Rings of Ice

by Piers Anthony

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “How much worse?” Gus asked. “You said six times as much—”

  “I can’t give an exact figure, because I don’t know how much will be lost in space or remain in the atmosphere. I’d guess we’ve had no more than a twentieth of the total rainfall—perhaps less.”

  “One twentieth!” Gus cried.

  “There won’t be anything left!” Floy said.

  “It’s not that bad,” Zena said. “There’s lots of land above two thousand feet elevation. The western plains—”

  “But who can live on scoured bedrock?”

  “We’ll worry about that when we get to it,” Gus said. “Right now, we have to gear for survival of the next deluge.”

  “Mindel,” Floy said.

  “And the ones after that,” Gus continued. “We have to grow food, trap meat, build shelter. High enough to be safe from rising water.”

  “The bus will do,” Gordon said. “We can add to it, once we get it parked. But we’ll need enough gas to drive it up into the mountains.”

  “Right. We’ll have to survey for parked cars anywhere within miles, and siphon out their gas. If we find enough, we can use the bus to haul in other equipment before we camp. We can make it all right, if we just consider the problems and get organized. Now I’ll appoint teams—”

  Dust Devil, who had been exploring among the trees, hissed. “He’s found something!” Floy said, running toward the cat. Zena shook her head. That grotesque awkwardness still embarrassed her. Floy was a good night guard— but what else could she do?

  “Hey!” Floy cried. “It’s a dog!”

  “Kill it,” Gus said. “We need the meat.”

  Zena wanted to protest, but knew he was right again. They could not afford to take in stray animals, and they did need the meat.

  “A puppy,” Floy said. “His folks must have ditched him. Somebody come pick him up.”

  Thatch went over. “Careful,” he said. “He may be wild—or rabid.”

  Gloria looked thoughtful. “A puppy should be train-able.”

  Gus paused. “You’re right. We have to anticipate trouble. A good guard dog could make the difference.”

  “Why are you always looking for trouble?” Zena demanded, irritated. “All survivors will have to work together.”

  “Maybe they will. But until they forget about that gas-tank raid of ours, we’d better work alone.”

  Zena hadn’t thought of that, but now she realized that this was what had given her misgivings about the raid from the outset. The survivors of that raid would be out to kill. Contact of any kind would be hazardous.

  “Would you rather kill the dog?” Gus demanded, misunderstanding her silence.

  Zena nodded “no.”

  They found gasoline, in small amounts. They set up a ten-gallon reserve to get up the mountain, and used the rest to drive about, picking up whatever supplies they could find. Karen checked over a deserted drug store for insulin, and Thatch found several hundred pounds of seed grains in a farm shed, already sprouting. They got gardening tools and hauled dirt and fertilizer to a forest glade in the mountains, and Zena became chief farmer. She had no prior experience, but she was unlikely to hurt herself in the course of this activity.

  “Party night!” Gus cried. “Look what I liberated!” He held up a bottle of Scotch whiskey.

  “Throw it away,” Zena said. “We have a world of problems without aggravating them.”

  “All work and no play,” Gus retorted. “I say, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow is another day.”

  “Gus, you cheated!” Karen chided him. “You’re already stewed.”

  “Have some yourself.” He brought out a bottle of sweet brandy.

  “I have to watch it,” Karen said dubiously. “If I take too many calories, or forget my insulin—”

  “We’ll remind you,” Gus said. “And here’s some for you, Glory.”

  Gloria accepted the bottle. “White cooking wine!” she exclaimed, delighted. She put it away in a cupboard for future use.

  “This is ridiculous!” Zena cried. “With so many things we need, to waste effort on this—”

  Gloria looked at her. “Gus is right. We’re a group, we have serious problems ahead. We’ll be better off if we learn to get along together, to understand each other well. We need to get sloshed together—one time, at least.”

  “Yeah,” Floy agreed, eagerly inspecting the wares.

  Zena threw up her hands. “I’m outvoted, as usual.”

  “Here,” Gus said, handing her crème de menthe.

  Zena shook her head in wonder. She had always been partial to that particular liqueur. Gus had uncanny perception about this sort of thing.

  They drank. Zena’s fears proved to be unfounded; no one imbibed to excess. Karen was quite careful, Floy took only sips of each type, Thatch made one small glass of brandy last an hour, and Gloria evidently had a connoisseur’s taste in alcohol. “Gordon gets drunk on hard liquor; I’m more discriminating,” she explained.

  Gus himself drank heartily, but only grew more affable. It was contagious, and Zena soon found herself pleasantly high. The awfulness of past events became bearable. She realized that some of this would have helped her with Thatch. Well, before long she would brace him again, and this time try to hang on to her consciousness. Sex was not an evil.

  It wasn’t? She caught herself in that mental dialogue and marveled. Were her fundamental values changing? What was the distinction between a Necessary Evil and a Means to an End?

  “Whatcha thinking of, brown eyes?” Gus asked her.

  “Green eyes,” she said. “It’s my hair that’s brown.”

  “Funny,” he said. “You look brown. Or black. Eyes. I must be getting drunk.”

  “That’s right,” Karen said. “Floy’s the one with black eyes.”

  “Yeah,” Floy agreed, obviously enjoying her first licit alcohol. “ ’Cause I hit myself in the face so often.”

  “Black-eyed or not, you’re a cute one,” Gus said grandly. “You did just great in that dance.”

  “Yeah,” Floy agreed, flattered.

  “I’d take you to bed in a moment—”

  “Why don’t we sing a song?” Zena suggested quickly.

  “Hey, pretty little black-eyed Susie,” Gus sang, slopping his drink as he gestured expansively. “Hey, pretty little black-eyed Susie! Hey, pretty little black-eyed Susie, hey!”

  “Hey, I like that song!” Floy said.

  “Watch it,” Zena warned. “Some of the words—”

  “Susie and the boys went huckleberry picking,” Gus continued jovially. “Boys got drunk and Susie got a licking!”

  Zena joined in the chorus: “Hey, pretty little black-eyed Susie!”

  “Susie and the boys went whiskey brewing, Boys got drunk and Susie got a—”

  “Licking!” Zena finished loudly, drowning him out Karen choked on a mouthful of brandy, laughing.

  Undismayed, Gus went through the chorus and started the next verse. “Susie and the boys went corn shucking—”

  This time everybody shouted “Licking!”

  Then Gloria tried a home-made verse in her husky voice: “Zena and the boys went ice-ring planing, Boys fouled up and Earth got a raining!” And the song dissolved into mirth.

  Next morning they started the garden. Thatch and Gordon had already made a plateau of rich earth and boxed it in as well as possible. Now Zena planted the seeds according to the instructions on each package.

  “We’ll need a privy,” Gus said. “Nothing like human ordure to fertilize a garden; mustn’t be wasted. I’ll draw up the plans.”

  “And we’ll need water,” Zena said. “It may not rain for a long time. We’ll have to haul it or pump it. A lot of it, if we want the plants to grow properly.”

  A fine beginning—but the weeds grew with far more vigor than the vegetables, and the insects were horrendous. Thatch and Gordon had to make a special foraging trip for weed ki
ller and bug spray, for it wasn’t only the garden that was attacked. Zena necessarily spent much time carefully pulling out each intruder without disturbing the tame plants. She didn’t mind; it was peaceful and she felt useful.

  Meanwhile, she saw much of the changing sky.

  The second canopy was forming. Barely two weeks after the rains of Gunz ceased, Ring Mindel appeared—because it had taken six weeks for Gunz to form and rain itself out. This new ring was more massive, and higher in the sky. Day by day it spread across the heavens, twisting slowly about to form the equatorial attitude it should have had at the outset. That huge effort was costing it cohesion and stability, and so the ring that had been projected to endure fifty years would be in disarray in weeks. At that, its fate was better than that of the first ring, that had dissolved so precipitously that a formal canopy had never even formed.

  At first Mindel was a thin vapor high in the heavens— two hundred miles, Zena thought. But it thickened and dropped lower, until the sun faded behind the mass of high cloud, and the under-surface of it was no further than a hundred miles above the ground.

  Mindel was rotating. She could tell by irregularities in its structure, occasional rifts that let the sunlight through. It moved as fast as the sun, but opposite; a rift in it would rise in the west and set in the east twelve hours later.

  But that was the least of it. The cloud cover was not even. It swirled in long strands, like a raveling rope or an endlessly writhing snake. Zena was fascinated by the slow undulations, seeing them as the struggles of an alien visitor: the ice nebula.

  A reptile encircling the globe, like the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth. A creature whose poison overwhelmed the Earth in a great flood—as Mindel was about to do. How bad would that flood be? No one could really say; it depended on the efficiency of that misguided military project, intended to save the world by solving its power crisis simplistically—but actually destroying it.

  Zena looked up, startled, a small weed in her hand. Midgard—Mindel. A coincidence of nomenclature, surely, but did it reflect reality? Götterdämmerung—the end of the world. The Biblical flood. Surely there had been a monstrous flood in antiquity; the mystery had been its cause. God had decreed it, perhaps, commanding the rain to fall, but no normal precipitation could actually have raised the level of the ocean. Could it have been such a canopy, visible as a snake or dragon in the sky, destined one day to swallow the entire Earth in the floods of its demise?

  She stared at the massive, endless torso of Mindel, and began to believe. If man survived this, there would be new legends, similar to the old.

  “There’s a station!” Gus cried happily. “Someone’s broadcasting again!”

  “Ham,” Gordon said. “Some ham got his equipment going again. Those hams are indomitable.”

  “I don’t care who it is!” Gus said. “It’s civilization!”

  This turned out to be true and not true. The hams were now in operation—but their dialogue only confirmed the devastation wrought upon the world. Just over a hundred feet of rain had fallen, wiping out every major city the hams knew about. Now they spoke for small groups of survivors who were trying to organize a new nation built upon the highlands. Mechanics were putting motor vehicles back in operation; builders were constructing mass housing. The nearest reconstruction center was in Atlanta, though it was laboring under the handicap of senseless vandalism that had destroyed much of its fuel reserves. The radio invited anyone in the area to participate in the recivilization effort.

  “They’d kill us,” Gus said morosely. “We don’t dare go near that place! Anywhere but there.”

  Thus they had forfeited their place in the new order. “It doesn’t make much difference, really,” Zena said. “There’ll be more rain—lots more. It will wipe out everything they rebuild.” She shared the guilt with Gus for that debacle: he for planning it, she for compounding it. Neither of them had anticipated the full cost of that endeavor, and both had to deprecate its importance. It did not make her like Gus any better, however; she was a partner with him in crime.

  “If only we had asked them for what we needed,” she groaned to herself. “Instead of coming as thieves.”

  Chapter 6: Food

  Dust Devil took to keeping Zena company in the garden, and the little cat was sociable enough in his way. He went after the larger insects—and these were becoming large indeed. Perhaps the presence of the puppy Foundling in the bus had encouraged the cat to seek other pastures, though the two animals seemed to tolerate each other well enough.

  Usually Gordon hauled water for home and garden, carrying it in two buckets hung from a crude shoulder yoke. The best spring they had found was a mile away, so it was a time-consuming, tedious, tiring job. This time Karen came.

  “Karen!” Zena cried. “You can’t do that! You could go into shock!”

  Karen carefully poured each bucket into the little irrigation trenches Zena had made, then came to sit by her. “No danger of that. I regulate my insulin according to need—and hard exercise helps utilize the glucose in my system anyway.” She sighed, looking at the meager rivulets her water had made. “But it is true I shouldn’t overdo it. I’ll rest for a while.”

  “Where’s Gordon?”

  “Out scouting with Thatch. This moss is growing over everything, making the terrain unfamiliar, so he has to be updated every so often.” She shook her head. “I rather envy Gloria. When she gets tired or fed up, presto—a man!”

  “Moss?”

  “You’re too absorbed in your garden, Zena! Haven’t you noticed it?”

  “I suppose I have. I just didn’t realize its extent. I keep it out of the garden automatically.”

  They watched Dust Devil pounce on a huge brown beetle that had been bulldozing its way toward the garden. The thing buzzed and fought in a manner that made Zena shudder. If bugs now stood up to cats, what would be next?

  “I think this cloud-cover encourages it,” Karen said. “We don’t get much direct sunlight any more.”

  “Yes. I hope we don’t have trouble with vitamin D deficiency.”

  “Plenty of that in those vitamin pills we loaded up on. They’ll last a year, at least—and the rain can’t go on longer than that, can it?”

  “Unlikely. Too bad we couldn’t find you similar reserves of—” Zena paused, having second thoughts as she spoke, but it was too late. So she modified the subject and went on: “Would you mind explaining just what your insulin does? I know it keeps you going, but—”

  “I could lecture for hours! But in essence, it’s this way: I have what is called ‘juvenile diabetes mellitus’. That’s the most serious kind; for some reason children get it much worse than adults. It means a portion of my pancreas called the ‘islets of Langerhans’ that normally makes insulin has failed. Insulin is needed to get the glucose, the blood sugar, out of my blood and into my muscles. Without it, my body starves, no matter how much sugar piles up in my blood. It’s like a trainload of food with nobody to unload it for the starving people. The pileup gets worse and worse—”

  “That’s why diabetics have sweet urine!” Zena exclaimed, understanding.

  “That’s why. So much sugar there that we’re pissing it out—and dying for lack of it in our body cells. Real irony. So we take insulin, to make up for what our body lacks, and that does the job. But if we take too much, it uses up too much of the blood sugar, making a critical shortage, and—”

  “Shock! I see it now. But you take more insulin when you’re working hard—”

  “Less, honey. Work helps the insulin, so I need less. If I don’t cut down, I’m in trouble, unless I take more sugar.”

  “So you’re really saving insulin when you do this water carrying.”

  “That’s right. And since my supply is limited, that’s all to the good.”

  Zena felt a sudden chill. She had gotten to like Karen as she understood her better; the woman was a hard worker with a steady temper. “How limited?”

  “Don’t worry!
I use Lente U80—that’s a fairly long-lasting combination, and strong. It doesn’t need to be refrigerated. You’ve seen my hexagonal vials? Insulin is shape-coded. I have a good six months supply, and with careful management I can stretch it out—”

  “Six months!” Zena cried, appalled. “What then?”

  Karen looked at the sky. “Well, it doesn’t keep forever, anyway. That’s a pretty heaven.”

  “Karen—”

  “But I don’t understand that shape to the north. That set of cow horns. Is that the devil coming for us?”

  How could Karen be so strong? It was death she contemplated in six months, or however long her insulin lasted. Certainly not more than a year. Yet she carried on without complaint.

  Karen turned, concerned at Zena’s silence. “Why Zena, you’re crying,” she said gently. “I’m sorry.”

  “I never cry!” Zena protested, wiping her face with the back of one dirty hand.

  “Oh, you should cry! I cried a lot when this started— the needle, the sugar-watching. It’s no shame.”

  “It is to me!”

  “It shows you’re human. No shame at all—so long as you get up afterwards and do what must be done. So that there is a continuity. I’m sure you will. Meanwhile I take it as a signal compliment—if your first tears are for me.”

  “Oh, Karen, this is awful! Can’t we find some more insulin?”

  “Only if some company still makes it. That’s possible. Gus has been listening in on the radio, just in case.”

  Zena had thought Gus was merely entertaining himself instead of working. Now she was embarrassed. She had been misjudging people again.

  “It is just possible that there is some in Atlanta …”

  Atlanta. Where they dared not inquire.

  “I really am curious about those horns,” Karen reminded her. “I’m not unduly superstitious, but I feel watched.”

  Zena looked north. “It’s the polar opening. The cloud canopy can’t cover the globe entirely—there’s nothing for it to rotate about at the poles. So it falls there, or fails to form, and leaves a circular opening. Nothing supernatural.”