“Free-fliers, yes,” Bella said, pleased that she was making progress. “That was when we had our first glimpse of the shaft surrounding us.”
“There was something else,” the other woman continued. “We got a radar echo off something very near. It vanished, then showed up again. It turned out to be something orbiting Janus. Svieta sent out another free-flier to snare it, pull it through the hole, down to Underhole.”
Bella thought about that for a few paces. “How long do you think it had been up there?”
“How should I know?”
“I was asking for your opinion, that’s all.”
Christine’s defensiveness cracked. She let out a quiet sigh, as if she had finally decided to stop being obstructive and there was a kind of relief in that. “All we had was guesswork. We know now that the Fountainheads drilled the hole, and that it was the Fountainheads that sent down the probes that people had started seeing.”
Bella nodded, remembering the spate of alien sightings that had led up to the discovery of the hole in the Sky. She had heard about that even in her place of exile. “So you think the Fountainheads put the cube into orbit around Janus?”
“That’s one possibility,” Christine said.
“But not the only one.”
“If you’ve seen that cube, you know it doesn’t look like anything else we’ve encountered. It isn’t Spican. It isn’t Fountainhead.”
Bella thought about the Musk Dogs. Since her return to Crabtree she had mentioned McKinley’s warning to no one. “Could another species have dropped it off?”
“I suppose so. We know that the endcap door opens now and again. The Year of the Iron Sky lasted for four hundred days. For all we know we completed our slowdown in one day and spent the next three hundred and ninety-nine days sitting inside the shaft, waiting for someone to let us out.”
“Are you suggesting that the Fountainheads might not have been the first aliens to reach us?”
“I think that’s a possibility we should consider.” She paused, one foot lingering in the air. “Anyway, there’s another problem. If you’ve seen the cube, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
Bella stopped, too. “The da Vinci engraving, you mean.”
“It’s a human message, Bella. It was meant for us.”
“Which rules out the Fountainheads,” Bella said. “If they’d recognised us as human from the outset, they’d have cut to the chase and used a language we spoke from the get-go. They didn’t start talking to us until after we sent Craig and Jim inside. Then the penny dropped, but not before.”
“Maybe there’s someone else out there.”
“The Fountainheads have never pretended that there aren’t other aliens in the Structure,” Bella said.
“Some of those aliens could be human. That’s definitely a human symbol, Bella. How else did it get here, if humans didn’t bring it?”
“The Fountainheads brought human data with them,” Bella pointed out. “That means they made contact with another branch of humanity. If it happened once, there’s no reason why another alien culture couldn’t have met another branch.”
“It’s a pretty cryptic calling card, though.”
“That’s why I’d like to know more about it.” Bella walked on a little further, considering her options. Above, an owl swooped under the ghostly support spars of the arboretum.
“I’ve told you all I know.”
“What about the others?”
“I don’t think you’ll get anything more out of them — including Svieta. We answered to her, that’s all. She wasn’t running her own independent investigations.”
“I believe you,” Bella said, “and I’d like to offer you that position on the analysis team. Are you interested? It’ll take time away from your language studies, but I’m sure your husband can take up the slack.”
“Especially if you let us have that computer time we need,” Christine said quickly, before Bella changed her mind.
“Of course. That was the deal.”
After a moment, the other woman said, “Aren’t you worried that I’ll report back to Svetlana, tell her that you’ve found the cube?”
“She already knows it exists, and given that she’s well aware of the Underhole project, she must have known that there’d be a good chance of us uncovering it one of these days.”
“I suppose so.” Christine sounded less sure of herself.
“Then it doesn’t matter. Tell her, or don’t tell her. I don’t care.” Bella looked at the other woman, wishing there was some way to convince her of her sincerity. “It’s up to you.”
“You trust me?”
“I’m not interested in keeping secrets from Svieta. It’s been twenty years, Christine. It’s time to move on. I don’t hate her for what she did — she had her reasons, I suppose. To be honest, I barely think of her at all these days.” She paused. “And yes, I do trust you. The question is: do you trust me?”
“Sometimes.”
Bella smiled. “That’s exactly the right attitude: trust your leaders, but be careful not to trust them too much.”
They walked out of the woods, saying nothing, moving in silence except for the honest crunch of gravel under their shoes.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Bella was not ungrateful for the rejuvenation that the Fountainheads had bestowed upon her, but even alien science had its limits. The days tore by as quickly as they ever had. Faster, perhaps, now that the metronomic tick of sleep had returned to her world, its nagging beat a constant reminder that there was always more to be done; never enough hours in the day; never enough days in the year. No one could honestly say that they felt immortal. No one had returned to the Fountainheads for a second rejuvenation, and while Bella had little doubt that the aliens would oblige if asked, it was unclear whether the process could be repeated indefinitely.
And sudden, violent death was still as much of a problem as it had ever been. What might once have felt like an acceptable risk to an eighty-eight-year-old woman now struck her as the utmost foolishness, when so much was at stake. She dreaded any business that required her to fly, even though there had only been one fatal lander accident in the last thirty-three years. In the new climate of forgiveness and reconciliation, there had never been less risk of assassination from Barseghian loyalists or other rogue elements. Yet still she spent hours tightening her security arrangements, as if every crowd concealed a knifeman, sniper or toxicologist.
Months passed, and her new body began to feel comfortably familiar again, to the point where it required an effort of will to remind herself of its novelty. She buried herself in her work, pushed the limits of endurance. But despite early progress in several areas, soon all avenues of investigation came to dead ends.
The black cube remained stubbornly enigmatic. Even the gleaming new tools of pre-Cutoff science could only scratch the surface of its mystery, and they’d learned depressingly little more than had been gleaned by Svetlana’s first fumbling probings. The best working hypothesis was still that it was some kind of massively advanced replicating technology, endlessly self-repairing, running on a substrate far finer than the atomic granularity of the Chinese nanotech in the forge vats. Nuclear-scale femtotech, perhaps, or even some kind of replicating machinery cobbled together from the basic structural units of space-time. Working with such materials would, Nick Thale had told her, be akin to trying to build a functioning lathe out of wet spaghetti.
Such difficulties clearly hadn’t daunted the cube’s creators.
She still had no better idea who they had been. Nothing in the pre-Cutoff history files hinted at any human faction with the means to make something like the cube, and even if that had been possible, there was still the awkward question of how they had placed it into orbit around Janus.
Never mind what they had intended by that.
Now and then Bella went along to the research lab where Ofria-Gomberg and the others were studying the cube. It was a white room, sunk deep in a bunker
. Caged between sensors, the cube stood out like an offcut of sculpted granite in an upmarket gallery.
Something about the cube still touched an ominous chord in her, as if it was trying to pull her in, whispering something to her hindbrain. She could only compare the feeling to the dark allure of dockside water, that seductive force that compelled people to fall in.
She did not want to fall into the black cube. She was afraid of what it would show her.
The ongoing inquiry into the death of Meredith Bagley had also ground to a halt after a promising start. Bella was still convinced that she had identified the three perpetrators, but had lost faith that the suit-repair log was enough of a smoking gun to convince a tribunal of their involvement. Hartk Dussen was out of reach, but she still intended to bring the two surviving men to justice. Morbidly it occurred to her that if either of the two suspects showed any sign of dying before the investigation had run its course, she would have to pull strings to get them bounced up the queue for rejuvenation.
But the case still demanded more evidence. The repair log alone wouldn’t clinch it; the only thing that would really persuade a sceptical tribunal would be the missing EVA log files showing who had really been on duty during that fatal shift. It was generally accepted that the logs had been lost accidentally, corrupted or deleted in the flexy die-off. But perhaps that was just too convenient. What if the logs had been deleted to protect the killers? Any one of the three men would have had reason to do that, but Bella could not be sure that any of them would have had the means. But someone had been in charge of managing those log files. Perhaps Parry could help her: he’d at least know whether it was feasible for an involved party to have tampered with the logs.
She made a mental note to contact him. She brightened at the prospect, wondering why it had taken her so long to think of him again. It had always been good to talk to Parry. He had been kind to her during her years of exile, often at the cost of his relationship with Svetlana. Things had obviously changed during the last twenty years, but in their rare meetings, Bella had never sensed any enmity or coolness on Parry’s side. He appeared to recognise that it was not Bella that had deposed Svetlana, but the return of Jim Chisholm. And, of course, Bella had been lenient with Svetlana and her allies. None of them had ended up in exile at the end of a superconducting line with only ice and silence for company. She might have marginalised them, stripped them of real power, but she had not treated them unfairly. Even her worst critics could never accuse her of indulging in tit-for-tat, and Parry had never been her worst critic.
But something happened the next day — a lander malfunction, of all things — and she forgot to call Parry. More days slipped by, then weeks, and a succession of minor crises pushed their way onto her agenda. The Bagley case remained on the backburner, and it would be many years before it once again returned to the forefront of Bella’s attention.
By then, someone else had come back from the dead.
* * *
Mike Takahashi awoke to the sound of burbling water and tinkling wind chimes.
“Hello,” Bella said, with what she hoped was the right tone of soft reassurance. “It’s me, Mike — Bella. Everything’s okay.”
She remembered how it had been for her: a moment’s disorientation, and then everything had clicked cleanly into place. No grogginess, no sense of fumbling around for her own sense of identity, no difficulty with coherent thought or language or even seeing things clearly. It was not like waking up at all, but more like opening her eyes after a few moments of intense meditation. Except that those few moments of meditation had contained infinities of time and space, and mysteries she had not even begun to unpack.
Takahashi moved to sit up. Bella offered him a blanket to preserve his modesty.
“Where am I?” he asked, looking around. He sounded mildly perturbed, that was all. “I don’t remember this place.”
“I’m not sure what you do remember,” Bella said, “but let’s start at the beginning. Do you remember Rockhopper?”
“Yes,” he said immediately. “Of course I do.”
“And Janus?”
A moment of hesitation there, but it didn’t last long. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”
“We were chasing after it — powering out of the system. Do you remember that?”
He looked at her and said, so quietly that she had to strain to hear him over the water, “Something went wrong. I remember something going wrong.”
“Yes,” she said, gladdened, because it was all going to be so much easier now. There was a problem with one of the mass drivers — it snapped off the spine and took another one with it on the way down. The ship held together, but there was a lot of superficial damage to the fuel tanks. We had to patch things up before we could continue to Janus at full thrust. You were part of the repair team, Mike.“
“Something happened,” he said. “Something bad.”
“Do you remember?”
She caught a flash of concern, as if he had, for a moment, remembered everything. But then he shook his head. “No. What happened? Why am I here?” He glanced down at himself. “I’m all right, aren’t I?”
“You’re more than all right,” Bella said, smiling.
The Fountainheads had put him back together, but they had not rejuvenated him to any significant degree. There had been no need: he had been a young and healthy man when the sprayrock took him.
“I still don’t remember what happened,” he said forlornly.
“You fell into sprayrock. You were trapped, your suit overheating. We couldn’t get you out of it. Parry did everything he could, but nothing worked. And time was running out.”
“Parry,” he said. “Is Parry okay?”
“Parry’s fine. You’ll see him soon.”
“What happened to me?”
Bella reached for his hand, closing her own around it. She had never had a son, but this, she thought, must be very much how it would feel to comfort a son during an emotional crisis. “We had to do something to you. There was a procedure that we could use to save you. It was called Frost Angel. Do you remember that?”
“No,” he said, but she caught the dilation of his eyes that told her that he did, on some level, remember all the salient details. They had never been sure how much of the experience of the accident would have had time to transfer to his long-term memory.
“Ryan Axford froze you. He had no choice. It was the right thing to do.”
“No,” Takahashi said, Bella feeling his distress welling up as the memories clotted back into place. “No. I didn’t want to die.”
“There was no choice,” she said. “We had to do it.”
Takahashi convulsed, the truth hitting him like a drug. “No! I didn’t die! This didn’t happen!”
“You died, Mike,” she said, as firmly as she thought he could handle. “But we brought you back. It’s all okay now.”
“No,” he said again, but he was slightly calmer now.
“You’re fine. Everything’s all right now.”
He shivered beneath the blanket. “Where am I?”
“In a ship,” Bella said.
He looked around, but there was nothing overtly alien about the revival area. Bella had even asked the aliens to tint the glass, and not to present themselves behind it. There was only so much Takahashi could take in at one time.
She wanted to make it as easy as she could. She’d always liked him, from the moment he rotated aboard Rockhopper. He was a solid EVA man, as dependable as any of them, but there was more to Mike Takahashi than his professional competence. There was a quiet modesty about him that she found attractive, a quality that she’d also cherished in Garrison. The two of them had the same way of laughing.
“After Janus,” he said, warily, “did we make it back okay?”
Bella smiled tightly. This part was never going to be easy. She nodded towards a small pile of clothes folded neatly on a dry rock like a miniature kiln. Most of Takahashi’s belongings had long since bee
n recycled — there simply hadn’t been any choice in the dark days of the early occupation. But they had always kept a few things back, as a kind of assurance that he would one day return to them. The clothes were very old now, but they had been well cared for and their age was not obvious.
“Get dressed,” she said, “then I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
Takahashi tightened the blanket around himself. “What happened to Janus?”
“We did,” Bella said, and then she helped him stand.
She told him what had happened, ladling out the truth in kind little measures, as she had always done for the people of Crabtree. At every opportunity she reassured him that he had nothing to fear, that everything was all right and that he had many, many friends who would be overjoyed to see him again. Takahashi said very little. Now and then he would repeat something that she had said, or ask her for some mild clarification on this matter or that, but in general he appeared emotionally disconnected from it all.
“Just like the Swiss Family Robinson,” she said, after she’d finished telling him about their arrival on Janus, and the early hardships they had overcome.
Takahashi didn’t laugh.
They were riding the express elevator to Underhole, racing down a glass tube lined with chrome-bright maglev induction rails. They had the entire compartment to themselves, save for the eternally vigilant security systems haunting every cubic millimetre of the car’s decor.
“But that all happened a long time ago,” Bella said. “We rode Janus all the way to Spica. Thirteen years, that took us. For most of that time, we were moving very close to the speed of light. Two hundred and sixty years passed in the outside world.”
Bella had dimmed the cabin lights so that they could see the view beyond the car. It was always dark under the Iron Sky. Underhole sprawled beneath them, a jewelled octopus of light, each of its arms tracing a different maglev line from somewhere else on Janus. Although the trains still arrived and departed from the same transit plaza, new developments continued to spill out along the tracks. The lines themselves curved out to the horizon in eight directions, glowing with blue filaments of embedded neon. At one time, the wastage of so much power would have appalled Bella. It was years since anyone had worried about a few lost kilowatts, though.
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