Asimov's SF, September 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I laughed. “Yes, Fred, and at the ripe old age of twenty-four years it's ploughing your daughter that has kept me so.”

  His face turned from red to purple. “I'll wring your neck! My girl's with child, ruined by your stinking seed. Why, to think I paid for you to stand in front of my own son in that school, with your Mathematicks and your Philosophies—”

  I stood up straighter, for I do have some professional pride. “You got the teaching you paid for, Fred, and if it was good enough for a kirk school in Edinburgh, it was more than good enough for your jug-brained offspring. I'm sorry about Verity for she's a good girl and no wanton, but I won't have you pointing fingers at me.” And to bring that home I grinned at Mary. “I know how loose your own breeches are, Fred!”

  Old Mary gasped at that, and to my shock she went for me. She had muscles herself from hauling kegs of ale all her life, and she gripped my shoulders hard and shook me. Meanwhile Fred roared like a stag and disappeared from the window, on his way down. Trapped, my skull rattling from the shaking, I began to think that last thrust had been a bit too bold.

  But I have never been one for hypocrites. I had a breed of Christianity beaten into me as a boy by my high churchman of a father, whose whippings seemed to demonstrate to me the non-existence of God rather than the opposite, for if He lives why would He permit those struggling to believe to suffer so? Catch me if you can, punish me as you will, but spare me your cant and your piety!

  Little enough of this flashed through my head as I loosened the grip of the innkeeper's wife on my shoulders and scarpered. And even as I ran I saw that bit of the Comet slide down through the air, sparking and brightening, dropping toward the south-east and so descending ahead of me in my flight, a Star of Bethlehem guiding a man who was anything but wise.

  * * * *

  I soon got through the heart of Jedburgh, which is pretty beside its river but has been battered by centuries of war between English and Scots, its poor abbey burned and looted over and over, leaving it a stunted and fearful sort of place, and I wasn't sorry to shake its dust from my boots. From Jedburgh town I meant to head off down Dere Street, the Romans’ old track, cutting across the country to join the Great North Road at Newcastle. With any luck I would find a bit of transport before I had worn out my poor feet with too many miles.

  I had long mapped out various routes for the day when escape from Jedburgh should become necessary. My final goal was to return to London, full of opportunities for a fellow like me, and I hoped that by now the various misdemeanors that had caused my father to curtail my Philosophical studies at the university there and haul me off to teach in Edinburgh would have been forgotten, if not forgiven—although the likely existence of a few young Hobbeses running around among the Cockneys countered that. My return from Scottish exile so far had got me only to this border town, where, lazy to a fault, I had got stuck for a year. But now at last I would resume my southward route toward the metropolis.

  As it happened the road passed Fred Partridge's own farm, and I remembered how I had trod this track many times in search of the delights of young Verity—damnable bad luck she had got with child! But the circumstances were less happy now. Though it was Fred's own fists I mostly feared I was cautious as I walked a field boundary, eyeing the rude farmhouse and the tumbled stables and the big barn that Fred liked to boast he had built himself with his father. The sun was up by now, a pale ghost that shed no heat. I stumbled a bit on soil frozen hard as Roman concrete, and the winter cabbages in the field glistened with frost.

  And suddenly my shadow sprawled over the ground afore me, cast not from the sun, which lay ahead of me, but from behind, and it shifted as I watched, quite unnatural. I whirled around, afeared that some lout of Fred's had after all come after me with a torch or a lantern.

  But it was nothing human that cast that shadow. It was that bit of the Comet, the fragment of the tail that was falling out of the sky. It had been a mere spark of light, a star, but now I could see it had grown into a lump, irregular, a glowing potato that tumbled as it fell. It sparked and flashed all over. I heard a kind of roaring, too, like a distant storm approaching.

  And as I watched those few seconds I heard that roar grow louder, and the potato swelled larger, and I realized that this spitting monster was falling to the ground right on top of me!

  I ran, a healthy instinct born of a lifetime of cowardice. I made for the nearest shelter, which was Fred Partridge's barn. Still the light brightened, still that dread roaring pounded my ears, and I felt a breath of hot wind. As I fled into the barn a pair of cows in their byre gazed at me with dull surprise.

  There was an enormous bang, a flash like a detonating sun, and a fist mightier than Fred's slammed me in the back. I flew through the air and hit something hard and I knew no more!

  * * * *

  II

  It was dawn when I was knocked unconscious, night when I woke. Thus I slept through the whole of a day.

  Night it might have been but the light was bright, a silver glow that sent shafts between the slats in the roof of the barn, and made a cow low fretfully. The light was not the moon, of course, but the Comet that still dominated the sky.

  All this I saw as I stirred in my impromptu sick bed. It turned out I had been flung across the barn to clatter against a wall; having been lucky to survive the Comet fall, I was lucky again to drop, insensible, into a heap of straw that cushioned me—and then the straw had kept me warm through the long day, for otherwise I might have perished from the cold. Lucky too was I to find, as I shifted my limbs, that I was whole in the skeleton despite my battering, and uninjured save for an aching chest and a pounding in the head. Lucky several times over then, though you might not have thought it from my self-pitying mumbling as I sat in my straw, sore, giddy, hungry, thirsty, and desperately cold, and picking bits of urine-flavored straw from my mouth. I have never been brave in the face of injury.

  But I shut up when I heard voices outside, and saw the flicker of lanterns. I was still on old Fred's farm, I reminded myself, and had best be careful who found me there. I crept out of my shadowed corner to see what I could.

  I was amazed to find that little had survived of the barn, save the end of it where I had been thrown. Where the barn's big doors had opened, a great pit had been dug in the earth, shallow like a saucer but as wide as fifteen or twenty paces, and perhaps five deep at its center. Around this the roof was blown away and the doors and walls scorched and fallen. One of those poor cows still stood in her byre, lowing softly as if she needed milking; of the other nothing remained but a splash of blood and some bits of hide. It was evident a great explosion had taken place here.

  And at the center of the crater, sitting like a potato on a plate, was a sort of boulder, perhaps six feet high and as broad, its surface scorched and steaming, evidently still hot. Despite my concussion I immediately deduced that this object must be that piece of the Comet tail that I had seen penetrate the air. Under a coating of soot, I thought it glimmered, like ice. Oddly enough I also saw what looked like hen's eggs nestling in the rubble of that crater, and that I could not understand; perhaps they had somehow been thrown here from a shattered hen coop.

  But I heard voices again, and ducked back into the shadows. Here came Fred Partridge with a party of his hinds, equipped with rakes and shovels. He set them to clearing away the debris of the shattered barn, and I thought that he might have been waiting out the day until the crater cooled enough for his men to approach, and get it filled in. But the ground in that pit was still too warm and the steaming lump too hot to handle, as one wretched hind learned at the cost of a scalded palm.

  Stuck in my shadows, hungry and chilled to the bone, I waited as the lads abandoned their tools and drifted off.

  Then I crept forward to spy out the land. The Comet light was bright. I had hoped to find a deserted field, and a way off this wretched farm and back to Dere Street and salvation. But a bonfire had been lit not far from the barn, and two of Fred's hinds sa
t huddled in blankets beside it. For all his piety old Fred was always a greedy sort as well as a hypocritical lecher, and I thought he must be setting his barn to protection against thieves. Cursing, I retreated into the dark.

  Gnawed by hunger and thirst I hunted through the ruin of that barn, but there was nothing to eat but the stale bread I had put in my pockets, and even the cows’ water was frozen solid in its trough. I even ventured to explore the crater for those hen's eggs. It was too hot to walk through, but I lay on my belly and reached in to pluck out one of those scattered eggs. But I snatched my hand back, for the egg was hard and heavy and cold and slick—an egg of ice! Whatever these strange formations may have been, none of them had been near a hen—and there was nothing for me.

  For a chap who believes he is so clever, it took me a while to recognize there was one tap in that barn that might run for me, and that was the udder of the one surviving cow, who remained ignored by Fred and his boys. I hurried over to the poor animal, found a knocked-over bucket, and rummaged around for her teats. I am no farmer's hind, and my only knowledge of milking was acquired through observing one or two farmers’ daughters or maids whose own pretty udders I had my eye on at the time. Still I labored at my task, grateful for a bit of warmth, and the cow mooed her relief, and thus we were united in our physical needs. Mammals, the lot of us! It is only hubris that makes us think we are better than the beasts of the field, so like us in every particular.

  After I had drunk of her lactation, warmed and refreshed, I stuffed my coat and hat with straw and huddled in a corner to endure the night. It was as uncomfortable an evening as any I have spent.

  I am city bred, having been born in Bristol, and had lived my life mostly in London and Edinburgh, capitals both. I was schooled in London and went up to university there at age fourteen, but was dismayed by the cold modern teachings of the Natural Philosophers with their Systems of the World and their Natural Religion: “Reason, not Revelation, boys!” This may be the new fashion of the day, but I was as repelled by a vision of a God who is absent from the Universe as by one who clouted me daily through my father's fists. I almost missed the old Tyrant!

  Well, though my brain is fine enough I became a poor sort of scholar in that place, and at nineteen was forced to flee London through scandals of my own making, which I will not test the reader's patience by listing here. As for Edinburgh, I soon discovered a certain facility for teaching, but I fell into my former sorry habits, and the old Presbyterian whose daughter I tupped there had gone one better than Fred in holding me to account, and after a thrashing I was stood up to marry the girl. We had some months of contentment, I would say, when we could get away from the father, and I think we both felt it in our hearts when she lost the bairn before its birth. After that I went to the bad once more, and was close to gambling away the last of her dowry when the latest Jacobite rebellion erupted and it became prudent to decant Jack Hobbes to somewhere less full of men with steel and muskets, and I fled for the border country.

  In short, in all my complicated career I had never been a farmer, and huddled in that barn that night I envied old Fred's hinds not one jot. Those fellows held to their duty, however. All night I heard their conversation continue, ever more drunken.

  And during that long night I watched what became of the bit of heaven that had fallen into Fred Partridge's barn.

  For a start I saw where those eggs came from.

  They were propelled out of the soot-covered kernel itself ! One by one the eggs sailed through the air like dried peas spat out by a boy. It took a bit of watching to observe this, for it was not a frequent event. Stranger yet, the eggs underwent their own evolution. They would burst open with a snap like melting ice and scatter fragments onto the earth. And then—so I surmise, for I did not observe this directly—those fragments gathered themselves up again into a sort of dome, perhaps the width of a man's hand, shallow as an upturned saucer. You could see that the dome incorporated bits of the earth, from the way the ice was streaked and dirty.

  A curiosity it was, but I am no nature-watcher; my intelligence is earthier than that. I fancy I slept a little.

  * * * *

  I was disturbed by a tickle, an awareness of something moving before my face, small and furtive. A rat, perhaps. Without opening my eyes I swept my arm around, fancying I might make a snack of him in the hinds’ bonfire. But my reward was not the squeaking I had expected but a kind of tinkle, like a falling icicle. Startled by that, I sat up. I found a little heap of icy fragments before me: a thing like a lens, perhaps six inches across, and fine rods no wider than straws, broken, splintered and piled up on the ground. It had not been there when I fell asleep.

  I looked about. Outside the ruined barn the sky was brightening, the sun's light seeping behind the Comet tail. The bonfire had burned down, and Fred's two hinds lay sleeping, one snoring loudly. At last, I saw, I had a chance to make a run for it. But I was distracted by motion in the pit before me.

  There was a stirring in the broken earth around one of those domed forms. Then, to my surprise, thin pipes scraped up out of the ground like fast-growing flowers, standing quite vertically, making a sort of crown all around the lip of the dome. These icicles were perhaps a foot long; I had never seen the like before. Then, stranger yet, the dome itself quivered and shook, and with an icy grind it rose up from the ground, rising through its cage of icicles to the top. Now I saw that the “dome” was as convex beneath as above, and that this ice artifact was in effect a lens, opaque and streaked with the dirt of old Fred's floor.

  The lens settled for a moment, and then the icicles themselves began to move. They slid under the carapace of the lens, remaining dead straight, clustered, moved again. And as they did so the lens itself began to shift to and fro, the whole assemblage migrating across the pit, inch by inch. The thing was something like a toy of a Greek temple on the move, those upright pillars sliding around beneath the lenticular roof. It was a strange manner of movement quite unlike anything I had ever heard of, though I have read plenty of travelers’ tales. And yet it had the semblance of life, like an ungainly crab made of ice. I realized that such a beast had disturbed me as I slept, and I had thoughtlessly smashed it up.

  And now that I knew how to see them, I realized that more of the creatures were shifting about their pit, those odd lenticular bodies sliding up and down the ice pipes, and shimmying to and fro with that odd, disturbing movement that would become so familiar across all of England in the days to come. Some of them, indeed, seemed to me to be venturing away from the pit, and even out of the barn. I could not count them; there might have been hundreds.

  And I heard voices coming from outside the barn, old Fred's gravelly tones as he rebuked his drunken hinds, and the shouting of men and the barking of dogs. Distracted by the ice novelties I had let slip my only chance of a fast escape from that wretched place. Trapped, still! Steadily cursing my own foolish curiosity, I slithered through the shadows to see what was what.

  * * * *

  This time Fred had gathered a veritable army, armed with staves and half-pikes and even a few fusees, fowling pieces, and the like. I observed this with a sinking heart, imagining Fred was setting off a hunt after me, his fox. But the men were heading not for the barn but in the direction of Fred's farmhouse, and I shook off my funk, for now I observed that the farmhouse too was damaged.

  The house was always a rude affair, built largely of stone robbed from the abbey in Jedburgh. Now one end of it, where the kitchen was built, was crumpled up and disheveled, the brick wall cracked, the chimney stack askew. I wondered if some fresh piece of Comet had come tumbling to earth, but I had heard nothing in the night. But I saw that what had damaged the house had come from not from above the earth but from beneath it. The kitchen had been nudged up by a great dome of dirty ice that had pushed its way rudely out of the ground, quite regular, the cousin of one of the tiny domes I had observed in my pit—but huge, as I could tell from the perspective of the men who walked aroun
d it and even over it. All this had erupted from the earth overnight.

  And as I framed that thought I felt the ground shudder like the slope of Etna, rattling the barn and alarming the cow. I thought I knew what was to come next, and that if I were one of those hinds around the big dome I would run fast.

  I did not have long to wait. Needles of ice shot out of the ground all around the hillock of ice, no splinters this time but pillars each a yard wide. Earth was scattered, the ground shook, and those hinds ran like mice. The pillars grew like weeds until they were perhaps a hundred feet tall.

  And then came the second act as that mountain of ice shuddered and clean ripped itself out of the frozen turf, and rose to the top of its circle of pillars with a deafening scrape. It was astounding; save perhaps for waterfalls and floods, I had never seen such a mass in motion. And if I was startled by all this, imagine how it was for the hinds, men whose minds were a void of ignorance broken only by the pious babblings of their ministers. Fred Partridge, meanwhile, was hopping about furiously, because the rise of the ice lens had toppled over his farmhouse as easily as a man kicks over an ant hill.

  Already those great limbs broke from their circular stations and slid back and forth beneath the belly of the lens, and gradually began to carry that ice carcass across the countryside, like legs bearing an animated tabletop. Fred and his men fled without looking back, and I was free at last.

  But the spectacle wasn't done yet. I saw another beast, even bigger, erupt from Fred's turnip field beyond. And then came another up from beneath the riverbed that shattered a water-mill into flying splinters, and another beyond that, so far off it was misted by distance, huger even than its Titanic brothers. As soon as they emerged all these beasts began the purposeful movement of the first, those limbs moving back and forth like sunbeams cast through a cloud. It did not take me long to deduce that the beasts were converging on Jedburgh.

  In the turmoil of the ‘Nineteen, as the Stuart-led mob of hairy-arsed highlanders had come down from the hills, Jack Hobbes had scarpered quick. Likewise now as those ice monsters bore down on the unfortunate town I ran the other way, heading south-east down the rutted old Roman road, ran until my lungs were fit to burst!