Mary was a good investigator, and for once, Drin thought, a little too good. This current led over a waterfall. “Possibly. We were close, once.”
“Drin..
Drin sighed from his blow hole, almost like deflating. So she knew. But what did that have to do with anything? “We left my sister, Bodil’ib, where she died. Eons hence, she will reach the sea.”
“How did she die?”
“The memory is painful. Is it relevant?”
“Would a Do’utian keep coming back? To pay respects? Or in times of great emotional stress? Have you?”
“Privately. She is gone, but she is still there—the suffering is frozen in her body. Mary, she went out alone in a snowstorm the day I left for Monitor training, and fell into a crevasse. They found her days later. Do’utians are built for the cold and it takes us a long time to die of it. They got some nourishment down to her and she seemed to rally for a while—she recognized Gonikli. But it took too long to get the equipment there.”
“I’m sorry Drin. But there’s more, isn’t there?”
Oh, yes, there was more. How much did he dare reveal to Mary? He remembered the strange, intense warmth of her body, and how that had said, “trust me, trust me.” She had saved his life more than once. Their ancestors had evolved in wildly different environments—but a common physics and logic of sentience had done its work, or they would not be here together.
“We are in conservative circles here; can you be very careful of who you tell?”
Mary nodded. “Drin, was there a bond between your sister and Gonikli’ibida that could last after death? Could Gonikli’ibida be out there, at the glacier now, looking for some way to deal with something? With you?”
“We were immature, Mary, playing games. New to our bodies, and curious. They wanted me to play beachmaster and they would play my cows. We didn’t understand what would happen, inside, as we played these roles. It just isn’t done with one’s sister, but we didn’t mean to do it. We didn’t know what it’ was; our stuffy parents kept too much in their beaks. We weren’t mature enough—there weren’t any eggs —but Bodil became very dependent on me. Then I left. Gonikli didn’t bond as strongly with me, but she felt Bodil was her senior co-mate; that bonding can be almost as strong.”
“Her first love. Drin, I can understand that. If she’s as disturbed about your questions as you say, maybe she went back to where—did you say Bodil? That’s a human name, too.”
Drin nodded, teetering on the brink of understanding. “Bodil’ib. My sister.”
Mary continued. “Maybe Gonikli’ibida went back to where Bodil died.”
Drin nodded. Gonikli might go there in time of crisis. But...
“But why would this be a crisis for her? We are only trying to find Richard Moon.”
“She was close to both Bi Tan and Richard Moon. Richard Moon didn’t say he saw Bi Tan die, he said someone he trusted had told him.”
Now that Mary had pushed him into the sea of understanding, what lay on the bottom was obvious. “You think Gonikli was the one who told Richard Moon that Bi Tan was dead? That would be unpleasant, but less than a crisis, unless she wasn’t being truthful. But a lie like that would kill both the Kleth, including her friend. None the less, it looks like she was involved—but how?”
“We’ll have to ask her, Drin.”
“Against Borragil’ib’s will?” Drin remembered images; images of challenge and images of duty. “Very well. We should go now. He has been away from the complex and may have other duties.”
Drin looked around and thought of family versus duty, and the possibility that he would not be welcome here again.
Trirniis’s climate is similar to that of Do’utia. That is to say, a little more energetic than that of Earth. The differences are, of course, statistical, and the immigrants from temperate Earth zones who settled in the high latitudes of Trimus claimed, ruefully, that they felt at home with the tornadoes. Do’utian immigrants noted that while the storms on Trimus are of similar intensity, they last much longer. Simulation studies point to the steady input of Ember and the complex tri axial climatic map to explain the duration of polar storms. Over the years, the main belt of Do’utian settlement has moved somewhat south of original projections.
The wind made even Drin cold, and he found himself picking up his pace through the early morning gloom to generate more heat. He could smell his skin glands react to the cold; his outermost doci or so would, effectively, hibernate, but remain flexible. Mary had substituted big, wide-bottomed boots for her flippers, but otherwise wore her formfitting artificial skin with an extra power pack. Her sea mask doubled as a cold mask and she’d added a transparent, wind-impervious, hooded cape with a weighted hem. Her tiny form bent against a wind that seemed to Drin to be enough to blow her away like a Kleth.
They reached the glacier after a vigorous climb of almost an hour that left Drin at an almost comfortable temperature. It lay in a valley between two mountain ranges piled high by the spread of a polar rift to the north, and spilled into the sea-flooded caldera now occupied by Drin’s branch of the Ib, west of the dome complex. On its way to the sea, the glacier split into several huge crevasses. When it got there, it gave rise to many icebergs.
For Drin, the glacier aroused primordial feelings, terror of the heights, comfort in the smooth ice and horror in the knowledge that below the surface of this ice lay not food, but death.
Drin had not called Do Tor and Go Ton in on this yet, thinking that he and Mary had overreacted a bit around Yohin Bretz a Landend’s tourist sailing ship—to the point of embarrassment. And, he’d reminded himself, they were not now going toward a potentially armed and dangerous vessel, but a heartsick Do’utian woman who had seen one too many close friends die.
If they could find her and get her to tell her story, whatever it was, Drin was hopeful that he could smooth currents with Borragil’ib and be on his way.
The glacier had flowed several macrounits toward the bay since his sister’s death, the surface features remained very much the same—it was almost eight-squared charter units across with a hump on the west wall about two-thirds of the way toward the sea. East wall lower than the west. It was split by several large crevasses, from flowing faster in the center than at the sides. In one of these, through occasionally blinding flurries of fist-sized snowflakes, Drin found his sister.
Someone had been visiting Bodil —her body was encased in clear ice that had been kept clean of all but the most recent snow. Memories. It had been storming like this when they found her. She had broken her back in the fall, but that would have been repairable if they could only have gotten her out in time. He shook as he thought about it.
Drin had to stop there. The visitors must have taken a different route; the sides of the crevasse came too near the walls of the valley here for Drin to find an easy way. Mary went ahead.
“Mary,” Drin said at length. “There’s no sign of Gonikli, so we may as well go back.”
There was no answer.
“Mary?” Drin called and looked around. She had been standing at the lip of the crevasse near an avalanche site that looked like a possible way down not a minute ago. Drin looked around again. Her olive body suit should stand out fairly well against the white snow. Still no answer.
Fearing the worst from the wind, he eased himself closer to the edge of the huge crevasse and looked down at the wall. Ominously, it seemed to overhang a little. Far below, perhaps six times his body length, he saw a splotch of olive color. How could this happen? He wondered. Had she been so surprised that she had not even cried out? Had he been so preoccupied that he hadn’t heard? Had he felt a little shake? A quake? No, that had been his own feelings, hadn’t it?