Phase Space (42 page)

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.