“Jim’s just as dead.”
“Jim’s a Frost Angel. That makes all the difference. He’s been frozen solid by a controlled medical process. He was euthanized before the cancer took away too much of his brain. There’s still material there for them to work with.”
She emitted a small, humourless laugh. “You’re saying… they might be able to bring him back?”
“To them he’s like a broken clock. If we take him in like that — how can they not see that we want him mended?”
* * *
Ash Murray was there to meet them when Crusader docked at Underhole.
“Parry, Svieta — there’s something you really need to see.”
They followed him back into the conference area. The dinners had been cleared away and the table laid with a loose mosaic of semi-functioning flexies. Everyone was looking expectantly at Svetlana, as if she was the long-awaited guest of honour finally showing up at a party.
She swallowed to clear a mouth suddenly flooded with saliva. “What?”
“We got more than we thought,” Murray said, picking at the corner of one eye with a finger. “Near the end, when Craig was in the airlock chamber — or whatever we’re calling it — we got a momentary improvement in signal throughput.”
She stood by the table, looking down at the ragged mosaic with its mismatched colour boundaries. “I don’t get it. What are you saying?”
“Craig came through — he got us the imagery. He pointed the cam and… we got a frame. It came through in low-end bits, riding the audio. That’s an emergency protocol that kicks in automatically when the system decides that audio needs priority — it’s why we missed it initially.”
“A single frame.”
“It’s way better than no frame.”
She looked at the distorted composite image created by the flexies, but at first she could make no sense of it. It was blurred like a picture taken out of the window of a speeding car: vague shapes, streaked hyphens of bleeding colour. Under the force of all that gravity, his breathing impaired by the rising pressure, it must have taken superhuman effort for Schrope to point the cam in even roughly the right direction, let alone hold it steady.
But he had done his best. And he had got them something.
“I take back what I said about hallucinations,” Axford said quietly.
Parry pointed at one of the blurred forms. “There’s definitely something here.” He moved his finger. “And here. And maybe here as well.”
“Spicans?” Svetlana said.
“Craig said there were several of them. He said they were big. He said they looked like —”
“Mountains,” Nadis said.
“Except they don’t.” Svetlana narrowed her eyes, trying to mentally unscramble the effects of cam blur and the distortion due to the intervening glass. The aliens were large, upright forms of marine colour — blue, green and turquoise. They looked like barnacles, rising from a flared circular base, but that basic tapering shape was all they had in common with mountains. Their sides curved over to form a flattened top surface, not a peak. They had no obvious front or back, no recognisable limbs or sensory apparatus, no clear means of locomotion. They looked as if they had been baked in a cake mould.
“But he saw them,” Parry said, “got the cam onto them. He said they were moving, coming closer.”
“If the optical properties of the glass changed, he might have mistaken that for motion,” Axford said. “What we’re seeing here might not be living — we might just be looking at mechanical structures.”
“No,” Svetlana said firmly, “Craig knew what he was looking at. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, shall we?”
“They’re not what I was expecting,” Parry said.
“I’m not exactly sure what any of us were expecting,” Svetlana said, smiling at Parry.
“If these are the Spicans,” Nadis said, “do we keep on calling them that, or should we stick with the name Craig gave them?”
“Craig got us this picture,” Parry said. “That’s enough to remember him by.”
“I’m wondering,” Svetlana said slowly, tilting her head, “whether he might not have said ‘mountains’ after all.”
* * *
Axford left for Crabtree on Crusader. When he returned four hours later, he had one of the Frost Angels with him. The body was in a grey metal medical cabinet, still in a state of cryogenic suspension.
Svetlana had confirmation by then that Bella had told the truth about Jim Chisholm’s wishes. Bella had given Parry a code phrase — multitudinous seas incarnadine — that unlocked a private partition in Jim Chisholm’s old data partition; his flexy had died years ago, but the entries he’d made on it had been distributed throughout the surviving network, and they remained intact. The codeword conjured up a short video clip Chisholm had made from his deathbed, holding the cam in one hand while he spoke.
Svetlana shivered to hear him speak again.
“If you’re hearing this,” he said, “then you either talked to Bella or you got damned good at decryption. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m guessing the former.” A ghost of a smile touched his wasted features. “I hope things are okay for you all. If it’s come to this, then at least some of you made it all the way to Spica, and there is someone or something waiting for you now you’re there.
“If Bella has relayed my wishes, please be assured that she’s told you the truth. As difficult as it may be for you to grasp, this is what I want you to do. We all remember those discussions about the theoretical nature of alien intelligence — I reviewed the summaries even though I couldn’t sit in on them in person — the long conversations about how if we ever do meet anyone, they’ll most likely be tens of millions of years ahead of us in every respect. Makes sense to me: if there’s anything we’ve learned from our own history, it’s that intelligence is a precious thing: rare and vulnerable. If the Spicans are still out there, then they’ve probably been starfaring for an awfully long time. I’m sure putting Humpty Dumpty together again won’t be too much of a stretch for them.
“So bring me to them, and see what they make of me. At the very least they might learn something about us just by taking me apart and seeing what makes me tick. Maybe it won’t work out, but if it doesn’t, I’ll have lost nothing.”
Jim Chisholm smiled a dead man’s smile. “And if I do come back, I’ll do my best not to scare the living daylights out of you.”
* * *
Svetlana returned to the hole in the sky. She carried the Frost Angel with her on an improvised sled, dragged it all the way to the Spican ship, which was still running its symbol dance. But when she neared the ramp the flicker of symbols slowed and stilled, as if the ship recognised her presence and wished to show it. Its watchful attention lifted the hairs on the back of her neck.
She walked up the ramp and followed Schrope’s trail into the glass interior. She found the spherical chamber where he had come to grief. She pushed the sled over the lip and watched it slide all the way down until it skidded to rest, the frozen body lashed to it like an offering.
The glass airlock sphinctered shut between her and the chamber. Nothing happened to the space where she stood; she could still see the sled and its cargo through the glass.
Presently, they came.
At first they were vague shapes approaching from beyond the far wall of the chamber. They were huge, just as Craig Schrope had said, three metres tall and at least as wide across at the base. They moved in an odd way, unlike any form of animal locomotion she had ever witnessed. They were blue, mainly, a pure chromatic blue shot through with twinkling filaments of green and turquoise and sometimes a flash of bright ruby.
They crowded the glass to see what she had brought them, flattening themselves against the surface like children pressing their faces against a window. Slowly, so as not to alarm them, she unclipped her cam and shot some footage. If the aliens were aware of her, they gave no sign.
She could see them better
now. Cylindrical in horizontal cross-section, they had no obvious front or back. What had looked like a solid form in the single frame Schrope had sent them was revealed to be a curtain of very fine fronds erupting from a central point and spraying down in all directions to brush against the floor. Not like mountains at all, but fountains. That was what Craig Schrope had said.
His description captured their essence in a single word: they looked like ornamental fountains spraying coloured water. They were constantly moving even when they stood still, the fronds rippling, flexing and interlacing like a nest of glittering snakes. They moved by flicking the fronds against the floor in a propulsive wave. Whenever a curtain of fronds parted, all she saw within were further layers of frondlike structure.
These, then, were the aliens — they were clearly not part of the ship. They were definitely not robots, not even alien robots: something about the way they moved, the way they squeezed against the glass, suggested living individuals rather than directed units.
A door opened in the chamber’s far side and one of the blue things oozed through the gap — the door looked far too narrow at first, but Svetlana had seen octopuses pull off similar tricks — and flowed down to the sled. Another alien followed it. She kept the cam trained on the pair as they flowed around the sled and then engulfed it completely. For a moment the two shapes were as one, as if conferring over the prize, then one of them disengaged, flowed back to the door and squeezed through. After some hesitation the other followed it. The sled and the Frost Angel had vanished.
“Take good care of him,” Svetlana whispered. She turned around and began to make her way back to Underhole.
TWENTY-ONE
Parry had the impression Bella had been waiting for him. The inside of the dome looked barer than before. Her meagre belongings had been neatly packed in storage crates, waiting to be moved through the airlock. Parry pretended not to notice. She prepared him tea, as usual.
“I’ve heard nothing from Crabtree,” she said, while the water was boiling.
“Svetlana’s tightened the blackout. Craig’s disappearance was one thing, but using Jim in this way, regardless of his wishes, is something else entirely. It was difficult enough for Axford to get the body out of the morgue without too many awkward questions from the medical staff.”
“I imagine he was discreet about it. But Svieta can’t keep up the blackout for ever — sooner or later they’ll have to know.” She spooned tea into the improvised strainer. “How long has it been now?”
“Three days, give or take.”
“And no change at all from the ship?”
“The symbols have quietened down again, fewer than there have ever been. It’s as if the penny’s finally dropped that we just don’t understand them. Although why they ever expected we would —”
“They didn’t expect,” Bella said. “They assumed. I’ve seen the pictures of that ship, and it doesn’t look particularly Spican to me. It’s sleek, glassy, curved. The Janus machinery is huge, monolithic and mainly black.”
“I don’t follow — how can it not be Spican? You’ve seen the symbols. Jake and Christine might not have found a precise match with any of the patterns we’ve mapped on Janus, but it’s clearly the same language.”
She poured him his tea. “The same language, I agree, but what other language would they show us? Not English or Chinese — they don’t know us that well, at least not yet. But suppose they do know a little about us: enough to guess that we’ve had time to crawl around Janus and study the Spican machinery. Suppose they’ve come into contact with Spican artefacts as well. Suppose they actually found the language easy to crack — so easy that they naturally assume we’ll have had no trouble with it either.”
“But we did have trouble. Lots of trouble.”
“I think they may have realised that by now,” Bella said ruefully.
“In which case — if they aren’t the Spicans —”
“I don’t know. And it could be that I’m totally wrong about all this. But I do have ideas. I’ve always had ideas.” Bella paused. “A long time ago, I told you that I thought we might be wrong about the Spicans.”
“I remember,” Parry said. “It was when I was taking you back to visit Jim for the last time.”
“Being out here on my own, with nothing to distract me… I’ve had a lot of time to think about things — Janus, mainly, and what it says about the creatures that made it.” She cocked her head, as if an idea had suddenly occurred to her. “We were very lucky, weren’t we?”
He’d lost her train of thought. “Lucky?”
“We found ourselves caught in the slipstream, bound to this thing like Ahab to his whale… ‘Beneath this smiling sky, above this unsounded sea’.”
“Bella,” he said, with a forgiving smile.
“Janus took us away from home, but it also kept us alive. We thought we were being so clever, the way we took power and materials from it for our own purposes.” She fixed him with that familiar intense gaze that had lost none of its power during her long years of exile. “But what if that was always the point? What if the Spicans expected us to make use of Janus? And to be amused by it, too. I think that was the point of it all, Parry. I think Janus was a puzzle designed to keep us alive and sane, like a cage at the zoo. You feed and water the animals, give them toys to play with and challenges to keep them alert.”
“We ended up on this thing by mistake,” he said. “The incident pit, remember?”
“The Charlie Foxtrot,” she said, nodding. “And yes, we did make mistakes. But an animal makes a mistake when it walks into a trap. Janus was our trap and our cage. It was designed to entice close study. It was designed to snatch us away, and then keep us alive for the journey.”
Parry’s voice came out paper-thin. “The journey to where, Bella?”
“Where else?” She flipped back the lid of her cup to take a sip of tea. “The zoo, of course.”
* * *
They had finished the tea, and the matter of the packed belongings could no longer be avoided. Bella pottered with a cheerfulness he hadn’t seen in her in thirteen years, washing the cups and tea-making equipment.
“It’s true what I told you,” she said over her shoulder, while Parry examined his helmet as if it were the most fascinating artefact in the world, entranced by every micrometeorite crater, every cosmic-ray scratch. “I’ve had a lot of time to think out here. Now at least I’ll be able to have some influence on policy, even if it’s only through the anonymous channel. I didn’t like the sound of that at first, but now that I’ve had time to sleep on it, I actually think it might be rather a good arrangement. Very democratic, very egalitarian. Difficult as it might be for you to believe, I actually have some sympathy with the Interim Authority. Svieta could have handled the Symbolists better, but that was never going to be an easy nut to crack.”
“She lied.”
Bella kept on pottering. “It’ll be good to be close to Crabtree, as well. I know I’ll still be living in an isolated dome, and that I won’t be able to make any unscheduled visits outside, but at least it won’t be so difficult for other people to come and visit me, even if it’s only more visits from Axford. But Ryan’s been kind to me over the years. Good man, Ryan — we could have done a lot worse than him.”
“She lied,” Parry said again.
Bella looked around. “I’m sorry?”
“She lied to you,” he said in a dead, deflated voice, still not looking up from his helmet. “Svetlana lied. You’re not getting what you thought you were promised.”
“No,” Bella said, with a kind of half-smile.
“Everything I said to you, I said in good faith. I meant every word.”
The smile was gone now, the truth hitting home. “No. She can’t do this.”
“She has. You had one thing she needed. Now she has it. You are of no further use to her.”
Bella’s voice dropped to a croak. “You can’t let her get away with this.”
“I
’ve tried. She won’t listen.”
Bella sat down on one of the packed crates, all her sprightly enthusiasm gone. “It was stupid of me,” she said at last, as if chiding herself. “I took the risk of trusting her.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Parry said. He wanted to comfort her, but knew that nothing he could say would ease the pain of this betrayal.
“I trusted her.”
“You did the decent thing. You told us the thing that mattered.”
“I bargained, Parry. I thought I was getting something in return.”
“But you’d have told us anyway, in the end, even if I’d promised you nothing, because above all else you care about Crabtree. Crabtree and doing the right thing by Jim.”
“Parry,” she said quietly, “would you leave now? It was kind of you to come here in person — I know it can’t have been easy — but I would very much like to be on my own now.”
He followed the power line back to Crabtree and made his way to Svetlana’s office still wearing most of his suit. He had to pass through the centrifuge section, spun up for a gee, but had dropped most of his depleted-uranium ballast weights in the tractor before taking the elevator.
He used his key to open the office. It was dark: Svetlana was still in Underhole, as he had expected. He brought the lights up to their dimmest setting and moved to the familiar rectangle of the fish tank, bubbling quietly in the gloom. The fish had adapted easily to near-weightlessness, which was just as well given where he intended to take them now.
Pushing Ice Page 37