dark now, the mist gone and nothing below me but black rock, look down, then suddenly the sense of nearness to great mass, and I dragged myself up the straps to soften the impact and saw the rocky floor and doubled my legs and pitched forward and flung out my hands, kicking at the rubble and feeling a tug on the lines as the canopy dragged and caught and jerked me upright before it broke clear and I went pitching down again, sliding on all fours across the rocks until everything stopped.
I thumped the release and stepped out of the harness and looked up to find the girl; then I heard her cry out and saw the huge shape of her canopy billowing against the sky before it reached the cliff and spilled air and she span and struck the rockface and bounced away again, swinging in a wild arc as the nylon tore free and dropped her small figure beyond the edge of a ridge. I began stumbling forward, pulling the radio from the kit strapped to my waist and hitting the transmit button.
Eagle to Jade One. Eagle to Jade One.
I kept moving forward, checking the straps securing the rest of the equipment; if she were still alive she'd need first aid.
The set put out a rush of static, then cleared as I adjusted the squelch. Come in, Eagle.
Ferris.
Eagle to Jade One. Q down and safe. DH injured. Will report.
He acknowledged and I shut the thing off and started running, my boots sliding over loose gravel and sending it scattering. Even with the noise I was making I was aware of the great silence around me, and the weight of the mountains that sprawled here in the shadow of night. I crossed the ridge and fell twice, loosening rock and hearing it tumble as small stones sent their echoes crackling against the hard face of the cliff. Three or four times I called her name softly, but heard no answer. The light was better here; the moon had found a break in the mist and the rocks glittered like jet. I called again, but there was only the massive silence pressing down.
I let myself drop again, sliding through a crevice and finding flat ground at the edge of a dark pool that had no reflection; and the eye-brain interchange of data and association took an instant to inform me that the pool wasn't water but her black canopy.
"Hello, Clive."
She was on the ground, face up, just lying there. I bent over her, freeing the buckles of the medical kit. "What's the damage?"
"Broken leg. Don't touch it; it's beautifully numb."
"Are you bleeding?"
"Not much, I think. Don't worry. I thought I saw a light, when I was coming down, over to the east — did you see it too?"
"No." I was touching her flying suit lightly, feeling for damage and odd angles, and also letting her know that she wasn't alone; sometimes the voice isn't enough. Blood glinted along her left leg, where the suit had been ripped away. "I'm going to clean you up a bit; it'll sting. Try to —»
"Clive," she said, "listen to me. And don't do anything. I think I saw a light from the direction of the monastery; then either it went out or the mist hid it again. You know what I'm saying. They might have seen us."
I soaked one of the cotton-wool pads in the ether. There was no blood pooling anywhere; it was just oozing from the surface capillaries of the abrasion. "We knew there was the risk," I told her.
"Okay. Clive, please listen and do what I ask. Put that stuff away. It stinks." Her voice was light but emphatic, and I stopped what I was doing. "I've got a broken leg, and there is absolutely no way you can get me out of here: no way. When the pain starts I'll need morphine — I'm no bloody hero; and that would mean carrying me across these mountains to a goat track, and finding a goatherd and asking him to fetch a horse and cart from the nearest village, and waiting till he did that; and there'd be the trip to the village, in a bumpy cart. Clive, do you know your paramedic stuff? Do you know what state my leg would be in by then? After two days, maybe three days?" She put her hand on my arm. "There's just one other little thing. When daylight comes we'll be in sight of the monastery, or if we're not, we'd move into sight of it a dozen times on the trek to the goat track, unavoidably. Are you starting to get any kind of message?"
I began swabbing her leg and she hissed her breath in, gripping my wrist. "The sooner we start getting you out," I told her, "the more chance we'll have."
"Oh Christ," she said, "I didn't know you were such a stupid bastard."
I finished swabbing and went for the roll of lint in the canvas bag. "Save your energy, Helen. Relax. Are you feeling thirsty yet?"
She closed her eyes and began laughing strangely, and the sound went on until she could speak again. "Am I thirsty? Clive, I'm dying."
I stopped unrolling the bandage. "Of a broken leg?"
"Of a broken leg. And the mountains."
There was a gash on the side of her crash helmet: I'd noticed it when I'd been feeling for damage. Perhaps she'd struck her head on the rockface, and the pain was making her irrational. But somewhere in my own mind there was a cold thought creeping: that she wasn't being irrational at all.
"Did you hit your head? Do you feel disoriented?"
She struggled to move a little, lifting her shoulders and propping herself on her elbows, watching me steadily in the moonlight. I was pulling in her chute.
"Clive, will you bloody well listen to me? I know you're acting according to your instincts, and I understand that. You think the first thing to do is to save life. But there isn't one to save — only yours." She spoke with slow clarity, as if she wanted to make absolutely sure I understood. "I'm not only talking about the sheer physical impossibility of getting me through these mountains with anything left of what I am now; and I'm not only talking about gangrene and pneumonia and no chance in hell of finding competent medical aid in the nearest village, though I'll just mention that morphine isn't totally effective with bone trauma and that I do not intend spending the next two or three days in screaming agony before they see us from the monastery and shoot us both. I'm also talking about why I took this job on, and what they told me when I was briefed, and what I agreed to do. I agreed to give you whatever assistance was necessary in making the drop and getting a fix on the monastery, and then to make my own way out while you proceeded with your mission; those were the actual words, in writing: while you proceeded with your mission. And that's what you've now got to do."
She went on watching me, giving me time to think over what she'd said.
"And leave you here?"
"And leave me here. I'll be all right. You're going to fix things for me."
"Fix things?"
"They shoot horses, don't they?"
"You're out of your mind."
"I've never been more rational in my life." Her voice was perfectly steady. "All you've got to do is cut a wrist. I'm an awful coward when it comes to self-inflicting anything. I can't even get a splinter out. We're all different, aren't we?"
I was aware of the bandage in my hand: conscious thought was overlaying the desperate attempt to deny all she was saying, to believe it wasn't the simple and appalling truth.
"You're asking me to kill you?"
"Don't be so melodramatic, Clive. I'm asking you for your charity. I'm asking you to save me from unbearable pain, and the unbearable waiting for the time when they see us, and come for us. I'm going to be killed anyway; you'll be more gentle than they will."
I thought for a long time, or it seemed long, kneeling on the loose shale beside her with the lint bandage in my hand and nothing to do with it, while I relearned the lesson that had been brought home to me rarely in my life: that to be helpless is the most subtle of all agonies.