Edelweiss

Leontopodium Alpinium Copyright Thomas Harlan 1997 Nilson slid down the granite slab, ice sputtering away from his boots. At the bottom, he came hard against a tree rooted in the crevice and huffed as it struck him. His hands, bleeding still from the glass, caught on the bark. Wind whistled in the emptiness under him. Below, the grinding churn of broken ice rolling over in the stream echoed up. He wiped frozen sweat from his eyes. The night was black. He could see nothing save in the brief glow of lightning spiking through the clouds above. Inside the heavy parka, he sweated, and felt chills. Blood seeped from his fingers and froze on the inside of his remaining glove. He pushed his night goggles back into place on his nose. The boulders of the ravine sprang into a slight yellow-green focus. Panting, his breath white in the frigid air, he swung his legs over the lip of ancient stone. There was nothing below, fifteen feet of grooved rock and then boulders and stones wrapped in frost-rime at the edge of the stream. Arms aching, extended, he dropped onto the stones. His right foot struck square on another sloping boulder, and he rolled down on it, and then, unable to stop, down onto lesser stones, with a crash, into the stream itself. Pitch-black water surged around him. He cried out at the talons of cold that slid into his foot and leg through rents in the padded trousers. His heart hammered, but still he crawled out, pulling his numb legs over stones, feeling the ridges of rock slash the pants to ribbons. Under an overhang screened with thick brush, now leafless in deep winter, he crawled and curled up. His hands were numb, and his skin felt hot and flushed. He drew a tab out of his breast-pocket and popped it. Heat burned in his throat and on his lips. In the cold, it was a torture, like fire. The side of his mouth began to twitch uncontrollably. Soon the back of his neck and his upper arms were shivering. But heat spilled out of his stomach and warmed his legs. His hands steadied and he pulled the thin silver sheet of a battle blanket out of the big pouch in the back of his parka. The knife grip, rubber, knurled, was tight in his hand as he sliced the material into long strips and wrapped it around his tattered climbing pants. A subsonic buzz set his teeth on edge and he slid quickly to the back of the little cave. In his goggled sight, a black shape hissed across the narrow strip of sky that he could see. A muted red glow of the aft engines all that betrayed it.

Nilson had smelled the sharp tang of spilled nutrient fluid first, even as his thumb had turned the unlocking ring on the door to his rooms, and he had backed away. Unbidden tears had blinded him for a moment. The bags of groceries in his arms, he kept, and quickly walked out of the little garden courtyard. Even in the afternoon it was lightly dusted with snow, the limbs and boughs cold and white in the late winter. He paused at the edge of the tunnel into the parking garage and put the groceries down in the alcove where the residents stored mukluks and galoshes. For a moment, he turned the slim black shape of the magnetic conversion unit over in his hands. He wondered if his purchase had drawn them to him, like Tarlen's