Magnificat (Galactic Milieu Trilogy) (54 page)

There were more ominous whisperings in local traitorous circles. Kyle Macdonald, my usual source of hot Rebellious poop, thought it was a foregone conclusion that the exotics would force a loyalty test on human magnates even if Davy himself didn’t, and those who failed would be kicked out of the Concilium. Even worse, Kyle seemed to believe that war was inevitable and might even break out inside of a year. Masha told him nothing about the affairs of the Rebel inner circle, but Kyle was astute at gathering bits and pieces of intelligence that his wife let slip inadvertently and stitching them together with his novelist’s imagination. The resultant patchwork scared the hell out of him.

It had terrified me, too, when Kyle had blurted it out a few days before in the Sap Bucket Tavern …

Striding through the crisp autumn morning in the mountains, I was able to forget my apprehensions for a little while. The trail followed the small Ammonoosuc River through open coniferous woods for about two and a half kloms. Then you crossed the stream on a footbridge and came to several lovely cascades. Above them the way became increasingly precipitous, and I was glad of my long legs as I climbed rough steps formed by the roots of spruces. Partway up I diverged from the trail so that I could go out on a ledge and savor the spectacular view of the main stream and a nearly parallel tributary, pouring down rocky gutters to a tumultuous confluence in the gorge below. The air was alive with beneficent negative ions, and a winter wren sang its fussy, lengthy song. I felt a whole lot better about being alive and tarried there for some time.

Climbing higher, I emerged from the ravine and came into the open krummholz zone, where the spruces and firs were dwarfed and gnarled by high winds and severe weather. The trail took a
southerly direction now, and the sun was in my eyes as I finally passed above tree line into the alpine zone, picking my way from yellow-painted cairn to cairn among great tumbles of rock.

In one of nature’s mysteries, the tree line in the Presidential Range is around 1525 meters, only about half its elevation in the Rockies. Our mountains are, in effect, a small chunk of Labrador plunked down in New England—with Labradorian ecology and weather to match. It pays to keep your wits about you when you go hiking in these parts.

I knew that. Fat lot of good it did me.

The wind had picked up considerably by the time I reached the AMC “hut” beside the two little Lakes of the Clouds. The place caters to hikers along the Appalachian Trail and is actually a sizable structure with stone walls, capable of lodging and feeding a hundred people at a crack. This time of the year it was shut up tight. I paused to eat a Kit Kat bar and drink some brandy-laced coffee from my Zojirushi bottle, pulling the hood of my insulated parka up over my head against the cutting gusts. A single raven showed up, eyed my candy, and said
Gimme
. But I wasn’t in the mood for birdwatching—or feeding—and I told it to piss off. It flew away toward the east.

The temperature was hovering around freezing. There were iceskims on the tiny lakes and plenty of heavy hoarfrost in among the rocks where the sun didn’t shine. It wasn’t shining much now, a fact that I belatedly got around to noticing. The sky had turned the color of milk and the top of Mount Washington was getting fuzzy, although visibility was still fine on the peaks to the south and on the lower slopes.

I said “Merde!” and rummaged in my pack for the telephone, figuring to call the Appalachian Mountain Club at Pinkham Notch for a weather update. I discovered that I’d forgotten the phone and gave myself a good cussing out. (But in retrospect, I might not have been to blame after all.) I tried a farshout, but evidently there were no operants near enough or sensitive enough to hear me. Even though the fancy restaurant in the Summit Chalet was closed for the season, egg-buses flew tourists up to the mountaintop on weekends throughout most of the year, except when the winds got above 160 kph or clouds ruined the view. Since it was Wednesday, however, there might have been only maintenance staff at the chalet, or even nobody at all.

Since I still had a modicum of prudence left, I decided to bag the summit climb and opt instead for a traverse to Jewell via the Westside Trail. If bad weather was putting in an early appearance,
as I suspected, it would get worse faster at higher altitudes. By sticking to the lower trail and stirring my stumps, I thought I could avoid it.

Those entities reading these memoirs who are experienced mountain hikers will realize that I was an idiot not to have turned tail and retreated back into Ammonoosuc Ravine. What can I say? It was my destiny to go on, and that’s what I did.

The Westside Trail is nearly straight and level, requiring no particular attention, and as I plodded along I found myself harking back to incidents that had taken place not far away. One recollection was bittersweet: my first bemused sighting of Elaine Donovan through the borrowed farsenses of the boy Denis. I had fallen in love with Elaine instantly, smitten by le coup de foudre. Later she had loved me, too, until my stupid pride drove her away.

There were other memories: my escape from the cog railway car where Victor Remillard and the lunatic Kieran O’Connor had held me prisoner. My killing of an anonymous mercenary in order to steal his environmental suit and stay alive in the snow. My final encounter with Vic as he prepared to blow up the Summit Chalet and all its occupants. The Family Ghost saving my life, holding the flaring Great Carbuncle against the stormy sky. And finally, the thousands of Milieu starships hovering above Mount Washington, intervening at last to save us Earthlings from ourselves.

Had the Intervention been nothing but an exercise in futility after all? Lately, there were those who warned that humanity was about to be hauled back in ignominy to the home planet, banished from the interstellar confederation forever. Or was the Intervention worse than futile? I thought I believed in the Rebellion; but was I really willing to pay the price of secession that Marc and his cohorts seemed ready to risk?…

My brooding was cut short abruptly when I slipped and took a heavy fall, jarring my brains literally back to earth. I was a stone’s throw away from the cog railway line. The rocks around me were wholly crusted with thick hoarfrost, as were the slightly elevated tracks. My left hip and outer leg hurt like hell and were probably badly bruised, but I didn’t seem to have broken anything. I had to use my stick to haul myself to my feet. The wind had died and it was very cold, with an opal-hued ring around the sun, a flat white disk that one could look at with impunity. The rugged landscape below had an almost supernatural clarity now. Upslope, in the direction of the now-invisible summit, was a bank of dark cloud with a peculiarly solid appearance.

It was oozing deliberately downhill, right toward me.

“Merde et contremerde,” I moaned. I had never seen the phenomenon before, but I had heard horror stories about it in the early days, when I worked at the White Mountain Hotel: It was the notorious icy fog of Mount Washington that engulfed unwary hikers, stole their body heat with insidious efficiency, and eventually froze them stiffer than an iced codfish.

I decided to think very carefully about what to do next.

The junction with the Jewell Trail, which would lead me to a lower elevation, was still a kilometer away. And the upper reaches of the Jewell were exposed rock slabs, hazardous in icy conditions even to the able-bodied—which I definitely was not. If I turned back to Ammonoosuc Ravine I’d have to travel twice as far, and I also had an excellent chance of missing a cairn in the fog and getting fatally lost in the maze of side trails around Bigelow Lawn.

Nope, there was only one sensible—if scary—course. I’d have to go
uphill
on a section of the Gulfside Trail paralleling the cog railway. The path was well graded, led directly to the summit, was less than a kilometer long, and I couldn’t possibly go astray hugging the tracks. At the top there was an emergency shelter at the chalet, with a telephone I could use to call for help.

I climbed painfully over the cog line and set off, hobbling as fast as I could. The way wasn’t especially steep, but once the icy fogbank swallowed me I was blind, dependent upon my inadequate farsight. Rime began to accumulate on my lower body. My jacket had a slick vylac outer face that discouraged frost buildup but my pants were old-fashioned rough wool. I had to bang my stick on the rocks constantly to keep it from becoming ice-sheathed and useless. I pulled the drawstring of my hood tight, leaving only a minimal aperture for breathing, and navigated wholly by my fading ultrasenses.

Some lucky operants are able to maintain their body temperature through mindpower in adverse conditions, but I’m not one of them. I felt the damp cold strike through my boots and socks, making my feet throb. My legs in their ice-crusted pants and inadequate longjohns were weakening, especially the bruised left one. Uncontrollable shivers racked me.

How far was I from the summit? It seemed I’d been slogging forever in the damned fog, slipping and sliding on the frost-coated rocks, moving slower and slower as my body succumbed to hypothermia. If I froze to death, maybe they’d erect a plaque in my memory, as they had to poor little Lizzie Bourne, who had perished somewhere close by in 1855. Or maybe not … Over 150 people had died on this mountain, more than on any other peak in
North America, and most of them had been damned fools like me, unprepared for the sudden shifts in weather that could turn a smiling sunny day into a hell below zero inside of an hour.

Now the wind was rising again, ripping apart the fog but increasing the chill factor. I couldn’t feel my feet, and my hands were starting to go as well. I’d stopped shivering and the bruises from my fall didn’t hurt anymore. Actually, I was beginning to feel pretty decent. I figured I’d feel even better if I crouched for a minute in the shelter of a big rock and rested. I let myself sink down and pulled open my hood so I could see. The wind was strong now, blowing over the col that links Mounts Washington and Clay, and a thick twilight had settled in.

The first snowflakes started to fly.

After a while I tried to get up, but my stiffened muscles balked. The wind thinned the clouds and across the tracks I caught a momentary glimpse of the Gulf Tank, the water supply for the cog’s steampowered locomotives. It was frosted like the gizmo on top of a wedding cake. I groaned aloud. The tank was a good halfkilometer from the chalet. I was never going to make it the rest of the way.

Eh bien, plus rien a dire. I was a goner.

From the deep recesses of my cooling brain I extracted the Acte de Contrition: I was sorry I’d been a self-pitying drunk, sorry I’d tried to murder my twin brother when he stole the woman I loved, sorry that I deliberately killed the thug on the mountain instead of just knocking him out.
Not
sorry I’d executed that monster, Parni—but that didn’t count because it was self-defense. I was most sorry of all that I’d been too proud to forgive Elaine for betraying me with Don. All my other sins … sorry for them, too, even though I couldn’t remember what they were. It had been an interesting 137 years amen amen ainsi soit-il.

Then I saw the light.

Beyond the water tower was a small shed. The door was open, illuminating a figure standing there. It beckoned to me, called my name. It was an operant, lending me mental assistance.

Creative energy warmed me, redaction infused my muscles with fresh strength. Nobody coerced me, but I got up and began to move. PK helped pick up my leaden feet and lay them down. I groped and flopped across the tracks, scrambled on hands and knees up the ice-coated incline to the shack. Snow stung the unfrozen parts of my face like a spray of needles.

Someone dragged me over the threshold, closed the door, began stripping away my ice-stiffened outer clothing. I was aware
of a small fusion-powered Mr. Heater unit, radiating blessed warmth. I saw racks of tools, a workbench, coils of hose hung on the wall, a lantern, a piece of machinery in one corner that might have been a water pump.

I sat on an old plass crate, feeling its rough surface beneath my painfully thawing fingers. My rescuer stood behind me, hands pressed to my icy face, curing the chilblains, speeding my congealed blood, pouring healing redaction into my moribund nervous system. The spasms of shivering ceased and I ached all over. Briefly, my body endured the painful recovery from frostbite. Then a plass cup touched my lips and I drank some of my own coffee and brandy between fits of hysterical giggling. I had nearly frozen to death, while the drink had remained hot inside its state-of-the-art Zojirushi vacuum bottle, forgotten in my daypack.

He squatted in front of me, smiling, prodding me here and there with his PK to be sure I had revived. Then he put my warmed clothing back on me, draping the jacket over my shoulders.

I said, “Merci, Denis mon fils.”

He said, “De rien, One’ Rogi.”

Time elapsed while my brain finished booting up. Then I asked Denis what the hell he was doing up here.

“Waiting for you,” he said, pulling up another crate and sitting down. “You wasted too much time checking out the twin sluices on the Ammonoosuc, but there was no way I could coerce you to get a move on. If you’d reached the cog track just half an hour earlier you’d have missed the ice-fog.”

“Was that your car in the Base Station lot?”

“No,” Denis said, veiling his eyes. “I came another way.”

“From Pinkham Notch? Up Tuckerman Ravine? Where are you stay—” The banal words dwindled to a choked mumble. I finally realized who I was talking to.
What
I was talking to. My face went slack with fear.

Denis sighed. “Get hold of yourself. It’s me, all right. But I don’t know how long I can retain possession of my body. Fury could return any moment and seize control. That’s why I’ve come to you. I need your help desperately. Even though I couldn’t coerce you, I was able to insert a suggestion into your mind that you come hiking on the mountain. You were ripe for the hint and you came. I had to meet you someplace where there were no other people nearby. Nobody that Fury could use.”