Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “It wasn’t doing this before,” Svetlana said. The Ofria-Gombergs still had not come up with any correlations against their database of Janus symbol patterns, but the one thing they had confirmed was that the ship’s symbols had been static ever since its arrival.

  Not now.

  “It’s as if it’s agitated,” Denise Nadis said, “as if it’s upset about what just happened. As if the Spicans know they did something wrong, and they want us to know how sorry they are.”

  “Or they’re angry,” Parry said. “Pissed off at us for sending Craig inside in the first place.”

  “Either way, it’s a reaction,” Svetlana said. “That’s more than we’ve had so far.”

  “You can’t consider this progress,” Parry said.

  “I’m clutching at any straws I can find. At least now we know they noticed what just happened. At least we know it’s provoked some kind of reaction.”

  “I was hoping we’d get through this without using the word ‘provoked’,” Parry said.

  Nobody said anything after that. They just looked at the cam window, hypnotised by the storm of alien language, daring to dream that it indicated remorse rather than rage.

  * * *

  Parry leaned against the doorframe. “How’re you feeling, babe?”

  “Not quite as bad as I look. Have you spoken to Emily?” Svetlana had been too tired, too frayed at the edges, to call their daughter before her excursion to the alien ship. She had been afraid Emily would pick up on some of that. “She’s fine,” Parry said. “No one’s told her about what’s going on here, I hope.”

  “I think some of it filtered through, but not enough to worry her. It’s all just big adult stuff going on over her head. Great being a kid, isn’t it? Here we are screwing up first contact and she’s worried about the doll Wang promised her.”

  “We were all like that once. I wonder what happened to us?”

  “You should get some more sleep.” Parry’s own face was puffy with strain and fatigue. “There’s nothing happening here we can’t deal with without you.”

  “That does great things for my pride.” Wide awake now, she picked at a loose eyelash gummed to her eye. “Sorry. I know you’re trying to help. Did anything happen while I was out?”

  “Nothing worth mentioning. No sign of any activity from the ship. Shall I fix you some breakfast, or are you going to try to catch a few more winks?”

  “So what happened that isn’t worth mentioning?” After so many years together, Svetlana was familiar with all Parry’s various distraction techniques.

  “You won’t like it,” Parry said warily.

  “I never like it. What happened?”

  “We heard from Bella. Word got out to her somehow.”

  Svetlana growled her annoyance. “She wasn’t supposed to know about any of this.”

  “Crabtree already has the full story. It was only a matter of time before Bella got wind of it.”

  “What did she want, anyway? To rub our noses in the mess we just created?”

  “That’s not the impression I got.”

  “There you go, always ready to jump in and defend her,” Svetlana said with a spitefulness she knew Parry did not deserve.

  “I take it that’s a ‘no’ on the breakfast front?”

  Svetlana pulled herself out of bed. She was still wearing the clothes she had gone to sleep in, now as wrinkled and musty as week-old laundry.

  “Give me a break, Parry. I’m doing my best here. And you do have a habit of defending her.”

  “Maybe because she’s not always wrong.” It was said too placidly to have been intended as a goad. Svetlana gave him a poisonous look as she pushed her hair into shape, making the best of the sleep-matted mess. “Bella heard about Craig,” Parry went on, immune to the look. “She wanted to talk to you about your next move.”

  “Like I need her advice now.”

  “She says it’s very important that you talk to her.”

  She pulled a fresh T-shirt from her overnight bag, one of her old ones, not one of the new garments from the forge vats. It was red with a masked mermaid and the words “Dive Chick” in faded silver glitter. Animated fish that had once swum around the mermaid no longer did anything.

  “She would say that.”

  “She also said it concerns Jim Chisholm.”

  Svetlana paused with the T-shirt half-on. “Say again?”

  TWENTY

  Parry crossed the open ground from the lander and waited politely for Bella to let him inside. In the hardsuit, it would have been impossible for her to tell whether it was Parry or Svetlana waiting in her airlock, but when the inner door opened he saw no surprise on her face.

  “Sit down,” she said, taking the helmet from his hands and racking it.

  “I know you were hoping to speak to Svetlana.”

  “Hoping. Not expecting. There’s a world of difference.” She had brewed him tea from her rations. He sipped at it from a vat-forged china cup with a hinged lid designed to keep the tea from wandering. Wang had printed it with the willow pattern, drawn from memory but with great accuracy and delicacy of line. The tea was weak, the colour of muddy rainwater, just the way he liked it. He wondered if Bella had remembered that from his last visit. “You’re looking well,” he ventured.

  “For a sixty-eight-year-old woman, you mean.”

  “Not every compliment has to be swatted down.” He peered at her over the rim of his cup. “Not that Svieta’s any better at accepting them.”

  “Would it have killed her to come in person?”

  Perhaps she caught his glance towards the window. Svetlana had forbidden him to mention that she was aboard Crusader. “It’s not been easy for her lately,” he said. “Since Bob Ungless died… since the Iron Sky went up… since this. How much did you hear about what happened to Craig?”

  “Enough.”

  “She blames herself for ever letting him inside that thing.”

  “Did she point a gun at his head and frogmarch him to the door?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then she doesn’t need to feel like a martyr.” Bella shrugged. “Unless she gets a kick out of it.”

  “Craig died badly. We were listening in. We heard everything.”

  “I heard he saw mountains.”

  Parry nodded, amazed at how much information had seeped out to Bella. “He says he saw the Spicans. Axford isn’t so sure — he thinks it was just Craig’s neurochemistry shutting down.”

  “I’m sure he saw something.”

  “This is going to sound harsh,” Parry said, “but in a way I’m glad it happened to Craig. We’d already lost him once. Losing him again… it’s bad, but it’s bound to hurt less than losing someone else.”

  “That does sound harsh,” Bella said. She poured herself a little more tea, using a strainer improvised from a suit dust filter. Under Janus gravity, the liquid did not so much flow as meander into the cup. “But I know what you mean.”

  “Will you tell me about Jim Chisholm?”

  “I said I’d speak to Svetlana.”

  “I’ve done all I can. She’s still not ready to deal with you.”

  Bella raised an eyebrow speculatively. “Why is that, do you think? Could it possibly be that she doesn’t want to acknowledge my existence? Because that would force her to confront what a mistake it was putting me here in the first place?”

  “You’d have made no material difference, Bella. We’d still have been on this ride, unable to get off.”

  “I heard about the trouble with the Symbolists. I’d have handled them better.”

  “Easy to say from here.”

  “Easy for you to dismiss. But I’d have had my ways. Svetlana’s mistake was treating the Symbolists as an aberration, something that could be diagnosed and cured like a pathology. I’d have accepted their inevitability and made them work for me. More tea?”

  “No thanks.”

  “She tried to keep them from the Maw because it offende
d her puritanical sensibilities to think that a bunch of cultists might actually be capable of running something. So she antagonised and marginalised them, sent spies and agitators in to try to break them up. Which, of course, only made things worse.”

  “Whereas you would have… ?”

  Her eyes widened. “I’d have embraced them, encouraged them. Zealots are exactly the sort of people you want running delicate machinery. The clockwork mechanism would have been in safe hands for evermore.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked.”

  “Svetlana’s methods were hardly a raging success, Parry.” Bella sniffed. “Still, if she won’t talk to me… no sense arguing with a sulking child, is there?”

  “Then you’ll talk to me?” Parry asked.

  “If that’s what it takes. The difference is I care about Crabtree, not my pride.”

  Parry leaned forward and softened his voice, trying to connect with the woman under whom he had once served. “Then tell me what this is all about. Tell me what Jim Chisholm has to do with what just happened to Craig Schrope.”

  “Everything,” Bella said. She put down her teacup and studied Parry with an intensity he found disquieting, as if his very soul were being scrutinised for flaws.

  “It’s about what Jim said to you, isn’t it? The day you came back to Crabtree to visit him.”

  “Of course.”

  “But that was… what? Nine or ten years ago, easily. Jim knew nothing about the Spicans.”

  “But he knew we’d meet them one day, and that when we did it might be —” Bella paused and hunted for the right word. “Difficult.”

  “But his knowing that — it doesn’t help us.”

  “I think it does,” Bella said. “You see, the thing is… This is difficult as well. I only have one thing still of value to me, Parry.” She looked down at age-spotted fingers laced in indecision. “It was a gift from Jim. He could have told you, could have told Svieta, or Ryan, or anyone else… but he didn’t. He told me, because it was the only way he could give me something useful. And I’ve kept his secret all these years, knowing it might one day help us, knowing it might one day help me… but at the same time hoping, praying, that the time would never come when I needed to reveal it.” She looked into his eyes with a sudden fierce gaze. “But now I think that time has come.”

  “Tell me,” Parry whispered.

  “I’d always hoped that I might use this to bargain with you. That’s why I wanted to talk to Svieta.”

  “I’ll relay any requests to her.”

  “I’m not asking for the world. Just let me come back to Crabtree. Allow me to play some kind of role in our affairs.”

  “Pass me my helmet,” Parry said.

  Bella obliged. He locked the helmet back into place and returned to the airlock. With the door closed behind him and the helmet tightly sealed, he was sure Bella would not be able to hear him talking to Svetlana on the Crusader.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “Bella’s ready to talk. Jim told her something that might help us. She’ll reveal it if we make concessions.”

  “I’m not negotiating. Get it out of her.”

  “Svieta —”

  “We’re halfway through screwing up the most historic event in human history, Parry. I am not in the mood to bargain. Tell her that if she doesn’t talk we’ll start taking stuff away.”

  “She’ll clam up. You know Bella.” There was a resentful silence at the other end of the line. Svetlana must have known he was right. The two women were too alike in temperament. “What’s she asking for?” Svetlana asked after a few moments. “A return to Crabtree.”

  “No fucking way.”

  “Listen to me,” Parry said. “Give her one of the outlying domes. It doesn’t have to be in the hab. She’ll still be a prisoner.”

  Again there was silence. It stretched for twenty or thirty seconds, while Parry imagined Svetlana’s anguished thought processes.

  “Just Crabtree, she said? No other requests?”

  “She’d like to play more of a role in Crabtree affairs.”

  “No.”

  Parry thought of Bella waiting on the other side of the lock, wondering what was going on. “There’s a way,” he said. “We already have a private channel for anonymous policy suggestions.”

  She sounded surprised. “Do we?”

  “Yes. Just because you never look at it.”

  “But you do.”

  “I skim the suggestions now and then. Sometimes there’s good stuff in them. When there is, I occasionally let it influence my thinking. Bella’s locked out of that channel now, but it wouldn’t cost us much to let her have her say. Anonymously, of course. She’d just be one voice amongst many.”

  “Does this run on ShipNet?”

  “It used to. Lately we’ve had to go back to paper notes dropped into sealed boxes, but it still works.”

  “I know her handwriting.”

  “It doesn’t matter — you never read the damned things anyway. I don’t know her handwriting, so what difference will it make?”

  “All right,” Svetlana said, with a world-weary sigh. “Offer her this much: an outlying dome at Crabtree — surface access via airlock only. No one visits her without a suit. And she doesn’t get one.”

  “I’ll see if that flies. And the other thing?”

  “She can use the suggestion box. She’ll be allowed a limited ration of paper. I don’t want her flooding the fucking thing.”

  “Generosity’s a lovely thing.”

  He opened the inner door of the airlock and returned inside, unlatching his helmet at the same time.

  Bella shot him a knowing look. “I can tell that went smoothly.”

  Parry sat down opposite her. “You’ve got your deal. You’ll be moved to Crabtree, into one of the perimeter domes. No tunnel access. No suit.”

  “Continue,” Bella said, giving nothing away.

  “You get to submit policy suggestions through an anonymous channel. I’ll read and screen them, not Svieta. Anything I think has wheels, she gets to hear. None of us will ever know who originated the suggestion.”

  “Very democratic of you.”

  “You’ll be part of Crabtree life again. You can build on that.”

  “Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “Everything that you’ve just offered me… I can trust you to deliver, can’t I?”

  “Of course,” Parry said.

  “It’s always been good to be able to talk to you,” Bella said. “It was a relief knowing not everyone hated me. There was always Axford, but you had every reason to turn against me. You didn’t. I’ve appreciated that more than you’ll ever know.”

  “You’ve always had my respect. Nothing’s ever changed that.”

  “Then perhaps we had better talk about Jim Chisholm.”

  * * *

  Svetlana watched Parry cross the ground to Star Crusader, observed by another figure looking out of the dome. Parry passed out of view into the lander’s airlock, and for a moment Svetlana felt as if Bella was looking at her, and she looking at Bella, even though they were too far away to see each other’s eyes. Somehow that didn’t matter, though. The human mind was so attuned to the importance of gaze that it could just tell.

  There was a moment of electric connection, like an emotional short circuit, before Svetlana flinched and looked away.

  Parry cycled through the airlock. She met him on the other side and helped him out of the suit, fingers urgent against the catches. Her fingertips felt raw, the nails chewed to the quick.

  “Did she bite?”

  “She bit. Took some persuading, but she went for it in the end. I don’t think she was all that excited about being transferred to another isolated dome. Being able to post suggestions, though — that mattered a lot to her.”

  “Whatever she needed to hear,” Svetlana said.

  “It wasn’t about what she needed to hear,” Parry replied. “It was about what we were comfortable offering.”

  P
arry followed her into the lander’s passenger lounge, with its scuffed decor and worn seats. Svetlana called Denise and told her they could return to Underhole. When Crusader was aloft, she said, “Now tell me what this is all about.”

  Parry took off his red cap and rubbed a hand through his greying hair. “It’s about what Jim told her in Crabtree. About his plans for what would happen when they came.”

  “They,” she echoed flatly.

  “The aliens he always guessed we’d meet. He figured that when we got to Spica, something like this was bound to happen. He knew he’d be dead by then, too.” Parry paused, making sure he had her attention. Of course he did. “Dead but frozen.”

  “One of Ryan’s Frost Angels.”

  He nodded solemnly. “Jim knew he was going to die, and he didn’t think we had much hope of ever making it back to Earth. But aliens? He thought we had every chance of meeting them. After all, Janus was taking us somewhere. Pretty good bet there would be aliens at the end of the line.”

  “He was right,” Svetlana said, thinking back to Schrope’s cryptic final words in the alien ship. “What does that have to do with our current predicament?”

  “Jim reckoned aliens would have a better chance of bringing him back than people ever did. He told Bella that when they came, if things didn’t work out so well at first, we should send him to them.”

  “Send a dead man,” she said.

  “Dead men don’t have a lot to lose.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Maybe. But is it any more insane than sending someone else inside that thing and waiting for them to die the same way Craig did?”

  “You don’t send a dead man in as your negotiator,” Svetlana said.

  “Maybe I missed something, but I don’t remember ever being shown the rulebook for this situation.”

  “We’ve given them one corpse already.”

  “No,” Parry said firmly. He was doing that maddening thing of staying calm, rationally arguing his case, never raising his voice or showing the least sign of irritation when she did not immediately see his position. “We gave them a living man and they killed him. Probably not intentionally, but it still happened. But they didn’t get a clean corpse at the end of it. They got a man who’d been crushed alive by gravity and pressure, a man who died in his spacesuit. He was still warm after his heart stopped, after the blood stopped flowing, but by the time they got to him, his brain must have looked like the Antarctic shelf. The damage was already done.”