Maximum Ice (15 page)

He winced. Kellian saw how her quiet manner was more ominous than Worley’s pink rage. She would remember that lesson.

The woman put a hand on Kellian’s shoulder. “I’m sorry for this,” she said. She seemed to move her lips first, and receive a translation from what Kellian now saw as a small device behind her ear. “You must rebuild, of course.”

“I’ll be with the nuns, ma’am.” Suddenly the prospect seemed less desirable.

The star woman looked worried. “Go with God, then,” she said.

Worley bundled the woman off, and the crowd surged to follow

Kellian looked down on the ruin of obo3. The star woman’s words wove into her thoughts.
You must rebuild, of course.

Of course.

Anatolly tried not to keep a brooding watch on the planet, but there he was, on the bridge, and once more staring at the view screen.

He sometimes had a strange visual impression of the globe—all in his imagination—as though he could see beneath the mantle to the shapes of the continents and the shorelines he had studied all his life. By its very blankness, the view sought definition, and his mind supplied it: the boot of Italy, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Red Sea, the wedge of India…
fabled names and places—but more real to him than this unnatural, fractured pearl.

Yet Ice was a more ambiguous presence than it had been. They had been assuming that Ice ruined earth—and indeed it had, but not, according to Zoya, before a different ruin bled off life from the world.
A good plan gone bad.
A compound tragedy First the great death from the field of dark matter. Then Ice to lock death in place….

Janos was by his side all of a sudden. “Incoming message, Captain.”

Zoya or Jozsef Mirran, then. But Janos was already shaking his head. “It’s the nuns, actually.” They exchanged looks.

Transferring command of the bridge to Lieutenant Andropolous, Anatolly had the radio link put through to his briefing room, just off the bridge. He had thought to let Zoya make the first contact, but here the nuns were taking the initiative. As Janos Bertak stood by his side, Anatolly opened his channel.

“Captain Anatolly Razo speaking, of the Independent Vessel
Star Road.”

The voice came with some interference and time lag, but it was a woman.
“Thank you for accepting this call, Captain. I am Mother Superior Solange Arnaud of the Sisters of Clarity.”

Anatolly’s left eyebrow went up. Janos’s whole forehead rose.
Sisters of Clarity
was no holy order he’d ever heard of.

“
I am calling to welcome you on your return from your far journey.”

Anatolly wrote on his stylus,
Solange Arnaud.
“Thank you indeed, Reverend Mother. We are glad of your kind words. Although we are surprised to have such a communication.”

“Surprised? We do mean our welcome most sincerely.”

“Yes, appreciated. But we’ve been in orbit already for eleven days…”

A cascading laugh.
“Time moves more slowly for us, Captain. Please overlook our backward manners.”

Anatolly found himself smiling and looking up at Janos. That was clever, that business of
time moves more slowly for us
— in terms of relativistic effects, that was clever. Janos caught it too, smirking.

“No need to overlook anything, Reverend Mother. We are delighted to hear from you. We are strangers here, though we have ties, of course. Ties of ancestry, ties of the heart.”

“Ties that bind,” she replied, and Anatolly wondered at that reference to the old Protestant hymn, and thought, here was a nun with a broad sense of humor indeed.
“Of course,”
she continued,
“I understand.”

An awkward pause. He wasn’t sure what it was she thought she understood. Nevertheless, he said, “My representative, Zoya Kundara, seeks an audience with you, Reverend Mother. A face-to-face meeting. I hope you will welcome her.”

“We’ll do our best. But nothing can replace a cordial understanding between leaders. The personal touch, don’t you agree, Captain?”

“Yes, of course.”

A fuzzy background static surged for a moment, and he had time to wonder where she called from, and then wrote on his stylus, pushing it over to Janos:
Trace where the signal is coming from.
Janos nodded, leaving the room.

“Captain Razo,”
came her voice again.

“Yes? I’m here.”

“Captain Razo, there is so much to say between us. Where to begin?”

“An excellent beginning has already been made, Reverend Mother. We have begun.”

“Certainly. But now we must go back a long way to begin. You will want to know us, and we you.”

“We go back rather longer than you may imagine.”
“The Sisters of Clarity have very long memories. But it may be that where you are concerned, memory fails us.” There was a loud buzz of interference. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, coming through now, we can hear you.”

“Our radio equipment is not as fine as yours, I fear. But we will make do, shall we not, Captain?”

“Continue, please, Reverend Mother.”

Janos came back in, moving to Anatolly’s side and hitting a key on the comm node. A screen display read,
latitude 47.40 n, longitude 122.07 w.
with a map of the western hemisphere zooming in to a flat swath between two mountain ranges. A yellow arrow showed Mother Superior’s location, two hundred kilometers south of the original shuttle landing site. It seemed their decision to land near the heaviest radio transmissions had taken them close to the enigmatic nuns. The whole area that had once been the megalopolis of Puget Sound was still heavily populated, by current standards. There were radio transmissions from at least six preserves… one of which now proved to be an outpost of this religious order.

The nun’s voice came again:
“Captain, you do not know us. I fear you have a rather bad shock coming.”

“We can see the world, Reverend Mother. It is a shock indeed, and weighs heavily on our spirits.”

“It is of the spirit that I mean to speak, Captain.”

Anatolly exchanged glances with Janos. He gestured for him to pull up a chair. If this was to be a religious lecture, they had better get comfortable. Janos sat at Anatolly’s elbow, as Mother Superior continued:

“
I do not know how long it is since you left us. Can you tell me how long?”

“It has been ten thousand years. For you. Less than that for us.”

“Ah.” After a pause, she said, “Then you will not know how we
have evolved from what you knew. Tell me, Captain, are you religious?”

A glance at Janos, who shrugged, as baffled as his captain.

“Mother Superior, we are a very Catholic ship, I assure you. We have been out of the bounds of the Holy See, but we have our priest, and we’ve kept the sacraments in the manner possible.”

“
I see.” More hissing and buzzing. Their orbit was taking them away from ideal transmissions. “You should know, Captain, that we—the Sisters of Clarity—are no longer a people of faith. We are a contemplative society, but not based on faith. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but you must accept us—if you do so at all—as we are.”

Consternation filled Anatolly What was this? Not people of faith? Sisters of Clarity… not of the Church?

“The Church,” she said, as though reading his mind, “no longer exists. Perhaps that is all for the best.”

After a long exhalation, Anatolly murmured, “We have a different viewpoint, naturally.”

“You haven’t had as long as we to achieve clarity.”

Was the woman presuming to lecture him on religion? She was bold, this one.

Solange continued.
“We found that as religion dropped away from us it became easier to find clarity on the human condition, to examine the moral life, without reference to… dogma.”

Anatolly just thanked God that he had not invited the
priest
in on this discussion. The whole concept of Ice Nuns was blasphemous from several angles. But that was a separate issue for now.

Anatolly responded, “I have always believed it best to be honest, and to proceed from there. Thank you for telling me.”

“And now, Captain, you.”

That was a quick transition. She was done with her story, and now wanted
his.
Fair enough.

Janos made a slow shake of his head, mouthing,
be careful.

He sighed, gathering his wits. “Mother Superior… shall I call you that? Or is there a term…”

“Please, if you wouldn’t mind. Mother Superior will do. It preserves the forms.”

Damn, that he had even asked. What right had she to
preserve the forms?
He shouldn’t have asked, should have called her madam president, or, or… but for the sake of courtesy, he was rather stuck.

“Well then… as to our story…”

Janos scrawled a note and pushed it in front of him:
How does she speak our language?

An excellent question, given Zoya’s heroic efforts in translation.

“First, if I may, I wonder how you speak the same dialect as we do—after all this time.”

Again that musical laugh.
“Captain, we don’t. Not usually. It’s just that we maintain the old tongue among ourselves, since the majority of our research texts are in that language. And we also speak the ancient Latin. Our inquiries are vast and deep.”

“Thank you, we did wonder.”

“We?”

“Ah, yes. Pardon me. My first mate, Lieutenant Janos Bertak, is at my side.”

“Delighted to meet you, Lieutenant.”

Janos spread his hands, letting Anatolly handle it.

“My first mate extends his warm wishes,” Anatolly said.

Her silence indicated it was his turn to speak. Once again, he mustered his story. He decided to emphasize his crew’s
human condition
, their suffering and courage. It was a good story, and a true one. He thought it would appeal to her.

“We left in the time of the Rampage,” he began. “You know of those times, Sister?”
“Yes, Captain, that period of history extended for almost two hundred years, so the ancient texts say. The world survived that epidemic, but many died.”

“It was tragic indeed. We kept contact with earth for many years, and knew that they found a cure eventually But it was only a temporary reprieve from disaster, I understand. The final blow came to civilization some years later. Is that correct?”

“Armageddon. Some called it the Collapse.”

He exchanged confused looks with Anatolly “Armageddon? But you aren’t…”

“Religious? No. We use some of the old words. Redefined for our purposes.”

The
redefinitions
were worse than her atheism.

She went on,
“But from ruin came rebirth. The Advent.”

“Advent?”

“Of Ice. We seek its knowledge. As you should. But please, Captain. Your story.”

“As to why we left, our people were unfairly held responsible for the epidemic by some. The People of the Road, we call ourselves, the Rom. You may know us as gypsies.”

“Yes,”
was all she said.

“We were immune to the virus, and hated for it. Gypsies have ever been suspect, because we had no fixed borders, no nation. We go from place to place, or we have done so when the spirit moved us. They studied our DNA for clues to our immunity, but to no avail. Some took us by force for intermarriage, hoping to confer immunity on the children. Others simply slaughtered us. It was genocide, eventually. When the truth became known, and the courts had their day, they asked us who would represent us, because we had no unified voice. We—our ancestors—chose a person. She was esteemed and learned, and had risen high in academic circles. A linguist and sociologist. A Hungarian gypsy This woman made her impassioned
pleas on our behalf, and when they would have executed the criminals—but only a few were brought to justice, mind you—she offered a compromise to stop the killing, to stop the endless round of murders and revenge.

“The People of the Road would accept sovereignty over the great generation ship that was then nearing completion under the management of the World Federated Industrial Program. It was meant to be a research ship, but we took it in payment. We would leave the earth, taking our problematic DNA with us— and our wandering ways, if you will. Not everyone chose to leave. For some it was too drastic. But many of the Rom were eager to leave. We had very bad memories, and we could never forgive. Each indicted country paid reparations to the WFIP, and after years of haggling, the ship was ours. And we left.”

“I see.” Static and buzzing. “So you are that ship.”

Yes, we’re back, he thought. And perhaps you wish we weren’t.

“And why did you decide to return?”

“We had to. Mother Superior, we have suffered on this journey. In the end, it was a journey that nearly finished us. Our people, to their great sorrow, can no longer successfully bear children, and our numbers are greatly reduced. We had hoped that by returning to earth, we could return to normalcy. To that end we will establish a colony. I trust we can count on your support.”

“Of course, Captain. Count on me, absolutely.”

“We would also have an interest in sharing your research into the problem of Ice.”

“The problem of Ice?”

“Yes. Its capture of the land. Its growth rate.”

“It alarms you,”
she said.

“Mother Superior, you may not be aware that Ice is aggressively spreading. Soon you may not have any free land left.”
“Those lands are dead in any case.”

“They might be saved.” Anatolly glanced at Janos. His first mate’s forehead was a pile of wrinkles, as he, like his captain, tried to fathom the woman.

“The land,” Solange was saying, “does not need saving, Captain. People do. That is the great promise of Ice.”

Buzzing and hissing increased. Their conversation could not last long, and there was so much left to discuss.

Her voice fought through the static:
“With all your high technology, Captain, do you mean to say you haven’t seen past the surface—to the information?”