Maximum Ice (8 page)

“DNA? Are we talking a physical material or a living thing here?”

“It’s not alive, no. I just used it as an example of randomness and information content.”

Anatolly frowned. “Let’s not use that analogy.”

“Yes sir.” He scrunched up his mouth. “How about information macromolecules?”

“God’s Blood, I don’t know!” Anatolly took a deep breath. Vlad was doing his best. “What does the light pulse have to do with information storage?”

Vlad looked at Janos for help.

“Well?” Anatolly demanded.

Janos said, “The light could carry information, rather like an optical computer does.”

“Computer,” Anatolly repeated. He looked around at the silent crystallography team. “Optical computer or quasi-crystal computer? It can’t be both.” By the Virgin, it couldn’t be either one, he thought crossly.

Vlad shrugged. “Actually, it
could
be both. The optical parameters of Ice provide an excellent lasing medium, depending on the direction of the crystal planes. Kind of an opto-crystal platform. It would be capable of massive parallel computation.”

Anatolly turned to Janos, hoping for some clarity. “How much of this is fact and how much is guessing?”

Janos said, “Guessing about the computational aspects, sir. Not guessing about the quasi-crystal structure.” He looked at Vlad for confirmation of his summary and got a nod.

Anatolly stood up, calling the meeting to a close. “Explain the quasi-crystal aspect to the crew at shift break, in the auditorium. I’ll be there, and I don’t want to hear about crazy physics or crystal computers. Tell them the truth, but keep your wilder theories in this room.” He paused, softening his tone. “Thank you, Vlad, that was helpful.”

He and Janos left the science team to their theory-building.

Despite Vlad’s quasi-crystal display and talk of impossible physics, the thing that stuck in Anatolly’s mind was the notion of information storage. He thought of the view of earth he’d been looking at earlier, that isthmus of Ice stretching over Central America. A link between the halves. There was some reason the equatorial lands were mostly Ice-free… and some reason why they soon wouldn’t be. He was fairly sure the closure of Ice boded ill in more ways than one.

CHAPTER FOUR

When the mining team broke through to the vault with the rich source of rubber, a frenzy of pushing and shoving broke out.

Kellian Bourassa found herself taking refuge inside one of the motor coaches. The strike was a fantastic event for Ancou preserve and soon the Group of Five would come down to the dig to see for themselves. Meanwhile, the workers were using the discovery as an excuse to break off work and carry on, prancing on the roof of the coaches, rolling rubber tires back and forth across the floor.

Her back ached. She wasn’t built for manual labor, and she was adapting to it badly. As she allowed herself a luxurious slump into the cushioned seat, an exhalation of dust greeted her. Some of the coaches they’d found over the years were in pristine condition, but this one was musty. No doubt its door had lain ajar since the First World.

The instrumentation panel would soon be scavenged, and that was a shame. When the disassemblers pried away every usable part, the purpose of the items would be lost in a pile of discrete pieces. Kellian gazed with longing on instruments meant to measure speed and efficiency and location. Some of the purposes of the instrumentation were well-known. The “kph” on the dials registered the fantastic speeds of the Ecos in their motor coaches. Some of her friends had seen sections of the broad paths dedicated for the purpose.

She traced the buttons and levers around the steering wheel. It would have been delicious to exchange ideas with this coach-builder, whose knowledge so far exceeded the common tinkering of the preserves. Tinkering, that’s as far as Ancou preserve got, as far as it would ever get. Few could appreciate her mobile intelligence units—as far as Ancou was concerned, her obo was a flop.

Dori bent into the open doorway. “Kellian, where have you been? People are looking for you.” Dori was a distant cousin, with creamy brown skin, much lighter than Kellian’s charcoal darkness. “You’re wanted topside.”

“Who wants me?” Kellian scrambled out of the motor coach.

Dori paused for effect. “The nuns.”

Kellian’s stomach tightened.

“Maybe they’ll give you a chance, Kellian,” Dori said, trying to soften the news.

Kellian swallowed hard, then plunged through the crowd toward the elevator shaft. Someone called to her, “You in trouble again, Kellian?”

“Probably,” she muttered. As she passed her obo, parked in the corridor, she summoned it to follow her. She hoped it would make it up the shaft without frying the elevator circuits.

Kellian still had grime under her fingernails when she walked into the great hall that her preserve had given over to the nuns for their interviews.

The Hall of Ice Eyes was in darkness, except for the far end, where two of the great electric chandeliers were lit near the sisters. Kellian walked toward her interview, her obo at her side, creaking and mumbling. She tried to summon her wits. Her mother’s hasty advice still rang in her ears.
Be nice, Kellian. Those sisters won’t brook impudence from a twenty-two-year-old misfit, especially if she’s arrogant. Be nice.

She would try very hard. It was her last chance.

Slabs of Ice protruded through the gaps in the vaulted room, gaps they called windows in the first age of earth. Nearest the chandeliers the incursions danced with reflected light, lighting up a profusion of tiny surface crystals.

There were two of the child-stealers waiting for her. Unlike other preserve families, the Bourassas had never given up a child to the sisters. It was a measure of Kellian’s disgrace that they hoped to do so today.

“Now who?” the older sister said.

“Kellian Bourassa, Sister,” the assistant said, reading from an activated scroll.

The nun looked Kellian up and down. Though well over sixty, the woman appeared to have all-porcelain teeth, at least in front. A gnarled hand rested on a cane with an ornate handle. A finger was tapping, tapping…

“I am Sister Patricia Margaret Logue,” the nun said. “I’d like to speak with you, Kellian. Don’t be nervous, just answer me the best you know how.” Sister paused. “You will say, ‘Yes, Sister.’ ”

“Yes, Sister.”

The other nun was young and cross- up the scroll and placed it in the folds of her robe. It was said the nuns carried all manner of tech about themselves, and the scroll reader was an example. They came to the preserves, snapping up the smartest recruits, setting them to the great task of their order: to interface with the computational programs of Ice. Someday, when the nuns programmed Ice to retreat, the preserve would dig through Ice as easy as scraping algae from the paddies.

“You have a noisy obo, Kellian,” Sister Patricia Margaret said.

“A noisy machine lets people step out of its way.”

“Better that it avoid humans than humans it, don’t you think?”

“No, obo3 is young, so it’s better being free to explore.”

The assistant seemed displeased with that answer, but received a calming hand wave from her superior.

Sister Patricia Margaret raised an eyebrow. “I understand the last time it
freely explored
, your obo blew a circuit that jeopardized half the preserve.”

“Power was only out for twenty minutes, Sister.” And the obo got a priceless lesson it would never forget. But for her, the price had been banishment to the digs. It was a harsh sentence, imposed by the Group of Five themselves. They had long since given up on her, as her experiments failed to yield anything useful. Hypotechnic, they called her, suited for labor, not invention.

The Group of Five couldn’t see past their potbellies.

The younger sister didn’t look happy with anything Kellian said. Or perhaps she was just unhappy to be in the preserve, surely not the luxury she was accustomed to. She brought a small lace hankie to her nose now and then, as if the preserve actually smelled bad.

“Sister?” Kellian spoke to the head nun. “Can my obo go walking? It isn’t often it gets the chance to learn in here.”

Sister Patricia Margaret waved her hand in permission.

Kellian looked down at her invention. “Go now, obo3. You can walk about.”

It left her side, wheezing and scraping. Luckily it turned to the side and didn’t go bumping into the sisters.

“Thank you, Sister,” Kellian said.

“You won’t ask questions though, Kellian. I will ask, you will answer.”

“Yes, Sister.”

The nun stifled a yawn. “Sister, bring Kellian a chair. She’s tall, and I’m too weary to stand just now.”

The assistant brought Kellian a chair, leaving it just out of reach.

Sister Patricia Margaret beckoned to Kellian, and she hauled the chair closer and sat down.

“Your betters think you waste your time, Kellian. Your obos are always bumping into walls and self-destructing. But I’m more open-minded. So tell me why you build robots without intelligence.”

“My obos learn, Sister.”

The side of the nun’s mouth quirked into her cheek. “Slowly, it would seem.”

“That’s true. But my obo is building its own chain of reasoning. I’m not guiding it, it’s guiding itself. But that takes a long time. Like a child learns, Sister.”

“Like the human brain?” The sister kept a neutral tone, but the reaction of the assistant was unmistakably contemptuous.

“No, nothing as fine as that.” Kellian knew better than to claim something so extravagant.

“Don’t play coy with me, girl.”

Kellian didn’t care for the tone of voice, the sharp commands from this old woman. If they knew so much, why did they comb the preserves for talent? But she managed to say, “No, Sister.”

“If your machine learns, isn’t that like human learning?”

“A little like that. But right now obo3 gets all tangled up in what it knows. I’m slowing it down so it can attack problems without getting overwhelmed. That means sometimes it doesn’t make much progress.” In the recesses of the hall she heard obo3 crash into something.

Up went Sister Patricia Margaret’s eyebrow again. “Interface with Ice is our goal, Kellian. Not robotics.”

“But, Sister, if I could devise an artificial intelligence in an obo, then maybe you could talk to Ice in a different way” She saw the skepticism in the nun’s face. “At the keep, you use supersmart computers to try to talk to Ice, but I think that’s the wrong direction. Best to start at the bottom.” Kellian was used to people not keeping up with her. But this nun, like all of the nuns, was highly educated and scientific. She would not, for example, ascribe to superstitions about Ice being a godlike power, nor to myths about Queen Ria and Winter. At the keep, all would be strictly scientific.

The nun twirled her cane, and light glinted from its handle—a metal sculpture in the image of a First World bird. “I like the bottom-up approach, Kellian, don’t mistake me. It’s just the mobile part that seems a dead end.”

“But how else can an AI unit learn? It has to encounter the world.”

The fingers of the nun’s left hand were tapping, slowly, methodically. She was not impressed.

“Sister,” Kellian said, feeling the interview slip away from her, “some people decide on the goal, then set their programs to pursue it. But I think we should go explore and see where we end up.”

The nun glanced in the direction of the noisy obo. “Walk about?”

“Yes, Sister.”

The older nun sat back, and either her back or the chair creaked. She sighed, closing her eyes for a moment. The interview was over, it seemed. After a time Sister Patricia Margaret looked up at her assistant who moved her chin to the side a fraction of an inch.
No.

Kellian was going to lose. But she couldn’t go back to the shovel and the cramped excavations. She was made for thinking, not toiling.

“Sister,” she blurted out, “why do you come hunting in the preserves, if you don’t want new approaches?”

Sister Patricia Margaret was staring down the length of the darkened hall, following the progression of the obo by the noises it emitted.