Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  With the tank unplugged from power and water, Parry made sure the lid was dogged down against spillage. He set his helmet on top of the lid, for easy access when he reached the tractor. The tank was wide, but he could just about brace his gloved hands on either side without too much strain. With an involuntary grunt of effort, he tried lifting the thing.

  On Earth, it would have weighed a tonne: there was easily a cubic metre of water in there, not to mention all the gravel and rocks on the base. On Janus, its effective weight should only have been a few kilograms, yet it didn’t budge when he tried to lift it. He tried again, unsuccessfully, then realised — stupidly — that the tank was fixed to its table with four dabs of geckoflex. He levered it loose one corner at a time and then suddenly it was free. It still had fearful inertia, but he was used to manhandling massive objects on Janus. Keeping it level, he walked awkwardly to the door.

  That was when he saw Svetlana, watching him from the corridor in dim silhouette.

  “I thought you were still in Underhole,” he said uneasily.

  “So I see.” One hand rested on her suited hip, the other dangled her helmet. “What are you doing?”

  He stopped, still holding the fish tank. “I’m doing the one thing that might let me get through this day with a shred of dignity. How about you?”

  She pushed her helmet against a ribbon of geckoflex on the ceiling. “Put the tank back.”

  “I’m taking it to Bella. We screwed her over the deal with Jim. The least we can do is give her something in return.”

  “Put the tank back,” she repeated.

  He took a step nearer the door. “No.”

  “Put it down.”

  “Get out of my way, Svieta.”

  She closed on him and got her own gloved hands on the tank. Geckoflex adhered tightly to glass. She was stronger than he had been expecting — Svetlana had always taken the time to keep in shape, even during the hardships of the Iron Sky. But Parry was stronger — he had kept in shape as well, and he had better leverage on the tank than she did. They wrestled with it, neither able to gain any ground on the other. Parry’s helmet slid off the top and settled to the ground with featherlike slowness. Even though he had tightened the lid, water still found its way through the seal. It emerged in a silvery sheet, breaking up into pearly blobs as it drifted to the floor.

  “Put it back,” Svetlana said, breathing heavily now. “She isn’t getting this.”

  Between grunts of effort, Parry said, “It’s been thirteen fucking years. Hasn’t she paid enough, without being lied to, without being cheated?”

  “Put… the tank…back.”

  His grip slipped where the geckoflex patch on his right glove had been wearing thin. Svetlana took advantage, heaving the tank her way, trying to twist it from his grip. Parry scrabbled for another purchase with his free hand but ended up overcompensating for Svetlana’s twisting motion. The tank skidded from his hands. For a moment Svetlana had it, but while she could manage the tank’s weight easily enough, it still had a tonne of inertia. In that one fumbling instant it had picked up dangerous speed. It was like trying to catch a falling engine block.

  The tank slipped from her grip. She tried to catch it, but it was already on its way to the ground, picking up momentum with every second it fell. The stiff articulation of the suits made it impossible for them to dive down and catch it. All they could do was watch as the tank rammed the floor like a rudder-locked supertanker. The glass held — it was space qualified, after all — but the lid popped free, allowing the remaining water to slurp out in a slow, sickly tidal wave, freighted with fish. “Oh, fuck,” Svetlana said.

  The water oozed in all directions, surface tension pulling it into an amoeba-like shape that appeared to spread out with a vague sense of will. The startled fish flopped around in the shallows with uncomprehending goggle eyes, flapping their tails and gaping their mouths in existential crisis.

  Parry and Svetlana looked down in horror. Some awful span of time passed before they suddenly moved as one, kneeling stiffly, trying to scoop up water and fish in huge silvery handfuls. By the time they had got most of the fish back into the tank, much of the water had soaked into Bella’s old carpet. What remained in the tank looked scummy and stagnant. The fish hung in it at limp, stunned angles. Their fragile sense of up and down had been destroyed.

  Wordlessly, Parry and Svetlana manoeuvred the tank up onto the table and plumbed it back into the water supply.

  “They’re not going to like this,” Parry said, when the tank was half-full. “I think you’re only ever meant to change a little water at a time, so that the ecosystem doesn’t suffer too much of a jolt.”

  “I’m sorry,” Svetlana said, shaking.

  Parry looked at her. “Are you talking to me or the fish?”

  “Take the tank to Bella. Maybe she can… fix things.”

  “What do you want me to tell her?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just take the tank.”

  At that moment they both noticed the quietly insistent chime coming from their helmets. Parry knelt down and collected his from the floor as Svetlana reached up to the ceiling for hers. The chime was coming from the HUD alert, so Parry settled the helmet over his head without engaging the neck ring. The HUD visuals lit up.

  “I think you need to put your helmet on,” he told Svetlana.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The space-suited figure stood at the top of the ramp leading down from the chandelier-shaped ship. At full zoom the cam traced details of the suit’s design, but no face was visible behind the reflective surface of the helmet’s visor.

  The suit did not resemble any aboard Rockhopper, but on some level that Svetlana could not quite identify, it carried the unmistakable signature of human thinking. Its pale-grey exterior flexed in some places and looked as rigid as armour in others. There were no seams or articulation points. The helmet, gloves and chestpack were part of the whole, as if the entire suit had been moulded in one piece. There was no sharp division between the faceplate and the rest of the helmet, merely a soft transition.

  The figure started walking. At first its movements were stiff and uncoordinated, as if it were a doll being propelled by an invisible hand. Once or twice it hesitated, or appeared to be on the point of stumbling, but with each pace the figure gained a measure of confidence and fluidity. By the time it was halfway down the ramp, it had settled into a purposeful stride. The fingers worked constantly, clenching and unclenching.

  The figure reached the bottom of the ramp and stepped onto the Iron Sky. It paused for a moment, twisting its upper body to look back at the ship from which it had just emerged. Then it continued walking in the direction of the hole, halting at the very lip. It moved to the cam that had been watching it, then reached down and detached the device from its geckoflex mounting. It held the cam at arm’s length, pointed at its head, but there was still nothing to be seen except the glossy mirror of the helmet visor.

  The figure returned the cam to its geckoflex and moved out of sight. The HUD window inside Svetlana’s helmet switched to a different cam, one of those stationed under the Sky, angled up through the hole. The figure had lowered itself over the edge and was now descending the sheer face where the sky had been drilled through, attached only by fingertips and the toes of its boots. It moved confidently, but with no apparent sense of haste. Soon it reached the inner side of the Sky, and for a minute it hung upside down, as motionless as when it had first stepped from the ship. Then it dropped.

  It gathered speed with the usual lazy reluctance of all falling objects on Janus. Once it had reached a rate of fall of twenty or thirty metres per second, it stopped accelerating. Slowly, the suit revolved through one hundred and eighty degrees and fell the remainder of the twenty vertical kilometres to Underhole feet first. It decelerated somehow just before contacting the ice, landing daintily.

  It walked up to the main dome in Underhole and knocked on the outer airlock door. No one heard the knocks, but by
that point there wasn’t a HUD or flexy that wasn’t tracking the grey-suited figure.

  The figure waited, then raised its hand and knocked again.

  “What do we do?” Denise Nadis asked, an edge of hysteria in her voice. “It wants to come in.”

  “So let it in,” Svetlana said, over the com from Crabtree. “Let it in, then tell it to wait. I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  Nadis met Svetlana, Parry and Axford in the airlock as they were undoing their helmets. They had lost the com feed to Crusader during the journey back from Crabtree, so Svetlana had no idea what had happened since the last update.

  “We’re still sitting tight,” Nadis said, looking as if she was running on willpower alone. “All it’s done since we let it in is sit at the table.”

  “It’s made no attempt to communicate?”

  Nick Thale stood behind Nadis, stirring a fork through the remains of a meal. He had just been rotated out to Underhole after a week back in Crabtree. “Not from its side. We haven’t tried much, either. Thought we’d best wait until you arrived.”

  “I think if it meant us harm, we’d have known about it by now,” Parry said.

  “Thing freaks me out,” Nadis said under her breath. “That’s all I need to know.”

  The grey-suited figure had seated itself at the head of the conference table with its arms resting on the wangwood, fingertips just touching. It still had the helmet on. The suit made a faint, rhythmic wheezing sound, despite there being no visible vents or grilles.

  “There’s clearly something alive in there,” Axford said, brushing aside the remains of foil-wrapped meals to make space on the table for his medical kit.

  “No visible suit diagnostics, though,” Thale said.

  Svetlana had expected the suit to reveal more of its secrets up close, but it was as seamless and inscrutable as it had been in the cam view. She hesitantly touched the seated figure’s forearm: the pale-grey material had something of the same neoprene slickness as wet dolphin skin. When she pushed her finger against it, it resisted a little and then absorbed the pressure, dimpling inwards. She scratched a fingernail against it, but left no mark.

  She sat down at the opposite end of the table from the figure. Parry stood behind her, with a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Axford had opened his medical kit, but so far had removed none of his equipment.

  “It’s Jim, isn’t it?” she said, staring at her own reflection in the black mirrored faceplate. “I’m guessing you can hear me, so… welcome back, Jim. It’s good to have you with us.”

  The figure spoke in an amplified voice that approximated Jim Chisholm’s. “Hello, Bella.”

  Something caught in Svetlana’s throat. “It’s not —” she began, but Parry’s hand tightened on her shoulder, clearly warning her not to contradict the figure. “Hello,” she said.

  The figure reached up with both hands and removed the helmet. It separated from the collar along an invisibly fine seam, like a piece of clay being torn in two. The edge was as clean and deliberate as if it had been cut with a sword. The figure placed the helmet on the table.

  Svetlana stared at what had been Jim Chisholm. It was his face, but it took an effort of concentration to convince herself of that fact. The features were different than she remembered, even near the end. It was thinner, the skin drawn so tightly against the bone that she could see the shape of the skull underneath. No hair, just a fine layer of stubble. No expression, either, beyond a kind of stunned incomprehension.

  “It’s good to have you back,” she said again.

  He looked at her, his eyes painfully wide. “I was away somewhere… away for a long time.”

  “But now you’re back,” she said, reaching out to touch one of his gloved hands. “Safe with us again.”

  “I was somewhere cold.”

  Svetlana nodded encouragingly. So there was memory there; not just the memory of faces (it was understandable that he had mistaken her for Bella, after so many years) but the memory of what had happened to him near the end, under Axford’s care.

  “You were a Frost Angel,” she said gently, “but now you’re back. You’re home again, where you belong.”

  “I’m glad,” Chisholm said.

  Parry leaned down, resting his chin on her shoulder. “Hi, Jim. Do you remember me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I remember. Parry.” Then he blinked, as if clearing his vision. “Older now. What happened to you?”

  “The same thing that happened to all of us,” Parry said. “Except you, Jim. You were the lucky one. You got to sleep.”

  “Sleep with angels,” Chisholm said.

  “Hi, Jim,” Axford said. “Do you remember me? I was your doctor. Your friend, too. We used to spend a lot of time together, talking stuff over, listening to music. You taught me to hear things in Mingus… things I’d never have noticed without you. I’m still grateful.”

  “Ryan,” Chisholm said, his eyes widening. “I remember it, too… Mingus. An ocean of Mingus. Bird calls. Oceanic. But all that was —” He averted his eyes, as if he had seen something shameful. “All that was such a long time ago. How can you remember it now?”

  Axford had removed an ophthalmoscope from his medical kit. “Jim, do you mind if I look into your eyes?”

  “No… please,” he said, with a childlike willingness. Axford moved close to Chisholm and gently touched the fingers of his right hand to the skin around Chisholm’s left eye. With the other hand he shone the light of the ophthalmoscope into the eye. The eye blinked at first and then held steady. Axford moved to the other eye, then switched off the ophthalmoscope and looked back to Svetlana.

  “Strictly preliminary,” he said, “but before we lost Jim, the glioblastoma was elevating intracranial pressure. Elevated ICP has a number of external symptoms, beyond the headaches and vomiting Jim was experiencing. Papilledema’s one of them — outward bulging of the retina. But I’m not seeing anything like that now. I’m reading normal pulsation of the retinal vessels, no blurring of the optic disc margin. Maybe some old retinal haemorrhages, but nothing recent — nothing that he’d notice.”

  “What are you saying?” she asked.

  “I’ll need to run proper tests in Crabtree — scans, bloodwork — but it very much looks as if they’ve debulked, or maybe even completely removed, the blastoma.” He touched a hand against Chisholm’s forehead. “He’s running one hell of a temperature, though. I’m keen to get him out of that suit and back to Crabtree as soon as possible.”

  “Jim,” Svetlana said, “do you remember this place? This world we’re on?”

  He cocked his head, as if searching for the answer. “Janus,” he said, after a moment.

  “Yes,” she said, brimming with relief. So Chisholm remembered: maybe not in sharp detail yet, but he had at least retained a basic skeleton of the facts. A skeleton that they could build on, flesh out with texture and colour, if his own memory was unable to supply the rest.

  “How long now?” he asked.

  “We’ve been here for thirteen years,” she said. “It’s been nine years since you left us.”

  For the first time he showed some wider interest in his surroundings. He looked around stiffly, to the walls and ceiling. The effort of moving his neck seemed to tax him. “Is this Crabtree?”

  “No. We’re in Underhole now — it’s just a monitoring outpost. You fell from the Iron Sky, remember?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, as if the memory amused him. “The Sky. I walked on it.”

  “And then you fell through the hole, the hole the aliens drilled through to us.”

  “I remember falling.” He lifted one of his hands from the table and spread the fingers. “This is a good suit. Better than the ones we had before.” Then he looked back sharply to Svetlana. “I don’t remember the Sky.”

  “It wasn’t there before,” she said. “The Spicans put it around us just before we started slowing down. We figured it was some kind of shield, to protect us during the d
eceleration phase.”

  “How long since they made the sky?”

  “It’s been over a year, Jim. It’s served its purpose, though. We’ve arrived in the Spica Structure. Safe and sound, like you.“

  “The Spica Structure,” he said, with a widening smile.

  “You remember it?” She smiled back. “That’s great.”

  Chisholm’s smile slipped. His voice became flat and emotionless again. “I remember the Spica Structure, yes.”

  “We’re there now. Two hundred and sixty light-years from home… but we’re still here, still alive. We made it. Now all we have to do is make it back.”

  His voice slowed. “I remember… yes.”

  “Easy,” Parry breathed.

  “I… remember —” Then a kind of shadow crossed Chisholm’s face, his expression reverting to the absolute blankness he had shown when he first removed the helmet: less a face than a death mask, emotions sucked back into whatever tiny core of personality remained. “I’m sorry.”

  Svetlana reached across the table and grasped his hand. “Jim, it’s okay. I know this is going to be tough for you, but… everything’s going to be all right. You’re with friends now. We’ll take care of you.”

  “Sorry.” His throat made a wet clicking sound, as if an invisible garrotte were tightening around his neck. “So sorry.”

  “Jim —” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  Chisholm started making rhythmic moaning sounds, like a person deep in the coils of nightmare, his breathing becoming heavier, the mask of his face pulling into something tortured. The moans became a howl of distress like nothing Svetlana had heard before, like nothing she would ever care to hear again. Distress transmuted to terror, as if moaning was the only human response to the paralysing burden of knowledge now unpacking itself inside his head.

  He stopped. The silence was worse than the moaning. Panting, his face slick with sweat, his eyes wide and unblinking, he looked around at his audience.

  Then he closed his eyes and pitched forward, his head lolling against the neck ring of the suit.