Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

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

‘Didn’t want you to burden you, Jim.’

She loved sarcasm, especially from engineers.

We’ll review the situation before proceeding closer. Any changes we don’t like the look of, we scrub. Clear on that?’ ‘Clear.’ ‘No arguments, no heroics,’ Parry said firmly. ‘No problem,’ Svetlana answered. ‘This is a heroics-free zone.’

Liz Shen’s computational needs were handled by her clothes and the kernels of Borderline Intelligence packed into her minimalist jewellery. The clothes and jewellery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements. The computational textiles exchanged data with the environment via rapid subliminal alterations to their colour patterning, too brief to be picked up by the human eye. The apparently serene environment, in turn, flickered beneath the level of perception with a frenzy of encoded data patterns.

‘I died while listening to Turandot. How many people can say 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.

Once upon a time we were all miners, all in it together. Pushing ice.’

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.’

‘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.’