Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “I’d have liked to have been a part of it,” Bella said. “I’m as much of a burden on this colony as anyone else. She keeps me boxed away like an old pair of shoes she doesn’t want to see again.”

  “I’ve pointed out the value of bringing you back into the fold. You wouldn’t need any formal position of power — just making you an advisor would be an improvement. But she won’t listen.”

  “We need union — now more than ever.”

  “That’s what I’ve told her. What’s worse is that I think even she sees it. She may be proud, but she was never stupid.”

  “No,” Bella agreed ruefully. “Never that.”

  Chisholm stared at the ceiling for a long time, as if lost in the mosaic of its chipped and discoloured tiles. “I still believe you matter to us,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to see you. I guess Ryan told you that I don’t have much time left. For a long while I only had headaches, a sense of pressure behind my eyes. Now I feel different… as if I’m moving into another room, another place. I have the oddest flashes of memory, the strangest dreams… sometimes when I’m wide awake. Everything feels vivid to me now. I can look at one of those tiles and see infinity in it. I’ve always loved Mingus, but now I hear things in that music I never dreamed of before. There was a sea there before, but now it’s an ocean: deep, mysterious, wonderful. I could swim in Mingus for eternity.“

  Bella looked at the brain images. “Seeing that up there helps? Or was that for my benefit?”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that to you. I like to see it.” He must have observed something in her face, some twitch of unguarded revulsion. “It’s my dragon, Bella. I have a right to know its face.”

  “Of course,” she said, chastened.

  “It’s going to kill me. Ryan says soon… weeks. They’ll freeze me before that — I’ve already given my consent. I’ll become a Frost Angel, just like Mike Takahashi. When the seizures become unmanageable, I’ll let him put me under.”

  Bella nodded. It was all she could do.

  “You don’t think it’ll make any difference,” Chisholm said. “You’re probably right: dead is dead, whether they freeze you or turn you into ash.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said. “If Ryan freezes you, then maybe we can fix you when we get back home.”

  “Home doesn’t even exist now. It’s the future, Bella, no matter what our calendar tells us. We might be better off riding this thing to the end of the line.”

  “And when we get there?”

  Chisholm closed his eyes and spoke very softly. “There’s something I need to tell you, Bella — it’s the reason I dragged you all this way.”

  “What is it?” she asked, intrigued.

  His lips formed a teasing smile. “No one else will hear this from me — not even Ryan. Definitely not Svieta. I’m telling you because it will give you something she doesn’t have.”

  “Why?” Bella breathed.

  “Because one day she’ll have to come to you for it. One day you’ll have something she needs, and that will give you leverage.”

  “How will either of us know when that day comes?”

  “You’ll know,” Chisholm said, still with that smile. “Trust me, you’ll know.”

  * * *

  A tiny spark moved away from the puddle of light that was Crabtree into the great darkness that surrounded the township. From her vantage point in the highest level of the High Hab — above the centrifuge, so that the view from her window remained fixed — Svetlana watched the tractor bob into the distance, dwindling and dimming until it disappeared beyond the limit of visibility. Only then did she allow herself to feel anything resembling calm.

  For the last six hours she had been in a state of wired tension, burning with the knowledge that she had entered her little empire again, and that she had no choice but to condone that return from exile, however temporary it might have been. She had sent Parry out to collect her because Parry was close to her and could be trusted not to talk. The involvement of Axford and the other medical staff could not be helped: she would just have to rely on their discretion. But no one else was to know that the exile had walked in Crabtree again, or that she had been granted an audience with the dying Chisholm.

  “It’s a kind of torture for her,” Axford said, standing behind Svetlana and a little to the right so that she saw his reflection in the window, flexy tucked under his scrub-sleeved arm. Behind Axford, dimmed so that it did not spoil the view, the wall showed a real-time feed from the Maw: the monstrous cogs and dynamos of the transmission system, threshing in the glare of multiple floodlights. Figures stood amidst a tangle of thigh-thick power lines, dwarfed by the clockwork mechanism. There was no shortage of energy down there, even if it was still difficult to convey it back to Crabtree.

  “I asked you for an update on her medical fitness, not a commentary on her punishment.”

  “It was meant to be exile, not punishment,” Axford said sharply. “I know. I was there when we took the decision on how to deal with her.”

  Svetlana turned angrily from the window and stood with her hands resting on either side of the swollen curve of her belly. Wang had grown her new clothes for the pregnancy, austere of cut. “Are you saying she should live in luxury while we starve and shiver?”

  “I’m saying you should understand what you are doing to her. If you want to torture her, there are cheaper ways to do it. We could ship her back to Crabtree unseen, just as we did today, find a nice little cell and lock her in it, with no access to the outside world. Frankly, that would make a lot more sense from where I’m standing.”

  “Fuck you, Ryan.”

  “If you’re at all unhappy with my reading of the situation, you’re welcome to dismiss me.”

  He was the only man on Janus who could criticise her openly and not lose a wink of sleep over the consequences. She hated and prized him for that. He was her conscience.

  “I gave her a flexy. I gave her books.”

  “The flexy died a year ago.”

  “We can’t spare any more now.”

  “Not now. A year ago… maybe we could have. But you turned my request down.”

  “She’s lucky we didn’t execute her the way we executed Herrick and Chanticler. Do you really think what she did is any less of a crime?”

  “In my darkest moments, no,” Axford conceded, “but generally I don’t allow myself to be ruled by my darkest moments.”

  “It’s easy for you. All you do is set bones and deliver babies. I have to hold this place together. She has to pay and be seen to pay.”

  “She’s paying,” Axford said quietly. Svetlana looked back to the horizon, but there was no sign of the tractor now. She pulled the blinds, screening out the darkness. Sometimes it seemed to lap at her thoughts, probing them for points of weakness. She thought of Parry somewhere out there, and wanted him back.

  “If there’s something…” she said, falteringly, “something that would keep her… intact.”

  If Axford felt a moment of triumph, nothing showed. “There are measures I could recommend. I’ll make a note of them, submit them for your approval.”

  Svetlana brooded over her answer for what felt like hours, even to her. Perhaps she imagined the kick in her belly, as the girl turned in her sleep. “All right. But she’s still an exile, Ryan. We never forget that.”

  “No,” he said.

  “One other thing — you escorted her to Jim. Did you hang around while she was there?”

  “Absolutely not. I left them alone.”

  “Then you have no idea what they talked about?”

  “I’m a doctor,” Axford said, affronted, “not a spy.”

  SIXTEEN

  The cliff soared far above, reaching over Svetlana in a dizzy overhang laced with ominous fissures. The calving of chunks of ice had slowed since the early days of Janus’s departure, but large breakaways still happened occasionally. The odds against a calving event happening while they were under the overhang were comfor
tably low, but Svetlana still could not rid herself of a knot of disquiet.

  She looked back, making sure that Parry and Nick were not too far behind her. They had trudged fifty metres north from the squatting form of the parked lander to the fiery ribbon of the lava line. It boiled orange, searing through the ice like a path of burning gasoline.

  In one direction, the line curved away to the horizon. In the other, it vanished into a blocky, ice-covered chunk of Spican machinery the size of an office block. Where there was no ice build-up, the lava lines were observed to float just above the underlying machinery, unsupported except at the point where they entered or left the interior of Janus. Robots had been sent under the lines, but had detected no peculiar field effects.

  Ahead, something was wrong with the line. Instead of following a customarily straight or gently curving trajectory, the line suddenly kinked, veering to one side at almost a right angle. After the kink, there was something subtly amiss with the line: the orange had taken on a pink tinge, and the diameter of the fiery tube was pinched. It looked stressed, like something about to snap.

  Svetlana allowed Thale to step ahead of her and lead the way, traversing the path that the line would have followed were it not for the kink. Don’t straighten out now, she thought.

  “Nothing’s come out to fix it,” he said. “Maybe it’s on a to-do list somewhere inside Janus, or maybe it just doesn’t know or care about this one breakdown.”

  “Ice did this?” Parry asked.

  “Ice and rock,” Thale said. “Sometime when Janus was parked around Saturn, a piece of chondrite rubble must have splatted onto the ice. When this part of the shelf collapsed, it took the boulder with it. The boulder smashed into the lava line just as a transit was passing.”

  Parry and Thale had been doing most of the talking since their departure, filling awkward silences with a strained attempt at small-talk. Thale and Svetlana still didn’t see eye to eye, despite his release from custody and the grudging changes Svetlana had made to the terms of Bella’s exile.

  Six years into the human settlement of Janus, the wounds were still raw. For months on end the colonists would muddle along as if the old grievances were history. For many of them — with their marriages and children — that was the case. But a few could not leave the past alone. Every now and then, something would happen to remind Svetlana that the crisis on Rockhopper had not been forgotten; would never be forgotten. Even if the troublemakers had no intention of changing the political situation in Crabtree, there were still scores to be settled.

  Most of the time, their actions never went beyond threats and intimidation, but occasionally something more significant happened. Every apparently accidental death on Janus had to be examined in the light of past events. Meredith Bagley had been the latest unfortunate victim. She’d been working on routine centrifuge repair, squeezed deep inside the drive mechanism, when the centrifuge started up. The preliminary investigation revealed that certain safety interlocks had not been set, implying that she’d been in too much of a hurry to get the job finished.

  Meredith Bagley had been known as a conscientious and thorough worker, but there was also the matter of what she had done on Rockhopper. When Bella had gone behind Svetlana’s back to check the sweatbox numbers on the fuel tanks, she had done so with Bagley’s visible assistance. Svetlana’s allies had viewed it as a kind of treachery. Most of them had forgiven Bagley by now — she’d been young, newly rotated aboard the ship and consequently unlikely to refuse a direct order — and most were content simply to give her the cold shoulder. But that still left the possibility of a small core of loyalists who might feel that Bagley hadn’t been adequately punished. Loyalists who thought they were obeying Svetlana’s private wishes. Already there were rumours that she wasn’t exactly displeased with the outcome.

  More than likely the death was exactly what it looked like: an accident rather than murder. Even good workers cut corners when they were behind schedule with someone shouting at them to get the centrifuge up and spinning again. But even the slightest suggestion of murder could not be discounted. The Judicial Apparatus had to look into all the angles before it closed the book.

  Bagley was just one case. Every accidental death was investigated with the same diligence. Likely suspects were brought to the High Hab and quizzed. No one liked it, and it certainly wasn’t helping to erase the old divisions, but it wasn’t the duty of the judiciary to bury the past.

  Dealing with men like Thale didn’t make it any easier, either. He’d nailed his colours to the mast pretty clearly when he tried to spring Bella from prison. No doubt where his loyalties lay, Svetlana thought acidly. But no one else on Janus had spent more time studying the lava lines than Nick Thale, and the knowledge he had accumulated was simply too valuable to lose by shutting him away.

  Not for the first time, Svetlana was grateful to have Parry around — he was the one crew member no one had a problem with. The Lind loyalists knew that he’d been generous to Bella, so they forgave him his choice of wife. Even Nick Thale appeared relaxed in his presence; far more so than when he was forced to deal with Svetlana.

  But in spite of her husband’s comforting presence, Svetlana would still be glad when this particular expedition was concluded.

  They could see the transit now, stalled a little further along the lava line from the kink. It was the first time she had seen one up close: normally they were moving too fast for the human eye to follow. Knocked off its course by the boulder, this transit had come to an abrupt halt, lodged against a chunk of protruding machinery. The transit’s outward form was very simple: a pair of thick coin-shaped endplates, floating independently of each other, with the “cargo” trapped inside a suspension field stretched between the inner faces of the end-plates. But this transit was damaged, bent out of shape by the impact — the endplates were twisted at an angle to each other. The stressed, constricted lava line had broken up into fingerlike tubes, playing over the endplates like Saint Elmo’s fire and etching a weird pattern of bronze-coloured erosion into their pewter-grey surface. Beyond the transit, the line kinked back onto something resembling its original path.

  The broken transit had spilled its cargo. The suspension field was still active — a flickering, writhing cylinder between the endplates — but the freight had escaped from its confinement through some point of weakness on the nearside. Plates, coils and tubes of dull material lay scattered in a fan-shaped pattern on the ice, like an eruption of entrails through a hernia. “You think we can just… take it?” Parry asked, when they had come to a halt, the toes of their boots only a few metres from the edge of the cargo.

  “My guess is nothing will stop us,” Thale said. “When the ice thins out, maybe this stuff will be reabsorbed into the normal machinery. Or maybe it’ll just form a garbage layer on top, like dead skin.”

  Parry fiddled with his helmet visor, snicking glare filters in and out. “No other transits have come out on this line?”

  “Not since the boulder came down. There was never much traffic on this one anyway — maybe one or two transits a week. If they’ve been re-routed onto other networks, we’d have a hard time spotting the difference.”

  “Any idea what the stuff is made of?”

  “Difficult call unless we take some of it back to Wang’s lab.”

  “It looks like metal,” Parry said. “Lead, or something. My suit isn’t picking up any rise in the background rads, so I guess it probably isn’t radioactive.”

  “Or the suit’s faulty,” Svetlana said.

  “Yeah, that too.” Parry managed a gallows laugh. “You think we should try to take some back now?”

  “I’d rather we sent in the robots first,” Thale said. “If this is some kind of trap or set-up, or if the materials turn out to be toxic — better to let them take the risk.”

  “I don’t know if Saul can spare any robots for a few days,” Parry said.

  “C’mon,” Thale said, his tone sceptical, “is it really that bad
? I thought that was just the party line, to keep us knuckled down.”

  “It’s worse,” Parry said.

  In the last few months, breakdowns and accidents had thinned the robot pool to a dangerous low. Complex artefacts such as microprocessor boards needed equally complex blueprints, specified down to atomic scales. For most of their machines, no such blueprints existed. Wang was doing his best, combining the vat’s built-in library files with a certain amount of reverse engineering, but so far he hadn’t come up with much that actually worked.

  “You must be able to pull some strings, though.” Thale pointed at the strewn cargo. “This is raw material. It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

  “I’ll see what Saul can spare you.”

  “We don’t have to wait for Saul,” Svetlana said. “There isn’t time. We need to know if this stuff is any good, and if it is we need a strategy for stealing more of it.” And then she walked forward.

  “Svieta —” Parry began.

  But she was already on her knees, pushing her gloves into the ice under the nearest dark-grey slab. “Feels okay,” she said. “My fingers aren’t tingling or anything weird. It just feels like a chunk of metal… really hard. It’s moving, I think.” She whistled. “Fuck, it’s heavy — must be denser than anything we use.”

  Parry and Thale stood either side of her, caught between fascination and alarm. She heaved at the slab until it lurched free from the ice in which it had buried itself. It came up easily then, although it still felt heavier in her hands than anything she had ever handled under Janus’s gravity. “Feels like a slab of concrete, or something. I don’t want to even think about what this would weigh under a gee. We’ve got to be talking tonnes.”

  “Be careful with it,” Thale said. “It’ll still have inertia. If you drop it on your foot, you will feel it.”

  “Gather up some of this stuff,” she ordered. “We’ll load as much of it into Crusader as we can take. And keep an eye on your Sheng boxes.”