Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  This could be an intriguing little game, the capture of a Jimmy. They had fallen asleep together, as chaste as children. Jimmy had offered lovemaking in virtual, with himself in the muscular persona of a prince of dreams. Pilar’s refusal did not seem to surprise him.

  Pilar smiled, remembering falling asleep to the sound of his soft breathing, and then a kinesic memory came to her with nauseating force, Jared struggling to reach the surface, hampered by the thick bulk of his parka. Somewhere far away, broken glass fell on frozen asphalt with a sound like crystal bells.

  Pilar did not want to be alone.

  “We—they, I mean Paul and Signy, want me to find out why you’re here. Paul thinks you queered our transmissions with that music of yours.” Pilar could see protest on Jimmy’s face. “Yeah, I told him you didn’t, and he knows it keyed a scrambler sequence that came from the Siranui, but he still thinks you knew it would fuck us over.”

  “No. God damn, no. I told you it came from something I got off the net. An idea for a melody—I scored it for you, Pilar, but there wasn’t anything in it that could have done what you guys say it did.”

  “You wrote it?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Good stuff, McKenna. You’re a composer?”

  “I mess around, yeah.” Jimmy looked at his hands, palms up in his lap, as if they were alien creatures. They were soft hands, short and square, but the fingers tapered pleasantly. Jimmy’s fingerpads were not the spatulate, flat sort that Pilar, for no reason she could define, disliked. Pilar reached for Jimmy’s hands and drew them up to her face so he would look at her.

  “Jimmy, it is beautiful work. Now. Tell me. Why did you send it to me?”

  “I thought you would like it.”

  “Wrong answer. Why did you send it to me?” Pilar held Jimmy’s palms together so that he looked as if he were praying. She stroked the backs of his hands.

  “Because. Because of the ‘Shelter’ song.”

  Oh, lord, she should have known. Tongue firmly in cheek, Pilar had set the simplest of melodies against a rhythm section of Brazilian drums, and filmed herself in the most hackneyed of brass-bra fantasy costumes, a judicious scattering of amethysts, their facets reflecting chrome and washes of synchronous blue light. The song’s words were easy nursery words, crooned soft and speaking of shelter, refuge, safety.

  Paul always called the work “Mama Neon.”

  Pilar looked at Jimmy’s wary eyes, so ready to be hurt, and saw in them—worship.

  “I wanted to meet you. So I got your address from Whiteline. He talked about this company you had going. When he said that someone was after an avant group to do some publicity, I sent them Edges’ name. Because I’d heard…”

  “That I lost my shirt on the tour.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said.

  “Did you come and see me?”

  “I came to the San Francisco show.”

  “Did you like it? The show?”

  “No.” Jimmy’s eyes searched Pilar’s face for reaction. She tried not to give one. “I didn’t think it was really you,” he said.

  Not Mama Neon. Just a woman onstage. What had led him, then, to seek the flesh-and-blood Pilar who lived in this house? Brave man, Jimmy, to dare the imperfections of a woman live and blemished, who, at the moment, smelled of a night’s hard work.

  “Jimmy? Who else heard your music? Did you play it for anyone?”

  “Uh, yeah. Just for one person, and she’s just in the net anyway. It’s not someone who would, like, know you.”

  “Who?” Pilar asked.

  “She was in Sri Lanka, so I didn’t think it would matter.” Jimmy swallowed on what looked like a dry throat. Pilar thought of coffee that she hadn’t yet had, that Janine usually made.

  “Who?”

  “Evergreen. That’s the only name I know for her. She found me when I was on that job in Houston. You know, where I met Signy for the first time. Whiteline got me the job; he said Gulf Coast wanted someone who was good with tolerance-specific graphics.” He paused, apparently seeing from her expression that she didn’t know what he was talking about. “I can turn numbers into beautiful things, Pilar. Things to pick up and hold, and push around. Dr. James McKenna, Ph.D. in physics, but what I do is structural analysis, in virtual.”

  “Evergreen,” Pilar said. “Where is she now, Jimmy?”

  “I don’t know. She’s gone,” Jimmy said.

  “Gone? Gone where?”

  “Whiteline said somewhere in Japan. He thinks.”

  “You miserable little shit,” Pilar said. Edges had been sold. To Tanaka? To a Tanaka rival? To a competing company, one of the conglomerates who arbitrarily sent hackers searching the net to tangle new companies just for practice? Jimmy hadn’t even been paid for messing them around, and that was the saddest thing of all. Pilar got up from her chair and walked away from him. She wanted coffee.

  “I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “I’ll go now.”

  “The hell you will,” Pilar called over her shoulder. “You’ll come in here, right this minute, and wash up some coffee mugs.”

  “Paul?” Pilar yelled at the kitchen mike.

  “I’m looking for her,” Paul’s voice said.

  FIFTEEN

  Signy hunched her parka up over her shoulders and struggled down the aisle of the plane, out into the warm moist luxury of Hawaiian air and the smell of plumeria blossoms. Great heaps of them, made into leis, were held by tour guides who waited for the groups of Japanese tourists boiling out of a nearby gate. Just beyond the guides, a gaggle of bored-looking chauffeurs held up signs. Signy hurried past them, intent on remembering the route to International Departures.

  “Signy Thomas? Miss Thomas, please?”

  A Japanese girl in a flowing tangerine jumpsuit waved a neatly printed sign above her head. SIGNY THOMAS, it read. The jumpsuit was gauzy Milanese cotton, not the garb of a hired guide.

  “Me?” Signy asked.

  “Tanaka has arranged your flight to New Zealand. We must hurry.”

  “You managed a seat? The airline people told me there was nothing until tomorrow.”

  “This way, please.” The girl tucked the sign under her arm and put her head down. Signy tried to match her steps to the girl’s jog trot. She was a short little thing. Her straight black hair parted neatly over the nape of her neck and the triangle of skin that peeped through was pale and smooth, oddly appealing. The girl snaked her way through the crowd with the skill of a good running back. Signy wedged her way past a group of Hawaiian activists in business sarongs waiting at a departure gate. They carried bulky winter-padded raincoats over their arms and they rolled perfunctory polysyllabic curses in her direction.

  A security guard lifted a velvet rope barrier and motioned Signy into a carpeted cattle chute that angled toward a plane’s open door. She shifted the weight of her duffel on her shoulder and turned back to her guide.

  “Thank you,” Signy said.

  “You are welcome.” The girl looked down. “Your friend Janine Hull is very—assertive.”

  “Yes.” Signy smiled. “I know.”

  Settled into a first-class seat, under one of the light blankets that airplanes always had somewhere if you asked, Signy cursed herself for a fool. Jared was dead, damn it, and his body was not Jared, was not what she sought. Or Jared lived, and she was unlikely to be able to help him survive. Anything she could accomplish in real time could be accomplished far better from home, where every mode of communication known to the civilized world waited ready. Fool, fool, why didn’t someone, anyone, point that out?

  Because of the primitive need to do something, even if it was wrong. Because that’s how humans were, with their fight-or-flight reflexes that were engraved as permanent, inescapable parts of vertebrate bodies. In grief or danger, everyone was as simple as a lizard; stay warm, feed, or run. Signy sat suspended over a world of water, going nowhere at seven hundred miles per hour, because of inevitable reflex arcs in primitive hindbrains.

>   Signy drifted into a restless space defined by the roar of engines and the feeling of a timeless entrapment where everyone waited, forever, for the opening of a locked door.

  * * *

  And woke to a questioning voice, that repeated “Miss? Miss Thomas?” in tones of professional concern.

  “Yes?” Signy tried not to sound as irritated as she felt.

  “You seem to be blinking quite a bit. Your wrists, I mean.” The woman gestured toward Signy’s ready lights, two of them flashing rapidly.

  “Ah. Thank you,” Signy said.

  The flight attendant seemed to want to hover. “I’ll answer these now,” Signy said. “If you’ll pardon me?”

  The woman frowned and found business elsewhere.

  The two lights belonged to Janine and Pilar. Paul’s light was dark, and Jared’s. Of course, Jared’s. Why had that surprised her? Signy shrugged her blanket up to form a cowl that muffled her voice somewhat and settled her headset into place.

  Janine’s cameras looked past pillars of yellowing stone, out to a softly lighted courtyard where a winged marble lizard coiled around a globe, his mouth pouring water into a pool surrounded by cream-colored paving.

  “You’re there already?” Signy asked.

  “I’m in a castle,” Janine said. “I get a view of a walled—garden?” Her eyes strayed across the courtyard and she focused on Moorish balustrades, on the grimace of a carved gargoyle.

  “I hear you were assertive with the Tanaka people on the coast.”

  “No. I was an aggressive bitch.” Janine investigated the bedroom, the bath, tiled in blue and white, and the writing desk, new wood that looked old. Her portable console was in place on it, up and running. The desk drawers were empty. She sat down on the bed and began to sort through her duffel. “Mr. Itano is taking me to dinner at Furasato.”

  “Furusato?”

  “It’s a chain, with good sashimi. Itano says.” Janine pulled her gray tunic out of her duffel and shook it.

  “No,” Signy said. “Wear the pale blue, would you?”

  “Okay. Signy, I’m going to need at least a rough sequence ready by tomorrow morning. Something to show Itano. Can you get Paul and Pilar in gear, for God’s sake? I’ll need a couple of thirty-second bits that can slant either way—something that pushes the quota system for harvesting if that’s the way things go, and one that pushes high bidders if I can talk Itano into that system. High bids are the best option, as far as I can figure it.”

  “Then convince him. Change his mind.”

  “Shit. I’m a garbage engineer, not a diplomat.”

  “You’re an environmental magician, a certified one. A highly respected role in today’s dump heap of a world, kid, and don’t think Itano doesn’t know it.”

  Janine went into the bathroom. The handles on the taps were shaped like dolphins. She splashed water on her face, leaned toward the mirror, and stretched the outer corner of her eyelid. It was puffy.

  “You’ve been crying,” Signy said.

  “Of course I’ve been crying.”

  “Don’t cry when you’re around Itano.”

  “Fuck you. I’ll cry when and where I damned well please.”

  “Janine, don’t blow this contract, okay? I don’t think Jared’s dead. I don’t know why, but I don’t. I think there’s a chance Itano could help us get him back.”

  “Jared’s dead,” Janine said. “We took a job, it turned out to be dangerous, Jared got killed. You didn’t kill him, Signy.”

  “If he’d dead, I killed him.”

  “Bull. Shit. Stop that, Signy. You didn’t hear the rest of us turning this job down, did you?” Janine smoothed her tunic over her hips. “I’ve got to go down to the lobby. You coming to dinner?”

  “I’m supposed to bug Paul for you.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “So I’ll do it.”

  Signy turned Janine off and accessed New Hampshire.

  Paul’s study was quiet, lighted only by a red glow from the fireplace. Signy made out an indefinite shape, a rumple of blankets on the floor. Paul sighed. He rolled over and settled into sleep again.

  Signy left him there and called Seattle.

  The studio showed the bridge on the Siranui. Windowed into a corner, a printout ran over a triangular sigil, a stylized two-lane blacktop painted with bright white lines. TRAWLER APPROACHING WITH FULL LOAD. PREPARE TO RECEIVE.

  Pilar’s man stayed on-line, it seemed. The words scrolled into storage, replaced by:

  ALL SLIME LINE PERSONNEL ON P.M. SHIFT REPORT TO HOLD AT 2100.

  “What’s a slime line?” Signy asked anyone who might be listening in Seattle.

  “Signy? That you, girl?” Pilar asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have any idea where Janine keeps the ketjap manis? Jimmy went down to Pike Street and brought back these marvelous farm prawns and I’m trying to put together a pad thai.”

  “Whatever the hell that is,” McKenna’s voice muttered.

  Pilar hadn’t chased him away. What did she think she was doing? “You still around, McKenna?” Signy asked.

  “He’s still here,” Pilar said. “He’s telling me everything he knows, Signy.”

  “And that’s useful?”

  “We think we know how our system got scrambled, and we’ve got a good idea who might have done it. Someone named Evergreen, it seems.”

  “Hacker?” Signy asked.

  “Sort of,” Jimmy said. “I can’t figure the schemata on how it worked. I’ve looked at it.… Signy, Pilar told me how you got messed up, the sensory spillover. I’m sorry. I didn’t do it, but I’m sorry it happened, anyway.”

  “Okay. Fine,” Signy said. Pilar sounded happier than she had in months. McKenna was just a kid. Signy could try to trust Pilar’s instincts, just a little. Jimmy couldn’t hurt any of them now; Paul was on his case. “Do you think this Evergreen works for Tanaka?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jimmy said.

  “That would make it just a bit sticky, wouldn’t it?” Pilar said. “Why would Tanaka be interested in sabotaging us? We’re theirs, you know.”

  “Paul doesn’t trust them,” Signy said.

  “Paul doesn’t trust anyone,” Pilar said.

  True enough. “Jimmy, a pad thai is a shrimp omelet,” Signy said. “More or less.”

  “But does it taste weird?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Watch it, Thomas,” Pilar said.

  “Janine needs—”

  “She told us. I can’t think of anything. Not that could be ready in six hours, anyway.” Pilar’s voice was accompanied by scraping sounds and the tattoo of a whisk in a bowl.

  “We’ll have to think of something,” Signy said. “How long has Paul been asleep?”

  “Hours,” Pilar said. “I’ll rouse him in a bit.”

  “Do that.” Jared, Jared, they are feeding each other and fucking like frenzied ferrets. The shits. “What have you heard from the fleet?”

  “Business as usual. As absolutely usual,” Pilar said.

  “Right.” A wave of fatigue came up from somewhere and Signy yawned.

  “I’ll call you when we finishing putting something together,” Signy heard Pilar say, somewhere far away and unimportant.

  * * *

  Her mouth was dry when the alarm on her wrist woke her with its buzzing. Signy got the flight attendant to bring her a club soda. Hampered by the limitations of her little heads-up display, which gave her tiny stereo views of Seattle and New Hampshire screens, but not touch, smell, or true directional sound, Signy watched what Pilar and Jimmy had kludged together:

  * * *

  Gray mists swirled over a hint of water and reeds. A crane, with awkward grace, spread white wings bordered in elegant black.

  A four-note motif, played pianissimo in hollow synthetic tones, cycled through random, hypnotic rhythms. It seemed to come from the edge of the water, or from beneath it.

  Ripples formed and
stilled again. The crane stabbed with its beak, one darting motion, and brought up wriggling silver. Bright drops fanned from the struggling fish and struck the water. Circles spread from the impact centers, rippled away their energies, and faded. The crane lifted its head to swallow in one efficient, jerky motion. And was still again, waiting.

  * * *

  [Paul] It’s beautiful, Pilar.

  Yes, it’s beautiful, Signy thought. “It’s too tropical,” Signy said, to be contrary, because the noise of the airplane was getting into her soul, and because Jared was missing and it was all her fault and nobody would agree with her on that, damn them.

  [Paul] Temperate, not tropical.

  “I don’t care,” Signy said. “Everything you’re probably layering in that suggests caution and careful husbandry is lost on me for the moment.”

  “So you’re a good control,” Pilar said. “You’re getting what the ghettos get.”

  “What they get is hungry,” Signy said. “Look, I just don’t think this works, even as a prelim. You’re aiming this first presentation to the Antarctic Treaty Commission, after a preview by Itano and his boys. That means you’ve got the mind-sets of diplomats and midlevel state department types to think about. The setting is Japanese, and that could ruffle some ethnic feathers. Besides, where are the penguins?”

  “Everybody loves penguins,” Pilar said. “They’re symbolically neutral, innocent, and overused. And they’re funny. No way Tanaka wants to look funny. Face, and all that.”

  “Tanaka execs wouldn’t give a damn if you put their little executive faces on some penguins and had them waddle for the audience. Not if it sold product,” Signy said. But what did Tanaka want? Tanaka’s profit taking had been cautious, or so Janine said. And Itano talked conservation, talked the long-term view. What was long-term for these people? Twenty years? Fifty?

  Paul sent voice and visuals from the New Hampshire house. “We don’t know product,” Paul said. “We have some profiles on the diplomatic paper pushers we’ll be dealing with in Lisbon. We can figure the Brits and the Argentines won’t basically give a damn, but the Chilean fleet wants its share and they’re too broke to be competitive. Then there’s Russian coalition, and they can’t come up with a decent bid. Not enough good equipment. They’ll hate it.”