Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  By lunchtime, she had completed more than her usual quota of business for a day. As arranged, she met Parry Boyce in one of the arboreta and treated him to lunch while she told him about her progress on the Bagley case.

  “I thought I was getting somewhere fifteen years ago,” she said, while they ate out of picnic bags, “but I let it drop. I was too worried about stirring up old ghosts back then. Now’s the time, though.”

  Parry asked her what she wanted of him. Bella explained that she needed information concerning the EVA log files: how easy it would have been to delete or alter them, using the flexy die-off as a cover.

  “Easy enough for someone on the inside,” Parry told her. He had been Skyside for rejuvenation thirty years ago, and now had a physiological age somewhere in the early sixties. His moustache was grey, his hair peeking out in sparse grey curls from beneath the ancient and faded red cap that bore the evidence of numerous repairs. He was still stocky, with the unforced musculature of someone who spent a lot of time in the high-gee zones.

  “Would there have been a back-up somewhere?”

  Parry grimaced. “You’re going back a long way now.”

  Bella flicked crumbs at a loitering squirrel, one of the gene-constructed mammals populating the arboreta. “Forty-three years really isn’t that long any more.”

  “You’ll kick up a storm.”

  “Better now than later. I can’t let it slip for another fifteen years, Parry. We need to open one last wound, heal it and move on.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “You know I’m right. Back when they killed Thom Crabtree, you moved quickly to punish the men responsible. It was fast, brutal, effective. I’ve never said this before, but I agreed with the way you handled it.”

  She saw flinching pain in his eyes, as if she was forcing him to review memories he would much sooner have kept locked away. Memories of the quick, percussive impact of hammerdrills against the thin armour of helmets, memories of blood spattering ice, memories of two kneeling corpses pitching forward as if in supplication.

  “I’m not proud of what we did to Chanticler and Herrick. It was wrong to kill them.”

  “We don’t kill any more. We incarcerate.”

  “Only because we’ve got the aliens looking down on us.” Bella scrunched up her picnic bag. “It’s a matter of practicality, that’s all. People in prison can still fulfil useful functions for Crabtree.”

  “Would you still kill them if they weren’t useful?”

  “I don’t know,” Bella said. “Would it make any difference if I said yes?”

  Parry stood up. “I’ll see what I can dig up for you. I just want you to understand that there’ll be consequences.”

  “There always are,” Bella said.

  * * *

  When she had finished with Parry, she made her way to the secure laboratory that housed the black cube. It lay under one of the outlying suburbs, screened within nested layers of sprayrock, acoustic-dampening material and multiple Faraday cages.

  The cube was never left unattended. Today it was Hannah Ofria-Gomberg’s turn to mother it, while robot sensors clicked and hummed through some methodical analysis sequence. It was deeply boring work and Hannah looked both delighted to have any company at all and startled that it was Bella paying her a visit.

  She was sitting in a padded seat, booted feet up on the desk, when Bella arrived. Hannah snatched tortoiseshell glasses from her face. They were deliberately hefty: late-twenty-first-century retro-chic. Opera music buzzed from the earpieces. Opera was the new thing now, Bella had noticed. All the kids were into it.

  “It’s all right,” Bella said, “I didn’t come to check up on you. I just dropped by to see how things are coming along.”

  “Nothing new down here,” Hannah said, bending her long legs under the desk. “We’re still running the same old same old. Did you see the last report we put together?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bella said, rolling her eyes. “The usual thrilling document. You all deserve some kind of medal for bashing your heads against that thing for so long.”

  “Maybe if it wasn’t just our heads we bashed, we might get somewhere.”

  Bella nodded gravely. “I’m sure we’d learn a thing or two about the cube if we sliced through it with a fusion flame. But then we wouldn’t have much of a cube any more.”

  “We could snip off a corner.”

  “One day, maybe. Until then, you’ll just have to be patient.” Bella walked closer to the rotating cube, careful not to cross the red line on the floor that marked the limit for human observers. Closer than that and her own bioelectric fields would ruin the scans.

  “Is there something —” Hannah began.

  “Not particularly,” Bella said. “I just like to come down here now and then and take a good look at it. It’s like a puzzle I’m hoping will one day solve itself before my eyes, like one of those psychology problems.”

  “It does that to people,” Hannah said. “They come down here, take a look at the thing… and then they keep coming back to stare at it, transfixed. It’s as if they’ve seen something in that blackness, some hint of a message.”

  “Do you experience that?”

  “I just see a black cube. One I’d really like to cut open one of these days.”

  “I’m glad the job isn’t getting to you.”

  Bella had studied the reports endlessly, even when they threatened to send her to sleep, but nothing in those summaries offered any hint of the cube’s real purpose. It was a human artefact, but it did not appear to have originated within the timeline leading up to the Cutoff. If it dated from after the Cutoff, what secrets did it hold? More than that: how had it reached Janus?

  The Fountainheads had never spoken of it. If they knew of its existence now — if they had picked up that knowledge from their human contacts — then they must have chosen not to mention it.

  Why?

  A thought tickled the back of Bella’s mind, nastily. Were the Fountainheads neglecting to mention the cube because they did not want to draw attention to its significance?

  She thought again of her conversation with Svetlana, and of the poisonous doubts Svetlana had insinuated into her mind. Bella had visited the Fountainheads for the first time just after she had been shown the cube. The knowledge of its existence would still have been in her short-term memory, gleaming like a jewel.

  They must know about it.

  So — again — why had they never mentioned it?

  The cube continued its slow, hypnotic revolution, squirming between one abstraction of blackness and the next. The da Vinci face turned into view — the stylised man, spread-eagled as if for dissection. The analysis machines tracked and scanned. Bella, held herself back from the red line, at the same time imagining reaching out to touch the cube. She had touched it once, wearing haptic gloves: had stroked the Euclidean hardness of its surfaces, like something carved from the very bedrock of reality itself. She had felt something of its antiquity creep through the data channels. But she had never had the courage to remove the gloves and press skin against matter.

  Suddenly it was vitally, crushingly necessary that she do just that. The compulsion came over her with the force of a seizure. The cube urged her to reach out and touch it.

  It wanted human contact.

  Bella gasped and stepped back from the red line before she did real harm. Her heart was racing. The anticipation had been almost sexual, like the rising moments before climax.

  “Bella?” Hannah asked. “Are you —”

  Bella found her breath and took another cautious step away from the cube. She could still feel that compulsion: it was weaker now, but still there, still exerting some measure of control. The da Vinci figure came into view again: the details of the man’s face had been simplified to little more than a motif, but that calm expression appeared to hold back some vast, lacerating knowledge — a burden it was almost too much to bear.

  “What do you want with me?” Be
lla whispered.

  It was almost certainly her imagination, but in that moment she felt a silent answer flood her brain like a hot summer tide: not a word, not even the memory of a word, but just a single, devastating truth.

  THIRTY

  When Parry showed up in the High Hab three days later, she had almost forgotten why he had come. It took several free-falling moments of mental stall before she remembered the Bagley case.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said dolefully. “Maybe we are better off letting this one sleep.”

  Parry looked disappointed. “That doesn’t sound like the Bella I spoke to three days ago.”

  He was right: it didn’t. It was a measure of how thoroughly the cube had upset her ordered view of things. “I’m sorry,” she said, offering Parry a seat amidst the shifting green radiance of her fish tanks. “I’m the last person who should be talking like that.”

  Parry removed the red cap and scratched at his wiry tangle of thin grey hairs. He looked at her with one eye narrowed. “Are you all right, Bella?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, a touch over-emphatically. “It’s just been a funny few days. A funny few weeks, come to think of it. Mike coming back… what happened at the party —”

  “I’m glad you talked to Svieta. Did you put Mike up to that?”

  “Absolutely not,” Bella said, alarmed that Parry had even considered the possibility. “I went into the arboretum determined I wasn’t even going to make eye contact with Svetlana. I was doing pretty well, too.”

  “I think she felt the same way.”

  “I could have killed Mike,” Bella said. “Which is saying a lot given how long we’d all waited to have him back.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Svieta wasn’t exactly thrilled either. He told her he’d arranged a one-on-one with McKinley. He never mentioned that you’d be sitting there as well.”

  “How is she now?”

  “Deeply, deeply relieved. I’ll be truthful: I think you both had your reasons for not wanting to see each other again.”

  “I can’t disagree with that.”

  “But by the same token I don’t think either of you really wanted it to continue for ever. You know, even in the darkest days, when Svetlana couldn’t even stand hearing your name mentioned in her presence —” Parry stalled and looked at her, seeking permission to continue.

  “Go on,” she said, warily.

  “Well, she still wouldn’t tolerate anyone criticising you. I mean, it was all right for her — she could accuse you of anything under the sun. But if anyone else had the temerity to do it — woe betide them. She was the only one who had the God-given right to criticise Bella Lind. No one else had earned it.”

  Bella smiled slightly. “I can believe that. Maybe I felt the same way at times.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I know how much it meant to Svieta that you two were able to talk. I know she could have ended the silence years ago —”

  “So could I,” Bella interjected.

  “But you didn’t, and neither did Svieta. Maybe you both wanted the other to make the first move, or maybe you were both afraid of what would happen if you did speak… that the sky would fall, or something like that. Well, I’m here to tell you it didn’t. And I think the world is a better place now than it was a week ago.”

  “I think so, too,” Bella said, but she heard something in Parry’s voice that unsettled her. “What is it?” she asked uneasily.

  “It’s about Meredith Bagley,” he said. “About the murder investigation.”

  “I know. That’s why I asked you to come here.”

  They sat and stared at each other. On several occasions Parry seemed about to speak, but then pulled back from whatever he had in mind. Bella remained silent, forcing herself not to prompt him. Parry looked down and closed his eyes, as if seeking some higher strength. Finally he looked up at her and said, very softly, “You have the right names.”

  “I know. I’ve always known. It was just a question of putting together enough evidence.”

  “I can help you.”

  “Only if you can prove that the logs were tampered with.”

  “I can do better than that. I concealed the evidence. I doctored the files, to protect those three men.”

  She heard the words, but she did not want to believe them. “No,” she said. “I called you here because you might have known how someone else got away with it. Not because you did it.”

  “You struck lucky, Bella, that’s all.”

  “No,” she said again. “You can’t have done it. You would never do this.”

  “But I did.”

  Slowly, the possibility that he might be telling the truth began to sink in. “They murdered her horribly. You would never have wanted any part of that.”

  “I didn’t.” Again, Parry paused to collect his thoughts. “I’d always known there was bad blood against Meredith, ever since you asked her to help you, forced her to act against Svetlana —”

  “Wasn’t Thom Crabtree enough for them?”

  “They killed Crabtree in blind rage. This was always going to be more premeditated. It was five years after our arrival on Janus. They wanted to show that they had long memories.”

  “Did you know it was coming?”

  “I thought her life might be in danger and I tried to warn her — advised her to get work in another section, away from Svetlana’s loyalists. She didn’t listen: she thought I was the one threatening her. But I had no idea when they were going to strike, or who was going to do it.”

  Bella allowed herself a moment’s relief. “So you had no part in the killing itself.”

  “Death is death. I only ever wanted an end to it.”

  She stared at him with appalled incomprehension. “But if you didn’t approve of the Bagley murder, why did you doctor the EVA logs? Those men could have been brought to justice forty-three years ago.”

  “I didn’t want them brought to justice.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You remember what it was like in those days. Every pair of hands mattered. We were barely holding on.”

  He was right. It was a long time ago, but she could still remember what it had been like in that hard first decade.

  “But justice,” she said plaintively. “Justice should have been done. They shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it.”

  “They’ve spent every day since worrying that they’d be discovered. I told them I’d concealed the evidence of who was in that EVA party, but I always made it clear that the evidence could be retrieved again, if I deemed it necessary.”

  Bella’s mind ran through the implications. “Didn’t it occur to them to kill you?”

  “Wouldn’t have helped. For all they knew, I’d told Svetlana, or someone else I trusted.”

  “So they’ve lived out their lives in a state of constant worry,” Bella said. “Haven’t we all?”

  “It’s lasted a lot longer for those men. It’s still going on.” He scratched at his moustache. “For fifteen years it’s been common knowledge that the Bagley case was open again. I doubt that the two survivors have gone a day since then without wondering when they’ll hear that knock on the door.”

  “Why now, Parry?”

  He offered her a consoling smile. “You’d have got there in the end, even if you didn’t necessarily like where it took you. Then you’d have been arresting me.” Parry opened his hands in surrender. “Whereas I’ve come to you freely.”

  “You deleted a log file, Parry. You didn’t kill Meredith Bagley.”

  “I concealed a crime.”

  “You did it to help Crabtree — so we wouldn’t lose another three lives.”

  “That’s what I’ll tell the tribunal. Whether or not they believe it…” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now. Let the tribunal decide.”

  “I can’t do this,” Bella said.

  “Do you want justice or not?”

  “Of course I want justice, just not… this w
ay. You’ve been good to me, Parry, good to us all. It can’t end like this.”

  “It has to. I’ve come to you, not the other way around. The choice isn’t yours, it’s mine.”

  Bella felt sick. “What about Svetlana?” she asked. “What does she think about all this?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “Oh, no.” Bella closed her eyes, willing someone to come in and take over from her, tell her that she had nothing to fear, that everything was going to work out all right in the end. “I can’t do this,” she said, so quietly that she doubted Parry had heard her at all. But he had.

  “Be brave,” he said. “Do the right thing.”

  “You’re telling me to be brave?” she asked, incredulously.

  * * *

  In some already resigned part of her mind, Bella knew that she had no choice. She allowed Parry to return to Svetlana for forty-eight hours. As he left the High Hab she gave him her assurance that she would have him called before the tribunal. But two days was long enough for doubts to circle. The case had already lain dormant for long periods since it had been reopened. If Bella were to tell the others that she had drawn another blank and needed time to explore other leads — time that might easily stretch to months or years — no one would have thought it suspicious.

  Each time the doubts arose she crushed them and forced resolve upon herself, knowing that she must finish what she had started. And for a little while that was enough. And then the doubts began circling again.

  After a day she heard from Svetlana. From her tone of voice, Bella knew instantly that Parry had spoken to her.

  “I have to see you,” Svetlana said.

  Bella should have refused to take the call, and having taken it she should have refused to meet with Svetlana. But when she reached for the strength of mind to do that, there was nothing there.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “You tell me, Bella.”

  “I have to be at Underhole in four hours — I’m due Skyside. I can meet you in Sugimoto’s, in the plaza.”