Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “I heard he made a lot of enemies on Mars.”

  “Enough that head office decided the only way to keep him on the payroll — and in one piece — was to move him onto another project. Hence Rockhopper. But don’t give Craig a hard time because he has a grudge against tool-pushers. Good ol‘ tool-pushers sabotaged his suit, tried to throw him down a service elevator, threatened to get to his family.”

  Svetlana looked down. “I didn’t know he had a family.”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know about each other,” Bella said. “And he’s wrong about us, of course — this is as tight and well-run an operation as any in DeepShaft. But you can’t blame him for carrying some suspicion over from his last assignment. It’ll just take a bit of time to rub his corners off. Then he’ll fit in, I’m sure of it.”

  “Okay, I’ll try to be patient,” Svetlana said. “But I still want to see him getting his share of homework.”

  “Don’t worry, that’s taken care of. He’s got a list of high-school science questions as long as my arm.”

  Svetlana patted the stack of printouts on her lap. “I’m glad we can talk like this… I mean openly, without any barriers.”

  “And I’m glad I can dump on you, when needs arise.” Bella sucked on the cigarette. “Like you said: what else are friends for?”

  * * *

  On the eighth day Bella called an emergency meeting of the chiefs. She gathered them in her office and sat impassive, wondering what they imagined the problem to be and secretly relishing their squirming discomfort.

  “What is it?” Svetlana asked, the first of them to break the silence.

  Bella stood up and peeled her flexy from the wall. It came to life in her hands. She held up the brightening panel to her audience.

  “This,” she said.

  “There’s a problem with ShipNet?” Nick Thale asked, looking — like all of them — at the top-level menu.

  “There’s nothing wrong with ShipNet,” Bella said. “That’s functioning normally. The problem’s more obvious than that. It’s staring you in the face.”

  They looked, and looked. They still couldn’t see what she was talking about.

  “Do you think the menu structure needs to be reorganised to take account of our new mission profile?” Regis asked.

  “Perhaps, but that’s not why you’re here. Look.”

  “The flexy needs regenerating?” Parry offered.

  “Yes, it does, but that isn’t the problem either.” Bella sighed: they weren’t going to get it. “The problem is the mascot. The problem is the penguin?”

  “I don’t —” Svetlana began. “Oh, wait a minute. You don’t think — Oh, Christ. Why didn’t we think of this before?”

  Parry looked at Svetlana. “I still don’t get it. What’s the problem?”

  “You really don’t see it?” Bella asked incredulously. “Don’t you see what that mascot actually looks like?”

  “It looks like a penguin to me.”

  “And what’s the nice penguin doing, Parry?”

  “It’s holding a drill… a jackhammer… Oh, hang on.”

  “Look at it through alien eyes,” Bella said. “The way that penguin’s grinning: don’t you think it looks just a tiny bit fierce? It even has teeth. Whose funny idea was it to put teeth on it, anyway? And that drill: don’t you think there’s a danger it might be mistaken for some kind of —”

  “Weapon,” Svetlana breathed.

  “Holy shit,” Parry said, and started laughing.

  “They might think we look like that,” Bella said. “They might think we’re the penguin.”

  “And that we’re armed,” Svetlana said.

  “With flippers?” Parry asked.

  “What about the flippers?” Bella returned.

  “Don’t you think they’ll find it rather odd that we’ve managed to build and fly a spaceship with just flippers? I mean, that would take some doing, wouldn’t it?”

  “Maybe they’ll assume we bio-engineered ourselves to have flippers once we’d achieved a sufficiently advanced technological support society,” Saul Regis said. “You could go back to flippers if you had robots to take care of you. In Cosmic Avenger, season two —”

  “The issue is not the flippers,” Bella said firmly. “The issue is the fact that our mascot might give cause for concern to our friends from Spica. It might just make them decide to shoot us out of the sky.”

  “Fine,” Nick Thale said, “so remove the mascot from ShipNet. That can’t be difficult, can it? It isn’t even as if we’d be giving them access to ShipNet anyway.“

  “ShipNet isn’t the difficulty,” Bella said patiently. “The difficulty is the twenty-metre-tall penguin painted on the side of this ship. The difficulty is that someone has to go outside and paint it out.”

  “Under thrust?” Svetlana asked incredulously.

  “Under thrust,” Bella said. “And while they’re out there, whoever it is can take out some blue paint and slap a large ‘UEE’ where the penguin used to be. As of today, we have official blessing from the United Economic Entities. Everyone on this ship has just been assigned temporary diplomatic status.” She offered them a confiding smile. “It’s time to start taking this seriously, people.”

  * * *

  Parry was in the EVA preparations room, flanked by racks of bright-orange Orlan nineteen hardsuits. He fixed the cam against the wall, then stepped back into its field of view, adjusting his usual red cap. They had asked him to wear a DeepShaft bib cap, but he had to draw a line somewhere.

  “You’ll get into trouble,” Svetlana warned, sitting cross-legged on a storage pallet. “Even I had to put the damned uniform on. Took me a day to find it, but I still had to put it on.”

  “They can sue me afterwards. There are a ton of DeepShaft logos in the background. Isn’t that good enough for them?”

  “I doubt it.”

  Parry warmed the flexy and started up the anchordoll. “Okay,” he said, addressing the flexy, “you can do your thing.”

  “Hi,” said the helium-voiced anchordoll. “You’re watching CNN. I’m talking to Parry Boyce, thirty-seven, head of cometary surface operations aboard Rockhopper and lucky partner of hot new science pin-up Svetlana Barseghian. How are you feeling, Parry?”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s good to hear. No nerves, no second thoughts?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s great.” The anchordoll beamed her approval. “Parry: when you reach Janus, you’ll be in charge of any activities that involve humans working in the vicinity of Janus — right?”

  “Right.”

  “Could you tell us a little more about how that’ll happen? I mean, how will you actually get out there?”

  “We’ll EVA.”

  “EVA.” The doll looked thoughtful. “And for the people at home that means…”

  “Extra-vehicular activity.”

  “That’s great. And what does that entail, exactly?”

  Parry shrugged. “Activities… outside the vehicle.”

  “The vehicle being?”

  “Rockhopper.”

  “That’s great. And these activities… what would they be, exactly?”

  “Janus operations.”

  “Meaning activities taking place in the vicinity of Janus, right?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “That’s great! And when you talk about activities taking place in the vicinity of Janus —” The anchordoll paused, distracted by Svetlana’s sniggering. Parry looked at her.

  “What?”

  She was creased up on the storage pallet. “You’re a natural, Parry. It’s the way you open up… the way you give so much of yourself. They’re going to love you.”

  He reached up and tore the cam from its gobbet of geckoflex. “If I have to do one more of these, I’ll strangle someone. Starting with you.”

  Svetlana put on her best innocent look. “Me? What have I done?”

  “You know full well. It’s yo
u they’re interested in, not me.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “Well, you could try being a bit less… well, clever and attractive, for a start.”

  “I’m glad you put them in that order. I’d hate to get the idea that my physical attributes have precedence over my intellectual ones,” Svetlana pouted, drawing her knees up to her chin. She was wearing skin-tight zebraprint skiing pants and a low-cut sleeveless turquoise vest, a combination Parry had always found particularly alluring. “Or is it because you think my physical attributes are somehow less impressive?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Not as such. You could, however, have been taken to imply it.”

  “You still look pretty hot to me, Barseghian.”

  “Ah, shucks: you’re just saying that.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  She eyed him coquettishly. “Prove it, then.”

  “Here and now? I think there’s an EVA party due through in about ten minutes.”

  “Oh, right. The dreaded killer penguin.” She sniggered. “Well, we wouldn’t want to take their minds off that vital mission, would we?”

  “No, we wouldn’t.” He leered suggestively.

  “Which only leaves one question: my place or yours?”

  “Yours,” he said, after a moment. “That extra fifty cubic centimetres makes all the difference.”

  * * *

  There was never much privacy on a ship, but Svetlana and Parry made the best of what they had. Her room was little more than a horizontal slot, probably modelled on the most austere and claustrophobic brand of Tokyo capsule hotel. There were one hundred and fifty similar slots, ringed in three tiers around the lower part of the hab, each containing just enough room to sleep, store a few personal effects and, now and then, snatch a few moments of precious seclusion. Svetlana had to climb a ladder to reach her slot, then twist sideways through the gap before sliding shut the long plastic door. It was a squeeze with just one person, and a kind of three-dimensional puzzle with two. But Svetlana and Parry put up with that, and with some ingenuity they had mapped out a range of positions that could just be accommodated without either of them suffering too many bruises.

  Making love was the only time when Svetlana welcomed the ship’s constant background noise, even though she could never quite disconnect her attention from the rhythms and cadences of that mechanical music. Parry sensed and tolerated her slight absences, while reminding her that it didn’t always have to be this way. He meant the two of them returning home, to that sparkling sunlit dream of the dive school.

  Parry was a diver at heart. He’d come into space because it was work. He shrugged off the differences between water and vacuum as if they were two mildly different states of the same hostile environment, but Svetlana knew where his heart was. She sometimes missed her diving days, but it didn’t gnaw at her like a disease, unlike Parry: dive culture was still thick in his blood. There were two kinds of people in his world: buddies and non-buddies — people you could trust and people you left on the shore. EVA was wet-time. He talked about Braille dives and incident pits as if they were all still back at sea.

  She loved him, but she loved space as well. Now she worried about space getting in the way.

  He lay against her now, blissfully calm, only just awake. After they had made love, Svetlana had fallen asleep as well, but now she was prickly and alert, trying not to think about their future. She had glued her flexy to the wall and navigated ShipNet to the news feeds, hoping to blank her concerns. CNN was running Bella’s interview on heavy rotation.

  Parry watched it over her shoulder.

  “I couldn’t ask for a better crew,” Bella was saying. “And we’re coming back in one piece. You can quote me on that.” Then the image morphed into Bella saying, “We push ice. It’s what we do.”

  “Got to hand it to the little lady,” Parry said, his unshaven chin bristling her neck, “she sounds like she means it.”

  “She does.”

  “They’re going for it, too. Her picture’s everywhere. You’d think she put this ship together with a spanner.”

  “She deserves some credit,” Svetlana said, and then regretted the defensive way it had come out.

  “She gets all the credit she needs from me, babe.”

  “I know.” It was true, too. Some of the men had issues with female authority, but Parry wasn’t one of them. “It’s just that I know some people are going to resent her for this, and I can’t stand that. They have no fucking idea what she’s been through to get this far.”

  CNN were running a biodoc on Bella, scraped together from video clips taken at various points during her career. Now the flexy showed a young Bella suiting into an ancient, dust-smeared Orlan, somewhere on the Moon. Every now and then they’d break away from the story to cut back to Bella saying, “We push ice. It’s what we do.”

  The words began to drill into Svetlana’s skull.

  “I think they’re beginning to get an idea,” Parry said. “Good for Bella. High time she got some exposure.”

  “Maybe it’ll change things for her.”

  “Things need changing?”

  Svetlana turned down the flexy. “We had one of our heavy discussions the other night.”

  “Nothing you need to tell me about if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s all right. It’s not as if Bella expects there to be any secrets between you and me. We talk about you often enough.”

  “Only the good stuff, I hope.”

  “With you, Boyce, there is only good stuff. All we do is sing your praises. Your ears must burn.”

  “They do, but that’s just the millisieverts kicking in.”

  “Ha.” She hated it when he joked about that kind of thing. “Anyway, we were talking about life stuff, and we got around to Garrison.”

  “Not the first time.”

  “The first time she really seemed to want to open up about it. Although even then she clammed up pretty quickly as soon as we got serious. It’s as if she wants to talk about it a bit, but not too much.”

  “So it’s still painful for her.”

  “It’s been twenty-one years, Parry. You’ve got to get over stuff eventually.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t judge. Neither of us has lost a partner the way she did.”

  “Okay — but I’ve known people who have lost loved ones, and they’ve found a way through it eventually.”

  “People are different.”

  “I know, but for Bella it’s as if she can’t move on. She as good as admitted she’s having her career for Garrison.” Svetlana rolled over on the bed to face Parry. “What I keep thinking is it must have something to do with the way he died.”

  “No warning, you mean?”

  “It can’t be the same as losing someone to an illness. They never had a chance to say goodbye to each other. They weren’t even together before he set off on that flight. Bella was back on Earth at the time, waiting for Garrison to get a rotation home. Even if they’d had a conversation before he went out, it must have been over the Earth-Mars network. Serious time-lag, not exactly conducive to intimacy. And neither of them knew what was about to happen.”

  “Unfinished business, you mean?”

  “I keep thinking about that tiff we had the other day, Parry — when you were on my case about the repairs, and I bit your head off about it.”

  He stroked a finger against her breast. “I think we kissed and made up about that one.”

  “I know — but what if we hadn’t ever had that chance? We both went outside the ship after the row. You went down to the comet, I went on EVA to nurse the robots. Anything could have happened to either of us.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  “What if it had? We don’t get paid a lot of money because the company likes us. We get paid because it’s dangerous out here. I tell you, I’m never stepping into an airlock after a row. Not again. We make up and then we go outside.”

  He looked at her, marvell
ing. “That conversation really got to you, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want you to lose me. I don’t want either of us to go through whatever Bella’s been dealing with for the last twenty-one years.”

  “Maybe Janus will change things, then. Let her move on. It’s going to be a landmark in all our lives.”

  “That’s what Bella says,” Svetlana said, remembering how they had talked about Parry’s desire to go home. Wait until Janus, then think things over.

  Wait until Janus.

  “I love you, Barseghian,” Parry said, pulling her into a tighter embrace, “but I wish you’d stop worrying.”

  * * *

  Flexies had been plastered to the wall, their edges staggered like bricks to form a ragged array that showed an object that could only be artificial: fuzzy, glimpsed at the resolution limit of the massive interferometric telescope, but unmistakably a made thing. It was a pipe: round in cross section, ten times as long as it was wide, formed from some kind of lacy framework. It resembled the flutelike skeleton of a tiny, dead marine creature.

  “We don’t know what it is yet,” Bella said to the small group of people who had assembled in the gymnasium. “All we know is that we’d have seen it years ago if anyone had thought Spica worthy of a closer look. What we’d have made of it if we’d found it before now is another thing entirely.”

  The image being displayed had arrived on the uplink just thirty minutes earlier; it was still embargoed from the media networks, so the news hadn’t made it on to the general-access ShipNet channels. Bella had not insisted that everyone attend the meeting; though this was connected to Janus, it wasn’t of specific importance for their mission, and she had no wish to increase the burden on an already overworked crew. All the same, most of Saul’s working party had taken up her invitation, as had a handful of interested stragglers from other departments.

  “You mean this thing was just sitting there all this time?” Parry asked. “Just waiting for us to notice it?”

  Bella smiled. “It wasn’t that simple. It took a massive coordinated effort to obtain this image. It’s the kind of observation that’s made about once a year, when some exosolar planetary alignment is particularly favourable and someone thinks there’s a chance of imaging an icecap or a continent. A month ago, if you’d have suggested Spica as the target, you’d have been laughed out of the room.”