Delga was watching Yuri’s reaction. “What are you making of all this, ice boy? Us and them. We make the decisions here, the women. The men—well, we need them to make babies. Other than that they do what we tell them.”
Dorothy laughed. “That’s pretty much true. Yuri, you might know something about this—I think we’ve got a social structure here like the elephants in the wild. Those old animals, you know? I once took a virtual safari, a corporate team-building thing. I remember the guide saying how a core of females used to be at the heart of elephant society. And the males formed bachelor herds, where they fought the whole time, competing for a chance to mate. In the same way, the men are on the periphery, really.”
Yuri shrugged, irritated. He thought he’d left all this stuff behind, years ago, people making dumb guesses about the age he’d come from. “The only elephant I ever saw was a gen-enged resurrected mammoth in a zoo.”
Delga was watching him, having fun in her manipulative, intrusive way, he realised. “Poor little mammoth, eh? Just like you, out of his time. Poor little ice boy.”
The children broke out of their circle of play and ran, laughing, down to the river. The water was flowing north, Yuri noticed now, away from the substellar zone to the south, towards the terminator to the north.
“So you had kids,” he said. “Just as Major McGregor ordered you to.”
Delga laughed. “You mean, all that Heinrich Himmler Adam-and-Eve crap? We didn’t take any notice of that bullshit. We just had kids. Even me, Earthman. See if you can spot my little Freddie. We keep our men like stud bulls. Want to join them, Yuri? Your last-century genes would enrich the pool—”
“Leave him alone,” Anna snapped. “It’s not like that, Yuri, she’s exaggerating.”
“Your camp—you’re pretty mobile, right?”
Dorothy said, “Well, we stick around long enough to raise a crop of potatoes, grow a field of grass. Raw material for the iron cows—it must be the same for you. Maybe a year in each place. But then, yes, we move on.”
“We’re following the river south,” Anna said. “Upstream.”
“Why that way?”
Dorothy said, “We like the idea of maybe reaching the source one day.”
“Maybe that will be at the substellar,” Delga said. “You remember that place, the storm system, the clump of forest, we all saw it from orbit? The navel of this world. What’s there, do you think?”
That had never occurred to Yuri, the significance of the substellar point. Maybe because he had never imagined he’d find a way to reach it.
“But it’s not just that,” Anna said. “We need to head south anyhow. Seems to some of us that the weather’s getting colder, bit by bit. You must have noticed the sunspot swarms on Proxima.”
“Yeah. And then there’s the volcanism.”
Dorothy frowned. “What volcanism?”
“To the north of here.” He meant the slow uplift that seemed to have triggered the builders to move the jilla lake.
She pressed, “How do you know about that?”
Delga asked, “Is that why you’re on the move, Yuri? You and your people?”
He said nothing.
Anna touched his arm again, a surprisingly gentle, friendly gesture. “Leave him alone. We went through it all with Klein, remember, when we met him and his gang of thugs. Let Yuri tell us whatever he wants, in his own time.”
He asked now, “How did you find the river? We were dumped in the middle of a dry landscape, almost a desert, at a sort of oasis.”
Delga snapped, “If that’s so how did you get out?”
“Hush,” Anna said. “Yuri, it was hard. A trek. But we knew which way to go. We had a map.”
“A map?”
“A map of this whole quadrant of the planet,” Dorothy said. “I’ll show you.” She stood, and ducked into one of the tents.
Yuri said sheepishly, “We have a map too. Kind of. I always carry it.” He produced Lemmy’s battered map from his pocket, unfolded it. “It doesn’t look much, but Lemmy Pink took weeks over this after the astronauts left…”
Dorothy returned with a map of her own, a single piece of paper. She folded it out on the ground by Yuri’s. Dorothy’s map covered just the north-east quadrant of the starlit face of Per Ardua—or “the Bowl”—but it was a professional piece of work, properly printed, showing coastlines, seas, rivers, mountain ranges, the features even assigned tentative names. And there were little shuttle symbols, scattered across the quadrant, which Yuri guessed signified landing sites. He looked up at Dorothy. “Where did you get this?”
“I bribed an astronaut. Oh, not with sex, the usual currency. I used to move in influential circles, back home. I happened to know something about this woman’s family which she did not want revealed to her colleagues… With this we could tell how close we were to the river. It was tough, but we made a dash for it when the children were still small.”
Delga stared at the two maps. “Look. This long scribble of the rat boy’s just has to be our river. Which does go all the way to the substellar point. Wow.”
“We may never get that far,” Dorothy said. “It’s a hell of a long way. Especially if we have to stop to grow a crop of potatoes every fifty klicks. And isn’t the climate there supposed to be difficult? Too hot—”
“If the whole world is getting cold,” Anna said reasonably, “then that might solve the problem.”
“And besides,” Delga said, “where the hell else is there to go?” She faced Yuri. “So what about it, Earthman? You going to join us?”
He couldn’t see a choice. There would be better protection in a larger group, a better chance of survival. And at least with this group there would be other kids for Beth to meet—a choice, at least, of partners for life. Maybe even more in Klein’s group, and he glanced that way.
Delga noticed the look. “Yeah. You’re going to have to go face the big man.”
“But bring your people here first,” Anna said. “Maybe you ought to go and tell them they aren’t alone any more.”
Yuri stood, and thanked them for their hospitality. He felt like his manners were rusty. Then he set out alone for the jilla lake and home, wondering how he was going to break all this to Mardina and Beth.
Chapter 45
When they came back to the camp by the river, it was as a convoy: Yuri and Mardina walked, and Beth rode on the hood of the ColU.
They had let Beth pick out her own favourite clothes, which were all colourful cut-downs from the old ISF gear. And she packed a bag with gifts for the children, from old toys to choice potatoes from the latest crop, and pretty rocks she’d found over the years. Though whether she had a clear idea of what “children” were going to be like, Yuri had no idea. She might imagine some version of the builders, Mister Sticks grown large and wearing human clothes.
Yuri had suggested to Mardina that they wear what was left of their own ISF-issue gear, in order to blend in with the crowd a little better. But Mardina went to the opposite extreme, picking out her drabbest stem-case work clothes, her coolie hat, even her bark sandals. “This is who I am now,” she said evenly.
Not for the first time in his life, Yuri couldn’t read her mood. But he went along with her decision.
The whole of Delga’s camp turned out to watch them approach, the men and women in their little huddles, the kids behind the women.
“Not exactly welcoming,” Mardina murmured.