Roger Zelazny. This Mortal Mountain
Roger Zelazny. This Mortal Mountain
I
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 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?”