Winter Song (2 page)

    Karl ripped off the mask, sighing with relief. He nodded, thin-lipped, and patted the wall. "Thanks… uh, you know–"

    "No time," Ship said. "Go now."

    The door irised slowly, revealing a wall of quivering blue jelly, three metres high and stuffed full of nanos. He paused, steeled himself, then pushed into the gel, which gave against him. He felt the stupid-smart goo hook into his skin and poke squidgy fingers into his nostrils, ears and even up his anus and urethra. It had little more intellect than an amoeba but was hardwired to climb into him and form a second skin, and did so relentlessly. He'd done this a hundred times, but every time it felt deeply unpleasant.

    "Why would Terraformers pick a planet with such an unorthodox primary?" Karl wasn't really that interested, but it was better than thinking about the gel, or worse, the boiling mass of superheated plasma hurtling toward them at a quarter of a million kilometres a second. He fought down a rising tide of panic as the gel pushed deeper. It took a mighty effort of will to open his mouth and let it flow down into his lungs. It formed an impenetrable skin over the vitreous liquid of his eyes: when it transluced so he could see the exit button, he knew that the covering was complete, and it had formed a tasteless, odourless emulsion between his frail flesh and the vacuum of space.

    "With high maintenance, it would have been a viable project," Ship said. "What they didn't foresee was the coming war. They never do. That changed everything."

    Karl felt, rather than heard, the deep groan in the bowels of the ship as the containment fields around the neutronium weakened, and began to tear Ship apart.

    "Got to go now!" he shouted to Ship by way of farewell.

    "I have been squeezing all the lifegel into Bay Eight," Ship said.

    Before he could ask why, because the extra gel would do him no good, the closet-sized airlock opened onto space. The depressurising atmosphere fired him clear, and he understood then. The extra gel was propellant, and as he tumbled head over heels, he blessed his clever, dependable Ship.

Counting showed that he was rotating head over heels every six seconds. The lifegel opaqued to protect his eyes – leaving him with only turquoise-blue to stare at – every time he faced the eye-meltingly fierce glare of the Mizar quartet. As he turned to face shadow, it cleared again.

    The lifegel formed a perfect seal around him, but he couldn't stop his chest from rising and falling; the carbon dioxide he breathed out was absorbed by the goo and gradually converted back into an oxygen and nitrogen mix a few microns thick, between him and the membrane.

    He hadn't counted how long he had been accelerating when Ship said, "Karl, there's something else that I should tell you. The colonised planet's ozone layer appears–" and broke off.

    Despite the fact that Karl was facing away from the suns, the membrane opaqued. Then – even though it was supposed to absorb all kinetic energy – he felt a punch in his back that would have been a fragment of Ship, blown to pieces.

    Although it had only been a semi-organic machine, Ship had been closer to him at times than any lover, and he wept for his loss.

    Later, after he had exhausted his tears, he slept. It was a fitful doze, more to process everything that had happened since his rude awakening than from exhaustion.

    When he awoke, he held himself in as long as possible until there was no evading the unpleasant sensation of voiding himself into the membrane and allowing it to absorb the deposit. If it had not been for his circumstances, hanging in space would have been enjoyable. He even wondered why no one had used the lifegel at home to sight-see Avalon's neighbour worlds.

    Astronomers on Ancient Earth had thought Mizar was one star. When they made the first telescopes, they realised that "it" was a pair. Still later, they finally understood that each pair – Mizar A and B – was in turn a pair.

    Using the info that Ship had fired into him he went through the seven worlds orbiting the smaller pair that was Mizar B and the centuries-old ruin of the semimythical Mizar B3, glimpsed only briefly before it flared and died again.

    Farthest away from the stars that the settlers had named Alfasol, Betasol, Gamasol and Deltasol was tiny Asgard, a ball of ice and methane around a rocky core. Next was Valhalla, a blue hydrogen, helium and methane giant like Neptune. Moving inward past green Midgard – Mizar B's Uranus – Vanaheim was the largest world, though only slightly bigger than many-mooned Asagarth, next to it and closest to the asteroid belt dubbed Bifrost. While sunward little Ragnarok was scorched to sterility. What this system lacked, Karl realised, was an equivalent to Earth and Venus; it would have made the Terraformers' choices much easier.

    And ahead of him was the other world, his destination. Isheimur, the settlers had named it –
ice world.

    The colony would have faded with the curtain-like falling of the Long Night, when the two types of humans, the Terraformers who wanted to shape worlds to fit humans, clashed with those Pantropists who rather wished to change humanity, to fit the worlds they settled. It had been a war that raged for decades, across only a few disputed systems to start with, but spreading like a virus.

    Two centuries on, he had no idea whether there were survivors here or he was falling toward a dead world. The thought of re-entry made his mouth go dry, but at least the interminable waiting would be over – if he didn't miss altogether and spin onward until the lifegel ate him alive.

Days, weeks, perhaps months passed. He had no way of telling one day from the next. He could have switched his companion on, but the semi-idiot objects reminded him too much of Ship, and he needed to save the power for more important things, like conserving the lifegel.

    Isheimur crept closer until it filled his whole sky and he saw patches of blue and grey toward the equator. Sometimes it even eclipsed Mizar B – or Gamasol and Deltasol, as he should now call them, he decided.

    He'd never heard of anyone trying what he was about to do, and he was sure that Ship would have told him if there was a precedent. No, this was the first attempt to confirm something that existed only as theory.

    He was desperate to test the theory, for he still hadn't got used to the gel taking care of his bodily functions; as well as the waste, it fed him through intravenous drips of nutrient-rich saline. Worse, he felt at times as if he was starting to lose his mind.

    If he had switched it on, his sub-moronic companion would have fed basic data directly into his cortex. But it would have been nothing compared to what sounded like Ship haunting him; he awoke from fragmented dreams with whispers still pulsing in his ears. Sometimes he woke crying. It seemed wrong that he should miss an artificial construct more than his own partners, but he'd spent more time with Ship than with them.

    He wondered what Karla was doing, where she was, who she was with. More mercurial than he, though they were supposedly the same, would she and the others wait for him, or would they decant a replacement?

    At last, he felt the drag of atmosphere. He swung his feet around so that he seemed to be standing on the still near-vacuum, but what air there was began to glow as he cut through it. He opened his arms to create drag, spreading himself as wide as he could. The gel rushed to insulate his feet and under his arms, but even so, some of the heat began to seep through.

    He doubted that anyone had ever tried to dive feetfirst into atmosphere, to fall all the way to the ground, and actually survived. Even with the lifegel, it felt as though giant hands squeezed him, and someone was applying a blow-torch to the soles of his feet.

    The roaring grew louder, louder, louder, louder – until it filled his whole world. It drilled into his ears and the hands around him squeezed ever harder and each breath was an effort. When oblivion came it was a merciful release.

TWO

Bera wanted to scream her grief at the night, but that would rouse the farmyard dogs. That would in turn wake the sleepers. She already felt so raw that she might as well have been scoured by sandpaper, and a public lecture from Hilda was more than she could face, so she clamped her jaw shut until it ached.

    The farmyard was so cold that her breath threatened to freeze solid in the midnight air – not that Isheimur's midnight sky was like other worlds, she gathered. It would be another five weeks until the equinox, when the Mizar quartet would line up together on Isheimur's far side, with only the twin moons, Stor and Litid, to illuminate the true-dark for a few hours. Until then, though Gamasol and Deltasol had set within a few hours of one another, the further pair was still high in the sky.

    That she could see where to put her feet on the rocky slope up to the grave made the act of mourning her dead son easier, and at least Ragnar had allowed her to bury Palli here, rather than in open ground. The graveyard was in a pocket of such boulder-strewn land that it was good for nothing else, unlike the rest of the valley. Its rocky border at least protected the bodies from burrowing marauders. Snolfurs were another matter – only a precious bullet or arrow would deter one of them.

    She clambered past a tapped-out steam-vent which no longer gave its energy to the generator, the metrewide pipe to the water tank down the hill now disconnected. Putting the sprig of lavender on the unmarked cairn was a pathetic little token, but it was all she had. At the thought of Palli's little face turning blue, the tears started up again, half-blinding her, freezing on her face as they trickled down.

    She crouched, offering prayers, to Wotan, Yahweh – any of the old ones who might exist, just in case – to take care of Palli. Assuming that there was an afterlife, rather than just mouldering in the dirt.

    Wiping her eyes, she glimpsed something streak above the top of the Reykleif hills in a flat curve, so it couldn't be a shapeshifter; nor did any troll ever move that fast. It was fiery bright, so it was most likely a meteor, she decided.

    Standing again, she winced. Moving sent slivers of pain shooting through her cramped-up feet, numb even through the fur-lined house-shoes. Taking outside boots would have meant stumbling around in the bootroom, perhaps falling over one of the sleeping farmhands. She didn't want that. Better her feet froze than to admit to the other women that she still grieved for her beloved bastard.

    If her body didn't give her away: ten days after burying him, her breasts were still swollen and sore, her blouses sodden even through the wadding that she'd shoved into her bra. The others must have noticed, but if they had, for once – in a rare show of restraint – they had said nothing.

    Bera turned back, looking down the slope to face Skorradalur. Farmhouses crouching into the hillside formed three sides of a square round a courtyard, with the lake Skorravatn beyond the barn the fourth side. On the far side of the lake, antique wind-turbines hunched in the lee of the valley slope, their blades turning slowly in the incessant wind, the open grassland between them peppered with sheep, grazing on the last of the late-summer long grass.

    She descended the stony, treacherous slope to Ragnarholt, the biggest farmhouse, passing the watertank which took the excess steam from the newer geo-thermal vent; what wasn't needed to heat the house was allowed to condense inside its bulk to provide fresh water, so that the settlers didn't need to venture down to Skorravatn in winter and risk ambush from lurking creatures. It wasn't the halcyon days of when the farm had fusion power, but it was better than nothing.

    Even in the thickening twilight she had to be careful not to turn an ankle on the stony ground. But if its aid in finding her way was a blessing, when the deep boom echoed from the west, waking the farm-dogs into a barrage of barking, it was a curse. Any onlooker could see her picking her way back. She speeded up, and twice nearly fell in hidden dips in the grass. Looking up, the shadowy bulk of Thorir perched in the watch-tower atop the farmhouse hadn't moved. Hopefully, he was asleep. Thorir was good at that, even though, if he were caught, it would mean a flogging.

    The breeze strengthened, the wind-turbines' blades speeding up.

    Brynja caught Bera's scent and yapped.

    "Hush!" Bera hissed.

    But instead the puppy redoubled her efforts to slip the leash, where she was tied to the courtyard water tap. Droplets from the tap had frozen so that Brynja's feet slipped and skidded on them.

    Reluctantly, Bera fondled the little dog's ears. She was as white and fluffy as the rest of the litter, but they'd all found homes. No one wanted the little runt, though, so Ragnar had banished her to the courtyard, saying, "We can't afford to throw away what resources we have on animals that aren't viable, however cute they look now." If Brynja survived on the scraps that she could scavenge, she would live, but she was already skin and bone.

    Desperately, shivering, Brynja tried to climb inside Bera's coat and nuzzled her blouse.

    Still thinking of Palli, and of Ragnar's ruthlessness, Bera undid the leash, her jaw clamped. Freed, the puppy scrambled inside her coat in a flurry of paws. Brynja nuzzled and nuzzled at her blouse, until Bera sighed. She reached in and undid her bra.

    Teeth like needles clamped onto her nipple. The pain made Bera draw her lips back from her teeth in a silent scream, but in a perverse way she welcomed it. However bad it was, it was real, and for a few too-short moments it obliterated memories of a tiny face turning blue and silent.

    Finally, the needles grew too fierce, and she prised her bloodied breast away from the seeking mouth. Rocking her furry cargo, humming an almost soundless lullaby, she crept across the farmyard to the back door.

    Looking up again, she saw a faint glow to the northwest between the hills.