Pushing Ice (51 page)

“Alien technology?”

He gave her a short, derisive smile. “No, but they can give us more things like the suit — data and technology from our own future history. Think of that, Svieta. We’re not just talking about useful hardware like a suit. We’re talking about medical advances, computing advances… nanotechnology that’ll make Wang’s forge vats look like blast furnaces. You’ve done well to keep the colony alive all these years, but I’ve been awake long enough to know how tough things must have been. Thirteen years alone didn’t put all those lines on Axford’s face.”

“It’s been tough,” she acknowledged, shrugging.

“But now it can get better. Let the Fountainheads give us what’s already our due. Negotiate with them. Send me back in as your spokesman. They know me inside out. They trust me.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

“Good. But don’t think about it for too long.”

“I won’t,” she said. She rose to leave. “I ought to let you get some rest now. Is there anything you need, anything I can do to make things better in here?”

He tapped the ballpoint against his lip. “No. Axford and the rest of his team have been treating me like a king.”

“If there’s anything, you only have to say the word.”

“I will,” he said. Then, just as she reached the door, he called out, “Svetlana… there is one thing, but I find it a bit awkward to talk about.”

She returned to his bedside. “Say it, Jim.”

“People have been kind to me since I got back. I know you’ve all been trying to put me at my ease, making it as easy as possible for me to adjust to the time that I’ve lost. But really, it’s all right. I can deal with things.”

“That’s good.”

“So you can tell me.”

“Tell you what?” she asked.

“Look, I know you’re all trying to be kind, but I can deal with the truth.”

“The truth?” she said, nonplussed.

“Bella’s dead, isn’t she? That’s why no one ever mentions her, and why you all look away whenever I mention her name. You’re worried about how I’ll deal with it. Well, I
am
dealing with it. Hour by hour, day by day… I’m handling it. I just need to know — did she come to you with my wishes, or did you crack the encryption on my message?”

“She came to us,” Svetlana said, reluctantly forcing out the words.

“How long ago was that? Was she ill? Did she know she was going to die?”

“She isn’t dead.”

Chisholm’s lip twitched. “I’m sorry?”

“She isn’t dead,” Svetlana repeated. “She’s alive, alive and in pretty good shape. Axford can tell you better, but… she’s okay.”

She watched expressions play across his face: relief that Bella was alive, then confusion, then something like disappointment. “I would have thought —” he began.

“That she’d have come to see you?”

“It wouldn’t have been asking much.”

“She couldn’t. She can’t come and see you because she’s still in exile.”

“In exile? Where?”

“The some place. The dome.”

He stared at her in revulsion. “You’ve had her in that place for
thirteen fucking years
? I always knew you were tough, Svieta. So was Bella. I guess it came with the territory. But I never had you down as heartless.”

“This isn’t about me and Bella,” she said.

Chisholm shook his head slowly. “It is now. I want to speak to Bella in person, in private. Just the two of us, just like old times.”

In that instant she could already feel the first ominous slippage, the beginning of a fatal loss of control. It had been a beautiful and humane thing, to bring Chisholm back from the dead. It had given her a line to the Fountainheads. It had also been the gravest political error of her thirteen years in command. She should have found another way… sent someone else in. Takahashi, perhaps, or one of the other victims. Bagley, maybe, or Fletterick, Mair, Ungless. There were always dead. There would always
be
dead, as long as people tried to live on Janus. Why had it never occurred to her that sending in Bella’s closest confidant and friend might not be the shrewdest of actions?

“You’re too weak to go out to her,” Svetlana said, grasping for an excuse.

“Then bring her here. Bring her back to Crabtree.” His eyes sparkled with schemes and dreams. “It’s time she was rehabilitated. Time things changed around here.”

Then he clicked the ballpoint pen, three times, slowly.

PART THREE - 2090+

TWENTY-FIVE

The Underhole Express gathered speed with its usual smooth surge of acceleration. As it threaded between Crabtree’s outlying precincts and domes, Bella buckled into her seat and made sure all her belongings were secured to the fold-down table.

“Before you fall asleep,” Liz Shen said, passing Bella a live flexy, “I need your okay on this.”

Bella glared at the document. It was the go-ahead for the Tier-Two feasibility study, which would see human expansion erupt onto the outer surface of the Iron Sky. She signed it with her customary flourish, despite the arthritis that was making it increasingly awkward for her to write. It was largely formality: the Tier-Two project had strong advocates in Crabtree and the more influential eddytowns, and it would take more than Bella’s obstructiveness to hold it back now.

“Any other business?” she asked guardedly.

“There’s the matter Avery Fox wants to discuss with you — I can brief you, if you like.”

“I’m sure he’ll tell me all about it when we get to Underhole, but I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to know the basics.”

“Basically, they found something when they were sinking some new foundation piles last week. No one quite knows what to make of it, but we’re pretty sure it hasn’t been down there for ever. It looks as if Svetlana buried it there just before she had to clear out of Underhole.”

Bella thought back to those events, compressed paper-thin by the weight of intervening years. “Why would she bury something? I gave her more than enough time to get out of there. Couldn’t be a bomb, could it?”

“Avery says not. Whatever it is just sits there — doesn’t do anything. It’s heavy, though, even under Janus gravity. Maybe that’s why she left it behind.”

“All right — Avery can fill me in on the details. Probably isn’t anything significant. Is there anything I
do
need to worry about?”

The smart young woman dimmed the flexy and slipped it under her floral-patterned jacket. “You’re keen. I have a paper copy of the latest draft report on the Bagley affair, if you want to review it.”

Bella rolled her eyes. “I’ve reviewed umpteen versions already. Show it to me when they have something that’ll hold up in court. Then I’ll think about reopening the inquiry.”

“There’ll be a lot of people hoping it never makes it that far,” Liz Shen said. “Of course, if you’d rather they didn’t have anything to worry about —”

“Oh, just give it to me,” Bella said grumpily, knowing Shen was right.

As the train whisked towards Underhole at a comfortable one hundred and eight kilometres per hour — just below orbital speed — Bella skimmed the latest draft report on the Bagley murder. The paper smelled faintly of peppermint. It was twenty-eight years since Meredith Bagley had been found dead, crushed by the movement of a centrifuge during scheduled maintenance. Five years ago, however, Hank Dussen — one of Parry’s old EVA men — had confessed to being one of three participants in her murder. Dussen had been on his deathbed at the time of his confession, riddled with radiation carcinomas from a lifetime of spacewalking. An affiliate of one of the more obscure Symbolist sects, he refused to entrust himself to the rejuvenative medicine of the Fountainheads. He saw his confession as a necessary step to absolution, but he had not named his co-conspirators.

The case had simmered on since then, unable to progress due to a lack of further information. Then, unexpectedly, Ash Murray had uncovered a paper log containing fault reports for the three suits that had been signed out for that shift. The log contained no names, but the three sets of faults had all been written in different handwriting. One set matched known documents linked to Hank Dussen, while the other two were good matches against samples from the suspected co-conspirators. After a lifetime of working in suits, filling in the fault documentation had been second nature to them.

Bella put down the document with a sigh. “Do you really think I should pull back this scab, Liz, just when we’re all beginning to live together in peace again… just when things are starting to settle down?”

“Has to be done,” Liz Shen said.

“I know, I know. It’s just…” Bella sighed heavily. “This is going to raise hell. It may not stop at just two names. God knows how many people have been involved keeping this covered up over the years.”

“Has to be done,” Shen repeated firmly. As ever, she appeared wise beyond her years, like the older sister Bella had never had. “And we’ll pull through it, too,” she added. “Maybe we actually need this, to finally move on from all that.”

There were many like Liz Shen now: children of Janus, pushing inexorably into adulthood, many with children of their own. Earth meant nothing to them. It was like some distant, exotic, vaguely perplexing foreign country — the way Japan or China had been to Bella when she was a girl. They were happy to take what they could from it — its fashions, music, clothes and consumer goods — but they had no gripping desire actually to visit the place. If Shen and her generation were nostalgic about anything, it was the version of Janus they remembered from their youth, with its deceptive simplicities and easily forgotten hardships.

Things had improved during the twenty years since the Fountainheads drilled through the Sky. After months of uneasy negotiation, the aliens had been allowed to sink energy-sucking taproots into the luminous vaults under Janus. In return, the Fountainheads had given the humans access to technologies, artefacts and data the aliens had acquired during their earlier episodes of human contact. None of these items dated from later than 2135 — the ‘Cutoff’, as it was now known — but that was still nearly eighty years of human progress to catch up on. Careful not to overwhelm the humans, the Fountainheads had drip-fed these marvels one dose at a time, in return for increasing access to the interior of Janus.

Liz Shen was an object lesson in how well these lessons had been integrated into the normal flow of Janus life. The flexy she carried with her was for Bella’s benefit, not hers. She regarded flexies with the eldritch horror Bella might have reserved for a steam-driven typewriter. Liz Shen’s computational needs were handled by her clothes and the kernels of Borderline Intelligence packed into her minimalist jewellery. The clothes and jewellery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements. The computational textiles exchanged data with the environment via rapid subliminal alterations to their colour patterning, too brief to be picked up by the human eye. The apparently serene environment, in turn, flickered beneath the level of perception with a frenzy of encoded data patterns.

The clothes had become so adept at reading Shen’s muscular intentions (they were sewn with superconductors, to pick up the myoelectric field pulses of her nervous system) that she rarely needed to complete the gesture itself. When she was busy, Shen’s muscles pulsated with a kind of low-level palsy, like a person receiving mild electroconvulsive therapy. She had the hard muscle tone of a ballerina. It might have looked odd, but there were people like Shen everywhere nowadays. Bella and the other old-timers were the oddities, with their quaint attachment to flexies.

Bella had tried to keep up, but she had been sixty-eight when the Fountainheads came, already set in her ways. Now she was twenty years older. There were many like her, too: mired in the past, dressing like ghosts from a vanished era, blinking in bewildered surprise at the rush of events.

Shen pulled down her sunglasses and went into a brief data-tremor. “We’re approaching Underhole,” she said. “We had a security scare a few hours ago, but everything’s normal now.”

Bella handed her back the papers on the Bagley case. “You’d better keep hold of these for now. If they can tighten section three, I think we’re there.”

“You’re going to have to subpoena Ash Murray,” Shen said. “I can start the paperwork on that, if you want. He’s not going to like it, though.”

“Of course he’s not going to like it. I have a feeling he expected to stay dead for rather longer than four years.”

“Serves him right for joining the Skippers.” Shen tore off a chunk of the Bagley report and pushed it into her mouth, talking as she chewed. “They called it ‘exporting expertise to the future’. Social cowardice, if you ask me.”

“Don’t be too hard on them,” Bella said. “We all lived through some pretty bad times. People like Ash… they’d just had enough.”

“I’m still glad you closed that loophole. Why should we carry their dead weight across the decades?” Shen tore off another corner from the report and offered it to Bella. “You haven’t eaten since this morning. Would you like some?”

“No thanks,” Bella said, touching a hand to her belly. “Paperwork always disagrees with me.”

* * *

Liz Shen handed Bella a plastic filter mask as they disembarked from the train into the unfinished transit plaza at Underhole. Dust hung in the air in languid, drifting sheets, never settling to the ground. The few human workers present guided their construction machines with slow full-body gestures, like t‘ai chi masters. Avery Fox came bustling over to see them, snatching down a dust mask and apologising for his lateness. He was twenty-six, born in the seventh year of the human occupation of Janus. He was the only child of Reda Kirschner and Malcolm Fox, a marriage across the lines of allegiance dividing Bella and Svetlana.

“They tell me you’ve found something,” Bella said.

“I thought you might like to see it sooner rather than later. We’ve booked a heavy tractor to haul it back to Crabtree, but it probably won’t get there for another week.”

“I’ve kept the Fountainheads waiting long enough. I’m sure a few more minutes won’t make any difference.”