“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.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
PART ONE - 2057+
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
PART TWO - 2059+
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
PART THREE - 2090+
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Alastair Reynolds, Pushing Ice
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