It was still early when they set out. As they skirted around the base of the hills, Rosalind found herself shooing away mites—or some kind of tiny black insect that fled from her approaching hand, but was too numerous for this discouragement to have much effect. Unlike the ones back home, none seemed to want to bite Tvíburans, but they were still curious enough to spend time exploring the foreigners’ skin, and however many got the message that there was nothing palatable for them here, they clearly had no ability to share that knowledge with the rest of the swarm.
“What are they eating?” she wondered. She had yet to see anything that she recognized as vegetation.
“Each other?” Kate suggested.
“Very funny.”
“There must be something growing up in the hills,” Anya decided. “Some fungus that can draw nutrients out of the rock. Or maybe there are patches of soil that blew in and got trapped.”
Joanna coughed, then burst out laughing.
“What?” Kate demanded.
“I think I just ate one of the insects.” She probed the inside of her mouth with her tongue, then added, “Yeah, it went down, and it’s not coming back. So if I’m still alive tomorrow, we’ll know what we can use for food if we ever get desperate.”
They set up camp at nightfall, with their destination a smudge on the horizon. Rosalind was surprised that they’d spotted it so early; either they’d walked faster than she’d expected, or the mass of soil rose even higher above the ice than she’d estimated when she’d examined its shifting shadow through the telescope.
Halfway through the night, she woke to the sound of something pushing against the tent. She tried to clear her head, wondering if it might have been the wind. Then she heard it again. The fabric wasn’t rustling in the breeze. It was being prodded.
The light of Tvíbura coming through the weave of the tent was bright enough to show her a small inward bulge in the wall, close to the ground, but this offered no real clues about the would-be intruder. Rosalind woke her companions, and took a knife from her pack.
She unlaced the entrance and stepped out. As she came around to the side of the tent, she saw a low, dark shape fleeing across the ice, moving with a rapid, elegant lope, heading north-west.
Joanna appeared beside her.
“Did you get a look?” she asked Rosalind.
“It wasn’t very big. Maybe some kind of cat.”
“Curious enough to give something strange and motionless a poke,” Joanna mused, “but too shy to stick around when an animal of our size emerges. If they’re the kind of neighbors we’re going to have, I can live with that.”
“Let’s hope that it’s our strangeness they’re shy of,” Rosalind replied. “Not a resemblance to something they’ve already learned to fear.”
Their ancestors had hunted Tvíbura’s predators to extinction, but that battle had relied on numbers and resources that could not be mustered at short notice here. Still, all they’d seen so far were a few lizards, aloof in the sky, some insects disinclined to bite them, and one timid cat. Rosalind lowered the knife, which she’d been holding up instinctively. One more day’s walk, and they might at least discover what lay at the very bottom of the food chain.
As they drew nearer to their destination, it resolved into a high plateau. The hills where they’d met probably hadn’t been much taller, but the color of this material was completely different: a rich brown, just like the most coveted soil back home. The gray of the hills here matched, almost exactly, the gray of the hills and mountains on Tvíbura, so why should other comparisons not hold? Rosalind couldn’t explain why a giant mound of soil with no grass to bind it hadn’t simply blown away, but she refused to believe that they were headed toward nothing but a useless slab of rock.
By mid-afternoon the wind was growing dustier, and the ice around them less pristine. Rosalind ran a finger over the ground then put it in her mouth; it tasted of soil. If she could breath Tvíburian air, belched up from Tvíburian oceans, what was to stop the geysers here from delivering soil that the plants of her home world could feed upon?
The closer they came to the plateau, the less it looked like desiccated, ancient rock. Kate said, “That’s ripe for farming. I can smell it!”
Joanna broke into a run, and this time Rosalind joined her. They sprinted together over the brown muddy ice, shouting exuberant taunts at each other as they took turns gaining the lead.
When they’d almost reached their destination, Rosalind stopped and glanced back toward Kate and Anya, who were proceeding at their usual unhurried pace. She felt slightly foolish, but she didn’t care. She had no more patience left.
She turned to examine the steep incline ahead. Where the approach to the plateau met the ice, the soil had spilled out and left a thin, loose coating, but once it started to rise it became pitted and clumpy, not at all like the side of a sandpile. She caught up with Joanna at the base of the slope.
“Are these some kind of roots?” Joanna wondered, squatting down to examine the tangle of pale, fibrous strands that poked out through the soil.
“That’s what they look like,” Rosalind agreed. “But the roots of what?”
They started up the slope, supporting each other, judging each step carefully as they negotiated the treacherously porous surface. The soil kept crumbling beneath their feet, but never catastrophically; their weight seemed to be collapsing a succession of small, air-filled spaces, but the roots were so tightly woven through the soil that it was impossible to start an avalanche.
When they came to an opening that might have been either a cavern formed by chance from a gap in the roots, or the mouth of a burrow dug by an animal, they skirted around it; this wasn’t the time to start pestering the neighbors. The ascent was growing arduous, but Rosalind had no intention of resting or retreating. There was not much daylight remaining, and she did not trust the light of Tvíbura to reveal everything they needed to know.
Finally, they staggered up onto the top of the plateau. The surface ahead of them stretched into the distance, roughly level as far as Rosalind could see, but as she stepped gingerly forward it was clear that it was no smoother or less porous than the slope. She knelt down and probed the ground with her fingers. The “roots” were still tangled with the soil, but they seemed oblivious to their change of circumstance. There were no stems, or flowers, or leaves protruding from them into the air; in the distance, the ground looked lifeless, just as it had through the telescope from Tvíbura, but each time Rosalind took a few more steps and checked again, she found the same tough, pale filaments locking up the soil.
Joanna said, “So this is Tvíburi’s natural vegetation? Its idea of grassland?”
“Apparently.” Rosalind didn’t think these strands could be something like Yggdrasil roots—part of an organism that drew its nourishment from below the ice, and which had merely trapped the soil by chance. This plant—or colony of plants—was living off the bounty that the geysers had rained down onto the ice, stabilizing it much as the grasses on Tvíbura would have done, but feeding so well on the soil itself that it had no real interest in sunlight.
“So how do we clear a field, out of this?” Joanna asked. “A scythe, a plow?”
Rosalind took the knife from her pack and knelt down again. There was so much soil here: enough for a thousand farms. And nothing to fight the crops for their view of the sky. But when she plunged her knife into the ground, it was impossible to move the blade sideways. The soil’s existing tenants—invisible from a few strides away, let alone from across the void—were nonetheless so numerous, and so strong, that it was like trying to carve into solid rock.