2
Freya stood outside the meeting hall, hugging herself in a vain attempt to ward off the chill of the night air, gazing in through the windows at the crowd gathered in the lamplit room.
Britt emerged. “I was wondering where you’d gotten to. We’re ready for you.”
“All right.”
“Don’t look so worried! We always treat our guests with respect,” Britt assured her.
Freya followed her into the hall. There were about eighty people present—mostly standing, with a few seats for the elderly and infirm. At least that was likely to discourage most of her audience from dozing off, while forcing her to put her case as succinctly as possible. If she kept people on their feet too long, their patience would run out very quickly.
She took the speaker’s position at the front of the hall. “Thank you for welcoming me into your village,” she began. “And thank you for coming here tonight, to hear the reasons for my visit.”
Freya had been intending to open with a reminder about the diminishing yields that everyone was facing, but as she took in some of the gaunter figures in front of her, it suddenly felt both superfluous, and too bleak a beginning. She wanted her potential allies thinking about their own strengths, as much as their problems—and something her host had told her over breakfast had remained with her all day.
“I believe that many young people in this village, before settling into adult life, follow the tradition of the Great Walk: taking thirty days to trek the whole way around Tvíbura. I must confess that I’ve never made that journey myself, though I expect to cover a similar distance soon, as I travel back and forth seeking help with the endeavor that I’m here to talk about tonight. But since so many of you have the experience of setting out from your home one day, heading west, vowing never to turn around until you find yourself back where you started… that seems like the perfect measure of just how great a feat any one of us can accomplish. One and a half million strides! When I speak those words, it sounds impossible. But you know that it isn’t. All of you here have done it, or know someone who has.”
She paused to gauge the effect of her words. The reception so far appeared friendly, but some people were already fidgeting; they had better things to do than listen to her flattery.
“One and a half million strides,” she said, “is twice the distance from this village to the nearest point on the surface of Tvíburi! And I’m here to ask for your support to make a new kind of Great Walk possible, perhaps for the great-grandchildren of the youngest people here in this room. I want to start growing a mountain of ice that will reach up toward Tvíburi, as the first step toward making it possible for our descendants to travel there, live there, and farm there, almost as easily as they would walk to new farmland on our own world.”
Some people were gawping incredulously now, but others were smiling at the audacity of the scheme, and no one was fidgeting anymore.
Freya described the plateau she’d found out on the ice field, then sketched her plans for a faster-growing, artificially sculpted version. “We would need to make this mountain hollow, both to keep it light and to provide a route for travelers once the air out on the slope became too thin. But we would also need to partition it, building floors along the way to catch the air that the roots release, lest it all fall to the bottom and leave the upper reaches of the mountain no different from the uninhabitable void.” She was honest about the uncertainties, both in the construction process, and the ultimate usefulness of the result. “Will there be a safe way to fall from such a height, on to Tvíburi? We can’t know that, until we’ve tried to fall on to Tvíbura from a similar height. Will there be Yggdrasils on Tvíburi with roots rising up through the ice, allowing us to grow a twin for this mountain and bridge the gap in comfort? We can’t know that, until the bravest of our descendants have set foot on that world to learn the answer for themselves.”
She stopped and asked for questions. For a moment everyone in the audience seemed dazed, and as they broke their polite silence and began to talk among themselves, Freya prepared herself for the usual objections. Surely the roots would stop growing? Surely the mountain would topple to the ground?
“You say the mountain might crack the ice beneath it, bringing new geysers?” an elderly woman asked.
“Yes. That’s always possible.”
“But you’d be taking steps to spread the load, and to make the mountain as light as you can?” The woman’s tone was puzzled, verging on reproachful.
“Yes,” Freya admitted. “Some of my friends have chosen the opposite tactic: they aim to build a mountain that works like a pick, with its weight concentrated on the smallest foundations possible. They hope to raise it at the western setting point, where Tvíburi does nothing to lessen the mountain’s weight.”
“Tell them to come here,” the woman replied. “What we need are fresh geysers, not some nonsense about a ladder to the sky. I’d happily vote for my farm to help feed them.”
“I understand,” Freya said. “But they’ve chosen a place where the gravity will give them an advantage.” In fact, they would have gained even more weight at the poles, but the selection of the site was further complicated by the way the sun tugged on the ocean; at the poles, it was never pulling water toward the surface. “They’re not going to make their job harder by trying the same thing here.”
“Then perhaps we’ll do it ourselves,” the woman retorted. “We’re not afraid of work, and the world can’t have too many geysers.”
“That’s true,” Freya agreed cautiously. “But the trouble is, we don’t know if it’s possible to create them that way. If it turns out not to be, all the work will have been for nothing, and it might be too late to try anything else.”
A younger woman, further back in the crowd, joined the discussion. “Then raise a mountain here that does its best to break the ice, and if it fails, it will still be in the right place to reach toward Tvíburi.”
“It’s not that simple,” Freya replied. “The two aims are so different that they shape the designs in different ways, even from the start. A mountain built to exert the greatest possible pressure at its base will not make a safe bridge, even if it fails to crack the ice to the depth needed to bring forth new geysers. Who in good conscience would send travelers across the largest bridge ever built, if its shape was a compromise—a way of making do, a way of patching over the failure of an entirely different structure, with entirely different needs?”
The older of her two interlocutors was undeterred. “Then do what you like, wherever you like, but don’t expect us to feed you! Unless you’re offering a chance to bring back the geysers, you’re not worth taking food out of the mouths of my grandchildren!”
Freya lowered her gaze, chastened. The woman’s position was understandable—and there was no point repeating one more time that the best-designed mountain for the purpose she sought might fail to crack the ice, when it was equally true that Freya’s own version might fail to be of any use at all.
When the meeting was over, Freya stayed in the hall and shared a meal with Britt and half a dozen of the other villagers. They were all polite, and almost apologetic that she’d come so far only to be rebuffed, but none of them were willing to vote for their own farms to contribute food or supplies to her project.