Winter Song Read Free

and Deltasol, as he should now call them, he decided.
        He'd never heard of anyone trying what he was about to do, and he was sure that Ship would have told him if there was a precedent. No, this was the first attempt to confirm something that existed only as theory.
        He was desperate to test the theory, for he still hadn't got used to the gel taking care of his bodily functions; as well as the waste, it fed him through intravenous drips of nutrient-rich saline. Worse, he felt at times as if he was starting to lose his mind.
        If he had switched it on, his sub-moronic companion would have fed basic data directly into his cortex. But it would have been nothing compared to what sounded like Ship haunting him; he awoke from fragmented dreams with whispers still pulsing in his ears. Sometimes he woke crying. It seemed wrong that he should miss an artificial construct more than his own partners, but he'd spent more time with Ship than with them.
        He wondered what Karla was doing, where she was, who she was with. More mercurial than he, though they were supposedly the same, would she and the others wait for him, or would they decant a replacement?
        At last, he felt the drag of atmosphere. He swung his feet around so that he seemed to be standing on the still near-vacuum, but what air there was began to glow as he cut through it. He opened his arms to create drag, spreading himself as wide as he could. The gel rushed to insulate his feet and under his arms, but even so, some of the heat began to seep through.
        He doubted that anyone had ever tried to dive feetfirst into atmosphere, to fall all the way to the ground, and actually survived. Even with the lifegel, it felt as though giant hands squeezed him, and someone was applying a blow-torch to the soles of his feet.
        The roaring grew louder, louder, louder, louder – until it filled his whole world. It drilled into his ears and the hands around him squeezed ever harder and each breath was an effort. When oblivion came it was a merciful release.

TWO
    Bera

    Bera wanted to scream her grief at the night, but that would rouse the farmyard dogs. That would in turn wake the sleepers. She already felt so raw that she might as well have been scoured by sandpaper, and a public lecture from Hilda was more than she could face, so she clamped her jaw shut until it ached.
        The farmyard was so cold that her breath threatened to freeze solid in the midnight air – not that Isheimur's midnight sky was like other worlds, she gathered. It would be another five weeks until the equinox, when the Mizar quartet would line up together on Isheimur's far side, with only the twin moons, Stor and Litid, to illuminate the true-dark for a few hours. Until then, though Gamasol and Deltasol had set within a few hours of one another, the further pair was still high in the sky.
        That she could see where to put her feet on the rocky slope up to the grave made the act of mourning her dead son easier, and at least Ragnar had allowed her to bury Palli here, rather than in open ground. The graveyard was in a pocket of such boulder-strewn land that it was good for nothing else, unlike the rest of the valley. Its rocky border at least protected the bodies from burrowing marauders. Snolfurs were another matter – only a precious bullet or arrow would deter one of them.
        She clambered past a tapped-out steam-vent which no longer gave its energy to the generator, the metrewide pipe to the water tank down the hill now disconnected. Putting the sprig of lavender on the unmarked cairn was a pathetic little token, but it was all she had. At the thought of Palli's little face turning blue, the tears started up again, half-blinding her, freezing on her face as they trickled down.
        She crouched, offering prayers, to Wotan, Yahweh – any of the old ones who might exist, just in case – to take care of Palli. Assuming that there was an