Грег Иган - Phoresis

On the morning of the fourteenth day, as Petra was disassembling her tent, she noticed a strange bulge on the horizon. It looked like a small mountain range, except that it was the color of ice, not rock. To explore it, she would need to detour to the north, and it seemed to correspond to nothing on her map. But then, either she was lost and this landmark would help to set her straight, or it was something genuinely new that merited investigation.

By mid-afternoon, the formation had come into clearer view, but that only made it less comprehensible. The “mountains” really were made of ice—or at least covered in it—but their shape was neither that of any rocky structure Petra had ever seen, or anything the elements had been known to carve out of the ice field. For a long time, she simply doubted that she was perceiving their geometry correctly; with a single viewpoint, changing so slowly, she lacked the cues to verify the full, three-dimensional forms that her mind kept proposing, then rejecting, then stubbornly returning to. But before night fell and she was left with nothing but starlight, she’d almost convinced herself: someone had tried to grow half a dozen separate Yggdrasil towers in the ice, all side-by-side. And then either by mishap, or by very strange design, they had all ceased growing vertically, and stretched out instead in more or less the same horizontal direction.

Dawn revealed nothing that made Petra change her mind, apart from one minor refinement: while five of the towers had remained upright, supporting the weight of their eccentric offshoots, the second from the left had toppled over in the direction of the overhang, but then rather than falling sideways as well it had come to a halt leaning against its neighbor.

She packed up her tent and strode toward the deformed towers as fast as she could. The wind was blowing strongly against her, but she had no intention of passing another night without resolving the mystery.

The only reason she could think of to grow an ice tower on the side of the world facing away from Tvíburi was in the hope of creating a geyser. But the stories all declared that Freya had proved such efforts futile—and while Petra could understand people doubting that those old fairground experiments had been conclusive, seeing the full-scale version stretching up into the sky without sinking its own foundations had surely been a great deal more persuasive.

Something touched her face, and she slapped at it instinctively. When she examined her palm, there was a soft, dark smear: the body of an insect.

Petra broke into a run, but her destination was too far away for a single burst of optimism to carry her there, so she slowed to a walk and conserved her strength. Sprinting to the point of collapse only to find a tiny patch of grassland clinging on behind the towers would not be worth it.

The sun was setting as she approached the feet of the towers. To Petra’s eye, they looked infinitely more misshapen and neglected than the one she’d descended, but if no one had ever been meant to climb them, different standards applied.

To the west, the sun was framed by the ramshackle arch of the fallen tower. Petra headed for the gap between the central pair, anxious as she passed below one of the overhangs, as if it might choose this very moment to tear itself free and crash to the ground. Staring up at the huge, horizontal column of ice, she thought of the tree branches she’d seen in the picture books passed down through her family. But no tree had ever stopped and sprouted a single branch of the same girth as its trunk.

She’d swatted a few more insects along the way, but she had to be ready to find herself among ruins as grim as any of the dead villages she’d passed through. When she reached the base of the tower, twilight had already descended, and whatever lay ahead was lost in the gloom. She stopped and prepared to set up camp.

“Who goes there?” a voice demanded.

Petra froze, unable to reply, though the tone had been more curious than threatening.

“Who is it?” The woman sounded annoyed now, rather than aggressive, as if she’d decided that a friend was playing a joke on her.

“My name’s Petra,” Petra called back into the darkness.

“Who?”

“Petra. Can I ask your name?”

A figure strode out of the shadows. “I’m Ebba,” the woman replied irritably, as if that ought to have been obvious. “Why don’t I know you? Which village are you from?”

Petra said, “I’ve come from far away.”

Ebba snorted. “Far away? Nothing’s far away.”

“I’ve come from Tvíburi,” Petra explained.

She couldn’t really see Ebba’s face, but the woman seemed to be scrutinizing her strange, coarse clothing. “What kind of nonsense is that? Are you telling me you flew here?”

“No. We finished our tower, and joined it with yours. There was some rope involved, but no untethered flight.” Petra was starting to wonder if she was dreaming, or had simply lost her mind. “We were afraid that everyone here might be dead.”

Ebba walked right up to her and grasped her shoulders, as if to check that she was awake herself, and that Petra was not her own hallucination.

She said, “We were afraid you were all dead, too. We thought the first travelers must have starved to death, along with every crazy woman who followed them on the basis of nothing but a scrawl on a fragment of a broken glider.”

Petra started sobbing. Ebba embraced her clumsily, hushing her. “Well, neither world is dead, so there’s only good news.”

“But what do you eat?”

“The usual kind of food.”

“Grown how? How do you still have soil?”

Ebba released her. “You didn’t see it, as you were approaching?”

“See what?”

“You must have been too far away.” Ebba caught herself. “And you must be very tired and hungry.”

Petra followed her through the darkness. She could smell the soil now, and some complicated scent carried on the breeze that she could only assume was a melange of old-world vegetation: grass, crops, trees. Ebba led her into a house, to a lamplit room, where two other women were preparing food. The three of them conversed in whispers, then Ebba introduced her friends as Laila and Tone.

“You came down through the old tower?” Laila asked, as if that were the most surprising aspect of Petra’s journey.

“Yes.”

“I went there once. I started walking up the stairs to see if I could get a nice view, but then I changed my mind and came down.”

Petra said, “Quite right. The stairs have lost their shape and they’re very slippery.”

She sat at the table and ate, in a daze, confused by the peculiar flavors and textures but not repelled; some part of her body welcomed every mouthful, more than it had ever welcomed her chewing on a tangler. She answered the women’s questions as best she could, though some words in their dialect were utterly opaque to her. When she tried to think of sensible questions of her own, her mind shrank away from the task. After a while, her eyelids became heavy, then Ebba led her to another room and gestured to the blanket on the floor.

When Petra woke, she could tell from the light that it was long after dawn. For a moment she felt ashamed, as if she’d failed to attend in a timely manner to some important duty, and betrayed herself to her hosts as lazy and ungrateful. But as her mind cleared, she decided that she had no reason to reproach herself. She’d come a long way; she could be forgiven for sleeping till mid-morning.