Berd burst into tears. Sele sat down beside her and rocked her, greatcoat and all, in his arms.

  He told her he had waited on the esplanade until his feet went numb. She told him about the suicide. She wanted to tell him about his sister, Isse, and her cousins, but could not find the words to begin.

  “I saw,” she said, “I saw,” and spilled more tears.

  “It isn’t a tragedy,” Sele said, meaning the suicide. “We all die, soon or late. It’s just an anticipation, that’s all.”

  “I know.”

  “There are worse things.”

  “I know.”

  He drew back to look at her. She looked at him, and saw that he knew, and that he saw that she knew, too.

  “Oh, Sele . . . ”

  His round brown face was solemn, but also serene. “Are you still going?”

  “Yes!” She shifted so she could grasp him too. “Sele, you have to come with me. You must, now, you have no choice.”

  He laughed at her with surprise. “What do you mean? Why don’t I have a choice?”

  “They—” She stammered, not wanting to know what she was trying to say. “Th-they have been following me, Wael and Baer and Isse. They’ve been following. They want—They’ll come for you, too.”

  “I know. I’ve seen them. I expect they’ll come soon.”

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s wrong, but they frighten me so much. How can you be so calm?”

  “We did this,” he said. “We wanted change, didn’t we? We asked for it. We should take what we get.”

  “Oh, Sele.” Berd hid her face against his shoulder. He was only wearing a shirt, she realized. She could feel this chill of his flesh against her cheek. She whispered, “I can’t. It’s too dreadful. I can’t bear to always be so cold.”

  “Oh, little Berd.” He stroked her hair. “You don’t have to. I’ve made my choice, that’s all, and you’ve made yours. I don’t think, by now, there’s any right or wrong either way. We’ve gone too far for that.”

  She shook her head against him. She wanted very much to plead with him, to make her case, to spin for him all her dreams of the south, but she was too ashamed, and knew that it would do no good. They had already spun their dreams into nothing, into cold and ice, into the land beyond death. Anyway, Sele had never, ever, in all their lives, followed her lead. And at the last, she could not follow his.

  They pulled apart.

  “Come on,” Sele said. “I have your things in my room.”

  The gas jet would not light, so Berd stood by the door while Sele fumbled for candle and match. Two candles burning on a branch meant for four barely carved the shape of the room out of the darkness. It seemed very grand to Berd, with heavy curtains round the bed and thick carpets on the floor.

  “A strange place to end up,” she said.

  Sele glanced at her, his dark eyes big and bright with candlelight. “It’s warm,” he said, and then added ruefully, “It was warm. Anyway, I needed to be around to meet some of the right people. It’s such a good address, don’t you know.”

  “Better than your old one.” Berd couldn’t smile, remembering his old house, remembering the street sign under her feet and the shape in the bonfire outside.

  “Anyway.” Sele knelt and turned up a corner of the carpet. “My hostess is nosy but not good at finding things. And she’s been good to me. I owe her a lot. She helped me get you what you’ll need.”

  “The ticket?” Berd did not have enough room for air in her chest.

  “Ticket.” Sele handed her the items one at a time. “Travel papers. Letters.”

  “Letters?” She was slow to take the last packet. Whose letters? Letters from whom?

  “From your sponsor. There’s a rumor that even with a ticket and papers they won’t let you on board unless you can prove you aren’t going south only to end up a beggar. Your sponsor is supposed to give you a place to stay, help you find work. He’s my own invention, but he’s a good one. No,” he said as she turned the packet over in her hands, “don’t read them now. You’ll have time on the ship.”

  It was strange to see her name on the top envelope in Sele’s familiar hand. He had never written her a letter in her life. She stowed them away in her pocket with the other papers and then checked, once, twice, that she had everything secure. I can’t go. The words lodged in her throat. She looked at Sele, all her despair—at going? at staying?—in her eyes.

  “You’re right to go,” Sele said. “Little Berd, flying south away from the cold.”

  “I don’t want to leave you.” Not I can’t, just I don’t want to.

  “But you will.”

  She shivered, doubting, torn, and yet knowing as well as he that he was right. She would go, and he would go too, on a different journey with Isse and Wael and Baer. So cold. She hugged him fiercely, trying to give him her heat, wanting to borrow his. He kissed her, and then she was going, going, her hand in her pocket, keeping her ticket safe. Running down the stairs. Finding the beacon of the aerodrome even before she was out the door.

  Out the door. On the very threshold she looked out and saw what she had not thought to look for from the window of Sele’s room. Inside, the masquerade party was in full swing, hot and bright and loud with voices and music and smashing glass. Outside . . .

  Outside the ice had come.

  It was as clear as it can be only at the bottom of a glacier, where the weight of a mile of ice has pressed out all the impurities of water and air. It was as clear as glass, as clear as the sky, so that the stars shone through hardly dimmed, though their glittering was stilled. Berd could see everything, the carnival town frozen with every detail preserved: the tents still upright, though their canvas sagged; the shanties with the soot still crusted around their makeshift chimneys. Even the bonfires, with their half-burnt logs intact, their charcoal facsimiles of chairs and books and mannequins burned almost to the bone. In the glassy starlight Berd could even see all the little things strewn across the ground, all the ugly detritus of the end of the world, the bottles and discarded shoes, the dead cats and dead dogs and turds. And she could see the people, all the people abandoned at the last, caught in their celebratory despair. The whole crowd of them, men and women and children, young and old and ugly and fair, frozen as they danced, stumbled, fucked, puked, and died. And, yes, there were her own three, her own dears, the brothers and sister of her heart, standing at the foot of the steps as if they had been caught, too, captured by the ice just as they began to climb. Isse, and Wael, and Baer.

  The warmth of the house behind Berd could not combat the dreadful cold of the ice. The music faltered as the cold bit the musicians hands. Laughter died. And yet, and yet, and yet in the distance, beyond the frozen tents and the frozen people, a light still bloomed. Cold electricity, as cold as the unrisen moon and as bright, so that it cast the shadows of Baer and Wael and Isse before them up the stairs. The aerodrome, yes, the aerodrome, where the silver airships still hung from their tethers like great whales hanging in the depths of the clear ocean blue. Yes, and there was room at the right-hand edge of the stairs where Berd could slip between the balustrade and the still summer statue of Wael, her cousin Wael, with his hair shaken back and his dark eyes raised to where Berd still stood with her hand in her pocket, her ticket and travel pass and letters clutched in her cold but not yet frozen fist. The party was dying. There was a quiet weeping. The lights were growing dim. Now or never, Berd thought, and she took all her courage in her hands and stepped through the door.

  My darling, my beloved Berd,

  I wish I had the words to tell you how much I love you. It’s no good to say “like a sister” or “like a lover” or “like myself.” It’s closer to say like the sun that warms me, like the earth that supports me, like the air I breathe. And I have been suffering these past few days with the regret (I know I swore long ago to regret nothing, even to remember nothing I might regret, but it finds me all the same) that I have never come to be with you, your lover or your husband, in your beloved north. It’s as though I have consigned myself to some sunless, airless world. How have I let all this time pass without ever coming to you? And now it is too late, far too late for me. But I am paid with this interminable waiting. Come to me soon, I beg you. Save me from my folly. Forgive me. Tell me you love me as much as I love you . . .

  THE ENDANGERED CAMP

  ANN LECKIE

  After the terrible push to be free of the Earth was past, we could stand again. In a while, the engineers had said, everything would float, but for now we were still accelerating. We were eight in the small, round room, though there were others on the sky-boat—engineers, and nest-guardians examining the eggs we had brought to see how many had been lost in the crushing, upward flight. But we eight stood watching the world recede.

  The floor and walls of the room were of smooth, gold metal. Around the low ceiling was a pattern of cycad fronds and under this scenes from the histories. There was the first mother, ancestor of us all, who broke the shell of the original egg. The picture showed the egg, a single claw of the mother piercing that boundary between Inside and Outside. With her was the tiny figure of her mate. If you are from the mountains, you know that he ventured forth and fed on the carcass of the world-beast, slain by the mother, and in due time found the mother and mated with her. If you are a lowlander, he waited in the shell until she brought the liver to him, giving him the strength to come out into the open. Neither was pictured—the building of the sky-boat had taken the resources of both mountains and lowlands.

  On another panel was Strong Claw, her sharp-toothed snout open in a triumphant call. She stood tall on powerful legs, each foot with its arced killing claw, sharp and deadly. Her arms stretched out before her, claws spread, and her long, stiff tail stretched behind. The artists had worked with such skill that every feather could be distinguished. Behind her was the great tree that had carried her across the sea, and in the water were pictured its inhabitants: coiled ammonites, hungry sharks, and a giant mososaur, huge-mouthed enough to swallow a person down at a gulp. Before Strong Claw was forested land, full of food for the hunting, new territory for her and her daughters yet unhatched.

  A third panel showed the first sky-boat departing for the moon that had turned out to be farther away than our ancestors ever imagined. That voyage had been a triumph—the sky-boat (designed, all were ceaselessly told, by lowlander engineers) had achieved a seemingly impossible goal. But it had also been a disaster—as the mountain engineers had predicted, and the lowlanders refused to believe until the last, irrefutable moment, there had been no air on the moon. But as we had now set our sights on Mars, the artist had left off the end of the tale, to avoid ill-omen.

  The engineers had used mirrors to cast an image of the Earth on the last, blank panel of the curved wall. It was this that held our attention.

  As we watched, disaster struck. A sudden, brilliant flash whited out the image for an instant, and after that an expanding ring began to spread across the face of the world, as though a pebble had been dropped into a pond. Almost instantly a ball of fire rose up from the center of the ripple and expanded outward, obscuring it. I blinked, slowly, deliberately, sure that my vision was at fault. Still the fire grew until finally it dissipated, leaving a slowly-expanding veil of smoke.

  There was silence in the sky-boat for some time.

  Out of the speaking tube came the quiet voice of an engineer in the chamber below us. “A great stone from the void.” There are many such, it seems, but no song speaks of them, no history tells us what happens when one strikes the Earth. This would not hinder the engineers, who are full of predictions and calculations.

  “I was not informed,” said White Ring into the tube. She was facing the image, her back to us. “Why?”

  “We did not know,” came the faint voice of the engineer.

  “Do we not watch the skies?”

  “The skies are vast. The stones are dark. We might have seen it if we looked in precisely the right place, at the right time. Or perhaps not.”

  “And now?”

  Around me, not a feather stirred. “The cloud will continue to expand. The impact will leave a crater.” Here the voice hesitated. “My colleague thinks perhaps twenty-five to thirty-five leagues wide, though I believe she has miscalculated the object’s size. Perhaps forty-five to sixty leagues.” White Ring’s killing claw clicked on the floor. “I have not calculated how long it will take the cloud to disperse,” the engineer continued. “I fear it will grow to cover the whole world. There may be fires as rocks fall back down to the ground. It hit water, so—”

  “Silence!” ordered White Ring. “How far will the damage reach?”

  A moment of silence from the tube. “It depends,” came the voice, slowly, carefully. “On how thick the cloud is, and how long it stands between the Earth and the Sun. And if there are fires. And other things we haven’t calculated yet.”

  For just a moment White Ring’s feathers ruffled as though a breeze had stirred them. Nearly every other face was turned towards the view of Earth, but I looked at her, sidelong, without moving my snout. I felt the muscles in my back and my legs tense, and I forced them to relax lest the click of my largest claw on the deck betray my thoughts.

  “We must go back,” White Ring said. Snouts turned towards her in surprise. She turned her head to look behind her, and then turned fully, her daughter ducking low to avoid her tail. Others in the ring ducked and turned so that all who had faced forward could face the center of the circle. “We can stay above until the cloud disperses, and then land.”

  “Can we go back?” One of the younger females.

  “We must,” said White Ring, her tone admitting no dispute. “This venture was risk enough with the world safe behind us. If we are the only ones left alive . . . .”

  White Ring’s daughter called through the speaking tube, and an answer came back. “We might be able to, if we act soon enough. We will have to make some calculations. But . . . ”

  “Make them,” said White Ring. Her daughter eyed the rest of us, watching.

  They had told us that leaving the Earth would be difficult. Three of our number had died in the punishing climb. But all of us standing here had survived it. Could those so silent and still around me be willing to throw that away, to throw away everything we had worked for? It seemed so.

  The engineer had said If we act soon enough. A question of fuel, no doubt. If I did not speak up now, the time would be gone.

  But here was my difficulty: every other person in the room was a lowlander. The superiority of mountain optics had ensured that some of the engineers aboard were highlanders, but I was one of only two surviving who was not either an engineer or an egg tender. If I spoke now, no one else would speak in support of me, unless they were completely convinced of my argument. Or unless I killed White Ring, in which case they would likely follow me out of fear if nothing else. But as things stood, I would not be allowed even to strike.

  But I am no coward. “We must not go back,” I said.

  My neighbors sidled away, as far as they could in the cramped space, claws clicking on the metal floor. I stood face to face with White Ring.

  “I hear nothing,” said White Ring. Her killing claw tapped once, twice.

  “This ship won’t be built again,” I said, “not in our lifetimes. Look!” I gestured at the picture with one clawed finger, at the still-spreading smoke. “Will we reach Mars, or will we die having made all this effort and accomplished nothing?”

  White Ring looked around the circle, watching the faces and the demeanor of the others. I did not dare take my eyes off her to make the same survey. “I hear nothing,” she said again.

  “Coward! You disgrace our ancestors!”

  Instantly White Ring’s neck snaked forward and she snapped her teeth together a breath from my neck. I stood still as stone.

  “Will you challenge me?” White Ring hissed. “At this time? Is your ambition so great?”

  I would not allow my feathers to lift, or flutter. I would not allow a single twitch that I did not intend. “Did Strong Claw turn back?” I asked. I would have pointed to the picture, but I did not wish to move.

  “She knew all was well behind her,” said White Ring. “If none survive on Earth, and we die attempting Mars, what then?”

  “We don’t know there’s air to breathe where we’re going,” said the daughter beside White Ring, when I didn’t answer. “There was none on the moon.”

  “What a wonder this is! You lowlanders disbelieved when the engineers from the mountains said there was no air on the moon. Now you disbelieve when you are told that Mars certainly has an atmosphere.”

  “Bent light,” White Ring began, her voice scornful.

  “There is more than just the bending of light to prove it. There are plants, the astronomers have said so. We see them wax and wane with the seasons. There is no reason to think that Mars will not be much like Earth.”

  “The astronomers are not all agreed. Not even those from the mountains.”

  “But you have staked your life on it,” I pointed out.

  “While other lives were sure to continue,” said White Ring. “What if everyone else is dead?”

  “Then they are dead because Earth is now unlivable,” I said. “And in that case, why turn back?”

  “I know your ambition of old,” said White Ring. “I had not thought you would exercise it at a time like this.”

  My feathers twitched then, I couldn’t avoid it. I allowed them to tremble and rise. White Ring and her daughter watched me with malice, the other five with fear, or perhaps something else.

  The moment stretched out. Time—time might be an enemy or an ally. Prolong the contention, and the moment to turn back would have passed. Allow the return to begin, and there would be only a short space, if any at all, in which it would be possible to correct our course.

  “You call me ambitious,” I said, “and I am. I would reach Mars! Did any of us embark without a similar ambition? But now you abandon what we have all worked so hard to attain! And when I point this out, I am threatened. Why is this? If one of you,” and here I pointed around the circle, “had spoken, would this have been the response?” Had I seen movement among the others? Someone about to speak, some thoughtful twitch of feathers? “You may kill me if you like, as I am clearly outnumbered. But it will not change the truth.”