“Oh, yes, they were a dangerous bunch of men,” Singh said, looking back at him, “Are you okay? Are you sure you want to be doing this?”
“Yes.”
“Very good. Yes, they would be standing on the footrope and giving their hands to the sails, reefing them or letting them out, tying frozen gasket knots, and sometimes in most wicked weather. They were quite the athletes, there is no doubt of that. Rounding Cape Horn east to west, that would be a trial for anyone.”
“Some of them must have fallen.”
“Yes, they lost men overboard, no doubt of that. Once a ship lost every man aloft when it gusted hard south of Cape Horn—five men in all. Here we are, at the end. Look at this block, the little runner inside it has pulled itself away from the side. A case of poor manufacturing, if you ask me. Now the line is stuck, and if you tried to reel it in it would snap the line or short the reel. Here now, you can lean out in your harness if you are wanting, you don’t have to hold on like that.”
“Oh.” Tom let go and leaned back in his harness, felt the wind and groundswell swirl him about. Up here you could see the pattern the waves made on the sea’s surface, long curving swells rippling the reflected sunlight. Blue everywhere. He watched the bosun repair the tackle block, asked him questions about it. “This line allows you to bring down this side of the sail. It is called bunting. Without it you can’t use the sail at all.”
Singh concentrated on his screwdriver and the block, swaying about as he worked. He explained some of the network of lines matted below them. “They are beautiful patterns, aren’t they? A very pretty technology indeed. Free locomotion for major freight hauling. Hard to believe it was ever abandoned.”
“Wasn’t it dangerous? I mean, that last generation of sailing ships, the big ones with five and six masts, most of them came to grief, didn’t they?”
“Yes, they did. The Kopenhagen and the Karpfanger disappeared from the face of the sea. But so did a lot of diesel-driven tubs. As for that particular generation of sailing ships, it was a matter of insufficient materials, and poor weather forecasts, and carrying too much aloft. And some design flaws. It was yet another case of false economies of scale—they built them too big. Bigger as better, pah! When you’re burning fuel to transport fuel, then it might look true. Until the ship strikes a reef or catches fire. But if the fuel is the wind, if you’re interested in full employment, in safety, in a larger definition of efficiency, then there is nothing like this beauty here. It is big but not too big. Actually it is as big as those old six-masters were, but the design and the materials are much improved. And with radio, and sonar to look at the bottom, and radar to look at the surface, and satellite photos to look at the sky, and the computer to be putting it all together.… Ah, it is a beauty, isn’t it?”
* * *
They stopped in Corinto, Nicaragua, and had to wait a day to get to the docks, anchored in a long line of ships like theirs. Tom and Nadezhda joined a group going ashore, and they spent the day in the markets behind the docks, buying fruit, an old-fashioned sextant, and clothing light enough to wear in the tropics. Tom sat for an hour in the bird market, fascinated by the vibrant coloration of the tropical birds on sale. “Can they be real?” he said to Nadezhda.
“The parrots and the mynah birds and the quetzals are real. The New Guinea lories are real, though they aren’t native to the area. The rest are not real, not in the way you mean. Haven’t you ever seen gene-engineered hummingbirds?”
Flashes of saffron, violet, pink, silk blue, scarlet, tangerine. “No, I don’t believe I have.”
“You need to travel more.” She laughed at the look on his face, kissed him, took his arm and pulled him along. “Come on, they make some fine bikes here, that’s something you know about.”
A day in a tropical market. Sharp smells of cinnamon and clove, the bleating of a pig, the clashing of amplified guitar riffs, the heat, dust, light, noise. Tom followed Nadezhda’s lead, dazed.
In the end they spent all the money they had brought ashore. The ship unloaded some microchips, titanium, manganese and wine, and took on coffee, stereo speakers, clothing and gene-engineered seeds.
The following evening, the last before they embarked, they went back ashore and danced the night away, sweating in the warm tropical air. Very late that night they stood on the dance floor swaying slightly, arms around each other, foreheads pressed together, bodies all around them.
* * *
They set sail, headed west across the wide Pacific. Endless days in the blue of water and sky. Tom became a connoisseur of clouds. He took more of the geriatric drugs. He spent time in the foretop, he spotted whales and dreamed great dreams. They passed a coral atoll and he dreamed a whole life there, Polynesian sensuousness in the peace of the lagoon.
* * *
One balmy evening Nadezhda’s class met on the foredeck, and Tom described his part in the struggle to make the international agreements curtailing corporations. “It was like trust busting in Teddy Roosevelt’s time. In those days people agreed monopolies were bad because they were bad for business, basically—they cut at the possibility of free trade, of competition. But multinational corporations were a similar thing in a new format—they were big enough to make tacit agreements among themselves, and so it was a cartel world. Governments hated multinationals because they were out of government control. People hated them because they made everyone cogs in machines, making money for someone else you never saw. That was the combination needed to take them on. And even then we nearly lost.”
“You talk like it was war,” Pravi said scornfully. She was one of the sharpest of Nadezhda’s students, well-read, quick-minded, skeptical of her teachers’ memories and biases.
“It was war,” Tom said, looking at her with interest. In the twilight the whites of her eyes looked phosphorescent, she seemed a dangerous young Hindu woman, a Kali. “They bought people, courts, newspapers—they killed people. And we really had to put the arm on the countries who decided that becoming a corporation haven would be a good source of revenue.”
“Put the arm on them,” Pravi said angrily. “You superpowers in your arrogance, ordering the world around again—what was it but another form of imperialism. Make the world do what you decide is right! A new kind of colonialism.”
Tom shrugged, trying to see her better in the dusk. “People said that when the colonial powers lost sovereignty over their colonies, but kept the power by way of economic arrangements. That was called neo-colonialism, and I see the point of it. But look, the mechanisms of control and exploitation in the neocolonialist set-up were precisely the corporations themselves. As home markets were saturated it became necessary to invest abroad to keep profits up, and so the underdeveloped world was subsumed.”
“Exactly.”
“All right, all right. But then to cut the corporations up, distribute their assets down through their systems to constituent businesses—this amounted to a massive downloading of capital, a redistribution of wealth. It was new, sure, but to call it neocolonialism is just to confuse things. It was actually the dismantling of neo-colonialism.”
“By fiat! By the command of the superpowers, telling the rest of the world what to do, in imperial style! Putting the arm on them, as you put it!”
“Well look, we haven’t always had the kind of international accords that now exist to take global action. The power of the United Nations is a fairly recent development in history. So some coercion by powerful countries working together was a political necessity. And at the time I’m speaking of capital was very mobile, it could move from country to country without restraint. If one country decided to become a haven, then the whole system would persist.”
“At that point third world countries would have been in power, and the superpowers would have become colonies. You couldn’t have had that.”
“But the haven countries wouldn’t have had the power. They might have skimmed away something in taxes, but in essence they would become functionaries of
the corporations they hosted. That’s how powerful corporate capitalism was. You just have no idea nowadays.”
“We only know that once again you decided our fate for us.”
“It took everyone to do it,” Tom said. “A consensus of world opinion, governments, the press. A revolution of all the people, using the power of government—laws, police, armies—against the very small executive class that owned and ran the multinationals.”
“What do you mean, a revolution?” another student asked.
“We changed the law so much, you see. We cut the corporate world apart. The ones that resisted and skipped to haven countries had their assets seized, and distributed to local parts. We left loose networks of association, but the actual profits of any unit company were kept within it in a collective fashion, nothing sucked away.”
“A quiet revolution,” Nadezhda said, trying to help out.
“Yes, certainly. All this took years, you understand. It was done in steps so that it didn’t look so radical—it took two working generations. But it was radical, because now there’s nothing but small businesses scattered everywhere. At least in the legal world. And that’s a radical change.”
Accusing, triumphant, Pravi pointed a finger at him. “So the United States went socialist!”
“No, not exactly. All we did was set limits on the more extreme forms of greed.”
“By nationalizing energy, water and land! What is that but socialism?”
“Yeah, sure. I mean, you’re right. But we used it as a way to give everyone the opportunity to get ahead! Basic resources were made common property, but in the service of a more long-distance self-interest—”
“Altruism for the sake of self-interest!” Pravi said, disgusted. Her aggression, her hatred of America—it irritated Tom, made him sad. Enemies everywhere, still, after all these years, even among the young. What you sow you will reap, he thought. Unto the seventh generation.
“Sociobiologists say it’s always that way,” he said. “Some doubt the existence of altruism, except as a convoluted form of self-interest.”
“Imperialism makes one cynical about human nature,” Pravi said. “And you know as well as I that the human sciences are based on philosophical beliefs.”
“No doubt.” He shrugged. “What do you want me to say? The economic system was a pyramid, and money ran up to the top. We chopped the pyramid off and left only the constituent parts down at the base, and gave the functions that higher parts of the pyramid served over to government, without siphoning off money, except for public works. This was either altruism on the largest scale ever seen in modern times, or else very enlightened self-interest, in that with wealth redistributed in this way, the wars and catastrophes that would have destroyed the pyramid were averted. I suppose it is a statement of one’s philosophy to say whether it was one or the other.”
Pravi waved him away. “You saw the end coming and you ran. Like the British from India.”
“You needn’t be angry at us for saving you the necessity of violent revolution,” Tom said, almost amused. “It might have been dramatic, but it wouldn’t have been fun. I knew revolutionaries, and their lives were warped, they were driven people. It’s not something to get romantic about.”
Insulted, Pravi walked away, down the deck. The class muttered, and Nadezhda gave them a long list of reading assignments, then called it off for the night.
Later, standing up near the bowsprit, looking at stars reflected on the water, Tom sighed. The air was humid, the tropical night cloaked them like a blanket. “I wonder when we will lose the stigma,” he said to Nadezhda softly.
“I don’t know. We’ll never see it.”
“No.” He shook his head, upset. “We did the best we could, didn’t we?”
“Yes. When they shoulder the responsibility themselves, they’ll understand.”
“Maybe.”
* * *
Another night he was called down to the communications room to receive a call from Nylphonia. She looked pleased, and said “I think you have Heartech and the AAMT in violation of Fazio-Matsui. Look here.”
The AAMT had put Heartech’s black account into a Hong Kong bank, but the funds were “washed but not dried,” as Nylphonia put it. Still traceable. Some information had been stolen from the bank, and it corresponded perfectly with electronic money orders that had been recorded in passage through the phone system, going from Heartech to the AAMT. It would not be enough to convict them in court, but it would convince most people that the connection existed—that the accusation had not been concocted out of thin air. So it was sufficient for their purposes.
Tom nodded. “Good. Send a copy of this along to me, will you? And thanks, Nylphonia.”
Well, he thought. Very interesting. Next time Kevin and Doris went into the council meeting, they could use this like a bomb. Make the accusation, present the evidence, show that the proposed development on Rattlesnake Hill had illegal funds behind it. End of that.
He thought of the little grove on the top of the hill, and grinned.
* * *
The next dawn he slipped out of their berth, dressed and went on deck. They were tacking close-hauled to a strong east wind, and rode over the swells at an angle, corkscrewing with the pitch and yaw. The bow was getting soaked with spray, so Tom went to the midships rail, on the windward side. He wrapped an arm through the bottom of the mainmast halyards to steady himself. The cables were vibrating. Time after time Ganesh ran down the back of one swell and thumped its port bow into the steep side of the next, and white spray flew up from the bow, then was caught by the wind and blown over the bowsprit in a big, glittering fan. The sky was a pale limpid blue, and the sun caught the fans of bow spray in such a way that for a second or two each of them was transformed into a broad, intense rainbow. Giddy slide down a swell, dark blue sea, the jolt as they ran into the next swell, blast of spray out, up, caught in the wind and dashed to droplets, and then a still moment, the ship led by a pouring arch of vibrant color, red orange yellow green blue purple.
* * *
Captain Bahaguna was on the other side of the deck, helping a couple of crew members secure metal boxes over the rigging reels. It was tricky crossing the deck in such a swell. “What’s up, Captain?”
“Storm coming.” He looked disgruntled. “I’ve been trying to get around to the north of it for two days now, but it’s swerving like a drunk.”
Tom toed the box. “We’ll need these?”
“Never can tell. I do it if we have the time. Ever been in a big storm?”
“That one off Baja.”
Bahanguna looked up at Tom, smiled.
* * *
Below decks Sonam Singh was showing a group of sailors how to secure bulkheads. “Tom, go check out the bridge, you’re in the way.” The young sailors laughed as they worked, excited. Immersion in the world’s violence, Tom thought, the primal thrill of being out in the wind. In the tempest of the world’s great spin through space.
In the comm room Pravi was studying a satellite photo of the mid-Pacific. Pressure isobars overlaid on it contoured the mishmash of cloud patterns, drew attention to a small classic whirlpool shape. “Is it a hurricane?” Tom asked.
“Only a tropical storm,” Pravi said. “It might get upgraded, though.”
“Where are we?”
She jabbed at the map. Not far away from the storm.
“And which direction is it moving?”
“Depends on when you ask. It’s coming our way now.”
“Uh oh.”
She laughed. “I love these storms.”
“How many have you seen?”
“Two so far. But it’s going to be three in a couple of hours.”
Another thrill seeker. Revolution of the elements.
Tom returned to the deck, holding on to every rail. Things had changed in his brief stay below; the sea was running larger, and the horizon seemed to have extended away, as if they were now on a larger planet. Ganesh seemed sma
ller. It sledded down the long backs of the swells like a toboggan, shouldering deep into the trough and then rising like a cork to crash through the crest and hang in space. Then a free fall, until the bow crashed down onto the water, and they began another exuberant run on the back of the next swell. Except for this moment of skating, it felt like the ship’s whole motion was up and down.
The wind still drove spray to the side in fanned white torrents, but the rainbows were gone, the sun too high and obscured by a high white film, which dulled the color of the sea. Off to the south the horizon was a black bar.
A bit dizzy, and fearful of seasickness, Tom found he felt best when he was facing the wind, and looking at the horizon. Seeing was important. He went to the mizzenmast halyards, wrapped his arms around a thick cable, and watched the sea get torn to tatters.
* * *
The wind picked up. Spray struck his face like needle pricks. It was loud. The swells had crest-to-trough whitecaps, which hissed and roared. The wind keened in the rigging at a score of pitches, across several octaves, from the bass thrum of the mast stays to the screaming of the bunting. Behind these noises was a kind of background rumble, which seemed to be the sound of the storm itself, disconnected from any source in wind or water: a dull low roar, like an immense submarine locomotive. Perhaps it was the wind in his ears, but it sounded more like the entire atmosphere, trying to leave the vicinity all at once.
Nadezhda appeared at his side, holding an orange rain jacket. “Put this on. Aren’t you going below?”
“It made me dizzy!” They were shouting.
“We had one of these on the way over from Tokyo,” Nadezhda said, looking at the long hog-backed hills of water surging by. “Lasted three days! You’ll have to get used to being below.”
“Not yet.” He pointed to the black line on the southern horizon. “I’ll have to when that arrives.”
Nadezhda nodded. “Big squall.”
“Pravi said it was almost a hurricane.”
Pacific Edge Page 29