Huddle. Part 3

Food was easy to find. The slushy ice was soft and easy to break through.

No-Sun would walk only slowly now. And she would not eat. Her memory of the monster that had snapped up One-Tusk was too strong. Night-Dawn even braved the water to bring her fish, but they were strange: ghostly-white creatures with flattened heads, sharp teeth. No-Sun pushed them away, saying she preferred to consume her own good fat. And so she grew steadily more wasted.

Until there came a day when, waking, she would not move at all. She stood at the center of a fat, stable ice-floe, a pillar of loose flesh, rolls of fur cascading down a frame leached of fat.

Night-Dawn stood before her, punched her lightly, cajoled her.

"Leave me here," she said. "It's my time anyhow."

"No. It isn't right."

She laughed, and fluid rattled on her lungs. "Right. Wrong. You're a dreamer.

You always were. It's my fault, probably."

She subsided, as if deflating, and fell back onto the ice.

He knelt and cradled her head in his lap. He stayed there all night, the cold of the ice seeping through the flesh of his knees.

In the morning, stiff with the cold, they took her to the edge of the ice floe and tipped her into the water, for the benefit of the creatures of this giant sea.

After more days of walking, the ice grew thin, the water beneath shallow.

Another day of this and they came to a slope of hard black rock, that pushed its way out of the ice and rose up before them.

The black rock was hard-edged and cold under Night-Dawn's feet, its rise unrelenting. As far as he could see to left and right, the ridge was solid, unbroken, with no convenient pa.s.ses for them to follow, the sky lidded over by cloud.

They grasped each other's hands and pressed up the slope.

The climb exhausted Night-Dawn immediately. And there was nothing to eat or drink, here on the high rocks, not so much as a sc.r.a.p of ice. Soon, even the air grew thin; he struggled to drag energy from its pale substance.

When they slept, they stood on hard black rock. Night-Dawn feared and hated the rock; it was an enemy, rooted deep in the Earth.

On the fourth day of this they entered the clouds, and he could not even see where his next step should be placed. With the thin, icy moisture in his lungs and spreading on his fur he felt trapped, as if under some infinite ice layer, far from any air hole. He struggled to breathe, and if he slept, he woke consumed by a thin panic. At such times he clung to Frazil and remembered who he was and where he had come from and why he had come so far. He was a human being, and he had a mission that he would fulfill.

Then, one morning, they broke through the last ragged clouds.

Though it was close to midday, the sky was as dark as he had ever seen it, a deep violet blue. The only clouds were thin sheets of ice crystals, high above.

And -- he saw, gasping with astonishment -- there were stars shining, even now, in the middle of the sunlit day.

The slope seemed to reach a crest, a short way ahead of him. They walked on. The air was thin, a whisper in his lungs, and he was suspended in silence; only the rasp of Frazil's shallow breath, the soft slap of their footsteps on the rock, broke up the stillness.

He reached the crest. The rock wall descended sharply from here, he saw, soon vanishing into layers of fat, fluffy clouds.

And, when he looked ahead, he saw a mountain.

Far ahead of them, dominating the horizon, it was a single peak that thrust out of scattered clouds, towering even over their elevated position here, its walls sheer and stark. Its flanks were girdled with ice, but the peak itself was bare black rock -- too high even for ice to gather, he surmised -- perhaps so high it thrust out of the very air itself.

It must be the greatest mountain in the world.

And beyond it there was a further line of mountains, he saw, like a line of broken teeth, marking the far horizon. When he looked to left and right, he could see how those mountains joined the crest he had climbed, in a giant unbroken ring around that great, central fist of rock.

It was a giant rock ripple, just as he had sketched in the ice. Perhaps this was the center, the very heart of the great systems of mountain rings and circular seas he had penetrated.

An ocean lapped around the base of the mountain. He could see that glaciers flowed down its heroic base, rivers of ice dwarfed by the mountain's immensity.

There was ice in the ocean too -- pack ice, and icebergs like great eroded islands, white, carved. Some manner of creatures were visible on the bergs, black and gray dots against the pristine white of the ice, too distant for him to make out. But this sea was mostly melted, a band of blue-black.

The slope of black rock continued below him-- far, far onward, until it all but disappeared into the misty air at the base of this bowl of land. But he could see that it reached a beach of some sort, of shattered, eroded rock sprinkled with snow, against which waves sluggishly lapped.

There was a belt of land around the sea, cradled by the ring mountains, fringed by the sea. And it was covered by life, great furry sheets of it. From this height it looked like an encrustation of algae. But he knew there must be living things there much greater in scale than any he had seen before.

"...It is a bowl," Frazil breathed.

"What?"

"Look down there. This is a great bowl, of clouds and water and light, on whose lip we stand. We will be safe down there, away from the rock and ice."

He saw she was right. This was indeed a bowl -- presumably the great scar left where one or other of the Moons had tom itself loose of the Earth, just as the stories said. And these rings of mountains were ripples in the rock, frozen as if ice.

He forgot his hunger, his thirst, even the lack of air here; eagerly they began to hurry down the slope.

The air rapidly thickened.

But his breathing did not become any easier, for it grew warm, warmer than he had ever known it. Steam began to rise from his thick, heavy fur. He opened his mouth and raised his nostril flaps wide, sucking in the air. It was as if the heat of this giant sheltering bowl was now, at the last, driving them back.

But they did not give up their relentless descent, and he gathered the last of his strength.

The air beneath them cleared further.

Overwhelmed, Night-Dawn stopped.

The prolific land around the central sea was divided into neat shapes, he saw now, and here and there smoke rose. It was a made landscape. The work of people.

Humans were sheltered here. It was a final irony, that people should find shelter at the bottom of the great pit dug out of the Earth by the world-wrecking Collision.

...And there was a color to that deep, cupped world, emerging now from the mist.

Something he had never seen before; and yet the word for it dropped into place, just as had his first words after birth.

"Green," Frazil said.

"Green. Yes..."

He was stunned by the brilliance of the color against the black rock, the dull blue-gray of the sea. But even as he looked into the pit of warmth and air, he felt a deep sadness. For he already knew he could never reach that deep shelter, peer up at the giant green living things; this body which shielded him from cold would allow heat to kill him.

Somebody spoke.

He cried out, spun around. Frazil was standing stock still, staring up.

There was a creature standing here. Like a tall, very skinny human.

It was a human, he saw. A woman. Her face was small and neat, and there was barely a drop of fat on her, save around the hips, b.u.t.tocks and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her chest was small. She had a coat of some fine fur -- no, he realized with shock; she was wearing a false skin, that hugged her bare flesh tightly. She was carrying green stuff, food perhaps, in a basket of false skin.

She was twice his height.

Her eyes were undoubtedly human, though, as human as his, and her gaze was locked on his face. And in her eyes, he read fear.

Fear, and disgust.

He stepped forward. "We have come to help you," he said.

"Yes," said Frazil.

"We have come far--"

The tall woman spoke again, but he could not understand her. Even her voice was strange -- thin, emanating from that shallow chest. She spoke again, and pointed, down toward the surface of the sea, far below.

Now he looked more closely he could see movement on the beach. Small dots, moving around. People, perhaps, like this girl. Some of them were small.

Children, running free. Many children.

The woman turned, and started climbing away from them, down the slope toward her world, carrying whatever she had gathered from these high banks. She was shaking a fist at them now. She even bent to pick up a sharp stone and threw it toward Frazil; it fell short, clattering harmlessly.

"I don't understand," Frazil said.

Night-Dawn thought of the loathing he had seen in the strange woman's eyes. He saw himself through her eyes: squat, fat, waddling, as if deformed.

He felt shame. "We are not welcome here," he said.

"We must bring the others here," Frazil was saying.

"And what then? Beg to be allowed to stay, to enter the warmth? No. We will go home."

"Home? To a place where people live a handful of winters, and must sc.r.a.pe food from ice with their teeth? How can that compare to this?"

He took her hands. "But this is not for us. We are monsters to these people. As they are to us. And we cannot live here."

She stared into the pit of light and green. "But in time, our children might learn to live there, Just as we learned to live on the ice."

The longing in her voice was painful. He thought of the generations who had lived out their short, bleak lives on the ice. He thought of his mother, who had sought to protect him to the end; poor One-Tusk, who had died without seeing the people of the mountains; dear, loyal Frazil, who had walked to the edge of the world at his side.

"Listen to me. Let these people have their hole in the ground. We have a world.

We can live anywhere. We must go back and tell our people so."

She sniffed. "Dear Night-Dawn. Always dreaming. But first we must eat, for winter is coming."

"Yes. First we eat."

They inspected the rock that surrounded them. There was green here, he saw now, thin traces of it that clung to the surface of the rock. In some places it grew away from the rock face, brave little b.a.l.l.s of it no bigger than his fist, and here and there fine fur-like sproutings.

They bent, reaching together for the green shoots.

The shadows lengthened. The sun was descending toward the circular sea, and one of Earth's two Moons was rising.