Chisholm nodded in reply. “Not half as good as it is actually to be back,” he said. “And to feel well again… I never thought this would happen.” He paused with the glass of water halfway to his mouth, studying the fine, hairless skin of his hand, with its utter absence of wrinkles and veins. For an instant, Svetlana thought she saw a shudder of horror pass through him.
“They fixed you,” she said.
“I know. They told me — or at least allowed me knowledge somehow — of what they were doing, but it’s only just sinking in. I’d like someone to bring me a mirror, in a while. They changed my face, didn’t they?”
“They put the clock back,” Svetlana said, “that’s all. You still look like Jim Chisholm.”
He stroked his clean-shaven jaw the way one might feel an object in the dark, and then his stubbled scalp. “I’m not so sure about the mirror now.”
“You look fine, buddy,” Parry said. “You’re thickening out by the day, You always were a handsome bastard. Pity they haven’t done anything about that.”
“Just… leaner and meaner, right?” Chisholm said, smiling ruefully. “Well, I can live with that — I suppose I can live with anything, given the alternative. I don’t want to sound ungrateful for what’s happened to me.”
“Wasn’t anything we did,” Parry said.
“Someone had the guts to carry me into that ship. That must have taken some nerve. Who drew the short straw?”
“I took you in,” Svetlana said. “And there were no straws. There isn’t a person on Janus who wouldn’t have done it in my place.”
“You still did it, Svieta.”
How much, she wondered, did he know about what had happened to Craig Schrope? Had any knowledge of that filtered through to him while he was under the aliens’ care?
“You deserved it,” she said. “It was a privilege… an honour. And I wasn’t scared. Not of the ship, anyway. I was scared about what would happen if we didn’t do something.”
“Well, you did the right thing. Again, I’m sorry about what happened in Underhole. I didn’t mean to cause any alarm. I don’t think I was fully awake then: I mean, I remember it all… but it doesn’t feel as if it was me speaking to you back then.”
“And now?” Svetlana asked.
“I feel clearer. A lot clearer. Like the way the air feels after a storm. It’s passed now.”
“You’re not out of the woods just yet,” Axford said firmly. “By any objective measure you’ve been through an extremely stressful series of events, even if you don’t remember all of it on a conscious level.”
“To be honest, I wish I remembered more of it. But it was only when the aliens put me back together that there was much of me capable of remembering anything.”
Svetlana sighed inwardly, relieved that Chisholm had brought up the matter of the aliens. Now at least she did not have to worry about broaching the subject, and possibly tipping him into another shock-induced coma.
“Do you remember them?” she asked.
“Absolutely. They made themselves known to me before letting me out of the ship. And to save you asking the one thing I’m sure you want to know above all else — they’re friendly. They mean us no harm. We have nothing to fear from them, and a great deal to learn.”
He sounded as if he meant it, Svetlana thought, but as the aliens had wired his head back together, that was hardly surprising. They could have programmed him to say anything, with any amount of conviction.
“I’m all for learning from them,” she said doubtfully, “but I can’t see what they’d hope to gain from us in return.”
“Not much from us per se,” Chisholm said, “but we do have one thing they have a use for: Janus. They don’t want to invade, or subjugate us, or anything banal like that, but there are things in Janus that they can exploit for their own ends: power and materials, basically, just like we’ve been doing, but in a more sophisticated way.”
Svetlana frowned: there were a lot of questions she wanted to ask, and she wasn’t quite sure how to prioritise them. “Where would that leave us?”
“No worse off than we are now. So far, we’ve only extracted a tiny fraction of what Janus has to offer. The aliens want to tap Janus at a deeper level, one that won’t impact on our energy-skimming at all. We can keep on doing what we’ve been doing since we arrived here — I’ve got some catching up to do, I know, but I would guess that things haven’t changed particularly drastically in the last nine years.”
“No point pretending otherwise,” Parry said.
“In that case we lose nothing. We grant them access rights to the interior, and in return they’ll give us more than we can dream of.”
“Okay,” Parry said, “but if they want Janus that badly — and right now I can’t quite see why they need it in the first place, they’re so advanced — why don’t they just take it from us? To them we must be like… I don’t know, a little kid with a big lollipop.”
Chisholm shook his head. “That isn’t the way they do things. They’ve found in their travels that it’s always better to arrive at a negotiated agreement.”
“But what if we say no?”
“They’ll respect that decision.” Chisholm smiled. “Look, I know you’ll find this difficult to grasp, but overwhelming us with force wouldn’t be a sensible strategy for them for two reasons. Firstly, although we’re less technologically advanced than them, like any other spacefaring culture they’re likely to meet we do have a rudimentary understanding of controlled fusion. Even if we don’t have nuclear weapons with us, we’ll have the means to make them. And nuclear weapons are already enough to rule out takeover by force. Not because we’d be able to use the weapons against them very effectively — although we might try — but because we could very easily destroy the one thing they want. Nukes are the ultimate trump card, you see. It’s like paper, scissors, stone. Nukes beat matter, every time, hands down.”
“They’re afraid we’d blow up Janus to stop them getting at it?” Parry said.
“That’s about it. Similar spoiling actions have been documented enough times in their past that they won’t risk a forceful takeover unless they really have run out of options.”
“You said there were two reasons,” Axford said.
“Secondly, we may look like a pushover, but they — or possibly alien entities known to them — have occasionally run into advanced cultures pretending to be at a lower level of development. They won’t attempt the big-stick approach in case we’ve got an even bigger stick hidden away somewhere.”
“But again, if we say no, they’ll just walk away?”
“No, I said they’ll respect that decision, but that won’t stop them exploring other avenues for negotiation. They have a lot of time to play with, you see. They’ll need Janus eventually — but not right now. They’re just taking the long view, before the resource gets snatched up by someone else.”
“Someone else,” Svetlana echoed, with a prickle of disquiet. “So there are other aliens out there?”
“The one thing I’ve learned,” Chisholm said, “is that it’s a big, wide universe, and not everything in it is as friendly as these guys.” He leaned forward in the bed. “Which is why we really should listen to them. They put me back together. We already owe them something.”
* * *
Chisholm was still Axford’s patient, and Axford was not going to let him be worn out by endless rounds of questions. Svetlana bowed to his wisdom, but made sure she arranged her own sleeping and working patterns to coincide with Chisholm’s visiting hours. He looked a little healthier, a little less wraithlike, each time she entered the room. He always smiled encouragingly when he recognised her, made all the right moves, did all the things that ought to have put her at ease. He made small talk and dropped jokes and self-deprecating observations into the conversation. But every now and then he still came out with something that brought an alien chill into the room.
“The suit you came back in,” Svetlana said, when it was tim
e to push him further. “It spoke Thai. It claimed to have been manufactured on Triton in 2134. Do you know anything about that?”
“If the suit told me it’d been manufactured on Triton, I’d be inclined to believe it.”
“The suit bothers us, Jim.”
He’d been making notes on a sheet of vat-grown paper with a ballpoint pen. Now he put the sheet aside. “It shouldn’t,” he said. “It’s just a spacesuit. It can’t harm you.”
“That’s not the point. What bothers us is how did the suit get to Spica?”
“The aliens found it. They’re not the Spicans, incidentally — but you’ve probably worked that out already.”
Parry had already told her of Bella’s suspicions. As much as it galled her, she had to concede that Bella had a point. “We’re calling them Fountainheads for now. If they turn out to be the Spicans after all, we’ll rethink the name.”
“Fountainheads.” He cocked his head, then nodded agreeably. “I like it. They’ll like it, too, I think.”
“Craig Schrope coined it,” she said. “He saw them first.”
He’d been told what had happened to Craig Schrope, but although he had absorbed the information, he did not seem to connect with Schrope’s death on an emotional level. “Good for Craig,” he said.
“What bothers us,” Svetlana said, “is how the aliens ever came into contact with the people who made that spacesuit.”
“They’re starfaring,” Chisholm said. “It’s what they do.”
“So at some point they encountered a human ship, one that happened to be carrying a spacesuit manufactured in 2134?”
“Pretty reasonable assumption.”
“Except it doesn’t cut it. We left the solar system in 2057. We’ve come two hundred and sixty-odd light-years since then, mostly at a speed only slightly slower than light. The latest information that could possibly have reached us out here would be from only one or two years after our departure. Even if the Fountainheads made contact with humanity in 2059, they’d only just have had time to race out here in time for our arrival — assuming they have the ability to travel slightly closer to the speed of light than us. But that suit’s from nearly eighty years after we left! Information about 2134 is on its way to us, but it won’t get here until somewhere around our version of 2134.”
“Nonetheless, the suit exists.”
“It doesn’t make any sense, Jim, not unless we throw out the light-speed limit. Are we ready to do that? Even Janus didn’t travel faster than light.”
“But it was the Fountainheads that brought you the suit. Their technology’s clearly of a different order than the machinery inside Janus. Perhaps they did exceed the speed of light to get here in time.”
“What did the aliens say, Jim? Did they tell you where they got hold of that suit?”
“No,” he said. “They didn’t tell me that.”
“You didn’t think to ask?”
For the first time, he sounded needled. “I didn’t care about the suit, Svieta. They fixed me up, let me get to know them a bit, then wound me up and set me walking back to you like a clockwork clown. You saw what I was like then. Do you think I gave the suit more than a glance?”
“Still bothers me, Jim.”
“Well, don’t let it. They’re benign, like I said. They want something that it’ll cost us nothing to give, and in return they’ll give us the world.”
“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?”