Pushing Ice (36 page)

“He won’t respond,” Axford warned in a low voice.

Bella lowered herself onto one knee to face Schrope on his level. He was staring at the floor. His eyes betrayed no sign of having noticed her presence.

“Craig, listen to me. This is not how it has to be.”

“Bella…” Axford purred.

She reached out and touched Schrope’s pyjama-covered knee.

“Something bad happened to us all,” she said. “You were caught up in something you never wanted to be a part of. It’s been hard for you ever since, Craig. Probably harder than it’s been for any of us. I can’t begin to imagine what you are going through but we still need you back.”

Axford stepped from the door and placed a hand on Bella’s shoulder.

“I should run your medical, Bella.”

She ignored him, reaching up to place one hand under Schrope’s clean-shaven chin. She tried to tilt his head so that she could look into his eyes. He was as stiff as a corpse.

“I said something bad to you once, Craig. You know what it was. I said sorry… but that wasn’t enough. I want to say it again now. I want you to know that you’re still a good man. You can still come back to us.”

His head moved the tiniest of degrees under the pressure of her hand. He did not look at her. She let go and stood up.

* * *

Axford worked efficiently: bloodwork, bone density, radiation dosimetry. Aside from the calcium depletion due to her permanent exposure to low gravity, Bella was healthy enough. She had an exercise cycle in the dome and she made a point of using it, even on the bad days. She might take her own life out there, but she was not going to let Janus do it for her.

She hated the moon and gave it no quarter.

When they were done, Axford sat her down in a quiet annexe and told her about Jim Chisholm.

“I give him a week, maybe two, of lucidity. The glioblastoma is interfering with normal brain function, squeezing some structures and infiltrating others. It’s also competing with them for blood and nutrients. He has elevated arterial and venous hypoxia: his brain’s literally being starved by the blastoma. Metabolic end-products are upsetting normal neurochemistry. For the last six months I’ve been seeing clear focal deficits.”

“Deficits in what?” she asked.

Axford ticked off fingers. “Language, comprehension, spatial tasks — none of them, are as good as they used to be. Seizures are getting worse — anticonvulsants can only do so much.” Axford pushed himself up in his seat and tried to look bright. “Today’s a good day, though. Jim knows it, I know it. That’s why Parry came out for you.”

“So that I could say goodbye to Jim?”

“That’s part of it, I guess.”

“I’m surprised Svieta allowed it.”

“Jim wanted to speak to you. That wasn’t the kind of request she could turn down.”

“That must have stuck in her craw.”

“She always liked and respected Jim. She couldn’t have lived with herself if she said no.”

“That’s all there is to this? Jim just wanting to see me one last time?”

“That’s between you and Jim,” Axford said.

* * *

Since
Rockhopper
had been grounded on Janus, Axford had expanded his medical complex, incorporating some of the surrounding rooms. Bella supposed he had more patients on his hands these days: not just the children and the pregnant women but all the people who were falling ill with things that would otherwise have been fixed once they returned to Earth. He had set aside an entire room for Jim Chisholm, furnished with plants and pictures. The room was clean but careworn: there were chips missing from the green tiles on the walls and ceiling, smudges of ineradicable colour on the floor.

One wall was sewn with iridophores, dappled with dead patches like leaf mould. A ShipNet portal was open, flanked on either side by some kind of X-ray or PET image of a human skull in lateral section, with its bones and tissue and liquid secrets traced in pale-blue monochrome, overlaid with white text and digits. She made out the tumour, lurking in one side of his brain like a weather system in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a third bigger than the last time she had seen an image of it, and angrier, somehow.

As they entered, Gayle Simmons was leaning over the figure on the bed, adjusting a fawn-coloured medical cuff. It sat like an oversized bangle around Chisholm’s stick-thin wrist.

“I’ll give you as much time as you need,” Axford said, “but don’t tire him out. You don’t have to leave Crabtree immediately — I can always invent some tests I need to run on you.”

“Thanks,” Bella said, and she squeezed his hand in gratitude.

Simmons stepped away from the bed as she approached. Bella noticed that she had something around her neck: a collection of plastic shapes in primary colours, threaded together on a nylon line. She whispered something to Axford and then the two of them left the room, leaving Bella alone with their patient.

It looked at first as if Chisholm was comatose or absent, unaware of her presence. He stared dead ahead, his attention fixed on a spot on the ceiling. She moved to his side and was about to speak when he moved his head by the tiniest of degrees.

“Bella,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

“Least I could do.”

He fumbled for the half-moon glasses strung around his neck on an elastic cord. “Have they been treating you well?” She wondered how much he knew. She considered mentioning her visit to Schrope, but decided against it. It was not as if there had been any communication between them.

“I’ve only seen Parry and Ryan. They’ve never treated me with anything other than kindness.”

“That’s good.” He nodded — an effort that must have been Herculean, given his situation. “Parry and Ryan: good people. We need more like them.”

“I think we have a lot of good people,” Bella said. “The fact that this place even exists, that they’ve managed to make it work —”

“It’s an achievement,” Chisholm said. “Did they tell you about the work in the Maw?”

“I’d have liked to have been a part of it,” Bella said. “I’m as much of a burden on this colony as anyone else. She keeps me boxed away like an old pair of shoes she doesn’t want to see again.”

“I’ve pointed out the value of bringing you back into the fold. You wouldn’t need any formal position of power — just making you an advisor would be an improvement. But she won’t listen.”

“We need union — now more than ever.”

“That’s what I’ve told her. What’s worse is that I think even she sees it. She may be proud, but she was never stupid.”

“No,” Bella agreed ruefully. “Never that.”

Chisholm stared at the ceiling for a long time, as if lost in the mosaic of its chipped and discoloured tiles. “I still believe you matter to us,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to see you. I guess Ryan told you that I don’t have much time left. For a long while I only had headaches, a sense of pressure behind my eyes. Now I feel different… as if I’m moving into another room, another place. I have the oddest flashes of memory, the strangest dreams… sometimes when I’m wide awake. Everything feels vivid to me now. I can look at one of those tiles and see infinity in it. I’ve always loved Mingus, but now I hear things in that music I never dreamed of before. There was a sea there before, but now it’s an ocean: deep, mysterious, wonderful. I could swim in Mingus for eternity.“

Bella looked at the brain images. “Seeing that up there helps? Or was that for my benefit?”

“No, I wouldn’t do that to you. I like to see it.” He must have observed something in her face, some twitch of unguarded revulsion. “It’s
my
dragon, Bella. I have a right to know its face.”

“Of course,” she said, chastened.

“It’s going to kill me. Ryan says soon… weeks. They’ll freeze me before that — I’ve already given my consent. I’ll become a Frost Angel, just like Mike Takahashi. When the seizures become unmanageable, I’ll let him put me under.”

Bella nodded. It was all she could do.

“You don’t think it’ll make any difference,” Chisholm said. “You’re probably right: dead is dead, whether they freeze you or turn you into ash.”

“Don’t talk like that,” she said. “If Ryan freezes you, then maybe we can fix you when we get back home.”

“Home doesn’t even exist now. It’s the future, Bella, no matter what our calendar tells us. We might be better off riding this thing to the end of the line.”

“And when we get there?”

Chisholm closed his eyes and spoke very softly. “There’s something I need to tell you, Bella — it’s the reason I dragged you all this way.”

“What is it?” she asked, intrigued.

His lips formed a teasing smile. “No one else will hear this from me — not even Ryan. Definitely not Svieta. I’m telling you because it will give you something she doesn’t have.”

“Why?” Bella breathed.

“Because one day she’ll have to come to you for it. One day you’ll have something
she
needs, and that will give you leverage.”

“How will either of us know when that day comes?”

“You’ll know,” Chisholm said, still with that smile. “Trust me, you’ll know.”

* * *

A tiny spark moved away from the puddle of light that was Crabtree into the great darkness that surrounded the township. From her vantage point in the highest level of the High Hab — above the centrifuge, so that the view from her window remained fixed — Svetlana watched the tractor bob into the distance, dwindling and dimming until it disappeared beyond the limit of visibility. Only then did she allow herself to feel anything resembling calm.

For the last six hours she had been in a state of wired tension, burning with the knowledge that
she
had entered her little empire again, and that she had no choice but to condone that return from exile, however temporary it might have been. She had sent Parry out to collect her because Parry was close to her and could be trusted not to talk. The involvement of Axford and the other medical staff could not be helped: she would just have to rely on their discretion. But no one else was to know that the exile had walked in Crabtree again, or that she had been granted an audience with the dying Chisholm.

“It’s a kind of torture for her,” Axford said, standing behind Svetlana and a little to the right so that she saw his reflection in the window, flexy tucked under his scrub-sleeved arm. Behind Axford, dimmed so that it did not spoil the view, the wall showed a real-time feed from the Maw: the monstrous cogs and dynamos of the transmission system, threshing in the glare of multiple floodlights. Figures stood amidst a tangle of thigh-thick power lines, dwarfed by the clockwork mechanism. There was no shortage of energy down there, even if it was still difficult to convey it back to Crabtree.

“I asked you for an update on her medical fitness, not a commentary on her punishment.”

“It was meant to be exile, not punishment,” Axford said sharply. “I know. I was there when we took the decision on how to deal with her.”

Svetlana turned angrily from the window and stood with her hands resting on either side of the swollen curve of her belly. Wang had grown her new clothes for the pregnancy, austere of cut. “Are you saying she should live in luxury while we starve and shiver?”

“I’m saying you should understand what you are doing to her. If you want to torture her, there are cheaper ways to do it. We could ship her back to Crabtree unseen, just as we did today, find a nice little cell and lock her in it, with no access to the outside world. Frankly, that would make a lot more sense from where I’m standing.”

“Fuck you, Ryan.”

“If you’re at all unhappy with my reading of the situation, you’re welcome to dismiss me.”

He was the only man on Janus who could criticise her openly and not lose a wink of sleep over the consequences. She hated and prized him for that. He was her conscience.

“I gave her a flexy. I gave her books.”

“The flexy died a year ago.”

“We can’t spare any more now.”

“Not now. A year ago… maybe we could have. But you turned my request down.”

“She’s lucky we didn’t execute her the way we executed Herrick and Chanticler. Do you really think what she did is any less of a crime?”

“In my darkest moments, no,” Axford conceded, “but generally I don’t allow myself to be ruled by my darkest moments.”

“It’s easy for you. All you do is set bones and deliver babies. I have to hold this place together. She has to pay and be seen to pay.”

“She’s paying,” Axford said quietly. Svetlana looked back to the horizon, but there was no sign of the tractor now. She pulled the blinds, screening out the darkness. Sometimes it seemed to lap at her thoughts, probing them for points of weakness. She thought of Parry somewhere out there, and wanted him back.

“If there’s something…” she said, falteringly, “something that would keep her… intact.”

If Axford felt a moment of triumph, nothing showed. “There are measures I could recommend. I’ll make a note of them, submit them for your approval.”

Svetlana brooded over her answer for what felt like hours, even to her. Perhaps she imagined the kick in her belly, as the girl turned in her sleep. “All right. But she’s still an
exile
, Ryan. We never forget that.”

“No,” he said.

“One other thing — you escorted her to Jim. Did you hang around while she was there?”

“Absolutely not. I left them alone.”

“Then you have no idea what they talked about?”

“I’m a doctor,” Axford said, affronted, “not a spy.”

SIXTEEN

The cliff soared far above, reaching over Svetlana in a dizzy overhang laced with ominous fissures. The calving of chunks of ice had slowed since the early days of Janus’s departure, but large breakaways still happened occasionally. The odds against a calving event happening while they were under the overhang were comfortably low, but Svetlana still could not rid herself of a knot of disquiet.

She looked back, making sure that Parry and Nick were not too far behind her. They had trudged fifty metres north from the squatting form of the parked lander to the fiery ribbon of the lava line. It boiled orange, searing through the ice like a path of burning gasoline.