Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  They were nervous at first, like children stealing apples from an orchard. But after three or four trips to the lander, following a different path each time to avoid tripping the route-repetition alarms retrofitted on their suits, it began to dawn on them that Janus simply did not care what they did with the spilled cargo. Only a certain disquiet about getting too close to the containment field prevented them from removing the entire catch. That would have to be a job for the robots, when they could be spared.

  Back in the lander, as it carried them aloft with tonnes of grey treasure in its hold, they couldn’t suppress an elated feeling of breakthrough. Svetlana put in a call to the crèche and said hello to her daughter, who was busy finger-painting with Danny Mair. Danny and Emily were about the same age, and appeared to communicate on some channel incomprehensible to adults as they explored new parameters of messiness. Emily held her latest creation up to the cam: yellow and orange smudges that might have been flowers, a smear of blue along the top that might have been sky.

  She had never seen sky or flowers.

  Svetlana wanted to cry, but she kept it together. Then she called Denise Nadis and told her to prepare for their arrival.

  “As soon as we’re down I want Wang on the case,” she said. “We have power now, and all the ice we can use. For once we may even have materials.”

  “It’s good,” Parry said, when she had finished the call, “but let’s not get carried away with this. We scored lucky this time — maybe. But we can’t expect something like this to drop into our laps every week.”

  “That’s up to us,” she said. “Janus has shown us a way. Now all we have to do is copy it. If nature can do that to a lava line, so can we.”

  Thale opened his mouth a crack, but said nothing.

  “What’s up, Nick?” she asked, missing nothing. “You don’t think we should take what’s there to be taken?”

  “I’m not one of those idiotic cultists,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything sacred about this place. It’s a fucking machine. On the other hand, I’m enough of a rationalist to believe we ought to be careful about provoking a reaction.”

  “I didn’t notice any reaction back there.”

  “Maybe we weren’t poking hard enough. Start dropping bombs on the lava lines and maybe you’ll cross that threshold.”

  She shook her head, disgusted by his timidity. “Perhaps it’s me, but I don’t remember giving permission for Janus to pull us away from home. We’ve been pussyfooting around too long. It’s time to start making this place work for us.”

  “You always did think like an engineer, Svieta.”

  She nodded. It was only hours later that she realised he had not necessarily meant it as a compliment.

  * * *

  One day, halfway into the seventh year, Ryan Axford called Svetlana to the medical centre. He had offered no explanation for the summons, but Axford would not have troubled her without excellent cause. Her contact with him had grown sporadic since Emily’s birth, even more so since the passing of Jim Chisholm, but she still placed complete faith in his professionalism. The medical centre was a different place now that Chisholm was gone. Busier than ever — the influx of the children saw to that — but Svetlana could feel the absence where Chisholm had been. He had spent so much time in this place that he had left a kind of psychic imprint on the surroundings.

  “What is it?” she asked when Axford had closed the door behind her.

  “You asked to be told,” he said. She looked at him blankly. “Told what?”

  “If there was any change.”

  “Any change in what?” she snapped, a little exasperated now.

  Axford’s thin, timeworn face conveyed amusement. “You barely remember, do you? He’s been up here so long, never changing —”

  Her jaw fell. “Craig?”

  For a moment, boyish enthusiasm stripped away the years and she glimpsed something of the younger Axford. “He’s coming out of it, Svieta. After all this time, I saw something human in there today. I think there’s hope after all.”

  “Is he talking?”

  “The odd word, a sentence now and then. More than we ever expected — or hoped.”

  Svetlana was surprised at how glad she felt. She had never seen eye to eye with Schrope on Rockhopper, and Schrope’s strategic alignment with her cause had been so transparently self-motivated that it had done little to improve her respect for him. But what Schrope had become since then was so pitiable that she could not help but feel sympathy for him. “What happened?” she asked.

  “Time,” Axford said. “The great healer. There’s some truth in that, you know — and the one thing I can say with certainty is that he’s had a lot of time.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “It’s about time he saw a few new faces — it might help him along.” He raised a warning finger. “But go easy. It’s early days yet, and I don’t want him pushed back into that shell.”

  Axford led her to the room where they kept Schrope. Svetlana hesitated at the high, small-windowed door.

  “Maybe this isn’t such a good idea, Ryan. How much does he actually know?”

  “Both much less and much more than you’d think.”

  “I don’t have much good news to offer him. If he thinks we’re getting back to Earth any day soon —”

  Axford answered softly, “He doesn’t — I’ve established that much. You don’t need to soft-pedal the truth. Just… go easy. One step at a time.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Schrope stood up as she came into the room. He’d been sitting in a chair next to a small bedside table. He put aside a book: not a flexy displaying text, but one of the very few actual printed books Rockhopper had been carrying, and which now formed a small and treasured library, like the valued collection of some medieval scholar. It was a dog-eared legal thriller entitled The Firm.

  “Hello,” Schrope said.

  “It’s good to see you,” she replied, the words spilling out in an automatic utterance that sounded flatly unconvincing even to Svetlana. But what did she really feel? She had never liked Schrope during their days aboard Rockhopper, and she had despised him when (as she was now certain had happened) he had persuaded Bella that she needed to be removed from duty. But this was not really Schrope: this was some pitiful, fragile, damaged thing that had been shattered into a thousand psychological pieces and then glued back together in some haphazard approximation of its former shape. Hating Schrope now felt redundant, even spiteful. If she could hate a bullying child and yet feel empathy for the same child lying ill in bed, then she could feel empathy for the man who had once been Craig Schrope.

  He looked better than she had expected. Now at least he was out of pyjamas and into normal clothes, even if they only ran to a drab grey T-shirt and a pair of white jogging pants. His hair was thicker, no longer shaved close to the scalp.

  There was an alertness in his eyes that she did not remember from her last visit.

  “I’m sorry —” He paused, losing the thread of whatever he had meant to say.

  “Easy, Craig,” she said gently.

  “I’m sorry… for the trouble.” He looked abashed. “All the trouble I caused.”

  “It’s all right,” she said.

  “No.” He stood before her with his hands dangling at his sides. “I should have…” He shook his head, exasperated with his own efforts. “Difficult, sorry.”

  “Take your time. No one’s in a hurry.”

  “I let you down. Should have pulled myself together.”

  Svetlana felt a wave of magnanimity pass through her, all their enmities abruptly forgotten, “You were never any trouble, Craig. It’s just good to have you back with us.”

  “I’m glad to be back,” he said earnestly. He lowered himself into his seat again and gestured towards the neatly made bed. “Sit down. Please.”

  Svetlana sat on the bed. “You’re doing fine, Craig — better even than Ryan led me to expect.”


  “Ryan’s been kind.”

  “He never gave up on you.”

  “Nor did you.”

  She glanced away, hoping he didn’t catch her guilty reaction. The truth was that she had given up on him long ago. She had not visited him in years and had come to pay little attention to Axford’s less-than-optimistic medical reports. The last time she’d visited, it had been sufficient just to look through the window.

  “I’m so glad you hung in there,” she said.

  As they talked, he gained confidence. “Your words meant a lot to me. I know you didn’t think I heard much… but they did.”

  “That’s good,” she said. But she knew that in all her visits, he had never said anything to him. Axford had always told her how pointless it would have been, and she had never had cause to doubt him. “When you said that I was still a good man… that I should come back to you —”

  “Yes?” Svetlana said, wondering what else his mind had conjured up during the long years of his exile from reality.

  “It helped. It reached me. It gave me something to cling to, something to show me the way.”

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  “I’m still not ready for the world. You can probably tell that.”

  She smiled quickly. “Early days, Ryan said.”

  “But I’ll make it. I know I will. Now that I’ve come this far… I’m not going back.” There was an absolute assurance in his words that stunned her. “I’ll make it work this time. One day — not now, maybe not even this year — I want to do something useful. I want to pay back my debt to Crabtree.”

  “You owe us nothing,” she said.

  “I know how hard it’s been out there. I’ve heard about the deaths, the suicides. You could have let me die. That would have been easier, wouldn’t it? One less mouth to feed. One less pair of lungs to fill. One less body to heat.”

  “We’re better than that, Craig.” His hands were trembling, she noticed.

  “The company took away my life. My dignity. I invested my whole fucking soul in DeepShaft. They took that as well. I’ll never get back everything they stole from me, but I can make a start, with your help.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To serve,” he said. “To earn your forgiveness.”

  * * *

  When she had finished stitching the flexies together on the wall, Svetlana stood back and watched the children enjoy themselves. They were in a partition of the gymnasium, once the largest habitable space aboard the old ship. Coloured paper bunting hung in twisted arcs from one false wall to the other, pulled taut by the centrifugal gravity of the room’s stately rotation. Party balloons floated in ripe bunches, bobbing where they had come to rest near the extractor vents. Some of them had been twisted into vague animal shapes; others had already burst, to the delight of some children and the perplexed anguish of others. Wang, who had made the ribbons and the balloons, had been persuaded to stay long enough to judge a painting contest, but he had gone now, back to his work with the vat. Svetlana hoped he would return, if only for the special treat she had prepared for the children later in the party. Wang was popular with the kids: somehow they sensed that he was the one adult on Janus totally unsullied by anything that had happened on the ship; the one adult everyone liked without reservation.

  The party was in Emily’s honour. She was five years old now, in this ninth year of human settlement. There were a dozen other children in the room, most of them younger than Emily. Hannah Ofria-Gomberg, the oldest child on Janus, was nearly eight now, and had taken to supervising the younger children with a precocious sense of duty. She was with Reka Bettendorf now, helping the older woman apply face paint (actually the harmless marker dye they’d once used to scrawl cutting points on ice) to a fractious group of three year olds, turning them into tigers, monkeys, bears and green-skinned space monsters. It kept the children entertained, although Svetlana wondered whether they would have been just as happy smearing the dye on themselves in abstract splodges. None of these children had ever seen a real cat, let alone a tiger.

  “She’s a beautiful little girl,” said Christine Ofria-Gomberg, nodding in Emily’s direction. “Your hair, your chin, Parry’s eyes and nose. That expression she makes when she’s not getting her way —”

  “Pure me,” Svetlana agreed, smiling. “Yes, I had noticed.”

  “I can’t believe it’s been five years.”

  “You should talk. Look at Hannah now — she’s almost like one of the grown-ups around the other kids.”

  “She’ll be eleven when we reach Spica.” Christine lowered her voice as Hannah looked their way, conscious that she was being discussed. “I remember being eleven, Svieta. It’s as if we have two boxes for all the memories we acquire between the moment we’re born and the moment we die: the child box and the grown-up box. You can still open the child box when you’re an adult, sift through those memories, take them out for examination, but they never feel as if they happened to you. It’s as though you see everything through thick glass, putting the world one notch out of focus. But by the time we’re eleven, everything goes in the grown-up box. She’ll always have grown-up memories of Spica.”

  “Let’s hope those are good memories,” Svetlana said, and then wished she had said something less pessimistic. Her dark sense of foreboding about the future did not belong at a birthday party any more than hilarity belonged at a funeral service.

  She knew it was futile to dwell on what was going to happen to them when they reached the Spican structure: it was every bit as futile as dwelling on the inevitability of death. For years, indeed, Svetlana’s immediate concerns had been so grave that she had not allowed herself the luxury of worrying about that remote event. So much else would have to go right for them before they could even dream of staying alive long enough to meet the aliens.

  But now it was beginning to look as if things might go right after all. For the first time in years, Svetlana felt as if they were winning the struggle for survival and that they had a good chance of making it to journey’s end. They had power from the Maw, and now they had the means to gather raw materials as well. It had taken time, but lately they had become very adept at harvesting the lava lines, stealing matter from Janus. Soon after that first discovery of the spilled cargo, Wang’s analysis had revealed that it contained many elements and compounds that were either in extremely short supply or entirely lacking in Crabtree or the other settlements. Better still, the materials could be manipulated using routine chemical and nanotechnological methods that Wang already possessed. The Spican machinery might be invulnerable to analysis once it was in place, but the raw matter of which it was made was much more susceptible to human intervention. It could be cut, smelted, vaporized, ionised, even stripped down to its component atoms and segregated into isotopic fractions. It would not mean an end to certain forms of rationing, and the closed-cycle systems would have to be maintained as diligently as ever, but at long last Svetlana’s people had the means to build, to keep building — even to toy with dreams.

  Wang, too, had made progress. For years his efforts had been hindered because the forge vat was damaged and his understanding of its functions had only been superficial. Painstaking dedication had allowed him to fix the vat hardware and repair many of the damaged template files in its memory, but the basic shortage of raw materials had impeded his attempts to fully master its workings. Now he could experiment as much as he liked, and at last he was making useful components: basic medicines and machine parts that actually worked. He planned to achieve much more than that, however. A single vat was always going to be limited in its usefulness, and that limitation would become more acute as the population grew. He had plans to make another vat by growing its component parts in the first. Difficult, he said, but not impossible. He could then take some of the replicators from the first vat and use them to seed the second, so he wouldn’t have to fabricate a fully functioning nanotech system from scratch. The second vat, if all went according to his plans,
would be a mere duplicate of the first, but if he could make it work, he would have gained enough confidence to build something even larger. His third vat would have a cubic capacity eight times the size of the first, which would allow it to cast an entire lander engine in one go. Eventually, he said, he would be able to make a vat as large as the grandest industrial units back in China: a block-sized monster capable of forging an entire ship in a single pass, hatching it like a newborn chick. Svetlana wondered how far in the future he was thinking, and if anyone else had plans that reached that far ahead.

  The face-painting done, the children had gathered around Parry who was dispensing chunks of chocolate: not the rubbery brown vat-grown approximation, but the real thing. A crate of Snickers bars had turned up during the clean-out of a cargo slot, and now the chocolate was kept under lock and key, strictly rationed and only to be dispensed during parties. The children only received two generous bites each, but such was their hyped-up expectation that they might as well have been portions of the finest caviar. Despite the minimal quantities of chocolate involved, it was gratifying how much mess some of the more enterprising kids were able to make. But the real chocolate stash was getting smaller with each birthday, and there were more birthdays to celebrate each year. Soon the kids would have to learn to like the vat-grown stuff.

  “Come here,” Christine said, taking Svetlana’s arm. “There’s something I want to show you while Parry’s got them occupied.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “Did you see the pictures Wang came to judge?”

  “A couple of them, but then I had to go and start stitching the flexies together.”

  Christine led her to the table where the paintings had been spread out in all their wet, dripping glory. She peeled one from the table, yellow paint smearing her fingertips. “Dawn Mair did this one,” she said, her tone confidential. “I asked her what it was meant to be. She said it was the bad man.”

  “What bad man?”

  “The one she hears all the grown-ups talking about.”