Cold as Ice (12 page)

The baleens were putting on a show—but for whom? Jon had watched them and waved to them a hundred times from the
Spindrift
, but there was no way they could know that one of their friends from the submersible was on the seawall. They were doing it for nobody. For sheer joy.

He found himself grinning down at the cavorting black bodies and the waving flukes. Maybe he should be feeling lucky, not peeved. Nell Cotter had left Arenas for Stanley three days earlier, but she had told him that he could stay at the studios for as long as he liked. Suppose that she had
not
done that? His GOMS dormitory permit had been good for one night and one day's meals. As far as anyone at the Admin Center knew, he was sleeping out on the sidewalks and starving to death among the flowers. It was no thanks to them that he was living in a luxury unknown on the floating bases.

The only real thing to be annoyed at was the waste of time. He had never thought to bring work to Arenas, never dreamed that he would have the time for it. Meanwhile, his office desk was piled with unread papers and unreduced smoker observations from earlier descents.

When he turned to go home it was quite dark. Jon allowed the rising southern constellations to guide him back east until the moon rose. It was close to the half, and bright enough for him to pick out the stark-black saber-cut of the Armageddon defense line across its mottled northern face.

The night was warm, and Jon had no reason to hurry. It was close to midnight when he reached the top of the hill and the first of the buildings. Now the moon had to compete with the gaudy lights of Arenas. The party was far from over. Jon was a mile outside the town and a thousand feet above it, but already he could hear the marching bands.

The main thoroughfare of Arenas descended in a huge double curve, turning north as though heading for the airport, then twisting all the way back to the south and finally turning again to run east to the great piers and jetties that flanked the Strait of Magellan. The slope of the road had been carefully chosen by its construction engineers. Never more than a degree or so, it presented no problem for even the most delicate and ungainly of the mobile floats.

Jon did not follow the broad, curving avenue, with its gleaming spheres of bioluminescence. Instead, he descended one of the darker and steeper crossing streets. These streets headed straight for the shore and were restricted to pedestrian traffic.

One of the guards on duty at the GOMS Admin Center had told him that this year's festival would be the biggest ever, with more than two hundred floats. When Jon reached the main street, he could easily believe it. There were moving behemoths visible in both directions as far as the eye could see.

The huge-wheeled figure of a sleeping giant came rumbling by at no more than two miles an hour. "Earth Mother!" droned a cavernous, amplified voice. "Bow down to the Great Earth Mother. Number one-seventy-eight." Pink smoke rose from the nostrils, white smoke jetted from the gigantic jutting nipples. Half a dozen near-naked women danced on the bare belly in the glowing red light issuing from the deep navel. They were carrying a gigantic phallus, striped red and white like a barber's pole. The men and women on both sides of the road cheered and made obscene gestures. As the giant passed them along the avenue, they entered their scores for Entry 178 on their electronic cards and waited for the next float to arrive.

Entry 179 did not use wheels. It was a re-creation of an apatosaurus, forty feet high and eighty feet long. The beast padded along smoothly on four vast articulated legs, beautifully matched in their movements. Although a dozen men and women rode on the broad grey back, the model's control was too precise to be anything but a single person operating from within its interior. The head on its immense neck swung out and swooped over the crowd, passing no more than three or four feet above Jon. He could see glittering red-rimmed eyes dipping down at him, and a quiet voice from the three-foot maw said, "Number one-seventy-nine. Remember one-seventy-nine." The number was painted on the great body in letters eight feet high.

Then there was a long wait, enough for the float that finally appeared to be greeted with hoots and jeers. It had obviously been having problems. The internal mechanism was squeaking, and the head-high outer lip had a crude and amateurish look, a contrast to the polished perfection of previous entries. The driver was visible in an open and unfinished box in the center, a skinny, dark-haired man crouched worried over the controls. The float bore the number "65" on its side, and it should have passed this point in the route hours ago. Now it was moving fast, trying to catch up. The effort was hopeless, because there was no way that the entries ahead would offer passing room.

The float was a miniature solar system installed on a carousel. Ten six-foot open baskets rotated on long metal arms, and inside each basket sat the living emblem of a planet. Mercury came past the audience first: a man—or was it a woman?—dressed in the garb of an ancient messenger. The face was hidden by a glittering visor, and nothing could be seen but a silver apron, two bare brown legs, and waving arms clothed in silver mesh. Venus was certainly a woman, never a doubt about that. She was naked, painted all over in gold but shrouded by long, cloudy-white tresses. Earth was her sister, clad in filmy blue-white drapes.

Mars was a muscular, red-painted male, as bare as Venus but in his case, totally exposed. From their reaction, the crowd preferred him to the women. They were warming to Entry 65, with its shaky, homemade look. The basket for the Asteroid Belt received the biggest cheer so far. Inside it sat not one person, but a dozen riotous dwarfs, brawling, waving, mooning the crowd, blowing farts, and fighting to stand on each other's head for better visibility.

The basket for Jupiter was just swinging into sight when the whole structure made a sudden lurching right turn. The crowd booed as Mars came back into view, waving his arms wildly to keep his balance, followed by Earth, flat on her back in her basket. The driver had made a spur-of-the-moment decision to leave the main avenue and take the float down one of the narrower streets. The strategy was clear enough: The float would catch up with the procession on the southbound leg, closer to the strait and the final rallying point, and try to regain its original position in the parade.

And it was clear to Jon at least that the decision was a disastrous one. He had walked the narrow, dim-lit crossing street and he knew how steep it was. While the bystanders were still jeering and waving at the departing Sixty-five, he sprinted across the avenue in pursuit. The float was picking up speed fast, in spite of a screeching from its wheels as loud as any of the marching bands.

The driver had realized his mistake. The brakes were on, but they were not enough to stop the vehicle, not even to slow it. The long arms, designed to operate horizontally, came gyrating crazily above Jon's head as he approached the float's rear. The baskets were missing the buildings on each side of the street by only a couple of feet. The driver knew that he was in desperate trouble, but he was helpless. All he could manage to do was to hold the vehicle in an exact line down the center of the street as its speed increased.

Faster and faster. Control would hold for another twenty seconds at most. Jon was running alongside now, flat out. The street was rough-paved but he hardly noticed. His feet scarcely seemed to touch ground, his balance adjusted without effort to the uneven road. He stared ahead to the main avenue. He could see a dense pack of spectators there, and a shape like a gigantic green grasshopper moving just beyond them. If Number 65 held to its present path, the juggernaut it had become would roll over hundreds in the unsuspecting crowd, then plunge through the middle of the parade itself.

The smooth side of the float was head-high, too tall for Jon to scale as he ran. He waited until an unbalanced arm swung over him, then leaped and grabbed it one-handed. He caught a glimpse of the gilded Venus, breasts bare, her tresses torn away, crouched helpless in the bottom of her basket. And then he was swinging hand-over-hand inward along the metal arm, toward the center of the carousel.

The air was thick with black smoke, and his nostrils filled with an unpleasant smell of burning plastics. The overloaded brakes were on fire . . . and failing. As Jon reached the open control cockpit, the float shuddered and began to pick up speed.

It was no time for half measures or courtesies.

Jon thrust the skinny driver out of the way without a word. The man fell to the flat body of the carousel. Jon ignored him. He turned the wheel, angling the float to graze the wall of the building on the left. One of the metal arms crashed into it first, along with the basket and its contents—Uranus? A bearded figure in glittering thaumaturgic robes fell into the street. Then the left front wheel scraped along the wall, twisted, and broke off.

The float listed steeply. The steering wheel jerked and turned in Jon's hands. He held it against a half-ton torque, dragging it back to the right. At last the heavy mechanism responded. The crippled vehicle lurched back toward the right-hand wall. Another turning arm smashed into a building. A basket and its human contents—the Belt this time, with its dozen cursing dwarves—went spinning away and out of sight. The right wheel hit, harder and more directly. The impact bounced the float back toward the center of the narrow street.

With both front wheels gone, the vehicle skated forward until it reached a break in the pavement. The forward edge dug in with a scream of twisting metal, and the float canted to forty-five degrees. There was a moment when Jon thought that the whole machine was going to turn over, but it collapsed backward and hit the roadway in a jangle of broken parts.

It settled motionless. And caught fire.

Burning insulation added to the smoke of cindered brakes. Jon glanced around. The driver had rolled away over the side. The people in the remaining baskets were swarming out of them, dropping to the floor of the carousel and jumping down to the street.

Only one basket was still occupied. Mercury. The radial metal arm was bent low, and the basket hung over the densest smoke. Jon ran across to it. The floor of the carousel was hot beneath his feet.

He swung up into the open basket and bent over the unconscious Mercury. He pulled off the figure's visor and found himself looking at a young woman. She had no obvious injuries. He lowered her feet-first onto the carousel and heard her moan of pain. In spite of the silver mesh and the apron, she was going to have burns from contact with the hot metal. Jon could do nothing about that. Choking on foul black smoke, he followed her from the basket, dragged her to the edge of the float, tipped her over, and jumped free. He lifted her again and carried her twenty yards down the hill toward the avenue.

And there he paused. The world steadied, came into different focus, and speeded up to normal.

The crashing of the float against the walls and pavement had finally drawn attention from the main parade. Scores of people were hurrying up the hill. At his feet Mercury was beginning to sit up, and she put a hand down to her seared bare leg. She did not seem to be badly hurt.

What about the others in the baskets? He could not see uphill past the smoke of the burning carousel, but those who had escaped to the downhill side were up and moving about.

Jon walked across to a shaded wall and stood with his back to it. He breathed deep and rubbed his smoke-irritated eyes. In just a few minutes, the worst part—for him—would begin. He was no longer useful, because others with better medical training than he would be arriving; but he would have to explain what he had done—over and over, to the parade organizers and the float operators and the Arenas police. And then to the press . . . and to the passersby . . . and to who knew how many others?

How could he explain to them that he
did not know
what he had done? As always in an emergency, another part of him seemed to take over his actions. They would ask him how he was feeling, how it had been for him when he was chasing the float. How could they understand that the incident already seemed as though it had happened to someone else? He
remembered
everything, but it was seen through the wrong end of the telescope. Every detail was clear, yet distant.

He turned to look down the hill. Maybe it didn't have to be like that. The people hurrying up toward him had their attention on the burning float and its injured crew. They took no notice of the soberly dressed individual quietly leaning against a shadowed wall.

Jon waited for a minute longer, until a score of people had passed him; then he walked quietly down the street to the main thoroughfare. The floats were still passing there, gaudy and enormous. People were cheering as though nothing had happened on the hill behind.

He merged into the crowd and felt vast relief.

* * *

It was two o'clock before Jon arrived at the studio building, exhausted but hungrier than he had been in months.

That was no problem. No worries
here
about being late for dinner. He washed the smoke and grime from his face, inspected the seared palms of his hands, and went into the deserted canteen. He helped himself to sushi, plums, and bean curd, and took them to a table.

He had to admit it. After years on the floating bases, the life-style of Arenas was a shock. He had thought at first that it was unique to the studios, but now he suspected that it was true everywhere: no set hours for meals, 'round-the-clock noise, and dress odd enough that
everyone
seemed to be in theatrical costume.

Now that he thought about it, he realized that no one in Arenas had ever asked for his identification. And that was the least of it. Tonight he had limped home with torn and smoke-blackened clothing, seared black face and hands, and scorched hair, past hundreds of people. Every moment he had expected to be stopped and questioned. And no one had taken the slightest bit of notice. In this world, his disheveled appearance was still drab enough to excite no attention.