The Walk Up Nameless Ridge (Kindle Single) (2 page)

The Sherpa of Changli had a saying:
A man can count on two
hands all the climbs he conquers, and that man conquers nothing.
I always took this to mean the
more we summit the more we lose. Climbers were notorious for staring down bars
in basecamp at lifted mugs, silently counting digits gone missing, making a
measure of a man’s worth by how far they’d pushed themselves. Saul had a
different take on the Changli saying. To the people who lived in the shadows of
mountains, these were not things to conquer. To climb them was foolish, and who
would think to do so? As much as I had loved Saul, he was always too
politically correct for my tastes.

Breaking snow up that unnamed ridge, my mind turning to
mush as supplemental oxygen and doped blood could only do so much, I felt the
first pangs of doubt. My cough rattled inside my mask; my limbs felt like solid
lead. Two days prior, at camp 5, I had pushed myself beyond my abilities.
Eating and drinking moved from inconvenient chores to something I dreaded. My
weight was down. I hadn’t been out of my clothes to see what I’d wasted away,
just comforted myself instead on how much less I now had to lug to the top.

The radio in my parka clicked on with the sound of Hanson
breathing. I waited a moment between arduous steps and listened for what he had
to say. When the radio clicked off, I turned to check on him, my headlamp
pointed at his chest so as not to blind him. Hanson was a strong climber, one
of the strongest I’d ever seen. He had fallen back to the end of the rope that
joined us, his breath clouding his mask. Lifting a hand a few inches from his
thigh was all the wave he could muster.

“Take your time,” I told him, clicking the large switch on
my belt. What I wanted to say was what the hell we thought we were doing.
There, five thousand feet below us and eight light years away, was the tallest
peak ever climbed. We were moving into the thin air above the highest of heads.
We would have been in outer space on some small planets, in orbit around others.
And still, we wanted to conquer more.

The rope between us drooped as Hanson took a few laborious
steps. I turned and broke snow, resigning myself to an extra hour at the head,
an extra shift to give him more rest. It was hard to know what drove you once
you passed the thresholds of all pain. Maybe it was the thought of Shubert and
Humphries somewhere above us, either in glory or buried in snow. Maybe it was
the fear that Ziba had gotten Cardhil’s ankle sorted and that they would begin
their push later that morning. Or maybe it was the promise I’d made to myself
after telling my wife and kids that I would be safe. I had told them that I
wouldn’t take chances. But I had already promised myself something different: I
would come home with that final ridge named after me, or I wouldn’t come home
at all.

5

My altimeter died at 62,000 feet, even though the
manufacturer sold these with a guarantee of 100,000. Such guarantees were
bullshit gestures with no real-world testing. As I climbed, I composed the post
I would make on the forums complaining of its failure. And had my remaining
fingers been any kind of functional, I would’ve removed the strap from my arm
to save the weight. Instead, I carried one more dead thing up with me. From
then on, I had to guess how high I was by the hour. It was still dark and we were
probably at 63,100 feet when I stumbled across Humphries.

He wore an orange suit, the kind men with low confidence
and a care for their mortal coil wore. It made them more easily found and more
likely
to be found, two very different things. I pointed out the snow-dusted form so
Hanson wouldn’t trip on him, but I didn’t slow. Humphries had died facing the
summit, which meant he hadn’t made it. I felt a mix of relief and guilt for the
awful thoughts I’d held in my sleeping bag all night. Shubert, of course, was
still out there. We could meet him stomping down in the dark, his eyes as
bright as the handful of twinkling stars above, and whatever was driving Hanson
and I upward would likely leak out our pores. Whatever glory I had hoped to win
would be spent in future days recounting my time on the same slopes as this
other man. I would detail my ordeal up Shubert Ridge, a horrible name if ever
there was one. I would write of his glory and bask in whatever shadows fell my
way. These were my mad ruminations as I left his dead tentmate behind and
crunched through that terrible snow a thousand feet beneath the peak.

A tug at my harness gave me pause. Hanson was flagging
again, at the end of his rope and ours. I questioned what I was running on for
Hanson to give out before me. I wondered if the doctors hadn’t worked some kind
of special magic between the doping and the careful regimen of drugs. Perhaps
the coils in my pants were holding up better than his. Hanson had skimped on
his gears and had invested in more heat. I may be freezing to death, but I was
still climbing. I saw the look on his face, beyond the glare of my flashlight
and the frost of his desperate breathing, and that look told me that this was
as high as he would go. It was a look I’d only seen from him once before, but
enough times from others to not need the radio.

After a coughing fit, I jerked my thumb toward the summit.
Hanson lifted his hand from his thigh and waved. As I pulled the quick release
that held our rope to my harness, I wondered if I would be stepping over both
him and Humphries on my way back down. God, I hoped not. I watched him turn and
trudge into the dark maw of night and white fang of snow before looking again
to my goal. The summit was several more hours away. I would be the first or the
second to stand there. Those were adjacent numbers and yet light years apart in
my esteem. They were neighboring peaks with a precipitous valley between. Being
second was death to me, so I lifted a boot, gears squealing, toes numb, and
remembered with sadness the lies I had spoken to my family. There was nothing
about this safe. If I loved them as much as I loved myself, I would’ve turned
around long before Hanson had.

6

The highlanders of Eno have a saying about climbing alone:
The winds
seek out the solitary
.
And sure enough, with Hanson dropping back to camp—
hopefully
dropping back to camp—the winds came for me and shoved my chest for being
so bold. With my oxygen running low, the mask became an impediment to
breathing, something to catch my coughs. Adjusting the top of the mask against
my goggles, fingers frozen stiff, I let the wind howl through a crack,
invigorating me with the cold. The gap sang like the sound a puff makes across
the mouth of a bottle. This whirring howl was a sort of musical accompaniment.
It made me feel less alone. The
dwindling oxygen made me feel crazy.

When I came across Shubert, I thought he was already dead.
The snow was covering him, and the ridge here was perilously narrow. Solid rock
stayed dusted with snow and ice, otherwise it felt the ridge itself should be
blowing away.

Shubert stirred as I made my slow and agonizing way around
him. He was faintly swimming toward the summit, clawing through the ice,
throwing his axe forward. I stopped and knelt by the young and powerful
climber. His suit made no noise. It must’ve given out on him, leaving him alone
and under his own power. My thoughts were as wild as the wind, disturbed by my
air-starved mind. I thought of Cardhil, and how something so reliant on its
mechanical bits held any hope for rising above camp 7. I rested a hand on
Shubert’s back to let him know he wasn’t alone. I don’t know that he ever knew
I was there. He was still crawling, inch by inch toward the summit, as I
trudged along, head down, mask singing a sad lament. If I made the top and got
home, I decided I would name that ridge after him. I was already dreaming not
just of being a legend, but the awesome humility I would display even so. It
was delusion beyond delusion. I was dying, but like Shubert, I cared only about
the next inch.

The oxygen ran dry as the sun broke. My headlamp had grown
feeble anyway, frosted with ice and with its battery crippled by the freezing
temperatures. This was my last sunrise, I was fairly sure. Cutting through the
shark’s teeth of peaks that ran the breadth of this alien continent, the dull
red glow was empowering with its illusion of warmth. Once that large foreign
star lifted its chin above the most distant of snow-capped crowns, it seemed to
rise with a vengeance. It made a mockery of my own agonizing ascent.

It occurred to me in the wan light of dawn that I was the
highest man in the universe. Coughing into my mask, I couldn’t feel my legs,
but I could at least balance on them. The handful—not quite—of
fingers and toes I had left would be gone. But that was optimistic. I could see
the summit up the ridgeline. There was no more technical climbing, no ice to
work up, no faces or craggy steps, just a long walk on unfeeling stumps. A walk
to a grave that stood far over all mortal heads.

I found myself on my knees without remembering falling.
The snow was thin here. It blew off sideways and was just as soon replaced.
There would be no flags ahead, no weather stations, no books to scribble in, no
webcams showing a high sunrise to millions of net surfers. It was just a lonely
and quiet peak. Not a footstep. Not ever. Untrammeled earth, a thing that had
grown exceedingly rare.

The people of Eno had their own name for Mallory. Locals
always did. It translated to
Unconquerable
, but of course nothing was. It was always a matter of time, of the
right gear, the right support teams, all the ladders and lines and camps and
bottles put in by hardworking sherpas.

I was on my hands and knees, mask howling, lightheaded and
half-sane, crawling toward my destiny. And I missed Hanson. I wanted him there.
I missed him more than my wife and kids, who I would never see again. There was
my grave up ahead, a bare patch of rock where snow danced across like smoke,
like running water, like angels in lace dresses.

I wondered if my body would lie there forever or if the
wind would eventually shove me off. I wondered this as I reached the summit,
dragging myself along, my suit giving up the last of its juice. Collapsing
there, lying on my belly, I watched the sun rise through my mask. And when it
frosted over, and my coughing grew so severe I worried those were flecks of
purple lung spotting my vision, I accepted my death by pulling the mask free to
watch this last sunrise, this highest and most magnificent sunrise, with my
very own eyes.

7

The tallest climbs, often, are the easiest. All the great
alpinists know this. Tell someone you’ve  summitted Mokush on Delphi, and
the mountaineer will widen his eyes in appreciation while the layman squints in
geographical confusion. The steep rock approaches of Mokush more than make up
for the lack of elevation. And of the several hundred who have reached the
top—Hanson and I among them—thousands have perished. Few peaks have
so bold a body count and so brief a list of conquerors.

On the other hand, list the highest peaks of the eight old
worlds, and most will whistle in appreciation. Everyone knows the great climber
Darjel Burq, the first to top the tallest mountain on each of the civilized
worlds. But other climbers know that Darjel was hoisted up many of those by
sherpas, and that he never once assaulted the great Man Killers who stand along
the shoulder of those more famous giants and claim the more daring of men.

This was a peak for climbers like Darjel, I thought, lying
on the top of the universe and dying. Here was a peak for the tourists. One
day—as I coughed up more of my lung, pink spittle melting the frosting of
snow on my mitts—the wealthy would pay for a jaunt to the top of Mallory.
The drugs and heatsuits and blood doping would improve. In another five years,
I would have made this climb and lived to tell the tale. But not today. And
anyway: in five years, it would not have mattered. I wouldn’t have been the
first.

The sun traveled through its reds and pinks until the
frozen skin of Eno was everywhere golden. It was a good place to die. And when
my body was found, they would know I’d made it. Unless it was many years hence
and the wind and blizzards had carried me off to a secret grave, they would
know. Such had been Mallory’s fate, the great and ancient climber whose name
graced this peak. I was of those who never believed Mallory had made it to the
top of Earth’s highest summit. But no longer. The madness of my oxygen-deprived
brain, the sad glory of my one-way victory, and suddenly I knew in that very
moment that Mallory had climbed to the top of my homeworld. He had simply never
planned for the climb back down.

Sleep came amid the noisy and blustery cold. It was a
peaceful sleep. My breathing was shallow and raspy, but at least the cough had
gone away. I woke occasionally and looked an alien sun in the face, whispered a
few words to that orange ball of fire, and allowed the ice to hold fast my lids
once more.

I dreamed of my wife. My kids. I went back to the party my
office had thrown, all the confetti and balloons, the little gifts that were
well-meant but that I would leave behind as useless. Coffee and dried meals,
boot warmers that were suited for lesser hikes, the kind of gifts that show how
little these revelers and kin know of where they are wishing me off to with
their gay ribbons and joyous cards.