This couldn’t be happening. Mary and Bodil in the same crevasse! Drin roared in anguish, then remembered his comset. There had to be some aircraft that could fight this storm. Best turn things over to Do Tor; Drin felt he was in no emotional shape to be much help in anything.
He stuck his head over the edge again. There had to be a way down. He looked at the green splotch with both eyes—it did seem to be Mary and she wasn’t moving. Now he realized how much a part of his life she had become. Familiar, expected, a certainty. Like his gun, like the Compact, like the Ib homestead, like—he remembered—his sister.
“No, no, no!” he roared at the unfeeling wind.
She had fallen about eight charter units from him, having followed a ledge that looked too narrow for a Do’utian. But he had four strong claws and the walls were snow and ice, not stone.
Drin reared up with his head pressed against the valley wall and placed a rear claw on the ledge, testing it with his weight. It held.
The snow on the wall had been densified by freeze-thaw cycles and compressed almost to ice by the wind. He slammed a foreclaw into the packed snow, claws extended, and pulled. It seemed solid enough. He risked moving his right rear leg, stretching about an eighth of a charter unit along the ledge until he found comfortable purchase. Then he swung his tail over to the ledge; it had nothing to grip with, but could exert a little upward pressure for balance. So, hanging by his foreclaws and the one rear leg, he moved his left rear leg to where his right one had been.
So far, so good. He made another foreclaw-hold and repeated the process. He was burning energy at a tremendous rate, but felt exhilarated—he could work at near maximum efficiency with the cold polar wind taking heat away as fast as he generated it.
Thus, with his massive bulk clinging to the wall like some kind of lizard, he managed to work his way sideways toward Mary.
Halfway to where she fell he set a foreclaw only to have a great swath of snow and rock pull free and go tumbling down over the edge, leaving his right foreclaw pawing nothing as he struggled with his other three limbs to stay on the wall. The snow under his left claw started to groan, shifting slightly. He began to lose his balance, tilting outward. Instinctively he shot his tongue uphill, found a rock and clung with both hands.
The wind stung his extended tongue. It would freeze in a few beats if he didn’t do something. He brought his right leg back toward his body and stabbed his claws into the snow just beside his head, and pulled.
If the snow here fell away too, he was done. But it held. He let go of the rock and pulled his tongue in. It burned the inside of his mouth with cold—but he could still feel. He tasted old ice, bitter with volcanic ash and dust. No permanent damage, he hoped. But he would have to go back.
No. Mary was down there.
Where was that polluting aircraft?
The wind blew some snow from the slide—it was loose, obviously. Experimentally, he shoved at the pile on the ledge with his tail. An eighth-squared of a cube of the stuff fell free over the ledge. Using his tail, he brushed the fallen snow from the ledge, and discovered the small avalanche had actually given him more room for his rear feet.
It took him a macrobeat to work his way through the small avalanche, but he managed it.
Ten macrobeats later, he was nearly over Mary. He tried his comset.
Nothing.
He pulled a in big lungful of freezing air, slowly so it wouldn’t freeze his blow hole, then yelled her name, throwing a recklessly large amount of volume into the lower register. Anything that was going to go in this area, he figured, had already gone.
An impact caught him in mid-bellow, not from above, but on his lower left leg, dislodging it from its precarious clawhold. A small shadow figure appeared momentarily then vanished into the blowing snow. What?
His attention had been on Mary and his upper claws were relaxed, and set in recently loosened snow anyway. Without the left rear leg, he started sliding down. Almost immediately, his rear legs were over the edge of the crevasse, flailing at air.
He dug at the snow with great swipes of his foreclaws now, essentially trying to swim back up the snow slide. For a moment it seemed to work.
Then there was a terrible moaning groan and the entire mass of snow under him seemed to flow, sending him into weightlessness over the edge of the giant crevasse. In one last act of sanity, he triggered his emergency beacon.
Then he screamed the death scream, instinctively warning any of his kind within hearing of mortal danger. Lungs still full, he glanced off the ice wall and bounced like a rubber ball, then exhaled in a great, painful gasp.
He hit it again and instinctively clawed the wall. The ice tore at the webbing between his toes, but he slowed, and slowed. He’d almost stopped when his left foreleg caught a crack, far too suddenly. He felt a bone snap, and let go in immediate reaction to the pain. But he was almost down to the floor, the slope was much less steep, and he stumbled more than fell.
He bounced once more and belly-flopped on the snow that over the ages had filled in the bottom of the huge crack. Pollution! How could he hurt so much? The nerves of his leg screamed in pain as he fought for objectivity.
Pulling air into his lung helped calm him. Somehow, aside from the leg, he was reasonably intact. The strained muscles in his back would feel abused for several turns, but he’d been through worse.
Drin gazed up at the edge of the crevasse through gaps in the blanket of blowing snow. If there was a way down, there was a way up. Walking three-legged was just barely possible for a Do’utian. Better to rear up, he decided, and stagger on the two hind legs, human fashion. But first, find Mary.
Every bruise and strain protested as he stiffened his tail for leverage and started to rise.
A roar like an aircraft fan buzz began echoing in the crevasse, building louder and louder. Wrong somehow—but the ice walls and the howling wind distorted everything. An aircraft? In this storm? Do Tor and Go Ton finally? It seemed so. Thank providence!
Then the first chunk of ice hit him. He had time to look up and see a giant vertical column of it slowly detach itself from the wall of the crevasse and topple over right on top of him, a huge solid slab heading right for his head. He tried to move and fell, collapsing on his broken leg, his beak digging into the ice. Then an ice slab landed on his head and he lost consciousness.
In inventing Trimus English, we gave the prefix “macro” the specific meaning of eight to the third power, and the prefix “mini” the specific meaning of eight to the minus third power. These were in addition to and consistent with their ordinary usage implying the very big and the very little. They, with prefixes like di, tri, etc. for squaring, cubing, and higher powers, were also direct literal translations of the base eight terms from my native language, for which I make no apologies. Math was never my specialty, and I was grateful not to have to relearn it!
—Go Zom’s notes on the Charter and Compact of Trimus.
When Drin put his memories back together he was surprised to find that he was still around to remember anything. It was pitch dark. He was colder then he’d ever been in his life. He couldn’t feel the end of his tail. His left foreleg was a tearing, rending, agony with each breath he tried to take.
“Mary?” he groaned, in reflex. There was no hope. There was no answer.
The situation was insulting. He was of a race that had moved worlds, that had made machines that answered their every whim, that had banished age and war. What was he doing helpless under a pile of snow? He tried to roar in anger. It came out as a kind of grunt.