Грег Иган: Phoresis

Freya held the image of frustrated fissures in the back of her mind as she worked. Even if she’d identified the true nature of the problem, it was hard to imagine any way that a few thousand surface dwellers could influence the behavior of cracks in the ice so far beneath their feet.

A part of her counseled: Time will fix it . The geysers had flowed freely in the past, and if chance alone had stymied them, by chance alone they should return.

But how quickly? How certain could she be that any children she had wouldn’t starve before the resurgence?

She looked up at Tvíburi. A slender white streak was clearly visible, rising up from the sunlit edge, bright enough to stand out against the sky. Their twin wasn’t suffering from the same hiatus, but Freya didn’t know if she should read this as a promise that the two worlds’ fortunes would converge, or if Tvíburi was simply mocking her: flaunting the very thing her people needed, while knowing it was utterly beyond their reach.

“There must be life there, surely?” Freya asked her friends around the table. “If Tvíburi’s made of the same ingredients as our world, experiencing the same conditions…?”

“I looked at it through a telescope once,” Erna said. “At a traveling fair. You can see the geysers clearly, and the soil they’ve spread over the ice. That much seems to be the same.”

“No farms?” Hanna joked.

“Farms might be a bit small to see, but I couldn’t spot any grasslands either.”

“I bet there are methanogens in the ocean,” Gro declared. “Whether or not there are creatures on the surface.”

“If the surface is barren,” Bridget replied, “why wouldn’t the ocean be barren too?”

Gro said, “Think how close these worlds are, and how long they’ve been together. How many chances would there have been, over the eons, for a geyser to blow spores all the way to Tvíburi?”

Freya laughed; she was not dismissing the idea, but it made her giddy. She said, “If that’s true, why don’t we follow them?”

This suggestion was enough to plunge the group into silence. Even Gro looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.

“What?” Freya protested. “If there is good air, and fertile soil…” She trailed off, unsure just what inspiring conclusion she’d thought she was reaching for. Quite apart from the absurdity of hoping that a band of explorers could cross the void like a spore on a water spout, if there had been geysers to ride there’d be no reason to ride them.

Erna said, “If we want a new geyser, maybe we should poison some roots. If they shrivel up faster than the ice reclaims the channel, it could leave a gap.”

Freya was horrified, but Hanna had more practical concerns. “A gap all the way down to the ocean?” she asked.

Erna hesitated. “It would have to be.”

“So you think we could more or less kill a whole Yggdrasil?” Hanna was incredulous. “You might as well talk about snuffing out the sun!”

“The upper roots are all too narrow anyway,” Bridget added. “Even if they died and turned to dust, any water trying to take the same path would freeze before it reached the surface.”

Erna didn’t reply immediately, but nor did she seem willing to concede the argument.

“Anyone else know how to cure the world’s problems?” Freya interjected. Some of their neighbors were casting worried glances at the group; the sooner they stopped talking about poisoning roots , the better.

“It’s only been a day,” Gro replied. “After a day, if you came to me covered in fresh soil and led me by the hand to the geyser it came from, I still wouldn’t take you seriously.”

Freya woke and disentangled herself from her blankets, then lay on the floor of the tent for a moment. Twelve days into their collective endeavor, all of her friends had liberated at least one root from the ice, some of them two or three. Either she’d been unlucky, or she’d allowed her attention to wander. If she really had been negligent, today was the day to make up for it.

As she stumbled across the tent in the half light, she bumped into Bridget, but they exchanged nothing more than the grunts of acknowledgment that minimal civility required. No one was talkative in the mornings. Freya ate quickly, but when she started dressing for the ice she noticed that two of her brothers were stirring. “Go back to sleep, you idiots,” she whispered, almost wishing they could understand her words, however disturbing that would have been. They kept reading the proximity of so many women as some kind of opportunity, when in truth it was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Of all the customary prerequisites for conception, a guaranteed air supply was among the most prudent.

Freya left the tent and set out for the patch of ice she’d been allocated for the day. The advance party had pegged out rectangular sections before most of the searchers had arrived, so all she had to do was find the right marker for the corner of her latest piece of the grid. Above her, Tvíburi was little more than one-quarter lit—and when she took in the rising sun in the same view, her sense of longitude became an almost palpable thing, as if she’d physically paced her way west from the prime meridian where the twin would be perfectly bisected at dawn, watching the perspective shift along the way as it did for a nearer object if she merely leaned to the left or right. No doubt the lonely cousins were happy with their lives, but she would have felt bereft if she’d been forced to live beneath their flat, distant sky.

When she reached spike number seventy-three and looked out across the territory it marked, Freya’s spirits sank. There was a plateau of blue ice rising up from the plain, occupying at least half of the patch. If the roots couldn’t break the surface where she stood, what chance would they have to climb higher? So much for catching up with her friends’ tallies.

It was hard not to feel cheated, but that was no excuse to shirk. Freya decided to ascend immediately and search the whole elevated region first. The approach was quite steep, and slippery with a lingering ethane dew; she had to use her pick a few times to give herself purchase.

When she reached the top of the plateau, she found that although the ice leveled off, it wasn’t flat like the plain around it; the surface was dimpled and lumpy, rising and falling with every few strides. Freya had never encountered anything quite like it.

The dips in the ground held much more dirt than she was used to, but she worked assiduously to rake it aside. In compensation, the mounds were much cleaner, though none of the ice itself was particularly clear: it was full of tiny defects that diffused the light, leaving it bluer, and much harder to inspect. She presumed it was newer than the ice of the plain; there hadn’t been a geyser around here in living memory, but there might have been one recently enough that its accumulated snowfall had yet to be entirely leveled by erosion.

When she reached the drop at the far end of the plateau, she reversed, pacing out a parallel strip. The uneven terrain made every step different from the last; Freya could only hope that the novelty would help her keep her mind on the task, for whatever that was worth up here. She wasn’t sure how long it would be from the time an active geyser refroze to the time a Yggdrasil would get around to sending roots through the new ice, but if there had once been a torrent of water shooting into the sky here, ripping up whatever had come before it, that could only lower her chances of success.