When the sun was an hour and a half from the horizon, the massif was invisible behind them, blocked from view by towering spires of sharp black rock. Shadows were lengthening and darkening across the rust-tinted ground. The ybnan teams on all the sleds were beginning to tire, even on the flat their speed was noticeably less than earlier.
“There’ll be no hunt today,” Sara said after she returned from a quick discussion with Bill. “And we need to set up the tents soon. It’s difficult in the dark.”
After another half hour, they emerged from the gap between two rock ridges to look down on a crater measuring over six miles across. Some time after the basin formed, the volcanic activity that riddled the area had thrown up yet another range of fierce crags. This one formed a long promontory extending out almost halfway across the crater.
The Silfen had gathered at the foot of the peak closest to the rim, riders and those on foot bunched together and glowing like a multifaceted jewel in the gathering twilight. A stretch of forest grew up the slope beyond them, its crystal trees taller than those back on the forests of the massif, looking dark and forbidding in the vermilion gloaming.
The sleds pulled up in a broad circle, half a mile from the Silfen, on top of an escarpment that skirted the landward crags. Everyone jumped to, hauling the tents out and slotting the framework together. Once the big tents were up, Ozzie, Orion, and George rigged a smaller frame over Tochee’s sledge, and pulled a big sheet of fur over it. Inside that, they draped another blanket of fur across the top of the sledge’s protective cylinder.
“It should be okay in that,” George said as he crawled out.
Ozzie, who was left inside, grunted agreement. He lit a pair of candles, and put them on the ground in front of the sledge’s windscreen. There wasn’t much space there, probably no more than a couple of cubic yards, but it allowed Tochee to look out, maybe take away any fear of entombment. Looking in through the pane of crystal, Ozzie could see the alien motionless behind it, front eye section aligned on him. He held a mitten out, thumb upward. Tochee’s front eye swirled with ultraviolet patterns, slightly smudged by flaws in the crystal. It translated roughly into: DON’T FORGET ME TOMORROW.
“Not a chance,” Ozzie whispered inside his balaclava.
Tochee pulled the tab on a heatbrick. Ozzie waited until he saw the brick start to glow a deep cherry red, then waved and backed out of the fur coverings.
There was probably another twenty minutes before the sun sank below the horizon. Ozzie hurried off toward the crater rim. It was achingly quiet in the moments just before nightfall. Even the Silfen’s perpetual singing had ended out here under the somber glacial sky. Ahead of him, the surface of the granular ice that filled the crater basin was so flat that the illusion of liquid was almost perfect. As he approached it, he half expected to see ripples. He knelt down beside it, and touched it with his mitten. The surface had the texture of thick oil, though the farther down he pushed his hand, the greater the resistance became.
“Careful you don’t fall in,” Sara said.
Ozzie straightened up, shaking residual grains from his mitten. “Man, you always make me feel like I’m doing something wrong.”
“People have fallen in before. We don’t risk our own lives trying to find them now. They never leave any trace, it’s not as if there could be any bubbles.”
“Yeah, figures. This stuff isn’t natural. Grains of ice like this should stick together.”
“Of course they should. But they’re being constantly churned up and kept loose, like flour in a food mixer.”
“And the icewhales are doing the churning.”
“Them, and whatever else is down there. After all, they have to eat something.”
“Hopefully just iceweed, or whatever the plant life is at the bottom.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever seen one.” She turned, and began to walk up the slight incline.
Ozzie started after her. “Why not?”
“Let’s just say they don’t act like herbivores.”
“You got it all figured out, don’tcha?”
“No, Ozzie, nothing like. I understand very little of this place, and all the others I walked through. Why don’t the Silfen allow us to have electricity?”
“Simple enough theory. They’re experiencing life on a purely physical level; that’s all these bodies we see are for, to give them a platform at this level of personal consciousness evolution. And it kills me to say it, but it’s a pretty low level, given their capabilities. You start introducing electricity, and machines, and all the paraphernalia which goes with it, then you start to shrink that opportunity for raw natural experience.”
“Yeah,” she said sourly. “God forbid they should invent medicine.”
“It’s irrelevant to them. We need it because we treasure our individuality and continuity. Their outlook is different. They’re on a journey that has a very definite conclusion. At the end of their levels they get to become a part of their adult community.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
He shrugged, a gesture largely wasted under his heavy fur coat. “I was told that once.”
“Who by?”
“This dude I met in a bar.”
“Dear Christ, I don’t know which is weirder, them or you.”
“Definitely them.” They came to the top of the small rim as the sun vanished, leaving only a flaming fuchsia glow in the sky.
“You also shouldn’t be out so late,” Sara said. “There’s no beacon to guide you back here, you know.”
“Don’t worry about me, I see better in the dark than most people.”
“You got fur instead of skin as well? Even the Korrok-hi don’t stay out at night on this world.”
“Sure. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”
“You’ll have to do a lot better tomorrow when you follow the Silfen.”
“Right. You know, I’m still kind of surprised you didn’t want to come with us.”
“I will leave one day, Ozzie. Just not yet, that’s all.”
“But why, you’ve been here long enough. I can’t see you buying into George’s idea about how living here as some kind of penance makes us value our lives more. And as far as I can make out there’s no one special for you. Is there?” Which had slowly begun to nag at him as his own suggestions in that direction over the months had all gone unheeded.
“No,” she said slowly. “There’s no one right now.”
“That’s a shame, Sara. We all need someone.”
“So were you going to volunteer?”
The mild scorn in her voice made him pause. After a moment, Sara stopped and looked back at him. “What?” she asked.
“Well, goddamn, I couldn’t have been any blunter,” Ozzie said.
“Blunt about what?”