by Sage Walker
“Neither did Jared. Sue didn’t want to tell him yet.” Mark’s wry little smile was the same, exactly the same, as Jared’s. “We haven’t been able to figure out how to work this. Sue wants Kelan to know her father, but I’m her father too. We wouldn’t be happy changing that.”
Oh, Lord. We’ll have to deal with this.
“We’ll work on it. Sue likes large families. It seems Kelan is part of one.”
Signy nodded at Jared’s brother. The child would be beautiful. Jared’s daughter would be so very beautiful. If the little girl learned who her father was, it must be in a good way, a sound and complete way. She must learn how much Jared would have loved her. If he’d known.
“Oh, God, I wish he could have seen her,” Signy said.
“So do I.” Mark turned and rubbed his hands across his face like a man waking. Then he shook his head, as if he’d been startled.
“We saw part of it, some of how Jared … I’ll send you the records of what happened. If you want,” Signy said.
“Not now. I’ll want to know, but not now. I’ll have to tell Sue, first.”
Jared had a child? The bastard, how could he have a daughter and not tell anyone? Mark said Jared didn’t know about her, but surely, surely, he must have.
“How old is Kelan?” Signy asked.
“Nine months,” Mark Balchen said. “She took her first step yesterday. Take care, Signy.”
Nine months?
The screen went blank, the air around Signy’s face shifted, she heard the stamp of boots in the hallway. Pilar called to her. They collided in the hallway in a tangle of arms and hugs and snow-laden parkas.
“God, it’s cold,” Pilar said.
“Yeah. Come in, come to the fire. Paul’s here.”
“You dug him out of his lair? Good work, girl. It must have taken a backhoe—” Pilar stopped, her arms falling limp to her sides, as she looked in through the doorway and saw Paul in the studio.
The knobs of the vertebrae on Paul’s back tented up the fabric of his skinthin. He sat crouched and bent in his chair, his head bobbing up and down as he watched something on the screen.
“Ah, shit,” Pilar whispered. “Nightmare in Starvation Alley. That’s cruel, that’s what it is.” Pilar tiptoed closer to Paul. She stretched her hand toward him, but she didn’t touch him. Paul’s screen cast its light on Pilar’s furious, still face.
“Do you have any idea what’s he working on?” Jimmy asked.
“I asked him to search out San-Li’s part in the helo crash,” Signy said. “But I don’t know. I’ve been afraid to look.”
“He doesn’t look like he’s altogether … together,” Jimmy said. “Will he eat?”
“He sipped at a mug of soup last night. He drinks tea.”
Pilar turned away from Paul, shaking her head.
Jimmy shrugged. “Okay. I’ll just slip in beside him, here. Some pancakes or scrambled eggs or something would go real well, in just a little while.”
“You act like you’ve seen this before,” Signy said.
“Signy. I’ve been this before. Probably why I stay so fat, is, I’m afraid I could get like this again. Paul’s better off than you think, is what I think.”
“Do you really think he’ll eat?” Signy asked.
“If he doesn’t, Pilar probably will. And me. It was a long damned walk out from town.” Jimmy brushed snow away from the thighs of his corduroy trousers.
Pilar’s nose was red beneath the cheekpieces of her headset. Jimmy’s cheeks looked scalded, like a sunburn.
“You walked?” Signy asked.
“There’s about three feet of snow outside,” Jimmy said. “We couldn’t get here any other way.”
“Oh, damn. I hadn’t looked outside since—I’ll get you something hot,” Signy said.
Pilar followed Signy to the kitchen. She watched while Signy rummaged through the cupboards, and Signy couldn’t figure out what to say, or how to say it. Tinned milk, frozen whipped cream.
“Chocolate?” Signy asked.
Pilar got up, slowly. “I’ll fix it,” Pilar said.
There were cinnamon sticks in the spice cabinet somewhere; Signy remembered buying them. Pilar’s hand reached over her shoulder and plucked the canister off the shelf.
“It’s okay, jita,” Pilar said, but Pilar was crying, too, both of them crying and holding each other’s shoulders.
“Oh, God. I killed him, Pilar.”
“No, you didn’t. Shut up.” Pilar drew away.
“I sent him down there.”
“Live with it or die,” Pilar said.
“I—”
“I shocked you, did I? Listen, sweetheart, we’ve all got guilt here. We needed some money, didn’t we? Where’s the stirring thingie?”
We’ve all got guilt here—Signy found the whisk in the drawer and handed it to Pilar. We’ve all got guilt. But while Pilar whisked grated chocolate into hot milk, Signy found herself blurting out—
“The bastard has a kid.”
“Huh?” Pilar asked.
“Jared. Has a daughter. Nine. Months. Old.”
Pilar added a tiny dash of black pepper to the pot and poured the chocolate into mugs. It smelled wonderful. “You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Oh, the cabron!” Pilar handed two of the mugs to Signy and began to laugh. “Oh, wonderful!”
Signy just stared at her.
“So those were good huevos he had between his legs. I guess I always wondered.”
“But a baby? Not a year old yet?”
“Busy boy, wasn’t he? Well, it happens. Don’t wave those cups around, you’ll spill them. Does Paul know?”
“I just found out,” Signy said, trailing Pilar down the hall.
“Paul!” Pilar called out. But Paul shushed her with an idle finger.
—On the holo stage, Janine and Alan Campbell sat side by side in one of the bright, hot-colored conversation nooks in the Tanaka entertainment suite. They had filled most of the space around them with diagrams and charts and strange cartoon graphics, changing the carefully orchestrated icescapes to hell and gone.
At her station, Signy vanished the Taos room and entered Janine’s world, but she entered it, on a whimsy, through Alan’s inputs.
—Alan’s body language carried a unique set of tensions; bemused interest, a tolerance of human cantankerousness, a quirky optimism. In all those close hours, in all they had survived together, Signy had not met him in virtual, had not donned his tensions and reflexes or looked out through his eyes. The experience was a different sort of awareness of him, miles from sex, in some ways more intimate. Alan was a calm day in Indian summer, a comfortable, tolerant set of energies.
Alan’s cameras showed the Tanaka courtesy suite in Lisbon.
“Hi there, Signy,” Alan said.
Wups. Alan had sensors that told him who was riding on his muscles. Signy backed away, quickly, feeling like a Peeping Tom, or some such. “Hi.”
In a sidebar, outlined in glowing turquoise to show the information was guarded in the files of the home system, Signy read:
[Paul] Tanaka wants to harvest icebergs, sell fresh water.
“What?” Pilar asked.
Signy grabbed for her notepad.
[Signy] You’re kidding.
[Paul] No.
[Signy] Sell fresh water where?
[Paul] Everywhere.
Janine looked up when she heard Pilar’s voice. Signy, viewing Janine from Alan’s cameras, watched a flash of hurt cross Janine’s face, a quickly hidden grimace of pain.
“Oh, damn,” Pilar whispered.
Signy heard Pilar’s quick footsteps running from the studio.
“They’re in the backpack,” Jimmy called, somewhere in the real world.
“I know,” Pilar said. “Shit!”
“Look at this,” Janine said.
The Lisbon hotel suite vanished, replaced by a ridiculous model, a giant curving chain of icebergs lin
ked by cables, with tender ships escorting them north. A segmented, headless ice-worm.
“Nukes for power,” Janine said. “The engines drilled into the bergs themselves. It would take a lot of number crunching to keep everything going the same way, what with breakups and reconfigurations, and tides.…”
“Indeed it would. Yes, ma’am.” Alan’s voice, intrigued; amused.
Signy panned the ice-train model, rotated it to view it as if she approached it from the sea, came in closer. She spied a human figure on top of one of the bergs, a figure the size of an ant, and suddenly the scale of the thing came home to her. The berg was kilometers long.
“That one’s average size for what they want to haul,” Alan said. “Ain’t small, is it?”
Signy switched her viewpoint to one of the Lisbon room’s security cameras. Alan and Janine sat in their chairs beside the model of the ice train and talked about thin mylar wraps and reflective surfaces and ice melt as insulators, and Signy got the idea that the curve of the chain was a result of Coriolis forces, the energies of the spinning earth. Now, that was big.
“Well, the Russkies have a lot of power plants from the old sub fleet. No need to waste ’em, I guess,” Alan said.
Signy started to say something, but stopped at a flash of motion. Pilar had found her portable rig.
Pilar popped into Lisbon, as her thin, unadorned self. She bent over like a crane and smacked a kiss on Janine’s cheek. “Hiya, sweet. I’m sorry I left you with all this.”
“Yeah.” Janine’s voice came tiny, a child’s voice. “Yeah, you did. But that’s you, Pilar. Now back off, okay? We’ve got some work to do.”
“Work? What sort of work?” Pilar asked.
“Just settle down, here. The scam is, the fishing ban goes through or it doesn’t, but Japan gets a tiny wrinkle written in to the mineral-rights provisions, a word or two. And then Tanaka negotiates with the Antarctic Treaty Commission and buys bergs. The free ones, the calves from the glaciers, out to two hundred miles, of course, but that’s a whole ’nother kettle of fish, whether you go with the permanent summer boundaries of the ice pack, or of the continent itself.”
Paul’s crab sigil appeared in Lisbon, a crab that danced its way from graph to graph. Signy pulled away from the virtual to look at Paul in real time. He seemed interested and alert, and he’d finished his mug of chocolate. Jimmy and Pilar sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, working with portable consoles and goggles.
“The Commission would get fees for the ice,” Paul said. “They might just like that.”
Somebody needed to feed these people. Signy guessed that meant it was time for her to cook.
Their voices followed her down the hallway and came to her through the kitchen speaker. Signy pulled her headset out of her way and rested it on her forehead. Flicking in and out of virtual had left her with burned fingers and burned food more than once.
She rummaged through supplies: pancakes, a canned ham, some frozen OJ; the kitchen speakers brought Edges’ conversation to her while she worked.
“There’s places you probably can’t drive the bergs.” Janine’s voice. “Even with nukes, you need enough mass to make the operation worthwhile on a cost basis. So you’ve gotta push a lot of ice, and you’ve gotta push it where it has a mind to go anyway. Japan is a good market, and the west side of the Americas and the west coast of Africa. You can’t turn the suckers in to the Mediterreanean; they won’t make the curve with any technology Alan or I can think of. So the Mideast doesn’t get much out of this, I guess.”
“What about temperature changes? Wouldn’t the bergs cool things off, when you got them wherever they’re going?” Paul asked.
“Yeah,” Janine said. “The melt would make for cold surfing outside L.A. What you do is you harvest the water out of the bottom, out of their wrappers, see, and you’ve got a long, long time to do the work. Thaw as needed, almost.”
“You just park them in somebody’s harbor?” Pilar asked.
“Tether one or two offshore,” Alan said.
Signy heard laughter. She pulled the headset over her face to see what was so funny.
—Someone had modeled a skier, in swim trunks and a scuba mask, and sent him schussing down the sides of an iceberg.
“Theme parks? Recreation?” Jimmy asked.
“That’s one idea. To offset the cost and the bitching, you charge people to play on them. The answer on local cooling effects and their impact on the sea is that nobody knows the answer,” Janine said.
“Ski Ensenada,” Pilar said.
Signy pushed her headset out of the way and flicked a drop of water on the griddle. It danced and popped. She poured out six circles of cream-colored batter. They hissed comfortably as they spread.
The ham, sliced, brushed with honey and mustard and a sprinkle of ground cloves, sent a nice smell from the oven.
“Paul, we’ll need some words,” Janine said. “Before lunch, here, a couple of hours. Okay?”
“Jiggle the treaty language?” Paul asked.
“Tanaka’s legal staff has come up with an alternate phrase, somewhere in here,” Janine said.
“Okay,” Paul said. “I’ll look at it.”
“Right. Now all we need to do is sell it. Got any ideas?” Janine asked.
“Jesus,” Pilar said. “Put those icescapes we made back up, would you, sweet? We can’t possibly do a whole new setting in two hours. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with.”
Signy flipped the pancakes, got the OJ ready while their top sides browned, made six more, and figured she’d just carry everything in to the studio. Something in there had made them all go quiet.
What about Jared? What about the fact that they were working for a company that used murder as one of its tools? That half-starved crazy daughter of Tanaka’s did, anyway. But Paul would find a way to trap her.
Where did vengeance belong? Where was rage best spent?
Mihalis, who had tried to cripple a fishing boat for money, had died as quickly as his victims. Psyche, who had been a hesitant participant in his scam, had drowned with Jared. San-Li, it seemed, had not planned for anyone to die. She’d just known it could happen. Sabotaging Cordova’s helo had been a risky business. If San-Li Tanaka had wanted to get rid of all the witnesses and the records they might have kept, she would have blown the Skylochori ship, the Sirena, clean out of the water, long before Jared’s rescue call came in.
To kill all of them, San-Li would have needed to get rid of the brothers on the ice, along with Psyche and the escaped Jared, and the ship. That would have been a complicated business. San-Li must have been aiming for the ship. Or maybe just for the woman and her brothers. Jared’s call for help was the unplanned thing.
Kazi had found San-Li’s mistakes to be shameful. There was an implication, in the way he’d talked in those awful moments after she’d appeared on the Lisbon screens, that the girl would be punished, probably in very unpleasant ways, for her mistakes.
Jared, damn it, was dead behind that child’s “mistakes.” But San-Li was a child. A murderous one. Is that what we must do in response to her, become amoral children, careless of other lives? Signy wondered.
Where does the rage go?
A slice of ham slid too far toward the edge of one of the plates. Signy pushed it back into position, and licked salty-sweet juice from her finger.
Balancing plates on her forearms in imitation of a hash-house waitress, she made it to the studio without dropping them. Hell, she was only carrying three this trip.
—Signy found the Lisbon icescapes restored, unchanged, the Taos humans speaking with disembodied voices, watching and listening.
“This is good stuff,” Pilar said. “I can’t see what needs changing.”
“Beautiful. Beautiful. I didn’t have time enough there. I didn’t get to look around,” Alan said.
Signy put a plate down next to Paul, and found spaces for plates on the floor next to Pilar’s and Jimmy’s knees.
Baked ham and hot honey smells wafted along her path. Signy wondered if they would notice.
“Food,” Jimmy said. “I smell food.”
“Uh, huh,” Signy said. While headsets came off and plates began to get shifted to laps, Paul set projections of Alan and Janine on the Taos holo stage, visitors at the party, but they couldn’t eat the food.
“Make them thirsty,” Signy said.
“Feed them salt,” Janine whispered.
“Salt. Smoked fish, salt-sweet nuts, pickled things. Do you think Tanaka would spring for caviar?” Signy asked.
“We didn’t budget for caviar,” Janine said.
“Tanaka can’t bitch. They—ran some changes in the specs, after all,” Signy said.
“Didn’t they just?” Janine giggled. “Good, pure water. No fizzies. Water in those clear glass carafes that look like lab containers. Tall, tall glasses, yeah.”
Pilar, who sat with her headset off, forking up ham and pancakes, said, “That would work.”
“That’s all we need?” Janine asked.
“Yeah. Get pure water ice to float in the pitchers. Transparent. The best ice in Lisbon.” Pilar shifted her plate from her lap to the floor, wiped her fingers on her thighs, and grabbed her headset again.
“Jimmy?” Paul asked. “Come help me with some stuff. And Janine, you’d better get back to the conference. We don’t have a mike down there, just what the news services will feed us.”
The Lisbon room vanished in a slow dissolve. The watchers waited while shadows grew large in Taos, in the evening hours of a winter storm. Alan, invisible, murmured something Taos couldn’t hear.
“I don’t think I will do that,” Janine said. “I don’t think I will go down to the conference.”
“Huh?” Paul asked.
“I’m coming home.”
Signy got into her own chair and her headset.
“Just like that?” Pilar asked.
“I’ve … had enough.” Janine sent voice only, and her voice trembled. “Please.”
“You can’t—” Pilar said.
Janine had been left alone with all the Lisbon work. Janine needed comforting, as best as could happen with Pilar and Jimmy as close as they seemed to be getting. “Oh, yes, she can,” Signy said. “It’s okay, Janine.” Who the hell cared about Tanaka’s contract, anyway? “Come home. We want you.”