Stephen Baxter - Icebones

Icebones marched grimly on through her hunger and thirst, through the gathering pain in her lungs and the aching cold that sucked at the pads of her feet.

At first she was not even aware that the Ragged One had stopped again. It was only when she made out the other’s grim, mournful lowing that she realized something was wrong.

The Sky Trail had fallen.

Icebones walked carefully over hard ridges of wind-sculpted ice.

Although those mighty legs still cast their gaunt, clean shadows over the Mountain’s slope, the silvery thread of the path itself had crumbled and fallen. It lay over the icy rocks like a length of shining spider-web. When she looked back down the Mountain’s flank she saw how the path dangled from the last leg to which it was attached, lank and limp as a mammoth’s belly hairs.

The fallen Sky Trail lay in short, sharp-edged segments, shattered and separated. When she probed at the wreckage with her trunk it was cold, hard and without taste or odor, like most of what the Lost produced.

The Ragged One was standing beside a great pod, long, narrow, like a huge broken-open nut. It seemed to be made of the same odorless, gleaming stuff as the Sky Trail itself.

And it contained bodies.

Icebones recognized them immediately. The stubby limbs, the round heads and hairless faces, all enclosed in complex, worked skins. They were Lost. And they were dead, that much was clear: there was frost on their faces and in their clouded eyes and opened mouths.

The Ragged One stood over the silent, motionless tableau, probing uselessly at faces and claw-like paws with her trunk. The wind howled thinly through the structure of the leg towers around her.

Icebones said, "They have been dead a long time. See how the skin of this one is dried out, shrunken on the bone. If not for the height here, the wolves and other scavengers would surely—"

"They were trying to leave," the Ragged One blurted. "Perhaps they were the last. And they died when they spilled out of the warmth of their pod onto this cold Mountain."

"Where were they going?"

"I don’t know. How can I know?"

"We should Remember them," Icebones said.

But the Ragged One snapped harshly, "No. It is not their way."

The shrunken sun was approaching the western horizon, and its light was spreading into a broad pale band across the sky. The light glimmered from the ice line of the distant ocean, and the tangled thread of the wrecked Sky Trail, and the tusks of the mammoths. Soon it would be dark.

Icebones said, "Listen to me. The Lost are gone or dead, and we cannot follow them. And we cannot stay on this Fire Mountain."

The Ragged One growled and stamped her feet, making the hard rock ring.

Icebones felt immensely tired. "I don’t want to fight you. I have no wish to lead. You lead. But you must lead us to a place we can live. You must lead us down from this Mountain of death. Down to where the air pools, like morning mist in a hollow."

The Ragged One stood silently. Then she said reluctantly, "You don’t understand. I am afraid. I have lived my whole life on this Mountain. I have lived my whole life with the Lost. I don’t know how else life can be."

Impulsively Icebones grabbed her trunk. "You are not alone. We are all Cousins, and we are bound by the ancient Oath of Kilukpuk, one to the other…"

But the Ragged One had never heard of Kilukpuk, or the vows that bound her descendants, whether they climbed the trees or swam the ocean or walked the land with heavy tusks dangling. She pulled away from Icebones’s touch.

Still suffused by that deep physical revulsion, Icebones nevertheless felt oddly bound to this pale, malformed creature. For all her strangeness, the Ragged One seemed to have more in common with Icebones than any of the other mammoths here. Only the Ragged One seemed to understand that Icebones was truly different — had come from a different place, perhaps even a different time. Only the Ragged One seemed to understand that the world had not always been the same as this — that there were other ways for mammoths to live.

And yet the Ragged One seemed intent on becoming Icebones’s enemy.

The Ragged One dropped her head dolefully, emitting a slow, sad murmur. She was clearly unwilling to leave these sad remains, all that was left of the Lost.

Alone, Icebones trudged further up the shallow slope.

The ice thinned. Higher up the slope it began to break up and dissipate altogether, as if she had come so high that even the ice could not survive, and there was only the bare rock. The texture of the rock itself was austere and beautiful, if deadly; it was a bony ground of red and crimson and orange, with not a scrap of white or green, no water or life, not an ice crystal or the smallest patch of lichen.

From here she could see that the eastern flank of the Mountain was a swathe of smooth crimson rock, marked here and there by the black cracks of gullies, or by narrow white threads that were frozen streams. But to the west she saw the white stripes of huge glaciers spilling down toward the lower plains from great bowls of ice.

The ground flattened out to afford her broadening views of the landscape: that gleaming white of ocean ice, the gray-green land below, the Fire Mountain’s twin sisters. The land had been distorted and broken by the vast uplift that had created the volcanoes here. In places the rock was wrinkled, covered with sharp ridges that ran around the base of the Mountain, and even cracked open like dried-out skin. The greatest crack of all, running directly to the east away from the Mountain, was that immense valley that stretched far to the horizon, extending around the curve of the world.

And soon she could see the caldera at the very summit of this Mountain-continent, the crater from which burning rock had so recently gushed. It was no simple pit, but a vast walled landscape of pits and craters. On its complex floor molten rock pooled, glowing bright red. The far side of the caldera was a long flat-topped cliff marked by layers, some black, some brown, some pinkish red. Immense caverns had worn into the softer rock, between harder, protective layers.

It was a pit big enough itself to swallow a mountain.

She stood there, listening to the quiet subterranean murmur of the Mountain. The sky faded to a deep purple and then a blue-black above. In that huge blueness, even though the sun still lingered above the horizon, stars swam. The ground under her feet was red-black, cracked and smashed, as if it had been battered by mighty feet, over and over.

She felt humbled by the immensity of this rock beast. The Lost had stolen the water that had lain frozen in its interior, and by doing so had woken its ancient rage. But the Lost’s puny devices were no more than scrapes on the Mountain’s mighty ancient bulk, the bite of an insect on a mammoth’s broad flank.

She returned, carefully, down the slope to where the Ragged One still stood beside the wreckage of the Lost seed pod.

The sky was crossed — not by one abnormal moon — but two.

The twin moons climbed rapidly in the daylit sky. But without warning they would wink into darkness, as if entering some huge mouth. Or, just as unexpectedly, they flickered into brightness in the middle of the night sky. One of them, which moved more rapidly, had a lumpish shape, like a rock or a bit of dung, not like a real Moon at all. But the other moon was, if anything, stranger still: just a pinpoint of light, like a meandering star.

The moons were eerie, unpredictable, and utterly strange. Icebones felt disturbed every time she glimpsed them.

It took days for the two of them to climb back down to the other mammoths.

One cold dawn, longing for company, Icebones stepped away from the Ragged One, who browsed fitfully, still half-asleep.