Zelazny, Roger - This Mortal Mountain

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Roger Zelazny. This Mortal Mountain

I looked down at it and I was sick! I wondered, where did it lead?

Stars?

There were no words. I stared and I stared, and I cursed the fact

that the thing existed and that someone had found it while I was still

around.

"Well?" said Lanning, and he banked the flier so that I could look

upward.

I shook my head and shaded my already shielded eyes.

"Make it go away," I finally told him.

"Can't. It's bigger than I am."

"It's bigger than anybody," I said.

"I can make _us_ go away..."

"Never mind. I want to take some pictures."

He brought it around, and I started to shoot.

"Can you hover--or get any closer?"

"No, the winds are too strong."

"That figures."

So I shot--through telescopic lenses and scan attachment and all--as

we circled it.

"I'd give a lot to see the top."

"We're at thirty thousand feet, and fifty's the ceiling on this

baby. The Lady, unfortunately, stands taller than the atmosphere."

"Funny," I said, "from here she doesn't strike me as the sort to

breath ether and spend all her time looking at stars."

He chuckled and lit a cigarette, and I reached us another bulb of

coffee.

"How _does_ the Gray Sister strike you?"

And I lit one of my own and inhaled, as the flier was buffeted by

sudden gusts of something from somewhere and then ignored, and I said,

"Like Our Lady of the Abattoir--right between the eyes."

We drank some coffee, and then he asked, "She too big, Whitey?"

and I gnashed my teeth through caffeine, for only my friends call me

Whitey, my name being Jack Summers and my hair having always been this

way, and at the moment I wasn't too certain of whether Henry Lanning

qualified for that status--just because he'd known me for twenty

years--after going out of his way to find this thing on a world with a

thin atmosphere, a lot of rocks, a too-bright sky and a name like LSD

pronounced backwards, after George Diesel, who had set foot in the

dust and then gone away--smart fellow!

"A forty-mile-high mountain," I finally said, "is not a mountain.

It is a world all by itself, which some dumb deity forgot to throw

into orbit."

"I take it you're not interested?"

I looked back at the gray and lavender slopes and followed them

upward once more again, until all color drained away, until the

silhouette was black and jagged and the top still nowhere in sight,

until my eyes stung and burned behind their protective glasses; and I

saw clouds bumping up against that invincible outline, like icebergs

in the sky, and I heard the howling of the retreating winds which had

essayed to measure its grandeur with swiftness and, of course, had

failed.

"Oh, I'm interested," I said, "in an academic sort of way. Let's

go back to town, where I can eat and drink and maybe break a leg if

I'm lucky."

He headed the flier south, and I didn't look around as we went. I

could sense her presence at my back, though, all the way: The Gray

Sister, the highest mountain in the known universe. Unclimbed, of

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course.

She remained at my back during the days that followed, casting her

shadow over everything I looked upon. For the next two days I studied

the pictures I had taken and I dug up some maps and I studied them,

too; and I spoke with people who told me stories of the Gray Sister,

strange stories....

During this time, I came across nothing really encouraging. I

learned that there had been an attempt to colonize Diesel a couple

centuries previously, back before faster-than-light ships were

developed. A brand-new disease had colonized the first colonists,

however, wiping them out to a man. The new colony was four years old,

had better doctors, had beaten the plague, was on Diesel to stay and

seemed proud of its poor taste when it came to worlds. Nobody, I

learned, fooled around much with the Gray Sister. There had been a

few abortive attempts to climb her, and some young legends that

followed after.

During the day, the sky never shut up. It kept screaming into my

eyes, until I took to wearing my climbing goggles whenever I went out.

Mainly, though, I sat in the hotel lounge and ate and drank and

studied the pictures and cross-examined anyone who happened to pass by

and glance at them, spread out there on the table.

I continued to ignore all Henry's questions. I knew what he

wanted, and he could damn well wait. Unfortunately, he did, and

rather well, too, which irritated me. He felt I was almost hooked by

the Sister, and he wanted to Be There When It Happened. He'd made a

fortune on the Kasla story, and I could already see the opening

sentences of this one in the smug lines around his eyes. Whenever he

tried to make like a poker player, leaning on his fist and slowly

turning a photo, I could see whole paragraphs. If I followed the

direction of his gaze, I could probably even have seen the dust

jacket.

At the end of the week, a ship came down out of the sky, and some

nasty people got off and interrupted my train of thought. When they

came into the lounge, I recognized them for what they were and removed

my black lenses so that I could nail Henry with my basilisk gaze and

turn him into stone. As it would happen, he had too much alcohol in

him, and it didn't work.

"You tipped off the press," I said.

"Now, now," he said, growing smaller and stiffening as my gaze

groped its way through the murk of his central nervous system and

finally touched upon the edges of that tiny tumor, his forebrain.

"You're well known, and...."

I replaced my glasses and hunched over my drink, looking far gone,

as one of the three approached and said, "Pardon me, but are you Jack

Summers?"

To explain the silence which followed, Henry said, "Yes, this is

Mad Jack, the man who climbed Everest at twenty-three and every other

pile of rocks worth mentioning since that time. At thirty-one, he

became the only man to conquer the highest mountain in the known

universe--Mount Kasla on Litan--elevation, 89,941 feet. My book--"

"Yes," said the reporter. "My name is Cary, and I'm with GP. My

friends represent two of the other syndicates. We've heard that you

are going to climb the Gray Sister."

"You've heard incorrectly," I said.

"Oh?"

The other two came up and stood beside them.

"We thought that--" one of them began.

"--you were already organizing a climbing party," said the other.

"Then you're not going to climb the Sister?" asked Cary, while one

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of the two looked over my pictures and the other got ready to take

some of his own.

"Stop that!" I said, raising a hand at the photographer. "Bright

lights hurt my eyes!"

"Sorry. I'll use the infra," he said, and he started fooling with

his camera.

Cary repeated the question.

"All I said was that you've heard incorrectly," I told him. "I

didn't say I was and I didn't say I wasn't. I haven't made up my

mind."

"If you decide to try it, have you any idea when it will be?"

"Sorry, I can't answer that."

Henry took the three of them over to the bar and started

explaining something, with gestures. I heard the words "...out of

retirement after four years," and when/if they looked to the booth

again, I was gone.

I had retired, to the street which was full of dusk, and I walked

along it thinking. I trod her shadow even then, Linda. And the Gray

Sister beckoned and forbade with her single unmoving gesture. I

watched her, so far away, yet still so large, a piece of midnight at

eight o'clock. The hours that lay between died like the distance at

her feet, and I knew that she would follow me wherever I went, even

into sleep. Especially into sleep.

So I know, at that moment. The days that followed were a game I

enjoyed playing. Fake indecision is delicious when people want you to

do something. I looked at her then, my last and my largest, my very

own Koshtra Pivrarcha, and I felt that I was born to stand upon her

summit. Then I could retire, probably remarry, cultivate my mind, not

worry about getting out of shape, and do all the square things I

didn't do before, the lack of which had cost me a wife and a home,

back when I had gone to Kasla, elevation 89,941 feet, four and a half

years ago, in the days of my glory. I regarded my Gray Sister across

the eight o'clock world, and she was dark and noble and still and

waiting, as she had always been.

The following morning I sent the messages. Out across the light-years

like cosmic carrier pigeons they went. They winged their ways to some

persons I hadn't seen in years and to others who had seen me off at

Luna Station. Each said, in its own way, "If you want in on the

biggest climb of them all, come to Diesel. The Gray Sister eats Kasla

for breakfast. R.S.V.P. c/o. The Lodge, Georgetown. Whitey."

Backward, turn backward....

I didn't tell Henry. Nothing at all. What I had done and where I

was going, for a time, were my business only, for that same time. I

checked out well before sunrise and left him a message on the desk:

"Out of town on business. Back in a week. Hold the fort. Mad

Jack."

I had to gauge the lower slopes, tug the hem of the lady's skirt,

so to speak, before I introduced her to my friends. They say only a

madman climbs alone, but they call me what they call me for a reason.

From my pix, the northern face had looked promising.

I set the rented flier down as near as I could, locked it up,

shouldered my pack and started walking.

Mountains rising to my right and to my left, mountains at my back,

all dark as sin now in the predawn light of a white, white day. Ahead

of me, not a mountain, but an almost gentle slope which kept rising

and rising and rising. Bright stars above me and cold wind past me as

I walked. Straight up, though, no stars, just black. I wondered for

the thousandth time what a mountain weighed. I always wonder that as

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