by Lee Baldwin
On the hallway floor, a piece of paper. Scanning the lines she sees it’s a prayer or a poem. Her own handwriting, but she can’t remember writing it, sometime very late at night, no doubt. Could be one of her old spells. Slips it folded in her jeans.
Downstairs in the kitchen she peeks outside, sees Clay moving in the shop. Pulls out a couple of beers. With her fingers fishes a pickle from a jar in the fridge, walks out to the workshop. Clay looks up from his laptop, tools and a scatter of airplane parts on a workbench.
“Well. Good evening.”
“Don’t get cute I been workin’.” She hands him a bottle.
“Now this is weird. I was just thinking I’d come in and have a beer with you.”
“What’s this?” It occurs to Tharcia that she hasn’t been inside the shop since he completed it months ago.
“It’s a 1977 Mace R-1 single seat racer. I’m restoring it.”
“But this one has a motor. You don’t fly motor ones.”
“I will when it’s finished.”
Tharcia absently licks her dripping pickle, washes down the taste with a swig of beer. “You gonna race it?”
“Might take a lesson. Mainly I’m rebuilding it for sale.”
“Mm.”
“What are you up to?”
“Conversing with the dead. Trying to. Doesn’t seem at all dependable.”
“Still texting the departed? Anyone we know?”
“Yeh. It’s interesting though. Someday maybe I’ll give you a tour of my temple.”
Amused expressions cross Clay’s face, digesting what Tharcia’s temple tour might take in. Reading the words on her T-shirt, he’s certain women buy those to make sure men look at their boobs. Or in Tharcia’s case, to make women look.
“Sure, show me.” He follows up the stairs to her room in the quiet hallway. At a walking pace she turns the knob, splats against wood, bounces off.
“Hey!” She rubs her shoulder. “This thing’s stuck.”
Clay tries the knob, it turns reluctantly. Sound of something cracking, tinkly things falling to the floor in there. Clay puts his shoulder to it, rams it once. Looks at it, gives it a harder shove. Door pushes in a few inches, something stops it. Darkness in the narrow opening. A cascade of cold into the hallway. Clay reaches through the door for the light switch. Reaction jerks his hand back fast. Like he touched something hot. But that’s not it.
“Dayum! The wall is covered with ice.”
Tharcia looks puzzled. “It was all normal a minute ago.” Clay kicks the door a couple feet inward. Hallway light illuminates the small room. A sharp intake of breath. Tharcia tries to see past his shoulder. Everything exactly as she’d left it, except that walls, ceiling, and floor are bound in a two-inch layer of crisp blue ice. Clay runs downstairs for a light. In the torch beam her made-up bed, her dresser with the vials of scented oil, altar candles, the dagger, dressed and inscribed candles, her incense wand, the arcane books. All are encased in ice. The open window, in spite of the bright afternoon, is night black.
Clay runs a hand over the frozen wall. The ice is completely dry, no sign of melting. He picks up a jagged piece that broke off when he forced the door. Like a shard of freezing rain. They stand in the hallway, not speaking. Their breath mists white in the air. Tharcia has a sudden urge to pee. Clay remembers something.
“Babe, tell me about stuff that gets moved in your room.” He can see the whites of her eyes, a horse about to bolt.
“Little things.” Breathing high in her chest. “Like someone pawed through my drawers, a sketch book open to a different page. Papers rearranged. Tarot cards spilled out.”
“But this ice,” Clay says, at the bottom of his voice, unable to finish the thought. He pulls the door hard closed until the latch clicks. Outside on the porch all is peaceful around the home, natural sounds of wind and forest animals.
Clay and Tharcia thoroughly inspect the house, walk the property. Inside and out, the old bunkhouse seems normal, no eerie noises or marauding ghosts. Nothing out of the ordinary. Only her room is affected. The deep freeze, Tharcia’s fucked-up spell. She does some web searches, a hopeful thread, that kind of thing not necessarily permanent.
Tharcia gets on the phone with Althea, who’s pleased to hear from her, and immediately concerned about the freeze-up in her bedroom. Althea comforts her with useful advice.
“Tharcia, what I am hearing from you is some kind of belief you hold.”
“Something I believe?”
“Yes. It is possibly not an external force, but a projection of your inner reality.”
“Hold up. I am making this happen?”
“There are two things. Either it is a genuine demonic presence, which may not even be evil, it could be benevolent. Or, it is something that you think should exist there, for reasons of your own.”
“So what do I do?”
Althea knows that if it’s Tharcia’s projection, then any suggestion will work. “Gather some ferns from the woods, any winter flowers if you find them. Tie them in a bundle with rawhide or a leather shoelace. Put a drop of lavender in it. Hang it from the door. That will keep the spirit contained. Soon it will fade.”
“That’s it?” From her reading, Tharcia understands that intention goes a long way in dealing with spirits.
“That’s all you need to do. I’ll make a few calls. I might know someone.”
Tharcia does as Althea suggests, and soon there is a neat bundle of green ferns with small white blossoms tied to the door, which is firmly closed. The lavender a calming fragrance in the house. Gradually she and Clay become okay with it, waiting for the ice to fade away.
Clay doesn’t mind her sleeping bag on the edge of his big bed, or at least he says he doesn’t. Tharcia wonders what Dr. Novack would make of it, if she told, even as a dream.
Ooh, sleeping on daddy’s bed. Bad girl!
Lust for a Woman
Out of the shower, bath towel around his waist, Mark Hermon nervously opens his second beer of the evening. His fingers tremble. He had lied to the Homicide cop. Stupid. Stupid. He does not know why, does not understand what made him blurt out the part about the restaurant menu, which now lies on the made-up bed in his small apartment, the detective’s white card beside it. Hermon had pocketed the paper as he got the pretty woman’s car open and started the engine, so there was no point in mentioning that to a cop. Tell him now? No, safer to just shut up, get rid of the thing.
Hermon picks up his phone, flips through the images. Yes, he had clicked off a few photos and a short vid of the raven-haired goddess with the fancy car. But he sure as hell did not hurt her. He didn’t want to admit he was sneaking photos of her to look at later. God, she is so damn pretty.
Actually, there are more than a few images in his phone. He’d got her from several angles, face, boobs, her curvy butt in the short skirt as she leaned in the passenger window. Beautiful, so beyond a guy like him.
He figured it like this: she’d been with someone, written her number on the take-out menu, guy forgot to take it. His loss my gain. Hermon believes if he looks at the photos long enough, he’ll get up nerve to call the number. But what the hell to say! How can a body shop mechanic making sixty grand a year catch a break with a class babe who drives a late-model Aston?
A sound, he turns. Two figures stand together, shoulders hunched strange yet beautiful, bathed in light. How did someone get in? Hermon’s last conscious thought is he should be afraid, but he’s the opposite of fearful. He is mesmerized by this bright swirling vision. His legs weaken, he drops to his knees, collapses forward onto the floor. Last thing Mark Hermon knows is an image of a woman’s lovely face.
Procession
The Japanese government is forthcoming with its information, the United States Navy not only willing but insistent to take command of the area. Comprehending a message somehow tattooed onto the flanks of a full-grown blue whale took some doing, but eventually bubbled up through Japanese political and military channels. Cont
rary to earlier reports, the Japanese had not hunted this whale. The ship was not a whaler, but a scientific drilling platform on mission to obtain deep seafloor rock samples off Antarctica. This whale had hunted them.
Following ever closer in their wake for fifty miles, the massive animal swims abeam the 200-meter ship, lazing on its side. Astonished crewmen excitedly read and photograph the extraordinary markings. Written in graceful calligraphic Kanji of brush-stroke form, the message is clear. It provides a latitude and longitude, a date and an hour. A position in the southeastern Pacific, a time two days later.
Two U.S. Navy carriers and four battle cruisers are within range. They bring with them advanced sound recording equipment, ultra-def still and video cameras, as well as subsurface imaging tools. The fleet of six ships and numerous support aircraft are on station hours before the appointed time. Remotely-piloted submersibles with sensors and cameras wait at the preordained location.
Submersible operator Ron Lloyd, a specialist in marine mammal studies including the blue whale, sits at a control console aboard a U.S. Navy battleship, making final checks of his panel. A mile off the battleship’s port bow, his remote craft, Debra, is behaving normally. Propulsion system, comm system, cameras function properly. He and four other remote pilots are in the rotation to operate this, one of three submersibles deployed for… what? No one has informed them why they are here. They’re only told to be ready, below the surface, on station. Two of his fellow submersible pilots stand behind him in the cramped quarters, not speaking, allowing Lloyd to concentrate. Tangible excitement throughout the control station.
Lloyd, an independent whale researcher who has made blue whale study expeditions to distant Pacific locations such as Yap and Ulithi, Midway, Tonga and Costa Rica, had been flown in by helicopter for a mission that was described to him in the most oblique fashion. Hover and wait. His flight yesterday had caught up with the Navy fleet in mid-Pacific, bound for a particular location Southeast of Guam. Only after he was aboard did he see photographs of the blue whale from the Japanese research crew. At first, Ron Lloyd was outraged. Who would dare place graffiti on the body of a blue? What next, he scoffed, we’ll be using them as billboards?
Learning of the unusual markings for the first time, it took some explaining for Lloyd to comprehend that a human cause is unlikely. The markings are not cut into the 90-foot whale’s skin, they are on the surface, a skin discoloration, a tattoo. Although the combined resources of the CIA and U.S. military intelligence still investigate, there is no chatter or other indication of a human source. To Lloyd’s practiced eye, the coloring is a natural variation in skin tone, the marble-like mottling which blues normally exhibit. Natural, that is, except that the Kanji forms on this animal’s sides are sharper of outline than usual markings. Beneath the graceful characters, an orderly row of iconic forms that seem to indicate whales in a long procession. Still suspicious of the cause, Lloyd is keenly interested in what the glyphs could mean. Are they, as some Navy personnel indicate, a type of invitation?
An announcement over the commlink. A number of blue whales have been spotted from the air, location twelve miles east. Excitement rises. A video image appears on Lloyd’s monitors, aerial shot from a helicopter. Lloyd is shocked at the behavior he sees. The whales swim in a circle, counterclockwise on the surface. They are not herding krill. He counts fourteen animals, each among the largest he’s observed, at least 100 feet from nose to fluke.
“Never saw blues behave like this,” Lloyd mutters.
“Debra crew, can you say again that last transmission?”
Lloyd looks over at the other pilots, both Navy. They give encouraging nods. He’d forgotten the submersible pilots are live on the commlink, and are being recorded. Lloyd clears his throat.
“Ah, in eighteen years of blue whale study, I have never observed animals swimming in circles as we see here.”
Abruptly, Lloyd and the others tense. In the aerial view, one of the whales breaks out of the circling formation into a straight path. The next animal follows, and the next after that. The huge swimmers now proceed arrow-straight, a line half a mile long. A call over the commlink, a helicopter crewman.
“The pod is on a southwesterly heading. They will intercept the fleet location in approximately four minutes.”
On the monitor, the aerial view slews away from the line of blues, centers on another group of whales that circles slowly, waiting. Lloyd counts twenty-six whales in this pod. He turns his attention to Debra’s scanners.
From beneath the waves, the submersible’s main display is an unbroken view of green subsurface haze, shafts of sunlight flicker downward. And there, outline forming from the gloom, a majestic blue whale, swimming directly at the submersible. Lloyd maneuvers Debra to clear the animal’s path. Debra’s companion submersible momentarily appears in the view. As the animal approaches, all can see that the whale’s sides are covered with rows of neatly-formed Arabic numerals.
Lloyd maneuvers Debra’s cameras to sweep the entire surface of the animal. The commlink is completely silent. Lloyd moves in close, cameras at full magnification. The numeric markings are the same skin coloration as the Kanji photographed by the Japanese research vessel.
Another whale follows a hundred yards astern of the first, and another and another in stately procession. All are tattooed with long sequences of integers. Completing the train of ponderous animals, the last whale bears no markings of any kind.
The excited voice of a helicopter pilot. “Slew northeast, there must be eight hundred blues out here.”
The helicopter video picks up other groups circling near the original location, counting eight, twelve, thirty, as many as 100 of the stately blue whales in each ring. Each group in turn breaks from its circle into a uniform line, proceeds along the same even course toward the waiting fleet. The whales appear on the surface at a steady pace, group themselves in orderly fashion a few miles out, and swim toward the unmoving ships. The tension breaks, excited calls spread among the 3300 crewmen of the fleet.
Passing at up to five each minute, the stream of majestic animals is steady, ponderous, and calm. Voices aboard the fleet drop to reverent whispers. In the end, the procession takes more than twenty-seven hours to pass. In all, seven thousand and sixty-nine blue whales swim past and are photographed. The sides of most animals are covered with numbers.
Officers and many crew are sleepless during the eerie passage. Fourteen hours into their vigil, an officer reports to his fleet commander.
“Sir, we have background on this gathering. It is extremely surprising.”
“Everything about this is surprising. Tell me something that makes sense.”
“Captain, this procession includes, so far, about one-quarter of all blue whales on Earth. Over three thousand have passed by already. The nearest population group is the Antarctic, but it numbers only two thousand, approximately. Some of these whales are from farther away.”
“Where do they go when they leave this position?”
“Everywhere sir. They separate into small groups and go every direction. They dive and disappear. The whale scientist, Lloyd, recognizes individuals from every migratory group in the Pacific. They come from unknown directions before they form up in their circles. After they pass, they depart toward all headings. We’ve launched flyovers of usual concentrations. We find many fewer blues in those locations at this time.”
“What are these numbers written on them? Are we photographing them all?”
“Yes, sir. We have multiple cameras recording the complete body surface of each whale. We plan to radio-tag one hundred. The animals tolerate the submersibles well.”
“So, what are the numbers?”
“Sir, we think it is a coded message.”
“Who from?”
“The whales, sir.”
“We have a coded message from thousands of whales?”
“Sir, other than that, we have absolutely no idea.”
Deep Intel
A hastily-called face meeting at General Solberg’s office in the Pentagon swing space. The building hums with intensity. Strand is shown inside even as Solberg ushers a Navy admiral to the door.
“Yes,” the general is saying, “that data and all photographs are hyper-secure. The information is encoded. A very small team will be working on that initially, under armed guard.”
“We can handle it, Ralph. You need us on this.”
“Point taken Stephen. You do realize an enormous amount of data could be represented there? Few computer systems in the world have adequate capacity to manage that volume of data. Few teams have the tools and techniques to develop that information. Results will emerge as fast as there is capability.” Solberg’s eyes flicker briefly in Strand’s direction as he eases the Navy man out the door. Turning back, Solberg gets right to it. He motions Strand to look at his laptop. There on the screen, a photo of a blue whale, along its flanks thousands of numbers lie in neat rows. Strand’s eyebrows chase his hairline.
“Chris, I need Next History on the whale data immediately,” Solberg whispers with a glance at the door. “A number theorist monitored the photos as they came aboard fleet command. She thinks it's a coded message. She estimates over 140 million digits in that sequence. It will require serious compute power to pick it apart, assuming it means anything. Mass storage and numeric techniques, tools such as Next History uses. I want your team to take it on if you have the bandwidth.”
Strand nods, scratches the back of his hand. “We’ll make it priority, Ralph. This suggests deeply coded information. When can we acquire the datasets, the film?”
“We’re assembling the complete sequence on DVD for you, along with all the original photographs, a structured database with tags and keys.”
“What other groups will have it?”
“That’s just it. There will be none. We’re treating this Security Alpha. Too much of what's happened since our courtyard visitor appeared has gone live on the Internet. We cannot afford that with the whale data. The accountability comes down to you and your team. And to me. I want your smallest possible group in contact with this data. None of your people can have access to all of it. Break it up somehow so that no one person can view the entire dataset.”