Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “What will happen if the Uncontained reach us? Will we die?”

  “If only a small contingent of Uncontained have broken loose, the Shaft-Five Nexus may be able to slow or repel an incursion. As affiliates of the Nexus, we will press for early intervention.”

  “Nice to know you care.”

  “We do care, and not just because of the energy you let us draw from Janus, although we value that. We also prize your company. We may be exotic to you, Bella, but there are entities in the Structure that even we find disturbingly strange.”

  Despite McKinley’s generous words, a spiteful impulse seized her. “That’s all very well, but I know this isn’t the Structure. It’s a structure, but not the one we always thought it was. We’re nowhere near Spica. We’ve come a hell of a long way further than that.”

  “We’ve never lied to you,” McKinley said.

  “No,” Bella said, “but you’ve done a damned good job of not correcting any of my assumptions.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  A few days later, Bella was awoken in the early hours of the morning by Liz Shen. She had been dreaming of the tribunal, watching Parry being taken out onto the ice to be drilled through the back of his helmet, watching the spray of blood and gore fan out across the ice, as if that was still the way they did things. The horror of it stayed with her into consciousness. When she answered Shen, she still assumed that the call must have something to do with the Bagley investigation.

  It didn’t.

  “I’m sorry, Bella,” Shen said, “but you asked to be called the moment something happened.”

  Bella forced her mouth to work. “The moment wash… the moment what happened?”

  “It’s the endcap door,” Shen said. “It’s open. Something’s coming through, and it isn’t like anything we’ve ever seen before.”

  “Put it through to me.”

  Bella dressed and crossed from her sleeping quarters to her office, grabbing a cigarette along the way.

  Cams stationed at intervals between Janus and the endcap door captured views of the emerging ship, or whatever it was, across a multitude of angles and spectral bandpasses. The cams blurted their data back to Janus through light-seconds of empty space and into waiting dish aerials, and then it passed through fibre-optic lines strung from the Iron Sky, through the Underhole pinchpoint and along kilometres of maglev track to Crabtree. In the city, BI minds sucked in the data and forced it through the shrieking turbine blades of intense computation. Within fractions of a nanosecond, the intelligences had already assembled an astonishingly complete composite model of the alien entity.

  One of Bella’s walls — the only part of her office not lost behind fish tanks — showed a mosaic of the best views overlaid with a tumbling wireframe graphic of the Musk Dog vehicle, with tick marks delineating scale in units of a tenth of a kilometre.

  Bella lit the cigarette and studied the graphic.

  Liz Shen’s initial assessment had been correct — the Musk Dog ship did not resemble anything they had seen so far. It did not look like Spican machinery, or Fountainhead machinery, or any product of the long-vanished Congress of the Lindblad Ring.

  It looked, in fact, like something coughed up by a very large cat.

  The ship was long but crooked-looking, as if at some point it had snapped and then been allowed to heal, like a poorly set broken leg. At one end it flared into a kind of porous, rock-seamed ball, like the upper part of a thighbone in the final stages of osteoporosis. There was a smaller clump or knot at the other end, flared like a hoof. Along the broken thing, at irregular intervals, were fatty nodes and wart-like calcifications. Sinewy strands, like the remains of veins or nervous tissue, wrapped the ship in an interrupted, straggly circulatory system, bulging here and there with a kind of sclerosis. Irregularly shaped objects dangled from the main body, attached by the flimsiest of connections. Smaller gobbets of material accompanied it, despite the absence of any physical linkages back to the main vessel. The entire ensemble looked obscene, half-digested, like nothing designed by a sane intelligence. Gristle, Bella thought: that was what it was. A ship made of gristle.

  A gristleship.

  It was big, too: three kilometres from end to end and several hundred metres across. And it was moving fast: it was rapidly eating up the hundred and fifty light-seconds between the endcap and Janus. According to the BI analysis, it would reach them within ten hours.

  She called Jim Chisholm.

  “In case you had any doubts,” he said, “it’s them.”

  “What do I do now?”

  “Exactly what McKinley’s said every time he’s ever warned you about the Musk Dogs: sit tight and ignore them, no matter what they say. Don’t even listen to their transmissions, let alone respond. It may take a while, but they will, eventually, desist.”

  Behind the gristleship, the endcap door remained partly open, the gap just wide enough to admit the gristleship. The sensors had detected nothing else crossing the gap, but now that Bella knew of the existence of such elusive entities as the Whisperers, that was scant consolation.

  “It’s just the Musk Dogs,” Chisholm said, obviously picking up on her concern. She hoped she could believe him.

  Bella stubbed out the cigarette. She knew that the wise thing would be to catch another few hours of sleep, but her mind was already buzzing. No one, she suspected, would be getting much sleep in the next twenty-four hours.

  She called Liz Shen to her office and together they looked at the steadily improving images.

  “Not exactly the prettiest thing in the world,” Bella said, “but I’ve been reassured that they won’t cause us any trouble. Provided, that is, that we ignore them completely.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Then they might be problematic. In the meantime, I’m hoping it won’t come to that.” She tapped a finger against her flexy. “I’ve recorded a statement: a calming message to the people, telling them that we have things under control and that they don’t need to worry about the Musk Dogs.”

  “Musk Dogs,” Shen said, with a shiver of distaste. “Is that what they actually call themselves?”

  “I suspect not.”

  “Why Musk? What does that mean?”

  “I hope we never have to find out.” Bella slid the flexy across her desk to Shen. “You’re welcome to review my message and suggest any edits, but make it quick. I want it out there and repeating on all ShipNet feeds before Crabtree wakes up to the fact that that thing is headed our way. I’ll make a live statement in four hours.”

  Shen regarded the gristleship with the revolted air of a vegetarian offered a half-eaten chicken drumstick. “It looks pretty vile. Almost too vile. Do you think they’re really so bad?”

  “Just look at it, Liz. Does that strike you as the product of the kind of intelligence you really want to do business with?”

  “I don’t know. We shouldn’t judge by appearances, after all.”

  “This time,” Bella said, “judging by appearances is exactly the right course of action.”

  Four hours later Bella made her statement, urging calm and forbidding anyone from attempting to make contact with the newcomers. She did not tell her people all that she knew, but she told them everything she felt they needed to know about the new aliens, without once mentioning Chromis or her doubts about the nature of the Structure. They would find all that out in good time, when Bella had decided which version of the truth she was inclined to believe: that of the Fountainheads, or that of the politician from the ancient past.

  Six hours later, the gristleship moved into position above the Fountainhead embassy. It came to a jarring halt at a deceleration that would have pulped a human vehicle, but the gristleship showed no sign of having been affected. Even its satellites — the unconnected gobbets and shards that moved with it — achieved standstill in the same perfectly choreographed instant. Once it had stopped, the gristleship remained still except for a slow longitudinal rotation, like a piece of meat on a spit.


  The cams had their best view now and details that had been blurred before were now anatomically clear and precise. It was evident that many of the nodes and thickenings in the structure of the gristleship owed their existence to artefacts of distinctly different origin — hard-edged and metallic in some cases; jewelled, faceted and glittering in others — that appeared to have been incorporated into the basic mass of the Musk Dog vessel. Already there was speculation that these artefacts might be alien mechanisms of foreign provenance, providing propulsion and inertial control. More and more the ship appeared to be a haphazard collection of disparate parts loosely united by a common chassis of meat and bone, slime and sinew.

  Then it waited, saying nothing, doing nothing, as if the simple fact of its arrival ought to have been sufficient to draw human attention.

  Again, Bella urged calm.

  In Crabtree, in Underhole, in the Maw and the eddytowns, in the construction dormitories of the Tier-Two expansion, it was not exactly business as usual. No one could block out the knowledge of that alien thing poised above Janus, or refrain from wondering what it might do to them. But Bella’s reassurances carried some weight. Amongst the citizenry it was known that Bella enjoyed the confidence of the Fountainheads, and that when she spoke of alien matters, it was their knowledge that she was revealing. If the Fountainheads said that the Musk Dogs were safe provided they were ignored, then many people were happy to believe that. The Fountainheads had, after all, given many of them the gift of rejuvenation.

  So people tried to get on with the ordinary routine of living, and some of them came close to succeeding. But not many managed that. Most people could do little more than shuffle through the motions, waiting anxiously for each new announcement from the High Hab. For the older adults — those who remembered the old crises aboard Rockhopper, the difficult years of the early settlement, the predations of the Year of the Iron Sky — this was just one more uncertainty to be looked square in the eye and stared down. It was much harder on the young, who had never known anything but the stability and comfort of the Fountainhead years. Bella pitied them, and she pitied the children most of all. They were frightened, and they wanted to be told that there were no monsters out there. Bella hoped she was right, but there was nothing more she could do to comfort them.

  A further day passed, and then the transmissions began.

  No one was quite sure how the Musk Dogs had done it — nothing had been observed coming or going from the gristleship — but somehow they had succeeded in tapping into ShipNet at its most secure, supposedly inviolable level of security. ShipNet continued to function normally, but suddenly there were extra channels and extra data frames interlaced into the existing streams.

  The content of the extra channels and the additional frames — when they were strung together in time order and played as a video feed — was disarmingly simple. It was a senior CNN anchordoll: a simulation of an attractive woman in her forties with styled auburn hair, wearing a crisp maroon blouse with a starburst brooch, backdropped by the jostling screens, clocks and global maps of a busy television newsroom somewhere in the middle of the last century.

  She spoke with the measured and emphatic tones of a Shakespearean actor. “Hello, and welcome. Permit me to introduce myself. I have the pleasure of being the spokesperson for the entities you already know as the Musk Dogs.” The anchordoll smiled, showing good teeth, and rearranged a sheaf of papers laid on the desk. “Please — we urge you — do not be afraid to keep using that name. Given our cultural differences, it’s as accurate a translation as we’re likely to agree on. Which is to say, not very accurate at all, but an infinite improvement on the alternatives.”

  Bella told herself to stop viewing the clip, remembering McKinley’s warning that there was no safe level of exposure to Musk Dogs. But what was to be gained by not viewing it? It was already out there now, available to everyone on Janus. She would be derelict in her duty if she did not study its content.

  “I’m speaking to you from inside the ship — the gristleship, as you call it,” the anchordoll went on. “It’s a fine name, and pleasingly close to the one we favour. Again — please do not feel in any way inhibited in using it. As you’ll discover — as we fervently hope you’ll discover — we’re very, very difficult to offend. We have had a great deal of experience in contact situations during our time in the Structure, including most beneficial interactions with many cultures. During that time we have learned that a thick skin is a prodigious asset.” She touched a hidden earpiece, as if receiving studio instructions, and nodded to an unseen director. “Which brings me to the point at hand: it would please us greatly to establish a dialogue with the people of Janus. It is our understanding that you have already enjoyed a degree of reciprocal trade with the entities you call the Fountainheads, and we are sure that you have enjoyed some benefits from that arrangement. It is clear that the Fountainheads have shared some of their knowledge with you, and that this has facilitated a modest improvement in your standards of comfort and security. But now we must reveal a state of affairs that you may find vexing. It is our most regrettable duty to inform you that the Fountainheads are not all that they claim to be.”

  She looked intently at the camera, then composed her expression into one of grave solemnity, the way all anchordolls did before they delivered bad news: a plane crash, a political assassination, the death of an actor or pop star.

  “Their history of dealings with other cultures is characterised by an unfortunate tendency towards parasitism. They prey on cultures like your own, offering meagre titbits in exchange for things the true value of which you hardly understand. Time and again their true intentions are exposed, causing them to move elsewhere in the Structure to seek new victims. You simply have the singular misfortune of being the latest culture to fall under the malign influence of the Fountainheads.” The anchordoll looked convincingly sympathetic. “We appreciate that this will be a difficult truth to accept after what may have appeared to be many years of beneficial trade. Nonetheless, and with due regret, it is the truth. Doubtless the Fountainheads will have sought to protect their position by disseminating misinformation concerning those other cultures with whom they would sooner wish you had no contact. We expect this. We know their methods, and we are accustomed to them.”

  She could turn off ShipNet, Bella knew. It was unprecedented — ShipNet had not been interrupted since the flexy die-off — but it was within her administrative powers to order a blackout. But that would not stop the Musk Dog poison spreading further via word of mouth and the countless unregulated networks over which she had no control.

  She could issue a counterstatement, but all she would be doing was restating what she had said before: that the Musk Dogs were not to be trusted, that they would go away if they were ignored, that spreading doubt and suspicion was precisely how they operated. It would be unlikely to make much difference now that the poison was out.

  She would do it anyway.

  The anchordoll was wrapping up her transmission. “We know that the Fountainheads will have advised that you should not engage in any form of contact with us. That is to be expected — how else are they to maintain their parasitic relationship, unless they obstruct competitors? But please listen to what we have to offer. What the Fountainheads have given you in exchange for access to Janus is what we would have given you freely, as a sign of our good intentions. In thirty-five years, they have bestowed upon you a few crumbs of prior human knowledge. We would never have sold you what was already yours. We would have given it gladly, as a courtesy. And then we would have invited you to enter into trade for items of genuine value.” The anchordoll paused and gathered her papers, tapping them together into a neat stack. “But it isn’t too late to change all that. The Fountainheads probably told you that we wouldn’t force ourselves upon you. That’s true — absolutely. And if you so wish, we will leave. But in the meantime, you have only to contact us. One word is all that it would take. Then we can start doing bus
iness.” The anchordoll smiled. “We look forward to hearing from you. We are sure that we can enter into arrangements of great mutual benefit.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Bella took the maglev to Eddytown. There were many eddytowns on Janus now, but this was the original one, and by far the largest. One hundred and twenty people lived there, a number not much smaller than Rockhopper’s original manifest. It was a sprawl of varying sized domes and micro-arboreta glued to the side of Junction Box, like a mass of barnacles on the sheer metal hull of a tramp steamer. In recent years the Fountainheads had shown the humans how to increase the gravitational field under Crabtree, Underhole and the other icecap settlements, but by then the eddytowns were already well established.

  The maglev rollercoasted through ninety vertical degrees, passing a vast farm of perpetual-motion wheels, turning slow and stately as the huge grey wind turbines Bella recalled from her childhood. Their ballasted rims were tilted partway into a region of high field strength, imparting a torque on the wheel that could be converted to electrical power.

  The maglev slowed into a glass concourse. Bella disembarked from the train, followed by Liz Shen and the stealthy wisp of the haunt. To Bella’s left, the rest of Janus was a wall that reached a dizzying distance above her head, until its scrawl of bright details — symbols and weaving lava lines — were reduced to a foreshortened smear. The side of Junction Box felt like a flattopped ledge jutting out from that wall. To the right, two or three hundred metres away, the ledge ended abruptly. Beyond lay only the sucking, abject darkness of the Iron Sky. The effect was exactly as upsetting as Bella had feared: a disorientation calculated to put her at a disadvantage. No wonder Svetlana had declined her invitation to come to Crabtree.

  Inside Eddytown, local agents escorted Bella, Shen and the haunt to a secure chamber where Svetlana was already waiting. The lavish room was panelled with deeply stained wangwood, enclosing lifelike holographic vistas from pre-Cutoff Mars. Save for the fact that the views represented locales from all over the planet, the room could easily have been a windowed belvedere situated high on a Martian promontory. The horizon lines and local lighting conditions had been carefully adjusted to assist the illusion of a seamless panorama. As Bella settled into her seat, dust devils lashed against the weather shields of some nameless surface colony, whose high turreted walls enclosed armoured minarets and mosques, glinting bronze and gold in the late afternoon of a Martian autumn.