harry by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons [Simmons, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-24T14:38:05.363000+00:00

I'm not even sure now how we managed the climb two days ago from Camp Two to this narrow patch of chopped out ridge crest. Our bug was obviously at the edge of his skill envelope, even with his extra legs and greater strength, and we decided to rope together fo the last few hours of climbing, just in case K peeled loose. It wouldn't do much good to pus the red panic button on the palmlog just to tell the arriving UN CMG guys that Kanakared had taken a header five thousand feet straight down to the Godwin-Austen Glacier.

"Mr. Alien Speaker, sir, we sort of lost your kid. But maybe you can scrape him up off t glacier ice and clone him or something." No, we didn't want that.

As it was, we ended up working after dark, headlamps glowing, ropes 'binered to our harnesses and attached to the slope via ice screws just to keep us from being blown into bla space, using our ice axes to hack a platform big enough for the tent—there was only room for a merged cluster of the smart tents, wedged ten feet from a vertical drop, forty feet from an avalanche path and tucked directly beneath an overhanging serac the size of a three story building—a serac that could give way any time and take us and the tent with it. Not t best spot to spend ten minutes in, much less three days and nights during a high-altitude hurricane. But we had no choice; everything else here was knife-ridge or avalanche slope.

As much as I would have preferred it otherwise, we finally had time for some conversation. Our tents were joined in the form of a squished cross, with a tiny central are not much more than two feet or so across, for cooking and conversation and just enough room for each of us to pull back into our small nacelles when we curled up to sleep. The platform we'd hacked out of the slope under the overhanging serac wasn't big enough or fl enough to serve all of us, and I ended up in one of the downhill segments, my head higher than my feet. The angle was flat enough to allow me to doze off but still steep enough to send me frequently lurching up from sleep, fingers clawing for my ice axe to stop my slid But my ice axe was outside with the others, sunk in the deepening snow and rock-hard ice with about a hundred feet of spidersilk climbing rope lashed around it and over the tent an back again. I think we also used twelve ice screws to secure us to the tiny ice shelf.

Not that any of this will do us a damned bit of good if the serac decides to go or the slop shifts or the winds just make up their minds to blow the whole mass of rope, ice axes, screws, tent, humans, and bug right off the mountain.

We've slept a lot, of course.

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