“It’s time, Ozzie,” the boy said in a near-fearful voice. “George says they’re getting ready.”
“Right then, man, let’s get to it.” Ozzie felt like singing, something uplifting, like the early Beatles or the Puppet Presidents. Out in the central chamber the Silfen had quietened down. He pulled the rings on the self-heating breakfast packets, and started to get dressed. Full body thermal underwear, of course, then a thick sweatshirt and his cord trousers, the clean checked shirt. By the time he laced his hiking boots up he was starting to feel warm, so he carried the rest, the two sweaters, waterproofed and insulated trousers, scarf, balaclava, gloves, earmuffs, goggles, and of course the icewhale fur coat, over trousers, and mittens. He checked Orion who was equally well dressed, half of his garments were Ozzie’s, cut down weeks ago and sewn carefully to fit in readiness for this occasion.
They ate their breakfast, took a last visit to the bathroom, then collected Tochee from its quarters. When they got upstairs, the big workshop was abuzz with activity. Silfen riders were already leading their animals from the stables. George was rapping out orders to his teams. Tochee shifted about uncomfortably on the cold, damp stone floor while Ozzie and Orion gave its sledge a final check, then it quickly slithered up into the protective cylinder of icewhale fur. Ozzie handed Tochee three heatbricks before carefully lacing up the flaps of fur at the back, making sure there were no gaps. He and Orion piled their packs on the little space left over at the rear of the sledge platform. Tochee was now going to have to stay inside until they reached a warmer world. Weeks ago, Ozzie had tried asking if Tochee got claustrophobia, but either their pictures and words vocabulary hadn’t developed enough to explain the concept, or the alien didn’t have a psychology susceptible to such things.
It was George himself who helped Ozzie and Orion push Tochee’s sledge outside into the weak predawn light, then they tied it to one of the big covered sleds pulled by a team of five ybnan. After exchanging “okay” and “good luck” signs with the alien, they clambered inside amid all the equipment for butchering and cooking the icewhales. Bill the Korrok-hi was their driver, and Sara wedged herself inside beside them, along with fifteen others. The small brazier hanging from the top of the sled was lit, casting a murky brimstone light around the inside, complete with noxious fumes. The side flap was closed.
As the red sun slowly rose above the horizon the Silfen gathered together outside the Ice Citadel, their white furs gleaming bright in the glow from their lanterns, spears and bows held ready. They began a slow chant, their voices deeper than Ozzie had ever heard before. In a mournful baritone they sounded a lot more alien, and far more menacing. Their riders moved off at an easy canter, leaving those on foot to follow at a slower pace. The sleds pulled by the ybnan lurched off in eager pursuit, with pans and metallic equipment clanking loudly.
It took an hour and a half just to reach the border of the crystal tree forest. So far the covered sleds had kept up with the Silfen on foot. But once they reached the small trees around the fringe they had to arrange themselves in single file. The path between the steadfast trunks was narrow and awkward, slowing them further. They slowly lost distance on the Silfen, although the track they left was easy enough to follow. Occasionally the Korrok-hi drivers would catch a glimpse of the shimmering light from their lanterns through the snow-covered trunks. Several times, Ozzie went over to the door flap to check Tochee was still being towed. The sledge was slipping along without any trouble. Tochee was barely having to use the four poles to steer with.
“How much longer?” Orion asked after they’d been pushing through the forest for over an hour.
“We’ll be in the forest for a couple of hours yet before we reach the hunting ground,” Sara said. “After that, who knows. Their riders went on ahead to try and track some icewhales.”
“How big is the hunting ground?”
“I have no idea. You can’t see the far side no matter how clear the air is. Hundreds of miles across, I suppose. Once we had to turn back we’d gone so far and they hadn’t started hunting. But that is rare. If we’re lucky, and there’s some close by, they might even hunt this afternoon.”
“Will they leave at night?” Ozzie asked.
“No. That is, they never have yet.”
It was another two and a quarter hours before they reached the edge of the forest. Ozzie and Orion both peered through the flap, eager to see the land beyond. They were high up, something Ozzie hadn’t appreciated before. The crystal tree forest sprawled across the plateau of some broad massif. Where it ended, the ground swept down toward a vast plain dominated by hundreds of low volcanic craters. Sara had been right about its size, the ultra-cold air was perfectly clear, yet from his vantage point half a mile above the plain, Ozzie couldn’t see the other side, it was hidden within a hazy crimson horizon. The crater rims themselves were almost flat, but between them the frozen land had ripped open, producing thousands of rocky fangs like small Matterhorns. Crystal trees grew on their lower slopes, although the pinnacles were rugged naked rock with a few streaks of snow and ice caught in crevices, reflecting a dusky scarlet in the pervasive sunlight.
The craters were all filled with ice particles, Sara told them, fine sandlike granules that produced a perfectly level surface, giving no clue how deep they actually were. Most of them had vapor rising from the center in small plumes that drifted almost straight upward, slowly getting wider and thinner as they climbed until, thousands of feet above the plain, they merged into smears of tenuous cirrus that meandered about like spacious contrails. When Ozzie switched to infrared he could see the craters glowing with a weak intensity, no more than a few degrees higher than the surrounding land, but a temperature difference sufficient to cause evaporation. He wondered how much warmer the craters were at the bottom.
Halfway down the slope leading to the plain, he could see the Silfen threading their way past small clumps of crystal trees, lantern lights bobbing about merrily. There was no sign of the riders. One by one, the big sleds crested the top of the slope, and began their precarious descent after the hunters.
It was a rough journey down, with the rucked surface rocking the sleds about. Every so often, the Korrok-hi drivers had to use the ybnan to slow their speed rather than pull them along. Ozzie had a lot of difficulty looking out and checking on Tochee; everyone inside the covered sled was hanging on grimly to the broad bone cage. In the end he just stayed put—there wasn’t much he could do if the tow rope broke anyway. Several pieces of equipment had worked loose to roll around, pans and bone struts jangling as they banged painfully into shins and arms and chests. The brazier was swinging in an alarmingly wide arc on its short chain.
They couldn’t have taken more than forty minutes to reach the plain, although time stretched out to hours inside the cramped stinking cabin. Ozzie had never before appreciated how important it was to be able to see out of a moving vehicle. His imagination filled the whole route down with knife-blade boulders waiting to split them open, and the slope was bound to end with a hundred-yard vertical cliff.
Bill let out a low trumpet of satisfaction to signal the descent was over. Inside the sled, everyone flashed nervous grins around, not willing to admit just how scared they’d been. After that, progress was appreciably easier. Sara was confident they could close some of the distance that had accumulated between them and the Silfen. Orion kept his friendship pendant clasped tightly in his fist, watching its sparkling blue light intently.
The covered sleds maintained a single file, following the fresh tracks in the crunchy grains of snow. They were heading directly away from the massif, rattling along at a good pace. By midday they were skirting along the shoreline ridge of the first crater, with a string of savage rock peaks on the other side. After that there were gullies crowned by curving waves of compacted snow, looking as if the slightest tremble would send them avalanching into the gulf below. Ravines with frozen sheet ice along the floor, where the ybnan had trouble getting a grip with their hoove
s. Spinneys and forests of crystal trees and bulbous bushes: often when he looked out, Ozzie would see great swaths of them smashed and shattered, leaving jagged stumps surrounded by a pile of ice-encrusted branches. There were narrow, steep saddle valleys to surmount, where their speed was reduced to a painful crawl on the ascent, only to degenerate into a mad slither downward, more abrupt and frightening than the trip down from the massif. Long curves around craters, where the vapor drifted out sideways like a mist, swiftly covering ybnan and sleds alike in a crusty hoarfrost.
When the sun was an hour and a half from the horizon, the massif was invisible behind them, blocked from view by towering spires of sharp black rock. Shadows were lengthening and darkening across the rust-tinted ground. The ybnan teams on all the sleds were beginning to tire, even on the flat their speed was noticeably less than earlier.
“There’ll be no hunt today,” Sara said after she returned from a quick discussion with Bill. “And we need to set up the tents soon. It’s difficult in the dark.”
After another half hour, they emerged from the gap between two rock ridges to look down on a crater measuring over six miles across. Some time after the basin formed, the volcanic activity that riddled the area had thrown up yet another range of fierce crags. This one formed a long promontory extending out almost halfway across the crater.
The Silfen had gathered at the foot of the peak closest to the rim, riders and those on foot bunched together and glowing like a multifaceted jewel in the gathering twilight. A stretch of forest grew up the slope beyond them, its crystal trees taller than those back on the forests of the massif, looking dark and forbidding in the vermilion gloaming.
The sleds pulled up in a broad circle, half a mile from the Silfen, on top of an escarpment that skirted the landward crags. Everyone jumped to, hauling the tents out and slotting the framework together. Once the big tents were up, Ozzie, Orion, and George rigged a smaller frame over Tochee’s sledge, and pulled a big sheet of fur over it. Inside that, they draped another blanket of fur across the top of the sledge’s protective cylinder.
“It should be okay in that,” George said as he crawled out.
Ozzie, who was left inside, grunted agreement. He lit a pair of candles, and put them on the ground in front of the sledge’s windscreen. There wasn’t much space there, probably no more than a couple of cubic yards, but it allowed Tochee to look out, maybe take away any fear of entombment. Looking in through the pane of crystal, Ozzie could see the alien motionless behind it, front eye section aligned on him. He held a mitten out, thumb upward. Tochee’s front eye swirled with ultraviolet patterns, slightly smudged by flaws in the crystal. It translated roughly into: DON’T FORGET ME TOMORROW.
“Not a chance,” Ozzie whispered inside his balaclava.
Tochee pulled the tab on a heatbrick. Ozzie waited until he saw the brick start to glow a deep cherry red, then waved and backed out of the fur coverings.
There was probably another twenty minutes before the sun sank below the horizon. Ozzie hurried off toward the crater rim. It was achingly quiet in the moments just before nightfall. Even the Silfen’s perpetual singing had ended out here under the somber glacial sky. Ahead of him, the surface of the granular ice that filled the crater basin was so flat that the illusion of liquid was almost perfect. As he approached it, he half expected to see ripples. He knelt down beside it, and touched it with his mitten. The surface had the texture of thick oil, though the farther down he pushed his hand, the greater the resistance became.
“Careful you don’t fall in,” Sara said.
Ozzie straightened up, shaking residual grains from his mitten. “Man, you always make me feel like I’m doing something wrong.”
“People have fallen in before. We don’t risk our own lives trying to find them now. They never leave any trace, it’s not as if there could be any bubbles.”
“Yeah, figures. This stuff isn’t natural. Grains of ice like this should stick together.”
“Of course they should. But they’re being constantly churned up and kept loose, like flour in a food mixer.”
“And the icewhales are doing the churning.”
“Them, and whatever else is down there. After all, they have to eat something.”
“Hopefully just iceweed, or whatever the plant life is at the bottom.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever seen one.” She turned, and began to walk up the slight incline.
Ozzie started after her. “Why not?”
“Let’s just say they don’t act like herbivores.”
“You got it all figured out, don’tcha?”
“No, Ozzie, nothing like. I understand very little of this place, and all the others I walked through. Why don’t the Silfen allow us to have electricity?”
“Simple enough theory. They’re experiencing life on a purely physical level; that’s all these bodies we see are for, to give them a platform at this level of personal consciousness evolution. And it kills me to say it, but it’s a pretty low level, given their capabilities. You start introducing electricity, and machines, and all the paraphernalia which goes with it, then you start to shrink that opportunity for raw natural experience.”
“Yeah,” she said sourly. “God forbid they should invent medicine.”
“It’s irrelevant to them. We need it because we treasure our individuality and continuity. Their outlook is different. They’re on a journey that has a very definite conclusion. At the end of their levels they get to become a part of their adult community.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
He shrugged, a gesture largely wasted under his heavy fur coat. “I was told that once.”
“Who by?”
“This dude I met in a bar.”
“Dear Christ, I don’t know which is weirder, them or you.”
“Definitely them.” They came to the top of the small rim as the sun vanished, leaving only a flaming fuchsia glow in the sky.
“You also shouldn’t be out so late,” Sara said. “There’s no beacon to guide you back here, you know.”
“Don’t worry about me, I see better in the dark than most people.”
“You got fur instead of skin as well? Even the Korrok-hi don’t stay out at night on this world.”
“Sure. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”
“You’ll have to do a lot better tomorrow when you follow the Silfen.”
“Right. You know, I’m still kind of surprised you didn’t want to come with us.”
“I will leave one day, Ozzie. Just not yet, that’s all.”
“But why, you’ve been here long enough. I can’t see you buying into George’s idea about how living here as some kind of penance makes us value our lives more. And as far as I can make out there’s no one special for you. Is there?” Which had slowly begun to nag at him as his own suggestions in that direction over the months had all gone unheeded.
“No,” she said slowly. “There’s no one right now.”
“That’s a shame, Sara. We all need someone.”
“So were you going to volunteer?”
The mild scorn in her voice made him pause. After a moment, Sara stopped and looked back at him. “What?” she asked.
“Well, goddamn, I couldn’t have been any blunter,” Ozzie said.
“Blunt about what?”
“About us. You and me. Rocking the mattress.”
“But you’ve got… Oh.”
“Got what?” he asked suspiciously.
“I thought… we all thought: you and Orion.”
“Me and Orion what… ohshit.”
“You mean he’s not your—”
“No. Absolutely. Not.”
“Ah.”
“And I’m not.”
“Okay. Sorry. Misunderstanding, there.”
“Not that there’s anything—”
“No, certainly not. There isn’t. I had lots of gay friends.”
“Did you?”
“That’s what you’re suppos
ed to say.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Well, that cleared that up, then.”
“It did.”Oh, terrific.
They hurried back up the remainder of the escarpment to the tents in silence. Everyone was inside now, thick black oil fumes were squirting out of carefully designed vents in the top as the evening meal got under way.
“Ozzie,” Sara said in a weary tone just before they went into their tent.
“Yo.”
“Tomorrow, when the Silfen hunt the icewhales, don’t get curious, okay? No matter how exciting or repellent, or fascinating you think it is, stay back, stay right out of their way.”
“I hear you.”
“I hope so. I know why you’re here, I’ve seen it in people before, you think you’re on some kind of mission, you think that makes you invulnerable. Hell, maybe it does, but take it from me, tomorrow is not a good time to test it out, okay? I understand your crazy ideas about the Silfen, and how existential they are, but tomorrow it doesn’t get more real and physical than this.”
“I’ll be careful, I promise. I’ve got the kid and the alien to worry about.”
They were woken as the first magenta glimmer of dawn appeared. Despite being crammed into the tent with ten other people, Ozzie had slipped into a deep dreamless sleep as soon as he zipped up his sleeping bag. It was the first night since he arrived that he hadn’t had to endure the ubiquitous red light.
He and Orion ate their packaged breakfasts, warding off the edgy, resentful comments from the others who were having their standard Ice Citadel meal of mashed crystal tree fruit and fried icewhale rashers. They filled their flasks with boiled water; to two they mixed in the added-energy juice powder, and to the second two they added soup concentrate. While the rest hurried outside to watch the Silfen begin their hunt, Ozzie and Orion packed their rucksacks for what they hoped was the last time on this world.
It had snowed overnight, the wisps of cirrus condensing into tiny hard flakes that drifted down to dust every surface. Ozzie and Orion brushed it off the outer sheet of fur they’d arranged over Tochee’s sledge. They dragged it back, with Ozzie partly dreading what they’d find. A stiff corpse? But the heatbrick had worked. Tochee waved at them from behind the crystal windscreen, apparently unperturbed by its night spent alone.
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