Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  “No!” Signy said. “Pilar, baby, don’t think like that. We’re fine. We’re going to be fine.” Signy reached for Pilar’s image, in a foolish and empty gesture of a hug.

  Pilar’s face vanished, replaced by a virtual crab that held a stylized Pilar in its lap.

  [Paul] What Signy said. Love, warmth, pat, pat.

  Pilar grinned at them. “Jared does it better,” she said. “But okay, I got it. We’ll be fine.”

  [Paul] Busy, my sweets. Later.

  He popped away, off-line from them, for whatever reason.

  Jared does it better. That is so true, Signy thought. If Jared were here, he would tease Janine, and Pilar would join in, and Janine wouldn’t be so uncomfortable going off by herself. If Jared were here, he wouldn’t be flying off to a stupid disaster at sea.…

  Stop it, just stop it, Signy told herself. Rescues and drama, fast action like this, is what Jared likes. Flying a rescue mission across a frozen ocean probably is safer than working those “free” clinics where Jared goes and comes back so grim. Where over and over, the primary diagnosis is followed by “Secondary to CM&MTE,” chronic malnutrition and multiple toxin exposure.

  Jared had listed the possibilities for her once, scrolled them by in block letters over static medical photos of the dying, until Signy held her hands over her eyes and asked him to stop.

  “People have to eat,” Jared had said. “They damned sure have to drink water, no matter what’s in it. And they have to live somewhere. That’s how it is, Lioness.”

  Signy pushed away from the consoles and stood up and stretched, just like Jared was forever telling her to do. Find a distraction, don’t get weird.

  Shower? But Jared might call in. The hot tub was out of the question. Taos time, it was midnight. Signy pulled her headset back on and went looking for Janine, who would, if asked, give Pilar the hug, in fleshtime, that she so obviously needed.

  The Seattle cameras found Janine standing at the front door. The porch light traced stained-glass diamonds on the entry floor, and the door chimes left dissonant harmonics in the air.

  “Whozit?” Janine asked.

  Signy switched to the porch scanner.

  Jimmy McKenna, seen in profile, wore a camo parka over a skinthin that might once have been military green. Intent and pale, his head looked too large for him and he hunched into his parka as if he were half-frozen. He carried a scuffed black duffel that bulged with irregular shapes.

  He looked like he’d come to camp for a week. Lots of luck, Signy thought.

  Jimmy found the camera’s eye tucked beneath a porch beam, and looked up at it to answer Janine.

  “Jimmy McKenna.” He held up the duffel as if he expected it to be scanned.

  Signy was, in fact, in the process of doing just that. There wasn’t much metal in it. Maybe he had a bomb in there, but nothing looked like a gun or a knife.

  “Pilar said I could stop by.”

  “Come in, then,” Janine said.

  “The bag’s okay, I think,” Signy said.

  “Yeah. I looked.” Janine swung the door open, and Jimmy got two steps inside and stopped. Pilar stood at the end of the hall, her paint-smeared white caftan swaying as she turned. The hall camera showed her back, her weight of black hair braided loose and heavy, and Jimmy’s face, apparently mesmerized at the sight of her. Janine waited for McKenna to clear the door so she could shut it. Finally, she pushed at his shoulder and he moved one step forward.

  “I brought you some music,” Jimmy said.

  “Did you, now?” Pilar smiled at him.

  Janine tugged at the door and Jimmy moved out of the way when it bumped him. Pilar turned toward the virtual room and Jimmy followed her down the hall. Signy’s view of the room showed it bare of any constructs, its projectors and consoles unadorned. Pilar’s easel stood near the window.

  Jimmy walked to the painting and whistled. He held his duffel in his left hand and his shoulders tilted toward its weight.

  “Don’t touch,” Pilar said. “It’s still wet, that’s A, and it isn’t finished, that’s B.”

  The windowsill held the fat pottery jar of pink tulips. Jimmy looked at them and turned back to the painting.

  “It’s beautiful,” Jimmy said. Still staring at the painting, he let his duffel slide to the floor. Pilar stood behind him, her head tilted as she watched the tech’s absorption in her abstraction of pinks and earth colors.

  “Were you working?” Jimmy asked. “I don’t want to keep you from working.” He reached out and brushed a fingertip across the silky skin of one of the tulips.

  “You brought your gear?” Pilar asked. Jimmy nodded. “Are you going to show us how you crashed our system?”

  [Signy] He’d better. Watch him, Paul.

  [Paul] Watching.

  “No,” Jimmy said. “Oh, no. It wasn’t like that. I told you I just got that music off the net. Oh, shit. Did you really get messed over?”

  “We’re up again,” Pilar said.

  Jimmy sat on the floor by his duffel and looked up at her with a relieved expression on his white, white face. “That’s good,” he said. “I brought some stuff to try to help out, if you weren’t.”

  “Wizard, are you?” Pilar asked.

  “I am. I really am.”

  “Let’s test that. Get your act together and help me with something, then. I’m trying to get a texture thing going, and it isn’t working.”

  Jimmy dropped to his knees and grabbed for the duffel’s zipper with such haste that he jammed it. Pilar knelt to help him.

  Janine brought in mugs of tea and found the two of them head-to-head on the floor, fighting with the zipper. She set the mugs down next to the battered tapestry cushions and left the room without saying a word.

  So Janine’s hurt. And I’m a voyeur, Signy told herself. She zoomed in on Pilar’s dark slender fingers butting Jimmy’s pale hands away from the jammed zipper. Pilar giggled.

  Tell them you’re watching. Signy spoke to the room’s speakers, full volume. “Pilar, you can’t be serious.”

  Jimmy looked up. “Who are you?” he asked. He turned his head from side to side, searching for the speaker’s location.

  “I’m Signy.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “Indeed, I am completely serious,” Pilar said. “I want to see what this guy can do, and Paul wants to see what he did, if he did it. There’s no contract work accessible right now,” Pilar said. “Sure, I’ll let him in.”

  Override? Trust this stranger? Is there anything he could want, could learn from playing with Pilar’s art that could harm us? Not bloody likely, Signy decided. But Paul would know.

  [Signy] Paul, are you going to let him do this?

  [Paul] Let him go for it. I’ll transfer every move of his to storage, and he won’t bring us down again. I’m interested, Signy.

  [Signy] I don’t like this. Get him the hell out of here.

  [Paul] Don’t be hysterical, darling.

  Jimmy got us the Tanaka contract, Signy remembered. Because he said we were good. So okay, he wants to work with Pilar; he wants to see what we do. If Paul kept him barriered in real time, the kid wasn’t likely to get any sabotage going. Not past Paul. And so far, Edges had stored reams of scientific articles on Antarctica that were public-access stuff anyway. And a post mortem on a dead sailor.

  So let McKenna play, so that Paul could analyze just how he played. Let Jimmy carry away whatever he could find. It wasn’t the raw data that made Edges work, it was assembly. Therefore—luck to him.

  [Signy] Paul, has Jared checked in yet?

  [Paul] No.

  Signy watched Seattle, where Pilar claimed possession of the duffel. She pulled at the zipper, gently, and it opened on a clutter of equipment. Jimmy stripped off his parka and kicked it away. He pulled mask and gloves from the duffel, the usual finishes to the anonymous frogman costume of the virtual player. His skinthin was covered with spliced-in additions, patches of brown fabric adhered onto new circuitr
y, a welter of contacts on trigger points on his forearms, the locations of the muscles of his back—not pretty, but damned efficient-looking.

  “Bring up what you’ve got,” Jimmy said. “I’ll noodle my way in; I’m compatible with almost any system.”

  And that, Signy decided, was for some odd reason one of the silliest come-ons she had ever heard. Signy reached for a focus control and got a whiff of sweat smell. Hers. Any minute now, she would get up and climb into the shower.

  “I’m after the texture of oiled wool,” Pilar said, “but I keep getting it too greasy.”

  “Umm,” Jimmy said. He got his gloves operative, and Signy felt a swollen oval of contact where Jimmy’s left thumb and index finger touched each other. Giant input, as if his hands spanned the room, jarring. Hesitance ruled his touch, his fingertips ached with cold, hot straps of tension bound the muscles in his shoulders. Pain burned razor hot in the area where his two fingers contacted each other, his pickups set too high for this sensitive system of theirs, and Signy felt a “gotcha” sense of unworthy satisfaction. Our rig’s tighter than your rig, she did not say.

  Jimmy toned down his sensory parameters. His fingers were not clumsy on the controls of his skinthin; he brought his touch and motion into something approaching human standards of comfort. He began to relax as Pilar brought up her construct, a simple tangle of blue-black yarn. “I don’t think I’ve ever picked up oiled wool on purpose,” he said.

  Pilar drew out a strand from the tangle and held it between two fingers, prickly soft, midnight dark. She ran her fingers down its length. “Think lanolin,” she said. “Think lambs, and resistance to rain, and wool holding heat when it’s wet.”

  “This?” Jimmy asked. And changed the touch, just a little.

  “That’s it!” Pilar snapped her fingers. The sound made a sharp little crack.

  Jimmy palmed a chip into Pilar’s console and Signy drew in a breath, expecting the entire system to blow, expecting Paul’s outrage at spending weeks resetting everything in the room, in the house. Nothing happened for a moment, and she found she had closed her eyes. Nothing reached her for a moment but the transmitted nudges of Jimmy’s touch on controls. His fingers had warmed. Signy looked at Seattle through Pilar’s eyes, and felt her friend’s amusement at her awestruck visitor. Pilar liked him. Jimmy was harmless enough to look at, and his body language was that of—a deserted puppy. Hating him was going to be a hell of a lot of work.

  “Try this,” Jimmy said.

  A swath of cashmere hovered like a magic carpet, yards and yards of it, murky dark, with the texture of the petals of pink tulips. It swirled and tossed in the air, and drifts of blossoms rose and tumbled slowly down to settle on the surface of the fabric.

  Fast, fast work, to change whatever construct he had brought with him, to meld in the colors and textures of the objects in the room; tulips, clean glass panes, Pilar’s imaged yarns. Oh, Jimmy, you are good.

  Pilar clapped her hands and laughed.

  [Janine] Signy, don’t worry. I’ll keep track of them.

  “Thanks, babe,” Signy said. Janine would watch them, of course she would.

  Signy yawned. She was getting tired. Record the interchange with McKenna? Absolutely. If Pilar wanted to screen her away, Pilar could. Signy set the systems to monitor and store for replay and lifted her headset away from her face. The volume controls on any possible transmission from Jared were set loud enough that she would hear him. She had to rest.

  The real room, the fleshtime room in Taos, looked strangely flat, its surfaces dull and contrived. The house half a continent away seemed much more substantial. Signy’s skin remembered the touch of petal-soft wool. She stretched, and the muscles in her shoulders ached, dull and distant compared with her memories of the enhanced burning pain in Jimmy’s fingers. Paul would wait for word from Jared. Janine would monitor Jimmy and Pilar, and if she sat here much longer she would grow to the chair. She felt stiff all over, and her eyes were beginning to see spots where spots weren’t.

  The reality of her discomfort woke her to a recurrent problem. Eat first or shower first? And she knew, on her way to stare into the refrigerator, that she was going to eat peanut butter on buttered toast, and ignore all the good stuff that waited to be cooked. Again.

  Signy licked melted butter from her fingers while she wandered toward the shower. Hot water and soap worked their usual magic. She gave herself permission for the luxury of fatigue, and stretched out on the couch. She could see the doorway to the studio from here, but she wasn’t in it. This was a break, after all. She burrowed into a down sleeping bag, a reject of Jared’s. It had a red flannel lining printed with ducks, and he hated it.

  A recitation played in her mind, the numbers as clear as if she read them: phytoplankton and microplankton, 6,400 million tonnes; 33 million seals weighing 7 million tonnes; 500 thousand whales weighing 9 million tonnes. Maybe more whales than that; the numbers were a decade old.

  Jared was flying over that sea, right now. Or maybe he had reached the ship, and done whatever he needed to do there. Jared was getting acquainted with Alan Campbell. They would probably like each other. Jared was competent and skilled and a survivor. What was Signy worried about?

  The sea was cold. And its riches fed—at least 75 million penguins and seabirds weighing at least 400 million tonnes. Anywhere from 100 million to 700 million tonnes of krill. Seven hundred million tonnes seemed a fair bet, since seabirds, whales, fish, squid, and “other predators” ate about 500 million tons of krill a year. More or less.

  Other predators. Right. Big naked predators. This one had just sacrificed a batch of seeds, of reproductive marvels that could make new peanut plants, and now those little peanut embryos would never grow up and fix a single gram of nitrogen. Ever.

  What’s our share? Man never lived down on the ice; no humans ever figured into the balance of krill and whale, not until well into the nineteenth century. And then we trashed the Kerguelen fur seals, and the whales. Almost trashed them, anyway. They’re back, the whales. The fur seals have filled their niche again and they are as mean as sharp nails. Good for them.

  What’s our share?

  Would a penguin like peanut butter?

  * * *

  “Signy?”

  She woke in the dark. Janine’s voice, plaintive, called from the studio speaker. “Signy, you awake?”

  “I am now.” God, what time was it? The glowing numbers on her watch said 4:06. Maybe she was trying to fit Jared’s schedule, waking up startled and hyper at this hour, but she felt alert. Signy hoped to find a status light that said she could talk to Jared. She would get up and go look any minute now, but it was so warm under the sleeping bag.

  “Come help me pack,” Janine said. “I’ve got to leave soon and I can’t think.”

  “Okay, babe. Be right there.”

  Signy pulled the comforter over her shoulders and went into the studio. No Jared; the screen reserved for him was empty. Out of habit, Signy brought up the Seattle studio:

  A Van Eyck fantasy, black-and-white tiled floor, high ceilings, walls of rough ecru plaster.

  Signy liked it.

  Precisely carved screens of pierced wood stood near a money-changer’s desk where a quill pen wavered in a barely perceptible waft of air. Dull light outlined old coins and the scrolled arms of a tilted balance scale. Blue-black cashmere covered a low couch padded with thick downy cushions, and drifts of pink petals overlaid Pilar’s golden skin, Jimmy’s white back.

  They sat knee to knee, motionless. A narrow mullioned window opened to an infinity of inky black and focused the sounds of a madrigal sung by inhuman voices. Its harmonies were modal, thick with parallel fifths and scored with innocent disregard of major/minor shifts.

  “Wups,” Signy said. But they couldn’t have heard her. Signy’s screens still listened to the Siranui’s bridge, silent for the moment. Jared’s name had not been mentioned while she slept; no message lights blinked.

  “I’m in my
room,” Janine said.

  Signy switched to the camera there, to bright light and a view of Janine’s compulsively spare bedroom. Every object in it looked ruthlessly clean; even the sueded nap on the bright yellow overstuffed chair seemed freshly brushed. Janine stared into her closet and sighed.

  “Has anybody heard from Jared?” Signy asked.

  “He hasn’t called in.”

  “Pilar and Jimmy are having quite the visit,” Signy said.

  “Yeah. They screwing yet?”

  A tricky business, sex in skinthins. Fleshtime sensations of fabric on fabric tended to intrude at the damndest times. Genital sensors tended to be off-putting, as well. Skinthins that permitted genital access were streetwear only for exhibitionists; that was one thing. Their ports were as obvious, to the most casual dabbler in virtuals, as the mating swellings of a chimpanzee.

  There was quite a market in odd devices, anyway, perineal muscle monitors and stimulators, dildos with cameras. One pink view of vaginal mucosa in a sexual flush looked much like another, to Signy. But everybody, almost everybody, tried virtual copulation at least once. The trick was, who controlled what? The devices led to strange dominance games or exotic mutual masturbation, most of the time.

  “No,” Signy said. “They’re just sitting around listening to music.”

  Janine pulled a maroon nylon carry-on out of the depths of her closet. She lifted jackets from their hangers and folded them into neat squares. An extra skinthin and makeup got tossed in, and the bag still sagged in nearly empty folds. Janine’s portable equipment would fill it up when she got a chance at the virtual room. Janine zipped the bag closed and sat on the bed next to it.

  “You’ll make sure she keeps working?” Janine asked.

  “I’ll nudge her. I’ll try.”

  “There was that time Pilar went off to L.A. and stayed with the body shaper.…”

  “She came back,” Signy said. “It didn’t take her long to figure that the guy carving up all that meat had his own problems with image.”