Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  The machinery moved with a merciful swiftness. A hole opened beneath his feet into a light-filled shaft plunging down through the abyssal kilometres of a vast engine-filled vault. A ferocious and highly localised gravitational field seized him and he fell like an express elevator into the heart of Janus, where he was dismantled and recycled in a matter of seconds.

  Where Sheng had been standing, the hole sealed itself. The symbols returned to their former configurations.

  He was never seen again.

  It took six months and another life to work out what had happened to him. Even as the clockwork continued running, Svetlana’s investigators combed the scene of the disappearance. It fell to Parry to lead the inquiry — Sheng had been his friend and he did not want the death to go unexamined.

  He considered the possibility of murder, even though nobody had ever come to light. Although Sheng had been popular, he had also sided with the old authority during the crisis on Rockhopper. Ever since the landing, there had been rumours that some of the old-line loyalists — particularly those who had acted directly against Svetlana — would be targeted by vigilante elements within Crabtree.

  But Sheng had never made any mention of threats being made against him, and the Maw was an unlikely choice of venue for an ambush. None of the other staff stationed there at the time struck Parry as plausible murderers. No one else could have made it into the Maw and out again without being noticed.

  So it wasn’t murder. Suicide didn’t seem very likely either, given that Sheng had been trying to call something in when he went off-air. Gabriela Ramos, his on-off partner at the time of his death, was distraught. Nothing about Sheng’s mood had indicated depression, and she was vehement that the explanation had to lie elsewhere.

  Parry believed her, but he didn’t know where else to look. Examination of the clockwork mechanism revealed no sign of misadventure. Dreadful accidents had happened when people got too close to the whirring machinery, but there was always gruesome evidence after the fact.

  Finally, more out of desperation than any sense of rigorous procedure, Parry had one of the apparatus investigators retrace Sheng’s footsteps, copying the route he was known to have taken. Perhaps Sheng had brushed against something, or had cause to grab hold of something, that might shed light on his disappearance.

  The first time, nothing happened. The second time, Parry changed the investigator’s route, realising that they had made a mistake with the first run-through due to a minor change in the layout of the clockwork since Sheng’s death.

  It was during the second reconstruction that the machinery roused itself. It did not mistake the new man for Sheng, but it recognised the familiar trajectory he was following. Sheng’s earlier behaviour had engraved a deep furrow in its memory. It was now conditioned to respond at a high level of alertness if the pattern was repeated, even though months had passed since the first death. Months or centuries, it didn’t matter to Janus.

  The machinery offered its usual generous warnings. The investigator observed the changes in the Spican symbols, changes that were also witnessed on flexies and cams by the other apparatus people.

  “Hold still,” Parry said, awed that they’d finally provoked a recognisable response from the machinery, even though he didn’t understand what they had done to provoke it. “Must be the thing Mike was calling in about —”

  The investigator took another step along the route, to place his feet on a more level surface.

  It was enough: the threshold had been crossed. Janus took him with the same bewildering swiftness that had met Mike Sheng. This time, however, there were witnesses. They saw the ground open up and swallow the investigator. They made futile efforts to break through the sealed-over surface even though no tools had ever been able to mark the Spican material. But by then it was much too late, and on some level they all knew it.

  Slowly, they came to an understanding of what had happened. It was Parry who bravely retraced the route one more time, up until the point where the symbols changed configuration. He backed off and observed the symbols flicker to their previous configuration. He took another step closer and saw them change again.

  They still had no idea what it meant. If the investigators followed any other route through the machinery, nothing changed. It was another month before the idea began to form that Janus was configured to punish repetitious actions, and that it had taken Sheng because he always followed the same route.

  Once the idea had formed, however, it was easy to test. Investigators mapped out routes through the machinery and followed them over many cycles, watchful for the slightest alteration in the symbols. When the symbols did change, they immediately deviated from the prior route. It was dangerous work and Parry saw that the volunteers who ran the maze were rewarded with a handsome allocation of extra rations and kilowatt-hours.

  New directives were issued. Workers in the Maw, and wherever there was Spican machinery in close proximity, were to take pains never to repeat a particular route during any duty shift. They were instructed to memorise key symbol patterns and watch for any changes. Some of them cut dice from offcuts of suit insulation and sealed the dice inside perspex boxes that could be chained to their suit belts. When they needed to plot a route, they rolled the dice to inject a degree of randomness into their movements, even if it doubled the distance they had to walk.

  It appeared to work. No one was exactly sure whether the pattern-avoidance needed to be carried on inside the domes and shelters in and around the Maw — so far no harm had come to anyone inside them — but most of the workers preferred not to take unnecessary chances. They did not roll the dice when they were inside, or insist that every route had to be unique, but they developed a habit of moving furniture and partitions every few days, to disrupt any potentially fixed patterns.

  Out on the icecap, in the tunnels and domes of Crabtree, life continued normally. Parry saw no need to impose additional pressures on people who were already coping with deprivation and anxiety about the future. If Janus had left them alone until now, it seemed likely that it would continue doing so in future. Besides, the machinery was kilometres below, unseen beneath that enormous tonnage of camouflaging ice.

  Whenever Parry made the long, solitary drive away from Crabtree, however, those easy assurances lost their charm. He saw himself from the machinery’s point of view: a lone thing far from companionship, following the arrow-straight line of the superconductor cable. And he imagined the machinery far below the tractor, focusing more and more of its attention on him, waiting for the moment when he exceeded some arcane condition of repetitiveness. He told himself that the machinery would not be able to touch him through all that ice, but another part of him reminded him that this was Janus, where nothing could be taken for granted.

  Once he was clear of Crabtree, therefore, he steered the tractor away from the line and followed a random trajectory. The ride became rougher, since the route had only been graded along the line itself. When he could take no more of it, he steered back to the line, which he strove to keep in view. Sometimes he veered too far, and lost sight of it.

  That had happened on this occasion. It seemed to take an inordinately long time for the line to come back into view, and when it did the angle was all wrong. He wondered if he had crossed over it by mistake somehow, and was now heading back to Crabtree. He had expected to catch sight of the dome by now.

  He was about to turn around when his lights caught the crest of the dome, poking above a nearby horizon of scalloped ice. With his destination in sight, he gunned the tractor. The vehicle bounced across a ridge, losing all contact with the ground for one sickening moment. Pushed to its maximum speed, the tractor nudged one-seventh of the velocity needed to escape Janus’s gravitational pull entirely. Driving on Janus was an art that Parry had no expectation of ever mastering, and now he pushed his modest skills to their limit, anxious to complete this errand as quickly as possible. He crossed the remaining distance and came to a skidding halt where the power
line plunged into the doughy base of the dome. A couple of equipment pallets stood by the gently glowing dome, but there were no other vehicles in sight.

  He stepped from the tractor and wiped a spray of frost from his faceplate. In all directions there was only darkness, save for the little puddle of light cast by the dome and the tractor. Crabtree had vanished over the horizon hours ago. His HUD should have picked up navigational cues from transponders, but too many of them had failed lately. Without the directional arrow of the power line, Parry would have no idea how to get back. The notion of being lost out here, wandering the dark night of Janus until his suit ran down and he died of cold or asphyxiation, prowled the edge of his thoughts.

  He wondered how long it had taken Bella to get used to this.

  The dome was the standard kind used during cometary surface operations. They had secured it in place with sprayrock and added an additional layer of insulation, none of which was really necessary except as a purely psychological measure. Radiation levels on the rear face of Janus were lower than in normal interstellar space since most cosmic rays were moving too slowly to catch up with the former moon. Even the gamma rays were redshifted to “mere” X-ray energies. And here on the sternward face there was no interstellar dust or gas to worry about. The vacuum Janus left in its wake was probably the most perfect in the galaxy.

  Parry gathered a cargo crate from the rear deck of the tractor and walked to the airlock. He waited until his suit had swapped protocols with the lock and then opened a voice channel into the dome.

  “Bella,” he said, “this is Parry. Can I come in?” He had a long wait before she answered him, in a dry croak of a voice that was both suspicious and hopeful. “Parry?”

  “Let me in, Bella. I have something for you.” The red lights above the airlock flicked to green. He opened the outer door and squeezed inside. The atmosphere exchanger took a long time to pressurise the compartment, and when he cracked his helmet the air was musty and thin. The dome needed a full systems overhaul, he concluded, but that would mean pulling Bella out of it for a week. Svetlana would never allow that.

  The inner door opened, revealing one dimly lit partition. Paper walls fenced off different areas of the dome. Lighting nodes glowed a sullen gold, turned down so low that they were almost dead. What little power had been spared on Bella’s prison was mainly used to keep her alive. The superconductor from Crabtree was an old one, too damaged to serve useful duty in the Maw, and it only carried a trickle of current. Parry had known this but it was still a shock to see how little there was to spare. It was even more of a shock when Bella emerged through the gloom of one ripped paper wall, like a paper phantom herself. She looked thin and old, as if decades had passed out here rather than the three years it had actually been.

  “Bella,” he said, doing his best to smile.

  “Why have you come?” she asked. “I know she doesn’t want anyone to have any contact with me. Especially not you.”

  Parry put down the crate. “Can I sit down?”

  “Do what you like. You own the place.”

  He parked himself on the crate and looked around, his eyes grudgingly accommodating the gloom. The partition was spartan, with no suggestion that Bella had tried to personalise it in any way. A crate loaded with silver-wrapped rations had been shoved against one wall. Most of them looked untouched. They brought food and water out to Bella, and once in a while Ryan Axford or one of his team drove out to examine her. Now and then someone came to fix a pump. That was all. There were no casual visits, not even from her old allies.

  There had been two attempts to spring her from prison, but both had failed. Without Ash Murray’s assistance, her would-be rescuers had been forced to purloin time-expired suits that were in need of overhaul. The first time, Thale and his collaborators had reached the halfway marker before suffering suit malfs that forced them back to Crabtree. Saul Regis had been lucky to survive, and Svetlana had refrained from punishing them too severely. The second time, not long after he’d been released from custody, Thale had succeeded in reaching Bella on his own. But he’d still returned empty handed, to a welcoming committee of Judicial Apparatus bailiffs.

  No one knew what had gone on between Bella and Thale that had caused him to return alone, but everything Parry knew about Bella led him to suspect that she had refused to accompany him because she only wanted to be released from prison under official terms. She must have known that she did not have enough support to take Crabtree by democratic means or force, and she must also have known that the settlement could not withstand another violent crisis given everything else it had to deal with. So she had chosen to remain a prisoner, for the sake of the community.

  Thale had been arrested and jailed.

  Parry had pleaded with Svetlana to reward Bella with an easing of the terms of her imprisonment, but Svetlana had only tightened security. The frequency of visits to the prison had been reduced. Her power ration was cut back by thirty per cent, so that she had to spend long hours in darkness. Denied access to ShipNet, her knowledge of events in Crabtree was limited to what she could glean during those rare face-to-face encounters. Svetlana discouraged any conversation beyond the simple practicalities required to swap rations, fix the dome and check on her physical wellbeing.

  Mostly, Parry believed, Svetlana got her way. With the exception of Axford and the other medics, the people who visited Bella were individuals who had turned against her during the crisis. Outright Lind loyalists were never allowed to make the journey.

  Bella sat down on another crate, with her hands dangling in her lap. She wore three or four layers of clothes, but still looked thin. She had allowed her hair to grow longer than Parry remembered, and it had become greyer, retaining just a few salmony flecks of colour. Her hair was lank and uncombed, glued to her forehead in messy coils.

  “What is this about?” she asked, fingering her shark’s-teeth necklace, now yellowed with dirt.

  Parry reached into his utility belt and brought out a small cardboard package. “Someone found a box of these. We didn’t think there were any left.”

  He reached out to hand her the cigarettes. For a moment she hesitated, her eyes boring into him, quizzing him for a trap. Then she reached out one bony hand and snatched the packet from his grasp. She fumbled it open and stared at the neat white tubes neatly arrayed within.

  “Does she know about you coming here?”

  “Of course.”

  “You didn’t come all this way just to give me cigarettes, Parry.”

  “There’s more to it than just the cigs.” Then, remembering, he reached deeper into his belt and found a lighter. He passed that to Bella as well and watched in silence as she lit one of the cigarettes and sucked it to a stub.

  “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? You wouldn’t have driven out here unless something was wrong.” The thought seemed to delight her in some perverse fashion — though it couldn’t have escaped her that she was completely dependent on Crabtree for her survival. “What is it? Tell me.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Parry said. “Things aren’t great, but they’re not as bad as we thought they were going to be a year ago. The Maw project —” He caught himself, remembering that Bella was supposed to know nothing of the monstrous clockwork apparatus churning inside Janus. But what did it matter if she learned a few things now? “We found a way to draw power from the moon,” he said. “There are still some issues to be resolved, but no major show-stoppers.”

  “I noticed the power outages. It gets cold and dark out here.” A little shiver passed through her. “You wouldn’t believe how cold and dark it gets out here.”

  “No,” Parry said gently, “I would believe it.”

  “You’re wasting tens of miles of superconducting line keeping me out here,” Bella said. “You could always relocate me to Crabtree and use the line for something else.” She ground the dead stub of the cigarette against the top of the crate. “Or just let me die.”

  “It’s nei
ther here nor there, really,” Parry said, not unkindly. “The line’s near the end of its life. It wouldn’t have been able to carry a useful load from the Maw.”

  “You could still use it somewhere.”

  “You can’t come back to Crabtree, not right now, anyway. Maybe one day… when things get better.”

  Bella laughed. It was brief, retching, doglike sound, as if a stone had lodged in her throat. “Svieta’ll never have me back.”

  “I’m sorry it came to this,” Parry said sadly.

  “Are you still with her?”

  “Yes,” he said, guardedly.

  “She’ll hate you for even talking to me.”

  “Perhaps. We’ll get over it. She sanctioned this visit, so she can hardly blame me for talking.”

  Bella narrowed her eyes to penetrating slits. “Did Craig Schrope go along with it as well?”

  Parry looked away. “Schrope isn’t really involved in such decisions.”

  ‘That’s what I heard. Some kind of withdrawal. Catatonic mutism, shell shock. DeepShaft was his life, and DeepShaft fucked him up the ass. That kind of thing can break a man, even a jarhead robot like Schrope. I’m right, aren’t I?“

  “You can discuss it with Ryan.”

  “Is that what this is all about? A visit to the doctor?”

  Parry patted the crate he had sat down on. “There’s a light-weight Orlan in here. If you agree to accompany me, you put the suit on and we leave now. I drive you to Crabtree for six hours, then I drive you back out here.”

  “Six hours?”

  “It’s long enough. You’ll have time to speak to him, and then Ryan can give you a check-up.”

  Her eyes narrowed in the half-light. “Talk to who?”

  “Jim Chisholm,” Parry said.

  She gave him a ghost of a nod, and he knew that she had forgotten none of it, not even the tiniest detail.

  “I didn’t think Jim would still be alive. I didn’t think he would last… weeks, let alone years.” She looked into Parry’s eyes, and for the first time since arriving he felt himself in the presence of the old Bella, however fleetingly. “How is he, Parry?”