Piers Anthony - Rings of Ice

“First we have to cast the net, and get it out of sight below the water,” Gus said. “Let it sink right down to the bottom. Then we’ll have to attract the fish.”

“We can’t spread it properly from the shore,” Thatch said.

“Well, swim out with it. It has to be done right.”

“It’s not safe,” Thatch said. “If there are large predators—”

“Of course it’s not safe!” Gus said. “But they’re not here yet. We’ll have to lay it in a hurry.”

But Thatch still balked at swimming far out, and Gordon agreed. “We’ll have to make a boat,” Gordon said.

They searched the shoreline for driftwood, and came up with assorted branches and trunks. They lashed this pile into a kind of raft. It looked clumsy and barely seaworthy, but it floated. Thatch lay on top of the pile and reached out and down with his hands to paddle on either side. Slowly he moved outward, trailing the net.

Fifty feet out he let the net sink, and started back. He floated higher now, for the net had been heavy. But his drift continued outward. “Oh-oh!” Gordon said. “There’s a tow!”

Zena saw a flash of something farther out to sea. “They’re coming!” she cried.

“We should have anticipated this!” Gordon exclaimed. “I’ll carry out a rope. When I get there, pull us both in— fast!”

He dived into the water and stroked quickly toward the raft. But the fins of the approaching fish were faster. “They’ll both get caught!” Zena cried.

Karen ran to the bus and brought out their rifles. She handed one to Zena. “Aim very carefully!” she cautioned.

Gordon reached the raft and scrambled on board. The thing shifted dizzily. “Pull!” he shouted. “Pull! Pull!”

Gus just stood there. Karen whirled around, the rifle leveled. “Pull that rope!” she screamed at Gus.

Startled, Gus began pulling. Karen aimed at the turbulence in the water and waited. “For a moment I thought you were going to shoot Gus!” Zena said.

“For a moment I thought so too,” Karen muttered. “We can’t afford to sacrifice the only two real men we have!”

Thatch and Gordon were splashing madly to drive off the fish. Fins were circling completely around them now. Zena could make out the shapes in the water only dimly, but they looked inordinately large. And fast.

Then one leaped out of the water. Zena gasped. “What is it?”

“Shark, maybe,” Karen said. “Or a sawfish. I don’t know, but it must be a yard long. No trout, for sure! We’re in trouble!”

Another jumped, and Karen’s rifle went off. The fish splashed back into the water and immediately there was a vigorous disturbance there. “You hit it!” Zena cried.

“Oh, yes, I’ve used a rifle before,” Karen said, preoccupied. “I doubt we can kill those things with bullets, but the blood makes them kill each other. Whatever you do, don’t hit the men!”

Zena was in little danger of doing that. The image of men falling before her machine gun was before her, and of flaming gasoline, and the acute physical pain of first intercourse came again—her punishment for those killings. She did not dare fire!

Then another giant fish sailed out of the water toward the raft, and her rifle went off.

“Too high!” Karen said. “Bring your aim down.”

“Porpoises!” Zena exclaimed. “Some of those are porpoises! Friends of man!”

“Not any more,” Karen said. “Maybe when man was dominant, they were friends.” Her rifle fired again. “But these are too small! Could they be giant piranhas?”

“How could a whole new species evolve in just a few months?”

“If there were canopy conditions before, canopy species could have evolved then,” Karen said. “Variants of the ones we know now. With the canopy back, they might metamorphose, returning to that prior state.”

“I doubt it,” Zena said. But she knew that animal life was capable of many unexplained phenomena—and there were the strange, vicious fish before her.

Now Gus had succeeded in hauling the raft into shallow water. It snagged on the bottom and began to fall apart. The two men jumped off and waded ashore. “The teeth on those things!” Gordon said.

“The net! The net!” Gus shouted.

They all rushed to their stations, hauling on the lines in unison. The net came up and forward, trapping the fish. The weight seemed to be enormous.

“Look at that!” Gordon cried.

Zena glanced at him, thinking he had seen a sea monster in the net; but he was staring at the sky. She followed his gaze, and froze in place.

A terrific band of color was there, like a rainbow, but almost a complete circle. In fact it was a double circle around the sun except that the sun itself could not be seen. Instead there were two or even four imitation suns intersected by the rings, each with a fiery comet-tail pointing outward. Fault rainbows were tangent to the outer ring, two below and one above. This brilliant complex filled the sky to the west, hanging above the water, making the cloud canopy seem suddenly darker.

Gus let go the net and dropped to his knees. “The end of the world!” he cried.

“Hold that net,” Karen cried. But it was too late; the net had sunk, and the strange fish were escaping over the rim to free water.

“A sign from God!” Gus said, still staring.

“It’s a prismatic effect of Mindel!” Gordon said. “You ought to know, it’s in your book. A complex canopy halo formed by refraction through the cloud layer.”

“But never like this!” Gus said.

“Riss just arrived,” Zena said. “Two canopies joined together, intensifying the effect. Dramatically.”

Slowly Gus came out of it. “I—suppose it is. I didn’t know it would be like this, so bright, so big.”

“Meanwhile we have lost our catch,” Zena said ungraciously.

“We’ll try it again tomorrow,” Karen said. “We do have the dead fish—what’s left of them.”

“We’ll camp here tonight and try first thing in the morning,” Gordon said. He scooped out a piece of fish. “Not much here for us. I’m no naturalist, but these specimens seem quite strange. They must be freshwater species, but not the conventional game fish. I wonder—Loch Ness —”

“What are you talking about?” Gus demanded. “Loch Ness is in Scotland.”

“The Loch Ness monster. There have been stories about many such creatures in isolated lakes of the world—that may not be so isolated any more. If conditions have been changed to favor them over the conventional species—”

“That’s what I was saying!” Karen said. “And if that’s so, we’re in for an age of monsters like never before!”

“But these are fish,” Gus said.

“Strange ones,” Karen reminded him. “Who knows where they’ve been hiding, waiting for this day, this season?”

Zena watched the image in the sky, now fading. “It is rather like a sign,” she said.

Karen looked at her. “You mean something by that, girl. Is it what I think you mean?”

“I suppose it is.”

“Great news! We’ll have a party!”

“Is it?” Zena asked. “Great news?”

But Karen was already telling the others. “Zena’s got her baby! She’s pregnant!”

Zena didn’t have the nerve to look at Thatch to see how he was taking it. “Without marriage, without love,” she murmured, feeling let down now that the news was out. “How can it be good news?”

But the others were far more positive. Zena expected Gus to say “I didn’t know you had it in you!” but she was spared that. “It was a sign of God!” Gus said. “That the plants may not procreate, but man will continue!”

“Not necessarily,” Zena said. “This dates from before the Mindel canopy.”