Ringclimber

Chapter 18 - The Day Comes

The day of their departure they start coming in at five after three. The vehicle is decelerating at a gravity. The suit technicians greet Sharon when she enters. She yawns, gestures, and mumbles her good mornings. They turn back to their checklists as she sinks into the webs by the window wall, staring out. She yawns again, opens a window on her datapad, and tries to read a light romance. Erin stalks in, waving her hands and calling out, "Cigars, Pablo! I've got to have a cigar before the flight." Pablo Thomas, her suit tech, grins, and mocks lighting up, in a room where the reality would not be allowed. Then he stands, flips a couple of switches on the suit collar, and, with a critical eye, watches the suit prostheses stiffen the suit to stand. He ticks off another step on his checklist.

Anne walks in just as the staff is bringing breakfast. She slips quickly into the examination room and then pushes her head back past the doorframe. "Bloods, please. Erin?" Sharon glances up from her meal as Erin stands, muttering. "God, before breakfast. Hell." Which leaves Sharon snorting a repressed laugh.

Kyle enters the room like an owner. He had been up much earlier, exercising to make himself alert. "Hi Sharon. Where's everyone?"

"Blood tests," she replies, trying to bring herself into focus. She yawns. "Pat's not here yet, she's saying good bye to her parents, but she'll be in shortly."

An attendant approaches with Trafton's breakfast, startling him. "Oh, don't worry," the attendant smiles, "it's only food." Trafton laughs, uproariously, and Sharon knows then that he is nervous. He never laughs like that.

The checklists are completed, breakfast consumed, bloods taken, physiques measured, and the technicians have stepped out for coffee in the outer lounge, Sharon looks around and extends her hands to the rest of the team. "Ready?" she asks, frowning with excitement. They form a circle and squeeze hands, looking from face to face; the smiles emerge, unbidden. Sharon grins.

"Okay," she says, satisfied. She steps to the door and leans through it. "Hey, folks, let's get started."

I have this life. Only one, and it's precious. I don't want to waste it. I don't want to die, but someday, I will. So, in the meantime, I'm really going to live. The best I can.

She steps from amber to void in the space between the F-ring and the A-ring.

It seems to take hours for the lock to cycle. Anne stands in the narrow room as the hissing roar of the pumps fades to a throb that pulses against the soles of her feet in silence. Her hands are clenched, and though there is no one to see, she holds her face a pale mask against fear. She wants to reach up to adjust her hair; she remembers a volume she had forgotten to download to the suit library. She looks at her hands. Slowly, she spreads her fingers, plastic raised to metal, flesh in plastic, and, as the metal slides softly aside, she reaches for space.

Erin waits as the air drains, remembering her last climb on a small crag in the hills above the city. The rock is hard and unforgiving under the hand of her imagination, but the motions are sensual, rippling the muscles of her thighs in sympathy.

Trafton feels himself shivering as he steps into space. Memories of being trapped are crowding the periphery of his mind. He thrusts failure away, hesitating.

Pat stands alone in the prep room, her place last by lot, staring at the door as each of the others pass through, as the alarms sound, and as the lock cycles to amber and back to blue. She waits for a few last minutes. Kyle stands in the wind of exhausting air and then steps away into space. The lock cycles blue and Pat steps forward to the threshold. The door rolls away. She steps through, thumbs up and the door rolls shut. Pumps roar into silence. The outer door goes and she knows she's ready to leave.

Below their feet the void stretches away light years to the nearest stars. The sun glares beside them, small but bright, throwing every wrinkle of their suits into stark relief. Ahead, Saturn is crescent as they begin the drift out of shadow, pacing the braided F-ring. Behind, the camera and relay pods accelerate, flocking to join the team. The drop vehicle is the only craft visible, though some distant mining vehicles have suspended operations to let their crews watch the start on their monitors.

Sharon is first, in accordance with the plan. Their heads-up displays are alive, bracketing her location and projecting her course. Pat tenses, then assumes the correct attitude and makes a burn. It will take fifteen minutes to reach the outermost braid. Anne launches. A cluster of sand flashes past her, grating on the helmet and she flinches. Kyle follows, and for a moment is tempted to wave his hands and fend off the ghostly sand. Erin follows at the rear, head swivelling with the view.

The team falls free, beads of life linked only by their sensors; they are alone, except for their communications.

"First fix," Sharon reports. "Shift left 3.4"

They burn again in sequence, setting up a slanted line for edge intercept, trying to match their line to the flow of the rings. "Targets of opportunity," Sharon announces. "See you in the first gap, boys and girls."

The solidity of the A-ring edge is merely apparent. On approach, it splits and diffuses into streamers of chaotic dust and rocks. Sharon fires a conservative thruster, then she reaches for a stone, a small one, the size of a suit. She pivots and rolls. There is the sudden kick of the stabilization burn as she is spattered with tiny rocks clattering the composite armor. She checks the planet as it rolls past her visor. Distant swirling clouds are girded with the shattered belt of the rings. Then another boulder is upon her.

As they enter the outer margin of the A ring, the shepherd satellite Atlas passes. Sharon watches the twenty kilometer cratered ellipse slide slowly by behind them. She feels as if there should be a rumbling from its passage - it is like watching a moving city blot out the horizon from far below to far above. Strands, braids, and clumps of dust seem to roil in its gravitational wake. As always, depth perception is strangely altered, and she is momentarily unsure as to whether she should cross hands before her face to push away the object, or whether to simply relax as she slides away through the dust streams toward the gap. Fortunately, the heads-up is not fooled, correctly reporting distance. The shadow of the kilometers distant receding satellite reaches an arm toward her through the dust. There is a spectral flash as the momentary last light of the sun glints through the translucent icy surface and then the crystals of the ring. For a moment, everything is black, with only the faintly glowing blue mist of eclipse. The shadow finally swings away, and the sun glares again.

Six hours at high speed in fairly clear space, and they have slid past the Saturnian noon, attaining the outer edge of the A ring. They prowl the flowing rocks and dust rapids and shift through sand to a small moonlet. They cling to it like a wall, gradually reorienting their local vertical. Behind them, the density of the particles drops away to form the edge of the Alfven Gap. And on their cheeks, sweat mats hair to skin, cooling rapidly as the temperature of exertion is exchanged with the air.

Erin sighs, cold light slashing across her features. "Well, at least the dynamics get a little quieter after this."

Anne climbs to the upper end of the moonlet, looking toward the gap. She brushes a flow of rocks away. They coil into a knot, pacing the moonlet. She looks down as Erin chortles. "Hey, look, a bloody new moon! Shall we call it Annet?" Anne replies, "We're behind as it is, I think. No time for pregnancy."

Pat stirs. It is her turn to lead. "Yeah, let's get at it. We'll be able to make up some time if the gap stays as clear as it looks."

Four weeks of eleven hour days. They sleep three hours each night, and rest fourteen as a "weekend" combined with six planning hours, consulting and updating the maps from current beacon tracks. They move more quickly as the sand tapers into dust and large rocks.

They travel nearly ten thousand kilometers of the A Ring, with stops every "mid-week" to rise to the ring surface and intercept the drop canister. Already their suits are battered, yellowed from the constant radiation. Even the hard crystalline plastic of their helmets has been scored.

They sleep in bubble tents anchored to ice boulders and drink milk as they lie awakening. Occasionally a stream of rocks rattles across the tent, and Sharon's hands knot with tension, unseen in the cold cyanotic dark.

"Try the console restart," suggests Erin's voice from her backlit figure. They are gathered around Sharon, their breath feathering in the dry cold, blocking the light and offering advice. Sharon bows her head and fumbles with the chin switches, tired.

There is a sudden whistle and whir. The suit bends and straightens.

Sharon sighs and smiles nervously.

"Well, I guess that's OK."

She glances down at the chest and swings her arms. The suit slips through the motions. The faint sound of the prosthetic micromotors permeates the tent, modulated by her movement.

"But is it safe?" Pat asks. "It's never taken two restarts to get started before." She looks sharply at Sharon. The bags under her eyes are etched by the reflected light. "You'll have to be concerned with manuverability. Not now, maybe. It'll be two more days to the Division. Lots of big rocks. Then we get back in the thick stuff, right?"

Sharon looks up from the checklist board. "Well, I'm not going to abort on a flawed suit. We can send up for the second suit tomorrow."

Erin frowns. "It's just one of those flaky things. Once in a while it happens. It might not happen again for days, or months even. And it probably won't mean anything."

Pat interrupts with a querulous glare. "But the backups are supposed to -- "

"Hey, you guys," Sharon interjects.

They switch to her, expressions still in argument.

"Really. I'm ready to go. Are you going to leave so I can get out and clamp the tent?" She gestures carefully.

At the outer edge of the Cassini Division they pause on a loose boulder shepherding a ringlet, imperceptibly losing ground as the density wave that had swept the material from the heart of the B Ring slowly pitches its substance into Division space.

Sharon stares from behind glass at her finger as it pokes gently into the fluffy aggregate, wondering what it would be like to have ridden the wave that formed the earth. Suddenly, she looks to one side, as if she has seen something in the distance.

Sharon is screaming. She fights with the other suits, unseeing. Every movement is the expression of her knowledge that Rael's body is diminishing away into the Rings.

Erin tries to hold her shoulders. "C'mon, Lazlo. Get your breath. It's OK. You have to snap out of it or I can't go look for him!"

Sharon feels her struggles weakening with futility, as if she is becoming too tired to fight. From a long distance, she can hear Pat setting up the emergency bubble around her, and then she struggles again. She doesn't want to be saved, or left behind. "You can't do this," she yells. But the bubble envelops her.

She sits in the dim glow, suspended in space, listening to the channels, waiting for her breath to spool down, for her shocked heart to come back from the frightening edge. She wants to scream and fly. She wants to wake up and she wants the bad dream to be over. It had been something totally impossible. But it had happened. Her hands fumble with the seals as she tries to push out through the neck of the bubble. She pokes out through the iris into sunlit space.

She wants to laugh. It is impossible to believe that it is anything other than a day in the Rings. But then she looks around at the winds of ice, and the heads up shows Pat and Erin at different distances, in different directions, and no sign of Rael.

She fights her way through the rocks, gasping, and hoping for the sight of a glint of blue. She sees nothing but the ice.

She hears the channel.

"Where the hell is she?"

"What do you mean?"

"Bubble's empty. Oh, damn, she went that way."

"Set the beacon."

A location gleams on the helmet as the beacon lights radio through the Ring.

"Sharon, answer me!" Erin yells.

Sharon is crying, tears streaming down her face.

She awakens alone in her personal tent. Her face is wet with the tears of dream.

Now she knows why she hates to sleep alone, ever since the Rings.

Rael is gone.

Her crying isn't fear or anger anymore. It is remorse. Rael is lost. Irreversibly lost. No one can take his place. No one sleeping beside her is Rael. And it is unfair to think they are.

She rolls over and stares at the faintly glowing wall, smells the ammonia ice contaminants like the fragrance of a spring. When she falls asleep, she is thinking of the moves she will make tomorrow, and there is a smile on her face.

They descend the inner slope of the A Ring, staying near the indistinct surface, when Anne loses it.

It happens once in a while, when things are busy. There are too many things flying around on the ring surface, churning with resonance and electrodynamics - sand and splintered rocks thrown off and bouncing with the hesitant inertial dynamics of fluffy ice. You had to watch them all and plan ahead.

Sometimes you forgot how to stop. You might panic. You might forget the stabilization sequence, or you would be afraid that the computer would blow it and burn you right into a rock for lack of any usable choice. You would bound across the rocks, throat knotted, getting more and more tired, trying to lose some velocity. Until you gave up and curled into a little ball, and felt the bashing of ice and stone.

As Anne does now...

"Well, I never expected that," Anne mutters, straining at the suit joints with a puller. She grunts as the joint pops back into place. A wisp of hair slips from beneath her kerchief and waves in the nonexistent gravity.

She looks over at Pat who, still suited, floats by the flap that leads out of the emergency bubble. "I thought that was how Rael got killed."

"Yeah, he got tired and slipped, like that, but Hannah, he hit bad charges. Who knows - we never found him. It was unlucky."

Anne thrusts the puller toward Pat like an extension of her arm., lecturing. "You always seem to know." Then her expression switches to embarrassment, as if she isn't quite sure how she means it. "Thought I was going to die." she mutters.

The rings crackle with electrical discharges. Surface material picks up energy from the solar wind protons that leak through the magnetosphere, and from the constant currents that traverse the flux tubes on an endless cycle between the space beyond the rings and the atmosphere of the vast ancient planet. The charges creep into the depth of the ring, and stratify as the material exits the shadow. Meteoric particles skim the Rings, provoking discharges. Currents shock across tens of thousands of miles in minutes, raising plumes of micron-sized dust into vast spokes that slowly splinter and disintegrate with orbital forces. The static of emissions replaces conversation, as thunder will for those on a porch at night. Sometimes lightning glints far ahead, or hidden among the ringbow spectra sunward. Gradually the wings of the Ringstorm enfold them. Ice, iron, and stone dust, filtered by energy into layers of charge. Lightning glittering against the stars.

Discomfort follows Sharon, and she is afraid that it blunts a slightest edge of her ability. She wonders if she has gone on to appease Erin, or, perhaps, to frustrate her. She isn't sure which, and that may be what bothers her the most. She senses Erin desperately wishing to continue and wanting to leave, and the conflict of the two is extending the silence in the short evenings.

Sharon broods as they pass through the sandwave, blinded in the granular murk.

The travel more slowly, on instruments, cruising gently around the images of unseen streams and boulders. Sharon considers each of her personal Waterloos. She makes a faint effort to still the flow of thought, but the bricks of evidence slowly assemble into an edifice, whose meaning is a foregone conclusion. I have given up too much of my personal freedom.

A vivid gleam of energy is painted on a window of her helmet in warning colors. Her audio hisses vaguely.

She remembers starting to climb on the traprock of Connecticut - a rich intellectual rock on short cliffs with scant protection and stiff ratings. She remembers Hadley asking her in the parking lot at flight school if she wanted to try climbing, and how it had connected to the images of her past. To her stepparents, now in Australia. She had been afraid to agree - it would be her first time since leaving France to become a pilot. But she had agreed. Hadley smiled, a tall dark woman, much like Erin in manner, but with bright dark eyes. Sharon had slipped back onto her bicycle to ride away. During that intermittent night, Sharon had dreamed visions that swirled unrestrained, unrestrainable.

She rides with Hadley to the cliff in the morning, their bicycle tires grinding and crunching on the sand, cold dawn light slipping in leafy patterns across the flesh of her thin forearms, her motion slowed by a leaden inertia that pounded with her blood. She had been torn between fear and longing. And when she saw the monoliths of stone, like strange alien buildings against the fractals of the trees, she felt something left behind stir again. When she touched the rock, she was clumsy, an inexperienced lover, but somehow, she had known it would go well.

And in all the thousands of days, on earth and in space, it had been mostly the same.

Until now.

She had never expected it. Days of waking to a jaw set frozen tight, days of watching the shifting streamers of ice and dust with a detached impersonality that she is unable to understand or penetrate. It is the first time she is unable to fully push off the prospect of agony with action. Her throat is raw with the constant torturous dryness and cold.

For a moment, they burst into a bowl of clarity. The sun slopes across kilometers of dust, stirred by kinetics into windforms of soft, hazed tan. Boulders drift slowly in ranks, like broad constellations casting dim shadows against the walls and floor of dust. And the torture is extinguished in beauty.

The ridges of dust reach for them all too swiftly. They become the color of snow.

That night as she sleeps, she has the dream, again. She is alone. The massive trees of the Patagonian rain forest soar above her, while the endless moisture rattles gently on the leaves and enormous flowers. She is on the path alone, for some reason, and her pack doesn't feel very heavy for a change.

She wonders why she is so desperate for the rich green. She touches a leaf and brings it near her eyes. It is soothing, and she realizes that her eyes are aching and burning from the dry air. The leaf, she realizes, is just what she needs. She rubs it across her eyes, but somehow the burning won't decrease...

She awakens suddenly to the glow of the lumes and the raucous snoring of the others. Her eyes open and close firmly. Twice. Then she lies there, staring at the dome, falling in the endless sensation of nanogravity, until a sleep rises out of the pain of the endless noise around her.

I never wanted to come to Saturn. She tastes it, rolls it all directions, studies it, rejects it. No. Still, it probably would have been a lot longer before I came alone.

She thinks of Phil. My substitute for Rael. Unfair to both of them.

I haven't made my own plans for a long time.

She watches the images of rocks on her helmet for a long time, and thought is silent as the edge of the ring plays itself out.

Where is Rael now? she wonders.

In camp, conversation ranges widely, as it must. The food cooks under shields, and only a trace of the rich odor makes it into the harsh air. The lamps race shadows across the dome. And the voices are laughing, mixing and chaotic.

"I always think it's more like one of those long treks. An Antarctic expedition, you know?" Erin smiles.

"It is like that," Sharon replies. "Sometimes I think it's missing some of the things I like in climbing. After all, the technique is important, but it isn't repeatable. You can't go back to any part of the rings and test your growth. It isn't like doing a climb back home."

Kyle interrupts. "But after all, the whole thing is a test."

"You mean, you can't repeat just one part, but you have to come back and do the whole thing?"

"Didn't Messner's grandson say something like that once? I think he was talking about long solo mountaineering. Enchainments in the Himalayas, wasn't it?"

"What a day, though," Pat's voice is buzzed with energy. "I mean, it might not be a day on the rocks for you guys, but I sure am psyched. For a space head, this is the best. I mean, how about that dust void this morning!"

"That was really pretty," Anne leans her head back against the wall, and her hair puffs out under the pressure. Though they are all growing unkempt in the constant non-gravity, Anne has kept the best grooming. "You know, the one thing about all of this is how rich and beautiful it is. I looked at the holograms you took last trip, Sharon, I mean, some of this was there - they were great pictures, but nothing like..."

"You have to be here," Pat replies. "Otherwise, why'd anyone come? After all, vicarious experience is at a high level now, but someone has to create it. Someone has to be there first. And there is a premium on really doing something. Not to mention, it's still better."

"Yeah, there are always people talking about safety, though," Kyle sneers lightly. His eyes flick surreptitiously to Sharon. "What's safe? You don't do anything, and you're safe. You stay home and you're safe. I tried that for years. Maps, computers, systems. I never had to go anywhere. I got sick of it. This is the place to be." His eyes are a little wide, and his voice is a little shivery with the cold air. Or is it fear?

"Yeah," Sharon jibes, "but let's hope you retain a little of your fascination with maps for the near future. And stay safe enough to come out the other side."

They cluster in their sleeping sacks on the walls, the remnant light casting their shadows across the curve of the inside of the dome.

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