Maximum Ice (16 page)

“No. Not yet, but we have every reason to be optimistic about what we can learn. In that regard I’m sending my representative to speak with you. Zoya Kundara is most eager to talk in person.”

In the fizzing coming from the speaker, only shreds of the sister’s words came through. “
… sled… Zoya…
”

“What’s that? Losing you, Mother Superior.”

“
…sorry… hear.”

“Thank you, Mother Superior. I hope we may speak again soon?”

But all that came from the speaker was static.

After a long pause, Anatolly turned to Janos. “That woman has some strange ideas.”

Janos was lost in thought. “This is her world now,” he murmured. “We are the strangers.”

Anatolly frowned. That might be true on some level. He didn’t like hearing it from his own first officer, though.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Swan gathered his thoughts. He concentrated on the subvocal commands, enunciating the commands in real language in his mind. It sped down his skin, dumping out of his hand when he pressed against Ice:

Ice flashed under his hand, responding in an instant.

Swan felt a prickle of annoyance. He should know if he was functioning well. And he damn well was not. Though he was stronger, heartier, he was always hungry. Then when he ate, food was tasteless, because he couldn’t smell. While it was a minor symptom, it might indicate a larger problem. However,
he must try not to worry about every small malfunction of his renewed body He’d only been awake a few days.

He framed his subvocal response to Ice:

Swan continued:

His stomach went sour. Ice acknowledged there was a problem. Given Ice’s—size—what could possibly be a problem? Ice was superbly suited to attack and subdue biological-systems issues, with their complex variables. It had virtually limitless calculating power and the luxury of ten thousand years to work on programmed goals. Yet it seemed… stuck. Why? Withdrawing his hand from its clasp on Ice, Swan looked at his tender, pinkish palm. Beneath the surface of the skin, the nanosculpted receptors were invisible to his unaided eyes, but nevertheless, he was infused with interface. The interface that Solange Arnaud and the good sisters labored to find was not to be found in hardware, but in wetware. Someday he would
share the process with a select few. For company, after all. No one wanted to live forever alone.

But let Solange prove herself on this plane first. In the matter of the ship. The ship that even at that very moment was attempting to break the source code. They would find all doors locked. But, standing behind the door, Swan was uneasy

The universe had generated a random event: the arrival of a ship where, in ten thousand years, no new thing had happened. A random event, impossible to plan for, like the arrival of the dark field, like the outbreak of a virus. No one predicted or controlled such events. Things fell apart with appalling frequency. Looking at the history of civilization, it was as though entropy itself was at work, nibbling away at human hopes. To judge by the chaos of the universe, humans were an accidental—and temporary—phenomenon.

Ice was his testimony to a contrary process, one of permanence and order. So if the ship was to upset everything, he certainly held it against them.

Then the timing of its arrival, causing Ice to waken him in a flawed condition.

The Watch-Out subroutine was his own design.
Watch out
for certain conditions that could thwart goal achievement. If they occur, wake me. Ice determined that the arrival of the generation ship fulfilled that criterion.

For better or worse, he was awake. Ice was working on the problem of unnatural hunger. He must be patient. Staring across the icy corridor, he regarded the grand planes of Ice. Such a long way he had come. That bore remembering.

He had begun as a researcher in the university artificial intelligence program—the Looking Glass Project—so called because the researchers fancied the notion that with true AI, humans could finally look into the eyes (or view screen) of an-
other fully sentient being. Swan was brilliant, but they were all brilliant—those computer scientists gathered together to develop a new basis for AI and computer technology Other AI systems were getting too big and too patched up. His team’s approach exploited advances in photonics and, in a leap of barriers, created the first stable quasi-crystal: until then a mathematical concept. Looking Glass had an entirely new platform: opto-quasi-crystal. OQC. Looking Glass was enormously successful, achieving inductive reasoning within a few years. The new platform blew past microprocessing’s.l micron barrier, whereby silicon circuits could not be shrunk further without leaking electrons. An entirely new technology had arrived.

Just in time to record the end of the world.

Dark matter. It was a massive cosmic structure. People called it a dark cloud. They looked up, expecting to see something blot out the sun. But it was an invisible field, far away but close enough. Deeply information-poor, it attracted many forms of information to itself, leaving noise—and chaos—behind. They had time to theorize that information can in a way be considered a physical entity. It has bits and molecules that contain organized data. Such information wasn’t normally susceptible to deterioration, not in that manner. Yet the information began moving from here to there—from a higher state to a lower one. They never figured out the mechanism, but the conjecture was that the cloud’s field “read” the information in the most accessible formats on earth, including hard drives and cells, and in the process of reading the information, it transferred the information to itself and then to the cloud of dark matter. Snatching the most available information first, entropy forces quickly degraded electronic records. The information in biological systems—in DNA and other molecules—had more
stability. For a while. Flora and fauna began to sicken and fail. Scientists called it the Entropy Effect.

Ordinary people called it the Collapse.

As electronic files decayed into noise, only Glass resisted. It held information. It was the only thing that did. Across the world, scientists passed the nucleation points on to colleagues, and the scramble was on to encode research and data into quasi-crystal.

But not only did quasi-crystal encode and maintain information in itself, it also offered refuge in its very form and bulk. The entropy forces couldn’t affect electronic data stored in Ice—or the people finding sanctuary under it. While political systems were still operating, the United States government directed a crash program to physically grow the Glass platform as widely as possible—both in the United States, and, by sharing the nucleation points with other countries—worldwide.

Toward the end, no one was in charge at the university Lucian Orr was the one among fifteen team members with no family, to distract him from the final stages of Glass’s programming. Some team members had already died or, watching their families die, were beyond caring about the Looking Glass Project or the future of the world. So Lucian Orr stayed, working alone, living off the hastily collected stores of water and food. It was a lonely time, even for one who never sought company. Then, there at coretext, he had his vision of how something, at least, might be salvaged from all the ruin. He became obsessed with the concept of entropy, decay, death—and their opposites. And as he stepped into his metamorphic sleep, the Looking Glass Project stayed behind to mind the world, on its own. With just a little help from Lucian Orr.

OK, it was true that it had grown large. He had feared it
might, but to achieve its goals, Ice must grow until it was large
enough.

Apparently, it had farther to go.

Worley looked like he had something stuck in his throat. Finally, he managed to spit it out: “The sisters are leaving.”

He winced as Zoya turned a dark stare on him. “When?”

“Now, I’m afraid.” he pointed up. “They’re loading their sled.” He stood in her way. “They’ve refused you an audience. I did what I could for you, but the good sisters do what they will.”

Zoya wasn’t so sure he did what he could. He and his Group of Five feared as well as courted her, sowing confusion, hedging their bets. She had already concluded he had no influence with the nuns.

She grabbed her satchel and hitched it over her shoulder. “Take me to them.”

He was still blocking her way with his considerable girth.

She smiled at him. “I want you to know, Worley, that your preserve’s generosity will not be forgotten by my captain. We won’t hold you to blame for this insult.”

“Insult?”

“The nuns’ insult.”

Zoya pushed past him into the corridor. A group of people who had been sitting outside her quarters rose, murmuring her name. They had been gathered there all night. Little piles of trinkets were accreting near her door, so that she had to pick her way carefully to avoid tripping on them.

“Where are the Ice Nuns?” Zoya called out to the people camped in the passageway.

A startled woman blurted out, “Topside.”

Worley barged his way through the crowd to Zoya’s side. “Please, Zoya. The sisters won’t be coerced.”

“Perhaps just a nudge, then.”

Zoya broke into a jog. The nuns were leaving, loading their sled. Evading her. She would find them again, but the cost of delay, the bitter cost…
Precious meters of ground lost every day
, Anatolly said. Ice advanced. The Rom were losing ground, losing their foothold before they even claimed it.

She scrambled up the ladder.

Pushing past the few nuns who were tying up gear in the tower room, Zoya strode out into bright sunlight. It blinded her at first. The day glared off white drifts. In patches where the wind had swept the area free of sand, the surface gleamed unnaturally, like the dull white of cataracts.

There, spread out in a line, was the impressive sled of the Ice Nuns. Larger by far than Wolf’s, the vehicle had covered compartments hitched together behind a large cab. The housing and runners were pure white, like a polar animal.

And there were groups of children, perhaps thirty or forty Little knots of worried faces. Some were crying.

The nuns’ black robes fluttered in the brisk wind, giving them the look of crows riding thermals.

Zoya took one nun by the arm as she passed. “Who’s in charge here?”

The sister’s look of alarm soon decayed into a darker look. She freed her arm from Zoya’s grasp and pointed to a nun near the lead cab. Zoya marched in that direction, down the line of small forms bundled in jackets and caps against the cold. Nuns were ushering the children into the cabs, where the side doors were thrown open. Why were children being taken? Where were the parents?

A cry drew her attention. A boy about nine years old was
struggling with a nun. Two more nuns entered the fray, subduing him.

Zoya broke her stride. She changed direction. Part of her said,
this is none of your business. Part of her said, get your damn hands off that boy.
Something was rising in her stomach, in her chest. It was an upwelling that could have lifted the whole sled and toppled it.

The next thing she knew, she was yanking the sisters away from the sled and interposing herself between them and the boy. She surrounded him with her arms, panting with exertion. The sisters were glaring at her, talking so fast she couldn’t keep up with it, but she could imagine the gist. The nuns surged forward to snatch the boy, but she held tighter. It was a standoff. Now, more dark-robed figures were headed in their direction. Well, this was not exactly keeping proprieties. Anatolly would not be pleased.