Stephen Baxter - Silverhair

"I have to get to the Mainland," said Silverhair.

"Mainland? Kelp good there. Mmm. Kelp." The sea cow looked dreamy. "But not there go sea cows. Why? Lost there."

"You know about the Lost?"

"Lost? Find me they if, drag me from sea they, eat my kidneys they, leave handsome body for gulls they. Terrible, terrible."

"I have met the Lost," said Silverhair.

"Think sea cows all gone Lost. Live in seas in south some Cousins. Here think kill us Lost, long time ago gobble up our kidneys Lost. But wrong they. But not Mainland go to I, kelp or no. Stay by Island. On Island no Lost."

"There are now," said Silverhair grimly.

"Terrible, terrible," said the sea cow, sounding dismayed. "Go to Mainland you, why if Lost there?"

"I have to," said Silverhair. "They took my Family."

The sea cow rolled in the water, almost throwing Silverhair off. "Terrible thing. Terrible Lost. Here. Hold on to me you." The sea cow held out a stubby, clawed flipper, and Silverhair wrapped her trunk around it.

The broad flukes beat, sending up a spray that splashed over Silverhair. The sea cow’s broad, streamlined bulk began to slide easily through the water, oblivious to the current that had defeated Silverhair, unimpeded even by the bulk of an adult mammoth clinging to one flipper. Soon her speed was so great that a bow wave washed around her small, determined head.

Her power was exhilarating.

The sea cow pushed easily through the loose, decaying landfast ice that fringed the shore of the Mainland.

Silverhair’s feet crunched on hard shingle.

She let go of the sea cow’s flipper. She stumbled forward up a steepening slope until she had dragged herself clear of the sea. Already frost was forming on her soaked fur, and she shook herself vigorously. Soon the warmth of the afternoon summer sun was seeping into her.

The sea cow used her stubby flippers to haul herself farther out of the water, so her bulk was lying on the shingle bed, her great broad back exposed. She began munching contentedly on a floating scum of brown kelp fronds. She chewed with a horny plate at the front of her mouth, for she didn’t appear to have any teeth. "Kelp. Mmm. Want some you?"

"Thanks — no."

Now that the sea cow was raised so far out of the water, Silverhair could see how strange she looked: a head and flippers much like a seal’s, but trailing a great bulbous body and a powerful split fluke, as if the front half of a seal had been attached to a beluga whale. Out of the water she was ponderous and looked stranded. Silverhair could see why her kind had been such easy pickings for the Lost, before the sea cows had learned to hide and feign extinction.

Silverhair looked back at the dark, sinuous waters of the Channel. "But for you," she told the sea cow, "I’d still be out there now. There forever."

The sea cow’s fluke beat at the water. "Oath of Kilukpuk. Hyros and Probos and Siros. Forgot that you?"

"No," said Silverhair quietly. "No, we haven’t forgotten." And she was filled with warmth as she realized that one of the most ancient and beautiful passages of the Cycle had been fulfilled, here on this desolate beach.

The Calves of Kilukpuk had been separated for more than fifty million years. But they hadn’t forgotten their Oath.

The sea cow rolled gracefully and slid into deeper water. "Stick to tundra next time you. Watch out for Lost you. Good luck, Cousin." Her stubby flippers extended, and she slid beneath the ice-strewn waves.

And Silverhair, her trunk raised and every half-frozen hair prickling, walked slowly up the shingle beach into the land of the Lost.

Everywhere on this ugly Mainland beach there was evidence of the Lost: chunks of rusting metal, splashes of dirty oil that stained the ice, scraps of the strange loose outer skin they wore. There were structures, long and narrow, that pushed out from the beach toward the water; at the end of these structures were more of the shell-like objects like the one she had seen on the ice floe, on her first encounter with Skin-of-Ice. But where the thing on that ice floe had been damaged, these seemed intact; they floated on the gray water, though some were embedded in the ice. Perhaps they were supposed to ferry the Lost across the water, she mused.

She walked over a line of scrubby dunes at the edge of the beach and reached the tundra. There she found grass and sedge, and even a few Arctic willows; but the ground was poor — polluted by more of the black sludgy oil that had marred the beach — and broken up by long, snaking tracks. There was a stink of tar, and a strange silence, an emptiness that was a chilling contrast to the Island’s rich summer cacophony.

And everywhere there were straight lines, the hard signature of the Lost, the symbol of their dominance over the world around them.

The most gigantic line of all was a hard-edged surface set in the tundra, black and lifeless. It was a road that proceeded — straight as a shaft of sunlight — to the heart of the City of the Lost.

The City itself was the sight she had seen many times from the safety of the headland on the Island: a tangle of shining tubes and tanks, randomly cross-connected, sprinkled with glowing point lights like captive stars. From tall columns oily black smoke billowed into the air, its tarry stink overpowering even the sharp tang of brine.

The City was huge, sprawling over the tundra. It must be the Lost’s prime nest, she thought. And that was where she must go.

She stepped away from the road. She found a place where the tundra wasn’t quite so badly scarred, and there were grass and willow twigs to graze. She deliberately pushed the food into her mouth, ground it up, and swallowed it. She found a stream. It was thin and brackish, but it tasted clean; the cold water revived her strength a little.

She noticed a carpet of lemming holes and runs, and droppings from the predator birds that hunted the little rodents. So there was life here.

And she glimpsed an Arctic fox, the last of its white winter fur clinging to its back. The fox’s coat was patchy and discolored, the nodes of its spine protruding from its back. As soon as the fox saw her, its hairs stood on end. Then the fox dropped its muzzle as if in shame, and slinked away.

Silverhair thought she understood. This creature had abandoned the tundra and had learned to live in the corners of the world of the Lost. But it was a poor bargain. She wondered if, in some deep recess of its hindbrain, the fox still longed for the open freedom and rich, clean silence of the tundra its ancestors had abandoned.

Her feeding done, she passed dung, the movement fast and satisfying. The world seemed vivid around her, ugly and distorted as it was here on the Mainland. If this was to be her day to die, then there would be a last time for everything: to love, to eat, even to pass dung — and at last to breathe. And all of it should be cherished, for death was long.

The rich scent of her own dung filled her nostrils — and suddenly she realized that there was no smell of mammoth here.

The mammoths had seeped into every crevice of their Island. It wasn’t possible to pull up a blade of grass that hadn’t been nourished by the dung of mammoths; mammoth bones erupted from the ground everywhere as the permafrost melted; mammoths had even shaped the tundra itself, by battering down the encroaching trees of the spruce forest.

But that wasn’t true here. When she raised her trunk to the air and sniffed, all she could smell was smoke and tar. And this was the place to which Foxeye and her calves had been brought: the place from which Silverhair must rescue them, or die in the attempt.

Perhaps if Lop-ear were here, she thought wistfully, he might be able to devise some plan, some way to gain an advantage over the unknowable swarms of Lost. But he wasn’t here, and she had no plan. She could only rely on her strength and speed and courage and native intelligence — and the guidance of the Cycle, which had brought her this far.