Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  It was like a night-time flight over a major city, but with the scale increased a hundredfold. Yet there was a strange absence of vertigo. She’d felt the same thing swimming over empires of coral reef, or the time when she had swum out over the edge of a continental shelf.

  The images of Janus taken soon after its departure from Saturn had suggested that the Spican machinery exuded a pale, twinkling luminescence. The truth was more complex. Up close, the machines appeared black across a wide spread of the electromagnetic spectrum, but many of their surfaces were in fact covered with light-emitting structures: coloured, glowing, window-like panels that merged seamlessly with the black background.

  The current consensus held that the windows formed a kind of symbolic language. Early studies had revealed one hundred and fifty-five distinct window shapes, each of which was composed of five or six rectangular sub-elements arranged together like dominos. Most of these window shapes were repeated thousands of times across the visible surfaces, although a handful were, tantalisingly, much rarer. One shape — a simple structure resembling the letter “T” — had been seen only once.

  Jake Gomberg, Rockhopper‘s language addict, had been assigned the task of making sense of the Spican markings. Amazingly, given their different temperaments, the garrulous Gomberg and the quiet, mouse-like Christine Ofria had become effective partners in this enterprise. They were a couple now, their marriage blessed by the Interim Authority. Their daughter Hannah had been the first child born on Janus, barely a year after the landing. She was one now, brimming with a fantastic precocity for language.

  But in nearly two years of study her parents had made crushingly little progress. They still did not know what to make of the fact that some of the symbols occasionally changed hue, or sometimes switched off completely. Perhaps these changes were the crucial key to unlocking the mysteries of the Spican language, or perhaps they were as insignificant as the flickering of a dying neon tube.

  Privately, Svetlana was glad that there had been no early breakthrough in the language study. She worried that the message, in the unlikely event that they ever succeeded in decoding it, might turn out to be dispiriting. The morale of her little community was already fragile enough without such a setback.

  Cosmic Avenger dipped lower, following a flight path that took it below the tops of the highest structures. They crossed what appeared to be a sinuous river of molten lava, winding its way between enormous slabs of Spican machinery. Svetlana waited, knowing that sooner or later a transit would appear. Before long she spotted the swiftly moving node of the alien machine, gliding along the lava like a swelling in the flow.

  Lava lines wrapped Janus from pole to pole. There were thousands of separate lines, tens or hundreds of kilometres long, joined together by complex cloverleaf intersections. The endpoints vanished into the sides of machines, terminating in blank walls that opened and closed a microsecond before and after the arrival of a transit.

  Nick Thale and his team had invested much time studying the lava lines. Careful observation had shown that the transits emerged from five distinct “factories” dotted around Janus, with neatly ordered pieces of material floating in their suspension fields. Transits running the other way tended to be ferrying a kind of slag, a rubble of misshapen pieces that might once have been intact components.

  Once, in the early months of the first year, seismic monitors had detected a violent event deep inside Janus. The quake shook the newly grounded Rockhopper to its foundations, nearly toppling it. Observations from the free-fliers still in the slipstream showed that the moon’s rate of acceleration dropped from five to three gees over the next week. During that same period, transit activity intensified, becoming much greater than at any time before or since. Huge amounts of rubble emerged from three closely spaced locations near a feature they had nicknamed Junction Box. The factories reciprocated by pumping out an enormous quantity of new components. There were “traffic jams” as the endless flow of transits clogged up the lava-line system, allowing close study of the vehicles for the first time. Minor alterations to the lava-line system were observed.

  At the end of the week, Janus resumed its former rate of acceleration as if nothing had happened. The implications, nonetheless, were clear: something had malfunctioned in the heart of the moon, perhaps catastrophically. The moon had throttled back, concentrated its repair resources and fixed itself.

  It was good and bad.

  It meant that while Janus was not infallible, that things could and did go wrong with it, it could repair itself. But by the same token, the ruthless speed with which the damage had been undone was in itself chilling. There had been talk of sabotaging the moon: throwing a human spanner into the heart of its alien drive system, like an FAD dialled to its maximum yield. Such hopes now seemed ludicrous in their naivety, like trying to stop a bulldozer with a feather.

  The transit veered ahead of the lander and plunged into the sheer blank wall of a pyramidal structure. The lander followed a diverging lava line for another five or six kilometres, swerving to negotiate a region of high gravitational fluctuation. They passed under an illuminated bridge or conduit, and then made a hair-raising passage between the language-crammed walls of an incurving canyon.

  There, dead ahead, lay the Maw.

  Lava lines converged on the Maw from all directions, plunging over its curving lip into the glowing red heart of Janus. Although the “floor” upon which the Spican machinery rested occasionally dipped down to twenty kilometres below its average level, the Maw was the only known opening into the deeper interior. Barely two hundred metres across and concealed from scrutiny by overhanging surface structures, the Maw had not been mapped until after Rockhopper’s arrival.

  Robert Ungless brought Cosmic Avenger to a halt above the opening with a tap of reverse thrust.

  Parry groaned, opened his eyes and pinched at their corners with his fingers. “Are we there yet?”

  “Patience,” Svetlana said. “We’re just arriving.”

  The lander lowered itself into the Maw, surrounded by a throat-like tube veined with the fiery light of lava lines. When the lander had dropped another three hundred metres, the wall fell away in all directions, curving back towards the horizontal.

  Svetlana had been expecting the vast cavern, but had not anticipated the claustrophobic feeling of entering a large, empty space through a narrow opening. As the lander put more distance between itself and the opening, the aperture began to appear treacherously small. The whole experience was too much like underwater caving for her liking. She could deal with swimming underwater at great depth, but not with having something between her and the surface.

  “Fun, isn’t it?” Parry said, grinning impishly at her.

  She frowned at him. “You’re just saying that to wind me up. It’s terrifying. Any sane human being would agree with me.”

  The lander banked, bringing more of the near-spherical chamber into view. It was ten kilometres across at its widest point. Most of the chamber’s machinery was confined to within a kilometre of the walls, with only a couple of needle-tipped spires jutting into the interior space. As on the surface, a scrawl of Spican symbols covered the machinery like neurotically precise tag graffiti. The illumination from these symbols gave the chamber its soft red glow: here, red symbols predominated over the other colours.

  Across a stretch of floor unoccupied by machines or lava lines, flashing yellow strobes defined a landing apron. A cluster of pressurised tents lay to one side of the apron. A space-suited figure tracked their approach, hand raised to visor to shield out the intermittent glare from the lander’s main engine.

  They came in fast — it saved fuel to use shock absorbers to cushion the landing instead of decelerating. Cosmic Avenger bounced a couple of times and then was still, its engine damped. Through the cockpit door Svetlana saw Ungless noting log details into a flexy.

  “Thank you for using Vomit Airlines,” Parry said.

  They fixed on helmets and gloves and
squeezed into the airlock. Ungless stayed aboard, making no effort to hide his eagerness to leave. That was fine by Svetlana: she had no intention of making a long stay of it.

  They stepped down from the lander onto the black floor of the Spican material. The surface resisted chemical or spectroscopic analysis, but was nonetheless grippy enough to walk on with geckoflex, and tolerated more permanent adhesive bonds. The hamlet of domes and equipment modules had been glued down to stop them drifting away during the mild gravity squalls that sometimes affected the chamber.

  The waiting figure raised a hand in greeting. Svetlana’s suit established a communications link and informed her via HUD that the other person was Gabriela Ramos.

  “Glad to have you here,” Ramos said over the suit-to-suit. “We were getting a bit desperate for company.”

  “It’ll be a flying visit, I’m afraid,” Svetlana said. She reached out and gave the other woman as much of a hug as the suits allowed. “It seems ages since I last saw you. How long have you been down here?”

  “On this rotation?” She tapped a finger speculatively against the chinplate of her helmet. “This is my sixth… no, fifth week. I’m due back topside in another ten days. At least, that was the plan before this came up.”

  Svetlana unclipped supply cases from the side of the lander. “I wish we could cut down the shifts, but you know how tight things are with fuel right now.”

  “I know, I know. We’re not complaining. At least we get some work done. And maybe what we’ve found will help a bit.”

  “That would be great,” Parry said.

  “You don’t sound convinced,” Ramos answered.

  “I guess I’d sound a bit more enthusiastic if there hadn’t been so many setbacks, but don’t let my natural pessimism put you off.”

  They carried the supply cases into a storage module and then spent ten minutes swapping recharged fuel cells for empty ones. When they were done, the spent cells loaded back aboard the lander, Ramos led them into the nearest tent. It was pressurised, so they passed through another airlock before removing helmets and gloves again. The tent’s interior had been divided using fabric partitions into a commons, kitchen and three sleeping annexes. The occupants, past and present, had done their best to cosy-up the place a bit, but with only limited success. With her helmet off, Svetlana registered that it was uncomfortably cold. She wondered if Ramos ever removed her spacesuit.

  “Axford says I’m to look at your bracelet,” she said. Ramos fiddled with her suit cuff until the bracelet came loose. “You know we’re getting less exposure down here than you folks topside.”

  “Just need to make sure — especially now that things have started happening.” Svetlana made a note of the dosage — it was comfortably within expectations — and handed back the bracelet.

  “What about the others?” Ramos asked her. “We’ll assume you’re all exposed to the same background. Can’t check bone density until you’re back topside, but I’ll just have to trust that you’re all doing your exercises.”

  Ramos prepared coffee, rationing it out in precise spoonfuls. Svetlana sipped at hers with the knowledge of someone enjoying a fine and dwindling delicacy. Axford could prepare passable tea from the arboretum plants, but he’d drawn a blank on coffee. Maybe Wang could help them one day, but for now they were down to less than two hundred kilograms of coffee for the entire settlement.

  Ramos pressed them mercilessly for topside gossip. Her mood seemed good. Svetlana liked Ramos: she always had, from the moment the young woman rotated onto Rockhopper, and she had adapted encouragingly well to Janus life. Reviewing her biographical notes, Svetlana had not been surprised. Ramos’s life prior to DeepShaft had been one long climb out of the flooded boca shanty towns of Old Buenos Aires. She still had family back there, Svetlana knew, but after her transfer to the ship she had become a popular and well-integrated member of the crew. The mutiny must have been all the more traumatic for her, like a squalid divorce.

  Lately, things had improved: there had been a kind of thawing in the strained relations between the two factions.

  Ramos had an on-off partner in Mike Sheng, one of those who had sided with the old regime. It would have been unthinkable even eighteen months ago — the wounds had still been that raw — but now such associations were becoming more commonplace. Ryan Axford’s insistence on caring for everyone, irrespective of where their basic loyalties lay, had played no small part in fostering the spirit of reconciliation.

  Of course, there were some differences that could not be glossed over so easily. And the general positive mood amongst the crew was partly due to the fact that most of them did not know how severe the fuel crisis really was. Svetlana did, and at times she found it very difficult to keep up a façade of breezy optimism.

  When they were done with the coffee — the last she would have for a week — Svetlana helped Ramos with the washing-up. Then they all put their helmets and gloves back on and traipsed back into the airlock.

  “I’m quite excited,” Parry said.

  “I should warn you,” Ramos said, “it’s not actually that impressive.”

  * * *

  It was only when she stepped out of the tent that Svetlana had a real sense of the size of the chamber. She looked up, leaning back awkwardly, and made out the hole leading into the Maw, delineated less by its black epicentre than by the convergence of lava lines around it. It looked hopelessly far away: the eye of a needle in the sky they would have to thread to find their way back out.

  “It’s this way,” Ramos said. “We’ll be using geckoflex, so I hope you’re all still in good shape.”

  She led them away from the parked lander, out beyond the apron and along a trail marked with luminous paint. The route took them through narrow defiles between looming slabs of Spican machinery for two or three meandering kilometres. Gradually Svetlana noticed that they were climbing, ascending the curved side of the chamber. The effort involved was slight, and she had to keep forcing herself to maintain a level posture: it was all too easy to lean back until she was in danger of dreamily toppling over.

  “The crazy thing is that we’ve been here so long without noticing this,” Ramos said.

  “What tipped you off that there was movement?” Parry asked. Svetlana heard music coming over the voicelink, but she couldn’t tell what Parry was playing. Probably not Turandot, she thought. He didn’t play much Puccini these days.

  “That was down to Jake and Chris,” Ramos said, referring to Gomberg and Ofria. “If they hadn’t been so keen to photograph and document all these symbols, we’d probably never have noticed.”

  “I’ll see word gets back to them. At least their study hasn’t been a complete waste of time and flexy power.”

  The going gradually became more difficult. Svetlana made increasing use of geckoflex, breathing more heavily and saying less. The curvature of the wall had steepened to forty-five degrees compared to their starting point, with the taller Spican structures looming at improbable, unsupported angles. Ramos pushed on eagerly, with a resilience that caused Svetlana to regret her earlier remark about the ground crew taking enough exercise.

  They pushed cautiously through a thicket of black, bladelike formations — sharp enough to slice through suit material, Ramos warned — and there ahead was the object of their trek: the larger of the chamber’s two main spires.

  The spire was a drawn-out cone, pushing three kilometres out into the middle of the chamber. The base of the cone where it met the wall was a hundred metres across, or so Svetlana judged — huge, anyway, and ringed with the now-familiar ranks of Spican symbols. The symbols climbed the cone until they merged into a twinkling, crimson haze. At the very tip of the structure was a spindly cruciform thing like a wrought-iron weather vane.

  Nearly lost around the curve of the base, two more space-suited figures worked with equipment on tripods. They waved to the approaching group and then went back to their task.

  Ramos led them to the base, slowing as her l
ittle party neared it. “I told you it wasn’t very impressive,” she said.

  It wasn’t — not by the scale of the surface structures, some of which were five or six times larger than this little spire. But there was something staggering, something crucially different about this feature: it was moving. Not quickly; the rotation of the spire was achingly slow, difficult to perceive with the naked eye even at its base. That was why it had taken so long for anyone to notice: it was only by paying close attention to the symbols that the rotation had become apparent. To all but the most vigilant eye, the spire looked the same every day.

  Svetlana knelt down at the point where the base met the floor. Symbols ran all the way down to the join. She pushed a finger to the base of the nearest icon, and held it there. “I can feel the motion,” she said.

  “It’s about half a centimetre per second at the circumference,” Ramos said. “Obvious once you know it’s happening — but dead easy to miss otherwise.”

  Sure enough, the iron grind of the spire’s rotation was just perceptible. But it wasn’t obvious, no matter what Ramos said. The featureless floor offered no easy reference points against which to judge the motion.

  “You think we can use this?” Parry asked.

  “With the right mechanism, we can try,” Ramos said stoutly.

  “This thing’s rotating for a reason,” Svetlana said. “Janus might not like it if we mess around with it.”

  “My theory is that Janus won’t even notice us. If it does… well, it’s not as if we’ll be skimming more than a tiny fraction of the power stored in this thing.” Ramos pointed to the other two space-suited figures. “They’ve glued metal plates to the base and used levers to measure the torque. Nothing we’ve done has made a measurable difference to the rotation rate. As far as we’re concerned, the torque is infinite.”

  “And the interface coupling — you think we can make that work?”

  “Nothing here’s ever a walk in the park, but we’ll make it work in the end.”