Pushing Ice (46 page)

“Well?” she asked.

“Bella’s ready to talk. Jim told her something that might help us. She’ll reveal it if we make concessions.”

“I’m not negotiating. Get it out of her.”

“Svieta —”

“We’re halfway through screwing up the most historic event in human history, Parry. I am not in the mood to bargain. Tell her that if she doesn’t talk we’ll start taking stuff away.”

“She’ll clam up. You know Bella.” There was a resentful silence at the other end of the line. Svetlana must have known he was right. The two women were too alike in temperament. “What’s she asking for?” Svetlana asked after a few moments. “A return to Crabtree.”

“No fucking way.”

“Listen to me,” Parry said. “Give her one of the outlying domes. It doesn’t have to be in the hab. She’ll still be a prisoner.”

Again there was silence. It stretched for twenty or thirty seconds, while Parry imagined Svetlana’s anguished thought processes.

“Just Crabtree, she said? No other requests?”

“She’d like to play more of a role in Crabtree affairs.”

“No.”

Parry thought of Bella waiting on the other side of the lock, wondering what was going on. “There’s a way,” he said. “We already have a private channel for anonymous policy suggestions.”

She sounded surprised. “Do we?”

“Yes. Just because you never look at it.”

“But you do.”

“I skim the suggestions now and then. Sometimes there’s good stuff in them. When there is, I occasionally let it influence my thinking. Bella’s locked out of that channel now, but it wouldn’t cost us much to let her have her say. Anonymously, of course. She’d just be one voice amongst many.”

“Does this run on ShipNet?”

“It used to. Lately we’ve had to go back to paper notes dropped into sealed boxes, but it still works.”

“I know her handwriting.”

“It doesn’t matter — you never read the damned things anyway. I don’t know her handwriting, so what difference will it make?”

“All right,” Svetlana said, with a world-weary sigh. “Offer her this much: an outlying dome at Crabtree — surface access via airlock only. No one visits her without a suit. And she doesn’t get one.”

“I’ll see if that flies. And the other thing?”

“She can use the suggestion box. She’ll be allowed a limited ration of paper. I don’t want her flooding the fucking thing.”

“Generosity’s a lovely thing.”

He opened the inner door of the airlock and returned inside, unlatching his helmet at the same time.

Bella shot him a knowing look. “I can tell that went smoothly.”

Parry sat down opposite her. “You’ve got your deal. You’ll be moved to Crabtree, into one of the perimeter domes. No tunnel access. No suit.”

“Continue,” Bella said, giving nothing away.

“You get to submit policy suggestions through an anonymous channel. I’ll read and screen them, not Svieta. Anything I think has wheels, she gets to hear. None of us will ever know who originated the suggestion.”

“Very democratic of you.”

“You’ll be part of Crabtree life again. You can build on that.”

“Perhaps,” she said doubtfully. “Everything that you’ve just offered me… I can trust you to deliver, can’t I?”

“Of course,” Parry said.

“It’s always been good to be able to talk to you,” Bella said. “It was a relief knowing not everyone hated me. There was always Axford, but you had every reason to turn against me. You didn’t. I’ve appreciated that more than you’ll ever know.”

“You’ve always had my respect. Nothing’s ever changed that.”

“Then perhaps we had better talk about Jim Chisholm.”

* * *

Svetlana watched Parry cross the ground to
Star Crusader
, observed by another figure looking out of the dome. Parry passed out of view into the lander’s airlock, and for a moment Svetlana felt as if Bella was looking at her, and she looking at Bella, even though they were too far away to see each other’s eyes. Somehow that didn’t matter, though. The human mind was so attuned to the importance of gaze that it could just
tell
.

There was a moment of electric connection, like an emotional short circuit, before Svetlana flinched and looked away.

Parry cycled through the airlock. She met him on the other side and helped him out of the suit, fingers urgent against the catches. Her fingertips felt raw, the nails chewed to the quick.

“Did she bite?”

“She bit. Took some persuading, but she went for it in the end. I don’t think she was all that excited about being transferred to another isolated dome. Being able to post suggestions, though — that mattered a lot to her.”

“Whatever she needed to hear,” Svetlana said.

“It wasn’t about what she needed to hear,” Parry replied. “It was about what we were comfortable offering.”

Parry followed her into the lander’s passenger lounge, with its scuffed decor and worn seats. Svetlana called Denise and told her they could return to Underhole. When
Crusader
was aloft, she said, “Now tell me what this is all about.”

Parry took off his red cap and rubbed a hand through his greying hair. “It’s about what Jim told her in Crabtree. About his plans for what would happen when they came.”

“They,” she echoed flatly.

“The aliens he always guessed we’d meet. He figured that when we got to Spica, something like this was bound to happen. He knew he’d be dead by then, too.” Parry paused, making sure he had her attention. Of course he did. “Dead but frozen.”

“One of Ryan’s Frost Angels.”

He nodded solemnly. “Jim knew he was going to die, and he didn’t think we had much hope of ever making it back to Earth. But aliens? He thought we had every chance of meeting them. After all, Janus was taking us somewhere. Pretty good bet there would be aliens at the end of the line.”

“He was right,” Svetlana said, thinking back to Schrope’s cryptic final words in the alien ship. “What does that have to do with our current predicament?”

“Jim reckoned aliens would have a better chance of bringing him back than people ever did. He told Bella that when they came, if things didn’t work out so well at first, we should send him to them.”

“Send a dead man,” she said.

“Dead men don’t have a lot to lose.”

“That’s insane.”

“Maybe. But is it any more insane than sending someone else inside that thing and waiting for them to die the same way Craig did?”

“You don’t send a dead man in as your negotiator,” Svetlana said.

“Maybe I missed something, but I don’t remember ever being shown the rulebook for this situation.”

“We’ve given them one corpse already.”

“No,” Parry said firmly. He was doing that maddening thing of staying calm, rationally arguing his case, never raising his voice or showing the least sign of irritation when she did not immediately see his position. “We gave them a living man and they killed him. Probably not intentionally, but it still happened. But they didn’t get a clean corpse at the end of it. They got a man who’d been crushed alive by gravity and pressure, a man who died in his spacesuit. He was still warm after his heart stopped, after the blood stopped flowing, but by the time they got to him, his brain must have looked like the Antarctic shelf. The damage was already done.”

“Jim’s just as dead.”

“Jim’s a Frost Angel. That makes all the difference. He’s been frozen solid by a controlled medical process. He was euthanized before the cancer took away too much of his brain. There’s still material there for them to work with.”

She emitted a small, humourless laugh. “You’re saying… they might be able to bring him back?”

“To them he’s like a broken clock. If we take him in like that — how can they not see that we want him mended?”

* * *

Ash Murray was there to meet them when
Crusader
docked at Underhole.

“Parry, Svieta — there’s something you really need to see.”

They followed him back into the conference area. The dinners had been cleared away and the table laid with a loose mosaic of semi-functioning flexies. Everyone was looking expectantly at Svetlana, as if she was the long-awaited guest of honour finally showing up at a party.

She swallowed to clear a mouth suddenly flooded with saliva. “What?”

“We got more than we thought,” Murray said, picking at the corner of one eye with a finger. “Near the end, when Craig was in the airlock chamber — or whatever we’re calling it — we got a momentary improvement in signal throughput.”

She stood by the table, looking down at the ragged mosaic with its mismatched colour boundaries. “I don’t get it. What are you saying?”

“Craig came through — he got us the imagery. He pointed the cam and… we got a frame. It came through in low-end bits, riding the audio. That’s an emergency protocol that kicks in automatically when the system decides that audio needs priority — it’s why we missed it initially.”

“A single frame.”

“It’s way better than no frame.”

She looked at the distorted composite image created by the flexies, but at first she could make no sense of it. It was blurred like a picture taken out of the window of a speeding car: vague shapes, streaked hyphens of bleeding colour. Under the force of all that gravity, his breathing impaired by the rising pressure, it must have taken superhuman effort for Schrope to point the cam in even roughly the right direction, let alone hold it steady.

But he had done his best. And he had got them
something
.

“I take back what I said about hallucinations,” Axford said quietly.

Parry pointed at one of the blurred forms. “There’s definitely something here.” He moved his finger. “And here. And maybe here as well.”

“Spicans?” Svetlana said.

“Craig said there were several of them. He said they were big. He said they looked like —”

“Mountains,” Nadis said.

“Except they don’t.” Svetlana narrowed her eyes, trying to mentally unscramble the effects of cam blur and the distortion due to the intervening glass. The aliens were large, upright forms of marine colour — blue, green and turquoise. They looked like barnacles, rising from a flared circular base, but that basic tapering shape was all they had in common with mountains. Their sides curved over to form a flattened top surface, not a peak. They had no obvious front or back, no recognisable limbs or sensory apparatus, no clear means of locomotion. They looked as if they had been baked in a cake mould.

“But he saw them,” Parry said, “got the cam onto them. He said they were moving, coming closer.”

“If the optical properties of the glass changed, he might have mistaken that for motion,” Axford said. “What we’re seeing here might not be living — we might just be looking at mechanical structures.”

“No,” Svetlana said firmly, “Craig knew what he was looking at. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, shall we?”

“They’re not what I was expecting,” Parry said.

“I’m not exactly sure what any of us were expecting,” Svetlana said, smiling at Parry.

“If these are the Spicans,” Nadis said, “do we keep on calling them that, or should we stick with the name Craig gave them?”

“Craig got us this picture,” Parry said. “That’s enough to remember him by.”

“I’m wondering,” Svetlana said slowly, tilting her head, “whether he might not have said ‘mountains’ after all.”

* * *

Axford left for Crabtree on
Crusader
. When he returned four hours later, he had one of the Frost Angels with him. The body was in a grey metal medical cabinet, still in a state of cryogenic suspension.

Svetlana had confirmation by then that Bella had told the truth about Jim Chisholm’s wishes. Bella had given Parry a code phrase —
multitudinous seas incarnadine
— that unlocked a private partition in Jim Chisholm’s old data partition; his flexy had died years ago, but the entries he’d made on it had been distributed throughout the surviving network, and they remained intact. The codeword conjured up a short video clip Chisholm had made from his deathbed, holding the cam in one hand while he spoke.

Svetlana shivered to hear him speak again.

“If you’re hearing this,” he said, “then you either talked to Bella or you got damned good at decryption. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m guessing the former.” A ghost of a smile touched his wasted features. “I hope things are okay for you all. If it’s come to this, then at least some of you made it all the way to Spica, and there is someone or something waiting for you now you’re there.

“If Bella has relayed my wishes, please be assured that she’s told you the truth. As difficult as it may be for you to grasp, this is what I want you to do. We all remember those discussions about the theoretical nature of alien intelligence — I reviewed the summaries even though I couldn’t sit in on them in person — the long conversations about how if we ever do meet anyone, they’ll most likely be tens of millions of years ahead of us in every respect. Makes sense to me: if there’s anything we’ve learned from our own history, it’s that intelligence is a precious thing: rare and vulnerable. If the Spicans are still out there, then they’ve probably been starfaring for an awfully long time. I’m sure putting Humpty Dumpty together again won’t be too much of a stretch for them.

“So bring me to them, and see what they make of me. At the very least they might learn something about us just by taking me apart and seeing what makes me tick. Maybe it won’t work out, but if it doesn’t, I’ll have lost nothing.”

Jim Chisholm smiled a dead man’s smile. “And if I
do
come back, I’ll do my best not to scare the living daylights out of you.”

* * *

Svetlana returned to the hole in the sky. She carried the Frost Angel with her on an improvised sled, dragged it all the way to the Spican ship, which was still running its symbol dance. But when she neared the ramp the flicker of symbols slowed and stilled, as if the ship recognised her presence and wished to show it. Its watchful attention lifted the hairs on the back of her neck.

She walked up the ramp and followed Schrope’s trail into the glass interior. She found the spherical chamber where he had come to grief. She pushed the sled over the lip and watched it slide all the way down until it skidded to rest, the frozen body lashed to it like an offering.