by Sage Walker
“I’d like some company.” If she left the Gulf Coast compound, she’d have to ask a guard to go with her. Mall cruising didn’t appeal, nor did dinner on a tray in her room.
“Why don’t I come by about seven?”
“Okay.” Signy watched him walk away, and she approved of his walk.
“He’s from Colorado,” her ear speaker told her. Signy had forgotten Paul was on-line. “Divorced, one child. Methodical, perfectionistic, and he has a temper.” Paul was methodical and perfectionistic, and Signy put up with him somehow. Colorado, she could believe. Alan Campbell walked the corridor with lanky ease, as if it were a high country prairie.
* * *
Late in the afternoon, Signy sent a backup of the day’s work to Seattle.
“Catch,” Signy muttered.
“Got it.” Janine answered real-time from Seattle, and sent a view of her face to Signy’s monitor. Behind Janine, Pilar worked with a light pen in the corner of the studio. Stripes of neon colors danced on the walls, Pilar choreographing something or the other.
“That’s pretty,” Signy said. “Pilar’s stuff. Not the stuff I just sent you.”
“You look worried,” Janine said. Amber light from Pilar’s pen strobed across Janine’s face.
“Do I? Maybe it’s this Tanaka business. Paul says he can’t sort them out, and it worries him.”
“Maybe you miss Jared.” Janine frowned at the monitor.
“Janine, you are so perceptive. How would you like to meet yet another of Jared’s women?” Signy set up the chip Jared had given her and readied it to show.
“Sure,” Janine said. “I guess.”
* * *
The picture that formed on the flatscreen was grainy and badly framed.
“Hello, Jared,” a smiling girl said. Susanna, if this was Susanna, was a Native American, tall, with very good cheekbones and a classic nose. Her smile was wonderful. She stood by a stone fireplace in a room with peeled log walls. The logs were huge. She wore jeans and boots and a navy blue wool shirt. “I’d say ‘Season’s Greetings,’ but we were gone for the holidays. And you know Mark never remembers holidays anyway until the last minute. He’s fine.”
Cut: to Jared’s brother’s face, a view taken in outdoor light with a background of prairie sky. Mark looked much like Jared, but he had grown a full beard since Signy had seen him last. He made a “go away” motion toward the camera.
Cut: Susanna again, the cabin interior. The cuts were amateurish, at best. Signy wondered who had held the camera. “Mark’s business is doing well.”
In the background, Mark’s voice called, “Sue? Sue?”
“We hope you’ll come and visit. I gotta go now.”
* * *
And that was that.
“Mark is Jared’s brother?” Janine asked.
“Uh-huh,” Signy said. “The girl’s name is Susanna. She’s Mark’s live-in now.”
“Mark looks like Jared. Sort of,” Janine said.
Pilar’s hawk sigil appeared on the screen, a discreet reminder that she was listening in.
“Pilar, did you see that?” Signy asked.
“The girl? Sure. She’s pretty. Signy, are you jealous?” Pilar asked.
“I shouldn’t be. I shouldn’t be at all. Jared sleeps with you, with Janine, with me, and that’s fine. What gets to me, I guess, is that I start wondering what was wrong with this young thing that Jared figured he could fix. I mean, I wish he would stop bringing home stray kittens.”
“He didn’t bring her home,” Janine said.
“No. He took her to his brother. That’s different?”
“Yes,” Pilar said. “I think it is. Do you want to marry him, Signy?”
“No.” Marriage negated part of a woman’s identity. Signy couldn’t imagine herself as “Mrs.” anybody. Marriage was still the best institution for the protection of children, granted, but Signy didn’t plan to have children. She feared she would do nothing else but mother, if she had a child.
“But you want him to change.” Pilar, visible over Janine’s shoulder, put her light pen down.
“No,” Signy said. “No, I don’t want that. Not at all. I don’t want him to change a single hair on his infuriating head.”
Pilar laughed at that and walked out of the Seattle studio, off screen.
“I’ll start work on what you sent, Signy,” Janine said.
“Oh, noble person,” Signy said.
“That’s me.” Janine flipped away, back to her lists.
In the anonymous visitor’s suite in Houston, Signy blinked at the empty flatscreen. The interchange with Pilar had been—comfortable, everyday, business as usual.
It couldn’t be this easy, Signy thought, but Paul’s crab sigil blinked on the screen and Signy began the business of sorting through the day’s work with him, looking for all sorts of pairings.
From credit-card listings, Paul had pulled records of family size, income, political leanings, and consumer records. He matched those with frequencies of the words Signy’s mikes had fed the test population today along with their lunch. There was nothing arcane about symbol correlation. It just took some big hunks of bytes to sort through it.
Intent, they worked, saying little except for monosyllables and grunts, flashing correlations back and forth, tossing some aside. They were fast at this, Paul and Signy; part of their speed was practice effect. They knew each other’s signals.
IVORY. Signy froze the screen. The wild elephants were gone, their habitats now pathetic deserts, but people reacted to ivory with nostalgia, with longing, with an odd mix of guilt and desire. Antique ivory commanded outrageous prices.
“Slowing down, Signy?” Paul asked.
Signy’s shoulders ached. She was woolgathering. How long had they been at this? The room was getting dark. It was time to quit.
“I’m afraid so,” Signy said. “Enough. I’m off-line until morning.”
“Are you planning a romantic interlude?”
“Hah. Maybe I am. Goodnight, Paul.”
“Enjoy.”
The feeling of a pinched heel, unobtrusive but there since noon, became suddenly unbearable. Signy shucked out of her skinthin and her boots and rubbed at the sore spot. The skin-thin landed in a corner, its recording chips still tucked inside. Her legs ached when she got up to pull the skinthin’s chips out of their little pockets. She fed the chips to the console and sent their information to New Hampshire.
“Alan Campbell is here,” the room told her.
“Shit,” Signy said. She tossed the chips in the direction of the discarded skinthin. “What time is it?”
“Nineteen-twelve.”
“Oh, damn. I mean, tell him to come in.”
Her sense of balance was out of kilter, and she staggered to the bathroom and grabbed a towel. Working portable links could never be as engrossing as working in virtual, but even small screens held magic and could keep her unaware of the rest of the world. Her eyes saw ghosts of numerical progressions and chaos geometries. Jared was forever fussing at her to remember to move and stretch while she worked. She never remembered.
A little sound made her turn. She pulled the towel up over her breasts. Alan Campbell stood at the suite’s small bar, working on easing the cork out of a bottle of Veuve-Cliquot.
“Some people work too hard,” Alan said.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I planned to set an alarm. I guess I forgot.” Signy accepted a tulip of champagne with one hand and held her towel with the other. “Thanks.” Tiny smooth bubbles flooded her mouth with tastes of silk and summer. The champagne was very good. Signy smiled at him. “There is no other taste like good champagne, not in the entire world,” she said.
Alan sampled his glass and lifted it in salute. “I’ll be damned. It’s a decent bottle,” he said.
“It’s lovely. I’ll get a quick shower and then we’ll go from there.”
“There isn’t any rush. We don’t roll up the sidewalks for another two hours.”
&n
bsp; “I won’t rush, then,” Signy said. She sipped at her glass again, still standing with her towel wrapped over most of her. She wondered if the window reflected her naked back to Alan’s eyes, for he looked at the window and smiled.
Now, she didn’t know him at all. He worked here, in this enclosed community, and had for years. If he turned out to be a total kook, all she had to do was yell. She knew damned well that Security monitored the guest suites.
“I could soap your back,” Alan said.
“You’ll get wet.” Signy hoped.
“I like to get wet,” he said.
Signy picked up her champagne glass and the ice bucket. Her towel fell and she stepped over it on her way to the shower.
Alan followed her. His jeans joined her skinthin in the corner. Fatigue and champagne mixed in wondrous ways. Signy let any shreds of hesitation wash away in steam and scented soap and accepted, invited, Alan’s deft skills at the gentle art of seduction. He took care of the condom, when it came time for that, without fuss or bother. He had freckles on his shoulders. His eyelashes were pale at the tips and his skin was the delicate skin of a true redhead, so fine to touch. He had a scar on the long finger of his left hand. It was ugly. She didn’t ask him how he got it; people hated to be asked that sort of thing over and over. But Signy wondered.
After a time, hunger intruded. “Would you like to go to dinner?” Alan asked.
“I’d like to stay here.” Cradled in the crook of his arm and watching his hand rest on her belly, she felt no desire to leave. She stroked the back of Alan’s hand and let her touch linger on the faint ridge of the scar that circled his long finger.
Alan pulled his hand away. “Cart service,” he asked the room. A mike was live in here; Gulf Coast could have recorded the bedroom acrobatics. What the hell, Signy decided. We were good. Alan ordered more champagne, and a servocart brought up a tray. They pulled cushions to a low table and sat facing each other. They ate shrimp from the Gulf’s filtered seawater farms (guaranteed to be within federal standards for toxin concentration, and expensive), with little side dishes of spiced sauces, Cajun-inspired and Houston-modified. There was a selection of fruit for nibbling. Signy tasted a raspberry and leaned across the tray to feed one to Alan. He took the fruit in his teeth and nipped at her finger.
“Ouch!” Signy said.
Alan kissed her finger and fitted his left hand against hers, palm to palm. “Try this,” he said. He ran his thumb and forefinger down the knuckle side of their mated fingers.
Signy copied his gesture. Slight differences in the temperatures and textures of his skin and hers created the sensation of numbness. “I remember the game,” she said. “It’s called Dead Man’s Finger.”
“That’s how the scar feels,” Alan said. “There wasn’t any way to do microsurgery in orbit. So that part of my touch is always numb.”
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me about how it is up there.”
“In a little while.”
Later, in drifts of musing, postcoital conversation, Alan told her of the silence and the cold, and the way the Earth looks from far away, blue-white and still and so very precious. There were hesitations in his speech at times, long silences. There was, in him, a knowledge of total dependence on others for each breath, for heat and light enough to permit survival. He carried memories of a violation of trust, memories of ice crystals and dying cells puffing silently away from a broken glove. Alan was a man who loved life and found it fragile.
And, Signy noted pleasantly, he did not snore.
FIVE
Half-dazed with restless airplane sleep, his ears numbed by the roar and whicker of helo blades, Jared endured yet another leg of travel. He had climbed into the helo in Punta Arenas at 10 A.M. local. His hindbrain insisted that he was awake in the middle of the night. His eyes disagreed and reported light suitable to a summer afternoon. Helo, not chopper; the term was different “down on the ice.” Jared shifted his weight, trying to find a more comfortable position in the seat-belt harness, in the confinement of layers of unfamiliar clothing. A bright yellow flotation suit covered his parka, and the hood stayed bunched at the back of his neck, no matter how he fiddled with it.
The pilot had watched him struggle into the bulky coverall, not helping, just grinning under his handlebar mustache. A generic caballero named Cordova, he came complete with swagger, but he had flown for years and he was still alive. That implied some degree of skill and caution. Or at least luck.
“Not that you will be alive in these waters past one minute,” Cordova had said. “But your corpse will float. Perhaps someone would haul it in.”
The helo cast its tiny shadow on a glittering sea where rounded tiles of pancake ice formed a mosaic that stretched from horizon to horizon. Darkest blue tinged with green; Signy would have a name for the color. Something like a duck, Jared remembered. Teal, he remembered suddenly.
Signy knew so many things. She knew the precise location of the spot on his back that always itched when he got tired, and the exact friction required to make it go away. Jared tried to rub the spot against the back of his seat. Damn. Didn’t work.
Signy was probably still pissed about that business with Susanna. But if he hadn’t told her, sooner or later Mark would say something, or Susanna would show up in Taos. Jared didn’t want Signy to be surprised when that happened, or to think that he’d been hiding a long and complicated relationship from her. It hadn’t been like that at all.
“I hope your ship does not run into trouble.” Cordova spoke into his mike. His eyes were on the horizon somewhere. “One of this Tanaka fleet’s ships is lost, so I have heard.”
“Lost?” Jared asked.
“A small one. It happens.” Cordova raised one shoulder in a small shrug.
“When was it lost?” Jared knew he should have called home before he left Punta Arenas, but the paper shuffling in the customs offices, the availability of a pilot, the hunger for destination, had distracted him. He felt uneasy, for no good reason. Nobody seemed to know enough, this time. But Edges always went in with a few unknowns to think about.
“Two days ago. Perhaps three, or four. The ship may have had some help in becoming lost,” Cordova said. “There are many arguments about what is taken from these waters.”
Record this? Get on-line to home? Yeah. Jared should have been recording in Punta Arenas, and Paul would fuss at him, but Paul wasn’t the one getting groggy from too many hours of commercial flying. Jared unzipped his duffel.
“Do you need something?” Cordova asked.
“Camera,” Jared said. The pilot’s tension suggested that he might have thought Jared was reaching for a gun. “Just a camera.” Jared kept his motions slow and calm while he pulled off the padded earphones that fed him the helicopter’s radio inputs. He lifted a tangle of wires and lenses from the duffel, tapped the sensor patch in place on the corner of his left eyelid, and settled the lenses of his forehead.
“That is a fancy rig.” Cordova yelled loud enough to be heard above the cabin noise.
“Thank you. It comes with the job,” Jared shouted. He hooked a lead into the collar of his skinthin and powered up the recorders. He settled the helo’s padded headphones over his ears and heard Cordova’s voice, at normal volume again, ask, “This recorder is running?”
“It is.”
“I am being recorded?”
“Only when I look at you. If we show your face, you get royalties.”
“That would make me very unhappy,” Cordova said. “Do not show my face, okay?”
“Okay.” Now was not a good time to ask why. Cordova operated a charter service out of Punta Arenas. One of the guys who ran tourists up and down the coast had recommended him, and suggested that Cordova’s availability was negotiable. It was, and the price was high. Jared had no desire to offend him. The sea looked empty, and very, very cold. They flew on, under a flat hazy sky that seemed close and low.
“Ah, we have a destination in sight,” Cordova said. He t
ilted the helo on its right side. “See?”
Beneath Jared’s right shoulder a tiny black ship made its way through geometric tiles of ice.
“Romeo Papa requesting permission to land,” Cordova said.
Jared’s headset fed him a flat Japanglish voice, a deck officer on the Siranui Maru.
“Romeo Papa incoming, we ask you hold at your present altitude. We have a distress beacon in range on our present heading. Source unknown. Do you see anything from up there?”
“I see a pod of Bryde’s whales at your stern, but nothing else. We will take a look,” Cordova said. He circled the helo. As it turned its nose toward where its tail had just been, Jared saw the whales, pale outlines beneath the clear water. They were blunt-nosed, and their tails tapered and flared like the tails of cartoon mermaids. The ice, gray-white pancakes set edge to edge, spun against an immense horizon in a pattern of frozen intricacy that stretched away forever. Janine, were she watching, would get seasick.
“Got it.” Cordova tilted the helo again, left this time. Jared stretched forward and saw an orange dot, ahead of the ship and probably hidden from her watchers by the shifting ice. “On your port side,” Cordova said. “About two kilometers ahead. You’ll be right on it if you hold your course.”
“Roger, Romeo Papa.”
“Shall I overfly?” Cordova asked.
“Negative, Romeo Papa. Come on down. Not to waste fuel.”
“Roger.”
The Siranui, Tanaka’s mother harvester, traveled arrow straight, seeming oblivious of the shifting ice around her and trailed by the barest wake. She was huge, unlovely, and reassuringly substantial. Giant hatches on her deck were dogged tight. Electronic gear bristled from her superstructure, metal sensors that watched the sea and the approaching helo. She stayed steady on her course to let them come down. Birds wheeled across the ship’s wake, black-and-white cape pigeons, the white airfoil shape of an albatross that seemed suspended, effortless, over the water. The helo sank toward a yellow X on the deck. Toy figures like children in snowsuits grew man-sized as the helo landed.