“Our arrangement,” Baldur said slowly, “includes whatever I want it to include. I expect you to learn more about him and keep me updated.” By the end of the twelfth hole Eoin was down a dozen strokes and just wanted to go home.
It wasn’t until after the fifteenth hole that Baldur brought up his next concern. “I’d like to get to know that girl you gave me.” Even Eoin recognized that he had not given Ariel to anyone, and had no power to do so, but he wasn’t about to correct Baldur. He went for a wary “What do you mean?”
“What it sounds like. You put a pretty girl on my project; I’d like to get to know her better. Surely you don’t object to that?”
“What you do with your free time is your business, and what she does with her free time is hers,” Eoin said in as agreeable a tone as he could manage.
“Don’t be silly. Her boss can direct what she does with her free time and we both know it. I’m going to have my yacht brought over to Dun Laoghaire Marina next week and then I am going to fly over here the week after and invite her out for a ride. I want you to make sure she agrees to go with me.”
Eoin said nothing. He picked up his club and a ball and walked up to the tee. He took a deep breath and made the swing of his life. The breeze caught the ball just right and it rolled onto the green, tumbling slowly to within a few feet of the hole.
He turned to face Baldur. “I don’t mind encouraging Ariel to spend time with you and get to know you. But know this. I will not make sleeping with you a requirement of her job. If you make doing so a requirement of mine, then Ullow will have my resignation. Period. There are a few things a decent man just does not do, and pimping would be one of them.”
Baldur seemed amused, and whether it was by the uncharacteristically good tee off or by the equally uncharacteristic bit of rebellion, was not clear.
“Well then, let’s both hope that Ariel accepts your encouragement to get to know me better,” he said.
At the end of the game Eoin lost by twenty strokes, but he felt like he had won something else. Even so, he couldn’t see any way that this thing between Ariel and Baldur could ultimately turn into anything but a disaster for everybody.
******
Ariel and Siarnaq communicated more often than Ariel would have expected. He liked to send her little things to make her laugh, stories that would be best appreciated by someone who had her skills. She felt like her life had more stress than his and her ability to find humor in the situations around her wasn’t as well developed. Nonetheless she tried to respond in kind by sending stories back, and by early June they had a working long-distance friendship going. He had not brought up Mikkel again, and for that she was grateful. Finally the subject came up at the end of a text message.
“I also have contacted another person who knows of Mikkel and does not like what he is doing either. I do not want to lie to you so I will tell you. His name is Baldur and he is your client.”
What? Ariel went from mildly amused at the preceding anecdote to furious in less than a second. How would Siarnaq even know about Baldur? Then she froze.
All that time lying side-by-side, with her viewing the lives of the Inuit of three centuries in the future while Siarnaq picked up the broad brush details that were his forte—but thanks to her he picked them up for once about people of the present day. More than anything, he picked up people that mattered to her. Of course he had seen Baldur, gained some knowledge of him. He could easily have gleaned animosity between Baldur and Mikkel as well.
“Not acceptable! This is my career you are fucking with!” Ariel was in no mood to use nice words and she typed with a staccato anger.
The words “This is humanity I am trying to save,” came back in seconds.
“Fuck humanity,” Ariel muttered it as she started to type it, then she stopped herself. That sounded horrible. On the other hand, why exactly should she, or any human for that matter, make their own life one bit more miserable for the sake of people three-hundred years from now? And how much misery did it have to be and exactly how much better did those people’s lives have to become before she was being an asshole?
She wasn’t even sure how much she believed that what Siarnaq saw was likely or even inevitable. How much did she believe that he was on a path to do some good? A lot of good? How much did and should she care if her species never saw the year 3000? Seriously, what did it matter? Her children’s children would be long gone before then, if she even ever had kids.
A bunch of strangers die. It happens every day. So what if it was all of the strangers? Did she believe someone out there was keeping score, would mark us as a failure as a species if we didn’t at least make it to the paltry fifty-thousand-year mark as a sentient life form?
At that she laughed. This was too much philosophy for Ariel. She tried for another response altogether.
“Your enemy’s enemy may NOT be your friend,” she typed. That was a good response, she decided. “Baldur may be as dangerous as Mikkel. Be careful.”
“I will.” It came back right away. “Thank you, sunset hair. I will try to cause you no trouble at your job.”
******
Zane called the next night, and Ariel thought that she knew why. He opened the conversation with the good news that all was well with their little sister Teddie, who had returned home safely from India and added that it looked like all that Teddie had been involved in was ending well.
“The need to be careful about what we say to each other is no longer there, due to her situation.” Ariel was pretty sure that she heard the emphasis correctly. Okay, Zane didn’t want her to jump in and start talking about Toby and his website. Was the whole world getting paranoid or what?
After a few more pleasantries Zane remarked that he had recently had a great visit with an old friend who sent his best and was very happy to learn of Ariel’s recent decision. This friend thought that Ariel needed to use caution, but suggested that any information that she came across would be appreciated. What was more, if she could manage to convey the full hypothesis of a colleague she had mentioned, and better yet provide his supporting evidence, that would be even more helpful.
“He’s an odd duck,” Zane chuckled and moved the conversation right on to law school and how difficult and yet boring it was to him. “All this memorization of stuff that can be found so easily now. I swear the legal world is still stuck in the nineties. “
“Hang in there, Zane.” Her genius brother already had a neuroscience degree and now was hoping to move into the world of medical ethics. Most learning came so easily to him, but he had no patience for busy work, and Ariel hoped that he would stick it out in law school. He had a lot to offer if he could get through the drudgery part.
“I will. Uh, be careful out there Ariel. I’m not sure that you and I grew up fully appreciating just how nasty some people can be.”
“Thanks Zane. I think I get that part these days, but I’ll keep an eye out.”
As Ariel hit the call end button she realized that only the night before she had been ready to sell out her whole species just to keep her own life from getting more complicated. Or had she really? If so, wasn’t that as nasty as a human could get?
She was tired of these questions and decided that a cold beer might help. Maybe two.
******
Nell looked at the pile of clothes on her bed and laughed out loud. It looked like someone had dumped the random inventory from a second hand clothing store into her room, and in effect that was what had happened. There was very little that hadn’t been purchased at a thrift store, she noticed. She could hardly have afforded to dress in new clothes for all the roles that she played. Cillian gave her a generous allowance for costumes, but she tried to save that money for looking the part of his sexy actress friend. The rest of her ensemble could make do with hand-me-downs.
It had been a while since Nell Gallagher had appeared in any theatrical production, and anyone who cared largely assumed that her recently renewed relationship with the rich Ci
llian McGrane was the cause. They were right, just not in the way that they thought. Cillian and Nell had always had the ideal platonic relationship between a man and a woman, the kind born of at least one person being attracted to their own gender. Nell didn’t fancy men much, except as buds, and Cillian had plenty of potential bedmates but was in a position to need all the true friends that he could find. Once they had picked up their college-days friendship like it had never lapsed, Cillian had offered Nell the role of her life working for him. After she heard why he needed her, she accepted the part.
She had three or four characters that she resorted to the most often, and that made it a little easier. Most of them were used briefly as couriers, delivering goods and information that was best not trusted to others. Her most used character, however, the one that really mattered the most, was luckily not all that different from Nell herself and, therefore, was easy enough to sustain for long periods of time.
Her creation Murna was a pretty Irish woman who liked women and made her living as a fake fortune-teller in Donegal. She saw to it that Murna was in town and practicing her profession on a fairly regular basis, so that enough locals could vouch for the fact that Murna was real. The truth was that Nell got a kick out of inventing attempts to see the future, given the real fortune-teller she found herself spending time with these days.
Murna’s new age interests took her to a number of fairs and conferences, several of which had been in Reykjavik—considered a premier location for such things. Luckily Cillian had already managed to learn that the reserved receptionist for d4 had a private soft spot for aura readings and working with crystal vibrations. A pretty fortune-teller from Ireland with a bit of a gypsy style about her was exactly Hulda’s type.
Nell always did her homework, and after the second conference together she had landed in Hulda’s bed, where she now was a welcome and fairly frequent visitor. Away from the office Hulda turned out to be smarter, funnier and nicer than Nell would have guessed, and the line between acting and genuinely enjoying was now quite blurred. Subterfuge worked best that way and Nell knew it, but the more she learned to care for Hulda the more she dreaded the inevitable end of her role. Ah well, that was a worry for another day.
Today’s problem was a bit sticky in its own way too. She needed to be a young male, and land a job as a temp at the Marina outside of Dublin. Hulda herself had provided the information that Baldur was having his yacht brought over. Nell wanted to get assigned to working around that yacht, using the opportunity to learn what she could.
Then her sweet Icelandic lover had uncharacteristically complained about her boss. Hulda confided to Murna that while she was willing to ignore Baldur’s ongoing conceit and arrogance, she was concerned that he seemed fixated on taking some young woman out on his yacht. Hulda got the impression that this lady might be forced to acquiesce to the boat ride and more, for business reasons, and that offended Hulda to her very core. So she had called Murna and questioned her at length about the Irish police and their attitudes and whether this young woman would likely find the legal system helpful in the worst of cases and did Murna think maybe Hulda should do something more.
Nell, as Murna, listened sympathetically and assured Hulda that surely the situation couldn’t be that bad. As soon as she heard the young woman’s name, however, it had taken considerably more acting talent to remain disinterested. Why in the world would Baldur, a man even his secretary described as having a low thermostat when it came to sex, be so insistent on taking Ariel on a romantic little jaunt out to sea?
Nell decided that she not only had to be part of the crew, she had to be along for that particular ride, and she had to be so well camouflaged that Ariel could look right at her and suspect nothing. Nell tore through the pile of clothes on the bed, seeking just the right look.
******
Siarnaq was glad that the man had been able and willing to travel to Nuuk. Ariel had made a good point. It was possible that this enemy of his enemy was every bit as untrustworthy as his own cousin, and possibly far more ruthless. Siarnaq thought that if he could look this stranger in the eye, he could better judge whether he, and the entire human race, were better off aligned with this foreigner.
Baldur was sure that he could gain the Inuit man’s cooperation over time, one way or another. Eoin had been proof of how easy it was to gain the obedience of a good man, if you did it very slowly. You needed to make a serious enough threat to the well being of someone they cared about, and require just a tiny infraction to remove the large danger. The decision had to be easy. Then over time, the threats could grow less while the requests grew larger, until the good man was so complicit in the process that he harmed himself more than anyone by trying to extricate himself from the situation.
Not that Eoin hadn’t asserted a little uncharacteristic independence out on the golf course the other day. Baldur wasn’t worried—he found it a bit amusing. Pimping was such an ugly word. No wonder Eoin balked once he considered the instructions in that light. Future directions regarding Ariel’s availability to Baldur would need to be given more obliquely. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be needed at all.
Baldur prided himself on being flexible. This trip proved it. He had never been to Greenland before, and frankly he would have been happy to keep it that way. But the Inuit man had insisted that they meet in person. So, what the hell? It was only an overnight trip.
Baldur exited the small plane and walked straight out onto the runway at the tiny airport in Nuuk and laughed. This was a nation’s capital? It was hard to imagine that there was anything up here worth coveting.
Siarnaq reached out his hand without thinking. His experiences with Ariel were unique as far as he knew. He never expected the surge of electricity that left him confused and almost helpless as soon as his fingers were less than a centimeter away from Baldur’s hand. Had he ever been touched by a Taser, he would have put the sensation in much the same category.
Baldur responded to the reach for a handshake without giving it much thought. He usually wore gloves, but had removed them once the day turned unusually balmy. With years of practice he had become less responsive to physical touch and more so to the feel of an electronic device. Flashes of the next few seconds seldom jolted him now when he shook hands, so he couldn’t have been more surprised when a dull low roar vibrated into his body like an earthquake rolling beneath him. He fought to keep his balance.
The two men eyed each other carefully. “We have to talk,” they said in unison. And so they did.
Baldur returned home amazed that he could possibly have been so naïve. Not only was there at least one person out there who appeared to be able to see weeks ahead, there was another who claimed convincingly to see through the centuries. Why had this possibility not occurred to him?
Baldur saw Ariel’s gift as potentially useful, but could not imagine what good Siarnaq’s ability could possibly be. What a nuisance to walk around obsessed with the end of the world. No wonder the man seemed more than a little peculiar.
What mattered was that this obsession with the world’s end had led Siarnaq to some crazy crusade to isolate his people. All well and good. Baldur could have cared less whether the Inuit retained their old ways of life or not. But that obsession had led to a hatred of a cousin who seemed hell-bent on doing the opposite. This cousin was moving machines into the far north and secretly training the Inuit to use them, and Siarnaq wished to stop this cousin at all costs. Siarnaq claimed that his need to stop his cousin had lead him to seek out the man’s potential enemies.
That had turned out to be excellent. The cousin was none other than Baldur’s competition, the tagalong investor Mikkel who seemed to be amassing wealth too fast to explain.
Baldur supposed that all the money was being funneled into the modernize-the-far-north campaign that this man led, which did seem like a colossal waste of resources, not that humanity hadn’t already found endless ways to take perfectly good money and blow it up in wars and otherwise piss it awa
y. Baldur didn’t like waste, and he would have thought more of Mikkel if the man were doing something productive with his money, like using it to grow more wealth.
But not all humans were as rational as Baldur, and he frequently had to remind himself of that. Others squandered fortunes on charities, political ambitions, and inevitably futile efforts to make the world more to their own personal liking. Baldur knew better than to waste his money on any of those things.
What mattered now was that he now knew what Mikkel was up to. If the man needed to be stopped, and it looked like he did, then Baldur had a second alternative. He could go after Mikkel’s investment firm or, if it turned out to be more efficient, he could now go after Mikkel’s pet project. Possibly it could be sabotaged gradually and used to drain Mikkel’s resources. Possibly it could be destroyed outright, leaving the man with no need to carry on. Either way, having options was better.
He had promised Siarnaq to stay in touch with him, and that he would work to bring Mikkel down. Siarnaq, for his part, had promised to pass along any further information that he learned, and had been genuinely thankful for the assurances.
Baldur wouldn’t go so far as to say that they parted as friends, but they had at least parted as two men with a common objective. And Baldur had to admit that he felt a little sorry for the guy. What a burden to live with. All that doom. Poor man.
Siarnaq said farewell to Baldur, amazed that he could once have been so naïve. Not only was there at least one person out there who appeared to be able to see events from her own life just weeks ahead, there was another who claimed convincingly to see clearly only seconds into the future. Why hadn’t this possibility occurred to him?
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