Pushing Ice (57 page)

“I heard you brought
Rockhopper
here — that it was your decision not to try to return home.”

“What do you think you would have done?”

Takahashi looked through his glass at the attractive woman. “At the time, I doubt that I’d have gone along with it, but in retrospect I think you did the right thing. You’d never have made it back. DeepShaft and the UEE would never have put together a rescue plan.”

“Hindsight is a wonderful thing. It’s just a pity not everyone saw it that way at the time.”

“Svetlana put you in prison. She punished you for saving us.”

Bella felt a tightness in her throat. She hardly ever talked about her exile now, or the spite that had caused it. “Svieta had her reasons,” she said, savouring the pious little thrill that came with magnanimity. “Had I listened to her, we would probably never have made it into the slipstream in the first place.”

“You had equally compelling reasons not to do as she asked.”

“Yes,” Bella said, “but it was still a mistake. I hope I redeemed myself later, but…” She trailed off: to say anything more in her defence would have been distasteful.

“It cost you your friendship with Svieta,” Takahashi said.

“We used to see things similarly. I considered her a good friend.” She paused, watching the orbiting groups of party-goers. “But friendships are always difficult to maintain across lines of rank, even in a civilian organisation. It was a wonder ours lasted as long as it did.” She shrugged, trying to make out that it was no great thing to her any more.

“How long has it been since you last spoke to her?”

Bella smiled: it was not a difficult question. “We haven’t exchanged a word since
Rockhopper
landed on Janus.”

He shook his head in appalled fascination. “That’s as long as I’ve been dead.”

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose it is.”

“It isn’t right, Bella.”

She felt, then, the first hint of irritation with him. What business did he have coming back from the dead and lecturing her? But she fought to keep it from her voice. “Mike, it was not because I didn’t try. I wasn’t asking for our friendship back. I wasn’t even asking for her to talk to me, or send a letter. I just wanted her to offer me one tiny shred of human dignity: the smallest acknowledgement that I could be something other than the force for evil she obviously considered me. But nothing came.”

“Do you think she hates you?”

“All I know is that when an intense friendship ends, this is often what happens.”

Takahashi swirled his wine. “I don’t think men have those kinds of friendships — I mean, not unless they’re lovers. I’ve never had such an intense friendship with another man. One guy, I crewed with him for eight years — helped him suit-up, ran EVA shifts with him, got drunk with him — and yet all that time went by before I even found out he was married.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Knowing that stuff about each other wasn’t even on our interpersonal radar. And yet we were as good a pair of EVA buddies as I’ve ever known.”

“What was his name?”

“Can’t remember.”

They sat in silence for several minutes, alone with their thoughts. Bella smoked a cigarette — it was the first she’d allowed herself in weeks. Groups of partygoers mingled in the lantern light, faces aglow with the pleasant intoxication of good drink on a glamorous evening. Just a glimpse of this evening would have sustained her through the darkest days of her exile.

Takahashi pointed to a sandy-haired boy standing with a party of adults. “Who’s the kid?”

“Axford.”

Takahashi frowned. “Axford had a kid?”

“No,” Bella said patiently, “the kid
is
Axford. He had the full reset the last time he went up.”

“You trust a kid to look after you now?”

“The kid still has Axford’s memories and adult experience. He thinks like a man, just happens to look like a little boy. Axford told me he’d put off going Skyside for so long that he didn’t want to have to go back for many, many years.” Mischievously, Bella added, “Besides, he says his hands can slip into surgical openings they could never fit through before.”

“Did they… you know, fix him?” Bella feigned puzzlement. “Fix him, Mike? In what way?”

“Axford was gay.”

“Axford is still gay, as far as I know. I don’t think he saw it as something that particularly needed fixing.”

“Okay,” Takahashi said, shrugging.

“He’s still Axford, Mike. He’s just more efficiently packaged. You’ll get used to it in the end. When I look at him now I hardly remember what the old Axford used to look like.”

One group dispersed, and in the sudden opening of a sight line she saw Svetlana, standing twenty or thirty paces away, her back to Bella, talking to Parry Boyce and a young couple she couldn’t name.

She experienced no shock at seeing Svetlana — she had been invited (or, rather, had not been deliberately excluded) and there had always been an excellent chance that she would attend. Takahashi’s return was as much part of her world as Bella’s, after all.

But Bella still felt uncomfortable to see her. This was the closest they had been in nearly fifty years. They were in the same room at last, even if it was the huge enclosure of the arboretum. Had they wished, they could have called out to each other.

“You saw her as well,” Takahashi said in a low, conspiratorial voice.

“I’m not surprised. I never exiled her. I never forbade her from setting foot in Crabtree.”

“Are the two of you going to say anything to each other?”

“I think we’ve said all that needs to be said.”

Svetlana started to look back over her shoulder, as if she had become aware of Bella’s guarded scrutiny. In profile she looked older than Bella remembered, even allowing for the flattering effect of the lantern light, but not fifty years older. Svetlana had visited the Fountainheads at least once, as had Parry. Like Bella, the clothes she wore were of antique cut — loose denim jeans, cowboy boots, a T-shirt and a brown leather jacket slung over one shoulder. Her red hair was cut spikily short, catching the lantern light.

There was a moment when they might have been close to making eye contact, when another group of celebrants blocked her view. A tumbling acrobat — Bella couldn’t tell if it was a person or a BI android — flung itself head over heels, its wrists and ankles spitting golden fire. When the tumbler had passed, Svetlana’s party had moved on.

Takahashi looked up as something huge rumbled towards them along a wide tree-lined avenue. “Hey, is that —”

“Yes,” Bella said, glad that the awkward moment had passed. “It’s McKinley. I hoped he’d accept the invitation.”

The Fountainhead had arrived in a four-metre-wide transparent sphere containing no visible instruments or life-support systems. Muscular waves of his tractor fronds propelled it forward. Bella shuddered to think of the pressure and gravitational forces trapped behind that glass.

McKinley must have seen her. He — she had come to think of him as male — rolled to a halt before her, before forming a high-resolution cross-weave.

“Hi,” she said, aware of how ludicrously banal the greeting was given the circumstances.

McKinley tipped himself forward in the Fountainhead approximation of a nod. “Hi yourself. And hello to Mike, as well.” The voice was louder and more human in texture than she remembered, but perhaps that had something to do with the acoustic amplification of the mobility sphere.

“Hi,” Takahashi said, raising a hand.

The alien turned the cross-weave towards him. “It’s good to see you up and about.”

“It’s good to
be
up and about,” Takahashi said. “Don’t let anyone tell you differently — being dead is no party.”

“No walk in the woods,” McKinley said, unravelling the cross-weave.

Takahashi smiled. “Nor that.”

“Everyone looks very happy to have you back,” the alien said. “You must have been very popular in your time.”

“I’ll try not to blow it this time around.” Takahashi stood up decisively from the stump, glass in hand. “I’m going to mingle for a while. You two stay and chat, and I’ll hook up with you later, okay?”

“Okey-dokey,” McKinley said.

Takahashi patted the glass sphere. “And no talking about me behind my back.”

Bella watched him stroll into the night until he was absorbed into a gaggle of well-wishers. As much as she enjoyed his presence, she was quietly glad that Takahashi had decided to leave her alone with McKinley.

“They’re happy for Mike,” the alien observed. “He was lucky to have someone like you in charge.”

“We owed it to him.”

“You’d be surprised how many species don’t take such a charitable view of their weaker members,” McKinley said, with an idle flick of his tractor fronds.

“I knew you were buttering me up for something,” she said. “That was, incidentally, a very nice segue to the main topic — which I take it has something to do with another species?”

“You’re a shrewd woman, Bella Lind.” McKinley made a weird twisting motion that she had not observed amongst his usual repertoire of gestures. It was almost, Bella thought, as if he was checking over his shoulder for eavesdroppers. He lowered his voice until she had to lean forward to hear him above the choral music. “That matter we discussed a little while ago… prior to your rejuvenation?”

“A little while? That was fifteen years ago, McKinley.”

The human perception of different units of time was still problematic for the Fountainheads. Through their conversations, Bella had come to suspect that the Fountainheads measured time in terms of the density of events, rather than the number of elapsed units of some specific interval. To Fountainheads, a hundred years in which nothing much happened was less time than an event-filled minute.

“But you know what I’m talking about,” McKinley said.

A BI stalked over, anxious to charge her glass. Bella waved the robot away. “The Musk Dogs, I imagine.”

“I am glad that you remember. They’ve been showing renewed interest in this region of the Structure. We think their arrival is now imminent.”

“The last time we talked about this, you defined ‘imminent’ as anything ranging from years to decades. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of narrowing it down a bit?”

“Now I would be inclined to talk in months. You should be ready for them.”

“Perhaps we are. You said it would be bad if we were in a state of social fragmentation, remember? Well, maybe we were then, but we’ve never been more unified than we are now. Just take a look at this party. There’s a representative of every faction on Janus here tonight, and so far I haven’t seen any fights breaking out.”

“It’s certainly encouraging.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“When they come, they will find the tiniest rift and open it wide. They will make blood enemies of cool rivals; rivals of the best of friends.”

Bella shook her head, exasperated. “Being factional is part of what we are.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” the alien said, with a gloomy note she couldn’t miss. “Things are better now, at least. Perhaps that will make enough of a difference.”

“If the Musk Dogs are so bad, why don’t you just make them go away?”

“We can dissuade them, but only if you ask it of us.”

“What does ‘dissuade’ mean?”

“It means we would emphasize the exclusive nature of the beneficial trading relationship we’ve established with your people. If Musk Dogs see no potential for undermining that mutually productive state of affairs, they will probably leave.” The Fountainhead paused, and added darkly, “Sooner or later another vulnerable species will arrive. They always do, even if the intervals grow longer.”

“So we’re just another vulnerable species?” she asked.

“You have your weaknesses, but like most newcomers, you also have something immensely valuable to those of us already here.”

“The world we rode in on.”

“You’re making quite a home of it.”

“We’re making
do
, McKinley. That doesn’t mean we plan to spend the rest of eternity here.”

His fronds swished thoughtfully. “It’s good to have plans.”

Just as he said that, Bella became aware of a presence behind her. She glanced around and saw Mike Takahashi, wine glass in hand. Next to Takahashi, standing a little further back, was Svetlana.

“Mike —” Bella started, ready to protest at his interference.

Takahashi blocked her with his palm. “If a recently dead man is to be allowed one concession, let it be this. I’m sorry about the feud, or the falling out, or the political schism, or whatever you want to call it. I’m even sorrier that two former friends can’t even say ‘hello’ to each other when they’re in the same room. Well, it’s time to do something about that, before it puts too much of a dampener on the evening.”

“This was a bad idea,” Svetlana said, not looking at Bella.

“I agree,” Bella said. She was blushing intensely, even though she had drunk little all evening. “Mike, I know you mean well but this isn’t just some playground spat you can put right with a sprinkling of fairy dust and some good intentions.” Takahashi sipped from his glass. “Fine. But just out of interest, how long were you two planning on holding this grudge? Another fifty years? A century? Or will you just be getting started then?”

“There is no grudge,” Bella said. She was uncomfortably aware of McKinley taking all this in.

Takahashi turned to Svetlana. “I spoke to Bella earlier this evening. She admitted that you had your reasons for taking over the ship. She made a mistake, a bad one, in not listening to you. She doesn’t deny that.”

“A mistake is still a mistake,” Svetlana said, her lips barely moving.

“Which she freely acknowledges. But given that she made that mistake — given the situation
Rockhopper
was then in — can you honestly deny that she did the right thing by forcing the ship back to Janus?”

“That doesn’t make amends,” Svetlana said.

Takahashi held up his hand again. “There’s more you need to hear, Svieta. When I spoke to Bella earlier she was… how shall I put this? Not without praise for the way you ran Crabtree?”

He looked to Bella for confirmation. She blushed again, for this — as Takahashi surely knew — was an outright lie. And yet, in private, in the most grudging of tones, she might have admitted as much.