Pushing Ice (61 page)

“You saw the Spica Structure,” the Fountainhead pointed out.

“Yes. One alien artefact around one star system, in one direction of the sky, two hundred and sixty light-years away. Made, incidentally, by beings we’ve still not seen. Where are they, McKinley? Where are the Spicans, after all this time?”

Jim Chisholm clapped his hands. “Okay, maybe we should wrap things up here.”

“I’m not done,” Bella said.

“Yes you are, Bella,” Chisholm said, with a sudden and uncharacteristic firmness. “You’ve said your piece. You’ve expressed reasonable concerns. McKinley, in turn, has made clear his reservations about revealing everything you’d like to know. You must respect that, as well. Would an adult answer every question a child asked? Of course not. It would be damaging.”

“Maybe I should have started with you,” she said sourly, “as you obviously see things from such a lofty perspective.”

“You’d have learned nothing from me you haven’t already learned from McKinley.”

“The difference is I can always tell when a man is lying. Even
you
, Jim.”

He looked at her with something like pity, shot through with love and compassion. “If I did lie to you, Bella, do you honestly imagine I wouldn’t have your best interests at heart?”

“I have a right to know the truth.”

“So do the citizens of Crabtree and greater Janus,” he countered. “Have you told Gabriela Ramos what happened to Old Buenos Aires? Have you told Mike Pasqualucci about the monster his son became?”

“That’s not the same thing,” Bella said, brimming with her own wounded self-righteousness. “You can’t say that’s the same thing!”

“It’s all the same,” Jim Chisholm said. He moved to turn his back on her, like a teacher let down by a promising pupil. “Call me when you’ve calmed down, Bella. Then perhaps we can make some progress.”

THIRTY-ONE

Bella stormed into the bunker, cycling through the many layers of security. Martin Hinks was on duty, supervising the scanning run. The cube turned within a loom of analysis instruments. Hinks — who had been born ten years into the Fountainhead era — jolted awake at Bella’s entry and tried to plaster on some vague simulacrum of alertness.

“Go back to sleep, Martin,” Bella said reassuringly. “It’s all right.”

“Madam —” he began.

But Bella had already crossed the red line on the floor. An alarm sounded, warning her that she was in danger of impairing the scanning run. Bella shoved aside the robotic scanners, toppling one of them on its spindly tripod. The fragile equipment crunched to the floor. Hinks redoubled his protests. Bella ignored him.

She reached out and touched one bare hand against the smooth black side of the cube. If asked, she could not have said exactly why she was doing this. All she knew was that the compulsion to touch the cube was now overwhelmingly strong, as if her entire life had been a vector aimed at this one moment. As if she had been born to touch the cube, and the cube had been born to embrace her touch.

The moving surface was iron cold. Nothing happened. Her fingers tingled, but that was all.

Bella pulled back, confused. Nothing had happened.

She flexed her fingers: the old stiffness was creeping back in with each year, like an invisible glove that was beginning to harden in place.

The alarm still blared. She looked back at Martin Hinks, expecting him to be angry that she had ruined the experiment, but instead he just looked embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” Bella said. “I shouldn’t have… I just wanted to know what it felt like.”

“It’s all right, madam.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

Hinks left his desk and moved to the fallen machine, gently tipping it back into place. The white casing was badly dented where it had hit the floor and Bella wondered idly whether it would ever work again. If they had not turned up the gravity in Crabtree, all would have been well.

“It’s okay,” Hinks said. “I’ve touched it. We’ve all touched it. It’s just something you have to do.”

“Did I mess things up?”

She caught the hesitation in his voice before he answered. Yes, she had. “No, no. We’d only just started this run. It won’t take long to restart it.”

“I’ve damaged the equipment.”

“It’s fixable. It’ll still work fine.”

The cube revolved again and she saw the icy smudge where her fingertips had transferred a micro-layer of grease and dead skin to the artefact’s perfect black surface. She felt ashamed. “I’m sorry, Martin. I’ve ruined things. That was indefensible.”

Hinks helped her to a vacant stool, pushed back from one of the science consoles. “Can I bring you something to drink, perhaps, Madam Lind?”

“I’m fine,” she said, but even as she said it she realised that she did not quite feel fine. She flexed her hand again — the fingertips were still tingling, as if the blood was just returning to them. She looked at the cube again. It was still turning, still oozing from one form to another, but the compulsion to touch it had disappeared. Her mind felt as clear as the dawn sky.

Too clear, in fact. Like a blackboard that had just been scrubbed.

“Martin,” she said calmly, “you need to do something for me. Call Ryan Axford, or whoever’s still on duty in the Hab, and tell them they need to come and fetch me. Tell them I think the cube has injected something into me. And tell them to hurry.”

* * *

She slept, woke, slept again. Axford was always there, frowning over a hard-copy read-out, tapping keypad instructions into some reassuringly antique item of medical hardware, whispering quietly to one of the other medics. Visitors came and went, through the quiet hours of the early morning and into the day shift. Bella watched the wall clock lurch forward in spasms, then appear to stall for subjective hours. In fever, she knew, the processes of the mind ran at an accelerated rate, distorting the perception of time. Something like that was happening to her now, as the cube’s machines spun havoc through her skull.

It was clear now that the cube had pushed something into her: its mass had decreased by half a gram since she touched it.

The day lulled into afternoon. Shifts changed, but Axford was always present. Once, when she came around and saw him looking askance at some display, she saw a weary old man packed into the shape of a boy.

Afternoon bled into evening. Nurses came and gave her something to drink — it might have been to slake her thirst, or to provide some isotopic tracer for the scans. They never offered her food, but she wasn’t hungry. Now and then they fiddled with the lacy imaging coronet Axford had positioned over her hair, or nipped blood from her thumb, or ran some other inscrutable test whose function she couldn’t guess.

Later, in the small hours, she had another visitor.

She felt more than usually alert. Normally she heard the hissing of the medical centre’s security doors, the exchange of words between visitor and duty staff, hushed confidences about her state of mind. There had been none of that this time.

The visitor was simply there, standing by her bed.

She was a woman, dressed in white. Bella saw only her face and hands. The rest of the woman’s head was concealed under a kind of flat-topped wimple of the same electric-white fabric as the rest of her gown. Her hands emerged from subtle folds, joined as if in prayer. Her skin was dark, her racial background otherwise indeterminate: Nordic bone structure, perhaps, or even Inuit? She was beautiful and severe, but there was a kindness and a wisdom in her face that touched Bella on some basal level of total trust.

“Hello, Bella,” the woman said. “You can see me now, can’t you?”

Bella found the energy to call out, “Ryan. Please.”

She had not even been sure that Axford was still there, but he came, bustling over with a concern that cut through any fatigue he must have been feeling.

“What is it?”

“I’m hallucinating,” Bella said calmly. “I’m hallucinating a woman dressed in white, standing immediately to your right.”

Axford looked guardedly to his side. “I’m not seeing anything, Bella.”

“She’s there. Solid as daylight. Looking at me.”

“Bella,” the woman said, with a searing empathy, “there’s no cause for alarm.”

Axford adjusted the imaging coronet. He snapped glasses from his pocket and placed them on his nose. They were ridiculously oversized for a child. “There’s a lot of activity in your occipitoparietal area, and in the auditory cortex,” he said, tapping a finger into midair to enlarge some detail of the scan.

“I think the machines must be there. I think they’re making me hallucinate.”

“Describe the woman,” Axford said.

“She’s tall. Black. Dressed all in white. Like a nun —” Bella scowled at her own imprecision. “But she’s
not
a nun. This isn’t some stock religious imagery my mind’s conjuring up during a moment of crisis.”

The woman looked on sympathetically, head tilted to one side, waiting for Bella to finish.

“Do you recognise her?”

“I can’t see much of her, just her face. I’m not experiencing any heavy jolts of déjà vu.”

“Bella, listen to me,” the woman said, with infinite patience, infinite serenity. “You don’t know me. You’ve never met me. It would have been difficult: I lived and died a long time after you left us.”

“She’s talking to me, Ryan.”

Axford pulled the ungainly glasses from his nub of a nose. “Perhaps you’d best listen, in that case.”

“Bella, the short form of my name is Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird, but you can call me Chromis — the whole thing
is
a bit of a mouthful.”

“Hello, Chromis,” Bella said, feeling awkward as Axford looked on, yet compelled to acknowledge the woman’s presence. “You can understand me… right?”

“Completely,” Chromis said, with a smile.

“Do you mind if I ask who you are, and what you’re doing in my head?”

“Not at all — it would be rude of me not to explain myself, after all. Well, to begin with… let’s just say that I’m a politician of quite some seniority — what you might call a senator, or a member of parliament. The political body I serve is — or was at the last census, at least — a grouping of worlds encompassing fifteen thousand settled solar systems, spread across a volume of space more than four thousand light-years in diameter.”

Chromis extended a hand, showing Bella a ring she wore on her right index finger. It was embossed with an interlocking geometric design that squirmed and shifted somehow before Bella’s eyes, teasing her with hints of dizzying complexity. “This is the seal of the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. That’s the name of the political administration I serve.”

“You’re a message from after the Cutoff,” Bella said.

“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘the Cutoff’, but I can tell you this much. You left Earth’s system in 2057, by your calendar. The exact date at which I’m recording this image is unimportant, suffice it to say that it’s more than eighteen thousand years since your departure.”

Bella shook her head. “No. We’ve only come two hundred and sixty light-years. A lot of time has passed, but… it’s only hundreds, not thousands of years.”

Chromis looked at her with that searing clemency. “There’s no mistake, Bella. We know what happened to you at Spica. We know what happened during your passage through the Spica Structure.”

“We didn’t pass through anything,” Bella said, all the while knowing that it was pointless and infantile to argue with the woman’s godlike wisdom. “We reached the Structure and now we’re in it.”

“You are somewhere,” Chromis said, “but it is definitely not within the Spica Structure.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because we destroyed it.” The woman looked rueful: it was the first glimpse of human fallibility Bella had seen in that gravely imperious face. “It was not intentional. We were studying it, trying to understand the principles underlying its function.”

“When?” Bella asked. “When did you destroy it?”

“Seventeen thousand years ago, by my calendar — around the early thirty-third century, by yours. And when I say ‘we’ destroyed it, I don’t mean any extant powers affiliated to the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. I’m simply referring to envoys of the human species — people from much nearer your own time.”

Bella’s mind reeled, but she didn’t have the slightest doubt that Chromis was speaking the truth. “This is a lot to take in.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.”

“When you say we passed through —”

“For two hundred and sixty years, you were under way to the Spica binary at ninety-nine point nine per cent of the speed of light. You experienced a time dilation factor of twenty-two, which compressed that two hundred and sixty years of flight into twelve years of subjective time, as measured by your clocks.”

“It was thirteen years,” Bella said.

“No. If thirteen years did indeed pass before your arrival here, it was because it took you twelve years to reach Spica, plus another year to reach somewhere else.”

“I still don’t —”

Chromis interrupted her gently. “The Spica Structure was a booster, Bella. Its purpose was to accelerate you even closer to the speed of light. A time-dilation factor of twenty-two, while high, was still insufficient for the long journey you eventually had to make.” Chromis’s serene face showed strain, as if imparting this information caused her genuine discomfort. “To adapt an analogy from your own era, Bella, the first two hundred and sixty light-years of your flight — that first twelve years of subjective time — was simply the process of taxiing to the runway. The Spica Structure was the runway. Your journey had not really
begun
until then.”

Bella wanted to deny it, but the woman’s conviction left no room for doubt. Chromis was telling the truth. “So where did we go?” she asked.

Chromis looked abashed. “We can’t be sure, even now. By the time you passed through the Structure, the nearest follow-on probes were still a hundred light-years behind you. Their observations were made from a great distance. They detected faint signals from your free-flier probes: enough to measure the change in your velocity as you completed your transit through the Structure. But by the time you emerged, those signals had been lost.”