Rings of Ice

by Piers Anthony

  Zena was nauseated, but the two animals were stimulated by the fumes. Dust Devil stopped at the door, not liking the rain; Foundling hesitated, then went on out. In a moment the cat followed. They did not return immediately, so Zena knew they had been fed… something.

  The human party had meat for supper. No one was able to take more than a bite, but each person did that much. They had promised, and it had to be. Zena knew the same word was going through all their minds, though it was unvoiced: cannibal.

  Next morning Thatch strapped on a pistol—they had plenty of firearms now, because of the spoils of the battle—and took Foundling along for a survey of the region. “Be careful,” Zena told him needlessly.

  He was back in an hour. “They’re gone,” he said. “I found their camp, deserted.”

  The days went by. They scorched as much meat as possible so that it would not spoil, but mold quickly sprouted on it. In fact, mold grew everywhere. It seemed to have gotten its start during the Gunz rain, and bided its time until Mindel gave it the solidly wet atmosphere it needed. Karen wiped it off the furniture every day.

  Thatch’s wound healed. He never made anything of it, though Zena was sure it hurt him. This silent suffering was not a thing she understood. Most people would have used such an injury as a pretext to rest a few days, at least, but Thatch neither expected nor desired such treatment.

  One person was always assigned to guard duty, which meant marching around the palisade, getting wet. No raincoat or poncho sufficed in that downpour, and soon they changed tactics. Anyone going outside went naked. The rain was warm, not cold; the hothouse effect had heated it. Zena was not eager to doff her clothes, particularly since her abdomen was beginning to round out, but she was spared that. The others were afraid her baby would suffer if she went out or stood on her feet too long. That cut it down to three: Thatch, Floy and Karen.

  On the fifth day of rain, Karen took a hand. “Your turn to go out,” she said to Gus.

  “What?” Gus seemed not to understand.

  “What if something happened to Thatch? We all have to know our way around,” Karen said persuasively.

  “I can’t go out! It’s raining!”

  “Why so it is,” Karen said as if surprised. “You had better take off your clothes so they won’t get wet.”

  “No!” Gus said, sounding shocked.

  Karen stripped, ready for the rain. “I will not return until you fetch me,” she said, and stepped out.

  Gus stared after her. “This is ridiculous,” he said. It was all Zena could do to keep from laughing, for he was now using her own phrase. “Thatch, bring her back!”

  Thatch headed for the door, but Zena stopped him. “This is between the two of them,” she said.

  The door opened. Gus whirled around—but it was Floy, not Karen. “Something up?” she asked as she shook the water off her bare torso. “It’s not Karen’s turn to walk out, but she told me—”

  Zena brought a towel and dried her off. The girl did have a good young figure, and getting better as she grew, but she still was almost intolerably clumsy. It was better to help her than to let her bash about doing things for herself. “She says its Gus’s turn,” Zena murmured.

  “Oh.” Floy glanced at Gus, comprehending. “Good for her.” Then her eyes fell upon the blonde wig Gordon had used, and something went out of her. She picked it up, crossed to the driver’s seat, and sat down.

  For an hour Gus paced about the bus, muttering. No one else spoke. Zena could tell by his reactions the hold Karen had over him. There was a lot of woman out there in the rain!

  Thatch took Gordon’s old shirt over to Floy. Karen had laundered the blood out of it and dried it as well as possible. He put it over the girl’s still shoulders, then took the adjacent seat. The members of the group were closer now, drawn together by the common tragedy of Gordon’s death. In the same fashion the others took care of Zena, they now took care of Floy. Yet it would have been infinitely better had Gordon lived.

  At last Gus launched himself out into the rain. “Karen! Karen!” he called. “Come back!”

  As though she had just left.

  Floy looked back, the wig on her head: incongruous, because Zena was so used to the features of Gloria, the statuesque blonde, not this pinched child’s face, prematurely aged by grief. “It won’t work,” she said, and returned to her private reflections.

  Floy had had nobody, until Gordon. What would she do, what would she be, when she came out of her sorrow? Was there hope for her now?

  Fifteen minutes later Karen showed up. “I need help,” she said.

  Now Thatch went out When they returned, they were supporting Gus, who was blubbering with fear. They got him inside and put him on the back couch, soaking clothes and all.

  “I thought he could do it,” Karen said, shaking her head sadly. “But the moment the rain hit him, he collapsed. He’s terrified of falling water. He never got beyond the wall of the bus.”

  Zena shook her head. It was hard to believe that a man could be such a coward, but it made things fall into place. Gus did not boss Thatch because he was stronger, but because he was weak. “At least he tried,” Zena said.

  Time passed. Their deck of cards became worn, and the books were read and reread. Zena went through every page of the Whole Earth Catalog, knowing that it was largely an exercise in futility. The Earth was no longer whole, and none of these intriguing things could now be ordered. She was morbidly fascinated by the section on childbirth… followed by the one on death.

  She wished she could go outside. But she had to content herself with doing calisthenics for health.

  Thatch ranged more widely in his search for supplies. He reported that the rain was now eroding the forest land, forming huge new gullies. The paint had been scoured from the outside of the bus.

  One day, about a month into Mindel, he came back shaken. “I found their other camp,” he said.

  “The attackers?” Zena asked.

  “Yes. They had a home base about five miles from here, shored up with rocks. For their women and children.”

  Zena felt the ugly, familiar chill. “Children?”

  “They had too little food, inadequate shelter. They’re gone now.”

  “Children!” Zena exclaimed. “They wanted the bus for the children!”

  Thatch nodded. “It looks as if there were six men, five women, and six children of different ages. I saw their skeletons.”

  “Skeletons!”

  “They were out in the open. Their roof had collapsed, maybe after they were dead. The wild animals, the rain.

  “They must have needed the bus more than we did!”

  “They attacked us!” Gus said. “What could we do?”

  “If I had known,” Zena said.

  “They could have talked to us,” Floy said. “We might have taken the children—if they had only asked. But they came instead to rape and kill. So what happened, happened.”

  And that was true. There had been occasion for negotiation, when Gloria fetched water for the first man. But the others had cared only for deceit and violence—and had paid the awful price. And Gordon was dead.

  The Biblical forty days of the first rain had passed, but this time there was no abatement. Their carefully rationed meat diminished; what they did not eat rapidly enough, the fungus did. There was no hope of lasting out Mindel on their present supplies.

  “Only two ways to eat,” Gus said. “First, go out and kill more people…”

  “That isn’t even funny,” Zena said. But she was as concerned as any, for the baby inside her was growing large.

  “Second, we have to go fishing again.”

  And those strange, vicious fish would now be much larger and more irritable, and the constant storm would make the job several times as hard. But what else was there?

  They thrashed it out and decided. Gus would stay behind in the bus, for it could not be driven now. Zena would come, and Floy, and Foundling; Dust Devil would stay with Gus
.

  “Remember, Gus,” Karen said. “If the bus is taken over, they’ll throw you out in the rain.”

  Gus nodded. He looked terrified, and Zena felt perverse sympathy for him. Some people were afraid of rain, others of sex. A lot could be tolerated when its exact nature was appreciated. Not understood, not condoned, but tolerated, and that was sufficient.

  Still, it was ironic that awkward Floy, who could have stood guard well, was coming to haul on the net while big strong Gus, afraid of being alone, would stay behind.

  The complete net was far too bulky to carry, so Thatch fitted a smaller section in his pack. Any fish at all would be better than none.

  The descent was horrendous. This was the first occasion Zena had been out for any extended trip since Mindel began falling, and the rain was much stronger than before. She found it hard to breathe, feeling as though she were under water. It was foggy, too, so that visibility was further limited. Not only was the footing treacherous, the landscape had changed drastically. Erosion gullies had become minor canyons. Loud torrents of water smashed down the mountain. It was impossible to cross these; they could toss whole trees about and sunder them unnoticed. A puny human body would be instantly lost.

  Karen put her mouth to Thatch’s ear and yelled something. Thatch nodded agreement. He unwound the coil of rope he carried and went to each of them in turn, looping it about their middles. He hesitated before Zena, and she knew why: he was afraid of injuring the developing baby. “If I die, it dies too,” she yelled. “That’s the point of this whole expedition. Tie the rope!”

  So he tied it, still doubtful. They went on, linked like mountain climbers: Thatch in the lead, Karen second, Floy third, and Zena at the rear.

  As they descended, the mist became thicker in patches, seeming to flow down in rivers of its own. At its worst, it obscured everything beyond a few feet. They had to go slowly, because it was possible to step into a slippery gully they could not get out of.

  Even so, the scenery was phenomenal. Sheer canyon walls loomed, seeming taller than they were because the mist shrouded the upper reaches. Zena was sure the rain could not have made these so quickly; they must be faults in the structure of the mountains, formerly hidden, now exposed by the washing away of the covering dirt and gravel.

  Yet not everything had been scoured. The fungus and mildew and moss—whatever the stuff was that she had noted during the dry period—had now multiplied fantastically. The lower and partially sheltered regions were thick with mushrooms. Zena did not know whether the nutrients in the alien water fertilized this explosive growth, or whether the plant growth thrived on sediments from the catastrophic erosion, but thrive it did. Branches and trunks of trees were coated with moss, in some cases inches deep; rocks were transformed into greenish mounds; and even portions of the ground had become a resilient living carpet. The stuff was slippery when squashed, so that she was always afraid of falling. It had a vile smell when bruised.

  But Thatch had explored all this region thoroughly, noting the changes as they occurred, and he knew where he was going. Zena was appalled in retrospect, now that she saw the immensity of the ongoing changes. Thatch could have been killed any one of those days of exploration, leaving the others in the bus helpless. No one, however brave or strong, could hope to survive long here without the kind of knowledge Thatch had evolved.

  No, not quite true, she reminded herself. Karen had come out here, and Floy. Still, why had none of them told her about this?

  She knew the answer to that too. Because they had not wanted to worry her. Because of the baby.

  They stepped down into a stream bed. There was very little water here, and Zena wondered why. Most other channels were raging torrents. Then they came to a fault traversing it, and she understood: all the rushing water was being diverted into the lower crevices, leaving this one comparatively high and dry. But woe betide whoever fell into one of the nether reaches!

  They stepped carefully over the cross-fault, hearing the roar of subterranean rapids, smelling the spray from the river. The ground shuddered here, making Zena fearful that the entire section of rock on which they walked would momentarily break off and plunge into that awful abyss.

  Her pregnancy had turned her into a silly weak woman. She would have to do something about that!

  Then a scramble up a rocky incline, under a lone tree that clung to its diminished plot of earth, and down another crevice. For a moment the fog lifted, owing to some peculiarity of the draft, and Zena could see where they were going. It was like a landscape of Mars, with holes like craters and faults like crevices. Or perhaps more like Venus, considering the cloud cover.

  Thatch stopped abruptly. “Oh-oh,” he said. “Something new.”

  At first Zena did not see what he meant. Then she smelled stronger fumes, something like burning sulfur. And felt warmth—not the mild warmth of the rain, but of a furnace.

  Hot steam was issuing from a vent in the nearby rock. It hissed like an irate dragon.

  “That was not here two days ago,” Thatch said worriedly.

  “Is this a volcanic area?” Karen asked.

  “No.”

  Zena felt the unpleasant prickle of fear run up her back. “How can it be hot, if—” But she was able to answer that herself. “The subterranean rock is always hot. If a fissure reached down far enough—”

  Thatch nodded. “The ocean must be two or three hundred feet above its original level by now. That is a lot of pressure on the land. Enough to push it in, make cracks, force the layers to buckle. Earthquakes—”

  “Minor compared to what must be going on in the true volcanic regions.” Zena said. “But it certainly makes me nervous here!”

  “Nothing we can do but go on,” Karen said. “We’ll have to keep an eye on it for the next few days, however. If steam starts coming up under the bus—”

  Zena shivered. “You would think of that!”

  They continued on over the nightmare terrain. It took two hours to reach the sea—less time than Zena had expected. Then she realized why: the sea was much closer than it had been.

  “It’s not the sea,” Thatch said, realizing what they were thinking. “It’s the Tennessee Valley Lake —the same one we went to before. Much higher and closer now. But before this rain is done, it will be the sea.”

  They anchored the near side of the net to trees that had not yet been drowned or washed out, and flung the rest into the water. There was no concern about man-eaters here, but there was an obvious current.

  Then the bait; chopped-up fragments of human bone and tendon. They let these sink, and waited half an hour for the fish to discover the delicacies and gather. The theory was that the aromas would spread through the water and alert any hungry lake denizens within range.

  At length they hauled it in. There were a few small bony fish that looked unhealthy.

  Zena sighed. “I know it’s not much of a day and not much of a net, but somehow I expected better.”

  “This is a new lake,” Karen said. “The creatures we saw last time must have been a passing phase, and there hasn’t been time for a new population to develop. The original spawning beds must have been washed out. This rain is as hard on the fish as on us!”

  Floy had been idly digging in the soaking ground with a stick. She was making a fair hole, since all it took was energy and she wasn’t aiming for any specific place. “Look!” she said.

  It was a fat grub. “Bait,” Karen said.

  “I was thinking of food,” Floy said. “Must be a lot of these in the ground. It’s so wet and warm—”

  Zena made a face, but Karen took the matter seriously. “You’re right, Floy! Grubs, worms, insects—wherever there is some protected dirt, they must be multiplying explosively. If we could eat them, we would never have to stray far from home.”

  “Not so fast!” Zena said. “There is very little protected dirt on this mountain. This is a recent alluvial deposit— material carried down by the water as it slows to enter the l
ake. You can tell, because there is no moss on it. You won’t find similar deposits near the bus. And the grubs can’t be everywhere; probably this one was carried down with the dirt and only survived by chance.”

  Thatch looked at the few small fish they had netted. “I can come down here alone each day and bring back a few.”

  “Fish and grubs,” Karen said. “It won’t be much, but maybe enough to tide us through until the ocean arrives.”

  “I’d as soon eat the moss,” Zena said. Then she lifted her head, startled at the notion. “The moss—if we could eat that—”

  “But the smell!” Floy protested, wrinkling her nose. Her lip pulled up as she did it, reminding Zena that Floy’s coordination problems were not over.

  “What about the smell of some kinds of cheese?” Zena asked. “They smell like stale urine. So do some wines— and they look the part, too! We could acquire the taste, if there were enough food value.”

  Karen nodded. “You may have a point. Let’s try some.”

  “It might be poisonous,” Floy said.

  Karen harvested a handful of green from the nearest rock. “Possible, but the odds are against it. This stuff hasn’t been around long enough to have natural enemies, so shouldn’t have defenses against them. And its odor may do that job anyway.” She put the stuff to her mouth. “But if it is deadly, there’s only one way to find out.” She took a bite.

  The others watched in apprehensive silence while she chewed. “Uh, awful!” Karen said. But she took another mouthful.

  “Maybe it would taste better if you cooked it,” Zena suggested. “Cooking changes onions, rhubarb—”

  “Could be,” Karen agreed. “If we got rid of the present flavor, then spiced it up with other things.”

  Cooking did help some, and spices some more; but mainly they just had to acquire a taste for the green growth. Karen’s digestion did not suffer, so they deemed it fit for human consumption. Once they had accepted the notion of eating the foul stuff, it was like manna from heaven. Instead of fishing, Thatch went out foraging for superior flavors of moss; there were several varieties. The menu was dull, but it kept them alive when all other food was gone.