The cool breeze she’d been longing for suddenly arrived, sending her clothes fluttering. She saw the glider’s shadow racing over the ice, unable to outrun its pursuer, and she braced herself for the inevitable meeting.
The runners struck the ground, sliding forward at an impossible speed. Rosalind stared down at the ice, terrified that the frame would break apart while she was moving so fast that the abrasive surface would take all her skin off the instant she touched it. But if anything, the ride kept growing smoother. Maybe the runners had grown so hot that they were simply melting away the rough patches. But if the smallest obstacles could vanish, anything larger would still be fatal.
She kept her body rigid, gripping the handle bars tightly but prepared to reach out and grab one of the bracing rods if the glider deformed and the structure betrayed her.
The betrayal never came. Friction did its work, uninterrupted, and the glider came to a halt, intact.
Rosalind unstrapped herself and knelt on the ground, trembling. Then she crawled out from under the glider and surveyed her surroundings.
The ice field stretched almost as far as she could see in most directions, though if she squinted at the horizon she could make out one of the geysers she’d noticed from on high, and some hills to the north. Tvíburi’s orbit had carried the whole world westward beneath her as she approached through the void, so she’d expected to land well east of the prime meridian; once she explored those hills, she could confirm exactly where she was.
The sun had moved a short way past Tvíbura, but every part of the home world that she could see was still in night. There was something comforting about the utter familiarity of the configuration; she could have looked up on any other afternoon and seen a near-identical sight. Nothing was back-to-front here, nothing was reversed or deranged, on its own terms. By day she saw Tvíbura’s night, and her east was Tvíbura’s west—but if two friends standing face-to-face could accommodate the meaning of left and right, the cartographic version should cause no greater confusion.
Something small and dark in the sky caught her attention. For a moment she wondered if it might be one of the gliders from the tower, but its motion was both too slow and too complicated.
As the thing came lower, she realized that it was a kind of lizard. But instead of holding its limbs outspread, stretching the membrane between them to act as a natural glider, it was moving them in a way that was making the membrane flutter. The action looked bizarre, and utterly counterproductive, but rather than sending the creature plummeting, these strange flutters seemed to be controlling its flight. And when it dropped toward her, instead of continuing to the ground—as every lizard she’d ever observed before would have been compelled to do—it rose up into the air again in a wide, helical trajectory, ascending so high that it disappeared from sight.
Rosalind began weeping with joy. Not only was the air here breathable, there were animals—strange, vigorous animals, who evidently suffered no lack of food. Whatever the absence of grasslands meant, this world had to be far from barren.
And they’d come with seeds, they’d come with tools, they’d come with generations of farmers’ knowledge. All this time, Tvíburi had been waiting to feed her sister’s children.
7
By sunset, five members of the expedition had joined Rosalind at the base of the hills. Anya had chanced on one of the supply drops along the way, and used the enclosed cart to drag the crate with her. The contents included blankets and a small tent, so they set up the tent and crowded in for the night.
There was no sign of Sigrid or Joanna, but Rosalind wasn’t too worried yet. The protocol “head for the nearest landmark to the north” had sent six of them from the ice field to the same hills, but it was not a foolproof recipe for convergence—and when the six who’d met up so far had done their best to mark their own landing sites on a map, it had been clear that chance variations in atmospheric conditions had had as much of an effect on where people hit the ground as the timing of their departure and the systematic libration of the two worlds. It wouldn’t be hard to guess the most likely places where the missing pair might have ended up, and if they followed the rules and waited to be found by a search party sent by the majority, everyone would be reunited before long.
Sleep proved impossible, but Rosalind resisted the temptation to walk out of the tent and start exploring. Many of the plans they’d made together before departing were sure to prove ill-conceived, but she wasn’t going to start her new life with a frivolous rebellion against the sensible consensus that everyone should rest and regain their strength on the first night after the journey.
So she settled for exploring from her blanket: pondering the strange smell of the new world, the effort it took to breath the thicker air and the greater reward it offered, the unfamiliar insect chirps, the deeper tones of the wind.
In the middle of the night, it started raining. No one had thought to set up a container to catch the ethane, so Rosalind went out and did it herself.
When she checked, around dawn, the container was almost three-quarters full—more than enough to keep them all healthy for days. She looked across the ice field and saw two figures in the distance, approaching slowly, arms around each other’s shoulders.
She ran to meet them. Joanna was uninjured, but Sigrid had broken her foot.
“How bad is it?” Rosalind asked, stepping in to support her on the other side to Joanna as they continued on toward the camp.
“It’ll heal,” Sigrid insisted. “It’s a clean break, it just needs a splint.”
“All right.” They had splints, bandages, and disinfecting ointments in every crate.
When Sigrid had been tended to, they left her in the tent to rest and began their sweep of the area to try to locate the remaining supply drops. Rosalind strode across the ice, diligently scanning the ground ahead for anything from an undamaged glider to the sparsest trail of debris, fighting the urge to keep looking up to check that it really was Tvíbura above her.
She was hungry, but that was more out of habit than need. The food they’d brought would have to be rationed carefully, with one meal every second day, but the air alone gave her a sense of vigor.
Around mid-morning, she found one of the supply drops. The glider was intact, apart from a small tear in one panel. She disassembled it and stacked the panels on top of the crate. As she started back toward the camp, she saw another of the flying lizards wheeling above her.
By noon, the travelers had recovered seven crates in total. By nightfall, eleven. They took a vote and decided unanimously to move on to the next stage of the plan; if they ended up desperately short of anything, they could always come back and search again for the twelfth crate.
But Rosalind was hoping that the glider in question had torn itself apart high above the ice field, leaving its cargo to plummet to the ground far short of all the other landing sites. Their luck could not be perfect, and if the cost of that was a broken foot for Sigrid and one missing box of supplies, that would leave her much less nervous than eight travelers entirely unscathed, twelve crates recovered, and some unknown price yet to be paid.
The nearest soil deposit was about two days’ walk north-west of the hills. They decided to send an advance party of four, traveling light, rather than lugging all of their supplies to a destination that might turn out to be unsuitable. Sigrid willingly forfeited her place, then the rest of them drew lots. Kate, Joanna, Rosalind and Anya picked the red tokens.