“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 into various oils; repairs were carried out on the Ice Citadel’s few precious communal metal artifacts, like the cooking range or cauldrons. Tools were mostly stone or crystal blades for shaping and cutting bone; those who arrived with their own little knives or pliers or multipurpose implements held on to them and treated them like the high value currency they were. Nobody was a real artisan, they didn’t have to be, all that was needed was a basic grasp of mechanics; the Ice Citadel kept ticking over on a level virtually equal to medieval.
The job that had been taking up everyone’s efforts for three days was repairing and refitting the runners on two of the big covered sleds. They’d finished one, and the second was resting a couple of meters off the ground on thick stumps of crystal, waiting for its newly carved runners. It was barely above freezing in the workshop, hot spring water ran along curved channels under the stone floor, keeping the air moderately warm. Like the rest of the Ice Citadel, the heating arrangement was worn down. The thick flagstones covering the water channels had cracked and shifted down the centuries. Tenuous puffs of mist leaked up in a dozen places, turning the air damp and cloying. Condensation slicked the walls and the workbenches, and rusted any metal that was left out for too long. Around the rotating door, it was a permanent prickly frost.
Ozzie made sure he kept his woolen gloves on at all times. It made the tools harder to use. He had to move slowly, and consider what he was doing. But without them, his fingers became too cold, losing feeling. That was when real accidents occurred.
He joined in with the repair team, three humans and a Korrok-hi lifting the first heavy runner up into place on the end of the legs—sliding it back under George Parkin’s directions. George had been at the Ice Citadel long enough to qualify as the unofficial workshop foreman; he was certainly the most competent carpenter. The new runner fitted neatly, the dovetail joins slipping into their grooves with the help of a little oil lubrication. Two of the team members set about securing the joins with locking pins hammered in sideways and glued.
Ozzie had now been out six times on the sleds as part of a harvesting party, twenty-five humans and aliens armed with ladders and baskets. On each occasion, they’d set out just as dawn rose, heading for the crystal tree forest surrounding the huge desolate depression. The opal-colored wedges that bloomed from the end of every twig on the mature trees were actually an eatable fruit, a little knot of near-tasteless carbohydrates in a tough shell. Without them, the inhabitants of the Ice Citadel would never survive. It took a couple of years for one to grow to the size of an apple, so they had to harvest in strict rotation, painstakingly recording each trip on crude hide maps that marked out radial sections of the nearby forest. When they got there, it was hard physical work retrieving the crop, ten hours with only one small break, climbing the ladders in thick layers of clothing and a fur coat to knock the fruit down with a length of bone. Ozzie was fascinated by the fruit. It convinced him that the crystal trees must be some kind of GM biology, or whatever Silfen science was equivalent.