Kath in Winter

by Marc Stiegler

Illustration by Steve Cavallo

He opened his eyes to a vision: she sat before him, the woman whose smile could light a galaxy.

Although Ross Herrick smiled at her, she did not move. Although he murmured a greeting, she did not reply.

A reply would have astonished him. She was, after all, just a picture—a picture of the greatest actress ever to grace the Silver Screen. The present Kath didn’t look like that photo any more, of course; the photo was sixty-two years old, and the living, breathing Kathleen Tepper was but an ember of the woman he now gazed upon.

By all accounts, however, she still sparkled. Her fire might now be an ember, but it was a shining ember indeed. Their mutual friends had told him this, though he himself had never met her.

He would meet her soon. Tomorrow, in fact, when he would attend a party. The hostess had promised that Kath would appear.

Ross glanced at the clock, noting the time with horror. He went into hyperdrive, pulling on khaki slacks, struggling to pull a polo shirt over his muscular shoulders, grabbing his leather jacket and duffel, and tugging a comb through his dark curls as he ran out the door to his Jeep. His plane for Seattle left in less than two hours. He wanted very much to meet Kath, and this would probably be his only chance. She was, after all, very old now. She couldn’t have much time left.

Kath fought off the sharp pain that stabbed behind her eyes, and examined herself in the mirror one last time. The scarf around her throat did an excellent job of disguising the progressive collapse of her neck muscles. Without the scarf, she looked like an aged turkey; but with the scarf in place, she looked more like her vision of herself. The word “spry” popped into her mind unbidden. Kath, she said sternly to her reflection, five years ago you would have withered anyone who called you “spry” with your famous patrician glare. She reviewed her present assets—she was still tall and slender, and osteoporosis had not yet distorted the straight iron of her back. Her mind was as sharp as… she stuck her tongue out at herself, fluffed her once-famous locks, and stepped out into the melee. At least, she viewed it as a melee, though the other participants no doubt thought it was a party.

She had never been much of a party-hound; she liked them even less now. Consequently, she always astonished herself on the rare occasions she accepted such invitations. But her grand-nephew Timmy was trotting off upon a long journey, and her niece Dolly had begged her to come and see him off. And since Kath considered it a good possibility that Timmy’d get himself killed on this expedition, she figured she could acquiesce this once. After all, even if Timmy did survive his attempt to climb Everest, Kath herself might not be around to celebrate his return. The thought displeased her enough to force her into the bright defiant smile she had perfected when Spence died, long ago.

Still, there was a positive aspect to attending a party thrown in honor of mountain climbers. They were a healthy lot, strong, vigorous and handsome in their own way. She enjoyed watching them… even if watching was all she did nowadays. She remembered the days when she would have—“Aunt Kath, I’d like you to meet someone,” Timmy spoke from stage right, just outside her field of vision.

She turned to him. “What’s that, Timmy?” she asked, not having heard him clearly. Hah, and people wonder if I’m senile! she thought to herself. No wonder, she concluded sourly.

“Kath, this is Ross Herrick, the leader of my expedition.” Timmy stepped back and a new character—no doubt this Mr. Herrick fellow-moved forward. He extended his hand. She could see, even without her glasses, just how rough—and how strong—his hand was.

Kath adjusted her social smile, took the proffered hand, and said, “A pleasure, I’m sure, Mr. Herrick.” She looked him over, and her smile grew warmer. He fit her stereotype for climbers to a degree—he was strong, and he had a dancer’s grace about him. But he was rather short, and plain rather than ruggedly handsome. Still, his smile lit his countenance, and dark hair and eyes had always caught her fancy. Spence, now—

He covered her hand with his other hand. “Meeting you is a great pleasure for me, Miss Tepper.” He looked away and laughed, as to himself. “At the risk of sounding trite, I must tell you that I have fallen in love with you at least a dozen times, in your different characters.”

“Goodness me, Mr. Herrick, you’ll make me blush.” She could feel it, too—she was blushing, of all absurd things. She couldn’t quite understand why, and she conceded to herself that she was sadly out of practice at this game. While Mr. Herrick was not by any means the first person to offer her such lavish, and silly, praise, his eyes were so dark with their intensity, it made her feel… warm… and…

Suddenly the warmth turned to ice in her stomach. His eyes, Mr. Herrick’s eyes, reminded her of Spence. Spence could always make her blush. “Of course, whatever greatness I achieved is ancient history, Mr. Herrick. As you must know, I retired when cybervid made film obsolete, twenty years ago.”

His eyes were still upon her. “I know, Miss Tepper. Frankly, your absence is cybervid’s loss. I, for one, prefer the old films.”

This Mr. Herrick was a most impertinent man! She concentrated hard on controlling her throat, to suppress the frail quaver that had encumbered her voice over the past decade, and set forth to put him in his place.

She affixed him with her finest highbrow stare, long enough to ensure that he understood his fate. She turned away and strolled to Dolly’s southeast bay window. It was a crisp evening; in the distance she could see Mt. Rainier, its stark white glaciers glowing in the twilight. As she had known he would, Mr. Herrick followed her, a moth too near a flame to save himself.

Kath watched the dusk slide up the flanks of the mountain. Spence had often compared her to Mt. Rainier; both of them were volcanoes, he would say, cloaked in wintry snow.

Mr. Herrick whispered reverently, “She is beautiful, isn’t she? The view from her peak still dazzles me, even though I have been there many times.”

Kath cleared her throat, and proceeded to the attack. “It amazes me, Mr. Herrick, every time I hear about people ready to commit acts of suicide, like climbing mountains, when there is no need.”

Mr. Herrick picked up the gauntlet quite smoothly. “All people contemplate acts of suicide, Miss Tep-per—even you.”

Kath responded in her best theatrical voice. “Why, I should say not! I demand, Mr. Herrick, that you produce examples.”

Mr. Herrick’s eyes pondered her, as he formulated his answer. Kath smiled serenely. Do your worst, Kath thought with glee.

“You are letting old age kill you,” he said quietly.

Her hand rose reflexively toward her throat; but she forced her hand down and glared at him instead.

He continued. “Death is on the verge of becoming obsolete. But typically, people of your age—” he glared back at her, challenging her in his turn—“people of your age reject the alternative to death out of hand. As if the alternative could be any worse.” He stopped, and waited for her reaction.

“And just exactly how would one avoid death, Mr. Herrick?” Could he actually be a follower of one of these New Age religious groups? Surely not! Not a man with Spence’s eyes, please, no.

“Cryonic suspension.” His voice was still quiet, but very intense. His intensity put her in mind of religious fanaticism, but somehow “cryonic suspension” didn’t sound very religious. If anything, it sounded coldly mechanical.

She couldn’t decide whether she was puzzled or irritated, but whichever she was, the quaver returned to her voice as she asked, “And would you please enlighten me as to the nature of ‘cryonic suspension’? Or would you rather prolong my suspense?”

“Suspension is the process of being frozen cold enough to preserve the body. Once suspended, you can wait indefinitely for science and technology to figure out how to cure the problems of aging… and also to figure out how to restore you from your suspended state.”

“I see.” Kath raised an eyebrow. “From your phraseology, may I presume that no one has yet been ‘restored’?”

The mountain climber’s shoulders sagged from a weight no muscles could hold up. “I’m afraid not. Still, suspension gives one a chance to survive. It seems likely—or at least possible—that science will eventually figure out how to get one back. Given the nature of an advance that revolutionary, one can reasonably take it a step farther and predict that restoration of the body will restore youth, into the bargain. I believe the technology to achieve this is just a matter of time, not feasibility. As people in the field say, being suspended is the second worst thing that can happen to you.”

Kath did not reply immediately. Could it be true? Science had done amazing things in her own lifetime. She remembered horse-drawn carts from her childhood, yet she had also watched men land on the Moon. She did have faith that science would do amazing things after she was gone, could it truly perform even this miracle? Mr. Herrick was so certain! Just like herself… just like Spence. Damn him!

The pain stabbed behind her eyes again. She stepped back, involuntarily, leaning against the wall for a moment with her eyes closed. But she recovered quickly, and said, “Perhaps being suspended is even the third worst thing that can happen.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes, just a touch of vertigo—it comes and goes.” She rubbed her eyes. “Tell me why you’re so sure that science will triumph over death.”

He pursed his lips. “Well, I know that they’ve already brought at least one man back from death.”

“Really,” she said skeptically. “I had no idea. Has he become a zombie?”

Mr. Herrick laughed. “No, he’s just a normal man. He died during an operation to save him from a brain aneurism.”

Pain stabbed her again. “A brain aneurism?”

“Yes, it’s a weak spot in a blood vessel wall. The wall expands, and eventually bursts. In the brain, it will kill you when it bursts. The condition was considered inoperable until just recently.”

“Why?”

“If you operate, you’ll spill as much blood as if the aneurism burst.”

“Not a pretty picture,” Kath said.

“No, but they saved him anyway—though they had to kill him first.”

“My heavens!” Kath reached for a mocking tone, but her sense of wonder hampered the effect.

Nevertheless, Mr. Herrick caught her intention. He frowned at her… and then caught the laughter in her eyes, and laughed himself. “I take this subject very seriously,” he said, “I’m sorry if I’m boring you. It’s just that… of all the people in the world I would like to see restored and renewed… the very first would be you.”

She blushed again. Oh my, another grandiose, gratuitous compliment, she thought. But he still looked so intense, so like Spence, even when he laughed. “Go on,” she said, “I’m listening.”

He looked at her for a moment.

“You were telling me about how they killed the man with the aneurism,” she reminded him.

“That’s right. Well, when they put him on the operating table, the first thing they did was lower his body temperature to 60 degrees.”

Kath shivered, though the room was toasty warm. “That would kill me, all right.”

“And by most standards, that in itself would have killed him, since his heart stopped and they had to pump blood with a machine. But that’s not all they did. After all, even at 60 degrees, if they operated they’d still spill plenty of blood. And he would still die a real death. No, the cooling in this case was just a preliminary step. The astonishing step came next: they removed all his blood.”

“All of it?” she asked, truly astonished for the first time since… for a very long time indeed.

He smiled. “All of it. You see, the reason they had lowered his body temperature was to slow the rate at which the cells of his body consumed oxygen. They estimated that, at 60 degrees, he could survive for almost an hour without any blood in his body, without any side effects.”

He paused, as if expecting her to figure it out from there, and sure enough, Kath understood. “So since there wasn’t any blood in his body, they could go in and operate on the aneurism without any bleeding.”

“Exactly,” he said, smiling. “And after they repaired the blood vessel wall, they pumped his blood back in, raised his temperature and—”

“And he woke up feeling like a zombie.”

Mr. Herrick smiled. “Probably. He certainly met the basic requirement-after all, for an hour he had been dead by every clinical measure of death ever devised. He had no heart-beat, he had no brain activity, he was as lifeless as the diamond in your earring.”

“And he’s fine now?”

“Very much so.”

“Well, Mr. Herrick, that certainly is an impressive story. Truly a miracle of science. But, ahhh, I seem to have forgotten: What exactly was the point?”

“The point was that this man survived for an hour preserved by the cold, without even a drop of blood in his body. So I’d hope that, given this example, you might find it more feasible to believe that by keeping you colder still, they could preserve you longer. Indefinitely, in fact—until they had the technology to make you young again.”

“That could be a very long time, Mr. Herrick—after all, they would have a rather titanic job with me, wouldn’t you say?”

“Hardly any job at all. Miss Tepper. It is clear that your mind is still young—and so is your heart.”

Kath suppressed an urge to stamp her foot. How could that man get to her, again and again? Suddenly the pain overwhelmed her again. “Mr. Herrick,” she said, putting a hand to her head, “perhaps we should continue this conversation at another…” and suddenly she was falling. The last thing she saw was his eyes.

The window in her hospital room had a view of Rainier—not as good as the view from Dolly’s house, perhaps, but a view nonetheless. Even though the damned mountain was seventy miles away she couldn’t seem to get away from it.

But even the mountain was not as tenacious as Mr. Herrick. No, indeed. She shook her head as she looked at him. “Yes, Mr. Herrick, it is an aneurism. No, Mr. Herrick, I do not need any special kind of surgery that had not been generally accepted by the medical profession.”

“Very well, Miss Tepper. It’s not my habit to beg people to do things for their own good.” He nodded to her in polite disappointment, although it was clear that he wanted to say more. She was glad that the argument was over.

But then the silly fool got down on his knees. “Miss Tepper, I beg you, one last time, please reconsider.”

“Oh, posh and nonsense!” She would have stomped her foot had she been able to stand “I have lived my life well. The doctor says I have a little time left, and that is all I want.”

He stood up and glared back at her. “You aren’t being rational!”

“Rationality is much overrated. Even you, Mr. Herrick, don’t hold it in too high a regard, as your actions demonstrate.”

A large smile crossed his face at this opportunity to replay Kath’s own words back to her. “Why, I should say I do! I demand, Miss Tepper, that you produce examples.”

“Very well. First of all, Mr. Herrick, do you have a contract for, um, let’s see now, ‘suspension,’ as you call it?”

He reached under his shirt, pulled a chain from around his neck, and handed it to her.

She peered at the small steel medallion dangling from the chain. She moved it around, squinting, trying to find a distance where she could read it easily without first finding her glasses. Finally, she read, “Push 50,000 U Heparin IV and do CPR while cooling with ice to 10C. Keep PH 7.5. No autopsy or embalming.” She looked back up at her tormentor. “Sounds rather ghastly, Mr. Herrick.”

“Not as ghastly as what the worms would do to you after being buried.”

She lowered her head in acknowledgment of his point. “Yes, I suppose so. Still. That’s all very fine, but I’m curious: what happens if you get killed up on the mountain? Will they still be able to suspend you?”

“Probably not,” he admitted. “By the time they got me down, it’d be too late. There’d probably be so much deterioration of my neural pathways, they’d never be able to put me back together again. Like Humpty Dumpty, I guess.”

“How much deterioration can you suffer and still revive?” she asked.

“No one really knows,” he explained, “there’s plenty of reason to think that the brain has lots of redundancy. It could be reconstructed even after terrible damage. But there are surely limits, even if we don’t know exactly what they are. That’s why they use liquid nitrogen for suspension—they want to make absolutely sure that they’re keeping you cold enough so that no further damage can occur.”

Kath thought that sounded rather soft and fuzzy for such a careful and correct individual, but she decided not to press the point. “So let me get this straight. When you climb the mountain, you risk not only temporary death, but real, everlasting, permanent death, even though, if you stay here, you believe you are safe from real death.” Her smile turned triumphant. “Am I correct, Mr. Herrick?”

He smiled. “Quite right, Miss Tepper. I see your point. It’s not perfectly rational, is it?”

“I should say not. You see, Mr. Herrick? Rationality is not everything.” Time to go for the kill, she thought. “Next, I’ll show you just how irrational, in your own terms, you really are.”

Mr. Herrick raised his eyebrows in anticipation.

“Suppose I offer you the following deal. Suppose I agreed to let some vampire of a surgeon perform this bloodless operation on me, Mr. Herrick. Would you agree, in exchange, not to go on this expedition to the Himalayas?”

Mr. Herrick pondered her, laughing. “Nice try, Miss Tepper. But no,” he countered, “good though it is, it is not good enough.” He turned serious. “Miss Tepper… whether or not you have this operation makes little difference. Facing facts, you are about to die—if not of this aneurism, then of another stroke, or of pneumonia, or of any of the thousand other ills that come with old age.”

“I see. Well. I suppose I shall have to up the ante. Suppose I also agreed to have a ‘suspension’ as you call it? Would that be enough? Would you promise never to climb a dangerous mountain again?”

This time his eyes filled with the strange intensity, the passion that reminded her so much of Spence. “Yes,” he said fervently, “I’d make that deal.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and knew, looking into his soul, that he was telling the truth. She had upped the ante enough, all right; indeed, she had upped it more than she was willing to pay.

“Well, Mr. Herrick, you have surprised me again. You are more rational, inside your own twisted view of the world, than I had given you credit for. I commend you.”

But now he wouldn’t let go. “Do we have a deal, Miss Tepper? I can call from here to cancel the expedition.”

She looked at him sternly. “Mr. Herrick, I was speaking hypothetically.” Settling back, she smiled tiredly. “Please do visit tomorrow. I find our conversations most, ahhh, entertaining.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Miss Tepper. We leave in the morning for Katmandu.”

“So soon?”

“So soon, Miss Tepper.” She could see in his eyes that he regretted it.

“Will I see you again?”

“That is entirely up to you, Miss Tepper. I shall be back in just a few months.”

“Yes. Well… good luck, Mr. Herrick. I hope you reach the top of the mountain.”

“And I hope you get to share it with me one day, Miss Tepper. When you are young again.” With that, he departed.

Kath sighed. People made so much ruckus about living and dying. She had seen so much of both. There were certainly ways of living that were worse than dying. And yet… somehow, she felt her conversation with Mr. Herrick had gone awry.

So he would be back in a few months. The main question, then, was whether she would still be here in a few months. Reading between the lines of what her doctor had said, she could see that the answer was a resounding no.

Damn that Mr. Herrick! Clearly, she had only one path to ensuring that she would be able to finish her work upon him. Even if her doctor was acutely hostile to this bloodless operation business, she would have to pursue it. Strengthened by her irritation, she reached for the phone, to call the surgeon Mr. Herrick had recommended. She would start by asking the man whether he liked draining the blood out of people, that should get them off to a nice start.

The room was cold, as cold as the light was bright. Both features heightened her irritation. Kath sat stiffly upright on the rolling bed that would take her into the operating room and contemplated her folly. Dying most certainly would have been simpler than this wretched undertaking. She blamed her failing memory for the error: she should have at least remembered how much she detested doctors. After all, what had doctors ever done for her—except stick needles in her and generally make her uncomfortable, and then tell her that she was sick, which she had known all along anyway. And then there were those hospital bathrooms. Had she ever spent time in a hospital when she was able to go to the bathroom like a normal person?

But here she was again, less than a month after her last incarceration. She had no doubts about whom to blame.

It was that Mr. Herrick’s fault. She would settle with him the next time she saw him, when he returned from his mountaintop. Assuming he made it back from his mountaintop, that is. The last she had heard (cleverly asking Dolly how her son was, rather than asking any questions specifically about Mr. Herrick), he was above 20,000 feet, making good progress. He was also hurrying because a truly wicked storm was brewing there. She had no idea what a storm might be like at 20,000 feet, but it sounded even more unpleasant than this hospital hallway.

Well. Mr. Herrick was not the only one facing imminent destruction. In minutes they would whisk her away to the operating room, where they would, as their first step, kill her. Supposedly they would bring her back again within the hour, but she had much less faith in their ability to pull off that crucial second step.

There was some good news. At least, whichever way it went, she would get some relief. The pain was continuous now, and for several days she had been seeing double.

A ridiculously cheery fellow in uniform—not a hospital uniform, however-interrupted her reverie. “Miss Kathleen Tepper?”

She snapped at him, though the quaver in her voice sapped most of the venom from her vocal projection. “Of course I’m Miss Tepper. Who else would sit like a ninny in this bed waiting for men with knives to come for me?”

“Special delivery from Nepal, Miss Tepper.” His voice was full of amazement, though it was unclear whether he felt such awe because he stood in the presence of the famous movie star, or because he rarely carried parcels from glacial peaks halfway around the world.

“My, my, I wonder which of my friends that could be.” There was only one possibility, of course, but it made no sense to admit this to the young man delivering the mail.

She signed for the package and examined it a moment before opening it.

It did not feel cold, despite its origins. This surprised her, despite the absurdity of the expectation.

It did not feel heavy; she could have believed that the package was empty.

Frustrated by the lack of tangible clues, she grasped the package at one end and tried to pull it apart. When that failed, a friendly hospital attendant assisted her, and soon she held the contents in her hand.

She read the note first. In his stark script, it said simply, After we settled into camp at 16,500feet, I wentfor a walk. I found this. I couldn’t believe it—it was growing in a shallow crack in barren rock, surrounded by snow. I knew that it wouldn’t last long, so I preserved it as best / could and sent it to you. Perhaps the winter flower will yet live, against all odds, R.H.

She opened the box and held the flower in her hand. She had spent a couple of decades gardening, and recognized the pink petals at a glance: a fairy rhododendron. These flowers were known for their ability to survive at high altitudes, but still, this was incredible. What astonishing travails the bright blossom had survived to get here!

Kath sighed. Such a romantic, this Mr. Herrick. You’d think he’d be more practical, with death as close at hand as it was in his present circumstances.

“Miss Tepper, we’re ready,” another bright young attendant announced. He wheeled her away to her doom, despite her protests.

She lay floating on the sea. It was quite comfortable there, though there was something odd about it. She drifted back to sleep, but something still bothered her about her comfortableness. Eventually she figured it out: her neck muscles were too relaxed. She had been tensing her neck muscles ever since the pain behind her eyes had begun, months ago; now her muscles were relaxed, because… because the pain was gone! She blessed the surgeon and drifted off to sleep again.

The next time she awoke, there was a stale, dry taste in her mouth. Her body was not floating; rather, it was a lead brick, designed to keep her trapped in bed. There could be little doubt about her condition: she was a zombie now.

Either that, or she was getting better. She considered the advantages of being a zombie, and rather preferred them.

Finally she woke up, in that terribly definitive way that told her that she wouldn’t drift off to sleep again soon. She complained about the coffee; she demanded, and received, a daily paper.

Reading the paper was a relatively new habit for her, only a few decades old. She hadn’t started until the ’90s. Before that, the headlines had always been the same: either someone was starting a war, or someone was trying to end one, or the Americans were talking to the Russians. But when the Soviet Union collapsed and the guardian B-52’s descended from the skies, a void appeared in the daily headlines. Oh, of a certainty, there were still wars—probably more than before—but without the global overtones of Communism versus Democracy, they rarely rated headlines.

So newspapers had gone back to covering news. They created headlines out of all kinds of oddities, from the nutritional value of theater popcorn to the sexual peccadillos of the current President years before he got elected. What news had lost in grand planetary sweep, it had gained in… humanity. One never knew what ridiculous concoction would become tomorrow’s news.

Today, however, the headline wasn’t at all amusing. No, not in the least.

She threw the paper aside, and blinked repeatedly; there were tears in her eyes! Damn him!

Well, Mr. Herrick was no doubt already receiving damnation from experts. There was little she could do to punish him any more. A massive avalanche had crashed down the side of Everest, burying half of the American climbing team. The team leader, Ross Herrick, was among those lost.

Contrary to her desires, Kath continued to recover. But as her body’s automatic physical process marched towards healing, her will to live faded.

Everyone and everything was gone. I have long outlived my usefulness, she thought, with only a trace of bitterness. Not even Mr. Herrick was left to argue with.

Dolly’s family held a memorial service for the late Mr. Ross Herrick; Kath did not attend. This was traditional for Kath: she had not even attended Spence’s funeral. No, her last memory of Spence was of the love in his eyes. Her last memory of Ross Herrick would be of his arrogant, challenging glare.

After the operation, the surgeon had confirmed for her what they had done: for almost an hour, she had been clinically dead. Dead, dead, totally dead.

She had half expected to see heaven—or more likely, hell—during that hour. But there was nothing. Death was flatly, simply, absurdly… boring. Kath, who had spent a lifetime of fierce activity, could think of little more distasteful. But she was tired now, too tired to pound back at Death again.

And everyone else was gone.

She recovered from her operation, but not from her sense of loss. She started to lose strength and weight once again. Her darned fool doctors could find nothing wrong, as usual.

Then the magazines started to arrive at her house—magazines about cryonics. Clearly, Mr. Herrick had alerted his compatriots that he had a fish wriggling on the hook. But that was before his oh-so-permanent demise.

Kath threw the magazines away. But they kept coming. And then came one issue that tried to answer the question that Mr. Herrick had evaded with considerable vigor: How cold was cold enough? She smiled as she remembered him, almost squirming, so she went ahead and read the article.

But in the end the essay disappointed her. The author spent a great many words saying that nobody really knew. He didn’t even dance around the question as skillfully as Mr. Herrick had. Disgusted, Kath tossed that magazine into the trash.

But as the paper hit the receptacle, she realized that the uncertainty held hope. She realized that, just possibly, not all of her friends were dead. Not quite yet.

But she also realized that the one friend who might yet survive would need her to save him. And she realized that, in order to save him, she would first have to save herself.

And to save herself, she would have to travel with Death once again. She found it hard to believe that she could let Death clutch at her yet again and still slip away from him. Nevertheless, it now made sense for her to try.

Besides, as a worst case, she would finally have the chance to give the Powers That Be a piece of her mind. That, at least, was something worth smiling about.

His memory of death was quite clear, quite certain. He remembered the terrible thunder, the shaking of the ground beneath him as uncounted tons of snow and ice poured down. He remembered clinging to his ice ax, jammed in a crack, and the giant fist of snow that flung him away. He remembered falling, sinking into his own private mountain of snow. He never really hit the ground: the snow simply became ever more dense, and his progress ever more sluggish, till at the last he was no longer moving.

It had been pitch black there in the middle of a hundred tons of snow. But what his eyes could no longer see, his other senses described for him with terrible surety. He had felt the snow and its bitter coldness. A burning, tingling sensation ran quickly down the tips of his fingers. He had realized he was going to die of hypothermia. He cursed under his breath.

But his attempt to curse had failed. Only then had he realized that he wasn’t breathing. The initial fall had knocked the breath out of him, and the densely packed snow had crushed his lungs. He had realized that the freezing cold would not be quick enough to kill him. He had tried to shout; but that hadn’t worked, either. He had fought for consciousness, for one last gasp of air…

And now he was here. No snow touched him at all. Lying there with his eyes closed, he was quite puzzled. He inhaled—and the breath came easily, no mean feat with crushed lungs. Even more puzzling, he felt warm, warmer than he had felt since he had reached the Himalayas. Of course, sometimes people felt a gush of warmth as they died of hypothermia, a merciful illusion cast by a failing body. How real it seemed now!

He opened his eyes to a dream: she sat before him, the woman whose smile could light a galaxy.

Although Ross Herrick smiled at her, she did not move. He murmured a greeting.

This time, unlike all the other times, she replied. “Well, Mr. Herrick. It has been a long time, hasn’t it? Though I imagine it doesn’t seem all that long to you now, does it? Indeed, if things have gone as they should, you should be rather surprised by the sudden absence of snow. And the question must arise in your mind, is this heaven… or is this hell?” Her smile held more than a hint of wickedness, and her voice sounded rather triumphant. The quaver in her voice, he noticed, was gone; she sounded as young as she looked.

He tried to decide what to be confused about first. That voice, it was the voice of Kathleen Tepper, and those eyes, those were the eyes of Kathleen Tepper, and he had just met her a couple of weeks ago, before starting the expedition. But the face matched his old photograph of her; and what had happened to the expedition, anyway?

And Kath started laughing. “Your face!” she said, “Your range of expressions in the last five seconds has just been priceless. Ah, Mr. Herrick, you have repaid me for all the irritation you put me through.”

He opened his mouth to speak—and then glimpsed the view out the window. He realized that, despite the perfection of the mimicry, this room he occupied was not his own. He knew because the view from his window was impossible—when he looked out, he did not see the mountains of Vermont. Instead, he saw the oceans of planet Earth. All of Earth, floating in a vast black starfield. He looked back at Kath.

“Are you beginning to understand, Mr. Herrick?” She laughed again. “It really is a marvelous new world. Why, I myself have a spaceship, no larger than a Coke can, that can… well, more of that later.” She harrumphed. “You are a very lucky fellow, you know. The temperature at 25,000 feet, on the side of Mt. Everest, buried under the insulation of a few hundred tons of snow, was, as it happens, minimally adequate to preserve your body. It was so minimal as to be quite worrisome, in fact. Yours was a very difficult restoration indeed, Mr. Herrick.”

He remembered the snow, and shuddered. “How long?”

“By the standards of your old life, a very long time, Mr. Herrick. But fear not; you will be back in the swing of things in no time. You will be provided with your own private tutor to help you.”

“You?”

Kath nodded. “Oh, don’t be too impressed with yourself, Mr. Herrick. Much of your education will not be conducted in person. You’ll be using the full line of Kathleen Tepper’s Educational Holoworlds to hasten your learning experience.”

“Holoworlds, huh? What happened to cybervid?”

“I’m afraid I missed that whole era, Mr. Herrick. Fortunately they developed a far superior medium before reviving me. Very thoughtful of them, too.”

At last, Ross began to laugh himself. He laughed until the there were tears in his eyes. “Miss Tepper… uh, if you’re going to be my private tutor, would you mind if I called you Kath?”

“Of course not, Mr. Herrick. As a friend of mine once said, ‘I think this could be the start of a long and beautiful friendship.’ ” Imperiously, she held out her hand. “Now get out of that bed and come with me. I have so much to show you.”

Content

Kath in Winter
by Marc Stiegler