Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  The smart young woman dimmed the flexy and slipped it under her floral-patterned jacket. “You’re keen. I have a paper copy of the latest draft report on the Bagley affair, if you want to review it.”

  Bella rolled her eyes. “I’ve reviewed umpteen versions already. Show it to me when they have something that’ll hold up in court. Then I’ll think about reopening the inquiry.”

  “There’ll be a lot of people hoping it never makes it that far,” Liz Shen said. “Of course, if you’d rather they didn’t have anything to worry about —”

  “Oh, just give it to me,” Bella said grumpily, knowing Shen was right.

  As the train whisked towards Underhole at a comfortable one hundred and eight kilometres per hour — just below orbital speed — Bella skimmed the latest draft report on the Bagley murder. The paper smelled faintly of peppermint. It was twenty-eight years since Meredith Bagley had been found dead, crushed by the movement of a centrifuge during scheduled maintenance. Five years ago, however, Hank Dussen — one of Parry’s old EVA men — had confessed to being one of three participants in her murder. Dussen had been on his deathbed at the time of his confession, riddled with radiation carcinomas from a lifetime of spacewalking. An affiliate of one of the more obscure Symbolist sects, he refused to entrust himself to the rejuvenative medicine of the Fountainheads. He saw his confession as a necessary step to absolution, but he had not named his co-conspirators.

  The case had simmered on since then, unable to progress due to a lack of further information. Then, unexpectedly, Ash Murray had uncovered a paper log containing fault reports for the three suits that had been signed out for that shift. The log contained no names, but the three sets of faults had all been written in different handwriting. One set matched known documents linked to Hank Dussen, while the other two were good matches against samples from the suspected co-conspirators. After a lifetime of working in suits, filling in the fault documentation had been second nature to them.

  Bella put down the document with a sigh. “Do you really think I should pull back this scab, Liz, just when we’re all beginning to live together in peace again… just when things are starting to settle down?”

  “Has to be done,” Liz Shen said.

  “I know, I know. It’s just…” Bella sighed heavily. “This is going to raise hell. It may not stop at just two names. God knows how many people have been involved keeping this covered up over the years.”

  “Has to be done,” Shen repeated firmly. As ever, she appeared wise beyond her years, like the older sister Bella had never had. “And we’ll pull through it, too,” she added. “Maybe we actually need this, to finally move on from all that.”

  There were many like Liz Shen now: children of Janus, pushing inexorably into adulthood, many with children of their own. Earth meant nothing to them. It was like some distant, exotic, vaguely perplexing foreign country — the way Japan or China had been to Bella when she was a girl. They were happy to take what they could from it — its fashions, music, clothes and consumer goods — but they had no gripping desire actually to visit the place. If Shen and her generation were nostalgic about anything, it was the version of Janus they remembered from their youth, with its deceptive simplicities and easily forgotten hardships.

  Things had improved during the twenty years since the Fountainheads drilled through the Sky. After months of uneasy negotiation, the aliens had been allowed to sink energy-sucking taproots into the luminous vaults under Janus. In return, the Fountainheads had given the humans access to technologies, artefacts and data the aliens had acquired during their earlier episodes of human contact. None of these items dated from later than 2135 — the ‘Cutoff’, as it was now known — but that was still nearly eighty years of human progress to catch up on. Careful not to overwhelm the humans, the Fountainheads had drip-fed these marvels one dose at a time, in return for increasing access to the interior of Janus.

  Liz Shen was an object lesson in how well these lessons had been integrated into the normal flow of Janus life. The flexy she carried with her was for Bella’s benefit, not hers. She regarded flexies with the eldritch horror Bella might have reserved for a steam-driven typewriter. Liz Shen’s computational needs were handled by her clothes and the kernels of Borderline Intelligence packed into her minimalist jewellery. The clothes and jewellery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements. The computational textiles exchanged data with the environment via rapid subliminal alterations to their colour patterning, too brief to be picked up by the human eye. The apparently serene environment, in turn, flickered beneath the level of perception with a frenzy of encoded data patterns.

  The clothes had become so adept at reading Shen’s muscular intentions (they were sewn with superconductors, to pick up the myoelectric field pulses of her nervous system) that she rarely needed to complete the gesture itself. When she was busy, Shen’s muscles pulsated with a kind of low-level palsy, like a person receiving mild electroconvulsive therapy. She had the hard muscle tone of a ballerina. It might have looked odd, but there were people like Shen everywhere nowadays. Bella and the other old-timers were the oddities, with their quaint attachment to flexies.

  Bella had tried to keep up, but she had been sixty-eight when the Fountainheads came, already set in her ways. Now she was twenty years older. There were many like her, too: mired in the past, dressing like ghosts from a vanished era, blinking in bewildered surprise at the rush of events.

  Shen pulled down her sunglasses and went into a brief data-tremor. “We’re approaching Underhole,” she said. “We had a security scare a few hours ago, but everything’s normal now.”

  Bella handed her back the papers on the Bagley case. “You’d better keep hold of these for now. If they can tighten section three, I think we’re there.”

  “You’re going to have to subpoena Ash Murray,” Shen said. “I can start the paperwork on that, if you want. He’s not going to like it, though.”

  “Of course he’s not going to like it. I have a feeling he expected to stay dead for rather longer than four years.”

  “Serves him right for joining the Skippers.” Shen tore off a chunk of the Bagley report and pushed it into her mouth, talking as she chewed. “They called it ‘exporting expertise to the future’. Social cowardice, if you ask me.”

  “Don’t be too hard on them,” Bella said. “We all lived through some pretty bad times. People like Ash… they’d just had enough.”

  “I’m still glad you closed that loophole. Why should we carry their dead weight across the decades?” Shen tore off another corner from the report and offered it to Bella. “You haven’t eaten since this morning. Would you like some?”

  “No thanks,” Bella said, touching a hand to her belly. “Paperwork always disagrees with me.”

  * * *

  Liz Shen handed Bella a plastic filter mask as they disembarked from the train into the unfinished transit plaza at Underhole. Dust hung in the air in languid, drifting sheets, never settling to the ground. The few human workers present guided their construction machines with slow full-body gestures, like t‘ai chi masters. Avery Fox came bustling over to see them, snatching down a dust mask and apologising for his lateness. He was twenty-six, born in the seventh year of the human occupation of Janus. He was the only child of Reda Kirschner and Malcolm Fox, a marriage across the lines of allegiance dividing Bella and Svetlana.

  “They tell me you’ve found something,” Bella said.

  “I thought you might like to see it sooner rather than later. We’ve booked a heavy tractor to haul it back to Crabtree, but it probably won’t get there for another week.”

  “I’ve kept the Fountainheads waiting long enough. I’m sure a few more minutes won’t make any difference.”

  “It’s true, then?” Avery asked. “You’re really going through with it?”

  “Even old women are allowed to change their minds.” She softened her expression: in recent years she had become dimly aware of how sternly disapproving she
could appear. “The years have caught up with me, Avery. Look at these useless old hands of mine.”

  “I hope it all goes well,” he said.

  “It will. They ought to be getting good at it by now.”

  He led them into the bowels of the Underhole transit complex, through dust screens and airlocks. Soon they arrived in an excavated space with a pit in the floor, where drilling had been suspended. A makeshift walkway had been geckoflexed to the ice. Bella tightened one of her useless old hands on the railing and looked down.

  “That’s it?” she asked, dismayed.

  It was nothing to look at: just a black cube about the same size as a transport crate.

  “It’s heavier than it looks,” Fox said, slipping into the peculiar lilting accent she often heard amongst the young. “Two hundred tonnes of mass, easily — it weighs more than five hundred kilos even on Janus. If they only had a few pairs of hands, they’d have had a hard time loading it onto a tractor. Easier to dig a hole and bury it.”

  “If Svetlana didn’t want me to see this thing, why didn’t she just destroy it?” Bella asked, not really expecting an answer.

  Liz Shen said, “What is it, anyway?”

  “No one knows,” Fox replied. There’s a design cut into one of the faces — some naked guy in a square.“

  “Not ringing any bells here,” Bella said, but something bristled the hairs on the back of her neck. “How closely have you examined it?”

  “We’ve poked and prodded it enough to be certain it isn’t a bomb. Looks solid all the way through.”

  “Composition?”

  “Funny thing is,” Avery said, “we haven’t had much luck shaving anything off for analysis. Tough as old boots, whatever it is. Maybe that’s why Svetlana didn’t destroy it — she couldn’t have even if she’d wanted to.”

  “And it’s been down here for twenty years?”

  “Unless someone tells us otherwise. If you want the facts, I guess Svetlana’s the person to ask. Do you still want us to ship it back to Crabtree?”

  “We’ll take the risk if it means we’ll have a better chance of studying it. But keep this under wraps — I don’t want this all over town by the time it gets there.”

  “I’m sure we can handle it with the necessary discretion,” Shen said, with the conceited glow of someone who knew they were extremely good at their job. “But what about Svetlana? Do you want someone to bring her in from Eddytown for questioning?”

  “No,” Bella said, “just dig out the names of everyone who might have been at Underhole just before the takeover. That’s where we’ll start.”

  “You really want to get into this on top of the Bagley investigation? Isn’t one hornet’s nest enough for you?”

  “Actually,” Bella said, “that’s a very good point. When you pick them up — whoever they turn out to be — drop hints that it’s all part of a peripheral inquiry related to the Bagley case. Don’t be afraid to take the train to Eddytown, if that’s where your investigations lead, but never let Svetlana suspect that this has anything to do with the cube.” Then she found herself looking back down at the ominous black object, as if it were exerting a magnetic tug on her thoughts, forcing her attention upon itself. “That… thing,” she said uneasily. “Has anyone actually touched it?”

  “I did,” Fox said, looking down shamefacedly. “It was stupid — I should have waited until we’d run tests. But no harm came from it.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “Very cold,” he said. “Cold and very, very old. A lot older than twenty years.”

  Bella shivered: she swore she could feel that antiquity without even touching it. But that was absurd.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Bella and Shen walked up the steep temporary ramp to the waiting elevator car, where a small security retinue waited. It was easy going now, even for Bella’s ageing muscles and knee joints. The gravity was currently Janus ambient, but when construction was completed the underlying machinery would be tweaked to induce a hotspot of point-five Earth gravities. It was a simple trick that the Fountainheads had taught the humans: one of the few gifts that had not involved the transfer of prior human knowledge.

  They’d already upped the gravity at Crabtree: the last centrifuge had been spun down and dismantled three years earlier. People had moaned and grumbled, but the medical benefits of permanent high gravity were too significant to ignore, and with the birth rate shooting up, the centrifuges could not have coped for much longer.

  Bella and Shen entered the elevator car with one of the security men and took seats. Soon they were rising, to the accompaniment of a tinkly rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema.” The car passed through an airlock into open space and Bella looked down at the sprawl of Underhole, imagining the deep foundations plunging through kilometres of ice to the Spican bedrock. If the Tier-Two advocates had their way, Underhole would form a throbbing arterial bridge between the interior and the new territories scheduled to spill out across the other side of the Sky.

  The upper works were much less impressive. A crane had winched the elevator across the twenty-kilometre gap, and now it swung its boom to one side and deposited the little compartment next to a cluster of domes barely larger than the original Underhole settlement. Bella and Shen passed through an airlock into a reception area. Furniture oozed into readiness, anticipating their arrival. A chair nudged Bella’s ankles with puppy-dog eagerness. She kicked it aside irritably.

  Nick Thale was waiting for them, as white-haired and patriarchal as a wizard. He was in his mid-fifties, but had turned down all offers of rejuvenation: he wanted to wait another twenty years, he said, just in case there were any unexpected complications.

  “It’s been a long time, Bella,” he said. “You should come and see us more often.”

  “You should see how difficult it is to drag her out of her office, let alone Crabtree,” Shen said.

  Bella shot the other woman a sidelong glance: was that an attempt at humour, or just a bald statement of the facts? Perhaps she needed to revise her opinion of Shen.

  “There’s enough to keep me busy, Nick. I trust you to keep a handle on things this side of the Sky.”

  “We do our best. How is Crabtree, anyway?”

  “You should pop down one of these days, take a stroll in one of the new biomes. We’ve got trees now — real, honest-to-god trees. Junipers… oaks. I never thought I’d see a tree again in my lifetime.”

  “Gene-edited from the aeroponics plant stocks?”

  “No,” Bella said. “That never worked. Turned out the plants we brought with us had already been hacked about to protect DeepShaft patents. Major chromosomal deletions, genetically impoverished: not enough material to work with.”

  “So the trees… ?”

  “Cultured straight from Fountainhead data. It was buried in the last batch of stuff they sent us, almost as an afterthought, as if they didn’t think we’d find it all that interesting.”

  “I’d like to touch a tree again,” Thale said wistfully.

  “Then come down to Crabtree. I’ll show you around. Things are buzzing now — it feels like a city.”

  Thale grimaced. “A city on Sunday, perhaps, when everyone’s left — even the ice-cream vendors.”

  “It’s filling out more and more every year. The kids make a difference. The grandchildren. Blink and there’ll be greatgrandchildren, kids for whom even the Year of the Iron Sky is ancient history. Earth’ll be like… I don’t know, Sparta, or Mesopotamia, a thing they look at in picture books before smiling and turning the page to something more exciting.”

  “You frighten me sometimes, Bella.”

  “I felt this way before I ever set foot on Rockhopper, as if the world was slipping away from me. It’s just got worse, that’s all.”

  Thale led her along the glass connecting walkway that led to the Fountainhead embassy, while Liz Shen stayed behind in the reception dome. Bella hoped her nervousness was not too apparent, but with every step closer
to the aliens she found her resolve crumbling. She had delayed this visit long enough, and would have continued putting it off had Jim Chisholm not requested her immediate presence. Chisholm was still technically her subordinate, but she had long ago learned that sometimes it paid to obey him.

  The embassy occupied the former landing site of the original Fountainhead ship. In some regards it was still the original ship, but due to the dreamlike malleability of Fountainhead technology it was difficult (and perhaps futile) to say for sure. The embassy was much larger, at any rate: its perimeter had encroached across half the distance between the original location of the ship and the hole, and it was much taller. But it had something of the same layered glassy architectural style, with many chandelier-like arms curving upward to tapering spires, forming a thicket of refractive structures around a gherkin-shaped central core. Now and then sub-units would arrive and depart, some of which were nearly as large as the original ship. Their mode of propulsion, like everything else associated with the Fountainheads, spoke of technologies far beyond human science at the time of the Cutoff.

  The glass tube led into a domed vault in the base of the embassy. Layers of transparent structure surrounded them, aglow with a soft and calming violet light. As they walked across the floor, two cylindrical kiosks rose seamlessly from its surface. Thale and Bella stepped through doorlike apertures in the sides of the kiosks, taking one each. Bella held still and waited for the kiosk to seal itself around her. After a moment the cylindrical form contracted until the inner surface of the enclosure was only centimetres from her body. Seen through the optically perfect glass, Thale’s kiosk had also shrunk down to something resembling a fat bottle.

  They started walking and Bella’s enclosure reshaped itself, bulging to accommodate the throw of her legs and the swing of her arms. It all happened so swiftly that Bella was never able to touch the glass. Thale led the way out of the vault and up a shallow helical ramp that led to a higher part of the embassy. As they walked, Bella knew, the external atmosphere was being swapped for the dense and poisonous broth of atmospheric chemicals necessary to sustain the Fountainheads. Gravity was also ramping up, but she felt none of that inside the suit’s protective envelope.