He bowed his head. “I thank you for your time.”
…
The red light was everywhere, oozing pervasively throughout the Ice Citadel to contaminate every room, passageway, and cranny. Ozzie detested it. The Silfen builders of old had done their job well; the big optical ducts and the light battery, whatever that was, delivered rosy sunlight throughout the frozen planet’s entire twenty-one-hour day. There was only one place that offered true sanctuary, the outside at night. But that was when it got seriously cold.
Inside, most of the private sleeping rooms had thick rugs rigged up over the radiant crystal to act as curtains. For those species that did sleep, or at least rest up at night, they were a godsend. Recently, Ozzie and Orion had taken to lighting a kerosene lamp in their room for a couple of hours before they went to bed. Their original supply of kerosene had quickly been exhausted, but one of the icewhale oils was a reasonable substitute. The yellow light also attracted quite a few fellow humans, who would come in and spend some time, either relaxing or bitching about their day. Ozzie’s room in the evening began to resemble a small bar, admittedly one without any alcohol. Inevitably, given that people had arrived at the Ice Citadel from many planets and over many centuries, the conversation ranged across a lot of different perspectives and opinions.
The gatherings also helped Ozzie gain a good understanding of the Ice Citadel and their general situation. One thing was perfectly clear, they shouldn’t try for another path until the Silfen came to hunt.
“That’s when you’ve got the best opportunity to get clear,” Sara said one day a couple of weeks after they’d arrived. She’d become a regular in Ozzie’s little evening club. Most humans at the Ice Citadel tended to look to her for guidance, a position she’d earned by the sheer quantity of time stacked up in her favor. It was a role she was content to see slide over onto Ozzie, who was equally keen to resist.
“Why?” Orion asked. “You don’t need them to get here.”
“Because it increases the odds,” she said tolerantly. “If you can follow them or, even better, stay with them, you’ll be on the path they take to get out. It’s definitely there, then. For the rest of the time, you’re just striking out into the unknown, hoping you’ll find a path that’s open. From what we know, there don’t seem to be many. And on this planet, that spells trouble. You have to carry a whole load of supplies and be quick as well.”
Ozzie had soon worked out it was a bad equation. You could use a sled to reach the forest of crystal trees surrounding the Ice Citadel crater easily enough, but then the sled would have a lot of trouble traveling through the forest itself. If you went forward on foot you needed a tent that could protect you from the deadly nighttime temperature. The air-insulated one he’d brought could conceivably do that, but then he had to carry enough food as well. The more weight you had, the slower you’d be. And so on. An ideal solution would be a pack animal, but those that could survive in these conditions, like the lontrus, were slow-moving. Which meant adding more food to the weight they carried. Sara was right, their best option was a fast dash behind the Silfen.
They had to be patient.
The usual early-morning sounds woke Ozzie, pans and bowls and platters clattering about as the breakfast shift began their preparations out in the main chamber. Human voices combined with alien hoots and whistles accompanied them, echoing down the short passageway to Ozzie’s set of rooms. He lay there on the cot for a while with his eyes shut, his mind ticking off the sequence. Low rushing sound of the bellows and oil burners. Water coming to the boil and rattling the big kettles. Knives being sharpened on the grinder. Familiar and tiresome.
This was the seventeenth week now. Or at least he thought it was. He was having strange dreams, events and Commonwealth worlds rushing past him like some fast-motion drama. There were stories from his fellow travelers about time being not-quite-right as you walked along the paths, of them missing or gaining weeks, months, years while they traveled through the Silfen worlds. The notion kept feeding his feeling of impatience.
Orion stirred, groaned—as he always did—and sat up in his sleeping bag.
“Morning.” Ozzie opened his eyes. The rug was still pulled over the crystal tract set in the ceiling, but enough light spilled around the sides, and through the curtained-off doorway, that he could see the room’s outlines without having to use his retinal inserts on infrared.
Orion grunted a response, and unzipped his sleeping bag. Ozzie started to get dressed as the boy went into the bathroom. When they arrived, he’d thought the Ice Citadel to be like a hothouse inside. After a while he knew that was just a reaction from being so cold when Sara brought them in. Despite the hot springs and all the body heat soaking through the Ice Citadel, it remained several degrees below genuinely comfortable. He fastened one of his thick checked shirts over his T-shirt, buttoned up his leather trousers, and pulled on a second pair of socks. Only then did he stand up and tug the rug off the overhead tract. Orion let out a sullen moan of complaint at the burst of red light. The boy was having a bad time of it in the Ice Citadel. The way it confined them physically, the monotony of the routine, the bland diet—it all chafed against his natural teenage boisterousness. Although the worst part was the lack of anyone else remotely near his own age.
“There aren’t any girls here,” the boy had moaned on the second day. “I couldn’t see any, so I checked with Sara. She says there were some twenty-somethings here a couple of years back, but they followed the Silfen out.”
“Yeah? Well, you’re not missing anything,” Ozzie had told him. He was slightly put out that the friendliness he’d shown toward Sara hadn’t been reciprocated.
“How can you say that! You’ve had hundreds of wives.”
“True,” Ozzie said modestly.
“I’ve never had any girl,” Orion said miserably.
“Not even back at Lyddington?”
“There were a few I hung out with. I liked one. Irina. We kissed and stuff, but…”
“You left and came walking down the paths with me.”
“Actually, she went off with Leonard. He’s slept with half the girls in town.”
“Oh. Right. Well… women, huh, who understands them?”
“You must, Ozzie.” Orion had produced one of those desperate mournful looks that always made Ozzie uneasy. “How do I talk to girls? I never know what to say. Tell me, please.”
“Simple really. It doesn’t matter what you say, you’ve just got to have confidence in yourself.”
“Yes?”
“Yeah.” Ozzie was worried the boy was going to start taking notes. “When you’re at a party, find a chick you can dig, break the ice, then let them do half the work. It’s supposed to be an equal relationship, right?”
“I suppose.”
“So let them do their fair share of the work. And if there’s nothing there, no spark—then no worries, man, just move on to the next babe. Remember, they had no spark either, they’re missing out on a great dude: you. Their loss.”
Orion considered that for a long moment. “I get it. You’re right.”
“Hey, it’s what I’m here for.”
“So what do I say?”
“Huh?”
“To break the ice? What’s a good opening line?”
“Oh.” Ozzie thought back to the few horrendous memories he’d kept from his high school days. “Well, er, just asking them to dance is always a great classic. Course, you have to be able to dance, chicks really dig that in a guy.”
“Can you teach me how to dance, Ozzie?”
“Ah, been a while there, man; best ask someone like Sara for some shapely footwork, okay?”
“Right. So, an opening line?”
“Er. Right. Yeah. Sure. Um. Hey! Okay, I remember this one from a party in the Hamptons way back when. Go up to a girl, and look at her collar, then when she asks what you’re doing you say: I was checking the label, and I was right, you are Made in Heaven.”
Orion was still for a second, then burst out laughing. “That is so lame, Ozzie.”
Which wasn’t quite the respectful response Ozzie had expected. Damn kids today. “It worked for me.”
“What was her name?” Orion asked quickly.
“I forget, man, it was a century ago.”
“Yeah, right. I think I’ll ask Sara, she’s probably better at this kind of thing.”
“Hey, I know how to chat up babes, okay. You are talking to the Commonwealth’s number one expert on this subject.”
Orion shook his head and walked off into the pool cave, chuckling. “Made in heaven!”
Ozzie rolled up his sleeping bag. Along with Orion’s, it went straight into the carbon wire security mesh that contained their packs. The mesh, looking like a black spiderweb, had wrapped itself around all the bags and bundles. A mechanical padlock fastened the mesh’s throat cable; he’d managed to loop it around a jag of rock on the wall, making sure no one could make off with the whole lot. After centuries spent moving around the Commonwealth, Ozzie knew just how much truth there was in the old saying that every conservative is another liberal who got mugged. He didn’t trust his fellow travelers an inch, especially those good causes less fortunate than himself. Right now, that was just about everyone in the Ice Citadel. The packaged food, first aid kits, and modern lightweight equipment in those packs were their best chance of making it off this planet.
For the first week or so, every time they’d come back to their rooms, there were new scuffs and scratches on the rock where someone had tried to work the security mesh loose or smash the padlock.
They took their plates and cutlery out to the main chamber and joined the short queue for breakfast. The food was the same as every day, the small pile of boiled and mashed crystal tree fruit looking like mangled beetroot, along with a couple of fried icewhale rashers that were alarmingly gray and fatty. There was also a cupful of the local tea, made from dried shredded fronds of lichenweed.
When they finished the meal they went back to their rooms to dress in thick icewhale fur jackets and over trousers. Orion went up to the stables, where he would spend several hours mucking out the animals, and bringing in new bales of rifungi for them to eat. Only the tetrajacks, which looked like blue horse-sized reindeer, received a different diet. They got to eat the swill left over from the kitchens below.
Ozzie walked up to the ground-level workshop. The big circular room had probably been intended as another stable—it had a rotating door large enough for an elephant to pass through comfortably—but the Ice Citadel’s new ragtag inhabitants were using it to garage the big covered sleds that were pulled by the stupid hulking ybnan. It was also the carpentry shop, not for wood, but icewhale bone, which had remarkably similar properties. Leather was also cured there; fat was rendered down
