Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“Can we make it to the summit and back by nightfall?” asked Reggie. “Or would we have to pitch my tent somewhere exposed, like at Mushroom Rock?”

The Deacon took a breath and shook his head. “I’m planning to go alone. And I’m not planning to return.”

I tried to shout then but my throat hurt too much. I took a shot of English air instead.

“You plan to commit suicide up here just to climb this hill?” Reggie shouted. “You are a coward despite what Cousin Charles told me and despite all your shiny medals!”

The Deacon smiled.

What’s funny? I remember thinking. I kept hearing and re-hearing the hiss that had flowed out of J.C.’s oxygen tank after the bullet had passed through both him and the metal bottle. It had sounded, even at the time, like the sound of Jean-Claude’s soul being forced out of his body.

“If going to the summit and not coming down isn’t suicide, what is it?” Reggie demanded of the Deacon. She looked about ready to punch him.

“You remember when Ken visited me in Sikkim…?” asked the Deacon.

“K. T. Owings!” I rasped. “What the hell does he have to do with anything?”

“Yes. Well, Ken has lived in Nepal on his own farm in the Khumbu Valley just below the south approach to Everest ever since he decided to leave the world right after the Great War. He’s still a poet; he just doesn’t show anyone his work now. And he’s still a climber, although no one hears about his climbs now.”

“Are you saying,” Reggie said testily, “that your chum Ken Owings has climbed Everest and will be waiting up there for you on the summit with an airship or something?”

The Deacon flashed a grin. “Nothing so dramatic, Reggie. But Ken has reconnoitered the approaches and cols and ridges to Everest from the other side—the south approach—and promised me that he and some Sherpa friends would leave path wands and crevasse ladders in place way down in the Khumbu Glacier Ice Fall. He says that may be the most dangerous part of the climb, and it’s right near his Base Camp on the south side.”

“There is no Base Camp on the south side,” I croaked, my voice sounding like long fingernails being dragged down a blackboard.

“There is now, Jake,” said the Deacon. “Ken has been climbing the last week and more—setting fixed rope—leaving tents on the South Col for me.” He looked at Reggie. “For us.”

“South Col,” I repeated, wincing from the pain. I’d heard and thought “North Col” so many thousands of times in the last nine months that it hardly seemed possible that there was a South Col to Everest—or that it might ever be relevant to anything.

“Nepal’s forbidden to foreigners,” said Reggie. “You’ll be imprisoned, Richard.”

The Deacon shook his head a final time. “Owings has friends there. His farm in the Khumbu Valley employs about a hundred locals, and he’s respected. He converted to Buddhism in nineteen nineteen—really converted, not like my meditate-in-the-morning, shoot-Germans-in-the-afternoon shallow sort of conversion—and many in Nepal consider him a holy man. He’ll find a place for me.”

Reggie looked at him for a very long silent moment. “Why do you want to go away from everything, Richard? Leave everything you know behind?”

When he finally spoke, the Deacon’s voice was thick. “I feel—as you once put it so beautifully, Reggie—that the world is too much with me, and not necessarily in a Buddhist sense. The best part of me never came back from the Great War.”

Reggie rubbed her cheek and then looked up at the white Summit Pyramid gleaming behind the Deacon’s head. “I’ve been fulfilling my duty as a Bromley and as a proud Briton since I came to India when I was nine years old,” she said. “I took over managing the tea plantation when I was fourteen and have run it ever since. Our income from that plantation keeps the House of Bromley in England going. When I was twenty-six, I married an old man I didn’t love—to get an infusion of fresh funds to keep the plantation going. Lord Montfort died before I really got to know him…and he never made any effort to get to know me. I’m tired of doing my duty.”

“What are you saying, Reggie?” I asked.

“I’m saying that I would love to set foot on the summit of Everest and wouldn’t mind seeing forbidden Nepal for a few years, Jake.”

“I will climb with you then, my lady,” said Dr. Pasang.

She touched his arm. “No, my friend. This time you do not come with me. Jake needs to get down to Base Camp and Darjeeling. We need to get those photographs to the right people. I’ve never ordered you to do anything, my beloved Pasang, but I beg you to take Jake down and return to the plantation while I do this thing.”

Pasang looked for a second as if he was going to argue, but in the end he only bowed his head. His dark eyes looked moist, but it might have been the wind that caused that.

“You know where I keep my will,” Reggie was saying to him when I’d finished taking another snort of English air. “You know the combination to that safe. You’ll find that I’ve left the plantation to you and your family, Pasang.

“There is a clause in the will,” continued Reggie. “A codicil that stipulates that should I die or disappear, one-third of the plantation’s profits shall continue to flow to Lady Bromley in Lincolnshire…until her death. Then all profits are yours to do with as you wish, my dear Pasang.”

He nodded again, not lifting his eyes to hers.

“Wait,” said the Deacon. “No one’s going to attempt the summit this afternoon—much less try to traverse beyond to where Ken left fixed ropes and tents and supplies—unless we’re absolutely sure that Jake can get down safely with only Pasang accompanying him.”

“Wait a minute,” I croaked. “We can spend the night in Reggie’s Big Tent at Mushroom Rock and decide all this in the morning. I’ll probably be fit as a fiddle by then. We can all go to the summit, and you can try that idiotic idea of traversing south to Nepal if you want—both of you! Pasang and I will come back down this way.”

Pasang was shaking his head. There was a soft but final firmness in his voice. “No, Mr. Perry. I am very sorry. You must go down today.” He turned to Reggie and the Deacon. “Mr. Perry can walk almost unassisted—I believe he will continue to be able to do that for a while, especially during a descent. When he no longer can, I shall carry him. When we are off the mountain and his breathing improves, I shall escort him down to Rongbuk Monastery and then make arrangements for us to return to Darjeeling.”

“Hey!” I croak-coughed. “Don’t I get a say in…”

Evidently I didn’t.

We all stood. The wind had died down appreciably, but the lenticular hat was back on Everest’s summit.

The Deacon pulled out his large Very military pistol and fired a flare high into the sky toward and beyond the summit. A white star-flare, the phosphorus burst much brighter than our regular mountaineering flares.

White, green, then red, I remembered K. T. Owings saying to the Deacon about ten thousand years earlier in Sikkim.

“I believe,” said the Deacon, his voice a strange mixture of sadness and a weary sort of exaltation, “that I…that we”—he looked at Reggie, who nodded—“can reach this summit, traverse the steep crest line between the two summits, rappel down that Big Step Ken told me about, and get to the fixed ropes Owings and his Sherpas have set up on the southern approach ridge by…before…midnight. If we can’t down-climb with our torches and headlamps, we’ll bivouac in the Big Tent somewhere beyond the South Summit and leave the tent behind us when we continue our descent in the morning.”