Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  It was simple to arrange and she had no objections. She had the transmission piped through to everyone on the ship, so that they could all hear what Chisholm had to say to the Musk Dogs. Once again a silence fell across the evacuees.

  It was not something she would soon forget.

  “This is James Henry Chisholm, human representative of the Shaft-Five Nexus, speaking to The One That Negotiates. In a very short while, you and the other Musk Dogs on your vessel will die. If you are not killed by the detonation of Janus, you will die when you are intercepted by the surviving elements of the Nexus, in punishment for crimes against a client species of that same Nexus, and for negligent actions that permitted the recent incursion by hostile elements of the Uncontained. This decision has been reached unanimously by Nexus tribunal, and is not open to appeal. However, since the Nexus is not without compassion, it has been agreed that you may transmit a final message into our safekeeping; This message will be archived until such time as we encounter any other Musk Dog parties, or specified alien third parties that you may designate as the intended recipient. No restriction will be placed on the message content, and we will continue recording until the moment of loss of contact.” Chisholm inserted a judicial pause before ending his statement. “We will be listening. If we do not detect a return transmission on this frequency within five Nexus standard time units, as measured by our clocks, we will assume that no message will be forthcoming.”

  When he was done, Svetlana asked him how long five Nexus standard time units was.

  “Just under three minutes,” he said.

  Three minutes passed with no word from the Musk Dogs, then four, then five. During the sixth minute, the radar witnessed something catastrophic happen to the gristleship. Stressed beyond the limits of its own structural integrity, it broke into two huge tumbling pieces.

  It stopped accelerating. Only in the seventh minute, as the endcap door was almost sphinctering shut, was a fragment of signal detected on the return frequency. Svetlana had it played over the same shipwide speaker. It was a horrible wet, phlegmatic sound, like something being strangled and drowned at the same time. Then Janus went up.

  Cams on the inner wall of the Structure caught much of the show and sent images up the shaft towards the lander until the blast scoured them out of existence. For an instant, the detonation shone through the skyholes in two lancing beams of cruel white energy. Then the Iron Sky gave way, shattering into a thousand black shards as it could no longer dam the upwelling energy of the moon’s end.

  The endcap door had narrowed to within a few hundred metres of closure when the blast hit. A sharp needle of cruel intensity pushed through the tightening circle in the middle of the irising door, the pure white radiance stained with the trace elements of the dying gristleship.

  Then the door snapped shut.

  FORTY

  A little while later, after a day that had felt longer than some years, when she had finally made up her mind about what she would do next, Svetlana arranged a private meeting with McKinley.

  “I’m sorry about your losses,” she said. “I know not everything that happened here was my fault. The Uncontained were coming no matter what happened on Janus.”

  “This is true.”

  She steeled herself. “But I accept responsibility for some of it. You warned us, I chose to ignore that warning and it cost us dearly.”

  The alien stirred its curtain of powerful tractor fronds. “Bella always gave you the benefit of the doubt. She believed you thought you were doing the best for the colony.”

  “I was. But I also wanted to damage her.”

  The Fountainhead had formed a high-resolution array and was holding up the meshed pattern of fronds like a shield. “To admit that is already the beginning of reconciliation, Svetlana.”

  “It’s a little late for that, I suspect.”

  “You said you had a proposal,” the alien said, with the faintest suggestion of impatience.

  “I’ve considered my options. Janus doesn’t exist any more, but the Judicial Apparatus survived. Parry was already being punished, and now I’ve done something that also deserves punishment. My actions were far worse than Parry’s well-intentioned little crime. I cost us more than a hundred lives, McKinley. If we still had the death sentence…” Though it would mean nothing to the alien, she mimed the blow to the back of the head that signified death by drill, in the old manner. “Bella maybe dead, but her authority isn’t. Nick Thale, Axford… they have every right to put me behind bars. But that isn’t going to happen.”

  At last, the alien unfurled the array. It had seen enough of her. “It isn’t?”

  “I’ve proposed a different form of punishment to the judiciary. It’s come back with tacit approval, although there’s been no official statement yet. That’ll have to wait until I get something from you.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I’m leaving,” she said, “taking a ship out through the hole the Musk Dogs made for us.”

  “Fleeing justice?”

  “Far from it. According to you, the last lot that tried to leave were never heard from again.”

  The mere suggestion of leaving brought shimmers of ruby and green agitation to McKinley’s fronds. “It would be foolish to understate the dangers. We — and many other sensible species — prefer to remain within the Structure, where the risks are quantifiable.”

  “That’s your prerogative. Ours is the right to leave, if we choose to do so.”

  “With official blessing?”

  “The judiciary will grant Parry and me full pardons in return for volunteering our services to explore the space beyond the Structure. No one’s pretending that this isn’t pretty damned close to a suicide mission, but we’ll run as hard and as fast as we can, and we’ll take lots of pictures on our way. We’re not setting out to die.”

  “Just the two of you?”

  “You’d be surprised at who’s agreed to come with us, if we can put this together. There are plenty of people who’d rather run than stay inside a prison.”

  “Pity the poor fools.” He waved a frond encouragingly. “But continue.”

  “We’ll need to equip one of the landers for interstellar flight, and we’ll need to do it pronto, before the wall fixes itself. No time to tick all the boxes on this one, McKinley.”

  “A tall order.”

  “I’m sure you’ll rise to the occasion. At the very least we’ll need another frameshift drive, a forge vat with a lot of files and maybe even some weapons, just in case we ran into anything we don’t like the look of.”

  “You’ve obviously thought this through.”

  “It’s the only way this can work, McKinley. Janus is always going to be Bella’s show. Even if we finished our sentences… I’d always be chafing against that.”

  “But Bella is gone. Bella is dead. It could all be yours.”

  “I’ve made up my mind,” she said. “We’re leaving, subject to your assistance.”

  “If the matter has tribunal blessing, then I have little choice. The fact that these technologies you desire may kill you will hardly be an issue outside the Structure. They will be all that might keep you alive, as well.”

  “Good.” Svetlana turned to go, somewhat theatrically, but stopped herself and looked back at the Fountainhead. “There’s one other thing, McKinley. It concerns Bella.”

  “I am sorry that we could not do more for her.”

  “I know — we’ve been over that. We froze her too late, and in any case the damage was too extensive.”

  “You must recognise that even Fountainhead medicine has its limitations.”

  “But you rejuvenated her once already. You took her apart and put her back together again.”

  “Yes, but —”

  “Surely you learned something during that process. Surely you remember something about the parts she lost.”

  “It would always be imprecise, a sketch where a blueprint was required.”

&nbs
p; “But better than nothing. This is death we’re talking about here, McKinley.”

  “A damaged mind is not necessarily an improvement on no mind at all,” the alien said sternly.

  “Then you’d better find another way to fill in the gaps.”

  “Again, I’m not —”

  She interrupted him. “The tribunal’s authorised administrative rejuvenation for Parry and me. If we’re going outside, we’ll never have another chance to reset the clock. The idea is they make us younger now, so we’ll at least have some hope of staying alive long enough to find something useful out there.”

  Some flicker of understanding ran through him. “I see.”

  “It means you’re going to be taking me apart again, McKinley. It means you’re going to look into my head, strip it down like an old motor. All I’m saying is, while you’re in there…”

  “Yes?”

  “Take whatever patterns you need. Then make her well again.”

  * * *

  They walked across the crystal translucence of the viewing deck, Svetlana feeling the smooth skin of Parry’s hand in her own. It was a young man’s hand, carrying no memory of the scars and blemishes of a working life. There were still moments when she underwent a shock of non-recognition, seeing a stranger out of the corner of her eye and then realising with a delicious jolt that it was Parry, her husband, and that she must look as fleetingly unfamiliar to him as he did to her. At the discretion of the tribunal — Svetlana had no knowledge of the debate that must have taken place — their biological clocks had been reset to early adulthood. Allowing for the beneficial effects of the rejuvenation process on the normal mechanisms of ageing, Parry and Svetlana could expect seventy or eighty years of life ahead of them. That, Svetlana supposed, should be time enough for anyone. But she had already lived through more than eighty years and she knew the heft of those years; how swiftly and cruelly they would slip through her fingers again. At the end of it, there would be no Fountainheads to reset the clock one more time.

  But, she reminded herself, this option was as much punishment as reward. It was not meant to be the easy way out.

  “Well?” McKinley asked. “How do you like it?”

  She turned to face his travel sphere. “It feels fine. Everything’s just the way it should be. I feel wonderful.”

  “Actually, I meant the ship.”

  “The ship’s beautiful,” Parry said. “That goes without saying.”

  “You like it?”

  Parry was still holding her hand. “Absolutely. You’ve done a grand job. It’s more than we ever expected, especially given how little time you’ve had.”

  “Needs must, when the devil comes calling,” McKinley said.

  The ship — visible through the armoured window of the viewing deck — was indeed beautiful. It floated within a great bay in the heart of the reassembled Fountainhead embassy, a vacuum-filled opening whose walls were studded with haphazard cones and helices of unknown function, jammed tight like the sound-absorbing baffles in some mighty anechoic chamber. A cradle of curved, tentacle-like arms wrapped the newborn ship in an armature of light, as if it was being embraced or devoured by some luminous seamonster. Had it not been for its surroundings, the vessel would have struck Svetlana as awesomely strange and alien. Instead, she recognised it for the essentially human artefact that it was.

  In truth, it wasn’t completely newborn. The aliens had taken the fundamentals of Cosmic Avenger and remade it into something else… as if that earlier version of the ship had only been a pupal stage for this. But the bones of the old ship showed through the skin of the new. The hull had been resheathed in an armoured plaque as sleek and clean as melting ice, but that was post-Cutoff human technology, rather than anything intrinsically alien. The same went for the new drive systems, the new sensors, the new weapons: they were either gifts from the distant future, or the distant past, but all of it carried the unmistakeable grain of human thinking.

  “Is she ready?” Svetlana asked.

  “A couple of hours, then we’ll hand her over. I take it you’re ready to depart as soon as the paint’s dry?”

  “More or less,” Parry said. “We’re just chewing over the last few candidates. The Apparatus gave us power of veto over any applicants, but we won’t want to turn anyone away unless we have excellent reason. It’s just a pity there isn’t more time to think things through.”

  “Believe me,” the alien said, “if I could shave five minutes from the remaining build-time, I would. There won’t be time to learn all the ropes before you depart, unfortunately. You’ll just have to let the ship handle itself until you have time to study her systems.”

  “Don’t worry. It won’t be the first time we’ve had to learn on the fly.”

  “We’re not sure about Saul Regis,” Svetlana said, tightening her hold on Parry’s hand. “He wants to come with us, but…” They’d talked long and hard about Saul Regis, unable to decide whether or not he would fit in with the exploration crew as it now stood. Time and again Svetlana found herself thinking back to that awkward conversation in Bella’s office, when Regis had mentioned the execution scene in the old TV series that had given the ship its name. She had sensed his craving then, longing for a world more like that cartoon-bright show and less like the one he inhabited, and she had sensed it again when Regis came to petition for a place on the new ship.

  “Would you care for my opinion?” McKinley asked.

  The two of them looked at each other and shrugged. “It can’t hurt.”

  “Take Regis. Take anyone who really wants to come, until you’ve allocated all the seats. They know the risks involved.”

  “You think so?” Svetlana asked.

  McKinley rolled past them, halting at the limit of the viewing platform. “We didn’t soup up the specification on those weapons for nothing, Svetlana. Or put in triple thickness hull-armour. There’s something out there that doesn’t welcome the curious. You’re going to meet it.”

  She nodded, and for the briefest of moments considered the alternative: abandoning this scheme, submitting to the original punishment plan, the one that had been on the table before she had ever suggested this to the Apparatus. But the moment did not last. She would be going.

  Parry, as if sensing her flicker of doubt, renewed his grip on her hand. Whatever happened out there, his grip told her, they would face it together, and they would face it as lovers, unafraid.

  “We’re doing this, McKinley. No second thoughts now.”

  “Okey dokey,” the alien said cheerily.

  “About Bella…” Svetlana began. “How’s it going…”

  “It’s not going to be as quick and easy as we imagined,” McKinley said, before spinning around to roll past them.

  FORTY-ONE

  Bella woke, after a long and unhurried climb out of the most oceanic state of unconsciousness: something so close to death, so close to nonexistence, that there was little distinction. She did not know where she was, except that it was either somewhere she had already been, very long ago, or a place so like it that it induced precisely the same combination of calm and enchantment. Serene acceptance filled her, a childlike sense that she was in infinitely wise, infinitely knowing hands. She had come to wakefulness in a pool of shallow water, burbling like the distant laughter of happy children. She held a hand up to the false sky and felt a thousand resonant echoes of déjà vu.

  “Bella,” a kindly voice said, “you’re back.”

  She gradually became aware that she was not alone, that someone had been watching and waiting for her to show signs of life. A man squatted on his haunches, hands on his knees.

  He avoided looking at her, directing his attention instead slightly to one side, as if a bird or butterfly of some rarity had alighted on a nearby stone.

  “I’m cold,” she said.

  “I brought you a gown. If you sit up…” He turned away for a moment and she found the strength within herself to rise from the cool water. The strength was
elusive: when she found it, it came with startling force, but it had been so long that she barely remembered how to command it. A gown wrapped itself around her, drying and warming her as it pressed itself to her skin.

  “You obviously understand me,” the man said, “but how much do you remember?”

  His face resolved slowly into focus, colour bleeding into it as the blood returned to her eyes. “I think I know you,” she said.

  “I used to look younger.” He pushed himself upright. “I’m Ryan, Bella.”

  “Ryan,” she said.

  “You do remember, don’t you?”

  “Axford,” she said, as if the word might unlock the most sacred mysteries of creation.

  He nodded approvingly. “That’s good.”

  “You used to be a little boy.”

  “I got older again. It’s been a while, Bella, since you were last with us.”

  She remembered almost nothing. All she could be certain of was the single fact of her former existence, and that she had known someone named Ryan Axford, a man who had been kind to her on more than one occasion, and that he had once looked passingly like the man who had come to help her.

  Forlornly, she asked, “What happened to me?”

  “You died. You died and then they brought you back to us.”

  “They?”

  “The Fountainheads.”

  There was something there: some thread of memory she could almost grab hold of. “Aliens.”

  “You’re doing well, Bella. It’s all going to come back in time.”

  She stepped out of the pool. There had been something wrong with her hands, something that made them useless and painful — but that was gone now. They were smooth and lithe, like the expressive hands of a Balinese dancer. Nowhere in her body was there anything but the memory of pain or stiffness or infirmity.

  “Where am I?”

  “In the embassy — the new one, that is.”

  She almost remembered the old embassy, the memory of it entangled with the intimation of some larger, vaguely felt catastrophe, like the faint unease that chased a nightmare into daytime.