Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

‘You know what they say about shit coming in threes, too,’

Rama reference?

She could never quite overcome a lingering prejudice against the comet miners. They were too brave, too courageous. Svetlana thought that the only kind of person you wanted anywhere near any part of a fusion motor was someone with a strong aversion to risk.

Cowards were exactly the kind of people you wanted around nuclear technology.

But that was reality: always pissing on the epic moment.

It’s as if we have two boxes for all the memories we acquire between the moment we’re born and the moment we die: the child box and the grown-up box. You can still open the child box when you’re an adult, sift through those memories, take them out for examination, but they never feel as if they happened to you. It’s as though you see everything through thick glass, putting the world one notch out of focus. But by the time we’re eleven, everything goes in the grown-up box.

‘Easy to say from here.’ ‘Easy for you to dismiss.

Through their conversations, Bella had come to suspect that the Fountainheads measured time in terms of the density of events, rather than the number of elapsed units of some specific interval. To Fountainheads, a hundred years in which nothing much happened was less time than an event-filled minute.

The existence theorem says that it is always much easier to find a solution when you can be confident that one exists.