Fait Accompli

by Jerry Oltion

Illustration by Janet Aulisio

I woke for the 146th morning to the sound of wind. Even so it took a minute to place myself. I wavered on the border between sleep and wakefulness, unsure which sensations to choose as real. In the confusion that comes with waking I couldn’t decide if my Universe was the one where wind shrieked and whistled overhead without a break, of if mine was the one where beautiful women aged eighty years in my arms. They seemed to blend together at times, the wind becoming the labored breathing of the dying woman, or the woman lifting up and blowing away through the walls.

I rubbed my eyes and broke the moment. The withered crone that had been Roxanne evaporated away. The wind grew stronger.

I had been on Glacia for nearly six months by Earth’s calendar, and in that time the wind had never once let up. I heard it roaring every moment of my waking day. My shelter, an insulated dome anchored to the slow-moving ice, muffled the sound to a distant rumble, but the walls couldn’t block it out completely. I had grown used to it, but it was always there. Only in my sleep could I find escape from the wind, but other torments awaited me there. Wind and dreams, mortar and pestle for my sanity.

The wind: it starts as a mass of air cooling over the pole. Convection brings it in from warmer climes to gather in a high-pressure cell over the north polar plateau, where it slowly loses its heat to space and falls. The air that comes in contact with the ice cools still further, but since it can’t fall it spreads out, still cooling, pushed by the descending air behind it until it crosses the hundreds of kilometers of plateau and runs up against the mountain range that separates the plateau from the basins beyond. The mountains are nearly buried in ice; momentum and pressure force the cold air through passes and over ridges to fall again down the glacier-filled canyons beyond and pour out into the basin, accelerating all the way. By the time it reaches weather station Delta—1500 kilometers from the pole—it’s doing at least a hundred kilometers an hour, and it hits like the blast of a rocket engine.

The dreams: Blonde hair in a frenzy of tight curls, framing a face with soft cheekbones, wide-set green eyes and a narrow, high nose above a mouth that always carried a hint of a smile. Roxanne. She was half a head shorter than me, and slender. I could slip one arm completely around her, but when I tried it in my dreams she would change. Her hair would gray and her eyes would lose their gleam and her smooth skin would wrinkle and hang in folds. The closer I held her the older she grew, until she was nothing but skin covering a loose frame of bones, peering out at me through eyes sunk deep in their sockets. And then she would speak.

Her voice was the same voice I knew, the voice of a woman in her mid-twenties. From that time-battered frame, the voice of youth would ask, “Do you still love me, Tony? Do you still love me?”

My analyst said I did. I quit talking to it after that, not because it was wrong so much as because it was obviously malfunctioning. A good counselor never tells you how you feel; it lets you discover that for yourself. So I kept myself sane without its help, spending my time reading, watching movies, listening to music, and maintaining the weather instruments.

I wasted little of my conscious time thinking about Roxanne. Riding a starship that traveled at almost the speed of light, I had put forty light-years of space and eighty years of time between us (for it’s a two-way trip), and if there’d been a planet farther out that would have taken me I’d have gone. Relativity kept me from aging during the trip; more distance merely meant more time gone, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to see Roxanne or even think of her again. After our divorce I’d sold everything she didn’t take with her, signed on with the World Restoration League, and jumped ship for Glacia, where I’d hoped to lose myself in the fascination of studying an ice age in progress.

I should have read the brochure. Meteorologists on Earth did all the studying; I was there to collect data. Actually I was there for less than that. The weather station collected the data automatically, but under the extreme conditions found on Glacia even the sturdiest equipment breaks down occasionally. I was the repair person. I functioned in my official capacity maybe once a month, usually when a piece of flying ice smashed one of the sensors. Then, for an hour or two, I would glory in a sense of purpose as I fought with the wind and the clumsy gloves of my environment suit, holding onto a safety rope all the time to keep from being blown away while I fixed the damaged instrument. Two hours of work every twenty or thirty days, and Glacia’s days were thirty hours long.

At that, I paid my way. There were only seven weather stations on Glacia, and each one was worth more to the people on Earth than it cost them to keep it manned. They were fighting their own ice age there, and the information we collected helped them to better understand what they were up against. Glacia had done what we were afraid Earth would do this time: frozen all the way to the equator, its once-temperate climate locked beneath a sheet of ice that would endure for millennia, if not forever.

Glacia wasn’t the only study planet. Explorers had discovered dozens of Earth-like worlds that had died in dozens of different ways, and we studied each of them to leam what not to do with Earth. A steady stream of survey ships coasted in an immense loop between star systems, collecting data, resupplying the stations, and rotating personnel from job to job so they wouldn’t grow overly bored or go crazy from the isolation.

So I wasn’t surprised when the radio buzzed for attention on the morning of day 146. I’d been expecting it for a couple of days by then, trying not to dwell on it and succeeding only when I slept. The supply ship had come, and I was getting out of there. Six months earlier than I’d contracted for, but I didn’t think I’d have any trouble convincing the people in charge that I was due for replacement.

I had set the radio in the middle of the dome where I could reach it from practically anywhere. When it buzzed I leaned over from the table/desk beneath the dome’s only window and picked up the receiver, a narrow-band blind set, and said, “Delta station, Stratton here.” My voice was gravelly from disuse; I’d given up talking to myself except in emergencies.

A woman’s voice said, “Hello down there. This is Elizabeth Duvall, commanding the starship Nereid. What is your condition?”

“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news,” I told her.

“Oh?” She didn’t sound amused.

I didn’t particularly care. I said, “The good news is, the station’s fully functional.”

After a pause, she finally asked, “And the bad news?”

“The bad news is, I’m not so sure about me.”

Her tone changed instantly from annoyed to concerned. “What’s the matter? Do you have a medical emergency?”

I laughed. “No, no. But I think I might before the next six months are up. I want to be rotated out of here this time instead of next.”

There was a considerably longer pause than before.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, suddenly sweating. The dome seemed to constrict around me. “You do have a contingency plan for this, don’t you?”

Duvall hummed thoughtfully. “Oh yes, of course. If you really need replacement, we can do so. Of course our counselor will want to discuss it with you. Could you transmit your analysis program records so she can prepare for the meeting?”

“I quit using it three months ago,” I told her.

“I see.” Pause. “Well, send us what you have, and we’ll send her down for a personal interview after she’s had a chance to look it over; but if you don’t mind the wait, we’ll schedule your shuttle last so we don’t hold up the other stations’ supplies.”

“Sure, sure, I can handle it,” I said. “As long as I know it’s temporary.”

“Fine.”

I linked the computer to the radio and transmitted the files. I expected Duvall to sign off as soon as she received them, but when the bleeps and twitters of computers talking had finished, she said, “Have you heard from station Alpha recently?”

Alpha. That was Ed Lawrence, at the north pole. “No,” I answered. “Not for a couple of weeks. Why?”

“We can’t reach him by radio.”

“Not surprising,” I said. “We don’t talk much between us down here, and he’s quiet even by our standards. He probably just switched it off.”

“We get an automatic response to our coded signal,” she said. “The radio works, but Lawrence won’t answer. Or can’t answer.”

I looked around the dome. Six meters across, two and a half high, and most of that filled with equipment and supplies. Could I ignore a radio call in a space this small? Not likely. “What’s the status of his station?” I asked.

“Operational,” Duvall answered. “We get continuous input from all the instruments except temperature. The last reading for that shows minus sixty, dated spring, uh, fifty-third.”

“We just have four months here,” I explained. “Spring fifty-third would have been—” I checked the X’ed-out calendar on my desk “—ten days ago. He’s dead then.”

My certainty surprised her. “How can you know that?”

“Because when something breaks in a station, you rejoice,” I said. “You’ve got something to do. You don’t necessarily hurry, but you do go out and fix it. If Lawrence hasn’t fixed his station in ten days, it’s because he’s not alive to do it.”

“Perhaps he’s only sick.”

“Ten days is a long time to be sick. Especially sick enough to keep you from fixing a thermometer.” I thought a moment, then asked, “What were the readings just before it went out?”

I waited for Captain Duvall to pull the information out of her computer. “Fluctuating around minus forty until two days before the malfunction, then dropping steadily to minus sixty for a day, then nothing. Why do you ask?”

“Look at barometric pressure and snow depth to be sure,” I said, “but I’ll bet it was storming. You don’t know what that means until you’ve seen it first hand, but it looks like Lawrence went out in it to fix the thermometer and got lost.”

Duvall said, “That does seem to be the logical explanation. Poor soul. He was due to come back this trip, too.”

I nodded, a useless gesture over the radio. “Yeah, too bad, but I pity his replacement more, especially if he’s got a vivid imagination.”

“Oh?”

“Ghosts, Captain,” I said. “They’re bugging me every night, and mine came from forty light-years away. I don’t even want to think what it’d be like living alone for six months in a dome where somebody died.”

“I’ll, uh, have the counselor discuss it with her,” said Duvall. “In the meantime, prepare for your own visit. By the counselor, I mean.”

I grinned. “Right.”

“Duvall out.”

I set the receiver back in its cradle. Lawrence was dead, huh? I felt a moment of sorrow at his loss, but I’d meant what I told Duvall. His replacement was in for a rough time.

I was packing my clothes a few hours later when the radio buzzed again. I expected it to be the shrink, but it turned out to be Duvall again. “I’ve got bad news,” she said without preamble.

“You found Lawrence.”

“We didn’t get that far. The shuttle was on its way down when the attitude control rockets failed. It crash-landed about three hundred kilometers from station Alpha, along meridian one-twenty. There is at least one survivor.”

“What do you mean, ‘at least’?”

“We can’t make radio contact, but someone set off the emergency beacon.”

“I thought those went off by themselves in a crash.”

“This was evidently too soft an impact for it,” Duvall said. “The transporter didn’t start broadcasting until ten minutes after the shuttle went down. Someone had to have triggered it manually.”

“Oh. So why are you calling me?”

“Because we don’t have another shuttle ready for flight. It’ll take us at least a week to assemble one, and by that time, if the survivors are injured, they could die.” Duvall sounded exasperated. I could tell she thought I was an incompetent boob and a pain in the ass to boot, and she wouldn’t have been talking to me unless she had to.

“You want me to go after them,” I said. “What, twelve hundred kilometers or so over the ice?”

“You’ve got a crawler, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “All the stations do, so we can reach our remote instruments, but I’ve never gone more than a hundred kilometers in mine and that’s on level ice. There’s a mountain range between here and there. I’d have to climb a moving glacier and hope there’s a pass or something at the top leading onto the polar ice sheet.”

“We can map a way for you from orbit.”

“Can you keep me from falling into a crevasse?”

“I thought you had radar for that.”

She had me there. The crawlers did have radar that would supposedly spot voids in the ice. I just didn’t want to trust my life to it. I guessed I was about to give it a try, though. Meridian one-twenty ran to the east of me by about fifteen degrees, but that still put the downed shuttle closer to me than anyone else. Damn. Here I was within a day or two of getting the hell off this dirty iceball of a planet, and now duty and honor were sending me off to get myself killed.

“What about storms?” I asked. “I’m not driving through a blizzard.”

She sighed again, and I could tell what she was thinking. A weather monitor who didn’t even keep track of the weather. Well, screw her; I kept the damned instruments running.

“The closest frontal system is four days west of you,” she said, and the silence grew while she waited for my answer. We both knew what it had to be.

“All right, all right, I’ll go,” I said. “But I want the widest, smoothest path between here and there, even if it takes me out of the way a little. The object is to get there in one piece, not play hero along the way.”

Duvall’s smile was almost audible. “We’ll get to work on it.”

“Good. Dump it into my computer when you get it; I’ll be outside getting the crawler ready.”

“Right. Duvall out.”

I left the radio on and made a circuit of the dome, tossing my medical console, some extra clothing, food, and anything else I could think of into boxes for the trip. The crawler would make about sixty kilometers an hour on the level, which would get me to the crash site in less than a day if it was all flat. I could count on maybe half of it being so, but the other half was going to be the trick. I packed for three weeks, and wondered if I’d go hungry before I got back.

After I’d stacked all my boxes of stuff by the door I pulled on my environment suit, a thick, heavily insulated overall—complete with sealed helmet—that felt like a construction worker’s spacesuit. It didn’t have air tanks, but the heater still made a clumsy bulge at my side. I tried not to knock it on the wall as I pried the outer door open.

It opened to the southeast, on the leeward side of the station. The wind whipped around in eddies, blowing loosened ice inside and howling around the edges of the door. I took a cautious step out. The sun blinded me for a moment; it was still late morning. Good. This time of year I would still have fourteen or fifteen hours of light for traveling, maybe more if I made it far enough north. After the artificial light in the dome the sun looked like an orange spotlight in the sky, but I knew I’d get used to the color soon enough.

I could see for kilometers. Scarps and crags stuck out in such sharp outline that I had trouble judging their distance; they all seemed too close. Though the entire atmosphere was rushing past at gale force, I could detect no motion on the ice. Nothing was left for the wind to move. Loose snow would sublime in less than a kilometer; any that hadn’t drifted solid in the last storm was gone by now. Occasionally the wind would wear away a chunk of ice and sent it flying, but that was rare.

I made my way to the crawler, only a few meters away on the right. It was designed for Glacia: low and wide and heavy. Not particularly fast, but it wouldn’t blow over in the wind. I’d learned to park it beside the dome instead of in the lee of it; the first time I’d done that I’d had to dig a tunnel through the drift that had formed between them. I held onto the guide rope while I chipped the door free with my hand axe, then pulled myself inside. The power plant took a few minutes to warm up, so I busied myself with a thorough inspection of the controls and gauges.

They were simple enough. Throttle and steering were both in one T-bar beside the driver’s seat, and the gauges and radar and gyrocompass and stuff were scattered across the dash in front. A thick jesus bar looped out of the dash as well, and the door held another. The roof was thickly padded, but that was overkill; if the ride got bumpy I had a full chest and lap harness I could wear.

When the idiot light told me the power plant was ready, I nudged the T-handle forward a notch. I could hear ice cracking over the roar of the wind as the crawler strained for a moment, then it lurched ahead with a shudder that made me grab for the jesus bar. I steadied myself and tried a gradual curve to the right.

It took me a few minutes to gain enough confidence to drive it back next to the station. The crawler had more than enough power to level the dome if I steered wrong, but I finally got it parked in the lee of the bubble and opened the door. Mistake. The crawler had upset the airflow; a gust of wind ripped the door out of my hand and plastered it against the side of the cab, nearly pulling me out with it. I crept carefully down and took one step to the station door, fighting to stay upright. How was I going to get all my food and equipment across there?

I settled for throwing it. The wind was in my favor going that way, and nothing was fragile.

Back inside the station I downloaded the maps the Nereid had sent me from the main computer into my pocket comp, then printed out hard copies just in case. It looked like they’d found a low pass where the ice from the polar plateau had broken through the mountains and joined smoothly with the lower basin. What looked smooth from orbit could be anything on the ground, but it was probably the best chance I had of finding a driveable route.

Despite my misgivings about the trip, I felt a shiver of excitement as I closed the station’s door from the outside. Even an hour of activity with a purpose had pumped some of my normal liveliness back into me. Was this all I needed? A little excitement?

No. I shivered with an entirely different emotion at the thought of another six months here, even if I were to get out and take a drive every day. I’d do this one last job, but then I was out of here.

I laughed when I realized I was looking for a way to lock the door. There wasn’t a single lock on all of Glacia. Who would you lock out? No one came knocking but the wind and the dreams, and neither of them used the door.

I dumped the maps into the navigation computer, then turned on the radar and set it to scanning for obstacles and fractures in the ice while I found north on the compass and fed power to the tracks. The crawler surged ahead, accelerating quickly up to cruising speed. The ice pack was pretty smooth here; I felt only the vibration of the treads and the occasional shift from side to side as I steered around bumps and depressions.

As soon as I settled in to the rhythm of driving, I called the Nereid. I could barely hear the radio through the shriek of the wind, until I plugged my helmet set into the crawler’s. Then radio and wind were about the same volume.

Captain Duvall was busy. A junior officer answered my call, and when I asked about the shuttle he said, “No more activity. It still radiates in the infrared, so we can assume the lifesys-tem still works. Beyond that we can only hope.”

“Yeah.” Spaceship crashes don’t leave much behind, and though an orbit-to-ground shuttle isn’t exactly a spaceship it still must have been moving at a hell of a clip when it hit the ice. Not hard enough to trigger the beacon, though, I reminded myself. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.

“Any changes to my route yet?” I asked. Presumably they were still examining the terrain from orbit for the best path.

“Nothing yet,” he said. “We’ll call you if we come up with any.”

“Right.”

It became obvious pretty quick that we didn’t have a whole lot more to say to each other, and I was afraid if I stayed on the radio I’d wind up talking with the shrink, so I signed off, settled back in my seat and readied myself for a long stretch of driving.

After a while I found myself thinking about Earth. I’d been so wrapped up in my own problems that I hadn’t even asked for news. I wondered if the glaciers had covered Canada yet, or if any of our work here had helped slow their advance.

But the Nereid’s crew wouldn’t know that any more than I did. They had left only six months later than me, after all. The only news of any value they could carry would be personal messages, now long out of date, but evidently no one had sent me any. That alone told me plenty.

I allowed myself to wonder what Roxanne would be doing now. She’d be forty years older than me, less the year difference in our birth dates. She had probably moved in with that jerk Holland or Hammond or whatever his name was. But would she have stayed with him? I doubted it. Up until I caught her in the sack with him I thought she was the most faithful companion a person could ask for, but now? What would keep her from doing it again in a few years?

I realized I was getting hot about it all over again, and got mad about that. It was old news, let it go. Roxanne had stepped out on me, and I had stepped out in return. End of marriage, end of subject.

Most of my friends misunderstood my reaction to finding her in bed with another man. They assumed I was living under second millennium moral standards, that I was jealous, and the fact that we’d married in the first place was proof enough to them. Marriage was an old custom, outdated in a modem society. They didn’t seem to remember that she’d married me, too. In their eyes she had done nothing wrong; it was me and my overreaction that bore the fault. They couldn’t understand that I was reacting to the lie, to the sudden realization that my whole life had been built around the false assumption that she loved me.

I still didn’t understand why she did it. She had given me no warning, no indication she was even thinking about another man. Things were going well. We’d just moved up to the Moon, where I’d taken a job with a new computer manufacturing company. Roxanne hadn’t found work yet, but she wasn’t really looking. I made more than enough to support us, and I told her to relax, to enjoy life for a while.

She claimed boredom after I caught them. Waiting in the apartment for me to come home, waiting for me when I had to go to Earth for sales meetings, always waiting but never doing anything on her own anymore.

I didn’t care why she’d done it. Just knowing she had was sufficient. She didn’t love me; she couldn’t have. And suddenly I didn’t love her either. I filed for divorce, and within a week of the decree I’d left for Glacia.

The constant vibration of the treads and whistling of the wind lulled me into a trance. I kept the throttle full ahead and the power balanced to both tracks unless the compass or the radar warning forced me to change my course. I couldn’t have guessed how long I’d been at it, but the sun had moved around behind me by the time the radio crackled to life again. I heard a few tentative squeals and crackles, then a faint voice covered by static said, “Hello… starship Nereid… is Saskia… ish. Do you… Nereid?”

It was hard to tell with the interference, but the voice sounded female. We had a couple of women on the planet already, but none named Saskia. Was that the shuttle pilot calling? Or Lawrence’s replacement? I waited for someone on the starship to reply, but after a few seconds it became apparent that they weren’t going to. Evidently her signal was too weak to trigger the communication satellites in synchronous orbit, and the starship was out of range as well. Which meant I was hearing her directly, via ionospheric skip. That might not last long.

I flipped my two-way switch and said, “This is Tony Stratton. Evidently the ship can’t hear you, but I’m headed toward you on the surface. Do you copy?”

I heard only the wind for a long moment, then just as I was about to call again she answered. Static kept washing out her signal, but I heard her say, “Thank God it’s… wasn’t sure I’d fixed it right… crash. The pilot’s… don’t think I can fix the shuttle, and I sure as… fly it. Where are you?”

“I’m about six hundred kilometers or so south of you. Are you hurt?”

Her voice was softer than the wind. Even with the volume turned up all the way I could barely hear her through the buffeting and the static. “…got bounced around a little… nothing broken. The pilot’s got a bad gash on his head… fell on him. Can you hear me OK? Your signal isn’t very—”

“Stratton?” Duvall’s voice blasted over hers. “Who are you talking to?”

“Quiet!” I shouted. “I’ve got your shuttle on the radio. The pilot’s injured, but the passenger, Saskia something or other, is OK. Saskia, can you hear me?”

“Yes. Barely.”

“Same here,” I said. “There’s lots of static, and the wind’s blowing. I’m getting about three-quarters of what you say, but if you talk slowly I think we can manage. The ship’s listening in on my half of the conversation.”

“Good. How long until you get here?”

“A day if I don’t run into trouble. Maybe two. Can you hold out that long?”

“I’ve got half a year’s supplies… all over the ship.”

There came a long burst of static, then, “…Have to help the… making noise. Don’t go away now.”

“I won’t,” I said. Then, turning down the volume, I said, “Captain, she’s evidently checking on the pilot. I’m getting her signal directly, but it’s pretty weak; can you boost the gain on the comsats?”

“They operate at maximum all the time,” Duvall said. “There’s just too much atmosphere in the way at this angle to pick up a weak transmission. We could put a satellite in polar orbit, but we’d only get a few minutes of contact every hour or two when it passed overhead.”

The radar beeped at me and I swerved to miss a depression in the ice. “It’s not worth it,” I said. “I’ll probably be in contact more than that.”

“Right. We’ll monitor your signal.”

“Good, but don’t talk unless you have to. I’ve got the volume up all the way.”

“Understood.”

I waited for Saskia to come back, during which time I wondered if there was any point to my continuing on. The shuttle’s medical supplies were just as good as what I carried, and Saskia could care for the pilot as well as I could. She didn’t need me there just to help wait for the new shuttle.

But I was already close to halfway there, and if something else went wrong she might need me. And I could wait for my replacement there as well as back at the station.

I examined the radio while I waited for her, looking for some way to tune in her signal better. The control panel had a button labeled NR, so I pushed that in the hope that it meant Noise Reduction. It must have, for a few minutes later I heard Saskia’s voice saying, “Hello, are you still there?” It was still faint and shot through with static, but not as bad as before.

“Right here,” I said.

“Good. How far away are you?”

“About six hundred kilometers. Half a day’s drive, if nothing unexpected comes up.”

I couldn’t tell if I heard her sigh, or if it was just the wind. “Well, things haven’t exactly worked out the way I thought they would so far, that’s for sure.”

“I know the feeling.”

“Oh? Oh, you mean driving all this way. I’m sorry about that.”

I laughed. “No apology necessary. That’s not what I was talking about. This is the most exciting thing to happen to me since I got here; that’s the problem.”

“Is it so boring here then? I was afraid it might be.”

“It’s boring enough that I asked for an early replacement,” I said.

“You what?” I thought I heard panic in her voice for the first time. “You can’t do that… can you?”

“I can and I did. As soon as the Nereid gets another shuttle on line, I’m out of here.”

She was silent, and I suddenly realized what was wrong. She didn’t want to hear about people freaking out on the first day of her tour, especially after what she’d been through.

“Hey, look,” I said, backpedaling as fast as I could, “not everybody reacts the way I did to the place. You’ll probably be fine. I just discovered I’m not the solitude type after all. I made a mistake coming here, but that doesn’t mean you did.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “I don’t know. Hell.” She didn’t speak for almost a minute, and I was beginning to wonder if we’d lost contact when she suddenly asked, “Why did you come here?”

I looked out over the ice. Nothing but white flatness from horizon to horizon. “Escape,” I said simply.

“From what?”

I had to think about that. Not about the question so much as whether or not I wanted to answer. I’d never really talked to anyone about it before, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to now. So I just said, “A bad marriage.”

“Really? You were married? Tell me about it.”

“No.”

“Come on, I’m curious. Not many people do that anymore. Besides, if you really did ask for an early replacement, the Nereid’s counselor is going to rip you apart; you might as well polish your story.”

I didn’t much like her choice of words, nor was I crazy about trying to converse through all the static, but she evidently needed to talk, and I supposed she had a point. “All right,” I said, “what do you want to know?”

“Tell me what it was like.”

Hmm. How to describe marriage to someone who’d never been there? I thought about it a moment, then leaned back and said, “It was like bringing opposite poles of a magnet together…”

I described how wonderful my first few years with Roxanne had been, how we’d done everything together, exploring first all that the Earth had to offer and then moving to the Moon when I’d gotten the job there. I tried to explain how complete we felt, how inseparable. Then I told her about finding Roxanne in bed with somebody else, and how I’d felt so betrayed that I didn’t think I could ever look at her again, and how I’d left for Glacia so I would never have to. I finished up with, “—I thought I could forget her, take a tour with the World Restoration League and go back to Earth after a century or two and start over again, but it didn’t work. I keep dreaming about her. The harder I try, the worse it gets.”

Saskia had listened patiently to it all, but now she said, “So, what, you’re going to run away from this, too?” Even with the lousy signal, I could hear the scorn in her voice.

“What else can I do?” I demanded. “Solitude didn’t work. It’s driving me crazy.”

“Nothing’s driving you crazy but your own guilt,” she said. “You can’t outrun that.”

“What guilt? She’s the one who cheated on me.”

“So what? You still love her. It’s obvious you do. But you ran out on her just the same.”

“You’re crazy. I don’t love her. Not any more.”

Saskia laughed. “You’re a terrible liar.”

That stung. “It makes no difference!” I shouted. “She doesn’t love me, and even if she did she’d be over a hundred years old by the time I could get back to Earth.”

“How do you know she doesn’t love you? Did she tell you so? Or is it just because she slept with another man?”

“Isn’t that enough?” I asked. I was coming up on a meter-high drift. The radar beeped at me, but I kept the crawler aimed straight ahead, imagining Hammond’s body lying in front of me. The crawler slammed into it, bouncing high and spraying ice and snow in all directions.

Saskia said, “God, I didn’t know men could be so dense. You were on the Moon! The most permissive society since the 1960s. And I don’t suppose your wife had a job or anything. What did you expect her to do with her time?”

“You’re saying she did it just because she was bored?”

“Bored and homy. I’ve lived on the Moon; the lifestyle gets to you. I don’t know what your sex life was like, but it sounds like you were busy at work all the time, too tired to perform when you got home most nights, right? Who could blame her for a little recreation, especially when it was so easily available.”

“I could,” I said.

“Look, she was probably doing you a favor. She could have started demanding more from you at home, made you give her more attention when you were already tired. Your job would have suffered.”

“Oh, so now she did it to save my job? I don’t buy it. If she loved me, she wouldn’t have—”

“Oh for Chrissake, Stratton, wake up. Look here, you still love her, don’t you? Come on, admit it.”

“All right!” I said. “Maybe I do. What of it?”

“This of it. You’ve been on this dirty snowball for six months without a woman. You’ve been bored out of your mind the whole damned time, but now there’s me. You’ll be here tomorrow, and I’ll admit I’m already hot for a man’s touch. You’re going to turn me down?”

“Cut that out!”

“What for? I’m stuck here now, too. I signed the same damned contract you did, and I don’t plan to waste what few opportunities I get for recreation.”

The wind whistled past while I tried to think of a response.

She didn’t give me a chance. “I’m young, Stratton. My breasts are round and firm and my nipples stick out when I’m cold, and there’s nothing but ice all around me now. I’ve got warm, hungry lips. I’ve got legs that can wrap all the way around you. What do you say?”

My mind was numb, but it didn’t matter. Hormones were in control of me now.

“Come on, Stratton, what do you say? It’s been a long six months.”

I had to swallow before I could speak. “I say you’re right. Damn you for a psychologist, but I say yes. I hope you really want what you’ve talked yourself into.”

“More than you could know,” she answered, and I heard the triumph in her voice even through the wind.

There didn’t seem to be a whole lot more to talk about. Saskia signed off, saying she needed time to prepare her boudoir, and I tried to concentrate on my driving. I called the Nereid a few times for navigational fixes, but I suddenly didn’t feel too talkative with them, either. Maybe I was afraid Duvall would come on to me, too.

And maybe I was afraid I’d accept.

I felt more disoriented now than when I’d found Roxanne and Hammond in the sack together. A woman I’d never seen, never even talked to before, had just propositioned me, and I’d just taken her up on it. Why had she done that? Why had I?

This of it, she’d said, and then the come-on. She’d been trying to prove that Roxanne loved me. What a strange way to do it!

But she’d made her point. I did love Roxanne, I knew I did, yet I’d accepted a proposition from another woman. No matter that I’d never see Roxanne again; I’d proven with my own actions that she could have still loved me when she did the same thing on the Moon.

Then I’d been a fool to leave her. I’d been the worst kind of fool, a proud one, and I had let my pride send me off to a place from where I could never return. I had wanted her out of my life; well I’d done a good job, and in doing it I had done her a wrong much worse than the one she had done to me.

But it was already eighty years too late to change it.

So I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances: I drove northward toward the woman who waited for me now.

The compass buzzer pulled me out of a trance a few hours later. I shook my head and straightened out of the crawler, wondering why my head felt so fuzzy. It was still daylight.

Idiot. I’d driven far enough north, it would be daylight for another month at this latitude. I looked at my watch and realized I’d been up for almost twenty-six hours. I had adjusted to Glacia’s long days, but there’s a limit. I called Saskia to tell her I was stopping for a nap, but she didn’t answer my call. Either she’d turned the radio off, or the skip conditions had changed. I told Nereid what I was doing, then pulled back on the throttle and let the crawler shudder to a stop.

The wind seemed lighter here. Either that, or it just seemed that way without the constant rumble of the tracks on the ice. I unlatched my seatbelt, set my watch alarm for four hours, and lay back in my seat to wait for sleep to take me.

When I woke, I felt completely refreshed, better than I usually felt after a whole night. I wondered why, then realized I hadn’t dreamed at all. Marvelling at the novelty of it, I fixed myself breakfast, then powered up the crawler again and drove away.

The mountains advanced steadily as I drove. I still couldn’t raise Saskia, but the Nereid called with more course corrections and landmarks to look for, and they assured me that the shuttle was still radiating infrared, so nothing had happened to her life-system.

Under the Nereid’s watchful eye I managed to keep out of the most rugged terrain, and soon I found myself between two canyon walls, climbing the gently-sloping glacier they said would take me all the way to the top. There were boulders in the ice bigger than the crawler, but the glacier was wide enough that I had plenty of room to steer around them.

I laughed at my earlier apprehension. I should have known the polar ice would wear a nice, wide gap through the mountains after all the millennia of glaciation. I did know that, but I was always making things seem worse than they really were. That’s how I’d gotten to Glacia in the first place. If I’d thought things through before I’d acted, I wouldn’t have come. I would never have left Roxanne, and I wouldn’t be yearning for her now.

Enough of that. She was gone, and I’d best start getting used to the idea. I’d been stupid and I’d made a colossal mistake, but it was done and there was no way to undo it. The only thing I could do now was learn from it and try to do better in the future.

The future. There was something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. I still had one, though, and it waited personified in a shuttle only a few hundred kilometers to the north. Except I was shipping out with the Neried as soon as they could come to get me.

Or was I? I suddenly realized that Saskia had just kicked the props out from under my reason for leaving. She had shown me why my dreams were haunting me so, and if my nap was any indication then I doubted if they would come back. Even if they did, a couple of sessions with a good analysis program would probably exorcise them again. I could stay on Glacia if I wanted to. I could finish what I’d started.

Right now that seemed like the most positive step I could take. Afterward I could work on rebuilding my life, but first I could honor my commitments.

The glacier grew steeper, and the radar started picking up fractures which I had to maneuver around, but even so the driving felt easier. I was carrying a lot less baggage now.

I started seeing more and more rocks in the ice, strung out in long parallel lines running up the canyon. Medial moraines, the seams where different ice flows came together somewhere up ahead. Each one meant a fork in the path, but the Nereid’s map kept me on the right glacier, and after a while I could tell where to drive just by the different texture of the ice. The one I wanted was old, fed by the polar ice cap. Where the snow had weathered away I could see down into it for several meters.

I stopped the crawler at one point and got out for a closer look. The whole inside of the glacier glowed softly with the greenish light of ancient ice. There was hardly a bubble or an opaque spot as far as I could see. The rocky floor of the canyon was lost in the depths, hundreds of meters below, but it seemed to me as if the ice went on forever.

I raised up, and realized I could stand in the wind without holding onto anything. I had to be near the top. I had climbed up into air that was just starting its long descent.

The end came abruptly. I wound my way slowly up through a wide curve to the left, looking nervously at the radar for crevasses, when I glanced up and saw ahead of me a flat expanse of ice like the surface of a frozen ocean. A few promontories of rock stuck up between me and the ice cap; mountain peaks buried to their chins in the ice I picked my way around the last of them and drove out onto the north polar plateau.

Saskia still didn’t answer my radio call. No matter. I was only a few hours away now.

I could feel the anticipation rise in me as I drove. The emotions that I should have felt when I came to Glacia were taking hold of me now: a sense of adventure, and of wonder, of heading off into the unknown. Who was this Saskia, this woman who could make me see my own mind better than I could myself? She had made me see a lot of things, made me feel for the first time since I’d been here. She’d awakened something I’d thought had burned out when I left Roxanne.

I wondered why she had come to Glacia. She had never gotten around to telling me her story.

And suddenly I knew. It only made sense one way: Saskia was Roxanne. Of course! How could I have missed it? Garbled voice Or no, I should have picked it up immediately. If she hadn’t deliberately altered her speech patterns, I would have. But it was her, it had to be. She knew me better than anyone, maybe better than I knew myself. She knew I would eventually regret leaving her, but I’d let my arrogance and pride send me on a oneway trip. I could never go back to her—but she could come to me.

Oh yes, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. She couldn’t know for sure if I was ready to forgive her, so she had planned to spend six months just out of reach, wearing down my resistance until I begged her to take me back, but the crash and the realization that I was leaving Glacia had made her change her plans. When she’d realized that I couldn’t identify her by voice, she’d decided to teach me my lesson the fast way.

She’d succeeded. I didn’t care about What’s-his-name anymore; she’d left him for me.

It was all I could do to keep the crawler down to sixty. I wanted to get there now, hold her in my arms again, smother her with kisses. But this would be a really stupid time to fall into a crevasse, now when all the wrongs in the Universe had suddenly been righted.

So I drove carefully, and a few hours after I emerged onto the ice cap, I saw a glint of silver on the horizon. It grew as I approached until it dwarfed the crawler: the shuttle resting at the end of a trench of plowed snow and ice. That was normal, though. The pilots usually skidded them in when they landed on ice, to avoid melting a puddle with the jets. I looked for other signs of a crash, but the stubby wings and tail fins were still intact. In fact, the shuttle hardly looked damaged at all. It was evidently made of tougher stuff than I’d thought.

I drove around it a couple of times before I pulled in beside the airlock, but there were no signs of life outside, and the cockpit was too high for me to see into. I didn’t care; in a moment I would be face to face with Roxanne again.

The wind was hardly more than a breeze when I stepped out of the crawler. I crossed the few meters to the airlock, listening to the squeak of my boots in the fractured ice and snow. The shuttle had come to rest with the door about chest high. I raised my hand to open it, but it swung inward before I connected, and I stood there like a statue with my hand extended upward toward a complete stranger.

She was at least a foot too short, with dark hair and skin, brown eyes, and a thin, angular face.

“You’re not Roxanne,” I gasped when I got my breath back. She stared at me as if I’d spoken a foreign language, and if she replied then I don’t remember it because I suddenly knew where Roxanne was. Horrified, I leaped into the airlock and pushed past the imposter into the shuttle.

“Roxanne?”

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” she demanded, slamming the door behind me.

“Looking for my wife,” I told her, but I stopped just inside the airlock’s inner door. The shuttle was in just as good shape inside as out. No cargo broken loose, no smell of shorted electronics, no red lights glowing on the control panels. And no injured pilot. Just a row of empty passenger chairs behind the two control couches.

“What’s going on here?” I demanded. “Where’s Roxanne?”

“Roxanne’s not here,” she said, softly, as if talking to a wild animal. “I’m sorry if I led you to think she was. I didn’t mean to do that.”

I turned back around to look at her. “Well what the hell did you mean to do, then?”

“Force you to confront your guilty conscience,” she answered. “Make you realize where your dreams were coming from.”

I looked back into the shuttle, all its equipment apparently in perfect working order. “You’re the ship’s counselor, aren’t you?” I asked.

“That’s right. And the shuttle pilot. We tend to double up our skills when we can.”

“This whole thing was a setup,” I said. “Applied psychology, frontier style.”

“That’s right.”

I sat down heavily in one of the passenger chairs. “Then Roxanne isn’t on the starship either, is she?”

She shook her head. “No, she’s not. Why did you think she would be?”

I struggled to find the words to explain it to her. “She has to be. That’s the only way it can work.”

She came up beside me and rested a hand on my shoulder. “It’s going to have to work without her, because she’s not here.”

I looked away from her, out through the windshield at the brilliant white ice. “She will be,” I said. “If not on this ship, then the next one, or the one after that.” She would come for me. I knew she would. She had to. She still loved me, and I still loved her. It might take her a while to realize that, but I would be here, waiting for her, no matter how long it took.

Content

Fait Accompli
by Jerry Oltion