Pushing Ice (62 page)

“You couldn’t see us any more.”

“No. The envelope was too dark, too absorbent.”

Bella supposed that she meant the Iron Sky. “But you must have had some idea where we were headed.”

“We had a rough idea. We extrapolated and located a counterpart to the Spica Structure two thousand light-years beyond Spica. Another booster, we presumed, or a course-adjustment element. We knew you’d probably reach it in two thousand years, but beyond that we had no means of tracking you, or estimating your subsequent time-dilation factor. You were too dark, too fast. We lost you.”

“But you found us again,” Bella said.

“We never forgot about you,” Chromis said. “The Janus anomaly changed history. The existence theorem says that it is always much easier to find a solution when you can be confident that one exists. Within a hundred years of your departure, there had been cataclysmic breakthroughs in fundamental physics. Janus taught us to look for loopholes in theories that had looked watertight for decades. Eventually, we had our own frameshift drive. It wasn’t as efficient as the Janus motor, and probably didn’t employ anything like the same principles, but it sufficed. Eighteen thousand years of expansion, Bella, at velocities very close to light speed. Frameshift made us a glorious human empire. The Congress of the Lindblad Ring is just one of the larger political entities in the great dominion of human space. I represent a small cluster of likeminded systems — about a hundred and thirty worlds — bound together by long-established trade routes and a common democratic framework — what you might call a state, or constituency, within the Congress. There are hundreds of such constituencies, some of them very alien in their modes of society. Anyway, as I said — you were never really forgotten. We found your self-sacrifice inspirational.”

“Our self-sacrifice?”

“Even when it became clear that you could not escape Janus, you kept sending data back home. But then you always promised as much.”

“I did?”

“The interview, Bella.” Chromis said it with a peculiar reverence. “You must remember.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

Chromis’s voice shifted, mimicking Bella’s own. “I’m Bella Lind, and you’re watching CNN.”

Bella blinked. “CNN. You just said CNN.”

“The interview was repeated many times during the years after you left, Bella. It became a touchstone for a kind of bravery, the noblest kind of selflessness. Children were taught to learn it, like a prayer or declaration of patriotic intent.”

“I’m having trouble dealing with this.”

“The Janus data changed history. It accelerated a hundred different scientific disciplines, revealed connections no one had ever suspected before. Our knowledge of mass-energy, mass and inertia became logically complete. It gave us the stars, and for that we’re enormously grateful. But at the same time it was always taken for granted that your ultimate destination — your ultimate
destiny —
must remain unknown. The boosters were shuttling you into the future, out of our reach.” Chromis smiled primly. “Then we had a modest idea. It was approaching the ten thousandth year since the first settlement of the first world in the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. There were many competing ideas for the best way to commemorate this anniversary. My people sent me to table a proposal to the delegates on New Far Florence, and after a degree of persuasion it was accepted. We would commemorate the founding by sending a message to the Benefactor.”

“The Benefactor being me, I suppose?”

“Now perhaps you begin to see the importance you assumed to us. It would be a message of thanks, of course, but also a message that might be useful to the Benefactor and her people, wherever they might find themselves. I am, self-evidently, that message. As the instigator of the project, my personality was encoded into the memorial cube you must have found.”

“How did it reach us?” Bella asked. “How far did it travel to get here?”

“I can’t tell. We made vast numbers of cubes. Short of being dropped into a star, there isn’t much that can harm them. We were thinking long term, extreme deep time.” Chromis anticipated Bella’s next question. “We scattered them to the four winds. Dispersed them throughout the galaxy via automated probes. Dropped them into orbit around a hundred million dead worlds. Cast them into intergalactic space, on trajectories that would eventually bring them into the gravitational influence of every major galaxy, satellite galaxy or globular cluster in the local group. We launched some of them far beyond the local group, towards the great galactic superclusters, halfway to the edge of the visible universe. They’ll take a while to get there, of course. We even fired some of them into naked black holes, in the hope that their information would be encoded and released in the immeasurably distant future, when the black holes surrender their parcels of entropy back to the universe. We continued making them for four thousand years. Of course, we never
really
expected success — it was just a gesture, the decent thing to do.”

“But you succeeded,” Bella said. “One of them found me.”

“Yes, it did, but there’s no telling where or when. All I know is that this cube — the copy that this personality was dropped into — was one of the last to be launched. By then, the memorial project had already been under way for nearly four thousand years, and in all that time, no contact had ever been claimed.” Chromis meshed her fingers nervously. “We can presume that you travelled a great distance, or we would have heard from you before the last cube was launched.”

“But you can’t tell me how far I’ve come.”

“The cube only knows its subjective history. It has no record of how much objective time passed before you touched it. It may have been picked up and discarded a hundred times, like a lucky coin. Even so, it
was
a long journey.”

“Tell me everything up to that point,” Bella said.

“In time,” Chromis answered. “All in good time.”

THIRY-TWO

Chromis disappeared, but Bella knew she had not seen the last of her. Afterwards, feeling a restfulness that she had not experienced since touching the memorial cube, she told Axford all that she remembered of the conversation — Axford interrupting here and there to probe for more details, which Bella was sometimes able to supply and sometimes not.

“I believed her,” Bella said. “Absolutely, implicitly. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

“She might have been manipulating you to achieve that effect.”

“What does it matter? She’s gone and I still believe it now. It has the ring of truth, Ryan. It explains a lot. The Iron Sky, for instance: it must have been a shield to protect us against the effects of super-relativistic velocity. Janus put it up as we were approaching the booster.”

“I don’t like it. It’s one thing to accept that you’ve fallen a few hundred years down the rabbit hole. How are people going to adjust to the fact that we’ve actually come eighteen thousand years?”

“More than that,” Bella reminded him. “That’s only the length of time that had passed when Chromis made her recording. There’s no telling how many more years passed before we picked up the cube.”

“You might want to consider sugaring the medicine here, Bella.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of that.”

“I don’t, as a rule.”

“But this would be one of the exceptions.”

“Perhaps. While we’re at it, incidentally, for every answer Chromis gave you, she threw up at least as many questions. If we’re not in the Spica Structure, where are we? We’ve already established that we’re inside something that matches the size of one of the spars.“

“I didn’t get an answer on that,” Bella said, with a creeping feeling of inadequacy.

“Here’s another thing: Chromis told you about a human civilisation spanning hundreds and thousands of worlds, spread across thousands of light-years — right?”

“Yes,” Bella said.

“And she dropped hints that they’d looked deep in the galaxy, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” Axford said, “remind me: when exactly did she mention the Fountainheads?”

* * *

The ordinary business of the High Hab rolled on with its own oblivious momentum.

Parry returned to Crabtree and surrendered himself to Bella and the Judicial Apparatus. He was detained in a secure room close to the court, with an excellent view over Crabtree. The room was clean and comfortable, but still had the air of a place of detention or psychiatric internment. The soft-surfaced walls had the profoundly dead look that told Bella they were not flickering with subliminal data patterns. There was a bed and a bedside table and a tray containing a half-eaten meal. Parry sat on the bed, seemingly unfazed by whatever might happen to him.

“Hello,” he said, standing up to meet her.

She motioned him to remain seated. “Are you all right?”

“They’re treating me very well.”

Bella didn’t doubt it. Parry had friends everywhere, and hardly any enemies. “I’ve some news for you,” she said. “The preliminary hearing’s set for tomorrow. You’ll be required to be there, but other than that you won’t have to do or say much.”

“Mm.” He scratched under his cap. “Other than state my guilt.”

“Yes,” Bella said. “If you still want to do that, of course. There’s nothing to stop you pleading not guilty.”

“Except I’ve never claimed that I didn’t do it. It’s the extenuating circumstances I’m interested in.”

“As I said, I’m sure a solid case can be made for that.”

“But not a watertight one.”

Bella remembered something she had been meaning to ask. “Parry, you’re a bright man. You have a lot of contacts, a lot of friends with good skills. When you knew I was closing in on whoever tampered with the log files, didn’t it ever occur to you to hide your trail? I’m sure you could have concealed the concealment, especially now, after all these years. I doubt it would have taxed you.”

“You’re probably right,” he said, “and maybe it did occur to me — for about five minutes.”

“So why didn’t you do it?”

“A couple of reasons, Bella. Firstly, it would have involved dragging more people into this shit, and I didn’t want to do that. This is my mess, no one else’s. Secondly, when I did what I did, I always knew it might come back and bite me one day. And I always promised myself that I’d stand up and take the punishment when that happened.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “And I’m glad I was right about it. I want you to know that whatever happens here, whatever the tribunal decides, I’ve never doubted your intentions, not for a second. And I never will.”

“Thank you,” Parry said.

* * *

During one visitation, Bella asked Chromis for a demonstration of her physical capabilities.

Chromis smiled patiently. “I have no physical capabilities, Bella. I’m just a ghost in your head. I can’t move a feather. I can’t even make you move a feather for me.”

“You know I mean the cube.”

“Ah,” Chromis said, as if the cube had been the last thing on her mind. “That.”

Bella walked on through the ice-lined tunnel under Crabtree. She had been on her way to the nursery, to talk to a class of babbling five year olds. “You told me that the cube is more than just a message. You said it might be useful to me.”

“It could also be very lethal. Now that I’ve learned a little more about the state of affairs here on Janus, I’m inclined to take the cautious line.”

“I’ll tell you what we think we know,” Bella said. “The cube is two hundred tonnes of replicating material squeezed into eight cubic metres. It’s not nanotech, since we can analyse that, but something as far beyond nanotech as nanotech is beyond clockwork.”

“Continue,” Chromis said, as if this was all just a mildly diverting parlour game they’d elected to play on a rainy afternoon.

“Some of that stuff must provide something to run on, and some of it presumably enables the cube to keep repairing itself, but I doubt it needs all two hundred tonnes just for that.”

“That would be excessive.”

“So what does the rest of it do?”

Chromis hesitated before answering. “Many things.”

“No shit. Really.”

“There isn’t much it can’t do, truth be told.”

“I suspected as much. Why are you quite so reluctant to discuss this, Chromis?”

“You would be, in my shoes.”

“If you meant for me to find the cube, why is there such a problem with telling me what it does?”

“Mm. The problem is —” Chromis made a frustrated face. “The problem is, we sent out the cubes with the best of intentions, but we were not hugely confident that any of them would find you.”

“So you said.”

“But we assumed that if by some great good fortune one of the cubes did find you, then it would more than likely be after a considerable period of time had elapsed.”

“A lot of time
has
passed,” Bella said impatiently.

“But not by your reckoning. How many years has it been, Bella, since you encountered Janus? A few decades, that’s all. That’s nothing compared to the eighteen thousand years between your time and mine.”

“It still feels like a long time to us.”

From their conversations, Bella had pieced together a coherent picture of Chromis’s world and history, and how it connected to her own. Somewhere around 2136, various lines of development had collided. What had once been servile Borderline Intelligences had jumped the tracks into genuine sentience. The luminously clever engines of Trangressive Intelligence had been much too clever, much too willing to oblige.

In an instant, humanity had found itself in possession of tools powerful enough to remake entire worlds, but equally capable of shattering them to dust. There was no war
as such
, but there were dreadful accidents, regrettable misunderstandings and hugely disproportionate retaliations. Around the edge of the system, those powers not embroiled in the transformation had looked on with something between horror and awe. The Thai expansion was less an attempt to establish a human presence beyond the solar system than a desperate effort to outrace that whirlwind of change.