"Dan Simmons - On K2 with Kanakaredes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

Yikes! Here's a story leading off this so-called cutting edge anthology that could have been published (mi
the naughty language) anywhere in the science fiction field in the last forty years. And by that I mean just ab
any magazine or anthologyтАФ or a number of same outside the field. I could see this one in the Saturday Even
Post in 1968, for crissakes.
What gives?
I'll tell you what gives: this story is great fiction today, forty years ago, or forty years in the future. Great fic
transcends any definition of cutting edge or New Wave.
Or genre labels.
Or any other kind of baloney.
Dan Simmons is well known to you all, or should be. He is the author of Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, The S
of Kali, and many other sf and horror novels. He's won numerous awards, including the Bram Stoker Award,
World Fantasy Award, and the Hugo Award, and also has conquered the spy thriller and suspense fields.
He's also responsible for the inclusion of one of the other great stories in this book, as you shall see.
But that's later; for now: enjoy the hell out of the following.



On K2 with Kanakaredes
DAN SIMMONS

The South Col of Everest, 26,200 feet
If we hadn't decided to acclimate ourselves for the K2 attempt by secretly climbing to t
eight-thousand-meter mark on Everest, a stupid mountain that no self-respecting climber
would go near anymore, they wouldn't have caught us and we wouldn't have been forced
make the real climb with an alien and the rest of it might not have happened. But we did
and we were and it did.
What else is new? It's as old as Chaos theory. The best-laid plans of mice and men and
forth and so on. As if you have to tell that to a climber.
Instead of heading directly for our Concordia Base Camp at the foot of K2, the three of
had used Gary's nifty little stealth CMG to fly northeast into the Himalayas, straight to t
bergeschrund of the Khumbu Glacier at 23,000 feet. Well, fly almost straight to the glacie
we had to zig and zag to stay under HK Syndicate radar and to avoid seeing or being seen
by that stinking prefab pile of Japanese shit called the Everest Base Camp Hotel (rooms U
$4,500 a night, not counting Himalayan access fee and CMG limo fare).
We landed without being detected (or so we thought), made sure the vehicle was safely
tucked away from the icefalls, seracs, and avalanche paths, left the CMG set in conceal
mode, and started our Alpine-style conditioning climb to the South Col. The weather wa
brilliant. The conditions were perfect. We climbed brilliantly. It was the stupidest thing t
three of us had ever done.
By late on the third afternoon we had reached the South Col, that narrow, miserable,
windswept notch of ice and boulders wedged high between the shoulders of Lhotse and
Everest. We activated our little smart tents, merged them, anchored them hard to ice-spum
rock, and keyed them white to keep them safe from prying eyes.
Even on a beautiful late-summer Himalayan evening such as the one we enjoyed that da
weather on the South Col sucks. Wind velocities average higher than those encountered ne
the summit of Everest. Any high-climber knows that when you see a stretch of relatively f
rock free of snow, it means hurricane winds. These arrived on schedule just about at sunse
of that third day. We hunkered down in the communal tent and made soup. Our plan was t
spend two nights on the South Col and acclimate ourselves to the lower edge of the Death
Zone before heading down and flying on to Concordia for our legal K2 climb. We had no