Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

  Something terrible had happened.

  “Janus,” she said.

  “Do you remember how it ended?” Axford asked her. His face was familiar to her, but there were lines and age spots on it that belonged to an older man.

  “I made a mistake,” she said.

  “It wasn’t your mistake, Bella.”

  Without quite knowing what it meant, she said, “I went to the Musk Dogs. They tricked me. Everything went wrong.”

  He studied her, saying nothing for a while. “It’s true that mistakes were made. What matters now is moving forward, not dwelling on old errors of judgement.”

  She remembered the smell of the Musk Dogs even before the memory of them had sharpened. Smell plumbed the ancient basement of her mind, short-circuiting slower, more rational processes.

  The recollection of the Musk Dogs stirred something else. “Svetlana,” she said, in the panicked tone of someone who had just recalled something urgent. “What about —”

  “Svetlana’s gone, Bella. It’s just you now.” He held out an inviting hand. “Let me show you.”

  Axford led her from the waking garden. They stepped through opaque glass doors into a kind of gallery, walled on one side by a long, high window of midnight black. He kept hold of her hand, enfolding her smooth fingers in his leathery old man’s grip.

  “You do remember Svetlana, then.”

  “She was my friend.”

  “But not always.”

  “No,” Bella said, as more connections slipped home. “Not always. Especially not near the end.”

  “Do you remember what happened to Janus, after the Musk Dogs —” He smiled tightly. “After they tricked you?”

  “We had to leave. Evacuate.”

  “Because?”

  “Janus was going to explode. Something that they did —” Simply thinking about events that close to the end made her uncomfortable. All the blissful calm she had felt in the pool was gone now, scoured away by a rising surf of bitter apprehension. Perhaps sensing this, Axford tightened his hand around hers. “What happened?” she asked at length, with a child’s fearfulness.

  “Janus did blow up. Most of us survived, though. We had time to evacuate Crabtree and the other settlements, and the passkey allowed us to sit out the explosion in the next chamber.”

  “Svetlana,” she said again. “She died, didn’t she? I went back for her… found her body. Too late.”

  Again Axford felt that tightening of her grip. “She made it, Bella. But after Janus had blown up, she had a decision to make, and not an easy one.” He sighed, as if burdened by the effort of revealing what had taken place. “The Musk Dogs detonated Janus in order to blow a hole in the Structure. You remember the Structure?”

  “Yes,” she said, after a brief moment of uncertainty.

  “Well, it worked. Janus punched a thousand-kilometre-wide gap in the outer wall, through matter and fields. But like Jim had already said, it wasn’t going to stay that way for ever. Self-repair was already cutting in. The Structure was healing itself, patching the damage. In a matter of days it was going to be sealed up again. Svetlana knew this was going to be our only chance of getting outside for a long, long time.”

  A memory spoke to her. “She went.”

  “She knew it would be a risk. Jim told her only one culture had ever made it outside in the recorded history of the Structure, and nothing more had ever been heard from them. But she still wanted to do it. There wasn’t much time, so she had the Fountainheads give her what they could — technologies they’d held back before, but which — given everything that had happened with Chromis and the Musk Dogs — it no longer seemed so vital to withhold. They took Cosmic Avenger, outfitted it with a large frameshift drive, a forge vat and enough construction files to keep improving things once they were under way.”

  “Cosmic Avenger,” she said, with a half-smile. The name had always been a bad joke, not something to be bestowed on an actual starship.

  “They got through,” Axford said. “It was close: the containment fields were already re-meshing. Another day and they’d have been trapped inside with the rest of us.”

  “How many did I… did she take with her?”

  “Thirty,” he said. Something crossed his face: some hint of concern, quickly quelled. “Svetlana, Parry, Nadis and the rest — all the people who’d always been behind her, plus a dozen or so who hadn’t even been born back then but who couldn’t face spending another minute in the Structure.”

  “What about everyone else?”

  “They didn’t have to turn many people down. By the time they were putting together the crew, word was already circulating about that other culture, the one that no one ever heard from again. The surviving majority were quite happy with the idea of remaining inside the Structure, at least for the time being.”

  The obvious question pushed itself into her head. “What happened to the ones who left?”

  “We don’t know. We hope they’re still alive, that they found enough out there to make life possible. They were hoping to reach a solar system, somewhere with a warm, wet world. But we don’t know.”

  “Why not?” Knowing what had happened to Svetlana suddenly felt like the most vital thing imaginable.

  “They kept transmitting data back to us once they’d passed through the wall, but within a day it became difficult to pick up their signals through the healing surface. Within two, we couldn’t detect them at all.”

  More memories clicked into place, like tumblers in a lock. “But they saw the Structure from the outside,” she said, wonderingly. “Didn’t they?”

  Axford swept his arm towards the black window, bringing it to life. There was panache to his gesture, a conjuror’s quiet pride in the excellence of his timing. “This is a picture taken one hour after departure,” he said. “They were on frameshift drive by then, so there was some image distortion due to the drive wake, but we’ve fixed most of that with software.”

  It was the outside of the shaft: a long, gently glowing cylinder with a ragged hole punched in one side. Numerics and annotations bracketed the image: it had clearly been worked over by a furiously keen science team, intent on gleaning a mother lode of wisdom from every image hexel.

  “Exit plus two hours,” Axford said.

  The image jumped scale, leaping back so that the cylinder became a thin branch, the hole so small as to be barely visible. “You’re seeing most of the distance between the two endcaps we first mapped,” he said. “The structure’s self-illuminated. Why it glows, we have no idea, but that made life a lot easier for us, so Nick says: they’d never have had time to sit and wait for radar returns.”

  It was like a filament of human hair, Bella thought, traced with the luminous false colour of a highly magnified image.

  “Exit plus six,” Axford said.

  Now she could not make out the hole at all, even with an arrowed overlay pointing to the position of the wound in the wall. The shaft was whisker-thin, thousands of times longer than it was wide. It was not the only one in view, either. Two other branches cut across the image at oblique angles, one slightly smaller and dimmer than the other.

  “Exit plus twelve,” Axford said. “Image corrected for both wake distortion and relativistic effects. After twelve hours, Avenger was moving at fifty per cent of the speed of light.”

  Not just three branches of the Structure now, but an entire intertwined mass of them, dozens of them. There was no geometric order that Bella could discern: it looked as if they’d been tossed into space in random configurations, like a magnification of one microscopic part of a child’s demented scribble.

  “Exit plus twenty-four,” Axford said, “one day out. By this point the signal was very difficult to intercept. Useful frame rate was down.”

  Bella shuddered at the jump in scale. A twig had turned into an entire forest. Individual filaments of the Structure were less obvious now than the gross organisation of those filaments on a much larger scale. It had looked rando
m at twelve hours, but now she could see that the filaments were indeed ordered, bunched and braided into macroscopic, ropelike groupings that must have been entire light-hours across, wider than the orbits of some planets.

  “Exit plus thirty-nine hours, the last useful image. Avenger was at ninety per cent of the speed of light and holding, prior to final acceleration boost.”

  The window filled with something twinkling and vast, something engineered — so it seemed to Bella — for the sole purpose of crushing the human spirit. She wanted Axford to hold her, so that she did not fall into that paralysing, deadening immensity. The Structure was far, far larger than she had ever imagined: as complex in its knotted, neural topology as a mind, as wide across as an entire planetary system. It was a torus of light, tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees so that its shape was suddenly revealed. It was only at thirty-nine hours that Avenger had managed to grab an image that encompassed most of the Structure.

  “Look at the middle,” Axford said.

  Bella complied. Many spokes of light — each of which was a thick braid formed from hundreds of individual strands — pushed inward from the inner face of the torus, as if they were meant to connect with each other, or form a bridge to some other knot of strands in the middle of the torus.

  But there was nothing there. The braids splayed apart, ragged as the branches of a lightning-struck tree.

  “Something’s missing,” Bella said. “It looks as if it isn’t finished.”

  “Or it was finished but something was destroyed. Perhaps that’s the answer to the question, Bella.”

  “The question?”

  “About where the Spicans went. Perhaps the animals revolted, and stormed the zoo.”

  Fragments of ancient conversations came to her in rainlike drabs: the memory of a friend now gone, a woman of wise counsel.

  “Then the Spicans are dead.”

  “Or they’ve gone into hiding. Either way — it changes the picture, wouldn’t you say?”

  For a moment, the dizzying shifts of scale overwhelmed her. “It’s all too big. What is it? Where is it?”

  “We don’t know — there aren’t enough background stars, not enough recognisable background-galaxies, to give us a handle. Avenger was still moving through outlying structures when we stopped reading her. Maybe if we’d had another day’s worth of data…”

  Bella stared numbly at the image. “At least they got us this.”

  “Svetlana thought it might come in useful. We’ve made a map of the local connections, out to several light-hours of shaft travel. Nick’s people are still squeezing more data out of the frames, improving the map all the time.”

  “It’s still just a map.”

  “It’s better than nothing, Bella. According to the aliens, it’s exactly the kind of data some cultures will be prepared to trade for.”

  “In other words, we have something to sell.”

  He swept a hand towards the window and the last image faded back into perfect blackness. “Now that we don’t have Janus, we have to make the most of what we salvaged.”

  “That was always the way we did things,” she said. Then something that had been nagging at her, pushing uncomfortably to the front of her mind, could no longer be resisted. “You were young, Ryan, the last time I saw you.”

  His face was sad. “You want to know how long it’s been, I suppose.”

  “That would help.”

  Again, she heard that troubled sigh. “You were a hard case, Bella. The aliens didn’t want to bring you back too soon, not until they’d made the best job they felt they were capable of. And we didn’t want to have you back until we were… well, back on our feet.”

  “How long has it been, Ryan? How long since those images came in?”

  “Sixty-one years,” he said, and made another gesture towards the window. The darkness cleared. They were inside a shaft — maybe not the old one, but a similar region of the Structure. Bella recognised the suffocating orange light from the distant glow of hundreds of snaking, intersecting lava lines. But they were not on Janus, not standing in the High Hab in Crabtree or on the other side of Iron Sky. They were some way above the wall — far enough that she could not be sure whether they were standing in the uppermost levels of a very tall building, or in a hovering spacecraft.

  Axford directed her gaze to a particular part of the wall where the glow of the lava lines was eclipsed by a smear of light, organised into a grid plan.

  “That’s New Crabtree,” he said. “Most of us live there now, on the wall.”

  The smear — which Bella judged to be tens of kilometres across — threw out pale-blue tentacles of light that linked it to smaller communities many hundreds or thousands of kilometres away up and down the shaft.

  “You made it,” she said. “Found somewhere new to live.”

  “It wasn’t easy. Of course, we had the Fountainheads to give us some guidance, but the transition was still difficult. You remember how hard it was during the Year of the Iron Sky.”

  She nodded meekly.

  “No one talks about the Year of the Iron Sky now. It’s ancient history, forgotten except in children’s playground rhymes. We got through something tougher.”

  “You let me sleep through it,” she said, with an odd sense of resentment.

  “We knew things would improve. There was no other way for them to go.”

  “And now?”

  “We want you back. Crabtree’s waiting, Bella. There are a lot of people who’ll want to welcome you home.”

  “I’ve been gone so long. What possible use —”

  “That’s for you to decide,” he said, before she had a chance to say another word. “Mike Takahashi runs the place. He’ll be more than willing to surrender some of that responsibility, if you give him half a chance.”

  At the mention of Takahashi’s name, she recalled how she had been there when he came back from the dead, back from the glacial cold of the Frost Angels. She had helped him adjust to a future he had never expected to see, and now Axford was helping Bella in the same fashion. It was a comfort to know that, however difficult this journey might be, someone else had already made it.

  But thinking about Takahashi brought her back to the end of Janus, and the people who had not made it out alive. She remembered trying to rescue someone, yet the more she tried to pin down the memory, the more it squirmed from her attention.

  All she felt was a vast sadness.

  “But if it wasn’t Svetlana I went back for…” Bella trailed off, and looked into Axford’s grave and kindly face. “Who was it?”

  “We’ll come to that,” he said gently, and turned her away from the window.

  EPILOGUE

  They asked Chromis to step outside while the vote was cast. Evening had begun to fall since she had made her case inside the Congress building, and although the sun was still catching the summit of the building, tinting the icecap a hard brassy gold, lights were coming on in the shadow-locked footslopes and inlets far below. The warm breeze on the balcony was a carefully maintained fiction. It felt as if it was blowing up from the tropical landscape twenty-two kilometres below, carrying a delicate freight of spices from the fishing villages around the nearest shore of the great lake. But the balcony was in fact shielded from the ambient atmospheric conditions by an invisible shell of femtomachinery, which also happened to provide protection against almost all conceivable modes of assassination. Admittedly there hadn’t been a documented assassination inside the Congress of the Lindblad Ring for three and a half thousand years, but there were still dissident elements out there. Just ask the good citizens of Hemlock, after the reeves had been sent in to restore public order.

  Chromis wondered how the vote was going inside the meeting room. She felt, on balance, that her speech had been received about as well as she had dared to hope. She had not deviated from her script; she had not stumbled or lost her rhythm. Rudd had come in on cue with perfect timing, and had played his role with conviction. No one
had tried to trump her with some other equally lavish proposal, and none of her habitual enemies had voiced any criticism while she was in the room. Doubtless a certain reverence had held them back: in criticising Chromis they would have been implying that they did not consider the Benefactor’s deeds worthy of commemoration. She had counted on that, but was nonetheless relieved.

  Still, she hadn’t received an ovation either. Even as she stepped out of the room, she had still found the delegates’ collective mood inscrutable. Their lack of questions, their lack of antagonism, might even have suggested bored indifference. She hoped not: Chromis had allowed for many things, but it had never occurred to her that her proposal might crash on the rocks of moderate apathy.

  Not for the first time since starting her journey to New Far Florence, she felt the Benefactor’s quiet presence, as if Bella Lind stood silently next to her on the balcony, as keen to know the outcome as Chromis. It was, she supposed, impossible to spend so long thinking about a single person without them assuming a degree of reality. And she doubted that anyone had thought as long and hard about Bella Lind as she had, during all the centuries of preparation. Once, the Benefactor had been a distant, schematic historical figure; now she was a tactile person whom Chromis felt as if she had met on many occasions. The more strongly this sense of solidity took hold, the more she vowed not to fail the ghost that her imagination had conjured into being.

  Overhead, the brightest stars were coming out. The glare from the sunlit icecap washed out any hope of seeing the Milky Way, but Chromis knew roughly where to look. Somewhere out there, she thought, Bella was waiting.

  Doors opened behind her. She turned to see Rudd walking towards her, carrying news from the delegates. She studied the hard set of his expression and felt her imaginary companion slip away politely, leaving them alone.

  “It’s not good news, is it?”

  “I’m sorry. It nearly went your way, but…” He offered the palms of his hands.

  “Tell me.”