“And yours?”
“We were lucky. Everyone survived.”
Erin turned and surveyed the trenches. “I see you’re trying the same thing as we did.”
“You’ve done this too?”
“Yes.” Erin hesitated, then added, “I should probably tell you about our experience.”
“You’d be welcome to.” Rosalind gestured toward the tent. “Come and rest, first. How long since you’ve eaten?” Erin looked remarkably healthy for someone who’d been walking for days, but it would still be impolite not to share what they had with her.
“Oh, I’m eating right now,” Erin replied cheerfully, opening her mouth to expose a half-chewed, fibrous mass.
Rosalind was startled. “You’re eating tanglers?”
“That’s not what we called them, but yes. Just the roots. You do know the nodules are no good?”
She had to mean what Joanna had called berries, though they sprung from the tanglers’ roots, and could only be plucked easily from the walls of an animal’s burrow. Rosalind said, “That was made very clear.”
Erin poked a finger into her mouth and dislodged the mass from around her teeth, shifting it to the other side.
“What else is your group eating?” Rosalind asked. The roots seemed to take so much effort to masticate that it was hard to believe the process didn’t consume more energy than it yielded.
“Parts of the voles. The cats are too hard to catch. I know, the voles eat the nodules too, and some of their organs seem to concentrate the unpleasantness, but most of their flesh is fine.”
Rosalind had more questions, but she led her guest toward the tent. “Frida and Joanna are off on a tour of their own,” she said. “They might even have stumbled on your people by now.”
“I have a map with all the villages on it,” Erin replied. “Or I will have, once I add this place. So if you tell me which way they were going, I can tell you who they will have met first.”
They entered the tent, and everyone embraced Erin. She refused all their offers of food, and the seven of them sat down in a ring on the blankets. They had no fuel for the lamps anymore, but there was enough light from Tvíbura to let them see each other’s faces.
Once the pleasantries were out of the way, people started quizzing Erin about her village’s agricultural experiments.
“We tried putting soil in furrows in the ice,” she explained. “The first time, we did it close to the plateau, as you’ve done—to make the transport easier. But within six or seven days, there were… I think you call them ‘tanglers’… growing in all the furrows. We assumed that the seeds must have blown in on the wind.”
So much for our own efforts, Rosalind thought. But at least they’d now be spared wasting any more time on a flawed method. And she could feel the tension growing as people waited to hear about the next step: the one that actually worked.
“We repeated the whole thing much farther away,” Erin continued. “We had guards watching, day and night, to shoo the cats away, in case they came and shat seeds into our precious soil. But the same thing happened. The tanglers appeared, just as quickly as before, and nothing of our own could grow.”
“How is that possible?” Hildur protested. “Even if the wind is blowing the seeds far and wide, how could there be as many of them at a greater distance?”
“We must have brought them there ourselves,” Erin replied. “The soil must be full of them, and they’re either too small to discern, or too similar to the particles of soil to be picked out by inspection. Whatever the cats are spreading, it can’t be the only means these things have of reproducing. We’ve tried washing the soil, sieving it through fabric, tossing it in the air and only using the parts that fall at different distances—hoping the wind will separate out the seeds and leave us with something we can use. But so far, whatever we do, we either end up with useless gray dust in which nothing at all will grow… or we end up with rich, brown soil full of tanglers.”
9
Rosalind couldn’t sleep, so she left the tent and walked out across the ice. It was close to midnight, with Tvíbura almost entirely in shadow.
She paced the encampment, repeating the calculations that had kept her awake, hoping she might have made an error that she could detect now that she was fully alert. But the results remained the same. Even if the people of all six villages devoted every waking moment to digging trenches in the ice and filling them with soil, it would take at least three generations to spell out an unambiguous message in letters large enough to be read through a telescope.
Maybe a written message wasn’t necessary; any clearly artificial structure would demonstrate that the colonists were still alive. In the absence of recognizable farmland, that would still prove that there was a source of food here. But would anyone actually make the crossing from Tvíbura on no other evidence than a few baffling lines appearing in the ice? If they were desperate, if they were starving, maybe a handful of people would interpret the peculiar artefacts as signs of hope; maybe there would even be enough of them to support each other in all the tasks they’d need to perform to make the crossing safely. But it was hard to imagine an influx so great that it became self-sustaining, with the new arrivals so numerous as to add significantly to the artefacts’ drawing power. Most people would need a clear promise that a better life awaited them on Tvíburi—and most people would find that unimaginable in the absence of the kind of plants they were accustomed to eating.
She heard a rustle of fabric, and turned to see Joanna emerging from the tent.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Joanna asked.
“Possibly, but tell me anyway.”
“We need to do something with the root cuttings.”
Rosalind took a moment to understand her meaning; most of the talk about “roots” that she’d heard lately had concerned the tanglers.
“Do what with them?” They’d brought the Yggdrasil cuttings with them on the chance that, if there was a local variety that lacked some of the qualities needed to grow a second tower, the two kinds might be spliced together. The idea itself wasn’t entirely fanciful; farmers had sometimes succeeded with heterogeneous grafts for other kinds of plants. But there was no sign of any local version of the Yggdrasils at all.
Joanna said, “Drop them in a hole that takes them all the way down to the ocean.”
“Into a geyser?” Rosalind was bemused. “Even assuming that they find the conditions amenable down there—with no competitors as brutal for them as the tanglers are for the crops—how long do you imagine it would take for the tree to get its roots up to the surface?”
“I don’t know,” Joanna confessed. “Generations, for sure. But that’s no reason to put it off. If we don’t do everything in our power to make it possible to get word back to Tvíbura, people are going to go mad. It’s hard enough accepting that there’s probably no way to achieve that in our lifetimes, but at least we have the tradition of the tower-builders to fall back on: if they could work for something that they knew they wouldn’t live to see for themselves, we can do the same. It won’t be enough to make anyone content, but it might be enough to keep us from losing hope.”
Rosalind couldn’t find much comfort in this definition of hope: some small chance of the cuttings thriving in the ocean; generations for the roots to break the surface, then generations more for a second tower to be grown. She wanted her friends to join her before she died. She wanted her mother to live long enough to know that the expedition had succeeded.