Rings of Ice

by Piers Anthony

  “I’m trying not to. You’re too nice a girl to—it wouldn’t be right. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You said that. Maybe you need to start with Karen.”

  “Yes. She’s experienced. She offered—”

  “She did!”

  “She has to take a lot of food, so she said she wanted to make it up to us any way she could. She thought it would make things easier for you and Floy if she just handled everything in that line. Until things were more settled.”

  “She’s probably right. But she doesn’t dare have a baby.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Gordon—?”

  “No. He’s ambiguous about sex.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I suppose I should have.”

  “Thatch, you knew it had to come to this eventually. You can’t turn down experience, then plead no experience.”

  “I think I’d know what to do if there were love.”

  If there were love…

  “You know, Thatch, when I came down here, I was afraid. But I see that I don’t have to be.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you stop saying ‘yes’!”

  “Sorry.”

  “Because you aren’t like the men I have known. Or thought I knew. You really aren’t going to push.”

  “I’m glad you understand. It wouldn’t be right.”

  Once she would have accused him of homosexual inclinations, but now she knew that his relationship with Gus was not of that nature. The two men had their peculiar social and intellectual interdependence, but in other matters they were separate. Instead she tried another thrust: “Because there must be love, and you don’t love me.”

  He was silent.

  “Did I say something wrong?” she asked after a moment.

  “No, of course not. There can’t be love unless it’s mutual.”

  She felt a thrill of something unfamiliar. “Are you saying you do?”

  “No, no, no, I didn’t say that. It isn’t right.”

  She felt the sting of tears in her eyes again. “Thatch, you never said anything!”

  “There was never anything to say.”

  “I can’t love anyone. I don’t know why.”

  “Maybe you never got to know anyone well enough.”

  “Did you?”

  “Gus always handled things.”

  “Especially the girls!”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I can’t stand Gus.”

  “Maybe you should get back on your bed now.”

  She took a breath. “No, I came here for a purpose.”

  “But I told you—”

  “Couldn’t you do it platonically? Weeks of group effort have gone into fattening this lamb for the slaughter! Mustn’t waste it. You are the least of evils, you know.” She was aware that she was making it about as inviting as an enema, but couldn’t help her own perversity.

  “No. Not platonically. Not with you. It would destroy—”

  “Destroy what?” What was the answer she sought?

  “Any chance for a real…” He did not finish.

  He wanted her love, not her body. He wanted too much.

  “When a horse breaks a leg,” she said, “you shoot him. Because it’s better than letting him suffer. You don’t have to love the horse.”

  “What has that to do with—”

  She laughed, not easily. “I hurt my ankle.” Did people still speak of a pregnant girl as one who had ‘sprained her ankle’?

  “It will get better.”

  “You’re not much for analogy, are you?”

  “No.”

  “It has to be done, and if I don’t do it this time I’ll never get up my nerve again. It would disgust me to have to get aggressive, and I might retch on you.” She lifted her head to look at him. “Please, Thatch—I’ll just lie here, and you do it. Quickly. I’ve gone as far as I can.”

  “I don’t like this,” he said, and she knew he meant it. She was not insulted, knowing his reason.

  “I know it’s not fair to you. I wish I could be like Karen. But I can’t.”

  “If you were like Karen, I couldn’t love—”

  “So it has to be like an operation,” she said quickly, refusing to hear what would embarrass her. Love was a gift that had to be returned. “And I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.”

  “I would never want to hurt you.”

  She sat up and struggled out of her clothes. “I want to be hurt. I didn’t realize it until just now, but I want to be punished. Because I fouled up the gasoline mission.”

  “Zena!” he said, sounding anguished.

  She would have felt better if he had told her to shut up in gutter language. But of course that was not his way. Thatch always gave way to others, concealing his substantial talents even from himself. So he became less than he might be—and would not budge from that subservience.

  She forced another laugh. Who was she to talk about being less than one might be! She had the figure and the health to put Karen to shame—but the very notion was sickening. “I’m making you out to be an instrument of torture, aren’t I.” She put her hand on his, and felt him shaking. “I take it all back. If I need punishment, it surely dates from decades ago. I have to get pregnant, so Gus will get off my back, and I’d rather it be yours. Maybe you could call that love.”

  “I wish it were,” he said wistfully.

  I wish it were, too, she thought—but could not say it. “You do know what to do, don’t you?”

  “Tell me to stop, if—”

  She was taken aback. She had anticipated yet another demurral, and perhaps an extension of the debate until Gordon returned, at which point the affair would have to be cut off. Thus she would gain credit for trying—and failing through circumstances.

  She called herself a hypocrite, and decided to go through with it no matter what. She spread her legs and pulled him against her. He was heavy, making breathing difficult. The position wasn’t right, and he had to back off to adjust. Maybe he’ll give up! she thought wildly.

  But she had really given him a directive, and Thatch always followed through on directives, however unreasonable they might seem. There was a probing, and, oddly, excitement. She was crossing a long-feared boundary, going off the high board with the icy water far below… and suddenly there was pain.

  She gasped for breath. Slowly, shallowly, it came. She realized that she had blacked out for an instant. She turned her head, feeling the weight of her eyeballs, and saw her surroundings.

  She was in a space ship, breaking free of Earth’s well of gravity. The lone civilian meteorologist to be consulted on this classified paramilitary project.

  Somewhere there was pain. She squirmed, but could not alleviate it at the moment.

  “You are conversant with the power crisis,” the officer said to her. “With civilian mismanagement, fossil fuels banned, and nuclear equipment not yet sufficient, we have to have a cheap, nonpolluting, now source of power. Obviously, this is the sun. There is enough energy in a few square miles of sunlight over Earth to produce a million kilowatts of clean power. The problem is putting the mirrors into orbit. If we can find a way to focus that light without mirrors, we’ve got it licked.”

  “It will take more than a million kilowatts to fill Earth’s power deficit,” Zena said.

  “We plan to set up the equivalent of a thousand million-kilowatt stations,” he said. “In a band about the equator. This will be an adequate temporary relief to the energy shortage.”

  “Just like that? A billion kilowatts? With no mirrors?”

  “No artificial mirrors. Actually, ice is a fine reflective surface. Picture what a ring of ice around the world would do.”

  “You would still have to get the ice there—and you could hardly take it from the oceans.”

  He showed her a slide. “This is a nebula,” he said. “A small one, containing only a few billion tons of matter— ninety-five per cent of which is ice. It is drif
ting in a course that will miss Earth by only a few million miles.”

  “Suddenly I see. You want to divert this icy nebula to intersect exactly with the orbit of Earth. And use all that ice to set up a cloud of crystalline mirrors.”

  “Precisely. The ice will form a pattern of concentric circles about the Earth, each highly reflective. Stations on the ground will receive that focused light and process it into usable power. In less than a year the energy will be flowing—the cheapest source yet available—and the cleanest.”

  “Too simplistic,” she said. “The mere presence of ice rings will not guarantee a usable focus of light. They would have to be precisely oriented. And the ice would soon melt, because Earth is much closer to the sun than Saturn is. And the energy required to divert the nebula even slightly—”

  “Here are the calculations,” he said with military smugness. “You will see that the orientation is, indeed, precise—an equatorial orbit angled to provide the necessary amount of reflection. There will be four rings, the outer ones shielding the inner ones from precipitous heat so that they will not melt rapidly. The system does not have to be permanent; it is projected to last fifty years, during which period more durable sources of energy will be developed. And as for diverting the nebula—”

  He paused with a satisfied smile. “Come this way.” He showed her a gravity-free chamber in the center of the station. “Observe the cloud of ice crystals on the left,” he said. He pushed a button, and a jet of vapor shot out, making her feel inexplicably queasy. The water quickly crystallized, forming a cloud of frozen particles that drifted on toward the center of the chamber.

  “Now observe the action of Substance J-2.” A smaller jet came from the opposite side, but this did not crystallize. “Only a twentieth the volume of the ice, and far less than that in mass—but an interesting reaction.”

  Zena already knew better than to inquire into the chemical identity of “J-2.” These people guarded their secrets jealously, with or without reason. An offshoot from sinister researches?

  The J-2 cloud met the ice. The explosion that resulted was soundless, since the chamber was airless. Ice shot out in a hemisphere—and the main body of the ice cloud reversed course. “Explosive interaction,” the man said. “The J-2 is almost completely destroyed, but the recoil shifts the direction of the remainder of the ice. This will work in deep space as readily as here, as it occurs in a vacuum. J-2 is cheap, as these things go; all we have to do is fire the proper quantity to intersect the nebula at the proper angle, and it will change that nebula’s course.”

  “It needs more consideration,” she said, though she was impressed. It appeared that they really could bring the nebula to Earth! “There are too many opportunities for error, and we don’t know what effect such a series of rings would have on the climate of the planet.”

  “That’s why we brought you in,” he said. “The conservation lobbyists squawked like a bunch of chickens when they heard about this—we’re running down the source of that information leak now—and demanded a reassessment. Well, we’re reasonable. You have forty-eight hours to study the proposal before implementation.”

  “Two days!” she exclaimed. “I can’t begin to appraise it in that time! It will take weeks on a computer to consider the meteorological impact—”

  “Sorry—our computer’s tied up. But we have plenty of paper and a pencil for you. You’ll find everything’s in order.”

  She felt another pain. “No, Thatch—of course it doesn’t hurt,” she said, wincing.

  The figures did seem to be in order, on gross examination. But they were all military figures, provided by the organization that had worked out this grandiose plan. Therefore they were suspect.

  “By the way,” the officer said as the two days expired. “There has been a small modification. The original attitude of the rings was inefficient for reflectivity, so the orbits have been changed from equatorial to polar. That will put the rings broadside to the sun, as it were, instead of edgewise. That one small change will multiply the reflective power a hundredfold, with no increase in investment.”

  Zena was stricken. “But the heat! The rings will melt and disintegrate!”

  “Oh, they’ll break down faster than they otherwise would have—but even as little as a decade will provide more power than half a century the other way. It is well worth it, since our power crisis is now.”

  “But the water!” she cried. “What do you think will happen to it, once the rings melt?”

  “It’ll dissipate in space,” be said nonchalantly. “Some will fall to the ground. What of it?”

  “What of it! Have you any idea what that amount of water would do to the climate of the planet? It would be the second Deluge!”

  “Let’s not exaggerate,” he said. “Now it is time to watch the J-2 missiles being launched. This is a great moment for Earth!”

  “You can’t do it!” she cried. “This is a disaster! At least run the revised figures through your own computer and get a projection for the time of breakdown. If—”

  The officer frowned. “I knew it was a mistake to let a flighty civilian in on this. Our computer is occupied with more important matters than a rehash of a minor variation in one project. Now are you going to watch the launch or aren’t you?”

  “The rape of Earth!” she cried. “You don’t know what you’re doing!” It was like a physical pain, a literal rape, making her writhe.

  “I’m sorry,” Thatch said. “I—I got carried away, I guess. Did I hurt you?”

  Zena reoriented. “Oh, no, of course not, Thatch!” He had hurt her, but she knew she must never admit that. “I was remembering things.”

  “Were you—were you ever raped?” he asked, looking at her with concern.

  Not before this! “Thatch! What a notion! Of course not.”

  “You screamed something about rape—”

  The rape of the Earth. “No, that was figurative. I— never mind! I must have passed out, and dreamed. Reliving something that happened weeks ago. Nothing to do with you.”

  “You passed out?” He sounded disappointed.

  What should she say now? “This experience—it was too much to assimilate all at once. My mind must have shied away. I’m sorry if it made it worse for you.”

  “No, you were very much alive! I thought—” He broke off.

  She had a certain sympathy. He had thought she was writhing with the pangs of fulfillment, when actually she was reliving the colossal blunder that had precipitated the deluge. What a blow to his fragile ego!

  “You did the right thing,” she told him. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said disconsolately.

  Her stomach started to heave. She turned her face aside quickly—but it was a false alarm. It was laughter.

  “So it is an annular system!” Gus exclaimed. “Just as Vail said.”

  “Close enough,” Zena said. “I don’t know whether there was ever a natural one, but we have an artificial one now.”

  “It’s natural! All you did was divert the nebula to bring it near Earth. Everything else happened just the way Vail said. If there’s one ice nebula, there must be others; if even one passed Earth, it would account for everything.”

  “Yes,” she said, not having the energy to quarrel. She still hurt from the siege of the night before, and from her prior injuries and exertions.

  “Except for one thing,” Gus said. “You say this ring was in polar orbit, not equatorial. So it wouldn’t act like Vail’s rings, would it?”

  “That’s complex to ascertain. Certainly the polar ring is less durable—in fact, it broke down in days, not years. But what the exact pattern of rainfall would be—”

  “In the Vail canopy, the rain falls mostly at the poles,” Gus said. “At least it does at first. The sky opens up, there, in a kind of circular window, and the stars shine through. We had our rain right here—the canopy never really formed.”

  “We certainly did have rain right here!�
� Gloria said. She was cooking something appetizing from unappetizing scraps: her special talent, much appreciated by the group. Gordon, oddly, could not cook well at all.

  “In the equatorial orbit the rings match the spin of the planet,” Zena said. “The canopy matches, too. But with this polar orbit, the breakup should be much less uniform. Worst at the equator, probably. Just one more consequence of the original blunder.”

  “When the military mind blunders,” Gus said, “it doesn’t do it small!”

  Zena thought of the raid on the gasoline tanks that Gus himself had planned. The type of mind was much the same.

  “But at least the rain is over,” Floy said.

  Zena shook her head. “It is not over. This was only the first ring, of four—and not the largest”

  “Oh, no!” Floy wailed.

  “How do you know?” Gus asked.

  “I studied the figures. They planned on four rings, each in a different orbit. The first and smallest in the center, as it were; the others outside, protecting it and contributing their own reflectivity. The second one out was to have about six times the mass of the first, for example. Of course all that came to naught when they set up the polar orbit, because the energy of the sun struck broadside—”

  “They didn’t send all the rings at once?”

  “No. One at a time. Spaced about two months apart.”

  “They couldn’t!” Gus exclaimed. “The first one has broken down all civilization. No way to mount the technology two months after this!”

  Zena shook her head. “Would it were so! They sent the batches of J-2 out at 48 hour intervals. They arranged it so that the first contributed less mass and more velocity, so it arrived faster. The others are larger and slower—but inevitable. They are all on their way right now.”

  “Maybe they goofed it up,” Floy said hopefully.

  “I doubt it,” Zena said. “The military mind is much sharper on detail than consequence. They won’t have many little mistakes to interfere with their big mistake.”

  “Four deluges!” Gus said, pushing his fists into the sides of his head. “That’s like the four parts of the last ice age.”

  “Gunz, Mindel, Riss and Wurm,” Zena agreed morosely. “We’ve had Gunz,” Floy said. “The others will be worse?”