‘But we can’t stay here,’ Frazil said.
‘So we go on.’ No-sun laughed, her voice thin and weak. ‘We go on, across the sea, until we can’t go on any more.’
‘Or until we find shelter,’ Night-Dawn said.
‘Oh, yes,’ No-sun whispered. ‘There is that.’
So they walked on, over the pack ice.
This was no mere pond, as they had left behind; this was an ocean.
The ice was thin, partially melted, poorly packed. Here and there the ice was piled up into cliffs and mountains that towered over them; the ice hills were eroded, shaped smooth by the wind, carved into fantastic arches and spires and hollows. The ice was every shade of blue. And when the sun set its light filled the ice shapes with pink, red and orange.
There was a cacophony of noise: groans and cracks, as the ice moved around them. But there were no human voices, save their own: only the empty noise of the ice – and the occasional murmur, Night-Dawn thought, of whatever giant beasts inhabited this huge sea.
They walked for days. The mountain chain they had left behind dwindled, dipping into the mist of the horizon; and the chain ahead of them approached with stultifying slowness. He imagined looking down on himself, a small, determined speck walking steadily across this great, moulded landscape, working towards the mysteries of the centre.
Food was easy to find. The slushy ice was soft and easy to break through.
No-sun would walk only slowly now. And she would not eat. Her memory of the monster which had snapped up One-Tusk was too strong. Night-Dawn even braved the water to bring her fish, but they were strange: ghostly-white creatures with flattened heads, sharp teeth. No-sun pushed them away, saying she preferred to consume her own good fat. And so she grew steadily more wasted.
Until there came a day when, waking, she would not move at all. She stood at the centre of a fat, stable ice floe, a pillar of loose flesh, rolls of fur cascading down a frame leached of fat.
Night-Dawn stood before her, punched her lightly, cajoled her.
‘Leave me here,’ she said. ‘It’s my time anyhow.’
‘No. It isn’t right.’
She laughed, and fluid rattled on her lungs. ‘Right. Wrong. You’re a dreamer. You always were. It’s my fault, probably.’
She subsided, as if deflating, and fell back onto the ice.
He knelt and cradled her head in his lap. He stayed there all night, the cold of the ice seeping through the flesh of his knees.
In the morning, stiff with the cold, they took her to the edge of the ice floe and tipped her into the water, for the benefit of the creatures of this giant sea.
After more days of walking, the ice grew thin, the water beneath shallow.
Another day of this and they came to a slope of hard black rock, that pushed its way out of the ice and rose up before them.
The black rock was hard-edged and cold under Night-Dawn’s feet, its rise unrelenting. As far as he could see to left and right, the ridge was solid, unbroken, with no convenient passes for them to follow, the sky lidded over by cloud.
They grasped each other’s hands and pressed up the slope.
The climb exhausted Night-Dawn immediately. And there was nothing to eat or drink, here on the high rocks, not so much as a scrap of ice. Soon, even the air grew thin; he struggled to drag energy from its pale substance.
When they slept, they stood on hard black rock. Night-Dawn feared and hated the rock; it was an enemy, rooted deep in the Earth.
On the fourth day of this they entered the clouds, and he could not even see where his next step should be placed. With the thin, icy moisture in his lungs and spreading on his fur he felt trapped, as if under some infinite ice layer, far from any air hole. He struggled to breathe, and if he slept, he woke consumed by a thin panic. At such times he clung to Frazil and remembered who he was and where he had come from and why he had come so far. He was a human being, and he had a mission that he would fulfil.
Then, one morning, they broke through the last ragged clouds.
Though it was close to midday the sky was as dark as he had ever seen it, a deep violet blue. The only clouds were thin sheets of ice crystals, high above. And – he saw, gasping with astonishment – there were stars shining, even now, in the middle of the sunlit day.
The slope seemed to reach a crest, a short way ahead of him. They walked on. The air was thin, a whisper in his lungs, and he was suspended in silence; only the rasp of Frazil’s shallow breath, the soft slap of their footsteps on the rock, broke up the stillness.
He reached the crest. The rock wall descended sharply from here, he saw, soon vanishing into layers of fat, fluffy clouds.
And, when he looked ahead, he saw a mountain.
Far ahead of them, dominating the horizon, it was a single peak that thrust out of scattered clouds, towering even over their elevated position here, its walls sheer and stark. Its flanks were girdled with ice, but the peak itself was bare black rock – too high even for ice to gather, he surmised – perhaps so high it thrust out of the very air itself.
It must be the greatest mountain in the world.
And beyond it there was a further line of mountains, he saw, like a line of broken teeth, marking the far horizon. When he looked to left and right, he could see how those mountains joined the crest he had climbed, in a giant unbroken ring around that great, central fist of rock.
It was a giant rock ripple, just as he had sketched in the ice. Perhaps this was the centre, the very heart of the great systems of mountain rings and circular seas he had penetrated.
An ocean lapped around the base of the mountain. He could see that glaciers flowed down its heroic base, rivers of ice dwarfed by the mountain’s immensity. There was ice in the ocean too – pack ice, and icebergs like great eroded islands, white, carved. Some manner of creatures were visible on the bergs, black and grey dots against the pristine white of the ice, too distant for him to make out. But this sea was mostly melted, a band of blue-black.
The slope of black rock continued below him – far, far onwards, until it all but disappeared into the misty air at the base of this bowl of land. But he could see that it reached a beach of some sort, of shattered, eroded rock sprinkled with snow, against which waves sluggishly lapped.
There was a belt of land around the sea, cradled by the ring mountains, fringed by the sea. And it was covered by life, great furry sheets of it. From this height it looked like an encrustation of algae. But he knew there must be living things there much greater in scale than any he had seen before.
‘ … It is a bowl,’ Frazil breathed.
‘What?’
‘Look down there. This is a great bowl, of clouds and water and light, on whose lip we stand. We will be safe down there, away from the rock and ice.’
He saw she was right. This was indeed a bowl – presumably the great scar left where one or other of the Moons had torn itself loose of the Earth, just as the stories said. And these rings of mountains were ripples in the rock, frozen as if ice.
He forgot his hunger, his thirst, even the lack of air here; eagerly they began to hurry down the slope.
The air rapidly thickened.
But his breathing did not become any easier, for it grew warm, warmer than he had ever known it. Steam began to rise from his thick, heavy fur. He opened his mouth and raised his nostril flaps wide, sucking in the air. It was as if the heat of this giant sheltering bowl was now, at the last, driving them back.
But they did not give up their relentless descent, and he gathered the last of his strength.
The air beneath them cleared further.
Overwhelmed, Night-Dawn stopped.
The prolific land around the central sea was divided into neat shapes, he saw now, and here and there smoke rose. It was a made landscape. The work of people.
Humans were sheltered here. It was a final irony, that people should find shelter at the bottom of the great pit dug out of the Earth by the world-wrecking Collision.
‘Green,’ Frazil said.
‘Green. Yes …’
He was stunned by the brilliance of the colour against the black rock, the dull blue-grey of the sea. But even as he looked into the pit of warmth and air, he felt a deep sadness. For he already knew he could never reach that deep shelter, peer up at the giant green living things; this body which shielded him from cold would allow heat to kill him.
Somebody spoke.
The crater was immense.
It must have been the worst impact since the end of the great bombardment that had greeted Earth’s formation.
The Gaijin helped her understand.
This was nothing to do with the Cracker wars of the remote past. In the long ages since then, the twin suns of Alpha Centauri had come sailing by the solar system, making a closest approach of about three light years. That was more than two hundred thousand astronomical units, a long way out. The twin suns hadn’t come close enough to interfere with the orbits of the planets, still less the sun itself. But they were close enough to disturb the comets, sleeping through their orbits in the Oort cloud, that great sparse fuzzy halo in the outer dark.
Because of Alpha’s grazing approach, more than two hundred thousand giant comets would cross Earth’s orbit over the next twenty million years. The Gaijin had no data on how many might strike the planet, or its Moon. This game of cosmic billiards was nothing to do with intelligence, nothing to do with war. It was just a matter of the random motion of the stars, whizzing around the Galaxy like molecules in a gas.
Even without predatory colonists, she thought, the universe is a dangerous place.
… Yes – but if we’d been left undisturbed, if not for these squabbling, colonizing Eeties, we would have figured out how to push the damn things away for ourselves.
Too late now. Damn, damn.
He cried out, spun around. Frazil was standing stock still, staring up.
There was a creature standing here. Like a tall, very skinny human.
It was a human, he saw. A woman. Her face was small and neat, and there was barely a drop of fat on her, save around the hips, buttocks and breasts. Her chest was small. She had a coat of some fine fur – no, he realized with shock; she was wearing a false skin, that hugged her bare flesh tightly. She was carrying green stuff, food perhaps, in a basket of false skin.
She was twice his height.
Her eyes were undoubtedly human, though, as human as his, and her gaze was locked on his face. And in her eyes, he read fear.
Fear, and disgust.
He stepped forward. ‘We have come to help you,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Frazil.
‘We have come far –’
The tall woman spoke again, but he could not understand her. Even her voice was strange – thin, emanating from that shallow chest. She spoke again, and pointed, down towards the surface of the sea, far below.
Now he looked more closely he could see movement on the beach. Small dots, moving around. People, perhaps, like this girl. Some of them were small. Children, running free. Many children.
The woman turned, and started climbing away from them, down the slope towards her world, carrying whatever she had gathered from these high banks. She was shaking a fist at them now. She even bent to pick up a sharp stone and threw it towards Frazil; it fell short, clattering harmlessly.
Madeleine made her home in the depths of the crater, where air pooled, thick.
A single Gaijin flower-ship stayed in orbit, in case she called. The Gaijin seemed prepared to wait forever. Sometimes she glimpsed it, at dawn, at sunset.
Madeleine’s conditions were hardly primitive. She had the Gaijin lander, which served as a fine shelter. It was stocked with food-preparation technology; all she had to do was cram its hoppers full of vegetable material, once or twice a week. But she also had her garden, and the fruits and berries she gathered from the sparse trees here, and she drank exclusively water from the snow-melt streams. It pleased her to live as close to the Earth as she could.
She didn’t go near the circular sea, though. There were creatures living in there she couldn’t identify. Their sleek forms scarcely looked friendly. And she thought there were human-like creatures on the far side of the sea. She didn’t approach them either.
It was a world of scale and depth, of perspective. She would lie on her porch and watch the waterfalls glimmering through the air from the rocky walls, kilometres above, and gaze even beyond that, at the feathery tails of the great comets that swept across the sky.
Sometimes she saw creatures moving against the ice which lapped against the rim mountains, far above her. Her sensor packs, even at highest magnification, showed her only penguin-like creatures, waddling over the ice, huddling against ferocious winds. Perhaps they were indeed some remote descendants of penguins. Or even post-humans, gruesomely adapted to survive. She felt no temptation to seek them out. But their presence disturbed her.
The Moon’s grey face was reassuringly familiar. The tide of life on that patient satellite had long receded, and the face of the Man was restored to patient watchfulness. Just as she was.
It was a vigil, Madeleine had decided.
Once, she’d read of an island called San Nicolas, off Los Angeles. Long before the coming of the Europeans, it had been inhabited by native Americans. But the settlement had collapsed, the numbers dwindling, one by one.
The last survivor was a woman who had lived on, in complete isolation, for eighteen years.
How had she spent her time? Had she watched for canoes that had never come, hoped to see the return of some last, desperate emigrants? Or had she simply savoured her memories, and waited?
She tried not to think too hard. What good would that do?
Madeleine Meacher was no vigil-keeper.
She grew restless, despite herself.
This wasn’t her world, whether it belonged to the post-humans or not. Anyhow she had never been too good at sitting still.
She’d never forgotten her alternative plan, as she’d discussed with Malenfant. To travel on and on. Why the hell not?
But if she entered the Saddle Point network again, she might never come out. If so, she supposed, she’d never know about it.
She watched the sky, studying the changed stars. When the wind picked up, stirring her wispy hair, she went into her lander and prepared her evening meal.
The next day, she called the Gaijin down from the sky.
‘I don’t understand,’ Frazil said.
Night-Dawn thought of the loathing he had seen in the strange woman’s eyes. He saw himself through her eyes: squat, fat, waddling, as if deformed.
He felt shame. ‘We are not welcome here,’ he said.
‘We must bring the others here,’ Frazil was saying.
‘And what then? Beg to be allowed to stay, to enter the warmth? No. We will go home.’
‘Home? To a place where people live a handful of winters, and must scrape food from ice with their teeth? How can that compare to this?’
He took her hands. ‘But this is not for us. We are monsters to these people. As they are to us. And we cannot live here.’
She stared into the pit of light and green. ‘But in time, our children might learn to live there. Just as we learned to live on the ice.’
The longing in her voice was painful. He thought of the generations who had lived out their short, bleak lives on the ice. He thought of his mother, who had sought to protect him to the end; poor One-Tusk, who had died without seeing the people of the mountains; dear, loyal Frazil, who had walked to the edge of the world at his side.
‘Listen to me. Let these people have their hole in the ground. We have a world. We can live anywhere. We must go back and tell our people so.’
She sniffed. ‘Dear Night-Dawn. Always dream
ing. But first we must eat, for winter is coming.’
‘Yes. First we eat.’
They inspected the rock that surrounded them. There was green here, he saw now, thin traces of it that clung to the surface of the rock. In some places it grew away from the rock face, brave little balls of it no bigger than his fist, and here and there fine fur-like sproutings.
They bent, reaching together for the green shoots.
The shadows lengthened. The sun was descending towards the circular sea, and one of Earth’s two Moons was rising.
PARADOX
When Kate had first met Malenfant, out at JPL, she could smell desert dust on him, hot and dry as a sauna.
But he was suspicious of her. Maybe he was suspicious of all journalists.
‘And you think there’s a story in the Fermi Paradox?’
She shrugged, non-committal. ‘I’m more interested in you, Colonel Malenfant.’
He was immediately defensive. ‘Just Malenfant.’
‘Of all the projects you could have undertaken when you were grounded, why front a stunt like this?’
He shrugged. ‘Look, if you want to call this a stunt, fine. But we’re extending the envelope here. Today we’ll prove that we can touch other worlds. Maybe an astronaut is the right face to head up a groundbreaker project like this.’
‘Ex-astronaut.’
His grin faded.
Fishing for an angle, she said, ‘Is that why you’re here? You were born in 1960, weren’t you? So you remember Apollo. But by the time you grew up cheaper and smarter robots had taken over the exploring. Now NASA says that when the International Space Station finally reaches the end of its life, it plans no more manned spaceflight of any sort. Is this laser project a compensation for your wash-out, Malenfant?’
He barked a laugh. ‘You know, you aren’t as smart as you think you are, Ms Manzoni. It’s your brand of personality-oriented cod-psychology bullshit that has brought down –’
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