by Greg Egan
“I understand,” Freya said. “But they’ve chosen a place where the gravity will give them an advantage.” In fact, they would have gained even more weight at the poles, but the selection of the site was further complicated by the way the sun tugged on the ocean; at the poles, it was never pulling water toward the surface. “They’re not going to make their job harder by trying the same thing here.”
“Then perhaps we’ll do it ourselves,” the woman retorted. “We’re not afraid of work, and the world can’t have too many geysers.”
“That’s true,” Freya agreed cautiously. “But the trouble is, we don’t know if it’s possible to create them that way. If it turns out not to be, all the work will have been for nothing, and it might be too late to try anything else.”
A younger woman, further back in the crowd, joined the discussion. “Then raise a mountain here that does its best to break the ice, and if it fails, it will still be in the right place to reach toward Tvíburi.”
“It’s not that simple,” Freya replied. “The two aims are so different that they shape the designs in different ways, even from the start. A mountain built to exert the greatest possible pressure at its base will not make a safe bridge, even if it fails to crack the ice to the depth needed to bring forth new geysers. Who in good conscience would send travelers across the largest bridge ever built, if its shape was a compromise—a way of making do, a way of patching over the failure of an entirely different structure, with entirely different needs?”
The older of her two interlocutors was undeterred. “Then do what you like, wherever you like, but don’t expect us to feed you! Unless you’re offering a chance to bring back the geysers, you’re not worth taking food out of the mouths of my grandchildren!”
Freya lowered her gaze, chastened. The woman’s position was understandable—and there was no point repeating one more time that the best-designed mountain for the purpose she sought might fail to crack the ice, when it was equally true that Freya’s own version might fail to be of any use at all.
When the meeting was over, Freya stayed in the hall and shared a meal with Britt and half a dozen of the other villagers. They were all polite, and almost apologetic that she’d come so far only to be rebuffed, but none of them were willing to vote for their own farms to contribute food or supplies to her project.
“Things are tight,” Aslaug explained, contemplating the less-than-lavish feast that they’d prepared for their visitor.
“Which is why I’m doing this,” Freya replied, trying not to let her exasperation spill over into discourtesy.
“But no one believes they’ll stay that way,” Britt added. “We’ve always come through the quiet times in the past.”
“There were less of us in the past. And what if the quiet times are growing longer?” Freya was beginning to wish she’d taken this more somber line with the whole gathering.
But it showed no sign of working on her present audience. “Everything’s cyclic,” Hetty declared confidently. “Can you name one thing in nature that goes just one way?”
Freya said, “If one example would be enough to kill us, why would I expect to be able to do that?”
Everyone around the table smiled, trying without success to conceal their amusement. Her words were empty sophistry. Her intentions might be noble, her purpose sincere, but nothing she’d said had been the least bit persuasive.
Freya lay awake between the blankets on the floor of Britt’s guest room. She was close enough to the window that she could see the bright edge of Tvíburi, protruding past the gutter that ran along the side of the roof above her. It was hard to sleep with her brothers fighting, wrestling with each other, mewling and hissing.
When Freya had been a child, she’d been sure that she knew all three as individuals—not by tracking their locations from moment to moment, but by recognizing their idiosyncratic temperaments. But now she was far less confident that this told her anything. If one of the erstwhile subjugated pair succeeded in upending the hierarchy, would she be able to tell the difference, or would the result be indistinguishable to her? She wasn’t even sure that the brothers themselves had any sense of their identity that ran deeper than their awareness of their own current status. If a jealous pretender finally usurped the previous proud-but-wary ruler, would he know or feel anything that his predecessor hadn’t known or felt?
Britt said, “Are you awake?”
Freya rolled over and peered toward the doorway, where her host appeared in silhouette against the gray of the hall behind her. “Yes. What is it?”
“We’re too inbred in this place,” Britt replied.
For a moment Freya thought she was apologizing for her fellow villagers’ lack of foresight, but then a low howl and a palpable thump against the inside of her abdomen reminded her that the fighting had probably not gone unnoticed outside the confines of her body.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” she asked.
“We can’t all stop having children until the geysers return.”
Freya laughed wearily. “No, we can’t.”
“We don’t have a lot of visitors from as far away as you’ve come,” Britt explained. “I tried to get pregnant when I did my Great Walk, but I must have had bad luck.” She shifted tentatively in the doorway.
Freya said, “If you’re resolved to try again now, you’re welcome.” Anything to quieten these idiots down.
Britt approached and knelt down on the edge of the blankets. “I haven’t done this for a while,” Freya confessed.
“Were there any children from the other times?”
“No. But I was young, and I think my brothers were so evenly matched then that they got in each other’s way.”
The two of them worked in silence for a while, trying to get into position, while whoever had won the fight in Freya’s belly moaned impatiently. Britt’s own brothers were quiet, recognizing the nature of the situation, but Freya remained wary; she’d heard stories about women surprised by an unexpected reversal.
Freya closed her eyes and felt the dominant brother begin protruding. She forced herself to relax and let him emerge unhindered. It was uncomfortable at first, from sheer lack of practice, but she’d be unwise to flinch now if she ever wanted to face childbirth.
When something close to half of the brother’s body was inside her, Britt began to sigh. Freya held the woman’s shoulders, bemused as ever by this intimacy in which she was almost, but not quite, a participant. At least there were no embarrassing mutinous tussles to complicate the exchange; whatever their long-term aspirations, the losing pair from the night’s ruckus seemed to have accepted their place, for now.
When it was over, Britt rested her face on Freya’s shoulder while Freya’s brother withdrew, then the two women parted and lay side by side on the blanket.
“Do you know if your own brothers have had children?” Freya asked.
Britt said, “I think so, but I’m not sure. That’s part of what went wrong on my Great Walk—they had to have it their way.”
“That must have been annoying.”
Britt took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted here.”
Freya said, “Well, at least I’ve made one of my brothers happy. If only there were some favor he could do in return.”
Britt snickered. “Plow a field? Help with the harvest?”
“I’m sure there’s a children’s story where someone was in trouble—injured out on the ice…or maybe captured by their enemies?—and they sent their brother crawling off for help.”
She was joking, but Britt didn’t reply. Freya pulled her hand free and turned to face the window. Maybe it was time for some new stories, where Tvíburi wasn’t Tvíbura’s twin, but the mother of her brother’s child.
She closed her eyes. There had to be words that would work, that would make it happen—or at least make it possible. But she hadn’t found them yet.
3
When Freya saw that the fair was in to
wn, she almost turned around and walked back onto the ice. No one would be interested in hearing her talk about the death of their crops when there were far more cheerful diversions to be had.
But the wind was relentless, and she hadn’t eaten for days. Even with the fair competing for the villagers’ time and generosity, they would never refuse food and shelter to a traveler.
The wind whipped gray sand around her feet, stinging her through the cloth of her trousers, and as she reached the first paved street she realized that the dusty barrage was coming from the village itself, not blowing in across the ice. She’d seen this kind of thing a few times before, when the soil that had supported a whole swathe of farmland suddenly lost its ability to cohere. The ring of roads and buildings that encircled the farms was usually enough to act as both a barrier against the wind and a trap for drifting soil, to the point where at least the bulk of it could be contained and brought back to the fields. But there seemed to be some threshold where the over-cropped soil became so loose and light that nothing could be done to hold on to it.
The fair had set up its tents at the western edge of the village, and as Freya trudged around the ring road, the sound of people talking and laughing rose and fell with the wind. Normally, a villager would have stopped to greet her by now and ask where she’d come from, but there was no one in sight. Everyone was at the fair.
She approached the cluster of tents reluctantly. She was tired, and even if she’d been in the mood to spend time gazing at the exhibits she had nothing to offer in payment. All she could do was try to find a corner out of the wind and hope that an observant local would realize that she had no connection to the fair. Freya had never been too proud to accept the kind of hospitality that she’d offer any traveler who came to her own village, but it would be humiliating if she had to explain herself in order to make her situation clear.
She weaved between the tents, squeezing past queues of people waiting to enter, and found herself on a patch of ground that was open to the sky but sheltered from all sides. In the middle of this square, a woman stood by a telescope, touting for customers. “See the mountains and ravines of Tvíburi! See the geysers of molten ice, close enough to touch!”
Freya found a place to stand where she wasn’t blocking anyone’s way, and put her dusty pack on the ground. The telescope woman turned toward her and smiled. Freya nodded a greeting, but kept her distance; it would be rude to approach, as if she were a potential customer, only to plead poverty at the last moment.
As the afternoon wore on, the other touts seemed to be drawing ever larger crowds, but the telescope remained unvisited. Freya glanced up at the waxing crescent, wondering why no one seemed interested.
The telescope woman approached her. “I’m Inga.”
“Freya.”
“You’re not from this village, are you?”
“No.”
“Do you want to take a look?” Inga offered cheerfully.
“I…” Freya lowered her gaze, ashamed.
“No charge for a fellow traveler,” Inga assured her.
Freya followed her over to the instrument, and lay down on the bench beneath the eyepiece. She wasn’t sure why she had never done this before; maybe as a child, other attractions had grabbed her attention first, and by the time a closer look at Tvíburi had begun to seem alluring she’d spent what her mother had to spare.
She squirmed across the bench and squinted into the eyepiece, trying to turn the confusing puddle of light she was seeing into something sharper. “I can’t…” she complained. But then she craned her neck and suddenly, she could.
The view showed an expanse of pale blue ice, covered in fine fractures like the lines on an old woman’s skin.
“Use the wheels,” Inga urged her. She guided Freya’s hand to a pair of disks with corrugated edges, connected to shafts on the telescope’s mount. “Turn the top one to move the view from side to side, the other to move it up and down, as you’re seeing it.”
Freya swung the telescope to the left too fast, transforming the landscape into a blur, but when it became still again she was staring down at a canyon. “Have you ever seen anything like that on Tvíbura?” she asked, before realizing that Inga would have no idea what she was looking at. “A furrow in the ice so deep?”
“No,” Inga replied. “We’re flatter, for sure.”
Freya nudged the wheels, searching the ice for a deposit of soil. Finally, she was rewarded: a deep brown splotch, piled up in the middle, tall enough to cast a shadow. As far as she could tell, it was barren, with no trace of wild grasses. But did that mean the soil itself was incapable of supporting life, or simply that the right kind of plants had never arrived, or arisen, on Tvíburi? It was certainly sticky enough to have held together despite the lack of vegetation; that alone made it seem more promising than the gray dust here that was blowing away on the wind.
She slid off the bench, afraid of becoming engrossed in the view and outstaying her welcome. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad I saw that.”
“It’s easy to take Tvíburi for granted.” Inga glanced around the square at the oblivious fair-goers. “Half the world has spent their lives looking up at it, but some people think that means there’s nothing more to see.”
“Believe me, that’s not how I feel.” Freya hesitated, reluctant to burden this woman with the details of her increasingly unlikely ambitions. But even if Inga had no crops of her own to offer to a team of mountain-builders, she was entitled to know what could be done in the face of dwindling yields and desiccated soil. If nothing changed, her grandchildren would starve even sooner than those of any farmer.
Freya said, “I think we need to build a bridge.”
Inga listened attentively, and if she seemed to be struggling to keep herself from interrupting, she had the demeanor, not of an exasperated skeptic eager to declare the whole idea preposterous, but of someone who kept anticipating both problems and solutions, who was waiting to hear whether the speaker would eventually catch up with her.
By the time Freya finally stopped talking, she must have addressed most of those concerns, because Inga just smiled and said, “That has to be the most intrepid plan I’ve ever heard.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Freya replied. “Though I’m not sure it’s the kind of endorsement that would recommend the idea to many farmers.”
“So you’re traveling from village to village, trying to get support?”
“Yes.”
“Any luck?”
“About as much as you’re having with your telescope.”
Inga frowned. “Why? Do people not believe that any of this is possible…or do they not believe that it could help?”
Freya explained about Gro’s competing project. “Everyone wants that to work instead. A better result, and a faster one—if it happens at all. But it makes my own plans sound like a waste of time.”
Inga pondered this. “You need props,” she said.
“I need what?”
“Objects that help you demonstrate your point. You need to make it easier for people to see why even the tallest mountain might not create a geyser.”
Freya said, “How can I make people see something that I’m not even certain of myself?”
“You’re not certain—but do you think your doubts about your friend’s scheme are well-founded, or do you think you’re just too stubborn to give up on your own idea?”
Freya was bemused. “Can anyone answer a question like that?”
Inga said, “If your doubts are well-founded, there must be something you can do to get them across to other people.” She glanced away; someone was finally approaching her telescope. “Meet me here when the fair closes, and I’ll see what I can do to help.”
Freya passed the time walking around the fairgrounds, trying to keep warm, too embarrassed to start approaching people and beg them for food and shelter. If anything, she tried to remain inconspicuous; if a villager did offer her hospitality now, how would she k
eep her appointment with Inga?
Halfway between sunset and midnight, as the laneways between the tents started emptying, she made her way back to the telescope. Inga still had one young customer, but when the girl left—beaming at what she’d seen—Inga gestured to Freya to approach.
“We’re here for two more days, so I won’t be packing this up,” she explained. “I just have to cover it to protect it from the dust.” She took some sheets of heavy fabric out of a box, unfolded them, and pegged them in place over the telescope.
She led Freya through the fairgrounds to a small, drab tent, and lit a lamp just inside the entrance. Most of the space within was taken up by two carts, piled high with wooden crates.
“How do you people lug all this across the ice?” Freya wondered.
“It’s not that hard, if you know what you’re doing; once you’ve got the wheels rolling, the carts only need an occasional push. The most dangerous part is when we have to stop in a hurry—that’s when I wish things had more weight and less momentum.” Inga was rummaging through one of the carts as she spoke, but then she stopped and announced happily, “Here it is!”
She carried the box she’d found away from the cart and placed it on the floor of the tent, then opened it and began removing some of its contents. “The first thing you want to impress on people is that, no matter how much ice you pile up, there’s a limit to how much it will weigh.”
Freya accepted that, but Erna’s mumbling about “one plus a quarter plus a ninth” didn’t really translate into anything she could sell with conviction to a room full of farmers. “Impress is a strong word.”
Inga was fiddling with some contraption from her crate. “Every child learns the inverse-square law, though?”
“Yes,” Freya agreed. “But the law itself is one thing; all its consequences are another.”
“So you need to make this consequence visible,” Inga replied. She took the gadget and offered it to Freya. It was a long tank with a square cross-section, and a flexible partition inside. The partition was connected to a series of pegs that protruded through holes in the side of the tank and emerged along an attached board, on which a grid had been drawn, its intervals marked with numbers.
