Intellivore - Diane Duane [58]
“Program is running. You may enter when eady.”
Picard stepped forward; the doors opened, closed again behind him.
The ridge was scattered with boulders of a bluish stone. Basalt? Picard thought. Or just a high cobalt content, maybe? The ridge trended upward against a sky that was blue-green, not as a freakish meteorological phenomenon, like a prestorm mountain sky on Earth, but blue-green naturally. All around, high mountains hemmed in the outer view.
There was no growth here, whether because of climatic conditions or simple lack of life-forms to fill the specific ecological niche, Picard couldn’t tell. At least the pathway up the ridge was clearly marked: someone had come along and put startlingly white rocks among the slate-blue ones to mark the route. Picard went on up, getting into the rhythm of the climbing and the breathing, breathing deeply enough to make sure he got the air he needed.
The trail was one of those that seems simply to vanish at the top. Around him, the mountains screening the exterior view began to fall away very quickly, as Picard slogged on up the trail, his breath coming harder now. Still out of shape, a little, he thought. Or maybe just recent stress. Dr. Crusher is probably going to have words with me about needing more exercise—
He came up to the top of the path. It did indeed simply stop, abruptly falling away on the far side of a little patch of bare stone with some flat rocks placed on it here and there.
And beyond it …
Mountains. Nothing but mountains. They flashed with snow, the nearest ones; glaciers draped themselves over their shoulders, some demure as white veils under their snow cover, some glittering with sunfire off blue-white ice and polished stone. Some were sullen and gray, deeply wrinkled with crevasses, dangerous-looking. Here and there, between one of the mountains and another, you might catch the slightest hint of blue-green, the idiosyncratic cyanophyll of the Trill homeworld, laid in a thin layer over the unforgiving stone.
Picard turned slowly in a circle, looking in astonishment for anything that was not a mountain, a glacier, or a cliff. Finally, behind him, looking down the ridge by which he had come, he looked away over the near-endless mountain crests and saw something else: the sea. A deep rich color, almost royal blue, it lay there under the brilliant sun, but too far away to see the glitter of the light on its surface. Just a bloom or glow of pale bright light was sheened across it, half faded away in the mist hanging over the mountains that lay between.
“Quite something, isn’t it?” said Clif.
Picard turned. Clif was coming up over the far side of the trail, from where it dropped off on the opposite side of the mountain’s “tabletop.”
Picard took a couple of long breaths, as much from the climb as anything else. “I would have thought you might be up here to meet me …”
“No,” Clif said. “The first time anyone climbs Arken, he should do it alone. It saves the need to think you have to say something to the other person while you’re trying to take it all in.”
Picard nodded.
“I thought you might be along when I wasn’t available,” Clif said, sitting down on one of the flat stones, “so I left this for you. How do you like it?”
Picard shook his head. “It’s an extraordinary vista,” he said. “Hundreds of valleys …”
“Thousands,” Clif said. “Ayai’leh-hirh, the Five Thousand Valleys. This is one of the largest mountain ranges on any inhabited planet.”
“Not the kind of place that would ever be heavily settled,” Picard said, looking away across it: mountain after mountain, like the sea, seemingly endless.
For a while they sat in companionable silence. “I’m sorry for giving you the preprogrammed version of the two-credit tour,” Clif said, “but you know how the schedule’s been. We’ll do this properly when there’s more time.”
Picard’s heart seized. He had to be quiet for some moments. Finally, he managed to say, “You know, I just remembered. I keep meaning to ask you