I’m not even sure now how we managed the climb two days ago from Camp Two to this narrow patch of chopped out ridgecrest. Our bug was obviously at the edge of his skill envelope, even with his extra legs and greater strength, and we decided to rope together for the last few hours of climbing, just in case K peeled loose. It wouldn’t do much good to push the red panic button on the palmlog just to tell the arriving UN CMG guys that Kanakaredes had taken a header five thousand feet straight down to the Godwin-Austen Glacier.
“Mr. Alien Speaker, sir, we sort of lost your kid. But maybe you can scrape him up off the glacier ice and clone him or something.” No, we didn’t want that.
As it was, we ended up working after dark, headlamps glowing, ropes ’binered to our harnesses and attached to the slope via ice screws just to keep us from being blown into black space, using our ice axes to hack a platform big enough for the tent—there was only room for a merged cluster of the smart tents, wedged ten feet from a vertical drop, forty feet from an avalanche path, and tucked directly beneath an overhanging serac the size of a three-story building—a serac that could give way any time and take us and the tent with it. Not the best spot to spend ten minutes in, much less three days and nights during a high-altitude hurricane. But we had no choice; everything else here was knife-ridge or avalanche slope.
As much as I would have preferred it otherwise, we finally had time for some conversation. Our tents were joined in the form of a squished cross, with a tiny central area, not much more than two feet or so across, for cooking and conversation and just enough room for each of us to pull back into our small nacelles when we curled up to sleep. The platform we’d hacked out of the slope under the overhanging serac wasn’t big enough or flat enough to serve all of us, and I ended up in one of the downhill segments, my head higher than my feet. The angle was flat enough to allow me to doze off but still steep enough to send me frequently lurching up from sleep, fingers clawing for my ice axe to stop my slide. But my ice axe was outside with the others, sunk in the deepening snow and rock-hard ice, with about a hundred feet of spidersilk climbing rope lashed around it and over the tent and back again. I think we also used twelve ice screws to secure us to the tiny ice shelf.
Not that any of this will do us a damned bit of good if the serac decides to go or the slope shifts or the winds just make up their minds to blow the whole mass of rope, ice axes, screws, tent, humans, and bug right off the mountain.
We’ve slept a lot, of course. Paul had brought a softbook loaded with a dozen or so novels and a bunch of magazines, so we handed that around occasionally—even K took his turn reading—and for the first day we didn’t talk much because of the effort it took to speak up over the wind howl and the noise of snow and hail pelting the tent. But eventually we grew bored even of sleeping and tried some conversation. That first day it was mostly climbing and technical talk—reviewing the route, listing points for and against the direct attempt once we got past this traverse and up over the snow dome at the base of the summit pyramid—Gary arguing for the Direct Finish no matter what, Paul urging caution and a possible traverse to the more frequently climbed Abruzzi Ridge, Kanakaredes and me listening. But by the second and third days, we were asking the bug personal questions.
“SO you guys came from Aldebaran,” said Paul on the second afternoon of the storm. “How long did it take you?”
“Five hundred years,” said our bug. To fit in his section of the tent, he’d had to fold every appendage he had at least twice. I couldn’t help but think it was uncomfortable for him.
Gary whistled. He’d never paid much attention to all the media coverage of the mantispids. “Are you that old, K? Five hundred years?”
Kanakaredes let out a soft whistle that I was beginning to suspect was some equivalent to a laugh. “I am only twenty-three of your years old, Gary,” he said. “I was born on the ship, as were my parents and their parents and so on far back. Our life span is roughly equivalent to yours. It was a…generation-ship, I believe is your term for it.” He paused as the howling wind rose to ridiculous volume and velocity. When it died a bit, he went on, “I knew no other home than the ship until we reached Earth.”
Paul and I exchanged glances. It was time for me to interrogate our captive bug for country, family, and Secretary Bright Moon. “So why did you…the Listeners…travel all the way to Earth?” I asked. The bugs had answered this publicly on more than one occasion, but the answer was always the same and never made much sense.
“Because you were there,” said the bug. It was the same old answer. It was flattering, I guess, since we humans have always considered ourselves the center of the universe, but it still made little sense.
“But why spend centuries traveling to meet us?” asked Paul.
“To help you learn to listen,” said K.
“Listen to what?” I said. “You? The mantispids? We’re interested in listening. Interested in learning. We’ll listen to you.”
Kanakaredes slowly shook his heavy head. I realized, viewing the mantispid from this close, that his head was more saurian—dinosaur/birdlike—than buggy. “Not listen to us,” click, hiss. “To the song of your own world.”
“To the song of our world?” asked Gary almost brusquely. “You mean, just appreciate life more? Slow down and smell the roses? Stuff like that?” Gary’s second wife had been into transcendental meditation. I think it was the reason he divorced her.
“No,” said K. “I mean listen to the sound of your world. You have fed your seas. You have consecrated your world. But you do not listen.”
It was my turn to muddle things even further. “Fed our seas and consecrated our world,” I said. The entire tent thrummed as a gust hit it and then subsided. “How did we do that?”
“By dying, Jake,” said the bug. It was the first time he’d used my name. “By becoming part of the seas, of the world.”
“Does dying have something to do with hearing the song?” asked Paul.
Kanakaredes’s eyes were perfectly round and absolutely black, but they did not seem threatening as he looked at us in the glow of one of the flashlights. “You cannot hear the song when you are dead,” he whistle-clicked. “But you cannot have the song unless your species has recycled its atoms and molecules through your world for millions of years.”
“Can you hear the song here?” I asked. “On Earth, I mean.”
“No,” said the bug.
I decided to try a more promising tack. “You gave us CMG technology,” I said, “and that’s certainly brought wonderful changes.” Bullshit, I thought. I’d liked things better before cars could fly. At least the traffic jams along the Front Range where I lived in Colorado had been two-dimensional then. “But we’re sort of…well…curious about when the Listeners are going to share other secrets with us.”
“We have no secrets,” said Kanakaredes. “Secrecy was not even a concept to us before we arrived here on Earth.”
“Not secrets then,” I said hurriedly, “but more new technologies, inventions, discoveries…”
“What kind of discoveries?” said K.
I took a breath. “A cure to cancer would be good,” I said.
Kanakaredes made a clicking sound. “Yes, that would be good,” he breathed at last. “But this is a disease of your species. Why have you not cured it?”
“We’ve tried,” said Gary. “It’s a tough nut to crack.”
“Yes,” said Kanakaredes, “it is a tough nut to crack.”
I decided not to be subtle. “Our species need to learn from one another,” I said, my voice perhaps a shade louder than necessary to be heard over the storm. “But your people are so reticent. When are we really going to start talking to each other?”
“When your species learns to listen,” said K.
“Is that why you came on this climb with us?” asked Paul.
“I hope that is not the result,” said the bug, “but it is, along with the need to understand, the reason I came.”
I l
ooked at Gary. Lying on his stomach, his head only inches from the low tent roof, he shrugged slightly.
“You have mountains on your home world?” asked Paul.
“I was taught that we did not.”
“So your home world was sort of like the South Pole where you guys have your freehold?”
“Not that cold,” said Kanakaredes, “and never that dark in the winter. But the atmospheric pressure is similar.”
“So you’re acclimated to about—what?—seven or eight thousand feet altitude?”
“Yes,” said the mantispid.
“And the cold doesn’t bother you?” asked Gary.
“It is uncomfortable at times,” said the bug. “But our species has evolved a subcutaneous layer which serves much as your thermskins in regulating temperature.”
It was my turn to ask a question. “If your world didn’t have mountains,” I said, “why do you want to climb K2 with us?”
“Why do you wish to climb it?” asked Kanakaredes, his head swiveling smoothly to look at each of us.
There was silence for a minute. Well, not really silence since the wind and pelting snow made it sound as if we were camped behind a jet exhaust, but at least none of us humans spoke.
Kanakaredes folded and unfolded his six legs. It was disturbing to watch. “I believe that I will try to sleep now,” he said and closed the flap that separated his niche from ours.
The three of us put our heads together and whispered. “He sounds like a goddamned missionary,” hissed Gary. “All this ‘listen to the song’ doubletalk.”
“Just our luck,” said Paul. “Our first contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, and they’re freaking Jehovah’s Witnesses.”
“He hasn’t handed us any tracts yet,” I said.
“Just wait,” whispered Gary. “The four of us are going to stagger onto the summit of this hill someday if this fucking storm ever lets up, exhausted, gasping for air that isn’t there, frostbitten to shit and back, and this bug’s going to haul out copies of the Mantispid Watchtower.”
“Shhh,” said Paul. “K’ll hear us.”
Just then the wind hit the tent so hard that we all tried digging our fingernails through the hyper-polymer floor to keep the tent from sliding off its precarious perch and down the mountain. If worse came to worse, we’d shout “Open!” at the top of our lungs, the smart tent fabric would fold away, and we’d roll out onto the slope in our thermskins and grab for our ice axes to self-arrest the slide. That was the theory. In fact, if the platform shifted or the spidersilk snapped, we’d almost certainly be airborne before we knew what hit us.
When we could hear again over the wind roar, Gary shouted, “If we unpeel from this platform, I’m going to cuss a fucking blue streak all the way down to impact on the glacier.”
“Maybe that’s the song that K’s been talking about,” said Paul, and sealed his flap.
Last note to the day: Mantispids snore.
ON the afternoon of day three, Kanakaredes suddenly said, “My crèche brother is also listening to a storm near your South Pole at this very moment. But his surroundings are…more comfortable and secure than our tent.”
I looked at the other two and we all showed raised eyebrows.
“I didn’t know you brought a phone with you on this climb, K,” I said.
“I did not.”
“Radio?” said Paul.
“No.”
“Subcutaneous intergalactic Star Trek communicator?” said Gary. His sarcasm, much as his habit of chewing the nutrient bars too slowly, was beginning to get on my nerves after three days in this tent. I thought that perhaps the next time he was sarcastic or chewed slowly, I might just kill him.
K whistled ever so slightly. “No,” he said. “I understood your climbers’ tradition of bringing no communication devices on this expedition.”
“Then how do you know that your…what was it, crèche brother?…is in a storm down there?” asked Paul.
“Because he is my crèche brother,” said K. “We were born in the same hour. We are, essentially, the same genetic material.”
“Twins,” I said.
“So you have telepathy?” said Paul.
Kanakaredes shook his head, his proboscis almost brushing the flapping tent fabric. “Our scientists think that there is no such thing as telepathy. For any species.”
“Then how…” I began.
“My crèche brother and I often resonate on the same frequencies to the song of the world and universe,” said K in one of the longest sentences we’d heard from him. “Much as your identical twins do. We often share the same dreams.”
Bugs dream. I made a mental note to record this factoid later.
“And does your crèche brother know what you’re feeling right now?” said Paul.
“I believe so.”
“And what’s that?” asked Gary, chewing far too slowly on an n-bar.
“Right now,” said Kanakaredes, “it is fear.”
Knife-edge ridge beyond Camp Three—about 23,700 feet
The fourth day dawned perfectly clear, perfectly calm.
We were packed and climbing across the traverse before the first rays of sunlight struck the ridgeline. It was cold as a witch’s tit.
I mentioned that this part of the route was perhaps the most technically challenging of the climb—at least until we reached the actual summit pyramid—but it was also the most beautiful and exhilarating. You would have to see photos to appreciate the almost absurd steepness of this section of the ridge and even then it wouldn’t allow you to feel the exposure. The North-East Ridge just kept climbing in a series of swooping, knife-edged snow cornices, each side dropping away almost vertically.
As soon as we had moved onto the ridge, we looked back at the gigantic serac hanging above the trampled area of our Camp Three perched on the edge of the ridge—the snow serac larger and more deformed and obviously unstable than ever after the heavy snows and howling winds of the last four days of storm—and we didn’t have to say a word to one another to acknowledge how lucky we had been. Even Kanakaredes seemed grateful to get out of there.
Two hundred feet into the traverse and we went up and over the blade of the knife. The snowy ridgeline was so narrow here that we could—and did—straddle it for a minute as if swinging our legs over a very, very steep roofline.
Some roof. One side dropped down thousands of feet into what used to be China. Our left legs—three of Kanakaredes’s—hung over what used to be Pakistan. Right around this point, climbers in the 20th Century used to joke about needing passports but seeing no border guards. In this CMG-era, a Sianking HK gunship or Indian hop-fighter could float up here anytime, hover fifty yards out, and blow us right off the ridge. None of us were worried about this. Kanakaredes’s presence was insurance against that.
This was the hardest climbing yet and our bug friend was working hard to keep up. Gary and Paul and I had discussed this the night before, whispering again while K was asleep, and we decided that this section was too steep for all of us to be roped together. We’d travel in two pairs. Paul was the obvious man to rope with K, although if either of them came off on this traverse, odds were overwhelming that the other would go all the way to the bottom with him. The same was true of Gary and me, climbing ahead of them. Still, it gave a very slight measure of insurance.
The sunlight moved down the slope, warming us, as we moved from one side of the knife-edge to the other, following the best line, trying to stay off the sections so steep that snow would not stick—avoiding it not just because of the pitch there, but because the rock was almost always loose and rotten—and hoping to get as far as we could before the warming sun loosened the snow enough to make our crampons less effective.
I loved the litany of the tools we were using: deadmen, pitons, pickets, ice screws, carabiners, jumar ascenders. I loved the precision of our movements, even with the labored breathing and dull minds that were a component of any exertion at almost 8,000 meters. Ga
ry would kick-step his way out onto the wall of ice and snow and occasional rock, one cramponed boot at a time, secure on three points before dislodging his ice axe and slamming it in a few feet further on. I stood on a tiny platform I’d hacked out of the snow, belaying Gary until he’d moved out to the end of our two-hundred foot section of line. Then he’d anchor his end of the line with a deadman, piton, picket, or ice screw, go on belay himself, and I would move off—kicking the crampon points into the snow-wall rising almost vertically to blue sky just fifty or sixty feet above me.
A hundred yards or so behind us, Paul and Kanakaredes were doing the same—Paul in the lead and K on belay, then K climbing and Paul belaying and resting until the bug caught up.
We might as well have been on different planets. There was no conversation. We used every ounce of breath to take our next gasping step, to concentrate on precise placement of our feet and ice axes.
A 20th Century climbing team might have taken days to make this traverse, establishing fixed lines, retreating to their tents at Camp Three to eat and sleep, allowing other teams to break trail beyond the fixed ropes the next day. We did not have that luxury. We had to make this traverse in one try and keep moving up the ridge while the perfect weather lasted or we were screwed.
I loved it.
About five hours into the traverse, I realized that butterflies were fluttering all around me. I looked up toward Gary on belay two hundred feet ahead and above me. He was also watching butterflies—small motes of color dancing and weaving twenty-three thousand feet above sea level. What the hell would Kanakaredes make of this? Would he think this was an everyday occurrence at this altitude? Well, perhaps it was. We humans weren’t up here enough to know. I shook my head and continued shuffling my boots and slamming my ice axe up the impossible ridge.
The rays of the sun were horizontal in late afternoon when all four of us came off the knife-edge at the upper end of the traverse. The ridge was still heart-stoppingly steep there, but it had widened out so that we could stand on it as we looked back at our footprints on the snowy blade of the knife-edge. Even after all these years of climbing, I still found it hard to believe that we had been able to make those tracks.