Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  Svetlana and Bella had both dressed formally, by their own standards: Bella in a black jacket over a plain black T-shirt and narrow black jeans, Svetlana in a high-collared navy-blue dress suit with black gloves. She had arrived with her own advisors and security: not a haunt, but a chrome BI that hung from the ceiling like an ugly light fitting, dangling a mass of bladed and beweaponed arms. The rumours that Svetlana had at least one working forge vat were obviously true. The table was set with glassware and a carafe of water.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see me,” Bella said.

  Svetlana opened her hands, then closed them again. “I don’t know quite what you’re expecting to hear from me.”

  “Reassurance,” Bella said, “nothing more.”

  “You’ve an odd sense of timing, in that case.” Svetlana tapped the flexy before her. Like Bella, she had a lingering attachment to the old ways. “I just saw the news from the Judicial Apparatus. They’ve set the terms. Parry’s going down for fifty years, following administrative rejuvenation.”

  Bella fought to keep her reactions under control. The tribunal had not gone as well as she had hoped, but she had never expected that the punishment would be so severe. The sentence must have been announced while she was on the train. She glanced at Liz Shen, who returned her enquiring glance with a microscopic nod.

  “I’m sorry,” Bella said. “That’s far longer than I was expecting. I did recommend clemency —”

  “It’s more than you used to get for murder.” Svetlana stroked a gloved finger across the flexy. “They say sentencing policy’s been reviewed in light of the increased lifespan we all enjoy. Now that we live longer, murder means more. But he didn’t murder anyone, Bella.”

  “I know. Again, I’m sorry.” She was flustered, disorientated. The news could not have come at a worse time. “I’ll put pressure on the Apparatus —”

  “It’ll do no good. They’ve made up their minds to make an example of him. The last of the great crimes.”

  “We all know he meant well,” Bella said. “Can’t that be some consolation?”

  “I don’t know how you have the nerve to talk about consolation. He’s my husband, Bella. They’re taking him away from me for fifty years. We haven’t even been here that long.”

  “They’ll review sentencing. They always do. Maybe not this year, but when the next set of appointments come through —”

  “So they reduce it to forty years, thirty if he’s lucky. Do you honestly imagine that will make it any better? At one point you told me his punishment might not even be custodial!”

  “I couldn’t be sure.”

  “But you must have had a shrewd idea of how unlikely that was. You’ve enough contacts in the judiciary. I doubt you were entirely in the dark.”

  Bella bit her lip and fought to speak calmly. “Do not accuse me of anything improper, Svetlana. The Judicial Apparatus was your invention, not mine.”

  “I thought I’d left it in safer hands.”

  “You left it in excellent hands. It’s a machine for dispensing justice, and that’s exactly what it does.”

  Svetlana raised her voice. The ceiling-hanging robot stirred its vicious arms in response. “You call fifty years justice?”

  “I call it fifty years. It’s a long time — I don’t deny that, but Parry won’t be any older at the end of it than he is now. That’s the point of administrative rejuvenation. If those years mean so much to you, you could always skip over them.” On a cruel impulse that she would later regret, Bella added, “I’d gladly fast-track the paperwork, Svieta.”

  “That would suit you very well, wouldn’t it? Me out of your hair for half a century.”

  “Now that you put it like that…” Next to her, the haunt flexed one of its paper-flat limbs. The ceiling robot crept forward. Bella shuddered to think what would happen if one of the security systems made an unanticipated move. The haunt would win, she thought, but not quickly enough to spare blood.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Svetlana said. “Not while I suspect it might be of the slightest convenience to you.” She rubbed her gloved fingers together, then looked up sharply. “Remind me: what was it you wanted to talk about?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you know. Despite all that’s happened between us, I’m still going to make a personal plea. I know you have certain… qualities, Svetlana. I’ve told you as much. I don’t even particularly blame you for hating me now. If Parry were my husband, I probably wouldn’t be any more inclined to forgiveness than you are.”

  “Where is this going, Bella?”

  “I’d still see sense. I’d still know a dangerous and foolhardy gesture when it came along. Doubtless you’ve seen the transmissions from the Musk Dog vehicle.”

  “They’re difficult to miss.”

  “Yes, and they’re seductive. A long time ago, McKinley warned me that the Musk Dogs would do everything in their power to undermine our faith in the Fountainheads. Now we’ve both seen the evidence. McKinley was right.”

  “Perhaps, but does that necessarily mean the Musk Dogs aren’t to be trusted?”

  “McKinley told me how damaging they are.”

  “But if what the Musk Dogs are telling us is true, wouldn’t he go out of his way to discredit them?”

  Bella shook her head. “We have to trust someone here, Svieta. After thirty-five years, I’ve no reason not to place absolute faith in McKinley.”

  “No reason at all, Bella?”

  “No reason that matters.”

  “Tell me, then: what is the function of the Structure? Who brought us here? Why are there other cultures here as well? What brought them here? What do the Fountainheads know that they aren’t telling us?”

  “There are answers to all those questions,” Bella said, “and McKinley will reveal them in due course, when he judges that we’re ready to hear them.”

  “Perhaps the Musk Dogs were right, in that case, and the Fountainheads are just a bunch of parasites, feeding on lesser cultures. No wonder McKinley’s so unwilling to open our minds.”

  “They’ve given us wonderful gifts,” Bella said.

  “The stream has been somewhat dry of late.”

  “Look,” Bella said defensively, “even if you don’t trust McKinley, at least trust Jim Chisholm. You do trust him, don’t you?”

  Through the nearest window, a wall of dust roared down a canyon like a piston, swallowing a lacy suspension bridge thrown from wall to wall.

  “I trusted Jim,” Svetlana said. “I’m just not convinced we ever got all of him back.”

  * * *

  Chromis found Bella troubled, during her apparitions. Lately Bella had discovered that the dead politician was the only counsel whose advice she had no compelling reason to distrust.

  Days and weeks had passed. The Musk Dogs had become cleverer, more inventive. Their messages continued to infiltrate ShipNet, but the tone had become more insidiously persuasive, the promises more concrete. In return for access to Janus, the Musk Dogs would gift humans with the door-opening passkey that they had acquired from the Whisperers. They would give humans the frameshift technology to which Chromis had already alluded.

  “Fountainheads and now Musk Dogs,” Chromis mused. “And Whisperers and the Uncontained, while we’re at it. Doubtless there are many others.”

  Bella had decided to tell Chromis everything she had gleaned concerning the other cultures in the Structure. “Thirty-five, McKinley said, including us.”

  They were in the civic aquarium after closing time, following a winding, balustraded route around huge looming tanks.

  When the larger fish — geneconstructed skates, rays and sharks — had outgrown the tanks in Bella’s office, she had gladly dedicated this public amenity to the people of Crabtree. It was built into the old tokamak chamber, under the remains of Rockhopper. The fish cruised through the disused magnets and mirrors of the plasma-confinement system, now as rusty and coral-bound as the timbers and cannon of some ancient wreck.

 
“You arrived on Janus,” Chromis said, “pulled here across space and time. It’s not inconceivable that the other cultures were lured here in a similar fashion.”

  “Aboard their own versions of Janus?” Bella asked.

  Chromis paused to study the luminous text under one of the tanks as an iridescent blue eel oozed through a crack in one of the magnet housings. “Why not? An icy moon, suddenly moving under its own motive power? That would be enough to attract the attention of most cultures, don’t you think?”

  “Why, though?”

  Chromis moved on. “I can think of several reasons, none of them especially reassuring. Let’s consider the simplest, and therefore the one most likely to be correct. Imagine that the Spicans — we’ll keep calling them that, for the sake of argument — were a very early galactic culture, one of the first to arise. I’m talking a very long time before humanity, obviously — more than just a few million years.”

  “Someone had to be first, I suppose,” Bella said.

  “If they weren’t the first, they were certainly amongst the very earliest. And they’d have done just what we did — looked out into the night sky and wondered where everyone else was. The Congress of the Lindblad Ring — and the other polities surrounding us — sent probes into the galaxy, but they’d only reached ten or eleven thousand light-years by the time I was encoded. Within that ever-expanding boundary, all our searches had failed to identify any other extant intelligences. And when we looked deeper — trained our instruments on stars beyond the Hard Data Frontier — we saw no signs of living intelligence. As far as we were concerned, we were expanding into an empty, dead galaxy.”

  “You think it was the same for the Spicans.”

  “If there had been other cultures out there, they hadn’t lasted long enough to survive into their era. The Spicans might have concluded that intelligence was both rare and unlikely to endure across cosmic timescales. Contact between intelligent cultures was therefore highly improbable. If it ever did happen — if by some chance two starfaring cultures happened to occupy the galaxy at the same time — they were unlikely to meet on equal terms. One of those cultures would have been around a lot longer than the other. There’d have been such a technological and intellectual disparity that dialogue — let alone something as banal as mutually beneficial trade — would have been unthinkable. What could a monkey offer you, Bella, that you don’t already have? Or a shrew, for that matter? That’s the kind of gap we’re talking about.”

  Bella nodded. They’d been over this line of reasoning so many times that it had the ingrained familiarity of a mantra. “They couldn’t experience anything resembling meaningful communication.”

  “No — that would have been out of the question. But the Spicans wanted more than that. They wanted contact so badly that they were prepared to tamper with the rules.”

  “Hence the Structure,” Bella said.

  Chromis nodded her approval. “Constructed at the end of time — or at the very least deep into time, long after their own era: a gathering point for samples of other intelligent cultures yet to come. The Spicans seeded the galaxy with lures — Janus-type devices — and waited. Apart from the envoys they must have sent into the distant future to assemble the Structure, the Spicans themselves vanished from the galaxy. Perhaps they became extinct, or perhaps they went somewhere else. Yet after they had vanished, other cultures inevitably developed. The intervals between the emergences of these cultures may have been many millions of years, Bella, but that is nothing compared to the age of the galaxy.”

  “Eighteen thousand years makes me dizzy, Chromis. Much beyond that and my brain just can’t cope.”

  “I know how you feel. But if I’m right — and this is only speculation — the point of the Structure was to reduce those intervals of time to nothing, and to bring those cultures together at the same time, as if they had always coexisted. A zoo compresses space and brings together creatures that could never have coexisted in the same location. The Structure does the same for cultures, by compressing time.”

  “Using the lures to bring them here,” Bella said.

  “They were the key. Sooner or later, representatives of those cultures were guaranteed to stumble on their equivalents of Janus. With us, we’d barely left Earth. With other cultures, it may have been thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years before they found the lures.” Chromis offered Bella a sympathetic smile. “With something like frameshift, hundreds of thousands of years is enough time to cross the entire galaxy. It’s enough time to forge an empire of a hundred billion worlds, something so glorious that you cannot comprehend that it will not last for ever. But even a hundred thousand years is a sliver, a moment, compared to the kind of deep galactic time we’re talking about here. In terms of contact between two cultures, it’s barely of consequence.”

  “The Fountainheads are a long way beyond us.”

  “They’d obviously been starfaring a long time before they rode their lure to the Structure, if that’s how they got here. It may even have been millions of years since they left their home world. But it wasn’t so much through time that they became incomprehensibly advanced. Their psychology is evidently alien, but they still have material needs. You have something they can use. That’s what matters.”

  “And the Musk Dogs?”

  “Another galactic culture snatched here from some different point in time. The same goes for all the others. Those that emerged later may have some dim knowledge of their predecessors, just as the Fountainheads appear to have learned of us by our ruins.” Darkly, Chromis added, “There may be entities in the Structure who know the Fountainheads by theirs.”

  “Why do this, though?” Bella asked. “If the Spicans are so interested in first contact… where are they?”

  “Perhaps they’re less interested in contact so much as the diligent study of how it proceeds. When the endcap doors are open, cultures are permitted to interact with each other. It can’t always go well. But then, if there are already thirty-five alien races in this thing, there are a lot of permutations.”

  “I thought they were zookeepers,” Bella said, “but you make them sound more like game-players.”

  “Perhaps that’s what they are.”

  “Then what happens if we want out of the game?”

  Chromis pursed her lips tactfully. “You may have less choice than you think. If the Structure is capable of holding the Fountainheads prisoner, not to mention the thirty-three other alien cultures, some of which are not even made of baryonic matter, then leaving may not be an entirely trivial exercise.”

  “That shouldn’t prevent us from trying,” Bella said.

  “No, it shouldn’t, but keep one thing in mind: you still have no idea how much better off you might be by staying inside this thing.”

  “I made a promise to get my people home.”

  “Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I’m a politician.”

  Bella jumped at the sound of approaching footsteps. The haunt, which had been with her all the while, folded out of the shadows and then resumed its low-threat posture.

  “Hello, Liz,” Bella said.

  “Is Chromis still with you?”

  Bella shook her head. She had disappeared the moment Liz Shen had arrived. “Is something the matter?”

  “Yes,” Shen said. “Something’s very much the matter. It’s Svetlana. She’s on her way to the Musk Dogs.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Svetlana climbed towards the broken bone of the gristleship, the Skyside terminal gradually shrinking to a knot of light next to the larger citadel of the Fountainhead embassy. The construction domes and supply lines of the Tier-Two settlement project barely dented the great blackness of the Iron Sky’s outer surface. Humans might spill out into that darkness, but it would be centuries before the population density approached that of the most crowded cities on Earth. And when that was done — when the Iron Sky itself had been wrapped from pole to pole in a hot, twinkling sprawl of human
habitation, they could keep expanding outwards.

  The HUD blinked: an incoming contact.

  “Is that you, Svetlana?” asked the anchordoll, in her well-mannered, nearly accentless voice.

  “It’s me.”

  “We’re sending out a shuttle to bring you into the ship. Do nothing, and all will be well.”

  Svetlana killed the suit’s thrust and let it drift. She observed a small, cyst-like node detach itself from the gristleship, stretching fatty tendrils until they snapped. The node approached her with deceptive acceleration. Like the mother ship, it consisted of sinewy strands bound around a handful of hard, foreign-looking mechanisms. A pair of fleshy doors opened like a ribcage that had been cracked and spread for heart surgery. The suit coasted into the soft red interior and came to rest. The ribbed doors closed, locking Svetlana inside. Through the faceplate she made out a vague pink-red glow, and a suggestion of throbbing surfaces. The status read-outs on the HUD remained placid. The Chakri five had detected nothing that caused it concern.

  The journey to the gristleship must only have taken a few seconds. Svetlana felt no acceleration or deceleration before the doors cleaved open, revealing a much larger enclosure bathed in the same pink-red glow. It was a cavernous space with no obvious distinction between floor, ceiling or walls. The decor, such as it was, consisted of a complex layered accretion of waxy blobs and hardened, stringy residues. Here and there were smears and daubs of distinct colour — yellows, browns and nasty mucosal greens. Blank spheres set into wrinkled, eyelike whorls provided the illumination.