Piers Anthony - Rings of Ice

“No.” Zena protested futilely. “Not for another month!”

They made her as comfortable as possible, gathering soft moss to make a temporary bed. The contractions eased, then came again, harder. Zena knew it would happen long before a month had passed. She must have miscounted, after all.

Now the boat came near. It was a canoe, or rather a kayak, covered over with animal skins to seal out the water. The upper halves of two people showed, stroking with paddles on opposite sides so that the little craft glided smoothly and swiftly forward. A man and a woman, both young and vigorous.

“We’d better parlay with them before we go anywhere,” Thatch said. “Maybe they can help.”

But the boat stopped thirty feet from the shore, its occupants backpaddling to hold it in place. “We don’t want any trouble,” the man called. “You stay on your island, we’ll stay on ours, okay?”

Gus and Thatch exchanged puzzled glances. “Trouble?”

Floy strode to the bank. “We have a woman in labor here. No drugs or anything. You’re the first human beings we’ve seen since the second rain began. Please, help us!”

The kayak moved closer. “They do!” the woman said. “And we thought we had problems!”

“I don’t see any weapons,” the man said.

“Weapons!” Gus cried. “We don’t want to fight! Too many people dead already.”

“He has a scar,” the man said.

The woman peered at Gus. “No, that’s not the one.”

“I put that scar on him, if you really want to know,” Floy said. She showed her fingers. “But that was a personal matter. We don’t want to—”

“We had to eat two of our own number just to get through,” Gus said.

“Shut up!” Floy hissed, too late.

“You killed your own?” the man demanded suspiciously.

“No, of course not,” Gus said. “One was killed when bandits attacked us, just as the rain was starting. The other was a diabetic. We—” He broke off, remembering Karen. “What do you care, anyway? If you don’t want to help—”

“Those bandits,” the man said, showing interest. “Were they white or black?”

“White,” Gus said. “One of them had a scar on his face. They came in with guns and knives, trying to take our home and women. We killed four. We don’t have any decent home anymore, so there’s nothing for you to take, if that’s what you’re—”

“Wait!” Zena cried, interrupting him. “They’re black! That’s why they distrust us!”

Gus did a double-take. “So they are! What difference does it make?”

“Those bandits,” the man said. “They hit us a week before the second rain. Killed two men and a child, burned our house. We thought it was a race war. But if they went after you too—”

“You have children?” Floy asked.

“Three of them. Not ours; we’re not a family. Weren’t, anyway, before the rains. We had to eat our dead, too; there wasn’t any other way, except the moss.”

“Well, the bandits are dead,” Gus said. “We found their camp.”

“Zena and I worked over scarface,” Floy said with relish. “And Dust Devil finished him off.”

“We gave him that scar,” the woman said.

“Any of you know nursing or medicine?” Floy asked. “We can’t wait long.”

“We have one old lady, used to be a midwife. You want to come in with us?”

“Sure,” Gus said. “For now, anyway. See how it works out. We have a net for fishing, but it’s hard to handle without plenty of manpower. Not much else we can contribute.”

The boat pulled up to shore. “Okay,” the man said.

“One of you came back with me, meet our people. Don’t expect too much, at first—we’re leary of whites, after what happened. But we’ll make do, make a new start together. Joy’ll stay here with you, talk things over. We’ll fetch our midwife.”

The pangs of labor were upon Zena again, but now she knew things were going to be all right. Joy was coming toward her solicitously, while Thatch struggled to enter the unfamiliar craft.

“Were you picked up in Florida?” Zena asked between spasms, remembering the girl they had lost.

“No. Never been there,” Joy said.

Oh, well. Mankind would continue—and perhaps this time it would build on a better foundation.

The Annular Theory has been presented in this novel as fiction. It is not. Isaac N. Vail was an obscure Quaker scientist who lived from 1840 to 1912; he originated and publicized this theory that there were once icy rings about the Earth, similar to those now about the planet Saturn. He suggested that these rings lost momentum, dropped closer to our planet, and dissolved into a tremendous vapor canopy perhaps a hundred miles above the Earth’s surface. This vapor canopy could have been similar to those of Jupiter and the other gas giants.

When sufficient material had been injected into this canopy, Vail suggests, it became unstable. As it spread out to shroud all the planet, the portion near the north and south poles had to fall. Vail believed that the lack of centrifugal force toward the poles caused the downfall, but modern interpretation considers that the interaction with Van Allen zones, whose impinging particles were discovered by space probes and earth satellites, could have been the controlling factor. Possibly future space probes that explore distant Jupiter may settle the issue of how such canopies operate. That the earth once had such a canopy that did fall in the poleward regions is at present still a viable scientific theory; all that remains is to settle the details.

Those details seem elusive. If we consider for the purposes of discussion that the Earth did have such a formation, similar to the cloud-banded formations on Jupiter and Saturn, we are faced with the question “Where do such canopies come from?” Various writers have taken different tacks at this point. Most astronomers consider that Jupiter’s canopy is simply a surface phenomenon on that planet and, of course, they may be right about that. But until the mid 1940s, very few astronomers thought that Saturn’s rings contained ice, and they were surprised when infrared evidence showed the presence of ice or frost-covered ring particles. To that extent, Vail’s theories were vindicated—but a nagging question remains: Where does a ring system get its ice, and how can it remain stable? Again a set of alternatives is available to us. For Saturn, the answer is easy: ice rings are stable at that distance from the sun. For the Earth, the stability of a ring of ice leads to problems. Some scientists simply state that it would melt and disappear and so could not exist at all. Horbiger, an Austrian scientist, dealt with the problem in another way. He considered that either a lost Earth moon of ice had broken up, or perhaps an icy comet was captured by the Earth. Skipping over the stability problem for a moment, we may ask, “How much material is necessary to produce a canopy?” Again we have some alternatives or limits. If the ice from such a canopy produced all the ice of the last glacial epoch, for example, the amount would equal a layer of water over a hundred feet in depth over the entire earth. Since a cubic meter of water produces something like two million cubic meters of “fog,” we would be calling for impossible dimensions for our hypothetical canopy. Fortunately, a very easy (and reasonable) alternative remains.

If we consider that a canopy had relatively little material, then we can invoke the phenomenon of “cloud seeding” to produce precipitation that would then provide glacial snows, thus piling up glaciation on the continents as is indicated in the records of geology. Incidentally, one theory under consideration by modern scientists considers that rainfall is sometimes initiated by meteoritic dust particles swept up from space by the Earth. A canopy that would collect particles for a time, and then collapse, might provide the kind of flooding and catastrophe that Piers Anthony has described in this novel.