Pushing Ice (52 page)

“It’s true, then?” Avery asked. “You’re really going through with it?”

“Even old women are allowed to change their minds.” She softened her expression: in recent years she had become dimly aware of how sternly disapproving she could appear. “The years have caught up with me, Avery. Look at these useless old hands of mine.”

“I hope it all goes well,” he said.

“It will. They ought to be getting good at it by now.”

He led them into the bowels of the Underhole transit complex, through dust screens and airlocks. Soon they arrived in an excavated space with a pit in the floor, where drilling had been suspended. A makeshift walkway had been geckoflexed to the ice. Bella tightened one of her useless old hands on the railing and looked down.

“That’s it?” she asked, dismayed.

It was nothing to look at: just a black cube about the same size as a transport crate.

“It’s heavier than it looks,” Fox said, slipping into the peculiar lilting accent she often heard amongst the young. “Two hundred tonnes of mass, easily — it weighs more than five hundred kilos even on Janus. If they only had a few pairs of hands, they’d have had a hard time loading it onto a tractor. Easier to dig a hole and bury it.”

“If Svetlana didn’t want me to see this thing, why didn’t she just destroy it?” Bella asked, not really expecting an answer.

Liz Shen said, “What is it, anyway?”

“No one knows,” Fox replied. There’s a design cut into one of the faces — some naked guy in a square.“

“Not ringing any bells here,” Bella said, but something bristled the hairs on the back of her neck. “How closely have you examined it?”

“We’ve poked and prodded it enough to be certain it isn’t a bomb. Looks solid all the way through.”

“Composition?”

“Funny thing is,” Avery said, “we haven’t had much luck shaving anything off for analysis. Tough as old boots, whatever it is. Maybe that’s why Svetlana didn’t destroy it — she couldn’t have even if she’d wanted to.”

“And it’s been down here for twenty years?”

“Unless someone tells us otherwise. If you want the facts, I guess Svetlana’s the person to ask. Do you still want us to ship it back to Crabtree?”

“We’ll take the risk if it means we’ll have a better chance of studying it. But keep this under wraps — I don’t want this all over town by the time it gets there.”

“I’m sure we can handle it with the necessary discretion,” Shen said, with the conceited glow of someone who knew they were extremely good at their job. “But what about Svetlana? Do you want someone to bring her in from Eddytown for questioning?”

“No,” Bella said, “just dig out the names of everyone who might have been at Underhole just before the takeover. That’s where we’ll start.”

“You really want to get into this on top of the Bagley investigation? Isn’t one hornet’s nest enough for you?”

“Actually,” Bella said, “that’s a very good point. When you pick them up — whoever they turn out to be — drop hints that it’s all part of a peripheral inquiry related to the Bagley case. Don’t be afraid to take the train to Eddytown, if that’s where your investigations lead, but never let Svetlana suspect that this has anything to do with the cube.” Then she found herself looking back down at the ominous black object, as if it were exerting a magnetic tug on her thoughts, forcing her attention upon itself. “That… thing,” she said uneasily. “Has anyone actually
touched
it?”

“I did,” Fox said, looking down shamefacedly. “It was stupid — I should have waited until we’d run tests. But no harm came from it.”

“What did it feel like?”

“Very cold,” he said. “Cold and very, very old. A lot older than twenty years.”

Bella shivered: she swore she could feel that antiquity without even touching it. But that was absurd.

TWENTY-SIX

Bella and Shen walked up the steep temporary ramp to the waiting elevator car, where a small security retinue waited. It was easy going now, even for Bella’s ageing muscles and knee joints. The gravity was currently Janus ambient, but when construction was completed the underlying machinery would be tweaked to induce a hotspot of point-five Earth gravities. It was a simple trick that the Fountainheads had taught the humans: one of the few gifts that had not involved the transfer of prior human knowledge.

They’d already upped the gravity at Crabtree: the last centrifuge had been spun down and dismantled three years earlier. People had moaned and grumbled, but the medical benefits of permanent high gravity were too significant to ignore, and with the birth rate shooting up, the centrifuges could not have coped for much longer.

Bella and Shen entered the elevator car with one of the security men and took seats. Soon they were rising, to the accompaniment of a tinkly rendition of “The Girl from Ipanema.” The car passed through an airlock into open space and Bella looked down at the sprawl of Underhole, imagining the deep foundations plunging through kilometres of ice to the Spican bedrock. If the Tier-Two advocates had their way, Underhole would form a throbbing arterial bridge between the interior and the new territories scheduled to spill out across the other side of the Sky.

The upper works were much less impressive. A crane had winched the elevator across the twenty-kilometre gap, and now it swung its boom to one side and deposited the little compartment next to a cluster of domes barely larger than the original Underhole settlement. Bella and Shen passed through an airlock into a reception area. Furniture oozed into readiness, anticipating their arrival. A chair nudged Bella’s ankles with puppy-dog eagerness. She kicked it aside irritably.

Nick Thale was waiting for them, as white-haired and patriarchal as a wizard. He was in his mid-fifties, but had turned down all offers of rejuvenation: he wanted to wait another twenty years, he said, just in case there were any unexpected complications.

“It’s been a long time, Bella,” he said. “You should come and see us more often.”

“You should see how difficult it is to drag her out of her office, let alone Crabtree,” Shen said.

Bella shot the other woman a sidelong glance: was that an attempt at humour, or just a bald statement of the facts? Perhaps she needed to revise her opinion of Shen.

“There’s enough to keep me busy, Nick. I trust you to keep a handle on things this side of the Sky.”

“We do our best. How is Crabtree, anyway?”

“You should pop down one of these days, take a stroll in one of the new biomes. We’ve got trees now — real, honest-to-god trees. Junipers… oaks. I never thought I’d see a tree again in my lifetime.”

“Gene-edited from the aeroponics plant stocks?”

“No,” Bella said. “That never worked. Turned out the plants we brought with us had already been hacked about to protect DeepShaft patents. Major chromosomal deletions, genetically impoverished: not enough material to work with.”

“So the trees… ?”

“Cultured straight from Fountainhead data. It was buried in the last batch of stuff they sent us, almost as an afterthought, as if they didn’t think we’d find it all that interesting.”

“I’d like to touch a tree again,” Thale said wistfully.

“Then come down to Crabtree. I’ll show you around. Things are buzzing now — it feels like a city.”

Thale grimaced. “A city on Sunday, perhaps, when everyone’s left — even the ice-cream vendors.”

“It’s filling out more and more every year. The kids make a difference. The grandchildren. Blink and there’ll be greatgrandchildren, kids for whom even the Year of the Iron Sky is ancient history. Earth’ll be like… I don’t know, Sparta, or Mesopotamia, a thing they look at in picture books before smiling and turning the page to something more exciting.”

“You frighten me sometimes, Bella.”

“I felt this way before I ever set foot on
Rockhopper
, as if the world was slipping away from me. It’s just got worse, that’s all.”

Thale led her along the glass connecting walkway that led to the Fountainhead embassy, while Liz Shen stayed behind in the reception dome. Bella hoped her nervousness was not too apparent, but with every step closer to the aliens she found her resolve crumbling. She had delayed this visit long enough, and would have continued putting it off had Jim Chisholm not requested her immediate presence. Chisholm was still technically her subordinate, but she had long ago learned that sometimes it paid to obey him.

The embassy occupied the former landing site of the original Fountainhead ship. In some regards it was still the original ship, but due to the dreamlike malleability of Fountainhead technology it was difficult (and perhaps futile) to say for sure. The embassy was much larger, at any rate: its perimeter had encroached across half the distance between the original location of the ship and the hole, and it was much taller. But it had something of the same layered glassy architectural style, with many chandelier-like arms curving upward to tapering spires, forming a thicket of refractive structures around a gherkin-shaped central core. Now and then sub-units would arrive and depart, some of which were nearly as large as the original ship. Their mode of propulsion, like everything else associated with the Fountainheads, spoke of technologies far beyond human science at the time of the Cutoff.

The glass tube led into a domed vault in the base of the embassy. Layers of transparent structure surrounded them, aglow with a soft and calming violet light. As they walked across the floor, two cylindrical kiosks rose seamlessly from its surface. Thale and Bella stepped through doorlike apertures in the sides of the kiosks, taking one each. Bella held still and waited for the kiosk to seal itself around her. After a moment the cylindrical form contracted until the inner surface of the enclosure was only centimetres from her body. Seen through the optically perfect glass, Thale’s kiosk had also shrunk down to something resembling a fat bottle.

They started walking and Bella’s enclosure reshaped itself, bulging to accommodate the throw of her legs and the swing of her arms. It all happened so swiftly that Bella was never able to touch the glass. Thale led the way out of the vault and up a shallow helical ramp that led to a higher part of the embassy. As they walked, Bella knew, the external atmosphere was being swapped for the dense and poisonous broth of atmospheric chemicals necessary to sustain the Fountainheads. Gravity was also ramping up, but she felt none of that inside the suit’s protective envelope.

The helix carried them into what Bella had always thought of as the diplomatic reception area. It was a cavernous space that must have taken up a third of the interior volume of the embassy’s central core: a room as large as a gutted skyscraper. Luminous pastel motifs ringed the space, suggesting — to Bella, at least — vast stained-glass windows of intricate abstract design. Angular structures plunged down from a distant ceiling, spiked and barbed and threaded with lines of soft illumination. It paid not to think about the gravitational forces struggling to rip them down. No Fountainheads were here yet, but — just as she had anticipated — Jim Chisholm was waiting to meet them.

He still looked human, but she wondered how deep that resemblance actually went. Chisholm did not require any visible protective armour in the presence of the Fountainheads. On the increasingly rare occasions when he returned to Crabtree, Axford sometimes managed to run medical tests on him. He never found anything anomalous, nothing to suggest that the man in his care was anything but human on a cellular level (and Axford’s tools were much more sophisticated now); but that was Chisholm in Crabtree, and this was Chisholm in the Fountainhead embassy, and the two apparitions were not necessarily the same being.

He smiled, spreading his hands in greeting and urging them further into the reception area. “I’m glad we finally talked you into this, Bella,” he said, his voice sounding as clear and normal as if they were talking across a coffee table, rather than through toxic metres of alien atmosphere.

“You’ve always had great powers of persuasion,” Bella said.

“There’s nothing to fear,” he said, “nothing in the world. They’ve got better at it since my day. It took them three days back then — can you imagine that?”

“I imagine practice has helped.”

“I suppose it has.” He wore loose, billowing garments in fawn and beige that — to Bella at least — were faintly suggestive of some minor theocratic order. His hair was longer than it had ever been on
Rockhopper
, combed back from his brow in thick waves. In twenty years, he’d shown little visible evidence of ageing: a few lines around the mouth, one or two creases in the forehead, but that was all. Such was the case with all the rejuvenations generally: even when there were signs of ageing, they appeared at a much slower rate than before. The half-moon glasses he still wore had to be an affectation. “Bella,” he said, “when all this is done… when they’ve made you young again —”

She knew from his tone where he was headed. “Jim —”

“It’s not forbidden to move on, you know.”

“I know you mean well.”

He spoke as if Nick Thale were not there. “No one expected you to change overnight after thirteen years of exile, but how long has it been now since I came back?” He held up his hands, smiling. “Rhetorical question.”

“Clearly.”

“There’s no law that says you have to spend the rest of your existence alone.”

“No one ever said there was.”

“You sometimes act as if there was.”

They’d had this conversation enough times for Bella to know that Jim Chisholm was not talking about the two of them having any kind of relationship. He meant that she should find another man amongst all that were available to her. As if it was that easy. As if pulling out that knife in her stomach was a matter of childish simplicity. A knife buried so deep that it felt familiar and even, at times, comforting.

He’d returned from the aliens gifted with strange wisdom, knowledge of things he barely dared speak of. Yet there were times when he appeared to know less about human affairs than he had before he died.

He must have seen something in her face. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to pry.”