Anathem

The journey lasted about two days-or, up here, two waking-and-sleeping cycles. I was all of a sudden ready to get back to work. The journey from Samble to the sledge port had been a welcome respite from reading and thinking, but seeing Jesry had shocked me awake. I might be sleeping twelve hours at a time and watching speelies, but my friends were working as hard as ever and going off on dangerous missions. It was difficult for me to act on this, though. The continuous vibration and occasional jarring shifts of the sledge train were about as far as you could get from the cloister. Reading and writing were difficult; even watching speelies was hardly worth it. Going outside was out of the question. I could understand why so many people up here were substance abusers.

Before we’d departed, Sammann had done research on how to sneak across the border without documents. Economic migrants did this all the time and some of them had logged their experiences, which gave me a rough idea of what and what not to do. The most important thing not to do was to ride the sledge train the whole way. Apparently the sledge port on the other side was a much more fastidious operation than the one we’d passed through. Officials would board the train at an outpost a couple of degrees north of the port and make a sweep down the length of the train during the last few hours of the journey. You could try to hide from them but this was chancy. Instead, illegals tended to jump off the train just short of the outpost and make deals with local sledge-men who would spirit them past the border post.

These came in two categories. The older, more established smugglers had bigger, long-haul sledge trains that they would drive over the mountains to the icebound coast, a couple of hundred miles away. There was also a newer breed using small, nimble, short-range snow machines just to circumvent the sledge port itself. We were hoping to get me on one of those. But the little ones couldn’t operate in foul weather. Of course, all of this smuggling could have been stopped if the Sæcular Power had been serious about doing so, but it seemed they were willing to look the other way as long as illegals showed them the courtesy of being a little bit sneaky.

Because of the Cousins’ jamming the nav satellites we could not know our latitude, but we could guess how far we’d come by dead reckoning. When we thought we were getting close, I put on all the warm stuff I had and topped off the fuel bladder in my suitsack. The backpack I’d been issued at Voco was too small, too new, and too nice-looking, but Yul said he had an old one in his fetch that was bigger, with a metal frame. So we bundled ourselves up and made our way back over the catwalks to the flatbed in the rear. Our backs were to the wind but we staggered and flailed as the sledges bucked over ridges in the ice. We had to shovel three feet of snow off his vehicle. More snow began to fall while we were doing this, and at times it seemed to come down faster than we could get rid of it. But eventually we got into the back of Yul’s fetch and found an old military backpack that wouldn’t be too conspicuous in the company I’d soon be keeping. I transferred the contents of my little rucksack into it. We filled the remaining volume with energy bars, spare clothes, and other odds and ends, and strapped a pair of snowshoes to the sides just in case.

Back at the head of the train, Gnel supplied me with coins: enough to pay for passage if I haggled, not enough to stain me as rich. Sammann printed out a map of the region around the sledge port. Cord gave me a hug and a smack on the cheek. I went out on the catwalk, pulled the fake-fur fringe of my hood out to shield my face from wind blast, and looked out the left side of the train. Like a litter of cubs following their mother, three much smaller sledge trains were now shadowing us on that side. They’d materialized out of the storm in the last quarter of an hour. Each consisted of a tracked snow-crawler drawing a few sledges behind it. Some of those sledges were open boxes or flatbeds. These were for smuggling goods, and indeed one was now being laden; it had pulled alongside the third sledge in our train, and men were throwing boxes and kicking gravid bags down into it. Others, though, were covered-tents had been pitched on their backs. I spied a couple of men in orange suitsacks vaulting down into one of those.

Sammann had given me one guideline and two rules. The guideline: get on a sledge with lots of other passengers. There’s safety in numbers. Rule 1: don’t let your feet touch the surface. You’ll be abandoned and you’ll die. Rule 2 I’ll get to presently.

Gnel and I paced the catwalks for a quarter of an hour, hoping to see something smaller than these three trains. Tiny as they might have seemed next to the giant sledge train, they were quite a bit bigger than most vehicles you’d see on a road down south. They were probably bound west over the mountains. We did not see any of the smaller, more agile vehicles that made short-range smuggling runs in the vicinity of the sledge port. None of them was out today-probably because of the foul weather.

One sharp-eyed sledgeman spied me. He gunned his engine, coughing out a roil of black exhaust, and pulled alongside. He had only one sledge behind his crawler. He slid his window open and stuck his ruddy, hairy face out and quoted a price. I walked back a few steps so that I could look into his sledge. Empty. He quoted a lower price before I said a word.

It didn’t feel right to jump into the first one that came along, so I shook my head, turned away, and headed back toward where a larger train was taking on passengers. This operation seemed more professional-if that word made any sense here-but I’d arrived late. The sledges were already crowded with what looked like organized bands of migrants whose stares suggested I wouldn’t be welcome. And the price was high. A third, smaller train of mixed cargo and passenger sledges looked more promising: there were enough passengers aboard that I didn’t fear being abandoned.

Seeing me and a couple of other singletons in negotiations with the driver of that train, the first sledgeman swooped in again. He pulled ahead so that I could look in through the flaps of the tent on his sledge and see that he’d taken on two passengers. The door of his crawler was hanging open, so I could see his control panel. A glowing screen was mounted above it, showing a jagged trace that scrolled horizontally as we moved: a sonic. Rule 2 was that I should never entrust myself to a sledge that lacked one. It used sound waves to probe the ice ahead for hidden crevasses. Most crevasses could be bridged by the tractor’s long treads, but some might swallow it and everything in train behind it.

I asked the driver where he was headed: “Kolya,” he answered. The longer, mixed passenger-cargo train was bound for another place called Imnash. The next icebreaker, we knew, was scheduled to leave from Kolya in thirty-one hours. So, having agreed on a price, I heaved my backpack down into the one-sledge train and became its third passenger. According to custom, I paid the driver half of the agreed-on fare up front and kept the other half in my pocket, payable on arrival. For another quarter of an hour he jockeyed for position along both flanks of the train, and managed to collect one more passenger on the right side. By that point, no one remained on the catwalks. All of the little sledge trains peeled away from the big one as if they’d received a common signal. I reckoned we must be drawing close to the outpost where the inspectors would board the train.

From fifty feet we could barely see the giant train; from a hundred it was invisible. A minute after that even the throbbing of its power plant had been muffled by the snow and drowned out by the higher-pitched note of our little train’s motor.

This was hardly the sort of thing I’d had in mind when I’d walked out of the chancel at the big Voco two weeks earlier! Even when I’d made the decision to follow Orolo over the pole, I hadn’t dreamed that the last leg of the journey was going to be like this. If someone had told me back at Samble that I was going to have to go on a ride like this one, I’d have come up with an excuse not to, and gone straight to Tredegarh. What wouldn’t have been clear to me, though, back in Samble, was just how routine this all was. People did it all the time. All I needed to do was kill twenty-four hours, which was how long it would take for this contraption to reach the sea.

We four passengers sat on a pair of sideways-facing benches that could have accommodated eight. We all looked about the same in our suitsacks. Mine was new compared to theirs even though I’d been living in it for a week. Despite the trouble we’d gone to to outfit me with desperate-looking baggage, mine still gleamed in comparison with the first two passengers’: poly shopping bags bound up with poly twine and reinforced with poly tape. The last passenger had an old suitcase bound up in a neat gridwork of yellow rope.

The first two called themselves Laro and Dag, the last was Brajj, all of these being reasonably common extramuros names. I said my name was Vit. Further conversation was difficult over the engine noise and in any case these guys didn’t seem very talkative. Laro and Dag huddled together under a blanket. I had the idea that they were brothers. Brajj, having entered last, sat closest to the flaps in the rear. Between his bulk (he was a little bigger than I) and his clumsy suitcase he claimed a lot of space. But it was space that we were glad to let him have because of the snow that swirled in from the sledge’s coiling wake.

I’d left all my books with Cord. No one had a speely. There was nothing to see outside but swirling snow. I set my catalytic heater to the lowest power level that would keep my digits alive, folded my arms, propped my legs up on my pack, slumped down on the wooden bench, and tried not to think about how slowly time was passing.

It seemed like years since I’d been in the comfortable surroundings of the concent. But here on this sledge I’d gone into a daydream where I could practically see my fraas and suurs in front of me and hear their voices. From Arsibalt, Lio, and Jesry, I moved on to the decidedly more enjoyable image of Ala. I was fancying her at Tredegarh, a place of which I knew little except that it was older and much bigger than Saunt Edhar, and that the climate was better, the gardens and groves lusher and more fragrant. I had to interpolate a fantasy wherein I survived this trip, found Orolo, got back to Tredegarh, and was allowed in the gate as opposed to being Thrown Back or spending the next five years with nothing except the Book to keep me company. Having got those formalities out of the way, I conjured up a half-waking dream of a fine supper in a rich old Tredegarh refectory at which fraas and suurs from all over the world raised glasses of really good-tasting stuff to me and Ala for having made those pinhole camera observations. Then the daydream took a more private turn involving a long walk in a secluded garden…this made me drowsy. It was not turning out as I’d expected. Whatever part of my mind was in charge of daydreams was shaping this one to comfort me and lull me, not to arouse passions.

A shift in the sledge’s attitude brought me just awake enough to know I’d been sleeping.

In going over the pole, we’d followed a stocky isthmus. Two tectonic plates had collided in the far north and pushed up a range of mountains that would have been tricky to pass over if they hadn’t been buried under two miles of ice. During the last day or so the continent had broadened beneath us, but we had stayed to the right or (now that we were southbound) western side of it. Not all the way to the edge, for the western coast was a steep subduction-zone mountain range. There was very little level ground between it and the frozen sea, and most of that was covered in treacherous crevasse-riddled glaciers flowing down from the mountains. So instead the sledge train stayed some miles inland of the coastal range, tracking across a plateau with stable ice. That’s where the sledge port stood. Roads ran south from there across ice, tundra, and taiga to connect up with the transportation network that ramified all the way to the Sea of Seas. But the first outpost going that way was hundreds of miles distant. Smugglers such as the man driving my sledge could not prosper carrying their passengers such a long way. Instead they veered to the right, or west, bypassing the sledge port and taking one of three passes that slashed through the coastal range to connect with ports on the shore of the ocean. These were reachable from the south via icebreakers.

Cord, Sammann, and the Crades would simply get into the fetches and drive south from the sledge port. If the weather had been better and the short-range smugglers had been operating today, I could have paid one of them to whisk me around the sledge port and drop me off on the road a few miles south where I could simply have climbed aboard Yul’s fetch. Instead, my four companions would drive south without me for a couple of days into a more temperate zone, then swing west and cross the mountains to a harbor called Mahsht-the home port of the icebreaker fleet. In the meantime I would buy passage on an icebreaker or one of the convoy ships that followed in its wake. This would bring me down to Mahsht. Once we’d rendezvoused there, it would be only a few days’ drive to the Sea of Seas. So what I was doing now was Plan B-Plan A being the short-range whisk-around-and frankly we hadn’t discussed it in very much detail because we hadn’t expected it to come out this way. I had a nagging feeling that I’d made the decision hastily and probably forgotten some important details, but during the first couple of hours on this little sledge train I’d had plenty of time to think it through and satisfy myself that it would turn out fine.

Anyway, when I sensed the sledge changing its attitude beneath me I took it as a sign that we were beginning the ascent to one of the three passes that connected the inland plateau to the coast. According to Sammann, one of these was considerably better than the other two, but was closed by avalanches from time to time. The sledge drivers never knew, from one day to the next, which one they would end up taking. They made up their minds on the spur of the moment based on what they heard from other smugglers on the wireless. Since our driver was in a separate vehicle, sealed up in a heated cab, there was no way for me to overhear his wireless traffic and get any sense of what was going on.

A few hours later, however, the sledge’s velocity dwindled and it shambled to a halt. We passengers spent a minute or so learning how to move again. I checked my watch and was astonished to learn that we had been underway for sixteen hours. I must have slept eight or ten of them-no wonder I was stiff. Brajj hurled a tent-flap aside to flood our sledge with grey light, bright but directionless. The storm had broken, the air was free of snow, but clouds still screened the sky. We had paused on the flank of a mountain, but the surface beneath us was reasonably level-some sort of sledge track, I guessed, that traversed the slope through whatever pass our driver had decided to take.

Brajj showed no interest in getting out. I got to my feet and made as if I were going to climb over his outstretched legs, but he held up a hand to stay me. A moment later we heard a series of thuds from the sledge tractor followed by a peeling and cracking noise as its door was pushed open through a coating of ice. Feet descended steel stairs and crunched on snow. Brajj lowered his hand and drew in his legs: I was free to go. Only then did I remember Sammann’s warning not to let my feet touch the surface, lest I be abandoned. Brajj, who seemed to have done this before, knew it wasn’t prudent to venture out until the driver had exited the tractor.

We’d invested in snow goggles at Eighty-three. I pulled them down over my eyes and climbed off the sledge to find an unfamiliar man standing on the snow up next to the tractor, urinating on the uphill slope. I reasoned that there must be a bunk in the tractor and that two drivers must spell each other. Sure enough, the first driver now stuck his sleepy-looking face out the door, pulled on his goggles, and climbed out to join the other. They kept the door open, apparently so that they could listen to wireless traffic. This came through in rare bursts, weirdly modulated. I could understand enough to gather that it was sledge operators exchanging information about conditions in the passes, and who was where. But very little seemed to be getting through. When a transmission did erupt from the speaker, the two drivers stopped talking, turned toward the open door, and strained to follow it.

Laro and Dag climbed out and went to the other side-the downhill side-of the sledge. I heard exclamations from both of them. They began talking excitedly. The drivers looked annoyed since this made it difficult to follow the bursts of distorted speech on the wireless.

I went around to the other side. From here we had a fine view down a snow-covered slope, interrupted from place to place by spires of black stone, to a U-shaped valley. We were on its north side. To our right, it broadened and flattened as it debouched into the coastal strip. To our left it grew steeper as it ascended into white mountains. So we had made it over the summit of the coastal range and were descending toward one of the icebound ports.

But that wasn’t what had drawn exclamations from Laro and Dag. They were looking at a black snake, ten miles long, wreathed in steam, slithering up the valley toward the mountains: a convoy of heavy vehicles, jammed nose to tail. All the same color.

“Military,” announced Brajj, climbing out of the sledge. He shook his head in amazement. “You’d think a war was starting.”

“An exercise?” suggested Laro.

“Big one,” said Brajj in a skeptical tone. “Wrong equipment.” He spoke with such a combination of authority and derision that I guessed he must be retired military-or a deserter. He shook his head. “There’s a mountain division on point,” he said, and pointed to the head of the column, which, I now noticed, consisted of several score white vehicles running on treads. “After that it’s all flatlanders.” He chopped air, aiming for the first of the dark drummons, then swept his hand down-valley, encompassing the remainder of the column, trailing toward the frozen sea, which could be seen from here as a white, jumbled plateau crazed with blue fractures. A smear of yellow and brown marked the port we were trying to reach. A lane of black water had been gouged by an icebreaker but was already fading as the ice crowded in behind it.

I was not a praxic and not an Ita but I’d seen enough speelies as a kid, and heard enough from Sammann, to have a general idea of how the wireless worked. There was only so much bandwidth to go around. In most circumstances it was plentiful. This was true even in big cities. But military used lots of it, and sometimes jammed what it didn’t use. The sledge operators up here in these mountains were accustomed to having a nearly infinite amount of bandwidth at their disposal, and had grown dependent on it-they were always swapping reports on the weather and on trail conditions. But at some point during today’s journey our drivers must have noticed something new to them: transmissions got through rarely, and were of poor quality. Perhaps they had thought their equipment was malfunctioning until they had crested the pass and discovered this: hundreds, maybe thousands of military vehicles, commandeering every scrap of bandwidth.

Everything about this was so remarkable that we might have stood there for hours looking at it if Brajj hadn’t turned to pay attention to our drivers. They were clambering over the tractor, knocking ice from various pieces of equipment, inspecting the treads, rattling the linkages between the tractor and our sledge, checking fluid levels in the engine. Brajj was a dour and calm man but he was extremely attentive, even skittish, to be standing on the snow at a time when both of the drivers had mounted the tractor. After a minute he simply became too uncomfortable and climbed back aboard. I was happy to follow his example. Only a few moments after I’d settled back into my place, we heard the door of the tractor thudding shut. We called out to Laro and Dag who were several paces behind the sledge, frozen in amazement at the sight of the convoy. We managed to get Dag’s attention. He turned to look at us but still didn’t seem to grasp what was happening until the engine of the tractor roared up, and a linkage clanked as it was put into gear. He smacked Laro on the shoulder, then took a couple of paces toward us, grabbing Laro by the collar as he went by and jerking him along in his wake. Brajj shifted closer to the back and thrust out an arm in case he had to pull them aboard. I got to my feet and moved closer to help. The tractor’s engine roared louder and we heard the distinctive clanking of its treads beginning to move. Laro and Dag reached us at about the same time; Brajj and I each grabbed one of their hands and hauled them aboard. Their momentum carried them forward into the front of the sledge. The tread clanks had already built to a steady rhythm.

We weren’t moving.

Brajj and I looked out at the snow. Then we looked at each other.

Both of us jumped out and ran around to the sides. The tractor was fifty feet away from us and picking up speed. The hitch that had linked it to our sledge was dragging on the snow behind it.

Brajj and I started running after it. The tracks supported our weight most of the time but every few steps we’d break through and sink to mid-thigh. In any event, I ran faster. I covered maybe a hundred feet before the side hatch swung open and the second driver emerged. He clambered out on to a sort of running board above the right tread, and let me see a long projectile weapon slung on his back.

“What are you doing!?” I shouted.

He reached into the cab, hauled out something bulky, and let it drop into the snow: a carton of energy bars. “We’re going to have to take a different pass now,” he called back. “It’s farther. Steeper. We don’t have enough fuel.”

“So you’re abandoning us!?”

He shook his head and dropped out another object: a can of suitsack fuel. “Going to see if we can beg some fuel from the military,” he shouted-getting farther away-“down there. Then we’ll come back up here and fetch you.” Then he ducked back into the cab and closed the door behind himself.

The logic was clear enough: they had been surprised by the convoy. They couldn’t get to safety without more fuel. If they took us with them on their begging expedition, it’d be obvious that they were smugglers and they would get in trouble. So they had to park us for a while. They knew we’d object. So they’d left us no choice.

Brajj had caught up with me. He had produced, from somewhere, a small weapon. But as he and I both understood, there was no point in taking potshots at the back side of the tractor. Only it, and the two men in it, could get us out of here.

When Brajj and I got back to the sledge dragging the fuel and the energy bars, we found Laro and Dag kneeling, face to face, holding each other’s hands and mumbling so rapidly that I couldn’t make out a single word. I had never seen any behavior quite like it and had to watch them for a few moments before I collected that they were praying. Then I felt embarrassed. I stepped back to get out of Brajj’s way in case he wanted to join them, but the look on his face as he regarded the Deolaters was contemptuous. He caught my eye and jerked his head back toward the flaps. I joined him outside. Both of us were hooded, goggled, and swathed against the cold. Frost grew with visible speed on our face-masks as we talked.

Brajj had been checking his watch every few minutes since we had been abandoned. “It’s been a quarter of an hour,” he said. “If those guys haven’t come back for us in two hours, we have to save ourselves.”

“You really think they’d leave us here to die?”

Brajj chose not to answer that question but he did offer: “They might get into a situation where they have no choice. Maybe they can’t get fuel. Maybe their tractor breaks down. Or the military commandeers it. Point being, we have to have our own plan.”

“I have a pair of snowshoes-”

“I know. We have to make three more. Load up your water pouch.”

The suitsacks had pouches on the front that could be stuffed with snow. Over time it would melt and become drinking water. That consumed energy, but it was sustainable as long as the body had food or the suitsack had fuel. We had both-for the time being. We packed ours as full of snow as we could. We replenished our fuel bladders from the cache that the drivers had left for us. Brajj interrupted the others’ prayers and insisted they also take on water and fuel. Then he had us each eat a couple of energy bars. Only then did we get working.

The tent was held up by flexible metal poles. We collapsed it and drew them out. This had the side effect of getting Laro and Dag’s attention. Our shelter was gone; they had no choice but to join in our plan. Brajj had a pocket tool with a little saw blade; he went to work cutting the tent poles into shorter segments. Once the others saw that there was work to be done, they joined in cheerfully. Dag, who was the sturdier of the two, took over the sawing of the tent poles. Brajj had Laro get to work scavenging every inch of rope and twine at our disposal. Then-perhaps leading by example-he undid the yellow rope that he had used to gird his suitcase. This turned out to be some thirty feet long. He undid the latches and dumped out the contents: hundreds of tiny vials, all packed in loose nodules of foam. I hadn’t seen such things before but I guessed that these were pharmaceuticals. “Child support,” Brajj explained, reading the look on my face.

The panels of the suitcase were a tough leathery material that we cut into slabs to make the platforms of the snowshoes. We bent the tent poles to make crude quadrangular frames and lashed the suitcase-panels to them using twine from Laro’s and Dag’s improvised baggage. This took a while because we had to do it with bare fingers, which went numb in a few seconds. The contents of Laro’s and Dag’s baggage were mostly old clothes, which they were willing to abandon, and keepsakes of their families, which they weren’t. I pulled one of the benches off the sledge, flipped it upside down, and kicked its flimsy legs off. It would serve as a toboggan. We loaded it with the supplies and wrapped them up in what remained of the tent. My pack had already been stripped of its metal frame and of anything that would serve as rope. I added my energy bars and my stove to the supplies, threw away my extra clothes, and put my bolt, my chord, and my sphere (pilled down as small as it would go) into the cargo pockets on the body of my suitsack. I considered adding my chord to our stock of rope, but we seemed to have plenty-Laro had found a fifty-foot coil stored under one of the sledge’s benches and we’d been able to make up another fifty by splicing together odds and ends from the tent’s rigging and so on. That plus Brajj’s thirty feet of yellow stuff gave us enough that we were able to rope ourselves together at intervals of thirty or forty feet, which Brajj explained would be useful if one of us lost his footing on a steep slope or fell into a crevasse.

These preparations consumed almost four hours, so we set out late according to Brajj’s timetable. The convoy down below seemed as though it had not moved an inch. Brajj estimated that it was two thousand feet below us. He said that if “everything goes to hell” we should just “pull the ripcord” and let ourselves slide down the ice to the valley floor where we could throw ourselves on the mercy of the military. They might arrest us but they probably wouldn’t let us die. It was a last resort, however, because if we tried it we stood a good chance of falling into a crevasse before we reached the bottom.

Brajj took the lead. He was armed with a length of tent-pole that he would use to probe the snow ahead of him for crevasses. At his hip he had his “sticker,” a long, heavy-bladed knife. He claimed that if one of us fell into a crevasse he would throw himself down and jam this into the ice, anchoring himself so as to arrest our fall. He had me go last and saw to it that I was armed with an L-shaped piece of metal scavenged from the frame of my pack, which I was to use in the same manner. He even had me practice throwing myself down face-first and jamming the short leg of the thing into the ice. Dag, then Laro, were roped up between us. The toboggan trailed behind me.

The first part of the trek was balky and frustrating as the snowshoes or the bindings that held them to the others’ feet seemed to give out every few steps. The whole expedition seemed to have failed before it had started. But then I noticed we’d been going for a whole hour without pause. I sipped from the tube that ran down to my water-pouch and munched slowly on an energy bar. I looked around me and actually enjoyed the view.

Allswell! The thought hit me like a snowball in the nose. I’d been out of the concent for a little more than two weeks, eating extramuros food the whole time. Lio and Arsibalt and the others had probably made it to Tredegarh in less than a week-too brief a time for them to be affected. But I had been out long enough that the ubiquitous chemical must have taken up residence in my brain-subtly altering the way I thought about everything.

What would my fraas and suurs have said about the decisions I had been making recently? Nothing too polite. Just look at where those decisions had gotten me! And yet, even in the midst of this terrible situation, I’d been strolling around with nothing on my mind except for how pretty the view was!

I tried to force myself into a sterner frame of mind-tried to envision some bad outcomes so that I could lay plans. Brajj’s “sticker” might serve as an anchor in a crisis-but he might just as well use it to cut himself free if one of us fell in. What should I do in that event?

But it was no use. Brajj had made himself the leader, and had made reasonable decisions to this point. There was no limit to the amount of time and energy I could put into spinning such alarming fantasies in my head. Better to attend to the here and now.

Or was that the Allswell talking?

For the first few hours we followed the tamped-down tracks left by the tractor, but then they veered downhill, following a cirque-a crescent-shaped vale cut by a tributary glacier-down toward the valley floor. This would take us straight to the military convoy, and so here we broke away from the trail and ventured across trackless snow for the first time. The first bit was slow going as we had to work our way up out of the cirque. By the time the slope began to level, I was ready to “pull the ripcord” in Brajj’s phrase. If I threw myself on the mercy of some military drummon operator, what was the worst that could happen? I hadn’t broken any laws. It was only my three companions who had to go to such ridiculous lengths to avoid the authorities’ notice. But for better or worse I was roped up to them and couldn’t cut myself free without endangering their lives and mine; I had to wait for them to pull the ripcord.

Then we crested a subsidiary ridge and came in view of the coastline. I was startled at how close it was. We had to shed some altitude but the horizontal distance didn’t look that great. We could easily pick out individual buildings in the port and count the military transport ships moored at its piers. Military aerocraft were lined up at the edge of a dirty landing-strip wedged in between the coast and the foot of the mountains. We watched one take off and bank to the south.

One or two civilian ships were also in the harbor, and this gave us all the idea that if we could only get down there in one piece-which looked like less than a day’s travel-we could buy passage on one of them and get out of here behind the next icebreaker. So we took a rest up there in preparation for what we all knew would be a long and arduous final push. I forced myself to eat two more energy bars. The things were starting to make me sick but perhaps that was just me worrying about the Allswell. I washed them down with water and refilled my snow pouches and my fuel bladder. Our supplies were holding up well. The sledge drivers had given us plenty-perhaps thinking that they might not be returning for a while. I was glad we had taken action-moved out instead of huddling in that tent not knowing if we’d live or die.

After an hour’s rest we repacked the toboggan and got underway again. We descended into a round-bottomed cleft: another cirque that cut across our path and seemed to curve toward the port. Brajj decided to follow this one down. The risk was that it would become too steep for us to negotiate and that we’d have to backtrack. On a few occasions during the next couple of hours I became very worried about this, but then we would come around a bend, or crest a little rise, and get a view of the next mile or so and see that there was nothing we couldn’t handle. On steeper bits the toboggan would try to run ahead of me, and then I would have my hands full for a while-the only remedy was to slew it round ahead of me and let it pull me downhill as I leaned back against its weight. At such times the others, who didn’t have to contend with such a burden, would outdistance me. The rope joining me to Laro would draw taut and remind me of his impatience. I felt like reeling him in and smacking him. But Brajj kept our pace from running out of control. Even in stretches that looked smooth and safe he plodded along at the same rate, pausing every couple of steps to probe the snow ahead of him with his tent pole.

I had long since learned to distinguish Brajj’s snowshoe prints from those of the others, and from time to time I would notice, to my indescribable annoyance, that they had diverged: Brajj had zigged for whatever reason, and Dag had zagged, and Laro followed in his kinsman’s steps, obligating me to do the same, and hence pass over ground that Brajj had not probed.

We had probably shed three-quarters of the altitude needed to reach the port. It would be relatively easy going from here. Laro and Dag were laborers-they had plenty of energy left and yearned to push on past the plodding Brajj to a place where they could get a hot meal and peel off the accursed suitsacks.

It was on one of those steep bits where the toboggan had swung around in front of me and I was straining back against two ropes at once that I noticed myself being pulled out of balance. The tension on the rope that connected me to Laro was rapidly increasing. I planted my left snowshoe and pulled back, but the last hours’ descent had turned my leg muscles into quivering flab. I collapsed to my knee, the rope at my waist pulling me forward. Just before I planted my face in the snow I collected a glimpse of Brajj standing up facing me, a hundred feet away, sticker in hand. Laro was sliding and tumbling down the slope, pulling me with him. Dag-who was roped between Brajj and Laro-was nowhere to be seen.

That remembered image was all I had to go on during the next little while, because I was face-down, being pulled along by Laro and by the toboggan. And-I realized-by Dag. He must have fallen into a crevasse! Why hadn’t Brajj stopped his fall? The rope-the frayed yellow thirty-foot poly rope that had connected Brajj to Dag-must have snapped. Either that or Brajj had cut it with a swipe of his sticker. I was the only person who could stop this, and save Laro, Dag, and myself: I had to plunge that L-shaped piece of metal into the ice. I should have had it out and ready to use-should have been watching ahead for signs of trouble. But in order to free both hands to wrangle the toboggan I’d stuck it in one of the equipment loops on the outside of my suitsack. Was it still there? I kicked wildly with one leg and managed to roll over on my back. My head was plowing up a bow-wave of snow that buried my face. I snorted it out of my nose and stifled the urge to inhale. I groped around until I felt something hard, and pulled it out-or so I guessed. Through those mittens it was hard to tell what was going on. I got the pick pointed away from my body, flailed the legs again, and managed to roll over on my stomach. My head came up out of the snow and I heard Laro screaming something-he must have gone over the brink of the crevasse. I put all of my weight on top of that L-shaped hunk of metal and drove it down. It caught-sort of-and became a pivot; my body spun around it as the rope at my waist, now drawn by the combined weights of Laro and Dag, torqued me downhill. The pick tugged at my hands, but not all that hard. It didn’t seem to be holding.

Or rather it held, but it held in a raft of snow that had broken loose and was now sliding down the hill beneath me.

This was just plain bad luck; if we’d been traversing packed snow, the pick would have had something firm in which to get purchase, but yesterday’s storm had left the packed ice covered with powdery stuff that slid freely on top of it.

Another vicious jerk at my waist told me that the toboggan had just hurtled over the edge. I raised my face up out of this mini-avalanche and got the weird idea that I wasn’t actually moving-because, of course, the snow around me was moving at the same speed as I. Then there was nothing under my toes. Nothing under my ankles. Nothing under my knees. My hips. The rope jerked me straight down with the weight of three men. I guess I did a sort of back-flip into the crevasse. But I only got to experience the terror of free fall for a fraction of a second before something terrible happened to my back and I stopped. The rope’s force was pulling me down against something immobile and hard. Loose snow continued to pummel me for a while. I remembered a woolly story that Yul had told me about getting caught in an avalanche, the importance of swimming, of preserving air space in front of one’s face. I couldn’t swim, but I did get one arm up and crooked an elbow over my mouth and nose. The weight of snow on my body built steadily, the tension on the rope slackened. Most of the avalanche seemed to be parting around me-falling away to either side-as I remained stuck.

For some reason I heard Jesry’s voice in my head saying, “Oh, so you’re only being buried alive a little bit.” What a jerk!

Then it stopped. I could hear my own heart beating, and nothing else.

I pushed outwards with my elbow. The snow moved a little and gave me a void in front of my face-air for a moment. More importantly it kept me from panicking, and let me open my eyes. There was dim blue-grey light. I could hear Arsibalt saying “Just enough to read by!” and Lio answering “If only you’d thought to bring a book.”

For whatever reason, I was not falling any deeper into the crevasse. Yet. And I didn’t think I’d fallen too far into it. Something had stopped my fall. I guessed that the toboggan had gotten lodged sideways between the crevasse walls and I’d fallen on it. Hard. I took a moment to wiggle my toes and my ankles, just to verify that I hadn’t broken my spine. It would have been nice to explore with my hands but one was pinned at my side and the other-the one I’d crooked over my face-was hemmed in by snow. I was, however, able to move that one downwards over my body. I found the zipper pull for my front pocket and inched it open. Then I moved that hand up to my face and pulled my mitten off with my teeth. I reached my bare hand down into the open pocket and fished out my sphere.

Spheres don’t have controls as such. They recognize gestures. You talk to them with your hands. My hand was a little stiff but I was able to make the unscrewing gesture that caused the sphere to get bigger. After a while this became a little scary because the sphere was stealing my air supply, claiming the void in front of my face and pressing on my chest. But I had the idea that the snow over me wasn’t that deep. So I kept telling it to expand. And just when I thought my own sphere was going to squeeze the life out of me, I heard rushing noises-a small avalanche. I reversed the gesture. The sphere got small, the weight came off, and I found myself gazing up through clear air between walls of blue ice. The sky was visible. And so was Brajj, standing at the edge of the crevasse looking down at me. I’d fallen about twenty feet.

“You’re avout,” was the first thing he said to me.

“Yes.”

“Got anything else in your bag of tricks? Because I have no rope. It all went down with those two Gheeths.” He patted the length of yellow rope tied around his waist. Only a foot or so dangled below the knot. It had been severed at exactly the point where the blade of his sticker would have intercepted it in a moment of panic-or of calculation.

“I thought maybe you cut it,” I said. I don’t know why. I guess it was that weird avout compulsion to state facts.

“Maybe I did.”

We looked at each other for a while. It occurred to me that Brajj was an exceptionally rational man-more so than some avout. He was another like the Crades or Cord or Artisan Quin who was smart enough to be an avout but who for whatever reason had ended up extramuros. In his case it seemed that being alone out here with no bond to anyone else like him had made him utterly calculating and ruthless.

“Let’s say you don’t care whether I live or die,” I said. “Let’s say that every decision you’ve made has been based on self-interest. You kept us alive, brought us with you, and roped yourself to us because you knew that if you fell in we’d try to help you. But the minute one of us fell in you cut the rope to save yourself. You looked down into this crack out of simple curiosity. Nothing more. Then you saw my sphere. You know I’m avout. What’s your decision?”

Brajj had found all of this faintly amusing. He rarely heard intelligent people state things clearly and he sort of enjoyed its novelty. He pondered my question for a minute or so, turning away at one point to look down the slope. Then he turned back to scrutinize me. “Move your legs,” he said.

I did. “Arms.” I did.

“Those Gheeths were more trouble than they were worth,” he said.

“Is that an ethnic slur for what Laro and Dag are?”

“Ethnic slur? Yeah, it’s an ethnic slur,” he said in a mocking tone. “Gheeths are great for digging ditches and pulling weeds. Worse than useless up here. But you might keep me alive. How are you going to get out of there?”

For 3700 years, we had lived under a ban that prevented us from owning anything other than the bolt, the chord, and the sphere. Shelves of books had been written about the ingenious uses to which these objects had been put by avout who’d found themselves in trying circumstances. Many of the tricks had names: Saunt Ablavan’s Ratchet. Ramgad’s Contraption. The Lazy Fraa. I was no expert, but when we’d been younger, Jesry and I had leafed through some such books and practiced a few of those tricks, just for sport.

Chords and bolts were made of the same stuff: a fiber that could coil into a tight helix, becoming short and bulky and springy, or relax into a straight filament, becoming long, lean, and inelastic. In the winter we told the fibers in our bolts to coil up. They got much shorter but the bolt became thick and warm because of the pockets of air involved with those coils. In summer we straightened them and the bolts became long and sheer. Likewise the chord could be fat and yarn-like or long and thready.

I made my sphere about as big as my head, wrapped my bolt around it, and tied it together with my chord. Then I made the sphere get bigger and let the bolt expand with it. The sphere wedged itself between the walls. It could go up but it wouldn’t go down, because the crevasse was wider at the top and narrower below. I pushed it up a short distance and it found a new equilibrium, a little higher. Then I expanded and pushed, expanded and pushed, a few inches at a time. The walls were surprisingly irregular, so all of this was more complicated than I’m making it sound. But once I got the hang of it, it went fast.

“Got it!” Brajj called. The sphere moved away from me, scraping against the ice walls. A panic came over me until I found my chord with a flailing arm. Then I let it slide through my hand until Brajj had pulled the sphere all the way out of the crevasse. Brajj and I were now linked by the chord. He jammed his sticker into the ice up there and wrapped my chord around its handle-or so he claimed.

I didn’t want to lose our connection to the toboggan and to Laro and Dag, but I had to cut myself free of it to have any hope of bettering things. The end of my chord I joined to the loop of rope around my waist. Then I cut my way free from that loop. So I was free of the hundreds of pounds of stuff anchoring me to the bottom. The chord was now our only link to the toboggan and to Laro and Dag. I gave instructions to Brajj on how to make the sphere smaller. He threw it down to me. I wedged it between the crevasse walls again. This time-now that I had freedom to move-I was able to get astride it. For the first time since the accident I took my weight off whatever hard thing had stopped my fall and saved my life. Looking down at it, I verified that it was indeed the toboggan, wedged at an angle between the crevasse walls like a stick thrust between a monster’s jaws. When I took my weight off it, it shifted, and a moment later it fell, tumbling another ten feet before getting wedged again. Braj had anchored his loop of the chord to his sticker, jammed in the ice, so we didn’t lose it. I was able to extricate myself from the crevasse by expanding the sphere, which pushed me up as it inflated, while keeping the chord looped around one hand in case I fell off. Once I was out, we doubled the anchor by driving in my makeshift ice-axe, and secured the chord to that as well.

For a little while we were able to haul the rope up by causing the chord to get shorter (a simple implementation of Saunt Ablavan’s Ratchet) but after a few minutes it ran out of stored energy. If I left it out in the sun for a while it would recharge, but we didn’t have time. And it wasn’t able to store a lot of energy anyway. So, after that, Brajj and I hauled using muscle power. Once we had gotten the toboggan up on the surface, this became markedly easier. A few moments later, Laro’s corpse could be seen deep down in the valley of blue light, emerging from the snow that had piled up in the bottom. The rope that trailed below him was no more than ten feet long, and ended in a botched knot. It had held well enough to drag down Laro, me, and the toboggan, but must have given way under the jerk when the toboggan and I came to rest. After that Dag must have free-fallen to the very bottom of the crevasse and been buried under falling snow. I hoped his death had been quicker than the long agonizing slide and tumble that had preceded it.

Brajj kept throwing me dirty looks as if to say why are we doing this? but I ignored him and kept pulling on the rope until we had brought Laro’s body up to the brink of the crevasse.

As we were rolling him up onto the surface at last, he twitched, gasped, and called out the name of his deity.

Now I understood Brajj. He was smarter, more rational than I at the moment. He’d probably been wondering what’ll we do if he turns out to be alive?

I just lay there on the snow for a few minutes, half dead. All the injuries I’d suffered in the fall were now making themselves obvious.

There was nothing to do but go on. Brajj was furious to have been burdened with an injured man, and kept stamping around in circles and gazing hungrily down the slope, wondering whether he should chance it alone. After a few minutes he decided to stay with us-for now.

Laro had a broken thigh, and his skull had taken a beating during the fall, creating some bloody lacerations. Between that and being buried in snow for a while, he was groggy.

One of Laro’s snowshoes still dangled from his foot. I took it apart and used its pieces to splint his leg. Then I made my sphere big and flat on the snow.

The sphere is a porous membrane. Each pore is a little pump that can move air in or out. Like a self-inflating balloon. The spring constant-the stretchiness-of the membrane is controllable. If you turn the stretchiness way down (that is, make it stiff) and pump in lots of air, it becomes a hard little pill. What I did now was the opposite. I made it very stretchy and removed most of the air. I spread my bolt flat on the snow and dragged the flaccid sphere onto it. Then I got Brajj to help me roll Laro into the middle. He screamed and cried out to his mother and his deity as we were doing this. I took that as a good sign because he was seeming more alert. I rolled him in the sphere and then wrapped the bolt loosely around that, leaving his head exposed. The whole bundle I tied with my chord. Finally I inflated the sphere a little bit while telling the bolt not to stretch. The sphere expanded to form an air bed that coccooned Laro’s whole body. The bundle was between two and three feet in diameter, and slid over the snow reasonably well, since I’d made the bolt sheer and smooth. I could never have pulled it up a slope, but going downhill ought to work.

I towed Laro and Brajj towed the toboggan. We tied ourselves together with the length of good rope that had formerly connected me to Laro, and set out in the same style as before, with Brajj going first and using his tent pole to probe for crevasses.

I tried not to think about the possibility that Dag might still be alive in the bottom of the crevasse.

Then I tried not to wonder how many other migrants’ corpses would be found strewn all over this territory if all the ice and snow ever melted.

Then I tried not to wonder if Orolo’s might be among them.

For now I’d just have to settle for making sure I wasn’t among them. I paid close attention to Brajj’s footprints. If Brajj went into another crevasse, I might try to save him-which was why he’d kept me alive. But if I went in, Laro and I were both dead. So I stepped where he stepped.

After a few hours I lost track of what was happening. Everything I had was channeled into keeping my feet moving. There’s not much point in trying to offer a description of the bleakness, the moral and physical misery. In those rare moments when I was lucid enough to think, I reminded myself that avout had been through far worse ordeals in the Third Sack and at other such times.

Since I was so groggy, I have no way of guessing when Brajj parted company with us. Laro’s voice brought me to awareness. He was screaming and fighting with the sphere, trying to get out. I told Brajj we had to stop. Hearing no answer, I looked around and discovered that he was gone. The rope that had connected us had fallen victim to his sticker. And no wonder: we were on the floor of a valley that led straight to the port, a couple of miles away, and the ground was black and burnished smooth by all of the tires and treads that had passed over it. We were on the path of the military convoy. No worries about crevasses here. So Brajj had taken off. I never saw him again.

Laro was frantic to get out. Perhaps he’d been that way for a long time. I was worried he’d hurt himself flailing around. I inflated the sphere until he couldn’t move at all, and then I knelt beside him and looked into his eyes and tried to talk some sense into him. This was monumentally difficult. I’d known some, such as Tulia, who could do it effortlessly-or at least she made it look that way. Yul simply would have bellowed into his face, used the force of his personality. But it was not a thing that came easily to me.

He wanted to know where Dag was. I told him Dag was dead, which did nothing to calm him down-but I couldn’t lie to him and I was too exhausted to devise a better plan.

The sound of engines cut through the still, frigid air. It came from up-valley. A small convoy of military fetches was headed our way-detached from the huge procession to go back and run some errand at the port.

By the time they approached within hailing distance, Laro had got a grip on himself, if hopeless, uncontrollable sobbing could be so described. I relaxed the sphere, undid the chord, and dragged him free of the bundle, then got everything stowed back in my pockets.

Those guys in the military trucks were real pros. They came right over and picked us up. They took us into town. They didn’t ask questions, at least none that I remember. Though I was not exactly in a mirthful frame of mind, I marked this down as being funny. With my simpleminded view of the Sæcular world, I’d assumed that the soldiers, simply because they looked sort of like cops with their uniforms and weapons, would act like cops, and arrest us. But it turned out that they couldn’t have cared less about law enforcement, which made perfect sense once I thought about it for ten seconds. They took Laro to a charity clinic run by the local Kelx-a religion that was strong in these parts. Then they dropped me off at the edge of the water. I bought some decent food at a tavern and slept face-down on the table until I was ejected. Standing out there on the street I felt stretched thin, diluted, as if that pale arctic sunlight could shine right through me and give my heart a sunburn. But I could still walk and I had money-the sledge driver had never collected the second half of his fare. I bought passage to Mahsht on the next outbound transport, boarded it as soon as they’d let me, climbed into a bunk, and slept one more time in that horrible suitsack.