Icebones

by Stephen Baxter

  Icebones rumbled uncomfortably. She sensed that even Autumn missed something of the certainty of those days, when the Lost ran the world and everything in it.

  There was movement on the canal's oily waters. Thunder backed away from the water's edge, perhaps recalling the whale that had come so close to taking Shoot in the Ocean of the North.

  But this was no whale. It swam over the surface of the water, a massive straight-edged slab. It had no eyes or ears or trunk or feet. Huge slow waves trailed after it, feathering gracefully.

  Autumn growled to Icebones, "It is obviously a thing of the Lost. And, look — it has a shining shell, like the ice beetle in the crater."

  The huge water beetle drifted to a halt against the canal bank. A straight-edged hole in its side opened up, like a mouth, and a tongue of shining material stuck out and nuzzled against the land. Then the beetle waited, bobbing gently as the waves it had made rippled under it, and its carapace glistened in the dusty sunlight.

  Nothing climbed aboard the beetle, and nothing came out of its mouth.

  After a time the beetle rolled in its tongue, shut its strange mouth, and pushed its way gently further down the canal. After a time it stopped again, and Icebones saw that once more it opened its mouth, waiting, waiting.

  Chaser-Of-Frogs growled, "Every morning it is the same. This water-thing toils up and down the canal, sticking out its tongue. This is the way of things here. Everything you see will be strange and useless. Nothing will do you harm. Come now." She stumped on.

  They followed, walking beside the shore of the canal, while the waves of the beetle slowly rippled and subsided.

  Soon they approached vast spires, slender and impossibly tall, taller than the greatest tree even on this tall planet. The gathering sunlight seeped into the spires, so they were filled with glowing pink light.

  As they approached these glittering visions all the mammoths grew perturbed.

  When Icebones looked into a spire she was startled to see another mammoth gazing back at her: a somewhat ragged, sunken-eyed, ill-fed Cow staring back at her from the depths of a glimmering pink pool. The mammoth had no smell and made no noise — for it was herself, of course, a reflection just as if she was staring into a pool of still water. But this "pool" had been set on edge by the strange arts of the Lost, and its strangeness disturbed her, right to the warm core of her being.

  Woodsmoke came running from between his mother's legs, trumpeting a shrill greeting. He ran straight into the shining wall and went sprawling, a mess of legs and trunk. Mewling a protest, he got up and trotted back to the wall. He raised his trunk at the mammoth calf he could see there, and the other calf raised its trunk back. With a comical growl, Woodsmoke tried to butt the other mammoth, only to find himself clattering against the wall again.

  He might have kept that up all day, Icebones thought, if his mother hadn't come to tuck him between her legs again.

  "I am bigger than him. Did you see? My tusks were bigger than his. He was frightened of me. He ran away."

  "Yes. Yes, he ran away."

  There were buildings all around them now, of all sizes and shapes and colors, all characterized by hard, cold straight lines. And there were tall angular shapes, like trees denuded of their branches. These "trees" had a single fat fruit suspended from their top. Many of the fruit had fallen and smashed, but from others an eerie yellow light glowed, perhaps the source of the light Icebones had observed during the night.

  The trails between the buildings were littered with red dust, and as the mammoths passed, their feet left clear round imprints. Many of the buildings showed signs of damage, their walls broken by huge rough-edged holes. In corners of the great avenues there were heaps of debris, branches and dust and bones, smashed up and dumped here as if by some great storm. It was evident that this place had been abandoned for some time.

  Icebones was aware of Spiral's growing, silent dismay; she would not find the Lost here.

  Suddenly, from all over the Nest, boxy beetles came scurrying.

  The mammoths stopped dead, and Breeze trumpeted alarm.

  The beetles began to rush from one silent building to another. A mouth would open in the hide of a beetle, and another would open to greet it in the gleaming side of the building, and the beetle would wait — just as the water beetle had waited by the side of the canal. But nothing came to climb into or out of the beetle, no matter how long it waited. At last the beetle would close itself up again and scuttle off to its next fruitless rendezvous.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the swarm of beetles thinned out. The last beetles shut their mouths and hurtled off out of sight.

  But now another crowd of toiling beetles hurried between the buildings. These creatures sprouted arms and scrapers and trunklike hoses, and they swept at the dust, making it rise in billowing red clouds into the air. But the dust would merely settle again once they had passed.

  One toiling beetle scurried after the mammoths. It scraped up their dung and placed it into a wide mouth in its own side, and then polished at the floor until no trace of the dung was left. Thunder went up to the beetle and kicked it so hard that he opened up a new mouth in its side. After that, mewling to itself, the beetle moved only in tight circles, endlessly polishing the same piece of ground.

  AS THE SUN CLIMBED higher in the sky, they moved away from the spires and scurrying beetles and reached an open area. This abutted the bank of the canal, and it was surrounded by a half-circle of low structures, like a row of wolf's teeth. The floor surface here was hard under their feet, and the light glimmered from it, pink and bright.

  Suddenly, all at the same instant, the structures snapped open, revealing black, cavernous interiors. And all the mammoths recoiled, for they smelled the greasy stink of scorched flesh.

  From nowhere gulls appeared, cawing. They soared down on huge filmy wings and pecked at the small buildings and the floor around them. Icebones even spotted a fox that came padding silently across the shining floor. The gulls cawed in protest at this intruder.

  Spiral cast to and fro, nervous, skittish. "It is the smell of food."

  "Broiled flesh?" Icebones said. "What kind of food is that?"

  "It is the food of the Lost," Autumn said grimly.

  Breeze said, "Maybe this is a place where the Lost would come to feed."

  "But if that's so," Spiral said anxiously, "where are they?"

  "Long gone," Autumn said. She reached for her daughter.

  But Spiral pulled away. Trumpeting, as if calling the small-eared Lost, she ran clumsily from structure to structure.

  No Lost came to eat. After a time the structures snapped closed once more, scattering the gulls.

  Chaser-Of-Frogs sneezed, and dusty snot gushed out of her trunk. She said brightly, "All this talk of food is making me thirsty. Come. Let us find water." Briskly, she turned and began to plod steadily down the canal bank, squat, solid, determined.

  Following the canal, they came to a new set of structures, situated at the base of a broad valley. From all over the valley, fat pipes, heavily swathed by some silvery skin, erupted from the ground and converged on this place.

  One structure was an inverted wedge of dull gray. It had grilles along its sides, and it was tipped by four giant tubes from which white steam plumed with a continual rushing noise. Icebones saw that water, condensing from the billowing steam, dribbled down the walls. Chaser-Of-Frogs lapped at this with her trunk.

  Icebones did likewise, with less enthusiasm. The water was fine, she supposed, but it was too warm, and it tasted of sulfur and iron, and of something else indefinable — something of the Lost, she thought.

  But she was thirsty, and forced herself to drink her fill.

  Soon the others joined her and drank with more apparent enjoyment, for they were more used to accepting water from the Lost than she was.

  Chaser-Of-Frogs called, "Bones-Of-Ice. Come stand here."

  Icebones complied, and, following Chaser-Of-Frogs's urging, leaned gently aga
inst a pipe that was almost as tall as she was. The pipe was warm.

  Chaser-Of-Frogs barked amusement. "The pipe contains warm water. The water comes from lodes of warmth buried deep under the skin of the world. And that is what keeps the Nest alive," she said. "You see?"

  "Not really," admitted Icebones.

  "I do," said Thunder unexpectedly. "Didn't Longtusk stamp his feet and draw heat from the ground, to keep his Family alive...?"

  Now Chaser-Of-Frogs wandered away from the water plant. Grunting, she began pawing at the ground with her forefeet. With clumsy swipes, the Swamp-Mammoth had soon wiped clear a wide area of the floor.

  Icebones saw there were shapes embedded in the shining floor. She leaned down to see better, and blew away more dust with delicate sweeps of her trunk.

  She saw leaves, stuck inside the shining floor surface. The leaves were gray and colorless, and they lay in thick sheets, one over the other. She stroked the floor with her trunk, but she touched only the hard, odorless floor surface.

  "What do you think of that?" Chaser-Of-Frogs demanded proudly.

  "They are like no tree I have ever seen."

  "Now look over here." Swamp-Mammoth led Icebones to another place, where she swept aside the dust once more.

  Here, inside the floor, Icebones saw the shells of animals from the sea — and bones. They were pretty, regular shapes, she thought, sharing a six-fold pattern: six leaves, six stubby limbs, six petals.

  Chaser-Of-Frogs said gently, "These are the bones of creatures who lived here long, long ago — before the Lost ever came here. When you die, Bones-Of-Ice, you will be covered by mud and dust that will squeeze you flat. Until—"

  "Until I become like this," Icebones said, awed. "Where I was born, the bones of mammoths lay thick in the ground. I thought there were no bones here — just as there are no mammoth trails. But I was wrong."

  "These are not the bones of our kind, Cousin. I was not always the Mother of the Big Pond. The Mother before me said that her Mother saw the Lost and their toiling beetles dig this strange bone-filled rock out of the Gouge wall — deep down, at its lowest layers. These squashed animals died long ago, you see. And nothing lived after them, so nothing was laid down over them but bare, dead rock, a great thickness of it. And the Lost took the bony rock and put it here."

  "Why?"

  "Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted. "Who knows why the Lost do as they do?"

  Icebones pondered the meaning of the rock. She pressed, frustrated, at the impenetrable surface, longing to touch and smell the ancient plants, to hear the voices of the animals.

  Long ago there was life here. There had been trees, and living oceans, and beasts that roamed the crimson lands. But their world died. The oceans froze over and dried up, and the air cooled, and the last rain fell, and the last snow... Now all that was left of them was here, in this rock, compressed flat by time.

  Clumsily, self-consciously, Chaser-Of-Frogs turned her back and pawed at the ground, trying to touch the bones with her hind feet.

  "You are Remembering," Icebones said.

  Chaser-Of-Frogs stopped, panting — used to her lethargic life in the mud, she got out of breath easily — and she looked up at Icebones with her small hard eyes. "Do you think we are foolish?"

  "No. I think you are wise."

  Chaser-Of-Frogs eyed her. "Bones-Of-Ice, I am done here. I am a poor fighter of wolves. I must go back before dark. You will go on. Just follow the canal."

  Suddenly the thought of being without the squat, humorous, courageous Swamp-Mammoth seemed unbearable. Impulsively Icebones twined her trunk around the other's. "Come with us."

  Chaser-Of-Frogs snorted. "What for, Cousin?"

  "The world is dying — just as it died before, ending the lives of those buried creatures..." Icebones explained how she was leading the mammoths to the basin she had called the Footfall of Kilukpuk, the deepest place in the world, where she hoped enough air and water would pool to keep the mammoths alive. "Come with us."

  "Me?" Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted, self-deprecating. "Look at me. I can scarcely trudge over an ice-flat plain for half a day before I am exhausted. How could I walk around the world?"

  "I'm serious—"

  "So am I," Chaser-Of-Frogs snapped. "Bones-Of-Ice, I am no fool. I can smell it myself. Every year the line of trees creeps further down the Gouge wall. Every year our ponds shrink, just that bit more. Every year I see more animals migrate one way up the Gouge then come back the other. But look at me, Bones-Of-Ice. I could not contemplate such a trek as yours... Not yet, anyhow. I smell wisdom on you, young Bones-Of-Ice, but you have much to learn. You see, my calves are not yet desperate enough."

  "I don't see what desperation has to do with it."

  Chaser-Of-Frogs said bluntly, "A trek to your Footfall pit would kill most of us. That is the truth. And that is why we must be desperate before we accept such suffering."

  Icebones was taken aback. "We will help you."

  "Why should you? You never knew us before. We aren't your kind. We aren't even like you."

  "We are Cousins, and we are bound by the Oath of Kilukpuk."

  Chaser-Of-Frogs grunted. "My dear Bones-Of-Ice, you have enough to do." The Swamp-Mammoth waddled away, toward the light of the setting sun. "I'll tell you what. I will seek out your scent at the Footfall. And if those piss-drinkers from the Pond of Evening get there before me, make sure you save the best pond for me..."

  THE NEXT MORNING the Lost-made canal, which had guided them eastward for so long, finished its course.

  Icebones stood at its head, before a square-edged termination whose regularity made her shudder. From here the canal arced back toward the west, a line of water straight as a sunbeam all the way to the horizon. She glimpsed the Nest of the Lost. In the uncertain light of the morning, the fruits of the light-trees were glowing in broken rows. Beetles clanked to and fro once more, opening their mouths for anybody who wanted to ride in them, and the food places opened, sending out thick smells of meat and drink for anybody who cared to call. But nobody came, nobody but the gulls.

  There was a flash of light, a distant crack like thunder.

  Flinching, Icebones raised her trunk.

  The sun was buried in a dense layer of mist and blue ice clouds at the eastern horizon, a band of light framed by the Gouge's silhouetted walls. The sky was clear, the world as peaceful as it ever got. What storm comes out of a clear sky...?

  Now there was another flash. She peered to the east, where she thought the flash had come from.

  The sun was swimming in the sky, sliding from side to side and pulsating in size. A line of light darted down from the sun's disc, connecting it to the ground, like a huge glowing trunk reaching down through the dusty air. She heard a remote sound, deep and complex — like a landslide, or the cracking of a rock under frost or heat.

  She blinked her eyes, seeking to clear them of water. When she stared again into the sun she could see its disc quite clearly, whole and round and unperturbed.

  She lowered her head, searching for grass and water, trying to forget the strangeness, to put aside her deep unease.

  5

  The Skua

  THEY WERE IN DIFFICULT COUNTRY.

  The Gouge floor was crumpled into ridges and eroded hillocks, pitted by depressions where water pooled, and littered with vast pocked boulders. Progress was slow, and all the mammoths were weary and fractious.

  The Gouge walls were now further apart and badly defined. The nearest wall was a band of deep shadow, striped by orange dawn light at its crest. And it was pocked by huge round holes, as regular as the pits left by raindrops in sand. Inside the holes the wall surface looked glassy, as if coated in ice.

  The holes were surely too regular to be natural. Icebones thought they must be the work of the Lost — though what there was to be gained by digging such immense pits in a rock wall, and how they had done it, was beyond her. Sometimes during the day she made out movement in those huge pits, heard the peep of chicks. Bird
s had made their nests there, high above the attention of the scavengers and predators of the Gouge floor.

  One early dawn, Icebones was woken, disturbed. She raised her trunk.

  The sun was still below the eastern horizon, where the sky was streaked with pink-gray. The other mammoths had fanned out over a patch of steppe. The only sounds they made were the soft rustle of their hair as they walked, or the rip of grass, and the occasional chirping snore from Woodsmoke, who was napping beneath his mother's legs.

  She heard the gaunt honking of geese. Sometimes their isolated barks rose until they became a single outcry, pealing from the sky. Now she saw the birds in the first daylight, their huge wings seeming to glow against the lightening sky.

  But it wasn't the geese that had disturbed her.

  She turned, sniffing the air. It seemed to her that the light was strange this morning, the air filled with a peculiar orange-gray glow. And there was an odd scent in the breeze that raised her guard hairs: a thin iron tang, like the taste of ocean air.

  She looked west, where night still lay thick on the Gouge as it curled around the belly of the world. A band of deeper darkness was smeared across the Gouge floor, and a wind blew stronger in her face, soft but steady.

  She felt the hairs on her scalp rise.

  SPIRAL WAS DIGGING with her trunk under Breeze's belly. "Let me have him. Let me!" She was trying to get hold of Woodsmoke, who, wide awake now, was cowering under his mother's belly.

  "Get away," Breeze said. "Leave us alone, Spiral..." Breeze pushed her sister away, but she was smaller, weaker. And the calf was becoming increasingly agitated by the pushing and barging of the huge creatures that loomed over him.

  Autumn walked to her squabbling daughters, stately and massive. "What is this trouble you are making?"

  The calf, mewling and unhappy, wanted to run to his grandmother, but Breeze kept a firm hold on him with her skinny trunk. "Make her go away."

  She is selfish," Spiral protested. "He loves me as well as her."