Fallen Fragon

by Peter F. Hamilton

  On this side of the planet, facing Nizana, the glacier still dominated the environment. The air was a lot colder, and clouds still sprinkled snow as they migrated out to the warmer tropics. Their jet touched down on a runway that was coated in white, powdery ice. They glimpsed it only a few seconds before the wheels hit. For the last hour, they'd been flying blind through thick fog. Oxendale's altitude a kilometer above the salty marsh meant that it was almost permanently in the clouds.

  They had a half-hour wait in the airport lounge while their luggage was transferred; then they trooped on board a thirty-seater STL plane, built for arctic conditions. Orchy was another two hours' flying time away. Forty minutes after takeoff, they cleared the base of the cloud layer to see Barclay's Glacier in the distance.

  With Amethi a quarter of the way around its orbit from superior conjunction, the sun was shining almost directly onto the vertical cliff face of the glacier. It split the land from the sky with a silver-white glare stretching from north to south, as if a crack had appeared in the landscape to allow another, closer sun to shine through from behind the planet. Lawrence had to put his sunglasses on to look at it directly. Colors here were all monotone. The surface of the glacier was pure white; even the clouds didn't seem to cast a shadow. Features, at least from this distance, were nonexistent. The most that could be said was that the ice was rumpled, with long, gentle curves overlapping all the way to the boundary. Overhead, the sky shone with an astonishingly bright metallicblue sheen. Nizana's dominant ocher crescent appeared intrusively alien, its darkness in some way negative. Squashed streamers of cloud swirled about, almost as bright as the glacier itself. All of them were sliding in the same direction, out from the ice shelf and away over the ocean floor.

  When Lawrence looked straight down, he could see nothing but dunes of slick auburn mud, their crests dusted white. Slivers of grubby water shimmered in the cirques amid the dunes, forming an infinite plexus of connected rills. Every few kilometers there would be a deep river cutting its way through the mud. Here the water was fast-flowing and filthy, clawing at the gully sides to loosen great swaths of mud. Lumps of ice bobbed along, colliding against each other with enough violence to produce small explosions of splinters, or even split apart.

  For all the physical activity, the vista got to Lawrence. He used to think the tundra desert outside Templeton was bleak, but this was pure desolation. There was no sign here that any of the terraforming algae had ever bloomed in the slushy puddles, no meandering tracks of slowlife organisms as they impregnated the mud with their spores and bacteria. This was impassive, ancient geology at its most aloof, untouched by life's Machiavellian tendrils. It made him feel small, irrelevant.

  After a while, the little aircraft curved around and headed in over the glacier. A lot of the edge was still sheer cliff, but a quantity had crumbled into giant talus falls extending for kilometers out into the mud. The top of the glacier was bisected by deep rifts that carried the rivers out from the interior. Some of these fractured canyons were over a kilometer deep and still expanding as the water gnawed away at their floor, but that still left them terminating high over the ocean floor. The edge of Barclay's Glacier was host to the most spectacular array of waterfalls on any known world. Over a thousand prodigious rivers ended abruptly hundreds of meters above the ground, projecting their waters in monumental arcs to thunder into ragged craters gouged out by their own relentless torrent.

  The town of Orchy was situated on the top of one of these rifts, Coniston's Flaw, a long jagged gully extending well over a thousand kilometers toward the east. In some places it was over three kilometers wide, its steep angled sides resembling the Alpine valleys of France and Switzerland. Orchy was currently sitting on top of a broad, curving section, with the river churning along the rift floor six hundred meters below. The curve meant that the water constantly chewed into the ice, an erosion that pulled down vast avalanches from the sides. Once they'd settled, they were excellent skiing slopes, although the flow of water that created them would ultimately undermine them, changing the valley's profile once again. The entire length of Coniston's Haw was a variable geometry, flexing in month-long undulations, with only its terminal waterfall holding reasonably steady. Even the tributaries would forsake it after abrupt and violent shifts, defecting to other rivers.

  Orchy moved to accommodate these whims, a truly mobile town, made up from oblong building modules that could be carried by large flatbed trucks. Whenever the slopes decayed or quaked or collapsed, the silvery modules would be unbolted and hauled along the top of the Haw to the next suitable site.

  The STL plane extended its ski blade undercarriage and skidded along a length of flat ice marked out by flare strobes. Fans howled as the AS pilot reversed pitch and brought them to a halt at the center of a microblizzard. A bus took them into town, dropping them off at the Hepatcia Hotel. It was identical to every other cluster of metal modules that made up the town. They were laid out in a fat fishbone pattern, standing on legs that left a seventy-centimeter gap between the floor base and the ice. Reception was at one end of the spine, with the bar, lounge and dining room at the other. The interior was smart without being ostentatious. It reminded Lawrence of aircraft furnishing.

  Their room was made up of three modules, which gave them a bedroom, a small bathroom and what the bellboy insisted on calling a veranda room. It was essentially an alcove with lounger chairs and a wide floor-to-ceiling triple-glazed window giving them a view out across Coniston's Flaw.

  "Wonder what old Barclay would make of this?" Lawrence mused. Thick clouds were boiling overhead, but they were pure white, fluoresced by the sun. Ice and snow gleamed underneath, making it difficult to know where the horizon was. Orchy was at the center of its own little closed radiant universe. With his new sunglasses, Lawrence could just make out tiny, dark figures zipping down the slopes below the hotel.

  "I think he'd be impressed," Roselyn said. Her dimples had returned as she took in the view. "I am."

  He glanced around the room. "Not quite up to the same standard as Ulphgarth."

  "We'll have to make do." She offered him a small jeweler's box.

  "What's this?"

  "Open it."

  There was a slim silver necklace inside, with a hologram pendant. When he held it up to the light, a small Roselyn in a blue dress smiled at him from inside the plastic.

  "So I can be with you all the time," she said, suddenly bashful.

  "Thanks." He slipped the chain round his neck and fastened the clasp. "I'll never take it off."

  Her hand turned his head to face her, and they kissed passionately. He began tugging at her blouse.

  "Wait," she murmured. "I'll just be a moment."

  Lawrence did his best not to show his frustration as she picked up a bag and went into the bathroom. "You could get ready, too," she said as she slid the door closed. "And I like the lights low, remember."

  He stared after her for a second, then raced over to the door and locked it Over to the big veranda windows and opaqued them. Swept the hand luggage off the bed. Pulled the cover onto the floor. Struggled to push his trousers down, dancing on one foot when his shoe became stuck. Got a shirtsleeve caught as he pulled it off over his head. Set the communication panel to call guard. Landed hard on the bed, and let out a small whoop of delight when the mattress rippled underneath him. Plumped up the pillows and flopped back onto them, hands behind his head, grinning oafishly at the ceiling.

  Ten days!

  Roselyn walked out of the bathroom. She was wearing a white silk negligee that couldn't have weighed more than ten grams. He'd never been so scared of her sexuality before.

  "You're magnificent," he whispered.

  She sat on the side of the bed. When he rose up to embrace her, she held up a finger, shaking her head softly. He let himself down again, not sure how long his self-control would last.

  "I so hoped you would enjoy me like this," she said quietly.

  "Fat chance I wouldn't—" He
broke off at the slight frown on her face.

  She reached out with one hand to touch the pendant, then gently traced the shape of his pectoral muscles. "I wore this because I wanted to please you. I need you to know how much tonight means to me."

  "It means a lot to me, too."

  "Does it, Lawrence?" Her hand stroked down his abdomen.

  The eroticism of the motion was an insanely beautiful torture. It almost brought tears to his eyes. All he could do was draw breath in sharp little gasps as her gray eyes searched his face, divining everything he felt. He'd never been so naked before.

  "We're going to spend the night together," she said. "Do you understand that?"

  "Of course I do."

  "Do you now? Well, I'll tell you anyway. It means that we can make love for as long as our bodies can last. That there will be nothing else to consider; no timetable, no having to go home, no caution about someone coming in. Just you and me alone with as much joy as we can create. And then when we're done with each other, we're going to fall asleep in each other's arms. We've never known that before, Lawrence. And it's going to be the most exquisite moment of all for me, because I'll do it knowing I'm going to wake up with you beside me. You don't know how long I've wanted that to be."

  Even in the dusky light he could see the admiration on her face, and the hope. "I want that just as much as you do," he said. "I wish you'd said something before. We could have worked out a way to make it happen before now."

  "Would you have done that? For me?"

  "Yes."

  "I love you, Lawrence." Her expression became rueful. "And you know all of me now, everything I am, however foolish that is." She swung her legs around and straddled him just above his hips.

  "You're not foolish," he told her earnestly.

  The grin that dawned on her mouth was wicked and knowing. Fingers slid back up his chest. "You're so fit now," she said huskily. "It's indecent."

  "You're the one who wanted me in this condition."

  "I did. And I'm a grateful girl." She arched her back, then slowly, tauntingly, began to undo the lace bows running down the front of her negligee.

  * * *

  They missed their first scheduled skiing lesson, staying in their room together for over a day. Not that it particularly mattered. Amethi wasn't going to move into Nizana's penumbra for another sixty hours. It would remain light for all of that time.

  After they did finally get out of bed to have breakfast, Lawrence called the school and arranged another lesson. The AS receptionist told them another slot wasn't available for five hours.

  They took a walk through the town, looking at the restaurants and cafes and bars. Pavements were slatted aluminum walkways set up between the buildings, standing on the same kind of legs. Lawrence loved it. The first open-air town he'd ever been in; the sensation of freedom was invigorating. Temperature was at least fifteen to twenty degrees below freezing. Not that he cared about that; they both wore their brand new ski-suits: colorful one-piece garments with a lace-work of active thermal strips whose conductivity could be set by an integral thermostat, allowing you to choose whatever temperature you wanted to be at. The hoods were close-fitting and had extra flaps, which could be pulled across the face. They were essential to stop windburn when you were skiing, but in town most people let them hang free.

  "It's like you can feel the ice pulling heat from your skin," Lawrence exclaimed. He was leaning over a walkway's rail, looking down what passed for Orchy's main street. Buses and ice bikes roared about, carrying vacationers between the hotels and the runs.

  "Nice to know," Roselyn said. Every flap on her hood was closed tight, leaving just her goggles poking through. Even so, she stood slightly hunched, as if fighting the cold.

  Lawrence laughed and kept walking. They stopped off in a couple of stores. The only difference they could find between them were the names of the owners. Both were franchises to the company that ran Orchy. And both of them sold the same ski equipment; there weren't many manufacturers on Amethi yet.

  "Business opportunity," Roselyn observed. She giggled at Lawrence, who was trying on a different hood: its style was awful, all pink and orange stripes. "Two business opportunities," she corrected.

  "I want to be seen on the slopes," he said with pained dignity.

  "What as?'

  They moved on. The trouble with a town made out of identical modules, they decided, was that you didn't know what kind of businesses they contained until you were inside. The names flashing over the doors didn't offer much of a clue. Accessing the datapool for a local directory was a pain, and too functional. They just wanted to stroll and take in the sights. Orchy wasn't really built for that. There was no civic identity; its purpose was simply to house and feed people in between skiing jaunts.

  They did find a reasonable cafe eventually. The Flood Heights was positioned as close to the edge of the rift as safety would allow. So Lawrence and Roselyn sat at one of the window tables and ordered hot chocolate and a plate of Danish pastries.

  He sat sipping at his mug, looking up into the sky with a kind of wistful admiration. He'd never seen Nizana like this, not with his own eyes. Here on the near-side it hung directly overhead, a massive circle sliced by a thousand compacted cloud bands, clearly defined lines of rust red and grubby white grating and tearing at each other with hooked curlicues. Hundreds of runaway cyclone storms the size of moonlets were constantly on the prowl amid the upper layers. They distorted the neat arrangement of bands, chaos engines churning the usual colors into freakish shades with oceanic-sized upwells of weird chemicals from the unseen depths. Sheets of electricity surged outward from their eyes, too vast to be called mere lightning bolts: continents of electrons birthed and extinguished in microseconds. Their ephemeral illumination ensured that Nizana's nightside was never dark; a jade aural phosphorescence writhed permanently within the cage of the ionosphere, while the discharges themselves fluoresced ragged patches of cloud thousands of kilometers across.

  "They're going so fast," Roselyn said, gazing down at the skiers sliding along the snow. "Do you think we'll learn to go that fast this time?"

  "Huh?" Lawrence brought his attention back to the ground, looking where she was. "Wrong question. You've got strips of polished composite strapped to your feet, and you're standing at the top of a mountain of ice. The trick is learning to go down slowly."

  She stopped dropping sugar lumps into her chocolate and flicked one at him. "Prat. You know what I mean."

  "Yeah. I don't suppose it's that difficult, not on the nursery slopes. They claim they can get you up to moderate grade by the end of a week."

  "It looks scary, but I think I'm going to like it." She watched several skiers as they reached the bottom of the main slope, curving to a halt in a graceful spray of snow. The cable lift began tugging them up to the top again. On the other side of the rift, slim-line fissures extended deep into the ice cliff, intersecting each other and twisting around in convoluted geometries. Sunlight shone into them to be refracted in glorious iridescent rainbows, forever encased below the translucent surface.

  Roselyn sighed contentedly. "I'm so happy. I've got you, I've got a life. It's funny, I never thought leaving Earth would allow me to be happy. You know the only thing I miss?"

  "What's that?"

  "Boats." She gestured around extravagantly. "I mean, Amethi's leisure industry is starting to lift off. There's this, and all those hotel domes in the middle of nowhere, and that ridiculous five-city motor rally race they've got planned for next year. But there are no boats."

  "Give it time. Our oceans are filling up, and there are lakes forming on the continents."

  "Ha! It'll take another thousand years to melt this glacier. So I'll see none of that till I'm either dead or too old to care. Such a shame. It would have been nice to stand on the prow with the sails creaking away, and feeling the wind on my face."

  "When did you ever do that?"

  "Dublin has a port, I'll thank you. Although
it's mainly for the big cargo ships that come in from England and Europe. But there are sailing clubs along the coast. I know how to crew a dinghy. I was even getting quite good at windsurfing." Her gray eyes stared off beyond the horizon. "But I've done it once. Better that, than never."

  Lawrence slouched down in his seat "And I never will."

  "You poor old boy." She pouted. "I fell off a lot. The water was freezing, and didn't taste so good either. Heaven alone knows what pollution was in that sea. That's the thing with memories, you only ever dwell on the good parts."

  The lesson went the way of all first skiing lessons. Lawrence and Roselyn spent a lot of time slipping about and falling over. But they did make a kind of progress, enough to slide down the nursery slope several times without landing in a tumble of limbs and poles, enough to get an idea of how much thrill there would be from descending the main slope, enough to promise faithfully they'd be back on time tomorrow.