Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  Jared stuffed a pillow behind his neck and pulled up the message list.

  Signy punched into ship’s comp and activated the mike on Kihara’s monitor. “Jared?”

  “Hey.” Jared’s eyes were already scanning the screened messages; Signy saw the square letters through the cameras on his forehead.

  “Oh,” Jared said. He looked a little startled, a little quizzical.

  Signy sent her face to Kihara’s screen. She hadn’t combed her hair yet. She ran her fingers through it and tossed a loose curl behind her shoulder.

  Signy watched Jared’s face through Kihara’s monitor cameras, and she saw her own face as Jared saw it on the flat screen of the little monitor. Signy’s face was square and her jaw always looked too determined to suit her. If she liked anything about her looks at all, she liked her eyes, true hazel, and not half bad if she remembered to wear mascara. But watching her own face was disorienting. Signy windowed her view of Kihara’s monitor to the left, so she would not be distracted by the motion of her own lips; she hated to watch herself talk.

  “Tell Pilar I don’t get to dive today,” Jared said.

  Signy watched him closely, his pale gray eyes, the motions of his lips. Knowing her own face so distant on the flatscreen, unable to send him touch or smell. As if I am a memory to him, she thought, as if we speak across time. His afternoon is my morning. He has lived this day and I’m just starting it.

  I hate time.

  Jared was thinking about something. He had that look.

  “Pilar, now. You know, it occurs to me that we drive her into these messes,” Jared said. “That we always have. What we do is, we push Pilar out somewhere on a limb, and then we haul ass and get her out of trouble.”

  No, Signy thought. We don’t. Yes, we do.

  “That’s ugly, Jared.”

  “People are ugly.”

  “Then we should stop.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe not. Think about it.”

  Signy thought about it. What Jared said made sense. Edges had leapfrogged their way into an affluence that a younger Signy would have found frightening. A lot of their success came from Pilar’s tangential sense of creativity; Edges made her dreams real.

  “I don’t think knowing it would change Pilar’s … structure,” Signy said.

  “I like her structure just fine, myself,” Jared said.

  “Yeah,” Signy said. And I enjoyed Alan’s, as I’ve enjoyed other “structures” now and again. That’s how we are, isn’t it? “Paul wants some numbers on tonnes of catch. I think I can pull them from ship’s comp but if you aren’t doing anything today—”

  “I don’t know yet.” Jared was not fond of statistics.

  “You’ll find something, it sounds like. I like Anna.”

  “So do I.”

  Who’s going to bring up Alan? Me, probably, Signy decided. “I pulled your views of the life raft last night and I’m trying to rebuild the lettering on it. OBU, OPU, something. And Paul is wondering if anybody’s ever going to take that corpse out of the freezer.”

  “I’ll ask Anna if she’s heard anything. We signed Skylochori out of the sick-bay records, so it’s bridge business. I may not hear about it. It still has an unusual feel to it, though.” Jared pulled the pillow from behind his neck, punched it, and settled back again. His thighs felt heavy to him, to Signy as she/he let them rest on the bed.

  “I’m getting weird, I guess,” Jared said. “The light, maybe, no day and night. I feel like a house officer again. But it’s only been a couple of days since this guy died. And I don’t know the ship’s policies on notifying families of sailors lost at sea.”

  “If there is a family,” Signy said.

  “Right. Now, about this Campbell?”

  Signy heard herself speaking fast, with undertones of apology that she wished weren’t there. “Just if you run into him. I don’t know. Either he’s looking to build something for Tanaka or he’s looking for something in the tech Tanaka is using.”

  “I don’t remember seeing any redheads.”

  “You were in the early stages of a feeding frenzy. I’ll show you.”

  Signy sent views of the short Japanese officer and Alan beside him.

  “He’s a bony sucker,” Jared said. As if he wondered at Signy’s taste. “I’ve seen him before, I think.”

  “He’s with Gulf Coast Intersystems,” Signy said. “We met him at a party.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Jared said. “If he’s still here. Are you going to stay in the studio for a while?”

  “Most of the day,” Signy said.

  “Stay with me, if you’d like. I’ll go see what I can find.”

  “I’ll check in and out. Jared?”

  He smiled at her. “Right here, pet.” With a halted motion of his arms, as if he would hug her.

  “Right here, there.” Signy wasn’t going to tell him how scared she’d been when the virtuals got away from her, or tell him he was right to want to run like hell from whatever fears haunted him, for all fears seemed foolish in the warmth they could make together. This was just a job that needed doing, and Jared’s uneasiness, Signy’s terrors, were midnight vapors, best ignored until they vanished of their own improbability. Signy looked at Kihara’s screen and saw that she had put on an “everything’s fine” smile.

  “Go to work, woman,” Jared said. “I need this screen to pull up the ship’s duty log.”

  “That means I have to look through lists of dead fish for Paul, not you.”

  “That’s right.”

  Jared’s face vanished.

  * * *

  Light snow fell on the blanketed figures outside the store. Signy parked her runabout and walked to where they stood. One finger over her lips to hush, if she could, the thanks she by no means wanted, she handed each one of them a fifty.

  Back home, Signy combed her hair and put on mascara. She brought a mug of hot chocolate into the studio.

  Newly constructed and presumably virus free, black-and-white birds wheeled over gray ocean swells, meshed in the rhythms of Pilar’s music. They brought with them a sense of wonder, a feeling of the effortless power of tides and time.

  TEN

  Because it was the lonely time, when night people could be found, Pilar went looking for someone named Jimmy McKenna, knowing that wouldn’t be the name he used. Privacies came in many strange forms in the net. What Pilar needed to find was someone who knew Jimmy’s Name and would be willing to tell her his address.

  Gulf Coast? The last place to look.

  Music? Beethoven’s Fifth Synchrony, BFS, hadn’t heard of him, or so he said.

  The Frisco Freak?

  [Freak] No way, hon. Pilar, we’re going to run a thing Thursday night at Infinity Warehouse. You wanna come down and do some fleshtime? Just for the old Freak, maybe?

  [Pilar] $$$???

  [Freak] Well, of course there’s no *money* in it, am I the Freak or what?

  Whiteline scored for her.

  [Whiteline] Yeah, Jimmy the Mac. Let me tell you, Empress, this is a shy dude and he just keeps pulling every byte of yours off the net. But he checks in with me alla time and somehow he manages to ask if I’ve heard from you. So have I?

  [Pilar] So you’ve heard from me, Whiteline. Like I want his ass soonest, okay?

  [Whiteline] I figure ten minutes.

  But it didn’t happen in ten minutes. Pilar slept well into the morning, and dreamed of brick alleys that never dead-ended and never opened onto streets. It was a maze in a kid’s book, she knew it, and if she could just get up high enough to look down, she could see where Out was.

  The bricks were old, their faces dulled with years into that funny baked-bean color. It was Boston; it was where she’d been taken after the double funeral, both her parents in caskets heaped with flowers. Drunk driver, drunk driver, only this time Papa was the drunk driver. Pilar still remembered him, and security, and laughter, when she smelled bourbon. Odd that she liked the way it smelled, even now.

/>   Pilar had sketched those brick walls, over and over. Sitting in Auntie Beatrice’s bay window that looked out on Beacon Street, where little old ladies in cloned minks rode their bicycles to market and the light always seemed to come through a thin lens of gray oil.

  * * *

  Pilar woke to a Seattle fog, and she woke charged, ready to work. On the holo stage, she set—

  A background of faded moiré velvet the color of tobacco, rumpled over cracked, stained marble. A stalk of dried mullein just there, its heavy head the shape of a candle flame. Tossed, a handful of freshwater pearls.

  Pilar tilted her head and looked at what she’d done. The sound, the sound, yes.

  It took her, for some inexplicable reason, several tries to find what she needed. In Symphony Hall in Boston, not the shrilling tune-up before a performance, but the time between movements of a string quartet. The first violin playing open fifths, quietly, to check the tuning, and somewhere, one cough, and then several. She took the sound, multiplied the tracks, and dulled them down to pianissimo. Then upped the echo again. A scent track? She tried a whiff of sandalwood. No.

  Janine, scrubbed and polished, waited at the doorway when Pilar looked up.

  “The florist is here,” Janine said.

  “Oh, yeah. I ordered some tulips for you. When’s your interview with Tanaka?”

  “Tonight. His tomorrow. Pilar, you going to eat today?”

  “Later. Later.”

  Janine sighed and left. Pilar enjoyed, in some perverse way, Janine’s concern. But pet, she wanted to tell her, I am not an anorexic. Or rather, I would be, but I have this thing about hot fudge sundaes. Pilar looked again at the tobacco velvet, at all the dry, soft textures.

  “This sucks!” she yelled, and stood up in the middle of scattered virtual pearls. Trash it?

  Pilar kicked a few pearls with her imaged foot and left them that way. She went into the kitchen and nuked up last night’s twice-cooked pork and rice and ate it all, with three glasses of orange juice and a vitamin pill. Then she fixed the tulips for Janine, went back to the studio to store the pearls and velvet, and just sat, for a while, looking out the window to where Rainier probably was.

  * * *

  Signy, looking in, saw Pilar at rest, her profile dark against the pearly light from the window, one arm draped over her bent knee and her midnight hair pulled forward over one shoulder.

  Pilar looked as if she had posed for a life class. Signy saved the image to storage and hunted for Jared on the Siranui.

  * * *

  She found Jared in a poker game. And didn’t bother him.

  * * *

  Signy worked her way through the Houston data, looking for correlations that might overlay Pilar’s iceberg scene. There were no telltale spikes in the graphics to give her a sure feel for emotional undertones. Rage, in the Houston population, was a dull thing, worn down by years and years of less and less. The world didn’t whimper anymore, it just … dwindled. The Great Plains aquifers were dead, the West surviving on rainfall and caution. The seas, the biologists said, were graying. Their creatures were duller, less exuberant than in times past. Times past.

  Signy lost herself, for a pleasant while, in Jared’s views of the sea. The world looked pretty healthy there.

  [Paul] It’s time, Signy.

  Seascapes vanished, replaced by Paul, dressed for Kobe’s morning business hours. Paul wore money clothes. He had spruced up, close-shaven enough that he looked scraped and oiled, in a carefully knotted foulard, a blinding white shirt, a British tailor’s charcoal suit. On the Seattle screen, Janine sat all proper in a pale gray business tunic. Her hands rested on Pilar’s scrubbed birch table. Janine and Paul both had their notebooks propped beside them; Signy would be able to add silent comments while they talked. A mass of forced pink tulips stood on an oak sideboard behind Janine. They were very Dutch-looking tulips, loosely bundled in markedly non-Asian profusion.

  “Okay?” Paul asked.

  “You’re gorgeous,” Signy said. Grubby Signy. As soon as they finished this little conference, Signy figured she would shower, or maybe soak in the hot tub.

  “Listen with us,” Paul said. “Cut in if you need to.”

  “You’re meeting with a company shyster,” Signy said. “Not Tanaka himself. But the finery looks nice.” And you’re both as scared as I am. God, kids, don’t blow it.

  “Kazuyuki Itano,” Janine said. “That’s as close as we’re likely to get to the center, for now.”

  Signy windowed up Itano’s dossier. A Stanford graduate, he’d spent years in Tanaka’s San Diego offices and now worked out of the home office in Kobe. Itano ran the fisheries for Tanaka and he would shepherd Tanaka’s position at Antarctic Commission meetings in Lisbon.

  “I may consult you while Itano is on-line,” Paul said. “I want him to meet all of us, so he’ll know we’re not offing a junior on him if he talks to you.”

  “Show my face and I’ll kill you,” Signy said. “Other than that, fine.”

  A young man with a round face and glasses answered Paul’s call. He wore a regulation dark business suit and looked too young to be a Stanford graduate. “Mr. Itano will speak with you now,” he said. Roundeyes was a secretary, Signy realized.

  Itano came onscreen, seated behind an expanse of glossy rosewood. The wall behind him was a windowless expanse of polished limestone rich with marine fossils. Kazuyuki Itano had white sideburns and a narrow European style nose.

  Signy figured the sideburns were cosmetic.

  “Mr. Maury, Dr. Hull,” Itano began a ritual round of greetings in unaccented West Coast English. Good, Signy thought, he won’t argue Janine’s input, even if she is a gaijin blonde. “I have read your negotiating proposals, Mr. Maury. Your suggestion that the French-speaking delegations would find a reexamination of the tourist ban to be ‘inflammatory’ is intriguing.”

  “They will become upset. It would be good for a distraction, if you need one. Remind people, again, that only the affluent could afford to travel to Antarctica thirty years ago, and they were banned. Now, such travel would be limited to the filthy rich. Such people fund research, after all.”

  “Research is integral to Tanaka’s interests,” Itano said. He looked at something over Paul’s head and seemed to change the subject. “We are pleased to learn that the nephew of the U.S. negotiator is graduating the Scripps Institute.”

  “I have heard that the young man is considering a position with Pacific Biosystems,” Paul said.

  “Is he?” Itano asked.

  And said young man just might receive an offer from Tanaka, at rather a more favorable salary, if Signy was reading Itano’s expression right. There was nothing ominous in such a move. We’ll be okay, Signy thought.

  “You have approved the advertisement in the Economist?” Advertizment, Paul said, dropping into British pronounciation.

  Signy smiled.

  “Your copy looked attractive to the type of recruit we seek,” Itano said. “Our British PR agency approved the copy as written. Have you recommendations for other media exposure?”

  “We have concerns about that,” Paul said. “This is delicate—it may be that public awareness of the renewal date for the Antarctic treaty may reopen the discussion about mineral rights. If no blather is heard, then the old environmental guidelines may stand as is, and the public will likely remain unaware that mineral extraction is only temporarily forbidden under the terms of the treaty. The guidelines could be brought up for review again. A company who promised extravagant safety procedures might find sympathetic listeners in the Commission. The oil reserves are considerable, we know, and copper? Its availability may be greater than we think. There is always the possibility that ‘objective’ estimates made in the eighties and nineties were slanted to appear less, rather than more, in quantity.”

  “Thirty years ago, no one wanted the continent disturbed,” Itano said. “Tanaka’s opinion has not changed. Leave it alone, at any cost.”

  “M
y information is that mining the continent would be economically ridiculous, even now,” Janine said.

  Itano frowned in Janine’s direction. Then, perhaps because the screen on the front of his desk was feeding him Janine’s academic credentials, he looked directly at Dr. Janine Hull’s face and nodded agreement.

  Economically ridiculous now, Signy thought, economically feasible when all else became scarce. The Alaskan oil fields are still pumping. We’ll need Antarctic oil and copper someday, but not yet. The restrictions keep the issue quiet, but not closed. Damned parasites, us humans. Still, some of us must live.

  “If someone stirs up the Greens, if someone makes them aware that mineral extraction is still a possibility in Antarctica, they may decide to take on the cause of the poor fishes again,” Janine said. “They would package the issues together; they would try to stop the mining, forever, stop fishing, forever.”

  So far, so good. Itano looked interested.

  Pilar had framed Janine and her wide blue eyes in front of massed pink flowers, so European. Way to go, Pilar, Signy cheered. If you can’t hide it, flaunt it. She wondered if Itano thought that Janine’s rose and ivory coloring was pretty, or just strange.

  Itano tented his fingers as if he were praying. “Maximum sustainable harvest is necessary. Many would starve without the sea harvest,” he said. “I emphasize: sustainable. We have no intention of depleting the Antarctic, Dr. Hull.”

  “So we have heard,” Janine said. “Mr. Itano, I am concerned about the proposed quota system. Giving the most fish to nations with the most people may not be the optimal way to maintain the safety of the biomass in the Southern Ocean.”

  “Nothing else has been proposed.” Itano pulled his hands beneath his desk and out of sight.

  [Signy] He’s tensing up, Janine. Paul, you answer.

  “A system was used in Arctic waters, briefly, twenty years ago,” Paul said. “Permits went to the highest bidders. Not by nation; any fleet could bid. The fleets who could get the fish out the most efficiently paid percentages of profits to a UN fund. The UN spent the money on benthic research and allocated some to protein distribution.”