Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 Read online

We were two-thirds of the way down—the bright red tents of Base Camp clearly in sight out on the rock beyond the ice—when Gary said, “Maybe we should talk about this Olympus Mons deal, K.”

  “Yes,” click-hissed our bug, “I have been looking forward to discussing this plan and I hope that perhaps . . .”

  We heard it then before we saw it. Several freight trains seemed to be bearing down on us from above, from the face of K2.

  All of us froze, trying to see the snowplume trail of the avalanche, hoping against hope that it would come out onto the glacier far behind us. It came off the face and across the bergeschrund a quarter of a mile directly above us and picked up speed, coming directly at us. It looked like a white tsunami. The roar was deafening.

  “Run!” shouted Gary and we all took off downhill, not worrying if there were bottomless crevasses directly in front of us, not caring at that point, just trying against all logic to outrun a wall of snow and ice and boulders roiling toward us at sixty miles per hour.

  I remember now that we were roped with the last of our spidersilk—sixty-foot intervals—the lines clipped to our climbing harnesses. It made no difference to Gary, Paul and me since we were running flat out and in the same direction and at about the same speed, but I have seen mantispids move at full speed since that day—using all six legs, their hands forming into an extra pair of flat feet—and I know now that K could have shifted into high gear and run four times as fast as the rest of us. Perhaps he could have beaten the avalanche since just the south edge of its wave caught us. Perhaps.

  He did not try. He did not cut the rope. He ran with us.

  The south edge of the avalanche caught us and lifted us and pulled us under and snapped the unbreakable spidersilk climbing rope and tossed us up and then submerged us again and swept us all down into the crevasse field at the bottom of the glacier and separated us forever.

  Washington, D.C.

  Sitting here in the Secretary of State’s waiting room three months after that day, I’ve had time to think about it.

  All of us—everyone on the planet, even the bugs—have been preoccupied in the past couple of months as the Song has begun and increased in complexity and beauty. Oddly enough, it’s not that distracting, the Song. We go about our business. We work and talk and eat and watch HDTV and make love and sleep, but always there now—always in the background whenever one wants to listen—is the Song.

  It’s unbelievable that we’ve never heard it before this.

  No one calls them bugs or mantispids or the Listeners any more. Everyone, in every language, calls them the Bringers of the Song.

  Meanwhile, the Bringers keep reminding us that they did not bring the Song, only taught us how to listen to it.

  * * *

  I don’t know how or why I survived when none of the others did. The theory is that one can swim along the surface of a snow avalanche, but the reality was that none of us had the slightest chance to try. That half-mile-wide wall of snow and rock just washed over us and pulled us down and spat out only me, for reasons known, perhaps, only to K2 and most probably not even to it.

  They found me naked and battered more than three-quarters of a mile from where we had started running from the avalanche. They never found Gary, Paul, or Kanakaredes.

  The emergency CMG’s were there within three minutes—they must have been poised to intervene all that time—but after twenty hours of deep-probing and sonar searching, just when the Marines and the bureaucrats were ready to lase away the whole lower third of the glacier if necessary to recover my friends’ bodies, it was Speaker Aduradake—Kanakaredes’s father and mother, it turned out—who forbade it.

  “Leave them wherever they are,” he instructed the fluttering U.N. bureaucrats and frowning Marine colonels. “They died together on your world and should remain together within the embrace of your world. Their part of the song is joined now.”

  And the Song began—or at least was first heard—about one week later.

  * * *

  A male secretary to the Secretary comes out, apologizes profusely for my having to wait—Secretary Bright Moon was with the President—and shows me into the Secretary of State’s office. The secretary and I stand there waiting.

  I’ve seen football games played in smaller areas than this office.

  The Secretary comes in through a different door a minute later and leads me over to two couches facing each other rather than to the uncomfortable chair near her huge desk. She seats me across from her, makes sure that I don’t want any coffee or other refreshment, nods away her secretary, commiserates with me again on the death of my dear friends (she had been there at the Memorial Service at which the President had spoken), chats with me for another minute about how amazing life is now with the Song connecting all of us, and then questions me for a few minutes, sensitively, solicitously, about my physical recovery (complete), my state of mind (shaken but improving), my generous stipend from the government (already invested), and my plans for the future.

  “That’s the reason I asked for this meeting,” I say. “There was that promise of climbing Olympus Mons.”

  She stares at me.

  “On Mars,” I add needlessly.

  Secretary Betty Willard Bright Moon nods and sits back in the cushions. She brushes some invisible lint from her navy blue skirt. “Ah, yes,” she says, her voice still pleasant but holding some hint of that flintiness I remember so well from our Top of the World meeting. “The Bringers have confirmed that they intend to honor that promise.”

  I wait.

  “Have you decided who your next climbing partners will be?” she asked, taking out an obscenely expensive and micron-thin platinum palmlog as if she is going to take notes herself to help facilitate this whim of mine.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Now it was the Secretary’s turn to wait.

  “I want Kanakaredes’s brother,” I say. “His . . . creche brother.”

  Betty Willard Bright Moon jaw almost drops open. I doubt very much if she’s reacted this visibly to a statement in her last thirty years of professional negotiating, first as a take-no-prisoners Harvard academic and most recently as Secretary of State. “You’re serious,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone else other than this particular bu . . . Bringer?”

  “No one else.”

  “And you’re sure he even exists?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “How do you know if he wants to risk his life on a Martian volcano?” she asks, her poker face back in place. “Olympus Mons is taller than K2, you know. And it’s probably more dangerous.”

  I almost, not quite, smile at this newsflash. “He’ll go,” I say.

  Secretary Bright Moon makes a quick note in her palmlog and then hesitates. Even though her expression is perfectly neutral now, I know that she is trying to decide whether to ask a question that she might not get the chance to ask later.

  Hell, knowing that question was coming and trying to decide how to answer it is the reason I didn’t come to visit her a month ago, when I decided to do this thing. But then I remembered Kanakaredes’s answer when we asked him why the bugs had come all this way to visit us. He had read his Mallory and he had understood Gary, Paul, and me—and something about the human race—that this woman never would.

  She makes up her mind to ask her question.

  “Why . . .” she begins. “Why do you want to climb it?”

  Despite everything that’s happened, despite knowing that she’ll never understand, despite knowing what an asshole she’ll always consider me after this moment, I have to smile.

  “Because it’s there.”

  Science Fiction The Best of 2001

  Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber

  ibooks

  new york

  www.ibooksinc.com

 

 

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