Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  Here was No-sun, blocking his way. ‘Stay out there. You have to take your turn.’

  ‘But it’s cold.’

  She turned away.

  He tucked his head under his arm and turned his back to the wind. He stood the cold as long as he could.

  Then, following the lead of others, he worked his way around the rim of the group, to its leeward side. At least here he was sheltered. And after a time more came around, shivering and iced up from their time to windward, and gradually he was encased once more in warmth.

  Isolated on their scrap of ice, with no shelter save each other’s bodies from the wind and snow, the little group of humans huddled in silence. As they took their turns at the windward side, the group shifted slowly across the ice, a creeping mat of fur.

  Sometimes children were born onto the ice. The people pushed around closely, to protect the new-born, and its mother would tuck it away into the warmth of her body. Occasionally one of them fell away, and remained where she or he lay, as the group moved on.

  This was the huddle: a black disc of fur and flesh and human bones, swept by the storms of Earth’s unending winter.

  A hundred thousand years after the Collision, all humans had left was each other.

  Mars was a deserted ice ball, as it had always been.

  Venus was choked by acid clouds, its surface glowing red hot.

  Mercury was, simply, gone. She smiled at that. Mercury had been the last refuge of mankind. Perhaps humanity persisted, somewhere out there, beyond.

  The Moon appeared restored: the craters, the great lava seas, the gleaming, ancient highlands. As if life had never touched its ancient face. But in the telescopic viewers she could see the traces of mankind, persisting even now. Abandoned dwellings, clinging to crater walls. Canals cut from crater to crater. Even water marks in some of the smaller craters, like drained bath tubs. Air, frozen out in the permanent shadows of the poles.

  And to Earth, at last, she turned.

  Spring came slowly.

  Dwarfed by the desolate, rocky landscape, bereft of shelter, the humans scratched at their isolated puddle of ice, beginning the year’s feeding.

  Night-Dawn scraped ice from his eyes. He felt as if he were waking from a year-long sleep. This was his second spring, and it would be the summer of his manhood. He would father children, teach them and protect them through the coming winter. Despite the depletion of his winter fat, he felt strong, vigorous.

  He found Frazil. They stood together, wordless, on the thick early-spring ice.

  Somebody roared in his ear, hot foul breath on his neck.

  It was, of course, the Bull. The old man would not see another winter; his ragged fur lay loose on his huge, empty frame, riven by the scars of forgotten, meaningless battles. But he was still immense and strong, still the Bull.

  Without preamble, the Bull sank his teeth into Night-Dawn’s neck, and pulled away a lump of flesh, which he chewed noisily.

  Night-Dawn backed away, appalled, breathing hard, blood running down his fur.

  Frazil and No-sun were here with him.

  ‘Challenge him,’ No-sun said.

  ‘I don’t want to fight.’

  ‘Then let him die,’ Frazil said. ‘He is old and stupid. We can couple despite him.’ There was a bellow. The Bull was facing him, pawing at the ice with a great scaly foot.

  ‘I don’t wish to fight you,’ Night-Dawn said.

  The Bull laughed, and lumbered forward, wheezing.

  Night-Dawn stood his ground, braced his feet against the ice, and put his head down.

  The Bull’s roar turned to alarm, and he tried to stop; but his feet could gain no purchase.

  His mouth slammed over Night-Dawn’s skull. Night-Dawn screamed as the Bull’s teeth grated through his fur and flesh to his very bone.

  They bounced off each other. Night-Dawn felt himself tumbling back, and finished up on his backside on the ice. His chest felt crushed; he laboured to breathe. He could barely see through the blood streaming into his eyes.

  The Bull was lying on his back, his loose belly hoisted towards the violet sky. He was feeling his mouth with his fingers.

  He let out a long, despairing moan.

  No-sun helped Night-Dawn to his feet. ‘You did it. You smashed his teeth, Night-Dawn. He’ll be dead in days.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to –’

  His mother leaned close. ‘You’re the Bull now. You can couple with who you like. Even me, if you want to.’

  ‘ … Night-Dawn.’

  Here came Frazil. She was smiling. She turned her back to him, bent over, and pulled open her genital slit. His penis rose in response, without his volition.

  He coupled with her quickly. He did it at the centre of a circle of watching, envious, calculating men. It brought him no joy, and they parted without words.

  He avoided the Bull until the old man had starved to death, gums bleeding from ice cuts, and the others had dumped his body into a water hole.

  For Night-Dawn, everything was different after that.

  He was the Bull. He could couple with who he liked. He stayed with Frazil. But even coupling with Frazil brought him little pleasure.

  One day he was challenged by another young man called One-Tusk, over a woman Night-Dawn barely knew, called Ice-Cloud.

  ‘Fight, damn you,’ One-Tusk lisped.

  ‘We shouldn’t fight. I don’t care about Ice-Cloud.’

  One-Tusk growled, pursued him for a while, then gave up. Night-Dawn saw him try to mate with one of the women, but she laughed at him and pushed him away.

  Frazil came to him. ‘We can’t live like this. You’re the Bull. Act like it.’

  ‘To fight, to eat, to huddle, to raise children, to die … There must be more, Frazil.’

  She sighed. ‘Like what?’

  ‘The Collision. Our purpose.’

  She studied him. ‘Night-Dawn, listen to me. The Collision is a pretty story. Something to make us feel better, while we suck scum out of ice.’

  That was Frazil, he thought fondly. Practical. Unimaginative.

  ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘where are the people we are supposed to help?’

  He pointed to the western horizon: the rising ground, the place beyond the blue-grey mountains. ‘There, perhaps.’

  The next day, he called together the people. They stood in ranks on the ice, their fur spiky, rows of dark shapes in an empty landscape.

  ‘We are all humans,’ he said boldly. ‘The Collision threw us here, onto the ice.’ Night-Dawn pointed to the distant mountains. ‘We must go there. Maybe there are people there. Maybe they are waiting for us, to huddle with them.’

  Somebody laughed.

  ‘Why now?’ asked the woman, Ice-Cloud.

  ‘If not now, when? Now is no different from any other time, on the ice. I’ll go alone if I have to.’

  People started to walk away, back to the ice holes.

  All, except for Frazil and No-sun and One-Tusk.

  No-sun, his mother, said, ‘You’ll die if you go alone. I suppose it’s my fault you’re like this.’

  One-Tusk said, ‘Do you really think there are people in the mountains?’

  ‘Please don’t go,’ Frazil said. ‘This is our summer. You will waste your life.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘You’re the Bull. You have everything we can offer.’

  ‘It’s not enough.’

  He turned his back, faced the mountains and began to walk.

  He walked past the droppings and blood smears and scars in the ice, the evidence of humans.

  He stopped and looked back.

  The people had lined up to watch him go – all except for two men who were fighting viciously, no doubt contesting his succession, and a man and woman who were coupling vigorously. And except for Frazil and No-sun and One-Tusk, who padded across the ice after him.

  He turned and walked on, until he reached bare, untrodden ice.

  After the first day of
walking, the ice got thinner.

  At last they reached a place where there was no free water beneath, the ice firmly bonded to a surface of dark rock. And when they walked a little further, the rock bed itself emerged from beneath the ice.

  Night-Dawn stared at it in fascination and fear. It was black and deep and hard under his feet, and he missed the slick compressibility of ice.

  The next day they came to another ice pool: smaller than their own, but a welcome sight nonetheless. They ran gleefully onto its cool white surface. They scraped holes into the ice, and fed deeply.

  They stayed a night. But the next day they walked onto rock again, and Night-Dawn could see no more ice ahead.

  The rock began to rise, becoming a slope.

  They had no food. Occasionally they took scrapes at the rising stone, but it threatened to crack their teeth.

  At night the wind was bitter, spilling off the flanks of the mountains, and they huddled as best they could, their backs to the cold, their faces and bellies together.

  ‘We’ll die,’ One-Tusk would whisper.

  ‘We won’t die,’ Night-Dawn said. ‘We have our fat.’

  ‘That’s supposed to last us through the winter,’ hissed No-sun.

  One-Tusk shivered and moved a little more to leeward. ‘I wished to father a child,’ he said. ‘By Ice-Cloud. I could not. Ice-Cloud mocked me. After that nobody would couple with me.’

  ‘Ice-Cloud should have come to you, Night-Dawn. You are the Bull,’ No-sun muttered.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Night-Dawn said to One-Tusk. ‘I have fathered no children yet. Not every coupling –’

  One-Tusk said, ‘Do you really think it will be warm in the mountains?’

  ‘Try to sleep now,’ said Frazil sensibly.

  They were many days on the rising rock. The air grew thinner. The sky was never brighter than a deep violet blue.

  The mountains, at last, grew nearer. On clear days the sun cast long shadows that reached out to them.

  Night-Dawn saw a gap in the mountains, a cleft through which he could sometimes see a slice of blue-violet sky. They turned that way, and walked on.

  Still they climbed; still the air thinned.

  They came to the pass through the mountains. It was a narrow gully. Its mouth was broad, and there was broken rock, evidently cracked off the gully sides.

  Night-Dawn led them forward.

  Soon the walls narrowed around him, the rock slick with hard grey ice. His feet slipped from under him, and he banged knees and hips against bone-hard ice. He was not, he knew, made for climbing. And besides, he had never been surrounded before, except in the huddle. He felt trapped, confined.

  He persisted, doggedly.

  His world closed down to the aches of his body, the gully around him, the search for the next handhold.

  … The air was hot.

  He stopped, stunned by this realization.

  With renewed excitement, he lodged his stubby fingers in crevices in the rock, and hauled himself upwards.

  At last the gully grew narrower.

  He reached the top and dragged himself up over the edge, panting, fur steaming.

  … There were no people here.

  He was standing at the rim of a great bowl cut into the hard black rock. And at the base of the bowl was a red liquid, bubbling slowly. Steam gathered in great clouds over the bubbling pool, laced with yellowish fumes that stank strongly. It was a place of rock and gas, not of people.

  Frazil came to stand beside him. She was breathing hard, and her mouth was wide open, her arms spread wide, to shed heat.

  They stood before the bowl of heat, drawn by some ancient imperative to the warmth, and yet repelled by its suffocating thickness.

  ‘The Collision,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Once, the whole world was covered with such pools. Rock, melted by the great heat of the Collision.’

  ‘The Collision is just a story, you said.’

  She grunted. ‘I’ve been wrong before.’

  His disappointment was crushing. ‘Nobody could live here. There is warmth, but it is poisonous.’ He found it hard even to think, so huge was his sense of failure.

  He stood away from the others and looked around.

  Back the way they had come, the uniform-hard blackness was broken only by scattered islands of grey-white: ice pools, Night-Dawn knew, like the one he had left behind.

  Turning, he could see the sweep of the mountains clearly: he was breaching a great inward-curving wall, a great complex string of peaks that spread from horizon to horizon, gaunt under the blue-purple sky.

  And ahead of him, ice had gathered in pools and crevasses at the feet of the mountains, lapping against the rock walls as if frustrated – save in one place, where a great tongue of ice had broken through. Glacier, he thought.

  He saw that they could walk around the bowl of bubbling liquid rock and reach the head of the glacier, perhaps before night fell, and then move on, beyond these mountains. Hope sparked. Perhaps what he sought lay there.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ No-sun said, a pillar of fur slumped against a heap of rock. ‘We should go back.’

  Night-Dawn, distracted by his plans, turned to her. ‘Why?’

  ‘We are creatures of cold. Feel how you burn up inside your fat. This is not our place …’

  ‘Look,’ breathed One-Tusk, coming up to them.

  He was carrying a rock he’d cracked open. Inside there was a thin line of red and black. Algae, perhaps. And, in a hollow in the rock, small insects wriggled, their red shells bright.

  Frazil fell on the rock, gnawing at it eagerly.

  The others quickly grabbed handfuls of rocks and began to crack them open.

  They spent the night in a hollow at the base of the glacier.

  In the morning they clambered up onto its smooth, rock-littered surface. The ice groaned as it was compressed by its forced passage through the mountains, which towered above them to either side, blue-grey and forbidding.

  At the glacier’s highest point, they saw that the river of ice descended to an icy plain. And the plain led to another wall of mountains, so remote it was almost lost in the horizon’s mist.

  ‘More walls,’ groaned One-Tusk. ‘Walls that go on forever.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Night-Dawn. He swept his arm along the line of the distant peaks, which glowed pink in the sun. ‘I think they curve. You see?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ muttered No-sun, squinting.

  With splayed toes on the ice, Night-Dawn scraped three parallel curves – then, tentatively, he joined them up into concentric circles. ‘Curved walls of mountains. Maybe that’s what we’re walking into,’ he said. ‘Like a ripples in a water hole.’

  ‘Ripples, in rock?’ Frazil asked sceptically.

  ‘If the Collision stories are true, it’s possible.’

  No-sun tapped at the centre of his picture. ‘And what will we find here?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They rested a while, and moved on.

  The glacier began to descend so rapidly they had some trouble keeping their feet. The ice here, under tension, was cracked, and there were many ravines.

  At last they came to a kind of cliff, hundreds of times taller than Night-Dawn. The glacier was tumbling gracefully into the ice plain, great blocks of it carving away. This ice sheet was much wider than the pool they had left behind, so wide, in fact, it lapped to left and right as far as they could see and all the way to the far mountains. Ice lay on the surface in great broken sheets, but clear water, blue-black, was visible in the gaps.

  It was – together they found the word, deep in their engineered memories – it was a sea.

  ‘Perhaps this is a circular sea,’ One-Tusk said, excited. ‘Perhaps it fills up the ring between the mountains.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  They clambered down the glacier, caution and eagerness warring in Night-Dawn’s heart.

  There was a shallow beach her
e, of shattered stone. The beach was littered with droppings, black-and-white streaks, and half-eaten krill.

  In his short life, Night-Dawn had seen no creatures save fish, krill, algae and humans. But this beach did not bear the mark of humans like themselves. He struggled to imagine what might live here.

  Without hesitation, One-Tusk ran to a slab of pack ice, loosely anchored. With a yell he dropped off the end into the water.

  No-sun fluffed up her fur. ‘I don’t like it here –’

  Bubbles were coming out of the water, where One-Tusk had dived.

  Night-Dawn rushed to the edge of the water.

  One-Tusk surfaced, screaming, in a flurry of foam. Half his scalp was torn away, exposing pink raw flesh, the white of bone.

  An immense shape loomed out of the water after him: Night-Dawn glimpsed a pink mouth, peg-like teeth, a dangling wattle, small black eyes. The huge mouth closed around One-Tusk’s neck.

  He had time for one more scream – and then he was gone, dragged under the surface again.

  The thick, sluggish water grew calm; last bubbles broke the surface, pink with blood.

  Night-Dawn and the others huddled together.

  ‘He is dead,’ Frazil said.

  ‘We all die,’ said No-sun. ‘Death is easy.’

  ‘Did you see its eyes?’ Frazil asked.

  ‘Yes. Human,’ No-sun said bleakly. ‘Not like us, but human.’

  ‘Perhaps there were other ways to survive the Collision.’

  No-sun turned on her son. ‘Are we supposed to huddle with that, Night-Dawn?’

  Night-Dawn, shocked, unable to speak, was beyond calculation. He explored his heart, searching for grief for loyal, confused One-Tusk.

  They stayed on the beach for many days, fearful of the inhabited water. They ate nothing but scavenged scraps of crushed, half-rotten krill left behind by whatever creatures had lived here.

  ‘We should go back,’ said No-sun at last.

  ‘We can’t,’ Night-Dawn whispered. ‘It’s already too late. We couldn’t get back to the huddle before winter.’