Winter Song

by Colin Harvey

  He lay back mouth agape like an idiot, as her lips played over his chest.

  "Don't," he gasped. "You think I've hurt my son enough today?"

  Thorbjorg lifted her head, and those full lips parted in a smile tinged with sadness. "This is where the healing starts, Pappi. He forgives you. It wasn't your fault."

  Somehow Ragnar doubted that his idiot son, if he were brutally honest with himself, would even understand let alone forgive. He should have let the boy die, as everyone said that defective children should. Not kill them, for that was murder – but not spend time, effort and resources that the colony didn't have on fighting a battle that could never be won. It was harsh, but fair. For Yngi needed constant care, diverting precious energy away from survival.

  His first sin had been to break that law from love, to keep something of his beloved Gunnhild who'd died bringing Yngi into the world. His second was in allowing what he'd thought of as just an overripe daughter-in-law, who even as he wept for his broken boy, hushed him, before she whispered, "I'll make you forget. I'll make you better, Pappi," and then took him in her mouth, before straddling him.

  But when he awoke, he was cold and alone, and the memories of her mouth and her lips were the only sign that she had ever been there. And the closed, but unlocked door. Which maybe he'd simply forgotten to lock.

  The next morning Karl and Bera rolled up the miscellany of furs that they had slept in.

  "Look how clear Thekla is!" Karl said, pointing at the jagged peak on the eastern skyline whose white cap rose high above the dun-coloured hills around it. One of the peaks bled lava, the brilliant carmine the only highlight in an otherwise drab landscape.

  Bera whistled, and held out our hand. "Dried fruit, high in sugar," she said, answering Karl's look. The horses duly ambled to her, while Karl unpacked food Bera had spent much of the previous evening separating into portions. "We won't have much to eat," she said, "but at least it gives us an idea. I think we have about twenty days' worth."

  Karl was sceptical, but then, he'd been wrong about the horses, he grudgingly admitted, as Bera fed them. When Bera had allowed the horses free rein, Karl had said, "You're not going to tie them to anything?"

  "They won't go far," Bera had said. "There's nothing much around here, which is a shame. I'd hoped we'd have grazing. They can eat a little before the toxins build up. But there's hay and feed in the bags, so unless there's native sedge or heathers right under their nose, the lazy buggers won't go far. They're not stupid."

  She was right, Karl thought, staring at the horses who stood over their saddlebags with reproachful looks that said, Come on, we're starving, feed us!

  "Rock-eaters," Karl said, indicating the score of white bundles ambling across the hills. He squinted, zooming in on them. "Some of them look as if they're wounded."

  "How can you tell?" Bera said, peering at the animals. "If you're right, that's not good. Rock-eaters mean snolfurs. Snolfurs attack rock-eaters and wound them, leaving them to bleed to death, and the snow to act as a deep-freeze. We should assume that there are snolfurs and other predators about."

  "Their meat's inedible?" Karl said, and joked, "It must be bad if you lot say that."

  "It's toxic over a period of time – how long varies from individual to individual – so we don't want to eat it and start poisoning ourselves until we have no other choice."

  "That makes sense," Karl said.

  The ground trembled as they munched on cold, dried meat, and Karl caught Bera watching him carefully. He decided not to mention the tremors if she didn't. He had grown almost used to the earth's almost constant shivering, but these were worse than usual.

  "What's the matter?" he said, wiping imaginary grease off his face, but she didn't react to the little halfjoke.

  "You were raving again last night," Bera said. She shivered. "It's scary."

  Karl felt a chill beyond that of the cold morning air. He thought he'd slept surprisingly well, considering how stony the ground was, but he had woken a couple of metres away from where he'd fallen asleep. There'd been a lot of lost hours lately.

  Bera blurted, "Some people at Skorradalur believed you're possessed."

  "You mean like a ghost or something?" Karl didn't bother to hide his scepticism.

  "Maybe," Bera said. "You're alien, so maybe ghosts are common to your people."

  "No," Karl said, "they're not."

  "I don't think that Ragnar believed it, but he pretended to, to keep some of the people happy."

  Karl shook his head. "Unbelievable."

  "Ragnar and I both heard you talking High Isheimuri, babbling about things; things that when I asked you about later, you denied all knowledge of. So, either you were lying one or other of the times, or you know things that you then forget you know."

  "Ragnar heard me, as well?" Karl said, a ball of ice forming in his stomach. What if the stress of Ship's attack and his subsequent isolation had induced schizoid behaviour? It would explain some of the symptoms; and neuro-nanophytes could only do so much.

  Bera nodded, "Oh yes."

  Karl said, "I'm going to run a diagnostic. I should have done it last night, since it puts me into a deep trance, but I didn't think of it. I've not wanted to do it before because it takes some time."

  Bera frowned. "How long is some time?"

  "Dunno," Karl said. "I've never done one before, so it could be a couple of minutes, or hours, depending on what, if anything, it finds."

  "I'm not sure I like the sound of that," Bera said. "As well as predators, Ragnar must have set off by now."

  "I'll be as quick as I can," Karl said. Closing his eyes, he began reciting the random lines of poetry and mathematical formulae that he'd been compelled to memorise at a subconscious level.

  The world faded.

  Ragnar stared at the Oracle in dismay. It had always worked. "How long has it been like this?"

  "Since yesterday morning," Hilda said, looking sheepish. "We were going to call a healer to treat Yngi's injuries, but it failed. You were… resting." She looked down.

  Ragnar felt his face flame. "How is he?" His voice came out harsher than he'd intended.

  "Blind in one eye, lacerations that will heal… physically. I don't know about any internal injuries, or mental scars."

  "Mental scars?" Shame made Ragnar defiant. "Stop blathering, girl. If he hadn't lied, he wouldn't have needed punishing. Maybe I should have given him a good hiding before." He flexed his sore knuckles. "Now, this…" He pointed at the silent Oracle.

  "We couldn't get it to work," Hilda said, "although Orn worked on it all night. But he did find what was wrong with it." She looked at him expectantly.

  "Go on," Ragnar said.

  "Orn found that a tiny crystal was missing. Only someone who knew what they were doing would have known to take that."

  "Allman," Ragnar breathed.

  "Or Bera," Hilda said. "She spent much more time with it."

  "No!" Ragnar scoffed. "What would a chit of girl know about something as delicate as this?" He ignored Hilda's look. "The bastard has gone too far this time." It felt good, having something he could really blame on someone else, again. "It's about time we brought the utlander to justice," he mused.

  Bjarney appeared in the doorway to the study-room. "Arnbjorn told me. We have no Oracle?"

  "For the moment, no," Ragnar said.

  Hilda chipped in, "We've been searching their rooms since last night – it's a tiny memory crystal that's missing, that acts as a guide to the Oracle on how to hook up with the others."

  "We have to find it! How did this happen?" Bjarney was rarely rattled, and didn't intrude into Ragnar's family's concerns, despite their living in each other's pockets in the winter. And he was entitled to question Ragnar – the vandalism affected all of them.

  Ragnar kept his face straight for all that Bjarney's indignation reminded him of a big red rooster. The Gothi felt he was walking an emotional tightrope. Rarely did Skorradalur feel quite this isolated for all
that they were two days' ride from the next farmhouse. But while he didn't want to show just how worried he was, nor did Ragnar want to seem so dismissive that the others thought he was underestimating how serious the situation was.

  "It happened because we were stabbed in the back," Ragnar said. He still found himself getting irritated with Bjarney. It's happening more and more, an inner voice said. His demon comparison the day before wasn't quite right. It was more like he had an inner cauldron of anger that flared up at the slightest obstruction to life's normal flow of life, just as a geysir erupts when its internal pressure can't vent smoothly.

  While they'd been talking, Orn had arrived and Arnbjorn returned. Orn said, "Those vandals must be punished – this is endangering people's lives."

  "Maybe," Ragnar said. While it suited his purposes that the neighbours were indignant at the culprits, he needed to control their anger.

  "No maybe." Orn was as angry in his own restrained way as Ragnar had ever seen him. Orn was slow to anger, but unlike Ragnar he didn't explode, but stayed angry.

  "How many labourers can you spare?" Ragnar said.

  "None," Bjarney said, folding his arms. "What do you have in mind?"

  "We know who did it, and which way, roughly, they've gone," Ragnar said. "I suggest we leave a labourer each. They stay here with the women and Yngi and hunt the missing crystal. If either of you has any short-term needs while we're away, your wives can talk to Hilda. They'll work something out, they're sensible folk. But apart from the three labourers and Yngi, we men form a posse and bring them to justice."

  Ragnar took a key and unlocked the glass-fronted armoury case and took from it a long-barrelled rifle. "We don't use this very often," he said softly. "Bullets are too scarce, and the climate will kill this eventually, but this shows how seriously I take endangering our families' lives."

  "Swords are good enough for self-defence, or whatever else we need," Thorbjorg said.

  "What if they can't find the crystal?" Arnbjorn said.

  "We load the ballista with a message capsule, and send it to the Norns," Ragnar said.

  He saw the others' bodies straighten, and knew that he had them. "In fact," he said, "we send a capsule anyway. Let's make sure that Skorradalur is isolated for as little time as possible."

  Just in case Steinar tries something; we'll tell the Norns that we've been threatened, and may need to call for assistance at any time. Let's put some pressure on them – if you can pressure machines.

  "Come on," he said to Arnbjorn. "Let's do it now."

  And then Herr Utlander, I'm coming after you.

  ELEVEN

  You were sure you were doomed when the Other launched the hunter-killer.

  "Sustaining a viable ecosystem will require continual adjustments to the climate–"

  You skulked, lying low on the basements of the meatbox-mind, and somehow you managed to evade the dark world-let that fell toward your hiding place. You had the same worm's-eye view of it that the survivors had of Asteroid Shiva thundering down on Tau Ceti IV in a ball of eye-melting fire.

  "The Interregnum was the inevitable consequence of trying to maintain a single society across interstellar distances with only sub-light travel to connect the various systems–"

  Leakages from the bulky monolith give it a name: "Diagnostic Program, Artificial Intelligence, Companion Level". But to you, it had the hallmarks of a killer, all muscles tattooed with circuitry, and cold, neck-snapping efficiency.

  "Only with the development of pseudo-FTL travel via foldspace, and the lengthening of human life toward its current four to five centuries was the post-Terran Hegemony possible–"

  We survived this time, you thought, but next time we may not be so lucky.

  It was clear that time was no longer a luxury you had, that the Other was determined to take control of your memories, which – unless you fought like a demon for every synapse, every aspect of your personality – were all you had. With no possibility of upload to a cybernetic host on this wilderness world, this body was all that remained between you and nonexistence.

  So if we must fight, you thought, we will. Time to counter-attack.

  "How do you feel?" Bera asked Karl, when he clambered, aching-limbed, from the blankets.

  "OK."

  "The way you're rubbing your back says otherwise. Another rough night?"

  "You really need to ask?"

  "No," Bera said, and exhaled. "You were restless again. Loki surfaced just before you fell asleep. That's what, four nights in succession?"

  "Yeah," Karl said. "Cerebral nanophytes aren't much use against insomnia. I guess that he surfaces when I'm on the wake-sleep cusp." He unpacked breakfast, another portion of lamb. He was so tired that his brain wouldn't function properly. "So where are we now?" It had been two – maybe three – days since they'd left Steinar's land; his last memory was of asking her a similar question the night before.

  Bera pulled out her precious scraps of paper. "I think that we're about here. That path leads to Nornadalur."

  "The valley of the Assemblers?" Karl translated, gazing at where the horses grubbed through the snow. He rubbed at the corner of his jaw that had been oddly sore this morning, counter-pointing the odd twinges at the base of his spine.

  All over the valley, a vast flock of rock-eaters rooted and snuffled through the white covering on their migration, leaving a crazy trail of tracks back across the stony moorland now facing the humans.

  "Yes," Bera said.

  "We should go there," Karl said.

  "It's slightly – only slightly, mind you – off course."

  "Still, we should go," Karl said. He added, "I'm starving."

  Bera sighed. "We're going through the food stocks far too fast. We're going to run out of food faster than I expected. I really, really thought that we had enough."

  Karl said, "I'm not criticising you. Quite the opposite, Bera." She beamed and Karl realised just how low her self-esteem was. "I couldn't have got this far without you."

  She said with sly humour, "While you and Ragnar were beating your chests, I prepared for the journey."

  "You could've warned me," he mock-grumbled.

  "It would have ruined the fun," she said, smiling. "And what good would it have done? You'd have made Ragnar suspicious if you'd stopped moaning at him. You distracted him while I prepared."

  "Charming," he said. "So why did you accompany me?" It was a question he'd wanted to ask ever since they'd left, but he needed to pick the right moment. Now, while she was laughing and joking, seemed that moment.

  "You wouldn't have lasted ten kilometres if I hadn't."

  "True," he conceded. "But why did you?"

  "I can be who I want to be out here," Bera said. "Not who they decide I am." She hefted the rifle. "If I'd suggested to Ragnar that I go shoot rock-eaters, his brain would have imploded. But let's hunt!" It was clearly all the explanation he was going to get, so he might as well accept it. She would tell him more when she was ready.

  She took careful aim, and dropped a rock-eater on the edge of the vast flock with one shot, a blue rose staining its chest. The others around it scattered. "Their brain's in their torso, which makes them easy to hunt. It's a lot harder to hit that little head." She walked over, pulled out a knife and, crouching, hacked at the torso.

  "I thought that you said their meat's toxic?" Karl watched her, his stomach churning. He'd managed to come to terms with eating meat, but only by keeping where it came from out of his head. Watching Bera butcher the rock-eater was a little too vivid a reminder of where that food came from.

  "It is, if you eat a lot for a long time," Bera said without looking up. "But a little, eaten, say, once a week, would probably only give you a stomach ache."

  "Actually," Karl said, "my nanophytes may render it harmless." If I can stomach it.

  She looked up. "Really?"

  "Maybe."

  Gamasol emerged from behind the clouds into a rare clear patch of sky. Karl took his shirt off
to absorb the radiation, ignoring the bitter chill. He caught Bera looking, and she saw him notice, and flushing, looked away. To ease the sudden tension, he said, "This will save us far more food."

  "But the further south we go, the weaker the sunlight, and the longer we're travelling, the deeper into winter we go – so the benefit diminishes doubly."

  She was right, as usual. Too often she'd found the flaw in his ideas. These people aren't stupid because they're primitive. "But it'll help." He glimpsed the blubbery steaks she was carving. "That's more fat than meat."