Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

In a way it was good news, because it was a concrete sign that their arrival had been noticed and — unlike the opening of the sky — it appeared to be a message addressed specifically to them.

  The bad news was that it was odd, unsettling and devoid of useful content, and ever so slightly threatening.

  It was a solid cube exactly two metres along each side, and very black, although not so black that it hadn’t thrown back a radar bounce. A manipulator-equipped free-flier was able to approach the object, touch it and stabilise its tumble. It massed precisely two hundred metric tonnes, but appeared otherwise quite inert and unresponsive. Svetlana weighed the risks and decided to permit the object to be brought back to Underhole for further study. A dome was thrown around the cube, initially unpressurized. Once a battery of tests had established that the cube probably wouldn’t be harmed by the presence of air — it appeared to be chemically inert — the dome was flooded with a normal atmospheric trimix. Denise Nadis, Josef Protsenko and Christine Ofria-Gomberg were running tests on the cube when Svetlana came to visit them a day after the dome had been pressurised.

  In the harsh floods rigged around it, the cube was dismayingly black. Its surface albedo was exactly 0.999999, to the limits of measurement. As it rotated on the electric turntable installed under it, the cube became a chunk of abstract form, almost appearing to ooze from one shape to another as it turned from face to face. It was surrounded by monitoring devices mounted on spindly tripods, trailing tangles of optical data cables and thick, frayed, heavy-duty power lines.

  The cube was smooth on all but one of its six faces. X-ray and acoustic probing revealed no hints of interior structure. Surface analysis, using atomic-force microscopes, drew blank on the matter of the object’s composition. For an artefact that had presumably spent some time in space, even in the hermetic environment inside the tube, it was astonishingly free of imperfections. The cube’s edges were still absurdly sharp.

  Must be self-renewing, the science team informed Svetlana: stuffed full of sleek alien nanotech, correcting any fault or imperfection before it had a chance to register. No chemical analysis was possible because the surface was itself in a state of constant overhaul and flux. If they had better tools, they said ruefully, they might have been able to glimpse these processes in action.

  Except — as they all knew — the nanotech might not be alien at all. The cube’s dimensions and mass suggested prior knowledge of human measurement systems.

  But that was not all.

  The sixth face contained an engraving.

  It was turning towards her now. By some trick of surface effects, the finger-thick lines of the engraving had a higher albedo than the surrounding face. It was da Vinci’s drawing of a man standing in a box, one of the most familiar and iconic diagrams imaginable. It had been stylised, reduced to the essentials, but it was still recognisable. It seemed unlikely that any alien mind had created this cube.

  The technical team wore masks, gloves and surgical scrubs, but that was just a token precaution: nothing they’d measured had suggested that the cube was in any way harmful. It just sat there, revolving slowly on the turntable, presenting five blank faces and then the da Vinci design.

  “You can touch it if you like,” Denise Nadis said, handing her a pair of recyclable surgical gloves inlaid with a matrix of haptic sensors. “We’ve all done it. It’s almost like a ritual. You don’t really believe it’s there until you’ve pressed a hand against it.”

  Svetlana snapped on one of the gloves. “What would happen if I touched it with my bare skin?”

  “You’d leave a nasty set of fingerprints — one of us already tried.”

  “They faded with time,” Christine Ofria-Gomberg said. “No harm was done. I just had to know what that material felt like under my skin.”

  “The haptics weren’t good enough?”

  “I had to know. What if there was a difference that the gloves weren’t picking up?”

  “And was there?” Protsenko asked.

  “No,” she said, sullenly. “It felt exactly the same.”

  Svetlana’s fingertips registered the tingle as the haptics engaged their microscopic contact cilia against her skin. She brushed her hand over the rough texture of her trousers and felt the bias of the fabric as if the gloves were not there at all.

  She moved to the cube and touched one of the slowly turning blank faces. It was cold, solid, mute. It felt old: shockingly so, as if it had been waiting an eternity for this instant of human contact. Her fingers skirted the sharp edge as the next face revolved into view. She wondered — as they were surely all wondering — who had put this thing into orbit around Janus. What was its message? What were they meant to make of it?

  The next face hove into view. She had only put on one of the gloves. She glanced back and saw that Nadis, Protsenko and Ofria-Gomberg were preoccupied with a flexy read-out. They were all looking down, not at her. Shielding her movements with her body, she reached out to touch the engraved face with her bare hand.

  “Svetlana,” Nadis called, “I think you need to see this.”

  She turned from the cube, snapping off the haptic glove before anyone noticed she had only been wearing the one.

  “Denise?” she asked innocently. “What is it?”

  “It’s the door,” she said. “It’s closing.”

  She realised that she meant the door at the end of the shaft, two light-minutes down the tube. “I didn’t even know it was open.”

  “Nor did we,” Nadis said. “It must have happened after we lost the second free-flier, before we got the hovering cam into place.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  “Then you’re going to like this even less: something came through.”

  NINETEEN

  Underhole was a smear of ruby light twenty kilometres under their feet. With the helmet binocs cranked up to full zoom, Svetlana could just make out the figures, tractors and temporary support domes of the little outpost. They were really no safer down there, not if one took the long view, but in that moment she would have given everything not to be up here, standing on the wrong side of the Iron Sky.

  She wondered how her partner felt. It was Schrope who would be taking the long stroll into the alien ship, not her. Let me be your envoy, he had said. He’d shown no sign of it, but she wondered if he was regretting those words now.

  Parry’s voice buzzed in her helmet. “Talk to us, boys and girls. We get nervous when we don’t hear anything.”

  “We’re still here,” Svetlana said.

  “No ill effects?”

  She looked at Schrope, who shook his head briefly. “We’re both doing okay. It’s no different up here than down here.” She risked a glance up towards the distant structure of the new sky: the inside of the huge shaft in which Janus had come to rest. “Just a lot more… exposed. I don’t think any of us realised how claustrophobic it was getting down there.”

  “Ryan says you’re both looking good. If you could breathe a bit slower, that would be great.”

  “Just getting over the flexwalk,” Svetlana said. “Seriously out of practice here.”

  “We’ll forgive you. Could you do us a favour and pan around?”

  She unclipped the cam from the side of her helmet and offered Parry a three-sixty sweep, without dwelling on the Spican ship. Part of her still hoped it would go away, like a psychotic aberration they could all just agree never to mention again.

  “How’s that?”

  “We’re dropping packets now and then, but other than that the images look pretty good.”

  “Maybe we should have brought that booster up with us after all.”

  “Nah. Not a good idea to have anything up there that they might not recognise as being one of us or belonging to us.”

  Svetlana nodded — they had been over that, of course, and she saw the logic in keeping the contact situation as clean as possible. But just having a relay box by the lip would have made her feel one degree less disconnected from th
e people below.

  Almost as soon as the ship had landed, it had extended what could only be interpreted as a boarding ramp. They had hoped to send robots into the ship before they sent a human volunteer, but every time they sent a free-flier or a legged robot anywhere near the alien ship, it pulled up the drawbridge.

  They were as close now as any of the machines had reached and the ramp was still down. Presumably the ship recognised that they were armoured organisms, not robot envoys.

  “Craig,” Parry said, “we’re getting some fuzz from your cam. Could you give it a clout, see if that clears things?”

  “Just a sec.” Svetlana watched Schrope knuckle the side of his orange-painted helmet. Sometimes a well-delivered jolt could separate bonded layers in the gelware of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky sandwich, allowing reaction fronts to propagate more freely. Wang had achieved great things, but the BZ tech was still too subtle for his forge vats.

  “Any better?” Schrope asked.

  “We’ll manage. Audio is good, at least. You still cool about going through with this, Craig?”

  “Well, cool isn’t quite the word I’d have chosen.”

  “It’s not too late to back out,” Svetlana said.

  She caught his sceptical look through the faceplate. “One of us has to do this, Svetlana. It might as well be me.”

  “You don’t owe us anything,” she said.

  “No,” he said, almost too quietly to be picked up by his helmet com, “but I do owe myself something.”

  Svetlana nodded once, briskly. “We’re about to start walking,” she told Parry. “Ship looks about a klick away, give or take, should be there in under twenty minutes.”

  “Let’s take things nice and slow,” Parry said. “Every twenty paces I want you to stop and hold your cams on the ship. We’ll review the situation before proceeding closer. Any changes we don’t like the look of, we scrub. Clear on that?”

  “Clear.”

  “No arguments, no heroics,” Parry said firmly.

  “No problem,” Svetlana answered. “This is a heroics-free zone.”

  They started walking. After twenty geckoflex paces they halted and allowed Parry and the contact team time to get a good look at the squatting ship.

  It sat on the outer surface of the Iron Sky like a chandelier that had fallen from a ceiling and somehow avoided shattering. It rested on a dozen or more curved arms that angled down to make contact with the ground before rising again to form tapered, nearly horizontal tips. The boarding arm differed from the others by resting flat on the ground all the way to its extremity, which pointed directly at the hole. The arm was flat in profile, except for two wall-like flanges running along its entire length. Svetlana might have had her doubts before, but from this perspective it looked more like a ramp than ever: a clear invitation to step inside.

  The boarding arm led into a bulbous, onion-shaped core that consisted of many concentric layers of glassy material. Long chains of Spican symbols floated on the outer layer, as if drawn in neon. Darker structures were dimly visible within, faint as the suggestions of organs in glassfish. Dozens of much thinner arms emerged from the central structure without contacting the ground. Some of them bulged into node-like structures that might have been sensors, or engines, or living quarters, or weapons. Soft light gleamed from the curves and joints, partly refracted from the ambient light of the chamber, but partly emanating from the ship itself.

  It was very, very large. The central core alone could have swallowed Crabtree from ground to hab.

  They stopped, advanced, stopped again.

  “No visible change,” Parry said, “but they haven’t pulled up the drawbridge either.”

  “Any word on those symbols yet?” Svetlana asked.

  “Jake and Christine are still working on the correlations. You’ll hear the moment they come up with something.”

  “But don’t hold my breath.”

  “You’ve got the idea.”

  Svetlana managed a gallows laugh. “Maybe we should bring in the Symbolists, see what they have to say.”

  “We’re not that desperate,” Parry bounced back.

  They walked, stopped, walked again. After ten or twelve minutes, Svetlana judged that they had crossed half the distance to the squatting ship. She glanced back and the hole in the sky looked foreshortened, difficult to make out against the dark pewter-grey of the surrounding undamaged surface. She wondered why the Spicans had been forced to cut the hole, rather than ordering the smart matter of the Iron Sky to open up like a door. So many questions. So few answers.

  A few more stops and starts and the ship loomed much larger, beginning to tower over them, its glassy intricacy all the more striking the closer they came. Rather than surrendering its secrets as they neared, the ship only became more bewilderingly complicated to look at.

  “Ease up, airhogs,” Parry said.

  Svetlana nodded, realising that she had been breathing too heavily again. The slow death march across the other side of the sky was getting to her. “Coms still okay?” she asked, just to be saying something.

  “Thready, but we can live with it. How are you feeling?”

  “As if I’m about to feed the fishes, but otherwise… I’m holding it together, more or less.”

  “How’s Craig doing?”

  Schrope cut in. “Verging on the apprehensive, but I’m holding it together as well.”

  “That’s good. Must be a hell of a view out there — I mean, with just a centimetre of helmet glass between you and it.”

  “You’re right,” Schrope said, and suddenly there was a tone in his voice that lifted the hairs on the back of Svetlana’s neck. “We shouldn’t forget how privileged we are. This is… it. What we’ve been waiting for all these years. Not just for the thirteen years we’ve been stuck on Janus, but all the thousands of years that have passed, the tens of thousands of years, even, ever since one of us looked up into the sky — into all that darkness — and wondered what was out there. Not if there was anything there, but what. We’ve always known they were out here somewhere, and that it was only a matter of time before we met. Well, this is that time, it’s here and now, and out of all the billions of people who have ever lived, it’s happening to us.”

  “Amen to that, buddy,” Parry said slowly, “but let’s not lose focus on the fact that this is just another job. It’s no more or less dangerous than planting a mass driver, or firing up a cold tokamak.”

  After another ten minutes they had arrived within twenty metres of the tip of the boarding ramp. They panned cams around and waited for word from below.

  “Are we still go?” Svetlana asked.

  A crackle, then Parry’s voice. “If Craig is still happy, we see no reason not to proceed.”

  “I’m ready,” Schrope said.

  “Ash says you’re good to go on suit systems. Your call, buddy.”

  “I’ll start the walk. Suggest Svetlana retreats to a midpoint between here and the hole. Shouldn’t make much difference to coms.”

  “I’m staying right here at the foot of the ramp,” Svetlana said.

  “I appreciate the offer,” Schrope said, “but at the slightest sign of anything happening, I want you to clear out. Remember what Parry said: no heroics.”

  She nodded. “How long are you planning on staying inside?”

  “I’m zeroing my suit timer and setting the clock for thirty minutes. When the alarm pings, I’ll finish my drink and ask for my coat.”

  Svetlana set her own timer for the same duration. “Sounds good. If you’re not out after thirty minutes —”

  “You forget about me. Do you honestly think there’d be any point sending in the cavalry?”

  “Not really,” she said, on a falling note. “Good luck, Craig. I know you and I haven’t always seen eye to eye —”

  “Forget about it. That’s a lot of water under a lot of bridges.” Schrope reached out and took one of her gloved hands. “Pushing ice, right?”

  She closed
her hand around his. “Pushing ice. All the way home.”

  Schrope let go and turned to walk the remaining distance to the end of the ramp. Svetlana stood her ground, training her cam on his flexwalking form. At the base of the ramp, he paused and looked back, and then placed one foot onto the nearly horizontal surface.

  “Keep talking, Craig,” Svetlana said.

  “Traction is good. Bond seems to be about normal. No trouble removing or repositioning. I’m about to place my other foot on the ramp.”

  “Easy does it.”

  “It’s done. I’m still standing. I’m on the ship.”

  “Describe the stuff you’re standing on,” Parry said.

  “It’s like glass, tinted a kind of purple-grey. I can just see the ground through it. Feels solid under me: there’s no give, no resilience, no vibration.” He unclipped the cam and waved it across the floor. “Getting this?”

  “Check your focus, buddy.”

  Schrope knocked the cam against his kneepad. “Better?”

  “Better. Hold it there for a second. Good. Now pan left, then right.” Svetlana heard Parry break off to discuss something with one of the other watchers. “Okay, you can stow the cam again.” Schrope fiddled the cam back onto its mounting. “I think I’m ready to take another step.”

  “In your own time,” Parry said.

  Svetlana watched him walk another pace along the ramp. “Still looking good here,” Schrope said. “I’m going to continue: I don’t want that alarm going off before I’m inside.”

  “Steady as she goes,” Parry said. “We’re not in a race here.” Schrope continued: five paces, then ten, then twenty. By now the ramp under him had begun to curve upwards, away from the floor. “Traction’s still good,” he said.

  “Take it nice and slowly all the way to the top,” Parry said.

  Schrope stopped after another dozen or so paces. Svetlana heard his breathing: it was harsher and faster than she would have liked, but that was entirely understandable given the circumstances.

  “I’m finding it difficult to judge my angle to the floor,” he said. “Horizon line looks tilted. I think there might be a field effect here, like at Eddytown.”