Maximum Ice (18 page)

The nuns came down the line, handing out dun-colored robes. Sizing up Kellian, the sisters had to rummage through their stack to find a robe long enough. By the time they found
one, Kellian was shivering hard. She dragged the nun’s fine wool over her head and shoulders.

It was only a uniform. It wouldn’t change her. She patted the back of her hair, with its smuggled file.

With Kellian in tow, Sister Patricia Margaret paused before the door to the dormitory

“These postulants work in my group. For the most part, they’re decent girls. Try to get along.” She lifted a white eyebrow, waiting for Kellian to give the proper response.

“Yes, Sister.”

“Remember, my girl. You
wanted
to be here.” Sister Patricia Margaret looked over Kellian once more, her eyes tracing the mass of wiry hair. “Tomorrow, a shave.”

With that, she opened the door.

The room was filled with bunk beds. Each one had flat blankets tucked in on all sides. It was hard to believe all the people within slept there, for no item was out of place. Young women lounged on the bunks, but with the interruption, sat up and nodded greetings to the sister.

“This is Kellian Bourassa, come just now from Ancou preserve. Welcome her, and show her the ropes. She’ll be working with us.”

“Yes, Sister,” came a chorus of soprano voices.

The postulants wore light brown robes like Kellian’s, except some were gray. And one was white.

The one in white stood in the middle of the group, and now came forward, curtsying to the sister. With a rounded face, she was rather plumper than Kellian was used to seeing, and Kellian hoped that boded well for the food.

“This is Hilde,” Sister Patricia Margaret said. “She’ll help you get settled.” The sister said this rather more pointedly than seemed necessary.

“Yes, Sister,” Hilde murmured. She glanced at Kellian, smiling. “Ancou is far from here. You must be tired.”

Kellian heard the door close behind the sister, and watched the smile slide off Hilde’s face.

The women and girls—some looked to be no more than thirteen or fourteen years old—now sat staring at the newcomer, with appraising looks. She did present a rather different picture. Some of them were dark-skinned, but none were as dark as Kellian. Heads were shaved. It looked cold, all those bare skulls.

Hilde circled around Kellian, stopping in front of her. “That’s your bunk.” She cocked her head at an empty one in the middle of the room. “Go ahead, get settled.”

“Where’s the toilet?” Kellian asked.

Hilde smiled. “Through that door.”

The latrine was wonderful, with doors on the stalls and commodes with rounded seats. Kellian took a long piss. She was so tired and comfortable she thought she could sit there and just sleep. The nuns might be child-stealers, but they knew how to make some things pleasant enough.

When Kellian returned, everyone was waiting for her, watching. She went to her bunk and sat down. “What are you all staring at?”

Hilde shook her head. “That’s three. You all saw, that was three, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, Top Hilde,” came a uniform murmur from the bunks.

Kellian’s heart began a slow drop. The room was under Hilde’s control. And, she began to fear, so was she.

Hilde said, “We have a few rules here, Kell. Unfortunately, you’ve just broken three of them.”

“What rules?”

One of the postulants, a young one on a top bunk nearby, gave a slow, pitying shake of her head.

“For example,” Hilde said, “speaking to a top without being spoken to first.”

Kellian forced her body and face to remain passive.

“For another, you went counterclockwise to get to your bunk. Only tops can go that way. Everyone else, clockwise. Keeps the traffic patterns in the dorm orderly.” When Kellian didn’t react, Hilde advanced a few paces. “But I don’t need to explain why. Mostly, I won’t explain.”

“My name’s Kellian, not Kell.”

Hilde’s face broke out into a bright laugh. She glanced around the room, shaking her head, getting mirthful expressions back from her cohorts. “That’s four. You’re going to be trouble, I can see that. Well, you’re older than we usually get. I’ll try to take that into consideration.”

She hooked a thumb into the belt of her white robe and continued, “Listen up: Every time you go to the latrine, you recite everyone’s name before you can leave the room.” Hilde spread out her arms, “OK, innies, recite your names.”

From a bunk in the corner came, “Mar.”

Then, next to her, “Jace,” and “Alb” and all the others, little, piping voices from each in turn.

“When you go, you put my name first, then everybody else’s.” She sighed. “Let’s see, what else? Oh, no inny can have a name longer than one syllable. If you ever reach white-robe status, you can have your long name back. Innies are invisible, that’s how they get their name, inny. That’s a clue for how you should act. I don’t give lots of clues.

“The tops in each dorm dole out the judgments. So, being that I’m the top, as penance for your four errors, you have to go clean the last stall in the latrine. That stall’s dirty. Probably hasn’t been cleaned since the last newcomer.”

Kellian sat, considering her options.

Four large girls closed ranks with Hilde. They looked eager to get their hands on Kellian.

She summoned a cool temper. Her mother’s words whispered to her:
Make nice.

As Kellian walked past Hilde, the woman said: “I could have been a lot meaner. You’re getting off easy.” Kellian locked gazes with her.

“And it’s not just because of your skin, either. I’m fair. Ask anyone.”

“You’re fair, Top Hilde,” came the chorus.

“Now go,” Hilde said.

Kellian went to the latrine door. She turned around. “Hilde,” she said. “Mar, Jace, Alb, Lon, Harp…” She continued reciting. She had learned the names the first time around. And Hilde was learning that Kellian had a good memory

Later, scrubbing stains that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the ancient floor tiles, Kellian heard the next stall door open. Instead of using the commode, the postulant brought a pail inside and started cleaning.

The little arm was skinny, the hand no larger than the scrub brush.

“Who are you?” Kellian asked.

“Nit.”

They scrubbed in unison for a while. “What did you do?”

“Got a spot on my robe.”

Kellian looked down at the spots she had already incurred from splashing dirt on herself. “What are the rest of the rules?”

The brush next door went back and forth, delivering up brackish suds. The scrubbing and soap made the latrine smell worse, releasing the acrid odor of urine from its dried state.

“Tell me the rules, Nit.”

“I’m not supposed to.”

Quick as a rat pouncing, Kellian’s hand grabbed hold of the little wrist. Nit froze.

“I won’t hurt you, Nit. But I have to know the rules.”

The little wrist twisted under her grip. “What’ve you got to trade?”

Kellian released Nit. “Nothing. I’ve got nothing right now.” She sat back on her haunches, staring at the commode. “But I will.”

“Well, future doesn’t count.”

Kellian retrieved the tronic wafer from her hair. Then she felt behind the commode for a hiding place, finding a loose tile that might serve to keep the wafer off the damp floor.

“It counts.”

“Shh. They’ll hear us.”

Kellian crouched down, looking under the stall. Nit was skinny and dark, about fifteen years old.

Kellian whispered, “Someday you’ll need a favor, Nit. When you do, I’ll be there.”

“How do I know?”

“It’s a risk. But it could pay off big. You want to always be stuck cleaning Hilde’s toilets? Is that what you want? I’ll bet you want more than that.”

Clutching her scrub brush, Nit watched her from deep-set brown eyes. Tears sparkled at the corners. After a moment she bent to her task of scrubbing again, using both hands to rake the brush over scummy tiles.

Kellian straightened up, rubbing the small of her back. She already knew one new rule. No spots on the robe. She took hers off, hanging it up on the door peg. Then she resumed cleaning in her slip.

A noise came from the next stall. Nit was whispering to her.

It was the rules.

The nuns had been gone a day and a half, but the tracks of their sled still cut a clear trail southward. To follow them, Zoya had managed to enlist Wolf’s help once again.

It would be a cold ride, but it needn’t be. Anatolly could have transported her with the shuttle. Instead, the craft merely made a drop of supplies. Lieutenant Mirran could hardly meet her gaze. Then, following orders, he left in the shuttle. And all because Anatolly—sensitive Anatolly—feared alienating the Sisters with a show of power.

“Anatolly,” she had begged, “there are rats. And the sled is very cold.”

He was unmoved.
“If it grows too dangerous, you should come home.”

“What does Janos think?” she asked in mock innocence.

“He’s in complete agreement. After Mother Superior’s call, we have a relationship to foster. No need to brandish our capabilities.”

“Pardon, Tolly, but that’s such nonsense.”

“That incident with the children didn’t help things, Zoya.”

“How do you know? Maybe they need to know what we stand for.”

“It doesn’t help to make enemies.”

She sighed. “Make an enemy, Anatolly. It would do you good.”

He put starch in his voice.
“Zoya Kundara, I’m still your captain.”

Last week, when Anatolly had been twenty-four he wouldn’t have hesitated to take Janos on. Anatolly was no longer her young lover, but when she couldn’t see him—as when she spoke to him by radio—she found herself calling up an earlier version of the man.

Then and now. She really must try to keep them straight.

“Yes, sorry,” she told him. She had placed herself under strict command of the ship’s captain, each of them in turn, over the centuries. Someone had to lead.

So she would accept Anatolly’s decision that her mission should not alienate the dark sisters who, apparently, were no
sisters
at all. Her own approach had clearly worked no better, and possibly worse. The one bright point was Anatolly’s recent contact with Mother Superior. She might be more open to converse than Sister Patricia Margaret Logue.

As the giant craft roared aloft, Wolf held on to the amulet around his neck, as though it might offer protection not only from the invisible darkness, but also space shuttles.

“Your people are loud,” Wolf said.

Of all the descriptions he might have come up with, that was an odd one. “We aren’t a timid people. Perhaps quietness is overrated?”

“Loud is overrated.” Wolf was securing the load on the cargo sled, which now contained decent tube food, an experimental Ice interface that Mirran’s research team had put together, and a rich payment in goods for Wolf. His price had gone up since the last ride.

She watched him in silence. His hand worked the ropes with economy and strength, nothing wasted, nothing halfhearted. Like a creature in a chain of predator and prey, he both concentrated on his task and on his surroundings. He watched the barrens, smelling it, tasting it, alert for movement, even when to her the land seemed bleached of sight and smell.

But the ground beneath her feet held information. Lieutenant Mirran confirmed it, having read the light pulses, or some of them, shreds of disconnected data, equations, words. At base camp, they’d quickly tapped into fragments of information. Fragments, without context, without meaning.

Working in cooperation with Vlad’s group on Ship, Mirran
confirmed that aspects of Ice were involved in information storage, possibly across vast geographic tracts. And more, that it likely manipulated data. If that was the case, it was a computational platform on a global scale. No wonder the preserves regarded it with superstition.

The computational architecture was optical, as they had guessed for some days. The hardware was crystalline, and depended, Vlad said, on the atomic orientation of crystal lattices. In their brief conversation, Mirran alluded to a code of light beams that might or might not pass through a filter, corresponding to a binary message of ones and zeros. Amplification resulted from reflecting back and forth between the different planes of crystal in an unknown manner, given their present understanding of quasi-crystal.

Imagine
what could be done, he’d said, where an optical computer—always theoretically possible—had no need of miniaturization?

Yes,
imagine.
And look around you. To a geography of information.

Powered by sunlight. Vlad was guessing, but it was a good guess. The sun was dumping stupendous amounts of solar energy onto the expanse of Ice. From there, Ice must take incoming photons and convert them directly into electrons to power its processes, perhaps as efficiently as plants using photosynthesis.

Zoya brushed away the white sand from the patch of ground near her feet. It was transparent to a certain depth. She peered down into the clearing, into a pale turquoise stratum, beneath which currents of information might swim. Leviathans of purpose, schools of silvered thoughts.

Why is it still growing?
Alger’s question pushed at her. If its first program was to grow and fend off dark matter, did it now have a second purpose?

A shadow turned her view opaque. Wolf stood beside her, blocking the sun.

Zoya said, “You don’t worship it, do you.”

He snorted. “Do you worship the sky?” By his expression, he knew the answer. “It deserves respect. Like most things that can kill you.”

“Ice can kill?”

He shrugged. “Look around you.”

She quashed her annoyance at being admonished. She was new there, with no help for ignorance but to accept a little schooling. She rose, following Wolf to the sled. The shuttle had by then disappeared over a ridge of hills, and they were left in the silence of a wiped-clean world. Small puffs of clouds wandered overhead, throwing moving lakes of shadow onto the land. Here and there, hills of Ice marked the former domain of islands, while in the east the dark spines of the Cascades— what Wolf called the Cadian Mountains—protruded through the mantle; to the southwest, she could make out the Oloms, the Olympics. To the west, beyond the former Vancouver Island, lay the great Paz, the white expanse now covering much of the ocean. The vast basin between the Cadian and Olom Mountains was the Val Paz, and it was down this immense trough they would make their way to the Keep.