Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

“We push ice. It’s what we do.”’

‘It’s still a man’s world out here,’ Svetlana said. ‘Every now and then something happens to remind me of that. Like I’m on some kind of probation. We’ll let you manage this expensive toy for now, but the moment you slip up—’

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.

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.

What she had never imagined was that when that moment came she would be sitting at her desk with her feet squishing soggy carpet. But that was reality: always pissing on the epic moment.

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

‘If the suit told me it’d been manufactured on Triton, I’d be inclined to believe it.’

‘Something’s on the horizon.’

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

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.

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.’ He turned and nodded at the waiting cauls. ‘Now let’s go down there and make the most of it, while it lasts.’