Maximum Ice (6 page)

A flicker of light in the nave caught her attention. A different laureate stood there, Mother Superior Betheny Marta. The old sow stood dour and pious, but she was better than Mother

Carmen. So far the sisters saw fit to ignore Solange’s accomplishments, denying her elevation. But to preside over the
Enunciation.
There could be no greater accomplishment, no surer path to the laureate. Of course, such an honor was a small thing compared to the higher calling of her order. It must not divert her from her mission. Nothing could divert her. They were on the verge of the next world, the world of meaning, the world of—

A thud came from the back of the sanctuary. She turned her head a fraction, signaling that an attendant could come forward.

Hurrying to her side, an attendant said, “Sister Verna. She fainted.”

Sister Verna was old, arthritic. “Give her some water.”

“Yes, Reverend Mother.”

“And have her stand an extra hour.”

CHAPTER THREE

Zoya braced herself firmly on the shuttle access ramp, slick from blowing sand. She was weighed down with a satchel containing extra clothes, tube food, and a radio pack. A good supply of water was already loaded on the sled.

Sand pelted her face from a gust of wind, harbinger of a storm. Not a good time to set out, but the sled driver, who gave his name as Wolf, could not be persuaded to wait. He stood by his sled, eyeing the shuttle and its gun ports uneasily. She hadn’t thought before how daunting the shuttle was, its metal bulk bristling with armaments.

Behind her, Janos was muttering something.

“Can’t hear you,” she told him.

Janos leaned in, determined that she
would
hear. “Be in contact every day. We’ll monitor constantly. No hasty decisions. You’ll be directed by us.”

By my captain, she thought. She said, “Of course, Janos,” giving him a rather fine smile of reassurance.

“Forgive me if I’m skeptical,” he said.

Skepticism she could handle. It was his hostility she’d rather do without. She felt sorry for Anatolly, with such a first mate. There was no end of trouble when an indecisive captain had an overbearing first mate. But Anatolly had surprised both of them by delivering his swift verdict that Zoya would be the one to go.

So then, go she would. And judging by the expression on

Wolf’s face, it could not be soon enough. He stomped his feet, ostensibly freeing them from snow—he called the crystal sand
snow
—but he was impatient to set off before the storm arrived in earnest.

Hearing of the sand storm brewing, Janos had made one last run at the captain, arguing for delay, but the captain was in the head. Again. Zoya smiled at Anatolly’s ingenuity. But she wasn’t smiling over Janos. He urged delay, hoping for more time to dissuade Anatolly But time was precious, time was land— colony land—now falling to the advance of crystal. The People of the Road had no time to argue among themselves. But a selfish man, an ambitious man, always spent liberally on himself.

It was a fact that she didn’t truly know this man. After all, only a few people now alive were around during her last awakening, and Janos Bertak had not been one of them. That, however, never stopped her from making snap judgments. It was all she ever had time for, anyway. She was used to awakening amid strangers, and taking their measure. But of course to a gypsy, only a nongypsy was ever a stranger…

Janos stood next to her now, scowling. No smile, not even to say good-bye.

There were not many men in Zoya’s considerable experience who could not at least be brought to smile with a little wheedling, but this Janos Bertak was one.

She had to raise her voice in the freshening wind. “You misjudge me so, Janos. You hardly know me.”

“Your reputation goes before you, Ship Mother.”

“Ah, the race with one’s reputation is never won.” She loved the old sayings. They always carried more weight than new ones. “So embrace me for farewell, Janos Bertak.”

He hugged her with all the warmth of an automatic seat restraint, pressing her head against his neck, pinching her ear where the translator lex nested.

It was time to board the sled. She was leaving behind the confines of Ship life and the close company of her people. Her children, so she felt. It was a momentous thing, yet she was eager to go. Three of her people lay in shrouds in that shuttle, and that was only the start of the dying unless they found a way to come fully and truly home. Perhaps their future was, after all, in some bleak, buried city such as this sled-driver spoke of. But their dreams were of land and sky and green living things. So
Ice
, as Wolf called it, could not have it all.

She left Janos on the shuttle ramp and approached the sled.

It was in two sections. The forward sled was motor-driven, with short forward runners for turning, and long runners in back and on the cargo sled. On the sloping backs of both sleds were arrayed solar panels linked to storage batteries. Wolf said that on a full charge the vehicle could travel one hundred kilometers. That was an advanced solar collection system, indeed. The preserves, he said, made “good machines.” She would see.

The sled driver was surly and suspicious, and getting him to talk in the first place had rather been like coaxing juice from a prune, but perhaps he was overawed by the shuttle and all he had surmised of the ship’s technology.

The driver’s sled had a traction drum mounted between the runners. This rolling drum was studded with traction spikes, which, connected to the motor with a drive belt, propelled the sled. The vehicle started and stopped as the driver pressed or released the accelerator. Behind a badly scratched but transparent windscreen, the driver could sit or stand while steering. Wolf must have been standing when she had seen him float toward the ship to confront the marauder.

The back section, linked to the front by a hitch, was piled with supplies and braced with a short railing. It bore the body of the man Wolf had killed, the man who had wreaked such havoc, and whom Wolf had been pursuing, he said, for a long
string of such crimes. His use of the term
snow witch
was disconcerting; crew tried to shrug it off, but they didn’t want to touch the body, and Wolf had to load it onto his sled by himself. He was happy enough to do so. There was a price on the outlaw’s head.

Wolf watched her approach. Zoya had already noted those blue-gray eyes, alert, suspicious. He wasn’t eager to have her as a passenger, but it was a short ride, after all. She stuffed her pack into the back sled, where he had arranged a space for her to ride. She unfastened one of the ropes that bound his supplies and wound it around her pack, careful that the precious radio was well padded from what she could predict would be a jolting ride.

Wolf gestured for her to get in the sled. Around his neck hung an amulet, shiny black, elaborately carved. Up close, she noted the threads of gray in his beard and his well-seamed face. Bits of sand shaped like flecks of mica collected in Wolf’s beard as the wind blew more steadily, driving a haze of particles across the flats. He looked to be about forty, but his body was hardened by physical exertion and a life on the surface. He could easily overpower her if he had ill intentions, and against that possibility Janos insisted that she pack a gun. She did so, if only to please him.

She scrambled into her seat. No sooner had she straightened her legs under the forward compartment than Wolf threw a tarp over her head and began lashing it to the sled.

“Hey, wait!” She pushed the flap away, meeting Wolf’s stony blue eyes. He muttered something.

Her translator lex said, “Storm will take your head off.” Well, they’d have to deal with idioms, of course, but she got the picture. He might have told her in advance that she should hunker down during their journey under an odorous cloth streaked with unimaginable stains.

After a moment he was back with two metal struts that he affixed to the side of the car in clamps. Over them the tarp now descended, making a tent over her head.

“I’m ready,” she whispered to her ear lex. And it told her the New English equivalent, which she called out to Wolf. In another moment the sled motor hummed to life, and they were under way. She wiggled her hand under the tarp and waved to Janos. She imagined him waving back, saying, “Go with God, Ship Mother.”

The image caused her to laugh out loud. Her ear lex squeaked back. Translators never knew what to make of laughter.

The sled had just enough room for her to shift her weight and pull up her knees if she wished, but surrounded by packs, she was limited to a narrow slot. Her sense of confinement was not helped by the fact that right behind her lay a dead body strapped to the sled’s supplies. Though it was not particularly macabre, neither could it be considered good company. Certainly Wolf was no company; he barely spoke to her. During their last stop he stared at the lex nestled behind her ear. Perhaps she had failed to explain adequately what it was. Or perhaps he was staring at her diamond studs.

Zoya tried peering outside from under her protective cover, a maneuver that entailed slouching in her seat and craning her neck enough to challenge an owl. Swirling clouds of sand darkened the sky, turning the white landscape gray. With her visibility all but obliterated, she could glimpse the terrain only in snatches. Here and there the tundralike landscape was interrupted by odd formations: upright forms like stalagmites. Some of these stacks had flat, jutting planes for sides, and others were studded with smaller facets of cubes, tetragons, hexagons—which
the science team said might and
might not
reflect atomic structure….

The crystallographers were cranking out one theory after another, including one to explain the strange pulse of light the shuttle crew had seen in the ground the previous day. In a kind of piezoelectric effect, they said, mechanical pressure on crystal over many square kilometers of territory might generate enough voltage to produce a discharge. Zoya watched for a repeat performance, but for the time being the land lay inert.

Abandoning the attempt to see through the sand storm, she gave herself over to the language tutor, concentrating on vocabulary, always the hardest part of languages for Zoya. Vocabulary was like calisthenics, while grammar’s deep structures were a heady dance. It wasn’t long before she silenced the lex and allowed the glide of the sled to lull her.

The sled’s runners churned up a shushing sound, like the wind in aspens. It didn’t do to ask herself how long since she’d heard sounds like it. There was Ship time, earth time, and her time. She didn’t measure her life as most people did, by year or decade, or the height of children. She had no decades in the usual sense. No children in the usual sense. So it didn’t do to ask
how long. The only answer was too long.
Despite this, she remembered everything perfectly. Trees. Wind in the green leaves.

They had left all that behind, had fled the killing, taking their unique genome with them; the DNA with which all their troubles had begun. Their oppressors wanted her people’s genetic secrets. But in the way of the world, they ended up killing what they wanted. Such was envy. And the terror of the times, to see Europe brought low by a virus in forty years. The Rampage picked and chose its victims. It never chose the gypsies. Envy decayed into hatred of those who were immune. Thus followed the containment camps, the disinfecting raids, and
those quiet barracks where blossomed the generic cruelty that grew so well in specific flesh.

Now those killers were long dead. All the old terrors were purged. The sterile world bore no viruses, no marauding hordes. The new terror was the land itself. And it was almost worse than the old enemies. It was like a parent who turned away—or who became something else entirely….

Shushhhh, shushhhh went the sled runners. Through her slit window she could see that the day was ending. Lexicon:
sunset, dusk.
Yes. And the New English was…

She heard a grinding whine. The sled motor, she thought. But no, it came from behind her.

It was the wind moaning. Then louder. Zoya twisted around, listening. The sled charged on. The groan rose and subsided like a drowning man bobbing in a sea. It could only be the black-haired man. She shouted for Wolf. Surely he must have heard, must have realized that their passenger wasn’t dead after all. Unless someone had jumped onto the sled.