Maximum Ice Read Free Page A

joined him. They were fully armed, and looked sour to be awakened so early
    Zoya turned the crystal over in her hand. Fyodor didn’t hesitate to call it
a piece of the earth.
There was something sweet and bold about the statement. Looked at strictly scientifically, the average atomic composition of the substance was silicon, oxygen, aluminum, iron, calcium, and other elements, in the precise ratio of the old earth’s crust. But the crystalline material was no known mineral. This notion frightened most of the crew; but Fyodor had the look of a boy in a bicycle shop.
    Once in the shuttle galley, she activated a cup of coffee and keyed up the view screen. The shuttle’s outside lights showed the near vicinity: the research tent, and surrounding it, a flat basin strewn with erratic, faceted slabs, like jumbled ice flows. Wind blew eddies of clear sand, glittering in the floodlights. It drifted into piles. However long earth had worn its coat, it had been long enough to erode slightly, producing small grains of crystal.
    The view didn’t crush down on her as it did the crew. Never an ardent Catholic, Zoya still saw wisdom in the injunction against despair. To her, this was a fresh start, a place swept clean of old dangers and ancient sins.
    Somehow, the land was inhabited. From her work so far on the content of radio transmissions, the local language was related to English. With her linguist’s ear, she was already picking out phonological similarities to
Star Road’s
dialect. The lexical and syntactic changes from Ship’s English were not as profound as she would have guessed from the long time periodinvolved. Given the harsh global conditions and difficulty of travel, there may have been few outside influences to propel changes in syntactical rules and vocabulary
    Additionally, from hundreds of points around the globe came transmissions, in many other languages. So people had survived. It was well to remember these miracles amid all their sorrows.
    For the ship had returned without children.
Star Roads
crew were as fruitless as the crystalline fields outside. The youngest of her people was nineteen.
    Earth was—or so they had presumed—the haven where they would renew themselves, the warm and green cradle of life. There might well be other such worlds, but
Star Road hadn’t found them. And now the ship was out of time. This might be the last generation of Star Road
, with its women unable to bear children to term, the consequence of 250 years of interstellar radiation that not even the vaunted microceramic shielding of the great vessel could successfully halt.
    She was startled at a movement in the corridor.
    Janos Bertak, the ship’s first mate, stood in the doorway “What are you doing?”
    “Looking outside.”
    “We heard noises in here.”
    She laughed. “Well, Janos, it was only me. I hope I’m not breaking curfew.”
    Her attempt at lightheartedness was met with a grimace.
    Janos Bertak had a full mustache that failed to make up for a seriously receding hairline. When he frowned it involved his whole forehead and bald pate.
    He was a nervous man. For one thing, they had brought the small shuttle down with only fourteen crew. Anatolly had judged that the number one shuttle, with its prodigious armament, would send the wrong message to the local inhabitants,so he sent the small one. Another of the first mate’s worries was his wife. Janos Bertak was middle-aged and Tereza was young. She was a great beauty, with classic features, and that creamy skin and red hair that graced generations of women and men in her family. Zoya remembered Tereza’s great-great-grandfather Halvor—now
there
was a man who knew how to please a woman.
    Janos turned to leave, but she stopped him. “Fyodor went outside,” she said. “Could I join him, just to watch?”
    “I have enough to worry about without you going outside.”
    She couldn’t suppress a smile. “Janos.
Nothing
would stop you from worrying.” It was the wrong