Ringclimber

Chapter 1 - The Event

The Dream

The bubble is isolate, swept beside a fragment through the trajectories of the Rings, entering the sector in shadow. The last climber pushes through the softlock and frosts over briefly.

The others are already gathered in in their bundles on the walls, faint lamplight lashing their shadows across the curved surface. The suit leans back and splits open -- Sharon floats up out of it, netted auburn hair drifting with incomplete motion.

Her hard blue eyes glint in the light from the helmet as she looks around. She is exhausted and the corners of her thin mouth are stiff with tension.

Floating, she closes the suit and racks it by the lock. Its shadow joins the ranks, standing guard. She flicks off its light and there is only the gentle sourceless glow of the lumes.

"Bloody cold," Erin remarks, arm pushing into the icy air, offering a bulb from her kit. "Here, have some soup 'till the heat comes up."

"Thanks."

Rael touches Sharon's arm gently, halting her drift. He regards her briefly, concerned at her tension, then glances away in embarrassment at his own display of emotion. She smiles, struggling into her own sack beside his, looking down from the arbitrary ceiling, across from the arbitrary wall. "It's getting thick out there. I'm surprised I'm not discharging all over the place."

"Ozone kid," Pat remarks.

"What's next?" Rael asks, frowning with a barely suppressed eagerness.

Sharon thinks of a reckless decision in the Adirondacks years ago. She knows what he wants... and she is tempted for a moment by the thought of the view.

"We can't go to the surface," she finally replies, "There are spokes less than a few kilometers spinward. I could see them from here. I don't think we want to be a bridge to ground." Her eyes flick around the team as they chuckle; inside the bag, her hand relaxes its unconscious tension.

Pat raises her harsh face to the glow. "Man, you build that charge, the next thing you touch..."

When she senses Rael about to protest, Sharon's lips thin. "Look, we'll stick with the schedule - straight through, like we planned. Camp inside Cassini for two rotations." Her voice is faintly bitter.

"Don't tell me you're getting sick of us already," Erin mocks.

"No." Sharon rests her chin on the edge of the bag, looks at Rael and winks. "Just impatient."

The lumes go black, and outside, fragments of the ring scrape past, a soft susurrus against the night.

...Like an avalanche floating in glass, the rings are a fume of dust streams and glittering boulders. The suited figures of the team are crosses of light on Sharon's command visor.

She watches as it happens. A small fragment, three meters across, near Rael's path...

A fragment, flushed from stability by a collision, slips across her view. Suddenly, his image is gone...

Awareness

"Rael!" she screams.

She awakens under broad windows. The Moon, nearly full, casts cold light in shards on the blanket. Beyond the window are the protean chasms of cloud, remote, lonely. She rolls over and buries her head in the pillow. She looks up, and then touches her own cheek, astonished. Her fingers come away wet with tears.

Now a dirigible, the planetary liner floats on thin stratospheric winds, descending to the spaceport. They are almost home.

"Must have come through while I was sleeping," she whispers to herself, pillow tight to the side of her face, trying desperately to forget her dream.

"He's dead! He's dead! That's enough!" someone shouts.

But it is her voice that echoes.

She looks around, shocked at herself. The fint red letters on the table beside the bed shows it is late. No one could have heard. She is alone. Alone! All right. Alone.

She closes her eyes and tries to think of nothing. Darkness. Sleep. Don't think of the dream. Don't think about not thinking of the dream.

"Damn!" she exclaims. She swings up out of her bed and sits, blue eyes staring.

She stands, sweeps up her dayrobe and swaths it around her. The door slams behind her exit.

The lounge is open despite the hour, walls of glass painted with clouds in the moonlight. It is empty, except for the robots, whose motions are a soft voice of precision against the discord of her haste.

"A table?" she asks the majordomo.

"The promenade is open, if you wish your usual seating. Landing will be in two hours." It has a pleasant, relaxed voice.

"Of course." They always remembered. But they never noticed what was most obvious. If they were human, it would have been kindness, or professionalism. For them, it is neutrality.

It leads her out to a table with the night sky on both sides. She slumps into a seat across the table. "Soup," she orders. "Wait, no... make that cocoa. It's cold." She pulls the dayrobe tighter about her as it leaves.

The clouds draw closer. She starts as the seat beside her scrapes back.

"Couldn't sleep, either?" Erin asks. Her dark hair is more than usually disorderly, and a cigarette hangs from the corner of her mouth, smoking softly.

Sharon shrugs.

The robot returns with the cocoa. "And you?" it asks Erin.

"Something quiet... how about a shot of Callisto?"

Sharon laughs.

"Whiskey? Quiet?"

"Well, it might get me to sleep."

Sharon sips her cocoa. "We'll be down in an hour or two."

"And in the meantime?" Erin asks, head cocked at a peculiar angle. "How much longer are you going to let this go on?" Which was about the softest Erin ever got.

Sharon's eyes suddenly fill with tears. "Oh, I don't know..." she whispers, voice cracking. "It's not... that bad." She leans back, rubbing her eyes, then her face. "I can stand it. I -- I'll get used to it. It's just going to take a while." She tries to block her emotions with a sip of cocoa.

"Yeah."

"It was a mistake, Erin. I should never have made this trip."

"It wasn't your fault," Erin insisted. "It was his choice."

Sharon searches Erin's face. "Erin, the leader has to take responsibility."

"You couldn't have made any difference," Erin insists, leaning across the table. "It was a malfunction! You know as well as I do -- it was the static and it made his systems pack up, and then he got hit. Stop taking it on." How can she tell her friend how foolish it was to climb with someone you loved? She reaches over and touches Sharon's shoulder, pushing down on something that wells up firmly within her, unnamed.

The Past

Sharon stares out from where she sits on the the edge of the ridge, faintly warm with just completed exertion; goggles change the snow to a brilliant gold under a flawless turquoise sky. Her breath smokes past the fabric of the balaclava into the far subzero air. The rope is stiff under her gloves as she draws it in through the belay device. Gradually, below, she can hear the faint thwack and chime of axes on ring-hard ice; growing closer, but slowly.

The sound seems to have a faint and distant echo from the other cliffs of Tyre. Mechanically belaying, she realizes she is watching a tiny speck in the col to her left, working hard and moving noticeably. The figure pauses, and she knows the climber is setting a screw in the ice. Difficult work in these temperatures, whether the ice is blue-hard, or frosty and brittle. But who could it be?

Peter's axe slaps over the dug-out cornice, flailing for a moment in the snow lip, finally gaining purchase. His arms, then his mask, crinkled with frosty ferns of breath. Finally, he pushes over, partly collapsing to his knees. The sound of ice screws on his rack is soprano like bells in the thin air. "Suppose... suppose you haul, since you're just sitting there," he gasps, muffled. She smiles, but he can't see it. "Okay." Then her curiosity wins. "Hey, listen, who's over there?" And she gestures a glove at the distant climber.

"Don't know," he mutters. He stands on the narrow ledge, peering.

Her voice becomes suddenly grim. "Well, whoever it is, they're not getting there first. Tie in, break out the tea - I'll haul the wings fast."

Only two hours later, at the summit, Sharon races for the edge. The thin wind keens over the fabric and tugs up her legs just at the cornice. Sun casts the brilliant color of the wings across her arms as the cliffs slip below. She dips and circles, watching the climber toiling up the last of the col beneath her. She wonders who it is.

Her doorbell rings as Sharon is halfway up the underside of the high garage roof. The surface is studded with plastic holds in various colors and sizes, and her hand stops halfway between one hold and the next.

"Just a minute," she yells. She hangs from one hand, using counterpressure with her feet to stay horizontal, slips a quickdraw through a bolt hanger and clips the autobelay rope to it.

From below comes the sound of footsteps. She looks over her shoulder, to see a courier with a package standing in the open garage door, driveway behind him, looking around as if confused. She laughs, and her feet come off, swinging wildly with the force.

"Hey!" He jumps back, staring up at her. He is not tall, and his hair is long, caught back into a ponytail by a gold ring. She lets go and falls. The rope catches her, and leaves her dangling for a moment, looking into his startled brown eyes, before it lowers her to the thick mats.

Sharon gestures the animation to pause as the glass door opens behind her. "Just a second." She drops the partial work into storage and turns to her secretary.

"A gentleman to see you, your appointment for ten, Rael Perez-Chartenay."

Sharon smiles a little at the secretary's lilting pronunciation. "Show him in, Mike." She glances at her watch, and settles into the chair by the vast, curtained windows. Just another interview, she thinks - until he steps through the door to her office.

He is not tall, but his frame shows his strength, and the structure of his neck and hands are well-muscled. His black hair is caught loosely at the back of his head in a gold band. He is young. A thin moustache droops over his lips, and there is a hint of an epicanthic fold to his eyelids.

"Well," she says, then falls silent, trying to retain control of the situation. Finally, she stands, and looks directly into his brown eyes, meeting his level stare. "I believe we've met before, Mr. Perez-Chartenay. I hope that's the way you pronounce it?"

He nods. "Yes we've met." They shake hands. "Twice actually." His voice is crisp and unchanged by the situation.

She sits and gestures to a chair. "Oh? I remember a delivery a few month ago."

"I was, ah, paying for my last trip. But I knew who you were."

She sits, thinking through the memories. She remembers a paraglide from the summit of Tyre and a lone climber on the slope below. "The Perez Col," she states finally, voice flat.

His eyes light for a second. "Ah, so you do remember."

"Yes, I do. And named for your climb that day, I believe. That's quite a route."

"The best."

"Solo."

"Yes. My partner retreated at one thousand meters."

She knows the kind of epic behind a sentence like that. Especially on near vertical ice.

"But you kept going."

"Yes."

She taps the leather of the chair arm and her eyes rest on something beyond the window for a while.

"Tell me about your interest in space construction," she asks at last. "Then we'll see if I think you're right for the course."

He stops her on the plaza as she is leaving for home.

"Excuse me, Ms. Lazlo, I have to talk to you."

"I'm sorry, I don't discuss business anywhere but the office." She shrugs his hand from her arm. "And I don't expect to be bothered when my day is over."

"But you rejected me! You wouldn't return my calls. I know it was something about my interview - but what? What's wrong? Why wouldn't the training be right for me? I didn't understand your mail."

"I said I'd rather not discuss it." She started to walk away, but he wouldn't leave her alone.

"But I paid the deposit. I passed your screeners. What more did you want?"

She sets her pack to the pavement. "What I expect is to make the final decisions about who gets trained, and who doesn't. Your deposit was refunded. That's the end of it."

"I know." But his eyes plead.

Her hands drop from the defensive position. "All right." Her voice is resigned. "Look, it's not what you might think. You're capable. But everyone who goes out of this school has my name on them. A few die. I try to make it as few as I can.

"Motivation is critical. This isn't climbing, where you have maybe ten or fifteen things at once to remember. There are a hundred, with check items for everything, and if you miss one you could be dead with your lungs blown inside out and frozen. The motivation it takes to be a climber isn't the kind of motivation that makes it work in space. You're a well-known climber. Okay. But if new experiences are what you're after, you probably don't belong in construction. Try hang gliding. Why waste my time and yours?"

"Because I can do the job."

Her face is closed.

"All right, if you won't train me, then I'll get out there anyway. Even if I have to go to Ramo to do it. But I'd rather go with you. Because of that better chance. Look, give me a shot, let me try it, even on probation - and if you're not satisfied, well... I'll rethink what I'm doing."

"Ramo's a complete ass." She snaps, suddenly. "All right, I'm going to take a gamble that this persistence you're showing is going to translate directly into your handling of things from the lock and out. Make sure I'm not wrong, because if I am, you're the one who'll be dead, not me. And if you don't die, I'll make sure you wish you had."

He listens to every word. He nods, even though his face is flushed with anger and embarrassment.

"Be at my office tomorrow at eight with your deposit. I'll have your status changed by then." She picks up her pack and swings it over her shoulder. "And don't show up outside my damn building again like this."

He looks away for a moment and then back again. His face is calm by then. "You won't be wrong," he replies. "I promise."

"That'll do," she interrupts. She walks away across the quiet plaza, the sound of her heels loud on the flagstones.

He claps his hands once, the sound like a rifle shot. She whirls and sees him striding away with exuberance, back straight. Her lips thin, but she can't restrain a faint smile.

"Well, Rael, I don't know how you rate, but the young lady herself is coming up for your check ride," his instructor informs him.

"That's interesting," he replies, perplexed.

"Interesting? You'll be lucky if you live through it. When she graduated me, she detached a whole section of B lock with a charge, and there I am, on it. And then, when I finally get off and into the gig, all she says is 'Well, Mr. Bose, what about that lock section? Are you going to get it stopped before it slams into Nimbus Station, or am I going to have to call an alert?'"

"Maybe I'll get lucky."

Bose shakes his head sadly.

She had spent a week planning his test, and even now, she is cold. There are always dangers involved in a licensing, dangers for both student and examiner. It is intended to be difficult. Most examiners would never go to such lengths to prove a student under actual conditions. But she only tests the best of the students. If they were the best, they would do exactly what she expected. And, she promised herself, if he slipped, she would fail him -- with no second chance.

She sleeps uneasily, waking once or twice in the darkness of her bedroom, and though she can find no dreams, she seems to remember a feeling of blind suffocation. At the breakfast table, she reviews his instructor's reports, and suddenly feels a spasm of guilt. She shoves the datapad across the table.

Harrison Bose, Rael's instructor, meets her at the airlock. "Welcome up, Ms. Lazlo. Did Wayne give you a good flight?"

"Fine, thanks," she replies. She reaches for the first handle and they monkey down the corridor, side by side.

"About this test, Ms Lazlo."

"Yes. You have the medical teams on standby in C wing, ready to breach outlock on my call?"

"Well, of course, but don't you think this is exceptional?"

"I had considered ignoring the medical teams on the basis of your reports of his capabilities, Harrison. But I reasoned that it would be better to be as prepared as possible."

He laughs.

"You're questioning my judgement again."

"And you're questioning mine," she replies coldly, halting in mid corridor as a pair of maintenance workers slide past.

He flushes, nearly missing the brake handle at the corner. "Well, yes."

She grins at him, and swings around the corner. "At least you're honest."

"But I expected to graduate him myself."

"I want to make sure you know what you're saying when you tell me someone's as good as he is." She grunts as she seizes the brake webs at the door to the waiting area. "So. Is he that good, or do I call this off?"

His face is impassive. "You've read my reports. You know what I think."

The shifting green and gold light of the lounge sweeps warm shadows across the floor. Rael smiles at her from a hammock on the wall. "Sharon," he cries. "How are you?" He thrusts a hand through the webbing and she grasps it, pulling herself up to float in his personal vertical.

"I'm fine, Rael. How do you feel about being certified?"

A proud curve to his lips, only a trace of uncertainty. "All set. And what a privilege - head of the corporation come to do my ride."

She shakes her head with a pitying smile. "We'll see if you feel that way, later."

...He checks out the suit under her careful eye. When he pulls the checkpad from the sleeve, she snags it from his hand. "No sir, you do this blind." He feels a flash of resentment, which he quickly suppresses. Why was she being such a pain? Was it the first interview, still? A shame, if so. He glares at the suit. All right. He can do it in the dark, if he has to.

"You realize, of course, that I would never do this at work," he replies, face still heated. "Harrison has beaten it into me to never do without the checklist."

"Yes, well, just this once, we'll see how good your memory is."

He finds four faults in the suit during the power-up. He glances at her with concealed suspicion, realizing that it is possible she has created them. She tried to hurry him on, talking about tight EVA schedules, but he resists, believing that she is trying to see if her authority will make him skip checks.

Then they line up in the lock, the roaring depressurization passes into silence, and the lights dim to a faint amber. He never sees her hand reach up to alter the CO2 mixer on his pack. The doors slide aside; the darkness and the stars are waiting.

His pulse is pounding with excitement as they float out to the practice zone. The matrix of girders is sketched by tiny beacons as the station rounds the dark side of the world. They close on the array in silence; with gentle pulses of their thrusters, they come to rest. The rim of the earth is faintly luminous with the corona of the sun, but it will be an hour yet before dawn.

She runs him through basic manuuvres, then starts him disconnecting a section of the grid. He feels his breath still coming hard, and wonders why he is so tired. She watches him carefully, and on a closed frequency checks that the med team is standing by.

He lifts a girder from its sockets and carefully brakes it. He feels his breath coming too fast, and he tries to calm it. It refuses his control, and finally he knows something was wrong.

"Sharon?" he queries, and though his voice is tight, it is steady. "There's something wrong with my air. I -- I'm not sure what it is, but I'm feeling dizzy."

"I'm coming," she replies. Her darkened form, hanging above the struts, catches the first reddish light of the rising sun. He decides that she looks like some ancient angel, dropping swiftly to pass him. After a moment, she reports. "CO2 mixer is misset. You're reset. Standby." She switches to the alternate frequency. "Get rid of the meds, Harrison, and get somebody out here to reconnect this beam." She switches back to the normal frequency. "Let's get inside. Someone else will take care of this beam."

"I can go on," he insists. "I feel better already."

"I'm sure you do, but there's no need. Back inside, now. B lock, and hustle."

"Roger," he replies, fully aware that he has aborted his own test.

He breaks down his suit in the web and stores it, eyes on his work, unable to rise to meet hers. His mouth is tight and set with an inwardly directed frown, as he angrily considers his own stupidity.

The locker room door slides back and Harrison Bose appears. He takes a worried glance at Sharon, who is grinning, and his grim expression eases. Rael comes out of the web, and when he sees Bose smiling, his frown becomes a glare. "You son-of-a-bitch, don't grin at me."

Sharon laughs; she can't contain herself any longer. Rael looks back and forth between the two of them, confused in the torment of his self-assumed failure. "Why are you laughing?" he demands.

"Why do you assume you failed?" she rejoins.

Now he is totally confused. "You mean it was all right?"

"I faulted your mixer, and there you are kicking yourself. The only thing that disappoints me is that you fell back on me without clearing your gauges. You could have found and corrected the fault. Still, it's better to take quick action in a situation where you're judgement might be impaired."

"So it's OK?"

"It's OK."

Harrison holds out his hand. "Welcome to the profession, sucker. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Sharon smiles, remembering how she had felt after her initiation. "Well, Rael, have yourself a fine party. Sorry I have to miss it."

"You mean you won't stay?" His expression is immediately concerned, and suddenly she feels as if she is betraying his concept of her by leaving.

She hesitates, thinking of all the duties waiting for her on Earth.

"Really, Sharon, you should come," Bose insists. "You know how much you enjoy graduations."

"You'd better find me some overnight quarters, then."

"I'll take care of that," Rael volunteers. "I know Brice pretty well. He'll find you something good. With windows," he promises.

She wonders how he knows what she likes in a room.

Why am I sitting in a corner?

She draws on the joint, sighs smoke through her nostrils into the already thick atmosphere of Gurney's. Earth wheels below, along with a myriad of office duties, both hundreds of miles away; both all too close.

The laughter and conversation swirls up for a moment, dimmed, a babel beyond her understanding. She thinks of all she has to do. Why did I ever start this? she wonders. The earth is beyond the glass, beneath her feet -- where it should be. But it was all too seldom, now... where it should be.

Rael bursts from the crowd, face glistening faintly with sweat in the earthlight, mouth loose and eyes excited. "Sharon!" he calls. "Dance?"

She tastes the idea. Inertia prompts her to say no, but she finds she can't. Instead she is smiling and rising to the center of the room. They wheel with the music, twining with the aggressive moves of free fall dance, an expertise required of all of her graduates. She realizes that he isn't her student now, and she feels sudden shame at the thrill that stirs in her. But the dance ends, and the strange complex of thoughts that had begin to evolve remains incomplete. One of the other students drags Rael away for the next dance, and Bose comes up to her laughing...

She waits by the boarding tunnel as the pilot arrives, nods to her, and ducks through the hatch. She turns and is about to follow him when Rael arrives.

"Sharon?"

"Hi."

"Well, I did it, just like I promised."

"You did." She smiles. "I didn't think you would, but you did."

"Yeah, I know. You thought I was a... braggart."

She is embarrassed.

"No, it's OK," he continues. "I've heard it before." He looks around. "Listen," he asks, eyes back to her, "I wonder, I'm not a student here anymore, and I'll be back on earth for some ground time before I go out to Natlan. I... wonder if we could go climbing before I head out?" He looks swiftly away, then back again.

She feels sorry and excited all at once, and she doesn't know how to say, no, she couldn't, she was far too busy. Finally, she gives up.

"Call me," she replies. She ducks into the tunnel and the airlock closes behind her.

Their lips meet in the thin mountain air above Patagonia.

The Present

The lock clicks. A welcoming house: the lights warm by themselves as Sharon enters. She hangs her cloak in the alcove and walks slowly down the short flight of stairs to the living room. Her eyes rove over the holos, flicking away from one of Rael. She stops at the iridescent vase on the table beside the stairs and almost runs a hand along its lip. She shakes her head at her own sentiment. "I'm home!" she yells to no one, raising her fists to the roof.

She drapes herself over the couch and stars at the darkened skylight - silent... moments pass, while her thoughts veer and flow.

Morning sunlight slips through the edge of the windows. It lights the side of her sleeping face.

Content, Layout, and Images Copyright © 1999 by Mark Cashman except where indicated (NASA photos)

Chapter 2