Ringclimber

Chapter 19 - Deep In The Avalanche

Their isolation becomes as precious and dreaded as sleep. Sometimes they look at each other as one studies a map of the ocean bottom. Other times they are as usual, with a light word at the critical times, skillfully lubricating the spirit of the team. And occasionally, they snap, the angry words are exchanged, or the heated argument is split four ways until someone finds how to get home. Except that their faces are tired, their eyes are tracking the script of a hidden ritual. They know it, but it only casts their faces more worried and drawn, as they inspect themselves for subliminal changes that might have escaped the ritual. Sometimes Sharon is frightened by the thought that they might survive the passage, only to find themselves irretrievably changed, values and behaviours silently altered by the alien environs of the Ring.

They pass another month. A month of days dominated by the bulk of the world toward which they are climbing. They are embedded in flowing silt, a ponderous wind of rock and ice, charged with electricity sucked out of the magnetosphere. In this foreign environment, they lose their connection with the daily world of humanity. If it had not been for the team, each one of them could have gone on for a moment until death.

They argue literature, music, the arts. They tell stories of other climbs, of jobs, of people known, of other faces and other purposes, all like myths they are just beginning to believe in. They analyze the samples they acquire and watch the developing curves of ring composition as if they are maps. They work on their hygiene and annoy each other with picky habits. They develop nicknames. They do anything but sit and brood.

One evening, Pat stands on the surface of their camp, almost ready to go in to join the rest. Above, the burn of a C-Ring ice hauler slits the sky. For a moment, she is blinded by bitterness, thinking of how much she is paying for what that freighter finds so simple. She hates the glaring streak until it flicks into darkness, leaving her alone. She stares at the surface of the planetoid until the feeling passes.

But Saturn has spread to fill half the sky, and they are almost obsessed.

It doesn't help Sharon that Erin is one of the first to arrive where she floats in paralysis. She feels unnamed impulses rage within her, so she keeps her face a mask. The suit, disabled, remains as motionless.

They touch helmets. "... you're OK?" Erin asks. She can hear over the link, as well as by conduction.

"Yes," Sharon replies, and it must have made it to Erin by conduction, because she seems to slip and lose her grip.

Pat drifts up to join them. "Embarrassing," she muses.

"Yes, that's all very well, " Sharon replies, receiving, but unable to transmit, shifting uncomfortably in her harness. But Erin can hear her through the helmet.

"Don't get all British on us, dear," Erin snaps in one of her infrequent serious curses. "Pat, give us a hand under her shoulders."

Sharon stretches out, drifting on the emergency tent floor, and they shut down the suit as well as possible. Fans roar heated air into the tent. Finally, she climbs out and stands glaring, breath frosting in clouds. After a moment, she frowns, as if aware that everyone is watching her. She quirks a smile. "Goddamn thing." The impalpable tension eases. "Well let's get some equipment on it, and see what's going on."

Startled glances are exchanged. Sharon's eyes follow them.

"Look, I thought I was getting sick of all this. Don't tell me you guys want to quit because the system crashes. You know how often this is going to happen?"

`Erin looks up from connecting her monitors to Sharon's suit.

Anne sighs. "I guess we'd rather just be careful. We've come further than I expected. It's not worth dying for."

Sharon is enraged. She leans over and seizes Anne's suit collar, dwarfing the smaller woman. "Not worth dying for! What do you think it means to come out here? We're not taking jogging the concourse at Chryse. We could die. It damn well better be worth it to you or you don't belong here." She suddenly sees her rage, and she releases the collar in self-disgust. "Listen, I'll abort when it's obvious there's no other choice. There are still choices. Let's get to work."

Kyle waits in the background, feeling the warm flow of his suit fans stir his hair, and thinking that he is a little more afraid of her in that moment.

The drop container waits in the dark above the rings, festooned with flashing lights and radio beacons that blaze on their helmet displays. The team rises slowly above the rings for their first real rest and replenishment in two Saturn weeks.

As they reach the airlock, the container sweeps out of the shadows, and, a kilometer below, the Rings suddenly burst into light. In the distance, a lightning bolt, invisible, reaches swiftly, and the spoke material rises with a startling motion like an island being born from dust.

Anne stares, rotating very slowly as she waits for the lock to clear from Pat's entrance. Kyle drifts beside her, and the light reaches into his helmet to etch the amazement that widens his eyes, and it purses his mouth with something to say that never makes it out of his mind.

But the door slides open beside her, waiting, and Anne feels the call of something even more basic than curiosity and surprise.

The singing is raucous in the showers. Women and man, they each enjoy the ecstasy of tepid water in cool air. Anne rubs the foaming disinfectant soap across her body, reveling in the feeling of her own hands on her own skin after days in suit and coverall. She wants to sing, but she doesn't know any song well enough. That doesn't stop the others, though.

At dinner they are not much more subdued. The air is oxygen rich, with none of the unavoidable ammonia and methane overtones. For a while it had seemed stale and tasteless, and they had breathed harder, which made them giddy, now, when the air is laced with the outrageous smell of cooked vegetables and meat.

Erin turns from the tiny kitchen with a smug look. She holds up a small flask and a tiny foil package. "Dessert," she laughs.

They hang in the cool air of the pale room, sipping tiny amounts of wine from the flask, and loading the recycling system with traces of smoke that set them to coughing and provide a certain distant haziness of experience.

The lights are dimmed and they sleep in their bags, clasped tightly to walls which are straight and secure. There are no sounds but the loud chorus of snoring.

It has been two months now, and their journey is perhaps a fifth complete. On Earth, there has been a major election. On Mars, a tiny volcano in Valles Marineris has become active for the first time in recorded history. Fifteen hundred companies have failed in the Belt, to be replaced by sixteen hundred new ventures. A major murder case on Phobos is into the third week of its trial.

But in the rings, two hundred and seventy features have been steadily modified by accretion, gravity, radiation and electricity; the changes have been mapped by the team and added to their simulation model. The team members have each changed suits once. Kyle has decided to grow a beard, even though it gets itchy with sweat. It helps him mark the distance. In the meantime, Erin has helped Pat shave her hair into a Mohawk, which she impishly dyes differently every week, to the amusement of Anne, who rolls her eyes every time, and to the amusement of a supply clerk on Mimas who supplies the wild florescent dyes, chortling as he packs the boxes, musing over a digital photo of Pat. And Sharon has conspired on a secret plan which comes to fruition at the beginning of the third month in the Rings.

They rise to find the drop container, but, as usual, it is slightly mislocated. As they soar toward its distant flashing, Kyle sighs a mist across the inside of his helmet, swiftly cleared, at the thought of what the last week has done to his maps, and the measurements he will have to make now to correct them.

Sharon stands within the inner door, helmet in one hand, giggling. And when the others come through one by one, she shushes them and prods them into various corners. Sharon lets her helmet float so she can clamp a hand over her mouth. Erin steps through last, and unseals the helmet with a sigh, looking around. Then she sees Gordon, and the baby.

"Oh, my..." her helmet drifts unheeded toward the floor, and Kyle snatches it before it rebounds.

Erin finds her hands shaking, and she can only step forward slowly, looking at Gordon's moist eyes, and at the steady regard of her child.

"Oh, hello," she whispers, looking at them. But to the child, she is enormous and frightening in a strange environment, and the tiny baby reacts, crying. Erin stares in shock. "Oh, honey, I'm so sorry, don't be scared. It's just me..."

But the baby squirms, and Gordon is helpless. Sharon realizes this may not have been a good idea. The wailing fills the room.

Kyle slips away into the hall. Looking back from the shadows at the gathered figures and the child, he has suddenly realized the price these women have paid for this venture, a price paid over decades. It is a price that he has not had to even consider for himself. And he wonders if he should be here.

He watches the faces that bend over the child, even Pat, who looks at Michel with wrinkled lips for his indecorous sound. Sharon is as sharp as a hawk, and he can see the lines that have appeared in her lean face since they started their journey. He wonders why he finds those lines so attractive. Why the way those teeth bare in their smile, and the way the eyes crinkle at the corners speak of conflicting facets of harshness and caring, focus and derision; and why that is comforting to him. They are the signs of age, after all, and he is still young.

And an intruder, he thinks. Swiftly, he hides his emotion in a communications link to his proxy.

"So what is this?" Erin demands in a hissing whisper as she racks her suit. She glares over her shoulder at Gordon who stands, arms crossed, waiting. Pivoting on the suit, she faces him in sad anger. "You want to remind me what I'm not doing? You think maybe I'm sick enough of living in bubbles and suits that I ought to exit on this basis?"

In that second, his face leaps from smile and smugness to a thick-lipped anger and resentment. But his eyes say something different - something sad. "I just wanted you to see Michel. I thought you'd miss him."

"Of course I miss him," she snaps, glaring over his shoulder at where Sharon holds Michel to her shoulder with Pat tickling at his chin, making him gurgle and squirm. "But what the bloody hell made you bring him here! It's so dangerous, even at this altitude." Her eyes are furrowed with worry, something Gordon almost fails to recognize, having never seen it before.

On an intuition, he reaches out and touches her shoulder, fingers feeling gaunt flesh on bone through the thin fabric. She has lost noticeable weight and muscle mass, and he feels a sudden worry of his own - a surge of what has torn him for two long months. But he struggles it down.

"I just wanted him to see you. To know who you are. Spend some time with him, hon. He needs it." He pauses. "Me too."

Suddenly, she relaxes and smiles. "Oh I've missed you. And Michel." She grasps his arm tightly. "Come on, let's not let Sharon have all the fun."

"Oh yeah, and wait until you see the other stuff I brought. You folks are going to have a real party. Hey, where's that Kyle fellow?" He pushes off into the room.

They are gathered around a vid player, watching a drama from Earth. Sharon sighs as she watches a character sit on the edge of a clean, crisp bed. What a feeling that must be, she thinks, remembering her own bed, its softness and clean smell.

Michel is floating in the center of the room, giggling as Erin tickles him. Gordon sprawls nearby, inches off the wall, enjoying the sight.

A long two day vacation, with new food, entertainment, and places to relax and sleep away from everyone. Sharon lies awake the second night, knowing they will leave soon, and knowing that it is a good idea to leave before they became too comfortable. Erin wakens again with weightless cramps, and cries a little at the warmth of her husband and child beside her.

Kyle sits up all night, alone. He finally falls asleep three hours before they are scheduled to leave.

Anne struggles awkwardly into her suit, while Erin and Sharon are waiting impatiently, fishbowls in hand. Gordon and Michel stand by, the child staring at his transformed mother, who smiles and winks at her uncomprehending son.

"Where's Kyle?" Sharon asks.

"Here," he replies, drifting past the door.

"Well, come on, let's go, we've only got five hours till dark, and we'll barely make a couple of streams before then."

"I'm not. I'm staying."

Anne stops pulling her hair back into her bun and stares. "What are you talking about?"

Kyle wishes he were sure. "You don't need me along."

Sharon pushes off and stops on the net beside the corridor, rocking with the extra inertia of the suit. "Excuse me?"

His eyelids are sullen hanging over the pupils. He barely looks up, and she thinks his fingers might be trembling.

Finally, he turns on her. "You have the maps, you've made your point. OK?"

"I don't have time for this, so let's get the explanation over with, Kyle. Now. Fast."

His eyes are still on her. But it takes a few seconds for the words to work their way out. "I... know you don't need me. You can do the map sightings and keep the software for the duration."

Pat shakes her head. "Talk about egregious self-pity."

"What are you talking about?" Sharon's eyes narrow as she leans in to Kyle. "There's no damn time for this crap. You carry your weight, you haven't balled up. Are you saying you can't take it? No way. Get your suit on." She turns away, hoping, angry.

"What are you expecting?" Pat asks, as if really curious, "An invitation? I think that's the best you're going to get."

Anne is at his side. She smiles warmly, but her eyes are sad. "Kyle, you're part of the team, we can't do it without you. We won't."

The lock cycles shut behind Sharon. Pat sighs, smiling. "That is, unless you try getting outside without a suit." She caps and waits for the lock to complete cycle. The door slides away, and she grins through the fishbowl. "Don't wait too long, Kyle," she yells, muffled by the crystal.

Erin floats past him. "Let's go, Kyle, we don't need her getting too big a head start." She caps and waves to Gordon, who tries to help Michel wave back.

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