Maximum Ice (29 page)

Nit did, though, and nearly dropped the candelabra on her feet.
A brother
, she mouthed.

“The sisters vote,” the stranger continued from the pew behind her. She could smell his male scent. “You won’t see any men in those holos.”

He was daring much. Brothers had no business in the sanctuary. They had their own sanctuary, downstairs. And further, they should never speak to a postulant.

Kellian couldn’t help it, she turned around.

The brother was startlingly handsome, with deep brown eyes and a sensual mouth.

His hand came up to her temple and firmly turned her head toward the front again. “If they come in, you don’t want to be seen talking to me. Do you know, newcomer, what they do to brothers who consort with postulants?”

Kellian didn’t want to guess.

“They castrate them. We have a lot of castrated brothers.”

Nit was still gaping. Kellian waved at her to turn back to her duties.

“The nuns break that rule freely,” he said. His voice was a creamy, bass sound. She’d missed the company of men. “The ranking nuns take lovers; it’s an open secret. But you don’t know much about our perverted little world, do you?”

“Enough to get by.”

He chuckled. “You’re sure of yourself, I’ll give you that. I like spunk.” His voice came nearer. “I’ve heard you’re ambitious. Is that right?”

“No.” She didn’t think she was, but perhaps others saw her that way. “I just want freedom to work.”

She could feel his warm breath on her neck. “Just? Any brother would give his left testicle for such freedom. But don’t worry about us, worry about yourself. Or are you too dumb to worry?”

As she tried to think of a good retort, she heard him chuckle, a nice throaty rumble that both irritated and attracted.

He continued, “You got your white robe in a hurry Now you’ll draw attention, not always good around here. I can teach you a thing or two, so you won’t get tripped up. We know more about how this place works than some of the nuns. We get all the dirty assignments. It’s a good way to learn.”

She turned around to get another good peek at his face. “So why should you help me?”

His hand pressed against her face, turning her around. “You know about Hilde,” he whispered, close to her ear now. “Don’t report her. That’s what I want.”

“Did Hilde send you?”

“Hilde would never stoop to begging. It’s one reason I love her.”

Oh, so this was
that
brother. She was surprised by a wave of jealousy that Hilde had such a lover. “I won’t tell,” Kellian said. “I never intended to.”

“Easy to say, postulant,” he murmured.

“It’s
not
easy to say. She’s a dragon.”

He laughed softly. The pew creaked behind her. Then his voice was very low as he whispered: “Does it change your mind if you know that I’m also Mother Superior’s consort?”

Nit, who was listening, almost buckled.

“No,” Kellian said. “Maybe it should change
your
mind.”

“Hilde’s punishment would be to go outside the walls. That would be the nicest thing Solange would do. The old harridan doesn’t expect me to love her, but she does expect loyalty.”

He continued, “Here’s your first installment of brotherly knowledge: Your Sister Patricia Margaret Logue is a big supporter of yours. But she’s vulnerable.”

“I know that,” Kellian snapped.

“Shut up. You don’t know anything. She tries to protect

Sister Verna, but Verna is old and cranky. Now they’ve sent Verna on a mission. When the sisters disappear around here, they’re said to be on a ‘mission’ to a preserve. Sometimes they don’t come back. Lost on the barrens. What really happens is that they’re put into a deep sleep—in Ice. As an experimental interface. And they wait for Prince Charming to wake them. Only trouble is, the prince never comes. Ice ignores them.”

“You’re lying,” Kellian said. He was trying to subvert her, to ruin the sisters in her eyes.

His voice was relentless. “Solange thinks that the witches can communicate with Ice, that Ice itself has altered them for the purpose. She hopes one of her volunteers will be transformed by Ice to become a pure channel, interpreting between crystal and human intelligence. She’s counting on the nuns’ purity of purpose to keep them from succumbing to dementia. A nice theory, isn’t it? Solange’s personal translator, frozen into place, serving the sisterhood.”

Kellian began seriously to doubt this brother. Ice didn’t create witches. It was ridiculous. Ice was a computational device, not… a laboratory.

He continued: “Just in case Ice ever tries to wake one of Solange’s volunteers, they’re chained. The ethical sisters won’t tolerate perversions. They don’t want to be responsible for the snow witches’ crimes. So the collars provide the humanitarian dimension. You wouldn’t expect less of the nuns, would you?”

“Why would they experiment on a frail old woman? Why not take healthy people?”

After a beat, he said, “You’re going to fit in well here, postulant.”

“I didn’t say I approve. I’m just testing your hypothesis.”

“It’s no hypothesis. Who do you think gets the work of entombing the sisters?”
The brothers
was the unspoken conclusion. “And they take all ages, just to see if the variables make a difference to Ice.”

Kellian shook her head. The nuns weren’t perfect, but they weren’t monsters. “I don’t believe Sister Patricia Margaret could be part of this.”

“Listen to me, postulant. She’s
not a part of it. She doesn’t know. I told
you there are secrets here. Your old nun is kept out of the higher circles. They can hardly wait for her to retire. But she’s popular with the rank and file, so they humor her.”

Kellian shot back, “I’ve heard the brothers torture snow witches. For sport.”

“If you want to talk about snow witches, that’ll be our second installment. Keep Hilde’s secret, and we’ll meet again to pursue your real education.”

She heard him move behind her. Before he left, she said, “I don’t care what Hilde does. Except for one thing.” She paused. “Tell Hilde to back off of the girls.”

He expelled an impatient breath. “It’s how she keeps our secret. Through a show of power.”

“Tell her.”

His voice sounded vulnerable for the first time. “I’ll try Don’t expect miracles.”

“I can’t help it.”

Nit replaced the candleholder in its niche and swung around to face Kellian. She wiped the sweat off her face with a fold of her robe. “Brother Daniel’s gone,” she said.

Brother Daniel.
So, Nit recognized him.

She turned around to find the chapel empty but for the two of them. And Mother Superior Mary Carmelita, hovering over the nave. Upon closer inspection, the nun looked decidedly less benevolent.

The north wing was cold that day. It was always cold, climatecontrolled for the tronics. But today it was different. The towering black walls were oppressive. She felt she was laboring at the
bottom of the ocean. Her endeavors seemed pointless. And wrong.

She was a cog in a machine of suffering. Nit, Daniel, Hilde, Verna, Patricia Margaret. In a desultory mood, she logged on to her computer. Her node time had arrived.

She stared at her screen.

Who are you? was displayed there.

Tronics hummed. Postulants shuffled around her.

She kept staring at the display. Then she slowly placed her fingers on the keyboard. It could be some nun, hailing her. But they didn’t communicate that way. It could be… her mind looped off in several directions, but came back to her fingers on the keys.

Kellian Bourassa
, she typed.

She turned the monitor away from the station next to hers. Sister Patricia Margaret wasn’t there that afternoon. Hilde, at the other end of the room, was ignoring her for the moment.

Thus she was left in relative privacy to spend the next hour talking to a stranger. Someone who seemed to know both a great deal and nothing at all.

Swan sat eating his late-night supper. It was tasteless, as usual.

A lamp burned at his side, casting a disk of light over his resting spot. It had been a long day, and Swan’s mood had been sliding down a long spiral ever since he came upon the lone traveler and killed him.

The lamp was a great comfort in his dark mood. He patted the lantern, leaving a bloody fingerprint there.

He was a murderer, he saw that now. The incident with the chained nuns had not been an isolated act. Ice had reduced
him to a predator. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind, and it horrified him, even as he ate.

Food was a problem in more than one way. There were no animals—none that he had seen so far—no birds, no insects, no mammals, except for rats. Nothing could grow, though here and there patches of soil had begun to form from thousands of years of dust from the equatorial lands and even, he supposed, meteorite strikes. But almost everything was dead.

There being no alternative, he had just eaten a man.

And he was still a little hungry… He chewed on a piece of meat. Blood everywhere. Dousing the light would help, but he didn’t want to be in the dark.

He didn’t have a normal metabolism anymore. With his altered chemistry, the definition of
normal
was up for grabs. It was cannibalism, of course. Looked at unflinchingly, it was the most repugnant of acts.

OK, he was a freak. One part of him knew that. But Ice, responsible for his health, had allowed errors to creep in. In fact, Ice was repeating those errors. In the prototypes. They craved large quantities of protein. It was a consistent presentation of Ice’s error. Ice must search the carbohydrate/glucose-processing issue. Good thing he awoke in time to do a little more programming.

Meanwhile, he couldn’t go on like this. Soon, he must claim one of the preserves’ food benders, or make his own. Eventually, there would be the equatorial lands, and he could live with some normalcy.

He stared at his hands, resisting the urge to lick them.

Just fighting the urge made him feel more self-respect.

Wasn’t it true that even civilized people, under extreme circumstances, ate each other? Plane crashes, sea disasters… Yes, they used to call it “the custom of the sea.” Set adrift at sea,
people drank urine, spilled their own blood to quench their thirst. At the end, they drew straws. It was the custom. A kind of normalcy

But he hadn’t drawn straws with this man. He hadn’t observed the ritual that made it lawful.

So looked at honestly, he was a perverted being, one who had abandoned civilized ways.

On the other hand, strictly speaking, cannibalism was not against the law. People who ate others must answer to the law for murder, not the meal. Cannibalism was never illegal, at least not in the United States, where he was. And in
extreme circumstances
—such as were brought about by the untimely arrival of the plague ship, and necessitating as it did his early awakening—well, people could easily break the ultimate taboo. The extraordinary could become customary, under extremity

He held the arm bone in his hand. It was awful. And necessary

OK, he did feel better.

And next time, he would add in the ritual of the straws. Yes, it would help immeasurably to follow the custom. That way, he’d have a fifty-fifty chance that it wouldn’t be murder. It was a flawed solution, of course. There tended to be flaws in things. It was the price he paid for the long life he hoped to live.

Once you’ve died you don’t have to again. It was one more thing that could be said in his defense. You only have to die once. That also was customary.

The crystal ground under his feet was stained red. It surprised him, the way Ice soaked in the blood. He walked around, kicking sand over the stain. Then, anxious to be moving again, he decided to push on through the night.

Ice faithfully reported on Zoya Kundara’s path, as she unwittingly left her track, through interfaces and radio transmissions
. That was reassuring, that Ice could accomplish new tasks. Just a little more reprogramming and perhaps his imperfections could be healed.

But that could wait. For now, there was the gypsy woman. He knew where she was, approximately

And now he had a sled.

Captain Anatolly Razo looked down at Midshipman First Class Novik, seated at his workstation. He was the radio operator of the watch. He was lying to his captain.

One indicator was the man’s neck, growing red with embarrassment. But Anatolly didn’t need his flush of guilt to know the man was lying.

“No communications from Ship Mother or Lieutenant Mirran for the last thirty-six hours?” Anatolly asked again.

“No, sir,” the midshipman said.

“Nor from the Sisters of Clarity?”

Novik’s neck burned crimson. “No, Captain. No hails.” Under Anatolly’s calm gaze, the midshipman stammered on: “The electromagnetic…”

“… storm,” the captain finished for him. “Yes, indeed.”

Anatolly set his mouth firm. If he had the man arrested, he would tip his hand, and he didn’t want to do that. Because he wasn’t sure he held the winning cards.

But he knew who did.

Anatolly straightened his jacket and swept the bridge with his gaze. Secrets lay under their flat, dutiful faces. Father Donicetti had tried to tell him. There had been meetings. When Anatolly had confronted Janos Bertak, Janos claimed to be smoothing things over with crew. Then, too much of a coincidence, Lieutenant Andropolous was on sick leave, with a broken hand
from a freak accident on the squash court. A crew member had managed to strike the lieutenant’s hand with his racquet.

“Lieutenant Marusic,” Anatolly said, “you have the bridge.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant replied, all duty. All false.

He left the bridge and headed down the corridor to find Janos. It was second shift, and Janos was off duty. That was why Anatolly had come onto the bridge during his own sleep period, to see what might be done when Janos wasn’t around. But Janos controlled the bridge even from his sleeping quarters, that was clear. Anatolly had once been good at reading his people, could tell by nuance and expression what was in their hearts. He’d lost that, in the press of administration and crisis management.
Delegated that
, as the priest had reminded him.