Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “You didn’t do all this in thirteen years,” Takahashi said.

  “No,” Bella conceded, “it took a bit longer than that.”

  “How long?”

  “After thirteen years the aliens came.”

  He nodded. He had needed to be told about the Fountainheads before anything else, although he hadn’t seen them yet. “How long ago was that?”

  “Thirty-five years,” Bella said, “which makes this the forty-eighth year of the human occupation. We’ve been on Janus for almost half a century. There are nearly five hundred of us now.”

  He looked at her wonderingly. “How old would that make you, Bella?”

  “Too old to answer that question,” she said, not quite able to meet his gaze. “Actually, it would make me more than a hundred years old. Which is sometimes how old I feel.” She paused, anticipating his next question. “When I was eighty-eight — which was fifteen years ago — I went to the Fountainheads. They made me young again: set my body clock back to about the same age I was when we met Janus.”

  “You don’t look much older now than you did then.”

  Takahashi wasn’t the type to dole out insincere flattery. Plus she had mirrors. She knew how she looked. “I should look seventy, I suppose, but clearly I don’t. I look a little older than when I walked out of the Fountainheads’ ship fifteen years ago, but not by that much.” She held up her hand. “For the first time I can feel the arthritis coming back. If it hadn’t happened to me already, I doubt I’d recognise the signs.”

  He studied her with unconcealed fascination. “My memory isn’t all there yet, Bella, but I remember that you were alone on the ship.”

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  “I’m guessing that’s changed after all these years, right?”

  She answered sharply. “I’m still alone.”

  “But it’s been…” He shook his head in amazement. “Wasn’t there anyone, Bella?”

  She could have lied to him, and to herself, but Takahashi deserved better than that. “I tried to make it work with someone, once. He was a good man, one of the best in Crabtree. For a few months…”

  He must have mistaken something in her voice. “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing — he’s still around. We just couldn’t make it work.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s my fault. I drag too much of the past around with me.”

  After a long silence, as the elevator slowed into the transit plaza in Underhole, with its concourse ramps and rows of boutiques and restaurants, Takahashi said, “Will they make you young again?”

  “They had better,” Bella said. “There’s still work to do.”

  * * *

  Takahashi’s good progress continued. In the sixth week, Bella decided that it was safe to introduce him back into the colony. She chose to arrange a party in his honour.

  It took place in Crabtree’s largest arboretum. It was evening. The ceiling lights had been turned down from their daytime glare and false stars sprinkled the strutted canopy. The largest trees had been strung with lines of paper lanterns in reds and golds and greens. Choral music floated from concealed speakers: Bella had chosen Arvo Part from the files because she had discovered one of the Estonian composer’s recordings amongst Takahashi’s personal belongings.

  She had considered it vital not to exclude anyone from the party, and consequently almost every adult citizen who could make it was there. They circled and talked in the still, scented air of a midsummer night. Hovering lanterns followed little groups, offering them light until they were shooed away good-naturedly. BI robots maintained a discreet presence, only emerging from the darkness between the trees to offer drinks, sweetmeats and the occasional helping hand.

  Bella was too nervous to fully enjoy the party herself, but as the evening wore on it gradually began to dawn on her that it was not going to be the abject failure she had feared. Takahashi was easy with the sudden flood of attention, moving comfortably from one group to the next, telling the same stories over and over again, laughing patiently at the same well-intentioned jokes. Now and then he would retire to a convenient tree stump for a few moments to himself, but whenever Bella talked to him he assured her that he was going to be fine, and that he was rather enjoying the whole affair. He was enchanted with the variety of costumes on parade: eighty years of fashion history that he had never lived through. Despite the collision of styles, the evening ambience and the soft light from the lanterns lent everything a subtle unity.

  “How do you like the music?” Bella asked, as they sat together with only a hovering lantern between them. “We found your old helmet, looked through the access statistics in the file memory. You used to listen to this a lot.”

  “It’s great. The main thing is that it isn’t Puccini.”

  “Puccini?”

  “I died while listening to Turandot. How many people can say that?”

  Bella put a hand on his knee. “I know this isn’t all going to be easy for you, Mike, but you’ll get there in the end. You’re a miner.”

  “Pushing ice,” he said, a touch too confidently to be convincing.

  She noticed that he had been watching a young woman standing at the edge of a nearby group. Her luminous, neon-patterned gown scooped low on her back, revealing more than it hid. The lantern light played softly over her shoulders and the incurve of her spine. Bella tried to remember the woman’s name, but nothing came.

  “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble just for me,” Takahashi said.

  “I think we did.”

  “Not that I don’t appreciate it, but… does everyone get this attention when they come back?”

  “You were different,” Bella said, gently chiding. “We never expected to get you back. That made it worth celebrating.”

  “You’ve all been through such hard times. I almost feel like a fraud… as if I’ve missed out on all the hard work.”

  “You shouldn’t feel that way. In fact, I’ll make a point of being cross with you if I even suspect that’s how you feel.”

  Takahashi accepted a BI’s offer to refill his wine glass. The glasses had been spun in the forge vats: miracles of crystalline delicacy, the stems braided from dozens of filaments of whisker-thin glass like the vapour trail of a corkscrewing fighter jet.

  “When you brought me down from the ship,” he said, meaning the Fountainhead embassy, “you told me there had been a difference of opinion on Rockhopper, that it hadn’t been a unanimous decision to come here.”

  “That was all a long time ago. No sense in going over old ground.”

  “I heard you brought Rockhopper here — that it was your decision not to try to return home.”

  “What do you think you would have done?”

  Takahashi looked through his glass at the attractive woman. “At the time, I doubt that I’d have gone along with it, but in retrospect I think you did the right thing. You’d never have made it back. DeepShaft and the UEE would never have put together a rescue plan.”

  “Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It’s just a pity not everyone saw it that way at the time.”

  “Svetlana put you in prison. She punished you for saving us.”

  Bella felt a tightness in her throat. She hardly ever talked about her exile now, or the spite that had caused it. “Svieta had her reasons,” she said, savouring the pious little thrill that came with magnanimity. “Had I listened to her, we would probably never have made it into the slipstream in the first place.”

  “You had equally compelling reasons not to do as she asked.”

  “Yes,” Bella said, “but it was still a mistake. I hope I redeemed myself later, but…” She trailed off: to say anything more in her defence would have been distasteful.

  “It cost you your friendship with Svieta,” Takahashi said.

  “We used to see things similarly. I considered her a good friend.” She paused, watching the orbiting groups of party-goers. “But friendships are al
ways difficult to maintain across lines of rank, even in a civilian organisation. It was a wonder ours lasted as long as it did.” She shrugged, trying to make out that it was no great thing to her any more.

  “How long has it been since you last spoke to her?”

  Bella smiled: it was not a difficult question. “We haven’t exchanged a word since Rockhopper landed on Janus.”

  He shook his head in appalled fascination. “That’s as long as I’ve been dead.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I suppose it is.”

  “It isn’t right, Bella.”

  She felt, then, the first hint of irritation with him. What business did he have coming back from the dead and lecturing her? But she fought to keep it from her voice. “Mike, it was not because I didn’t try. I wasn’t asking for our friendship back. I wasn’t even asking for her to talk to me, or send a letter. I just wanted her to offer me one tiny shred of human dignity: the smallest acknowledgement that I could be something other than the force for evil she obviously considered me. But nothing came.”

  “Do you think she hates you?”

  “All I know is that when an intense friendship ends, this is often what happens.”

  Takahashi swirled his wine. “I don’t think men have those kinds of friendships — I mean, not unless they’re lovers. I’ve never had such an intense friendship with another man. One guy, I crewed with him for eight years — helped him suit-up, ran EVA shifts with him, got drunk with him — and yet all that time went by before I even found out he was married.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Knowing that stuff about each other wasn’t even on our interpersonal radar. And yet we were as good a pair of EVA buddies as I’ve ever known.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Can’t remember.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes, alone with their thoughts. Bella smoked a cigarette — it was the first she’d allowed herself in weeks. Groups of partygoers mingled in the lantern light, faces aglow with the pleasant intoxication of good drink on a glamorous evening. Just a glimpse of this evening would have sustained her through the darkest days of her exile.

  Takahashi pointed to a sandy-haired boy standing with a party of adults. “Who’s the kid?”

  “Axford.”

  Takahashi frowned. “Axford had a kid?”

  “No,” Bella said patiently, “the kid is Axford. He had the full reset the last time he went up.”

  “You trust a kid to look after you now?”

  “The kid still has Axford’s memories and adult experience. He thinks like a man, just happens to look like a little boy. Axford told me he’d put off going Skyside for so long that he didn’t want to have to go back for many, many years.” Mischievously, Bella added, “Besides, he says his hands can slip into surgical openings they could never fit through before.”

  “Did they… you know, fix him?” Bella feigned puzzlement. “Fix him, Mike? In what way?”

  “Axford was gay.”

  “Axford is still gay, as far as I know. I don’t think he saw it as something that particularly needed fixing.”

  “Okay,” Takahashi said, shrugging.

  “He’s still Axford, Mike. He’s just more efficiently packaged. You’ll get used to it in the end. When I look at him now I hardly remember what the old Axford used to look like.”

  One group dispersed, and in the sudden opening of a sight line she saw Svetlana, standing twenty or thirty paces away, her back to Bella, talking to Parry Boyce and a young couple she couldn’t name.

  She experienced no shock at seeing Svetlana — she had been invited (or, rather, had not been deliberately excluded) and there had always been an excellent chance that she would attend. Takahashi’s return was as much part of her world as Bella’s, after all.

  But Bella still felt uncomfortable to see her. This was the closest they had been in nearly fifty years. They were in the same room at last, even if it was the huge enclosure of the arboretum. Had they wished, they could have called out to each other.

  “You saw her as well,” Takahashi said in a low, conspiratorial voice.

  “I’m not surprised. I never exiled her. I never forbade her from setting foot in Crabtree.”

  “Are the two of you going to say anything to each other?”

  “I think we’ve said all that needs to be said.”

  Svetlana started to look back over her shoulder, as if she had become aware of Bella’s guarded scrutiny. In profile she looked older than Bella remembered, even allowing for the flattering effect of the lantern light, but not fifty years older. Svetlana had visited the Fountainheads at least once, as had Parry. Like Bella, the clothes she wore were of antique cut — loose denim jeans, cowboy boots, a T-shirt and a brown leather jacket slung over one shoulder. Her red hair was cut spikily short, catching the lantern light.

  There was a moment when they might have been close to making eye contact, when another group of celebrants blocked her view. A tumbling acrobat — Bella couldn’t tell if it was a person or a BI android — flung itself head over heels, its wrists and ankles spitting golden fire. When the tumbler had passed, Svetlana’s party had moved on.

  Takahashi looked up as something huge rumbled towards them along a wide tree-lined avenue. “Hey, is that —”

  “Yes,” Bella said, glad that the awkward moment had passed. “It’s McKinley. I hoped he’d accept the invitation.”

  The Fountainhead had arrived in a four-metre-wide transparent sphere containing no visible instruments or life-support systems. Muscular waves of his tractor fronds propelled it forward. Bella shuddered to think of the pressure and gravitational forces trapped behind that glass.

  McKinley must have seen her. He — she had come to think of him as male — rolled to a halt before her, before forming a high-resolution cross-weave.

  “Hi,” she said, aware of how ludicrously banal the greeting was given the circumstances.

  McKinley tipped himself forward in the Fountainhead approximation of a nod. “Hi yourself. And hello to Mike, as well.” The voice was louder and more human in texture than she remembered, but perhaps that had something to do with the acoustic amplification of the mobility sphere.

  “Hi,” Takahashi said, raising a hand.

  The alien turned the cross-weave towards him. “It’s good to see you up and about.”

  “It’s good to be up and about,” Takahashi said. “Don’t let anyone tell you differently — being dead is no party.”

  “No walk in the woods,” McKinley said, unravelling the cross-weave.

  Takahashi smiled. “Nor that.”

  “Everyone looks very happy to have you back,” the alien said. “You must have been very popular in your time.”

  “I’ll try not to blow it this time around.” Takahashi stood up decisively from the stump, glass in hand. “I’m going to mingle for a while. You two stay and chat, and I’ll hook up with you later, okay?”

  “Okey-dokey,” McKinley said.

  Takahashi patted the glass sphere. “And no talking about me behind my back.”

  Bella watched him stroll into the night until he was absorbed into a gaggle of well-wishers. As much as she enjoyed his presence, she was quietly glad that Takahashi had decided to leave her alone with McKinley.

  “They’re happy for Mike,” the alien observed. “He was lucky to have someone like you in charge.”

  “We owed it to him.”

  “You’d be surprised how many species don’t take such a charitable view of their weaker members,” McKinley said, with an idle flick of his tractor fronds.

  “I knew you were buttering me up for something,” she said. “That was, incidentally, a very nice segue to the main topic — which I take it has something to do with another species?”

  “You’re a shrewd woman, Bella Lind.” McKinley made a weird twisting motion that she had not observed amongst his usual repertoire of gestures. It was almost, Bella thought, as if he was checking over his shoulder for eavesdroppers. He lowered hi
s voice until she had to lean forward to hear him above the choral music. “That matter we discussed a little while ago… prior to your rejuvenation?”

  “A little while? That was fifteen years ago, McKinley.”

  The human perception of different units of time was still problematic for the Fountainheads. Through their conversations, Bella had come to suspect that the Fountainheads measured time in terms of the density of events, rather than the number of elapsed units of some specific interval. To Fountainheads, a hundred years in which nothing much happened was less time than an event-filled minute.

  “But you know what I’m talking about,” McKinley said.

  A BI stalked over, anxious to charge her glass. Bella waved the robot away. “The Musk Dogs, I imagine.”

  “I am glad that you remember. They’ve been showing renewed interest in this region of the Structure. We think their arrival is now imminent.”

  “The last time we talked about this, you defined ‘imminent’ as anything ranging from years to decades. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of narrowing it down a bit?”

  “Now I would be inclined to talk in months. You should be ready for them.”

  “Perhaps we are. You said it would be bad if we were in a state of social fragmentation, remember? Well, maybe we were then, but we’ve never been more unified than we are now. Just take a look at this party. There’s a representative of every faction on Janus here tonight, and so far I haven’t seen any fights breaking out.”

  “It’s certainly encouraging.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “When they come, they will find the tiniest rift and open it wide. They will make blood enemies of cool rivals; rivals of the best of friends.”

  Bella shook her head, exasperated. “Being factional is part of what we are.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” the alien said, with a gloomy note she couldn’t miss. “Things are better now, at least. Perhaps that will make enough of a difference.”