Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  The woman pulled it loose and hurled herself toward the edge of the boat. Jared thought for a minute she was going overboard, but she retched, repeatedly, instead. She took a deep breath, spat, wiped her mouth, and sank back into the Zodiac as it rode another wave.

  Jared kept the shore to starboard and cut the Zodiac’s speed back. The glacier, a sheer wall of layered ice, its seaward face kilometers wide, emptied itself into the sea. The Zodiac’s little motor hummed along, steady. It had been kept well tuned, a fact for which Jared was deeply grateful. The motor had no fuel gauge, and Jared spent some long minutes wondering if one of the tarps hid a can of gasoline.

  Distance didn’t calm him. Jared felt irritable; he wanted—drugs, of course. He wanted the nice smooth feeling he’d had for three or four days, according to the length of his beard, which had gotten past the stubbly stage and felt soft to his fingers.

  Past the glacier, the sea butted against overhangs of pack ice. Jared watched the shore for potential landing spots. The swells were getting too high for his liking, and the clouds lowered themselves toward the sea. The light faded as he watched. Now that Jared no longer dreaded the tearing agony of a bullet in his back, he remembered that he didn’t know if the Zodiac carried food, or flares, or anything that could be used as a shelter. Seals could legally be killed to feed man or dog, except dogs had been banned here for thirty years. Even without weapons, he could probably batter one to death with an oar if he had to do it. They probably tasted fishy. Jared didn’t want to kill a seal, and he didn’t know where the hell he was.

  The woman might know. She hadn’t said anything. She watched the shore, not him, but she hadn’t tried to fight him.

  Jared mused on stupidity and wondered why he’d been so hell-bent to leave the nice warm tent, where the only danger was immediate death. He’d only wanted to escape, waking helpless and trapped, a feeling made worse because of his bound hands.

  He’d been an idiot. His captors could have killed him at any time, and they hadn’t.

  The shoreline curved inward, and gave a faint hope of shelter. A sudden break in the clouds showed a glimpse of high, distant mountain peaks above the shore, blinding white. The water brightened from gray to green and went back to gray as the clouds settled on the water again, close and low.

  Snow began to fall, pellets driven by the wind to pepper Jared’s face. He blinked sleety water away from his eyes, and hoped he could get the Zodiac to shore before shore disappeared.

  Something black broke the monotony of the ice, and Jared aimed for it. Closer in, he saw it for what it was, a leopard seal hauled out on the ice. If a seal could get onshore, Jared figured he could.

  He surfed the Zodiac shoreward, intent on watching the waves form offshore, waiting, waiting. Not this one, not yet; now. Here we go.

  Jared gunned the motor to catch the wave he wanted. It carried the Zodiac onshore with a satisfying rush.

  All that was needed, Jared figured, as the inflatable skidded onto a patch of bare rock, was a palm tree or two, and a girl in a bikini.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The inside of the helo was a warm shell, an enclosed timeless bubble of white noise that rose and fell over vistas of cloud and ice. Ice with all the names of ice that Signy had ever heard—brash, bergy bits, firn, a stretch of iron-hard sastrugi carved by time and wind into Zen sculptures, seen when the helo went overland across the snowpack to reach another part of the sea—Signy wanted more names than English knew for the shapes, colors, forms of it. The day was overcast, the light soft and foggy. Inland, mountains rose high and desolate, sharp-peaked shapes of raw power.

  Trent muttered about the weather as the helo skimmed across waves and islets, searching for potential harbors near the coast.

  Signy had told Trent to watch for a small craft, a raft, a Zodiac. She looked for anything black, and found instead the backs of seals, dark shadows, sunstruck phosphenes from her own blinking.

  Trent’s terse comments to the Siranui, to McMurdo, assumed strange imports in Signy’s ears; Trent’s “Rogers,” and “Say agains?” becoming codes for storms, floating corpses, disasters.

  Signy closed her aching eyes and let them focus on nothing, a nothing colored with amorphous cloud shapes in yellows and dull reds, with tiny imploding dots formed of visual fatigue. She had this one flight, a foolish visual search for someone lost, and then she would have to seek for Jared in other ways.

  Jared could be on the Siranui. Signy could be leaving him behind, helpless, hurt or tied up somewhere. One transmission burst, twelve hours ago, was all she had to give her hope. Why hadn’t there been more?

  Signy had this flight, with three people who might simply be decent humans with no ulterior motives, but decent humans could serve so many indecent purposes—and say, later, to themselves, to any accuser, I was only doing my job.

  If this visual search failed, as it was far too likely to do? Anna might know someone here who would take a helo up, take a boat out. Right now, Signy could fantasize that Jared was healthy, well fed, warm, that he would find a way free of whatever bonds held him.

  “There’s a hell of a lot of weather, folks,” Trent said. “McMurdo’s tracking a storm for us, and we’re skirting its edges. There’s sections of the grid that we won’t get a look at today.”

  “Well, maybe this inconvenient friend of Signy’s is in the right part of the grid,” Alan said.

  “Let’s hope so.” Trent lowered the helo to look at something, but Signy saw only more water and more ice. Anna kept her face turned to the window, watching, watching. Anna had been quiet for a long time.

  “How long can we keep looking?” Signy asked.

  “A while,” Trent said.

  * * *

  In Lisbon, the Palacio’s techs had suspended a holo of the southern latitudes above center stage. A huge bowl of a contour map hung over the delegates’ heads like the bottom half of a cut melon. The fifty-degree line sliced off the southern tip of South America. The blurry line of the Antarctic convergence circled the outer limits of the winter ice, a boundary that marked the turmoil of the meeting place of sun-heated and ice-chilled waters, an area of rich nutrients to feed sea creatures.

  Pilar decided the effect was okay, the same sort of view people in the space station got of Earth hanging above them.

  Far away on the cold southern seas, in real time, fishing fleets trawled back and forth across the Antarctic convergence, searching for the sweet spots, wherever the krill thought they were in any given season. On the projection above the delegates’ heads, suspended and slowly turning, last year’s thickest krill concentrations were marked in translucent squares of coral red, the color of well-cooked lobsters.

  Beneath the holo, alliances formed and broke. Watching, Pilar could pick out the delegates who had known about the U.K.’s proposal in advance. They had their positions thought out, their statements ready, pro and con, and their behaviors showed no surprise. Others kept their eyes glued on their notebooks while they tapped out requests for instructions, data, potential strategies.

  Janine’s muscles sent sensations of tight knots, perceptible monitors of anxiety. Pilar damped down Janine’s kinesics signals and keyed up a white-noise series of controlled breaths, a repeated series of calm, counted exhalations. Janine’s fingers tapped entries on her keyboard that she deleted, unsent.

  “Sweetheart,” Pilar said, “are you rehearsing what you’re going to ask Kazi, or what?”

  [Janine] I hate him.

  “No, you don’t. It’s biz, Janine. Just ask him, at lunch, what the hell is going on.”

  [Janine] Kazi, are we fired? How’s that?

  “Not subtle,” Pilar said.

  [Janine] I’ll find out what happened. Idiots here talk forever, ever, ever.

  “The Tanaka contingent is still carrying our prompts.” Paul’s voice seemed to come from a space over Janine’s head. “Do you think they’ve built an alternate program to sell?”

  “How the hell should
I know, Paul? You’re the strategist.” Pilar snapped the words out. Then she feared she might have pushed Paul too far, that he would withdraw again.

  “They have,” Paul said. “Damn them. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Paul sounded so certain. Give him a few minutes, and he would have an entire alternate scenario planned, ready for Edges to put together to Tanaka specs. In only a few hundred impossible man-hours. Pilar had to believe that Paul could do it, that he wouldn’t space out and add to everyone’s problems. Jared could have teased Paul along, kept him calm. Jared wasn’t here.

  God, kowtowing to these Tanaka people was going to be a royal pain. Yes, boss; we deeply regret that you didn’t tell us what was really happening, yes, sir; we’ll fix it, so sorry. If we could just dump the contract and tell Janine it was okay to march out in a huff and get on a plane for home—but there’s Jared, if he’s not dead by now, and there’s money. We can’t quit, Pilar thought. We have to wait and be fired, if we aren’t already.

  At breakfast, Kazi had passed out crib sheets to his team. Laid out for the Tanaka crew were the voting records and political leanings of most of the attending delegates. Personal foibles, passions, and quirks rounded out many of the profiles. In their notebooks, Kazi’s people carried prompts from the work Signy had done in Houston, revised and condensed and weighted with changes from trends that Paul and Jimmy had reviewed last night.

  Talk about new varieties of trees designed for rapid growth, the prompts advised. Mention ermine, sandalwood, and ivory to the Europeans. Do not say the word “green,” or “thirst,” or “rain forest” to anyone. Say “toxin,” if you can. Speak of contaminants, in art, music, food, if you can.

  The ban had a decent chance, still, in this group of conservation-minded Antarctic buffs. How their individual governments saw the proposal was a different can of worms. And now, Pilar mourned, we’ll never know if it could have worked.

  [Janine] France looks hungry. Maybe here comes lunch.

  France, at the head of the oval table, rapped the gavel and stood. The room erupted in babble. Janine, hampered by a moving barricade of suits, tried to get close to Kazi. She dodged and nudged and said “Pardon me,” working her way through the Japanese delegation that crowded up the stairs and toward the foyer.

  Pilar tuned Janine’s kinesics back in, prepared to monitor Janine’s tension, wanting the feeling of action, however distant it might be.

  “Stay with him, kid,” Pilar urged. “Get what you can. It’s Friday; we’ve got all weekend to sort this out.”

  Pilar could see Kazi nodding to a man whose words were full of gutturals and excitement. Janine dodged around someone with a large set of shoulders and gained a position next to Kazi. Kazi smiled at her.

  “What’s going on?” Janine asked.

  “We are scheduled for luncheon with the Portuguese delegate,” Kazi said. “He is serving a national dish. Pork cooked with clams?”

  A wall of smiling Japanese faces surrounded Itano. Pilar felt, through the sensors, Janine’s right foot hit the marble floor with a discreet, but definite—stamp.

  “Amêijoas com carne,” Janine said. Janine’s voice was light and lovely. The rest of her was a solid knot of anger. She reached for Kazi’s proffered arm and held it so that it brushed her breast. Kazi smiled down at her, a tall man protecting a tender blonde.

  Janine’s fingers dug into Kazi’s arm, hard. Kazi reached over and patted her hand, and leaned close, his lips close to her ear. “Remain calm,” Kazi whispered. He smiled at the woman from Argentina, who had shouldered her way to the center of the crowd.

  “That’s Isabel Sarmiento,” Pilar said.

  “Kazi!” the woman said. “You are looking so well!”

  “And you, Bella. May I present Dr. Hull?”

  “Hello,” Janine said. “Pleased to—”

  “Dr. Hull, so nice to meet you. Kazi and I were classmates at Stanford. You’re lunching with Portugal? I hope you like cilantro,” Sarmiento said to Kazi, adding, sotto voce, “Chile plans to bring up the sinking of the Noche Blanca. And the Oburu.” She winked. “You owe me, Kazito.”

  Señora Sarmiento let the crowd take her out of the range of a reply.

  Janine focused on the woman’s thick knot of black hair, as glossy as if it had been varnished. “Kazi, what the hell are you doing?” she hissed.

  “Later, dear,” he whispered. “Smile, please?”

  * * *

  The woman scrambled forward and helped Jared pull the raft up the beach, into the roaring wind. There was nothing on this stretch of land to break it, and it whistled and threw handfuls of snow into his face and down the neck of his parka. The leopard seal had disappeared. The snow fell white and the air was darker.

  Jared tried to unwrap one of the tarps that covered a bundle in the raft.

  “Help me with this!” Jared shouted. The wind whipped his words away, and he wasn’t sure the woman would understand them, anyway. But she grabbed a corner of the tarp and held it while the wind unfolded it for them. They ducked beneath the tarp and pulled it over them, tying it down where they could and tucking it under boxes. They ended up with a draft-free shelter, walled by the containers the raft carried, where they sat knee to knee, huddled in the dark. A place where they might get a little rest before they worked on building something that would keep them from freezing if they slept.

  Jared’s hands and feet had been cold forever, and now he felt the cold climbing his arms and legs, although his middle still felt warm. Waves of fiery pain throbbed in his hands once the wind stopped chilling them. His fingers felt huge, clumsy, like balloons filled with scalding liquid. The rest of him didn’t feel slow or stupid, not yet. That would happen if his core temperature began to fall. Would he notice?

  “Thanks,” Jared said. “Psyche? Is that your name?”

  The woman stared at him.

  “You have killed us,” she said.

  Her English was thickly accented and carefully enunciated. She spoke to him as if he were somewhat simple and might have difficulty understanding her.

  “Perhaps I have,” Jared said. “In any case, I think we have time enough to talk. Talk to me, Psyche. Tell me why you tried to kill me.”

  “No. We did not.”

  “Then why did you knock me off that boat? What the hell were you doing?”

  The whites of Psyche’s eyes were lustrous in the dusk. She looked away from him, at the tarp that sheltered them from the wind, which had begun to die down.

  “I am the wife of Mihalis Skylochori,” she said.

  “So you kidnapped me? I had nothing to do with his drowning.”

  “He was a bastard, Mihalis.”

  “But yours.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why have you taken me, Psyche?”

  “Because of money.” Psyche turned her head and spat. Her chapped lips were more pale than her face. She wiped her mouth with her hand.

  “Whose money, Psyche?”

  “Mihalis—my Mihalis, and his friends. They were good boys, once. But times are bad. The seas—”

  Psyche paused. Jared waited. He found his gloves in his pocket, and drew them over his injured hands. The salt and the bugs from his own skin were going to cause infection. He thought, distantly, that he was going to lose part of a finger or two. He thought he was trapped with an actress, and he wished he could tell her she was playing for the most attentive audience she would ever have.

  “The seas are dying,” Jared said.

  “We live where Odysseus wandered, barbarian. Do not think to tell us what we know.”

  Psyche rubbed at her forehead and shifted so that her body was closer to him, not farther away. We are cold, Jared thought, we are so cold, that whatever our hatreds are, they cannot last. In a minute, I will reach for her, and hug her close to me, because we need each other’s warmth.

  “A woman hired us. To make trouble in the seas, she said. The catch—too many people fight over the catch. The we
alth of the seas. Pfah. The wealth of the seas is smelly little bugs. They are all we have left now.” Psyche shifted her shoulders against the box behind her. “This woman—a Tanaka woman—she asked us to do a job for her and then she would not pay us.”

  “So you came after me?”

  “You show the world many things, you rich American camera people. You are not so rich as you were, and we are glad.”

  “You kidnapped me because of the cameras?”

  “No. You were a man on a Tanaka deck, that’s all we knew. We wanted our money,” Psyche said. She twisted to reach for the latch of the box behind her. “We thought that the woman would not want her story told to the world. And we would get our money.”

  “Don’t pull a gun out of there,” Jared said. He had begun to shiver, and he hoped Psyche wouldn’t notice. Jared feared that his reflexes were slowing down, and he wasn’t sure he could grab her in time to stop her.

  “A gun? If I had one, I would kill you. I don’t.”

  Psyche lifted the lid of the box and rummaged in it without looking inside. She kept her eyes on Jared’s face.

  “Here,” she said. “Will this help us now, Jared Balchen?”

  She tossed him his battery pack.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Trent’s silence and his concentration on his flying led Signy to believe that he really was concerned about the weather. Alan sighed, once, and his hand crept up to grip the shoulder strap of his harness and stayed there. It wasn’t a bumpy ride. Signy wondered what Alan knew that she didn’t. The helo’s speed seemed to vary a lot, at times seeming to cruise over the terrain, at times almost standing still in the air. Signy didn’t think Trent was finding any reason to slow down when that happened, so it must be the winds that did it. Signy didn’t like that, either. Patches of sunlight were getting more scarce as the minutes passed.

  “Sorry,” Trent said, as they turned away from a wall of solid cloud. “Our corridor is shrinking. We may need to set down at McMurdo rather than back on ship. It’s thick over the Siranui about now.”