Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

incident pits were underwater situations that turned bad in little increments. Each small step - almost inconsequential in themselves - took one ever deeper into a pit with ever-steepening sides. Near the top, there was still time to reverse the situation and get out. Deeper in, options thinned out fast.

Svetlana watched on the cam as the workers at the base attacked a piece of debris. ‘Tell them to take care.’ ‘Just because they’re fast doesn’t mean they’re not good. These are the same people I’d trust with the trickiest jobs on a comet.’ Svetlana forced herself to nod. 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.

I can only help one person a day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow doesn’t look good either.

Fluency with mathematics - in the context of any kind of engineering discipline or physical science - was a use-it-or-lose-it skill.

Nukes are the ultimate trump card, you see. It’s like paper, scissors, stone. Nukes beat matter, every time, hands down.’

‘They will offer you the world,’ McKinley said. ‘If you take it, you will lose everything.’

Chromis said. ‘The Janus anomaly changed history. The existence theorem says that it is always much easier to find a solution when you can be confident that one exists. Within a hundred years of your departure, there had been cataclysmic breakthroughs in fundamental physics. Janus taught us to look for loopholes in theories that had looked watertight for decades. Eventually, we had our own frameshift drive. It wasn’t as efficient as the Janus motor, and probably didn’t employ anything like the same principles, but it sufficed.

But organised structure is the most precious thing in the universe. When it is lost, it is truly lost.’

‘Ten thousand years is just a pebble tossed into eternity’s canyon, Chromis.’

‘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.’