‘Don’t think so.’
‘Now that was being unprepared in the mostest serious fashion. Jesus, it was a miracle he ever came back, and he was only a couple of yards from the wormhole the whole time. That would have been fucking impressive wouldn’t it? First person to step through our new machine and he drops down dead from the lack of a bicycle puncture repair kit. History would have been a hell of a lot different.’
‘What was it like, Mars?’
‘Cold. Colder than this dump. And dead. I mean really seriously dead. Believe me, you know when somewhere has been dead for a billion years before the dinosaurs were killed off. You just had to look at it and you knew.’ He shook his head, surprised by how strong the image was after nearly three and a half centuries. ‘So now, show me what you’ve put in the pack.’
*
Tochee returned with the bucket it ate its mashed crystal tree fruit from. Ozzie and Orion settled down on their cots with their packaged meals, and the three of them ate in silence. The Silfen out in the central chamber were singing away blithely, clearly intent on partying the night away like a bunch of boisterous students. Ozzie caught the occasional line of verse, most of which praised the icewhales for their size and speed and ferocity.
Sara was their first visitor. Ozzie handed over the items he was leaving behind, which she accepted with brisk thanks. George turned up, with the sledgemasters who would captain the hunting party. The other five people who were going to try and find a path off the planet wandered in, four men and one woman. They sat on the cots, and everyone started discussing options and strategies. The modest rock cavern took on the kind of hyped-up atmosphere in the team changing room minutes before the big match. Thinking that, Ozzie briefly wondered who had won the Commonwealth Cup.
It amazed him he even managed to fall asleep. But there he was, tangled up in an unsealed sleeping bag, his arms and neck chilly, as Orion shook him awake. The rug hadn’t even been pulled over the bright crystal duct in the ceiling.
‘It’s time, Ozzie,’ the boy said in a near-fearful voice. ‘George says they’re getting ready.’
‘Right then, man, let’s get to it.’ Ozzie felt like singing, something uplifting, like the early Beatles or the Puppet Presidents. Out in the central chamber the Silfen had quietened down. He pulled the rings on the self-heating breakfast packets, and started to get dressed. Full body thermal underwear, of course, then a thick sweatshirt and his cord trousers, the clean check shirt. By the time he laced his hiking boots up he was starting to feel warm, so he carried the rest, the two sweaters, waterproofed and insulated trousers, scarf, balaclava, gloves, ear muffs, goggles, and of course the icewhale fur coat, overtrousers, and mittens. He checked Orion who was equally well dressed. Half of his garments were Ozzie’s, cut down weeks ago and sewn carefully to fit in readiness for this occasion
They ate their breakfast, took a last visit to the bathroom, then collected Tochee from its quarters. When they got upstairs, the big workshop was abuzz with activity. Silfen riders were already leading their animals from the stables. George was rapping out orders to his teams. Tochee shifted about uncomfortably on the cold, damp stone floor while Ozzie and Orion gave his sledge a final check, then it quickly slithered up into the protective cylinder of icewhale fur. Ozzie handed Tochee three heat bricks before carefully lacing up the flaps of fur at the back, making sure there were no gaps. He and Orion piled their packs on the little space left over at the rear of the sledge platform. Tochee was now going to have to stay inside until they reached a warmer world. Weeks ago, Ozzie had tried asking if Tochee got claustrophobia, but either their pictures and words vocabulary hadn’t developed enough to explain the concept, or the alien didn’t have a psychology susceptible to such things.
It was George himself who helped Ozzie and Orion push Tochee’s sledge outside into the weak pre-dawn light, then they tied it to one of the big covered sledges pulled by a team of five ybnan. After exchanging ‘okay’ and ‘good luck’ signs with the alien, they clambered inside amid all the equipment for butchering and cooking the icewhales. Bill the Korrok-hi was their driver, and Sara wedged herself inside beside them, along with fifteen others. The small brazier hanging from the top of the sledge was lit, casting a murky brimstone light around the inside, complete with noxious fumes. The side flap was closed.
As the red sun slowly rose above the horizon the Silfen gathered together outside the Ice Citadel, their white furs gleaming bright in the glow from their lanterns, spears and bows held ready. They began a slow chant, their voices deeper than Ozzie had ever heard before. In a mournful baritone they sounded a lot more alien, and far more menacing. Their riders moved off at an easy canter, leaving those on foot to follow at a slower pace. The sledges pulled by the ybnan lurched off in eager pursuit, with pans and metallic equipment clanking loudly.
It took an hour and a half just to reach the border of the crystal tree forest. So far the covered sledges had kept up with the Silfen on foot. But once they reached the small trees around the fringe they had to arrange themselves in single file. The path between the steadfast trunks was narrow and awkward, slowing them further. They slowly lost distance on the Silfen, although the track they left was easy enough to follow. Occasionally the Korrok-hi drivers would catch a glimpse of the shimmering light from their lanterns through the snow-covered trunks. Several times, Ozzie went over to the door flap to check Tochee was still being towed. The sledge was slipping along without any trouble. Tochee was barely having to use the four poles to steer with.
‘How much longer?’ Orion asked after they’d been pushing through the forest for over an hour.
‘We’ll be in the forest for a couple of hours yet before we reach the hunting ground,’ Sara said. ‘After that, who knows? Their riders went on ahead to try and track some icewhales.’
‘How big is the hunting ground?’
‘I have no idea. You can’t see the far side no matter how clear the air is. Hundreds of miles across, I suppose. Once we had to turn back we’d gone so far and they hadn’t started hunting. But that is rare. If we’re lucky, and there’s some close by, they might even hunt this afternoon.’
‘Will they leave at night?’ Ozzie asked.
‘No. That is, they never have yet.’
It was another two and a quarter hours before they reached the edge of the forest. Ozzie and Orion both peered through the flap, eager to see the land beyond. They were high up, something Ozzie hadn’t appreciated before. The crystal tree forest sprawled across the plateau of some broad massif. Where it ended, the ground swept down towards a vast plain dominated by hundreds of low volcanic craters. Sara had been right about its size, the ultra-cold air was perfectly clear, yet from his vantage point half a mile above the plain, Ozzie couldn’t see the other side, it was hidden within a hazy crimson horizon. The crater rims themselves were almost flat, but between them the frozen land had ripped open, producing thousands of rocky fangs like small Matterhorns. Crystal trees grew on their lower slopes, although the pinnacles were rugged naked rock with a few streaks of snow and ice caught in crevices, reflecting a dusky scarlet in the pervasive sunlight.
The craters were all filled with ice particles, Sara told them, fine sand-like granules that produced a perfectly level surface, giving no clue how deep they actually were. Most of them had vapour rising from the centre in small plumes that drifted almost straight upwards, slowly getting wider and thinner as they climbed until, thousands of metres above the plain, they merged into smears of tenuous cirrus that meandered about like spacious contrails. When Ozzie switched to infrared he could see the craters glowing with a weak intensity, no more than a few degrees higher than the surrounding land, but a temperature difference sufficient to cause evaporation. He wondered how much warmer the craters were at the bottom.
Halfway down the slope leading to the plain, he could see the Silfen threading their way past small clumps of crystal trees, lantern lights bobbing about merrily. There was no sign of the riders.
One by one, the big sledges crested the top of the slope, and began their precarious descent after the hunters.
It was a rough journey down, with the rucked surface rocking the sledges about. Every so often, the Korrok-hi drivers had to use the ybnan to slow their speed rather than pull them along. Ozzie had a lot of difficulty looking out and checking on Tochee. Everyone inside the covered sledge was hanging on grimly to the broad bone cage. In the end he just stayed put – there wasn’t much he could do if the tow rope broke anyway. Several pieces of equipment had worked loose to roll round, pans and bone struts jangling as they banged painfully into shins and arms and chests. The brazier was swinging in an alarmingly wide arc on its short chain.
They couldn’t have taken more than forty minutes to reach the plain, although time stretched out to hours inside the cramped stinking cabin. Ozzie had never before appreciated how important it was to be able to see out of a moving vehicle. His imagination filled the whole route down with knife-blade boulders waiting to split them open, and the slope was bound to end with a hundred-metre vertical cliff.
Bill let out a low trumpet of satisfaction to signal the descent was over. Inside the sledge, everyone flashed nervous grins around, not willing to admit just how scared they’d been. After that, progress was appreciably easier. Sara was confident they could close some of the distance that had accumulated between them and the Silfen. Orion kept his friendship pendant clasped tightly in his fist, watching its sparkling blue light intently.
The covered sledges maintained a single file, following the fresh tracks in the crunchy grains of snow. They were heading directly away from the massif, rattling along at a good pace. By midday they were skirting along the shoreline ridge of the first crater, with a string of savage rock peaks on the other side. After that there were gullies crowned by curving waves of compacted snow, looking as if the slightest tremble would send them avalanching into the gulf below. Then ravines with frozen sheet ice along the floor, where the ybnan had trouble getting a grip with their hoofs; spinneys and forests of crystal trees and bulbous bushes. Often, when he looked out, Ozzie would see great swathes of them smashed and shattered, leaving jagged stumps surrounded by a pile of ice-encrusted branches. There were narrow steep saddle valleys to surmount, where their speed was reduced to a painful crawl on the ascent, only to degenerate into a mad slither downwards, more abrupt and frightening than the trip down from the massif. And there were long curves around craters, where the vapour drifted out sideways like a mist, swiftly covering ybnan and sledges alike in a crusty hoarfrost.
When the sun was an hour and a half from the horizon, the massif was invisible behind them, blocked from view by towering spires of sharp black rock. Shadows were lengthening and darkening across the rust-tinted ground. The ybnan teams on all the sledges were beginning to tire. Even on the flat their speed was noticeably less than earlier.
‘There’ll be no hunt today,’ Sara said after she returned from a quick discussion with Bill. ‘And we need to set up the tents soon. It’s difficult in the dark.’
After another half-hour, they emerged from the gap between two rock ridges to look down on a crater measuring over six miles across. Some time after the basin formed, the volcanic activity which riddled the area had thrown up yet another range of fierce crags. This one formed a long promontory extending out almost halfway across the crater.
The Silfen had gathered at the foot of the peak closest to the rim, riders and those on foot bunched together and glowing like a multifaceted jewel in the gathering twilight. A stretch of forest grew up the slope beyond them, its crystal trees taller than those back on the forests of the massif, looking dark and forbidding in the vermilion gloaming.
The sledges pulled up in a broad circle, half a mile from the Silfen, on top of an escarpment which skirted the landward crags. Everyone jumped to, hauling the tents out and slotting the framework together. Once the big tents were up, Ozzie, Orion, and George rigged a smaller frame over Tochee’s sledge, and pulled a big sheet of fur over it. Inside that, they draped another blanket of fur across the top of the sledge’s protective cylinder.
‘It should be okay in that,’ George said as he crawled out.
Ozzie, who was left inside, grunted agreement. He lit a pair of candles, and put them on the ground in front of the sledge’s windscreen. There wasn’t much space there, probably no more than a couple of cubic yards, but it allowed Tochee to look out, maybe take away any fear of entombment. Looking in through the pane of crystal, Ozzie could see the alien motion-less behind it, front eye section aligned on him. He held a mitten out, thumb upwards. Tochee’s front eye swirled with ultraviolet patterns, slightly smudged by flaws in the crystal. It translated roughly into: Don’t forget me tomorrow.
‘Not a chance,’ Ozzie whispered inside his balaclava.
Tochee pulled the tab on a heat brick. Ozzie waited until he saw the brick start to glow a deep cherry red, then waved and backed out of the fur coverings.
There was probably another twenty minutes before the sun sank below the horizon. Ozzie hurried off towards the crater rim. It was achingly quiet in the moments just before nightfall. Even the Silfen’s perpetual signing had ended out here under the sombre glacial sky. Ahead of him, the surface of the granular ice which filled the crater basin was so flat that the illusion of liquid was almost perfect. As he approached it, he half expected to see ripples. He knelt down beside it, and touched it with his mitten. The surface had the texture of thick oil, though the further down he pushed his hand, the greater the resistance became.
‘Careful you don’t fall in,’ Sara said.
Ozzie straightened up, shaking residual grains from his mitten. ‘Man, you always make me feel like I’m doing some-thing wrong.’
‘People have fallen in before. We don’t risk our own lives trying to find them now. They never leave any trace, it’s not as if there could be any bubbles.’
‘Yeah, figures. This stuff isn’t natural. Grains of ice like this should stick together.’
‘Of course they should. But they’re being constantly churned up and kept loose, like flour in a food mixer.’
‘And the icewhales are doing the churning.’
‘Them, and whatever else is down there. After all, they have to eat something.’
‘Hopefully just iceweed, or whatever the plant life is at the bottom.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever seen one.’ She turned, and began to walk up the slight incline.
Ozzie started after her. ‘Why not?’
‘Let’s just say they don’t act like herbivores.’
‘You got it all figured out, dontcha?’
‘No, Ozzie, nothing like. I understand very little of this place, and all the others I walked through. Why don’t the Silfen allow us to have electricity?’
‘Simple enough theory. They’re experiencing life on a purely physical level; that’s all these bodies we see are for, to give them a platform at this level of personal consciousness evolution. And it kills me to say it, but it’s a pretty low level, given their capabilities. You start introducing electricity, and machines, and all the paraphernalia which goes with it, then you start to shrink that opportunity for raw natural experience.’
‘Yeah,’ she said sourly. ‘God forbid they should invent medicine.’
‘It’s irrelevant to them. We need it because we treasure our individuality and continuity. Their outlook is different. They’re on a journey that has a very definite conclusion. At the end of their levels they get to become a part of their adult community.’
‘How the hell do you know that?’
He shrugged, a gesture largely wasted under his heavy fur coat. ‘I was told that once.’
‘Who by?’
‘This dude I met in a bar.’
‘Dear Christ, I don’t know which is weirder, them or you.’
‘Definitely them.’ They came to the top of the small rim as the sun vanished, leaving only a flaming fuchsia glow in the sky. br />
‘You also shouldn’t be out so late,’ Sara said. ‘There’s no beacon to guide you back here, you know.’
‘Don’t worry about me, I see better in the dark than most people.’
‘You got fur instead of skin as well? Even the Korrok-hi don’t stay out at night on this world.’
‘Sure. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.’
‘You’ll have to do a lot better tomorrow when you follow the Silfen.’
‘Right. You know, I’m still kind of surprised you didn’t want to come with us.’
‘I will leave one day, Ozzie. Just not yet, that’s all.’
‘But why? You’ve been here long enough. I can’t see you buying into George’s idea about how living here as some kind of penance makes us value our lives more. And as far as I can make out there’s no one special for you. Is there?’ Which had slowly come to nag at him as his own suggestions in that direction over the months had all gone unheeded.
‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘There’s no one right now.’
‘That’s a shame, Sara. We all need someone.’
‘So were you going to volunteer?’
The mild scorn in her voice made him pause. After a moment, Sara stopped and looked back at him. ‘What?’ she asked.
‘Well, goddamn, I couldn’t have been any blunter,’ Ozzie said.
‘Blunt about what?’
‘About us. You and me. Rocking the mattress.’
‘But you’ve got . . . Oh.’
‘Got what?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘I thought . . . we all thought: you and Orion.’
‘Me and Orion what . . . ohshit.’
‘You mean he’s not your—’
‘No. Absolutely. No.’
‘Ah.’
‘And I’m not.’
‘Okay. Sorry. Misunderstanding, there.’
‘Not that there’s anything—’