The Complete Ice Schooner

  The towers were grouped thickly, with barely enough space between the outer ones for them to enter the city. As they reached the great forest of metal and glass they realized that there was something more unnatural about the city than the warmth that came from it.

  Arflane’s mount’s feet skidded on the surface and he called out in amazement, ‘This isn’t ice!’

  The stuff had been cunningly made to simulate ice in almost every detail; but now that they stood on it they could tell that it was not ice; and it was possible to look down through it and make out the dim shapes of the towers going down and down into the darkness.

  Donal cried: ‘You have misled us, Arflane!’

  The sudden revelation had shocked Arflane as much as the others. Dumbly, he shook his head.

  Ulsenn charged forward on his mount to shake his fist in Arflane’s face. ‘You have led us into a trap! I knew it!’

  ‘I followed Pyotr Rorsefne’s chart, that was all!’

  ‘This place is evil,’ the priest said firmly. ‘We can all sense that. It matters not how we were deceived - we should leave while we can.’

  Arflane shared the priest’s feeling. He hated the atmosphere of the city. He had expected to find the Ice Mother and had found instead something that seemed to stand for everything the Ice Mother opposed.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We turn back.’ But even as he spoke he realized that the ground beneath them was moving downward; the whole great plain was sinking slowly below the level of the surrounding ice. Those closer to the edge managed to leap their clumsy animals upward and escape, but most of them were left in panic as the city dropped lower into what was apparently a huge shaft driven into the ice. The shadows of the shaft’s enormous sides fell across the group as they milled about in fear.

  Arflane saw how Donal and Ulsenn were staring at him and realized that he was to be their scapegoat.

  ‘Ulrica,’ he called, turning his mount to plunge into the mass of towers with the woman close behind him. The light grew fainter as they galloped through the winding maze; behind, they heard the barbarians, led by Ulsenn and Donal, searching for them. Arflane knew instinctively that in their panic they would butcher him and probably Ulrica too; they had to stay clear of them. He had two dangers to face now and both seemed insuperable. He could not hope to defeat the barbarians and he could not stop the city sinking.

  There was an entrance in one of the towers; from it streamed a soft light. Desperately he rode his beast through it and Ulrica came with him.

  He found himself in a gallery with ramps curving downward from it towards the floor of the tower far below. He saw several figures lower on the ramps; figures dressed from head to foot in red, close-fitting garments, wearing masks that completely covered their faces. They looked up as they heard the sound of the bears’ paws in the gallery, and one of them laughed and pointed.

  Grimly Arflane sent the creature sliding down the nearest ramp. He glanced back and saw that Ulrica had hesitated but was following him. The speed of the descent was dangerous; twice the bear nearly slid off the edge of the ramp and three times he nearly lost his seat on the animal’s back, but when he reached the floor of the lower tower the masked men were gone.

  As Ulrica joined him, looking in awe at the strange devices that covered the walls, he realized that the city was no longer in motion. He stared at the things on the wall. They were instruments of some kind; a few resembled chronometers or compasses while others were alive with flickering letters that meant nothing at all to him. His main interest at that moment was in finding a door. There seemed to be none. Was this, after all, the court of the Ice Mother and the red-clad creatures ghosts? From somewhere came faint laughter again, then from above an echoing yell. He saw Ulsenn riding rapidly down the ramp towards him; he was waving a flenching cutlass while Arflane had only a javelin.

  Arflane turned to look into Ulrica’s face. She stared back at him, then dropped her eyes, perhaps in consent.

  Arflane rode his bear towards Ulsenn as the man lunged at him with the cutlass. He blocked the blow with the javelin but the blade sheered off the head of the spear, leaving him virtually defenceless. Ulsenn swung clumsily at his throat, missed, and was taken off balance. Arflane plunged the jagged shaft into his throat.

  Ulrica rode up, watching silently as Ulsenn clutched at the wound, then fell slowly from the back of the bear.

  ‘That is the end of it now,’ she said.

  ‘He saved your life,’ Arflane said.

  She nodded. ‘But now it is over.’ She began to cry. Arflane looked at her miserably, wondering why he had killed Ulsenn then and not earlier, before the man had had the chance to show that he could be courageous. Perhaps that was why; Ulsenn had become a true rival.

  ‘A fine piece of bloodshed, stranger. Welcome to New York.’

  They turned. A section of the wall had vanished; in its place stood a thin figure. Its overlong skull was encased in a red mask. Two eyes glittered humorously through slits in the fabric. Arflane jerked up his javelin in an instinctive movement. ‘This is not New York - this is some evil place.’

  The figure laughed softly. ‘This is New York, indeed, though not the original city of your legends. That was destroyed almost two thousand years ago. But this city stands close to the site of the original. In many respects it is far superior. You have witnessed one of its advantages.’

  Arflane realized he was sweating. He loosened the thongs of his coat. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘If you are genuinely curious, then I will tell you,’ replied the masked man. ‘Follow me.’

  25 The Truth

  Arflane had wanted the truth; it was why he had originally agreed to Rorsefne’s scheme; but now, as he stared around the luminous chamber, Ulrica’s arm on his, he began to feel that the truth was more than he could accept. The red-masked figure left the room. The walls gleamed blindingly bright and a seated man appeared at the far end of the chamber. He wore the same red garments, but he was almost a dwarf. One shoulder was higher than the other.

  ‘I am Peter Ballantine,’ he said pleasantly. His pronunciation was careful, as if he spoke a language he had recently learned. ‘Please sit down.’

  Arflane and Ulrica seated themselves gingerly on the quilted benches and were startled as the man’s chair slid forward until he sat only a foot or two away from them. ‘I will explain everything,’ he said. ‘I will be brief. Ask questions when I have finished.’

  The world had grown decadent and a malaise had settled on the West so that people lost the will and eventually the means of surviving. A peculiar society of stoics had grown up in the polar bases of the South Antarctican International Zone, where Russian, American, British Commonwealth, Scandinavian, and other research teams lived; and Camp Century, the city the Americans had established under the Greenland ice cap. Nature, unbalanced by a series of wars in Africa and Asia, had swiftly begun to draw a healing skin of ice over her ruined surface. What had precipitated the ice age was primarily the bombs (‘They called it the Nuclear Night,’ said Ballantine.) The men of the two polar camps had communicated for a while by radio but the radiation was too great to risk personal contact. For one reason and another, forced by their separate circumstances, the groups of survivors had chosen different ways of adapting to the change. The men of the Antarctic learned to adapt to the ice, making use of all their resources to build ships that could travel the surface without need of fuel, dwellings where one could live without need of special heating plants. As the ice covered the planet, they moved away from the Antarctic, heading towards the equator, until, at length, they reached the plateau of Matto Grosso and decided that here was an ideal location for permanent camp. In adapting to the conditions, they had neglected their learning and within a few hundred years the creed of the Ice Mother had replaced the logic of the second law of thermodynamics, which had shown logically what the people now believed instinctively - that only ice eternal lay in the future. Perhaps the adaption of the Antarcticans had
been a healthier reaction to the situation than that of the Articans who had tended to bury themselves deeper and deeper into their under-ice caverns, searching for scientific means of survival that would preserve the way of life they knew.

  Among the last messages to be sent by the Articans to the Antarcticans was the information that the northerners had reached the stage where they could transport their city complex further south and that they intended to site it in New York. They offered help to the Antarcticans, who refused it, stripping their radios to make better use of them. They had grown to feel easy with their life.

  So the Arcticans refined their science and their living conditions until the city of New York was the result. The rapid growth of the ice was now just as rapidly reversing.

  ‘It will take at least another two hundred years before any great area of land is cleared,’ Peter Ballantine explained. ‘Wildlife is returning, though, from Eastern and Western areas that were never entirely icebound.’

  Arflane and Ulrica had received the information almost expressionlessly. Arflane felt that he was drowning; his body and mind were numb.

  ‘We welcome visitors, particularly from the Eight Cities,’ Ballantine continued.

  Arflane looked up at him then. ‘You are lying. The ice is not melting. You speak heresies . . .’

  ‘We offer only knowledge. What is wrong with that?’

  Arflane said slowly: ‘I believe in the ice eternal, the doctrine that all must grow cold, that only the Ice Mother’s mercy allows us to live.’

  ‘But you can see how wrong that is,’ Ballantine said gently. ‘Your society created those ideas to enable them to survive. They no longer need such a harsh mythology.’

  ‘I understand,’ Arflane said. The depression that filled him was impossible to overcome; it seemed that his whole life, since he had first saved Rorsefne, had led to this point. Gradually he had forsaken old principles, allowed himself soft emotions, taken Ulrica in adultery, involved himself with others; and it was as if, by forgetting the dictates of the Ice Mother, he had somehow created this New York. Logically, he knew the notion was absurd but he could not shake himself clear of it. If he had lived according to his code, the Ice Mother would be comforting him at this moment; if he had listened to Urquart, last of the Ice Mother’s true followers, and gone with him, they would have found the New York they expected to find. But he had killed Urquart in saving Ulrica’s life. ‘You have killed everything,’ Urquart had said as he died. Now Arflane understood what the harpooner had meant. Urquart had tried to change his course for him, but the course had led inevitably to Peter Ballantine and his logic and his vision of an earth in which the Ice Mother was dying, or already dead. If he could find Her . . .

  Ulrica Ulsenn touched his hand. ‘He is right,’ she said, ‘that is why the people of the Eight Cities are changing - because they sense what is happening to the world. They are adapting in the way that animals adapt, though most of the animals - the land whales and the like - will not adapt in time.’

  ‘The land whales’ adaptation was artificially stimulated,’ Ballantine said with some pride. ‘It was an experiment that was incidentally beneficial to your people.’

  Arflane sighed again, feeling completely dejected. He rubbed his sweating forehead and tugged at his clothes, resenting the heat of the place. He turned and looked at Ulrica Ulsenn, shaking his head slowly, touching her hand gently. ‘You welcome this,’ he said. ‘You represent what they represent. You’re the future, too.’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t understand you, Konrad. You’re being too mysterious.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He glanced away from her and looked at Ballantine as he sat in the moving chair, waiting patiently. ‘I am the past,’ he said to the man. ‘You can see that, I think.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ballantine sympathetically. ‘I respect you, but. . .’

  ‘But you must destroy me.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I have to see it so.’ Arflane sighed. ‘I am a simple man. An old-fashioned man.’

  Ballantine told him: ‘We will find accommodation for you both while you rest.’ He chuckled. ‘Your barbarian friends are still chasing around on the surface of the city like frightened lice. We must do our best to help them. In their case our hypnomats will doubtless be of more use than conversation.’

  26 North

  The next day Peter Ballantine walked in the artificial gardens of the city with Ulrica Ulsenn. Arflane had looked at the gardens and declined to enter. He sat now in a gallery staring at machines Ballantine had told him were the life-giving heart of the city.

  ‘Just as your ancestors adapted to the ice,’ Ballantine was saying to the woman, ‘so you must readapt to its disappearance. You came north instinctively because you identify the north with your homeland. All this is natural. But now you must go south again, for your own good and the good of your children. You must give your people the knowledge we have given you; though it will take time, they will gradually come to accept it. If they do not change, they will destroy themselves in a reversion to savagery.’

  Ulrica nodded. She looked with growing enjoyment at the multitude of brightly coloured flowers around her, sniffed their scents in wonder, her nostrils the keener for never having experienced such perfume before. It made her feel lightheaded. She smiled slowly at Ballantine, eyes shining.

  ‘I realize Arflane is disturbed just now,’ Ballantine continued. ‘There is a lot of guilt in his attitude; but there is no need for him to feel this. There was a purpose to all those inhibitions, but now it does not exist. That is why you must go south again, to tell them what you have learned.’

  Ulrica spread her hands and indicated the flowers. ‘This is what will replace the ice?’ she said.

  ‘This and much more. Yours and Arflane’s children could see it if they wished to journey even further south. They could live in a land where all things grow naturally.’ He smiled, touched by her childlike enjoyment of his garden. ‘You must convince him.’

  ‘He will understand,’ she said confidently. ‘What of the barbarians? Donal and the rest?’

  ‘We have had to use less subtle and possibly less lasting methods on them. But they will help spread the ideas.’

  ‘I wish Arflane had not refused to come here,’ Ulrica said. ‘I’m sure he would like it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Ballantine. ‘Shall we return to him?’

  When Arflane saw them come back, he rose. ‘When you are ready,’ he said distantly, ‘I would like to be taken back to the surface.’

  ‘I have no intention of keeping you here against your will,’ Ballantine said. ‘I will leave you together now.’

  He left the gallery. Arflane began to walk back to the apartment that had been set aside for them. He moved slowly, Ulrica beside him.

  ‘When we go back to Friesgalt, Konrad,’ Ulrica said, taking his arm, ‘we can marry. That will make you Chief Ship Lord. In that position you will be able to guide the people towards the future, as Ballantine wants us to. You will become a hero, Konrad, a legend.’

  ‘I do not trust legends,’ he said. Gently he detached her hand from his arm.

  ‘Konrad?’

  He shook his head. ‘You go back to Friesgalt,’ he told her.

  ‘What will you do? You must come with me.’

  ‘No.’

  He moved as if to embrace her; then he checked himself. ‘Our love was immoral. We paid our price. It is over.’ He frowned as if he heard his own voice for the first time. He continued, almost amused. ‘I give myself to the Ice Mother. She has all my loyalty now.’

  She kissed his shoulder. She turned back towards the garden.

  Epilogue

  The city climbed slowly to ground level. A storm was rising over the iceplains. The wind whistled through tall towers. Peter Ballantine helped Ulrica into the cabin of the helicopter that would take her most of the way back to Friesgalt.

  There was a confused bustling among the barbarians. Then they had mo
unted up and turned their steeds towards the south. With a wave Donal led his men away across the plain. Donal now carried a new gospel.

  Arflane watched them leave. There were skis on his feet, two lances in his gloved hands, a visor pushed up from his face; on his back was a heavy pack.

  Ulrica looked out from the flying machine. ‘Konrad . . .’

  He smiled at her. ‘Good-bye, Ulrica.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Where can you go?’

  He gestured into the distance. ‘North,’ he said. ‘To seek the Ice Mother.’

  As the rotors of the helicopter started to turn, he pushed himself around on his skis, dug the lances into the ice and sent his body skimming forward. As he gathered momentum he leaned into the wind. It had begun to snow.

  The helicopter rose unsteadily into the air, then tilted towards the south. Ulrica stared through the glass to watch him moving swiftly northward. His figure grew smaller and smaller. Sometimes he was obscured by drifting snow; sometimes she glimpsed him, his lances rising and falling as he further increased his speed.

  Soon, he was out of sight.

  Coranda by Keith Roberts

  When I was writing my novel The Ice Schooner for NEW WORLDS’ now sadly defunct companion magazine IMPULSE, Keith Roberts (author of The Furies) was then editing the magazine and worked closely on the serial. He worked so closely, in fact, that he became himself interested in the world of the new Ice Age which was the background to my story, had certain ideas about how he would handle it if he were writing it, decided he would write it anyway and the result was this fine story told in a manner reminiscent of Dunsany at his best.Michael Moorcock.