Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “We all grasp the risks,” Svetlana said impatiently, “but whatever we do in the Maw will be nowhere near as risky as sitting here hoping for something else to drop into our laps.”

  Thale closed his eyes. “I’m just saying —” he began again, before shaking his head. “Never mind. You wouldn’t go for it anyway.”

  Svetlana sensed a trap, but spoke anyway. “Go for what?”

  “This is too big a decision to be left to a handful of people sitting around a table.”

  “You mean we should poll the rest?”

  “No… not that.” He spoke with infinite caution, as if every word might trigger the most devastating of reactions. “I mean we should consider bringing other opinions into the debate. I’m talking about Wang, of course, and perhaps one or two others, but mainly I mean her.”

  “No,” Svetlana said.

  “You won’t even consider it?”

  “No,” she repeated. “Not now, not ever.”

  Thale shrugged, as if this was no more and no less than he had expected. He sank back into his seat. “Fine, then.”

  Svetlana felt a hot blush sear her cheeks. She was grateful when Parry filled the silence, sparing her the duty. “We’ve been over this, Nick,” he said. “We all know that some of us felt more loyalty to her than others. But that was then. Everything is different now: her opinions just don’t have any further relevance.”

  “You’d love to believe that,” Thale said. “You’d love to believe that we can just put her in a box and forget about her, like an old toy we don’t want to play with any more.”

  “She had her chance to turn us around,” Parry said. “Instead she dragged us into this mess.”

  “She acted on the best information available to her,” Thale said.

  “Nick’s right,” Axford said. “Nothing Bella did was motivated by greed or self-interest. She only ever did what she thought was best for her crew.”

  “She couldn’t face the idea that DeepShaft was screwing us,” Svetlana said. “I gave her all the evidence she needed, and she blanked on it.” She thumped the table with her fist. “Why the hell are we still talking about this? We’ve been over it a thousand times. She had her chance. She blew it. End of story.”

  “Look,” Parry said, talking directly to Axford, “I agree completely that Bella didn’t act out of self-interest. No argument there.”

  “Fine,” Axford said briskly.

  “But she still made bad decisions. Maybe her heart was in the right place. So what? It was the decisions that mattered. That alone should disqualify her from having any further say in our affairs.”

  “You just don’t get it,” Thale said.

  “No, Nick,” Svetlana answered, “you don’t get it. We all know where your basic loyalties lie. You just can’t let it go, can you? You just can’t accept that things are different around here now.”

  “Maybe it isn’t me who has trouble letting go of the past,” Thale said.

  “Meaning what, exactly?” Svetlana said, her voice low and dangerously sweet.

  “When we grounded Rockhopper, you made a big speech about how we all had to pull together, how we had to heal old wounds and face the future with clear hearts, clear minds. I remember it well. It was a damned effective piece of sloganeering.”

  “Careful, Nick,” she said.

  He shrugged and continued speaking. “I remember one other thing you said, about how we had to use every resource available to us, every possible means of staying alive. Well, some of us listened to you. Some of us thought you meant it.”

  “I did,” she said, on the boiling edge of fury. “Perhaps that’s true, up to a point, but there’s one resource you’ve never had the courage to tap. It’s always easier to hate than to forgive, isn’t it?”

  “I think you’ve said enough,” Parry said. “The decision regarding Bella’s exile was unanimous —”

  “That was two years ago,” Thale said. He stood up, flinging his flexy across the table. “We need Bella, whether you like it or not. If we all die out here, it won’t be Janus that kills us.”

  * * *

  Svetlana had regained some scant measure of calm by the time her wanderings took her to the buried laboratory where Wang Zhanmin spent his days and nights. She heard faint Chinese music as she neared the lab. It was on the outskirts of Crabtree, connected to the rest of the community by one ice-walled tunnel and a single superconducting power line as thick as her forearm. The line was glued to the inner surface of the ice tunnel with gobs of geckoflex. Placing her palm next to it, she swore she felt her hand tingle. One-tenth of all the power generated for Crabtree passed along the line.

  She knocked politely and stooped into the icy cold of the kettle-shaped room. For all the energy at his disposal, Wang wasted none of it on his own comfort. The only concession was a speaker glued high up on one wall, out of which poured a constant tinny medley of twenty-year-old Chinese pop songs. Svetlana shivered and zipped her coat tighter. Her breath gusted before her in a white flourish. She could still feel the embarrassment on her face, reddened by the cold.

  “I’ve brought you a present,” she said, raising her voice above a screeching girl group.

  He turned from one of his desks, his face lost behind an improbable arrangement of magnifying lenses and improvised HUD read-outs, lashed together with solder and Day-Glo duct tape. He reached up with fur-gloved hands and tugged off the home-made apparatus. He wore a red woollen cap, like one of Parry’s aquatics. His hair erupted in messy black coils from underneath it, tumbling over his ears and brow. A pale-green medical smock covered at least five layers of puffed insulation. His feet vanished into huge boots ripped from an irreparable spacesuit. He still looked too young and earnest for her. She had nothing against Wang, but it terrified her that so much depended upon him.

  Wang turned down the music. “A gift?” he echoed.

  “Don’t get too excited.” She held up the limp thing for his inspection. “I heard your flexy died.”

  “Yes,” he said, distractedly, as if he had not considered the matter for some while. “Yes, it did die. Is that for me?”

  “If anyone needs one, it’s you.”

  Coming closer, he took the flexy from her and held it in his gloved hands. “They don’t like the cold in here,” he said.

  “Not much we can do about that. If you spared a bit of warmth for yourself —”

  “I can’t,” he said. “The experiments run best when they’re cold. If I heated the room, it would cost even more power to cool them down selectively.” He stiffened the flexy, touched it with one finger so that it lit up with ShipNet options and then placed it gently on a clear spot on the nearest desk, amidst his equipment and notes. “It’s better this way.” He looked up at her. “How many do we have left now?”

  “Flexies? I don’t remember. One hundred and sixty, something like that.”

  “There were more than two hundred when we landed, weren’t there? That means forty have died since our arrival.”

  “They’re not meant to last for ever,” Svetlana said.

  “All the same. I am no computer specialist, but if more of them die… that will not be to our immediate advantage, will it?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  ShipNet was a distributed system, spread amongst the processing nodes of the flexies. Already there had been a measurable degradation in the speed and accuracy of certain ShipNet queries. The remaining flexies were compensating for the loss of the other units by hoarding more and more data within each of them, but this was only possible because of a reallocation of bioware processor functions. Within six months, Saul Regis said, the degradation would become obvious even to casual users. Within a year, large parts of ShipNet simply wouldn’t work at all.

  “I’ll do my best to look after this one,” Wang said, caressing the thing as if it had genuine sentience. “Perhaps if I sleep with it… use it as my pillow —”

  “Just use it,” Svetlana said. “If it dies, w
e’ll find you another one. If you can get the vat running, it will be worth the sacrifice.”

  “I am sorry that I have not made better progress,” Wang said, turning to face the vat. “I was overconfident. I shouldn’t have promised so much.”

  “You promised nothing, Wang. You just said you’d do your best to help us. That was all we could ever have asked of you. More than we had any right to ask.”

  The forge vat sat in the middle of the room, resting on four welded legs. It was a fat red cylinder as large as a small lander, rising almost to the plasticized ice of the ceiling. Its lid had the concave curve of a pagoda. In one side was a small circular door, copiously hinged and armoured, surrounded by read-out ports, valves and input sockets. Ribbed power lines plunged up from the floor into the vat’s flanged base. It drew power and control commands from the consoles arranged around it, most of which had been salvaged from the avionics of the Shenzhou Five before it melted its way into the icecap, lost for ever.

  Unlike Wang, whose limbs had healed well enough under Axford’s care, the vat retained evidence of the damage it had sustained during the Shenzhou Five’s crash. The red paint was bright and new on one side, where extensive patch repairs had been made.

  They had all done their best, including Wang, but attempting to fix a forge vat using Rockhopper’s tools was like trying to repair a cuckoo clock with an axe.

  They would keep trying, all the same.

  “When we last spoke —” Svetlana began.

  “I thought I might have something to show you. Well, I was right, I suppose.” He bent over the desk, picked up a pair of luminous plastic tweezers and fished around in a tray brimming with aquamarine fluid. The tweezers bit on something. With great care, Wang lifted them from the tray. Draped around their lower extremities was something that looked like milky seaweed or overcooked translucent noodles. “I kept this because it was the most progress I had made to date.”

  Svetlana looked at the fibrous white mass. “What is… was it?”

  “It was meant to be paper,” Wang said. “Paper is a rather simple test subject for a forge vat. If you can’t do paper…” He shook his head, not needing to say more.

  “At least it’s a kind of solid,” Svetlana offered.

  “Yes, at least I made a kind of solid. And it is white. I suppose that has to count as progress.”

  Svetlana looked back at the humming cylinder of the forge vat with an irrational resentment. All it did was drink power from Crabtree like a greedy baby and vomit out shapeless white pulp, when what they wanted was hard machinery, flexies, foodstuff, miles of superconductive cabling.

  “It’s progress,” she said, swallowing her frustration and disappointment. “No doubt about it. I can’t give you any more power, Wang, but if there’s anything else you need — people, resources — you know I’ll always see what can be done.”

  He returned the white mass to its bath and then wiped the tweezers clean with a sterile rag. “I have power enough for now. More hands would only get in the way.” He looked at her helplessly. “I just need time, and patience.”

  “Time and patience,” she echoed.

  “Except there isn’t any time, is there? That’s what you came to tell me.”

  “No, there’s plenty of time,” she said, knowing that he was working as hard as anyone on the moon. “I came to give you the flexy, and to see how you’re holding up.”

  He studied the gift again, as if some trick were involved. “Someone must have been using this one until now. No one has died, have they?”

  “No,” she said. “No one has died. Nick Thale decided he could live without a flexy for now.”

  “Oh,” Wang said, looking down.

  “It was his choice,” Svetlana said.

  “Yes, of course it was.” Wang pulled his cap straight and reached for his headset, adjusting one of the stalk-mounted lenses, and prepared to lower it down over his face again. “If it is all right with you, I will continue trying to make paper.”

  “You’ll let me know as soon as you get anywhere?”

  “You’ll be the first person I call,” he said, scraping the headset down over his woollen cap.

  “Wang,” Svetlana said.

  “Yes?”

  “No matter what happens in the future, I want to thank you for what you did.” She stopped: that was all she had intended to say, but now that the words were out, something more seemed to be needed. “You didn’t have to join us. You could have tried to make it back home.”

  “I wouldn’t have succeeded,” Wang said.

  “You were a national hero,” she told him. “They’d have found a way to bring you back.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But you knew we needed you more. After all we’d done to you… you still put that aside and gave us this gift.”

  “There was a degree of self-interest. If I was going to strand myself on Janus —”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” she said, holding up one hand. “What you did was still a brave and selfless act. A beautiful thing.”

  He said nothing, just returned to his experiments. She stooped out of the room and waited for the music to start again, but by the time she reached the end of the corridor all she could hear was the ruminative humming of the forge vat.

  FIFTEEN

  Late in the third year of the settlement, in the glow of the Maw, surrounded by the vast, dark clockwork of the power-generating machinery, Mike Sheng paused in his slow and solitary tour of inspection. He tabbed down through his helmet HUD options, bored with the Black Sabbath he’d been listening to. Against regs, some of the workers watched kung-fu movies or porn flicks, half their attention on the flickering images filling their faceplates and the other half on the real world beyond the glass. Sheng, who knew the limits of his own ability to multitask, had always been too conscientious for that. It was music or nothing, and when he needed to think really hard, even the music had to go.

  But this work did not demand much of him. Twice during his duty shift, he followed an overly familiar path through the whirring machinery, ducking between enormous cogs and flywheels, pausing at designated intervals to check that some bearing or linkage was holding up well. His ballasted Orlan nineteen carried additional panniers filled with vacuum lubricant, and where necessary he used the jet nozzle clipped to his belt to add a dab to some hot or dry-running part. In an ideal world, they’d have instrumented the whole clockwork gear train with thermal sensors and monitoring cams, but this was Janus, and Janus — as the saying amongst the EVA crews went — was a long way from ideal.

  Functioning cams and sensors were already spread pretty thinly monitoring other critical systems, and the magic vat still wasn’t capable of brewing anything particularly complicated. If a job could be performed by a watchful human on a tour of inspection, that was how it was done. Sheng took the job seriously because he knew how much depended on the continued working of the clockwork contraption. All the same, it wasn’t the most taxing of duties.

  Scrolling through a small list of files, Sheng settled on some mid-period rock he’d copied over from Parry Boyce’s much larger music library. Some of the other miners mocked Parry’s tastes, but the way Sheng saw it, if you needed something to cut through the background drone of generators and pumps, there was not much out there to beat amped guitars, hammering drums and screaming vocals, no matter when it was recorded. It was driving music, for the ultimate drive.

  “Tomorrow begat tomorrow…” Sheng sang along, music filling his helmet like a derailing freight train. With the long cylinder of the lubricator nozzle unclipped, he pulled some mean poses like the secret axe hero he’d always imagined he could have been. He knew he looked ridiculous making those moves in an ancient orange Orlan nineteen bulked out with panniers, but his only audience was ancient alien machinery. Sheng considered it a reasonably safe bet that the ancient alien machinery had no particular opinion on the matter.

  Sheng was not quite correct in that assumption.
>
  The machinery had no grasp of the significance of his gestures, but it had started to pay attention to him. It was happy to let the humans come and go, happy to let them prod and poke at it with their crude instruments, happy even to let them tap power with their primitive lash-up of clockwork gears and jury-rigged dynamos. On that level it ignored them completely, for their actions were of no consequence. But now the machinery took a more than casual interest in Sheng. Around him, unnoticed, the symbols flicked to warning configurations. It was not because of anything he had done, but rather the manner in which he had done them. The machinery was vigilant for patterns. In particular, it was designed to recognise repetitive actions.

  Sheng was a creature of habit. He always took the same route.

  He had been doing it for many turns of duty, and with each repetition the machinery’s interest had been stimulated a notch higher. Had Sheng decided to take a different path through the clockwork, the machinery would have turned its attention away from him. He would have been safe, provided he didn’t fall into the habit of repeating the new route. But now the machinery’s highest threshold of alertness had been tripped. The warning symbols, unheeded by Sheng, urged him to break out of his stereotypical behaviour pattern.

  Sheng continued on his customary way. Around him, the symbols turned dark.

  He gradually became aware of the change, but could not immediately put his finger on what had happened. He stopped, stowed the applicator nozzle and turned the music down. Around him, the clockwork machinery continued its slow grind. It was the repetitious movement of individuals, not mechanisms, to which the Spican machinery was engineered to respond.

  Sheng turned around slowly, conscious now of the darkness where before there had been a forest of interlocked symbols. He felt the first tickle of unease.

  He turned on voice coms. “Mike here. I’m up in the high clockwork, near train five. There’s some weird shit going —”

  That was as much as he managed.