Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  Well, nuts to that. With “benign piracy,” Morris Kazenstein already had one oxymoron in play, so why not go for another? Even given the triple constraints of practicality, physical law, and the humble conservationist stance it was pledged to defend, who said the Yabba-Dabba-Doo couldn’t be a merry man-o’-war?

  Morris had done his best. Intended to be as much an ark as a combat engine, the giant-economy-size sub could have carried two hundred people with ample breathing and elbow room for all. But an ingenious set of labor-saving and centralized control devices held the crew to fourteen, and even that was padding it. This left plenty of space for a research library, gymnasium, cybernetics and machine shop, full veterinary surgery, and eight-person hot tub, not to mention free-ranging mascots of every description. The Yabba-Dabba-Doo was also the only sub on record to contain an arboretum.

  It was via that scenic route that Philo now traveled, moving forward towards the bow, passing through several watertight doors and stopping for a friendly tussle with Borneo Bill, an orang-utan who had once rocketed into orbit aboard a test flight of the Trump Shuttlecraft. A final self-sealing hatchway gave access to an area that on a more conventional sub would have been claimed by torpedo tubes and other battle machinery. A wave of damp, rich air and greenery greeted Philo as he entered; the motif this season was South American rain forest, and the enclosed biosphere was crammed with near-extinct flora destined for ecological safehouses. The sound of the hatchway drew the attention of a three-toed sloth, which swung a weary gaze in Philo’s direction. A wall of vines parted and Jael Bolívar, the sub’s Kuwaiti-Latino biologist, poked her head through to say hi.

  “How’s the green business?” Philo asked.

  “It’s fucking humid in here,” Jael told him, tugging at the front of her T-shirt. “How ’bout we switch to African veldt after Thanksgiving? The Doolittle Gang are busting a baby elephant out of Ringling Brothers and they’re going to need a place to put it.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Morris about that one,” Philo delegated. “I’m not sure he’s ready to open up the whole bow again. Maybe he could rig you a fan . . .”

  “Morris can go screw. I mean he may be kid dynamite on an Electric Drafting Board, but every time I ask him to help with some grunt work he says he’s too busy to get his hands dirty.”

  “I’ll speak to him about it,” Philo promised. He grabbed a vine and climbed up to another hatchway. This was not the easiest way to get to the command deck, but for Philo it was the most physically satisfying. Feeling spry and pleasantly sweaty, he arrived in the control room to find Morris conferring with Norma Eckland, a former executive producer for the Fox Network who now served as the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s chief of communications.

  “Morning, Philo.” Norma raised a hand.

  “So what have we got?”

  “Take a peek.” Morris gestured at the periscope. Philo peeked. Eight miles away, as measured by the ’scope’s rangefinder, a ship was rounding the tip of Long Island. He pressed the magnification stud in the periscope’s handgrip and read the name off the ship’s bow: South Furrow.

  “Steel hull,” Philo observed. “Looks like an icebreaker.”

  “Just came out of Bath Ironworks in Maine,” Morris said.

  “What are the specs?”

  “Hold on,” said Norma. The Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s main computer had the entire World Maritime Registry on file, and Morris updated it regularly. Norma fed the information directly into the periscope sight:

  South Furrow

  WMR#1078626, Icebr. class

  Registered U.S., Gant Industries Inc., Antarcticorp Div.

  Spec.: 429 ft., 20500 tns., 100000 max. hp

  Oper. Assignment: Gant Mineral Research Site, Antarctica

  “Told you you’d like it,” Morris said.

  “Why was it launched so late in the year?” Philo asked. “It’s already springtime at the South Pole, shouldn’t it be down there by now?”

  “It shouldn’t be anywhere now,” Norma Eckland told him. “The Coast Guard commissioned it to replace the Polar Dream, then had to back out when their budget was cut. Gant offered to take it off their hands if he could have it by November.”

  “Harry’s sending a lot of extra muscle and equipment south this month,” said Morris. “Sounds like the president finally gave him a green light to start drilling. The other Treaty nations aren’t going to like that.”

  “They aren’t going to have a chance to not like it,” Philo said, “because that icebreaker isn’t getting anywhere near Antarctica.” A bobcat rubbed itself lovingly against his ankles; he stooped to scratch its chin. “Call battle stations. And send somebody to wake up Twenty-Nine Words.”

  Twenty-Nine Words for Snow

  The Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s boarding party had grown up at Mrs. Butterworth’s Home for Unfortunately Displaced Indigenous Orphans in Osceola, Arkansas. His legal name there was Ringo Beefheart—after Mrs. Butterworth’s two favorite musicians—but the other children, half-blood Plains Indians, mostly, called him Ringo Igloo. Having had enough of that by his fifteenth birthday, he’d gone over the wall one summer night and into the Mississippi. A homemade raft fashioned from Styrofoam peanuts and a mess of Hefty bags carried him all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, by which point he was starving, delirious, and raving at imaginary waiters to bring him whale blubber and ice cream. Fortunately the Yabba-Dabba-Doo was passing through the Gulf on its first extended sea trial. Philo and Morris picked Ringo up just a few hours before a tropical storm would have erased all trace of his existence. He was taken aboard the sub, fed, and taught ecology. Now he subdued entire ship’s crews for a living, a better career than he could ever have hoped for in Osceola.

  While Ringo was still in her care, Mrs. Butterworth had done what she could to instill him with a sense of his ethnic heritage. Regrettably, her sole teaching text in this endeavor was a 1992 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia. The Eskimo entry ran only ten pages, from which Ringo gleaned what he could, further supplementing his knowledge with snippets from National Geographic specials and a video of Nanook of the North.

  The word eskimo, he learned (Mrs. Butterworth reading to him in the playground while the other children shot suction-cup-tipped arrows at one another), was an Amerind term for “eaters of raw meat,” though his Canadian Eskimo forebears called themselves “Inuit,” or “people.” Ringo didn’t know which name he preferred but liked the fact that he had a choice. He was also determined to become an eater of raw meat himself. At the Home, where the children were fed pork chops three times a week by an anti-Semitic nutritionist, this meant a constant flirtation with trichinosis, but on the Yabba-Dabba-Doo Philo lectured him about the dangers of parasites and introduced him to sushi. A proper ethnic diet being thereby established, Ringo got to work tailoring the rest of his lifestyle.

  Eskimos were hardy people who lived in sub-zero temperatures without a shiver. They built houses of ice and caribou hide and never bathed. Morris Kazenstein thought Ringo was kidding when he asked to have his sleeping quarters chilled to minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit, but then got caught up in the technical challenge of the design. After clearing out and insulating a double stateroom, Morris rigged up a chemical-free acoustic refrigeration system. Artificial snow was scattered on the floor; a waterbed installed, frozen, and wrapped in imitation walrus skins; and an igloo constructed around the waterbed. Morris insisted Ringo wear a biomonitor during his first night in the room, to warn of hypothermia, but he took to the cold like a true son of the Arctic and woke twelve hours later refreshed, home at last.

  “But you have to bathe,” Philo told him.

  “Inuit never bathe,” Ringo insisted.

  “They do on submarines, at least if they want other people to talk to them. Make the water ice cold if you want, but you shower once a week.”

  “He’s nuts,” Morris said, when told of this latest development. “Not even sexually repressed people take cold showers on purpose anymore.”

  “Hey
,” replied Philo, “you’re the one who just spent a week figuring out how to put an igloo inside a submarine. All he did was talk you into it. So who’s the nut?”

  Nuts or not, he was happy. Happy at long last. All that remained was to find a new name for himself, one more fitting than Ringo. He remembered what the World Book had had to say about the Inuit language: “The Eskimos of most regions had more than one word for most objects. For example, they had many words for seal. The choice of one of these words depended on whether the animal was young or old, on whether it was in water or on land, and on a number of other circumstances.”

  “What about snow?” he’d wondered aloud to Mrs. Butterworth. “How many words do they have for that?”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Butterworth had guessed, “I’m sure they have at least twenty-nine.”

  So much for Ringo, then. He was and would be evermore Twenty-Nine Words for Snow, hunter of the frozen north, subduer of big things swimming in the sea.

  The Show

  “Ready for surfacing,” Morris Kazenstein announced as the Yabba-Dabba-Doo closed within a quarter mile of the South Furrow.

  “What’s the weather like?”

  “Couple other ships about,” Asta Wills called from the sonar bay. “Fishing boats, nothing to give us trouble. Latest word is the Coast Guard’s busy with a tanker accident farther down the island. Our sheila’s unprotected up there.”

  “No spy satellites due overhead for the next twenty-eight minutes,” Norma Eckland added, consulting a printed timetable.

  Philo rubbed his palms together. “Ozzie, bring us in and surface alongside them, but leave enough room for maneuvers if they decide to ram us.” Osman Hamid, the helmsman—in his youth the fastest taxi driver in western Turkey—grinned like a bandit and spun the annunciator to Full Speed Ahead. “Norma, begin jamming procedures as soon as we’re up,” Philo continued. “Assault personnel and media crew stand ready.”

  Marshall Ali, the sub’s costume designer and trainer in arcane Kurdish martial arts, helped Twenty-Nine Words suit up. “You have your body armor on, yes?” Marshall Ali was a fanatic about the essential Zen qualities of bulletproof padding.

  “I’m wearing it, but I don’t like it,” Twenty-Nine Words said. Over the armor he had on a fake polar bear skin, complete with fanged head. Great outfit, but hot as hell even without the layer of armor—and the temperature outside was a sweltering forty-five degrees Fahrenheit. “I’ll probably get a heat stroke.”

  “You are not allowed to get a heat stroke. And you have to wear your armor.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when you go into battle you must always assume your opponent will be ruthless, and take every precaution. Also, I am bigger than you and will beat you about the face and neck if you do not do what I say.”

  “Istanbul!” Osman Hamid cried. Though he understood commands intuitively, he spoke no English and used the name of his hometown as an all-purpose expletive. Morris translated: “Surfacing, Philo.”

  “Jamming all S.O.S. channels,” said Norma.

  “Match speed and stay parallel with the target,” Philo ordered, studying the South Furrow through the periscope. Crew members were running around the deck, pointing at the sub and giving the dread cry: “Yabba-Dabba-Doo ho!” “Launch the helicopter wing. Norma, start transmitting. It’s showtime.”

  Aft of the sail, where the missile deck would have been located on an ICBM sub, openings appeared in the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s green and pink hull, and a swarm of model helicopters rose into the air. Each about equal in size and mass to a winged hunting dog, the choppers were computer-remote-controlled and painted in a variety of cheery Day-Glo colors. Most mounted high-definition television cameras for use in the upcoming broadcast, but one group of four shared a special cargo borne aloft on a network of quick-release cables: a gigantic lemon meringue pie, ten feet in diameter.

  Once the remote helicopter wing was airborne, another, larger whirlybird was raised to the launch deck. Christened a Flying Zodiac by its inventor, Morris Kazenstein, this chopper was just big enough to carry one unfortunately displaced indigenous orphan. As Twenty-Nine Words lifted off, Marshall Ali appeared on the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s observation bridge atop the sail, shouting guttural phrases of encouragement: “Bruce Lee! Chuck Norris! Sonny Bono!”

  Meanwhile, Norma Eckland had raised a telescoping transmitter dish and interfaced the Yabba-Dabba-Doo with the North American Satellite Computer Net, bypassing a dozen security barriers to pull the plug on the Turner Soap Opera Network. Con Edison’s main billing computer was told to institute an immediate power shut-off for lack of payment at Turner Broadcasting’s New York studios; automatic switching facilities at cable television companies across the continent were instructed to accept an alternate transmission; and just to be obnoxious, every pizza parlor on the island of Manhattan received a faxed order for a double-anchovy pie to be delivered to Harry Gant’s office at the Phoenix.

  Morning devotees of Dog Eat Dog—having tuned in to learn whether Donna would seduce Chad to keep him from telling what he knew about Tama, or simply toss him into one of the batch tanks at her aunt’s nerve gas factory—saw a burst of static, then a computer-graphic rendering of the Dufresne pirate logo, a hybrid cross between an ecology symbol and an Amish hex sign. A synthetic brass band played the theme from Global Village Bandstand while the ageless voice of Dick Clark gave the intro: “And now, live from Planet Earth, it’s time for another daring daylight raid by that champion of unspoiled nature, your pirate and mine, PHILO DUFRESNE . . .”

  Canned cheers, the roar of the crowd at the 2017 Super Bowl when Brenda Bamford scored the winning touchdown for the New York Jets. The Yabba-Dabba-Doo made a brief on-screen appearance, from which Norma dissolved to taped scenes of the aforementioned unspoiled nature: wide glacial expanses, clean white Antarctic landscapes, Mt. Erebus rising against a crystalline sky.

  “Morning, world,” Philo said, having donned a set of earphones and a throat mike. “Philo Dufresne here, acting today on behalf of the Seventh Continent. Thought I’d let you in on some disturbing rumors I’ve been hearing—rumors that American oil and mineral interests have convinced a certain second-term president to authorize the exploitation of Antarctic resources, despite the fact that he doesn’t have the power to authorize that, not without an act of Congress and the majority support of fifty-two other countries. Now it’s a little early in the day for rhetoric, so I’m going to spare you the usual party line about saving a piece of the wilderness for our grandchildren; likewise I’m not going to say a word concerning the possibility of armed conflict if those fifty-two other countries decide they don’t like having a treaty broken . . . none of that, I just want you to look at these pictures we’re flashing you and see if you don’t agree with me that Antarctica is a pretty place. Harsh, yes. Cold, you bet. But certainly nicer in its current state than those places where the blast-and-drill companies have already been hard at work.” Norma cut to a montage of Alaskan oil disasters: dead birds drowned in the slicks in Prince William Sound, lovesick caribou running from the ruptured Transalaska Pipeline after the ’quake of ’02, fudgy black tides marking the 2020 blowout in Bristol Bay.

  “Now I know what you’re probably thinking,” Philo continued, as Norma returned to the pristine Antarctic vistas. “Sure it looks nice, and everyone loves penguins, be great to have some living in your neighborhood, but. . . what can the average person do? We’re going to give you some suggestions along those lines later in the program, but I did want to tell you first that I understand that feeling of helplessness. Some mornings I feel as if Earth’s problems are just too big, and I haven’t got a clue where to even begin.

  “Then there are other mornings, like this one, when I wake up, look across the waves, and see a ship belonging to my old pal Harry Gant”—cut to a long shot of the South Furrow—“and I say to myself, ‘Philo, you may not have all the answers to saving the world, but why not start by sinking that goddamn boat? Sink it for
the penguins. Sink it for the grandchildren of America. And may God bless us all.’”

  Morris flipped a switch and the cargo helos released the pie. The remote cameras captured its descent in super slow-motion, frame by frame down a long arc to splatter across the face of the icebreaker’s pilothouse. “That one was just for you, Harry,” Philo said. Up on the sail Marshall Ali brought a water cannon to bear and began hosing down the South Furrow with whipped cream.

  Twenty-Nine Words flew in fast and low, letting his on-board targeting computer aim the Zodiac’s Electric Harpoon. He was happy in his natural element, stalking a seafaring quarry many times his size, and only for one guilty second did he wish the ship were a whale, the Harpoon a real killing spear tipped with stone. He let fly as he crossed the stern of the icebreaker, skewering a fat gray cable at the base of the South Furrow’s radar mast. The Harpoon struck and spliced like a hot needle probing the spine of a catfish; the hardware package in its shaft fed a paralyzing series of virus programs into the ship’s navigation and control systems. The big boat shuddered and began to slow down.

  The Zodiac shot over the pilothouse and dropped down, almost into the path of the whipped cream stream; Twenty-Nine Words stuck out a hand, pulled back a fistful of sugary white fluff. Smearing his mouth with it, he brought the whirlybird around, settling it into a low hover above the icebreaker. He flipped on the autopilot and unfurled a flag from beneath his seat. Then he jumped.

  Whipped cream already lay three feet thick on the deck amidships; it was like falling into a mattress of cotton candy. Twenty-Nine Words came up laughing and waving the flag, which bore a small but proud igloo on a white field. “I claim this tub for the Inuit people!” he shouted.

  He found himself surrounded by an angry detachment of the South Furrow’s crew. Twenty-Nine Words had seen the deckhands of other ships respond with laughter to the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s attack, but these folks were clearly bad sports. “C’mon, lighten up,” he told a big burly fellow who was actually growling. “I know it’s a little embarrassing, but it’s for the good of the environment.”