by Sage Walker
Signy turned down a walkway toward the forbidden zones, trying for a shortcut to the Tanaka office. The forbidden zones were not marked in any special way, and the buildings that Snead had said were closed to her looked no different from any other prefabs in McMurdo’s maze. Signy thought about walking in, just to see what would happen, and then decided physical access wouldn’t tell her as much as her system would, once she keyed it to search out McMurdo secrets. The keycard she held probably recorded her attempts to open any door; she didn’t want to blow her status here, whatever it might be.
Back in the claustrophobic Tanaka suite, Signy accessed Janine’s night, the tensions of a businesslike seduction, ritualized compliments, Janine’s quick editing, idle chatter in a bedroom.
—Janine and Kazi shared reminisences of student days at Stanford, of hot California wind and sun and shadowed courtyards where the bright and young gathered in flocks, dressed in the faded cottons of that year’s fashion. Changing the world, they thought, or at least learning to manipulate it. Signy extrapolated tensions in Kazi’s voice, picked up a faint xenophobia from him when he was confronted with the reality of Janine’s creamy skin, her total blondness.
[Janine] Skilled. Thorough.
Janine had done some editing on the bed-with-Kazi sequence, it seemed.
[Janine] Cut to payoff.
Signy smiled. Janine had planted a single mike in the Lisbon bedroom, no camera.
New Hampshire and Seattle were still quiet; Signy called up the empty rooms there while she listened to Kazi follow Janine’s postcoital invitation to speak of his dreams for the future, to delineate his importance in Tanaka’s world.
“I could become the CEO,” Kazi’s voice said. “If things go well, if I am cautious and efficient.”
“You rank that highly?” Janine asked.
“Yoshiro Tanaka has placed all the divisions of Tanaka in competition. For profits, of course, but also for growth. He is getting older, and says that he wants Tanaka to become a colossus, to be an institution that prospers for centuries. We have a goal. We would bring the world safely through this current crisis of hunger and back into a balance of resources and demands.”
The speech sounded rehearsed, a ritual recitation of a religious creed. Which, Signy figured, it was. More or less.
“Current crisis?” Janine asked. “We have centuries of exploitation and waste behind us. What’s current about it?”
“We strive for a new, consciously directed exploitation. Our vision is the directed use of exploitation in the service of ecologic balance.”
Kazuyuki Itano actually seemed to believe the words he’d just said. His tones were convinced, earnest, and not at all cynical. We may have done better with our careful fisherman than we thought, Signy decided.
“Who rules, in this new balance?” Janine asked.
“Ah, those who control food and access to it; they rule,” Kazi said.
“Benevolently, I hope.”
“Efficiently,” Kazi said. “And my division, fisheries, we are very efficient.”
Kazi sighed over the sound of rustling bedclothes. “Of course, there is the problem of the biomass division, vat foods. They show a larger profit margin than the fisheries this year. But we can conquer that problem, I think.”
“We?” Janine asked.
The sound of ice tinkling in a glass. “I am Stanford, yes, Janine, but I am also Japanese and we work in teams in ways that are difficult for a U.S. woman to understand. We, yes, fishing and aquaculture. My team includes Tanaka’s daughter, and we are close to our director’s vision; I am sure of it.”
What’s her name, Signy wondered?
“Daughter?” Janine asked, but her words were muffled and Kazi laughed.
[Janine] End.
[Signy] Seattle! Hey, you guys! Is somebody working on Tanaka’s daughter’s name? Priority. We need to find it, okay?
No one answered. This anonymous Tanaka office irritated Signy; she felt homeless, an Antarctic bag lady with nowhere to go. There was little else she could do here.
Signy placed a few codes in the room’s system, access if and when she might need it. She loaded her duffel and got her parka, and went to the Hotel California.
* * *
Plastic palms flourished in metal oilcans filled with sand. The foamed insulation on the walls was covered, here and there, with woven mats, their bright dyes faded. The mirrored bar was long and well stocked. There were no customers. No music played. A short dark man sat at one of the Formica tables. He wore a Hawaiian shirt over long-sleeved thermals. Three sets of knitted cuffs lined up over his thick wrists, gray, gray, and black. A flatscreen mounted behind the bar showed a crowd of bare-legged men chasing a soccer ball.
The bartender turned and nodded as Signy came in. Polynesian, she thought, or Filipino. He gave her a shy half-smile but he did not stand up.
“You’re open?” Signy said.
“Sure I’m open. What would you like?”
Not booze, Signy thought. The salt in the eggs had made her thirsty. She had had plenty of coffee, though, enough to make her a little shaky. “Iced tea?” she asked.
“You want lemonade,” he said.
“Okay.”
Signy sat at one of the tables while he rummaged behind the bar and clinked ice. A coconut hung from a coat-hanger wire in one of the palm trees. It was marked with a yellow and black biohazard symbol.
The bartender sat a tall glass down in front of her.
“What’s wrong with the coconut?” Signy asked.
“From Bikini,” he said. “Genuine U.S.A. radioactive coconut.”
“Is it going to give me cancer?” Signy asked.
“Just don’t eat him,” the bartender said. He looked back toward the flatscreen. “Very important game,” he said. “Excuse me?”
“Sure,” Signy said.
He sat down again. Signy sipped her lemonade. The bartender watched the game; Signy watched him. She had nothing to do but watch, nothing to play but the hurry-up-and-wait game that seemed normal here, the timing of this place measured by the movements of helos and ships, not by clock hours. Signy sensed the rhythms of the humans that worked here, their schedules shaped by implacable ice and the dictates of transportation, tied to the pace of machines that could go where a walking man could not. No traffic came in and out today, so this bartender rested and waited, and so must she.
“Ah!” he said as something happened onscreen. “Twenty dollars for me.” The announcer chattered in Spanish. The bartender flicked a remote at the screen and turned it off. “Now you can ask questions. You’re waiting for somebody?”
“Yes. Someone’s coming to get me.”
“Short time here, then.”
“Just this morning, I think.”
He nodded. “You like Antarctica?”
Jared liked it. Everything he had sent them had carried an intensity of interest, a fascination with the glimpses he had seen of the wild ice. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen anything but the airfield and my room.”
“I think you will like it,” he said. “You have that sort of face, I think. Some people can’t stay here; some people can’t stay away.”
“What is there to like?” Signy asked.
“Penguins, seals, beautiful ice. Not the wind,” the man said. “Take off your nose, your ears, this razor wind here. But everything else is okay. You’ll get pretty pictures.”
He had observed her headband, the sensor hooked to her eyelid. Signy had forgotten she wore the familiar equipment. The bartender had ignored her lenses and mikes; most people got self-conscious when they thought they were being recorded.
“How long have you been here?” Signy asked.
“Nine years,” he said. “I go home to Truc and see my wife, my babies, every April. Love my wife, make a new baby, come back in October.”
“What happens here? What do people do?”
“Work like crazy fools, mostly. Then come here after work, or go hide out. So
me people go out on the ice for a while, make up some excuse to do that. Those ones are nuts, most of them.”
“What are they building on Erebus?”
“I don’t know,” he said. His eyes shifted around the room, as if looking for cobwebs was preferable to talking about Erebus.
Then he looked up and smiled, all sunshine and plenty of gold in his teeth, at the woman who opened the door. “Long time, de Brum,” he said. He got up to greet her.
“Long time, Marty. You taking care of my friend?”
“I treat her pretty good. The usual?”
Marty grinned; Anna grinned; they stood about two feet apart, arms at their sides, not hugging, not touching. They looked like courting penguins, to Signy’s eyes.
“I can’t stay,” Anna said. “Sorry, Marty.” Anna reached for the doorknob. “The pilot’s waiting.”
Signy stood up and grabbed at the strap on her duffel.
“You’re Signy,” Anna said. “Come with me, please.”
“De Brum, next time you stay and talk,” the bartender said.
Anna smiled at him and hustled Signy through the door. “Get your hood up,” Anna said. “We’re loaded and ready to leave.”
The helo waited in a wasteland of mud and slushy snow, flimsy on its skids and tiny against a bank of clouds that barriered the—southern, of course, Signy reminded herself—southern horizon. They lifted and turned, swaying as they rose. Beyond the domes of McMurdo, the helo flew over ice-flecked seas.
“I watched Jared on the Kasumi,” Anna said. “I think you are right. Someone else was in the water.” Anna spoke into her mike, her voice muffled by the roar of the engine.
Signy looked forward to where the pilot sat, hunched forward and listening to them, she assumed.
Anna saw Signy’s automatic frown and her stare in Trent’s direction. “Trent flew with us to the Kasumi,” Anna said.
“I wonder if what happened on the Kasumi is connected, some way, to what happened to the Oburu?” The pilot did not look back at the two women; he kept his attention on the skies. Signy watched his lips move and heard his voice in her earphones.
“Oburu?” Signy asked. OBO, OPO, her reconstruction of a life raft’s faded letters; she remembered their outlines on orange fabric.
“A Tanaka trawler. That’s the one that went down with all hands.”
“The dead sailor,” Signy said.
“You knew about that?” Trent asked.
“We watched you bring him up.”
“I would not be happy to think that my ship is subject to sabotage,” Anna said. “I am concerned that there has been no investigation of the Oburu’s loss. That I have heard about.”
“Things around the fleet are as quiet as a Mafia war,” Trent said. “But with the treaty under review, you’d think Tanaka would be yelling bloody murder. Asking for a U.N. escort, or some such.”
The woman and the pilot shared the gossip with Signy, seemingly without concern. This must be a truly lonely place, Signy decided. A newcomer must want to be here, and by definition had business here. Therefore it was okay to talk to any new face, Signy guessed. “The waters have never been policed,” Signy said. “Perhaps Tanaka wants them left alone.” Left alone to be harvested down to the last fish, the last tonne of krill. It had nearly happened in the North Pacific, it had happened, for all practical purposes, in the North Atlantic. And it would happen here, the rich waters empty, even the plankton strained up as soon as it formed. The waters would go clear and sterile, the barren ice would become truly barren.
Broken ice stretched across the sea beneath her. The helo traversed a wilderness of ocean where people were fragile intruders, lethally unfit to survive. This was no place for landbased humans. The world’s poverty could be measured in this, that the seas here should be stripped of their harvest.
They followed another helo down to the Siranui. Three figures scuttled away from it and a crew rolled it into its docking bay.
“It’s Uchida,” Trent said. “He’s back from the Kasumi.” He brought the helo down on the X. Signy climbed out and followed Anna to a hatch, and looked up at the man who waited there.
“Hello, Alan,” she said.
His skin was tanned and dried by the sun and the cold; he looked older, and thinner, than he had in Houston. He kept his face an expressionless mask that covered a slight degree of grief, perhaps. No, she was reading too much into his apparent concern. Alan, who had hardly known Jared, would want to get back to business as usual, and was here for reasons of his own that had nothing to do with a drowned medic.
“I heard you would be here,” Alan said. “I asked to come back—to meet you.”
“You found nothing,” she said.
“Nothing at all.”
Anna herded them down a passageway. “We will go to Kihara’s cabin,” she said. “You wanted to look through anything Jared might have left there.”
“Come with me, Alan,” Signy said, aware of him close behind her, hearing the small creaks and rustles of his padded clothing and hers. Alive, so alive.
Inside the small cabin, on the tightly made bunk, Jared’s personal items were laid out in neat rows. Anna’s work, perhaps. The array depressed her. Jared’s shaving gear and pocket clutter seemed intimately personal and at the same time anonymous, an assortment of mass-produced artifacts that meant nothing. Signy grabbed Jared’s skinthin and searched for storage chips. There were none. She tossed the skinthin back on the bunk and powered up the cabin screen, New Hampshire:
Paul smiled at her, his face clean-shaven and his hair still wet from a recent shampoo. His crab sigil blinked in a corner of the screen, pincers around a folded slip of paper.
“Hello,” Paul said. “Hello, Anna, Signy. Alan Campbell? Nice to meet you.”
“I needed to talk to you, hours ago,” Signy said. “But not now. Just wait, okay?” She started to turn Paul off. “You’d better get on-line with Janine,” Signy said. “She’s getting busy about now.” Signy blanked the screen.
“Who’s that?” Alan asked. He stood near the doorway and tossed his gloves from one hand to the other in an uneasy rhythm.
“Paul Maury,” Signy said. “My partner. Anna, could we look through sick bay as well? There may be recordings there, messages only I would know to look for.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “Although I think there isn’t anything there that belonged to Jared.” She led them to sick bay. Anna watched while Signy ran checks on the screens. Alan sat on a chair in the little waiting room alcove, seeming content to wait for her all day. No one, Signy thought, but me can do a damned thing around here. She accepted that sort of internal bitching as a sign of frustration, of guilt. I got Jared into this, she remembered. My fault, it’s all my fault.
“There’s nothing here,” Signy said. “Nothing that we haven’t downloaded at home already. Thank you, Anna. Could I go back to Kihara’s cabin? I would like to talk to my people in the U.S., and it’s already set up for that.”
“Kihara will not return today,” Anna said. “Yes, go there if you like. I need to stay in sick bay. But come back when you feel hungry. I’ll take you to eat and then show you whatever I can.”
The passageways carried the déjà vu of Jared’s remembered journeys through them, their strange familiarity altered by the presence of Alan beside her. Signy needed allies. She needed a fleshtime associate, and Alan would do if she could recruit him. Paul would hate the idea. Just us, he always said. We’re all we need. “Just us” wasn’t going to work anymore. Paul would have to live with a new face or two. Signy opened Kihara’s cabin door, ushered Alan in, and shut the door behind her.
“I think Jared is alive,” Signy said. She could see the doubt on Alan’s face, the presumption that he dealt with a grief-crazed fool.
“There’s some sort of sabotage going on in this fleet, in this company. You’re working for them; you could possibly be in as much danger as Jared.”
“Can you explain why you think this?” Campbell
asked.
“Not in five words or less. I want to find Jared. If he’s alive, I don’t have time to censor what I tell you. I don’t have time to keep secrets. I have an offer; will you listen?”
Signy realized she was speaking as if she were onscreen in a bulletin board, empowered and anonymous, forgetting all the niceties of face-to-face communication. Still, she watched Alan Campbell’s face for clues, and saw a glimmer of interest, a willingness to give her the benefit of, at least, doubt.
“Let’s hear it.” A tall man in a low room, he stood by the silent screen, touching nothing, a visitor in someone else’s territory.
“You help me. We pay with access to all our files on Tanaka. Information shared with you as soon as we get it.” Not enough, his face told her. “We’ll sell Tanaka on your product, if you decide to ask for a contract to make subs for them. That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?”
“It’s a small profit we’re looking at,” he said. “The market for submersibles is minuscule, compared to some of the boosters Gulf Coast makes. We’re more after systems comparisons—the subs are good test systems for developing long-distance vehicles—but I’ve seen a lot of what I wanted to see here. Why should I stay?”
“Let me try to convince you. Please. Do you have a screen in your cabin?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s get out of here, then.” Signy motioned to the cabin screen and Alan moved aside. “I’ll need to change a few things here—what’s your access number?”
Alan told her. Signy transferred Edges’ codes to his terminal. “There. Let’s go. This cabin bothers me.” Jared’s absence seemed a palpable thing in the air. Chemical traces of him teased at Signy’s hindbrain, unscented pheromones spoke directly to triggers below consciousness. Her responses were chemically inevitable, a cellular uneasiness, and she wanted to be somewhere else.
“What about this stuff?” Alan motioned to the clutter on the bed.
“Bring it,” she said. “Just throw it into something. Jared can sort through it when I get him back.”