Грег Иган: Phoresis

She weaved between the tents, squeezing past queues of people waiting to enter, and found herself on a patch of ground that was open to the sky but sheltered from all sides. In the middle of this square, a woman stood by a telescope, touting for customers. “See the mountains and ravines of Tvíburi! See the geysers of molten ice, close enough to touch!”

Freya found a place to stand where she wasn’t blocking anyone’s way, and put her dusty pack on the ground. The telescope woman turned toward her and smiled. Freya nodded a greeting, but kept her distance; it would be rude to approach, as if she were a potential customer, only to plead poverty at the last moment.

As the afternoon wore on, the other touts seemed to be drawing ever larger crowds, but the telescope remained unvisited. Freya glanced up at the waxing crescent, wondering why no one seemed interested.

The telescope woman approached her. “I’m Inga.”

“Freya.”

“You’re not from this village, are you?”

“No.”

“Do you want to take a look?” Inga offered cheerfully.

“I…” Freya lowered her gaze, ashamed.

“No charge for a fellow traveler,” Inga assured her.

Freya followed her over to the instrument, and lay down on the bench beneath the eyepiece. She wasn’t sure why she had never done this before; maybe as a child, other attractions had grabbed her attention first, and by the time a closer look at Tvíburi had begun to seem alluring she’d spent what her mother had to spare.

She squirmed across the bench and squinted into the eyepiece, trying to turn the confusing puddle of light she was seeing into something sharper. “I can’t…” she complained. But then she craned her neck and suddenly, she could.

The view showed an expanse of pale blue ice, covered in fine fractures like the lines on an old woman’s skin.

“Use the wheels,” Inga urged her. She guided Freya’s hand to a pair of disks with corrugated edges, connected to shafts on the telescope’s mount. “Turn the top one to move the view from side to side, the other to move it up and down, as you’re seeing it.”

Freya swung the telescope to the left too fast, transforming the landscape into a blur, but when it became still again she was staring down at a canyon. “Have you ever seen anything like that on Tvíbura?” she asked, before realizing that Inga would have no idea what she was looking at. “A furrow in the ice so deep?”

“No,” Inga replied. “We’re flatter, for sure.”

Freya nudged the wheels, searching the ice for a deposit of soil. Finally, she was rewarded: a deep brown splotch, piled up in the middle, tall enough to cast a shadow. As far as she could tell, it was barren, with no trace of wild grasses. But did that mean the soil itself was incapable of supporting life, or simply that the right kind of plants had never arrived, or arisen, on Tvíburi? It was certainly sticky enough to have held together despite the lack of vegetation; that alone made it seem more promising than the gray dust here that was blowing away on the wind.

She slid off the bench, afraid of becoming engrossed in the view and outstaying her welcome. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad I saw that.”

“It’s easy to take Tvíburi for granted.” Inga glanced around the square at the oblivious fair-goers. “Half the world has spent their lives looking up at it, but some people think that means there’s nothing more to see.”

“Believe me, that’s not how I feel.” Freya hesitated, reluctant to burden this woman with the details of her increasingly unlikely ambitions. But even if Inga had no crops of her own to offer to a team of mountain-builders, she was entitled to know what could be done in the face of dwindling yields and desiccated soil. If nothing changed, her grandchildren would starve even sooner than those of any farmer.

Freya said, “I think we need to build a bridge.”

Inga listened attentively, and if she seemed to be struggling to keep herself from interrupting, she had the demeanor, not of an exasperated skeptic eager to declare the whole idea preposterous, but of someone who kept anticipating both problems and solutions, who was waiting to hear whether the speaker would eventually catch up with her.

By the time Freya finally stopped talking, she must have addressed most of those concerns, because Inga just smiled and said, “That has to be the most intrepid plan I’ve ever heard.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Freya replied. “Though I’m not sure it’s the kind of endorsement that would recommend the idea to many farmers.”

“So you’re traveling from village to village, trying to get support?”

“Yes.”

“Any luck?”

“About as much as you’re having with your telescope.”

Inga frowned. “Why? Do people not believe that any of this is possible… or do they not believe that it could help?”

Freya explained about Gro’s competing project. “Everyone wants that to work instead. A better result, and a faster one—if it happens at all. But it makes my own plans sound like a waste of time.”

Inga pondered this. “You need props,” she said.

“I need what?”

“Objects that help you demonstrate your point. You need to make it easier for people to see why even the tallest mountain might not create a geyser.”

Freya said, “How can I make people see something that I’m not even certain of myself?”

“You’re not certain—but do you think your doubts about your friend’s scheme are well-founded, or do you think you’re just too stubborn to give up on your own idea?”

Freya was bemused. “Can anyone answer a question like that?”

Inga said, “If your doubts are well-founded, there must be something you can do to get them across to other people.” She glanced away; someone was finally approaching her telescope. “Meet me here when the fair closes, and I’ll see what I can do to help.”

Freya passed the time walking around the fairgrounds, trying to keep warm, too embarrassed to start approaching people and beg them for food and shelter. If anything, she tried to remain inconspicuous; if a villager did offer her hospitality now, how would she keep her appointment with Inga?

Halfway between sunset and midnight, as the laneways between the tents started emptying, she made her way back to the telescope. Inga still had one young customer, but when the girl left—beaming at what she’d seen—Inga gestured to Freya to approach.

“We’re here for two more days, so I won’t be packing this up,” she explained. “I just have to cover it to protect it from the dust.” She took some sheets of heavy fabric out of a box, unfolded them, and pegged them in place over the telescope.

She led Freya through the fairgrounds to a small, drab tent, and lit a lamp just inside the entrance. Most of the space within was taken up by two carts, piled high with wooden crates.

“How do you people lug all this across the ice?” Freya wondered.

“It’s not that hard, if you know what you’re doing; once you’ve got the wheels rolling, the carts only need an occasional push. The most dangerous part is when we have to stop in a hurry—that’s when I wish things had more weight and less momentum.” Inga was rummaging through one of the carts as she spoke, but then she stopped and announced happily, “Here it is!”

She carried the box she’d found away from the cart and placed it on the floor of the tent, then opened it and began removing some of its contents. “The first thing you want to impress on people is that, no matter how much ice you pile up, there’s a limit to how much it will weigh.”