“Ha ha!” Shatz Abel whooped, throwing his shovel into the air where it disappeared into a blowing cloud of snow and was lost.
“What are you doing!” Dalin said in alarm; he approached the pirate, who was now jumping into the air, letting his huge body land in the most convenient drift of snow underneath.
“Ha!” Shatz Abel shouted.
Now Dalin Shar stood over the other man, gripping his shovel like the weapon he had fantasized about.
The pirate looked up at him and produced fresh laughter.
“Ha! Young King Shar, you now present the picture I proposed! Go ahead! Hit me!”
Shatz Abel began to laugh uncontrollably—and when he abruptly lunged up at Dalin, the king stumbled back, shouting, and sought to strike at the pirate in self-defense.
Shatz Abel easily warded off the blow, then grabbed Dalin’s shovel from his hands and threw it after his own, into the storm.
“You’re mad!” Dalin shouted in alarm, as Shatz Abel continued to laugh; now the insane man rose out of the snow, laughing, and lumbered forward to take the king in his grasp.
“Let me go, you lunatic! We’re both going to die!”
“No!” Shatz Abel laughed. “We’re both going to live!”
The pirate wrestled briefly with Dalin, turning him around in the direction of their habitat set within the side of a bill.
“Look!” Shatz Abel laughed.
Dalin stared; through a fog of snow, he could just make out the cleared-away entrance of their home.
“Don’t you understand?” Shatz Abel laughed, as Dalin continued to stare.
Realization began to dawn on the king.
“I can see it!”
“Yes, young fool! You can see it! The storm is lessening! Soon it will stop, and we’ll be on our way!”
Dalin pushed himself out of the pirate’s grasp and jumped into the air, giving his own whoop of joy. “Finally!” he shouted.
“Yes! Finally, Sire!”
While Shatz Abel stood laughing, Dalin scrambled off into the snow and began to search desperately. “What are you doing?” the pirate laughed.
“The shovels!” Dalin shouted in mock desperation.
“We’ll need them to finish digging out our supplies!”
Two days later, surrounded by provisions in their habitat, with the crystal-clear sky of Pluto, SunOne hanging warmly in one corner, greeting them from their window, Shatz Abel was in a more somber mood as he outlined their plan for the fiftieth time.
On a crudely constructed map, the pirate elucidated their difficulties. One X represented their present home; another, two feet away, represented Tombaugh City. In between, there were tentative sketches and much blank space.
“The trouble is, I just don’t remember,” Shatz Abel said. “I wasn’t exactly provided with a viewer and satellite maps when they dropped me on this snowball. And there wasn’t much to bother pirating during my years in that profession.
“So we have our eyes, and what equipment we possess. A hundred kilos is a long stretch to do by foot. I’ve had a long time to think about this trip, Sire, and I’m afraid that’s the way we have to go. Ballooning is out; we need to go north and would never get there with the wind always blowing west. I’ve salvaged parts from two crashed satellites and a downed shuttle over the years, but even a sled hits difficulties twenty kilos or so out. Trouble is, the land is just too rough for a spell. It gets very icy beyond that, but it’ll be impossible to get a sled past the rough spots. The farthest I’ve gone myself is twenty-two kilos, which took me three days there and back. I saw enough in that time to know that once this trip is committed to, there’s no turning back.”
He stabbed a thick finger at a smudge on the map, a little ways from their home.
“That’s as far as I got, laddie. A gorge that stopped me cold. I think it’s called Christy Chasm. You’ve seen Vales Marinares, on Mars? Shrink it down, and coat it with ice, and now you’ve got an idea.”
“How far did you explore to either side? Maybe there’s an ice bridge—”
Shatz Abel laughed. “Ice bridge? The monster is a kilometer wide, at least. We’ll have to descend. And that’s where things get ill-defined…”
For the first time since Dalin had known him, the pirate showed not only doubt but a touch of something else—fear, almost.
“What is it?”
“It’s not anything I’ve mentioned before, because it’s more of a rumor than fact. But there are stories about Christy Chasm.”
When the pirate merely frowned, Dalin said, “What kind of stories?”
Shatz Abel rose, rolled his map into one ham-sized fist and cried, “Bah! Best to forget it. I never was one for fairy tales myself.”
Dalin stood his ground. “Tell me.”
Looking flustered, Shatz Abel finally relented. “There’s stories of goblins down there. Creatures of Pluto that were here before SunOne or any human, sheet-white things made of frost or fog that no one’s ever seen. Or lived to tell about, anyways.”
Dalin laughed. “The boogeyman? Here?”
Shatz Abel frowned. “Best not to laugh about it, Sire.”
Dalin laughed even harder. “There’s nothing to do but laugh! If boogey stories are the most we have to contend with, I say let’s start now!”
The pirate continued to frown, until Dalin Shar approached to slap him on the back.
“Look at us!” Dalin said with bluster. “Me the fearless one and you the scared pup! Do we have a choice about making this trip, Shatz Abel?”
“Why, no…”
“Then why are we standing here making excuses for not going? We each have work to do! You want to get off Pluto as much as I, don’t you?”
“Yes. But it’s best not to make light of such stories—”
Dalin’s enthusiasm flared to mild anger: “Do we have a choice?”
His resolve reinstated, Shatz Abel said, “No.”
“Then let’s get ready to leave!”
Filling his barrel chest with air, the pirate said, “Yes! Let’s do that, then!”
Dalin laughed; and soon, as SunOne touched the horizon’s mountains outside with twilight, they had resumed their packing, Shatz Abel singing a lusty pirate song with his nearly bottomless courage and enthusiasm renewed:
“So keel-haul the blighter
From cockpit to stem,
And pillage that freighter—
What we can’t sell we’ll burn!”
Dalin hummed along lustily; but in his heart a clutch of questions and new terrors were fighting for dominance: Goblins? Boogeymen? No one’s lived to tell about?
And though he smiled and hummed and packed with enthusiasm, inside he said: What next?
When SunOne was rising again, they were ready to leave.
To the north, between two far mountain peaks, their destination glowed invitingly. It would be dawn there, too. In Tombaugh City there were real streets, and bustling people, and restaurants and shops. And shuttlecraft, and Tombaugh Port—from which, somehow, they would get off Pluto.
“Ready, Sire?” Shatz Abel shouted.
Taking his eyes from the northern horizon, Dalin surveyed their sledded gear, which, with SunOne’s help, threw tall shadows on the cleared patch before their habitat, whose window was now dark for the first time since Dalin had arrived on Pluto.
He tried to feel something for this hovel cut out of a mountain, which had kept him alive and sheltered him for three years—but he felt very little, except the wish to be moving. He found himself turning to the sky, to once again search for tiny Earth in all those stars—
“All aboard, my liege! Ready to pull anchor!”
Dalin jumped onto Shatz Abel’s sled, as long as five men and as wide as three, its runners of nearly frictionless sheathing cut from the skin of the abandoned shuttle. The sail, on a mast fashioned from the bow-mast of the same shuttle, now unfurled, with Shatz Abel’s expert guidance to its fully massive length,instantly caught the eight-mile
-an-hour wind.
Immediately they slid forward, up the incline of their cleared hollow and onto the newer snow plains of the recent storm; and Shatz Abel, whooping from his position in the center of the sled, maneuvered the sail and turned them north.
“Away we go, my king! Away we go!”
Dalin shouted into the wind and looked back at the rapidly disappearing hill that had, up until a few moments ago, imprisoned him.
No wonder I feel nothing for it.
“Yes! Away!” he shouted.
“Ha ha!” the pirate answered, as they sped on. Soon even their hill was lost to sight behind them, and Dalin knew that he had seen it for the last time.
They covered ten kilos by sled the first day, then tented a camp and covered the final twelve by midday the second. SunOne was high overhead, washing out stars to either side of it yet leaving a black corona of night sky at the horizon, when Shatz Abel lowered the sail and they coasted to a stop at the far edge of a level plain.
Before them, the land changed radically. What had been smooth snow became jagged gullies and sharp hillocks; but the far mountains seemed noticeably closer.
“Foothills of the Plutoman Apennines,” Shatz Abel explained. “From now on it’s rough and rougher, till we get to the mountains themselves. Luckily we get to pass between two of ‘em across a valley. The others would surely kill us.”
Dalin studied them with their single pair of ancient binoculars; they looked much as they had when he had dropped into the atmosphere courtesy of Wrath-Pei: like jagged teeth waiting to bite him.
“I suppose we’ll see,” Dalin said.
“That we will. If …”
He stopped himself and said, “Time to secure whatever gear we can’t bring, and get ready for our trek tomorrow.”
Overhead a moving dot of light caught Dalin’s eye; it seemed to detach itself from SunOne and move off toward the distant mountains.
Shatz Abel said, “You’ve seen your first transport heading for Tombaugh City, my king. We’re now close enough to pick them up as they drop. A good sign, no?”
Dalin nodded. “A good sign.”
They worked, securing and camouflaging their gear, pitched camp again, and waiting for the next morning.
“Now we walk!” Shatz Abel said.
Dalin’s pack felt as if he were carrying himself on his own back; but he said nothing, noting that the pirate’s pack was twice the size of his own. The snow boots he wore seemed oversized, but he soon came to see their advantages, when they hit the first deep pool of drifted snow and the boots kept him from sinking as their webbed soles automatically widened.
“Look back!” Shatz Abel ordered, when they stopped to rest briefly an hour later.
Dalin looked behind them and was surprised to see that nothing looked familiar. It was as if they had dropped onto another planet; for the moment, at least, gone were the snow plains and familiar hills; the landscape in all directions looked more like ancient Mars after an infrequent snowfall, pocked with glazed boulders and rusty rocks.
“It gets even stranger ahead,” Shatz Abel promised. “Ready?”
Dalin adjusted his pack and breathed deep. “Ready,” he said.
They trudged on, snow dust gradually giving way to stretches of black, interspersed with lengthy patches of ice. Dalin’s boots adjusted as well as they were able; on the ice, tiny spikes were activated, keeping him from falling; but once or twice, in the middle of black-red sand, his boots mistook this substance for snow and widened, nearly pitching Dalin over. He learned to trudge carefully.
But soon there was more ice than anything: a bluish plain swept with snow devils that twirled like dervishes around them. Cracks in the surface appeared, sometimes forming strange pictures; some looked like spider webs, or a Screen’s interference patterns, or the tendrilous heart of a nebula’s star-forming region. One looked like an Earth cow; another like a distorted human face.
“Dalin! Look out!”
The king was so absorbed in finding pictures that he nearly stepped into a crack wider than a man. His gripping boots stopped him and he looked down into dark blue nothingness as Shatz Abel reached his side.
The pirate shone a hand lantern down into the crevasse, but still they could see no bottom; to the contrary, the chasm seemed to widen out as it deepened.
“That would have been the end of you,” the pirate said.
Dalin backed away, resolving to look at no more pictures in the ice.
They walked on.
The plain became as an ocean, as wide and far as the eye could see—save for something in the near distance, a disturbance or frozen roiling in the ice that became more pronounced as they approached it. Beyond, the ice flattened again to the northern horizon, until the jagged peaks of the Plutonian Apennines thrust up like ravenous fangs at the sky.
Pointing to the disturbance in the ice, Shatz Abel said, “Christy Chasm!”
And soon enough they reached it.
Dalin now understood the pirate’s description: it did, indeed, resemble Screen pictures Dalin had seen of Mars’s great canyon, Valles Marinares, which cut that planet nearly in half across a third of its circumference. Take the red tones from Valles Marinares, replace them with gray-blue ice, shrink it in scale for Pluto, and the two would be indistinguishable.
“How deep is it?” Dalin asked.
“I reckon nearly a kilometer,” Shatz Abel said. “I wasn’t about to descend by myself, last time I was here.”
Dalin studied the length of the abyss, as well as its breadth, and said, “I understand what you meant now about no possibility of a bridge.”
“It’s just too wide, lad. We could spend a month trying to go around it or hoping for it to narrow out. Best just to go down and then go up.”
Dalin nodded. “I agree. When?”
“Tomorrow morning, after a good long rest.”
Again Dalin nodded.
Shatz Abel grinned. “Unless, of course, you’d like to go back.”
“Still thinking of goblins?” Dalin asked.
But seeing the look on the pirate’s face, as well as feeling the knot that formed in his own stomach, Dalin was sorry he’d opened his mouth.
“Best to get that rest, Sire,” Shatz Abel said, subdued as he pulled their tent from his pack and began to erect it at the chasm’s lip.
That night Dalin dreamed of something like white shadows in the wind, something that flapped before him before melting in the morning’s daylight.
They began their descent at dawn.
There was an ice shelf fifty meters below their picked spot, and first they lowered their supplies down. Then Dalin prepared to go over the side, secured to a thick rope gripped in Shatz Abel’s beefy hands.
“Now remember, boy, I’ll let you down easy. Anything out of the ordinary, give a tug. Test the ice shelf before stepping onto it.”
Dalin nodded, and in a moment Shatz Abel had lowered him into the yawning chasm.
Dalin looked down; through the glare of ice he saw the ice shelf, and the supplies piled on it, rising toward him. And then a trick of light, a glint or shimmer that floated like a wave between him and the pile of provisions–
Dalin yanked hard on the rope; immediately his progress stalled and he hung suspended in midair, staring hard at the spot where he had just seen the optical manifestation.
There was nothing there: the slight wind whistled coldly, pushing him askew; the day was bright with blue ice that hurt his eyes.
It was nothing.
“Boy! What’s wrong?” came Shatz Abel’s shout; and now the huge pirate’s form appeared above him, holding the rope in one hand, as if Dalin were a marionette.
“Nothing!” Dalin shouted up. “Nothing’s wrong—keep going!”
“Are you sure, Sire?”
“Yes!”
“Very well …”
Shatz Abel stepped back, and in a moment Dalin was lowered once more.
And almost immediately he saw the shimmer aga
in: like a flapping mist that passed between himself and the ice shelf.
He almost tugged at the rope again, but refrained.
His body approached a section of the ice shelf just to the side of the gear; as he reached it, Dalin tugged on the rope to stop his progress, and tentatively tapped on the ice with his boot.
It seemed solid enough.
“Dalin!” Shatz Abel shouted.
“It’s all right! Let me down all the way!”
The rope lowered, then went slack; Dalin removed it from his waist and now stood firmly on the ice ledge—
It crumbled beneath him.
Calling out, Dalin sought with his hands to grab at the still-solid ledge where the provisions were stacked; but the ice was slick, and he felt himself sliding down. He had a brief look below and saw nothing but chasm, slivers of broken ice tumbling into an endless hole.
He looked up and saw Shatz Abel’s shocked face looking over the ledge above, his hand still gripping the slack, now-useless rope.
Dalin fell into nothingness.
And then was surrounded by a shimmering sheet of light, which seemed to float out of the walls of the chasm.
The goblin.
Chapter 8
Of all the useless and unpleasant tasks Carter Frolich had to perform, his weekly audience with Prime Cornelian was the most irksome.
Though he always tried to control his anger and impatience, it always broke to the surface, to the detriment of everything he was trying to accomplish. Like it or not, he continued to need the High Leader; like it or not, his fate and the fate of his beautiful Venus were tied to the Martian warlord.
“Cornelian, how are you?” Frolich said to the High Leader’s loathsome Screen image. Already having blundered, he sought to correct himself: “I mean of course, High Leader, how are you?”
“Well enough,” the Martian said. He seemed preoccupied, as he often did—which was fine with Frolich.
“Are things well?” Frolich said, seeking to be diplomatic; the last thing he expected was a truthful answer.
Journey - Book II of the Five Worlds Trilogy Page 5
