“My fellow citizens, I wish I could welcome you with a sense of satisfaction,” he said. “For once again we who have fought the subterranean battle to prevent the Starflyer’s agents gnawing away at the heart of our wonderful Commonwealth have been proved right. But of course I feel no joy at the situation we face this day. We failed to destroy the Second Chance , and now the starship has begun a chain reaction of events which will plunge us into war. The Dyson aliens have been let out of their prison in accordance with the Starflyer’s wishes. We have all seen the recordings of their aggression, a brutality which we all know will be turned toward us as soon as they build their own starships.
“Even if we survive the coming assault, we will be weakened terribly. Our wealth and our talent will be poured into our very survival, where it will be consumed by nuclear fire. That is when the Starflyer will strike against us, unseen, from our very midst.
“This monster will ruin us unless we guard against it. The Guardians of Selfhood will always be ready to thwart its machinations, right to the very end. We will root it out and eliminate its agents. But we need your help. Be vigilant. Be vocal. Stand for elections on a platform opposing the meager efforts which this corrupt government is proposing to protect us. We do not need three scoutships; we need an armada of battleships. We do not need further investigation; we need weapons that can blow the invaders out of space. We must be ready to defend ourselves from the Dyson aliens right now. They will appear in our skies soon enough. Don’t let us fall to their onslaught. Challenge those who claim to be working on your behalf. They are not; they serve only themselves and their evil master. Help us. Be strong. Guard yourselves.”
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.