Silverhair tm-1

by Stephen Baxter

  So the Cycle, after all, culminated in a lie: there would be no rescue for her Family, no glowing future for the mammoths on the Sky Steppe.

  She found herself thinking of Lop-ear, that first time they had come to the southern coast: how, in the sunshine, he had teased her and tried to goad her into the water, and told her tall stories of the Calves of Siros. If she had shared Lop-ear’s gift for original thinking, was there any way she could have avoided this fate?

  …The Calves of Siros. Suddenly, sinking in the darkness and the cold, she had an idea.

  She tried to remember the sounds Lop-ear had made when he had called for the Calves of Siros. She had to get it right; she had only one lungful of air, and would get only one chance at this.

  She began a low-pitched whistle, punctuated by higher squeals, squawks, and shrieks. The sound rippled away into the black water around her. She kept up the noise until the last wisp of her air was expended.

  Not even an echo replied.

  She stopped kicking and let the current carry her. She had fallen so far, the surface was reduced to a vague illumination far above. She could feel the ocean turn her slowly around as she drifted with it.

  A deeper blackness was closing around her vision. The pain in her empty lungs, the ache of her exhausted limbs, the vaguer ache of the wounds inflicted by the Lost — all of it began to recede from her, as the cold forced her to shrink deep into the core of her body.

  It was almost comfortable. She knew this ordeal would not last much longer…

  And now a sheet of hard blackness rose from the depths beneath her. Perhaps this was death, come to meet her.

  But she hadn’t expected death to have sleek fur, a fluked tail, stubby flippers, and a small, seal-like head that peered up at her out of the gloom.

  The rising surface pushed softly against her feet and belly. She could feel a great body swathed in fat, strong muscles working.

  Suddenly she was rising again.

  She burst into light and air. It was like being born. She coughed, clearing water from her trunk and mouth, and air roared into her starved lungs.

  Gradually the pain in her chest subsided. She was still floating in the water, but now her trunk lay against a great black body, and she was able to hold herself out of the ocean easily. Strong tail flukes held up her head, and the skin under her face was rough as bark.

  The creature under her was huge, she realized: at least twice her own body length, and covered with the dense black hair of a seal.

  A small head twisted back to look at her. She heard squeals and chirrups, alternating low whistles and high-toned bleats. It was speech: indistinct but nevertheless recognizable.

  "…See you I. Paddling through water see you I. Recognize mammoth I. Mammoth better swimmer than old sea cow think I. Understand you?"

  "Yes," Silverhair said, and the effort of speech made her cough again. "I understand. Thanks…"

  The sea cow’s long muscles rippled. To Silverhair’s surprise, a gull came flapping out of the sky and landed in the middle of the sea cow’s broad back. The gull started to peck at the damp hair, plucking out parasites, and the sea cow wriggled with pleasure. "You here are why? Not roll on tundra do sea cows." The sea cow raised her small muzzle and whistled at her own joke.

  "I have to get to the Mainland," said Silverhair.

  "Mainland? Kelp good there. Mmm. Kelp." The sea cow looked dreamy. "But not there go sea cows. Why? Lost there."

  "You know about the Lost?"

  "Lost? Find me they if, drag me from sea they, eat my kidneys they, leave handsome body for gulls they. Terrible, terrible."

  "I have met the Lost," said Silverhair.

  "Think sea cows all gone Lost. Live in seas in south some Cousins. Here think kill us Lost, long time ago gobble up our kidneys Lost. But wrong they. But not Mainland go to I, kelp or no. Stay by Island. On Island no Lost."

  "There are now," said Silverhair grimly.

  "Terrible, terrible," said the sea cow, sounding dismayed. "Go to Mainland you, why if Lost there?"

  "I have to," said Silverhair. "They took my Family."

  The sea cow rolled in the water, almost throwing Silverhair off. "Terrible thing. Terrible Lost. Here. Hold on to me you." The sea cow held out a stubby, clawed flipper, and Silverhair wrapped her trunk around it.

  The broad flukes beat, sending up a spray that splashed over Silverhair. The sea cow’s broad, streamlined bulk began to slide easily through the water, oblivious to the current that had defeated Silverhair, unimpeded even by the bulk of an adult mammoth clinging to one flipper. Soon her speed was so great that a bow wave washed around her small, determined head.

  Her power was exhilarating.

  The sea cow pushed easily through the loose, decaying landfast ice that fringed the shore of the Mainland.

  Silverhair’s feet crunched on hard shingle.

  She let go of the sea cow’s flipper. She stumbled forward up a steepening slope until she had dragged herself clear of the sea. Already frost was forming on her soaked fur, and she shook herself vigorously. Soon the warmth of the afternoon summer sun was seeping into her.

  The sea cow used her stubby flippers to haul herself farther out of the water, so her bulk was lying on the shingle bed, her great broad back exposed. She began munching contentedly on a floating scum of brown kelp fronds. She chewed with a horny plate at the front of her mouth, for she didn’t appear to have any teeth. "Kelp. Mmm. Want some you?"

  "Thanks — no."

  Now that the sea cow was raised so far out of the water, Silverhair could see how strange she looked: a head and flippers much like a seal’s, but trailing a great bulbous body and a powerful split fluke, as if the front half of a seal had been attached to a beluga whale. Out of the water she was ponderous and looked stranded. Silverhair could see why her kind had been such easy pickings for the Lost, before the sea cows had learned to hide and feign extinction.

  Silverhair looked back at the dark, sinuous waters of the Channel. "But for you," she told the sea cow, "I’d still be out there now. There forever."

  The sea cow’s fluke beat at the water. "Oath of Kilukpuk. Hyros and Probos and Siros. Forgot that you?"

  "No," said Silverhair quietly. "No, we haven’t forgotten." And she was filled with warmth as she realized that one of the most ancient and beautiful passages of the Cycle had been fulfilled, here on this desolate beach.

  The Calves of Kilukpuk had been separated for more than fifty million years. But they hadn’t forgotten their Oath.

  The sea cow rolled gracefully and slid into deeper water. "Stick to tundra next time you. Watch out for Lost you. Good luck, Cousin." Her stubby flippers extended, and she slid beneath the ice-strewn waves.

  And Silverhair, her trunk raised and every half-frozen hair prickling, walked slowly up the shingle beach into the land of the Lost.

  20

  The City of the Lost

  Everywhere on this ugly Mainland beach there was evidence of the Lost: chunks of rusting metal, splashes of dirty oil that stained the ice, scraps of the strange loose outer skin they wore. There were structures, long and narrow, that pushed out from the beach toward the water; at the end of these structures were more of the shell-like objects like the one she had seen on the ice floe, on her first encounter with Skin-of-Ice. But where the thing on that ice floe had been damaged, these seemed intact; they floated on the gray water, though some were embedded in the ice. Perhaps they were supposed to ferry the Lost across the water, she mused.

  She walked over a line of scrubby dunes at the edge of the beach and reached the tundra. There she found grass and sedge, and even a few Arctic willows; but the ground was poor — polluted by more of the black sludgy oil that had marred the beach — and broken up by long, snaking tracks. There was a stink of tar, and a strange silence, an emptiness that was a chilling contrast to the Island’s rich summer cacophony.

  And everywhere there were straight lines, the hard signature of the Lost, the symbol o
f their dominance over the world around them.

  The most gigantic line of all was a hard-edged surface set in the tundra, black and lifeless. It was a road that proceeded — straight as a shaft of sunlight — to the heart of the City of the Lost.

  The City itself was the sight she had seen many times from the safety of the headland on the Island: a tangle of shining tubes and tanks, randomly cross-connected, sprinkled with glowing point lights like captive stars. From tall columns oily black smoke billowed into the air, its tarry stink overpowering even the sharp tang of brine.

  The City was huge, sprawling over the tundra. It must be the Lost’s prime nest, she thought. And that was where she must go.

  She stepped away from the road. She found a place where the tundra wasn’t quite so badly scarred, and there were grass and willow twigs to graze. She deliberately pushed the food into her mouth, ground it up, and swallowed it. She found a stream. It was thin and brackish, but it tasted clean; the cold water revived her strength a little.

  She noticed a carpet of lemming holes and runs, and droppings from the predator birds that hunted the little rodents. So there was life here.

  And she glimpsed an Arctic fox, the last of its white winter fur clinging to its back. The fox’s coat was patchy and discolored, the nodes of its spine protruding from its back. As soon as the fox saw her, its hairs stood on end. Then the fox dropped its muzzle as if in shame, and slinked away.

  Silverhair thought she understood. This creature had abandoned the tundra and had learned to live in the corners of the world of the Lost. But it was a poor bargain. She wondered if, in some deep recess of its hindbrain, the fox still longed for the open freedom and rich, clean silence of the tundra its ancestors had abandoned.

  Her feeding done, she passed dung, the movement fast and satisfying. The world seemed vivid around her, ugly and distorted as it was here on the Mainland. If this was to be her day to die, then there would be a last time for everything: to love, to eat, even to pass dung — and at last to breathe. And all of it should be cherished, for death was long.

  The rich scent of her own dung filled her nostrils — and suddenly she realized that there was no smell of mammoth here.

  The mammoths had seeped into every crevice of their Island. It wasn’t possible to pull up a blade of grass that hadn’t been nourished by the dung of mammoths; mammoth bones erupted from the ground everywhere as the permafrost melted; mammoths had even shaped the tundra itself, by battering down the encroaching trees of the spruce forest.

  But that wasn’t true here. When she raised her trunk to the air and sniffed, all she could smell was smoke and tar. And this was the place to which Foxeye and her calves had been brought: the place from which Silverhair must rescue them, or die in the attempt.

  Perhaps if Lop-ear were here, she thought wistfully, he might be able to devise some plan, some way to gain an advantage over the unknowable swarms of Lost. But he wasn’t here, and she had no plan. She could only rely on her strength and speed and courage and native intelligence — and the guidance of the Cycle, which had brought her this far.

  She walked back to the Lost road. Its hard surface was unyielding under the pads of her feet, and its blackness soaked up the thin rays of the sun, making it feel hot. She recoiled from its strangeness.

  But she raised her trunk, every sense alert, and began to walk.

  The City of the Lost sprawled across the landscape, ugly, careless, uncompromising. It was a place of huge, rust-stained cylinders, gigantic pipes that sprawled across the ground, smaller tanks and boxes and heaps of strange metal shapes. As she approached the City’s heart, the tallest buildings loomed over her, and she felt a helpless awe at their tall, shadowy straightness — and at the power of the worm-like creatures who had built this place.

  But it was a place of waste.

  She came to a pile of spruce wood cut into lengths, evidently with great effort — and then abandoned on the ground to rot. And here was a heap of cracked-open cans that evidently had been simply abandoned, piled up without purpose or value. Traces of brown, rotting metal and oil had leaked into the ground, poisoning it so nothing grew here.

  The Lost were not like the mammoths, she thought, whose very dung enriched the places they passed…

  And suddenly, she encountered her first Lost.

  He came walking around one of the buildings, not looking up, his face lowered so he could peer at a sheet he carried. His outer skin was a gaudy blue, and he wore some form of orange carapace, hard and shiny, on his head.

  She stood stock-still, her trunk and tusks raised high above him.

  His footsteps slowed, halted. Perhaps it was her smell he had noticed — or even the stink of brine that she must have carried from the sea.

  He turned, slowly. He lowered his sheet, revealing cold blue eyes.

  Silverhair saw herself through his eyes. Perhaps she was the first mammoth he had ever seen. She loomed before him like a fur-covered mountain, stinking of brine, her tusks alone almost as long as his body. Her face was a scarred mask, from which hard, determined eyes glowered.

  The Lost yelped, comically. He threw his sheet up in the air, and stumbled backward, landing in the mud.

  He scrambled to his feet and ran away along the road, yelling. He turned a corner and disappeared into the complex, shadowy heart of the City. The sheet he had discarded blew toward her feet; she crushed it with one deliberate footstep.

  Stolidly she followed the fleeing Lost.

  The buildings of the Lost loomed huge and faceless, dwarfing her. The only sounds were her own breathing, the soft slap of her footsteps — and the thumping of some distant metal heart, its low growl deeper than the deepest contact rumble. This place was alive, and she was willingly walking into its mouth.

  Suddenly the Lost were here in front of her. Evidently Orange-Head had raised a warning. She was faced by a row of them — three, four, five, emerging from the buildings — and they all looked scared, even though they bore thunder-sticks aimed at her chest and head.

  She had known this confrontation would come. She was a mammoth: not a burrowing lemming, a scurrying fox who could hide.

  And she knew that from this point the river of time, running to eternity, would split into two branches.

  If the Lost chose to pump her body full of the stinging pellets of their thunder-sticks, then she would die here — though she would, she thought grimly, take as many of them with her as possible. But if not…

  If not, if she lived and the future was still open, there was hope.

  She took a deliberate step forward, toward the circle of Lost.

  One thunder-stick cracked. A pellet sizzled past her ear. She couldn’t help but flinch.

  But it had missed her. Still she stepped forward.

  Now the Lost were cawing to each other. One of them seemed to be taking command, and was waving his paws at the others. One by one, uncertainly, they lowered their thunder-sticks. Evidently they didn’t want to kill her. Not yet, anyway.

  Perhaps they had their own purpose for her. Well, she didn’t care about that. For now, it was enough that she still breathed.

  She called with the contact rumble: "Foxeye! Croptail! Can you hear me? It’s Silverhair. Foxeye, call if you hear me…"

  She heard the thin trumpeting of a frightened calf — a trumpeting that was cut off abruptly.

  Her heart hammered. At least one of them was still alive, then.

  She moved forward, gliding deeper into the complex of buildings and pipes and smoking pillars. The Lost formed up behind her, their thunder-sticks never far below their shoulders, and they followed her like a gaggle of ugly calves. She called as she walked, and liquid mammoth rumbles echoed from the metal walls of this City of the Lost, and the massive, natural grace of her gait contrasted with the angular ugliness of the place.

  She walked right through the City, to its far side. Here she could see open tundra, stretching away. There were more buildings here, but their character was d
ifferent. These were much rougher structures, some of them so flimsy they looked ready to fall down. Thin smoke snaked up to the gray sky, bearing the sour smell of burned meat. The ground here was churned-up, lifeless mud.

  There were many Lost here, some of them emerging from the crude buildings to stare at her, some running away in fear.

  And there, in a clearing at the center of this cluster of buildings, were the mammoths. She counted quickly — Foxeye and Croptail and Sunfire — all of them alive, if miserable and bedraggled. Her heart hammered, and she longed to rush forward to her Family. But she forced herself to be still, to observe, to think.

  The mammoths were held in two cages: one for Foxeye alone, the other for the two calves. When the calves saw Silverhair approach, Croptail set up an excited squealing. "Silverhair!"

  The cages, crudely constructed, were too small to allow the mammoths to move, even to turn around. The cages had thick ropes trailing from their roofs. Silverhair saw how distressed the calves were to be separated from their mother. Silverhair wondered if these Lost knew how cruel that separation was — indeed, that without her mother’s milk Sunfire would soon surely die.

  Croptail was still calling. But there was a Lost beside the calves’ cage. He had a goad, which he flicked cruelly through the bars of the cage, snapping at Croptail’s flank.

  Silverhair rumbled threateningly.

  The Lost looked at her — an unrestrained adult mammoth — and decided not to whip the trapped calf again.

  Silverhair approached Foxeye’s cage. Foxeye was standing with her great head bowed, beaten and subdued, her coat filthy. She was burdened by heavy chains that looped around her neck and feet, fixed to stakes rammed into the muddy ground. Silverhair reached through the bars of the cage, and wrapped her trunk around Foxeye’s.

  At first Foxeye’s trunk was limp. But then, slowly, it tightened.

  "I promised I’d save you," said Silverhair. "And here I am."