Green Grow the Rashes and Other Stories Read Free

of your lives. But nothing has prepared you
for what is out there, what must be faced if we are to survive the
time that is left to us. It is vast, it is empty, and it does not
care.
    It just does not
care.
     
    ~-o0O0o-~
     
    I had music
turned up loud for most of the next few hours. It seemed to help,
to stop the oppressive sky from beating me down into the ice that
lay everywhere below me. I almost didn’t hear the beep as the probe announced a finding.
    I checked the
co-ordinates and my heart sank. It was a four-hour flight away. I
wasn’t sure my mind could take so much open space, so much
desolation. Then I remembered.
    Ten short
years . And twelve points short of my breeding
merit.
    I set my eyes on the
brightest star, and told the probe to go.
    I tried to let my mind
wander, to think of happier times in the warren, of solid walls and
enough light to keep the dark at bay permanently. But my eye kept
drawing me back to that star, a bright pinpoint. At first I thought
it might be one of the planets, before I remembered that, without a
star to light them, they too had gone mostly dark. I realised that
I was looking at Sol itself… or what was left of her after the
dimming.
    You’ve all seen the
history vids, you all know of the great golden ball that some days
seemed to fill the sky. And I know that some of you harbour
thoughts that it’s still up there, hanging above, and that we will
walk underneath its heat again.
    I wish I could show you
that sad little point of light that is all that remains; I wish I
could make you see just how far the dark has encroached since we
went under. I flew over the desolation for hours. We know from our
lessons that we went to ground where we hoped to be hottest.
Iceland they used to call it, a place of hot springs and abundant
thermal energy. Or so we thought. The dimming changed all of that;
not quickly, but three hundred years without heat is a long time.
And Iceland now lives up to its name.
    There is no
sea.
    I’ll repeat that, for it
is something we have forgotten. We see the pictures, of waves
crashing on sandy shores, and smiling people walking hand in hand
under open sky. Never again. There is ice, pack ice, and rock.
Nothing else.
    I headed south and west.
Again the history tells of cities, tall mighty monuments to our
past. They are all gone. The ice has eaten everything. The history
of mankind has gone cold. More than halfway into my journey I
crossed what had been the Equator, what had been lush greenery. All
gone. The whole planet has gone cold.
    That was my thought and I
saw nothing to make me change my mind.
    Until I reached my
destination.
     
    ~-o0O0o-~
     
    And here I must take more
care over my words. There are no histories that mention what I must
tell, no pictures I can show you. Only what I have seen with my own
eyes, and if I am to impress you with urgency, I must be clear in
my intent.
    The flyer told me I was
somewhere in the South Pacific. It looked little different to the
spot where I had come upside, but as we descended I saw that the
ice here was less compacted. Several darker patches showed. As I
got closer, I could see there were stretches of broken ice and
slush. I started to think there might even be open water available.
The probe beeped a proximity alert warning as the flyer hovered ten
feet above an island of rock, black against the ice all
around.
    There was ore here, and a
lot of it. The scan showed a seam, some one hundred feet deep in
the rock. I quickly spotted that I would have to land and drill to
get proof, for if the deposit was as large as it seemed to be, then
more flyers would be needed to carry it back below to where it was
needed.
    I put the flyer down on
the flattest spot I could find. I did not need to get out to
supervise the drilling; the on-board bot handled that. But I could
not come all this way to merely sit in a bubble. Even despite the
glowering stars overhead, my curiosity won over my fear. I put on a
helmet and ventured