by Sage Walker
Alan found a sack in the tiny bathroom and loaded up the gear, obedient, perhaps responsive to Signy’s sudden surge of energy. Signy felt she could conquer the world, the ice, anything. Motion and tasks, they shaped a type of confidence; Signy realized in part that she was responding to the complex nuances of real-time experience. Yes, she had traveled these passageways with Jared; yes, they were different when experienced in her own flesh. Signy walked the distance to Alan’s cabin at a quick-march, slammed herself down in the only chair, and brought up New Hampshire.
Paul answered her on the instant. He’d been listening throughout the sick-bay visit, he said, and he had heard her talk with Alan. He didn’t look happy.
“We’re hiring Alan Campbell,” Signy said. “For assistance in locating Jared. That’s if we can convince him we can pay what he wants.”
“I am hesitant, Signy,” Paul said.
“You know I’ll need help here. Alan is a Done Thing. His employment by us is not a matter for argument. I need his help.”
“I understand,” Paul said.
Pilar checked in, in a corner window. She sat in lotus, busy with the multiple outputs of a synthesizer. Signy nodded in her direction. “You haven’t heard this, Pilar. The ship that went down was a Tanaka trawler. Named Oburu. Question: Was Skylochori a crewman? Also, question: Is Janine available? We need to have Janine quiz Itano about this.”
Janine sent a graphic, a large ear that sported a faux diamond earring.
[Janine] All ears. Can’t talk, though.
Janine was working on good old Kazi, Signy figured. Or working with him.
“Hi, Janine. I’ll tag a note on the Oburu for you, babe. Pick it up when you can,” Signy said. Alan leaned toward the screen and braced an arm on the desk. Signy shifted out of his way as best she could. “Alan, just hang on, we’ll fill you in as fast as we can. For starts, Paul, outline the Master Plan for Alan’s waiting ears, okay?”
“I’m not sure I have it in a brief form.”
“Don’t give me that.”
“Yes, Lioness. The Master Plan is to arrange an international moratorium on all fishing in Antarctic waters for a minimum of thirty years. Convince Tanaka they’ll make money out of that scenario, and then sell it to the Antarctic Treaty Commission. While finding Jared, of course.”
“How do you figure they get more money for no fish than they’re getting for fish?” Alan asked.
“Nudge them to increase aquaculture in the temperate latitudes. That would fit in with what Tanaka’s daughter wants. Yeah, Signy. I found her. But the moratorium will play hob with Itano’s position,” Paul said.
“Anything in it for Gulf Coast? Life-support systems, subs?” Signy asked.
“Work up some fish-herding subs for them, is an offhand possibility.…”
Signy could almost hear the little gears spinning in Paul’s head. He might explore scenarios for Gulf Coast involvement in the Tanaka empire for twenty minutes, if she didn’t stop him. “Paul, fill us in on Tanaka’s mysterious daughter, okay? I have a strange feeling about her.” Signy got her arms out of her parka and hung it over the back of her chair, staring at the screen while she twisted out of the bulky jacket.
Paul imaged up his crab persona. The crab settled a pair of large black-rimmed spectacles on its protruding eyestalks and opened its slip of paper with a skillful claw. “The name is San-Li Tanaka. Don’t look to blackmail the old man with just knowing he’s got no sons, only a daughter; her status as his only get is common knowledge among the sararimen. Tanaka seems to hate her. He holds out the carrot that the company goes to the most productive manager; San-Li is in competition with every exec in the company and may not make the grade. She handles the aquaculture farms.”
“I think unscrambling her importance to us is for later,” Pilar said. “It’s time to get a program for Janine to sell old Kazi, here.” Pilar punctuated her words with a chorus of voices that argued up and down a pentatonic scale.
[Janine] Old Kazi got all choked up over the crane sequence. Music did him in.
“Congrats to McKenna,” Paul said.
“I’ll tell him when he gets back. Jimmy’s out shopping,” Pilar said.
“Janine, here’s how we sell our moratorium. Have Tanaka pressure the North Pacific fisheries to let the Tanaka fleet into U.S. waters, under paper transfers of ownership to U.S. canneries—Tanaka owns a few of them, anyway.” Paul set up a coastal map of the Pacific Northwest on his side of the screen, starred with tiny shore-based factories that had legal access to the limited North Pacific catch. “That would give Tanaka some slack; they could let the pressure up on Antarctic waters until the stocks recover.”
On Paul’s map, small black-suited men erupted from the factory roofs and stalked to the left side of the screen, to stand under a paper parasol marked with the Tanaka logo. The parasol was held by a spiny fugu fish that sported a fat-lipped grin.
Pilar had left her synthesizer. She windowed the Seattle studio into a corner, a view that showed her frowning at the flatscreen. Pilar chewed at a purple marker that left stains like bruises at the corner of her lip. She reached down and worked at the Seattle inputs. Pilar’s face disappeared, and Paul’s little factories erupted in flames and drifted away in smudges of black smoke. Pilar added a voice-over. “Wouldn’t the U.S. canneries hate that?” Pilar asked.
“Yes.” Paul replaced Pilar’s smoke with a view of hot-air balloons marked with Japanese, U.S., and E.C. flags. The balloons drifted over Europe, tossing down grinning silver fish equipped with tiny parachutes. “This outcome is equally possible,” Paul said.
“U.S.–Euro cooperation with Japan would take one hell of a lot of work,” Signy said.
A man’s hand covered the map, the balloons. “You’re being monitored,” Jimmy said. “In case you didn’t know.”
“Oh,” Paul said. “Yes, I see. Hmm, let me fix this a bit. Can’t get too creative, not with Signy’s stuff coming in from the Siranui’s lines.”
“Hullo, Jimmy. How was shopping?” Pilar asked.
“I got ice cream,” Jimmy said. “And fudge sauce.”
Jimmy appeared behind Pilar in the corner screen, Jimmy’s arms filled with bulging sacks of groceries.
“McKenna?” Signy asked. “Have you found Evergreen yet?”
“Jesus. You’re on my case as much as Paul—I’ve looked everywhere. I told you guys that,” Jimmy said.
“Try to find her here—on the Siranui,” Signy said.
Jimmy put the grocery sacks down on the floor. “Oh, shit,” he said. “The one place I didn’t look.…”
The little screen in Alan’s cabin went white and blank, Paul’s overrides shielding the system, for what it was worth. The audios stayed up.
“You have an address for the Siranui, Jimmy,” Signy said. “You used it to get us on the bridge.”
“Give me some time, okay?” Jimmy pleaded.
Everyone fell silent, waiting. Alan leaned away from the screen. He settled on the bunk behind Signy and rested his elbows on his knees. Signy watched Alan watching the white, empty screen.
“Jimmy’s looking for our saboteur,” Signy said.
“Saboteur?” Alan asked. “What’s going on here?”
“Someone glitched our system. We think it was a woman called Evergreen,” Signy said. “I don’t know how she fits into the business with Jared, if she does. But this one random scrambling sequence is all we have.…”
Alan raised his eyebrows with a skeptical look. “You guys always carry on like this? Fishes and fires and stuff?”
“Pretty much,” Signy said. The semblance of normalcy made her happy. In the nonsense and chatter that had filled the little screen, Signy felt at home, safe, on familiar ground. One wacko family, except for the empty space that no one but Jared would ever fill.
Signy looked down at her wrist, at the dark pip that marked Jared’s absence. Jared’s light suddenly blinked.
NINETEEN
Signy punched in th
e codes to access Jared in a frenzy of frantic caution. Her hands trembled, afraid of the idiosyncrasies of an unfamiliar system. The keys beneath her fingers were dusty. Campbell, if he had pulled any data at all, hadn’t accessed it here. Faint, blurred sensations came to Signy’s awareness. The screen reversed fields and went to total black.
Signy entered:
—a world with no voice, no vision. Jared’s muscular body signaled to her in patterns of singular and unmistakable familiarity. Signy knew his signature in the sensations of pressure on his shoulders and in the particular spacing of the bony prominences marching down his back, the stretch of his skinthin over his thighs. He lay on his back somewhere and he seemed to be without hands.
Signy felt a knot of anger burn in her belly, outrage and fear at the partial sensations of a mutilated body, and then realized, no. Jared is sending just with his suit, he’s not wearing his gloves, his mike, or his lenses.
The patterns of pressure transmitted to her skinthin’s sensors told her that Jared shifted his weight to his left side and curled up in a fetal position, stretched his arm to reach for—
Gone.
* * *
Jared heard something nearby, some rhythmic sound that came from his right, muffled thuds in a walking cadence. Padded boots on thick snow? He tried shifting his weight and couldn’t get his arms free of what felt like a soft straitjacket.
Irritation rose through what had been a good sleep, a deep sleep. He hated mummy bags. The damned things were well named.
Jared flexed his hands and found them wrapped in layers of soft wadding. They hurt terribly and distantly and he realized he’d been drugged, that his disinterest in the pain must be a result of some opiate or other.
His hands were frostbitten, that’s what was wrong. Frostbite was so difficult to treat. He hated frostbite. He moved his clumsy, clumsy hands and found the battery pack, but he couldn’t remember if he was recording. He pushed at the switches and wondered why they were made so damned small.
Signy would worry if he didn’t talk to her soon. Soft Signy, she was so soft for a thin girl. She made it so hard for him to talk sometimes. Jared loved her. Love, that was a hard word to say to Signy. Love. Jared could see, so clearly, the way Signy’s eyebrows arched, so that she always looked surprised; he could see the fine high lines of her cheekbones and the seashell curve of her ears. He loved Signy’s ears. He wanted to tell her that, soon.
A continuous line of pressure circled Jared’s eyes and traced the ridge of his frontal bone. He wore goggles, he realized; not his camera headband. The goggles were tinted for snow. Through their lenses Jared saw a series of curved arches above him and beyond that a painfully bright sky, transparent blue.
Jared closed his eyes against the glare. There were some positive things about a thick down mummy bag, warm and soft. Someone tried to help him with the battery switch. Nice of them. He thought about saying thanks.
Someone had cold hands and Jared wasn’t sure if they had turned his skinthin on or off.
He slept again.
* * *
Silence, while they took a collective breath, while fingers flew over keyboards linked across three continents. Gone, couldn’t reach Jared again; no combination seemed to work.
Campbell’s cabin mikes erupted in babble; Janine, Paul, Pilar, all their voices tangled in feedback loops. Paul muttered repetitive curses, as if he were praying, and pounded his fist on something hollow. Pilar argued with Jimmy, her voice as shrill as razor wire in a wind. “What the hell do you mean you can’t get a location from that signal?” Pilar yelled.
“I’ll need more than one burst. He’s wearing a battery-pack transmitter, and if he’s got a GPS monitor, he didn’t turn it on.” Jimmy strobed through the Seattle screens, hunting God knew what, flashing through menus and accesses like a demented demon with a TV remote tuned to Fast Forward.
“I should have said something. I should have told him we picked up his signal,” Signy said. But Jared couldn’t have heard her without a live speaker on him somewhere, and surely whoever had grabbed him would have seen an ear speaker on him, and removed it.
“What’s going on?” Alan asked.
“Jared,” Signy said. No visuals of Jared had appeared on the screens. The group’s sudden flurry of activity would have been completely opaque to a watcher. “We got a signal from him. Now it’s gone again.”
“You’re sure it’s him?” Alan asked.
“We know,” Signy said. Those were not the random motions of a suit on a dead man. No one else moved like Jared, no one in the whole world. The certainty of Jared’s life overwhelmed her, real, immediate. She felt a sudden wave of nausea; beads of chill sweat popped out on her forehead. Signy leaned forward in her chair and found a wastebasket under the desk. She hooked it close with the toe of her boot and threw up breakfast.
Behind her, she heard Alan scramble off the bunk. Signy held tight to the plastic-lined can. She never got seasick. She didn’t feel seasick now. The sound of running water came from the tiny bathroom, and Alan’s hurried footsteps.
Signy reached for the washcloth Alan handed her, ran the welcome wet cloth across her neck and her mouth, and smiled up at him.
“What the hell?” Alan asked. His face showed the dismay of a man confounded by a pregnant wife. Well, Signy remembered, he has a daughter. This can’t look that strange to him.
“I feel better,” Signy said. “I’m fine. You see, I didn’t really think Jared was alive.” She reached down to tie the plastic bag closed. “Where can I dump this?” she asked.
“Just sit there, okay? I’ve got it.” Alan grabbed the can from her hands and went out the door.
He was a good man, Alan. Signy shouldn’t let him clean up her messes, but she tried to stand and felt a little wobbly. Where was Jared? Where? Signy clung to the edge of the desk and took a deep breath or two. She searched out access to the bridge and sorted through the ship’s operations, coded, safe, not easily accessible to manipulation, just displays. Sidetracked, damn it, Signy found herself wading through a list of readings on fuel feeds and diesel mixtures. She got out of that screen and found a list of coordinates in degrees, that ticked on and off in measured rhythm.
“Thanks,” Paul’s voice said.
Paul brought up a map of the Southern Ocean. A tiny ship traveled a blue, blue sea, trailed by the segmented lines of its recent path across the water. Its coordinates glowed in a corner of the screen. Paul used the same graphics Signy had seen on the map behind Snead’s head at McMurdo—Huh?
“Paul?” Signy asked. She would ask if he’d been eavesdropping, silent when she needed his voice, silent when she needed his support last night.
“Got him!” Jimmy yipped. “Got him, within a hundred miles.”
Jimmy graphed a blurry purple circle on Paul’s map, centered over the Siranui’s trail in the water. The tiny ship pushed at the margin of the circle, as if it were a stylized sperm trying to exit an ovum in an odd reverse fertilization.
“How?” Paul asked. “What did you…”
“Jared’s signal came in to the Siranui and got boosted from there. That puts some limits on him. Now that we’ve got the location on the ship, he’s in here somewhere.” Jimmy circled his circle with an invisible stylus that left a trail of rapidly fading red.
“Good work,” Paul said.
* * *
The curved arches above Jared angled sharply and then tapered as they neared the ground. They were the craziest tent supports he’d ever seen. He stared at the one directly overhead.
“It’s a rib, specifically the sixth rib, Jared. Observe the rough line, there at the angle where the rib curves forward, for the attachment of the iliocostalis muscle.” Professor Lachman’s thick German accent cut through the music the wind made, playing through the giant harp of bone.
I beg your pardon, Professor. I do not know if whales possess an iliocostalis muscle. That is whale bone, Herr Professor. No, not baleen, a whale’s bones. I am lying
flat on my back in the vanished belly of a vanished leviathan in the worst virtual I’ve ever even thought about. The symbolism sucks. And by the way, people who have been dead for twenty years don’t give anatomy lectures. You’re a hallucination. You can’t fool me.
“The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom.”
That’s Melville but there ain’t no gloom around here. Arched over me, arched over me—
* * *
Signy heard the door open. Alan came back in and sat down. On the screen, the Siranui was out of the circle Jimmy had drawn, heading east.
“Now what, Paul?” Signy asked. “Jared’s stationary, on land somewhere, or he’s on this damned ship, within reach. Which is it?”
Paul expanded the blue map where the Siranui traveled. “There are islands near where you were. Islets, rather. They are quite small.”
“I think Jared’s on the Siranui. Occam’s razor,” Pilar said.
“Okay.” Signy set Alan’s cabin console to take her suit’s transmissions and forward them to Paul. She spun the swivel chair and looked up at Alan Campbell. “Okay, I’ve got a partner who’s alive and I’ve got a shipload of people who are telling me he’s dead. I don’t know whether it’s a deliberate attempt to ignore what’s happened to him or whether it’s inertia. I don’t even know whether Jared was the man who was supposed to fall off that boat, or whether it was you. Do you have any thoughts about that?”
Alan wrapped his hands around one of his knees and gave her a level, appraising look. “I can’t think of any competing bidders for what I was looking at down here. So no, I don’t think they were after me.”
“But you’re in this equation, if whoever took Jared knows you were with him.”
“You just may have something there,” Alan said. “The way you’re putting this together makes it sound like my hide and yours may be on the market fairly cheap. But I don’t know if I can buy your scenario without some—verification.”
“I don’t know how to get that for you,” Signy said.
Alan reached behind him and fumbled with his parka. It looked like he was getting ready to leave. Signy had convinced Alan that he was dealing with a bunch of warped screenfreaks, she figured, and part of her didn’t blame him for backing out.