Kistenpass by Kim Stanley Robinson

Author:Kim Stanley Robinson [Robinson, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf

When I trudged up the final approach to the Muttseehutte I was really ready to sit down and have a caffee fertig or two, or three. After that I would continue over a nearby rise called the Muttenchopf, and descend to the cable car that would drop me to the road at Tierfed.

The hut keeper was standing on the porch outside his door. He greeted me as I approached: “Grüüüüt-zi!” It was the Swiss greeting at its most Swiss.

He was short and bald, barrel-chested and suntanned, with immense forearms. He asked me where I had come from and I told him, re-entering that zone of competence in German that I had magically occupied during my time with Mario. The hut keeper asked questions about snow conditions on the south side of the pass, and I described what I had seen, and it was all as clear as could be. I did not attempt to tell him about my encounter with the helicopter, which was beyond my German to express, and so the conversation proceeded well. At one point, enjoying my ability to do it, I asked him how long it would take me to hike over the Muttenchopf, and when the last cable car of the day left Galbchopf for Tierfed.

The question startled him: Why? he asked. Did I want to take it?

Exactly, I said. I did want to take it.

He walked across the porch to me and said very firmly, “Du muss schon gegangen sein!”

You must already gegone to be.

I thought it over; yes, that was what it meant; most of the words were utterly simple, and I knew very well that “schon” meant “already,” because that was what I used to yell at my Swiss baseball teammates when they did something good, meaning to yell “schцn” like they did, a mistake that had given them no end of amusement before they had finally corrected me. So:

You must already be gone!

“Whoah!” I said. The hut keeper nodded as he saw I understood, just as the train conductor had that morning. He took me by the arm and walked me down to a trail sign just below the hut. In rapid but still magically comprehensible German he told me that the trail that went down to the dam, and then through a tunnel to the cable car station, was a much faster route than the trail over the Muttenchopf-so much faster that it was my only hope of catching the last car, which left at 3:45.

It was now 3:05. I got out my topo map and he nodded approvingly and traced with a thick finger the trail I should take. “Fiertzig minuten,” he said emphatically. Forty minutes. And then he stepped back and cried, “Fliegst du!”

FLY YOU! Yikes! No more than five minutes had passed since my arrival, and here I was waving good-bye to the hut keeper and running down the trail, over the lip of the Mutten and down a steep green bowl to the shore of the virulent Limmerensee.

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