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.

‘You could give scheming lessons to Machiavelli,’ Parry said. ‘I did. He flunked.’

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

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.