Part 19 (2/2)

Following her to cubicle nine, Zed shook out the soft, furry folds of the ice suit and laid it on the single chair. He stripped, and, unsealing the suit, stepped into it. It molded around him from ankles to neck. He worked his hands into the suit's arms and into the flexible framework of the fingers. Except for the deceptively mild stiffness of the struts that held the claws in place, they felt very much like surgical gloves.

”You want a bandolier?” Loren said. Zed shook his head. ”Rope?”

”No.” He laced on his boots. She bent to check the lacings.

”Belt holsters,” she suggested.

Zed frowned. Finally he decided to take axe and hammer with him. He might tire of the claws and need the tools. He took axe, hammer, crampons, and his iceshades from the bag, and nested the axe and hammer into the holsters. ”All right,” he said.

He followed Loren to the sound room. The heavy door, closing, sealed out extraneous sounds; the seals' barking, the clatter of pa.s.sing boats, the _lip- lip_ of water. The rhythms of their breathing seemed unnaturally loud. With total impersonality, Loren ran her fingers over the crotch of Zed's suit until she found the thumbnail size disk that led to the suit's power pack. She pulled a lead from the machine at her side and attached it to the suit. She nodded, and Zed said his name. Most ice climbers chose their own names to signal their claws; your own name was the one thing you would not shout by accident on the ice.

”Zed. Zed.” His voice sounded strange, but that was because, in the sound room, it was unmingled with all other sounds. ”Zed.” He repeated it, whispering, shouting, speaking normally, until Loren signaled him to stop. She changed the wire's position. ”Yago,” Zed said. ”Yago.”

”Enough,” Loren said. Detaching the lead, she snapped the protective patch on the disc.

Zed extended his hands. ”Zed.” The claws slid out. They were five centimeters long, light, rigid, very strong, made of a steel-and-ceramic laminate. Zed's fingers crooked to follow the curve. ”Yago,” he said. They retracted. He repeated the ritual, changing his voice, and the claws responded each time. ”Good.”

Loren said his name. The claws did not move. ”All right,” she said. She opened the sound room door. They walked out of the building. ”Take trail four,”

she directed.

”Right,” Zed said. He had done it once, some years ago, but by now it would have changed, as, beneath the coating of Antimelt, compressed by the climbers, ice s.h.i.+fted and reformed.

”If you don't come down by nightfall, we'll come get you,” she said. She always said that. Occasionally a bubble did have to come and pick some exhausted climber from the ice. But for a clawed climber, unpartnered, unbelayed, there were only two ways down. One was to reach the east face trail, where steps had been chopped into the ice. The other was to fall.

”See you,” said Zed. He walked to the trail marker, and stopped at the foot of a blue, near-vertical wall. He fastened his iceshades around his head and strapped the crampons on his boots. Now his feet had claws: ten pointing down, two pointing out of the toes of each boot. Primo II towered over him, pitiless and stark. Its snow cover had long gone, melted in its journey toward the equator; what gleamed above him now, rucked and creva.s.sed and thousands of years old, was Chabad's polar ice.

Beneath the ice, showing only occasionally on the surface of the berg, lay the water system's pipelines. They were set off by red markers, and the climbers stayed out of their way. The pipelines halted a few meters above the waterline. Nothing disturbed the ice above that point; not sunlight, not the friction of an occasional storm wind, or the great wreaths of fog that gathered around the ice peaks and blew inland in gray plumes. Zed examined what he could see of the trail. About twenty meters up was a ledge. He could not see farther than that because of the glitter in his eyes. Foolish to wait any longer, he thought, and his heart began to beat with increased strength. ”Zed,” he said.

The claws slid out. He reached, chopping as high as he could into the frozen blue surface with his left hand. Kicking the front points of his right foot into the ice a meter up the face, he pushed upward, swinging his right hand at the ice. The claws gripped. He was up. He set his left front points in, leaned his weight on them, and worked his left-hand claws free of the ice. He reached upward, struck. Stopped and kicked his right foot. Ice climbing was not like rock climbing, where there were projections to cling to, boulders to grab, the safety and strength of rock. He leaned out, keeping his heels low and his muscles loose, snaking slowly up the milky blue wall, dancing on the tips of his fingers and toes. Despite the cooling breeze, it was hot -- 32 degrees Celsius - - and sweat slicked his skin within the ice suit. It was the best material ever developed for climbing ice: made of apton and kerit fur, it was supple, nearly weightless, and it fended off cold at the same time as it reflected back light.

But it was not perfect. Pressed against the ice, Zed's palms began to ache. More than once he hung by claws alone, kicking to get his front points more solidly into the ice. His forearms hurt. He should have started with axe and hammer. He should at least have taken rope and set up a belay. He told the thinking, doubting brain to shut up. Left hand. Right foot. Right hand. Left foot. Do it over again. Sweat stung his eyes till they burned. The interior of the ice suit was at body temperature; it would stay that way. His hands were numbing. He worked his way around a bulge so big he could not see around it. He knew what was on its other side: more ice. It rippled mercilessly overhead, as high as infinity. His foot slipped. He kicked it in again, went up another twenty centimeters, and found himself at the ledge.

It was a wide ledge, roomy enough to sit on and still have room to stand and turn around when it was time to start again. Zed waited for his hands to warm up. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, and before his head could tell him why he should stay on the ledge a little longer, just a little longer, he began climbing. He used the claws. He had gone from looseness to tension and now he was loose again. He felt as if his skin were soaking in a warm oil bath. The physical, the sensory, the real took hold of him like a great inexorable hand.

It thrust him up the mountainside. He cursed the heat, the glare, the numbing cold that sealed his flesh to his bones. He couldn't feel his fingers. He looked down once.

The sea glittered like blue-green crystal below him.

The second ledge turned out to be sixty meters up. This ledge, too, was wide. Zed muscled onto it. ”Yago,” he said, and his claws slid back. He worked his cold, tired, and cramped hands forward and back, till the blood began to return to tingle and burn them. It was a welcome pain. His mouth quirked, and he leaned back against the adamantine ice face. Pain cleared the senses; it made the world seem bright and sharp. Zed wondered what Dana Ikoro would think of that.

For a price, there was a further refinement of ice climbing technology available on Chabad. The operation was tricky, but surgeon Ja Narayan had been known to do it. Zed knew two climbers who had had it done. The bones of the hands and forearms were removed, the flesh laid back, and artificial bone was joined to real bone. At the tips of the fingers, the artificial bones ended with retractable claws. The operation destroyed the feeling in the hands, and, when the claws were extended, the hands could not be closed. At a party, Zed had heard some learned guest of Theo Levos discourse on ”the ultimate egotism” of ice climbing. The speaker claimed that it was an unconscious confirmation and symbol of this egotism that a claw climber shouted her or his name over and over again at the ice. This, the philosopher remarked, revealed the fundamentally decadent nature of Chabadese society. The listening guests nodded, and refrained from pointing out that the speaker was the guest of a Levos, and was standing in the heart of that decadent society, being served by slaves, drinking decadently imported wine.

Zed had refrained from strangling the idiot. He asked the man if he had ever done any ice climbing. The answer had been, ”No, certainly not!”

Zed grinned, remembering. He'd rarely heard anyone make less sense. After a very little time on the ice, the shouted name became meaningless, a noise without objective referent. It ceased to have an owner; it was just a word, unconnected.

He stood on the ledge. Glancing at his left wrist, he checked the small suit chronometer which told him how long he had been climbing. It did not surprise him to learn that he had been climbing for nearly three hours. His shoulders and forearms ached; he ignored them. A cool wind fanned his cheeks. He smelled the sharp, tangy scent of the ice. He said his name; the claws came out.

He chopped his aching arm into the ice wall and stepped upward, setting the front points of his right foot.

He climbed.

At breakfast that morning, Rhani, remembering Zed's comment from the night before, waited for him to join her. Finally, when Amri came into the bedroom to remove the plates, she realized that he was not coming. ”Amri, is my brother still asleep?” She said.

Amri shook her head. ”No, Rhani-ka; his door is open. He isn't in the house.”

”Do you know where he went?”

”No. But I think he left early this morning.”

Corrios, padding up the stairs with the mail, said, ”Yes.”

”Do you know where he went, Corrios?”

”Ice,” the big man said succinctly.

”Ah,” Rhani said. She took the mail from the tray. She wondered what had happened at the party to send Zed to the ice. She doubted very much that it had been his conversation with Imre.

Could it have been meeting Ferris? She considered that, then shrugged. As she did so, her fingers encountered a letter with a crest on it.

It was from Ferris Dur. She opened it. It asked after her health and sent regrets that she had not come to the party. There was also a letter from the Abanat police. She tore it open quickly. Officer Tsurada wrote: ”_We are having some difficulty in tracing the Free Folk of Chabad. They are either smaller than we thought, or more tightly organized. Only a few of our informers have even heard of them, and their information is sketchy and has proved largely useless_.”

”Wonderful,” Rhani said aloud.

”I beg your pardon, Rhani-ka?” said Binkie.

She looked up. ”Good morning,” she said. ”I didn't hear you walk in.” She held the letter out to him. He perused it.

”I'm sorry, Rhani-ka,” he said.

”So am I.” She stretched. ”Is there anything else in that pile that I should look at?”

He fanned through the rest of the letters. ”They seem to be mostly invitations, Rhani-ka.”

”Feh.” She stretched again. Her body felt tense and tight. Perhaps she had slept in an odd position. Rising, she paced around the room once. ”Zed isn't here,” she said to Binkie. ”He's ice climbing.” He bowed his head. She wondered where Dana was. She had a swift, unexpected memory of his hand against her cheek, and s.h.i.+vered.

Turning to the intercom, she called him. ”Dana!”

”Yes, Rhani-ka?”

”Come to my room, please.” She stepped away from the intercom and smiled at Binkie. ”Bink, I shall not need you this morning.”

He bowed. ”As you wish, Rhani-ka. I -- ” he hesitated, then said, ”I have some errands to run in the city. May I -- ”

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