Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  Longtusk was entranced.

  He couldn't help contrast the calf's deep physical exploration of the unfamiliar object with the way a Firehead cub would study something new — just looking at it. For a mammoth calf, the look of something was only the most superficial aspect of it: the beginning of getting to know the object, not the end.

  Longtusk rumbled softly. Even after so long in the nunatak, such behaviors still charmed and fascinated him. He'd spent too much of his life away from his own kind, he thought sadly, and that had left scars on his soul that would never, surely, be healed. He wondered if there was anything more important in the world than to watch a new-born calf with her mother, lapping at a stream with her tongue, too young even to know how to use her trunk to suck up water...

  Now Saxifrage recalled he was there. She abandoned the tusk fragment and ran to him, dashing under his belly.

  He tried to turn, but his legs were stiff as tree-trunks nowadays, his great tusks so heavy they made his head droop if he wasn't careful; and in his rheumy vision the calf was just a blur of orange-brown fur, running around his feet and under his grizzled belly hair.

  As the calf made another pass he looped down his trunk, grabbed her around the waist and lifted her high in the air, ignoring the protests from his neck muscles. She trumpeted her delight, a thin noise just at the edge of his hearing.

  He set her down before him once more, and she stepped through the forest of his curling tusks. Her calf fur was orange, bright against his own guard hairs, blackened and gray with age.

  She said, "Longtusk, I'm going to be your mate."

  He snorted. "I'd be impressed if I hadn't heard you say the same thing to that old buffer Threetusk yesterday."

  "I didn't! Anyway I didn't mean it. Why do they call him Threetusk? He only has two tusks, a big one and that spindly little one."

  "Well, that's a long story," said Longtusk. "You see, long ago — long before you were born, even before Threetusk became the leader of the bachelor herd, in fact — he got in an argument with one of his sons, called Barktrunk—"

  "Why was he called that?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "Where is Barktrunk? I never met him."

  "Well, he died. That was before you were born too. But that's another story. You see, the first time Barktrunk came into musth—"

  "What does musth mean?"

  Longtusk growled. "Ask your mother. Now, where was I? Barktrunk. Now Barktrunk did some digging — just over there, where those rocks are piled up — and he found a new spring of water, and he said we should all drink it at once. He wanted to show us how important and clever he was, you see. Especially the Cows."

  "Why the Cows?"

  "Ask your mother! Anyway — what was I saying? — yes, the water. But Threetusk, his father, came over and tasted a little of the water, just on the tip of his trunk, and he said no, this water has too much sulfur. He said so to everybody, right in front of Barktrunk."

  "I bet Barktrunk didn't like that."

  "He didn't. And they got into a fight. Now in those days Threetusk was big and strong, not the broken-down grass-sucking old wreck he is now, and you can tell him I said so. It should have been easy for Threetusk to win. But there was an accident. Barktrunk came at him like this" — he feinted stiffly — "but Threetusk dodged, and knocked his head like this" — a deft sideways swipe, but slower than a glacier, he thought sourly — "and that was when it happened. Threetusk got one of his tusks stuck in a cleft in the rock. Just over there. When he was trying to get free the tusk broke off. Maybe that was one of the bits of it you were playing with just now. And then—"

  But Saxifrage was running around in circles, trying to catch her own tail. Longtusk rumbled softly; he had lost his audience again.

  "You listen to Longtusk," said Horsetail, Saxifrage's mother, who had come lumbering up. Named for the long graceful hairs that streamed across her rump, this daughter of Splayfoot was the Matriarch now — she had been since Splayfoot's death, some years ago, when his sister's proud heart, strained by her dismal experiences, had at last failed her. Horsetail pulled her calf under her belly fur, where Saxifrage began to hunt for a nipple. "I'm sorry, Patriarch," she said respectfully. "Everybody knows you need time to work on those willow leaves these days."

  "Not that much time," he growled. "And I do wish—"

  "Try not to bite, Saxifrage!"

  I do wish you'd listen to me, he thought.

  But, thinking back, he was sure he had ignored almost all of what everybody had had to say to him, back when he was a calf — even Walks With Thunder, probably.

  Remarkable to think that the last time he saw him, Thunder had actually been younger than Longtusk was now. How on Earth had he got so old? Where had the years gone? And...

  And he was maundering again, and now the calf was nipping at his toes.

  Saxifrage said, "Longtusk is going to mate with me when I'm old enough."

  Horsetail rumbled her embarrassment, flapping her small ears.

  Longtusk said, "I'm flattered, Saxifrage. But you'll have to find someone closer to your own age, that's all."

  "Why? Mother says you're a great hero and will go on forever, like the rocks of the nunatak."

  Again Horsetail harrumphed her embarrassment.

  "Your mother's right about most of that," said Longtusk wryly. "But — not forever. Look." He kneeled down before the calf, ignoring warning stabs of pain from his knees, and opened his mouth. "What's in here?"

  Saxifrage probed with her trunk at his teeth and huge black tongue. "Grass. A bit of old twig stick under your tongue—"

  "My teeth, calf," he growled. "Feel my teeth."

  She reached in, and he felt the soft tip of her trunk run over the upper surfaces of his long lower teeth.

  He said, "Can you feel how worn they are? That's because of all the grass and herbs and twigs I've eaten."

  "Everybody's teeth get worn down," said Saxifrage, wrinkling her trunk. "You just grow more. My mother says—"

  "But," said Longtusk heavily, "I've gotten so old I don't have more teeth to grow. This is my last set. Soon they will be too worn to eat with. And then..."

  The calf looked confused and distressed. He reached out and stroked the topknot of her scalp with his trunk.

  She said, "Will you at least try to keep from dying until I'm big enough? I wouldn't have thought that was too much to ask."

  Longtusk eyed Horsetail; that was one of her favorite admonitions, he knew. "All right," he said. "I'll try. Just for you."

  "Now come on," said Horsetail, tugging at her calf's trunk. "Time for a drink. And you really mustn't bother the Patriarch so much."

  "I told you," he said. "She wasn't bothering me. And don't call me Patriarch. I'm just an old fool of a Bull. That Patriarch business was long ago..."

  But Horsetail was leading her calf to a stream which bubbled from the rocks; a group of mammoths was already clustered there, their loosening winter coats rising in a cloud around them. "Whatever you say, Patriarch."

  Longtusk growled.

  Now there was a tug at his belly furs. He turned, wondering which calf was troubling his repose now.

  It was the old Dreamer, Willow. Standing there in his much-patched skins, with grass crudely stuffed into his coat and hat, Willow was aged, bent almost double, his small face a mass of wrinkles. But, with a gnarled paw, he still stroked Longtusk's trunk, just as he had when they'd first met as calf and cub.

  And Longtusk knew what he wanted.

  Longtusk turned slowly, sniffing the air. After all these years he had learned to disregard the pervading stink of sulfur which polluted the air around this nunatak. There was little wind, and though there was a frosty sharpness to the air, there was no sign that the weather was set to change.

  All in all, it was a fine day for their annual trek.

  Rumbling softly, with Willow limping at his side, Longtusk set off.

  LONGTUSK CLIMBED A SHALLOW RISE, away from the gle
n where the mammoths fed. At first he walked on soil or rock, but soon his feet were pressing down on ice and loose snow.

  The going got harder, the slope steepening.

  At first Willow was able to keep up, limping alongside the mammoth with one paw wrapped in Longtusk's belly hair. But soon his wheezing exhaustion was obvious.

  They paused for breath. Longtusk turned, looking back over the nunatak and the life sheltered there.

  From afar, the mammoths were a slow drift of dark points over a field of tan grasses. Occasionally the long guard hairs of a mature Bull would catch the light, glimmering brightly. Their movements were slow, calm, dense, their attitudes full of attention. They were massive, contemplative, wise: beautiful, he thought, wonderful beautiful animals.

  The nunatak was everything he could have hoped for, that fateful day when he took his leave of his own Family. But still—

  But still, how brief life had been. Like a dream, or the blossoming of a spring flower on the steppe — a splash of color, a burst of hope, and then...

  Willow stroked his trunk absently, bringing him back.

  He'd been maundering again. Morbid old fool.

  With considerable effort on both their parts, Willow managed to clamber onto his back. Longtusk couldn't help but recall the liquid grace with which Crocus, the Firehead cub, had once flowed onto his back, how they had run and pranced together.

  With a deep rumble he turned away and headed up the cold, forbidding slope. His breath steamed, and his aging limbs tired quickly.

  The old Dreamer was already snoring gently.

  Soon Longtusk neared the crest of a ridge. The snow thinned out, and he found himself walking on rock that was bare or covered only by a scattering of snow. The land flattened out, and he stood atop the ridge, breathing hard.

  He was standing on the rim of a crater.

  He stepped forward cautiously. It was a great bowl, cut into the Earth, like the imprint of an immense foot. The rim curved around the huge dip in the land to close on itself, a neat circle.

  The crater wall, coated with snow and ice, was sculpted to smoothness by the wind, like the sweep of a giant sand dune. The shadows were subtle and soft, white shading to blue-gray — save at the rim itself, where a layer of bare brown rock was exposed. The winds off the ice sheet kept this curving ridge swept clear of new snow falls, so that ice could not form. He let his eye be drawn to the crater's far side, where there had been an avalanche, and the smooth snow surface was marked by great ripples descending toward the crater's base.

  The floor of the crater was surprisingly flat. He knew there was a lake down there. In the brief summer it would melt, turning into a placid pond of blue-gray water, cupped by the crater, visited by birds — in fact, the geese who had guided him here to the nunatak. If a mammoth were down there now, walking across that frozen surface, she would look no larger than a grain of sand, dwarfed by this immense structure of rock and ice.

  Longtusk raised his trunk and trumpeted, high and thin. His voice echoed from the iced-over walls of the crater, and pealed out over the frozen lands around the nunatak.

  Willow stirred on his back, grumbling, and subsided back to sleep, clinging to Longtusk's fur instinctively.

  Longtusk walked a little farther around the crater's rim. He came to a broad ridge in the icebound land, leading away from the crater. He walked this way now, feeling for the firm places in the piled-up snow.

  Soon he saw what he was looking for. It was a splash of coal-black darkness, vivid against the snow that surrounded it. This was another crater, but little more than ten or fifteen paces wide. And further craters lay beyond, dark splashes on the snow, as if some wounded, rocky giant had limped this way.

  He let himself slide over crunching rubble into the small crater. The rock was warm under his thick footpads. Where snow fell from his coat it melted quickly, and steam wisped up around him. The rock here was fragmented, crumbled. It was jet black, sharp-edged, and the fragments he picked up had tiny bubbles blown into them, like the bones of a mammoth's skull.

  This crater did not have a neat rounded form, no cupped lake in its base. The walls here were just crude piles of frothy black rock. In places he could see flat plates of rock which lay over drained hollows, like the remnants of broken eggs. Everything was sharp-edged, new. This small crater was obviously much younger than its giant cousin nearby. Perhaps these small frothy rocks, frozen fragments of the Earth's chthonic blood, were the youngest rocks in the world.

  And yet even in this new raw place, there was life.

  He picked up a loose rock. He tasted moss and green lichen, struggling to inhabit this unpromising lump: sparse, nothing but dark green flecks that clung to the porous stuff — but it was here. And these first colonists would break up the hard cooling rock, making a sand in which plants could grow. Perhaps one day this would be a bowl of greenery within which mammoths and other animals could survive.

  He came up here once a year — but always with Willow as his sole companion. Mammoths are creatures of the plains, and the members of his little Clan were suspicious of this place of hills and ice. And there wasn't a great deal to eat up here. But Longtusk embraced the stark, silent beauty of this place.

  For he knew that these craters were a sign of Earth's bounty — the gift that had created this island of life and safety, here at the heart of the forbidding icecap.

  ONE NIGHT — MANY YEARS AGO — the mammoths had seen, on the fringe of their nunatak, a great gush of smoke and fire which had towered up to the clouds. The mammoths had been terrified — all but Longtusk, who had been fascinated. For at last he understood.

  Over most of the world, the heat which drove life came from the sun. But here, far to the planet's north, that heat was insufficient. Even water froze here, making the icecaps that stifled the land.

  Instead, here in the nunatak, the heat came from the Earth itself.

  In some places it dribbled slowly from the ground, in boiling springs and mud pools. And in some places the heat gathered until it burst through the Earth's skin like a gorged parasite.

  That was the meaning of the great eruption of fire and smoke they had seen. That was why the land was littered by enormous blocks of black rock, hurled there by explosions.

  And the craters — even the biggest of them — were surely the wounds left in the Earth by those giant explosions, like scars left by burst blisters. In this small crater he could actually see where smaller bubbles had formed and partially collapsed, leaving a hard skin over voids drained of rock that had been so hot it had flowed like water.

  It was the Earth's heat which had shaped this strange landscape, and it was the Earth's heat which cradled and sustained the nunatak.

  HE LEFT THE SMALL CRATERS BEHIND and began a short climb to another summit.

  Soon he was breathing hard. But he'd been climbing up here every spring since they'd first arrived, and he was determined that this would not be the year he was finally defeated.

  He reached the summit. This rocky height, windswept bare of ice like the crater rim, was one of the highest points in the nunatak, so high it seemed he could see the curve of the Earth itself.

  All around the nunatak was ice.

  The icecap was a broad, vast dome of blue-white, blanketing the land. The ice was smooth and empty, as if inviting a footstep. Nothing moved there, no animals or plants lived, and he was suspended in utter silence, broken not even by the cry of a bird.

  Mountains protruded from the ice sheet like buried creatures straining to emerge, their profiles softened by the overlying snow. The mountains — a chain of which this nunatak was a member — were brown and black, startling and stark against the white of the ice. Their shadows, pooled at their bases, glowed blue-white.

  Over the years Longtusk had come to know the ice and its changing moods. He had learned that it was not without texture; it was rich with a chill, minimal beauty. There were low dunes and ridges, carved criss-cross by the wind, so that the ice was a c
omplex carpet of blue-white traceries, full of irrelevant beauty. In places it had slumped into dips in the crushed land beneath, and there were ridges, long and straight, that caught the low light so that they shone a bright yellow, vivid against ice. Here and there he could see spindrift, clouds of ice crystals whipped up by the wind and hovering above the ground, enchantingly beautiful.

  The ice was a calm flat sea of light, white and blue and yellow, that led his gaze to the horizon. The ice had a beauty and softness that belied its lethal nature, he knew; for nothing lived there, nothing outside the favored nunatak.

  But much had changed in the years — by Kilukpuk's dugs, it had been forty years or more — that he had been climbing this peak.

  To the west he looked back the way they had come on their epic trek, so long ago: back across the fragile neck of land that connected the two landmasses. On the land bridge's northern side there was a vast, glimmering expanse of water, dark against the ice. It was where he recalled the ice-dammed lake had been.

  But that lake had grown immeasurably — it was so large now it must have become an inlet of the great northern ocean itself.

  Ice was melting into the oceans and the sea level was rising, as if the whole ocean were no more than a steppe pond, brimming with spring water. And the ocean was, little by little, flooding the land.

  Meanwhile, on the southern horizon, there was brown and green against the ice white: a tide of warmth and life that had approached relentlessly, year by year. The exposed land formed a broad dark corridor that led off to the south — and into the new land, the huge, unknown continent that lay there — a passageway between two giant, shrinking ice sheets.

  The world was remaking itself — the land reborn from the ice, the sea covering the land — all in his lifetime. It was a huge, remarkable process, stunning in scale.