Pushing Ice (66 page)

Bella nodded. They’d been over this line of reasoning so many times that it had the ingrained familiarity of a mantra. “They couldn’t experience anything resembling meaningful communication.”

“No — that would have been out of the question. But the Spicans wanted more than that. They wanted contact so badly that they were prepared to tamper with the rules.”

“Hence the Structure,” Bella said.

Chromis nodded her approval. “Constructed at the end of time — or at the very least deep into time, long after their own era: a gathering point for samples of other intelligent cultures
yet to come
. The Spicans seeded the galaxy with lures — Janus-type devices — and waited. Apart from the envoys they must have sent into the distant future to assemble the Structure, the Spicans themselves vanished from the galaxy. Perhaps they became extinct, or perhaps they went somewhere else. Yet after they had vanished, other cultures inevitably developed. The intervals between the emergences of these cultures may have been many millions of years, Bella, but that is nothing compared to the age of the galaxy.”

“Eighteen thousand years makes me dizzy, Chromis. Much beyond that and my brain just can’t cope.”

“I know how you feel. But if I’m right — and this is only speculation — the point of the Structure was to reduce those intervals of time to nothing, and to bring those cultures together at the same time, as if they had always coexisted. A zoo compresses space and brings together creatures that could never have coexisted in the same location. The Structure does the same for cultures, by compressing time.”

“Using the lures to bring them here,” Bella said.

“They were the key. Sooner or later, representatives of those cultures were guaranteed to stumble on their equivalents of Janus. With us, we’d barely left Earth. With other cultures, it may have been thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years before they found the lures.” Chromis offered Bella a sympathetic smile. “With something like frameshift, hundreds of thousands of years is enough time to cross the entire galaxy. It’s enough time to forge an empire of a hundred billion worlds, something so glorious that you cannot comprehend that it will not last for ever. But even a hundred thousand years is a sliver, a moment, compared to the kind of deep galactic time we’re talking about here. In terms of contact between two cultures, it’s barely of consequence.”

“The Fountainheads are a long way beyond us.”

“They’d obviously been starfaring a long time before they rode their lure to the Structure, if that’s how they got here. It may even have been millions of years since they left their home world. But it wasn’t so much through time that they became incomprehensibly advanced. Their psychology is evidently alien, but they still have material needs. You have something
they
can use. That’s what matters.”

“And the Musk Dogs?”

“Another galactic culture snatched here from some different point in time. The same goes for all the others. Those that emerged later may have some dim knowledge of their predecessors, just as the Fountainheads appear to have learned of us by our ruins.” Darkly, Chromis added, “There may be entities in the Structure who know the Fountainheads by theirs.”

“Why do this, though?” Bella asked. “If the Spicans are so interested in first contact… where are they?”

“Perhaps they’re less interested in contact so much as the diligent study of how it proceeds. When the endcap doors are open, cultures are permitted to interact with each other. It can’t always go well. But then, if there are already thirty-five alien races in this thing, there are a lot of permutations.”

“I thought they were zookeepers,” Bella said, “but you make them sound more like game-players.”

“Perhaps that’s what they are.”

“Then what happens if we want out of the game?”

Chromis pursed her lips tactfully. “You may have less choice than you think. If the Structure is capable of holding the Fountainheads prisoner, not to mention the thirty-three
other
alien cultures, some of which are not even made of baryonic matter, then leaving may not be an entirely trivial exercise.”

“That shouldn’t prevent us from trying,” Bella said.

“No, it shouldn’t, but keep one thing in mind: you still have no idea how much better off you might be by staying inside this thing.”

“I made a promise to get my people home.”

“Some promises are best broken. Trust me on this: I’m a politician.”

Bella jumped at the sound of approaching footsteps. The haunt, which had been with her all the while, folded out of the shadows and then resumed its low-threat posture.

“Hello, Liz,” Bella said.

“Is Chromis still with you?”

Bella shook her head. She had disappeared the moment Liz Shen had arrived. “Is something the matter?”

“Yes,” Shen said. “Something’s very much the matter. It’s Svetlana. She’s on her way to the Musk Dogs.”

THIRTY-FIVE

Svetlana climbed towards the broken bone of the gristleship, the Skyside terminal gradually shrinking to a knot of light next to the larger citadel of the Fountainhead embassy. The construction domes and supply lines of the Tier-Two settlement project barely dented the great blackness of the Iron Sky’s outer surface. Humans might spill out into that darkness, but it would be centuries before the population density approached that of the most crowded cities on Earth. And when that was done — when the Iron Sky itself had been wrapped from pole to pole in a hot, twinkling sprawl of human habitation, they could keep expanding outwards.

The HUD blinked: an incoming contact.

“Is that you, Svetlana?” asked the anchordoll, in her well-mannered, nearly accentless voice.

“It’s me.”

“We’re sending out a shuttle to bring you into the ship. Do nothing, and all will be well.”

Svetlana killed the suit’s thrust and let it drift. She observed a small, cyst-like node detach itself from the gristleship, stretching fatty tendrils until they snapped. The node approached her with deceptive acceleration. Like the mother ship, it consisted of sinewy strands bound around a handful of hard, foreign-looking mechanisms. A pair of fleshy doors opened like a ribcage that had been cracked and spread for heart surgery. The suit coasted into the soft red interior and came to rest. The ribbed doors closed, locking Svetlana inside. Through the faceplate she made out a vague pink-red glow, and a suggestion of throbbing surfaces. The status read-outs on the HUD remained placid. The Chakri five had detected nothing that caused it concern.

The journey to the gristleship must only have taken a few seconds. Svetlana felt no acceleration or deceleration before the doors cleaved open, revealing a much larger enclosure bathed in the same pink-red glow. It was a cavernous space with no obvious distinction between floor, ceiling or walls. The decor, such as it was, consisted of a complex layered accretion of waxy blobs and hardened, stringy residues. Here and there were smears and daubs of distinct colour — yellows, browns and nasty mucosal greens. Blank spheres set into wrinkled, eyelike whorls provided the illumination.

For the first time since leaving Eddytown, she had weight again. She stepped out of the shuttle onto a scalloped, sloping path that ambled down to the lowest part of the chamber. The gravity felt close to a standard gee, though inside the suit it was difficult to tell. She panned around, taking in the whole grotto. She felt an obligation to observe, knowing that the suit would be storing the data for future playback.

Another pair of rib-like doors swung open in the far wall. The sudden movement startled her, but she kept her cool. Then a Musk Dog came through the wall.

She got it badly wrong at first. She thought there were several of them, not just one individual. The alien looked like two or three scabby street dogs fighting over a scrap of meat: an unruly mass of mismatched limbs, fur the colour of sun-baked mud, too many tightly packed eyes above a toothsome black muzzle. It was difficult to make out its basic body shape, for the thing kept scratching and scrabbling and pissing, arcs of steaming urine jetting from too many places as it made its scratching, scrabbling, sniffling way through the chamber. It only came as high as her waist.

When it spoke, Svetlana heard a rapid, strangulated retching and gargling. Overlaid on that, produced by some mechanism she couldn’t see, was the cool, synthetic voice of the CNN anchordoll.

“Svetlana Barseghian, welcome aboard the gristleship. We trust your stay here will be pleasant. Feel free to leave at any time, but we hope you will stay awhile.”

“Thank you,” she said, the suit transmitting her voice to the outside world.

“It is safe to breathe our atmosphere. There are no toxins, viruses or microorganisms that might cause you harm or discomfort.”

She glanced at the HUD read-out. It confirmed that the external atmosphere was safe to breathe, while warning her that its readings might be in error and that she should therefore proceed with due caution.

“I’m okay in here, thanks.”

The Musk Dog snuffled around her suit. It brushed against her, lingering with its hindquarters. “Please consider breathing our air. It would please us very much.”

She shook her head, hoping that the creature recognised the gesture. Their use of the anchordoll suggested that they already had a thorough grasp of human body language. “If it’s okay with you, I’ll keep the suit on for the moment. It’s not that I don’t trust you — just that I feel safer inside.”

The Musk Dog paused in its inspection of her. “That’s fine. We understand. Perhaps next time, when you have grown more accustomed to our ship?”

“Perhaps,” Svetlana allowed.

“I must introduce myself. I am The One That Greets.”

“Hello, One That Greets. Thank you for having me aboard.”

The Musk Dog paused to squirt urine against part of the chamber. Where the urine impacted, Svetlana noticed, the chamber walls gained a temporary, fading discoloration.

“It is our pleasure. Now, will you please follow me? I am tasked to take you to The One That Negotiates.”

“Lead on,” Svetlana said.

She followed the flailing mass of red-brown limbs, pausing every now and again as the creature halted and urinated against the wall. The Musk Dog brought her to a sweaty chamber deep within the gristleship. The walls were covered with the same fused secretions, years upon years’ worth of them, layered in a crusted impasto that she guessed was metres thick. On some level, Svetlana judged, the ship was the product of those secretions and daubings.

“I will leave you with this one,” the Musk Dog said, retreating the way they had come.

The other Musk Dog was crouched down in front of a kind of display wall: a mosaic of randomly shaped facets pressed into a claylike matrix at odd, arbitrary angles. Each of the facets was displaying a different ShipNet channel. The creature’s attention hopped from screen to screen with manic inattention. Svetlana heard a babble of human voices, and over that a synthetic rendition of the Musk Dog language.

The second Musk Dog waited until The One That Greets had left before acknowledging Svetlana’s presence. It turned from the display wall, raised its muzzle and examined her, sniffing vigorously.

“The other one touched you,” it said, walking around her. Limbs thrashed and tangled against each other, as if there was something fundamentally wrong with the alien’s motor coordination.

“It brushed against my suit,” Svetlana said.

The creature cocked its head, as if weighing the significance of what she had just told it. After a moment it said, “I am The One That Negotiates. I am most gratified that you have come aboard the gristleship. There is much that we can offer in trade. With the Whisperer passkey, you will have access to closed regions of the Structure. With femtomachinery and frameshift technology, you will enjoy a negotiating advantage over several less advanced cultures. Now that the Uncontained are loose again, such things may make the difference between extinction and survival. You should not rely on the Shaft-Five Nexus for protection against the Uncontained. The Stiltwalkers did, and look what happened to
them
. Yet these are only the first of many things that we will offer you. There will be much more to follow, if negotiations proceed harmoniously.”

Very little of what the alien had just told her meant anything to Svetlana, not being privileged to the information Bella had gleaned from McKinley. “What do you want from us?” she asked.

“The same commodity as the Fountainheads: we seek access to the deep mechanisms of your world.”

“You want to draw power from Janus.”

“The very thing,” the Musk Dog said, after a moment’s consideration.

“What would you need from me for that to happen?”

“Simply your permission, as a delegated negotiator for your culture.” Again, the Musk Dog cocked its head. “The method of your approach was eccentric. Was there some technical problem that required you to drill your way out of the transparent structure?”

“Yes,” Svetlana said. In order to reach open space, she’d had to use a suit-mounted cutting torch to drill her way through the elevator shaft blocking the skyhole, ascend the shaft until she was on the far side of the Iron Sky and then cut her way out again. The shaft would repair itself easily enough, but news of the damage — and the fact that she had attempted to visit the Musk Dogs — would be sure to have reached Bella by now.

“Very well,” the Musk Dog said shrewdly. “No further questions are required, then?”

“None at all.”

“That’s good. It’s always most satisfying to us when we can be sure that we are dealing with a delegated negotiator rather than an adventurous free agent. You can imagine the great vexation that has caused us in the past.”

“You need have no fears in that respect,” Svetlana said.

The Musk Dog knew she was lying, Svetlana was certain. It knew she was lying and it didn’t care.

“Then we may begin. As a token of our goodwill, you will already find forge-vat construction files uploaded into your suit memory. These concern technologies postdating the emergence of the Transgressive Intelligences. You will find tools, weapons and protective devices, together with protocols for more efficient forge-vat designs. All these gifts must be used with due scrupulousness.”