Pushing Ice (35 page)

“I noticed the power outages. It gets cold and dark out here.” A little shiver passed through her. “You wouldn’t believe how cold and dark it gets out here.”

“No,” Parry said gently, “I
would
believe it.”

“You’re wasting tens of miles of superconducting line keeping me out here,” Bella said. “You could always relocate me to Crabtree and use the line for something else.” She ground the dead stub of the cigarette against the top of the crate. “Or just let me die.”

“It’s neither here nor there, really,” Parry said, not unkindly. “The line’s near the end of its life. It wouldn’t have been able to carry a useful load from the Maw.”

“You could still use it somewhere.”

“You can’t come back to Crabtree, not right now, anyway. Maybe one day… when things get better.”

Bella laughed. It was brief, retching, doglike sound, as if a stone had lodged in her throat. “Svieta’ll never have me back.”

“I’m sorry it came to this,” Parry said sadly.

“Are you still with her?”

“Yes,” he said, guardedly.

“She’ll hate you for even talking to me.”

“Perhaps. We’ll get over it. She sanctioned this visit, so she can hardly blame me for talking.”

Bella narrowed her eyes to penetrating slits. “Did Craig Schrope go along with it as well?”

Parry looked away. “Schrope isn’t really involved in such decisions.”

‘That’s what I heard. Some kind of withdrawal. Catatonic mutism, shell shock. DeepShaft was his life, and DeepShaft fucked him up the ass. That kind of thing can break a man, even a jarhead robot like Schrope. I’m right, aren’t I?“

“You can discuss it with Ryan.”

“Is that what this is all about? A visit to the doctor?”

Parry patted the crate he had sat down on. “There’s a light-weight Orlan in here. If you agree to accompany me, you put the suit on and we leave now. I drive you to Crabtree for six hours, then I drive you back out here.”

“Six hours?”

“It’s long enough. You’ll have time to speak to him, and then Ryan can give you a check-up.”

Her eyes narrowed in the half-light. “Talk to who?”

“Jim Chisholm,” Parry said.

She gave him a ghost of a nod, and he knew that she had forgotten none of it, not even the tiniest detail.

“I didn’t think Jim would still be alive. I didn’t think he would last… weeks, let alone years.” She looked into Parry’s eyes, and for the first time since arriving he felt himself in the presence of the old Bella, however fleetingly. “How is he, Parry?”

“Could be better,” he said.

* * *

Bella put on the suit and left her prison. Suit-to-suit communication was available, so Parry did his best to prepare Bella during the long drive back to Crabtree, even as he kept half his concentration on the business of steering the tractor, following the snaking path of the superconductor cable and willing the lights of the High Hab to crest the horizon.

Bella knew more and less than he had expected — clearly some of her visitors had done more than just swap rations and check her blood pressure, but there were still gaps in her knowledge. She knew about Wang Zhanmin and his heroic efforts to coax life into the forge vat. She knew something of the Ofria-Gomberg work on the Spican symbols. She knew nothing of the Maw project, or the study of the lava lines, or the fact that Jim Chisholm was still alive.

“Wang had Chinese medicine on his ship,” Parry said, “some of it more advanced than anything Ryan had in his toolkit. It helped slow the spread of the tumour.”

“Slow but not stop.”

“No. That wasn’t within his capabilities. Wang said it was just emergency field medicine — not even the best they had.”

“We were wrong about the Chinese,” she said. “Badly wrong. We should have embraced them, welcomed their help.”

“Too late to kick ourselves about it now.”

“I think we might be wrong about the Spicans, too.”

Parry pressed her on that, but that was all she would say on the matter. The remark troubled him all the way back, until Crabtree began to emerge over the horizon. First the tower appeared, with the swollen cylinder of the High Hab perched at its top, then the outlying structures, then the squared-off trenches where water had been mined from the ice. They couldn’t waste power illuminating the tower for its own sake, but its shape was defined by the light coming from its windows, and by the glow spilling from the spawn of domes surrounding it. Light raced along the guy lines, bluish as moonlit cobwebs.

“This is the first time I’ve seen this,” Bella said, something like awe in her voice.

“It’s home.”

“It doesn’t even look like a ship any more. If I didn’t know —” She bit down on whatever she had started to say. “How many are there now?”

“One hundred and forty-six — five more than we arrived with.”

“Children,” Bella breathed, as if the word was a kind of oath, or invocation: to be used sparingly, and with caution. “How… how are they?”

Parry steered the tractor around one of the ice trenches. At the far end, a robot was carving out a block with a cutting beam. “They seem okay. We take special care of them. We don’t leave much to chance.”

“This is no place for children,” she said.

“We came here to live. Children are part of that.” He took one hand off the tractor’s steering wheel to point to the hab. “They spend a lot of time up there, in the centrifuge. Six hours a day, at one-point-five gees. Costs power, but we need to give them more gravity than Janus has to offer.”

“That works?”

“Ryan says bone development looks normal.”

“He isn’t a paediatrician.”

“He’s learning.” Parry returned his hand to the wheel in time to steer them down a tunnel ramp, into the labyrinth of corridors under Crabtree. “That’s all any of us are doing, from day to day: learning as best we can. What did you mean back there, by the way, about us being wrong about the Spicans?”

But Bella ignored his question, and silence stretched between them as they pulled into a parking cavern, the walls furred with whorls of hastily applied sprayrock. Robots and tractors huddled in vacuum, but there was no one living to greet them. Parry and Bella disembarked and made their way to a large airlock littered with machine parts.

“I’m glad you named this place after Thom,” Bella said as the lock cycled. “It was bad, what we did to him.”

“What
they
did to him,” Parry corrected gently.

“No,” Bella insisted, “what
we
did. All of us. Including you, including me.” She kicked one heel against the ground. “This is our atonement.”

* * *

Ryan Axford still occupied his old medical complex in one of the two Hab centrifuges. He was alone when Parry dropped Bella off, and the lights in the medical complex were dimmed to their lowest settings. He stood up from a desk-mounted microscope with a glass slide in his hands, smeared with something yellow. He wore crumpled green scrubs and white gloves. “Hello, Bella,” he said. “It’s good to have you back.” Axford’s aged appearance didn’t alarm or surprise Bella: she had seen him many times during her exile, and could only guess at the burden of work he had been under since their arrival. He had been a young-looking forty-four before they chased Janus, but now he could have passed for a man in his late fifties, worn down by long decades of overwork. The salt-and-pepper crew cut she remembered was now nearly snow-white.

“I gather I won’t have time to outstay my welcome,” Bella said.

“Six hours is better than nothing. We’ll just have to make the most of it, won’t we?”

She steadied herself against a cabinet. This wasn’t even full gravity — the centrifuge had obviously been spun down for her visit — but it was still taxing after nearly three years in Janus’s microgravity. She struggled to catch her breath before speaking. “Parry told me you’ve been branching into paediatrics.”

“And obstetrics,” Axford added, with a gentle smile. “Not just me, of course: there’s Jagdeep, Thomas, Judy… Gayle.”

Thomas Shen and Gayle Simmons had taken Svetlana’s side during the crisis. Bella wondered what it had cost Axford to keep his team together, despite that rift. Something in the lines of his face spoke of the toll that other kind of healing had taken.

“Parry said there are several children now.”

“Yes, and there’s one more on the way,” Axford said. “I shouldn’t really tell you this, but it’s common knowledge in Crabtree — Svetlana’s pregnant.”

“Nice for her.”

“I don’t suppose word reached you that she lost one child already? A daughter. I did what I could, but…” Axford faltered, as if something had caught in his throat.

“I’m sorry she lost the child,” Bella said, and for an instant she permitted it to be true.

“They named her Hope. Hope was stillborn. That says something, don’t you think?”

“Mind if I sit down, Ryan?”

“I insist on it.” While she shuffled to a chair, he put down the slide, snapped off his gloves and reached for a flexy, glancing at it just long enough to review her case file. “How’ve you been doing since the last checkup?”

Bella smiled bleakly. “Better than Craig, from what I can gather.”

“Nothing to report, then?” He looked at her encouragingly. “Nothing ailing you?”

Through her feet she felt the quiet rumble of the centrifuge, like a fairground ride. “Oh, nothing worth mentioning. Sometimes I wake up screaming with terror because I think there are things outside, trying to get into the dome. Sometimes I catch myself standing naked in the airlock, halfway to the outside. Sometimes I find something sharp and think about killing myself.”

“We all have bad days.”

“Those are the good ones.”

He scratched a note onto the flexy. He held the stylus the way surgeons were trained to hold scalpels: four fingers on the shaft, like a violin bow. “Something stops you, though. Something holds you back, when you could end it all.”

“Duty,” Bella said. “Something that won’t let me turn away from this mission, and my responsibility to it.”

“Your responsibility ended the moment Svetlana took over.”

“No,” she said quietly. “It didn’t. It just got harder. I went peacefully because I knew it was the one thing that would allow Svieta’s people to forgive the others and work with them. It was the one thing that would bring the crew back together.”

“You had no choice. She made that decision, not you.”

“I went along with it.” She balled one fist and touched it to her heart. “That doesn’t mean I liked it.”

Axford placed the flexy back on his desk. Bella noticed that the display was discoloured, with many dead hexels blotching the iridophore array. “You know you have many friends in Crabtree — almost half the population were on your side. A lot of the people who turned to Svetlana only did so because Parry led the way. And you know Parry doesn’t have anything personal against you.”

She nodded, thinking of Parry’s small kindness in bringing the cigarettes.

“For the last two years we’ve been pushing to make things easier for you,” Axford said. “We haven’t made much progress yet. But I’m confident that when the energy crisis is finally resolved…”

“I don’t want things to be easier,” she said. “I want them harder.”

“I think you’ll get your wish, at least while Svetlana is running things. She can barely bring herself to mention your name.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Don’t take it to heart. That’s often the way it goes when deep friendships turn bad. And there is no denying the fact that you were very good friends.”

“Whatever she feels about me, I don’t hold it against her.” Bella looked down feeling suddenly childlike and vulnerable. “I knew Janus would come between us,” she said. “I felt it coming long before things turned really bad. I saw the lightning on the horizon.”

“Just… hang in there,” Axford said. “For all your other friends, for all of us who still care.”

“Is it true what I heard about Craig Schrope?”

“I still hope Craig will come around,” he said. But something in his tone suggested that he never expected it to happen. “Crabtree could always use an extra pair of hands. It already has to feed and water him so why not make him work for his keep?”

“Has he tried killing himself?”

“Given what we allow him in that room he’d need to be pretty creative. I don’t think he was ever a particularly creative man.”

“No,” Bella said. “I don’t think so either. Is he up here?”

Axford nodded cautiously. “It’s better to have him close.”

“I’d like to see him.”

“Sorry, I can’t possibly allow it.”

“Svetlana need never know. Who’d tell her?”

“Me.”

“You could choose not to. And Craig is not likely to go blabbing, is he?”

“Why, Bella? Why does it matter so much? Craig turned against you. He took the ship from you.”

“He thought it was the right thing to do. Even at the time, part of me wondered if he might be right about it. I just want to let him know,” she faltered offering Axford her best pleading look, the one that’d opened so many doors in the past. “Just a moment with him, that’s all.”

He cocked his head, his nostrils pinched. “She will have my hide if she ever finds out.”

“She won’t.”

“Two minutes, Bella. That’s all.”

“Thank you.”

He fished a key from his pocket and walked her to a door with a small circular window set at head-height. Axford rose upon his tiptoes to peer inside.

“He is awake. That’s good. I wouldn’t want to wake him.”

Axford let her into the room. He remained by the door watching Bella and his patient. Craig Schrope sat on the edge of his bed wearing white pyjamas. He rocked gently back and forth, his hands tucked in his lap, fingers interlaced either in supplication or due to some intense skin crawling anxiety. His hair was shaved almost down to his scalp and he smelled strongly of disinfectant. His expression was blank, alarmingly neutral with the waxy pallor of a shop window mannequin. His lips moved, but not much else. He was saying something, mouthing words at the very limit of audibility.

“Hello Craig,” Bella said. “It’s me, Bella. I’ve come to see you. How are you doing?”