Phase Space (43 page)

There was a shallow beach here, 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.’

‘But we can’t stay here,’ Frazil said.

‘So we go on.’ No-sun laughed, her voice thin and weak. ‘We go on, across the sea, until we can’t go on any more.’

‘Or until we find shelter,’ Night-Dawn said.

‘Oh, yes,’ No-sun whispered. ‘There is that.’

So they walked on, over the pack ice.

This was no mere pond, as they had left behind; this was an ocean.

The ice was thin, partially melted, poorly packed. Here and there the ice was piled up into cliffs and mountains that towered over them; the ice hills were eroded, shaped smooth by the wind, carved into fantastic arches and spires and hollows. The ice was every shade of blue. And when the sun set its light filled the ice shapes with pink, red and orange.

There was a cacophony of noise: groans and cracks, as the ice moved around them. But there were no human voices, save their own: only the empty noise of the ice – and the occasional murmur, Night-Dawn thought, of whatever giant beasts inhabited this huge sea.

They walked for days. The mountain chain they had left behind dwindled, dipping into the mist of the horizon; and the chain ahead of them approached with stultifying slowness. He imagined looking down on himself, a small, determined speck walking steadily across this great, moulded landscape, working towards the mysteries of the centre.

Food was easy to find. The slushy ice was soft and easy to break through.

No-sun would walk only slowly now. And she would not eat. Her memory of the monster which had snapped up One-Tusk was too strong. Night-Dawn even braved the water to bring her fish, but they were strange: ghostly-white creatures with flattened heads, sharp teeth. No-sun pushed them away, saying she preferred to consume her own good fat. And so she grew steadily more wasted.

Until there came a day when, waking, she would not move at all. She stood at the centre of a fat, stable ice floe, a pillar of loose flesh, rolls of fur cascading down a frame leached of fat.

Night-Dawn stood before her, punched her lightly, cajoled her.

‘Leave me here,’ she said. ‘It’s my time anyhow.’

‘No. It isn’t right.’

She laughed, and fluid rattled on her lungs. ‘
Right. Wrong.
You’re a dreamer. You always were. It’s my fault, probably.’

She subsided, as if deflating, and fell back onto the ice.

He knelt and cradled her head in his lap. He stayed there all night, the cold of the ice seeping through the flesh of his knees.

In the morning, stiff with the cold, they took her to the edge of the ice floe and tipped her into the water, for the benefit of the creatures of this giant sea.

After more days of walking, the ice grew thin, the water beneath shallow.

Another day of this and they came to a slope of hard black rock, that pushed its way out of the ice and rose up before them.

The black rock was hard-edged and cold under Night-Dawn’s feet, its rise unrelenting. As far as he could see to left and right, the ridge was solid, unbroken, with no convenient passes for them to follow, the sky lidded over by cloud.

They grasped each other’s hands and pressed up the slope.

The climb exhausted Night-Dawn immediately. And there was nothing to eat or drink, here on the high rocks, not so much as a scrap of ice. Soon, even the air grew thin; he struggled to drag energy from its pale substance.

When they slept, they stood on hard black rock. Night-Dawn feared and hated the rock; it was an enemy, rooted deep in the Earth.

On the fourth day of this they entered the clouds, and he could not even see where his next step should be placed. With the thin, icy moisture in his lungs and spreading on his fur he felt trapped, as if under some infinite ice layer, far from any air hole. He struggled to breathe, and if he slept, he woke consumed by a thin panic. At such times he clung to Frazil and remembered who he was and where he had come from and why he had come so far. He was a human being, and he had a mission that he would fulfil.

Then, one morning, they broke through the last ragged clouds.

Though it was close to midday the sky was as dark as he had ever seen it, a deep violet blue. The only clouds were thin sheets of ice crystals, high above. And – he saw, gasping with astonishment – there were
stars
shining, even now, in the middle of the sunlit day.

The slope seemed to reach a crest, a short way ahead of him. They walked on. The air was thin, a whisper in his lungs, and he was suspended in silence; only the rasp of Frazil’s shallow breath, the soft slap of their footsteps on the rock, broke up the stillness.

He reached the crest. The rock wall descended sharply from here, he saw, soon vanishing into layers of fat, fluffy clouds.

And, when he looked ahead, he saw a mountain.

Far ahead of them, dominating the horizon, it was a single peak that thrust out of scattered clouds, towering even over their elevated position here, its walls sheer and stark. Its flanks were girdled with ice, but the peak itself was bare black rock – too high even for ice to gather, he surmised – perhaps so high it thrust out of the very air itself.

It must be the greatest mountain in the world.

And beyond it there was a further line of mountains, he saw, like a line of broken teeth, marking the far horizon. When he looked to left and right, he could see how those mountains joined the crest he had climbed, in a giant unbroken ring around that great, central fist of rock.

It was a giant rock ripple, just as he had sketched in the ice. Perhaps this was the centre, the very heart of the great systems of mountain rings and circular seas he had penetrated.

An ocean lapped around the base of the mountain. He could see that glaciers flowed down its heroic base, rivers of ice dwarfed by the mountain’s immensity. There was ice in the ocean too – pack ice, and icebergs like great eroded islands, white, carved. Some manner of creatures were visible on the bergs, black and grey dots against the pristine white of the ice, too distant for him to make out. But this sea was mostly melted, a band of blue-black.

The slope of black rock continued below him – far, far onwards, until it all but disappeared into the misty air at the base of this bowl of land. But he could see that it reached a beach of some sort, of shattered, eroded rock sprinkled with snow, against which waves sluggishly lapped.

There was a belt of land around the sea, cradled by the ring mountains, fringed by the sea. And it was covered by
life,
great furry sheets of it. From this height it looked like an encrustation of algae. But he knew there must be living things there much greater in scale than any he had seen before.

‘ … It is a bowl,’ Frazil breathed.

‘What?’

‘Look down there. This is a great bowl, of clouds and water and light, on whose lip we stand. We will be safe down there, away from the rock and ice.’

He saw she was right. This was indeed a bowl – presumably the great scar left where one or other of the Moons had torn itself loose of the Earth, just as the stories said. And these rings of mountains were ripples in the rock, frozen as if ice.

He forgot his hunger, his thirst, even the lack of air here; eagerly they began to hurry down the slope.

The air rapidly thickened.

But his breathing did not become any easier, for it grew
warm,
warmer than he had ever known it. Steam began to rise from his thick, heavy fur. He opened his mouth and raised his nostril flaps wide, sucking in the air. It was as if the heat of this giant sheltering bowl was now, at the last, driving them back.

But they did not give up their relentless descent, and he gathered the last of his strength.

The air beneath them cleared further.

Overwhelmed, Night-Dawn stopped.

The prolific land around the central sea was divided into neat shapes, he saw now, and here and there smoke rose. It was a made landscape. The work of people.

Humans
were sheltered here. It was a final irony, that people should find shelter at the bottom of the great pit dug out of the Earth by the world-wrecking Collision.

… And there was a colour to that deep, cupped world, emerging now from the mist. Something he had never seen before; and yet the word for it dropped into place, just as had his first words after birth.

‘
Green,
’ Frazil said.

‘Green. Yes …’

He was stunned by the brilliance of the colour against the black rock, the dull blue-grey of the sea. But even as he looked into the pit of warmth and air, he felt a deep sadness. For he already knew he could never reach that deep shelter, peer up at the giant green living things; this body which shielded him from cold would allow heat to kill him.

Somebody spoke.

The crater was immense.

It must have been the worst impact since the end of the great bombardment that had greeted Earth’s formation.

The Gaijin helped her understand.

This was nothing to do with the Cracker wars of the remote past. In the long ages since then, the twin suns of Alpha Centauri had come sailing by the solar system, making a closest approach of about three light years. That was more than two hundred thousand astronomical units, a long way out. The twin suns hadn’t come close enough to interfere with the orbits of the planets, still less the sun itself. But they were close enough to disturb the comets, sleeping through their orbits in the Oort cloud, that great sparse fuzzy halo in the outer dark.

Because of Alpha’s grazing approach, more than two hundred thousand giant comets would cross Earth’s orbit over the next twenty million years. The Gaijin had no data on how many might strike the planet, or its Moon. This game of cosmic billiards was nothing to do with intelligence, nothing to do with war. It was just a matter of the random motion of the stars, whizzing around the Galaxy like molecules in a gas.

Even without predatory colonists, she thought, the universe is a dangerous place.

… Yes – but if we’d been left undisturbed, if not for these squabbling, colonizing Eeties, we would have figured out how to push the damn things away for ourselves.