Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  Toward light, flames, a wondrous fan of colors. A thigh flexed, a claw tightened and clung and vaulted into the air, into washes of pure light—emerald, celadon, citrine, cobalt yellow, but this yellow was filled with transcendent white, the white of metal glowing in flame.

  Topaz, aquamarine, sapphire blue, moonstone seen in moonlight.

  Laughing, the salamander gulped flame. The creature examined, in motions that wrote unknown scripts and soundless words, the newborn, terrible power of its burnished limbs. Living, elemental, and joyous, it existed.

  * * *

  Pilar stood on the empty ice next to San-Li. Pilar held a little figure in her hand, a salamander made of stones and metal.

  “It’s beautiful,” San-Li said.

  “It’s a symbol. A salamander can be torn apart, but it is reborn in flame. We survive, San-Li. Will you?”

  * * *

  After a time, bright letters took shape in the darkness.

  the exploitation of minerals

  is forbidden

  on the Antarctic continent and its continental shelf

  for a period of thirty years from the date of ratification of this treaty

  “Very good!” Paul said. “That little segment of the treaty leaves a hole for Tanaka’s water buyers to slip through. The Commission won’t vote on it until October or so. People, we have lots of work to do before then.”

  Paul sounded happy.

  The copy of the treaty faded and vanished.

  “Thank you, San-Li,” Paul said. “You may go.”

  San-Li was left alone on the ice. Her dismay spoke to them from the signals of her tight, quick muscles.

  “Thanks, Evergreen,” Jimmy said.

  San-Li and the ice disappeared.

  * * *

  Jared walked on the mesa. He looked up at Taos Mountain’s snowcap, stained red in sunset colors. The air smelled of recent rain and wet sage.

  Jared snapped his fingers and the watchers, obedient, vanished.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The newsnets gave full coverage to the funeral of Yoshiro Tanaka. Signy, in Taos, watched a flatscreen view of wall-to-wall black umbrellas crowding a rainy Kobe street.

  “Paul, we should never have let her go. We had a monster in our grasp and we turned her loose.”

  “Is San-Li Tanaka a monster?” Paul stayed in New Hampshire most of the time, but he was in Taos now, he came to Taos when Kelan did. Paul had taught Jared’s daughter to read. Kelan used to sit on his lap and listen to the same stories over and over again. Paul, helpfully, made mistakes for Kelan to correct. By the time Kelan was four, she could read on her own. Now she was ten and she read legal briefs to Paul.

  “Yes, San-Li is a monster,” Signy said. “She’s become second-in-command at Tanaka Pacific, formerly Tanaka Company and Pacific Biosystems, through an extremely clever series of career moves. Make that woman-in-charge of Tanaka Pacific, now that Yoshiro is dead, and she’s never made a mistake yet. That’s monstrous.”

  “She made one mistake,” Paul said.

  “Yes.”

  On the flatscreen, priests in yellow robes preceded a coffin draped in wet flowers. Surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards, a slender woman walked behind the coffin.

  “Good and evil can be measured on many scales,” Paul said. “San-Li began the rescue of the ecosystem of the Southern Ocean. That’s probably good. Tanaka’s water is keeping part of the U.S. West Coast alive for a few more miserable years. That’s probably evil. Balance her actions, Signy, and give me your judgment.”

  “No,” Signy said. “That’s not my job.”

  “Do you still talk to her?” Paul asked.

  “Pilar does.” Pilar and Jimmy and Janine were on the Station, doing in-depth interviews with a crew outbound for Saturn. Signy hoped Janine wouldn’t sign on for the trip, but you never knew.

  “What’s Alan doing?” Paul asked.

  “He’s out teaching Kelan how to split wood. Or she’s teaching him, I don’t know which. Enough of this funeral, Paul. Susanna and Mark are coming in from the airport to pick up their child in one hour. I have things to do. I guess our fun’s over for the summer.”

  Kelan would go back to Canada, to school and winter. During the winter, Kelan popped in and out of the studios in Taos and New Hampshire and Seattle. Sometimes she spent time walking beside Jared, sharing things he’d done years ago, asking interminable questions of the rest of them.

  “I’m a lot like Jared, aren’t I, Signy?” Kelan had asked Signy once.

  “You’re like him. You’re like Mark and Susanna, too.”

  “And Paul.”

  “Yes. But you’re more like Kelan than anyone else.”

  “Signy, there’s a contract proposal I want to show you,” Paul said.

  “After dinner,” Signy said. “Please?”

  EPILOGUE

  Anna’s little sloop flanked the ice train as it moved north. Anna usually ran a zigzag course, crossing and recrossing the boundaries of the band of cool water the ice left in its invisible, slow wake. The changes in the seas’s tiny creatures were more easily measured there. Anna couldn’t be sure yet, wouldn’t know for years, but it seemed the cooler water caused no harm.

  The ice train had left the Ross Ice Shelf fourteen months ago and it would cross the equator today.

  Anna thought she would tell Kelan to come up to the deck to get her earring. That old, old ceremony always pleased the young.

  But Kelan left her studies, the summer coursework that had sent her here to work with gray-haired Anna, and came topside without prompting. For a haole, she was gorgeous, Kelan with her dark curls and her brown eyes, the vibrant energy of her newly ripened body.

  “We’re almost at the equator, aren’t we?” Kelan asked.

  “It’s not a line painted on the water,” Anna said. On the horizon, Anna spied what she had hoped to see. She laughed.

  “What?” Kelan asked. She squinted as she stared out at the fractured sunlight on the water. “Oh. I see it!”

  The whale broached, sped toward the sloop, and rose again. She slapped her tail on the water and blew a mighty plume for Anna and Kelan to watch. Her arrival announced, the young humpback came alongside and rolled her length for their scrutiny. She looked healthy and unscarred, still, but she was very young.

  Kelan leaned over the rail at a precarious angle. A pendant hung from a chain around her neck. It looked heavy. It swung back and forth with the tilt of the waves.

  The whale vanished as if she had never been. Kelan stood upright again.

  “Will she be back?” Kelan asked.

  “Humpbacks like to blow three times,” Anna said. “That’s a pretty necklace, Kelan.”

  The girl’s hand reached to enclose it. The length of her hand, it was an intricately carved salamander, a graceful little creature of red coral, amber, and agate, set in beaten silver.

  “Thank you,” Kelan said. “Pilar made it for me.” Kelan searched the empty water for the whale. “I wish the whale would stay with us. Do you think she might?”

  “I think she might.” The young humpback had always visited Anna, these past years. The whale would continue to leave her herd and visit Anna until she calved. Then she would stay with her sisters, and her sisters were shy.

  “You know her, don’t you, Anna?”

  “I knew her father.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Twenty. Like you.”

  The young humpback showed no signs of illness as yet, and she had bred. Anna worried for her, and for her unborn calf, and guarded them as best she could.

  The whale saluted them with ritual solemnity, sending up a flawless plume of breath, and later, another, while the little sloop sailed north with the ice.

  READ ON FOR A PREVIEW OF

  THE MAN IN THE TREE

  SAGE

  WALKER

  Available now from Tom Doherty Associates

  A TOR HARDCOVER

  Copyright © 2017 by Sage Walke
r

  ONE

  Pleasure Centers

  The sun in the hollow center of Kybele is supported by six Eiffel Towers.

  In daylight, the clusters of petals near the top of the towers, closed, look like bulbous minarets. As they unfold, black shadows strike the fields and forests below. Kaleidoscopic patterns of ever-increasing darkness spread over the landscape until the edges of the petals almost touch each other and the day-bright interior of the asteroid is dimmed for night.

  Kybele was Earth’s first, perhaps Earth’s only, seedship, and she existed because there was a chance, a statistically infinitesimal chance, that someday she or a daughter ship of hers might return, headed back toward Earth with hope and life. Kybele’s singular existence was possible because of asteroid mining, hope, and diverted resources from an Earth that said it couldn’t afford her. The Mars colony, small and underground, was only viable because of money from asteroid mining. The time frame for terraforming Mars, a planet with no seas and no magnetic core, was centuries longer than Kybele’s voyage.

  Earth’s humans were in a battle for survival that constantly teetered near disaster. Kybele was a long-shot insurance policy of sorts. Some very good minds had run the numbers and found an intersection, a window, between dwindling resources and increasing technical ability where a seedship could be built. Kybele was that intersection.

  Helt Borresen, Incident Analyst for the seedship, walked spinward from the base of Athens tower on a path he knew well. He sat down beside a creek and fitted his back against the trunk of an aspen. The creek talked a little of this and that.

  This was a private place, one he liked. He came here for solitude, but last night and the night before he’d caught glimpses of an interesting woman, barely seen in the shadows, a woman who moved quickly and quietly, as if she were watching something but didn’t want to be seen.

  Downhill from the aspen, a marshy meadow flanked the creek. Tall grasses grew there, late summer yellow, some of them seeding for next year. Cattails marked soggy ground. Beyond the meadow, anti-spinward, the deep gash of Petra canyon was darker than the forest that grew to its rim. Beyond it, up the curved inner surface of Kybele’s hollow interior, the forest ended abruptly at the edge of croplands, squares of plowed black soil and yellow stubble, striped by shadows from the legs of the towers and going monochrome in the fading light. The warmth of an October day began to fade and a cool breeze came up to rustle the cattails. Kybele’s night was programmed to replicate the twenty-eight-day cycles of Earth’s moon, and as Helt sat, half-dozing, the light dimmed toward quarter moonlight, dark enough to silver the grass and turn the shadows black.

  A flicker of white brought his focus back to the meadow. White-tailed deer, a dozen or so, appeared in the tall grass, as quickly and quietly as if they had been popped into place by a special-effects team. Two yearling bucks, their antlers only brave stubs, were with the females, but none of the big guys. The herd was close enough that Helt heard grass tear as they munched their way toward the water. He had never been able to see a herd of deer, or elk, or reindeer, without counting them. Fourteen. The herd went downhill in the tall grass and vanished.

  The show was over. He thought about getting up.

  And then he didn’t, for the pair of young bucks reappeared at the edge of the meadow. The woman he had seen here briefly last night stepped out of the pines on the far side of the clearing. She had a bottle tied to her belt and something small gripped in her right hand.

  The deer came to her. She was on the far side of the deer from Helt, so he couldn’t see what she did to the neck of one and then the other. Whatever it was, when she finished, she shoved at the neck of the deer she had just handled. It didn’t move away. The little buck lowered his head to have the skin around the nubs of his antlers scratched. His buddy decided he needed some attention, too.

  The woman groomed both of them for a little while. Then she laughed, low and soft, and clapped her hands. The deer bounced away. She unhooked a bottle from her belt, put things in it, and screwed down the lid. The motions caused the interlocked squares of her plaid shirt to tighten and loosen over her breasts in pleasant ways.

  She turned and walked toward Helt’s aspen. He supposed she saw him. He was visible enough against the white trunk of the tree, so he stood up. She was a tall woman. The top of her head would have fit comfortably just under his chin. She had dark hair, tied back. The faux moonlight made it shine.

  She stopped walking.

  “Hi,” Helt said.

  She gave a little shrug. It looked liked resigned acceptance of his presence. “Hello,” she said aloud. “I disturbed you.”

  “I enjoyed watching you. I’m only a little disturbed.”

  “About what?”

  “About what you did to call them in.”

  “Oh.” She reached in her shirt pocket and pulled out a little control box. She stepped closer to Helt, to show him. “They have electrodes in their pleasure centers, and the buzz they get gets stronger the closer they come to this. The guys you saw were numbers thirty-three and thirty-five. I pushed their buttons. They came running.”

  She was close enough that he could smell her hair, her skin. He didn’t smell perfume, just clean healthy human, and whatever scent there is that tells a hindbrain a woman is nearby. She was maybe ten years younger than Helt and her eyebrows were dark wings above her large eyes. In the moonlight, he thought her eyes were gray.

  Helt felt lonely. He was lonely. He had no one special right now, and hadn’t for a couple of years. Well, four, actually.

  “I’m disappointed.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just tech. I wanted to think it was magic.”

  “It’s sufficiently advanced to seem so. To a deer.”

  “Clarke’s third law. Advanced technology looks like magic. Did you ever read any of his novels?” Helt asked.

  “No. I came across that quote once and liked it.”

  The novels had been written in the twentieth century. The 2209 Helt lived in was very different from the future the old dreamer had imagined. Humanity had stayed at the edge of disaster, as ever, and survived some of its own failings—so far.

  “I’m Elena,” she said. “Biosystems.”

  “Helt. Systems Support.” He wondered why he’d never met her. He wondered how long she’d been on board.

  They started walking toward Athens tower.

  “Thirty-three and thirty-five will be leaving the herd soon, out for a tour of enforced bachelorhood,” Elena said. “The stags will see to that. I needed some blood from them. We monitor hormone levels, nutrition, muscle mass, many other things.” She spoke standard Omaha English, but there was a touch of hesitation, of indrawn breath, before some of her words. “These yearling bucks have stayed with their moms a bit longer than we expected,” Elena said. “If they’re developing normally, their testosterone levels should be lower than they were a few weeks ago. Rutting season is almost over.”

  Helt didn’t mind a discussion of testosterone levels at all. His were rising a little, and he decided to take her willingness to play biology teacher as a positive sign.

  Beneath the support pillars of the towers, the ground was in permanent shadow. People walked there because it was easy. Nothing much grew underfoot. Helt thought of giant mushrooms, blind insects, cave-adapted species, spooky creatures made of old fantasy. Perhaps he would avoid mentioning them to the SysSu techs. They might manufacture some displays to jump out and go “Boo!” Just because they could.

  “Are you worried that the deer won’t be guy enough for their jobs?” Helt asked.

  “That’s what I’m checking. They have a lot of adapting to do,” Elena said. “They seem to be thriving at half-g. They love to jump, but we’ve seen no broken legs yet, so they’ve sorted that out. They can’t be really wild with this much human contact; there’s taming, of sorts. They don’t get shot at, so they don’t flee us the way their cousins back home do. And there aren’t any large preda
tors to give their adrenals a workout.”

  No large predators, except for humans. When it came time to thin the herd, to harvest venison, would Biosystems establish a hunt? Would running the deer become a sport on Kybele, good for working off human frustrations and sharpening the survival skills of the herd? Surely Biosystems had thought of this, and had made a list of pros and cons. Helt would look to see what they were, later. “Do you think the fear of getting eaten would keep them healthier?” he asked.

  “Perhaps. They are active without that, so far. They play. The males battle each other. But there’s so much to think about. Maybe they’re missing mosquito bites, or something,” Elena said.

  “You’re teasing me,” Helt said.

  “Yes.”

  “Please tell me you won’t put mosquitoes up here.”

  The woman named Elena looked up at him and smiled. He still couldn’t tell exactly what color her eyes were. The lights near the elevator door made them look sort of hazel, maybe. Her plaid shirt was black and white and gray.

  He hoped she liked men who were sort of sand-colored all over. He hoped she didn’t mind a five o’clock shadow with a few white whiskers in it. He hoped she didn’t mind that his hair looked like someone had cut it with a pair of office scissors, for that’s what he had done four days ago when he’d noticed it was falling in his eyes.

  Helt wished the walk had been longer. He liked Elena. Walking with a woman beside him felt good.

  The elevator was large enough for twenty. There was no good reason for him to stand really close to her as it took them down from Center, so he didn’t.

  The doors began to slide open on Level One. “Could we keep talking?” Helt asked.

  “I really have to get back to my lab before my blood gets hot,” Elena said. She looked down at the thermos bottle clipped to her belt, tapped it, and walked away. She was going toward the train station that would take her back to Stonehenge, he supposed.

  But he’d seen a little smile at the corner of her mouth.