Pushing Ice (47 page)

The glass airlock sphinctered shut between her and the chamber. Nothing happened to the space where she stood; she could still see the sled and its cargo through the glass.

Presently, they came.

At first they were vague shapes approaching from beyond the far wall of the chamber. They were huge, just as Craig Schrope had said, three metres tall and at least as wide across at the base. They moved in an odd way, unlike any form of animal locomotion she had ever witnessed. They were blue, mainly, a pure chromatic blue shot through with twinkling filaments of green and turquoise and sometimes a flash of bright ruby.

They crowded the glass to see what she had brought them, flattening themselves against the surface like children pressing their faces against a window. Slowly, so as not to alarm them, she unclipped her cam and shot some footage. If the aliens were aware of her, they gave no sign.

She could see them better now. Cylindrical in horizontal cross-section, they had no obvious front or back. What had looked like a solid form in the single frame Schrope had sent them was revealed to be a curtain of very fine fronds erupting from a central point and spraying down in all directions to brush against the floor. Not like mountains at all, but
fountains
. That was what Craig Schrope had said.

His description captured their essence in a single word: they looked like ornamental fountains spraying coloured water. They were constantly moving even when they stood still, the fronds rippling, flexing and interlacing like a nest of glittering snakes. They moved by flicking the fronds against the floor in a propulsive wave. Whenever a curtain of fronds parted, all she saw within were further layers of frondlike structure.

These, then, were the aliens — they were clearly not part of the ship. They were definitely not robots, not even alien robots: something about the way they moved, the way they squeezed against the glass, suggested living individuals rather than directed units.

A door opened in the chamber’s far side and one of the blue things oozed through the gap — the door looked far too narrow at first, but Svetlana had seen octopuses pull off similar tricks — and flowed down to the sled. Another alien followed it. She kept the cam trained on the pair as they flowed around the sled and then engulfed it completely. For a moment the two shapes were as one, as if conferring over the prize, then one of them disengaged, flowed back to the door and squeezed through. After some hesitation the other followed it. The sled and the Frost Angel had vanished.

“Take good care of him,” Svetlana whispered. She turned around and began to make her way back to Underhole.

TWENTY-ONE

Parry had the impression Bella had been waiting for him. The inside of the dome looked barer than before. Her meagre belongings had been neatly packed in storage crates, waiting to be moved through the airlock. Parry pretended not to notice. She prepared him tea, as usual.

“I’ve heard nothing from Crabtree,” she said, while the water was boiling.

“Svetlana’s tightened the blackout. Craig’s disappearance was one thing, but using Jim in this way, regardless of his wishes, is something else entirely. It was difficult enough for Axford to get the body out of the morgue without too many awkward questions from the medical staff.”

“I imagine he was discreet about it. But Svieta can’t keep up the blackout for ever — sooner or later they’ll have to know.” She spooned tea into the improvised strainer. “How long has it been now?”

“Three days, give or take.”

“And no change at all from the ship?”

“The symbols have quietened down again, fewer than there have ever been. It’s as if the penny’s finally dropped that we just don’t understand them. Although why they ever expected we
would
—”

“They didn’t expect,” Bella said. “They assumed. I’ve seen the pictures of that ship, and it doesn’t look particularly Spican to me. It’s sleek, glassy, curved. The Janus machinery is huge, monolithic and mainly black.”

“I don’t follow — how can it not be Spican? You’ve seen the symbols. Jake and Christine might not have found a precise match with any of the patterns we’ve mapped on Janus, but it’s clearly the same language.”

She poured him his tea. “The same language, I agree, but what other language would they show us? Not English or Chinese — they don’t know us that well, at least not yet. But suppose they do know a little about us: enough to guess that we’ve had time to crawl around Janus and study the Spican machinery. Suppose they’ve come into contact with Spican artefacts as well. Suppose they actually found the language easy to crack — so easy that they naturally assume we’ll have had no trouble with it either.”

“But we did have trouble. Lots of trouble.”

“I think they may have realised that by now,” Bella said ruefully.

“In which case — if they aren’t the Spicans —”

“I don’t know. And it could be that I’m totally wrong about all this. But I do have ideas. I’ve always had ideas.” Bella paused. “A long time ago, I told you that I thought we might be wrong about the Spicans.”

“I remember,” Parry said. “It was when I was taking you back to visit Jim for the last time.”

“Being out here on my own, with nothing to distract me… I’ve had a lot of time to think about things — Janus, mainly, and what it says about the creatures that made it.” She cocked her head, as if an idea had suddenly occurred to her. “We were very lucky, weren’t we?”

He’d lost her train of thought. “Lucky?”

“We found ourselves caught in the slipstream, bound to this thing like Ahab to his whale… ‘Beneath this smiling sky, above this unsounded sea’.”

“Bella,” he said, with a forgiving smile.

“Janus took us away from home, but it also kept us alive. We thought we were being so clever, the way we took power and materials from it for our own purposes.” She fixed him with that familiar intense gaze that had lost none of its power during her long years of exile. “But what if that was always the point? What if the Spicans expected us to make use of Janus? And to be amused by it, too. I think that was the point of it all, Parry. I think Janus was a puzzle designed to keep us alive and sane, like a cage at the zoo. You feed and water the animals, give them toys to play with and challenges to keep them alert.”

“We ended up on this thing by mistake,” he said. “The incident pit, remember?”

“The Charlie Foxtrot,” she said, nodding. “And yes, we did make mistakes. But an animal makes a mistake when it walks into a trap. Janus was our trap and our cage. It was designed to entice close study. It was designed to snatch us away, and then keep us alive for the journey.”

Parry’s voice came out paper-thin. “The journey to where, Bella?”

“Where else?” She flipped back the lid of her cup to take a sip of tea. “The zoo, of course.”

* * *

They had finished the tea, and the matter of the packed belongings could no longer be avoided. Bella pottered with a cheerfulness he hadn’t seen in her in thirteen years, washing the cups and tea-making equipment.

“It’s true what I told you,” she said over her shoulder, while Parry examined his helmet as if it were the most fascinating artefact in the world, entranced by every micrometeorite crater, every cosmic-ray scratch. “I’ve had a lot of time to think out here. Now at least I’ll be able to have some influence on policy, even if it’s only through the anonymous channel. I didn’t like the sound of that at first, but now that I’ve had time to sleep on it, I actually think it might be rather a good arrangement. Very democratic, very egalitarian. Difficult as it might be for you to believe, I actually have some sympathy with the Interim Authority. Svieta could have handled the Symbolists better, but that was never going to be an easy nut to crack.”

“She lied.”

Bella kept on pottering. “It’ll be good to be close to Crabtree, as well. I know I’ll still be living in an isolated dome, and that I won’t be able to make any unscheduled visits outside, but at least it won’t be so difficult for other people to come and visit me, even if it’s only more visits from Axford. But Ryan’s been kind to me over the years. Good man, Ryan — we could have done a lot worse than him.”

“She lied,” Parry said again.

Bella looked around. “I’m sorry?”

“She lied to you,” he said in a dead, deflated voice, still not looking up from his helmet. “Svetlana lied. You’re not getting what you thought you were promised.”

“No,” Bella said, with a kind of half-smile.

“Everything I said to you, I said in good faith. I meant every word.”

The smile was gone now, the truth hitting home. “No. She can’t do this.”

“She has. You had one thing she needed. Now she has it. You are of no further use to her.”

Bella’s voice dropped to a croak. “You can’t let her get away with this.”

“I’ve tried. She won’t listen.”

Bella sat down on one of the packed crates, all her sprightly enthusiasm gone. “It was stupid of me,” she said at last, as if chiding herself. “I took the risk of trusting her.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Parry said. He wanted to comfort her, but knew that nothing he could say would ease the pain of this betrayal.

“I trusted her.”

“You did the decent thing. You told us the thing that mattered.”

“I bargained, Parry. I thought I was getting something in return.”

“But you’d have told us anyway, in the end, even if I’d promised you nothing, because above all else you care about Crabtree. Crabtree and doing the right thing by Jim.”

“Parry,” she said quietly, “would you leave now? It was kind of you to come here in person — I know it can’t have been easy — but I would very much like to be on my own now.”

He followed the power line back to Crabtree and made his way to Svetlana’s office still wearing most of his suit. He had to pass through the centrifuge section, spun up for a gee, but had dropped most of his depleted-uranium ballast weights in the tractor before taking the elevator.

He used his key to open the office. It was dark: Svetlana was still in Underhole, as he had expected. He brought the lights up to their dimmest setting and moved to the familiar rectangle of the fish tank, bubbling quietly in the gloom. The fish had adapted easily to near-weightlessness, which was just as well given where he intended to take them now.

With the tank unplugged from power and water, Parry made sure the lid was dogged down against spillage. He set his helmet on top of the lid, for easy access when he reached the tractor. The tank was wide, but he could just about brace his gloved hands on either side without too much strain. With an involuntary grunt of effort, he tried lifting the thing.

On Earth, it would have weighed a tonne: there was easily a cubic metre of water in there, not to mention all the gravel and rocks on the base. On Janus, its effective weight should only have been a few kilograms, yet it didn’t budge when he tried to lift it. He tried again, unsuccessfully, then realised — stupidly — that the tank was fixed to its table with four dabs of geckoflex. He levered it loose one corner at a time and then suddenly it was free. It still had fearful inertia, but he was used to manhandling massive objects on Janus. Keeping it level, he walked awkwardly to the door.

That was when he saw Svetlana, watching him from the corridor in dim silhouette.

“I thought you were still in Underhole,” he said uneasily.

“So I see.” One hand rested on her suited hip, the other dangled her helmet. “What are you doing?”

He stopped, still holding the fish tank. “I’m doing the one thing that might let me get through this day with a shred of dignity. How about you?”

She pushed her helmet against a ribbon of geckoflex on the ceiling. “Put the tank back.”

“I’m taking it to Bella. We screwed her over the deal with Jim. The least we can do is give her something in return.”

“Put the tank back,” she repeated.

He took a step nearer the door. “No.”

“Put it down.”

“Get out of my way, Svieta.”

She closed on him and got her own gloved hands on the tank. Geckoflex adhered tightly to glass. She was stronger than he had been expecting — Svetlana had always taken the time to keep in shape, even during the hardships of the Iron Sky. But Parry was stronger — he had kept in shape as well, and he had better leverage on the tank than she did. They wrestled with it, neither able to gain any ground on the other. Parry’s helmet slid off the top and settled to the ground with featherlike slowness. Even though he had tightened the lid, water still found its way through the seal. It emerged in a silvery sheet, breaking up into pearly blobs as it drifted to the floor.

“Put it back,” Svetlana said, breathing heavily now. “She isn’t getting this.”

Between grunts of effort, Parry said, “It’s been thirteen fucking years. Hasn’t she paid enough, without being lied to, without being cheated?”

“Put… the tank…back.”

His grip slipped where the geckoflex patch on his right glove had been wearing thin. Svetlana took advantage, heaving the tank her way, trying to twist it from his grip. Parry scrabbled for another purchase with his free hand but ended up overcompensating for Svetlana’s twisting motion. The tank skidded from his hands. For a moment Svetlana had it, but while she could manage the tank’s weight easily enough, it still had a tonne of inertia. In that one fumbling instant it had picked up dangerous speed. It was like trying to catch a falling engine block.

The tank slipped from her grip. She tried to catch it, but it was already on its way to the ground, picking up momentum with every second it fell. The stiff articulation of the suits made it impossible for them to dive down and catch it. All they could do was watch as the tank rammed the floor like a rudder-locked supertanker. The glass held — it was space qualified, after all — but the lid popped free, allowing the remaining water to slurp out in a slow, sickly tidal wave, freighted with fish. “Oh, fuck,” Svetlana said.

The water oozed in all directions, surface tension pulling it into an amoeba-like shape that appeared to spread out with a vague sense of will. The startled fish flopped around in the shallows with uncomprehending goggle eyes, flapping their tails and gaping their mouths in existential crisis.