But she had no idea how to make those things happen.
“We don’t seem to have any other use for the cuttings,” she conceded, “and if half the villages keep theirs, just in case, I can’t see any harm in trying.”
“So you’ll vote with me on this?”
“Yes.” Rosalind stopped to ponder the practicalities. “Which geyser are we talking about?”
“The closest one to the closest point to Tvíbura,” Joanna replied. “I don’t care how far I have to walk, but if the Yggdrasil is to be of any use for tower-building, we need the roots to emerge in the right position.”
“The terrain around there looked a bit tricky.” Rosalind had found the strangely sculpted ice deposits quite beautiful when she’d been gazing down at them through the telescope, but she’d never contemplated trying to scramble over them.
Joanna didn’t dispute this assessment. “So if you’re coming with me,” she said, “don’t forget to pack plenty of rope.”
The geyser rose highest around midnight and noon, dying away completely by sunset and dawn. Rosalind watched the white column ascend every morning, wondering if the glimmering haze contained a few droplets of water, or if the spray bursting out from the buried ocean froze entirely into powdered ice by the time it reached the surface. It was strange to think that the same eruptions had once been so common on Tvíbura that everyone in the world would have seen at least two or three in their lifetime, and many would have witnessed them up close. The marvel she was approaching had been entirely commonplace.
In the evenings, they often saw cats out on the ice, and by day, lizards overhead. No animal here was quite the same as anything back home, but they seemed too close to Tvíburan species to have no kinship with them at all. With plants it was another story, but perhaps the tanglers were the oldest, purest Tvíburians, and they’d conquered their territory long before any Tvíburan seed tried to gain a foothold. Rosalind could not imagine a cat being flung from world to world by any means and ending up alive, but if ancient lizards had flown in the skies of Tvíbura when its own air was thicker, it was not inconceivable that they could have survived the crossing.
By the fourth day of their journey, the geyser was beginning to resemble an ephemeral version of the tower: a white streak bisecting the horizon and stretching toward the zenith, tapering to invisibility long before it actually came to an end. There was a faint, low rumble in the ice that presaged its appearance, catching Rosalind’s attention just in time for her to follow the top of the fountain as it rushed into the sky.
Though the column of ice-dust came and went, it rose from a permanent base. It was hard to discern when the geyser was flowing, but in the late afternoon, when the sun had moved on to squeeze the ocean out through other vents, a low, broad cone of ridged and jagged ice emerged from the haze.
On the morning of the sixth day, the hard, flat surface of the ice field, compressed by time and worn smooth by wind and dust, began to acquire a smattering of fragile encrustations, shaped more like delicate sculptures than anything that belonged to the realm of geology. Rosalind did her best to avoid them, but as they grew more common she grew impatient with the need to weave a complicated path around them, and started crunching them underfoot.
“Why don’t they just lie flat?” Joanna asked, irritated but still curious. She squatted down to inspect one of the deposits. “You know these things are mostly thin air? They’re like shrubs sprouting ever finer branches, taking up space without actually containing much ice. But I don’t know what makes the ice from the geyser so special that it doesn’t fall straight to the ground.”
Rosalind pondered this. “The ice dust might fall straight to the ground, but if there’s vapor it could condense around whatever’s already there.”
Before long, there was no unencrusted ground remaining; everywhere they trod, ice crumbled beneath their boots. And with each step, they found themselves sinking a little deeper, demolishing ever taller structures before their soles ended up on solid ice and they were left ankle-deep in the surrounding deposits. But then, even more disconcertingly, the lower portions of the ice-shrubs began to resist their weight—with the upper parts still collapsing, leaving them perched on the jagged remnants.
“How did people ever do this, back on Tvíbura?” Joanna wondered.
“What makes you think they were ever stupid enough to try?” The view from on high had been misleading; Rosalind had been prepared to face a craggy landscape built of solid ice, but no amount of rope was going to render this terrain traversable.
“I wouldn’t call it stupid,” Joanna protested. “How could you know there were cracks in the ice going all the way down to the ocean, and not want to take a look? And just because we’re unprepared, it doesn’t mean they were.”
Rosalind could recall children’s stories where people both innocent and wicked had been cast into the chasms by their antagonists. But those tales had been woefully light on detail about the method of approach.
Joanna cried out in pain, and spread her arms to stay balanced as she tried to take the weight off her right foot.
“How bad is it?” Rosalind asked.
“It stabbed through the sole of my boot, but I don’t think it went far into my foot.”
Rosalind pictured the two of them walking with Joanna’s arm across her shoulder; anywhere else it would have been the right thing to do, but here it was only likely to make things worse.
Joanna raised her foot and brought it down again slowly, angled slightly.
“We need to get back on solid ground,” Rosalind said.
“I’m not giving up!” Joanna replied angrily.
“I never said we should. But you need to put a bandage on that. And then we need to find a better route.”
As they were retracing their steps, Rosalind heard the usual rumbling and felt the wind rising up, blowing toward her from the ice field. She turned to see the geyser ascending; they were so close now that the column of white haze blotted out a third of the sky. As she raised her eyes toward the vanishing point, it looked as if the torrent of ice dust was tumbling down, falling toward Tvíbura—as if their dying home was reasserting its power. But Tvíbura had nothing to do with it, and even the sun was cheating: squeezing the trapped, subterranean ocean, raising the pressure in one direction and lowering it another. Down was still down, and no quirk of gravity was going to lift her up off this accursed ground and drag her into the sky.
She looked down again and kept walking gingerly across the perilous surface. After a while, she felt an odd sensation on her skin; she inspected her palms, and saw a faint, branched pattern catch the light. The fine coating of ice cracked and splintered as she flexed her hands. She blinked, and felt the same thing happening on her eyelids.
They set up camp out on the ice field, and Joanna rested her bandaged foot. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take us to learn to repair boots with anything Tvíburian,” she lamented. “Did you see the fabric Hildur wove from tangler fibers? After one day wearing that I think it would take most of your skin off.”
“We’ll learn how to treat the fibers to make them softer,” Rosalind asserted, trying to keep them both optimistic. “And we still haven’t cataloged all the less common plants. Nobody made the plants on Tvíbura for our benefit; we just discovered ways to use them, over time. It will be the same here.”
“Maybe.”
The next morning, they left their tent standing and set off in a broad arc around their target, hoping that a combination of influences—the prevailing winds, the topography of the ice field, and the shape of the chasm itself—might direct the falling plume of ice dust and water vapor in such a manner that a path was left clear. But while the edge of the region plagued by encrustations moved closer to the chasm for a while, it soon reversed direction and forced them away again.