As a demonstration of how Waldena’s rant had pushed him to his apoplectic uttermost, he slammed his glass of iced sumac tea on his chair’s wrought iron armrest, sent ice cubes skittering, and opened a nice gash in his palm. Waldena had drawn first blood without even standing up. Another break was declared; Snorri bloodied Eero’s shirt while fending off his ministrations, asking Eero if he and his Varangian girlfriends stopped mid-battle for antiseptic ointments and stitches.
I watched the vein in Snorri’s temple throb and the blood stain spread over his bandage as he endured Waldena’s remonstration. She continued, “Snorri calls himself a whaler. The Finlindians fancy themselves a whaling people. Yet what his people consider whaling would shame even a little Estonindian boy with a homemade fishing pole and a pocket full of worms. It pains me to even hear him utter the word “whale”; it diminishes, demeans the noble leviathan. To think of those pallid dwarf minkes and inbred belugas listlessly bobbing for air in your rank fjords like so many bleating sheep in a paddock—it’s so typically Finlindian. Bred for good behavior and obedience.
“See the world from the whale’s point of view. Lords of the ocean in all of its dimensions—from the sunny surface to breathe, to unknowable depths to feed. Summer in the Arctic, winters off Baja, you have a prick the length of your body and cows waiting for you in every port. You have only two predators—clever apes with boats, and squid. One pokes you from the surface, the other grasps from below. Evade them and you will live nearly a century to see the world, visit your friends and allies in all the oceans, battle your rivals, and see your children grow.
“Your lineage is so ancient your ancestors knew the planet before the continents had moved. The stories of your voyages and battles are written in scars along your back, each creature an epic unto itself. Your voice travels hundreds of miles, your presence known to everyone but your prey. Even before you arrive at the breeding ground, the cows are quivery in anticipation; they’ve heard you singing your name and how hard you’ll fuck them from miles away.
“If you don’t live long enough for your corpse to descend to the benthonic plains, at least you will die nobly, fighting your greatest adversary—the Estonindian. Your flesh, oil, blubber, and bones will be in the hands of men and women who understand your dignity; a people who look upon you with awe and ferocity.
“Now consider the fate of a whale in Finlindia. Each generation of whale punier, more docile, fed on whale kribble grown in a lagoon. How long are you going to live? Ten years? Probably just long enough to have someone like Snorri jerk you off for your sperm before you’re hauled out of the fjord and gutted. What talent does it take to harpoon a whale in a pen? What kind of life is it, isolated from the world to wallow in the same mucky fjord all your days, where everyone is your cousin? You weren’t meant to be kept and herded. You weren’t meant to live in a warm bath full of parasites and feculence. Your flesh wasn’t meant to be flabby; you shouldn’t have to listen to the nonsensical gabble of devolved pathological dwarves who can only moan and whistle songs of inbred decadence and despair.
“What kind of nation turns its back on millennia-old traditions? A people preparing to surrender their identity. To turn away from hunting—something so noble, so proper for our people—and take up herding? Should they just wear their pajamas all day? Join the European Union so you can spend your lives arguing about Brussels sprouts and cheese? Why not just sell yourselves to Sweden or Denmark and get it over with? Why bother going on as a Northern Indian?”
Waldena folded her arms and glared at Snorri. The rest of us watched him too, to see how well his goat had been got. Her point had been made, evidently. Though the specifics still eluded me, I got the gist of her ire. She looked satisfied but still hungry. I wasn’t going to be telling my fellow Thing members, but her speech had given me a bit of a hard-on; she must have floated some pheromones my way. I liked it when she was mad at other people; yet, I still felt implicated somehow. God knows I never tried to raise a whale. All I’d ever done was kill fish and eat them. I’d never even cleaned an aquarium before.
Maybe it was his age or the slantwise wisdom his angler fishlike eyebrows belied, but Snorri righted his temper and steered a straight course through Waldena’s gale. Maybe it was the fact he’d already monkeywrenched the Maiden.
“From the whale’s perspective, Waldena? Does the whale’s umwelt need to include being chased to death by trigger-happy har-poonists who aren’t slaked until they are soaked by the bloody flume from a jabbed whale’s spew hole? Is there room in their umwelt for anything but terror and anguish? I’ve chased plenty of beings to their deaths. How noble am I now? You spoke about the ethos of our people; don’t you think a people should tend to the creatures in their care? Who cares what kind of incantations you make to your prey when you jab it? Not your whale, I’m certain.
“I’ve seen so much blood flow in my life, on and off of Finlindian soil, don’t you think I’ve learned something about cruelty? I don’t need to apologize to my prey. I can dangle my legs over the fjord and yoik about the frisking minkes and the shimmering northern lights, and they will rise to the surface and join my song. And the waters are hardly full of feculence and incest. We breed our whales carefully to maintain stocks that are the whaling world’s envy. No nation on Earth has our talent for it—the whales aren’t puny, they are the optimal size for their lifestyle and ours. They spend their lives in the best whale water on earth. They have nothing ahead of them but safety and fellowship—no worries, no predators.
“And, perhaps, Waldena, you may have noticed your prized free rangers are a sorrier bunch of lone wolves every year. And it’s not because the squid are getting grabbier. They stray into shipping lanes, they get swallowed by Japanese meat-grinder vessels, and if they manage to avoid all the iron leviathans on the surface long enough to grow to adulthood, along come the Estonindians looking to drive a spear through the skulls of the biggest, wisest bulls. And why? They’re mostly blubber and chuck. Most of the meat goes to dog food. Landsmen gain little while whales lose their grandfathers and their links to cetological history. Just to give you all a thrill to make up for your disappointment that your nation cannot master captive whale breeding.”
Mineola harrumphed. “You all set?”
“I am OK,” said Chosen.
Snorri and Waldena, who could not be OK in the same room together, both gave him the stink eye.
“I think this Thing might need more a little more focus,” said Mineola. “I move we foreshorten the historic expiation and cut to the chase.”
“The bitch killed my whale.”
“The bearfucker fouled the Maiden.”
“She hag rode the poor creature to death, and she’s proud of it.”
“Snorri, that thing was literally out of its depth. What you did to that whale was a perversion of nature. They aren’t meant to live that way.”
“Oh, that’s right. So kill it, huh?”
“At least at the bottom, it’s fulfilling its natural purpose.”
“Sure, I’d forgotten the Estonindians think a whale carcass gets protective status and the live ones deserve to die. That’s a little self-serving, don’t you think?”
“Whale carcasses are a vital part of the marine ecology!”
“Right, the ocean needs more dead whales.”
“It does! You Finlindians refuse to accept what the rest of the world knows is foregone—whalefalls need to be distributed throughout the depths to foster new growth of the herds; they are like seed pods for future generations. You pen them up and haul their carcasses to rot on dry land, you are not only stinking up your own country but you’re robbing the ocean of the raw material of evolution itself.”
“Waldena, you’re young, so I’ll forgive your ignorance. That’s not actually how whales reproduce.”
I can’t tell the difference between their native tongues, but I do know a reeling din when I hear one, and they were at it hammer and tongs. Snorri’s snide comment was the last s
traw for constructive dialogue in English. The Koreans blew off English as well and were ignoring us. I looked to Mineola, my fellow Anglophone, for support. She just rolled her eyes.
“I could get a gavel,” growled Mineola.
“No weapons,” said Waldena.
“Gavels are ceremonial totems of justice carried by North American judges,” said Snorri. “Little cudgels they wear under their vestments.”
“No wigs, though,” added Ill John.
Mineola rapped the wrought iron table with her knuckles, “I’m calling us to order. That means everyone shuts up. I think I can settle things between Waldena and Snorri quite easily. What we do is forget that business and move on to our own business. The promise of profit should balance out whatever miscarriages of justice you two have conceived.”
The Northern Indians both grumbled, but Snorri looked pleased enough to be tamed by Mineola, and Waldena was smart enough not to argue with her in her own house. “You have all previously agreed to become a sub-directorship with limited liability of a joint-stock company administered from the top by a presiding council of Northern Indian Whaling Councils representing the nations concerned. Our own group here would be traditionally represented by a board of directors, but since there are no other members, we will simply be the board and I will be the chair.
“Our board has two functions. Snorri has been carrying out the first for over a year now. You know that he and his partners have implanted antennae in a sufficient number of whales to make the cell network feasible, and he is ready to begin road testing it, as it were. His partners were not made aware of the purpose of the antennae and believe that they were part of a scientific study.”
Snorri nodded.
“We have nearly one hundred whales set up with these antennae; we have proof-of-concept that roving nodes are practicable. Next we just have to see if the network holds together as the nodes disperse—or collect, as the case may be.”
Snorri said, “Honeypaws has.…”
Mineola pointed at him. “You’ve had your turn.”
“But I…”
Mini gave him a ‘shut up’ squint. He squinted back, but the ‘shut up’ held.
“The second function of our board is to assemble North American investors,” continued Mineola. “This will begin in earnest next year when we have hard data. This is contrary to typical business models, at least here in America, where we gather investors first and use their money. However we must do it this way, because secrecy is so important—right now, our whales and our intellectual property are very vulnerable and difficult to defend. This is possible due to the fiduciary enthusiasm these pan-national whaling councils have shown for this opportunity—we have a surprising amount of capital. Not only do these councils support the technical developments we are making, they are also eager to keep a good portion of their profits in extraterritorial scientific research, which limits the opprobrium they face in many ports.”
Mini directed her comment about opprobrium to the two Northern Indians, who probably did need to be reminded that much of the world loathed whaling in all of its forms.
“Now that Snorri has begun the field testing, I want to review the roles we’re playing in this endeavor. Waldena has been instrumental in liaising with Estonindian concerns; without their technology and enthusiasm for wild-water whaling, this project would never had got out of the bathtub. She and Snorri will, on the Hammer Maiden and Honeypaws, stay within the network during the testing period. We’re just going to have to find out in the field, or at sea, whether the dispersal and migration models work out in practice. You know we chose this breed of whales for their predictable circumnavigation along the Gulf Stream, and it’s a little too predictable. Waldena and Snorri will be doing a bit of police work, making sure they don’t get poached.
“Chosen and Ill John have been integral to this since the project’s inception. Since they first met Snorri last year, their insight into how to move money internationally without subjecting it to the depredations of taxation has made this enterprise seaworthy, so to speak. Through their own network of floating fish factory ships and continental Koreatowns, our investments will metamorphose from several different forms of currency into dollars that will become, eventually, our company’s dividends.”
I understood that Mineola was talking about money laundering, but I understood the concept about as well as I understood whale fishery. Well, maybe a bit better, since most cash arrangements here on the island were conducted to escape federal and state attention. Of the people on this island who were smart enough to keep books, most were smart enough to keep two sets. But that’s not money laundering. Money only needs to be washed when there’s too much of it, and that’s just laughable on Bismuth. This was a sort of entrepreneurship I admired, but I couldn’t see myself convincing anyone at home they had too much money and that I could get rid of it for them for a fee.
“Our Korean partners,” Mineola continued, “will be leaving soon but maintaining a presence here that will allow them to account for a certain modest cash flow. They’re also going to continue working closely with me on the administration of the company.
“Myself, through my own business and government contacts, I have a good pool of investor stock to choose from. I will involve people of enough importance that they can provide capital and yet keep quiet due the contentious nature and pending legitimacy of this company. I’m going to have to give wide berth to most of this, however. I am much too public a figure to play an evident role in the company. By providing Gaiety as a base I could actualize the network, but I’ll have to keep things very quiet. I’ll need to work with people I can trust and who know how to mind their own business. That’s why we brought you in, Orange.”
I almost bust in to her speech to tell her how good I’d be at shutting up, but managed to restrain myself.
“Orange is going to play an important role for us if he can keep this all in his hat and his hat on his head.”
“And his cat in his bag,” said Chosen, eager to give an idiom some exercise.
“What we could really use here is someone who does not need a passport, someone who can come and go without suspicion. It’s awfully hard for most members of our board to get much closer to the continent than Bismuth without attracting undue attention. Orange, you might be pleased, or maybe even disappointed to know that you are not on any sort of database or registry available to my research staff, and they have some good contacts. You’re not on the no-fly; credit agencies have incomplete records for you; your phone number is listed under your father’s name; your university records misspell your name; and you are not listed as owning anything taxable, not even an income.”
“I am the silent ninja shadow.”
“Don’t get too impressed with yourself. You’re no Buddha, there’s a limit to what you can achieve by doing nothing. We’re going to be asking a lot from you. In return.…” Mini handed me a black zippered document portfolio.
I opened it and found three healthy stacks of American currency, one of which was entirely hundreds. I blew my cool when my stomach growled loudly. “I promise.…”
“Actually, you don’t need to promise anything. Let’s just say I can make Bismuth so small, there will be no room left for you if you betray us.”
What was I going to do, give her back the money? Her threat was annoying, but only mildly so. Every Island imprecation ends with an unsaid ‘and I know where you live.’ Mini was being more gauche than insulting. I knew she was right about my lack of official accountability, but there was still a strange contradiction to it—here at home, everyone knew my employment status, my negligible romantic eligibility, not to mention my address. As long as I kept my troubles offisland, they would froth up a welter of deniability if the suits ever came a-knocking. I gave the stack of hundreds a riffle so I could savor the bouquet as it wafted, zipped the portfolio back up, and told her OK.
“Good. Now here’s the next step. For the first half of September you�
�re going to crew with Snorri on Honeypaws. That will give him a good opportunity to coach you on the network while you assist with monitoring the whales. He’ll bring you back to the Bis this evening and then you’ll set off later next week.”
I saluted Snorri. “Skipper.”
Snorri replied in Finlindian and added, “That’s how we say ‘first mate.’”
Waldena rolled her eyes. “More like Gilligan.”
“This is important,” said Mini, “you’ve got to go back home and establish a cover story. People need to hear that you’re shipping off for a long run. Don’t mention Snorri, since no one on Bismuth would believe he’s a real fisher. I suggest you tell Donny Lucy that you’re hard up for money and are going to work on a Korean processing ship for a couple of weeks. There’s no chance that he’ll keep his mouth shut, and he’ll think Ill John and Chosen have hired you; that will help explain their presence here. You’ll need to behave normally and don’t let it slip that you’re involved in anything else.”
“You’re going to tell me not to spend this all at once, aren’t you?” I said, tapping the portfolio with the cash.
“I think maybe it might be for the best if I hold on to that for now; you won’t be needing it on the Honeypaws.”
“Nope, nope, I got it, OK.” I took the portfolio from the table and held it on my lap.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Double Shift
Even I had to work on Labor Day weekend, thanks to my new role as a sleeper agent on Bismuth. The tourists work very hard to make enough money to come here and give it to us, and it was our responsibility as Islanders to make sure the cash flowed with few obstructions and little value exchanged. I took the Saturday afternoon prep shift in the Topsoil kitchen, hoping to scoot out before the rush. Prepping is significantly cleaner and less frantic than line or dish work. People are still in a reasonable mood and you even have a chance of going home in the daylight.
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