Pushing Ice (55 page)

Word returned that Nick Thale had spoken to Christine Ofria-Gomberg. At first, she had been reluctant to discuss anything that had happened during the last few days of the Barseghian regime, but Bella knew she would be open to persuasion with the right manipulation. Christine and her husband Jake were still deeply involved in their studies of the Spican language. The arrival of the Fountainheads hadn’t dented that particular enthusiasm at all, especially since the essential mystery remained intact. The Fountainheads might well have cracked the language themselves, but they were sharing none of that wisdom with the humans.

For twenty years, the Ofria-Gombergs had continued their private study, subjecting their data to increasingly sophisticated statistical tests in the hope of teasing out at least the existence of meaning. When a heavy nugget of lexical data was being subjected to a complex piece of analysis, the drag on the distributed system was visible. People’s clothes stalled and crashed under the processing load, and the normally seamless environment flickered with eye-wrenching patterns. There had been at least one instance of someone suffering an epileptic fit during a particularly protracted piece of number-crunching, and there was a nasty whiff of lawsuit in the wangwood-lined halls of the High Hab Court.

They could call it blackmail if they wanted, but all Bella was saying was that the Ofria-Gombergs’ continued utilisation of the system might be contingent upon their cooperation with the cube inquiry.

“I don’t know what you expect me to tell you,” Christine said, as they followed a meandering gravel path through the arboreta. It was twilight — the topside lights had been dimmed — and they had the place to themselves. Bella’s security had made sure of that.

“We found the cube,” Bella said. “It was buried beneath Underhole. It was only a matter of time, what with all the digging they’ve been doing there.”

Christine had never visited the Fountainheads, yet she seemed young beyond her years. Her hair was grey now, but she carried herself with the poised elegance of a much younger woman.
A good spine
, Bella thought idly.

Christine’s expressive face shifted from playful amusement to lofty disdain. “Where is it now?”

“Here in Crabtree,” Bella said. “I’ve got a team working on it. So far they haven’t come up with anything we didn’t know a month ago, but it’s still early days, I suppose.”

“What have they tried?”

“It’s you I want answers from, Christine.”

“I’m sure I won’t remember anything useful.”

“Tell me what you do remember, and I’ll be the judge of what’s useful.”

“It was just a cube.”

“Where did it come from? How did it end up in Underhole?” Bella waited a while, as they walked around half the perimeter of a little rock pool. She was prepared to be patient, but only up to a point. “Start giving me something, Christine, or I’ll have to seriously reconsider your allocation of algorithmic cycles in the next assessment round.”

“That’s your problem,” she said. “You only ever offer the stick.”

Bella’s shoes crunched pleasantly on the gravel. It was nice to walk under half a gee, the loading painless on her bones and joints. “All right, then,” she said slowly, as if it had only just occurred to her. “I’ll hold up a big orange carrot: tell me about the cube and I’ll offer you a place on the analysis team. I’m sure you have
something
to contribute.”

They had walked to the end of another line of caged and bound saplings by the time Christine spoke again. “It came from space. After the hole opened in the Sky, we sent probes out to examine our surroundings.”

“Free-fliers, yes,” Bella said, pleased that she was making progress. “That was when we had our first glimpse of the shaft surrounding us.”

“There was something else,” the other woman continued. “We got a radar echo off something very near. It vanished, then showed up again. It turned out to be something orbiting Janus. Svieta sent out another free-flier to snare it, pull it through the hole, down to Underhole.”

Bella thought about that for a few paces. “How long do you think it had been up there?”

“How should I know?”

“I was asking for your opinion, that’s all.”

Christine’s defensiveness cracked. She let out a quiet sigh, as if she had finally decided to stop being obstructive and there was a kind of relief in that. “All we had was guesswork. We know now that the Fountainheads drilled the hole, and that it was the Fountainheads that sent down the probes that people had started seeing.”

Bella nodded, remembering the spate of alien sightings that had led up to the discovery of the hole in the Sky. She had heard about that even in her place of exile. “So you think the Fountainheads put the cube into orbit around Janus?”

“That’s one possibility,” Christine said.

“But not the only one.”

“If you’ve seen that cube, you know it doesn’t look like anything else we’ve encountered. It isn’t Spican. It isn’t Fountainhead.”

Bella thought about the Musk Dogs. Since her return to Crabtree she had mentioned McKinley’s warning to no one. “Could another species have dropped it off?”

“I suppose so. We know that the endcap door opens now and again. The Year of the Iron Sky lasted for four hundred days. For all we know we completed our slowdown in one day and spent the next three hundred and ninety-nine days sitting inside the shaft, waiting for someone to let us out.”

“Are you suggesting that the Fountainheads might not have been the first aliens to reach us?”

“I think that’s a possibility we should consider.” She paused, one foot lingering in the air. “Anyway, there’s another problem. If you’ve seen the cube, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

Bella stopped, too. “The da Vinci engraving, you mean.”

“It’s a human message, Bella. It was meant for us.”

“Which rules out the Fountainheads,” Bella said. “If they’d recognised us as human from the outset, they’d have cut to the chase and used a language we spoke from the get-go. They didn’t start talking to us until after we sent Craig and Jim inside.
Then
the penny dropped, but not before.”

“Maybe there’s someone else out there.”

“The Fountainheads have never pretended that there aren’t other aliens in the Structure,” Bella said.

“Some of those aliens could be human. That’s definitely a human symbol, Bella. How else did it get here, if humans didn’t bring it?”

“The Fountainheads brought human data with them,” Bella pointed out. “That means they made contact with another branch of humanity. If it happened once, there’s no reason why another alien culture couldn’t have met another branch.”

“It’s a pretty cryptic calling card, though.”

“That’s why I’d like to know more about it.” Bella walked on a little further, considering her options. Above, an owl swooped under the ghostly support spars of the arboretum.

“I’ve told you all I know.”

“What about the others?”

“I don’t think you’ll get anything more out of them — including Svieta. We answered to her, that’s all. She wasn’t running her own independent investigations.”

“I believe you,” Bella said, “and I’d like to offer you that position on the analysis team. Are you interested? It’ll take time away from your language studies, but I’m sure your husband can take up the slack.”

“Especially if you let us have that computer time we need,” Christine said quickly, before Bella changed her mind.

“Of course. That was the deal.”

After a moment, the other woman said, “Aren’t you worried that I’ll report back to Svetlana, tell her that you’ve found the cube?”

“She already knows it exists, and given that she’s well aware of the Underhole project, she must have known that there’d be a good chance of us uncovering it one of these days.”

“I suppose so.” Christine sounded less sure of herself.

“Then it doesn’t matter. Tell her, or don’t tell her. I don’t care.” Bella looked at the other woman, wishing there was some way to convince her of her sincerity. “It’s up to you.”

“You trust me?”

“I’m not interested in keeping secrets from Svieta. It’s been twenty years, Christine. It’s time to move on. I don’t hate her for what she did — she had her reasons, I suppose. To be honest, I barely think of her at all these days.” She paused. “And yes, I do trust you. The question is: do you trust me?”

“Sometimes.”

Bella smiled. “That’s exactly the right attitude: trust your leaders, but be careful not to trust them
too
much.”

They walked out of the woods, saying nothing, moving in silence except for the honest crunch of gravel under their shoes.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Bella was not ungrateful for the rejuvenation that the Fountainheads had bestowed upon her, but even alien science had its limits. The days tore by as quickly as they ever had. Faster, perhaps, now that the metronomic tick of sleep had returned to her world, its nagging beat a constant reminder that there was always more to be done; never enough hours in the day; never enough days in the year. No one could honestly say that they felt immortal. No one had returned to the Fountainheads for a second rejuvenation, and while Bella had little doubt that the aliens would oblige if asked, it was unclear whether the process could be repeated indefinitely.

And sudden, violent death was still as much of a problem as it had ever been. What might once have felt like an acceptable risk to an eighty-eight-year-old woman now struck her as the utmost foolishness, when so much was at stake. She dreaded any business that required her to fly, even though there had only been one fatal lander accident in the last thirty-three years. In the new climate of forgiveness and reconciliation, there had never been less risk of assassination from Barseghian loyalists or other rogue elements. Yet still she spent hours tightening her security arrangements, as if every crowd concealed a knifeman, sniper or toxicologist.

Months passed, and her new body began to feel comfortably familiar again, to the point where it required an effort of will to remind herself of its novelty. She buried herself in her work, pushed the limits of endurance. But despite early progress in several areas, soon all avenues of investigation came to dead ends.

The black cube remained stubbornly enigmatic. Even the gleaming new tools of pre-Cutoff science could only scratch the surface of its mystery, and they’d learned depressingly little more than had been gleaned by Svetlana’s first fumbling probings. The best working hypothesis was still that it was some kind of massively advanced replicating technology, endlessly self-repairing, running on a substrate far finer than the atomic granularity of the Chinese nanotech in the forge vats. Nuclear-scale femtotech, perhaps, or even some kind of replicating machinery cobbled together from the basic structural units of space-time. Working with such materials would, Nick Thale had told her, be akin to trying to build a functioning lathe out of wet spaghetti.

Such difficulties clearly hadn’t daunted the cube’s creators.

She still had no better idea who they had been. Nothing in the pre-Cutoff history files hinted at any human faction with the means to make something like the cube, and even if that had been possible, there was still the awkward question of how they had placed it into orbit around Janus.

Never mind what they had intended by that.

Now and then Bella went along to the research lab where Ofria-Gomberg and the others were studying the cube. It was a white room, sunk deep in a bunker. Caged between sensors, the cube stood out like an offcut of sculpted granite in an upmarket gallery.

Something about the cube still touched an ominous chord in her, as if it was trying to pull her in, whispering something to her hindbrain. She could only compare the feeling to the dark allure of dockside water, that seductive force that compelled people to fall in.

She did not want to fall into the black cube. She was afraid of what it would show her.

The ongoing inquiry into the death of Meredith Bagley had also ground to a halt after a promising start. Bella was still convinced that she had identified the three perpetrators, but had lost faith that the suit-repair log was enough of a smoking gun to convince a tribunal of their involvement. Hartk Dussen was out of reach, but she still intended to bring the two surviving men to justice. Morbidly it occurred to her that if either of the two suspects showed any sign of dying before the investigation had run its course, she would have to pull strings to get them bounced up the queue for rejuvenation.

But the case still demanded more evidence. The repair log alone wouldn’t clinch it; the only thing that would really persuade a sceptical tribunal would be the missing EVA log files showing who had really been on duty during that fatal shift. It was generally accepted that the logs had been lost accidentally, corrupted or deleted in the flexy die-off. But perhaps that was just too convenient. What if the logs had been deleted to protect the killers? Any one of the three men would have had reason to do that, but Bella could not be sure that any of them would have had the means. But someone had been in charge of managing those log files. Perhaps Parry could help her: he’d at least know whether it was feasible for an involved party to have tampered with the logs.

She made a mental note to contact him. She brightened at the prospect, wondering why it had taken her so long to think of him again. It had always been good to talk to Parry. He had been kind to her during her years of exile, often at the cost of his relationship with Svetlana. Things had obviously changed during the last twenty years, but in their rare meetings, Bella had never sensed any enmity or coolness on Parry’s side. He appeared to recognise that it was not Bella that had deposed Svetlana, but the return of Jim Chisholm. And, of course, Bella had been lenient with Svetlana and her allies. None of
them
had ended up in exile at the end of a superconducting line with only ice and silence for company. She might have marginalised them, stripped them of real power, but she had not treated them unfairly. Even her worst critics could never accuse her of indulging in tit-for-tat, and Parry had never been her worst critic.