Phoresis

by Greg Egan

  Phoresis Copyright © 2018

  by Greg Egan.

  All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2018

  by Gregory Manchess.

  All rights reserved.

  Print version interior design Copyright © 2018

  by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  Electronic Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-867-4

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  subterraneanpress.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1

  Freya walked slowly across the ice, using her rake to scrape aside the thin cover of dirt and crystalline powder, peering down into the translucent slab below for any sign of a slender rootlet struggling to force its way out into the air.

  Something dark and linear caught her eye, about a hand’s breadth deep. She stopped walking and squatted down for a closer look, then she took her pick and swung it into the ice. Once the surface shattered it was impossible to see anything beneath it, but after a dozen blows she stopped and cleared the debris out of the hole she’d made. She’d exposed the inclusion, but it wasn’t a root: it was just a streak of trapped gravel.

  The sun was behind a bank of reddish clouds that covered most of the western sky and left the ice field in a state of ambiguous gloom, so she glanced up at Tvíburi, hoping to find that the time had sped by while she worked. But the twin world was still just a crescent: the afternoon shift was barely half over.

  Freya was tired and hungry. She took a deep breath and held it in to make the most of it; by the time she exhaled she felt a little steadier. The air was thin from the sun’s recent tantrums, but thousands of villages besides her own would be performing the same time-tested remedy. The Yggdrasils thrived on the temperature difference between the buried ocean and the cool of the surface, but sometimes their roots didn’t make it all the way through the ice. Chipping away the final barrier let them complete their journey—and once they were exposed to the open air, they were free to dispense all the volatile treasures they’d pumped up from below.

  Off to her right, her nearest neighbor was intent on her own patch, and too far away to converse with unless they shouted. Freya stopped procrastinating and recommitted herself to the task. The sooner they’d reached their quota, the sooner they could all go home.

  The communal tent was noisy, and the long table was more crowded with diners than food, but Freya was glad to be out of the cold, walking barefoot on the tent’s tattered rugs. She eyed the remaining provisions and estimated a fair share, then she gathered the food up quickly before someone assumed she’d lost her appetite.

  It was only as she sat down to eat that she realized she’d arrived in the middle of an argument. “And what about the soil?” Gro demanded. “This is just a stopgap! It might help us breathe, but it’s not going to give us so much as a handful of new soil.”

  “You want to dig a whole new geyser while we’re out here?” Hanna teased her. “Cleave through a few thousand strides of ice and…” She gestured with her hands, miming an eruption. “What could be simpler?”

  “So if we don’t know how to fix the problem, no one should talk about it?” Gro retorted. “In my mother’s day, the yields were at least a third more than they are now!”

  “So tighten your stomach,” Bridget advised.

  “And keep your brothers in check,” Hanna joked.

  Gro’s demeanor was becoming increasingly sour. “Will you laugh when your children are born too small and sickly to survive?”

  “You didn’t tell us you were pregnant,” Erna interjected solemnly, tentatively offering Gro some of her own food.

  “I’m not!” Gro gripped the table in frustration. “So does anyone else believe that there’s a problem? Or am I just imagining it?”

  Freya said, “The yields are going down, everyone’s seeing it.”

  “At last! Thank you!” Gro stood up, as if to walk over and embrace her in gratitude, but then she changed her mind and sat down again.

  “But I don’t know what we can do, except hope for a fresh geyser,” Freya added. She had never heard of any kind of intervention that could achieve such a goal.

  Gro said, “How about acknowledging that this isn’t going to fix itself, and turning our minds to finding a solution?”

  There was a moment of silence from the other members of the group, and then Hanna conceded, “There must have been a time before anyone thought about exposing the roots. When they all just sat around, too tired to move, waiting for the air to replenish itself.”

  “Exactly,” Gro replied. “And if they’d kept on that way, we might not even be here now.”

  “But a geyser?” Bridget protested.

  “If it were easy,” Gro said, “it would have happened long ago. Keep it in your minds, that’s all I’m asking. Search your thoughts while you search the ground. It might even help you pass the time.”

  The next morning, Freya took Gro’s advice, staring into the ice as diligently as ever as she trudged across the unbroken plain, but letting the impossible problem sit like a nagging onlooker in the back of her skull.

  Geysers came and went, with no apparent pattern to their arrival: bursting out of the ice and then flowing twice a day, lasting anything from a year to a century. As fickle as the sun’s own eruptions, they provided an erratic counterbalance to those air-ablating blasts. But while Freya had no idea what caused the solar flares, every child was taught the origin of the geysers.

  As Tvíbura and Tvíburi turned together, their mutual orbit swung them around in a single day, compared to the fifteen days it took them to circle the sun. So Tvíbura’s choice to fix her gaze upon her twin precluded the same relationship with her light-giving mother—and just as well, on every count Freya could think of. People joked about the lonely cousins in the realms where Tvíburi was hidden from sight, but while the gifts of nocturnal light and an immovable beacon to navigate by were great boons, if the world had instead been divided into the eternally sunlit and the eternally dark, neither half would have been grateful.

  But the other benefits of Tvíbura’s rotational allegiance were just as crucial. Only a single point at the center of the world could fall freely, surrendering completely to its mother’s and sister’s pull; the rest of the rock, ice and ocean that was dragged along with it was forced to compromise, struggling to hold together despite gravity’s predilection for tugging harder on whatever happened to be nearest. And unlike the force wielded by Tvíburi, to which the world could accommodate once and for all, the sun’s stretching and squeezing cycled relentlessly as it rose and set. The rock at the core grew hot from this endless kneading—which kept the ocean around it from freezing solid all the way down. The ocean, trapped between rock and ice, was forced to push hard against its confines, and the same gravitational edicts acting on the ice itself left it groaning and splintering. When the flaws in the ice lined up, the pressure of the water was enough to drive the ocean’s riches all the way to the surface and beyond—restoring the air, and raining fresh, fertile soil down upon the land.

  Freya paused to examine a dark smudge in the ice. But it was too diffuse to be a rootlet; it was just dirt, trapped beneath the now-compacted crystalline snow from some long-extinct geyser.

  It took the strength of the sun itself and the rush of two worlds through the void to crack the ice and squeeze the ocean into the sky. The pause they were suffering was not from any lack of the usual forces; it could only be that the fractures required for a geyser were currently misaligned, present here and there at different depths but failing to meet up. If water had been finding a path to the surface lately, word of the event
might not have reached the village—but the thicker, sweeter air it brought would have made itself known long ago.

  Freya held the image of frustrated fissures in the back of her mind as she worked. Even if she’d identified the true nature of the problem, it was hard to imagine any way that a few thousand surface dwellers could influence the behavior of cracks in the ice so far beneath their feet.

  A part of her counseled: Time will fix it. The geysers had flowed freely in the past, and if chance alone had stymied them, by chance alone they should return.

  But how quickly? How certain could she be that any children she had wouldn’t starve before the resurgence?

  She looked up at Tvíburi. A slender white streak was clearly visible, rising up from the sunlit edge, bright enough to stand out against the sky. Their twin wasn’t suffering from the same hiatus, but Freya didn’t know if she should read this as a promise that the two worlds’ fortunes would converge, or if Tvíburi was simply mocking her: flaunting the very thing her people needed, while knowing it was utterly beyond their reach.

  “There must be life there, surely?” Freya asked her friends around the table. “If Tvíburi’s made of the same ingredients as our world, experiencing the same conditions…?”

  “I looked at it through a telescope once,” Erna said. “At a traveling fair. You can see the geysers clearly, and the soil they’ve spread over the ice. That much seems to be the same.”

  “No farms?” Hanna joked.

  “Farms might be a bit small to see, but I couldn’t spot any grasslands either.”

  “I bet there are methanogens in the ocean,” Gro declared. “Whether or not there are creatures on the surface.”

  “If the surface is barren,” Bridget replied, “why wouldn’t the ocean be barren too?”

  Gro said, “Think how close these worlds are, and how long they’ve been together. How many chances would there have been, over the eons, for a geyser to blow spores all the way to Tvíburi?”

  Freya laughed; she was not dismissing the idea, but it made her giddy. She said, “If that’s true, why don’t we follow them?”

  This suggestion was enough to plunge the group into silence. Even Gro looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.

  “What?” Freya protested. “If there is good air, and fertile soil…” She trailed off, unsure just what inspiring conclusion she’d thought she was reaching for. Quite apart from the absurdity of hoping that a band of explorers could cross the void like a spore on a water spout, if there had been geysers to ride there’d be no reason to ride them.

  Erna said, “If we want a new geyser, maybe we should poison some roots. If they shrivel up faster than the ice reclaims the channel, it could leave a gap.”

  Freya was horrified, but Hanna had more practical concerns. “A gap all the way down to the ocean?” she asked.

  Erna hesitated. “It would have to be.”

  “So you think we could more or less kill a whole Yggdrasil?” Hanna was incredulous. “You might as well talk about snuffing out the sun!”

  “The upper roots are all too narrow anyway,” Bridget added. “Even if they died and turned to dust, any water trying to take the same path would freeze before it reached the surface.”

  Erna didn’t reply immediately, but nor did she seem willing to concede the argument.

  “Anyone else know how to cure the world’s problems?” Freya interjected. Some of their neighbors were casting worried glances at the group; the sooner they stopped talking about poisoning roots, the better.

  “It’s only been a day,” Gro replied. “After a day, if you came to me covered in fresh soil and led me by the hand to the geyser it came from, I still wouldn’t take you seriously.”

  Freya woke and disentangled herself from her blankets, then lay on the floor of the tent for a moment. Twelve days into their collective endeavor, all of her friends had liberated at least one root from the ice, some of them two or three. Either she’d been unlucky, or she’d allowed her attention to wander. If she really had been negligent, today was the day to make up for it.

  As she stumbled across the tent in the half light, she bumped into Bridget, but they exchanged nothing more than the grunts of acknowledgment that minimal civility required. No one was talkative in the mornings. Freya ate quickly, but when she started dressing for the ice she noticed that two of her brothers were stirring. “Go back to sleep, you idiots,” she whispered, almost wishing they could understand her words, however disturbing that would have been. They kept reading the proximity of so many women as some kind of opportunity, when in truth it was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Of all the customary prerequisites for conception, a guaranteed air supply was among the most prudent.

  Freya left the tent and set out for the patch of ice she’d been allocated for the day. The advance party had pegged out rectangular sections before most of the searchers had arrived, so all she had to do was find the right marker for the corner of her latest piece of the grid. Above her, Tvíburi was little more than one-quarter lit—and when she took in the rising sun in the same view, her sense of longitude became an almost palpable thing, as if she’d physically paced her way west from the prime meridian where the twin would be perfectly bisected at dawn, watching the perspective shift along the way as it did for a nearer object if she merely leaned to the left or right. No doubt the lonely cousins were happy with their lives, but she would have felt bereft if she’d been forced to live beneath their flat, distant sky.

  When she reached spike number seventy-three and looked out across the territory it marked, Freya’s spirits sank. There was a plateau of blue ice rising up from the plain, occupying at least half of the patch. If the roots couldn’t break the surface where she stood, what chance would they have to climb higher? So much for catching up with her friends’ tallies.

  It was hard not to feel cheated, but that was no excuse to shirk. Freya decided to ascend immediately and search the whole elevated region first. The approach was quite steep, and slippery with a lingering ethane dew; she had to use her pick a few times to give herself purchase.

  When she reached the top of the plateau, she found that although the ice leveled off, it wasn’t flat like the plain around it; the surface was dimpled and lumpy, rising and falling with every few strides. Freya had never encountered anything quite like it.

  The dips in the ground held much more dirt than she was used to, but she worked assiduously to rake it aside. In compensation, the mounds were much cleaner, though none of the ice itself was particularly clear: it was full of tiny defects that diffused the light, leaving it bluer, and much harder to inspect. She presumed it was newer than the ice of the plain; there hadn’t been a geyser around here in living memory, but there might have been one recently enough that its accumulated snowfall had yet to be entirely leveled by erosion.

  When she reached the drop at the far end of the plateau, she reversed, pacing out a parallel strip. The uneven terrain made every step different from the last; Freya could only hope that the novelty would help her keep her mind on the task, for whatever that was worth up here. She wasn’t sure how long it would be from the time an active geyser refroze to the time a Yggdrasil would get around to sending roots through the new ice, but if there had once been a torrent of water shooting into the sky here, ripping up whatever had come before it, that could only lower her chances of success.

  She arrived back at the edge where she’d started, and reversed again. She was beginning to view her lack of success with a degree of equanimity; she might be teased a little, but everyone knew her as a hard worker on the farm, and they all agreed that the tallies were mostly down to luck.

  Freya stopped to rake the dirt out of a furrow. It was stickier than usual, and darker—not quite like soil, but not as loose and powdery as the fine gray dust that blew across the plain.

  The rake met an obstruction. Freya kneeled down and started scooping the dirt aside with her hands. She could smell a buried fragrance rising from the furrow—
several odors, in fact, some sweet, some pungent.

  As the dirt parted from the thing it had concealed, she saw it plainly: a fully formed root flower, with six cooling petals arrayed around the central stalk. Freya laughed with delight; a shallow burial in such porous material probably hadn’t been doing much to limit the flower’s outgassing, so this didn’t really count as a victory for the atmosphere, but it was still more than she’d expected to find. Why hadn’t this root given up while the whole plateau was still above it, when so many others had barely made it within sight of the surface, down on the plain?

  She spent a while savoring the discovery, brushing off as much of the clinging, aromatic dirt from the flower as she could, as if she were cleaning an old agricultural implement she’d chanced upon buried in a field. Then reluctantly, she rose to her feet and continued.

  A few furrows later, she found a second flower, similarly buried in the dirt. Then a third, and a fourth. She was beginning to wonder if anyone would believe her when she reported the finds, even if she declined to claim them for her tally.

  When the string of successes petered out, Freya wasn’t surprised; the cluster must have come from rootlets branching off from a single, tenacious progenitor—one chance event out of sight to explain all four on the surface. Nonetheless, as she paced back and forth across the plateau three more times without another sighting, she found it harder to resign herself to the outcome than before, when she’d expected nothing.

  And after one especially deep and dirt-filled furrow proved flowerless, her disappointment took hold of her. She swung her pick into the ice: six blows, a dozen, eighteen. She stopped, feeling foolish; she didn’t have the time or energy to waste on pointless acts of frustration. And she very nearly walked on without even clearing away the shattered ice, but then that seemed doubly wasteful, so she squatted down and started pulling the shards out of the pit she’d made.

  There was a root. She’d damaged the top of it with the pick, and it was seeping sweet-smelling alkanes onto the ice, but if she exposed some more of it, more carefully, there was no reason why the unbroken part wouldn’t shed the injured section and flower.