Pushing Ice (40 page)

Then again, there might be no Spicans waiting at all, just their ancient and obedient machines. Perhaps it would be very difficult to tell the difference, from a human perspective.

She felt a bleak, premonitionary chill shiver through her. She thanked Thale and Nadis and dismissed them. She moved to the window and hugged herself against the stellar cold that seemed to push infiltrating fingers through the glass. The distant spikes twinkled with ominous activity. Parry waited, saying nothing, leaving her with her thoughts.

“I’m scared,” she said at last, as if she had the room to herself. “I’m scared and I worry that we might be terribly wrong about all this.”

She heard his footsteps, saw his dim reflection loom behind her in the glass. Parry wrapped his arms around and held her tight, and though she was glad of that, nothing he did could take away the chill and the fear.

* * *

“It’s good of you to keep me informed,” Craig Schrope said, “even if it isn’t the best news.”

They were in the High Hab, in one of the administrative chambers of the Interim Authority. Schrope had an office to himself, lined with wangwood shelves brimming with hard-copy. He spent most of his days there, occupying himself with the legal processes of the Judicial Apparatus. It was solitary work, for the most part, but that suited Schrope. Despite years of rehabilitation, his emotional constitution was still fragile, and there were only a handful of people in whose company he felt truly at ease. Svetlana felt an elitist thrill at being counted amongst that number. They would probably never be close friends, but simply being on civil terms was an astonishing improvement on the old state of affairs.

“I wanted you to know that we aren’t keeping anything from you,” Svetlana said. “You’ll hear rumours, I’m sure, but the truth is that we haven’t got a clue what it is.”

“Do you have a name for it yet?”

“The Iron Sky,” she said tersely.

Shortly after attaining their final height of twenty kilometres, the spires had changed again. Their upper extremities — the last three kilometres — had thickened into budlike forms that had then split open along invisible seams, each of them forming six radial petals defined by faint tracings of lava. The petals reached out three kilometres from the central bud, oblivious to Janus’s gravitational field. Then the petals had started growing, spreading and widening like oil slicks.

Over the next two months they had blocked off more and more of the sky until their edges met and fused, and then there was no sky except this oppressive black ceiling, suspended twenty kilometres above the ice. The lava lines had faded. Though the spires continued to be lit by Spican symbols, the ceiling was now as dark as the interstellar space it served to hide. “Can you see through it?” Schrope asked, closing one of his legal binders. The paper was thick and vat-grown, the cover appropriated from an old Lockheed-Krunichev Fusion Systems spiral-bound technical manual entitled
Tokamak Start-up Procedures in A Nutshell
. “Did you hear that we could?”

“Just rumours, Svieta.”

“No. We’ve seen nothing. Everything we shine at it gets absorbed. If there’s something on the other side, we’re not picking up the echo.”

“And the free-fliers?”

“Deadsville, If they’re still out there, we’re not hearing anything from them.”

“Does it trouble you?”

“Of course it troubles me. How did you expect it would make me feel?”

“It makes remarkably little difference to me,” Schrope said easily. “Down here, entire days go by without me seeing a hint of the outside world. Legal work eats time like a machine, you know.”

He put the folder aside. Literally and metaphorically, he had been closing the file on Meredith Bagley. Every now and then, rumours had resurfaced that there had been more to her death than just a grisly accident during routine centrifuge maintenance. Svetlana’s anger at the merest hint that she might have tacitly sanctioned it had spurred her to authorise the inquest Schrope had helmed. He was good with legal inquiry: it utilised the same forensic instinct that had worked so well for him in Shalbatana.

Terrier-boy’s conclusion was that there had been nothing suspicious about the death. The rumours might continue, but there was nothing the Judicial Apparatus could do about that.

“Your work is important,” Svetlana said, “but I have to take the wider view. What’s the point of having a Judicial Apparatus if we don’t have a world left to govern?”

“Things aren’t that bad,” Schrope said soothingly. “It’s just a sky.”

“It won’t let us touch it,” she said. “We send free-fliers up to it and it repels them.”

“It probably has our best interests at heart.” One hand clicked the mechanism of a ballpoint pen, neurotically fast. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“I find it claustrophobic,” she said. “I used to swim. I was a pretty good free-diver. Water never bothered me, no matter how deep and black and cold. But I always hated having anything above me but sea and clear blue sky.”

“It’s no worse than what we had before — it’s been a while since there were stars up there, Svetlana.”

“But we could always leave if we wanted to.”

He put the folder back onto one of the shelves, squeezing it into place between two other bulging documents. For a colony of under two hundred people, Crabtree and its peripheral suburbs generated a considerable amount of legal business. That wasn’t too surprising, though. They’d had to build an entire economy from scratch just so that people could be paid for an honest day’s work. After twelve years, the High Hab was still processing complaints from people who felt they had been short-changed in the initial allocation of credits. There was even a black-market economy of sorts. Officially, there was no coffee left anywhere on Janus, but if you knew the right people, it was still possible to obtain hitherto unallocated rations.

“It would have killed us to leave,” Schrope said, “to drop out of the slipstream, out of the protective shadow of Janus. We’d have lasted about five minutes.”

“But it was an option. I’d always rather have the option, wouldn’t you?”

“Judging by the business that comes through here, Svetlana, most people are just getting on with life.” Schrope indicated one of his shelves. “That file on the end is a disputed paternity case. On Earth, we’d have settled it in a few minutes with a DNA profile. It wouldn’t even have reached court. Out here, we don’t have DNA sequencers. Axford’s doing the best he can, but he’s already a busy man, and I don’t wish to take up more of his time than is absolutely necessary. That’s just one file. We have divorce proceedings, personal-injury claims, accusations of libel… even the Symbolists are claiming religious discrimination.”

“They
invented
their religion from scratch,” Svetlana said indignantly. “I’ve got every damned right to discriminate against them.”

“Yet by all accounts they do a reasonable job of running things in the Maw.”

She conceded his point with a pout of displeasure. “Maybe. But how long can we rely on them? They’re already saying I’ve been heavy-handed. I’m not even allowed in the Maw now. I have to send Parry.”

“All I’m saying is… life goes on. Perhaps the Iron Sky isn’t as bad as you fear.”

“That’s what people keep telling me — that Janus is still supplying us with power and materials, that the icecap is still there… that if we’ve survived for twelve years, we can survive a bit longer.”

Schrope stopped clicking the pen and put it down. “You don’t sound convinced.”

“I don’t like it, Craig. I don’t like not knowing what’s out there. We should have arrived at the Spican structure by now.”

“Maybe we have,” he said soothingly, as if the matter was of only passing concern to him. “The binary consists of blue stars, Svetlana, hot and very bright. Not a healthy environment for humans. Perhaps the whole point of the sky is to keep us safe from harm.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I’m just scared of what we might see on the other side, if we ever get the chance to find out.”

He sighed and rocked back in his seat, fingers meshed behind his head. “You’ve been good to me, Svetlana. You called me back from that place I was in and gave me a chance to make something of myself again.”

She nodded, but said nothing. Schrope still credited her with doing far more during his years of withdrawal than she knew to be true. Once, he had even told her how he had seen Bella, and how she had spoken to him. Svetlana knew for certain then that his memory of that time could not be trusted.

“I hope I’ve served Crabtree in some small way,” he continued, “but I know I’m not indispensable. I know that there are a dozen people who could do this legal dogwork just as well as I can.”

“I don’t know —” she began.

He shook his head and interrupted her. “But one day I hope I can be indispensable. Not by shuffling papers, but by doing something concrete. Something no one else will do.”

“I don’t follow,” she said.

“You’re scared, and I don’t blame you for that, but I’ve been to a place in my head worse than anything this universe has to offer. If they come, Svetlana, I’ll go to meet them. You can send me first. I don’t have anything to fear from the Spicans.”

“Craig —”

“I’m asking you to let me be your envoy. It’s the least I can do.”

EIGHTEEN

It came down without warning, nearly four hundred days after the sky had finally closed over Janus.

Seismic monitors, installed in concentric rings around Crabtree to detect signs of icecap break-up, registered a single massive spike. Time-of-arrival analysis revealed that the seismic disturbance had originated in a very small area of the icecap, about one hundred kilometres south of Crabtree. Once the initial reverberations had died down — the icecap flexing like a drum — the seismic activity returned to its usual quiet level. There were no aftershocks or hints of further movement after that first hammer blow.

Though she was unwilling to dismiss the incident, Svetlana was equally reluctant to send out a lander to scout the area. Fuel and spare-parts stocks were dwindling, and although Wang had lately become very good at coaxing miracles from the forge vats, complex spacecraft components were still a challenge. So Svetlana sent out a trio of tractors, which followed the line of a superconductor for twenty kilometres before turning south over hard, ungraded terrain. The tractors fanned out until they could just see each other’s strobe lights, then made a series of awkward sweeps through the area of the seismic disturbance. But they found nothing, and the going was hard. When one of the machines damaged a mesh wheel, she ordered the trio to return home while they were still able to assist each other. She ordered a free-flier sent aloft, but the free-flier’s cam was designed for inspecting hull damage at close quarters, not scanning a wide swathe of ice at high resolution. Nor did it have the power to generate effective ground illumination. It merely zigzagged ineffectively back and forth until it ran out of fuel.

A day passed while she brooded over the mystery. Should she risk committing a lander now, or send out another tractor sweep? All operations beyond Crabtree carried a measure of risk. Janus was quixotic, and the hammer blow might only indicate that something had happened deep in the machinery, even though the evidence, such as it was, suggested an event near the surface. There had been bangs and crashes in the night before, and people had soon learned not to let such things worry them. Not when there were a hundred other things more deserving of their anxiety.

Then — as so often happened — some other affair pushed itself to the forefront of her attention. In fact, it was a constellation of distractions. Trouble from Nick Thale and the other Lind loyalists, pushing for concessions. Symbolist agitation in the Maw. Yet another round of troubling rumours concerning the death of Meredith Bagley — had it really been accidental, or had someone made that centrifuge motor turn while she was deep inside its gears? A coldness between her and Parry that resurfaced occasionally, when she would catch Parry looking at her as if she was someone he barely knew, let alone liked. It would pass — it always did — but during these intermissions in their relationship she would glide into a neurotic spiral of self-examination. Parry was good. Parry was honest. If he had a problem with her, then there had to be a reason for it. Maybe she had taken too tough a stance on some things. But it was never Parry who had to make the difficult decisions. He thought he knew what she was going through, what it was costing her, but really he had no idea. He facilitated her decisions, but Svetlana made them. She never caught Parry awake at three in the morning, his mind overheating like a sixty-year-old reactor with jammed control rods.

So she put the hammer blow to the back of her mind.

Eight days later she had cause to remember it again.

There were reports of alien activity. This in itself wasn’t anything unusual, and would not ordinarily have raised any flags. People had been seeing things on Janus for thirteen years. Out on the ice, on a lonely drive between outposts, it was easy to understand why. The believers saw luminous entities, alien forms that could equally well have been angels or ghosts, who arrived with reassuring messages from loved ones left behind. The more spaced-out aquatics tended to see whales or dolphins in alien form. The
Cosmic Avenger
fans saw humanoid aliens that conformed to the show’s stiflingly repetitive template for extraterrestrial intelligence. Now and then there was something weirder, but nothing that Svetlana considered evidence of a genuine external phenomenon. Granted, Janus could still surprise them — but nothing she had seen in thirteen years had convinced her that the former moon was anything other than an automated mechanism.

Indeed, the new reports were not of aliens per se, but of alien
things
. It was that difference that convinced her to look at them more seriously. All over Janus, from the Maw to Eddytown to the outskirts of Crabtree itself, normally reliable people were seeing things. Reports of sightings of swift, fleeting entities — machines, it appeared — with a fluid, glassy appearance. They came in fast, sniffed around something — a generator, battery or superconductor junction — and then left, vanishing into the night as quickly as they had come. So far, no active cam had captured more than a few smudges. Were it not for the number of witnesses, and the apparent reliability of their testimonies, Svetlana would have ignored the images. There was, of course, also the matter of the hammer blow. On more than one occasion, the visiting entities had appeared to originate from the same area.