Maximum Ice (23 page)

She twisted around to look as they passed the lead sled. Wolf had no intention of stopping. “Please, Wolf,” she said, getting to her feet and swaying in the bounce of the vehicle.

There was no getting through to him. Worse, he was changing direction, peeling off to the west.

“That’s the wrong direction,” Zoya said.

They jolted along, leaving the caravan farther behind, leaving their true course behind.

In her frustration, Zoya grabbed hold of the steering wheel. Wolf turned on her, but instead of anger, she saw an expression of what might be pain, or fear.

“A snow witch,” he said. “Fresh sign.”

She locked gazes with him. “Snow Angel, then?”

He nodded. “Maybe.”

If there was a lone witch, they could travel forever and never find him. Wolf was well aware she was in a hurry. She’d told him why. He’d responded that if speed was important, she would be traveling in a spaceship, not a sled. To that logic, she had no answer, except Janos, Janos. Damn him for a meddling conniver.

She looked behind her, southward. Toward the Keep. Anatolly had said the nuns didn’t see Ice as a problem, but rather as a resource. If so, were the nuns involved with Ice’s renewed growth? Was it their
intention
that it stay, and stay? She was most eager to meet this leader of secular nuns, this Solange Arnaud. But no, they would chase phantoms, instead.

Over the whine of the engine she growled at Wolf, “I paid you.”

“Not enough,” she heard him say.

He pressed the accelerator to the floor, and they sped through the translucent forest, lacking trails or landmarks. But Wolf seemed to know exactly where he was going.

—2—

The slippered feet of the postulants set up a rhythmic thudding as they walked in double file down the great hall of the Keep. In their midst, Kellian wore a dun-colored robe. Hands tucked in sleeves, eyes downcast.
Contemplation, detachment, obedience.
After two days of instruction from the Sisters of Clarity, Kellian knew the litany. She could mouth it with the best of them. And like them, she had lost her hair to the zealous nun barber. Without it, she felt curiously undressed, despite the long robe.

“The sanctuary,”
whispered Nit, next to her.

They were passing an arched doorway, carved from un-thinkably precious marble. From inside came the gleam of stained glass.

“It’s the best place to sleep,”
Nit said, her voice barely audible, her lips not moving, a trick Kellian was practicing herself. Nit suppressed a guilty smile. One did not sleep during instruction, when the nuns were droning on about Ultimate Meaning.

The wooden floor glowed, polished from hundreds of years of slippered feet. Light washed down on them from chandeliers of glass and gold. Glass, gold, wood, marble. The sheer wonder of such materials was enough to quell wayward thoughts. This was the fabled Zoft of the Ice Nuns, mysterious, elegant, final. No one who left the preserves to serve the nuns ever returned. So when Kellian said good-bye to her parents, it was forever, a weight that she felt keenly in her chest. It would dissolve in time—with contemplation, detachment, obedience. So the nuns said.

“The Hall of Horrors,” came Nit’s puff of a voice. They passed the gallery displaying humanity’s inhumanity, the very reason why the Sisters of Clarity existed. “Mother Superior doesn’t approve,”
Nit said.
“Why?”
“Horrors are not uplifting. But I go there lots.”

Kellian suppressed her own smile. She liked this Nit, who could not be called Nita because she was an inny

Shhh!
Came from behind them. Jace brought up the rear. One of Hilde’s gang.

From the opposite direction walked a figure dressed in a dark brown robe. Hooded. Kellian’s stare received a sharp elbow from Nit.

It was a brother. Only brothers had cowls. Eyes down, hands in sleeves. Kellian had never seen a man in a dress before. She wondered what he wore under it. Well, if the brothers
were off-limits—and they
were
—she might have to take a rather large dose of that detachment the sisters were so eager to hand out.

She and Nit had been cleaning the latrine—again—when the subject of the brothers first came up.

“They don’t have much capacity,” Nit had whispered. “Sex and power, that’s what men want. Even the Eco men made a waste of things, going after sex and power. Go see the Hall of Horrors if you don’t believe me.”

“But the nuns brought men to the Zoft.”

“With proper training they do all right. Some are capable, and make contributions to our discipline. We don’t despise them just because they’re men.”

“That’s open-minded.”

“Yes,” Nit said, missing the irony. “Plus,” she went on, “they’d defend us with their lives.”

Yes, against the Zeros. The preserves always coveted the nuns’ technology, but were no real threat to the Keep. Distance and apathy were strong deterrents to conquest. But if they realized how little the nuns’ goals resembled their own, the Zeros might eye the nuns differently. For the Sisters of Clarity, Kellian now knew, had no intention of helping the preserves mine through Ice. For starters, they couldn’t access Ice’s programs any more than the Zeros. And if they could, it wouldn’t be to dissolve Ice.

The Zeros.
As though she hadn’t been one herself until a short while ago. Thanks to a barrage of instruction, Kellian was losing her previous self. Different clothes, different customs, different thoughts. Sister Gretchen and Sister Roselyn enlightened her daily, almost hourly, on the precepts of the order. Meaning without faith, social cohesion without worship.

Well, she was still a Zero in one respect: she didn’t give a wad of spit for philosophy. Even while saying,
Yes, Sister.

The discrepancy between the image of the nuns and their reality made Kellian uneasy But politics was not her passion; it was science, research. It was why she was there. Her mother’s words hovered for a moment:
You lie down with rats, you rise up with fleas.
Kellian felt an itch. Perhaps it was the scratch of the wool robe.

The troop of postulants turned into the great rotunda, where the west and east wings met. They had just come from the postulant and services wing in the east. Across the marble expanse of the hall lay the arch into the west wing, the quarters of the nuns.

Nit was urging Kellian to look off to the left.
“That’s it,”
Nit muttered low.

Kellian followed Nit’s gaze to the side, to great wooden doors, thirty meters high. Brothers were opening the porthole to the north wing. There was the third wing that Kellian had heard of, the wing that plunged back, deep into the shelf of Ice.

Sister Patricia Margaret Logue was waiting for them. Her hand rested on the ornate cane Kellian had seen before. Tap, tap, went her fingers. They were three minutes late. Hilde, chastened, assembled her charges before the sister.

Around them, the walls of Ice revealed a frozen ocean of startling clarity. In the great depth and weight of Ice there, no air at all occluded the molecular interstices.

Nuns were already huddled over their opto-electronic computers, working, working. Had they arisen even before the early-dawn rousting of the postulants?

Ignoring the workers, Sister Patricia Margaret fixed Hilde’s troop with a baleful eye.

“I had a fine talk planned, but sadly, we have no time for that now.”

Nit had warned Kellian that sister would give a speech in honor of the newcomer among them.

“Here’s the short of it, my girls, so try to pay attention. We’re behind schedule. We’ve just lost another node to Sister Helena. It will be cramped in this gallery for a while until I rattle some cages to get more space.”

“We never have enough space,”
Nit whispered.

Sister Patricia Margaret pounced. “Nita, my dear, would you care to give my speech for me?”

Nit fairly imploded. “No, Sister, forgive me.”

Sister had already turned from the offending Nit. “I needn’t remind you, but I’ll say for the sake of our new postulant, Kellian Bourassa, that our little enterprise is—underappreciated. Why?”

She adopted a tone of high irony. “Because we fly in the face of all the work done in north wing. Our position—a highly offensive one—is that all the so-called
data retrieval
the Sisters of Clarity have ever achieved is nothing of the sort. Our group’s hypothesis is that we have never cracked the least part of Ice’s encryption. That being the notion, what is it, exactly, that we have gleaned from Ice, the fragments, the intriguing partials? Girls?”

“Signals,” came the chorus from the postulants.

“So then, Ice is programmed with a goal of transmitting signals. For what purpose?”

“A purpose we must discover,” came the unison reply.

“And why is this harmless idea so despised in the glorious north wing?” Sister Patricia Margaret’s eyes darted from one postulant to the other, ready to swoop.

Tapping on the head of her cane, the old nun gave them plenty of time to display their ignorance. Then she muttered under her breath and shook her head. “No answer? Just as well. You are obedient, as is only proper.” She looked in the
direction of the other galleries in the long hall of the north wing. “Envy is the enemy of inquiry. Remember that, my girls.”

“Now to work.” The cane thumped on the floor, and Hilde stepped forward to marshal her charges.

The sister held up her hand. “One last thing. Most of you are here as apprentices, to serve the sisters. Hilde, as your senior, has her team, of course. In addition, I am giving Kellian some time on one of our nodes. I have an interest in her approach.”

Hilde stopped still. “But Sister, she doesn’t know how we do things here.”

“Exactly,” Sister Patricia Margaret said. “Sometimes you need to crash around a little, make a mess, to find something new.”

She turned a shrewd gaze on Kellian. “But not
too much
of a mess, mark me, girl.”

—3—

Solange watched Sister Patricia Margaret stalk off after a most unsatisfactory meeting. She heard the thunk, thunk of the woman’s cane as the nun made rather more noise than was necessary, leaving the audience with her mother superior.

Solange admitted she might have exercised poor judgment, sending Sister Verna on a mission, given how close the two women were. Events pressed in on her: Swan’s disappearance, Zoya Kundara’s mission, Janos Bertak’s maneuvers. Weary, and sleepless as she was, mistakes might creep in. Perhaps it was time for Sister Patricia Margaret herself to leave… she was long past her usefulness. But the sister was very well liked, despite her ascerbic manner, of which Solange had just had a taste.

She looked out her narrow window, expecting to see the
tracker’s sled hove into view. It was too soon to expect Wolf and his passenger, though.

The white plains remained empty, an emptiness some saw as
clean, and others as bleak.
Out of respect for Ice, it was customary to pronounce it
grand. There was always a tension in the order regarding the capacity of Ice—to accord it respect, but not too much
respect. Even the Sisters of Clarity were susceptible to bouts of awe and irrational belief. The order was vigilant over such weakness. Ice, it must be remembered, had no
purpose.
It was a logic device. Still, the dilemma was, why after all these millennia, did Ice still grow? Had it designed a new purpose? That way lay error. One must not ascribe purpose to Ice. Not yet.

Her view stretched all the way to the crumpled towers of Seetol. It was not a pleasant vista. In fifty years, since she first took her vows, Solange hadn’t stepped onto Ice. She had always felt blotted out by Ice, especially by this damnable view. The distant ruins showed what Ice could do at the macro level: crush, destroy, obliterate. Here was the great duality of quasi-crystal: destruction and creation, outer and inner.

Now there was a man of Ice named Swan. What was he? A freak, a madman, a cannibal. How was he framed so misshapen? Since he said that he had slept in Ice, was it Ice, then, that had altered him? Or his own perversion?

Looking out windows was a bad business. She turned away from the view, from such useless speculation.

Swan was gone. Gone to the surface, the brothers told her. Though monstrous, the man was fragile. He could hardly survive without transport, secure transport. Perhaps, in his unraveling state of mind, he was intent on self-destruction. His death would bury his secrets, and so many of her hopes. All her hopes, if truth be told.

It was time for her call from the ship.

Solange smoothed her hair, though Janos wouldn’t be looking at a visual. She consulted her scroll, readying her report. So far, twelve children, two of them infants. Sister Loselle was even now speeding south to Koma preserve, with four lesser ones along the way

She sat on her divan, waiting for the radio transmission.

The window slit blinked at her as a cloud passed over the sun, and departed. She went back to the window and pulled the drapes.

A muted darkness. Better.

The transmitter squawked.
“Sisters of Clarity, radio check, over.”

She leaned in to speak. “I hear you. This is Mother Superior. Who is this?”

“Who do you think? It’s Janos Bertak. Expecting someone else?”

“I was hoping it was you. Certainly there are other possibilities.” She must remind Janos that he wasn’t master of the ship yet.

“He’s not a possibility. He’s not in the line of information anymore. ”

“So you will demand an election?”

“
Now? I could, if I wanted to. But I’ll wait. He’s likely to be a sentimental favorite. It would help if you could deliver your end of things.”

It stung, that business of her
end of things.
She mustered detachment. “I have fourteen children. More in a few days.”

“How long?”

“Four days, perhaps five,” she answered.

“I’ll plan to receive them from you near Ancou preserve. Then I’ll be in a better position up here. Don’t call me, I’ll transmit when it’s safe.”

“Still wary of Anatolly Razo?”