South Coast (Shaman's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1)

by Nathan Lowell

  He didn’t enter the cottage proper, but went directly to the shop. He lit the stove and stoked it up to a small blaze. He wouldn’t be there long, but wanted to take the chill off. His half-carved gull rested on the bench. He settled down with it and worked on freeing it from the stick. He smiled at it, thinking of the broad reaches of open ocean to the south, and the long journey the gulls made twice each year. In less than a stan, he had freed the gull and found a lovely bit of purple shell for the inlay work. He worked it carefully into the wood, then tucked the gull into his pocket for later.

  He checked the sun and found that there was still time before he would meet his mother. It was a sunny day, and the tide was right for a short gather. Banking the fire and closing the dampers, he left the shop and headed for Sandy Long.

  The breeze from the ocean carried a freshness, a sense of greenness that it hadn’t had in the depths of winter. The summer was not far away and the short spring season was racing by. The morning frosts had burned off long ago and the beach stretched out before him. He struck out at a leisurely pace, letting his path swerve from stick to shell, from rock to wood. Several small pieces of wood and shell went into his bag. As he walked, his thoughts went to his father. He was almost amused to notice that he thought of him, not as he was–locked helplessly in the pod at the clinic–but rather as he must have been, walking alongside Grandfather Benjamin on this very beach.

  Otto had seen pictures of his grandfather, so he could almost envision the rangy youth that his father had been. There was a photo of the two of them hanging on the wall in his parent’s bed room. His father wore a broad brimmed hat pushed way back off his face and a leather jacket. He smiled from under a full head of hair. Grandfather Benjamin was the color of oiled wood with an ivory smile, and shockingly white hair down to his shoulders. He was smiling and his eyes crinkled in a way that made Otto feel good whenever he saw it. They did look alike. Grandfather’s mouth and chin echoed in the youthful Father.

  He could almost see their echoes walking ahead of him down the beach, almost hear their conversations still riding the ocean’s breeze.

  “How do you know which one to take?”

  “You just pick up the pieces that speak to you and leave the rest.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “You have to listen to the world, Richard. It’s what a shaman does.”

  Otto imagined the residual frustration was almost palpable on the wind, even decades later. Or maybe he only confused it with his own experience.

  An oddly shaped bit of wood caught his eye and he picked it up, holding it to the light and turning it. At first he didn’t know why it had attracted his attention, then he saw the figure in it and grinned broadly. “There you are.” He brushed the loose sand from its surface, and smiling, slipped it into his pocket. He looked out to sea at a line of gulls fishing along the shore, then turned back to the cottage.

  He got back to the clinic just before noon. His mother was where he’d left her, her head down on the pod, and her eyes closed as if sleeping. As he walked up to the entrance to the cubicle, she spoke without opening her eyes. “I can almost hear him.”

  “Who? Father?” Otto asked.

  “No. Benjamin.”

  The medtech came over. “You really don’t need to sit there,” she said again. “That can’t be comfortable.”

  Rachel smiled, stroking her hand down the side of the smooth autodoc pod. “No, it isn’t, but it is comforting.”

  The medtech smiled. “You can go home. We’ll call you. He’s making progress but we’re not going to open the pod until tomorrow at the earliest.”

  Otto noticed that another amber light had turned green. “He’s getting stronger.”

  The medtech looked over the instrumentation one more time. “Yes, his vitals are good. The brain functions are well within parameters. We’re still picking bits of toxin out of his tissues, but the dendrite regeneration is going very well.”

  “Come on, Mother, I’m hungry and I saw the special at Rosie’s is shepherd’s pie today.”

  “Oh, your father loves her shepherd’s pie! He’ll be so jealous to find out what he missed.” Her stomach growled loudly and she gave a real laugh. “I suppose I better eat. Some of Rosie’s shepherd’s pie sounds lovely.”

  Otto held out his arm. She used it to pull herself to her feet.

  Otto faced the pod. “We’ll be back, Father. Don’t go away.”

  The medtech laughed and even his mother chuckled a bit.

  As they walked to the diner, Otto asked, “What does he say?”

  Rachel looked at him blankly. “Who?”

  “Grandfather Benjamin.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t really hear him.” After a moment she added, “He was a tremendously patient and wise man, Otto. I wish you could have met him.”

  “I do, too, Mother. I think it would have helped.”

  The mood at the diner, felt subdued. Everybody felt the effect of having one of their own small community in the pod. Rachel found it comforting, in a way, to have the community around them. The atmosphere of shared pain removing the onus of having to mouth the platitudes, “I’m sorry,” and “Be strong,” and “I’m sure it’ll be fine.” They all knew about box fish. They all knew the fear, the pain, the anxiety. They shared it like the air, filled with the scents of herb, spice, meat, and wool. They didn’t need to speak of it. Many of their friends stopped to say hello and to wish them well—quietly, respectfully, genuinely. Everyone knew that the next one could be them, or a loved one. The village was a large, perhaps slightly dysfunctional, family after all. Richard was no less one of them for being Rachel’s husband and Otto’s father. For being their shaman. They all felt it.

  After lunch, standing in the lane outside, Rachel and Otto had to decide whether to return to the clinic or go back to the cottage.

  The chill sun beat down, casting more warmth here, out of the wind. They didn’t speak. Didn’t discuss it. They could go back to the clinic, but the buffers of pod, people, and medicine did little to provide comfort. Without a word, Rachel turned for the cottage, pulling Otto in her wake, his staff rattling and thumping as they paced off the distance.

  Chapter Thirty

  Aram’s Inlet

  March 18, 2305

  Jimmy walked back into the office just after 8am to find Tony already there. The four hour nap had helped, as had fresh clothes and a shower. Tony was there already. He nodded to Jimmy, grunting his good morning. He poured coffee from a fresh Beanery container on the worktable and nodded at the box of pastries.

  “Barney sent this over for us. Figgered we’d need it.”

  “He was right.” Jimmy poured hot coffee into a mug and took a bite out of a granapple danish. He stood in the middle of the room and surveyed the charts, maps, and photos all around the walls. He chewed methodically through the danish and the information. He sipped his coffee and tried to let the whole thing just sort of percolate.

  “Did we find anything?” Casey asked as she came through the door, looking devastatingly awake in a fresh blouse, jeans, and a pullover fleece. Her hair was still damp from her shower and she had a wide eyed alertness that left Jimmy envying and admiring in equal measures.

  “Fresh coffee and danish,” Tony said. “But fishing grounds, no.”

  “Oh, we found some new banks, yesterday, I thought!” Casey said, filling her cup while trying to look at the walls and not overflow.

  “There’s a bit there,” Jimmy said, “but on the grand scheme of things, not enough to matter.”

  “Well, Billy had good data from the fisheries model, at least,” she said.

  Jimmy snorted. “Yeah, we can only fish twelve boats a day on the Pumpkin. That gives us a dozen or more we could use somewhere, if we had somewhere to use them.”

  Tony slumped in a chair, cradling a cup between his hands and inhaling the warm steam rising out of it. “It’s right in front of us, Jimmy. We can’t see it.”
>
  Jimmy sighed. “Yeah, I got that feeling, too.”

  Casey said, “Can we get him back here?”

  “Who? The Ole Man?” Jimmy asked.

  She shook her head. “No. Billy.”

  “He ran all the numbers last night,” Jimmy said. “We could redirect about half the fleet to fresh grounds if we had someplace to send them. He left the list for how many boats can fish every one of the banks and grounds in the database.” Jimmy sipped his coffee and shook his head slightly. “He’s a clever kid.”

  “He figured all this out from writing a game?” Tony asked.

  Casey grinned. “Yeah. It was pretty cool, too. That’s why you should get him back here. We might be able to use his game to fill in the fisheries model with the boat characteristics and figure out how many boats we need to make the quota based on his new projections.”

  Jimmy blinked a few times trying to wake up. “We sent him home around ten o’clock last night. If he’s smart, he’s sleeping in.”

  Carruthers burst through the door. “Box fish poisoning in Callum’s Cove day before yesterday. I just got the report.”

  Tony blanched and Casey cursed in a most ladylike and delicate fashion, if the lady in question were an offshore fisherman, which she was.

  Jimmy asked, “Who?”

  “Alan said it’s the village shaman.”

  “What?” Jimmy asked. “Krugg? I didn’t know he was a fisherman.”

  Carruthers glanced at Tony. “He wasn’t until this quota thing came up. He was one of the few people they could put up as crew for the new boats we sent last fall. They were out on the Kelp Bank and he got tagged on the arm, just above his glove.”

  Jimmy sighed. “Poor bastard. Does his wife need anything? We’ll cover the funeral, of course, but anything she needs? Is she an employee?”

  “No, he’s alive. It just brushed the skin and the air-rescue flitter got him ashore in time for treatment,” Carruthers said.

  “You’re kidding,” Jimmy said. “That’s the first bit of good news I’ve heard for a while.”

  “He gonna be all right?” Casey asked.

  “Don’t know,” Carruthers said. “Alan says they’ll probably let him out of the autodoc tomorrow. The medtechs are being cagey about it.”

  Tony snorted. “Medtechs are always cagey. If they don’t tell ya anything, they can’t be wrong later.”

  “Thanks, Carruthers. Keep us posted, okay?” Jimmy said.

  Carruthers nodded and backed out of the office.

  “Well, that’s a kick in the pants,” Casey said into the awkward quiet. “A shaman, too.”

  Jimmy shrugged. “People with nerves, just like anybody else.”

  “Jimmy, there aren’t any more grounds,” Tony said after several long ticks. “Where the hell are we going to get the fish?”

  Jimmy sighed. “I don’t know, Tony. I just don’t know. Call Jake and have him send Billy up, again. Let’s see if his game can help.”

  Casey grinned. “I bet it will.”

  While they waited, Jimmy called up all the satellite scans that he’d asked Janie Pritchard for. He dimmed the lights and projected them on the wall to see if the larger scale would give them any better insight. Halfway through the second one, Billy walked through the door.

  “You wanted to see me, Jimmy?”

  Tony brought the lights back up and they all sat down with fresh coffee and pastry.

  “Here’s my problem, Bill,” Jimmy said. “I need more grounds for the boats to fish on if I’m gonna make the quota. I can’t find any more grounds. You studied the database to make your game, right?”

  Billy shrugged. “It was just a game.”

  “What kinda fish can we catch that aren’t on the grounds?” Jimmy asked. “Are there any fish stocks in the database that are commercially viable, but we’re not going for because we’re too busy draggin’?”

  Billy pondered for a few ticks. “Well, I never understood why we weren’t harvesting the shellfish.”

  “We do,” Tony said.

  “Only for local consumption,” Billy said. “You can get clams, mussels, crabs, even a kind of shrimp and lobster here. We don’t take them in commercial quantities because, well, they take specialized gear.”

  Jimmy nodded. “Yeah, clams are impossible. They’re just not thick enough, but mussels, we could cultivate them. Why aren’t we?”

  Tony said, “Transportation. We take the fish we can transport.”

  “Mussels can be shipped,” Billy said. “Even frozen. Might take a little more processing, but there are ways to do it. Shrimp would be a lot easier.”

  “Are there viable shrimp stocks?” Jimmy asked. “Why aren’t we catching shrimp?”

  “Mostly it’s gear changes,” Billy said. “Different net, different rigging, and it’s a limited season. You have to get them when they’re schooling up in soft shells. They shed in the early spring so you really only have a short season, but it’s in December and January, when most of the boats are wrapped in storage.”

  “Nobody wants to be out in the open ocean during those blows, Billy,” Casey said.

  “True, but these are coastal fisheries. We’re talking within five kilometers of shore, not out in the open. I bet there’s commercial populations right here in the Inlet. Sardines and pilchards, too. Those are everywhere and school up in the shallows here in the late summer. You can see them from the headlands, roiling the water for square kilometers.”

  “Why aren’t we fishing these stocks? Is there no market?” Jimmy turned to Tony.

  “Oh, there’s market for shrimp and sardines, no problem,” Tony said. “We just have been deep water trawlers since the Combine started developing the planet. We’ve always specialized in the bottom fish we get on the grounds.”

  “And you learned all this from making a game, Bill?” Jimmy asked.

  He looked a little uncomfortable, and mumbled down into his coffee cup. “Well, yeah. In order to make it more like real fishing, I got the fish population data from the Combine, along with the fisheries development model. I started looking around and realized we have all these other fish that nobody’s fishing for. I added them into the game, but they weren’t very popular.”

  Casey spoke up. “Yeah, the variety was amazing. There’s kinds of fishing I never even heard of in that game.”

  Jimmy looked to Tony who only shrugged in return.

  “Okay, Bill. Here’s my problem,” Jimmy said. “I gotta meet an impossible quota.”

  “I heard about that,” Billy said with a grin.

  “We’ve been running up toward seven hundred fifty metric megatons with the current fleet. Some years a little more, some years a little less.”

  Billy whistled. “That’s a lot of fish.”

  “Yeah, well, this year we need twenty percent more.”

  Billy blinked. “Nine hundred metric megatons?”

  Jimmy sighed. “About that. We feed a lot of people. It takes a lot of fish. That’s why we spent the day and most of the night looking over the maps. We’re looking for new fisheries that we can exploit immediately if not sooner.”

  Billy shrugged. “Well, not this year for shrimp and sardines, but they might add fifty to the mix based on the estimated stocks in the database.”

  It was Jimmy’s turn to blink. “Fifty what?”

  “Metric megatons,” Billy said. “Maybe more, maybe less. We’ve never really gotten a confirmation on the populations.”

  Jimmy sat back in his chair, and squeezed his head between his palms while he looked at the ceiling and counted to ten. “Tony? Would you take Bill down to Carruthers and get him on the payroll. Director of Fisheries Development. When we’re done here.”

  Billy looked startled. Tony grinned, but Casey whooped.

  “I’m a waterman, Billy, but you know more about the big picture of fishin’ on this whole planet than any eight fishermen I can think of, and that includes the Ole Man. We need ya, and we’ll make it worth your while,
but we have to fill that quota by the end of October, and we really only have the draggers to do it with right now.”

  Billy looked dazed by the whole turn of events, but as Jimmy spoke, he focused on what he was saying. “Okay, Jimmy. How do we do that?”

  “I don’t know yet, Bill,” Jimmy said. “I’m still trying to ask the right questions and get some meaningful answers.”

  “Basics,” Tony said. “Given the new production projections you worked out yesterday, how many boats do we need to work to make nine hundred metric megatons?”

  “Standard boat?” Billy asked.

  “No, use the real number for a stern trawler, seventy-five metric tons,” Jimmy said. “I need to know how many more boats your father needs to make me.”

  “Can I borrow your terminal again?” Billy asked.

  Jimmy jumped up from the desk and ushered Billy into the chair. “Please be my guest.”

  Billy sat down and started slapping keys.

  “How long do you think it’ll take to figure out?” Tony asked.

  Billy looked up at him. “Forty-two thousand.”

  “What?” Tony asked.

  “Forty-two thousand boats,” Billy said. “That’ll give you about nine hundred metric megatons by the end of the season.”

  “That can’t be right,” Jimmy said.

  Casey was looking confused, and even Tony was startled.

  “Bill,” Jimmy said, “can you double check that? See if you lost a decimal place somewhere?”

  He shrugged and went through the calculation a little slower. They could see him double checking and moving deliberately through the calculations. He sighed. “No. No mistake. Forty-two thousand boats.”

  “But, Jimmy,” Casey said, “Didn’t you tell me we’ve got something like eighty-thousand boats in the fleet?”

  Tony and Jimmy just stared at each other in disbelief.

  “How?” Jimmy barked.

  Billy just looked bewildered. “Well, it’s simple division. You need nine hundred metric megatons, a boat can catch a little over twenty-two thousand metric tons in a season. Divide it out with the real numbers and it works out to forty-two thousand. What with rounding and the actual landings capacities, it’s not quite as many.”