Грег Иган - Phoresis

When she left the room where she’d spent the night, she found the rest of the house empty, so she walked outside, squinting at the brightness. Stretched out in front of her was a row of similar houses; beyond them, an expanse of green fields full of low, leafy plants, interspersed with what she took to be orchards.

Past the fields, there were more villages, and more fields, and on it went, until behind the most distant fields there was a row of ice towers. At first Petra thought they were the ones she’d seen as she’d arrived, but that made no sense; she hadn’t walked that far. As she turned her gaze to take in the whole impossible, idyllic scene, she realized that there was a ring of towers, encircling all of the agricultural land. Maybe twenty or thirty in total.

There were women walking along paths between the fields, and when Petra caught their gaze they raised their hands in greeting. No one came scowling to inquire about her origins; they must have been told already. Petra found a bench and sat, taking in the morning sun.

Ebba approached, carrying a basket full of something that looked disturbingly like tangler nodules, but were probably actually edible. “How did you sleep?” she asked Petra.

“Deeper than I’ve ever slept before.” Petra wanted to thank her for her hospitality, but then thought better of it; it might be insulting to suggest that she would ever have treated a stranger otherwise. “Can I ask you something?”

Ebba said, “Of course.”

“Where does all the soil come from?”

Ebba turned and looked out across the fields. “If you can be patient for a moment longer, you’ll see for yourself.”

Petra didn’t mind waiting. Ebba joined her on the bench.

“You came all this way thinking that we might be clinging to life, desperate to join the migration?”

Petra said, “Can you blame us? Nothing we could see through the telescopes looked good.”

“We were desperate,” Ebba conceded. “In my grandmother’s time, a lot of people starved. This place is beautiful, but it took generations of work to complete, and it can only feed so many of us.”

“Your grandmother worked on the towers?”

“Yes.”

Petra heard a faint hissing sound, somewhere in the distance. She turned toward it, and saw a slender column of white ascending from the middle of the fields. Compared to the geysers on her own world, it was ridiculously modest, as if the crack in the ice through which it flowed might be barely a hand’s breadth wide. But then, if it ran slowly and never rose high, whatever soil it delivered would not be scattered uselessly across the distant ice fields. It would all rain down upon the farms.

“The towers are so small,” she said.

“Yes,” Ebba agreed. “But they’re unbalanced in a way that puts the ice under stress—and more so at a distance than directly beneath them, so the effects of several towers can be combined. We found a spot where the ice was weak already, where an old geyser had once flowed. Freya showed that you can’t punch a hole through a slab of flawless ice just by piling up weight on top of it. But where there was a crack before, there’s a chance. We built rings of towers like this in seventeen different places. This is the only one that worked.”

Petra piled up all those towers, failed and fruitful, in her mind’s eye; nothing had come easily to anyone. She said, “Everyone will have the chance to walk on the two worlds now. We can travel, we can trade, we can bring the most distant cousins together. The hard times are over.”

The white column rose higher, summoned by the sun. Petra closed her eyes. She’d stay here and rest for a few more days, meet Rada to share the good news, then climb back to the void she loved, and join the others working on the bridge between the worlds, strand by strand, until it was complete.

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Phoresis Copyright © 2018

by Greg Egan.

All rights reserved.

Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2018

by Gregory Manchess.

All rights reserved.

Print version interior design Copyright © 2018

by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

ISBN 978-1-59606-867-4

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