The water was too deep in these parts for the Hard Rain to have visibly reshaped anything, barring another hyperimpact like the one that had created Antimer, and so the general shape of things was little changed until they verged on the continental shelf, just a hundred kilometers or so south of what had once been Alaska’s coastline. In the shallows between that and the foothills of the coastal range—a strip of sea and land between one and two hundred kilometers wide—visible changes had been wrought. But the coastline was basically where it had always been. More effective than direct bolide strikes in the reshaping of the land had been the disappearance of the glaciers and the endless series of tsunamis that had been funneled into this broad bight over the millennia. The one hurled up by the Antimer impact had overtopped the mountains themselves, cresting over what had formerly been glacier-bound peaks and slamming down far inland to boil dry on the hot rocks. Since the beginning of the Cooling Off, about eleven hundred years ago, and particularly since humans had reconstituted the oceans by dropping comets on the surface, snow had begun falling on those peaks again. But it took a long time for glaciers to form, and it would be millennia more before cracked rivers of old blue ice oozed down the mountain valleys to touch the sea.
When that day came, the settlement of Qayaq would have to move out of the way. It was built on a heap of rubble on the western bank of a cold river that hurtled down out of the mountains, just at the place where it emptied into the Pacific. There was not enough space between sea and snow for an airfield of the size Qayaq required, and so they had constructed one out of the mix of fiber and ice known as pykrete. This floated just offshore, a perfectly flat slab laced with tubes through which refrigerated coolant was circulated to keep it solid—not a difficult task in a place where the temperature of sea and air alike was only a few degrees above freezing. Other than that, nothing was really here. Even the TerReForm presence was minimal, it being easier for TerReForm staff to operate from boats.
The Qayaq airfield had to exist because of the Ashwall. West of here, all the way to 166 Thirty and beyond, the chain of volcanoes formerly known as the Kenai and Alaska Peninsulas and the Aleutian chain were in a nearly continual state of eruption. Any pilot meaning to fly north or south across the sixtieth parallel, in the zone bracketed by 166 Thirty on the west and the Rockies on the east, had to make allowances in the flight plan for the likelihood that their path would abruptly be barred by a plume of volcanic ash hurled into the stratosphere by any of a hundred active volcanoes lying upwind. Airplanes were expensive, even more so than they had been on Old Earth. They were too large to manufacture in the ring and transport down to the surface and so they, and other large productions such as arks and ships, had to be built in factories on the surface. Typically these lay on the outskirts of Cradle sockets. In any case, planes had to be babied, given that high-capacity turbofan engines were extraordinarily difficult to make. Every flight plan had to include a possible emergency landing on the artificial floe of Qayaq, which in turn had to be fully capable of hosting big airplanes. So what had been conceived as an emergency landing site had become something of a hub, where planes tended to land just because it was convenient and predictable. In any case it happened to be the final destination of the military flight on which the Seven had hitched a ride, so they had to get off here anyway.
It was about as warm and welcoming as you would expect of a forward airbase constructed on a slab of ice. A low cloud layer kept it in eternal twilight and converted all colors to shades of gray. Across a strip of water, the town sprawled on its rubble pile like a dead starfish. Beyond that was a black wall that they understood to be the lower slopes of the coastal range, carpeted now with young trees but too obscured by mist and gloom to be identifiable as such. Higher up, just below the cloud ceiling, some of these were dusted with fresh snow, or perhaps just ice condensed directly from the fog. Had those clouds been absent, as they were for a few cumulative weeks out of each year, the Seven would have been able to look up above snowcapped peaks to a sky made black by the Ashwall. One of the big volcanoes on Kenai had been erupting copiously for two weeks.
The temptation to cocoon in a microhotel pod on the slab, to eat hot noodles from a cup and watch videos, was strong. Anything to escape the sense of being trapped between ice and sea below, fog and ash above, the Pacific to the south, and the mountain wall to the north. Instead of which Tyuratam Lake announced that he was going into the city to sample its drinking establishments. He did so in a manner so bluff as to make everyone else feel faintly idiotic for even thinking of doing otherwise. Kath Two, Beled, and Langobard said they were in. Doc demurred on grounds of wanting a nap, and Memmie, as always, stayed with Doc. Ariane seemed peeved and conflicted. The politics of race had been gradually coming into play during the journey from Cradle, and now Ty was pushing harder.
According to a five-thousand-year-old understanding shared by most who were not Aïdans, and some who were, Ty was going to be the leader of the group. This was partly because he was a native Beringian who knew his way around the place, but it was mostly just because he was the Dinan, and being the leader was a thing that Dinans did. Ariane had been organizing things—it was she who had somehow strung together the series of flights that had taken them from Cradle to Qayaq—and in the early going she’d had Doc’s ear. It had seemed impossible to talk to Doc without going through her. But since then Doc had made a point of spending time privately with the others, and Ariane, after a day or so of confusion and irritation, had accepted this. The natural constraints of group travel had kept them all together. Now Ty was mounting an unauthorized expedition to the mainland, and Ariane was perhaps torn between the desire for that private cup of noodles and the fear that she would miss something.
She ended up coming with them. They broke open one of the chests of gear that had been with them since Cayambe and found warm clothes. Then they hiked across the ice to some steps that led down to a little port for water taxis, and made the trip—just a few hundred meters—to the shore of Beringia. A rambling stair, carved into the rock by mining robots, took them from the water’s edge up to the place where the slope became gentle enough to walk on, and then they found themselves looking down a main street that ran inland for all of about a hundred meters before dead-ending against a vertical wall of rock: a boulder that had been forcibly embedded in the flank of a larger mountain. Even from here they could tell that the boulder was a piece of the moon. Efforts had been made to pep the place up by making use of various light-emitting technologies, which now festooned the fronts of the establishments and bled lurid, saturated colors into the translucent air. It could be inferred from the nature of their advertising that the typical customer was military and lonely.
“I SOMETIMES WONDER,” BARD SAID, GRIMACING AT THE TASTE OF the local cider, “whether the Eves, being women, really got the connection between the male visual system and sex drive.” He was looking sidelong at a naked lady at the opposite end of the room.
Kath Two had little interest in the naked lady, but she had turned her back on the rest of the group, a minute earlier, to watch a disturbance. Now she turned to face Bard. “Well, they were women. They had spent their whole lives under that gaze. Everything they’d ever been taught about how to dress, how to carry themselves—”