Or was I? I suddenly realized that Saskia had just kicked the props out from under my reason for leaving. She had shown me why my dreams were haunting me so, and if my nap was any indication then I doubted if they would come back. Even if they did, a couple of sessions with a good analysis program would probably exorcise them again. I could stay on Glacia if I wanted to. I could finish what I’d started.
Right now that seemed like the most positive step I could take. Afterward I could work on rebuilding my life, but first I could honor my commitments.
The glacier grew steeper, and the radar started picking up fractures which I had to maneuver around, but even so the driving felt easier. I was carrying a lot less baggage now.
I started seeing more and more rocks in the ice, strung out in long parallel lines running up the canyon. Medial moraines, the seams where different ice flows came together somewhere up ahead. Each one meant a fork in the path, but the Nereid’s map kept me on the right glacier, and after a while I could tell where to drive just by the different texture of the ice. The one I wanted was old, fed by the polar ice cap. Where the snow had weathered away I could see down into it for several meters.
I stopped the crawler at one point and got out for a closer look. The whole inside of the glacier glowed softly with the greenish light of ancient ice. There was hardly a bubble or an opaque spot as far as I could see. The rocky floor of the canyon was lost in the depths, hundreds of meters below, but it seemed to me as if the ice went on forever.
I raised up, and realized I could stand in the wind without holding onto anything. I had to be near the top. I had climbed up into air that was just starting its long descent.
The end came abruptly. I wound my way slowly up through a wide curve to the left, looking nervously at the radar for crevasses, when I glanced up and saw ahead of me a flat expanse of ice like the surface of a frozen ocean. A few promontories of rock stuck up between me and the ice cap; mountain peaks buried to their chins in the ice I picked my way around the last of them and drove out onto the north polar plateau.
Saskia still didn’t answer my radio call. No matter. I was only a few hours away now.
I could feel the anticipation rise in me as I drove. The emotions that I should have felt when I came to Glacia were taking hold of me now: a sense of adventure, and of wonder, of heading off into the unknown. Who was this Saskia, this woman who could make me see my own mind better than I could myself? She had made me see a lot of things, made me feel for the first time since I’d been here. She’d awakened something I’d thought had burned out when I left Roxanne.
I wondered why she had come to Glacia. She had never gotten around to telling me her story.
And suddenly I knew. It only made sense one way: Saskia was Roxanne. Of course! How could I have missed it? Garbled voice Or no, I should have picked it up immediately. If she hadn’t deliberately altered her speech patterns, I would have. But it was her, it had to be. She knew me better than anyone, maybe better than I knew myself. She knew I would eventually regret leaving her, but I’d let my arrogance and pride send me on a oneway trip. I could never go back to her—but she could come to me.
Oh yes, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. She couldn’t know for sure if I was ready to forgive her, so she had planned to spend six months just out of reach, wearing down my resistance until I begged her to take me back, but the crash and the realization that I was leaving Glacia had made her change her plans. When she’d realized that I couldn’t identify her by voice, she’d decided to teach me my lesson the fast way.
She’d succeeded. I didn’t care about What’s-his-name anymore; she’d left him for me.
It was all I could do to keep the crawler down to sixty. I wanted to get there now, hold her in my arms again, smother her with kisses. But this would be a really stupid time to fall into a crevasse, now when all the wrongs in the Universe had suddenly been righted.
So I drove carefully, and a few hours after I emerged onto the ice cap, I saw a glint of silver on the horizon. It grew as I approached until it dwarfed the crawler: the shuttle resting at the end of a trench of plowed snow and ice. That was normal, though. The pilots usually skidded them in when they landed on ice, to avoid melting a puddle with the jets. I looked for other signs of a crash, but the stubby wings and tail fins were still intact. In fact, the shuttle hardly looked damaged at all. It was evidently made of tougher stuff than I’d thought.
I drove around it a couple of times before I pulled in beside the airlock, but there were no signs of life outside, and the cockpit was too high for me to see into. I didn’t care; in a moment I would be face to face with Roxanne again.
The wind was hardly more than a breeze when I stepped out of the crawler. I crossed the few meters to the airlock, listening to the squeak of my boots in the fractured ice and snow. The shuttle had come to rest with the door about chest high. I raised my hand to open it, but it swung inward before I connected, and I stood there like a statue with my hand extended upward toward a complete stranger.
She was at least a foot too short, with dark hair and skin, brown eyes, and a thin, angular face.
“You’re not Roxanne,” I gasped when I got my breath back. She stared at me as if I’d spoken a foreign language, and if she replied then I don’t remember it because I suddenly knew where Roxanne was. Horrified, I leaped into the airlock and pushed past the imposter into the shuttle.
“Roxanne?”
“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” she demanded, slamming the door behind me.
“Looking for my wife,” I told her, but I stopped just inside the airlock’s inner door. The shuttle was in just as good shape inside as out. No cargo broken loose, no smell of shorted electronics, no red lights glowing on the control panels. And no injured pilot. Just a row of empty passenger chairs behind the two control couches.
“What’s going on here?” I demanded. “Where’s Roxanne?”
“Roxanne’s not here,” she said, softly, as if talking to a wild animal. “I’m sorry if I led you to think she was. I didn’t mean to do that.”
I turned back around to look at her. “Well what the hell did you mean to do, then?”
“Force you to confront your guilty conscience,” she answered. “Make you realize where your dreams were coming from.”
I looked back into the shuttle, all its equipment apparently in perfect working order. “You’re the ship’s counselor, aren’t you?” I asked.
“That’s right. And the shuttle pilot. We tend to double up our skills when we can.”
“This whole thing was a setup,” I said. “Applied psychology, frontier style.”
“That’s right.”
I sat down heavily in one of the passenger chairs. “Then Roxanne isn’t on the starship either, is she?”
She shook her head. “No, she’s not. Why did you think she would be?”
I struggled to find the words to explain it to her. “She has to be. That’s the only way it can work.”
She came up beside me and rested a hand on my shoulder. “It’s going to have to work without her, because she’s not here.”
I looked away from her, out through the windshield at the brilliant white ice. “She will be,” I said. “If not on this ship, then the next one, or the one after that.” She would come for me. I knew she would. She had to. She still loved me, and I still loved her. It might take her a while to realize that, but I would be here, waiting for her, no matter how long it took.