Piers Anthony - Rings of Ice

Gloria glanced at her. “You fight these things like a man. How would you like to exchange bodies with me?”

Gloria meant no offense, but the question floored Zena. Assume a male body? Her stomach knotted.

“Don’t tease her, Glory,” Gus said. “She’s not transsexual, she’s merely inhibited. Once she feels at ease, she’ll be all woman.”

“Thanks!” Zena said bitterly.

“That’s the way it goes,” Gus said. “First denial, then anger—and finally acceptance.”

He was right about the anger, anyway.

Gus came out to look at the garden. “It isn’t doing well,” he said.

Zena’s hand tightened on the hoe. “Give it a chance! It’s only been two months since the rain stopped.”

Gus carried a fistful of the little packages they had found in a garden store. “Carrots,” he read off the first. “Ready in 78 days.” He looked at Zena’s row of carrots. “Are they going to be ready in 18 more days?”

Obviously they weren’t. The tops were growing, but no significant carrot roots were forming.

“Lettuce,” Gus read. “Ready in 45 days.”

“We’ve been using it for a month,” Zena said with a certain pride. “Also the chive.”

“But none of it is going to seed,” he pointed out. “What will we have for the next season?” He looked at another package. “Radish—ready in 23 days.”

“I don’t know what went wrong there. We got a few from the first planting, but these later ones don’t seem to be developing. Maybe the soil—”

“Cora—12 weeks. Pumpkin—112 days. Cucumber—”

“What are you getting at?” Zena said irritably.

“I’m getting at the fact that there is a pattern to what isn’t growing. We have not had a single plant form a root—a storage root—or go to seed. Not after Mindel spread its shadow across here.”

Zena realized it was true. “Those first radishes were before that! The other plants—”

“That’s right. Those plants need light to grow on—direct sunlight. Maybe ordinary clouds don’t interfere too much, but Mindel is high and thick, with extraterrestrial impurities. The vegetables can grow, but the light trigger that makes them mature never comes. Maybe the soil affects it too; Gunz-water has soaked into it. But we aren’t going to be able to do much more farming.”

“We can eat the leaves,” she said. “Carrot tops can be cooked, and turnip greens—”

Gus smiled. “Sure, Zena. I’m not deprecating your effort here. You’ve put in so many hours it’s a wonder you’re not stir-crazy. I just wanted you to understand that we can’t live entirely on your garden, now or ever. Greens won’t keep; we need solid vegetables like potatoes, or grains, for storage. Or meat—plenty of it.”

“We’ve pretty well cleaned out the edible wildlife we can catch around here,” Zena said. “Foundling has a good nose and the hunting instinct.”

“Except the bugs. I understand insects taste pretty good when you know how to fix them.”

“Gus!”

“Yeah, it turns my stomach too! So we’ll have to do what the others are doing, the way Thatch reports from his reconnoitering. Go fishing.”

Floy emerged from the bus and came over. “Hey, I thought of something. I’ve been reading that Annular book.”

“It’s good reading,” Gus said.

“It says people must have lived a long time, back when there was a canopy, thousands of years ago. Like in the Bible, maybe they really did live nine hundred years.”

“Could be,” Gus agreed. “The rays of the sun kill every living thing.”

“But the sun is necessary to reproduction,” Zena pointed out. “The plants—”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Floy said, perturbed. “If we need the sun to grow to maturity, will I be frozen like this, never quite big enough—”

“You’re okay as you are,” Gus said. “Don’t let anybody tell you differently!”

But this time Floy was not put off by his compliment. “Never able to have a baby of my own? I don’t care if I live nine hundred years, if I can’t—”

“No babies!” Gus exclaimed. “God, I hadn’t thought of that! We can’t have a new order without—”

“We were talking about fishing,” Zena said. “That’s dangerous.”

“Fishing? No more dangerous than starving,” Gus said.

“The waters of the world have changed, Gus. There’ll be unpredictable currents, strange tides—and probably few fish.”

“Should be plenty of fish!” he said. “All that water—”

“But it’s fresh water! It will drive the salt fish away.”

“Now where could they go?” he asked reasonably.

“Or kill them off in huge numbers. There could be disease—”

“Thatch says the fish exist. Maybe new species are taking the place of the old.”

“It doesn’t happen that rapidly! It would take them generations.”

“Why don’t we just go down to the shore and see?”

She sighed. Gus was usually right, even when he was wrong. A useful and obnoxious trait. “What do you want me to do?”

“And me!” Floy put in.

“Help make the net.”

“The net?”

“The predator fishes come in close to land, Thatch says. Chasing the scavengers. The best way to catch them is by netting them. We may have to use the bus to haul the net out of the water, but we’ll have plenty of food.”

“It can’t be that simple.”

“It isn’t. The word is those fish are fierce.”

Zena laughed, and so did Floy. “Fierce fish!”

“The kind that survive in rough times,” he said.

It took them a week to gather the line to make a strong net, and ten more days to fashion it. Gus insisted that every intersection be knotted precisely, and that every loop around the edge be tested. He had questioned Thatch closely and made many diagrams of his own, becoming expert in his fashion. Gus did not, however, do any of the finger-bruising work himself.

A question of a different and significant nature had developed in Zena’s mind, meanwhile. By the time they were ready for their first fishing expedition, she was sure, But whom should she tell—and when?

They piled into the bus and drove down the mountain. The ride was rough but strangely scenic. Zena had been intent on her gardening and net-making, and had not traveled since the ill-fated gasoline raid.

The forest was much as she had known it. But abruptly at its edge the change began. She remembered the desolation of bare rock, where the rain had washed out every sign of human habitation or construction except for sections of the highway and the most solid buildings. Now it was all green.

The moss had sprouted everywhere, covering the scoured surfaces and softening the bleak outlines. But this did not improve the look of the land; it rendered it even more foreign than before.

The steeper slopes, however, remained bare. In some places there was a desert of packed sand with multicolored rocks projecting jaggedly. Tufts of grass grew up around the edges of the rock, and a number of tall weeds had sprouted—but none of these had gone to seed.

Below, the land leveled out somewhat, and the vegetation became more lush. Still it was a matter of scattered clusters of trees, a light covering of weeds, and the rest filled in by the moss. There were no flowers. Small canyons had been cut through what had once been rolling hills.

The shore, too, was strange. It was not the ocean, but an arm of the Tennessee River, backed up behind the Appalachian range, maintained at super-flood stage by the continuing runoff from the mountains. By the time it dropped to more reasonable levels, Mindel’s rain would begin, and it would become a sea in fact as well as appearance.

Now dying trees projected from the placid water, and there was no formal beach.