Off the ridge at last, we roped up for the glacier but voted unanimously to descend it by staying close to the East Face of K2. The earlier snowstorm had hidden all the crevasses and we had heard or seen no avalanches in the past seventy-two hours. There were far fewer crevasses near the face but an avalanche could catch us anywhere on the glacier. Staying near the face carried its own risks, but it would also get us down the ice and out of avalanche danger in half the time it would take to probe for crevasses down the center of the glacier.
We were two-thirds of the way down—the bright red tents of Base Camp clearly in sight out on the rock beyond the ice—when Gary said, “Maybe we should talk about this Olympus Mons deal, K.”
“Yes,” click-hissed our bug, “I have been looking forward to discussing this plan and I hope that perhaps…”
We heard it then before we saw it. Several freight trains seemed to be bearing down on us from above, from the face of K2.
All of us froze, trying to see the snowplume trail of the avalanche, hoping against hope that it would come out onto the glacier far behind us. It came off the face and across the bergeschrund a quarter of a mile directly above us and picked up speed, coming directly at us. It looked like a white tsunami. The roar was deafening.
“Run!” shouted Gary and we all took off downhill, not worrying if there were bottomless crevasses directly in front of us, not caring at that point, just trying against all logic to outrun a wall of snow and ice and boulders roiling toward us at sixty miles per hour.
I remember now that we were roped with the last of our spidersilk—sixty-foot intervals—the lines clipped to our climbing harnesses. It made no difference to Gary, Paul, and me since we were running flat out and in the same direction and at about the same speed, but I have seen mantispids move at full speed since that day—using all six legs, their hands forming into an extra pair of flat feet—and I know now that K could have shifted into high gear and run four times as fast as the rest of us. Perhaps he could have beaten the avalanche since just the south edge of its wave caught us. Perhaps.
He did not try. He did not cut the rope. He ran with us.
The south edge of the avalanche caught us and lifted us and pulled us under and snapped the unbreakable spidersilk climbing rope and tossed us up and then submerged us again and swept us all down into the crevasse field at the bottom of the glacier and separated us forever.
Washington, D.C.
Sitting here in the Secretary of State’s waiting room three months after that day, I’ve had time to think about it.
All of us—everyone on the planet, even the bugs—have been preoccupied in the past couple of months as the Song has begun and increased in complexity and beauty. Oddly enough, it’s not that distracting, the Song. We go about our business. We work and talk and eat and watch HDTV and make love and sleep, but always there now—always in the background whenever one wants to listen—is the Song.
It’s unbelievable that we’ve never heard it before this.
No one calls them bugs or mantispids or the Listeners any more. Everyone, in every language, calls them the Bringers of the Song.
Meanwhile, the Bringers keep reminding us that they did not bring the Song, only taught us how to listen to it.
I don’t know how or why I survived when none of the others did. The theory is that one can swim along the surface of a snow avalanche, but the reality was that none of us had the slightest chance to try. That half-mile-wide wall of snow and rock just washed over us and pulled us down and spat out only me, for reasons known, perhaps, only to K2 and most probably not even to it.
They found me naked and battered more than three-quarters of a mile from where we had started running from the avalanche. They never found Gary, Paul, or Kanakaredes.
The emergency CMG’s were there within three minutes—they must have been poised to intervene all that time—but after twenty hours of deep-probing and sonar searching, just when the Marines and the bureaucrats were ready to lase away the whole lower third of the glacier if necessary to recover my friends’ bodies, it was Speaker Aduradake—Kanakaredes’s father and mother, it turned out—who forbade it.
“Leave them wherever they are,” he instructed the fluttering UN bureaucrats and frowning Marine colonels. “They died together on your world and should remain together within the embrace of your world. Their part of the Song is joined now.”
And the Song began—or at least was first heard—about one week later.
A male aide to the Secretary comes out, apologizes profusely for my having to wait—Secretary Bright Moon was with the President—and shows me into the Secretary of State’s office. The aide and I stand there waiting.
I’ve seen football games played in smaller areas than this office.
The Secretary comes in through a different door a minute later and leads me over to two couches facing each other rather than to the uncomfortable chair near her huge desk. She seats me across from her, makes sure that I don’t want any coffee or other refreshment, nods away her aide, commiserates with me again on the death of my dear friends (she had been there at the Memorial Service at which the President had spoken), chats with me for another minute about how amazing life is now with the Song connecting all of us, and then questions me for a few minutes, sensitively, solicitously, about my physical recovery (complete), my state of mind (shaken but improving), my generous stipend from the government (already invested), and my plans for the future.
“That’s the reason I asked for this meeting,” I say. “There was that promise of climbing Olympus Mons.”
She stares at me.
“On Mars,” I add needlessly.
Secretary Betty Willard Bright Moon nods and sits back in the cushions. She brushes some invisible lint from her navy blue skirt. “Ah, yes,” she says, her voice still pleasant but holding some hint of that flintiness I remember so well from our Top of the World meeting. “The Bringers have confirmed that they intend to honor that promise.”
I wait.
“Have you decided who your next climbing partners will be?” she asked, taking out an obscenely expensive and micron-thin platinum palmlog as if she is going to take notes herself to help facilitate this whim of mine.
“Yeah,” I said.
Now it was the Secretary’s turn to wait.
“I want Kanakaredes’s brother,” I say. “His…crèche brother.”
Betty Willard Bright Moon’s jaw almost drops open. I doubt very much if she’s reacted this visibly to a statement in her last thirty years of professional negotiating, first as a take-no-prisoners Harvard academic and most recently as Secretary of State. “You’re serious,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Anyone else other than this particular bu… Bringer?”
“No one else.”
“And you’re sure he even exists?”
“I’m sure.”
“How do you know if he wants to risk his life on a Martian volcano?” she asks, her poker face back in place. “Olympus Mons is taller than K2, you know. And it’s probably more dangerous.”
I almost, not quite, smile at this newsflash. “He’ll go,” I say.
Secretary Bright Moon makes a quick note in her palmlog and then hesitates. Even though her expression is perfectly neutral now, I know that she is trying to decide whether to ask a question that she might not get the chance to ask later.
Hell, knowing that question was coming and trying to decide how to answer it is the reason I didn’t come to visit her a month ago, when I decided to do this thing. But then I remembered Kanakaredes’s answer when we asked him why the bugs had come all this way to visit us. He had read his Mallory and he had understood Gary, Paul, and me—and something about the human race—that this woman never would.
She makes up her mind to ask her question.
“Why…” she begins. “Why do you want to climb it?”
Despite everything that’s happened, despite knowing that she’ll never understand, despite know
ing what an asshole she’ll always consider me after this moment, I have to smile.
“Because it’s there.”
Introduction to “The End of Gravity”
...............................
The final story in this collection is not exactly a story, or rather it is not just a story. The subheading for “The End of Gravity” is “a story for the screen” and it was written for this purpose—to serve as a literary equivalent to a film treatment. (If you know the format for a formal film treatment you know that some of the protocols are followed here—the use of present tense, for instance—while others, such as the capitalization of characters’ names the first time they appear—are not used. You’ll have to trust me that this was out of choice, not ignorance, on my part.)
Most novelists have a love-hate relationship with Hollywood and the movies. That is, they love feeling that literature is superior to movies; they hate being ignored by Hollywood; they love it when they get a shot at writing for the silver screen; they usually hate the experience (or love it and lose themselves in it so that they’re frequently ruined as literary writers); they love to bitch about it.
I suppose that my experiences and reactions fall into some or all of the love-hate categories listed above, but the truth is that I love movies. I met my wife while shooting films in inner city Philadelphia in the winter of 1969. I got into teaching through filmmaking and earned my master’s degree in education while doing research on the effect of television and films on children’s learning and perception. When I finish a long day and evening of writing, I prefer to watch a movie on DVD before reading again at bedtime.
Unlike most readers I know, much less most writers, I have a list of films that I think are superior (or at least equal) to the books upon which they’re based. (Jaws is a good example. The book, a first effort by Peter Benchley, has its characters having sex in motels half the time. Benchley helped write the screenplay, but by then, Spielberg and others had convinced him that the story was about a big, scary fish so lose the adultery. The English Patient is a more complicated example of a beautifully written, lyrical piece of writing that fails on several levels as a novel—contorted plot, lumpy expositions, unbelievable coincidences, too many authorial games going on—but which was turned into a fine (and logical!) equivalent movie. To Kill a Mockingbird is a brilliant novel, but the film—even with events and subplots missing—is a brilliant work in its own right, brought to life by the performances of Gregory Peck, young Mary Badham, and a fine supporting cast. And I’ll stop here before I get carried away with my list.
Many of my novels and stories have been optioned for film, but as of this writing none have been produced. I’ve adapted two of my own short stories as teleplays that were produced for the old, ultra-low-budget Monsters syndicated TV series, and however modest the results, the process was enjoyable. As I write this, I’ve recently received word that a recent novel of mine—Darwin’s Blade—has been “greenlighted” as an episodic TV series on TV for the fall 2002 season. (I’ll believe it when I see it.) I once was hired to adapt my thousand-page horror novel Carrion Comfort into a treatment for a two-hour feature film and that was an education. (Unlike most novelists, who try to keep the bulk of their novel in a screenplay whether it works for the movie or not, I kept trying to throw out the bulk of the plot, subplots, and characters to whittle the story down to feature-film size, while the producers kept insisting on keeping the novel’s huge scale and complexity. It didn’t work. As a mini-series, yes. As a feature, never.)
More recently, I’ve spent the last three years—between novels and other projects—doing five drafts of a screenplay adaptation of my 1992 novel Children of the Night. This wasn’t for Hollywood, but for a German film production company new to the feature film business. Twice, the project came close to beginning principal photography in both the United States and Romania, but each time the project collapsed because of the inability of the European producers to get their act together…to get their ducks in a row…to get their shit together. This was a more common movie experience for a novelist—a three-year roller coaster ride of high hopes and thwarted compromises resulting in…nothing. In the end, the company owns a very fine screenplay which will never be worth a cent to them because—finally disgusted by their ineptitude—I will never option or sell the novel rights to them.
But, again, the process of writing the screenplay was not painful. I loved deconstructing the novel—not just truncating or altering it, but truly deconstructing it in the literal sense, finding the core of it and shaping the new entity of the film around that core. In many places, the film script is superior to the novel—tighter, more focused, more exciting. And as a real bonus in this three-year effort, I became good friends with the young German film director, Robert Sigl, whose dream of making Children of the Night started the whole project. It wasn’t Robert’s fault that the production finally tore its hull out on the coral reef of funding and production mismanagement and—knowing Robert’s determination and my own Irish stubbornness—I suspect that Children of the Night: The Movie may yet get made some day.
All of which has nothing to do with the following story, “The End of Gravity,” except to illustrate why I was extremely skeptical about one year ago when European film producer Andrei Ujica (born in Romania, living in Berlin, often working in Russia) contacted me and asked me to write a movie that was to be shot, in part, aboard the International Space Station.
“Aboard the space station, huh?” was my response on the phone. “Uh-huh. Yeah. Right.”
But I soon learned that Andrei Ujica had already shot one documentary film in space—Out of the Present, filmed by his cosmonaut friends aboard Mir in the early 1990s. Now Andrei wanted to do a nondocumentary film, a feature, filmed in Russia and aboard the station, which would include homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris while dealing with deep psychological and philosophical issues surrounding mankind’s evolutionary leap into the cosmos.
“Uh-huh,” I said suspiciously. “Why me?”
Again, serendipity, for good or ill, had stepped in. A few years ago, the Fondation Cartier (a foundation for modern art) in Paris had asked me to do some catalog copy for a display of millennial art they were putting on, including an essay on a collection of toy robots and another essay about SF thoughts about the future and the art that’s inspired. I looked at the photographs of the toy robot collection and the amazing art gathered for the show—it was a huge show with wonderful art—and wrote the essays, but because of one thing and another, my wife and I were unable to be their guests at the month-long show and their international receptions. I’ll always regret missing that. As for my “catalog copy”—well, I half-imagined the catalog as a loose-leafed or stapled-together thing, but it turns out that both essays (translated into French, of course, as well as in the original English) were released in beautiful, expensive hardcover books that would grace any coffee table.
The SF-sees-the-future essay was in a book that included an interview with filmmaker Andrei Ujica. I couldn’t read the interview with Andrei because my French is essentially nonexistent, but Andrei read my essays, thought that I might be the one to write his movie, went on to read several of my novels…voilà!
For some months, Andrei and I communicated only via e-mail and occasional telephone calls. His interests and ideas for the film—The End of Gravity is his suggested title despite the fact that I once wrote a novel called Phases of Gravity—were philosophical and complex, ranging from thoughts on human evolution to theories of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. To these suggestions, during these satellite phone calls, I would make comments such as—“Yeah, yeah, Heidegger is good…but what we really need is some sex. A love interest. And maybe an explosion or two.”
Andrei was very patient with me. In the end, he paid me to go off and write whatever I damned well pleased. So I did.
Andrei loves the treatment-story and my next step, scheduled for next month as I write this introduction, is to t
urn it into the final screenplay. He wants Dustin Hoffman as “Norman Roth.”
We’ll see. As I tend to say to friends or interviewers who ask about Simmons’s prose appearing on the screen—“I’ll believe it when I’m eating popcorn in the theater and watching the final credit crawl.”
A digression here.
A few years ago Karen and I were hanging out with Stephen and Tabby King at their rented house in nearby Boulder when a funny little thing happened. King was doing his ABC mini-series remake of The Shining that spring, shooting at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park only a few miles from my cabin, and he and Tabby had leased a home in Boulder for several months and they’d invited us over to watch some video dailies—including a wonderful scene, edited out of the final cut, where Steve, in white tie and tails as the dead and rotting ghostly bandleader, has his rotted face literally fly apart, but not fast enough for the makeup man, whose fingers reach in on camera and begin clawing at the makeup, sending great gouts of blood and tissue everywhere.
In the middle of this—while we all chomped on popcorn and laughed—Steve and I exchanged big grins (his more maniacal than mine, I confess).
“Damn,” I said, “don’t we have the greatest job in the world?”
“And they let us get away with it,” said King.
Exactly.
We knew exactly what the other meant. We weren’t talking about writing for film or TV at that moment, but just about being writers. About making a living as a writer. About being paid to create this stuff and have other people read it, much less have carpenters build sets and actors learn lines and makeup people do their gory best to realize the images that had hatched in our imaginations, our dreams, our fears. We both knew that we had taken the thing we most loved from childhood—exploring our fears and interests by telling stories, by playing games, by getting the other kids to play in the woods with our war games and story lines and characters as a guide as they ran and shot and fell and died and rose again—and now we got paid for doing exactly what we loved to do as kids. It’s the greatest job in the world.