Ozzie had now been out six times on the sledges as part of a harvesting party, twenty-five humans and aliens armed with ladders and baskets. On each occasion, they’d set out just as dawn rose, heading for the crystal tree forest surrounding the huge desolate depression. The opal-coloured wedges which bloomed from the end of every twig on the mature trees were actually an edible fruit, a little knot of near-tasteless carbo-hydrates in a tough shell. Without them, the inhabitants of the Ice Citadel would never survive. It took a couple of years for one to grow to the size of an apple, so they had to harvest in strict rotation, painstakingly recording each trip on crude hide maps that marked out radial sections of the nearby forest. When they got there, it was hard physical work retrieving the crop, ten hours with only one small break climbing the ladders in thick layers of clothing and a fur coat to knock the fruit down with a length of bone. Ozzie was fascinated by the fruit. It convinced him that the crystal trees must be some kind of GM biology, or whatever Silfen science was equivalent.
Several members of the harvesting party roamed along the treacherous rocky gullies which criss-crossed the forest, where patches of lichenweed that took decades to grow coated the steep sides in shaggy blue-grey carpets. They stripped them off like vandals on a wrecking spree. Fungi were another prize, with the tetrajacks sniffing them out among the narrow clefts in the icy ground so they could be scooped out by picks and shovels. Between them, their haul was enough to feed the Ice Citadel for another couple of weeks.
The harvest, and the subsequent cooking and processing of the fruit and fungi, was a communal effort. Everyone contributed to the general upkeep in whatever way they could. Sara told him it was a civilized place most of the time. She could only remember it getting unpleasant once, when the Silfen hunt didn’t visit for over a year, and the icewhale meat had run out.
The workshop team lifted the second runner into place before lunch. Ozzie stood back with George Parkin to watch the locking pins being hammered into place.
‘Two days,’ George said happily. He had some kind of thick English regional accent which Ozzie couldn’t place. ‘The glue’ll set, then we’ll be able to take her out again.’ He put his bone pipe into his mouth, and lit the dried fronds of lichenweed. It smelt foul.
‘How many big sledges have we got?’ Ozzie asked, waving the smoke away.
‘Five. I’m planning on building another after the next hunt when we’ve got a decent stock of new bone in. I’ve a few ideas for improvements, and these old ones have been rebuilt so many times they’re losing their strength.’
‘Five large sledges, and what, like seven small ones?’
‘Nine if you count the singletons.’
‘That’s not quite enough to carry everyone, is it?’
‘No. Those five big sledges carry about twenty of us when we go chasing off after the hunt. It could be a lot more but we have to haul our tents along with us as well. Nights out there are just plain evil – we need those triple-layer fur tents. And we’ve also got to leave enough room on board the sledges to bring back the icewhale. Big brutes they are. You’ll see.’
‘But there’s enough bone inside the Ice Citadel to build more sledges.’
George gave him a funny look, sucking hard on his pipe. ‘Not spare there ain’t, no.’
‘Chairs, cots, rug frames. There’s a ton of it.’
‘People are using it.’ He sounded quite indignant.
‘They might want to use it for something else.’
‘What are you getting at, lad?’
Ozzie wiped the back of his glove across his nose. As always in the workshop, it was cold and runny. ‘I’m talking about taking everyone out of here. All of us at once.’
‘Chuffing heck, lad; how do you figure that?’
‘People get out by following the hunt, right? But they’re on foot, or sometimes skis. They have to be fast to keep up.’
‘Aye.’
‘So we follow the hunt on sledges. Pile everyone in, humans and aliens, take all the animals, the tetrajacks and the lontrus and the ybnan; use them in relays to pull us, cut the exhausted ones loose if we have to. But that way we can keep up with the Silfen. Man, we can do it!’
George took the pipe out of his mouth and examined it solemnly. ‘It’s a grand idea, lad. But these big sledges won’t be able to get through the forest on the other side of the hunting ground.’
‘Okay. Then we cannibalize them and build a fleet of smaller ones. They’ll be lighter, easier to pull, faster. It’ll increase our chances.’
‘Aye, lad, it probably would at that. But how does that resolve why we’re here?’
‘What do you mean, why we’re here? We’re here because we walked down the wrong path.’
‘Did we? You’re still thinking everything in life takes place on a physical level, what about your spirituality?’
‘My spirituality is fine and looking to get the hell out of here.’
‘Then I’m happy for you, lad. But I’m not ready to leave. I believe we’re here for a reason, each and every one of us. The Ice Citadel is teaching us about ourselves, things we need to know as well as things we don’t necessarily want to know. I believe we’re here for a reason. We all know you’re rich back in the Commonwealth; a lot of folk wandering the paths are. I was. Proper little idle sod I was back in those days. Usual crap, born into a family with more wealth than sense. I’m a Yorkshireman, me, born and bred, and right traditional. Our family made a fortune out of scrap, raking it in and selling it on, making brass out o’ muck. We were doing it centuries ago, recycling stuff before anyone even heard of the word. Then Europe went bloody daft on the idea; if it were toxic you couldn’t use it, and that which you were allowed to use had to be reused. We ended up with fridge mountains because you couldn’t let the chemicals out of the coolant system, then computer mountains, then car mountains. We ’ad bloody Alps of consumer goods waiting to be broken down and refined cleanly. That was our family’s second fortune. Then you and your pal came along with wormholes, and all everyone wanted to do was dump all the poisons and pollution out away in space. We got rid of all the fancy recycling plants, but we kept on collecting rubbish off people, and ran it through your open enders. Our third fortune.’
‘The Mo-oM corporation,’ Ozzie said. ‘They’re Europe’s biggest trash disposers. Is that your company?’
George nodded, quite pleased that Ozzie knew the name. ‘Aye, that it is. Know what Mo-oM stands for? Molehills out of Mountains.’
‘I figured something like that.’
‘That’s what I was born into. Never did a day’s graft in my life, I was a total wastrel back then, useless, pointless, and out o’ me head half the time. Everything taken care of by money: parties, women, travel, drugs, rejuve – I ’ad the finest of them all. And you know what, after the third time around, it’s as boring as shite. So I followed the paths to find the fairy folk, because that’s the one thing money can’t buy.’
‘And they brought you here.’
‘Aye, they did that. This is where I’m learning what I am, Mr Isaacs, I’m learning what it’s like to live as a real person. I’m important here; people ask me what to do about icewhale bone, how to fix it, how to shape it, how to glue it, how to saw it. I’m respected now. That might not seem much to you, you’re someone who really achieved something in his life; but this respect I’ve got now was earned, and earned the hard way. That’s why I’m in this place. I’ll leave eventually, we all do one way or another, either by walking out or dying in the forest. But until that day, I’ll do what I can to help the rest of me friends through the bad times.’
‘Does everybody get this speech from you?’
‘Those that need it, aye. But I can see you don’t, not with all your wisdom. So let me put it this way. What if we all set off like you suggest, and we still get left behind? What if the paths reject us? We’d all be stuck out there in the forest, too far away to get back here: well and truly up the creek wi’out a paddle. Not that
you would get everybody. There’s the likes o’ me, and then there’s the Korrok-hi, they’re not about to leave. This place is just right for them. And what about those who arrive next? What do you think would have happened to you if our Sara hadn’t come for you and took you in?’
‘Good point.’
‘That it is. This is a place that has a purpose. Just because you don’t want to be here, don’t mean it’s a wrong-un.’
‘Right. I guess I’d better go and work on plan B, huh?’
George shook his pipe at him. ‘You do that. But make sure you’re back here after lunch. We need a hand to get the sledge down off them blocks.’
‘Sure.’ Ozzie took a couple of paces, then looked back. ‘George, you don’t happen to know any good chat-up lines, do you?’
George took a moment to examine his pipe. ‘If I did, I wouldn’t waste them on the likes of you.’
Ozzie left the workshop and headed back down to his rooms. George had made him remember the worst days of high school, the times when he wound up outside the principal’s office. The talking-to that was always worse than any possible detention.
He could never tell George, or Sara come to that, but the reason he’d been considering the mass escape was Orion. The simple fact was, he couldn’t be sure about getting out if he took the boy with him. On his own it wouldn’t be a problem. He could ski, he’d even started carving himself a pair out of bone. No Silfen was going to get away from a human on skis no matter how fleet of foot they were. And he had his packaged food, and energy drinks, and lightweight equipment; all of which he could carry. But Orion . . . The boy hadn’t even seen snow before they got here, let alone knew how to move through it.
And all the while, when he was putting plans together, there was that one thought coiled up at the back of his mind, how much simpler it would be to leave Orion behind. There might even come a day when he didn’t have a choice. It wasn’t like he’d come searching for enlightenment or fulfilment like George and most of the others. He was on the paths for a reason. And God only knew what was happening back in the Commonwealth right now.
Ozzie walked across the main chamber and into the passageway which led to his cluster of rooms. The tochee was there, just coming out of the cavern they used to sleep in. It was the alien Ozzie had mistaken for a young Raiel the day he’d arrived at the Ice Citadel. At first sight it was a reasonable error. The tochee had a similar blunt body, like a squashed egg about three and a half yards long, and coming up to the middle of Ozzie’s chest. Its hide was a kind of bristly fur, a dark caramel in colour, which looked as if it was about two sizes too big, the whole body was covered in wrinkles and creases, like a bulldog’s face. Strange little wizened black fronds grew out of the folds, as if it was sprouting seaweed. They looked like dead leathery parasites, which were becoming so dry and brittle in the Ice Citadel’s atmosphere they were starting to crumble and tear off.
Its mouth was a small lip-sphincter that formed a snout on the apex of its conical front, looking far too small given the size of the body, though when it was open, a circular array of very sharp teeth were visible. The eye, or what people believed was its seeing organ, was a curved pyramid a yard or so behind its mouth, made up from three oval sections of translucent black flesh, with the one at the front twice as long as the other pair, curving down so it could follow the body-profile.
But it was the way the alien moved which was the most interesting part. Two fat ridges of rubbery tissue ran along its underbelly, for all the world like sledge skis, except these rippled like snakes to push it along. The surface of the ridges was mottled, grey and bruise-brown, with some cracks oozing rheumy body fluid. Sara had said the tochee was in bad shape when they found it out on the edge of the crystal tree forest. Although the ridges were a sophisticated biological method of locomotion, their nature meant it couldn’t wear protective cladding. The tochee was obviously from a warm-weather climate. Its ridges were badly frostbitten from moving over the icy ground, where they suffered constant contact with the sub-zero soil. That was over two years ago, and the flesh still hadn’t grown back properly.
A second pair of ridges protruded from its back. They were shorter, extending only a little further than its eye, and they were more bulbous. Ozzie had seen them swell out to grip cups and plates, or help lift objects too heavy for human arms, like giant amoebas shaping themselves into chubby tendrils or jaws. As tool users went, it was a high-evolutionary concept.
In fact, it was only its manipulator flesh, along with a few high-technology artefacts it was carrying on a utility belt, that convinced the other Ice Citadel residents that it was sentient at all. In the whole two years it had been here, nobody had managed to communicate with it at all. It didn’t make any sound with its mouth, let alone speak. As far as they could tell, it was deaf. They’d tried chalking pictures on a slab, but it didn’t seem to understand them. All they had left were simple arm gestures: come, stay, go, lift, put down. It cooperated most of the time, as if it was a well trained sheepdog.
They didn’t even know its true name, the Korrok-hi had named it the tochee, which in their language of hoots and whistles meant: big fat worm.
‘So what were you looking for in there?’ Ozzie mused out loud as he stood in front of it.
The tochee’s snout waved slightly from side to side, putting Ozzie in mind of some animal awaiting castigation. To his eye it had the attitude of a whipped dog, but then, he supposed, if all he did every day was carry buckets of water from the fountain to the kitchen, on frostbitten toes, unable to talk to anyone, or know what was going on outside, he’d be seriously depressed too.
‘Okay, let’s go see.’ He walked round the flank of the tochee and pushed the door curtain aside. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the security mesh had been moved round slightly, as if something had gently prodded it. ‘Come on then.’ He beckoned the tochee with an exaggerated gesture. The big creature turned smoothly in the passageway, and slithered into the sleeping room. Once again, Ozzie was impressed by how agile the alien was; for something that size it could move quickly and precisely.
He sat on the cot, staring at the tochee, and gestured round expansively. ‘Go ahead.’ The alien didn’t move. It kept its great front eye perfectly aligned on the human.
‘All right then.’ Ozzie went over to the security mesh and clicked the padlock’s combination code, covering the motion with his body. He still wasn’t that trusting. With the mesh open, he pulled out various articles, food, clothes, a kerosene lamp, his sewing kit, a hand-held array, and set them down on the floor in front of the alien. The tochee’s locomotion ridges flattened slightly, lowering it down; then its manipulator flesh on the left side flowed out into a slim tentacle which picked up the array. The tip pressed each of the five buttons on top. But the unit remained dead.
‘Ah ha,’ Ozzie said. Only someone familiar with technology would understand a button. ‘So you understand technology, but we can’t communicate. Why not?’ He sat back on the cot and looked at the tochee again. It might be a human interpretation, but the alien seemed to slump in disappointment at the array’s failure. It slowly replaced it on the floor, little black fronds rustling like autumn leaves in a breeze.
‘You don’t use sound, so what does that leave us with? Telepathy? Doubtful. Magnetic fields? Bees and trokken marshrats can sense them, but the Silfen are probably dumping them here. Possible, then. Electromagnetic? Ditto for radio waves, the array is dead. Shapes? You’re visually perceptive, so that’s another possible. I can’t match that shapeshifting arm trick, though, and Sara said you didn’t understand pictures.’ He cocked his head to one side. ‘Make that human pictures. I wouldn’t understand yours. That’s if you draw them. Now there’s a culture difference. Do you have art?’ Ozzie stopped. He was feeling mildly foolish talking out loud to an alien that couldn’t hear. The tochee was still facing him, the front eye perfectly aligned. Ozzie shuffled a few inches along the cot. The tochee’s front body moved slightly, trackin
g him. ‘Why are you doing that? What can you be trying to say.’ No, not what. How? Ozzie stared at that elongated oval of shiny black flesh that was pointing right at him. Not sound, but an emission of . . . ‘Shit.’ He switched his retinal inserts to infrared, and the tochee’s body crawled with strange thermal signatures, hinting at the location of blood vessels and organs hidden below the flesh. He slowly worked up through the visual spectrum, until he reached ultraviolet. ‘Fuck!’ Ozzie jumped backwards in reflex shock, and fell off the cot.
The tochee’s forward eye was alive with complex dancing patterns of deep purple light shining straight at him.
*
When Orion returned to their rooms a couple of hours after lunch he found the tochee almost blocking the doorway. Ozzie was sitting on his cot, sketching furiously with a pencil on one of his notebooks. The rock floor was littered with scraps of paper, all with the weirdest patterns on them, like flowers drawn by a five-year-old, where every petal was represented by a jagged bolt of lightning.
‘George Parkin’s been looking for you,’ Orion began. ‘Why is that in here?’
Ozzie gave him a manic grin, his crazy hair fluffing out from his head as if he’d been hit by a big static charge. ‘Oh, me and tochee here are just having a little chat.’ He just couldn’t keep the smugness from his tone.
‘Uh?’ was all Orion managed.
Ozzie picked up one of the pieces of paper torn out of the notebook. The pattern was like a rosette of fractured glass, but there was a word scribbled on the top corner. Ozzie’s other hand held up a leather shoe. Half of the contents from their packs were scattered round. ‘This is its symbol for shoe,’ he said jubilantly. ‘Yes, look, it’s repeating it. Course, it might just be the symbol for violated dead animal skin, but who the hell cares. We’re getting there. We’re building a vocabulary.’
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