. Sudden ice storms would freeze them to the side of the slideway and someone traveling 150 klicks an hour would suddenly have their clip ring encounter immovable ice. It is hard enough these days keeping the cableway clear: the fixed lines of the slideway had been unmanageable.
So the slideways were abandoned. At least until teenagers looking for a thrill and adults in a serious hurry found that nine times out of ten, one could keep the sledfoils in the groove just by glissading—that is, by using one or more ice axes in the self-arrest position and keeping the speed low enough to stay in the trough. “Low enough” meaning beneath 150 klicks per hour. Nine times out of ten it would work. If one was very skillful. And if the conditions were perfect. And if it was daylight.
A. Bettik and I had taken the slideway three other times, once returning from Phari with some medicine needed to save a young girl’s life and twice just to learn the turns and straightaways. The voyage had been exhilarating and terrifying those times, but we had made it safely. But each time had been in daylight … with no wind … and with other glissaders ahead of us, showing the way.
Now it is dark; the long run gleams wickedly in the moonlight ahead of us. The surface looks iced and rough as stone. I have no idea if anyone has made the run this day … or this week … if anyone has checked for fissures, ice heaves, fractures, cave-ins, crevasses, ice spikes, or other obstacles. I do not know how long the ancient toboggan runs had been, but this slideway is more than twenty klicks long, running along the side of the sheer Abruzzi Spur connecting K’un Lun Ridge to the slopes of Hua Shan, flattening out on the gradual icefields on the west side of the Flower Mountain, kilometers south of the safer and slower Walk Way looping down from the north. From Hua Shan, it is only nine klicks and three easy cable runs to the scaffolding of Jo-kung and then a brisk walk through the fissure pass and down onto the sheer face walkways to Hsuan-k’ung Ssu.
A. Bettik and I are sitting side by side like children on sleds, waiting for a push from Mommy or Daddy. I lean over, grab my friend’s shoulder, and pull him closer so that I can shout through the thermal material of his hood and face mask. The wind is stinging me with ice now. “All right if I lead?” I yell.
A. Bettik turns his face so that our cloth-covered cheeks are touching. “M. Endymion, I feel that I should lead. I have done this slideway two more times than you, sir.”
“In the dark?” I shout.
A. Bettik shakes his hooded head. “Few try it in the dark these days, M. Endymion. But I have a very good memory of every curve and straight. I believe I can be helpful in showing you the proper braking points.”
I hesitate only a second. “All right,” I say. I squeeze his hand through our gloves.
With night-vision goggles, this would be as easy as a daylight slideway glissade—which does not qualify as easy in my book. But I had lost the goggles that I had taken on my farcaster Odyssey, and although the ship carried replacement pairs, I had left them in the ship. “Bring two skinsuits and rebreathers,” Rachel had relayed from Aenea. She might have mentioned night-vision goggles.
Today’s jaunt was supposed to have been an easy hike to Phari Marketplace, a night spent in the hostelry there, and then a pack trip back with George Tsarong, Jjgme Norbu, and a long line of porters, hauling the heavy material for the building site.
Perhaps, I think, I’m overreacting to the news of the Pax landing. Too late now. Even if we turn around, the rappel down the fixed lines on K’un Lun Ridge would be as much trouble as this glissade. Or so I lie to myself.
I watch as A. Bettik rigs his short, 38-centimeter ice-climbing hammer in the loop of the wristband on his left arm, then readies his regular 75-centimeter ice axe. Sitting cross-legged on my sled, I slip my own ice hammer into my left hand and trail my longer ice axe in my right hand like a tiller. I give the android the thumbs-up signal again and watch as he pushes off in the moonlight, spinning once, then steadying the sled expertly with his short ice hammer, chips flying, and then hurtling over the brink and out of sight for a minute. I wait until there is an interval of ten meters or so—far enough to avoid the ice spray of his passing, close enough to see him in the orange light of the Oracle—and then I push over myself.
Twenty kilometers. At an average speed of 120 klicks per hour, we should cover the distance in ten minutes. Ten freezing, adrenaline-pumping, gorge-rising, terror-beating-against-the-ribs, react-in-a-microsecond-or-die minutes.
A. Bettik is brilliant. He sets up each turn perfectly, coming in low for the high-banked curves so that his apogee—and mine a few seconds later—will be teetering right at the lip of the icy bank, careering out of the banked turn at just the right speed for the next descending straight, then banging and skipping down the long icy ramp so fast that vision blurs, the pounding comes up through my tailbone and spine so that vision is doubled, trebled, and my head pounds with the pain of it, then blurs again with the spray of ice chips flying, creating halos in the moonlight, bright as the unblinking stars spill and reel above us—the brilliant stars competing even with the Oracle’s glow and the asteroid moons’ quick, tumbling light—and then we are braking low and bouncing hard and riding high again, arresting into a sharp left that takes my breath away, then skidding into a sharper right, then pounding and flying down a straight so steep that the sled and I seem to be screaming into freefall. For a minute I am looking straight down at the moonlit phosgene clouds—green as mustard gas in the lying moonlight—then we are both racketing around a series of spirals, DNA-helix switchbacks, our sleds teetering on the edge of each bank so that twice my ice-axe blade bites into nothing but freezing air, but both times we drop back down and emerge—not exiting the turns so much as being spit out of them, two rifle bullets fired just above the ice—and then we bank high again, come out accelerating onto a straight, and shoot across eight kilometers of sheer ice wall on the Abruzzi Spur, the right banked wall of the slideway now serving as the floor of our passage, my ice axe spinning chips into vertical space as our speed increases, then increases more, then becomes something more than speed as the cold, thin air slices through my mask and thermal garments and gloves and heated boots to freeze flesh and to tear at muscle. I feel the frozen skin of my cheeks stretching under my thermal mask as I grin idiotically, a rictal grimace of terror and the sheer joy of mindless speed, my arms and hands adjusting constantly, automatically, instantly to changes in the ice-axe tiller and the ice-hammer brake.
Suddenly A. Bettik swerves to the left, chips flying as he bites deep with the curved blades of both long and short axes—it makes no sense, such a move will send him—both of us!— bouncing off the inner wall, the vertical ice wall, and then screaming out into black air—but I trust him, making the decision in less than a second, and slam the blade of my large axe down, pounding hard with my ice hammer, feeling my heart in my throat as I skid sideways and threaten to slide right instead of left, on the verge of spinning and spiraling off the narrow ice ledge at 140 kilometers per hour—but I correct and stabilize and flash past a hole in the ice floor where we would have been sliding except for this wild detour, hurtling onto a broken-away ledge six or eight meters wide, a trapdoor to death—and then A. Bettik rackets down off the inner wall, catches his slide with a flash of ice-axe blades in the moonlight, and then continues hurtling down the Abruzzi Spur toward the final series of turns onto the Hua Shan ice slopes.
And I follow.
On the Flower Mountain, we are both too frozen and shaken to rise from our sleds for several cold minutes. Then, together, we get to our feet, ground the piezoelectric charges in our sleds, collapse them, and fold them away in our packs. We walk the ice path around the shoulder of Hua Shan in silence—I in awe of A. Bettik’s reactions and courage, he in silence I cannot interpret but fervently hope is not anger at my hasty decision to return via this route.
The final three cableway flights are anticlimax, noted only
for the beauty of the moonlight on the peaks and ridges around us, and for the difficulty I have in closing my frozen fingers on the D-ring brakes.
Jo-kung is ablaze with torches after the moonlit emptiness of the upper slopes, but we avoid the main scaffolds and take the ladders to the fissure pass. Then we are surrounded by the shadowed darkness of the north face, broken by sputtering torches along the high walkway to Hsuan-k’ung Ssu. We jog the last kilometer.
We arrive just as Aenea is beginning her early evening discussion session. There are about a hundred people crowded into the little platform pagoda. She looks across the heads of the waiting people, sees my face, asks Rachel to begin the discussion, and comes immediately to where A. Bettik and I stand in the windy doorway.
16
admit that I was confused and a bit depressed when I first arrived on the Mountains of Heaven.
I slept in cryogenic fugue for three months and two weeks. I had thought that cryogenic fugue was dreamless, but I was wrong. I had nightmares for most of the way and awoke disoriented and apprehensive.
The translation point in our outbound system had been only seventeen hours away, but in the T’ien Shan System we had to translate from C-plus out beyond the last icy planet and decelerate in-system for three full days. I jogged the various decks, up and down the spiral staircase, and even out onto the little balcony I’d had the ship extrude. I told myself that I was trying to get my leg back into shape—it still hurt despite the ship’s pronouncement that the doc-in-the-box had healed it and that there should be no pain—but in truth, I knew, I was trying to work off nervous energy. I’m not sure that I remembered ever being so anxious before.
The ship wanted to tell me all about this star system in excruciating detail—G-type yellow star, blah, blah, blah—well, I could see that … eleven worlds, three gas giants, two asteroid belts, a high percentage of comets in the inner system, blah, blah, blah. I was interested only in T’ien Shan, and I sat in the carpeted holopit and watched it grow. The world was amazingly bright. Blindingly brighi. A brilliant pearl set against the black of space.
“What you are seeing is the lower, permanent cloud layer,” droned the ship. “The albedo is impressive. There are higher clouds—see those storm swirls in the lower right of the illuminated hemisphere? Those high cirrus causing shadows near the north polar cap? Those are the clouds that would bring weather to the human inhabitants.”
“Where are the mountains?” I asked.
“There,” said the ship, circling a gray shadow in the north-em hemisphere. “According to my old charts, this is a great peak in the northern reaches of the eastern hemisphere—Chomo Lori, ‘Queen of Snow’—and you see these striations running south from it? See how they stay close together until they pass the equator and then spread farther and farther apart until they disappear into the south polar cloud masses? These are the two great spine ridges, Phari Ridge and K’un Lun Ridge. They were the first inhabited rock lines on the planet and are excellent examples of the equivalent early Cretaceous Dakotan violent upthrust resulting in …”
Blah, blah, blah. And all I could think of was Aenea, and Aenea, and Aenea.
It was strange entering a system with no Pax Fleet ships to challenge us, no orbital defenses, no lunar bases … not even a base on the giant bull’s-eye of a moon that looked as if someone had fired a single bullet into a smooth orange sphere—no register of Hawking-drive wakes or neutrino emissions or gravitational lenses or cleared swaths of Bussard-jet drones—no sign of any higher technologies. The ship said that there was a trickle of microwave broadcasting emanating from certain areas of the planet, but when I had them piped in, they turned out to be in pre-Hegira Chinese. This was a shock. I had never been on a world where the majority of humans spoke anything but a version of Web English.
The ship entered geosynchronous orbit above the eastern hemisphere. “Your directions were to find the peak called Heng Shan, which should be approximately six hundred and fifty kilometers southeast of Chorno Lori … there!” The telescopic view in the holopit zoomed in on a beautiful fang of snow and ice leaping through at least three layers of cloud until the summit gleamed clear and bright above most of the atmosphere.
“Jesus,” I whispered. “And where is Hsuan-k’ung Ssu? The Temple Hanging in Air?”
“It should be … there” said the ship triumphantly.
We were looking straight down at a vertical ridge of ice, snow, and gray rock. Clouds broiled at the base of this incredible slab. Even looking at this through the holo viewer made me grab couch cushions and reel in vertigo.
“Where?” I said. There were no structures in sight.
“That dark triangle,” said the ship, circling what I thought was a shadow on one gray slab of rock. “And this line … here.”
“What’s the magnification?” I asked.
“The triangle is approximately one-point-two meters along the longest edge,” came the voice I’d grown to know so well from my comlog.
“Pretty small building for people to live in,” I pointed out.
“No, no,” said the ship. “This is just a bit of a human-made structure protuding from under what must be a rock overhang. I would surmise that the entire so-called Temple Hanging in Air is under this overhang. The rock is more than vertical at this point … it pitches back some sixty or eighty meters.”
“Can you get us a side view? So that I can see the Temple?”
“I could,” said the ship. “It would require repositioning us in a more northerly orbit so that I can use the telescope to look south over the peak of Heng Shan, and go to infrared to look through the cloud mass at eight thousand meters which is passing between the peak and the ridge spur on which the Temple is built, I would also have to …”
“Skip it,” I said. “Just tightbeam that temple area … hell, the whole ridge … and see if Aenea is waiting for us.”
“Which frequency?” said the ship.
Aenea had not mentioned any frequency. She had just said something about not being able to land in a true sense, but to come down to Hsuan-k’ung Ssu anyway. Looking at this vertical and worse-than-vertical wall of snow and ice, I began to understand what she meant.
“Broadcast on whatever common frequency we would have used if you were calling a comlog extension,” I said. “If there’s no answer, dial through all the frequencies you have. You might try the frequencies that you picked up earlier.”
“They were coming from the southernmost quadrant of the western hemisphere,” said the ship in a patient voice. “I picked up no microwave emanations from this hemisphere.”
“Just do it, please,” I said.
We hung there for half an hour, sweeping the ridge with tightbeam, then broadcasting general radio signals toward all the peaks in the area, then flooding the hemisphere with short queries. There was no response.
“Can there actually be an inhabited world where no one uses radio?” I said.
“Of course,” said the ship. “On Ixion, it is against local law and custom to use microwave communication of any sort. On New Earth there was a group which …”
“Okay, Okay,” I said. For the thousandth time, I wondered if there were a way to reprogram this autonomous intelligence so that it wasn’t such a pain in the ass. “Take us down,” I said.
“To which location?” said the ship. “There are extensive inhabited areas on the high peak to the east—T’ai Shan it is called on my map—and another city south on the K’un Lun Ridge, it is called Hsi wang-mu, I believe, and other habitations along the Phari Ridge and west of there in an area marked as Koko Nor. Also …”
“Take us down to the Temple Hanging in Air,” I said.
LUCKILY, THE PLANET’S MAGNETIC FIELD WAS COMPLETELY adequate for the ship’s EM repulsors, so we floated down through the sky rather than having to descend on a tail of fusion flame. I went out to the balcony to watch, although the holopit or screens in the top bedroom would have been more practical.
It seemed to
take hours, but actually within minutes we were floating gently at eight thousand-some meters, drifting between the fantastic peak to the north—Heng Shan—and the ridge holding Hsuan-k’ung Ssu. I had seen the terminator rushing from the east as we descended, and according to the ship, it was late afternoon here now. I carried a pair of binoculars out to the balcony and stared. I could see the Temple clearly. I could see it, but I could not quite believe it.
What had seemed a mere play of light and shadow beneath the huge, striated, overhanging slabs of gray granite was a series of structures extending east and west for many hundreds of meters. I could see the Asian influence at once: pagoda-shaped buildings with pitched tile roofs and curling eaves, their elaborately tiled surfaces gilded and glowing in the bright sunlight; round windows and moon gates in the lower brick sections of the superstructure, airy wooden porches with elaborately carved railings; delicate wooden pillars painted the color of dried blood; red and yellow banners draped from eaves and doorways and railings; complicated carvings on the roof beams and tower ridges; and suspension bridges and stairways festooned with what I would later learn were prayer wheels and prayer flags, each offering a prayer to Buddha every time a human hand spun it or the wind fluttered it.
The Temple was still being built. I could see raw wood being carried up to high platforms, saw human figures chiseling away at the stone face of the ridge, could see scaffolding, rude ladders, crude bridges consisting of little more than some sort of woven plant material with climbing ropes for handrails, and upright figures hauling empty baskets up these ladders and bridges and more stooped figures carrying the baskets full of stone back down to a broad slab where most of the baskets were dumped into space. We were close enough that I could see that many of these human figures wore colorful robes hanging almost to their ankles—some blowing in the stiff wind that blew across the rockface here—and that these robes looked thick and lined against the cold. I would later learn that these were the ubiquitous chuba, and that they could be made of thick, waterproof zygoat wool or of ceremonial silk or even of cotton, although this last material was rare and much prized.