Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  Svetlana looked at the picture, applying mental filters to strip away the clumsy and smudged execution, trying to see what the child had intended. There was a yellow sky and a grey-green strip of indeterminate ground, and a stick-figure man standing on that ground, rendered in a murky shade of reddish black. The man had nasty scarecrow limbs, arms terminating in tree-like explosions of crooked black digits. The face — as far as she could make out — was vulpine and sleek and strangely menacing. In one skeletal hand the man held something that looked like a broken doll, more red than black.

  “I’ve no idea who that’s meant to be,” Svetlana said.

  “Nor me, so I asked, and she just kept saying he was the ‘bad man’. When I asked his name, she said something I didn’t understand, at least not at first — something that sounded like ‘pull’ or ‘pow’. Then it clicked, and I knew exactly what she was saying, and I felt my blood temperature drop about thirty degrees.”

  “What was the name?”

  “Powell,” Ofria said, with a slow and delicious emphasis. “Powell Cagan.”

  “Holy shit.” Svetlana forced her startled voice lower. “How could she —”

  “Because people still talk about him, Svieta. Maybe not in public, but in the privacy of their own living quarters… he’s the man who got us into this mess, after all. We all know that, it’s just that most of us have… found a way to move on. We have enough to deal with here without projecting all our hate onto someone who probably died more than a century ago, hopefully in prison after serving a life sentence for corporate manslaughter, after receiving inadequate, analgesics for his very painful terminal illness.”

  “But not everyone has such an enlightened view.” Christine shrugged. “He’s the new bogeyman, the demon some of the parents use to keep their kids under control. Be good or Powell will get you, and take you away to his wife.” Svetlana looked at the doll-like figure in the man’s fingers and realised that it was supposed to be a child he had stolen. “His wife?”

  “The wicked witch, the mad old woman who lives out on the ice.” Christine put down Dawn Mair’s painting and picked up another from the table. ”Take a look at this. It’s Richard Fleig’s picture of Bella — or at least what he thinks she is.”

  The seven-year-old son of Chieko Yamada and Carsten Fleig had drawn a creditably insane-looking old witch, squatting in a kind of fractured ice-blue igloo under an iron-black sky. Svetlana stared at it in cold horror: she had seen the picture earlier, but its significance had been lost on her. Just a witch, she had thought, never for one moment realizing it was meant to be Bella.

  “I never put these thoughts in their heads,” she said, as if she needed to defend herself. “The children aren’t even meant to know about her.”

  “Someone let it slip.”

  “Who?”

  “All of us, Svieta, in those unguarded moments when we forget that the kids are around. Can you honestly say you’ve never mentioned Bella, never even alluded to her, when Emily’s been within earshot?”

  “Alluded maybe, but —”

  “That’s all they need. Kids make their own mythologies, their own angels and demons. All we had to do was give them the tiniest helping hand, the tiniest nudge in the right direction. If they hate and fear Bella, it’s only because they’ve latched onto the way we think about her.”

  “They’re too young for monsters.”

  Christine returned the dripping painting to the table. The black line at the top of the picture had begun to bleed a tendril towards Bella’s dome. “Maybe not. In less than four years we’ll meet the real ones. Perhaps it’s time we all started thinking about monsters.”

  By then the children were done with the chocolate and were swirling around the gymnasium again, laughing and screaming, bursting balloons and spilling drinks and food. Unable to suppress the disquiet that the paintings had provoked, Svetlana clapped for attention. When she spoke, her voice sounded troubled, evasive.

  “Hi, kids — wanna see a movie?”

  Damn right they did: they’d been hyped-up for it as thoroughly as for the chocolate, and their anticipation was no less intense. She waited until they were gathered before the flexy array, settled down and prepared for the long bout of concentration, silence and bladder control watching the movie would require.

  “We found this movie in the archives,” Svetlana said, smiling brightly. “It was lurking there for years, stored under the wrong file name. That means none of you will have ever seen it before. Isn’t that great?”

  Most of the children nodded their approval. Danny Mair started to cry.

  “This is a film I saw when I was a little girl,” Svetlana said, soldiering on. “Even then it was an old film: my mother remembered seeing it when she wasn’t much older than any of you. I know you’re going to like it, though. It’s a film all about a little fish, a little orange fish with one fin bigger than the other one, who gets separated from his dad, and all sorts of magical adventures happen to both of them while they’re trying to find each other again. They meet these really cool turtles and… well, I don’t want to spoil it. Shall we just watch the film?”

  There was a murmur of polite if not overwhelming enthusiasm. Some of the smaller kids were already looking distracted.

  Perhaps it would have been better to have said nothing, Svetlana thought. She used her own flexy to start the movie, and then took a place behind the kids to watch the show.

  Finding Nemo wasn’t a complete success. It went down well with a handful of the kids, but even then Svetlana couldn’t be sure that they weren’t just sitting still and looking engrossed because that was what was expected of them. The reactions of the others ranged from indifference to a kind of bewildered edge-of-tears dismay, as if she’d forced them to sit through an hour of algebra. They just didn’t get it on any significant level. Few of them had seen Bella’s old aquarium, so the things swimming around on the flexy screen were simply too unfamiliar to them, alien beings immersed in an utterly alien environment of which they had no experience. A few of the children were sufficiently amused by the bright shapes with human faces, but for others it was too much like watching an endless parade of abstract ink-blot forms. They had trouble following the narrative, trouble working out who they were meant to identify with. The sharks, meant to be funny, disturbed them profoundly. When the action shifted out of the water, they lost the thread completely. By the time the movie had finished, half the kids had drifted away to play with the balloons and make alterations to their demon-haunted paintings.

  Svetlana felt dispirited. She had been in an excellent mood at the start of the party, but by the end of the film she was convinced that they were raising a generation of psychopaths: children utterly starved of the fundamentals necessary for adequate emotional development. How could they have responded so ungraciously to a movie in which she had expected them to take such untrammelled delight?

  But then she saw the kids laughing again, having their face paint straightened out and de-smudged, and she forced her mood out of its rut. She had asked the kids to take instant pleasure in a movie that had been nearly sixty years old before Rockhopper met Janus. As a kid, there’d been things that her own parents had expected her to enjoy — films they’d liked when they were small — but which to her had seemed quaint and colourless and somehow melancholy, and even at this remove she could remember their quiet, brooding disappointment. They must have worried about her, for a moment. But she hadn’t turned out to be a monster any more than these kids would.

  She knelt down, picked up a balloon and punched it through the air towards Emily. While there were children there was hope, no matter how unamusing they found one deformed orange fish.

  SEVENTEEN

  In the highest part of the High Hab, far above the sprawling lights of Crabtree, Svetlana sat in numbed silence. It was near the end of the twelfth year of settlement. The analysis team had just processed the latest data on the Doppler measurements, and the numbers were not remotely wh
at she had been hoping for.

  “This can’t be right,” she said, shaking the aged flexy like a damp dishrag. “We’re fewer than eight weeks from Spica. We damn well should be seeing some slowdown by now.”

  “Well, we’re not,” Nick Thale said. He sat opposite her, his hands laced as if in prim contemplation. It was months since their last face-to-face meeting and Thale looked older than she remembered. He had allowed his hair to grow out around his bald crown, falling in snow-white waves that lent him the faintly simian look of an emeritus professor.

  He was accompanied by Denise Nadis, her dreadlocks now shot through with grey, her dark skin age-spotted around the cheeks, the lines around her mouth deeper than Svetlana recalled. Unconsciously, Svetlana touched her own face and felt alien textures that had not been there a year or so ago.

  They were all getting old, even in the time-dilated reference frame of Janus.

  “Can I trust these numbers?” she asked.

  “We’re having trouble making measurements on the blue-shifted face,” Thale said. “It’s difficult enough getting our equipment to function against those fluxes. Symbolist sabotage isn’t helping matters, either.”

  “What sabotage?” Svetlana asked.

  “Frida Wolinsky’s extremists. Ever since Gregor died…” Thale shrugged, knowing that no more needed to be said.

  “They don’t like us making measurements into the blue,” Nadis said. “Especially after what happened to Bob Ungless.”

  Robert Ungless had left a suicide note and driven a tractor over the horizon from Crabtree, in the direction of the bow face. His last coherent transmissions had spoken of brightness, and the luminous, beckoning things he saw in that brightness even as the blue-shifted radiation chewed away his mind. After that he spoke only in riddles. The Symbolists claimed that Ungless had received divine information, that his every fevered utterance must be scrutinised for revelatory content.

  “They think it’s a kind of blasphemy,” Nadis went on. “They send out robots from the Maw to cut our data lines and smash our instruments. They deny it, of course.”

  “We should have locked them up years ago,” Svetlana said.

  Parry grimaced. “We’ve been over this. We need someone in the Maw to grease the clockwork, and it might as well be Symbolists. At least they’re dedicated to their work.” Svetlana gritted her teeth and moved on. “Tell me about the data.”

  Nadis shifted uncomfortably. “The numbers are reliable. Within the stated margin of error, there’s been no significant change in the frequency of the starlight. Either something freaky is happening to the space-time ahead of us, or we’re not slowing down.”

  At five gees of effective acceleration, Janus had taken two months to reach its present cruise velocity following its departure from Earth’s solar system. Svetlana’s best minds still had no idea how the moon had accelerated itself, but they had assumed that the same mechanism would operate in reverse during the anticipated slowdown phase. But they were already into that crucial two-month window, and there was no hint that the moon had begun its deceleration procedure. They were still shooting through space at a hair’s breadth below the speed of light.

  “If we’re not slowing down,” Svetlana said, “what the hell is going to happen to us when we reach Spica?”

  “I guess that’s up to Janus and the Spicans,” Thale said.

  Parry coughed warningly. “If you could err towards keeping your remarks constructive, Nick, that would be great.”

  Thale looked nonplussed. “Then I have nothing useful to add. You’ve seen the latest imagery: the Spican structure is still ahead of us, and it’s turned its long axis around to align with our present vector. Whether we slow down or not, we’re going to enter that tube.”

  “And then what?” Svetlana said. “Do we just shoot on through, like a rat through a pipe?”

  “I’ve no idea. You might as well cast tea leaves.”

  Nadis leaned forward, clicking her purple fingernails against the table. “Maybe the slowdown mechanism is different.”

  “Go on,” Svetlana said, with a strained smile of encouragement.

  “Janus was alone in our solar system. It only had its own motive power to accelerate up to cruise speed. Up ahead, it might be different. Maybe the Spican structure is part of the deceleration system.”

  Svetlana flashed her attention to Thale. “Any thoughts on that, Nick?”

  “It’s as good a guess as any,” he said.

  “What about the spikes?” Parry asked. “Any idea where they fit into all this?”

  “None whatsoever,” Thale said simply.

  “It can’t be coincidence, though,” Parry persisted. “Two months from slowdown, and these things start pushing their way through the ice — there’s got to be a connection, right?”

  While she waited for Nick Thale to favour them all with a reply, Svetlana studied the latest map of the spire growth.

  Since the discovery of the first breakthrough point, nineteen similar features had been mapped around Janus, spaced more or less equidistantly. Enormous spire-like structures were pushing their way through the crust, ramming past machinery and ice, squeezing obstructions aside like erupting wisdom teeth. The spires glittered with symbols in new syntactical patterns that confounded the best theories of the linguists. They rose higher and higher, until they were a kilometre thick at the base and their needled tips were twenty kilometres from the surface of Janus.

  Two of the spires were visible from Crabtree, thrusting up through the sternward icecap. Where there had been darkness, now there were tilted wedges of pastel light slanting from the horizon like frozen aurorae. Their sides were veined with lava lines, snaking in meandering trajectories to a point just below the spire, where they plunged inside. Around the clock, transits raced up the spires, laden with freight. Unguessable transformations must have been taking place inside them.

  “Nick,” she pressed.

  “You want guesswork, I’ll give you guesswork, but don’t blame me for it later.”

  “I won’t.”

  “More than likely there is a connection. Janus seems to be preparing itself for something. It might be the slowdown we’ve all been expecting. Maybe these spikes are part of the mechanism, and they’re going to bring us to a dead stop on a dime as soon as we hit the tube. Or maybe it’s nothing like that at all.”

  “I need something,” Svetlana said desperately.

  “We’ll know sooner or later,” Thale said, shrugging resignedly.

  Svetlana thought about the skeletal tube they were approaching, with its struts and spars, its almost unimaginably expansive internal surface area — a million Earth-sized planetary surfaces, at the very least, each of which might easily contain several billion sentient creatures if the Spicans’ idea of tolerable population density was anything like humanity’s.

  Then again, there might be no Spicans waiting at all, just their ancient and obedient machines. Perhaps it would be very difficult to tell the difference, from a human perspective.

  She felt a bleak, premonitionary chill shiver through her. She thanked Thale and Nadis and dismissed them. She moved to the window and hugged herself against the stellar cold that seemed to push infiltrating fingers through the glass. The distant spikes twinkled with ominous activity. Parry waited, saying nothing, leaving her with her thoughts.

  “I’m scared,” she said at last, as if she had the room to herself. “I’m scared and I worry that we might be terribly wrong about all this.”

  She heard his footsteps, saw his dim reflection loom behind her in the glass. Parry wrapped his arms around and held her tight, and though she was glad of that, nothing he did could take away the chill and the fear.

  * * *

  “It’s good of you to keep me informed,” Craig Schrope said, “even if it isn’t the best news.”

  They were in the High Hab, in one of the administrative chambers of the Interim Authority. Schrope had an office to himself, lined with wangwood s
helves brimming with hard-copy. He spent most of his days there, occupying himself with the legal processes of the Judicial Apparatus. It was solitary work, for the most part, but that suited Schrope. Despite years of rehabilitation, his emotional constitution was still fragile, and there were only a handful of people in whose company he felt truly at ease. Svetlana felt an elitist thrill at being counted amongst that number. They would probably never be close friends, but simply being on civil terms was an astonishing improvement on the old state of affairs.

  “I wanted you to know that we aren’t keeping anything from you,” Svetlana said. “You’ll hear rumours, I’m sure, but the truth is that we haven’t got a clue what it is.”

  “Do you have a name for it yet?”

  “The Iron Sky,” she said tersely.

  Shortly after attaining their final height of twenty kilometres, the spires had changed again. Their upper extremities — the last three kilometres — had thickened into budlike forms that had then split open along invisible seams, each of them forming six radial petals defined by faint tracings of lava. The petals reached out three kilometres from the central bud, oblivious to Janus’s gravitational field. Then the petals had started growing, spreading and widening like oil slicks.

  Over the next two months they had blocked off more and more of the sky until their edges met and fused, and then there was no sky except this oppressive black ceiling, suspended twenty kilometres above the ice. The lava lines had faded. Though the spires continued to be lit by Spican symbols, the ceiling was now as dark as the interstellar space it served to hide. “Can you see through it?” Schrope asked, closing one of his legal binders. The paper was thick and vat-grown, the cover appropriated from an old Lockheed-Krunichev Fusion Systems spiral-bound technical manual entitled Tokamak Start-up Procedures in A Nutshell. “Did you hear that we could?”

  “Just rumours, Svieta.”

  “No. We’ve seen nothing. Everything we shine at it gets absorbed. If there’s something on the other side, we’re not picking up the echo.”