10.
Throwing a Donner Party at Sea
(5/13/2114)
Today is Friday, though for many aboard the village barges scattered about the globe, and so on the Argyle Shoestring, the distinctions between days and weeks and months tend to blur. But not for Ahmed Andrushchenko, who obsessively marks off each date on calendars he makes himself. Bartleby Johnson has never seen the point of it. Sure, the tier farmers and hydroponics need to know the growing seasons, and there are still those who celebrate Christmas, Ramadan, Easter, Chanukah, all the host of High Holy Days, Boxing Day, Launch Day, goddamn May Day and St. bloody Valentine’s Day. There is that peculiarly nostalgic minority. Johnson, he figures it’s the norm ashore, that the terrestrials rejoice as a matter of course. But it’s raw on the waves, and most old ways have been set aside for the monotony of the deep. Today is Friday, and he’s repairing the aft solar-sail array. It’s tedious work – especially with such jerry-rigged replacement parts – but it beats to hell and back passing the afternoon with Ahmed. His latest tiresome obsession is the trans-Neptunian object 90377 Sedna, which by his calculations (and century old astronomical charts) has recently overtaken the dwarf planet Eris as the farthest known celestial body orbiting the sun. That, and news of the civil unrest in the Greater Republic of India.
Better, thinks Johnson, that I spend however many hours dangling from this catwalk, suspended above the abyss with a wrench and spanner.
He is undeniably fond of Ahmed. They’ve been quarter mates for eight years now, ever since Johnson came aboard in Portugal. But the prattle wears on one’s nerves and wears thin. So, times like this he is grateful to be a mechanic, frequently called out to keep this ramshackle cobble-together from breaking apart to scatter across the waves and send them all to the drowning.
Johnson is replacing a shot rivet at the base of the heliogyro when the sirens sound that mean another vessel is coming alongside. He uses both feet to shove off the hull, swinging his harnesses around for a better view. It’s an FS Navy ship, a high-speed trimaran wearing the name Silver Girl. Never a good sign, the Navy bothers sending a trimaran this far from littoral. A voice booms from the Silver Girl’s loudspeakers, notifying the barge that it will be boarded in five minutes and to ready the ramp right quick. Johnson curses, takes a firm hold of the crisscross network of safety lines, and hauls himself back up onto the widowmaker. By the time he’s unbuckled, navigated the jibboom and bowsprit, then climbed down to Red Tier, through his spyglass, across two hundred yards, he can see the Navy men are filing onto the barge, two abreast, armed so that it will be obvious to everyone in the village that they mean business. This isn’t some sort of routine inspection (not that they’d ever send a littoral trimaran for an inspection).
It might be that crate of black market quinoa, flax, and soy they bartered for a while back. Or it might be the two fugitives they (very unwisely) gave sanctuary down on the Houston wharves, on a Texas run six months ago. Or it might be…
Ahmed.
Johnson shoulders through the throng of worried, frightened, and curious onlookers blocking his way. He moves as quickly as he possibly can, and once there’s almost a scuffle when he overturns a melon cart. But by the time he’s made it to the front of the crowd, one of the Navy men has hauled Ahmed from below decks and is leading him in cuffs towards the ramp. Ahmed’s head is down, and he doesn’t see Johnson. They take Ahmed Andrushchenko away, and not once is there eye contact between him and Johnson. Two midshipmen in hard-shell hazmat suits are carrying Ahmed’s footlocker with as much care as they would handle a nuke. A major reads off the charges to anyone who cares to hear them, and before half an hour has passed the Silver Girl is rapidly putting distance between them, tacking westward towards shore. In another fifteen minutes, it’s only a glint on the horizon.
On his way back to his quarters, Johnson is intercepted by another mechanic – a hulking Scotsman named Galbraith – who wants to know what the fuck that was all about.
“He was your bunkmate, yeah? Figure you gotta have a notion, yeah? What was in that fucknut’s footlocker?”
Johnson shakes his head, and he tells Galbraith, “No idea. His business was his own. But you swim quicktime, you can ask ‘im for yourself, yeah?”
“You are a lying cocksucker!” the Scotsman shouts after him.
Yes, I am. Yes, I most surely am. But so are we all.
Ahmed traded a box of chips and circuits for it almost a year back, so long Johnson can’t even recall the name of the barge he found the trunk on. But he does remember the contents. Nothing he’d conjured on overly long, and, truth told, he’d not ever thought of the trunk in quite a long while. But now, now, now it was fresh in his mind as that busted rivet on the sail. Mostly there’d only been an assortment of musty old books, a case of roundabouts no machine on a dump like the Argyle Shoestring would ever be able to spin, and an assortment of motion cubes – equally fucking useless. Among the books was a volume on advanced chess tactics and another on cosmological inflation theory, and Johnson, at first, had assumed those were the reason Ahmed had bothered haggling for the lot. Until he’d pulled a shiny lead cylinder from the jumble. There was a Category A UN 2814 biohazard designation pressed into one side and also the lid of the cylinder, along with a date: 18-2-13.
“No,” Johnson had told him, grabbing for the cylinder, no matter how it was scaring him shitless. “That goes right the fuck overboard.”
“Screw you, Bartleby,” Ahmed said. “It’s mine. It cost dear, and it is mine.” There had ensued a tussle that ended in Johnson sporting a newly chipped incisor and Ahmed an eye that would go black and blue as storm clouds. But Bartleby had given up. He threatened to report Ahmed to the selectmen, but that hadn’t made any difference. He threatened never to play chess with Ahmed again, and, again, no dice. Johnson sat on the floor below the porthole, sweating and teasing the damaged tooth with the tip of his tongue.
“You ain’t gonna open that, you crazy son of a bitch. Even you’re not that daft.”
But then Ahmed did pop the seal. There was an audible hiss, and a subsequent series of clicks as the cylinder released the inner capsule. A fog of liquid oxygen or nitrogen billowed from the violated artifact, and when it cleared Johnson saw what had been shut away more than one hundred and one years: clamped firmly in place between steel rods, a glowing tube, maybe thirty-five, maybe forty milliliters. Whatever was in the tube had a pearlescent quality about it, and it glowed ever so slightly in the twilight filling up the cabin.
“You got no inkling what that shit is,” Johnson said.
“Isn’t that the marvel of it?”
“I ought to murder you in your sleep, you bastard. Slit your throat, toss that shit overboard myself.” Johnson hadn’t meant it, but he was frightened, and his tooth hurt, and he has always been apt to blurt such threats in the heat of the moment.
“If you gotta, then you gotta,” Ahmed shrugged, and he gazed in wonder at the pearly tube before shutting and sealing the cylinder again.
So, thinks Johnson, sitting on the edge of his bunk, so somehow the military got word and come for it. Might be they’ve been doggin’ that can around for tens and tens, and Ahmed gets it, and they get Ahmed. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Fuck.”
That’s when Johnson happens to glance at the shelf that holds Ahmed’s books, and right off he notices one, and only one, is missing. The White Queen.
“Fuck us all,” he whispers and lies down and stares at the underside of Ahmed’s bunk. Soon enough, it’ll be someone else’s bunk.
11.
The Spider’s Stratagem
(London, 12/12/2012)
Ptolema taps ash, ash from her first cigarette in fifteen years, onto the polished floor of the Commissioner’s study. The tiles are cut from beds of lithographic limestone near Langenaltheim, Germany, the same quarry where the first specimen of Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861. If the Commissioner objects to cigarette ash on his Jurassic floor, he’s
kept it to himself. Maybe he’s too absorbed in their game of chess to notice, or it may simply be that he doesn’t care. Ptolema takes a long drag, exhales, and considers her next move. The Commissioner takes chess very seriously, and it wouldn’t do to let on that she truly has no interest in whether she wins or loses. It wouldn’t do to put the man in a disagreeable mood this evening, not with her report still freshly landed on his desk.
Ptolema sees that she can win in eleven moves and tries to decide whether or not to throw the game, whether or not it’s necessary, and if he’d know. He is a strange man, even among this bevy of strange men and women, and she has long since learned that second-guessing the Commissioner is a perilous undertaking, indeed.
“That disagreeable woman in Dublin…” he begins and trails off, lifts his black knight, then returns it to the board. “I do trust that you were quite thorough before taking care of her?”
“I’m certain of that, Sir.”
“Ptolema, my dear, no one is ever fucking certain of anything. In all the wide world, there is not a scintilla of certainty.”
Ptolema keeps her eyes on the board.
“I put two bullets in the back of her head, and another in her chest. I weighted the body and sunk it in the river. Unless the Xers have mastered necromancy, you may rest assured she’s out of the picture.”
“I never rest assured of anything,” he sighs, lifts the knight a second time, and, a second time, returns it to the board.
“She’s dead, Sir.”
“And that other one?”
“Her, too. Three bullets, same as the redhead. With all due respect, meting out death is one of the few things at which I excel. I’ve been doing it…seems like almost forever.”
“It wasn’t an insult, Ptolema. You ought to know enough to know that. But I like to hear these things delivered directly from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Paperwork is all well and good, but it cannot replace my ability to glean the truth of a situation from the timbre, the tonality, of a human voice.”
She has heard it said that the old man is a living, breathing polygraph machine. She’s heard it said he’s as good as a syringe of sodium pentothal or thirty seconds of waterboarding. Only an idiot would lie to the Commissioner, but, even within the ranks of their organization there are very many idiots, though their tenure inevitably proves short.
“Understood, Sir.”
“Is it a fact that you once played Wilhelm Steinitz?” he asks her, studying the board, clearly aware of her advantage. “I have heard that, but one hears so many fairy tales.”
“I did,” she replies. “In 1892, before he lost his title to Lasker.”
“And you beat him?”
“No, Sir. Stalemate, after fifty-two moves. Queen versus pawn, but his pawn had advanced to its seventh rank.”
“Still,” he said, “Steinitz. What I would have given just to have seen that game. Now, what about the Twisby woman?”
“It’s in the report – ”
“Bugger the ruddy report, woman. I asked you, did I not? Where do we stand as regards to that slippery bitch?”
“No one’s seen her since the seventh of December when she was spotted in Paris.”
He swears and dithers over his one remaining knight.
“You knew that already,” she says, and he looks away from the board only as long as it takes him to scowl at her. “But, at this stage, she hardly matters,” the Egyptian continues. “Not with a double agent in place on site. We give the kill order, and it’s over. To be frank, I don’t understand why it wasn’t given a month ago. The longer we wait…”
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