Kay Kenyon by Maximum Ice

Author:Maximum Ice
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

—3—

The Keep slept. The north wing lay quiescent, except for whispers of laser light, the eternal background noise of Ice.

Nit turned from her sentry post at the corridor opening. “Please hurry!” she whispered.

“Almost done…” Kellian bent closer to the keyboard to see in the dim gallery. It was a clumsy arrangement, working on a tronic computer and translating to an optical platform, but of course no one knew how to make an optical computer—except Ice.

“You’ve been saying Almost done’ for an hour now!” Nit was peering around the doorway from time to time in quick jerks.

Hilde was off on one of her midnight trysts, leaving a gap in dormitory security. Now Kellian would by God get extra time on the node. And she needed the cloak of darkness to take her wafer and download her obo work into the tronic station.

Nit made a good, if skittish, ally. She dared more than she thought. And she was grateful to Kellian for helping her with her instruction in computer programming.

“I’m stupid,” Nit had said when Kellian helped her. “They call me Nitwit. Except they can’t, because it has two syllables.”

“You’re not stupid, you just don’t learn by rote, the way the nuns teach.”

“How do I learn?” Nit asked. Large brown eyes gazed at Kellian with open devotion.

“By doing.”

Sometimes, Kellian had let Nit try to write programming code, letting her make mistakes and fix them. A smile skittered across Nit’s face when she got the fixes right.

Now, Kellian had to concentrate on her own learning curve. The keyboard clattered under her fingers.

A sound.

Kellian stopped inputting. Around her, Ice hovered, somnolent. Against the silence, she heard a distant cry

Nit said, “A snow witch.” She looked out into the corridor as though she thought one might be lurking there. “Sometimes at night you can hear them wailing.” At Kellian’s look, Nit said, “The brothers use them for sport.”

“The nuns allow that?”

Nit shrugged. “The brothers have to discharge their aggression. It’s the best way.”

Kellian turned back to the keyboard. “They should put them out of their misery.” It was disgusting to torture the grotesque creatures. The preserves routinely euthanized the ill. Well, perhaps the brothers had more power there than she first thought.

Nit jerked back from the doorway. “Rat shit! Someone’s coming.”

Kellian toggled off the node. Grabbing Nit by the arm, she ducked behind the data console, crouching.

They waited, hardly breathing. Nit trembled at her side.

The hall was black. They stared hard, watching for the telltale deeper black of a nun’s robe, listening for the padding of feet. Had the nun seen their probe lights? Hope to God she thought the lights originated from Ice and not a wayward novice from Ancou preserve.

Kellian had always gone her own way and didn’t plan to change now. She worked on her own ideas by night and Sister Patricia Margaret’s by day. Sister’s approach was to match the signals from Ice, feeding back its own data with identical data, or slightly revised data. It was a kind of “We hear you” approach based on the theory that Ice was programmed to communicate with people.

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