Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

’Or zoos.’
    ’We, my kind, can live here, on this cold world, without making it
warm.’
    ’Then you’ll have to leave,’ she snapped.
    She reached the outskirts of the city.
    It was a gridwork of foundations and low walls, all of it
half-buried under a blanket of rock-hard water ice and frozen air.
The buildings and roads seemed to follow a pattern of interlocking
hexagons, quite unlike the cramped, organic, circle-based design of
modern Conurbations on Earth, or the rectangular layout of many
older, pre-Qax human settlements.
    As she walked along what might once have been a street, the pain
in her hands and feet seemed to be metamorphosing to an ominous
numbness.
    The ghost seemed to notice this. ’You continue to lose heat,’ it
said. ’Shivering is no longer enough to warm you. Now your body is
drawing heat back from your extremities to your core. Your limbs are
stiffening - ’
    ’Shut up,’ she hissed.
    She found a waist-high fragment of wall protruding from the layers
of ice. She brushed at it with her glove; loose snow fell away,
revealing a surface of what looked like simple brick. But it crumbled
at her touch, perhaps frost-shattered.
    She walked on into what might once have been a room, a space
bounded by six broken walls. Though there were many rooms close by
here - clustered like a honeycomb, closer than would have been
comfortable for people - it was hard to believe the inhabitants of
this place had been so different from humans.
    She wondered what it had been like here, before.
    Once, Snowball had been Earth-like. There had been continents,
oceans of water, and life - based on an organic chemistry of carbon,
oxygen and water, like Earth life, and it had worked to create an
atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen, not so dissimilar to Earth’s. And
there had been people here: people who had built cities, and breathed
air, and perhaps gazed at the stars.
    But the long afternoon of this world had been disturbed.
    Its sun had suffered a chance close encounter with another star.
It was an unlucky, unlikely event, Minda knew; away from the Galaxy’s
centre the stars were thinly scattered. As the interloper fell
through the orderly heart of this world’s home system, there must
have been immense tides, ocean waves that ground cities to dust, and
earthquakes, a flexing of the rocky crust itself.
    And then, at the intruder’s closest approach, Snowball was
slingshot out of the heart of its system.
    The home sun had receded steadily. Ice spread from polar caps
across the land and the oceans, until much of the planet was clad in
a thick layer of hardening water ice. At last the very air began to
rain out of the sky, liquid oxygen and nitrogen running down the
frozen river valleys to pool atop the vast ice sheets, forming a
softer snow metres thick.
    She wondered what had become of the people. Had they retreated
underground into caves? Had they fled their planet altogether -
perhaps even migrated to new worlds surrounding the wrecking
star?
    ’This world itself is not without inner heat,’ the ghost said
softly. ’The deep heart of a planet this size would scarcely notice
the loss of its sun.’
    ’The volcano,’ Minda said dully.
    ’Yes. That is one manifestation. And vents of hot material on the
spreading seabed have even kept the lower levels of the ocean
unfrozen. We believe there may still be active life forms there
feeding on the planet’s geothermal heat. But they must have learned
to survive without oxygen…’
    ’Do you have that on your world? Deep heat, water under the
ice?’
    ’Yes. But my world is small and cold; long ago it lost much of its
inner heat.’
    ’The world I come from is bigger than this frozen ruin,’ she said,
spreading her arms wide. ’It has lots of heat. And it is a double
world. It has a Moon. I bet even the Moon is bigger than your
world.’
    ’Perhaps it is,’ the ghost said. ’It must be a wonderful
place.’
    ’Yes, it is. Better than your world. Better than this.’
    ’Yes.’
    She was very tired. She didn’t seem to be hungry, or thirsty. She
wondered how long it was since she had eaten. She stared at the
frozen air around her, trying to remember why she had come here. An
idea sparked, fitfully.
    She got to her knees. She could feel the diamond grid of the
suit’s heating elements press into the flesh of her legs. She swept
aside the loose snow, but beneath there was only a floor of hard
water ice.
    ’There’s nothing here,’ she said