Stephen Baxter - Icebones

"I’m sorry, Thunder. What did you say? I am hot, and the day is bright."

But Thunder’s pink tongue was lolling. "It is the sky," he said. "Look, Icebones. There is nothing wrong with you. It is the sky!"

The sun had grown huge — and was getting larger. With every extension of that pale, ragged disc, the heat and the brilliance around her increased. It was silent, eerie, and profoundly disturbing.

There was a nudge at her side, an alarmed trumpet. Icebones made out Spiral, a shimmering ghost in the pink-stained brilliance. "Come away! You are in great danger here. Hurry…!" Spiral began to barge vigorously at Icebones’s flank.

Icebones needed little further urging.

The ground was littered with scree and, unable to see, she stumbled frequently. Her shoulder hurt profoundly, and she felt as if she would melt from the heat. Though she was half-blinded, she could hear as clearly as ever: Spiral’s blaring, the scrape of her foot pads over the loose rock, even the scratchy, shallow breathing of the other mammoths further away.

That flaring sun expanded still further. Eventually it became a great disc draped over the sky, its blurred rim reaching halfway to the horizon.

It was horrifying, bewildering, unreal, a new impossible unreality in this unreal world. The sun does not behave like that. If I am the frozen dream of some long-dead seer, she thought, then perhaps the dream is breaking down; perhaps this is the light of the truth, breaking through the crumbling dream…

But now the heat began to fade, suddenly. There was a soft breeze, carrying the tang of ice. The light, too, seemed dimmer.

Her thoughts cleared, like a fever dream receding. Here was Autumn, a blocky, ill-defined silhouette before her.

"If that was summer," Icebones said, "it was the shortest I’ve ever known."

"This is no joke." Autumn pushed her trunk into Icebones’s mouth. "You’re too hot. Come now, quickly." So Icebones was forced to walk again, in the footsteps of hurrying Autumn.

They reached a tall, eroded rock, crusted with yellow lichen. In its shade there was a patch of snow, laced pink by dust. Autumn reached down, scooped up snow with her trunk and began to push it into Icebones’s mouth.

Icebones lumbered forward and let the cool pink-white stuff lap up to her belly. Mammoths did not sweat, and using frost or snow like this was an essential means of keeping cool. Icebones only wished that the snow were deep enough to cover her completely.

When she felt a little better, she staggered wearily out of the ice. Slush dripped from guard hairs that were still hot to the touch of her trunk tip.

The place where she had been standing with Thunder, bathed in light, glowed a bright pink-white. Threads of steam and smoke rose from the red dust. The stink of burning vegetation and scorched-hot rock reached her nostrils.

Above the glowing ground a column of shining, swirling dust motes rose into the air. It was a perfect, soft-edged cylinder that slanted toward the sun — but Icebones had never seen a sunbeam of such intensity, nor one cast by such a powerful and misshapen sun.

Away from the sun itself, the sky seemed somehow diminished. Close to the zenith, she could even make out stars. It was as if all the light in the world had been concentrated into that single intense pulse.

An overheated rock cracked open with an explosive percussion, making all the mammoths flinch and grumble.

"If we were still standing there," Thunder said grimly, "we too would be burning."

Spiral nudged him affectionately. "And your fat would flow like water, you big tusker, and we would all swim away."

But now the shining pillar of light dispersed, abruptly, leaving dust motes churning, and the intense glow dissipated as if it had never been. When she peered up, Icebones saw the sun was restored to its normal intensity, small and shrunken.

"It is a thing of the Lost," she said. "This great tusk of light that stirs and breaks the rock."

"Yes," said Autumn. "Somehow they can gather the light of the sun itself and hurl it down where they choose. From the Fire Mountain I saw it stab at the land, over and over, carving out pits and valleys."

"Like the canal in the Gouge," Icebones said.

"But now it is scratching the land as foolishly as Woodsmoke trying out his milk tusks. The Lost are gone, and it doesn’t know what to do."

The cloudy deformation of the sun was gathering again, and the light beam was slicing down once more, this time on the higher land to the south, above the escarpment at the head of the valley. Where it rested the rock cracked and melted.

The ground shuddered — a single sharp pulse — and the mammoths rumbled their unease.

Autumn said, "I think—"

"Hush!" The brief, peremptory trumpet came from Thunder. "Listen. Can’t you hear that? Can’t you, Icebones?"

Breeze said impatiently, "I hear the burning grass, the hiss of the melting rock—"

"No. Deeper than that. Listen."

Icebones stood square on the ground, pressing her weight onto all her four legs, despite the stabs of pain in her shoulder. And then she heard it: a subterranean growl, deep and menacing.

"We have to get to the higher ground," she said immediately. They were halfway across the valley, she saw, and the eastern slope looked marginally easier to climb. "Let’s go, let’s go. Now." She began to limp that way, her damaged shoulder stinging with pain.

The mammoths milled uncertainly.

"Why?" Breeze asked. "What are we fleeing?"

"Water," said Icebones. "A vast quantity of water, an underground sea locked into the ground. Like the great flood that once burst across this land, scraping out the valley you stand in. And now—"

"And now," said Thunder urgently, "thanks to the shining tusk, that underground sea is awakening, stretching its muscles. Come on."

At last they understood. They began to lumber across the plain toward the eastern wall, trunks and tails swaying.

The ground above the escarpment cracked with a report that echoed down the walls of the valley, and steam gushed into the air. The vast body of water beneath, vigorous on its release after a billion years locked beneath a cap of permafrost ice, was rising at the commanding touch of the great orbiting lens — rising with relentless determination, seeking the air.

Though the ground was broken and their way was impeded by half-buried lumps of debris, they all made faster time than Icebones — even the calf, who clung to his mother’s tail.

A giant explosion shook the ground.

Her foreleg folded beneath her. She crashed forward onto her knees, pain stabbing through her shoulder.

From the great scribbled scar inflicted by the tusk of light, a vast fountain of steam gushed into the pale sky. Vapor and debris drifted across the sun, turning it into a pale pink smear.

I’m not going to make it, she thought.

And now dust rained down like a dense, gritty snow. Icebones snorted to clear her trunk, and she tasted the blood flavor of the hot, iron-rich dust.

Suddenly she was alone in a shell of murky dust. And the mammoths were no more than crimson blurs in the distance, fast receding.

She supposed it was for the best that the others had not looked back. She had never wanted to become a burden.

She found herself staring at a rock — staring with fascination, for it might be the last thing she would ever see. It was heavily weathered, eroded, pitted and cracked. Its color was burnt orange, but there were streaks of blue-red on its north-facing surfaces, which had been exposed to sunlight longer. It was made of a lumpy conglomerate, pebbles trapped in a mix of hardened sand.

Pebbles and sand, she thought. Pebbles and sand that must have formed in fast-flowing rivers, and then compressed into this mottled rock on some ocean bed. All of it ancient, all of it long gone.