Maximum Ice (11 page)

But that was a mistake: to sleep. The land slept. Only a few people walked the earth, engaging its dream time, stalking witches, murdering children. For all its peacefulness, the realm had its nightmares. Time to wake, Zoya thought, Queen Ria or not.

Wolf nudged at her arm. “Best to go in.”

He led her inside the tower, into a cramped stone room. A trapdoor lay open on the floor, and a ladder disappeared into the depths. A rising column of warm air carried the stench of urine and rot.

Zoya strapped her satchel onto her back to free her hands for descending the ladder. She paused before the gaping hole down which the sisters had somehow borne their captive.

“Wolf, I thank you for the ride and your protection.”

For an instant his eyes flicked to meet hers.

“It was a difficult journey,” she said, “but I wouldn’t have you think me ungrateful.” She smiled at him. “Do you?”

He shrugged. “I got a snow witch. And good boots.”

If she was any judge of the man, there was a hint of warmth behind the stark words.

“May those boots carry you safely and far,” she said, smiling.

As to the snow witch, she was less certain.

Turning to climb down into the hole, she saw Wolf secure the tower door, throwing the bolt. Then she descended the ladder into the depths, each step taking her deeper into a thick stew of reeking air.

CHAPTER FIVE

Solange Arnaud stood in front of the small, gnarled tree. She caressed the needles, brimming with their potion of chlorophyll, the elixir that turned sunlight into energy. So far as she knew, this was the only tree on earth, and the thought of its value, both aesthetically and genetically, thrilled her.

Hands came around Solange from behind, opening her lounging robe, cupping her breasts. “Come back to bed.”

His deep voice stirred her, and she allowed him to lead her back into the bedroom, where, apparently, his needs were rebounding. She was happy to meet them, flattered by his desire, given the difference in their ages. Her own arousal was no small matter, either, though he had satisfied her once. He was a treasure to her, fully as much as the bonsai tree. For all of her cloistered life Solange had kept chaste, until now, until this man proved he could take her into the ways of flesh. Flesh, the uncharted world. She could lay aside her black robes. Lay aside thinking. The pleasure was arresting, but it was transformation she wanted. To leave the self that thought, planned, worried, analyzed. Only someone who had lived within those ordered halls for sixty years could understand the lure of a hidden door. Behind that door, the new land had its own rules and inevitable, sure instructions:
touch here… be still… move now… hold… release…

She had spent her whole life looking for clarity. She had
begun to wonder if, sadly, it lay only in the body Well, if it did, then she would seek it with this lover.

“Mother Superior,” he said, mockingly, dropping her robe from her shoulders.

“Brother,” she answered, her tone strict.

He guided her onto the bed, not worried about protocols. “How may I serve you?”

She told him. But he had his own ideas, and they were even better than hers. That he disobeyed her was part of their play All so forbidden—although Solange was certainly not the first mother superior to take a lover in this bed. She might well be his first female lover. She hoped she was. The brothers satisfied each other, it couldn’t be helped. But she kept a strict eye on her girls. And the punishments were terrible, of course.

So when he came to her chambers, she was the beneficiary of his rather insistent demands.

It was not strictly ethical. She felt disturbed by that. It especially troubled her to punish couplings between postulants and brothers. But postulants were in training. Their minds needed discipline, the rigors of the order. Flesh could come later, when it was less distracting. And brothers, of course—well, their minds were not an issue.

Afterward, he lingered in the darkened doorway, wanting to say something. But she discouraged talk. She didn’t want him to lie to her, about affection, about what it meant. In the world of the body,
meaning
wasn’t necessary.

He left, closing the door.

As her mind gradually came back to claim its property, she bathed and dressed. Once in her black robes, she was in thinking mode again.

The crew member, Zoya Kundara, had reached the preserve. Sister Patricia Margaret, forewarned by Solange over their se-
cure radio channel, had met the woman. She could be trouble, sister reported. Her moral guidance system would not mix well with the Sisters of Clarity in the matter of the snow witches, and perhaps much else. It was so like sister to take the woman’s measure quickly. It came of long practice, recruiting novices.

Sooner or later, Solange would meet Zoya for herself. Meanwhile it was best to cultivate backups. Zoya Kundara might be brought around, but if she was hostile, one must find more receptive individuals. In an institution—and of course the ship was an institution as well as a vessel—there were always factions. She would delay meeting Zoya until she knew better the lay of that land.

There must always be backups. If Swan proved false in his promises, then perhaps the ship had superior technology for interface. So the ship was both a threat and a potential resource. That was often the case in the world, in its disturbing ambiguity

Swan’s vision of a military raid by the brothers was artless and dangerous. Force could only produce a temporary victory No, she would take the ship as she had taken her position as Mother Superior, by persuasion. Always a consummate persuader, she felt newly inspired by the Ice change that might— oh,
might
—now be within reach.

Before leaving her suite, Solange paused before the door, smoothing her hair. She was firmly back in the province of the mind.

It did have its allures.

Dog-tired, muscles curdled, Zoya gave up trying to sleep. Her thoughts were of long ago; 250 years by one reckoning, 10,000 by another. No good to ask about real time. Time wasn’t
absolute, as physicists knew, but it was especially relative where Zoya was concerned. She turned on the lightbulb over her cot and sat up.

Middle of the night. Made it to the preserve. Graciously given a meal. Now she was wide-awake in her quarters, a square, stark room with a bare lightbulb—so like a military barracks. Overhead, the thud of someone moving on an upper level set the light swinging in a short arc. Back, forth, back.

So like a barracks.

The preserve, in its ugly functionality, kicked up an old memory. She couldn’t blame the preserve; hadn’t she kept the memory alive on purpose? Didn’t she call forth the story, over and over for
Star Road, why they had left? We had to leave. But why, Ship Mother?
Then came the stories. Among them, the story of the barracks.

It was a plain wooden frame building with a long hall down the middle, and doors to rooms on either side. When the camp was freed, she had been there, had walked down the long corridor, looking in the rooms to left and right, through the little windows with their little bars. No faces peered through those windows, no skinny hands gripped the bars. The occupants were too small, being children.

In midnight sleeplessness it was a frequent walk. Even in the sustained dreams of stasis. They said you didn’t dream in stasis. That was a lie.

Tears clogged her throat. Some of those young ones couldn’t be saved. Some of them refused to be saved. That was the hardest thing to bear. When the prison doors were opened, some refused to leave. That was Zoya’s definition of despair. She saw that same look on the crew’s faces as they looked out on the altered earth.
Skinny hands gripping the bars, holding the door shut…

She paced the room, trying to leave the vision behind. This time we don’t refuse. It’s a fresh start. A new earth. From what the preserve inhabitants had said so far it was also an exceedingly
strange
earth. Not what we expected—but when have the Rom ever gotten what they expected?

At last she turned off the lightbulb and lay back down, seeing the afterimage of the stark bulb, looking like a crystal world, lit from within.

Zoya regarded the plate of food before her. The platter held a fine approximation of sausage and hash browns, except that everything was an alarming shade of brownish green. The young man who’d brought her the breakfast smiled and gestured for her to eat. He was young to be missing so many teeth. His attire was drab and dirty, like her quarters—and like the rest of the preserve she had seen so far: a patchwork assemblage of spare parts, a dreary, gadget-filled warren, festooned with cables carrying the circuitry of the habitat. The place stank. Vents exuded smells of cooked algae one moment, followed by a blast of fecal odors. No one seemed to notice but her. It was remarkable to think that this warren was all that remained of the once great city of Vancouver. But Ship assured her that below the preserve were the remains of that city

She picked up her fork and spoon, connected together by a wire. Using the fork, she broke off a piece of the green mass, and chewed. It tasted like chicken feed. She smiled at him. “Good.”

After her server left, she abandoned the food and unpacked her radio unit. It was past time to be in contact with the ship.

Star Road greeted her hail with relief and scolding. Where had she been? Why had she not reported in? “I’m reporting now.” They would
begin with why the rules had been broken. “Bring Captain Razo, please,” she said.

Anatolly’s worried voice soon greeted her. With the captain was Janos Bertak, carping on her failure to report, hovering around Anatolly like a bad case of the flu.

“There was the storm, Janos. It disrupted our communications. And we took great pains to avoid drawing the attention of the rats.”

“Rats? There are rats?”
Anatolly asked.

“Yes, indeed, rats. So something does live on the surface.”

“What do they subsist on?”

Zoya hesitated to say
travelers.
No need to alarm Anatolly or give Janos fuel for intervention. “For one thing, they raid the agricultural patches. The preserves grow some food—an algaebased staple.” She went on to fill in the details of her report, telling of the geography, the lights of the crystal stacks, and the surprising revival of the man presumed dead. Then she proceeded to tell of her odd encounter with the dwellers there.

Last night, though she would have been glad of his support, Wolf had disappeared into the nether regions of the place, leaving her among a group that seemed curious as to what she might be. They had offered her a simple hospitality of perfectly acceptable tea and perfectly awful pellets of green. She suspected that for the duration of her stay she would become all too familiar with the culinary repertoire of algae.

As she ate, she noted the ingenious mixture of wall and flooring materials: asymmetrical chunks and slabs of what might be plastic, asphalt, laminates—and even a large section of fine pink marble. Bonding it all together were thick seams of clear adhesive. Tubes and pipes twisted over the walls in tight arrays, affixed to the surface by more bonding agent. Zoya judged that glue was a critical resource in this habitat, literally holding the place together.

Her hosts waited for her to finish her meal, staring unabashedly at her clothes and gear. But they were friendly
enough, sitting on boxes and items of decrepit machinery, while according her the lone real chair among them.

As she and Anatolly had decided in advance, she didn’t hide from them that she had come on a ship. The information was greeted with both open disbelief and fascination.

They called themselves Zeros, or so her lex said. They thought she might be an Eco. The terms gave her translator logic net no end of trouble.

She gathered that these preserve inhabitants were well aware that the earth had not always been as it was now and, in the time before—what they called the First World—it had been dominated by flora and fauna of all sorts. Was she an Eco?

Such a question was hard to answer, nor did she.