Rings of Ice

by Piers Anthony

  “But we can’t see the north from here, and it’s not a circle.”

  “The cloud layer is becoming reflective. The image bounces off the bottom surface and reaches us inverted. We only see part of it, and naturally it’s distorted.”

  “You mean we’re seeing around the horizon?”

  “Two and a half thousand miles around,” Zena said. “Maybe more. The effect will get stronger as the canopy thickens.”

  “Not the devil…”

  “Not the devil!” They exchanged smiles.

  The garden languished, but the sky grew in splendor. Halos of light appeared around the dimming sun—huge circular rainbows, with all their colors. At first they were hazy, extremely faint, but now they could be seen by anyone. Sometimes there was a double ring, and sometimes only a semicircle.

  Still that serpent of Mindel writhed across the welkin, growing darker and stronger in its changing manifestations. Some days it hardly showed in the high haze; other days it seemed ready to swallow the sun itself.

  Zena had a sobering thought: What if Mindel did not collapse before Riss arrived? Then the third ring of ice would overshadow the second canopy, and break down on top of it, forming either a double canopy or a doubly thick one. Which would make the eventual rain that much more severe.

  And if that rain took longer than two months, as it probably would, considering how much water had to be cleared this time, the fourth ring, Wurm, would form on top of that. There would be not two, but three canopies breaking down together.

  It would be one hell of a deluge.

  Gus was trying the radio again, while Gloria washed the dishes. “Gus, I want to apologize,” Zena said.

  He glanced up. “Forget it.”

  “I haven’t even told you what for!”

  “It’s about the radio, isn’t it? I knew you’d understand when you thought it out.”

  “Have you found anything?”

  “Lots of stuff. Nothing we can use. It would help if I could talk to them, ask questions.”

  “I understand there are five stages of dying,” Gloria said.

  “Nobody’s going to die!” Gus snapped.

  Gloria was unshaken. “The first is denial. The second is anger.”

  “How about action?” Gus growled.

  “I’m thinking of inevitable death, that the patient knows is coming. Like leukemia, or—”

  “Diabetes,” Zena put in—and again was sorry. She spoke too often, now, before she thought.

  “God won’t let it happen,” Gus said.

  “God let the rings of ice happen!” Zena said.

  “That’s the third stage,” Gloria said. “Bargaining with God. I’d respect prayer more if it came at occasions other than the last resort. The fourth stage is depression—and the last is acceptance.”

  “Karen has reached it,” Zena said. “I haven’t.”

  Gloria glanced at her. “You fight these things like a man. How would you like to exchange bodies with me?”

  Gloria meant no offense, but the question floored Zena. Assume a male body? Her stomach knotted.

  “Don’t tease her, Glory,” Gus said. “She’s not transsexual, she’s merely inhibited. Once she feels at ease, she’ll be all woman.”

  “Thanks!” Zena said bitterly.

  “That’s the way it goes,” Gus said. “First denial, then anger—and finally acceptance.”

  He was right about the anger, anyway.

  Gus came out to look at the garden. “It isn’t doing well,” he said.

  Zena’s hand tightened on the hoe. “Give it a chance! It’s only been two months since the rain stopped.”

  Gus carried a fistful of the little packages they had found in a garden store. “Carrots,” he read off the first. “Ready in 78 days.” He looked at Zena’s row of carrots. “Are they going to be ready in 18 more days?”

  Obviously they weren’t. The tops were growing, but no significant carrot roots were forming.

  “Lettuce,” Gus read. “Ready in 45 days.”

  “We’ve been using it for a month,” Zena said with a certain pride. “Also the chive.”

  “But none of it is going to seed,” he pointed out. “What will we have for the next season?” He looked at another package. “Radish—ready in 23 days.”

  “I don’t know what went wrong there. We got a few from the first planting, but these later ones don’t seem to be developing. Maybe the soil—”

  “Cora—12 weeks. Pumpkin—112 days. Cucumber—”

  “What are you getting at?” Zena said irritably.

  “I’m getting at the fact that there is a pattern to what isn’t growing. We have not had a single plant form a root—a storage root—or go to seed. Not after Mindel spread its shadow across here.”

  Zena realized it was true. “Those first radishes were before that! The other plants—”

  “That’s right. Those plants need light to grow on—direct sunlight. Maybe ordinary clouds don’t interfere too much, but Mindel is high and thick, with extraterrestrial impurities. The vegetables can grow, but the light trigger that makes them mature never comes. Maybe the soil affects it too; Gunz-water has soaked into it. But we aren’t going to be able to do much more farming.”

  “We can eat the leaves,” she said. “Carrot tops can be cooked, and turnip greens—”

  Gus smiled. “Sure, Zena. I’m not deprecating your effort here. You’ve put in so many hours it’s a wonder you’re not stir-crazy. I just wanted you to understand that we can’t live entirely on your garden, now or ever. Greens won’t keep; we need solid vegetables like potatoes, or grains, for storage. Or meat—plenty of it.”

  “We’ve pretty well cleaned out the edible wildlife we can catch around here,” Zena said. “Foundling has a good nose and the hunting instinct.”

  “Except the bugs. I understand insects taste pretty good when you know how to fix them.”

  “Gus!”

  “Yeah, it turns my stomach too! So we’ll have to do what the others are doing, the way Thatch reports from his reconnoitering. Go fishing.”

  Floy emerged from the bus and came over. “Hey, I thought of something. I’ve been reading that Annular book.”

  “It’s good reading,” Gus said.

  “It says people must have lived a long time, back when there was a canopy, thousands of years ago. Like in the Bible, maybe they really did live nine hundred years.”

  “Could be,” Gus agreed. “The rays of the sun kill every living thing.”

  “But the sun is necessary to reproduction,” Zena pointed out. “The plants—”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Floy said, perturbed. “If we need the sun to grow to maturity, will I be frozen like this, never quite big enough—”

  “You’re okay as you are,” Gus said. “Don’t let anybody tell you differently!”

  But this time Floy was not put off by his compliment. “Never able to have a baby of my own? I don’t care if I live nine hundred years, if I can’t—”

  “No babies!” Gus exclaimed. “God, I hadn’t thought of that! We can’t have a new order without—”

  “We were talking about fishing,” Zena said. “That’s dangerous.”

  “Fishing? No more dangerous than starving,” Gus said.

  “The waters of the world have changed, Gus. There’ll be unpredictable currents, strange tides—and probably few fish.”

  “Should be plenty of fish!” he said. “All that water—”

  “But it’s fresh water! It will drive the salt fish away.”

  “Now where could they go?” he asked reasonably.

  “Or kill them off in huge numbers. There could be disease—”

  “Thatch says the fish exist. Maybe new species are taking the place of the old.”

  “It doesn’t happen that rapidly! It would take them generations.”

  “Why don’t we just go down to the shore and see?”

  She sighed. Gus was usually right, even when he was wron
g. A useful and obnoxious trait. “What do you want me to do?”

  “And me!” Floy put in.

  “Help make the net.”

  “The net?”

  “The predator fishes come in close to land, Thatch says. Chasing the scavengers. The best way to catch them is by netting them. We may have to use the bus to haul the net out of the water, but we’ll have plenty of food.”

  “It can’t be that simple.”

  “It isn’t. The word is those fish are fierce.”

  Zena laughed, and so did Floy. “Fierce fish!”

  “The kind that survive in rough times,” he said.

  It took them a week to gather the line to make a strong net, and ten more days to fashion it. Gus insisted that every intersection be knotted precisely, and that every loop around the edge be tested. He had questioned Thatch closely and made many diagrams of his own, becoming expert in his fashion. Gus did not, however, do any of the finger-bruising work himself.

  A question of a different and significant nature had developed in Zena’s mind, meanwhile. By the time they were ready for their first fishing expedition, she was sure, But whom should she tell—and when?

  They piled into the bus and drove down the mountain. The ride was rough but strangely scenic. Zena had been intent on her gardening and net-making, and had not traveled since the ill-fated gasoline raid.

  The forest was much as she had known it. But abruptly at its edge the change began. She remembered the desolation of bare rock, where the rain had washed out every sign of human habitation or construction except for sections of the highway and the most solid buildings. Now it was all green.

  The moss had sprouted everywhere, covering the scoured surfaces and softening the bleak outlines. But this did not improve the look of the land; it rendered it even more foreign than before.

  The steeper slopes, however, remained bare. In some places there was a desert of packed sand with multicolored rocks projecting jaggedly. Tufts of grass grew up around the edges of the rock, and a number of tall weeds had sprouted—but none of these had gone to seed.

  Below, the land leveled out somewhat, and the vegetation became more lush. Still it was a matter of scattered clusters of trees, a light covering of weeds, and the rest filled in by the moss. There were no flowers. Small canyons had been cut through what had once been rolling hills.

  The shore, too, was strange. It was not the ocean, but an arm of the Tennessee River, backed up behind the Appalachian range, maintained at super-flood stage by the continuing runoff from the mountains. By the time it dropped to more reasonable levels, Mindel’s rain would begin, and it would become a sea in fact as well as appearance.

  Now dying trees projected from the placid water, and there was no formal beach.

  “First we have to cast the net, and get it out of sight below the water,” Gus said. “Let it sink right down to the bottom. Then we’ll have to attract the fish.”

  “We can’t spread it properly from the shore,” Thatch said.

  “Well, swim out with it. It has to be done right.”

  “It’s not safe,” Thatch said. “If there are large predators—”

  “Of course it’s not safe!” Gus said. “But they’re not here yet. We’ll have to lay it in a hurry.”

  But Thatch still balked at swimming far out, and Gordon agreed. “We’ll have to make a boat,” Gordon said.

  They searched the shoreline for driftwood, and came up with assorted branches and trunks. They lashed this pile into a kind of raft. It looked clumsy and barely seaworthy, but it floated. Thatch lay on top of the pile and reached out and down with his hands to paddle on either side. Slowly he moved outward, trailing the net.

  Fifty feet out he let the net sink, and started back. He floated higher now, for the net had been heavy. But his drift continued outward. “Oh-oh!” Gordon said. “There’s a tow!”

  Zena saw a flash of something farther out to sea. “They’re coming!” she cried.

  “We should have anticipated this!” Gordon exclaimed. “I’ll carry out a rope. When I get there, pull us both in— fast!”

  He dived into the water and stroked quickly toward the raft. But the fins of the approaching fish were faster. “They’ll both get caught!” Zena cried.

  Karen ran to the bus and brought out their rifles. She handed one to Zena. “Aim very carefully!” she cautioned.

  Gordon reached the raft and scrambled on board. The thing shifted dizzily. “Pull!” he shouted. “Pull! Pull!”

  Gus just stood there. Karen whirled around, the rifle leveled. “Pull that rope!” she screamed at Gus.

  Startled, Gus began pulling. Karen aimed at the turbulence in the water and waited. “For a moment I thought you were going to shoot Gus!” Zena said.

  “For a moment I thought so too,” Karen muttered. “We can’t afford to sacrifice the only two real men we have!”

  Thatch and Gordon were splashing madly to drive off the fish. Fins were circling completely around them now. Zena could make out the shapes in the water only dimly, but they looked inordinately large. And fast.

  Then one leaped out of the water. Zena gasped. “What is it?”

  “Shark, maybe,” Karen said. “Or a sawfish. I don’t know, but it must be a yard long. No trout, for sure! We’re in trouble!”

  Another jumped, and Karen’s rifle went off. The fish splashed back into the water and immediately there was a vigorous disturbance there. “You hit it!” Zena cried.

  “Oh, yes, I’ve used a rifle before,” Karen said, preoccupied. “I doubt we can kill those things with bullets, but the blood makes them kill each other. Whatever you do, don’t hit the men!”

  Zena was in little danger of doing that. The image of men falling before her machine gun was before her, and of flaming gasoline, and the acute physical pain of first intercourse came again—her punishment for those killings. She did not dare fire!

  Then another giant fish sailed out of the water toward the raft, and her rifle went off.

  “Too high!” Karen said. “Bring your aim down.”

  “Porpoises!” Zena exclaimed. “Some of those are porpoises! Friends of man!”

  “Not any more,” Karen said. “Maybe when man was dominant, they were friends.” Her rifle fired again. “But these are too small! Could they be giant piranhas?”

  “How could a whole new species evolve in just a few months?”

  “If there were canopy conditions before, canopy species could have evolved then,” Karen said. “Variants of the ones we know now. With the canopy back, they might metamorphose, returning to that prior state.”

  “I doubt it,” Zena said. But she knew that animal life was capable of many unexplained phenomena—and there were the strange, vicious fish before her.

  Now Gus had succeeded in hauling the raft into shallow water. It snagged on the bottom and began to fall apart. The two men jumped off and waded ashore. “The teeth on those things!” Gordon said.

  “The net! The net!” Gus shouted.

  They all rushed to their stations, hauling on the lines in unison. The net came up and forward, trapping the fish. The weight seemed to be enormous.

  “Look at that!” Gordon cried.

  Zena glanced at him, thinking he had seen a sea monster in the net; but he was staring at the sky. She followed his gaze, and froze in place.

  A terrific band of color was there, like a rainbow, but almost a complete circle. In fact it was a double circle around the sun except that the sun itself could not be seen. Instead there were two or even four imitation suns intersected by the rings, each with a fiery comet-tail pointing outward. Fault rainbows were tangent to the outer ring, two below and one above. This brilliant complex filled the sky to the west, hanging above the water, making the cloud canopy seem suddenly darker.

  Gus let go the net and dropped to his knees. “The end of the world!” he cried.

  “Hold that net,” Karen cried. But it was too late; the net had sunk, and the strange fish were es
caping over the rim to free water.

  “A sign from God!” Gus said, still staring.

  “It’s a prismatic effect of Mindel!” Gordon said. “You ought to know, it’s in your book. A complex canopy halo formed by refraction through the cloud layer.”

  “But never like this!” Gus said.

  “Riss just arrived,” Zena said. “Two canopies joined together, intensifying the effect. Dramatically.”

  Slowly Gus came out of it. “I—suppose it is. I didn’t know it would be like this, so bright, so big.”

  “Meanwhile we have lost our catch,” Zena said ungraciously.

  “We’ll try it again tomorrow,” Karen said. “We do have the dead fish—what’s left of them.”

  “We’ll camp here tonight and try first thing in the morning,” Gordon said. He scooped out a piece of fish. “Not much here for us. I’m no naturalist, but these specimens seem quite strange. They must be freshwater species, but not the conventional game fish. I wonder—Loch Ness —”

  “What are you talking about?” Gus demanded. “Loch Ness is in Scotland.”

  “The Loch Ness monster. There have been stories about many such creatures in isolated lakes of the world—that may not be so isolated any more. If conditions have been changed to favor them over the conventional species—”

  “That’s what I was saying!” Karen said. “And if that’s so, we’re in for an age of monsters like never before!”

  “But these are fish,” Gus said.

  “Strange ones,” Karen reminded him. “Who knows where they’ve been hiding, waiting for this day, this season?”

  Zena watched the image in the sky, now fading. “It is rather like a sign,” she said.

  Karen looked at her. “You mean something by that, girl. Is it what I think you mean?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Great news! We’ll have a party!”

  “Is it?” Zena asked. “Great news?”

  But Karen was already telling the others. “Zena’s got her baby! She’s pregnant!”

  Zena didn’t have the nerve to look at Thatch to see how he was taking it. “Without marriage, without love,” she murmured, feeling let down now that the news was out. “How can it be good news?”