The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson

by Johnathan Strahan

  The box hooted and squawked, the Iggglas leader cocked his head to one side and listened, watching Rumford carefully. When the message was completed the leader did a little dance of its own, all on one spot. Then suddenly it approached the Ba'arni directly. Rumford held his breath. The Iggglas leader shrieked at the Ba'arni, sweeping one wing at them in a ferocious gesture.

  All three Ba'arni opened their immense mouths, which appeared to split their immense heads in half, and whistled loud and high. Rumford had to hold his hands over his ears, and the Iggglas leader stepped back. Impressive sight, those three open mouths. The Igggla opened his long mouth as if to mock them; lot of teeth in there. Impressive as well. Battle of mouths. All right if it didn't lead to anything. Tense. Need to get a response in squawks from old gar face. Couldn't seem to intrude too much, however.

  A long minute's wait as the two parties stared each other down. The Iggglas leader suddenly turned and squawked.

  On screen: "Heat death fat food postponement replacement cannibalism for Iggglas assurance renewal of slag heat war fat food in twelve squared years." Rumford let out a long breath.

  He switched to Ba'arni, typed.

  "Iggglas agree to acknowledge Ba'arni honor, promise renewal of honorable battle next time in twelve squared years."

  Whistle, click, whistle. The Ba'ar on the left spoke quickly.

  "The Ba'arni accept postponement and acknowledgement of their honor."

  When Rumford conveyed the news to the Iggglas leader, it too was agreeable. Appeared to like the promise that the conflict would be renewed. But then it squawked on at length:

  "Iggglas negative continuance until next ritual war with heat death bombs in Iggglas seas, insistence removal immediate."

  Hmm. Bit of a problem, to tell the Ba'arni to remove bombs they didn't know existed. Meanwhile they were looking at Rumford to see what had been said, and to gain time Rumford switched to Ba'arni and typed, "Iggglas agree to honor Ba'arni and agree to return to ritual war next time."

  A repeat of the previous message to them, but Rumford was too busy to think of anything else, and happily the Ba'arni didn't seem to notice. They agreed again, and Rumford returned to Iggglas.

  "Ba'arni state weapons on Iggglas seafloor will be de-activated. All they can do as weapons cannot be relocated."

  The Iggglas leader shrieked, pummelled the dust. "War war war total annihilation war fat food heat death unless sea bombs removal exclamation."

  Hmm. Wouldn't do to stop a small ritual war by starting a total war even more likely to destroy Rannoch Island. Rumford quickly got the Ba'arni's assurances that they would return in twelve squared years, then returned to Iggglas:

  "Ba'arni state detonator will be given to Iggglas. Detonation wavelength determined by detonator and Iggglas can change this and render bombs inoperative. Demonstration of this on small scale can be arranged in Rannoch ocean. Translator agrees to convey detonator and run demonstration as ritual forbids Ba'arni speaking to Iggglas in between ritual wars."

  Could get a good long-distance detonator from the manganese mines, set up an offshore explosion. Hopefully convince them.

  After a long and apparently thoughtful dance, the Iggglas leader ate two of the rabbit-things, and indicated his acceptance of this plan. The Iggglas abruptly turned and hopped back down the road to the spaceport. The meeting was over.

  Owen Rumford stood up unsteadily, and feeling drained he accompanied the three Ba'arni back to the beach. As they got into their seacraft, the one on the left said something; but Rumford had his box in his coat pocket. After the Ba'arni craft rolled under the black waves, he took the box out, turned it on and tried to imitate the last set of whistles. The box printed it as, "(y-click x-click; see dictionary.)" He switched to the dictionary function and looked it up.

  "Y-click x-click: 1. Ebb tide. 2. Twisted, knotted, complex. 3. The ten forefingers. 4. Elegance. 5. The part of the moon visible in a partial eclipse. 6. Tree."

  "Hmm," Rumford said.

  He walked slowly up toward the town. Y-click x-click. Those big plate eyes, staring at him. Their half of the conversation had gone pretty smoothly. Very smoothly. And all his assumptions, about the famine, the rituals. Could they be… just a little…. But no. Language barrier as troublesome in telepathy as in speech, after all. Maybe.

  Y-click x-click. If he had gotten the whistle right. But he thought he had. Why have word for something they'd never seen? But Ba'arni had traded with earlier passersby, witness box. Curious.

  Tin roofs glinting in the light. Black stone walls, veined with white quartz. Black cobblestones. Very neat. Fine little town. In a hundred and forty-four years, they would have to figure something out. Well, that was their problem. More warning next time. Nothing to be done about it now.

  He walked into the tavern and sat down heavily. His daughters had just finished preparing the tables for lunch. "Papa, you look exhausted," Isabel said. "Have you been trying to exercise again?"

  "No, no." He looked around with a satisfied expression, heaved out a long breath. "Just a spot of translation." He got up and went behind the bar, started drawing a beer from the tap. Suddenly the corners of his moustache lifted a little. "Might get a bit of payment for it," he told her. "If so—still care for a picnic?"

  Glacier

  "This is Stella," Mrs. Goldberg said. She opened the cardboard box and a gray cat leaped out and streaked under the corner table.

  "That's where we'll put her blanket," Alex's mother said.

  Alex got down on hands and knees to look. Stella was a skinny old cat; her fur was an odd mix of silver, black, and pinkish tan. Yellow eyes. Part tortoise-shell, Mom had said. The color of the fur over her eyes made it appear her brow was permanently furrowed. Her ears were laid flat.

  "Remember she's kind of scared of boys," Mrs. Goldberg said.

  "I know." Alex sat back on his heels. Stella hissed. "I was just looking." He knew the cat's whole story. She had been a stray that began visiting the Goldbergs' balcony to eat their dog's food, then—as far as anyone could tell—to hang out with the dog. Remus, a stiff-legged ancient thing, seemed happy to have the company, and after a while the two animals were inseparable. The cat had learned how to behave by watching Remus, and so it would go for a walk, come when you called it, shake hands and so on. Then Remus died, and now the Goldbergs had to move. Mom had offered to take Stella in, and though Father sighed heavily when she told him about it, he hadn't refused.

  Mrs. Goldberg sat on the worn carpet beside Alex, and leaned forward so she could see under the table. Her face was puffy. "It's okay, Stell-bell," she said. "It's okay."

  The cat stared at Mrs. Goldberg with an expression that said You've got to be kidding. Alex grinned to see such skepticism.

  Mrs. Goldberg reached under the table; the cat squeaked in protest as it was pulled out, then lay in Mrs. Goldberg's lap quivering like a rabbit. The two women talked about other things. Then Mrs. Goldberg put Stella in Alex's mother's lap. There were scars on its ears and head. It breathed fast. Finally it calmed under Mom's hands. "Maybe we should feed her something," Mom said. She knew how distressed animals could get in this situation: they themselves had left behind their dog Pongo, when they moved from Toronto to Boston. Alex and she had been the ones to take Pongo to the Wallaces; the dog had howled as they left, and walking away Mom had cried. Now she told Alex to get some chicken out of the fridge and put it in a bowl for Stella. He put the bowl on the couch next to the cat, who sniffed at it disdainfully and refused to look at it. Only after much calming would it nibble at the meat, nose drawn high over one sharp eyetooth. Mom talked to Mrs. Goldberg, who watched Stella eat. When the cat was done it hopped off Mom's lap and walked up and down the couch. But it wouldn't let Alex near; it crouched as he approached, and with a desperate look dashed back under the table. "Oh Stella!" Mrs. Goldberg laughed. "It'll take her a while to get used to you," she said to Alex, and sniffed. Alex shrugged.

  Outside the wind ripped at the tre
etops sticking above the buildings. Alex walked up Chester Street to Brighton Avenue and turned left, hurrying to counteract the cold. Soon he reached the river and could walk the path on top of the embankment. Down in its trough the river's edges were crusted with ice, but midstream was still free, the silty gray water riffled by white. He passed the construction site for the dam and came to the moraine, a long mound of dirt, rocks, lumber, and junk. He climbed it with big steps, and stood looking at the glacier.

  The glacier was immense, like a range of white hills rolling in from the west and north. The Charles poured from the bottom of it and roiled through a cut in the terminal moraine; the glacier's snout loomed so large that the river looked small, like a gutter after a storm. Bright white iceberg chunks had toppled off the face of the snout, leaving fresh blue scars and clogging the river below.

  Alex walked the edge of the moraine until he was above the glacier's side. To his left was the razed zone, torn streets and fresh dirt and cellars open to the sky; beyond it Allston and Brighton, still bustling with city life. Under him, the sharp-edged mound of dirt and debris. To his right, the wilderness of ice and rock. Looking straight ahead it was hard to believe that the two halves of the view came from the same world. Neat. He descended the moraine's steep loose inside slope carefully, following a path of his own.

  The meeting of glacier and moraine was a curious juncture. In some places the moraine had been undercut and had spilled across the ice in wide fans; you couldn't be sure if the dirt was solid or if it concealed crevasses. In other places melting had created a gap, so that a thick cake of ice stood over empty air, and dripped into gray pools below. Once Alex had seen a car in one of these low wet caves, stripped of its paint and squashed flat.

  In still other places, however, the ice sloped down and overlay the moraine's gravel in a perfect ramp, as if fitted by carpenters. Alex walked the trough between dirt and ice until he reached one of these areas, then took a big step onto the curved white surface. He felt the usual quiver of excitement: he was on the glacier.

  It was steep on the rounded side slope, but the ice was embedded with thousands of chunks of gravel. Each pebble, heated by the sun, had sunk into a little pocket of its own, and was then frozen into position in the night; this process had been repeated until most chunks were about three-quarters buried. Thus the glacier had a peculiarly pocked, rocky surface, which gripped the torn soles of Alex's shoes. A non-slip surface. No slope on the glacier was too steep for him. Crunch, crunch, crunch: tiny arabesques of ice collapsed under his feet with every step. He could change the glacier, he was part of its action. Part of it.

  Where the side slope leveled out the first big crevasses appeared. These deep blue fissures were dangerous, and Alex stepped between two of them and up a narrow ramp very carefully. He picked up a fist-sized rock, tossed it in the bigger crack. Clunk clunk…splash. He shivered and walked on, ritual satisfied. He knew from these throws that at the bottom of the glacier there were pockets of air, pools of water, streams running down to form the Charles… a deadly subglacial world. No one who fell into it would ever escape. It made the surface ice glow with a magical danger, an internal light.

  Up on the glacier proper he could walk more easily. Crunch crunch crunch, over an undulating broken debris-covered plain. Ice for miles on miles. Looking back toward the city he saw the Hancock and Prudential towers to the right, the lower MIT towers to the left, poking up at low scudding clouds. The wind was strong here and he pulled his jacket hood's drawstring tighter. Muffled hoot of wind, a million tricklings. There were little creeks running in channels cut into the ice: it was almost like an ordinary landscape, streams running in ravines over a broad rocky meadow. And yet everything was different. The streams ran into crevasses or potholes and instantly disappeared, for instance. It was wonderfully strange to look down such a rounded hole: the ice was very blue and you could see the air bubbles in it, air from some year long ago.

  Broken seracs exposed fresh ice to the sun. Scores of big erratic boulders dotted the glacier, some the size of houses. He made his way from one to the next, using them as cover. There were gangs of boys from Cambridge who occasionally came up here, and they were dangerous. It was important to see them before he was seen.

  A mile or more onto the glacier, ice had flowed around one big boulder, leaving a curving wall some ten feet high—another example of the glacier's whimsy, one of hundreds of odd surface formations. Alex had wedged some stray boards into the gap between rock and ice, making a seat that was tucked out of the west wind. Flat rocks made a fine floor, and in the corner he had even made a little fireplace. Every fire he lit sank the hearth of flat stones a bit deeper into the otherwise impervious ice.

  This time he didn't have enough kindling, though, so he sat on his bench, hands deep in pockets, and looked back at the city. He could see for miles. Wind whistled over the boulder. Scattered shafts of sunlight broke against ice. Mostly shadowed, the jumbled expanse was faintly pink. This was because of an algae that lived on nothing but ice and dust. Pink; the blue of the seracs; gray ice; patches of white, marking snow or sunlight. In the distance dark clouds scraped the top of the blue Hancock building, making it look like a distant serac. Alex leaned back against his plank wall, whistling one of the songs of the Pirate King.

  Everyone agreed the cat was crazy. Her veneer of civilization was thin, and at any loud noise—the phone's ring, the door slamming—she would jump as if shot, then stop in mid-flight as she recalled that this particular noise entailed no danger; then lick down her fur, pretending she had never jumped in the first place. A flayed sensibility.

  She was also very wary about proximity to people; this despite the fact that she had learned to love being petted. So she would often get in moods where she would approach one of them and give an exploratory, half-purring mew; then, if you responded to the invitation and crouched to pet her, she would sidle just out of arm's reach, repeating the invitation but retreating with each shift you made, until she either let you get within petting distance—just—or decided it wasn't worth the risk, and scampered away. Father laughed at this intense ambivalence. "Stella, you're too stupid to live, aren't you," he said in a teasing voice.

  "Charles," Mom said.

  "It's the best example of approach avoidance behavior I've ever seen," Father said. Intrigued by the challenge, he would sit on the floor, back against the couch and legs stretched ahead of him, and put Stella on his thighs. She would either endure his stroking until it ended, when she could jump away without impediment—or relax, and purr. She had a rasping loud purr, it reminded Alex of a chainsaw heard across the glacier. "Bug brain," Father would say to her. "Button head."

  After a few weeks, as August turned to September and the leaves began to wither and fall, Stella started to lap sit voluntarily—but always in Mom's lap. "She likes the warmth," Mom said.

  "It's cold on the floor," Father agreed, and played with the cat's scarred ears. "But why do you always sit on Helen's lap, huhn, Stell? I'm the one who started you on that." Eventually the cat would step onto his lap as well, and stretch out as if it was something she had always done. Father laughed at her.

  Stella never rested on Alex's lap voluntarily, but would sometimes stay if he put her there and stroked her slowly for a long time. On the other hand she was just as likely to look back at him, go cross-eyed with horror and leap desperately away, leaving claw marks in his thighs. "She's so weird," he complained to Mom after one of these abrupt departures.

  "It's true," Mom said with her low laugh. "But you have to remember that Stella was probably an abused kitty."

  "How can you abuse a stray?"

  "I'm sure there are ways. And maybe she was abused at home, and ran away."

  "Who would do that?"

  "Some people would."

  Alex recalled the gangs on the glacier, and knew it was true. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be at their mercy, all the time. After that he thought he understood her permanent frow
n of deep concentration and distrust, as she sat staring at him. "It's just me, Stell-bells."

  Thus when the cat followed him up onto the roof, and seemed to enjoy hanging out there with him, he was pleased. Their apartment was on the top floor, and they could take the pantry stairs and use the roof as a porch. It was a flat expanse of graveled tarpaper, a terrible imitation of the glacier's non-slip surface, but it was nice on dry days to go up there and look around, toss pebbles onto other roofs, see if the glacier was visible, and so on. Once Stella pounced at a piece of string trailing from his pants, and next time he brought up a length of Father's yarn. He was astonished and delighted when Stella responded by attacking the windblown yarn enthusiastically, biting it, clawing it, wrestling it from her back when Alex twirled it around her, and generally behaving in a very kittenish way. Perhaps she had never played as a kitten, Alex thought, so that it was all coming out now that she felt safe. But the play always ended abruptly; she would come to herself in mid-bite or bat, straighten up, and look around with a forbidding expression, as if to say What is this yarn doing draped over me?—then lick her fur and pretend the preceding minutes hadn't happened. It made Alex laugh.

  Although the glacier had overrun many towns to the west and north, Watertown and Newton most recently, there was surprisingly little evidence of that in the moraines, or in the ice. It was almost all natural: rock and dirt and wood. Perhaps the wood had come from houses, perhaps some of the gravel had once been concrete, but you couldn't tell that now. Just dirt and rock and splinters, with an occasional chunk of plastic or metal thrown in. Apparently the overrun towns had been plowed under on the spot, or moved. Mostly it looked like the glacier had just left the White Mountains.