Icebones tm-3

by Stephen Baxter

Icebones blew dust out of her trunk. "That we will never know—"

  The sea’s placid surface erupted before them. Dunes flowed and disintegrated. A great black cylinder rose, and dust fell away with a soft rustle all around.

  Icebones stumbled back, and she made to trumpet a warning. But so profound was her shock at this sudden apparition that her throat and trunk seemed to freeze. And besides, what warning could she give.

  The cylinder of black-red flesh, twisting out of the dust, was crusted with hard segmented plates. At its apex was a nostril, or mouth: a pit, black as night, lined with six inward-pointing teeth. Dust was falling into that gaping maw, but whatever immense creature lay beneath the surface seemed indifferent. The great mouth folded around the lower portion of the floating sac. Huge, sharp teeth meshed together with a noise like rock on rock, and the sac’s fabric was ground apart effortlessly.

  Then the vast pillar twisted and fell back into the dust. It sank quickly out of sight, dragging half the sac and the trailing cable with it.

  There were no ripples or waves. The dust ocean was immediately still, with only a new pattern of dunes left to show where the beast had been. The severed upper half of the sac drifted away, tumbling, on breezes that were gathering strength in the morning air.

  For heartbeats the two mammoths stood side by side, saying nothing, stunned.

  "It was a beast," said Thunder fervently.

  "Like a worm. Or a snake."

  "Do you think the Lost brought it here from the Old Steppe?"

  "I don’t think it has anything to do with the Lost, Thunder. Did it smell of the Lost — or any animal you know? Did you see its teeth?"

  "They were very sharp and long."

  "But it had six: six teeth, set in a ring." Just as the footprints she saw in the ancient outflow channel had had six toes. Just as the creatures buried in the rock floor of the Nest of the Lost had six leaves and limbs and petals…

  She stepped forward, sniffing the chill, thin mist pooling over the flooded crater. "I think our sand worm was here long before the coming of the Lost." Surviving in the dust, where creatures of water and air froze and died as the world cooled — perhaps sleeping away countless years, as the tide of life withdrew from the red rock of the world, waiting patiently until chance brought it a morsel of water or food… "Perhaps the Lost never even knew it was here," she said.

  "If they had known they would probably have tried to kill it," said Thunder mournfully. "We should not seek to cross this dust pool."

  "No," said Icebones. "No, we shouldn’t do that."

  Now the other mammoths were starting to wake. The dawn was filled with the soft sounds of yawns and belches, and the rumbling of half-empty guts.

  Icebones and Thunder rejoined their Family.

  2

  The Blood Weed

  The land, folded and cracked and cratered, continued to rise inexorably. There was no water save for occasional patches of dirty, hard-frozen ice, and the rocks were bare even of lichen and mosses. The sky was a deep purple-pink, even at noon, and there was never a cloud to be seen.

  Icebone’s shoulder ached with ice-hard clarity, all day and all night. She limped, favoring the shoulder. But over time that only caused secondary aches in the muscles of her legs and back and neck. And if she ever overexerted herself she paid the price in racking, wheezing breaths, aching lungs, and an ominous blackness that closed around her vision.

  One day, she thought grimly, that fringe would close completely, and once more she would be immersed in cold darkness — just as she had been before setting foot on this crimson plain — but this time, she feared, it was a darkness that would never clear.

  It was a relief for them all when they crested a ridge and found themselves looking down on a deeply incised channel. For the valley contained a flat plain that showed, here and there, the unmistakable white glitter of ice.

  Woodsmoke trumpeted loudly. Ignoring his mother’s warning rumbles, the calf ran pell-mell down the rocky slope, scattering dust and bits of loose rock beneath his feet. He reached the ice and began to scrape with his stubby tusks.

  The others followed more circumspectly, testing the ground with probing trunk tips before each step. But Thunder was soon enthusiastically spearing the ice with his tusks. More hesitantly, Spiral and Breeze copied him.

  Icebones recalled how she had had to show the mammoths how water could be dug out from beneath the mud. To Woodsmoke, born during this great migration, it was a natural thing, something he had grown up with. And perhaps his calves, learning from him, would approach the skill and expertise once enjoyed by the mammoths of her Island.

  Icebones longed to join in, but knew she must conserve her strength. To her shame the weakness of the Matriarch had become a constant unspoken truth among the mammoths.

  Alone, she walked cautiously onto the ice.

  The frozen lake stretched to the end of the valley. To either side red-brown valley walls rose up to jagged ridges. The ice itself, tortured by wind and sunlight, was contorted into towers, pinnacles, gullies and pits, like the surface of a sea frozen in an instant. Heavily laced with dust and bits of rock, the ice was stained pale pink, and the color was deepened by the cold salmon color of the sky; even here on the ice, as everywhere else on these High Plains, she was immersed in redness.

  Soon Thunder trumpeted in triumph, "I am through!"

  He had dug a roughly circular pit in the ice. The pit, its walls showing the scrape of mammoth tusks, was filled with dirty green-brown water.

  All of them hesitated, for by now they had absorbed many Cycle lessons about the dangers of drinking foul water.

  At least I can do this much for them, Icebones thought. "I will be first," she said.

  With determination she stepped forward and lowered her trunk into the pit. The water was ice cold and smelled stale. Nevertheless she sucked up a trunkful and, with resolution, swallowed it. She said, "It is full of green living things. But I think it is good for us to drink." And she took another long, slow trunkful, as was her right as Matriarch.

  Defying Family protocol, as calves often would, Woodsmoke hurried forward, knelt down on the gritty ice, and was next to dip his trunk into the ragged hole. But he could not reach, and he squeaked his frustration.

  Autumn brushed him aside and dipped her own mighty trunk into the hole. She took a luxurious mouthful, chewing it slightly and spitting out a residue of slimy green stuff. Then she took another trunk’s load and carefully dribbled the water into Woodsmoke’s eager mouth.

  After that, the others crowded around to take their turn.

  When they had all drunk their fill, Thunder returned to his pit. He knelt down and reached deep into the water. Icebones could see the big muscles at the top of his trunk working as he explored. The modest pride in his bearing was becoming, Icebones thought. He was growing into a fine Bull, strong in body and mind.

  With an effort, he hauled out a mass of slimy green vegetation. He dumped it on the ice. It steamed, rapidly frosting over. He shook his trunk to rid it of tendrils of green murk. "This is what grows beneath the ice," he said. "I could feel sheets of it, waving in the water like the skirt of some drowned mammoth. I think the sheets are held together by that revolting mucus."

  Spiral probed at the mat with her trunk, the tense posture of her body expressing exquisite disgust. "We cannot eat this," she said.

  Autumn growled, "You will if you have to."

  "No, Spiral is right," Icebones said. "If we are driven to eat this green scum, it will be because we are starving — and we are not that yet." She sniffed the air. It was not yet midday. "We will stay here today and tonight, for at least we can drink our fill."

  The mammoths fanned out over the valley, probing at the ice, seeking scraps of food in the wind-carved rock of the walls.

  Icebones came to an odd pit in the ice, round and smooth-sided.

  She probed into the pit — it was a little wider than her trunk — and she found, nestling at the bottom, a
bit of hard black rock. When she dug out the rock and set it on the surface, it felt a little warmer than the surrounding ice. Perhaps it was made warmer than the sun, and that way melted its tunnel into the ice surface, at last falling through to the water beneath, and settling to the lake’s dark bed.

  She found more of the pits, each of them plunging straight down into the ice. The smaller the stone, the deeper the pit it dug. Driven by absent curiosity she pulled out the rocks wherever she could. Perhaps the rocks would start to dig new pits from where she had set them down, each in its own slow way. And perhaps some other curious mammoth of the future would wonder why some pits had stones in them, and some were empty.

  Close to one valley wall she found a stand of squat trees. They had broad roots, well-founded in frozen mud, and their branches were bent over, like a willow’s, so that they clung to the rock wall. But the fruit they bore was fat and black and leathery.

  They were breathing trees.

  She began to pull the leathery fruit off the low, clinging branches. She recalled how the Ragged One had shown her how to extract a mouthful of air from those thick-coated fruit. Each charge of air was invigorating but disappointingly brief, and afterwards her lungs were left aching almost as hard as before.

  Thunder called her with a deep rumble. He was standing on the shore’s frozen mud, close to a line of low mounds. She left the trees and walked slowly over to him.

  The mud was dried and hardened and cracked. She could see how low ridges paralleled the lake’s ragged shore: water marks, where the receding lake had churned up the mud at its rim.

  She pointed this out to Thunder. "It is a sign that the lake has been drying for a long time."

  "Yes," he growled. "And so is this." He swept his tusks through one of the mounds. It was just a heap of rocks, she saw, with larger fragments making a loose shell over smaller bits of rubble. But its shape had been smoothly rounded, and inside there were bits of yellow skin that crumbled when Thunder probed at them. "I think this mound was made in the lake."

  She tried to pick up a fragment of one skin-like flake. It crumbled, and it was dry, flavorless. "Perhaps this was once alive. Like the mats you found under the ice."

  "The lake is dying, Icebones. Soon it will be frozen to its base, and then the ice will wear away, and there will be nothing left — nothing but rock, and dried-up flakes like this."

  They walked a little further, following the muddy shore.

  In one place the lake bank was shallow, and easily climbed. Icebones clambered up that way. The land beyond was unbroken, harsh. But it was scarred by something hard and shining that marched from one horizon to the other: glimmering, glowing, an immense straight edge imposed on the world.

  Icebones and Thunder approached cautiously. "It is a fence," he said.

  "A thing of the Lost."

  "Yes. A thing to keep animals out — or to keep them in."

  That made no sense to Icebones. The land beyond the fence seemed just as empty and desolate as the land on this side of it. There was nothing to be separated, as far as she could see.

  Thunder probed the fence with his tusk. Icebones saw that it was a thing of shining thread, full of little holes. The holes were too small to pass a trunk tip through, but she could see through the fence to what lay beyond.

  And what she saw there was bones: a great linear heap of them, strewn at the base of the fence.

  The mammoths walked further, peering up and down the fence, trying to touch the bones through the mesh.

  "I don’t think any of them are mammoth," Icebones said.

  Thunder said tightly, "The animals could smell the water. They couldn’t get through the fence. But they couldn’t leave; the world was drying, and they couldn’t get away from that maddening smell."

  "So they stayed here until they died."

  "Yes." And he barged the fence with his forehead, ramming it until a section of it gave way. Then he tramped it flat into the dust.

  But there were no animals to come charging through in search of water; nothing but the dust of bones rose up in acknowledgment of his strength.

  She tugged his trunk, making him come away.

  From the lake came a soft crushing sound, a muffled trumpet.

  The mammoths whirled.

  Icebones looked first for the calf: there he was, safely close by his mother’s side, though both Breeze and Woodsmoke were standing stock-still, wary.

  But of Autumn there was no sign.

  Ignoring the pain in her straining lungs, Icebones hurried stiffly onto the ice. "Where is she? What happened?"

  "I don’t know," Breeze called. "She was at the far side of the lake, seeing clearer water. And then—"

  "Keep the calf safe."

  Thunder immediately began to charge ahead.

  Icebones grabbed his tail and, with an effort, held him back. "We may all be in danger. Slowly, Thunder."

  He growled, but he said, "Lead, Matriarch."

  Trying to restrain her own impatience, Icebones led Thunder and Spiral across the frozen lake, step by step, exploring the complex red-streaked surface with her trunk tip.

  She heard a low rumble.

  She stopped, listening. The others had heard it too. With more purpose now, but with the same careful step-by-step checking, the three mammoths made their way toward the source of the call.

  At last they came to a wide pit, dug or melted into the ice. And here they found Autumn.

  She lay on her side, as if asleep. But her body was covered with broad streaks of blood red, as if she had been gouged open by the claws of some huge beast. Her face, too, was hidden in redness, from her mouth to the top of her trunk.

  "She is bleeding!" cried Spiral. "She is dead! She is dead!" Her wails echoed from the high rock walls of the valley.

  But Icebones could see that Autumn’s small amber eyes were open, and they were fixed on Icebones: intelligent, angry, alert.

  Icebones reached down and touched one of the bloody streaks with her trunk. This was not broken flesh. Instead she found a cold, leathery surface that gave when she pushed it, like the skin of a ripe fruit.

  "This is a plant," she said. "It has grabbed onto Autumn, the way a willow tree grabs onto a rock." She knelt and leaned into the pit. She stabbed at the plant with her tusk, piercing it easily.

  Crimson liquid gushed out stickily, splashing her face. The tendril she had pierced pulled back, the spilled fluid already freezing over.

  The plant closed tighter around Autumn, and the Cow groaned.

  Spiral touched Icebones’s dirtied face curiously and lifted her trunk tip to her mouth. "It is blood."

  Thunder growled, "What manner of plant has blood instead of sap? What manner of plant attacks a full-grown mammoth?"

  "She cannot breathe," Icebones said. "She will soon die…" She reached down and began to stab, carefully and delicately, at the tendrils wrapped over Autumn’s mouth. More of the bloody sap spurted. But the plant’s grip tightened on Autumn’s body, as the trunk of a mammoth closes on a tuft of grass, and Icebones heard the ominous crack of bone.

  At last she got Autumn’s mouth free. The older Cow took deep, gasping breaths. "My air," she said now. "It sucks out my air! Get it off. Oh, get it off…"

  Icebones and Thunder began to stab and pry at the bloody tendrils. The eerie blood-sap pumped out and spilled into the pit, and soon their tusks and the hair on their faces were soaked with the thick crimson fluid. But wherever they cut away a tendril more would come sliding out of the mass beneath Autumn — and with every flesh stab or slice the tendrils tightened further.

  "Enough," Icebones said. She straightened up and, with a bloodstained trunk, pulled Thunder back.

  Woodsmoke stood with Breeze a little way away from the pit. He trumpeted in dismay. "You aren’t going to let her die."

  It struck Icebones then that Woodsmoke had never seen anybody die. She wiped her bloody trunk on the ice, then touched the calf’s scalp. "We can’t fight it, little one. If
we hurt the blood weed it hurts Autumn more."

  "Then find some way to get it off her without hurting it."

  Thunder rumbled, from the majesty of his adolescence, "When you grow up you’ll learn that sometimes there are only hard choices, calf—"

  But Icebones shouldered him aside, her mind working furiously. "What do you mean, Woodsmoke? How can we get the weed to leave Autumn alone?"

  Woodsmoke pondered, his little trunk wrinkling. "Why does it want Autumn?"

  "We think it is stealing her breath."

  "Then give it something it wants more than Autumns breath. I like grass," he said. "But I like saxifrage better. If I see saxifrage I will leave the grass and take the saxifrage…"

  Icebones turned to thunder. "What else could we offer it?"

  Thunder said, "Another mammoth’s breath. My breath Icebones, if you wish it—"

  "No," she said reluctantly. "I don’t want to lose anybody else. But what else…?"

  Even as she framed the notion herself, Thunder trumpeted excitedly. "The breathing trees," they shouted together.

  "Get the fruit," said Icebones. "You and Spiral. You are faster than I am. Go."

  Without hesitation the two young mammoths lumbered over the folded ice toward the breathing trees, where they clung to the lake’s rocky shore.

  Autumn moaned again. "Oh, it hurts… I am sorry…"

  "Don’t be sorry," said Woodsmoke mournfully.

  "It is my fault," Autumn gasped. "The plant lay over the pit. It was a neat trap… I did not check… I walked across it without even thinking, and when I fell, it wrapped itself around me… Oh! It is very tight on my ribs…"

  "Don’t talk," said Icebones. Her voice lapsed into a wordless, reassuring rumble. Breeze joined in, and even Woodsmoke added his shallow growl.

  Perhaps the pit had been melted into the ice by a stone, Icebones thought. Perhaps the blood weed, driven by some dark red instinct, had learned to use such pits as a trap. And it waited, and waited…

  Autumn lay still, her eyes closed, her breath coming in thin, hasty gasps. But Icebones could see that the blood weed was covering her mouth once more.