Huddle. Part 2

They stayed a night. But the next day they walked onto rock again, and Night-Dawn could see no more ice ahead.

The rock began to rise, becoming a slope.

They had no food. Occasionally they took sc.r.a.pes at the rising stone, but it threatened to crack their teeth.

At night the wind was bitter, spilling off the flanks of the mountains, and they huddled as best they could, their backs to the cold, their faces and bellies together.

"We'll die," One-Tusk would whisper.

"We won't die," Night-Dawn said. "We have our fat."

"That's supposed to last us through the winter," hissed No-Sun.

One-Tusk s.h.i.+vered and moved a little more to leeward. "I wished to father a child," he said. "By Ice-Cloud. I could not. Ice-Cloud mocked me. After that n.o.body would couple with me."

"Ice-Cloud should have come to you, Night-Dawn. You are the Bull," No-Sun muttered.

"I'm sorry," Night-Dawn said to One-Tusk. "I have fathered no children yet. Not every coupling--"

One-Tusk said, "Do you really think it will be warm in the mountains?"

"Try to sleep now," said Frazil sensibly.

They were many days on the rising rock. The air grew thinner. The sky was never brighter than a deep violet blue.

The mountains, at last, grew nearer. On clear days the sun cast long shadows that reached out to them.

Night-Dawn saw a gap in the mountains, a cleft through which he could sometimes see a slice of blue-violet sky. They turned that way, and walked on.

Still they climbed; still the air thinned.

They came to the pa.s.s through the mountains. It was a narrow gully. Its mouth was broad, and there was broken rock, evidently cracked off the gully sides.

Night-Dawn led them forward.

Soon the walls narrowed around him, the rock slick with hard gray ice. His feet slipped from under him, and he banged knees and hips against bone-hard ice. He was not, he knew, made for climbing. And besides, he had never been surrounded before, except in the huddle. He felt trapped, confined.

He persisted, doggedly.

His world closed down to the aches of his body, the gully around him, the search for the next handhold.

...The air was hot.

He stopped, stunned by this realization.

With renewed excitement, he lodged his stubby fingers in crevices in the rock, and hauled himself upward.

At last the gully grew narrower.

He reached the top and dragged himself up over the edge, panting, fur steaming.

... There were no people here.

He was standing at the rim of a great bowl cut into the hard black rock. And at the base of the bowl was a red liquid, bubbling slowly. Steam gathered in great clouds over the bubbling pool, laced with yellowish fumes that stank strongly.

It was a place of rock and gas, not of people.

Frazil came to stand beside him. She was breathing hard, and her mouth was wide open, her arms spread wide, to shed heat.

They stood before the bowl of heat, drawn by some ancient imperative to the warmth, and yet repelled by its suffocating thickness.

"The Collision," she said.

"What?"

"Once, the whole world was covered with such pools. Rock, melted by the great heat of the Collision."

"The Collision is just a story, you said."

She grunted. "I've been wrong before."

His disappointment was crus.h.i.+ng. "n.o.body could live here. There is warmth, but it is poisonous." He found it hard even to think, so huge was his sense of failure.

He stood away from the others and looked around.

Back the way they had come, the uniform hard blackness was broken only by scattered islands of gray-white: ice pools, Night-Dawn knew, like the one he had left behind.

Turning, he could see the sweep of the mountains clearly: he was breaching a great inward-curving wall, a great complex string of peaks that spread from horizon to horizon, gaunt under the blue-purple sky.

And ahead of him, ice had gathered in pools and creva.s.ses at the feet of the mountains, lapping against the rock walls as if frustrated -- save in one place, where a great tongue of ice had broken through. Glacier, he thought.

He saw that they could walk around the bowl of bubbling liquid rock and reach the head of the glacier, perhaps before night fell, and then move on, beyond these mountains. Hope sparked. Perhaps what he sought lay there.

"I'm exhausted," No-Sun said, a pillar of fur slumped against a heap of rock.

"We should go back."

Night-Dawn, distracted by his plans, turned to her. "Why?"

"We are creatures of cold. Feel how you b.u.m up inside your fat. This is not our place..."

"Look," breathed One-Tusk, coming up to them.

He was carrying a rock he'd cracked open. Inside there was a thin line of red and black. Algae, perhaps. And, in a hollow in the rock, small insects wriggled, their red sh.e.l.ls bright.

Frazil fell on the rock, gnawing at it eagerly.

The others quickly grabbed handfuls of rocks and began to crack them open.

They spent the night in a hollow at the base of the glacier.

In the morning they clambered up onto its smooth, rock-littered surface. The ice groaned as it was compressed by its forced pa.s.sage through the mountains, which towered above them to either side, blue-gray and forbidding.

At the glacier's highest point, they saw that the river of ice descended to an icy plain. And the plain led to another wall of mountains, so remote it was almost lost in the horizon's mist.

"More walls," groaned One-Tusk. "Walls that go on forever."

"I don't think so," said Night-Dawn. He swept his arm along the line of the distant peaks, which glowed pink in the sun. "I think they curve. You see?"

"I can't tell," muttered No-Sun, squinting.

With splayed toes on the ice, Night-Dawn sc.r.a.ped three parallel curves -- then, tentatively, he joined them up into concentric circles. "Curved walls of mountains. Maybe that's what we're walking into," he said. "Like ripples in a water hole."

"Ripples, in rock?" Frazil asked skeptically.

"If the Collision stories are true, it's possible."

No-Sun tapped at the center of his picture. "And what will we find here?"

"I don't know."

They rested awhile, and moved on.

The glacier began to descend so rapidly they had some trouble keeping their feet. The ice here, under tension, was cracked, and there were many ravines.

At last they came to a kind of cliff, hundreds of times taller than Night-Dawn.

The glacier was tumbling gracefully into the ice plain, great blocks of it carving away. This ice sheet was much wider than the pool they had left behind, so wide, in fact, it lapped to left and right as far as they could see and all the way to the far mountains. Ice lay on the surface in great broken sheets, but clear water, blue-black, was visible in the gaps.

It was -- together they found the word, deep in their engineered memories -- it was a sea.

"Perhaps this is a circular sea," One-Tusk said, excited. "Perhaps it fills up the ring between the mountains."

"Perhaps."

They clambered down the glacier, caution and eagerness warring in Night-Dawn's heart.

There was a shallow beach here, of shattered stone. The beach was littered with droppings, black and white streaks, and half-eaten krill.

In his short life, Night-Dawn had seen no creatures save fish, krill, algae and humans. But this beach did not bear the mark of humans like themselves. He struggled to imagine what might live here.

Without hesitation, One-Tusk ran to a slab of pack ice, loosely anch.o.r.ed. With a yell he dropped off the end into the water.

No-Sun fluffed up her fur. "I don't like it here --"

Bubbles were coming out of the water, where One-Tusk had dived.

Night-Dawn rushed to the edge of the water.

One-Tusk surfaced, screaming, in a flurry of foam. Half his scalp was torn away, exposing pink raw flesh, the white of bone.

An immense shape loomed out of the water after him: Night-Dawn glimpsed a pink mouth, peg-like teeth, a dangling wattle, small black eyes. The huge mouth closed around One-Tusk's neck.

He had time for one more scream -- and then he was gone, dragged under the surface again.

The thick, sluggish water grew calm; last bubbles broke the surface, pink with blood.

Night-Dawn and the others huddled together.

"He is dead," Frazil said.

"We all die," said No-Sun. "Death is easy."

"Did you see its eyes?" Frazil asked.

"Yes. Human," No-Sun said bleakly. "Not like us, but human."

"Perhaps there were other ways to survive the Collision."

No-Sun turned on her son. "Are we supposed to huddle with that, Night-Dawn?"

Night-Dawn, shocked, unable to speak, was beyond calculation. He explored his heart, searching for grief for loyal, confused One-Tusk.

THEY STAYED on the beach for many days, fearful of the inhabited water. They ate nothing but scavenged sc.r.a.ps of crushed, half-rotten krill left behind by whatever creatures had lived here.

"We should go back," said No-Sun at last.

"We can't," Night-Dawn whispered. "It's already too late. We couldn't get back to the huddle before winter."

"But we can't stay here," Frazil said.

"So we go on." No-Sun laughed, her voice thin and weak. "We go on, across the sea, until we can't go on anymore."

"Or until we find shelter," Night-Dawn said.

"Oh, yes," No-Sun whispered. "There is that."

So they walked on, over the pack ice.

This was no mere pond, as they had left behind; this was an ocean.

The ice was thin, partially melted, poorly packed. Here and there the ice was piled up into cliffs and mountains that towered over them; the ice hills were eroded, shaped smooth by the wind, carved into fantastic arches and spires and hollows. The ice was every shade of blue. And when the sun set, its light filled the ice shapes with pink, red and orange.

There was a cacophony of noise: groans and cracks, as the ice moved around them.

But there were no human voices, save their own: only the empty noise of the ice -- and the occasional murmur, Night-Dawn thought, of whatever giant beasts inhabited this huge sea.

They walked for days. The mountain chain they had left behind dwindled, dipping into the mist of the horizon, and the chain ahead of them approached with stultifying slowness. He imagined looking down on himself, a small, determined speck walking steadily across this great, molded landscape, working toward the mysteries of the center.