Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  “Did people stay around?” Janine asked. She snuggled close to Signy, a warm presence, a voice coming from close by.

  In the distance, Pilar said, “You can set up your rig in the workroom. Come on, Jimmy. There’s no room in the studio.”

  “They stayed late,” Alan said. “The vote on the fishing ban has been moved up in the schedule. As in, this morning. I don’t know if that throws you a curve. I hope not.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Paul said, Paul in Jared’s chair. “I’ll window in the newsnet feeds and we’ll get the vote as it comes in. What we need you to do is, you get in range of our friend Abeyta, the proud gentleman from Chile. If anyone is going to mount an opposition to the minerals provision as written, they’ll come to him. While the vote is going on.”

  “You know that?” Alan asked.

  “I know it,” Paul aid. “Kazi talked with Abeyta last night. He’s all for the ice. After the offer Kazi made him, he would have to be.”

  “Who did the listening?” Janine asked.

  “Jimmy listened,” Paul said.

  And Paul had spent his time staging a scenario to punish San-Li; he’d been at it most of the day. But he’d made sure that Jimmy kept in touch with Lisbon. At least he’d done that.

  “Good for Kazi,” Janine said. “I thought I’d messed him up with Abeyta for sure.”

  “You tried hard enough,” Pilar said, sotto voce, over a background rumble of stones tumbling in a polisher.

  “Go on down to the voting, Alan,” Paul said. “Call us when you’re there.”

  Alan vanished.

  * * *

  So simply, so quietly, the delegates made their choice. Edges watched the newsnet, on flatscreen. The sober, proper gentle-persons voted to leave the world’s last wild fishery alone for a time.

  Japan made its plea—The world needs the protein now. From the nations near the world’s thirsty waist, the cry rose—We cannot wait. We are starving.

  The countries who were not starving, not yet, sent expressions of tired sympathy, and voted for the ban.

  Leave the southern ocean alone; let it survive and heal if that is possible, Europe said, and Russia agreed. The empty Arctic helped the Russians in their moral stance, perhaps. Don’t eat the fish, the Americas said, and China. Leave the deeps to Leviathan and the will of Allah, the bitter Mideast said, voting, with grim distaste, in uneasy agreement with Britain, Australia, and Israel.

  With stoic faces, Japan’s delegation accepted the verdict.

  * * *

  “Well, that’s done,” Janine said.

  “It didn’t seem like such a big deal.” Alan’s words, transmitted from the Palacio, mingled with the babble that followed the vote count, the Brownian movement of the crowd as people planned their next moves in Lisbon. Alan moved with the crowd, keeping Abeyta in sight ahead of him.

  Paul sent a virtual crab to scuttle down the hallway, two steps ahead of Alan’s feet. “Don’t celebrate just yet,” Paul said. “There’s the little matter of the ice.”

  “Anna will celebrate,” Alan said.

  Alan had a gift for anonymity, it seemed. Taller by a head than the people around him, but he looked like he belonged where he was, in the center of a group that collected around a long table and braced themselves to begin the wordy, lengthy business of ratifying the Antarctic Treaty for yet another thirty years.

  “Has anyone heard from her?” Signy asked.

  “I haven’t,” Alan said. He looked toward the head of the table, where France cleared his throat, picked up a sheaf of papers, and began to read.

  * * *

  —Fading in, replacing Alan’s view of the delegates, a desolation of ice and glory formed, ominous, powerful, and silent. Jared’s hands hurt. He stood on packed snow, under a stormy sky. Broken ice floated in the sea. He/she was cold, and tired, and hopeful.

  Egoless, engulfed, Signy was there with Jared, the knowledge of his/her strength welcome, comfortable, comforting.

  “Is Paul doing this?” Janine asked. “Paul? What the shit are you doing?”

  Signy shook her head, unable to speak. She didn’t know. She truly didn’t know.

  “Paul, she’s here.” Jimmy spoke, his calm, soft presence smoothing away some of Paul’s angular tensions, dulling the edge of Signy’s fear.

  “I hardly thought she’d manage to stay away,” Paul said. “She’ll join us when she’s ready.”

  “Who?” Janine asked.

  “San-Li,” Signy said.

  “No way,” Janine whispered.

  A pebble rattled on the beach. Jared/they, alerted by the sound, saw the girl’s thinness, became aware of her terrible, constant hunger. San-Li wore a blue coverall from the Siranui’s stockroom, and a wool watch cap. The coverall hung loose around her. San-Li walked toward Jared/the watchers with hesitant steps, as if she were, as yet, unaware of them.

  “Join us,” Paul said.

  The girl blinked at the light. She turned her head from side to side.

  “You’re in the right place. Signy’s here.”

  “Paul!” Signy’s shout echoed in the Taos studio. She grabbed for Paul’s shoulder. (The ice tilted.) Paul twisted away from Signy’s touch.

  Somewhere, Pilar laughed.

  Jared stepped aside, making room for another figure. Paul, dressed in the most impeccable of dark gray business suits, appeared on the ice. He bowed to San-Li and offered his arm.

  “You can’t keep me here,” San-Li said.

  “Force was never what we had in mind. You’ve come to us in our sorrow, and we would like you to stay with us for a time. To honor Jared,” Paul said.

  “It is not appropriate,” San-Li said.

  “Oh, but it is. Don’t be frightened. We respect your need for privacy. To many of the visitors here, you are simply not present.”

  Paul brought San-Li to sit beside him on a Victorian love-seat that appeared on the sunstruck ice. “Nor is this.” He/they (but Jared was gone, now) stroked the back of San-Li’s hand, the rough knuckles, the spot of raw burn on San-Li’s finger.

  Visitors? Signy felt their attention, their blurred, mingled interests, gathered in the background. Waiting.

  “Who are these people?” Signy asked.

  “The lurkers? Whiteline is here; and a lot of people who seem to know Jared,” Pilar said. “Paul’s set this up on open lines; San-Li’s screened away, but the rest of this is on the net.”

  San-Li’s hand, seen against a background of black, toyed with a silver letter opener shaped like a dragon. San-Li’s hand picked up a limp sausage made from a condom filled with white powder and slipped it in the pocket of her parka.

  Cut: Cordova’s helo waited on McMurdo’s landing strip. A small figure in black trudged toward it.

  Cut: Small chapped hands unscrewed a fuel cap and fed the condom inside.

  “It wasn’t like that!” San-Li said. “It wasn’t like that at all,” while the helo rose above the sea. San-Li’s injured hand, now a giant’s, reached up for the helo and plucked it from the air like a daisy.

  “Perhaps not,” Paul said.

  Caught in the spinning blades, San-Li’s hand shredded into bloody fragments that stank of brine and rotting kelp. San-Li whimpered.

  “But we…” Pilar’s voice paused, while it seemed she examined something nearby and of extreme interest. “… could convince people that it was. Like that.”

  Torn metal shrieked like a woman. A claw of red coral, carved and polished, coalesced from the drops of San-Li’s blood.

  “Signy, who’s doing this?” Janine asked.

  “Janine, baby,” Pilar said, “all of us are. It’s a requiem, that’s what it is. Performance Art. Real.” A hammer fell and something shattered. “Time.”

  “Pilar, must you?” Signy whispered.

  “She killed my brother.” Mark spoke, his angry voice much like Jared’s. “Let her learn how we feel about that.”

  “Is Susanna with you?” Signy asked.

&nbs
p; “Oh, yes.” Susanna was a soft voice, a soft presence, one of the many disembodied observers hovering near the lonely slab of ice where San-Li stood.

  San-Li’s fear, her rage, ran like a current through the shared awareness. San-Li braced against terror and terror became purpose. As it had always, in San-Li’s life, become purpose. Signy knew her, now. San-Li existed, glittering and complete, built of facets made of grueling physical and mental disciplines, Yoshiro Tanaka’s calculated, calculated scorn of the female he had chosen to create as heir, San-Li’s hatred of, and love for, her father, and San-Li’s yearning for unfettered years of power. That hope lent Tanaka’s daughter an unflinching willingness to survive.

  “Signy, what do they want? What price do I pay?” San-Li asked.

  Debits, credits. Signy could imagine the columns adding up in San-Li’s mind, this much to squelch a nasty rumor, this much to replace a lost ship. “Money can’t buy you out of this. Money, spent freely, could buy you simulations better than ours, simulations that would show you innocent, but we don’t give a damn about that.”

  Acceptance came to Signy, resignation of a sort. It seemed that Pilar and Paul and Jimmy had spent the day’s energies on creating a rite of passage, however strange it might be. Perhaps it would serve their needs, Signy’s needs. What it might mean to San-Li was another question. “Cash won’t be enough, San-Li. I think that all we want you to do is stay with us, for a while.”

  “I don’t want…”

  “The discomfort will be acute, I assure you. Sharing this with us is, however, a matter of honor.” Signy waited, feeling the sense of held breath surrounding the Tanaka daughter, the mixed sensations of anger and bemused anticipation. Honor, my ass, Signy thought. This will be such an inexpensive ordeal. Think about it, kid.

  San-Li melded into their awarenesses, determinedly among them. Jared sat down on the loveseat next to San-Li. He held San-Li’s hand and patted it.

  * * *

  Suddenly in Lisbon, they saw bent heads, an array of notepads. They heard rapid French, creaking chairs, and Alan.

  “Son of a bitch,” Alan said. “I think they’re going to get to the minerals section of the treaty this afternoon.”

  “Our best shot is they just run right past it,” Paul said.

  “There may be a studious lack of attention,” Alan said. “If Kazi and Abeyta have done their homework. These people look disinterested enough to make a person tense.”

  “Hang in there,” Janine said.

  “I will do that. I truly will.” Alan disappeared.

  —The world, the green world, rippled. With Jared, weightless and relaxed, Signy looked up through iridescent water at a ceiling of ice carved into cathedral arches. She/they wondered at the effortless grace of a swimming bird, watched a dance between a woman and a huge and curious seal.

  Rising with Jared, toward the surface, toward air and light, Signy listened. They listened; Signy could feel the observers close to her in nonspace.

  Hammers striking stone. Deep, freight-train sound of a whale taking a measured breath. Whalesong.

  An oboe sang a counterpoint to the whale’s melody.

  Time spun, and place, and images that Jared, bemused, seemed to explore with them. Jared watched with them as Pilar danced grief in a cold Seattle fog.

  “Jimmy, you brought this?” Pilar asked.

  “Yes.”

  —Paul followed Jared along a high sun-dappled trail in southern Colorado. The Spanish Peaks lay beyond the ridge. Listening to Paul’s labored panting, Jared halted. Paul turned around and frowned at him.

  “You’re resting because I’m tired?” Paul asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t do that,” Paul said.

  “Okay.”

  They walked on, until Paul sat down, bang, in the middle of the trail, and began to laugh.

  —walking, in easy strides, Jared/they felt the solid irregularity of brick paving beneath their feet. Jared whistled, tuneless, as he walked along Beacon Street, the weight of a worsted jacket over his shoulder. Infant spring leaves danced in the wind, and his eyes appraised that sweet young thing as she walked by, and left her unresponsive face to watch another, taller girl, who winked at him.

  Startled, momentarily, delighted, yes, he/they turned to watch her walk past. Signy had never seen that jacket, that Boston spring.

  Another watcher entered the nonspace where Jared walked.

  “Alan,” Paul said. “When did you get here?”

  “I’ve been checking in and out,” Alan said. Yes, Signy realized, I sensed you, subtle and complicated, and wondered who you were. Stay.

  They watched the girl; Alan and Jimmy now overlaid their particular tensions of responses, pro and con, regarding that particular, momentary girl possibility.

  “He is (we, Jared and I, are) not simply a collection of memories!” Signy heard her voice grate out the words, strident, dismayed.

  Jared the student, Jared the lover, Jared who tried to stop pain, images rushed by, tumbled across Signy’s eyes and her memory.

  They/we know, someone said.

  Jared/they brushed gentle fingers across Signy’s cheek.

  “I sent you away and you died,” Signy said.

  “We sent him, Signy.”

  Whose voices? Janine’s voice, Paul’s, Pilar’s.

  “You couldn’t have held me back,” Jared said.

  Alto voices swelled into a wordless chord. Red light defined the countours of bulky, modeled muscles, gliding under metal-smooth skin. Inhuman arms, not Jared’s, held Signy, held all of them, in security and iron strength. This was not Jared, this synthesis of awareness. Jared existed in it, but not alone. So many strengths were here.

  “Forgive yourself,” Signy heard Jared whisper. “Or, as Pilar would put it; live with it or die.”

  Could she?

  I’ve never been held like that. San-Li’s chapped hand wrote the wistful words in tiny, cramped letters that twisted and vanished, whirled away on the wind.

  A tenor, impossibly true in pitch and timbre, called out an eleison.

  * * *

  “Alan,” Paul said. “What you’re looking at. Show us.”

  Paul, the multitracked bastard, remembered real time.

  Alan picked the hard copy he held, murmured apologies, went out into the halls and found a scanner.

  Paul, murmuring phrases from the document Alan sent to Paul’s screen, stepped back on the imaged ice. In the distance of that space, Paul set up an Escheresque infinity, pale blue and diamond white, a lattice of three-atomed, crystalline water. Ice.

  Paul reached out and folded the scene into a sheet of thick paper.

  “Hold this for us, would you, San-Li?” Paul asked. “Thank you, dear.”

  * * *

  Signy/they walked with Jared, past rows of cots where the hungry, the ill, the poisoned, lay in eternal boredom, exhausted by the work of living. When Jared looked up, the corridor stretched forever, the lines of cots vanishing in the distance.

  Jared left that pathetic reality, its unending, numbing repetitions, left it for the day. It would be there in the morning. It would always be there.

  On a powder morning in Taos, Jared embraced gravity and motion in an exuberant, masterful rush of skis down Al’s Run. He shouted at the top of his lungs.

  Twinned sprays of snow flew, followed his skis, and formed a giant prismed wake.

  * * *

  A head turned, slowly, its weight borne on a heavy neck of beaten silver. Pilar incised faint spokes of color into the iris of the beast’s eye with a scalpel of titanium steel. The tiny sounds it made creaked and scraped above a rumbling bass rhythm at the lower range of human hearing, the pulsing of a giant heart.

  “You hurt,” Jimmy said. “That hurts us.”

  “Creation hurts.” Pilar stood with her head tilted, her eyes on—

  * * *

  Susanna, laughing, a tall girl in khaki shorts. Susanna knelt by a midsummer stream, cupping handfuls o
f water over her long black hair, her neck, washing away trail sweat.

  Had Mark captured Susanna’s summer laugh? Had Jared? Did it matter?

  “Paul, Janine; Jared has a daughter,” Signy said. “She’s learning to walk.”

  Paul’s startle, Janine’s rush of warm delight, Jimmy’s somewhat dismayed interest in the possibility, Pilar’s acceptance; Signy embraced them all. She wanted to see Kelan, to hold her.

  “A baby?” Janine asked. “A baby?”

  “Well,” Paul said. “Well.”

  “Kelan looks like her father,” Susanna said. “Thank goodness.”

  “When can we see her?” Signy asked.

  “Soon,” Susanna said. “Soon, and often. You’ll love her.”

  “Yes,” Signy said. “I will.”

  * * *

  Jared? Part of this, yes. The multiple, overlaid inputs of touches, tensions, angles of vision included Jared’s reality, his delight in the physical, intricate world. Signy could sense him, amused, interested. His alert attention watched with them, the body she/they wore now was a part of every observer. And their eyes created—

  * * *

  A single drop of water falling into the sea. It tolled like a giant bell and they looked up toward a distant surface. As the drop fell, it was, had always been, a claw, grasping for something just out of reach. The color of red coral, taking shape as it fell beneath them.

  Shapes, translucent, mutable, that might have been a rounded, massive belly, a heavy head, limbs supple and more massive than a dragon’s haunches, flailed and sank in a collage of textures and struggle. The light from a beating heart pulsed with the color of marigolds, the wavering reflection of the sun. Swirling downward in a great eddy, separate, separate and lonely, segments made of loves and losses formed and vanished and formed again as they fell.

  A monstrous concern circled the circling, sinking shapes of love and power.

  The undersurface of the water was lighted neon orange. A great presence circled and nudged, nudged upward, the embryonic creature forming itself from the sea, a creature that pulled its substance from the swirling waters and centered itself around its beating heart. Midwife on a whale’s back, it rose toward air and light.