Pushing Ice (56 page)

But something happened the next day — a lander malfunction, of all things — and she forgot to call Parry. More days slipped by, then weeks, and a succession of minor crises pushed their way onto her agenda. The Bagley case remained on the backburner, and it would be many years before it once again returned to the forefront of Bella’s attention.

By then, someone else had come back from the dead.

* * *

Mike Takahashi awoke to the sound of burbling water and tinkling wind chimes.

“Hello,” Bella said, with what she hoped was the right tone of soft reassurance. “It’s me, Mike — Bella. Everything’s okay.”

She remembered how it had been for her: a moment’s disorientation, and then everything had clicked cleanly into place. No grogginess, no sense of fumbling around for her own sense of identity, no difficulty with coherent thought or language or even seeing things clearly. It was not like waking up at all, but more like opening her eyes after a few moments of intense meditation. Except that those few moments of meditation had contained infinities of time and space, and mysteries she had not even begun to unpack.

Takahashi moved to sit up. Bella offered him a blanket to preserve his modesty.

“Where am I?” he asked, looking around. He sounded mildly perturbed, that was all. “I don’t remember this place.”

“I’m not sure what you do remember,” Bella said, “but let’s start at the beginning. Do you remember
Rockhopper
?”

“Yes,” he said immediately. “Of course I do.”

“And Janus?”

A moment of hesitation there, but it didn’t last long. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

“We were chasing after it — powering out of the system. Do you remember that?”

He looked at her and said, so quietly that she had to strain to hear him over the water, “Something went wrong. I remember something going wrong.”

“Yes,” she said, gladdened, because it was all going to be so much easier now. There was a problem with one of the mass drivers — it snapped off the spine and took another one with it on the way down. The ship held together, but there was a lot of superficial damage to the fuel tanks. We had to patch things up before we could continue to Janus at full thrust. You were part of the repair team, Mike.“

“Something happened,” he said. “Something bad.”

“Do you remember?”

She caught a flash of concern, as if he had, for a moment, remembered everything. But then he shook his head. “No. What happened? Why am I here?” He glanced down at himself. “I’m all right, aren’t I?”

“You’re more than all right,” Bella said, smiling.

The Fountainheads had put him back together, but they had not rejuvenated him to any significant degree. There had been no need: he had been a young and healthy man when the sprayrock took him.

“I still don’t remember what happened,” he said forlornly.

“You fell into sprayrock. You were trapped, your suit overheating. We couldn’t get you out of it. Parry did everything he could, but nothing worked. And time was running out.”

“Parry,” he said. “Is Parry okay?”

“Parry’s fine. You’ll see him soon.”

“What happened to me?”

Bella reached for his hand, closing her own around it. She had never had a son, but this, she thought, must be very much how it would feel to comfort a son during an emotional crisis. “We had to do something to you. There was a procedure that we could use to save you. It was called Frost Angel. Do you remember that?”

“No,” he said, but she caught the dilation of his eyes that told her that he did, on some level, remember all the salient details. They had never been sure how much of the experience of the accident would have had time to transfer to his long-term memory.

“Ryan Axford froze you. He had no choice. It was the right thing to do.”

“No,” Takahashi said, Bella feeling his distress welling up as the memories clotted back into place. “No. I didn’t want to die.”

“There was no choice,” she said. “We had to do it.”

Takahashi convulsed, the truth hitting him like a drug. “No! I didn’t die! This didn’t happen!”

“You died, Mike,” she said, as firmly as she thought he could handle. “But we brought you back. It’s all okay now.”

“No,” he said again, but he was slightly calmer now.

“You’re fine. Everything’s all right now.”

He shivered beneath the blanket. “Where am I?”

“In a ship,” Bella said.

He looked around, but there was nothing overtly alien about the revival area. Bella had even asked the aliens to tint the glass, and not to present themselves behind it. There was only so much Takahashi could take in at one time.

She wanted to make it as easy as she could. She’d always liked him, from the moment he rotated aboard
Rockhopper
. He was a solid EVA man, as dependable as any of them, but there was more to Mike Takahashi than his professional competence. There was a quiet modesty about him that she found attractive, a quality that she’d also cherished in Garrison. The two of them had the same way of laughing.

“After Janus,” he said, warily, “did we make it back okay?”

Bella smiled tightly. This part was never going to be easy. She nodded towards a small pile of clothes folded neatly on a dry rock like a miniature kiln. Most of Takahashi’s belongings had long since been recycled — there simply hadn’t been any choice in the dark days of the early occupation. But they had always kept a few things back, as a kind of assurance that he would one day return to them. The clothes were very old now, but they had been well cared for and their age was not obvious.

“Get dressed,” she said, “then I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”

Takahashi tightened the blanket around himself. “What happened to Janus?”

“We did,” Bella said, and then she helped him stand.

She told him what had happened, ladling out the truth in kind little measures, as she had always done for the people of Crabtree. At every opportunity she reassured him that he had nothing to fear, that everything was all right and that he had many, many friends who would be overjoyed to see him again. Takahashi said very little. Now and then he would repeat something that she had said, or ask her for some mild clarification on this matter or that, but in general he appeared emotionally disconnected from it all.

“Just like the Swiss Family Robinson,” she said, after she’d finished telling him about their arrival on Janus, and the early hardships they had overcome.

Takahashi didn’t laugh.

They were riding the express elevator to Underhole, racing down a glass tube lined with chrome-bright maglev induction rails. They had the entire compartment to themselves, save for the eternally vigilant security systems haunting every cubic millimetre of the car’s decor.

“But that all happened a long time ago,” Bella said. “We rode Janus all the way to Spica. Thirteen years, that took us. For most of that time, we were moving very close to the speed of light. Two hundred and sixty years passed in the outside world.”

Bella had dimmed the cabin lights so that they could see the view beyond the car. It was always dark under the Iron Sky. Underhole sprawled beneath them, a jewelled octopus of light, each of its arms tracing a different maglev line from somewhere else on Janus. Although the trains still arrived and departed from the same transit plaza, new developments continued to spill out along the tracks. The lines themselves curved out to the horizon in eight directions, glowing with blue filaments of embedded neon. At one time, the wastage of so much power would have appalled Bella. It was years since anyone had worried about a few lost kilowatts, though.

“You didn’t do all this in thirteen years,” Takahashi said.

“No,” Bella conceded, “it took a bit longer than that.”

“How long?”

“After thirteen years the aliens came.”

He nodded. He had needed to be told about the Fountainheads before anything else, although he hadn’t seen them yet. “How long ago was that?”

“Thirty-five years,” Bella said, “which makes this the forty-eighth year of the human occupation. We’ve been on Janus for almost half a century. There are nearly five hundred of us now.”

He looked at her wonderingly. “How old would that make you, Bella?”

“Too old to answer that question,” she said, not quite able to meet his gaze. “Actually, it would make me more than a hundred years old. Which is sometimes how old I feel.” She paused, anticipating his next question. “When I was eighty-eight — which was fifteen years ago — I went to the Fountainheads. They made me young again: set my body clock back to about the same age I was when we met Janus.”

“You don’t look much older now than you did then.”

Takahashi wasn’t the type to dole out insincere flattery. Plus she had mirrors. She knew how she looked. “I should look seventy, I suppose, but clearly I don’t. I look a little older than when I walked out of the Fountainheads’ ship fifteen years ago, but not by that much.” She held up her hand. “For the first time I can feel the arthritis coming back. If it hadn’t happened to me already, I doubt I’d recognise the signs.”

He studied her with unconcealed fascination. “My memory isn’t all there yet, Bella, but I remember that you were alone on the ship.”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“I’m guessing that’s changed after all these years, right?”

She answered sharply. “I’m still alone.”

“But it’s been…” He shook his head in amazement. “Wasn’t there anyone, Bella?”

She could have lied to him, and to herself, but Takahashi deserved better than that. “I tried to make it work with someone, once. He was a good man, one of the best in Crabtree. For a few months…”

He must have mistaken something in her voice. “What happened to him?”

“Nothing — he’s still around. We just couldn’t make it work.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s my fault. I drag too much of the past around with me.”

After a long silence, as the elevator slowed into the transit plaza in Underhole, with its concourse ramps and rows of boutiques and restaurants, Takahashi said, “Will they make you young again?”

“They had better,” Bella said. “There’s still work to do.”

* * *

Takahashi’s good progress continued. In the sixth week, Bella decided that it was safe to introduce him back into the colony. She chose to arrange a party in his honour.

It took place in Crabtree’s largest arboretum. It was evening. The ceiling lights had been turned down from their daytime glare and false stars sprinkled the strutted canopy. The largest trees had been strung with lines of paper lanterns in reds and golds and greens. Choral music floated from concealed speakers: Bella had chosen Arvo Part from the files because she had discovered one of the Estonian composer’s recordings amongst Takahashi’s personal belongings.

She had considered it vital not to exclude anyone from the party, and consequently almost every adult citizen who could make it was there. They circled and talked in the still, scented air of a midsummer night. Hovering lanterns followed little groups, offering them light until they were shooed away good-naturedly. BI robots maintained a discreet presence, only emerging from the darkness between the trees to offer drinks, sweetmeats and the occasional helping hand.

Bella was too nervous to fully enjoy the party herself, but as the evening wore on it gradually began to dawn on her that it was not going to be the abject failure she had feared. Takahashi was easy with the sudden flood of attention, moving comfortably from one group to the next, telling the same stories over and over again, laughing patiently at the same well-intentioned jokes. Now and then he would retire to a convenient tree stump for a few moments to himself, but whenever Bella talked to him he assured her that he was going to be fine, and that he was rather enjoying the whole affair. He was enchanted with the variety of costumes on parade: eighty years of fashion history that he had never lived through. Despite the collision of styles, the evening ambience and the soft light from the lanterns lent everything a subtle unity.

“How do you like the music?” Bella asked, as they sat together with only a hovering lantern between them. “We found your old helmet, looked through the access statistics in the file memory. You used to listen to this a lot.”

“It’s great. The main thing is that it isn’t Puccini.”

“Puccini?”

“I died while listening to
Turandot
. How many people can say that?”

Bella put a hand on his knee. “I know this isn’t all going to be easy for you, Mike, but you’ll get there in the end. You’re a miner.”

“Pushing ice,” he said, a touch too confidently to be convincing.

She noticed that he had been watching a young woman standing at the edge of a nearby group. Her luminous, neon-patterned gown scooped low on her back, revealing more than it hid. The lantern light played softly over her shoulders and the incurve of her spine. Bella tried to remember the woman’s name, but nothing came.

“You didn’t have to go to all this trouble just for me,” Takahashi said.

“I think we did.”

“Not that I don’t appreciate it, but… does everyone get this attention when they come back?”

“You were different,” Bella said, gently chiding. “We never expected to get you back. That made it worth celebrating.”

“You’ve all been through such hard times. I almost feel like a fraud… as if I’ve missed out on all the hard work.”

“You shouldn’t feel that way. In fact, I’ll make a point of being cross with you if I even suspect that’s how you feel.”

Takahashi accepted a BI’s offer to refill his wine glass. The glasses had been spun in the forge vats: miracles of crystalline delicacy, the stems braided from dozens of filaments of whisker-thin glass like the vapour trail of a corkscrewing fighter jet.

“When you brought me down from the ship,” he said, meaning the Fountainhead embassy, “you told me there had been a difference of opinion on
Rockhopper
, that it hadn’t been a unanimous decision to come here.”

“That was all a long time ago. No sense in going over old ground.”