the Silfen. Just before they started, Ozzie held up the little friendship pendant. Its sparkle wasn’t as strong as yesterday, but tiny slivers of blue light still crawled around inside it. He took that as an encouraging sign, and pushed off.
A wind picked up, drifting through the forest all morning. It carried little flecks of snow with it, forcing Ozzie to wipe his goggles free every few minutes. Whenever he paused for his drink, he had to go and brush solid flakes off the sledge windscreen. He wasn’t sure if it was actually snowing up there above the treetops, or if this was simply residual swirls that the wind was rearranging. It had always puzzled him why the ground here wasn’t covered by several feet of snow and ice. Then Sara had told him that once or twice a year a gale would blow for days, scouring away the loose snow and tiny ice pellets. Somehow that didn’t surprise or even bother him, this whole planet was weird; privately he considered that it might be as artificial as Silvergalde.
He deliberately set a slower pace that morning. Yesterday had been a determined effort to keep up with the Silfen, grasping the faint chance that they might lead him away off the planet before nightfall. There was still an urgency to their trek, but a constant and realistic pace was more important now than pure speed. His new concern was how the little zephyrs were steadily eradicating the compacted footprints. Although, as if in compensation, it did seem like the trees had parted slightly to form a rudimentary path through the forest.
Lunch was soup again, snatched in the paltry lee of one of the clustered sphere trees; with its snow coat disguise it could have passed for a swollen Christmas pine. As before, even a short stop hauled their body temperature down, for which the hot soup seemed unable to compensate. Ozzie hated the sensation of cold sinking into his toes, he couldn’t stop worrying about frostbite. When they reemerged from behind the tree, the falling snow was thicker, eliminating almost all trace of the tracks they’d been following. To make matters worse, it was starting to adhere against the fur of their coats. The sledge was like a small lumpy mound of snow on runners.
Ozzie could feel the tiny particles working their way around the rim of his hood. Slender lines of ice were burning against the skin of his cheeks. After a few minutes, the trees began to thin out. While it made skiing slightly easier, it reduced their protection from the wind and ice flakes. It wasn’t long after that when the Silfen tracks vanished completely. He slowed to a halt, then had to push off again quickly as Tochee’s sledge nearly slid into him.
This was what he’d feared happening right from the start, this world’s weather closing in on them, and losing the path. He fumbled with his mittens, pulling out the friendship pendant. A small bluish glimmer still lurked below the surface. Ozzie turned a complete circle. He thought—possibly—it was a fraction brighter at one point. It was a pretty tenuous assumption to gamble three lives on, but he had nothing else.
He went around to the rear of the sledge and found a length of slim rope. With one end tied to his waist and the other to the front of the sledge, he set off again. The wind at least seemed to have died down somewhat. But if anything the snowfall was thicker. He was stopping constantly to check the pendant, while the whole time a treacherous thought in his mind kept asking why bother? At least when they arrived on this world he had the comforting ignorance of believing that nothing bad could happen to any traveler on the Silfen paths. Now he knew his life was on the line, and he was trusting it to a piece of alien jewelry. How tenuous was that?
His timer told him they’d been out in the open for forty minutes, though it felt like most of the afternoon, when he came to the edge of another forest. As soon as they were inside and under the protective boughs, the swirling ice flakes abated considerably. Ozzie kept the rope tied to the sledge though.
“We’ll make camp in a couple of hours,” he told his companions. He’d really hoped they could have kept going for longer, but once again this world had thwarted them. He was exhausted by two days of battling his way across hostile terrain, and he knew Orion was never going to be able to take much more of this. As for Tochee… well, who knew? But tonight, they would have a long rest, which would at least enable them to keep going for another full day. Beyond that, there was nothing to think about.
He kept going, moving heavy arms and aching legs in slow rhythm. His feet were numb now, the cold cutting off all feeling below his ankles, which allowed his imagination to summon up the worst-case images of what he’d see when he took his boots off that evening. At least the forest was on a gentle downward slope; there were mounds and ridges, of course, but the overall progress was helpful. He wasn’t sure if he could manage another big uphill slog. The snow was deeper, too, covering all the usual stones and snags. Several times he shook it off his fur coat where it was clinging.
“Ozzie!”
He turned at the shout, seeing Orion waving frantically. Now what? Despite nerves that were getting badly stretched, he signaled Tochee to stop, and skied around to the boy.
Orion pulled his goggles off. “It’s wet,” he exclaimed.
Instead of shouting at the boy to put the goggles back on, he leaned in closer to see what had happened.
“The snow,” Orion said. “It’s melting. It’s warm enough to melt.”
Sure enough, the ice on the goggles seemed to be mushy, sleet rather than ice. Ozzie snatched his own goggles off, and looked straight up. A million dark specks were falling out of the uniform coral-pink sky. When they landed on his exposed skin, they didn’t sting and burn as they had before; they were wintry, yes, but they quickly turned to slush and dribbled over his skin.
Ozzie propelled himself over to the closest tree. He raised a pole, and whacked it hard against the trunk. The snow loosened, falling away. He hit it again and again until the bark was exposed. Real, biological bark. It was a proper wooden tree. He laughed with more than a touch of hysteria. It was a stupid irony that he’d gotten so cold he couldn’t actually tell when the environment warmed up to a mere ten degrees below freezing.
Orion had churned his way over. He looked at the exposed patch of crinkled bark with trepidation.
“We did it!” Ozzie shouted, and flung his arms around the boy. “We fucking did it! We are gone from that bastard world. Out, out, out. I’m free again.”
“Are we? Have we really escaped?”
“Oh, goddamn yes! You bet your sweet ass we have. You and me, kid, we did it. Oh, hey, and Tochee, of course. Come on, let’s go tell it the good news.”
“But Ozzie…” Orion glanced up. “The sky’s still red.”
“Ur, yeah.” He squinted up at it, not wanting to damage the image, although it was a very bright pink, especially for this time of day—that is, the time of day on his digital timer. If they were on a different world—“I dunno; there’s more than one red star in the galaxy.”
He tugged out his battered parchment as he slid over to the front of the sledge, and wrote: I think we made it. Can you keep going a little while longer?
AS LONG AS I LIVE.
When Ozzie held the friendship pendant up, the spark of light had almost vanished. “This way, I think,” he said, and pushed off once again, not that he was really worried about direction now. Physically, the conditions had hardly changed, but simply knowing they were clear of the dreadful Ice Citadel world allowed his body to tap some previously unknown energy reserve. Just like an icewhale, he told himself.
Of course, now he knew what to look for, the signs were obvious. The thick snow, different types of tree with bony branches outlined against the sky, the lighter sky itself. With every yard they moved forward things changed. It wasn’t long before he saw thin henna-colored wisps of grass sticking out above the snow. Then there were little rodent creatures scampering about around the trees. Branches shed little piles of snow to fall around them with constant wet thudding sounds as the thaw grew. They were heading down quite a steep slope now, losing height rapidly.
The end of the forest was abrupt. Ozzie shot past the last trees and onto a snowfield that was broken by boulders and widening patches of orange-tinted grass. They were halfway along some massive valley created by Alp-sized mountains. A lake of beautifully clear water stretched out below him, extending for twenty miles on either side. Its shores were also ringed with trees, whose dark branches were just starting to bud. The snowfield died out completely about half a mile ahead of them, with the grass sliced by hundreds of little seasonal streams as the melting edge slowly retreated upward. On either side, the tree line was almost constant, drawing a broad boundary between the lower grass slopes of the mountains and their rocky upper levels.
When he looked back at the forest he’d just come from, Ozzie was sure it would only take five minutes or so to ski through, yet they’d paused a good quarter of an hour ago. A brilliant sun was rising at one end of the valley, and he finally understood the pink sky. They had come out of a gloomy maroon nightfall and straight into a vibrant dawn.
Ozzie slowly pushed his hood back, and smiled into the strengthening light as it began to warm his skin.
EIGHTEEN
No Prime immotile had a name. Names were derived from a communications system completely different from their species’ direct nerve impulse linkages. They did of course have ways of identifying each other. Immotiles even in their group cluster form were above all individual, a factor that sprang out of their early history’s territorialism. Alliances between them were built and fractured with reliable regularity in their planet’s premechanization age, when even the closest partnerships were liable to be swiftly discarded if an advantage could be pursued with another. Disputes in those days were always over the size of territory and the available resources —mainly fresh water and farmland. Little changed over the millennia.
After mechanization flourished, the nature of the alliances altered as the demands of machinery had to be met. Although the maneuvering and ever-flowing tides of allegiance continued to be played by the same rules of deception and force.
There was one immotile that always managed to retain its preeminence among the rest of its species. Always building the strongest alliances, always advancing itself at the expense of others, always holding its boundaries secure, always the most wily. In later times the largest and most powerful of all. Although not named, it could be characterized by its location: MorningLightMountain, a large cone of rock and earth that sprouted at the center of a long valley defined by rugged cliffs rising hundreds of meters from its swampy floor. Such was the alignment of the high walls that the thick beams of sunlight that the irregular edges produced swept across the central peak only during the morning.
It was the perfect place to establish a new Prime immotile territory. At the time of its amalgamation, seven or eight thousand years before Christ appeared on Earth, there were thousands, possibly even tens of thousands, of immotiles served and protected by their clans of motiles, occupying the planet’s equatorial zone. They were primitive then, creatures whose long evolutionary sequence was only just bearing fruit. Sitting in the middle of their covetously guarded fragment of land, immotiles flexed their rudimentary thoughts by plotting against their neighbors. Herds of standard motiles busied themselves consuming their own base cells from muddy streams and tending the edible vegetation; while the soldier variant motiles started to develop as the stronger, more agile members of each immotile’s herd were pressed into duty bashing rival herds’ brains out with wooden clubs.
The little sub-herd of twelve motiles was sent out by its birth immotile, seeking a place where a fresh herd could be established. Such a new neighboring territory would be advantageous to the founder immotile; with a joint personality origin their allegiance would be the strongest of all, at least for the initial years. After a while divergence crept in, it always did.
MorningLightMountain still retained the memory of itself before amalgamation and true thought began. The sub-herd had spent days carefully picking their way down the valley walls, dodging rockslides and clambering over sharp outcrops. Now they bunched together as they walked through the rainforest that sprang from the boggy ground along the valley floor. Every daybreak a mist would slither upward from the lush vegetation, a legacy from the nightly rains hazing the air and turning the mighty sunbeams a delicate orange-gold.
