Alex knew that rivers were free-flowing streams of water propelled by gravity rather than pressure. He had seen pictures. He could even close his eyes and remember them. He had swum in one once, a majestically slow stream with banks choked by trees, as close to weightlessness as he had come in those days. But memory did not prepare him for the sight of the Red River from atop the Dakota Glacier.
Sherrine stopped the sledge at the head of a vast ramp of ice while Thor and Steve probed ahead for crevasses. Mike pointed downward. "There she is," he said. "The Red River of the North. It carries warmer water from the south into New Lake Aggaziz. If it weren't for the river and the rectenna farm, Winnipeg would be under the Ice by now."
Alex looked where he pointed. The valley was partially filled in, with ice and snow forming a broad shallow U. The river itself gleamed a perfect silver, the sunlight dancing on it where it showed between the choking ice floes. At first the river seemed merely large; but the nearby hills and ice banks gradually brought it into scale in his mind. The largest free-flowing stream he had seen in recent years was when the laundry basin in the daycare center had plugged up and the rinse water overflowed. He'd gotten three kinds of hell over it and spent a day and a half sponging loose globules out of the air. What he saw now was vast beyond belief. Hundreds of liters of water, at the very least!
He shivered, and not from the cold. Even the trip across the glacier had not prepared him for this sight. The white sky and white land had blended together, destroying all sense of distance. He had halfway convinced himself that he was in a small, sterile room. Now an immense vista opened below him, and--oddly--he felt more dwarfed than during an EVA.
Sherrine must have seen him studying the river because she asked him what he thought.
Alex shook his head. "I've never seen anything so big." He laughed nervously. "In fact, I'm feeling a touch of agoraphobia."
"You're kidding," said Mike. "You live in orbit. You should be used to wide open spaces."
"Well, yes and no," Alex answered him. He kept his gaze fixed on the panorama below him, forcing his mind to accept it. "Inside the habitats, everything is cramped; outside, everything is so vast you can't even relate to it. Life consists of things you can reach out and touch and things you could never touch in a lifetime of reaching. Somehow this intermediate scale seems much bigger.
Sherrine laughed. "You should see the Mississippi."
"He may," said Mike. "When the Great Ice builds up enough weight, it'll tip the North American Plate and the Mississippi'll start running north. I'd hate to be in California when that happens. The whole tectonic boundary'll go at once." He dismounted from the sledge and trudged across the Ice to where Bruce Hyde stood watching the skiers through a pair of binoculars.
Alex turned to Sherrine. "Is he always like that?" he asked.
"Mike? Sure. We call him the 'Round Mound of Profound.' " She was perched tailor-fashion atop the snowmobile engine housing, taking advantage of the break to warm herself from the engine heat. "He'll talk about anything and everything. Sometimes he even knows what he's talking about."
Alex shook his head. "Why do you put up with it?"
She gave him a look of surprise. "Fen are a tolerant bunch. You'd be shocked at some of what we put up with. Besides, every now and then he comes up with something useful."
"So, were to now?" he asked. It was irritating to sit bundled in the sledge while others took charge. He knew he should be used to that. MacLeod do this. MacLeod do that. Don't forget to clean up. Help the kids put their toys away. Try to be useful for a change. But piloting Piranha had wakened something. For a short time he had been making the decisions. Poor ones maybe; but his decisions.
Sherrine twisted and faced the river valley. Directly east was the sheer wall of another glacier, higher than the one they were on. "Over there," she said, pointing. "The Minnesota Glacier." For a time she stared silently into the valley. Then, "When I was a little girl, the Red was a 'mean and cantankerous river.' It was either too high or too low. Mostly too low. Filled with sandbars and driftwood. And, oh God, the mosquitoes! They were this big!" She held her hands out an improbable length. "The riverbanks were lined with thick strands of chokeberry and pussywillow, some box elder and elm, even a little cottonwood here and there." She sighed. "It's all gone now. Living in the Minneapolis heat sink, it's easy to forget how much has already been swallowed up under tons of ice. The trees, the fish, even the damn mosquitoes. Whole environments. Soon, the river will be gone, too. It'll freeze and become just another tongue of the glacier."
"So fast," she said. "It came on so fast. Positive feedback. Once it gets started, it runs away before you know it's begun." She turned and looked at him over her shoulder; gave a little shrug. "Sometimes it gets me down, you know what I mean?"
Bruce and Mike were walking back to the sledges, waving their arms. Sherrine and Doc resumed their seats in the snowmobiles. "It's ironic, don't you think," she asked him before starting the engine, "that the biggest environmental disaster in history was caused by environmentalism?"
The Valley was as quiet as a Christmas postcard scene. Everything was shrouded in a blanket of light powdery snow. There were ghostly hummocks from which protruded the odd chimney or tree branch. Steve spotted an automobile embedded in the side wall of the glacier itself, its tail end protruding several meters past ground level.
Alex remembered reading about the mammoths found frozen in the Siberian glaciers of an earlier ice age and wondered what future generations would make of this relic when and if the Ice released its grip.
Thor shucked his skis, climbed the ice wall, and pierced the car's gas tank from underneath with an ice pick. Using a funnel attached to a syphon hose, he refilled one of the depleted jerry cans with what gasohol remained in the tank.
So easy. With gravity to help, the fuel didn't have to be pumped; it just streamed toward the Earth's center. But why were Sherrine's fists clenched into tight balls while she watched Thor work?
He asked. She said, "If he slips, he could break his neck."
Right. It was just as well that he was strapped into the sledge. Free to help, he'd be worse than useless. He'd be an embarrassment. Thirty years of conditioned reflexes could not be forgotten overnight. If it had been him scavenging the gasohol, he would have tried to jump over to the car and stand on the ice wall. You can't stand on walls in a gravity field, Alex. The car didn't just drift there, it must have been lifted and held by the ice. And, if Thor lost his grip, he would not simply float away in a slow spin; he would accelerate to the ground. It did not seem a terribly long way to fall, but what did he know about falling?
When they set forth again, Thor lagged behind a bit as if reluctant to leave. He kept glancing back over his shoulder. Then he set his poles and pushed off hard, racing past Steve Mews, who had taken the point. Steve gave him a curious glance as he slid past, but did not quicken his own deliberate pace to catch up.
I-29 was poorly maintained. It had been plowed in places, but long stretches had been engulfed by the Dakota Glacier just as the car had been. Alex could see where another highway--US 83--had been cleared as an alternate route wherever the interstate was impassable.
"They don't spend as much effort on this road as they do on I-94, "Mike explained. "There are only a couple of towns in the Valley still open"--he wave a mittened hand north--"and only Winnipeg at the dead end."