It took them all day to come full circle.
Joanna limped to a halt in front of the tent. “We need to come back with wooden boards we can put under our feet,” she said. “Strapped to our boots, to spread the weight over a larger area.”
Rosalind said nothing, but she suspected that that would just delay the inevitable: they might succeed in crossing more of the fragile ice before it gave way beneath them, but when it happened they would only plunge deeper into the pile of icy spears and blades that the geyser had been stacking up around itself since its inception.
She looked up wearily toward Tvíbura. A lizard was circling overhead; she’d seen so many of them close to the geyser that she was starting to wonder if there was some kind of oceanic insect that they were feeding on—snatching it out of the air as the geyser delivered it, stunned or dead, into this strange, hostile world that the poor creatures could never have imagined existing.
“I know how we can get the root cuttings into the chasm,” she said.
“With my ice shoes,” Joanna replied, puzzled, as if the matter had been settled.
“We saw some cliffs to the north,” Rosalind reminded her. “Not much farther from the geyser than we are now.”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
Rosalind said, “The ground’s not safe to walk on, but the lizards have no trouble with the air here. I’ll glide off the cliffs, and let the updraft carry me over the chasm.”
10
Rosalind took her time, studying the lizards as closely as she could, contemplating the modifications she would need to make to her glider if she wanted to mimic the way they spiraled up around the geyser. Trying to create panels that undulated like the lizards’ membranes would be absurd, but adding a system of struts and levers that allowed her to flex the whole shape slightly, giving it enough asymmetry to force it to swerve left or right, seemed like a reasonable ambition.
She made the changes, then carried her glider to the top of the plateau to test the new design. But as she ran toward the edge, her courage failed her. She stopped and knelt down on the tangler-infested soil, trembling in horror at the risk she’d almost taken. If anything had gone awry, she could have dashed her skull open on the ice below.
She left the glider where it was and made her way carefully down the slope, relieved to have abandoned the whole insanely reckless notion. It was only when she was back on level ground that she paused to reflect on the reasons for her change of heart.
Rosalind stood on the ice for a long time, weighing up her options. Then she went looking for Sigrid.
“I think it’s time,” she told Sigrid. “We know we can survive on the tanglers and the voles. We can feed and shelter ourselves. And we understand the animals here well enough not to fear them. Nothing’s certain, but someone has to be first. And I know you’d make the best mother, out of all of us.”
Sigrid was amused. “If your brothers are annoying you, just say so. You don’t need to flatter me.”
“But you agree?”
“Yes. When do you want to do this?”
“Tonight,” Rosalind replied. “Up on the plateau, where we’ll have some privacy.”
As the time approached, Rosalind tried to keep her mind on other things. She spent the afternoon helping Hildur with her weaving, then she chatted with her fellow villagers, pursuing every idle topic that arose, prolonging each distraction for as long as she could.
“Are you all right?” Joanna asked her.
“I’m fine.”
“How are your experiments with the glider going?”
Rosalind said, “There are some aspects that are proving trickier than I expected. But I think I can sort them out.”
At sunset, she left the tent on the ice field and headed up the slope. There was a second tent, on the plateau, that had been largely abandoned since their farming experiments had failed. As Rosalind entered, Sigrid called out to her; she had followed close behind.
“Don’t be nervous,” Sigrid told her, as they knelt down together in the near darkness. “Before I joined the expedition, I let one of my brothers breed. It only seemed fair, before they faced the long sleep. And I can promise you, it’s not that difficult. Just relax, and he’ll know what to do.”
They loosened their clothing and brought their bodies together. Rosalind felt all three of her brothers scrambling to take advantage of the opportunity, but the struggle didn’t last long. The winner emerged, protruding from between her legs, crossing the narrow gap between the women, determined to father a child.
Sigrid gasped, but didn’t flinch; she wrapped her arms around Rosalind to keep their bodies from being pushed apart. Rosalind listened carefully to her labored exhalations, trying to judge the progress of the act. She had no experience at all, but she’d heard enough talk from other women to know what to expect.
Sigrid shuddered, then relaxed. Rosalind pulled away from her as quickly as she could, then reached down and took hold of her retreating sibling before he could disappear. She got to her feet, hitching up her trousers with her other hand, and headed out of the tent.
“Are you all right?” Sigrid called after her.
“I’m fine,” she replied. “It’s just the pressure on my bladder…”
Rosalind walked carefully across the uneven soil, afraid of tripping on the tanglers. When she was far enough away from the tent, she knelt down on the ground and groped in her pocket for the knife.
Before her brother could sense what was happening and try to change her mind, she pushed the blade into his body and forced it through to the hilt. He squealed and thrashed, but the handle of the knife was jammed against her thighs, so the more he tried to retreat to safety, the more damage the blade wreaked.
When he stopped moving, Rosalind cut off everything that protruded and buried it in the soil. She was weeping softly, but she hardened her heart. He’d fulfilled his purpose; she’d given him that. She would do the same for the other two.
She had no choice. However repugnant this fratricide, she couldn’t spare them. She had her purpose too.
Once Rosalind had perfected her technique, she demonstrated her modified glider to the rest of the village: launching off the plateau, and completing a rough circle over the ice before landing.
Afterward, they gathered in the tent and she sketched out a plan that she hoped they’d find plausible.
“You’ll start flying while the geyser’s active?” Kate asked, troubled by the notion.
“It’s the only way to get above the chasm,” Rosalind explained. “I need a strong updraft. Even starting from the cliffs, if I tried to approach while the geyser was quiet, I’d just crash into the needle-ice before I was even close.”
“So you approach, you circle around waiting for the geyser to stop, then you swoop over the chasm, drop the root cuttings… and hope you get back to solid ground before you lose altitude?”
“Exactly,” Rosalind agreed. “But when you say ‘hope’ that makes it sound like a huge gamble. I’ll make sure I’m high enough to start with so it won’t be unlikely at all.”
Kate looked dubious. “And when you say ‘I’ll make sure’ that makes it sound as if you’ve done all this a thousand times before.”