Pushing Ice (31 page)

“I’m quite excited,” Parry said.

“I should warn you,” Ramos said, “it’s not actually that impressive.”

* * *

It was only when she stepped out of the tent that Svetlana had a real sense of the size of the chamber. She looked up, leaning back awkwardly, and made out the hole leading into the Maw, delineated less by its black epicentre than by the convergence of lava lines around it. It looked hopelessly far away: the eye of a needle in the sky they would have to thread to find their way back out.

“It’s this way,” Ramos said. “We’ll be using geckoflex, so I hope you’re all still in good shape.”

She led them away from the parked lander, out beyond the apron and along a trail marked with luminous paint. The route took them through narrow defiles between looming slabs of Spican machinery for two or three meandering kilometres. Gradually Svetlana noticed that they were climbing, ascending the curved side of the chamber. The effort involved was slight, and she had to keep forcing herself to maintain a level posture: it was all too easy to lean back until she was in danger of dreamily toppling over.

“The crazy thing is that we’ve been here so long without noticing this,” Ramos said.

“What tipped you off that there was movement?” Parry asked. Svetlana heard music coming over the voicelink, but she couldn’t tell what Parry was playing. Probably not
Turandot
, she thought. He didn’t play much Puccini these days.

“That was down to Jake and Chris,” Ramos said, referring to Gomberg and Ofria. “If they hadn’t been so keen to photograph and document all these symbols, we’d probably never have noticed.”

“I’ll see word gets back to them. At least their study hasn’t been a complete waste of time and flexy power.”

The going gradually became more difficult. Svetlana made increasing use of geckoflex, breathing more heavily and saying less. The curvature of the wall had steepened to forty-five degrees compared to their starting point, with the taller Spican structures looming at improbable, unsupported angles. Ramos pushed on eagerly, with a resilience that caused Svetlana to regret her earlier remark about the ground crew taking enough exercise.

They pushed cautiously through a thicket of black, bladelike formations — sharp enough to slice through suit material, Ramos warned — and there ahead was the object of their trek: the larger of the chamber’s two main spires.

The spire was a drawn-out cone, pushing three kilometres out into the middle of the chamber. The base of the cone where it met the wall was a hundred metres across, or so Svetlana judged — huge, anyway, and ringed with the now-familiar ranks of Spican symbols. The symbols climbed the cone until they merged into a twinkling, crimson haze. At the very tip of the structure was a spindly cruciform thing like a wrought-iron weather vane.

Nearly lost around the curve of the base, two more space-suited figures worked with equipment on tripods. They waved to the approaching group and then went back to their task.

Ramos led them to the base, slowing as her little party neared it. “I told you it wasn’t very impressive,” she said.

It wasn’t — not by the scale of the surface structures, some of which were five or six times larger than this little spire. But there was something staggering, something crucially different about this feature: it was moving. Not quickly; the rotation of the spire was achingly slow, difficult to perceive with the naked eye even at its base. That was why it had taken so long for anyone to notice: it was only by paying close attention to the symbols that the rotation had become apparent. To all but the most vigilant eye, the spire looked the same every day.

Svetlana knelt down at the point where the base met the floor. Symbols ran all the way down to the join. She pushed a finger to the base of the nearest icon, and held it there. “I can feel the motion,” she said.

“It’s about half a centimetre per second at the circumference,” Ramos said. “Obvious once you know it’s happening — but dead easy to miss otherwise.”

Sure enough, the iron grind of the spire’s rotation was just perceptible. But it wasn’t obvious, no matter what Ramos said. The featureless floor offered no easy reference points against which to judge the motion.

“You think we can use this?” Parry asked.

“With the right mechanism, we can try,” Ramos said stoutly.

“This thing’s rotating for a reason,” Svetlana said. “Janus might not like it if we mess around with it.”

“My theory is that Janus won’t even notice us. If it does… well, it’s not as if we’ll be skimming more than a tiny fraction of the power stored in this thing.” Ramos pointed to the other two space-suited figures. “They’ve glued metal plates to the base and used levers to measure the torque. Nothing we’ve done has made a measurable difference to the rotation rate. As far as we’re concerned, the torque is infinite.”

“And the interface coupling — you think we can make that work?”

“Nothing here’s ever a walk in the park, but we’ll make it work in the end.”

“How long do you need?”

“Two years, give or take. It’ll involve a lot of cargo flights, a lot of people down here.”

“Two years is too long,” Svetlana said. “Any chance we could halve that?”

“Halve it?” Ramos said incredulously. “Well,
that
might take some doing.”

“I want you to put together a plan for gearing this thing up within twelve months. I’ll give you all the fuel you need, all the robots, and twelve people — that’s the most we can possibly spare from topside.”

“Well…” Ramos hesitated, understandably fearful of committing to something she was not certain she could deliver. “I’m not even sure we have enough superconducting cable to reach down here.”

“We’ll have the forge vat online within six months. Priority one will be spinning out new cable.”

“Once you’ve dealt with all the other things on the list,” Ramos countered, unconvinced.

“We need this,” Svetlana said forcefully. “Sooner rather than later.”

“But the fuel crisis — that’s still a long way off, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Svetlana said quickly, trying to strike the right note of soothing reassurance, “but all the same — better safe than sorry, right?”

“We’ll do what we can,” Ramos said.

FOURTEEN

A sea of black ice flowed under the lander as it traversed the shelf. Parry dozed again, his head lolling against the window. Svetlana followed his lead and power-napped for ten dreamless minutes. When she came to, the lander was on final approach for Crabtree, Ungless making the same unforgiving economies with fuel. Svetlana thought about the easy promises she had given Ramos: all the fuel and machines she needed, and twelve strong workers. As if it was ever going to be that easy.

Lesson one on Janus: nothing was easy. The lander made a descending curve around the central tower that had once been
Rockhopper
. Nine hundred metres of the ship projected above the foundation well Parry and his team had punched into the Janus ice. They had buried the ship stern-down, with the engine, reactor assembly and fuel tanks completely underground. Just like plugging a mass driver into a comet, Denise Nadis had said. All that was visible now was the spine and the top-heavy bulge of the habitat section. Tether lines splayed out from the hab in four directions, anchored to the ice with sprayrock-embedded pitons beyond the loose perimeter of the surface community.

The ship was never going anywhere again. No one even
thought
of it as a ship any more.
Rockhopper
was just the central tower of Crabtree: its administrative core and power station. It was a resource to be stripped and remade for the good of the community.

Of the hundred and forty-one people on Janus, most now chose to dwell outside
Rockhopper
. Thirty domes spread away from the base of the ship, linked by underground tunnels and pressurised surface corridors. Ice had been lathered up over the sides of the domes to provide additional insulation, lending them the look of half-melted igloos. Most of the domes were just large enough for a single family-sized unit: three or four people at most.

The domes closest to the ship had been put down first: Parry’s EVA team had used them during the initial cometary operations. Those further out were improvised structures, lashed together using metals and composites scavenged from
Rockhopper
, with offcuts of parasol foil providing the basic pressure-containing envelope. Sprayrock was a quicker building medium, but like everything else it had to be used sparingly now. Between the domes lurked equipment modules, generators and storage shacks. A scattering of pale-yellow window lights hinted at human presence. Blackouts were enforced during long hours of each day. Svetlana would gladly have extended the duration of the power outages, but she was concerned about spreading panic.

The lander bumped to ground beyond the edge of Crabtree.

They disembarked and boarded a wire-wheeled tractor that had been waiting at the edge of the apron. Ungless took the tractor’s controls and drove it along a furrowed, slipshod road that cut between the tents and their snaking connections. Crabtree was still only a hamlet, but at times it felt as if it was poised to become something larger. If the deaths slowed and the births continued, then within ten years, by the time they arrived at Spica… But Svetlana closed the book on those thoughts. She did not hold out any hope that Janus could be slowed, let alone reversed, but unless their current fortunes improved, they could not count on surviving until they reached Spica either.

She kept having to remind herself that it was not October 2059. It was…
some other date
that she did not want to think about. 2059 was just a lie they told themselves to stay sane, to comfort themselves that they had not already drifted too far upstream ever to return home.

It was the one piece of advice Svetlana had accepted from
her
, before the exile. Honour the old calendar: make a day count as a day, even as their increasing speed squeezed time until it bled.

Two months after
Rockhopper
‘s entry into the Janus slipstream, the moon had reached a speed that was slower than light by only one-tenth of one per cent. Janus had stopped accelerating once it reached that speed, but it was still harrowingly fast. Relativity dictated that clocks ran twenty-two times slower on Janus than they did on Earth. Not just clocks, either, but every measurable physical and biological process.
Including time itself
.

In the hour that had passed since she had said goodbye to Ramos, nearly a full day had elapsed on Earth.

Janus had been at cruise speed for twenty-two months, as measured by
Rockhopper
time. On Earth, forty years had passed. It was somewhere near the closing years of the twenty-first century. If by some unlikely good fortune they were to succeed in turning around now, eighty years would have elapsed by the time they made it back home.

It would be nearly 2137.

Not everyone accepted this. With its antennae pointed back home, Crabtree was still intercepting radio signals originating from Earth. The messages were red-shifted towards ultra-long wavelengths, but information could still be gleaned from them. And according to the messages it was still only 2059. They heard news from families, loved ones, friends — but a little less with each week that passed.

The world they’d left behind spun on, half-familiar news stories still dominating the headlines. The same celebrities, the same scandals and tragedies. For a little while the plight of
Rockhopper
and its crew had even been one of those objects of global attention, until something quietly displaced it and they faded into the back pages. The messages were dangerous and comforting in equal measure. They told a lie, but only because they were bound to the same universal speed limit as Janus. Messages from 2097, or even 2137, would not catch up with Janus before it reached Spica. They would never learn the history of the world they had left behind.

Not until they turned for home — at which point they’d be flying headlong into that blizzard of information. The years would crash forward: eighty years of history crammed into the two years of their return flight even if they succeeded in turning around now. And if they did not begin their return journey until after Janus reached Spica, they would have to recapitulate five hundred and twenty years of history.

That was too much to take in, so they used the old calendar and pretended that every day that passed on Janus had the same measure as a day on Earth. It gave their lives some structure. They celebrated birthdays, holidays and festivals. They still talked of summer and winter, and made some effort to mark these seasonal changes in the way that the blackouts and brownouts were imposed on Crabtree’s electrical supply. Svetlana had done all that she could to make the last summer a little better, a little more tolerable, than the grim winter that had preceded it.

But now it was winter again and the fuel tanks were running perilously low.

Above the settlement, a huddle of blood-red stars crowded the zenith directly over Crabtree’s central tower. There were no stars at all anywhere else in the visible hemisphere of sky: they had been torn from their fixed positions by the iron hand of relativity. Most stars were red to begin with, so the Doppler effect only made them redder. On the bow side of Janus there was another, brighter huddle, where starlight had been shifted ferociously into the blue. It was as beautiful as it was lethal. Bracelet dosages went through the roof as blue-shifted cosmic rays sliced flesh and cell.

The electric tractor bumbled down an ice-walled ramp into one of the equipment bays dug out around the base of the downed ship. They disembarked, passed through another airlock and were helped out of their suits by a beaming Kunj Ramasesha. Like Ramos, Ramasesha had made the transition to Janus life with relatively little difficulty. The suit technicians — not just Ramasesha, but Ash Murray and Reka Bettendorf — were vital to the functioning of the new colony, and they revelled in their new sense of civic importance, guarding their expertise with the zealotry of a medieval guild.