Stephen Baxter: Silverhair

"Look," said Lop-ear softly, and he tugged her ear.

She looked up. The Sky Steppe was floating high above the moist tundra, a point of light gleaming fiery red. She stared through the glass wall at the ruddy air. It seemed to her that — just for a heartbeat — the red fire of the Sky Steppe washed down over the world, mixing with the sunset.

But then the clouds closed over the sky, and she was looking out at the dullness of the moist, rainy tundra.

Lop-ear was still talking. "…strange name, but the Lost…"

"What did you say?"

"I was telling you what the Lost call the Sky Steppe. For they see it better than we do, Silverhair. They know much about the land there, even about the two moons that follow it. They call it…" And he raised his head to the light in the sky, and shaped his mouth to utter the strange Lost sound.

"Mars."

The sky closed over, and snow began to fall steadily. The Arctic summer was over, and Silverhair could feel the bony touch of another long, hard winter.

It is a frozen world.

Though the sun is rising, the sky above is still speckled with stars. There is a flat, sharp, close horizon, a plain of dust and rocks. The rocks are carved by the wind. Everything is stained rust-brown, like dried blood, the shadows long and sharp.

In the east there is a morning star: steady, brilliant, its delicate blue-white distinct against the violet wash of the dawn. Sharp-eyed creatures might see that this is a double star: a faint silver-gray companion circles close to its blue master.

The sun continues to strengthen. It is an elliptical patch of yellow light suspended in a brown sky. But the sun looks small, feeble; this seems a cold, remote place. As the dawn progresses, the dust suspended in the air scatters the light and suffuses everything with a pale salmon hue. At last the gathering light masks the moons.

Two of them.

The land isn’t completely flat. There are low sand dunes, and a soft shadow in the sand. It looks like a shallow ridge.

It is the wall of a crater.

It seems impossible that anything should live here. And yet there is life.

Lichen clings to the crater walls, steadily manufacturing oxygen, and there are tufts of hardy grasses. There are even dwarf willow trees, their branches clinging to the ground…

And there is more.

A vicious wind is rising, lifting the dust into a storm. The horizon is lost now in a pink haze, and the world becomes a washed-out bowl of pink light.

And out of that haze something looms: a mountainous shape, seemingly too massive to move, and yet move it does. As it approaches through the obscuring mist, more of its form becomes visible: a body round as an eroded rock, head dropped down before it, the whole covered in a layer of thick, red-brown hair.

The great head rears up. A trunk comes questing, and immense tusks sweep. An eye opens, warm, brown, intense, startlingly human.

The great trunk lifts, and the woolly mammoth trumpets her ancient songs of blood and wisdom.

Her name is Icebones.