Stephen Baxter - Icebones

"Thunder, you must understand that every mammoth alive today is descended from survivors: mammoths who mastered the world well enough to reach adulthood and raise healthy calves, who grew up in their turn. The Cycle is the wisdom of that great chain of survivors, accumulated over more generations than there are stars in the sky."

"But this is a different place. You say that yourself. Perhaps no mammoths lived here before the Lost brought us. What use is the Cycle to us?"

"While we live, we must not be afraid to add to the Cycle. Ganesha taught us that, and Longtusk. The Cycle will never be complete. Not while mammoths live and learn. There is completeness only in extinction…"

But she felt that such comfort, embedded in the Cycle itself, was thin.

And perhaps Thunder was right.

This Sky Steppe was itself a part of the Cycle. But whereas the rest of the Cycle was a memory of the past, the Sky Steppe had always been a vision of the future: a glittering, succulent promise of days to come.

Sometimes, when this small red world seemed so strange, she wondered if perhaps nothing around her was real. Maybe she was living in a moment embedded in the vision of a mammoth long dead — Kilukpuk herself, perhaps. And in that case she was part of that dream too. She was living thoughts, just a concoction of memories and dreams, with no more life than the reconstructed bones of the mammoth on the Fire Mountain.

But now Woodsmoke brayed and yelled, "I am a great Bull. I will mate you all, you Cows!" His thin cries and milky scent, and the iron stink of the dust he kicked up, were sharp intrusions of reality into her maundering.

The calf started dancing in a tight circle around the lemming. The little rodent sat as if frozen, clearly wishing this huge monster would go away. Then Woodsmoke made a mock charge, head lowered. The lemming, snapping out of its trance, turned tail and shot across the ground, a muddy brown blur, until it reached a hole and disappeared.

Woodsmoke’s mother cuffed him affectionately and tucked him under her belly, where the great Bull was soon seeking out his mother’s milk.

Thunder growled. "That little scrap is mocking me."

"He is playing at what he will become."

"But he was threatening a lemming."

"He has to start somewhere. If there were other calves here, he would wrestle with them and stage little tusk-clashes. It is all part of his preparation for the battles he must wage as an adult."

Thunder growled again. "Perhaps. But when that wretched calf approaches me, reaching up with his grass-blade trunk to wrestle, I want to throw him out of the Gouge…"

Suspicious now, she sniffed at the ground over which Thunder had walked, smelling his urine, which was hissing slightly as it settled into the red dust. And she probed at the thick hair before his ears with her trunk fingers. She found a dark, sticky liquid trickling from his temporal gland.

"Thunder — you are in musth!"

He rumbled deeply. It was the musth call, she realized. Without understanding it he was calling to oestrus Cows, if any had been here to listen. "I thought I was ill."

"Not ill." She stroked the temporal glands on both sides of his head. They were swollen. "You are sore here." Gently she lifted his trunk and had him coil it so it rested on its tusks. "That will relieve the pressure on one side of your face at least."

"Icebones, what is happening to me? I roam around this Gouge listening, but I don’t know what for. The Cows keep their distance from me — even you.

It was true, she realized. She had responded to his calls without thinking. She said carefully, "Musth means that you are ready to mate. Your smell, and the rumbles you make, announce your readiness to any receptive Cows. The aggression you feel is meant to be turned on other Bulls, for Bulls must always fight to prove they are fit to sire calves. But here there are no Bulls for you to fight — none save Woodsmoke, and you have shown the correct restraint."

He growled, "But there are Cows."

"None of us is in oestrus, Thunder," she said gently. "You will learn to tell that from the smell of our urine. None of us is ready."

She felt his trunk probe at her belly. "Not even you?"

"Not even me, Thunder. I am sorry." Again she was struck by the fact that she had still not come into oestrus, had felt not so much as a single twinge of that great inner warmth in all the time she had been here. "Don’t worry. In a few days this will pass and you will feel normal again."

He grunted. "I hope so."

In fact she suspected that even if one of the Cows were in oestrus, right here and right now, still Thunder would fail to find himself a mate. He was clearly young and immature, and no Cow would willingly accept a mating with such a Bull. If there were other Bulls here he wouldn’t even get a chance, of course. For his first few musth seasons Thunder would simply be overpowered by the older, mature Bulls.

He pulled away, grumbling his disappointment. He raised his tusks into the shining sunlit air, and a swarm of insects, rising from a muddy pond, buzzed around his head, glowing with light. "I feel as if my belly will burst like an overripe fruit. Why, if she were here before me now, I would mate with old Kilukpuk herself—"

"Who speaks of Kilukpuk?"

Thunder brayed, startled, and stopped dead. The voice — like a mammoth’s, but shallow and indistinct — had seemed to come from the reaches of the pond ahead of them.

"What is it?" Thunder asked softly. "Can there be mammoths here?"

Icebones grunted. "What kind of mammoth lives in the middle of a pond?"

"Kilukpuk, Kilukpuk… How is it I know that name?"

And a trunk poked up out of the water, and two wide nostrils twitched. It was short, hairless, stubby, but nevertheless indubitably a trunk.

Icebones stepped forward. The mud squeezed between her toes, unpleasantly thick, cold and moist. "I am Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. If you are mammoth, show yourself."

A head broke above the surface of the water. Icebones saw a smooth brow with two small eyes set on top, peering at her. "Mammoth? I never heard of such things. Bones-Of-Ice? What kind of name is that?" The creature sniffed loudly. "Don’t drop your dung in my pond."

Thunder growled, "If you don’t show yourself I will come in there and drag you out. Before I fill up your pond with my dung."

Thunder’s musth-fueled aggression was out of place, Icebones thought. But it seemed to do the trick.

There was a loud, indignant gurgle. With a powerful heave, a squat body broke through the languidly rippling water.

It stood out of the water on four stubby legs. It had powerful shoulders and rump, and a long skull topped by those small, glittering eyes. It wasn’t quite hairless, for fine downy hairs lay plastered over its skin, smoothed back like the scales of a fish. But the whole body was so heavily coated in crimson-brown mud that it was hard to see anything at all.

It was like no mammoth Icebones had ever seen. And yet it had a trunk, and even two small tusks that protruded from its mouth, curling slightly and pointing downward. And it gazed at Icebones with frank curiosity, its stubby trunk raised.

More of the hog-like creatures came drifting through the water. They looked like floating logs, Icebones thought, though thick bubbles showed where they belched or farted.

Meanwhile the other mammoths gathered around Icebones and Thunder — all save the calf. Woodsmoke, quickly bored, had splashed into the mud at the fringe of the pond and was digging out lumps of it with his tusks.

Spiral asked, "What is it?"

The creature in the pond said, "It is Chaser-Of-Frogs. I am the Mother of the Family that lives here."