Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “If the Musk Dogs are so bad, why don’t you just make them go away?”

  “We can dissuade them, but only if you ask it of us.”

  “What does ‘dissuade’ mean?”

  “It means we would emphasize the exclusive nature of the beneficial trading relationship we’ve established with your people. If Musk Dogs see no potential for undermining that mutually productive state of affairs, they will probably leave.” The Fountainhead paused, and added darkly, “Sooner or later another vulnerable species will arrive. They always do, even if the intervals grow longer.”

  “So we’re just another vulnerable species?” she asked.

  “You have your weaknesses, but like most newcomers, you also have something immensely valuable to those of us already here.”

  “The world we rode in on.”

  “You’re making quite a home of it.”

  “We’re making do, McKinley. That doesn’t mean we plan to spend the rest of eternity here.”

  His fronds swished thoughtfully. “It’s good to have plans.”

  Just as he said that, Bella became aware of a presence behind her. She glanced around and saw Mike Takahashi, wine glass in hand. Next to Takahashi, standing a little further back, was Svetlana.

  “Mike —” Bella started, ready to protest at his interference.

  Takahashi blocked her with his palm. “If a recently dead man is to be allowed one concession, let it be this. I’m sorry about the feud, or the falling out, or the political schism, or whatever you want to call it. I’m even sorrier that two former friends can’t even say ‘hello’ to each other when they’re in the same room. Well, it’s time to do something about that, before it puts too much of a dampener on the evening.”

  “This was a bad idea,” Svetlana said, not looking at Bella.

  “I agree,” Bella said. She was blushing intensely, even though she had drunk little all evening. “Mike, I know you mean well but this isn’t just some playground spat you can put right with a sprinkling of fairy dust and some good intentions.” Takahashi sipped from his glass. “Fine. But just out of interest, how long were you two planning on holding this grudge? Another fifty years? A century? Or will you just be getting started then?”

  “There is no grudge,” Bella said. She was uncomfortably aware of McKinley taking all this in.

  Takahashi turned to Svetlana. “I spoke to Bella earlier this evening. She admitted that you had your reasons for taking over the ship. She made a mistake, a bad one, in not listening to you. She doesn’t deny that.”

  “A mistake is still a mistake,” Svetlana said, her lips barely moving.

  “Which she freely acknowledges. But given that she made that mistake — given the situation Rockhopper was then in — can you honestly deny that she did the right thing by forcing the ship back to Janus?”

  “That doesn’t make amends,” Svetlana said.

  Takahashi held up his hand again. “There’s more you need to hear, Svieta. When I spoke to Bella earlier she was… how shall I put this? Not without praise for the way you ran Crabtree?”

  He looked to Bella for confirmation. She blushed again, for this — as Takahashi surely knew — was an outright lie. And yet, in private, in the most grudging of tones, she might have admitted as much.

  “We all did our best,” Svetlana said, looking at Bella properly for the first time.

  Bella reached deep into herself, groping around for something nice to say. “It can’t have been easy. Especially during those first few years, before the Maw came on-stream.”

  “We got through it,” Svetlana said tersely.

  “It took leadership.”

  Svetlana looked at Bella, held her gaze and nodded just so. The acknowledgement was as frostily diplomatic as they came, but it was more than Bella had expected. “Thank you,” Svetlana mouthed.

  Takahashi’s eyes gleamed in the lantern light. “Svetlana, for her part, admits that you’ve handled things very capably since you returned to Crabtree. Your management of the Symbolists was an exercise in tact and restraint.” He glanced at Svetlana. “Wasn’t it?”

  “You did okay,” she said, after a moment’s pause.

  “Svetlana also had a degree of praise for the way you refrained from exiling your former adversaries. Rather than indulging in petty recrimination, you put the needs of the colony first.”

  “Bella still marginalised us,” Svetlana said.

  “That was her prerogative. But I can’t help noticing that she did invite you along tonight.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Bella ventured, “I thought you’d like to see Mike again. Now I’m beginning to wonder why I invited him.”

  “Yes,” Svetlana said, directing an acid glance at Takahashi. “It would have saved us both some embarrassment if you hadn’t.”

  Takahashi nodded, smiling ruefully. “Yes — without my intervention, you two could still be playing your avoidance games, whereas now you’ve been standing next to each other for five minutes already, without a single drop of blood being spilled. Sorry, but where I come from that has to be considered an improvement.”

  “Not where I come from,” Bella said, just as Svetlana said exactly the same thing.

  They looked at each other and both let out a single, cautious, self-conscious laugh. Then there was nothing to say. The silence was the most exquisitely awkward part of the encounter so far. They could turn away now, Bella thought — having had this brief, bloodless, dignified encounter — and return to their own groupings, and for a while it might seem as if something had changed for the better. But soon things would be exactly the way they had been before.

  It was now or never, to make a change that might stand a chance of lasting. Bella’s throat was furnace dry. She opened her mouth, willed words to emerge. “You must be proud of Emily,” she said. “I see her in Crabtree nearly every day. She’s very talented, very beautiful. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t speak highly of her.”

  “Thank you,” Svetlana said, and this time she spoke the words rather than just grimacing them. Another awkward silence descended, and then Svetlana added, “It was kind of you to arrange that line of work for her.”

  Bella glanced at McKinley. “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s fully aware that we have a study group dedicated solely to discovering the secrets of the Fountainheads. If they will insist on dropping little hints every now and then, what do they expect?”

  Bella had observed real analytic skill in Emily Barseghian, and had seen to it that she was rewarded with a position in the coveted Fountainhead intelligence section. There had been disappointingly few breakthroughs, but none of that failure could be placed at Emily’s door.

  “She enjoys it,” Svetlana said.

  “I knew she would. I see a lot of you in her.” Bella offered a half-smile. “Maybe a little of me, too.”

  “I could never do what she does,” Svetlana said. “I’m still just an engineer at heart.”

  Recklessly, Bella said, “Crabtree always needs good engineers.”

  “I’m still keeping busy.”

  Yes, Bella thought: dead-end spanner work, a long way from anything interesting. “But maybe I could have made better use of you. I must admit I didn’t go out of my way to involve you in the most exciting projects. You’ve been to Underhole recently, I take it? You’ve seen the Tier-Two development?”

  “I haven’t been on the other side of the Sky in thirty-five years,” Svetlana said. “This is only the third time I’ve been back to Crabtree in all that time.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bella said, as the magnitude of that span of time hit her with physical force.

  “You don’t need to apologise. At least you didn’t lock me away for thirteen years. For what it’s worth… I made a mistake, okay? But right now that’s the closest you’re going to get to an apology.”

  “I’ll take whatever’s going.”

  “And I screwed you over the Chisholm affair. If it’s any consolation, that’s one o
f the things I’m least proud of.” Something changed in her expression, a closing up, as if she realised that she had said too much, too quickly. “Look,” she went on, “I really should be getting back. I’m glad we talked, Bella. If you’d have asked me this morning… well, I’d never have believed we could be talking like this. But it’s time to go now.”

  “No,” Bella said firmly. “Stay. I still want to talk to you. I’m not done yet, Svieta.”

  “You’re not done?”

  “No. And neither are you.” Bella looked around. “Look, let’s find somewhere quiet to sit down. Just the two of us — no Takahashi, no McKinley.”

  “All right,” Svetlana said uneasily, as if she still did not quite trust Bella’s motives.

  Svetlana had nothing in her hand. “Do you want a drink?” Bella asked. “I’d offer you a cigarette, but as far as I remember you don’t smoke.”

  “I’ll take a drink, yes,” Svetlana said.

  Bella snapped her fingers at the nearest BI. “Over here,” she called.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The music was muted and the lanterns dimmed. They sat together in the gathering quiet as the party wound down to its natural conclusion. McKinley and Takahashi had wandered off into the woods, leaving Bella and Svetlana alone. The remaining handful of revellers watched them guardedly, while pretending not to notice. Everyone must have been aware of the significance of this meeting.

  They had gradually become easier in each other’s presence. It was not exactly a relaxed state of affairs — Bella was acutely conscious of monitoring every nuance of every word she and Svetlana uttered — but they were at least able to have something that, to a casual witness, might have approximated a normal conversation.

  “Now and then I hear things from Emily,” Svetlana said. “I know she probably isn’t meant to talk about her work, but I can be very persuasive.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Bella said. She corrected herself quickly. “That you’d be interested, I mean. Sometimes I think I should release all their findings and speculation at once, and damn the consequences. But another part of me worries about how we’d all deal with that.”

  “You’re probably right,” Svetlana said.

  “Things are pretty stable and well adjusted now, even if I say so myself. But we still don’t know much more about the aliens, or the Spica Structure, or what our long-term situation is. I worry that if we learn something unpleasant, we might not hold together.”

  “Do you ever think —” Svetlana stopped and looked at her hands.

  “What?” Bella asked gently.

  “Does it ever occur to you that maybe we’re going to be stuck inside this thing for ever? It’s been thirty-five years now, and we’re still no closer to finding a way out.”

  “It sounds like a long time.”

  “It is, Bella, by any measure.”

  “Not compared to the two hundred and sixty years it took us to get here, though. From the standpoint of whoever made this thing, we might just be in some kind of quarantine period now.”

  “And the Fountainheads?” Svetlana asked dubiously. “Are they in quarantine as well?”

  “I don’t know,” Bella said.

  “Well, where exactly do they fit in? And all the other species you have intelligence data on?”

  “The data’s sparse. We really don’t know as much as you might think.”

  “But you know that we aren’t the only species inside this thing. That’s why the Fountainheads are so keen not to have us go poking our noses beyond the endcap door.”

  Glumly, Bella remembered McKinley’s recent warning about the Musk Dogs. “I think they have our best interests at heart,” she said.

  Svetlana nodded knowingly. “They certainly have someone’s best interests at heart.”

  “Nothing we’ve learned in all these years has made us doubt that we can trust the Fountainheads.”

  “They’ve been good to us,” Svetlana allowed. “Rejuvenations, little gifts of technology and culture. But the technology and the culture were already ours — we had every right to them. They’ve given us nothing of themselves beyond a few hints and tips about how to get more out of Janus.”

  “They know best, I think.”

  Svetlana’s expression was troubled. “I’ve been thinking about the Cutoff a lot lately. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “In what way?”

  “That they know so much about us up to a specific date, and then nothing.”

  “They only made contact with us on that one occasion,” Bella said, reciting the standard line. “They acquired human cultural data up to the time of the contact, but beyond that, they have no information.”

  “We already know they must have superluminal signalling, Bella — maybe even superluminal travel. How else did that knowledge overtake us?”

  Bella shifted uncomfortably on the tree stump. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

  “If they had that signalling capacity, doesn’t it strike you as odd that the Fountainheads only ever encountered one single ship from Earth? We already know that the Thai expansion was a concerted effort to establish extrasolar colonies around more than one star. They must have sent out lots of ships, in all directions, across many decades.”

  “Only one of which encountered the Fountainheads,” Bella pointed out.

  “But the Fountainheads are a starfaring culture with a technology far beyond our own. I remember those discussions aboard Rockhopper, Bella. Once you get one advanced star-faring culture, you expect it to encompass a huge swathe of the galaxy — tens of thousands of solar systems, at the very least — in very little time.”

  “Which is very little time by galactic standards,” Bella said, detesting the pedantic tone she heard in her own voice.

  “Okay — we might still be talking hundreds of thousands of years, but that’s still nothing in cosmic terms. It’s just an eye-blink. The Fountainheads should have been out there, massively established in all directions.”

  “Maybe they were.”

  “And yet when the Thai expansion fired ships into the night, only one of them ran into the Fountainheads? That just doesn’t stack up, Bella. There should have been multiple contacts, and not all happening simultaneously, either. Some of the ships would have further to travel before they hit the Fountainheads, and some of them would have left later. They’d all have been carrying different sets of historical and cultural data — some of them updated later than others. And unless those ships were moving very close to the speed of light, they’d have had no trouble receiving newer data from Earth.” Svetlana smiled and shook her head. “Listen to me — like I thought all this up for myself. I didn’t. I just listened to the right people.”

  “I do the same thing,” Bella said.

  “All the same, it still bothers me. The Fountainheads should have collected data from dozens, maybe even hundreds, of different contact episodes. And with superluminal signalling, they should have had no difficulty in merging those data sets.”

  “There’d still have been a cutoff,” Bella said. “No matter how many individual contacts took place, there’d still have been one ship that was carrying the most up-to-the-minute cultural data.”

  “I know, but by then the Thai expansion should have been under way for many years. It should already have been part of the history records aboard the ship — even if they were based on updates beamed aboard after launch. But that isn’t how it’s presented to us, is it?”

  “The Fountainheads haven’t presented much to us at all,” Bella said. “They’ve allowed us to draw our own inferences.”

  “Based on the data they allow us to see.”

  “I still don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  “I’m saying it doesn’t add up. I’m saying there’s something wrong here, something that doesn’t make sense. If we believe the story that the Fountainheads apparently want us to believe, then we have to accept that they’ve only ever made contact with us once —
despite our expectation that it would either never happen, or happen many separate times. We also have to accept that — for reasons of their own — they choose not to act in any of the ways we’d expect a starfaring culture to behave. There is, of course, an alternative.”

  “Which is?” Bella asked.

  “That they’re lying to us,” Svetlana said.

  * * *

  Bella woke early the next morning, glad that she had refrained from drinking much at Takahashi’s party. Her mind was gin-clear now, yet it rang with the world-changing implications of her renewed communication with Svetlana.

  It would be too much to expect them ever to be close friends again — Bella was too much of a realist for that. But simply to be on cordial terms would be a wonderful improvement on the way things had been since the crisis on Rockhopper. And while friendship might be ruled out, perhaps they could become allies again, of a kind.

  The transformation ought to have enlivened her, and filled her with a renewed sense of purpose. It did, for a little while. She busied herself with administrative affairs and renewed promises to herself to close a number of issues that had been left pending for far too long, including the Bagley inquiry. With a reinvigorated sense of optimism, she rubberstamped funds for a slew of projects she had been dithering over for weeks. New perpetual-motion wheels, new maglev routes, new massively serial computer mainframes to handle the most taxing analysis tasks required by the Ofria-Gomberg Institute. An offer from the Fountainheads to drill two new skyholes, to ease congestion at Underhole. Go-ahead for a Phase-A feasibility study for the Crabtree dome, which would encompass the entire community as far out as the Mairville and Sheng-town suburbs, and reach twice as high as the High Hab itself. An even longer-term scheme for pumping atmosphere into the entire volume between Janus and the Iron Sky, so that they could dispense with domes altogether.

  Such matters would normally have consumed every iota of Bella’s attention, but now she could not stop thinking about her conversation with Svetlana. Try as she might, she could not dismiss the doubts Svetlana had raised concerning the truthfulness of the Fountainheads.