Silverhair

by Stephen Baxter

  Copyright

  About

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part 1: Family

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part 2: Lost

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Part 3: Matriarch

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  * * *

  This book was

  copied right, in

  the dark, by

  Illuminati.

  About the

  e-Book

  TITLE: Silverhair

  AUTHOR: Baxter, Stephen

  ABEB Version: 3.0

  Hog Edition

  Silverhair

  Stephen Baxter

  Dedication

  To Sandra, and the Calves of Probos.

  Acknowledgments

  My research for this book took me to the Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe; the Chobe National Park, Botswana; the George C. Page Museum at the Rancho La Brea tar pits, Los Angeles County; the Natural History Museum, London; and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. I'm indebted to Eric Brown for reading the manuscript, and for feedback to Dr. Adrian Lister of the Department of Biology, University College, London. Dr. Lister's masterly book, Mammoths (Macmillan, 1994), was an essential resource, as was Gary Haynes' Mammoths, Mastodons and Elephants (Cambridge University Press, 1991). Any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations are, of course, mine.

  Stephen Baxter

  Great Missenden

  August 1998

  Prologue

  IT IS A FROZEN WORLD.

  To the south there are forests. But to the north the trees — hundred-year-old spruce barely six feet tall, stunted by cold and wind — grow ever more thinly scattered, until they peter out altogether.

  And beyond, where it is too cold for the hardiest tree, there is only the tundra: an immense, undulating plain, a white monotony broken by splinters of rock. Very little snow falls here, but unimpeded winds whip up ice crystals, giving the illusion of frequent blizzards. Even the outcropping rock has been shattered by millennia of frost to a rough, unstable scree.

  Under the silent stars nothing stirs but the ruffled surface of the larger lakes, tormented by the breeze. The smaller lakes are frozen completely. From this place there is nothing but snow and ice and frozen ocean, all the way to the North Pole.

  It seems impossible that anything should live here. And yet there is life.

  There are birds here: snowy owls and ptarmigan, able to survive the bleakest midwinter by sheltering in holes in the snow. And later in the season many thousands more birds will migrate here from their winter homes across the planet. More life, plant and animal, lies dormant under the snow, waiting for the brief glory of summer. And to the north, on the frozen ocean itself, live polar bears and their prey: sea mammals like seals and walruses.

  And there is more.

  The stars are scintillating now. A vicious wind is rising, and the ice fields to the north are shrouded in a gray haze.

  And out of that haze something looms: a mountainous shape, seemingly too massive to move, yet move it does. As it approaches through the obscuring mist, more of its form becomes visible: a body round as an eroded rock, head dropped down before it as it probes for saxifrage buds beneath the snow, the whole covered in a layer of thick, red-brown hair.

  The great head rears up. A trunk comes questing, and immense tusks sweep. An eye opens, warm, brown, intense, startlingly human.

  This is not a vision from prehistory. This is real: a living thing a hundred times as massive as any human, a living thing prospering in this frozen desert.

  The great trunk lifts, and the woolly mammoth trumpets her ancient songs of blood and wisdom.

  Her name is Silverhair.

  Part 1: Family

  The Story of the Hotbloods

  THE FIRST CYCLE STORY of all (Silverhair told Icebones, her calf) — the very first of all — is of long, long ago, when there were no mammoths.

  In fact, there were no wolves or birds or seals or bears.

  For the world belonged to the Reptiles.

  Now, the Reptiles were the greatest beasts ever seen — so huge they made the Earth itself shake with their footfalls — and they were cunning and savage hunters.

  But they didn't have things all their own way.

  Our ancestors called themselves the Hotbloods.

  The Hotbloods were small, timid creatures who lived underground, in burrows, the way lemmings do. The ancestors of every warm-blood creature you see today lived in those cramped dens: bear with seal, wolf with mammoth. They had huge, frightened eyes, for they would emerge from their burrows only at night, when the Reptiles were less active and less able to hunt them. They all looked alike, and rarely even argued, for their world was dominated by the constant threat of the Reptiles.

  That was the way the world had been for ten thousand Great-Years.

  It was into this world that Kilukpuk, the first of all Matriarchs, was born. If you could have seen her, small and cautious like the rest, you would never have imagined the mighty races that would one day spring from her loins. But despite her smallness, Kilukpuk was destined to become the mother of us all.

  Now, Kilukpuk had a brother, called Aglu. He was hard-eyed and selfish, and was often accused of hiding when foraging parties were being readied, and of stealing others' food — even stealing from infants. But Aglu was sly, and nothing was ever proven.

  Despite his faults, Kilukpuk loved her brother. She defended him from attack, and did not complain when he took the warmest place in the burrow, or stole her food, for she always dreamed he would learn the error of his ways.

  Now, there came a time when a great light appeared in the night sky.

  It was a ball of gray-white, and it had a huge, hairy tail that streamed away from the sun. The light was beautiful, but it was deadly, for it turned night to day, and made it easy for the Reptiles to pick off the foraging Hotbloods. Great was the mourning in the burrows.

  One night Kilukpuk was out alone, digging in a mound of Reptile dung for undigested nuts — when suddenly...

  Well, Kilukpuk never knew what happened, and I don't suppose any of us will.

  The Earth trembled. There was a great glow, as if dawn were approaching — but the glow was in the west, not the east. Clouds boiled across the sky.

  Then the sky itself started to burn, and a great hail of shooting stars poured down toward the land, coming from the west.

  Kilukpuk felt a new shaking of the ground. Silhouetted against the red fire-glow of the west, she saw Reptiles: thousands, millions of them — and they were running.

  The Reptiles had ruled the world as gods. But now they were fleeing in panic.

  Kilukpuk ran back to her burrow, convinced that if even the gods were so afraid, she, and her Family, were sure to die.

  The days that followed were filled with strangeness and terror.

  A great heat swept over the land.

  Then a rain began, salty and heavy, so powerful it was as if an ocean was emptying itself over their heads.

  And then the clouds came, and snow fell even at the height of summer.

  Kilukpuk and her Family, starved and thirsty, thought this was the end of all things. But their burrows protected the Hotbloods, while the creatures of the surface perished.

  At last the cold abated, and day and night returned to the world.

  No
Reptiles came. There were no footfalls, no digging claws, no bellows of frustrated hunters.

  At last, one night, Kilukpuk and Aglu led a party to the surface.

  They found a world that was all but destroyed. The trees and bushes had been smashed down by winds and burned by fire.

  There were no Reptiles, anywhere.

  But the Hotbloods found food to eat in the ruined world, for they were used to living off scraps anyhow. There were roots, and bark that wasn't too badly burned, and the first green shoots of recovering plants.

  Soon the Hotbloods grew fat, and, without the ground-rattling footfalls of the Reptiles to disturb them, began to sleep well during the long, hot days of that strange time.

  But there came a time when some Hotbloods did not return from the nightly foraging expeditions, just as it had been before. And then, one day, Kilukpuk was wakened from a dreamless sleep by a slam-slam-slam that shook dirt from the roofs of the burrows.

  Aglu, her brother, came running through the burrows. "It is the Reptiles! They have returned!"

  Kilukpuk gathered her calves to her. They were terrified and bewildered.

  After that, things rapidly got worse. More foragers were lost on the surface. The Hotbloods became as fearful and hollow-eyed as they had ever been, and food soon began to run short in the burrows.

  But Kilukpuk could not help but notice that not all the Hotbloods were suffering so. While the others were skinny and raddled by disease, Aglu and his band of companions seemed sleek and healthy. Kilukpuk grew suspicious, though her suspicion saddened her, for she still loved her brother deeply.

  At last, one night, she followed Aglu and his companions to the surface. She saw that Aglu and the others made little effort to conceal themselves — in fact, they laughed and cavorted in the Moonlight.

  Then they did a very strange thing.

  When they had eaten their fill of the roots and green plants, Aglu and his friends climbed up low bushes and hurled themselves at the ground. They pushed pebbles off low outcrops and let them dash against the ground. They even picked up heavy branches and slammed them against the ground — all the time roaring and howling as if they were Reptiles themselves.

  And when an unwary Hotblood came poking her nose out of the ground, Aglu and his friends prepared to attack her.

  Immediately Kilukpuk rose up with a roar of rage. She fell on Aglu and his followers, cuffing and kicking and biting them, scattering their pebbles and their sticks.

  The Hotblood whose life had been spared ran away. Aglu's followers soon fled, leaving Kilukpuk facing her brother. She picked him up by the scruff of the neck. "So," she said, "you are the mighty Reptile that has terrified my calves."

  "Let me go, Kilukpuk," he said, wriggling. "The Reptiles have gone. We are free—"

  "Free to enslave your Cousins with fear? I should rip you to pieces myself."

  Aglu grew frightened. "Spare me, Kilukpuk. I am your brother."

  And Kilukpuk said, "I will spare you. For Hotblood should not kill Hotblood. But you are no brother of mine; and your mouth and fur stink of blood. Go now."

  And she threw him as hard as she could; threw him so far, his body flew over the horizon, his cries diminishing.

  She went back to the burrows to comfort her calves, and tell her people the danger was over: that they need not skulk in their burrows, that they could live on the land, not under it, and they could enjoy the light of the day, not cower in darkness.

  And Kilukpuk led her people to the sunlit land, and they began to feed on the new plants that sprouted from the richness of the burned ground.

  As for Aglu, some say he was ripped apart and eaten by his own calves, and they have never forgotten the taste of that grisly repast: for they became the bear and the wolf, and the other Hotbloods that eat their own kind.

  Certainly Kilukpuk never gave up her vigilance, even as she grew strong and sleek, and her fertile loins poured forth generation after generation of calves. And her calves feared nobody.

  Nobody, that is, except the Lost.

  1

  The Headland

  SILVERHAIR, STANDING TALL on the headland, was cupped in a land of flatness: a land of far horizons, a land of blue and gray, of fog and rain, of watery light no brighter than an English winter twilight.

  It was the will of Kilukpuk, of course, that Silverhair should be the first to spot the Lost. Nobody but Silverhair — Silverhair the rebel, the Cow who behaved more like a musth Bull, as Owlheart would tell her — nobody but she would even have been standing here, alone, on this headland at the southwestern corner of the Island, looking out to sea with her trunk raised to test the air.

  The dense Arctic silence was abruptly broken by the evocative calls of birds. Silverhair saw them on the cliff below her, prospecting for their colony: the first kittiwakes, arriving from the south. It was a sign of life, a sign of spring, and she felt her own spirits rise in response.

  A few paces from Silverhair, in a hollow near the cliff edge, a solid bank of snow had gathered. Now a broad, claw-tipped paw broke its way out into the open air, and beady black eyes and nose protruded. It was a polar bear, a female. The bear climbed out, a mountain of yellow-white fur. She was lean after consuming her body fat over the winter, and her long, strong neck jutted forward; her muscles, long and flowing, worked as she glided over the crusted snow.

  The bear saw Silverhair. She fixed the huge mammoth with a glare, quite fearless.

  Then she stretched, circled, and clambered back in through the narrow hole to the cubs she had borne during the winter, leaving a hind leg waving in the air.

  Amused, Silverhair looked to the south.

  The black bulk of a spruce forest obscured her view of the coast itself — and of the mysterious Nest of Straight Lines that stood there, a place that could be glimpsed only when the air was clear of fog or mist or snow, a sinister place that no mammoth would willingly visit. But Silverhair could see beyond the forest, to the ocean itself.

  Here and there, blown snow snaked across the landfast ice that fringed the Island's coast. Two pairs of black guillemots, striking in their winter plumage, swam along the sea edge, mirrored in the calm water. Pack ice littered the Channel that lay between Island and Mainland. The ice had been smashed and broken by the wind; the glistening blue-white sheet was pocked by holes and leads exposing black, surging water.

  Away from the shore the sea remained open, of course, as it did all year round, swept clear of ice by the powerful currents that surged there. Frost-smoke rose from the open water, turned to gold by the low sun. And beyond the Channel, twilight was gathering on that mysterious Mainland itself. It was the land from which — according to mammoth legend recorded in the Cycle — the great hero Longtusk had, long ago, evacuated his Family to save them from extinction.

  And as the day waned she could see the strange gathering of lights, there on the Mainland: like stars, a crowded constellation, but these lights were orange and yellow and unwinking, and they clung to the ground like lichen. Silverhair growled and squinted, but her vision was poor. If only she could smell that remote place; if only it sent out deep contact rumbles rather than useless slivers of light.

  And now heavy storm clouds descended on that unattainable land, obscuring the light.

  In the icy breeze, the air crackled in her nostrils, and her breath froze in the fur that covered her face.

  That was when she saw the Lost.

  SHE DIDN'T KNOW what she was seeing, of course.

  All she saw was something adrift on the sea between Island and Mainland. At first she thought it was just an ice floe; perhaps the unmoving shapes on top of the floe were seals, resting as they chewed on their monotonous diet of fish and birds.

  But she had never seen seals sitting up as these creatures did, never seen seals with fins as long and splayed as those — never heard voices floating over the water and the shore of ice and rock, as petulant and peevish as these.

  Even the "ice floe" was strange, its
sides and one end straight, the other end coming to a point like a tusk's, its middle hollow, cupping the seal-like creatures inside. Whatever it was, it was drifting steadily closer to the Island; it would surely come to ground somewhere south of the spruce forest, and spill those squabbling creatures on the shore.

  She knew she should return to the Family, tell them what she had seen. Perhaps Owlheart or Eggtusk, in their age and wisdom — or clever Lop-ear, she thought warmly — would know the meaning of this. But she had time to watch a little longer, to indulge the curiosity that had already caused her so much trouble during her short life...

  But now she heard the stomping.

  It was a deep pounding, surging through the rocky ground. A human would have heard nothing, not even felt the quiver of the ground caused by those great footfalls. But Silverhair recognized it immediately, for the stomping has the longest range of all the mammoths' means of calling each other.

  It was the distinctive footfall of Owlheart herself: it was the Matriarch, calling her Family together. The birth must be near.

  When Silverhair had been a calf, the Island had rung to the stomping of mammoths, for there were many Families in those days, scattered across the tundra. Now there was only the remote echo of her own Matriarch's footfall. But Silverhair — nervous about the birth to come, her curiosity engaged by what she had seen today — did not reflect long on this.

  The new spring sun was weak, a red ball that rolled along the horizon, offering little warmth. And already, heartbreakingly soon, it was setting, having shed little heat over the snow that still covered the ground. The last light turned the mountains pink, and it caught Silverhair's loose outer fur, making it glow, so that it was as if she were surrounded by a smoky halo.

  She stole one last glimpse at the strange object in the sea. It had almost passed out of sight anyway, as it drifted away from the headland.