Maximum Ice (7 page)

As they rushed on, Zoya fumbled at the tarp lacings, managing to loose one side and stand half-upright. Behind her, the moan ramped up to a ululating cry.

Through blowing grit, she saw Wolf at the helm, driving with one hand while he twisted around to look behind her.

In alarm, she also turned, but the cargo area was aflutter with wind-whipped cloth and ropes and the long hair of the former corpse. She whispered to her ear lex and got the words, yelling to Wolf over the wind and the awful bellow of their passenger, “Stop! He’s alive.”

“Alive, ohhhhh alive,” came the creature’s wail, as though lamenting his new condition.

Wolf turned back and continued driving.

The sled bumped and swayed while the mortally wounded man lay roped facedown over sacks. Around them the biting
wind conspired against any intention she might have to crawl back and help him.

She found herself trying to tip over the sled. By swaying her body from side to side she managed to rock her sled car from one runner to the other. In the next instant Wolf leaned back and, using the blunt end of his harpoon, shoved her squarely in the chest, toppling her backward.

She scrambled to her feet again, crying out, “Please stop,” forgetting to translate.

Wolf cut the motor, bringing the sled to a stop. In the sudden quiet, he slowly dismounted from his perch and approached her, glaring.

She was there on solid ground to meet him. “He’s not dead,” she growled at him. To that, the creature’s wailing offered ample proof.

“Good,” Wolf said. “Worth more that way.”

In the steady wind, the tarp was flapping like a captured sting ray.

“He needs help. We have to help him.”

Wolf stood unfazed by her plea, his eyes looking like they’d long since been frosted over. “The snow witch is beyond help.”

“Beyooond,” came the cry. “Oh, beyooond.” The boom of the wounded man’s voice was very strong—too strong for one with such a wound. It gave her a shudder to hear it.

Wolf turned to remount his sled. She rushed after him. “This man is in terrible pain. We have to
do
something.” The wind snatched her words and scattered them, while pummeling her face with particles sharp enough to leave dents.

Wolf looked up at the sky and his nostrils flared. Then he withdrew a very large knife from a scabbard at his belt. He pointed the handle at her.

“Then kill him for mercy.”

She took the knife.

“Quickly, packs are coming. They hunt at night.”

She stood with the huge blade, not knowing whether to hand it back or strike him with it. After a moment of mutual glaring, Wolf marched back to his sled. He put his hands on the steering wheel.

He wouldn’t dare.

Foot to the accelerator, he eased the sled forward.

She called out, “I paid! You owe me a ride!”—or some equivalent her ear lex coughed up.

“Good knife I gave you,” Wolf shouted back at her, as the sled pulled away.

Zoya began to jog next to the sled. Then she was running as it gathered speed, finally throwing herself at her car with one foot dragging on the Ice. She heaved herself halfway inside the sled, swearing and suffering the awful translations in her ear. “Shut the hell up,” she snapped at it. The loose end of the tarp beat on her with a brutal whipping motion.

Behind her, the snow witch bellowed, “Kniiiiiife.”

In her graceless lurch onto the sled, Zoya had accidentally rammed the knife into the pack that formed her back rest. Out of it spilled what might have been flour, forming a cloud of choking dust. The sled pounded along at a renewed speed, jarring her to the bone. She left the blade in its new scabbard and, grabbing the corner of the tarp, held it around herself, fending off flour dust, pelting sand, and singing corpses.

Anatolly lay in his bed wasting a badly needed sleep period. It was his age, and the pressure. Perhaps he should step aside, let a younger man lead them through the terrors of this homecoming. A younger man came to mind. But did they need youth or experience?

He gazed resentfully at the view screen, watching a real-time display of earth. He already knew his altered geography The mountain chains still gave evidence of themselves—rumples in the smooth coat of Ice—good markers for the former continents: the Rockies and Andes in the western hemisphere, the Caucasus, the Himalayas, and the Alps in the eastern. And down through Central America, the contiguous isthmus of Ice, connecting the global Ice halves as though trying to stay in touch. Theories sprouted like mushrooms as to why the equatorial zone remained free of Ice. None of them stuck.

But it was a temporary puzzle; soon it would all be Ice. And in a mere three months, they forecast, the shrinking lands in the Sahel would be too small to support them. Then they would be forced to live on the crust itself.

“Star field,” he voiced, changing the view, and his position in bed.

Even this view kept him awake. The stars were icy failures, too. No fallback plans in the stars—no habitable planets detected along the ill-fated path
Star Road
had taken.

Someone was in his cabin. A movement, a dark shape. Anatolly sat up.

“Captain, wake up.”

Janos Bertak was at the side of his bunk. “What is it Janos?” He called for light, swinging his feet over the side of the bed.

Janos handed him his pants. “Results from the samples. Word is leaking out, and the crew is alarmed.”

Anatolly pulled on his clothes and splashed water in his face. The chronometer showed it was the middle of first sleep, so it must be a crisis. It was the way of Ship life that the worst things always happened when the captain was asleep.

As they left the cabin together, Sandor hurried up to them, shaking sleep from his eyes. “Go back to bed,” Anatolly told his assistant. Leaving Sandor behind, he and Janos set out down
the corridor. His first mate’s smooth head shone in the corridor lights. The receding hairline made Janos look a decade older than he was, a fact that gave Anatolly some satisfaction. It was petty, but there was no fighting a gypsy man’s natural vanity

“What about the samples?” Anatolly asked, as they walked.

Janos spoke low to avoid others’ ears. “It’s what they’re calling quasi-crystal. A form halfway between crystal and glass.”

He was talking about the crustal material. The lab had been poring over the samples ever since the shuttle returned.

“The crew takes it badly, sir. People are saying it’s an impossible structure. Alien at best, mystical at worst.”

“Mystical?” Good heavenly Lord. Anatolly knew how a Catholic ship, once started down the road of
mystical
, could build castles in the air—or devils out of dust. “Who’s leaking this? Why wasn’t I informed?”

“One of the crystallography techs spoke to his wife. That’s the source of the leak. Too late now.”

“How did we get from quasi-crystal to voodoo?” They rounded the corner into the science section, and headed for crystallography

“It’s because—if I have it right—the molecular structure is five-sided. And that it can’t be.”

“Well, why can’t it be?”

“Because a five-sided structure can’t cover a surface without irregular gaps. But there aren’t any gaps. So the crew is talking an act of God. Or godlike aliens.”

Anatolly’s heart was plummeting. Of the choice between God and aliens, he would much prefer aliens. Although they’d never met any, Anatolly was always prepared to accept their existence. But miracles of God, once stuck in the craw of a religious crew… Now that could get out of hand. They’d fended off miraculous revelations several times on Ship, and they were better off for it.

The lab crew looked up as he entered. They were grouped around a table, drinking coffee and looking remarkably cheerful.

He scowled them into more sober countenances. Taking a seat among them, he nodded for Vlad, the chief engineer, to begin. Vlad was brilliant, and looked to be about twenty years old, Anatolly thought. He sincerely hoped Vlad wouldn’t get bogged down in the math.

“The electron diffraction image gave us quite a surprise,” he began without preamble.

“Keep it simple, Vlad,” Anatolly murmured, reaching for coffee.

“Well, it’s
not
simple.” The engineer ran his fingers through shocks of reddish brown hair. “OK, you know how you can’t tile a floor with pentagons?”

Anatolly stared at him. He had never tiled a floor, nor ever thought of doing so with pentagons.

Undeterred by the blank stare, Vlad went on: “Well, trust me, you can’t do it, not without leaving irregular gaps. We thought this mantle we’re dealing with was crystalline. And crystals are unit cells stacked in repeating patterns. But there aren’t any repeating patterns possible using five-sided units. Which is what we have here. They’re rhombohedrons, sort of like skewed cubes.” He paused, looking at his colleagues. “You can’t tile with these things unless you use two types of units of different shapes. And even then the sequence of patterns would
never
repeat itself. So, by definition, that’s not a crystal. It’s what we call a quasi-crystal. It’s never been seen in nature, and at the magnitude we have here, it’s just not possible.”

Anatolly wished they would stop saying that what obviously existed was impossible.

Vlad brought up a holographic projection at the table’s center. The image rotated. “Our sample of the stuff shows we’ve
got a material that appears the same when rotated by one-fifth of a circle.” He paused to let that sink in.

For Anatolly, it didn’t sink far.

“Ergo, it’s five-sided.”

“Get to the point, Vlad. Tell me why my crew is going nuts over Madonnas and mysticism.” He regretted saying that, but it was the middle of his sleep period, not theirs.

“To cover the globe with these units means that, since the patterns are nonrepeating, you need to know the positions of very distant units to make it all fit. Which, if this is naturally occurring—and it’s hard to imagine that it’s all planned—is damn difficult if not impossible. Contradicted, if you will, by the laws of physics.” The hologram began tiling, creating what appeared to be a random design.

Anatolly muttered, “Well, maybe we need a new law to cover this one.”

“It’s not that we’re missing a law. The laws of physics outright prohibit it. Something called nonlocality, events in one place simultaneously affecting events in another. Prohibited. The second law of thermodynamics would argue for disorder, not some convenient rules that happen to organize something this complex.”

Anatolly took in a huge chest full of air and slowly let it out. Ah. The mysticism part.

Vlad continued, “And here’s another weird thing—it’s made up of silicon, iron, aluminum, calcium, sodium—the constituents of the earth’s crust—and yet it’s creating just one kind of molecular pattern. Quasi-crystal. And as for the external shape—the crystal’s habit, as we say—well, we’re seeing the gamut of crystalline symmetries.” He looked around at his colleagues and shrugged. “That’s about it for now. We’ve just scratched the surface.” Several others around the table smirked at the crystallography witticism.

Anatolly allowed himself to scowl. “Who’s spilling the beans— or the crystals—to the crew?” He glanced around the circle as the evident culprit, Milo, stared at a coffee stain on the table.

Janos Bertak spoke up. “We’ll give an update to the whole crew between shifts in a couple of hours.” He shrugged. “We couldn’t have kept it from the crew in the end, anyway.”

Milo looked grateful for the reprieve.

Anatolly saw that in comparison to Janos, he was coming off as peevish and confused. Well, damn it, he
was
peeved and confused.

Anatolly turned to Vlad. “So what’s your best guess as to what caused this quasi-crystal? Or allowed it to form, or contradict physics, or whatever you say makes it impossible?”

“That’s actually several questions,” Vlad said, scrunching up his forehead.

“Then answer them one at a time,” Anatolly snapped.

Vlad killed the holo display. “OK, first of all, I have no idea what caused it. That’s a question for later.” He dipped his head apologetically at the captain. “As for how the physics works, it’s math I’m afraid.”

“Without the math.”

Vlad paused.

Anatolly had always thought if the techs couldn’t explain something to a bright ten-year-old, they didn’t understand it themselves. He waited.

“Maybe we’re not seeing all there is.”

That’s an understatement, Anatolly thought.

“Maybe in higher spatial dimensions—say in six-dimensional space—quasi-crystal
is
regular, only we’re just seeing part of the pattern in three dimensions.” He waited for the light of recognition in his captain’s face, but a stoical gaze met his.

Janos said, “Vlad, the captain is looking for something to calm the rumors. To let the crew know we’re on the problem.”

Vlad looked vexed. “All I have are theories.”

Anatolly said, “Well, give me one then, something simple, one we can explain to the crew before someone suggests an act of God’s punishment for whatever we’ve done wrong lately.”

“Right.” Vlad pushed back a lock of hair that flopped forward. “It could be, say, some aspect of quantum mechanics. Something operating at that level could organize things geometrically over limitless areas.”

Anatolly breathed a sigh of relief. “Better. All right, quantum mechanics it is, then.”

“But…” Vlad began.

“And sound convincing when you talk to the crew. Call it a working hypothesis. And for God’s sake, don’t look like a man who’s just seen physics fall apart.”

“Yes sir.” Vlad opened his mouth, then shut it again. Began once more: “That’s not all.”

Anatolly waited. He could always wait for bad news.

“There’s another aspect we should mention. That pulse of light the shuttle crew saw. If it was generated by the quasi-crystal…” Vlad looked uncomfortable, but plunged on. “It sounds strange, but it could be related to data.”

The room was very quiet. His associates were avoiding eye contact, staring at coffee mugs.

“Go on,” Anatolly said.

“We can’t help but think that the structure, globally, has a high information-storage capacity, with enormous algorithmic complexity. A normal periodic crystal has low algorithmic information content. A quasi-crystal pattern is largely random, and so it has the potential to be information-rich. Rather like DNA, if you see what I mean.”