by Pam Crane
and weeping crowd.
"What we don't know yet, sweetheart ... no, we have to do this ... is whether this alien horror is intelligent. For some reason you and I had fore-warning. I don't think it was a fluke. They don't know what we are, either. We need to sort this out."
"Brian, they could eat us!"
"I don't think so. They seem to live on fresh air! Do you remember the Air Plant your mother gave us one Christmas?"
"It died."
"I know. That was our fault. We didn't understand it. These things may be the same. They have exploded into growth just by being here in our environment. That may be why they are here! In which case they know where they are, and this is a planned invasion. And that makes them highly intelligent creatures. Amorphous and apparently vegetable, yes, but with developed mental functions that may be superior to our own."
"We should get Jill."
"There isn't time."
Brian walked away.
Now he stood, shaking, a few feet from the intricately curled edge of a massive green ... thing ... where his surgery had been. He spoke.
"I knew you were coming. I had a dream. Why?"
Confrontation. Sounds. Tendril 1 was alert. The small, warm living thing before him was communicating! Frequency detection would not be adequate. He would have to switch into mental extension to have any hope of insight and a possible response. Brian suddenly felt very odd; he sank to his knees, nearly swooning, as the thoughts behind his words were probed by fingers of an alien consciousness.
And next it felt as if a light had gone on in his brain. He was understood. And he could understand the invader's reply.
"You are one of the sentients! Our plight was broadcast as soon as we found your planet. We streamed data constantly as we planned this escape from our dying world, in the hope that friendly minds might receive the news that we were coming. The surprise to us is that we have arrived to find photosynthetic life in retreat - and you, the presumed lower life-form, possessed of the intelligence we thought to find in the Green."
"What do you need from us? You are crushing our civilisation!"
"Carbon dioxide, and sufficient water."
"CO2 pollutes our entire planet. We destroyed so many trees that the oxygen we desperately need is dwindling and the climate is now critical. And we have no means of escape."
"Then ... Brian-and-Rosina? ... we need each other. The millions that are coming will be told to avoid the structures upon which you seem to depend, and to populate only those empty places where there is still water enough to sustain our lives. Inform your companions on other land-masses that this will happen, and far from bringing you to harm we can help your ... nations? ... gradually to re-balance their ecosystems and feed themselves again. Please don't eat us !!! Even if you do think of us as glorified cabbages!"
A pistachio copy of Brian's arm extended from the Viridian to touch his cheek. The delicate restorative gesture moved him, and he smiled as he turned back to Rosina and then the waiting crowd.
"Anyone here with 7G? Dry your eyes, get out your cell-phones: let's start saving the world."
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SILVER
She was simply the most stunning girl I'd ever seen.
In the ten seconds it took for her to bend and rummage for documents in her travel bag an entire glorious lifetime together sped behind my eyes before commonsense and long training extinguished it.
"Name?"
"Silver."
The others crowding into the room were striking, unusual; she was outstanding.
"Full mutant?"
"Yes, both parents. Third generation."
She pushed the paperwork under my nose, tapping her feet. The officialese granting her permission to move north was as indecipherable as usual; her signature was as graceful and distinctive as her voice.
"Are you with anyone?"
"Not personally ... " my heart surged, ungovernable ... "but I am leading a group." She gestured behind her to a couple of dozen individuals who had detached themselves from the murmuring phalanx and edged closer.
"I shall need to see all their papers."
I could barely concentrate. All I wanted to look at was this girl. She was silver. Every inch of visible skin was covered in the finest, thickest, most reflective silver hair, and she shone. Everyone in that holding room had their own grey fur, but some was less dense, some ragged, most quite dull, and some too patchy to be acceptable. It had taken decades to match and mate enough of the increasingly unusual births among the circum-polar peoples to select for a perfect human pelt and there was clearly a long way to go - but the girl called Silver was a ray of hope. She and her heavily-swathed band would be among the first to travel back into the coldest parts of old Europe and with the help of experienced Inuit and Sami begin to excavate the cities and re-colonise.
The problem was clothing. With the sudden failure in 2020 of the Atlantic Conveyor, and no more Gulf Stream to warm the northern hemisphere, the climate had changed catastrophically. Warnings had been ignored; the industrial nations were plunged into a new ice age while Earth's equatorial region became a dust-bowl. There were massive extinctions. Farming animals for food, fibre and skins was almost impossible with so few crops to sustain them and with all power sources now at a premium the only oil-based fabrics available were those that could be salvaged and repaired. People had to keep themselves warm another way; they had to regrow their own fur.
"It takes guts to do this," I said, looking up from the cluttered desk into calm grey eyes.
"Guts and a lot of dead animals!" she grinned. "We'll be living off anything we can catch, and wasting nothing. How the sled dogs will manage remains to be seen. Water won't be a problem as we can melt snow, but food may often depend on the success of our digs. At least everything's been in the fridge!"
"But how will you keep fires going?" Nothing could be taken for granted any more. It was so long now since most of the forests had burned, died or been buried under ice, that surface kindling wasn't easy to come by.
"It'll be hard, but we're trying solar panels in ground arrays to keep some energy generated for heating and eating ... and comms of course."
"It all sounds dreadfully precarious."
"It is. But we have to try. The Inuit and Sami will help us. They have always known how to survive the Arctic. And we are allowed to breed with them, which will help the gene pool."
How I longed at that moment to be Inuit. I felt my cheeks flush.
"Won't there be danger from bears?" I asked.
"I expect so. But we also hope to be a danger to them! We shall need meat, and skins and sinews. There are large populations of polar bears now, and seal, and walrus. There has been so little interference with them since the cataclysm, and of course they have spread south."
"I wish I could come with you!" I couldn't keep those words in any more.
"Why?" She looked genuinely astonished. "You would lose your skin. You would be frost-bitten in days."
"The early explorers managed."
"Barely. We have to make a life up there - and make a living."
"Is the rumour true that blocks of ice will be cut and floated south for drinking water?"
"Where did you hear that?"
"BBC Short-wave."
"Not on our agenda. We'll be tunnelling. God knows what we'll find."
"I could help you."
The girl called Silver sighed and riffled the untidy pile of documents.
"Just stamp these, will you? They're all waiting. We have to go."
I had nothing to lose, everything I could ever imagine longing for to gain...
"I'm a dowser."
"A what? "
"I find things. By dowsing. By sensing. Like being a detectorist but without the kit."
"And that would be helpful?"
"I could find the right places to dig. I could tell you what might be down there, under the ice."
"Oh please. We have maps for that. And reference books. Grow up."
>
The desk lamp made her silver cheeks sparkle. I was so captivated by now that even this dismissive retort couldn't hurt. A certainty grew in me, spreading like a storm cloud in my mind, that I would be there; whatever she said now, I would see her again. It was simply a matter of time.
Briskly, forcing my gaze away from Silver's beautiful face framed by the heavy sealskin hood, I stamped the expedition papers and handed them across the desk. Our fingers touched just for a moment, then after one heart-stopping glance, she turned, beckoned to her companions - and was gone.
Why ... how are people so real in our dreams? Silver came to me in my dreams night after night as weeks, then months went by with no news of the ice-sheet pioneers. In my dreams she would throw back the hood, step from the fragrant skins, shake her long bright hair free and let me stroke her silken fingers, her velvet shoulders, the glorious shimmering fur of her back ... her breast ... then one intoxicating kiss, and she would vanish, and I would wake with a pounding heart and tears on my cheek.
It was a particularly unpleasant Monday. I was processing my third batch of unpromising adventurers when the dull light from the hall window was blocked by a tall man in a carefully mended suit with a Global Migration Office lapel badge.
"You here nine months ago?"
"Yessir. Never miss a day."
"Good lad. Now then, did you stamp the permissions for this lady?" He pushed an ID photograph towards me. It was Silver.
Now I was shaking. "Yessir. Why, Sir?"
"Her party is missing. Radio contact was lost three weeks ago while they were digging the London ice-sheet. We need to know how many were with her - any details you can