Stephen Baxter - Icebones

She ran her trunk fingers over the rock’s pocked surface. She found a series of small, shallow pits, a row of them, each just large enough to take her trunk tip.

…They were footprints, locked into the surface of the hardened rock. She probed more carefully at the nearest print. It had six toes. No living animal had six toes. Now its kind was lost, leaving no trace save these accidentally preserved prints.

She felt a surge of wonder. Despite the noise, her pain, despite the imminent danger, despite the rock’s shuddering, she longed to know where that ancient animal had been going — what it had wanted, how it had died.

But she would never know, and might live no more than a few more heartbeats, not even long enough to savor such wonder.

The dusty debris falling over her was becoming more liquid, she thought, and warmer too. The flood was nearing. The ground shook. She huddled closer to her rock.

But a long, powerful trunk wrapped under her belly.

It was Spiral. The young Cow loomed over Icebones as a mother would loom over her calf. She was coated in red dust, and her guard hairs were already damp.

Icebones said, "You shouldn’t have come back. You’ll die, like me. The flood is coming."

Spiral rumbled, loudly enough to make herself heard over the noise of the water. "Yes, the flood comes… like the tears of Kilukpuk."

Icebones felt weary amusement. "You talk now of Kilukpuk?"

"I’m hoping you’ll tell me more of those old tales, Icebones."

"It’s too late. We can’t get to the bank."

"No. But there is an island, further to the north, that might stay above the waters." She grabbed Icebones’s tusks and began to drag her along the bed of the ancient channel.

Icebones tried to resist, digging her feet into the ground, but the pain in her shoulder was too great even for that.

"You must not do this," she said.

"Icebones, help me or we’ll both drown."

Icebones forced herself to her feet.

To the north, the way the ancient waters had once flowed, the land was covered by scour marks, braided channels, heavily eroded islands, sand bars, the scars left by flowing water. The island Spiral had selected was shaped like a vast teardrop, its steep, layered sides polished to smoothness by ancient floods.

Climbing the island’s crumbling walls was one of the most difficult things Icebones had ever done. The strata cracked and gave way, coming loose under her in a shower of rock and pebbles and dust, and each fall brought lancing pain in her shoulder that made her trumpet in protest. But Spiral stayed with her every step, ramming Icebones’s rump with her head, as if driving her up the slope with sheer strength and willpower.

At last they reached the lip of the wall. With a final, agonizing effort Icebones dragged her carcass onto the island’s flat top. She crumpled, falling onto her knees. The surface was smooth hard mudstone, a fragment of the floor of some ancient sea, she thought.

Spiral stood before her, breathing hard, caked with orange dust, her hair ragged: tall and wild, she was a figure from a nightmare. "You are a heavy burden to haul."

Icebones gasped, "You should have left me."

"Too late for that."

And now, through the murky, sodden gloom, more mammoths approached: Autumn, Thunder, Breeze, the calf.

Icebones growled, "What are you doing here?"

"We are waiting for you," said Thunder. "Did you think we would go on without you? And when we saw Spiral bringing you here—"

Lightning flashed. The mammoths flinched.

Where the sky tusk had broken the ground, dust and steam still gushed, crimson red, and over the towering clouds of dust and steam, lightning cracked. Now water was beginning to pulse out of the ground, stained pink by the ubiquitous dust.

Instinctively the mammoths gathered closer, nuzzling and bumping.

Icebones was surrounded by the rich smell of their hair, and they loomed over her as if she was a calf. She snorted. "Some Matriarch. I did not understand the tusk of the sun. I did not hear the movement of the water under the ground until we were in danger. I am the slowest of us all, and have put you at risk."

Autumn said, "But I understood the meaning of the tusk. And Thunder with his sharp hearing heard the water, and understood, and warned us in time. And Spiral used her strength to save you — just as you have used your strength to aid others of us in the past."

"But the Cycle teaches—"

"Is the Cycle more important than the instincts of the mammoths around you?"

"…No," Icebones conceded.

"So you have not failed," Autumn whispered. "We are Family. We are what you made us. My strength is your strength."

"It doesn’t always work like that," Icebones said grimly. "Sometimes it is right to abandon the weak…"

Autumn pushed her trunk into Icebones’s mouth. "No more lessons."

All the mammoths began to murmur, a deep rumble of reassurance as if to soothe a frightened calf. Their rumbles merged subtly, becoming like the single voice of a vaster creature.

Icebones let her self sink into that comforting pit of sound. She felt her doubts and fears and anxieties dissolve — and her sense of self washed away with them. She was Family: she heard the world through Thunder’s sharp ears, and felt Spiral’s tall strength suffuse her own limbs, and Autumn’s deep knowledge and unknowing wisdom filled her head, and she shared Breeze’s deep love for her calf, who became as precious to her as her own core warmth.

She had never forgotten how bleakly bereft she had felt on that rocky hillside, when she first woke from her unnatural sleep, bombarded by strangeness — alone, as she had never been in her life. But now a new Family had built around her — I had become We — and she was whole again.

With a final shuddering tremble, the ground around the great fracture gave way. Layers of rock lifted like a lid. Angry water spilled into the valley, pounding on the eroded boulders, shattering ancient stones that might not have been disturbed since the world was young.

A wall of dirty, rust-brown water fell on them, hard and heavy.

As the setting sun began finally to glint through the remnant haze, the mammoths separated stiffly. They were cold, hungry, bruised, utterly bedraggled.

Water, turbulent and red-brown with mud, still surged around their island. Immense waves, echoes of the mighty fracture, surged up and down the ancient valley.

But already the flood water had begun to recede. Much of it was draining away through the ancient channels to the Ocean of the North. The rest was simply soaking away into the dust, vanishing back into the thirsty red ground as rapidly as it had emerged. The revealed ground, slick with crimson mud and remnant puddles, sparkled in the low sunlight, as red and wet as skinned flesh.

The very shape of this island had changed, its battered walls crumbled away under the onslaught.

The Lost remake worlds, Icebones thought. But they do not stay remade. Soon the things the Lost have built here, all the bridges and pipelines and Nests and the toiling beetles, will collapse and erode away. And when the dust has silted up even their marvelous straight-edged canal, the ancient face of the Sky Steppe will emerge once more, timeless and indomitable.

The Lost are powerful. But the making of a world will forever be beyond them, a foolish dream.

By the light of a fat, dust-laden pink sunset, the mammoths scrambled down the island’s newly carved sides, and across the valley floor. By the time they got to the higher ground they were so coated in sticky red-black mud Icebones could barely raise her legs.

"What now, Matriarch?" "What should we do?" "Where should we go?"