Maximum Ice (39 page)

“And you don’t know it now,” Sister Patricia Margaret said. “She’ll be put outside. She could survive.”

Zoya had just seen how outside could kill. “When?” Looking behind her, she saw the postulant’s imploring face, still watching her from the middle of the hall.

“In a few days.” A ripple of concern broke through the nun’s placidity. “But she chose to come, and chose to break the rules.”

“What rules?”

“None of your concern.”

They stood before a small, ornate door on one side of the rotunda. “The Hall of Honors,” Sister Patricia Margaret announced.

Zoya wondered how they could find honor in sending a young woman to her death for breaking rules. And how she could stop them.

Sister opened the carved door, ushering Zoya into an empty, circular room. A nun stood in the center, illumined by the roseate glow of a spotlight. Solange Arnaud no doubt.

“What shall I call her?” she muttered to her escort.

“Mother Superior is customary.” The sister left, closing the door behind her.

As Zoya approached, Mother Superior Solange Arnaud turned toward her. Slim, patrician, hair gone to silver, high cheekbones, and the sort of complexion that looks superb in black. Zoya imagined the impression her own appearance conveyed: filthy hair, sunburned face, bedraggled clothes. She had declined the offer of a clean brown robe.

Zoya drew herself taller and gave a respectful nod. “Mother Superior.”

Solange Arnaud smiled, just enough. “Zoya Kundara. And by what title shall I call you, my dear?”

“Ship Mother.”

“Charming. Our names are similar then.”

“And not
my dear
, if you please. My captain is sensitive to protocols.”

“Yes, Captain Razo. A sensitive man.”

Her tone conveyed that she had Anatolly’s measure. Zoya muffled a sigh. The chessboard was already full of pieces: Anatolly the girl Kellian, the man named Lucian Orr, the subroutines of Ice that drove the world. Zoya decided she wouldn’t give away what she knew. She would wait to see what it might be worth.

But before politics came something more personal.

“Mother Superior, my first priority is to secure my companion’s remains, outside your walls. My people owe him a proper burial.”

In a gesture toward the barrens, the nun displayed a large ruby ring. “The horde carries association of disease. Those who die of such a raid are left to the cleansing winds, or cremated.”

“But I’ve been told the rats are not diseased,” Zoya said. So she’d learned at the preserve. They wouldn’t eat infected meat.

Mother Superior’s voice was rich, like the fine wool of her robe. “It is traditional.”

Zoya gazed at this chief nun. She thought the woman seldom drank, sang, or told stories. It led to a multitude of ailments, such as joylessness and cold heartedness. She was the sort of person Zoya had the least use for. There were only so many days allotted to one’s life. They should be chock-full of life in all its rumpled glory, not pounded flat and stiff.

The nun said, “I commend your honorable intentions toward your driver. But surely we have more important things to discuss?”

Oh, very flat and stiff, if she thought burying a friend was unimportant.

“Both our people have traditions,” Zoya said. “Let’s begin by understanding that. I would agree to placing his remains outside, in a proper receptacle, near the Zoft’s walls. Not out on the plain. I’ll gather them myself, if you’ll provide a shroud.” She smiled. “A reasonable compromise, yes?”

Solange shook her head. “You may not touch pack-kill, and then come inside.”

Zoya looked at her steadily. “I see.”

A long pause as the nun’s face grew sober. “Not a good beginning, then.”

“Perhaps not.”

“Your reputation goes before you, Ship Mother.”

“Regrettably, I have a longer reputation than most.”

“I’ve heard,” Solange said. “You sleep. Then awake. And so on.”

And so on.
A merciless summary. But it would do.

Solange lifted her hand and pointed to the walls of the room in a 360-degree arc. Around them, a silent scene materialized. People were massing in a joyous crowd. Trucks delivering food, ragged people passing along the sacks of food, hand to hand. The scene shifted to medics delivering shots to children, nurses caring for diseased patients so ill that blood oozed from their pores. The holography made them real, surrounding the viewer.

The scenes were from different parts of the world, different times—but all before the time of Ice.

“Real recordings?” Zoya asked.

“Yes. Records of the First World. Very rare. This Hall of Honors has hundreds of hours of such recordings. This Keep is an ancient site, among the first to find protection under Ice. We are at the location of an ancient enterprise of the highest technology.”

The displays segued to leaders signing documents, shaking
hands amid hundreds of international flags rippling in the wind, sharing the same plaza.

Zoya asked, “What has this to do with the Sisters of Clarity?”

The nun’s eyes took on a new luster. “It is our grail. To achieve—consistently achieve—honors like these.” Her hand gestured to the unfolding scenes. “For this reason, we look to Ice for higher reasoning.”

“Reasoning? You believe Ice can reason?”

Solange’s voice came indulgently. “Look around you, Ship Mother. The world is Ice. Can you believe it is simply a complex system? Nothing more?” She continued, “At the very least, it is capable of higher logic. To analyze a path to moral resources that can save us from destructive impulses.”

“Better living through information processing?”

“Easy to sneer. But what is your alternative? Religion? Good intentions?”

“Good intentions aren’t a bad start.”

Solange paused, shaking her head. “You have such faith in human capability. But think about it, Ship Mother. What can we really know? What can we possibly know? There is a gap between what we think and what is actually the case. The less intelligent you are, the greater the gap. But there is always a gap. And what rushes in to fill it?”

“Philosophy, it would seem.”

The nun waved a dismissive hand. “The least objectionable. Worse are the infectious diseases of the mind: religion, mysticism, good intentions. All are players in the game of reality generation.”

“As is philosophy.”

“Yes, that is so. Until Ice lifts us above ourselves.”

“Until…” Zoya murmured. “You await a day that may never come.”

Mother Superior fingered her ruby ring. “That depends.”

“On?”

“We have our hopes. Our inquiries are far-reaching.” She looked up. “You, for instance. How have you fared against the encryption?”

“Nothing, yet.”

“Ah.”

Zoya asked, though the answer was clear enough. “And you?”

“Nothing,” the nun said. “Yet.”

Zoya gazed at the display of honors. She murmured, “The preserves think you’ll rid them of Ice—set them free from poverty.”

“They are simple people with shortsighted goals.”

“But you’ve banished poverty from your Keep, I observe.”

The nun shrugged. “Volunteer labor.”

Zoya didn’t pursue that, much as she would have enjoyed doing so. She turned to look at the holo display. The figures were close enough to touch. But of course, they were all tricks of light. Truly, the nuns were a soiled ally. Zoya had thought so from the day she held the crying boy, shielding him from the pack of nuns.

“I’ve seen enough, Mother Superior.”

Solange waved her hand, and the scenes dissolved. The nun was considerably less attractive when she scowled. “This hall has been my life’s work, Ship Mother. To collect and display humanity’s potential. But the sisters don’t come here. They prefer the Hall of Horrors. Some people are incapable of finding inspiration in humanity’s transcendent moments. The rabble does prefer horror.” She glanced at Zoya. “I beg your pardon. You are not part of our tradition, of course.”

“Sometimes the harsh stories are best.”

Solange turned and walked toward the wall opposite the entrance door. “This way, Ship Mother. If it’s horrors you want.”

They passed through to a long, bare room, with benches in the middle, as in a museum. At the nun’s wave, the few sisters
who were visiting the hall fled. Zoya walked by Mother Superior’s side, as a wall screen came to life. It showed the flowering cloud of a nuclear detonation over a Japanese city. Hiroshima. Then the aftermath: the ghastly wounded, the shadows on the ruined walls, carbon remnants of human beings.

“I don’t need reminding,” Zoya remarked, “of inhumanity.”

“We all need reminding.”

They walked on. China’s Great Leap Forward—to mass starvation, while leaders feasted in their palaces. This was an older technology, of projected films. Solange remarked that the hall was ancient. Left unsaid was the slim chance that her own accomplishment, the Hall of Honors, would last as long.

Mother Superior led her down the hall. To a hill of skulls. The Khmer Rouge. To the ghastly ruins of New York’s twin towers. To the pits of Copenhagen, filled with Rampage victims, some still living… they walked on.

“We have the standard lecture,” Solange said, “on the monsters inside us: sadism, tribalism, feuding, genocide, racial cleansing. Ideology, often religious. But some need the pictures to make it real.”

They passed the conflagration of New Orleans, when the plague city was torched, people and all. Flames fed on the grease of flesh.

She knew why the sisters came here, and not the place of honors. Because here, the scenes were awful, mesmerizing, and unstaged. So hard to look away. Oddly, suffering commanded attention, and celebration did not.

Solange went on: “The slave trade of even the most pious of empires, even the old United States… the genocide of the American Indian by Spaniards, by Americans… the 60 million dead in World War II… the Nazi concentration camps… shall I go on?”

“Oh please do.”

“The Soviet gulags killed three million… the mass starvation in India… the fall of Africa to AIDS while the world watched indifferently…”

Solange watched her. She was trying to soften Zoya, to make a point. Yes, it was a fine point, an inescapable one: humanity’s depravity. It was central to the order’s creed and ambitions, but remote from life. Incidental to the larger perils that somehow had fallen on Zoya to contain….

Another display. It was a barracks. A simple wood-frame building. Zoya had a bad feeling about this one. The scene was not as remote as she might wish.

It was altogether more affecting. She narrowed her eyes… It was a military camp, a cleansing camp like ones she’d seen, walked in, grieved in. The barracks… women in ragged slips. Children, naked children. Eyes peering from the shadows of darkened cells. She looked at the display, her mouth dry, stomach feeling like it had dropped several stories.

She turned away. It was all to make a point. Mother Superior’s point. The point that the good sisters wished to make. For clarity

When Zoya turned her back on the display, she knew she’d lost it. Her control. Her diplomacy

“Those are my people,” Zoya whispered.

Solange nodded. “I know.” In the flickering lights of the film, the nun’s face took on a whitened pallor, such as could come with too much thinking.

“You don’t use my own history against me.”

“Just to open your eyes.”

Zoya bit off the words, one at a time. “My eyes
are
open.” She had been there, had her eyelids peeled back, had carried the scene with her into all her sleeps. For these nuns, it was just one thing in a long list of things. One more horror for the hall.

The nun held her gaze for a moment, then looked away “Yes, of course. We only mean to preserve the records, so it will never happen again.”

But it is happening again. The children, the execution. The woman, so earnest and certain, was blind to the appalling irony

Under better control, Zoya said, “So Ice will save us from all this?” She gestured down the Hall of Horrors.

Solange shot back, “We devoutly hope so. How well have we done, otherwise?”

“How well are you doing now?”

The nun swept past this, full of her convictions. “The Sisters of Clarity are creating the next stage of the world. From information to meaning. Ice must take us to that stage.”

“A new ideology.”

The nun’s eyes were lit with a strange fire. “All right, if you will. It won’t be perfect.” She gestured at the barracks. “But it will be better than
this.”

“No, Mother Superior. It won’t be.” No pretense, now, of diplomacy. There wasn’t time for pretenses.

Solange lifted her hand, as though giving permission to speak, to rebut.

Zoya didn’t need permission. “It won’t be anything more than what it is right now. The world is both honor and horror. My people never thought it was all one thing. It’s dangerous to think so. Many of the horrors in this hall came from people who thought it could all be good, who wanted to erase their favorite evil. Oddly, you don’t see that.”

The nun shook her head. “Now
your
ideology is showing, Ship Mother. You speak of evil. Such error. You are a Catholic.”

“Not necessarily. I’m Ship Mother.”

The nun cocked her head.

“You get used to a load of trouble, being Ship Mother. It’s all
in the mix of things. People are a mix. The world is a mix. I prefer it that way. And so do the People of the Road, I think you’ll find.”

Although Zoya did not detect a signal from the nun, the display ceased, and the wall screen went bare. They faced each other across the gulf their conversation had created.

Mother Superior said, “Nothing will change your mind. I can see that.” She shook her head. “You are no friend to Ice. You would wish it gone.”

“Yes. But slowly. Nothing sudden.”

“Sudden,” Solange repeated, eyes flicking up to meet Zoya’s. “No, not sudden, of course not.”

An awkward silence prevailed while Zoya considered what to tell, what not to.

“There is a man by the name of Lucian Orr,” Zoya said. “You’ve heard of him?”

“No. Lucian… Orr—you say?”

“There is a story, Mother Superior, about a man named Lucian Orr. In this story—an ancient story—he designed Ice to discover the secret of longevity, to prolong his life beyond the normal course.”