It ends. Their dream-gifts vanish. At random, he seizes Ninameen, and clasps her close until the spasm of terrifying displacement has run its course. “Are you frightened?” she asks. “Are you troubled? Are you sad?”
17
A day and a night and a day and a night and a day, and they enter a land of woods and streams, rugged and broken, patrolled by beasts. Certain patterns seem dear to evolution. He sees something that is almost a moose, though it is crowned with a green-flowered shrub instead of antlers; he sees an almost-bear, paunchy and jowly, made strange only by its spike-crested spine; he sees flat tails strike the water, and thinks of beavers, though their owners have long serpentine necks; he hails a mound of shining quills as a porcupine, a flash of tooth and tail as a bobcat, a tremor of long ears and creamy fur as a rabbit. There are also many for whom he can find no counterparts in the zoologies of times past: a perambulating heap of hairy flesh with five equidistant trunks along its perimeter, a blue vertical thing that bounds along on a single rubbery leg, a flightless bird with chicken claws and crocodile snout, a limbless scaly crawler with three snaky bodies linked in parallel, and more. As they proceed, the weather worsens, which puzzles him, for it is distinctly autumnal here and he has grown accustomed to a world without seasons or climatic zones. A frosty wind blows toward them. Withered leaves whip in the crackling air. The sunlight is thin and strangled; all sounds are sharper; heavy gray clouds load the horizon. “We near another of the uncomfortable places,” Hanmer explains.
“Which?”
“It is called Ice.”
The place called Ice comes upon them with great suddenness. A thick curtain of close-packed trees bearing bulging blue needles, like those of cancerous spruce, marks the boundary between the woodlands and the awful zone beyond. The marchers push through these trees and emerge into eternal winter. Like a leprous spot on a tender cheek is this incongruous segment of the old Antarctic, somehow mortared into a kinder globe. Whiteness reigns. It stuns; it dazzles. The furious glare stabs his eyes, and he turns away, saying to Serifice, “Are you sure that this is not the place you went to, mistaking it for Death?” and she replies, “Death was much whiter than this. And not nearly so cold.”
Cold. Yes. Naked to the polar furies. He will freeze. He will become a pillar of ice, eyes still open, lips clamped, his genitals turned to icicles. “Must we go forward?” There are limits. What will protect him? The ice is taut and sleek, a blanket over the land, alive with a terrible sheen. Black rocks, fissured and fanged, leap up from it. There are subterranean rumblings and crackings, as of hidden cannons. He hears the birth pangs of crevasses. Yet Hanmer goes out onto the ice and all the others follow. He too. Aching. Frosted. The sunlight plays with ice, leaping over it and straining it at every touch: deep blue here, yellow-green there, and on these ridges the tint is red, the marriage of blood and light. In the frozen silence between underground sounds, masses of fog overwhelm the travelers, and, while he welcomes the soft fleecy wrapping, he fears that he will be separated from the others while they are engulfed, and will perish in this wasteland. For he knows that he is drawing warmth from them. They nourish him as the crossing proceeds.
Figures appear in the mist and cross his path: upright two-legged creatures, slender and elongated, with short malproportioned legs and barrel-like bodies. A thick gray pelt covers them; their bodies are powerfully muscled, with massive necks forming tall pedestals for their high-domed heads. The mouths are well toothed. The noses are strong and hooked. The eyes, bright yellow, gleam with cunning. They look a little like giant otters adapted for a life of walking; but they also look like men transformed for meeting the special conditions of Ice. He fears them. He glances about, searching for his companions; momentarily he cannot find them, and panic heats his soul. “Hanmer? Ninameen? Ti?”
The gray creatures move in idle sauntering paths, but it becomes clear that they are closing in. There are about a dozen of them, now, and more are visible every time an opening appears in the dense white fog. Clay picks up their scent: sour, grating, a smell of wool left too long in the rain. He feels absurdly naked. He knows that these are no beasts of the wilds, but rather the sons of man in yet one more guise.
“Bril? Angelon? Serifice?”
Something warm touches his elbow: the breast of Serifice. He turns to her, trembling. “Do you see them?” he whispers.
“Of course.”
“What are they?”
“They are Destroyers.” Simply; matter-of-factly; with full acceptance.
“Human?”
“In their way, yes.”
“They frighten me.”
Serifice laughs. “You, who debate with Eaters, are frightened by these?”
“An Eater is nothing but teeth and claws and swagger,” Clay says. “And these—”
He hears the familiar sobbing sound sweeping through the fog.
“Yes,” Serifice says. “Servants of Wrong.”
A fierce gust blows. He huddles, covering his face and his loins. The fog wraps him more tightly. Wrong cackles. Sunlight, sliding over the frozen ground, slips under the fleecy mist to bathe him in blue, glossy green, and velvet black; he feels a flash of golden fire, and then the light is gone. “Serifice?” he calls. He gropes for her. My lips must be turning blue. My ears. My fingers. He imagines that he could crack his frozen penis off with one snap. His crystalline balls. He shuffles his feet; the ice is a mirror beneath him, cold slick glass. “Hanmer? Bril?” To dissolve, now. To soar, to leap into space, to hover between the stars—anywhere, anywhere, only not here. What is the area of Ice? This patch of blight. This chilly blemish. The sobbing grows louder. It wrenches the heart; can Wrong really grieve so deeply? For what? For whom? “Ti? Ti, where are you? Any of you. Ninameen?” To reach them with his mind, to wrap a tendril of supplication about one of them and draw them near. He is too vulnerable. This cold is real. His friends are shallow, mercurial, forgetful; they lost the spheroid coming back from the stars, and said nothing of it; they may not even be his friends. Where are they? Why did they bring him to this place? The smell of rotting wool, a louder smell now, rank, dismaying. He remembers ponds, valleys, meadows, streams, the fragrance of strange flowers, the sweet taste of mysterious waters. He remembers entering Ninameen’s warm moist cleft. He remembers old ecstasies and former comforts. Blundering forward, he trips on his own foot and falls headlong: his body blazes from chest to thighs where it touches the ice. Ears caked with sobs. He scratches frost from his skin. The world is darkening now. The light retreats, sucked away westward, draining all color from icefield and fog and sky. And in the blackness new colors come. The aurora erupts; pale electric streams cascade from a pocket of the sky, and draw fiery strands around him in a web of rosy goldness. Playful tremors rack the new night. But there is warmth in the beauty of this storm. He rises, he reaches forth his hands, he tries to seize the aurora and clothe himself in it. Folds and ripples in the night; pearly gray, turquoise, emerald, lemon, cerise; hammers ring on a million anvils; voices cry out; Wrong weeps joyously. He goes forward. He knows now that the Skimmers have abandoned him to fortune, and it hardly matters. Fear has not left him, but he has encapsulated it and bears it like a cyst in his breast. He loves the ice. He loves the cold. He loves the night. He loves the fire in the heavens. He loves those who destroy. He loves his fear.
A ring of Destroyers now surrounds him.
He sees them plainly, by the aurora’s blaze. Slightly taller than he is, but much heavier, for their muscles are huge and thick slabs of fat lie under their skins. Their gray fur is close-woven and silky. Their paws seem to have retractile claws. These are efficient engines of death, compact and streamlined: not grotesque overblown monsters like the Eaters, so terrifying that they are comic, but rather the essence of animal powers understated, menacing. They remind him now less of otters than of wolverines. But their stance is human, and so is that cold light of knowledge in their eyes. They stand facing him, patient, immobile, their long rap
acious arms hanging down below their knees. What do they want? Merely to devour him? They are so very carnivorous; he pictures himself spread out on this primeval plain of ice, intestines bared and steaming, liver and lights aglow, while the Destroyers quarrel over his pancreas, his kidneys, his aorta, his spleen. But that seems too trivial a fate. He tests them, feinting to his left, then pivoting as if to break through a gap in their circle. Their reflexes are, as he expects, superior to his: with barely an indication of response they move to close the gap, and remain as before.
“Can you talk?” he asks. “Do you understand me? Do you know what I am?”
Thin black lips curl in unmistakable smiles.
“A man,” he says. “Ancestral species; early form. The time-flux brought me. The Skimmers escorted me. I’m unadapted and unspecialized, nothing going for me except a brain, and that’s no good when you’re naked on a field of ice. Do you understand me? Can you talk?”
The Destroyers say nothing.
He rushes forward, not feinting now, simply trying to get past them and run; perhaps he can yet find Hanmer, possibly he can go from this place. For a moment it appears that they will let him pass, but as he breaches the circumference of the group one of them casually snares him by the arm and pulls him back into orbit. They toss him around the circle. He is embraced by one, another, another—a quick bear-hug, nothing affectionate about it, more a gesture of mockery than of love. Now he becomes truly aware of their physical power: he is a heap of straw in their hands. The smell of them inflates his skull. He dizzies. He falls. He no longer notices the cold. It seems quite natural to be naked on the ice. The aurora fades. The night is triumphant. The Destroyers laugh, and do a clumsy dance, and bay the absent moon. Morning may never come.
18
By morning they have reached the far perimeter of Ice. Marching with Destroyers all about him, he is shielded from the cold by a wall of dense fur; spring comes into his step, and he holds himself buoyantly erect. The bland lightnings of the aurora have come and gone all through the night. He is in the repose that lies beyond exhaustion.
They have met many other Destroyers—moving usually in packs—in their crossing of the whiteness. Bound on taut errands, lashed to unexpressed duties, these Destroyers move about with a purposed look that he has not seen on other beings of this world. The members of one pack greet those of another with appropriately feral growls, which Clay senses are far from hostile in content; but nothing is exchanged that he can recognize as a word. Nor is he able to enter the minds of these grim folk with his thoughts, though he is certain of their strong, cold intellects. They treat him with a kind of amused lip-smacking interest; clearly they are attracted to him, but is it the pleasure of his company they desire, or, ultimately, the taste of his meat? He knows they must have contempt for him: pale hairless beast, almost in a man’s shape, so weak, so simple. They hustle him along, bumping him with hips and haunches when he pauses. Day breaks.
By first light he discovers the Destroyers at their great task. Scores of them are at work along the border between Ice and the district beyond. Some are diligently felling trees and uprooting shrubs; they perform this labor with arms and shoulders and chests, and their bodies seem severely strained by its demands. Others gather the debris left by the clearers and pile it in heaps. Still others periodically incinerate these heaps, apparently by sudden intense flares of concentration. A different team, crouching and hopping about, rips up the turf with awesome bared claws, slashing the network of roots and runners and grasses and ropy weeds that binds the sod into something sturdy and able to resist. Lastly comes a quartet of Destroyers, arms linked, eyes closed, walking slowly out of Ice. They move with the greatest effort, as if pushing against a breast-high metal band that bars their advance; but with each struggling step they take, the area of Ice undergoes a minute expansion. A line of frost sprouts on the interface between the icefield and the newly upturned soil. The frost, at first, is only a glittering white film on the clumps of earth; but quickly it takes on substance, deepening, conquering. The dour Destroyers, pressing forward into fertile territory, pull the rim of the glacier behind them. Already, the ice is six inches thick at the inner end of the point at which they began their morning’s toil, sloping from there to the frost line immediately to their heels.
“Do you mean to freeze the entire planet this way?” he asks.
There is goodnatured laughter. No one replies. The fringe of ice progresses another quarter of an inch. Farther out, a tree falls, screaming. Are there Destroyers everywhere on the glacier’s rim, working to expand its dominion? How long will it be before the world is wholly covered?
“Of course,” a Destroyer tells him, “we lose ground also. The sun beats us back. Our enemies thaw the perimeter. Some days we do nothing but repair the damage of the day before, and often we may pass a week with no net gain in territory.”
“But why do it?” he asks.
Laughter again. No reply. Did the Destroyer actually speak? He saw no lips parting. He saw no jaws in motion.
He tours the edge of the ice, accompanied always by several Destroyers who never let him stray. He feels as if he is being shown some throbbing, productive factory. The Destroyers display a pride in their work. Look at us, see how dedicated we are! Keep your idle Skimmers, keep your sluggish Breathers, keep your rooted Awaiters, keep your raging Eaters: we are no sluggards, we are no dreamers! See our zeal as we consume the forest. See the passion with which we extend the ice! We are the committed ones; we are the doers of deeds. And the ice grows. And the soft summer shrinks.
“There were six Skimmers,” he says. “I was with them and lost them in the fog. Do you know where they might be?” He says, “Can you tell me why you’re keeping me here? I’d be much happier where it’s warm.” And he says, “Won’t you even speak to me? Since you can understand me, why won’t you bother to answer?”
At night they take him back into the heart of Ice.
Again the aurora. Again the green and red and yellow splashes, the hissing, the crackling. The groaning deep in the ground. He watches a feast of the Destroyers as he sits clutching himself against the cold. They have captured one of the five-trunked animals and have brought it shambling into their camp; it is elephantine in bulk and somewhat spherical in shape, with long black hair, glossy and coarse, and an uncertain number of thick short legs. The Destroyers surround it. Each lifts its left arm; claws slide from sheaths; the aurora blazes more fiercely and fire descends, playing over the shining yellow blades with somber brilliance. Abruptly that concentrated flow of energy finds its focus, rushing toward the captive beast. The creature’s hair rises, revealing large sad eyes, a pimpled purple skin, a baggy-lipped mouth. The five trunks grow rigid and deliver trumpeting cries of pain. The animal falls and does not move. The Destroyers pounce. They have the nostalgia of old carnivores for a world of universal rapacity, and they tug and rip and claw their meat with superfluous fury. One of them, showing a bloody humor, brings Clay what he suspects is a prized delicacy: some internal organ, the size of a fist, with the iridescent green glint of a beetle’s wings. Clay looks at it doubtfully. He has taken no solid food since his awakening, and even if he still had need for food, he would hesitate at raw meat. Though this appears not to be raw; it is warm in his hands, not only with animal warmth but with a tingling glow that the aurora’s flare must have caused. The Destroyer who offered it to him pantomimes the act of eating, and laughs, and slaps his foreshortened thigh in pleasure. Clay frowns. Instinct tells him to beware the generosity of the servants of Wrong. Will the meat turn him into a Destroyer? Shrink him? Expand him? Poison him? Hallucinate him? He shakes his head. He begins to hand the morsel back to the Destroyer, and receives such a terrible glare of threat that he kills the gesture at once, and puts the meat to his lips. He nibbles. He admits a single shred of flesh to his mouth. The flavor is extraordinary: rich, pungent, a tinge of cloves and an oystery aftertaste. He smiles. The Destroyer smiles, looking almost benevolent.
Clay takes another bite.
Now he feels effects. A metallic taste in his mouth; a band of hot steel pressing against his forehead; a sheet of fire bursting from his pores. He gobbles the meat. Where are the Destroyers? Sprawling in the snow, sated, belching. He no longer fears them. Clumsy beasts. Killer apes, evolution’s prank. Getting a creative thrill out of spreading the ice. “Build!” he shouts at them. “Heal! Repair! Improve!” They glance up, eyes dulled and contemptuous. He wishes he could strip them of their fur. “Push back the ice!” he cries. “Plant greenery! Bring warmth!”