Bob Shaw - The Fugitive Worlds

“We may have corroboration.”

“By telescope?”

“By your lady friend—Countess Vantara.” Kettoran dabbed a drop of moisture from the end of his nose. “Her ship departed not so many days before ours.”

“You’re right, of course.” Toller was dully surprised to realize he had forgotten about Vantara for several hours. “The ice… the barrier… whatever it is… may have been in place when she made the crossing. It is something we will have to confer over in detail.”

Having derived an unexpected grain of comfort from the discussion—a readymade reason to seek out Vantara, wherever she might be—Toller gave his attention to the task of steering his ship around the edge of the disk. The maneuver was not a difficult one in theory. AH he had to do was pass the western rim by a short distance, carry out a simple inversion and begin flying back into the thicker air at the core of the atmospheric bridge.

Leaving Steenameert at the controls, he remained by the rail in order to obtain the most advantageous viewpoint and started giving detailed handling instructions. The ship was moving very slowly as it drew level with the rim, probably at no more than walking pace, but after some minutes had passed it came to Toller that it was taking longer than he had expected to reach the limit of the ice wall. Suddenly suspicious, he trained his binoculars on the rim. The sun was close to his aiming point, hurling billions of needles of radiance into his eyes and making the viewing difficult, but he managed to get a clear look at the icy boundary. It was now less than a furlong away in reality, and the image in his glasses brought it much closer.

Toller grunted in surprise as he discovered that the rim of the ice sheet was alive.

In place of what he had expected—the inertness of frozen water—there was a kind of crystalline seething. Glassy prisms and spikes and branches, each as tall as a man, were sprouting outwards on the rim with unnatural rapidity. They were extending the boundary of the sheet with the speed of billowing smoke—each thrusting into the gelid air and glistening in the sunlight for a moment before being overtaken and assimilated by others in the racing, sparkling vitreous foment.

Toller stared at the phenomenon, tranced, his mind awash with the unexpected and incredible beauty of it, and it seemed a long time before the first coherent thought came to him: The rim of the barrier is moving outwards at almost the same speed as the ship!

“Increase speed,” he shouted to Steenameert, his voice strained by the bitter coldness and the inimical nature of the thinning air. “Otherwise you’ll never see home again!”

Commissioner Kettoran, who had seemed almost a well man during the passage through the weightless zone, had been struck by a fresh seizure when the ship was only a few thousand feet above the surface of Overland. In one second he had been standing with Toller at the gondola’s rail and pointing out familiar features in the landscape below; in the next he was lying on his back, unable to move, eyes alert and afraid, beaconing an intelligence trapped inside a machine which no longer responded to its master’s bidding. Toller had carried him to his nest of quilts, wiped the frothy saliva from the corners of his mouth, and had gone immediately for the sunwriter in its leather case.

The lateral drift had been greater than usual, bringing the ship down some twelve miles to the east of the city of Prad, but the sunwriter message had been picked up in good time. A sizeable group of coaches and mounted men—plus a sleek airboat in grey-and-blue royal livery—had been waiting in the touchdown area. Within five minutes of the landing the commissioner had been transferred to the airboat and sent on his way to an emergency audition with Queen Daseene, who was waiting in the overheated confines of her palace.

There had been no opportunity for Toller to pass on any words of reassurance or farewell to Kettoran, a man he had come to regard as a good friend in spite of the disparity in age and status. As he watched the airboat dwindle into the yellow western sky he became aware of a sense of guilt and it took him some time to identify its source. He was, of course, deeply concerned about the commissioner’s health, but at the same time—and there was no getting around the fact—one part of him was thankful that the older man’s misfortune had come along, like the answer to a prayer, exactly when he had needed it. No other circumstance that he could readily think of could have placed him back on Overland and within reach of Vantara in such a short time.

What sort of monster am I? he thought, shocked by his own selfishness. I must be the worst…

Toller’s bout of introspection was interrupted by the sight of his father and Bartan Drumme descending from a coach which had just arrived at the landing site. Both men were attired in grey trews and three-quarter-length tabards gored with blue silk, a formal style of dress which suggested they had come straight from an important meeting in the city. Toller strode eagerly to meet his father, embraced him and then shook hands with Bartan Drumme.

“This is truly an unexpected pleasure,” Cassyll Maraquine said, a smile rejuvenating his pale triangular face, “it is a great shame about the commissioner, of course, but we must assume that the royal physicians—a plentiful breed in these times—will quickly put him to rights. How have you been, son?”

“I am well.” Toller looked at his father for a moment in that unique gratification which springs from an harmonious relationship with a parent, and then—as extraneous matters crowded into his mind—he shifted his gaze to include Bartan Drumme in what had to follow. The latter was the only surviving member of a fabled voyage to Farland, the local system’s outermost planet, and was acknowledged as Kolcorron’s leading expert on astronomical matters.

“Father, Bartan,” Toller said, “have you been observing the skies within the last ten or twenty days? Have you noticed anything unusual?”

The older men exchanged cautiously surprised glances. “Are you speaking of the blue planet?” Bartan said.

Toller frowned. “Blue planet? No, I’m talking about a barrier … a wall … a lake of ice… call it what you will… which has appeared at the midpoint. It is at least sixty miles across and growing wider by the hour. Has it not been observed from the ground?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary has been observed, but I’m not even sure that the Glo telescope has been in use since—” Bartan broke off and gave Toller a quizzical stare. “Toller… Toller, you can’t nave an accretion of ice at the midpoint—there simply isn’t the water. The air is too dry.”

“Ice! Or crystal of some kind. I saw it!” The fact that he was being disbelieved did not surprise or unduly disturb Toller, but it caused an uneasy stirring in the lower levels of his consciousness. There was something wrong with the pattern of the conversation. It was not going as it should have gone, but some factor—perhaps a deep-seated unwillingness to face reality—was for the moment paralyzing vital mental processes.

Bartan gave him a patient smile. “Perhaps there has been a major failure in one of the permanent stations, perhaps an explosion which has scattered power crystals over a wide area. They might be drifting and combining and forming large clouds of condensation, and we both know that condensation can give the appearance of being very substantial… like banks of snow or—”

“The Countess Vantara,” Toller interrupted with a numb smile, keeping his voice steady to hide the fear that had been unleashed in him as certain doors swung open. “She made the crossing only nine days ago—had she nothing unusual to report?”