Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Thank you,” Parry said.

  * * *

  During one visitation, Bella asked Chromis for a demonstration of her physical capabilities.

  Chromis smiled patiently. “I have no physical capabilities, Bella. I’m just a ghost in your head. I can’t move a feather. I can’t even make you move a feather for me.”

  “You know I mean the cube.”

  “Ah,” Chromis said, as if the cube had been the last thing on her mind. “That.”

  Bella walked on through the ice-lined tunnel under Crabtree. She had been on her way to the nursery, to talk to a class of babbling five year olds. “You told me that the cube is more than just a message. You said it might be useful to me.”

  “It could also be very lethal. Now that I’ve learned a little more about the state of affairs here on Janus, I’m inclined to take the cautious line.”

  “I’ll tell you what we think we know,” Bella said. “The cube is two hundred tonnes of replicating material squeezed into eight cubic metres. It’s not nanotech, since we can analyse that, but something as far beyond nanotech as nanotech is beyond clockwork.”

  “Continue,” Chromis said, as if this was all just a mildly diverting parlour game they’d elected to play on a rainy afternoon.

  “Some of that stuff must provide something to run on, and some of it presumably enables the cube to keep repairing itself, but I doubt it needs all two hundred tonnes just for that.”

  “That would be excessive.”

  “So what does the rest of it do?”

  Chromis hesitated before answering. “Many things.”

  “No shit. Really.”

  “There isn’t much it can’t do, truth be told.”

  “I suspected as much. Why are you quite so reluctant to discuss this, Chromis?”

  “You would be, in my shoes.”

  “If you meant for me to find the cube, why is there such a problem with telling me what it does?”

  “Mm. The problem is —” Chromis made a frustrated face. “The problem is, we sent out the cubes with the best of intentions, but we were not hugely confident that any of them would find you.”

  “So you said.”

  “But we assumed that if by some great good fortune one of the cubes did find you, then it would more than likely be after a considerable period of time had elapsed.”

  “A lot of time has passed,” Bella said impatiently.

  “But not by your reckoning. How many years has it been, Bella, since you encountered Janus? A few decades, that’s all. That’s nothing compared to the eighteen thousand years between your time and mine.”

  “It still feels like a long time to us.”

  From their conversations, Bella had pieced together a coherent picture of Chromis’s world and history, and how it connected to her own. Somewhere around 2136, various lines of development had collided. What had once been servile Borderline Intelligences had jumped the tracks into genuine sentience. The luminously clever engines of Trangressive Intelligence had been much too clever, much too willing to oblige.

  In an instant, humanity had found itself in possession of tools powerful enough to remake entire worlds, but equally capable of shattering them to dust. There was no war as such, but there were dreadful accidents, regrettable misunderstandings and hugely disproportionate retaliations. Around the edge of the system, those powers not embroiled in the transformation had looked on with something between horror and awe. The Thai expansion was less an attempt to establish a human presence beyond the solar system than a desperate effort to outrace that whirlwind of change.

  The people of Chromis’s era looked back on that period with a feeling of collective disquiet, a kind of shuddering disbelief that they had made it through.

  It had nearly ended everything.

  “I don’t doubt that it feels like, a long time to you, but it isn’t really, is it? You’ve done well to survive here at all, but it’s not clear to me that you’re ready to accept the cube’s gifts. Perhaps in a hundred, two hundred years —”

  “Don’t give me that!” Bella snapped. “You started it by appearing to me, Chromis!”

  “I did, yes,” she said ruefully, “and that might have been a mistake. Not because I don’t like and admire you — I’m hardly capable of anything else — but because it’s begun to dawn on me how damaging it might be to open the cube now, rather than later.”

  “So you’d withhold the opening of the cube, is that it?”

  “Not exactly. I am your servant, and I won’t refuse a direct command, but I’ll do my level best to talk you out of it.”

  “Because the technology in the cube is so dangerous?”

  “In unwise hands, yes.”

  Bella considered this as they walked on. “What if you judged that we were in danger anyway? How would that change things?”

  “Like I said, I wouldn’t refuse a direct command.”

  “But would you intervene to help me anyway, even if I didn’t command it? Does your impulse to protect me go that deep?”

  “I’d do almost anything to protect you,” Chromis said.

  “Then I think it likely that at some point you will have to intervene. I already have intelligence on at least one approaching threat. There may be others.”

  A frown creased Chromis’s delicate features. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Since it’s as good as guaranteed that I’ll need to see the cube do its stuff sooner or later, there’s no harm in me seeing a demonstration now.” Bella glared at her ghostly companion. “Is there?”

  “Since you put it like that…”

  Bella looked at her watch. “I’m already late for this nursery thing. When I’m done — which’ll be in an hour or so — I want you to pop back into my head. Then we’ll take a little walk to the laboratory and you can show me something of the cube’s abilities. It doesn’t have to be much — I just want some basic idea of what I’m dealing with.”

  “I can give you a basic idea now,” Chromis said.

  “We’re not at the cube.”

  “We don’t have to be.” Again, Bella sensed the other woman’s profound unease. “Are you certain you want this, Bella?”

  “Yes.”

  “Absolutely certain?”

  “I can keep saying yes all day, Chromis.”

  “Very well. Since you insist.”

  Bella felt the air move around her, as if a flock of things — things that were very big and completely invisible — had just swooped past her by a hair’s width. A little further ahead along the ice-lined tunnel, a clot of darkness formed in midair, then enlarged into a hovering cube about the size of a hatbox. The air stilled.

  Bella stepped back reflexively.

  “It’s all right,” Chromis said. “You did ask for a demonstration.”

  “Is it real?”

  “Reach out and touch it.”

  Bella extended a hand and brushed her fingers against the black surface of the hovering form. It was as cold and hard as the memorial cube, and felt as if it were fixed solidly in place, anchored in position somehow.

  “How… how did this get here?”

  “It… arrived.”

  “Don’t get clever, Chromis.”

  “The cube donated a few hundred kilograms of itself, at my command.”

  “We’re a long way from the cube.”

  “The machinery travels quickly, especially through air. It disassembles itself into countless individual entities that move independently and then reassemble at their destination. Doors and barriers won’t stop it — at least not the kind you’re capable of making. It finds ways to ooze through. If it can’t ooze, it drills. You’d never even notice the invisibly small channels it makes for itself.”

  “You were right to be worried about my reaction.”

  “There’s more.”

  The black cube enlarged, as if being inflated from within, and the sharp edges became curved. The cube elongated into a mummy-like form, and then sharpened
its details. Colours and textures bled across the black surface.

  Bella stared at a perfect image of herself. “Okay, I’m officially impressed.”

  The image spoke in perfect harmony, with no detectable lag in its responses.

  “Then you’re satisfied with the demonstration?”

  Bella swallowed and nodded. “Yes.”

  “Good, but I’m not quite done yet. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they used to say.”

  “Chromis —”

  The image darkened and shrunk back down into the cube form.

  “You were on your way to the nursery, were you not?”

  “Yes…” Bella faltered.

  “And you are running late.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we’d best do something about that, hadn’t we?”

  “Chromis —” she said again.

  “Quiet now, Bella. Quiet now and listen. The machinery is going to assemble itself around you. We call it a travel caul — it’s how we move around where I come from. The caul is going to take you to the nursery. It will happen very quickly, and you will feel nothing. The caul will infiltrate your body to gird you against the acceleration and deceleration during your journey.”

  “Infiltrate my body? I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Unfortunately, it isn’t practical to generate a frameshift field on this scale, so there’s no option but to construct a temporary intracellular scaffold. But don’t worry — you’ll feel nothing, and there’ll be no evidence after the fact.”

  “You’re scaring me now.”

  “And taking rather a childish delight in doing so. You will forgive me, won’t you?”

  “I can still make it on time if I run.”

  “Running?” Chromis looked appalled. “How utterly undignified. We wouldn’t want you showing up in front of the children all sweaty and out of breath, now, would we?”

  Bella started to say something, but the cube was already changing shape, flattening and flowing towards her. She took a reflexive gulp of air before the black surface wrapped around her. There was a moment when she felt its iron coldness seeping into her skin, and then the surface was pulling itself away again, as if something had gone wrong…

  But nothing had gone wrong. She was somewhere else.

  Bella was standing in the plastic-walled corridor outside the nursery complex. By her estimation she had moved three or four hundred metres in the blink of an eye.

  “So now you’ve had your demonstration,” Chromis said.

  The caul had disappeared. There was no sign of the miniature black cube. Bella opened her mouth and tried, to speak. “I…”

  “It’s all right. You’re fine. Your first time was bound to be a little disorientating.”

  Through the thin plastic door Bella heard a clamour of infant voices, raised in expectation of her arrival.

  “I can’t just… go in there. Not after that.”

  “The whole point was to make up lost time.”

  “I need to sit down. I need to get my head together.”

  Chromis cocked her head at the door. “The children, Bella — they’re beginning to sound fractious.”

  Bella felt as if her entire existence had slipped a gear. “Did anyone see me arrive?”

  Chromis tutted. “Oddly enough, it did occur to me to check that no one was around first.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just a bit… taken aback.”

  I won’t do it again. Not unless you ask.“

  “There’s a door,” Bella said, “a heavy-duty airlock between here and where we were standing. It would have been closed. I have an access key to open it — how in hell did we get through?”

  “One piece at a time,” Chromis said. “Or is that too much information?”

  * * *

  There was something new in the embassy: an enormous circular table formed from a thick black material. It had a low rim, and the surface was marked with hundreds of luminous blue squiggles in concentric rings, none of which appeared to correspond to the Spican alphabet. A reflective silver ball the size of an orange rested in the precise middle of the table.

  “You didn’t call me here to deliver good news, did you?” Bella said.

  Chisholm smiled apologetically, as if this was all somehow his fault. “Musk Dogs have reached the endcap door. They’re on the other side, waiting to get through.”

  “When will the door open?”

  “Soon.” He looked back at the huge round table. “McKinley mentioned the Whisperers to you before, I think?”

  “Yes, when he first spoke of the Musk Dogs — and the Uncontained.”

  “There’s a Whisperer envoy here now.”

  “In the embassy?”

  “In this room.”

  Bella measured the glassy environment of the embassy chamber against her memories. The table was the only thing different since her last visit. If there was another alien in the room, either it was the table, or it had blended expertly with its surroundings.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “They’re… elusive.”

  McKinley bustled closer, vivid sparks of ruby and green flashing through the curtain of his tractor fronds. “In the past, the Whisperers have tended to confine their activities to a single chamber of the Structure. Lately, disturbances have forced them to do business with other cultures, across the matter gap.”

  “The door hasn’t opened in a while. How’d it get here?”

  “The doors don’t trouble Whisperers — they can usually slip through them. If a door’s too heavily shielded for them to slip through, they have passkeys that talk to the locking mechanisms.”

  “If they can get through the doors, what’s to stop them leaving the Structure?”

  “The walls are much stronger, laced with fields that even the Whisperers can’t cross. Whoever made this place must have anticipated that it might have to contain something like the Whisperers.”

  Bella’s skin tingled. “How do you know there’s one here now?”

  “We’re detecting it,” McKinley said. “Whisperers reveal themselves by their gravitational influence, and by inducing subtle, statistically weak asymmetries in quantum chromodynamic interactions.”

  “Why has it come here?”

  “To warn us,” McKinley said. “It says that other Whisperers have done a deal with the Musk Dogs.”

  The silver ball started moving, rolling away from the middle of the table. Something about the way it rolled conveyed an impression of tremendous, unstoppable mass. It rumbled around the table, then slowed above one of the symbols before moving on. The symbol shone red. The ball moved to another symbol, which also changed from blue to red. Three more symbols followed, before the ball returned to the middle of the table.

  McKinley translated. “The Whisperer says it has been banished by the others of its kind because it opposed the deal with the Musk Dogs. It says it fears the consequences of the deal.”

  The red symbols faded slowly back to blue.

  “What is that thing? Is the Whisperer inside that ball?”

  “The ball is just a ball,” McKinley told her. “The Whisperer has a counterpart to the table on its side of the matter gap. When it wishes to talk to us, it moves a gravitational point mass from symbol to symbol. The ball senses the gravitational field across the gap and moves accordingly.”

  The ball rolled again, highlighting a different sequence of symbols.

  “The Whisperer says that the Musk Dogs are not the main problem, although they shouldn’t be underestimated. The real problem is the Uncontained.”

  “So tell me about them — sounds like I’m going to find out about them sooner or later no matter what happens.”

  “Regrettably, that may be the case. The Uncontained are made of normal matter, like you and me. In Structure terms, they arrived very recently and immediately set about implementing a policy of aggressive hegemonization of the entire habitable volume. Their activities wiped out one culture
and pushed another to the brink of extinction. After that, a coalition of like-minded entities — the Shaft-Five Nexus — succeeded in confining the Uncontained to a single volume. Unfortunately, a small contingent of Uncontained recently escaped from this volume back into the larger Structure. They are now at large again, which is leading to new difficulties.”

  The ball moved again, highlighting a different symbol chain.

  “The Whisperer warns that the Musk Dogs cannot be trusted to use passkeys responsibly.”

  “Hold on,” Bella said. “Let’s back up a minute, while you’re willing to answer questions. How many cultures are there inside this thing?”

  “After the last extinction? We know of thirty-five. Present company included, of course.”

  “Any particular reason why you couldn’t have told me this sooner?”

  “It’s been our experience that knowledge of the true extent of the Structure, and the number of entities contained within it, can have a dispiriting effect on certain cultures.” McKinley paused delicately. “Most especially those cultures deemed to be at high risk for self-destruction.”

  “Like us, I presume. So why the big change of heart?”

  “The arrival of the Musk Dogs precipitates a certain shifting in our affairs.”

  “You think they’ll bring the Whisperers with them?”

  “The Whisperers aren’t the main problem. Many cultures find their presence unsettling, but they are not amongst the worst hostiles, and we have done useful business with them on a number of occasions. In any case, the Whisperers don’t need the Musk Dogs to open doors for them. The problem is that if the doors are open, we won’t just be dealing with the Musk Dogs and the Whisperers.”

  The ball moved again, trundling around the table. When it had spelled out its message, McKinley said, “The Whisperer speculates that there may have been contact between the Musk Dogs and the Uncontained. If so, that is a most worrying development.”

  “Why would the Musk Dogs talk to the Uncontained? What do they want or need from each other?”

  “The Whisperer isn’t sure. Nor are we. The Whisperer is trying to obtain more data on the negotiations.”