Pushing Ice (80 page)

At the mention of Takahashi’s name, she recalled how she had been there when he came back from the dead, back from the glacial cold of the Frost Angels. She had helped him adjust to a future he had never expected to see, and now Axford was helping Bella in the same fashion. It was a comfort to know that, however difficult this journey might be, someone else had already made it.

But thinking about Takahashi brought her back to the end of Janus, and the people who had not made it out alive. She remembered trying to rescue someone, yet the more she tried to pin down the memory, the more it squirmed from her attention.

All she felt was a vast sadness.

“But if it wasn’t Svetlana I went back for…” Bella trailed off, and looked into Axford’s grave and kindly face. “Who was it?”

“We’ll come to that,” he said gently, and turned her away from the window.

EPILOGUE

They asked Chromis to step outside while the vote was cast. Evening had begun to fall since she had made her case inside the Congress building, and although the sun was still catching the summit of the building, tinting the icecap a hard brassy gold, lights were coming on in the shadow-locked footslopes and inlets far below. The warm breeze on the balcony was a carefully maintained fiction. It felt as if it was blowing up from the tropical landscape twenty-two kilometres below, carrying a delicate freight of spices from the fishing villages around the nearest shore of the great lake. But the balcony was in fact shielded from the ambient atmospheric conditions by an invisible shell of femtomachinery, which also happened to provide protection against almost all conceivable modes of assassination. Admittedly there hadn’t been a documented assassination inside the Congress of the Lindblad Ring for three and a half thousand years, but there were still dissident elements out there. Just ask the good citizens of Hemlock, after the reeves had been sent in to restore public order.

Chromis wondered how the vote was going inside the meeting room. She felt, on balance, that her speech had been received about as well as she had dared to hope. She had not deviated from her script; she had not stumbled or lost her rhythm. Rudd had come in on cue with perfect timing, and had played his role with conviction. No one had tried to trump her with some other equally lavish proposal, and none of her habitual enemies had voiced any criticism while she was in the room. Doubtless a certain reverence had held them back: in criticising Chromis they would have been implying that they did not consider the Benefactor’s deeds worthy of commemoration. She had counted on that, but was nonetheless relieved.

Still, she hadn’t received an ovation either. Even as she stepped out of the room, she had still found the delegates’ collective mood inscrutable. Their lack of questions, their lack of antagonism, might even have suggested bored indifference. She hoped not: Chromis had allowed for many things, but it had never occurred to her that her proposal might crash on the rocks of moderate apathy.

Not for the first time since starting her journey to New Far Florence, she felt the Benefactor’s quiet presence, as if Bella Lind stood silently next to her on the balcony, as keen to know the outcome as Chromis. It was, she supposed, impossible to spend so long thinking about a single person without them assuming a degree of reality. And she doubted that anyone had thought as long and hard about Bella Lind as she had, during all the centuries of preparation. Once, the Benefactor had been a distant, schematic historical figure; now she was a tactile person whom Chromis felt as if she had met on many occasions. The more strongly this sense of solidity took hold, the more she vowed not to fail the ghost that her imagination had conjured into being.

Overhead, the brightest stars were coming out. The glare from the sunlit icecap washed out any hope of seeing the Milky Way, but Chromis knew roughly where to look. Somewhere out there, she thought, Bella was waiting.

Doors opened behind her. She turned to see Rudd walking towards her, carrying news from the delegates. She studied the hard set of his expression and felt her imaginary companion slip away politely, leaving them alone.

“It’s not good news, is it?”

“I’m sorry. It nearly went your way, but…” He offered the palms of his hands.

“Tell me.”

“Forty-three ayes, forty-nine nay’s, seven abstentions.”

“Damn.”

“You came close, Chromis. It wasn’t an overwhelming defeat, not by any means. There’ll be another chance.”

“I know, but… damn.” Disappointment hit her in slow, soft waves rather than a single, crushing onslaught.

“You’ve planted the seed now. All you have to do is hope that it takes root in half a dozen delegates.”

“I was hoping to win them over on this round, Rudd. I never expected it would be so close. I always thought in terms of majestic defeat or total, storming victory. Either way I’d have been able to walk out of there with my work done: heading back home either with my tail between my legs, the tragically vanquished hero, or as champion. Instead I’m faced with this messy compromise.”

“That’s reality for you,” Rudd said. “Always pissing on the epic moment.”

“How am I going to win them over?”

“With iron will and stubborn determination.” He looked at her with horrified incomprehension. “You didn’t come all this way to give up, did you?”

“I suppose not.”

“The Benefactor wouldn’t have given up.”

“I know.”

He joined her by the balcony rail and gave her a brief consolatory hug. “I think we need to work on the guilt angle. It’s all very well pointing out to them how noble and civic this scheme of yours will make us all feel, but that’ll only work on some of them. To win the rest of them over, I think you need to emphasise how the future will view us if we fail. Remind them that — if history’s any guide — one day there won’t
be
a Congress of the Lindblad Ring, just records of our deeds.”

Perhaps it was some brief fluctuation in the femtotech bubble shielding the balcony, but she could have sworn that she felt a breath of the evening’s true chill touch her flesh.

“That’s pretty close to heresy, Rudd — especially when we’re supposed to be gearing up to celebrate our very permanence.”

“Ten thousand years is just a pebble tossed into eternity’s canyon, Chromis.”

“All right, all right, I’ll work on the guilt angle.”

“Good girl. And you might want to think about approaching someone else to act as your tame devil’s advocate next time. I’d be happy to oblige, but I don’t think they’ll tolerate our little parlour game twice.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Chin up. You’ve done very well, considering.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. I’m pretty sure you’ve already knocked some of the competition out of the running. That’s the last we’ll hear about fountains.”

“That’s something, anyway.”

“The blood thing worked well.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Chromis said, as an idea began to form in her mind. “That point I had you make about a copy of the message falling into the wrong hands?”

“What of it?”

“There’s something more to that. Keying the message to the Benefactor’s DNA is a good precaution, and I didn’t go all the way to Mars for nothing. But we could probably use an additional safeguard.”

“Go on,” Rudd encouraged.

“I think each copy of the message — in whatever form it takes ought to be able to decide for itself whether or not to divulge its contents. That’ll demand a degree of intelligence — enough to grasp the ins and outs of human behaviour, so that the copy can base its decisions on what it sees.”

“In other words, it’ll need to be human as well.”

“It’s within our means, Rudd. Looking at it this way, it would be almost negligent not to equip the message copies with full sentience.”

Rudd pondered this for long moments, while Chromis watched the shadows below turn a deep, mysterious purple. More and more communities were lit up against evening now, and small boats were plying across the lake, bright and colourful as paper lanterns.

“I think I agree,” he said, “but there’s an obvious stumbling block: who would ever consent to having their personality copied into a billion green bottles, like some cheap, mass-produced commodity?”

“I’m sure a volunteer could be identified.”

He nodded knowingly. “And I bet you have just the candidate in mind.”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I win.”

“Remember: play on their guilt. Works every time. Should have reminded you of that before, really.”

“Might have helped, Rudd. Then at least we could have gone out celebrating tonight.”

“Oh, that won’t stop us. We can always celebrate the fact that we weren’t defeated by an overwhelming margin.”

She smiled, something of her former good mood returning. “Any old excuse.”

He looked in the direction of one of the lakeshore communities. “In fact, I know this really great place — we can caul there now, if you like.”

“Shouldn’t I go back inside and face the music?”

“I think a dignified silence might work better. Let that guilt start eating away at them.”

“If you say so.”

“I know so. Years of experience at this sort of thing.” Rudd closed his eyes for the moment it took to summon a pair of cauls. Shortly, the local femtotech would allocate a small fraction of itself for the safe conveyance of the two friends.

While they waited, Chromis asked, “Do you really mean it, about the Congress not lasting for ever?”

“Like I said, ten thousand years really isn’t all that long. I’m sure the Spicans expected to last for ever, too. But one day the same thing will happen to us — we’ll be gone, and there’ll be something else in our place.”

“Something human?”

“Not necessarily.”

The cauls arrived, orbiting them like a squadron of black moths before meshing into their final travel configuration. Sensing that a conversation was in progress, the cauls waited for a decent pause before snatching the two people from the balcony.

“Then all this,” Chromis said, gesturing at the vista before them, “everything we’ve lived for and made, everything we’ve dreamed into existence — you firmly believe it won’t always be here?”

“It’d be egocentric to think otherwise. Almost every sentient being who ever lived belonged to a society that doesn’t exist any more. Why should we be any different?”

“But our deeds will remain.”

“If we’re lucky. There’s every chance they won’t survive either.”

“That’s so bleak, Rudd.”

“Bracing, I prefer to think.”

“But if nothing we do here has any guarantee of lasting, if even the best gestures have only a slim chance of outliving us — is there any reason not to just give up?”

“Every reason in the world,” Rudd said. “We’re here and we’re alive. It’s a beautiful evening, on the last perfect day of summer.” He turned and nodded at the waiting cauls. “Now let’s go down there and make the most of it, while it lasts.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Deep gratitude to George Berger, Hannu Blomilla, Peter Hollo, Rick Kleffel, Paul Kloosterman, Kotska Wallace and (last but not least) Josette Sanchez, all of whom were kind enough to read and comment on various parts of this book. And thanks as ever for hard work, patience and a necessary dose of good humour to Jo Fletcher and Lisa Rogers.

Some of the science in this book is real, and some of it is made up. One of the real bits, perhaps surprisingly, is the biomedical argument underlying the Frost Angel process. Interested readers are pointed to the article “Buying Time in Suspended Animation” by Mark B. Roth and Todd Nystul, which appeared in
Scientific American
in June 2005. Suspended animation has suddenly gone from looking like one of science fiction’s least likely prophecies to one of its canniest.

AR

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Alastair Preston Reynolds (born in 1966 in Barry, Wales) is a British science fiction author. He specialises in dark hard science fiction and space opera. He spent his early years in Cornwall, moved back to Wales before going to Newcastle, where he read physics and astronomy. Afterwards, he earned a PhD from St. Andrews, Scotland. In 1991, he moved to Noordwijk in the Netherlands where he met his wife Josette (who is from France). There, he worked for the European Space Research and Technology Centre, part of the European Space Agency, until 2004 when he left to pursue writing full time. He returned to Wales in 2008 and lives near Cardiff.