Maximum Ice (13 page)

She wondered if the idiom meant the same in their language as hers. Eng was giving her little shakes of his head.
Don’t ask
, he seemed to convey

“Will there be a… trial, a judgment made after fair inquiry?”

Worley frowned. “They’re not people, you realize.” He cut
off her response. “They
eat
people. Just like animals. See the difference?” In a more collegial tone, he said, “Now, if you want to share in the snow-witch price, we can discuss it. But, please, time enough for business later.” He gestured to the door.

“The nuns will kill him?” she persisted.

“The nuns do what they will,” Worley said, leading her to the door.

She rose, taking in the Group of Five, searching for any signs of concern. Some had donned their headsets. They had moved past the subject.

Worley gestured at her satchel. “You can leave that with your assistant.” He waved in the young man who apparently had been waiting for her outside. “He can take it into safekeeping.”

Zoya latched on to the satchel straps. “No, I couldn’t ask him to do that. Among my people, we always carry our own baggage.”

Especially if it seemed likely one’s baggage would walk off and get ever so lost.

The records vault lay deep in a region of chemical-processing nodes, with air so laden with fumes that Zoya’s throat hurt. Worley recited the outputs with pride: paraffin, benzene, chlorine, phenyl, ammonia, and amines. All the products were reduced from mine salvage in a wonder of reverse synthesis. Her host rattled off the names of their machines with evident pride: coagulators, masticators, reducers, degassers, acetylators, and devices for hydrogenation and polymerization. Attached to each apparatus was a prominent electricity meter, measuring the draw on the solar reserves.

Just past the chemical plant, Worley stopped at a plain
metal door that looked in rather better condition than most she’d seen. It was the records vault. Entering, Zoya passed into a realm of scrubbed tidiness. Meticulous order reigned, along with soul-lifting fresh air.

There, on long, spotless tables, a few book remnants were laid out like sacred relics. Gloved workers bent over the tables, examining the records with what looked like magnifying devices.

“Don’t touch!” Alger, the chief of records, was at least seventy years old, and though in a wheelchair, he was clearly in charge of his domain. On his thin body, his head appeared large, augmented by thick gray hair like an outer shell on a sphere.

“These are fragile artifacts, not for touching,” he rasped at her.

Zoya withdrew her hand.

Worley intervened: “That is no way to speak to our honored guest, Alger.”

The things Worley could say with a straight face. Zoya knew he was distressed by her presence among them, and commotion was growing. To maintain order, he’d moved her to a more isolated room. But he was stalling.

Alger powered his chair around to glare at Worley. “That book is nine thousand years old, and worth more than the entire Worley dig, with its effluvia of knickknacks.” He stared Worley down. “You lift a book like that, it disintegrates.”

“I’m so sorry,” Zoya hastened to say. “I’ll keep my hands to myself, I promise.”

Alger held Worley’s gaze another moment, then swung around to look up at Zoya. “See that you do.” He had started to show them his operations, and now proceeded, though he kept a skeptical eye on Zoya.

Gesturing for one of his assistants to stand away from his worktable, Alger approached the workstation. A small sliver of
paper lay on a tray amid several miniature brushes and flasks containing liquids.

“We have to coat them, once we separate the pages,” Alger explained. “Not much can be salvaged, because the pages adhere to each other. When we rescue a fragment, we coat it with a preservative.”

When Zoya bent closer, she saw that the fragment was in the old tongue, Ship’s English, which she had decided to call Late English. All that was left of this record was, “… as weatherization, appliance efficiency and rebates…” To her surprise, Alger read it out loud, with a heavy accent, but accurately.

Noting her expression, he said, “If I couldn’t read the old language, what good would the records do us?” He waved at his assistants. “They all can read it, or they wouldn’t be here. They’d be down at the digs trying to scrabble a living in the junk industry.”

Worley drew himself up, as much as his stocky frame allowed. “That junk keeps us alive, Alger. It’s nothing to sneer at.”

“Oh, it’s plenty to sneer at.” He rolled onward, his chair bristling with tech that easily allowed him to navigate the aisles and make notes in his arm pad, which he did, as his roving eye noted things they passed. In some respects the motor chair seemed needlessly complicated, as though mechanical appliances might be valued for their own sake. Yet despite the preserve’s flair for mechanics, the effect was still that of jury-rigged salvage.

Zoya started to follow Alger, but Worley held her back a moment, commenting in an undertone, “We indulge him”—he waved at the room and its contents—“but what good is all this? Can’t touch it, can’t taste it, can’t spend it. It’s a waste of resources.” He winked at Zoya, as though she shared his assessment.

Alger turned around his chair, waiting for them to catch up.

“I haven’t got all day. We’re busy here, as I believe you can see for yourselves.”

Zoya caught up with Alger. “Please continue. You’re very kind.”

“Kind has nothing to do with it.” He fixed her with a cool gaze. “This is a courtesy to a fellow student of science.” He nodded. “Oh, I’ve heard all about you, Zoya Kundara, enough to know you’re not one of the rabble. Came on a star ship, did you? Good, good. We’ll exchange information, then.” He craned his neck to get a peering at her ear lex. “Like to take a look at that speech device of yours, sometime.” Then he looked down the aisle, where Worley was bending rather too close to a book fragment. “Don’t waste your time with that man and his ilk. He’s a
politician,”
saying that last word in a tone of voice that left little doubt of his opinion of public servants.

“Alger, are your entire records stored here in this room?” Zoya asked. She hoped this was not the extent of their collection. “Where are your electronically stored records?”

“From the First World?” Alger shook his head. “All gone. Pfft.”

“Pfft?” Zoya repeated.

“Yes, ruined, useless. All of it.” He sniffed. “So you don’t know about that part.” He powered closer to her. “A good plan gone bad,” he said.

“What was a good plan?”

“Ice.” He glanced down the aisle where Worley was still engaged with one of his assistants. “It’s not a welcome theory Contradicts the rabble’s beliefs about Ice watching over them. These people aren’t scientific, they’re feeble-minded occultists with a penchant for gadgets.”

She gently steered him back. “The plan?”

“Yes, it was a plan! Do you think something like Ice happens by accident? Spontaneous generation?”

“Created by a previous civilization, is that what your research shows?”

“The Ecos built it, everyone knows that.”

“To contain information…”

Alger nodded. She’d been holding that concept at bay. It had been theory and superstition, and it still might be. But myths always contained their own truths.

Alger was saying, “What happened to the Ecos, everyone wonders. I’ll tell you. They’re dead. All dead. Ice killed them, just as it’s killed everything that once lived here. We’re all that’s left. We’re the Ecos. But we’re Zeros, all right. Ignorant, pawing in the garbage dumps of history.”

“And what was the Ecos’ plan?”

“To save us, you damn fool. Aren’t you listening? It was all created to defend us, and ended up doing the opposite. Now, we think—those of us who bother with thinking—that it was dark matter.” He cocked his head. “You know what
that
is?”

Zoya was beginning to feel like a schoolchild who hadn’t done her homework. “I have a general idea…”

“Ideas aren’t general, they’re specific, or what good are they?” He went on, “Our records show that the Ecos always thought there was something out there”—he glanced upward. “Something that could account for certain measurements that didn’t make sense. So long as it was just a theory, who cared?” He glanced at Worley as though he were an example of one who cared little for theories. “Then we encountered it in an unpleasant manner. The dark days. Dark days indeed.”

“What happened?”

“Pfft.” Alger nodded his head like a giant flower gone to pollen. “Gone. Destroyed.” He waited for her to catch on. Then he gave up. “Biological systems went down. Plant life died. Then people died. The Collapse. No records, of course, except notes on paper.” He looked around the lab with its relics of paper
. “Opposites, that’s the gist of it. The dark cloud was deeply negative as to information. It attracted information to itself, at our expense.” He flashed her a warning look. “Don’t ask me how. I don’t know how. We’re always looking in the records for the mechanism of how it worked. Haven’t figured it out yet. But we will. The point is, it came and went—the threat passed by, eventually. But Ice stayed.”

He nodded. “You might ask, why did Ice keep growing? That, my friend, is the big question. Would the Ecos have been so foolish to create a defense that would ruin the very earth it was designed to protect? No, not intentionally. It was never meant to grow so large. Something went wrong.”

“Nonsense.” Worley had returned to stand beside them. “How could the Ecos commit such a blunder?” He shook his head. “Alger gets carried away sometimes.”

“Carried away by the evidence!” Alger shot back.

“It’s a theory, Alger,” Worley said, with his habit of gentle reasonableness. It grated on Zoya. “Not a bad one, but it doesn’t go well with the folks here.” He looked at Zoya, shrugging. “Simple folk need their religion. They hold Ice in awe. Doesn’t do to call it a mistake.”

“No. Doesn’t do to speak the truth.”

Zoya slipped between them. “Alger, I was hoping that you might demonstrate an interface with Ice.”

Alger gave her a withering glance. “Interface? Interface? I leave that to the cranks. Don’t waste your time. Whole thing’s encrypted. A waste of time, unless you’re keen on fortune-telling.”

Encrypted, Zoya thought. She imagined a closed, bolted door. But it
was
a door.

Worley shook his head, “Foretellers have their place, Alger. Live and let live.”

“Politician,”
Alger muttered as he turned his chair and cruised away down the aisle.

Worley watched him go. “May we go on, Zoya? I did hope to show you the digs and the metal-reduction plant. We’re proud of them, even if our master of dust isn’t.”

She allowed herself to be led from the room, with its ancient texts, the fragments of phone books, old novels, repair manuals. A hopeless labor. She followed Worley to the mines, thinking of the most important question Alger was pursuing: Why did Ice keep growing? The answer might lie in the records.

But Zoya was looking elsewhere, to
intention.

CHAPTER SIX

Anatolly could see his breath in front of him in this region of Ship, minimally heated to conserve energy. Most crew found these decks lonely and depressing, a sign of failure. The Rom’s reduced numbers. But for a man who seldom had privacy, Anatolly liked to stroll in them.

He found himself drawn to deck five and the stasis chambers, where the seeds and eggs were kept. He traced his hand along the wells, and the names lit up as he did so:
Biston betularia, Podicepts cristatus, Foraminifera.
Fascinating words, splendid creatures. In English they sounded more mundane: peppered moth, crested grebe, sea spider. His fingers trailed the plaques of names, and the litany of creatures instructed him of his purpose.

Someday soon they would incubate the organisms. Having saved these life-forms from extinction,
Star Road
could be regarded as the new ark, not to put too religious a stamp on it. It gave him some peace to consider such a high mission. Perhaps the Rom would fail to thrive on earth. But before they perished, they would set those seeds into the world. Jozsef Mirran had already arrived in the Sahel. Anatolly insisted on calling it the Sahel, not the last lands, as some of the crew were calling it. Too negative. True enough, the land was bare, though it received more rainfall than in an earlier age.