“And why, again?”
“The sublime isn't always beautiful.”
“True. It transcended beauty, it really did. One time I walked out onto the polar dunes, you know. . . .” But he doesn't know how to tell it. “And so, and so it seemed to me that we already had an Earth, you know? That we didn't need a Terra up here. And everything they did eroded the planet that we came to. They destroyed it! And now we've got—whatever. Some kind of park. A laboratory to test out new plants and animals and all. And everything I loved so much about those early years is gone. You can't find it anywhere anymore.”
In the dark he can just see her nodding. “And so your life's work . . .”
“Wasted!” He can't keep the frustration out of his voice. Suddenly, he doesn't want to, he wants her to understand what he feels; he looks at her in the dark. “A three-hundred-year life, entirely wasted! I mean I might as well have just . . .” He doesn't know what.
Long pause.
“At least you can remember it,” she says quietly.
“What good is that? I'd rather forget, I tell you.”
“Ah. You don't know what that's like.”
“Oh, the past. The God-damned past. It isn't so great. Just a dead thing.”
She shakes her head. “Our past is never dead. Do you know Sartre's work?”
“No.”
“A shame. He can be a big help to we who live so long. For instance, in several places he suggests that there are two ways of looking at the past. You can think of it as something dead and fixed forever; it's part of you, but you can't change it, and you can't change what it means. In that case your past limits or even controls what you can be. But Sartre doesn't agree with that way of looking at it. He says that the past is constantly altered by what we do in the present moment. The meaning of the past is as fluid as our freedom in the present, because every new act that we commit can revalue the entire thing!”
Roger humphs. “Existentialism.”
“Well, whatever you want to call it. It's part of Sartre's philosophy of freedom, for sure. He says that the only way we can possess our past—whether we can remember it or not, I say—is to add new acts to it, which then give it a new value. He calls this 'assuming' our past.”
“But sometimes that may not be possible.”
“Not for Sartre. The past is always assumed, because we are not free to stop creating new values for it. It's just a question of what those values will be. For Sartre it's a question of how you will assume your past, not whether you will.”
“And for you?”
“I'm with him on that. That's why I've been reading him these last several years. It helps me to understand things.”
“Hmph.” He thinks about it. “You were an English major in college, did you know that?”
She ignores the comment. “So—” She nudges him lightly, shoulder to shoulder. “You have to decide how you will assume this past of yours. Now that your Mars is gone.”
He considers it.
She stands. “I have to plunge into the logistics for tomorrow.”
“Okay. See you inside.”
A bit disconcerted, he watches her leave. Dark tall shape against the sky. The woman he remembers was not like this. In the context of what she has just said, the thought almost makes him laugh.
For the next few days all the members of the team are hard at work ferrying equipment up to Camp Three, except for two a day who are sent above to find a route to the next camp. It turns out there is a feasible reeling route directly up the Gully, and most of the gear is reeled up to Camp Three once it is carried to Camp Two. Every evening there is a radio conversation, in which Eileen takes stock and juggles the logistics of the climb, and gives the next day's orders. From other camps Roger listens to her voice over the radio, interested in the relaxed tone, the method she has of making her decisions right in front of them all, and the easy way she shifts her manner to accommodate whomever she is speaking with. He decides she is very good at her job, and wonders if their conversations are simply a part of that. Somehow he thinks not.
Roger and Stephan are given the lead, and early one mirror dawn they hurry up the fixed ropes above Camp Three, turning on their helmet lamps to aid the mirrors. Roger feels strong in the early going. At the top of the pitch the fixed ropes are attached to a nest of pitons in a large, crumbling crack. The sun rises and suddenly bright light glares onto the face. Roger ropes up, confirms the signals for the belay, starts up the Gully.
The lead at last. Now there is no fixed rope above him determining his way; only the broad flat back and rough walls of the Gully, looking much more vertical than they have up to this point. Roger chooses the right wall and steps up onto a rounded knob. The wall is a crumbling, knobby andesite surface, black and a reddish gray in the harsh morning blast of light; the back wall of the gully is smoother, layered like a very thick-grained slate, and broken occasionally by horizontal cracks. Where the back wall meets the sidewall the cracks widen a bit, sometimes offering perfect footholds. Using them and the many knobs of the wall Roger is able to make his way upward. He pauses several meters above Stephan at a good-looking vertical crack to hammer in a piton. Getting a piton off the belt sling is awkward. When it is hammered in he pulls a rope through and jerks on it. It seems solid. He climbs above it. Now his feet are spread, one in a crack, one on a knob, as his fingers test the rock in a crack above his head; then up, and his feet are both on a knob in the intersection of the walls, his left hand far out on the back wall of the Gully to hold on to a little indentation. Breath rasps in his throat. His fingers get tired and cold. The Gully widens out and grows shallower, and the intersection of back wall and sidewall becomes a steep narrow ramp of its own. Fourth piton in, the ringing of the strikes filling the morning air. New problem: The degraded rock of this ramp offers no good cracks, and Roger has to do a tension traverse over to the middle of the Gully to find a better way up. Now if he falls he will swing back into the sidewall like a pendulum. And he's in the rockfall zone. Over to the left sidewall, quickly a piton in. Problem solved. He loves the immediacy of problem solving in climbing, though at this moment he is not aware of his pleasure. Quick look down: Stephan a good distance away, and below him! Back to concentrating on the task at hand. A good ledge, wide as his boot, offers a resting place. He stands, catches his breath. A tug on the line from Stephan; he has run out the rope. Good lead, he thinks, looking down the steep Gully at the trail left by the green rope, looping from piton to piton. Perhaps a better way to cross the Gully from right to left? Stephan's helmeted face calls something up. Roger hammers in three pitons and secures the line. “Come on up!” he cries. His fingers and calves are tired. There is just room to sit on his bootledge: immense world, out there under the bright pink morning sky! He sucks down the air and belays Stephan's ascent, pulling up the rope and looping it carefully. The next pitch will be Stephan's; Roger will have quite a bit of time to sit on this ledge and feel the intense solitude of his position in this vertical desolation. “Ah!” he says. Climbing up and out of the world. . . .