Into her rhythm, taking it slow. So far of all the clients Ta Shu seemed the least affected by their long march. He spent all his rest time contemplating the distant peaks of the Queen Maud Range, deciphering their feng shui message no doubt. While walking he stumped along steadily, and at times caught up with her and walked by her side. “We are doing well!”
“Yes.”
He pointed at the mountains, the only thing marring a perfect white/blue circle of a horizon. “This is a good place,” he said. He was pointing at what Val hoped was Barnum Peak, standing over the west side of the Hump Passage. “Open to the south. Protected on the north by mountains. This is good.”
“Doesn’t all that reverse in the southern hemisphere?”
“No. Constant everywhere. A dragon-spine range, that. Fire over water. Sometimes bad health. I would have to do more study.”
“No time for that,” Val said politely. “Anyway, it looks like your health is fine. You’re really going strong.”
“Thank you,” he said. He was hiking with his face uncovered, and now as he smiled some of the icicles in his gray moustache broke off and fell away. “No problem so far. I can walk; one of the few things I can do. I spent my childhood harvesting rice. Walking to town. Walking to school, when I went. A peasant life. Then given a spot at university, very lucky. Then, just after I got there—re-education!” He laughed. “So back to the fields for some more years.”
“Good way to get in shape.”
“Oh, there are better ways, I assure you.” Laughing at her. “Better ways indeed. Not enough to eat, you see. But it made me strong. Now I am old, but that kind of strength, ha—you must sit many years before it is all gone:”
Val nodded. She knew what he meant; she had often seen that kind of strength in Nepal, where people had an endurance that no Westerner could touch. A couple of Sherpas she knew had walked from Everest Base Camp to Kathmandu in three days, just to see how fast they could do it—a trek that even the best Western mountaineers took two weeks to do, back when they had walked it at all. No, Val had walked many miles with the Sherpa and Rawang porters, and she had seen that although they had mostly been very cheerful people, they were pack animals, really, like draft horses or donkeys—that was how they made their living, as beasts of burden, working hard, tired in the afternoons, eating like starved dogs every evening. Val had admired a lot of those guys for the way they worked, loved them dearly even though she had towered over them and hadn’t spoken their language. It hadn’t been the kind of love that had any real connection in it. But sometimes watching them she had wanted a big Western man to have that kind of spirit, that cheery toughness, something like Ta Shu’s. These were the kind of people she wanted to walk with.
Instead this little group of clients, with only one Ta Shu in it, and the rest slowly losing steam. In fact Jack and Jim were falling behind faster than ever. Puzzled, Val stopped and watched them closely for a while. It was not Jim who was slowing them down: Jack had hit the wall, it looked like. “Fuck,” she said. He had gone out too fast, perhaps, and burnt out. Or was feeling the loss of blood from the cut in his hand. Or both. Anyway he was slowing down markedly.
Val called an early break, and waited for the two men to catch up, cursing to herself. They joined the group twenty minutes after Jorge and Elspeth came in, and during that time the others had eaten and drunk their flasks and refilled them, and were beginning to freeze. This was a serious problem, and she couldn’t help thinking that it was Jack’s fault. So often it happened that men like him took off too fast, on an adrenaline rush, thinking their emergency energy would be inexhaustible, and then they were the first to hit the wall. Pacing took a lot of self-discipline. And big muscular men were generally not so good in ultra-longdistance events: they had too many muscles to feed, and when they ran out of the day’s carbo load, they had too little body fat to throw on the fire.
So when Jim and Jack clumped into the group, Val suggested that they have a bite of their belts to give themselves more energy. Jim nodded, and pulled out some of his belt and tore it off and stuffed it under his ski mask into his mouth before it froze.
Jack just shook his head irritably. “I’m just pacing myself,” he snapped. “Like you said to do. Don’t get neurotic about it, that’s the last thing we need. Let people go what pace they want.”
“Sure sure. Try eating some food, though. We need the group to stay more or less together, or the people in front will freeze waiting for the ones behind.”
“Don’t wait then!”
She stared at him. “You should eat,” she said finally. “And drink your arm flasks and refill them, for God’s sake.”
And after a little while more she had taken off again, and was soon leading the way. No beeps, thank God; they were out on the big ice cube itself now, a solid mass with very little cracking, and thank God for that. Just a matter of walking. Pacing oneself, yes, and walking. Hour after hour. She shifted them to a ten-minute break every hour, which was exactly Shackleton’s pattern. Frequently she glanced back over her shoulder. Jack was still falling behind, perhaps even more rapidly than before; and Jim was sticking with him.
At some time when she was not looking the sun was touched by a thin film of cloud, which had appeared out of nowhere. A white film, but heavily polarized by her sunglasses, so that it was banded prismatically.
As usual, it only took the slightest cloud cover for the day to go from blinding and hot to ominous and chill. Already they were pulling their ski masks down over their faces, and zipping up their parkas; and as they did the cloud thickened further, into a thin rippled patch thrown right over the sun, as if someone had tried to place it there. So often it happened that way; the cloud could have appeared anywhere in the sky, but ended up right between Val and the sun. It happened so frequently that she figured it must be some trick of perspective rather than a real phenomenon. In any case, there it was again.
Which was bad, bad news. The immediate effects were that their suits wouldn’t be as warm, and worse, their arm flasks would be much less efficient at melting snow and ice. It would take twice as long to melt snow now, maybe three times. So they were going to get thirsty.
The mental effect of the cloud was also bad. What had been a blazing plain was now shadowed and malign. Underfoot the beautifully elaborate crosshatching in the snow was revealed better than ever, a granulated fractal infinity of sharply cut microterracing. This complex world underfoot was as prismatic as any cloud whenever it flattened enough, and now when she looked in the direction of the sun Val saw diaphanous icebows, curving both in the cloud and across the snow itself. They walked forward into a geometry of rainbows. Val looked back at Ta Shu, and he raised a ski pole briefly, to let her know he had noticed the phenomena, and appreciated her thinking to bring them to his attention.
A beautiful sight; and yet still the world seemed dim and malignant. Clouds of any kind on the polar cap often presaged even worse weather, of course, which perhaps was part of the mood it cast. Hopefully her clients did not know that and so wouldn’t be affected as much. They were still many hours’ walk out from Roberts, and a lot could happen to Antarctic weather in that amount of time.
Nothing to do but forge on, of course, into a landscape turned alien; the awesome become awful, and all in the few minutes it had taken for a thin cloud to form. After which they were mere specks on a high plateau on Ice Planet, a place where humans could not live except in spacesuits. And they could feel that palpably, in the penetrating cold.