Icebones tm-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Icebones knew she should give a lead to the others. But it took all her strength just to keep moving. She plodded on in silence, locked in her own world of determination and pain: Just this step. Now just one more…

  She found a small, deep pond, frozen over. Impatiently she pressed on the ice until it cracked into thick, angular chunks, and she sucked up trunkfuls of cold, black water, ignoring the thin slimy texture of vegetation. Soon she had washed the dust out of her throat and trunk, and was trickling soothing water over her aching shoulder.

  The others still bore injuries. Breeze nursed the brutal slashes in her back. The calf was fascinated by his wounds, and his grandmother often caught him picking at the scabs that had formed there.

  But the one who slowed them down the most was Icebones herself, to her regret and shame.

  Thunder stood very still, listening carefully to the deep song of the rocks, as she had taught him. "This is a damaged country," he said.

  "Yes." She forced herself to raise her head.

  To the north, the valley branched into a series of smaller channels, like a delta. The waters must once have flowed that way. The valley floor was smoothly carved, textured with sandbars that followed the path of the vanished flood. She saw what must have been an island in the flow, flat-topped, shaped like the body of a fish to push aside the water. To the south, where the water must have come from, the landscape was quite different: littered with blocks and domes and low hills, all of them frost-cracked, water-eroded and streaked with lichen, their outlines softened by layers of windblown dust. But many of these blocks were immense, much larger than any mammoth. It was just like the bottom of a huge dried-up river.

  All this was drenched in a pink-white glow, and she could feel the sun’s heat on her back. She squinted up, wondering if she would find the sun misshapen again, as she had seen it days before, close to the canal’s terminus. But the light was too bright, and it dazzled her. She turned away, eyes watering.

  Thunder said, "There is water under the ground. A great lake of it, trapped under a cap of ice. I can feel it. Can you?"

  "Yes—"

  "But it is very deep." He seemed excited as his awakened instincts pieced together the story of this land. "Perhaps the water broke out in a huge gush, as the waters broke out of Breeze’s belly when Woodsmoke was ready to be born. Then it flooded over the land, seeking the sea to the north. The water carved out this valley. See how it washed across the ground here, shaping it, and surged around that island… Perhaps the land to the south simply collapsed. If you suck the water out of a hole in the ice on a frozen pond, sometimes the ice will crack and fall, under its own weight…"

  Maybe he was right. But whatever water had marked this land was vanished a long time ago. She saw craters punched into the ancient valley floor, themselves eroded by wind and time.

  Thunder was still talking. But his words blurred, becoming an indistinguishable growl. The air was now drenched by a dazzling light that picked out every stray dust mote around her.

  "I’m sorry, Thunder. What did you say? I am hot, and the day is bright."

  But Thunder’s pink tongue was lolling. "It is the sky," he said. "Look, Icebones. There is nothing wrong with you. It is the sky!"

  The sun had grown huge — and was getting larger. With every extension of that pale, ragged disc, the heat and the brilliance around her increased. It was silent, eerie, and profoundly disturbing.

  There was a nudge at her side, an alarmed trumpet. Icebones made out Spiral, a shimmering ghost in the pink-stained brilliance. "Come away! You are in great danger here. Hurry…!" Spiral began to barge vigorously at Icebones’s flank.

  Icebones needed little further urging.

  The ground was littered with scree and, unable to see, she stumbled frequently. Her shoulder hurt profoundly, and she felt as if she would melt from the heat. Though she was half-blinded, she could hear as clearly as ever: Spiral’s blaring, the scrape of her foot pads over the loose rock, even the scratchy, shallow breathing of the other mammoths further away.

  That flaring sun expanded still further. Eventually it became a great disc draped over the sky, its blurred rim reaching halfway to the horizon.

  It was horrifying, bewildering, unreal, a new impossible unreality in this unreal world. The sun does not behave like that. If I am the frozen dream of some long-dead seer, she thought, then perhaps the dream is breaking down; perhaps this is the light of the truth, breaking through the crumbling dream…

  But now the heat began to fade, suddenly. There was a soft breeze, carrying the tang of ice. The light, too, seemed dimmer.

  Her thoughts cleared, like a fever dream receding. Here was Autumn, a blocky, ill-defined silhouette before her.

  "If that was summer," Icebones said, "it was the shortest I’ve ever known."

  "This is no joke." Autumn pushed her trunk into Icebones’s mouth. "You’re too hot. Come now, quickly." So Icebones was forced to walk again, in the footsteps of hurrying Autumn.

  They reached a tall, eroded rock, crusted with yellow lichen. In its shade there was a patch of snow, laced pink by dust. Autumn reached down, scooped up snow with her trunk and began to push it into Icebones’s mouth.

  Icebones lumbered forward and let the cool pink-white stuff lap up to her belly. Mammoths did not sweat, and using frost or snow like this was an essential means of keeping cool. Icebones only wished that the snow were deep enough to cover her completely.

  When she felt a little better, she staggered wearily out of the ice. Slush dripped from guard hairs that were still hot to the touch of her trunk tip.

  The place where she had been standing with Thunder, bathed in light, glowed a bright pink-white. Threads of steam and smoke rose from the red dust. The stink of burning vegetation and scorched-hot rock reached her nostrils.

  Above the glowing ground a column of shining, swirling dust motes rose into the air. It was a perfect, soft-edged cylinder that slanted toward the sun — but Icebones had never seen a sunbeam of such intensity, nor one cast by such a powerful and misshapen sun.

  Away from the sun itself, the sky seemed somehow diminished. Close to the zenith, she could even make out stars. It was as if all the light in the world had been concentrated into that single intense pulse.

  An overheated rock cracked open with an explosive percussion, making all the mammoths flinch and grumble.

  "If we were still standing there," Thunder said grimly, "we too would be burning."

  Spiral nudged him affectionately. "And your fat would flow like water, you big tusker, and we would all swim away."

  But now the shining pillar of light dispersed, abruptly, leaving dust motes churning, and the intense glow dissipated as if it had never been. When she peered up, Icebones saw the sun was restored to its normal intensity, small and shrunken.

  "It is a thing of the Lost," she said. "This great tusk of light that stirs and breaks the rock."

  "Yes," said Autumn. "Somehow they can gather the light of the sun itself and hurl it down where they choose. From the Fire Mountain I saw it stab at the land, over and over, carving out pits and valleys."

  "Like the canal in the Gouge," Icebones said.

  "But now it is scratching the land as foolishly as Woodsmoke trying out his milk tusks. The Lost are gone, and it doesn’t know what to do."

  The cloudy deformation of the sun was gathering again, and the light beam was slicing down once more, this time on the higher land to the south, above the escarpment at the head of the valley. Where it rested the rock cracked and melted.

  The ground shuddered — a single sharp pulse — and the mammoths rumbled their unease.

  Autumn said, "I think—"

  "Hush!" The brief, peremptory trumpet came from Thunder. "Listen. Can’t you hear that? Can’t you, Icebones?"

  Breeze said impatiently, "I hear the burning grass, the hiss of the melting rock—"

  "No. Deeper than that. Listen."

  Icebones stood square on the ground, pres
sing her weight onto all her four legs, despite the stabs of pain in her shoulder. And then she heard it: a subterranean growl, deep and menacing.

  "We have to get to the higher ground," she said immediately. They were halfway across the valley, she saw, and the eastern slope looked marginally easier to climb. "Let’s go, let’s go. Now." She began to limp that way, her damaged shoulder stinging with pain.

  The mammoths milled uncertainly.

  "Why?" Breeze asked. "What are we fleeing?"

  "Water," said Icebones. "A vast quantity of water, an underground sea locked into the ground. Like the great flood that once burst across this land, scraping out the valley you stand in. And now—"

  "And now," said Thunder urgently, "thanks to the shining tusk, that underground sea is awakening, stretching its muscles. Come on."

  At last they understood. They began to lumber across the plain toward the eastern wall, trunks and tails swaying.

  The ground above the escarpment cracked with a report that echoed down the walls of the valley, and steam gushed into the air. The vast body of water beneath, vigorous on its release after a billion years locked beneath a cap of permafrost ice, was rising at the commanding touch of the great orbiting lens — rising with relentless determination, seeking the air.

  7

  The Flood

  Though the ground was broken and their way was impeded by half-buried lumps of debris, they all made faster time than Icebones — even the calf, who clung to his mother’s tail.

  A giant explosion shook the ground.

  Her foreleg folded beneath her. She crashed forward onto her knees, pain stabbing through her shoulder.

  From the great scribbled scar inflicted by the tusk of light, a vast fountain of steam gushed into the pale sky. Vapor and debris drifted across the sun, turning it into a pale pink smear.

  I’m not going to make it, she thought.

  And now dust rained down like a dense, gritty snow. Icebones snorted to clear her trunk, and she tasted the blood flavor of the hot, iron-rich dust.

  Suddenly she was alone in a shell of murky dust. And the mammoths were no more than crimson blurs in the distance, fast receding.

  She supposed it was for the best that the others had not looked back. She had never wanted to become a burden.

  She found herself staring at a rock — staring with fascination, for it might be the last thing she would ever see. It was heavily weathered, eroded, pitted and cracked. Its color was burnt orange, but there were streaks of blue-red on its north-facing surfaces, which had been exposed to sunlight longer. It was made of a lumpy conglomerate, pebbles trapped in a mix of hardened sand.

  Pebbles and sand, she thought. Pebbles and sand that must have formed in fast-flowing rivers, and then compressed into this mottled rock on some ocean bed. All of it ancient, all of it long gone.

  She ran her trunk fingers over the rock’s pocked surface. She found a series of small, shallow pits, a row of them, each just large enough to take her trunk tip.

  …They were footprints, locked into the surface of the hardened rock. She probed more carefully at the nearest print. It had six toes. No living animal had six toes. Now its kind was lost, leaving no trace save these accidentally preserved prints.

  She felt a surge of wonder. Despite the noise, her pain, despite the imminent danger, despite the rock’s shuddering, she longed to know where that ancient animal had been going — what it had wanted, how it had died.

  But she would never know, and might live no more than a few more heartbeats, not even long enough to savor such wonder.

  The dusty debris falling over her was becoming more liquid, she thought, and warmer too. The flood was nearing. The ground shook. She huddled closer to her rock.

  But a long, powerful trunk wrapped under her belly.

  It was Spiral. The young Cow loomed over Icebones as a mother would loom over her calf. She was coated in red dust, and her guard hairs were already damp.

  Icebones said, "You shouldn’t have come back. You’ll die, like me. The flood is coming."

  Spiral rumbled, loudly enough to make herself heard over the noise of the water. "Yes, the flood comes… like the tears of Kilukpuk."

  Icebones felt weary amusement. "You talk now of Kilukpuk?"

  "I’m hoping you’ll tell me more of those old tales, Icebones."

  "It’s too late. We can’t get to the bank."

  "No. But there is an island, further to the north, that might stay above the waters." She grabbed Icebones’s tusks and began to drag her along the bed of the ancient channel.

  Icebones tried to resist, digging her feet into the ground, but the pain in her shoulder was too great even for that.

  "You must not do this," she said.

  "Icebones, help me or we’ll both drown."

  Icebones forced herself to her feet.

  To the north, the way the ancient waters had once flowed, the land was covered by scour marks, braided channels, heavily eroded islands, sand bars, the scars left by flowing water. The island Spiral had selected was shaped like a vast teardrop, its steep, layered sides polished to smoothness by ancient floods.

  Climbing the island’s crumbling walls was one of the most difficult things Icebones had ever done. The strata cracked and gave way, coming loose under her in a shower of rock and pebbles and dust, and each fall brought lancing pain in her shoulder that made her trumpet in protest. But Spiral stayed with her every step, ramming Icebones’s rump with her head, as if driving her up the slope with sheer strength and willpower.

  At last they reached the lip of the wall. With a final, agonizing effort Icebones dragged her carcass onto the island’s flat top. She crumpled, falling onto her knees. The surface was smooth hard mudstone, a fragment of the floor of some ancient sea, she thought.

  Spiral stood before her, breathing hard, caked with orange dust, her hair ragged: tall and wild, she was a figure from a nightmare. "You are a heavy burden to haul."

  Icebones gasped, "You should have left me."

  "Too late for that."

  And now, through the murky, sodden gloom, more mammoths approached: Autumn, Thunder, Breeze, the calf.

  Icebones growled, "What are you doing here?"

  "We are waiting for you," said Thunder. "Did you think we would go on without you? And when we saw Spiral bringing you here—"

  Lightning flashed. The mammoths flinched.

  Where the sky tusk had broken the ground, dust and steam still gushed, crimson red, and over the towering clouds of dust and steam, lightning cracked. Now water was beginning to pulse out of the ground, stained pink by the ubiquitous dust.

  Instinctively the mammoths gathered closer, nuzzling and bumping.

  Icebones was surrounded by the rich smell of their hair, and they loomed over her as if she was a calf. She snorted. "Some Matriarch. I did not understand the tusk of the sun. I did not hear the movement of the water under the ground until we were in danger. I am the slowest of us all, and have put you at risk."

  Autumn said, "But I understood the meaning of the tusk. And Thunder with his sharp hearing heard the water, and understood, and warned us in time. And Spiral used her strength to save you — just as you have used your strength to aid others of us in the past."

  "But the Cycle teaches—"

  "Is the Cycle more important than the instincts of the mammoths around you?"

  "…No," Icebones conceded.

  "So you have not failed," Autumn whispered. "We are Family. We are what you made us. My strength is your strength."

  "It doesn’t always work like that," Icebones said grimly. "Sometimes it is right to abandon the weak…"

  Autumn pushed her trunk into Icebones’s mouth. "No more lessons."

  All the mammoths began to murmur, a deep rumble of reassurance as if to soothe a frightened calf. Their rumbles merged subtly, becoming like the single voice of a vaster creature.

  Icebones let her self sink into that comforting pit of sound. She felt her doubts and fear
s and anxieties dissolve — and her sense of self washed away with them. She was Family: she heard the world through Thunder’s sharp ears, and felt Spiral’s tall strength suffuse her own limbs, and Autumn’s deep knowledge and unknowing wisdom filled her head, and she shared Breeze’s deep love for her calf, who became as precious to her as her own core warmth.

  She had never forgotten how bleakly bereft she had felt on that rocky hillside, when she first woke from her unnatural sleep, bombarded by strangeness — alone, as she had never been in her life. But now a new Family had built around her — I had become We — and she was whole again.

  With a final shuddering tremble, the ground around the great fracture gave way. Layers of rock lifted like a lid. Angry water spilled into the valley, pounding on the eroded boulders, shattering ancient stones that might not have been disturbed since the world was young.

  A wall of dirty, rust-brown water fell on them, hard and heavy.

  As the setting sun began finally to glint through the remnant haze, the mammoths separated stiffly. They were cold, hungry, bruised, utterly bedraggled.

  Water, turbulent and red-brown with mud, still surged around their island. Immense waves, echoes of the mighty fracture, surged up and down the ancient valley.

  But already the flood water had begun to recede. Much of it was draining away through the ancient channels to the Ocean of the North. The rest was simply soaking away into the dust, vanishing back into the thirsty red ground as rapidly as it had emerged. The revealed ground, slick with crimson mud and remnant puddles, sparkled in the low sunlight, as red and wet as skinned flesh.

  The very shape of this island had changed, its battered walls crumbled away under the onslaught.

  The Lost remake worlds, Icebones thought. But they do not stay remade. Soon the things the Lost have built here, all the bridges and pipelines and Nests and the toiling beetles, will collapse and erode away. And when the dust has silted up even their marvelous straight-edged canal, the ancient face of the Sky Steppe will emerge once more, timeless and indomitable.