I was dressed in the black robes of an Auditor by the Wardens, who also shaved my hair and beard. The Inspector of Wardens presented me with a pair of red leather gloves.
“From this day, the blood of the guilty will be on your hands,” he said as he went down on one knee and raised the gloves on his upturned palms.
The Retributor now stood before me, bowed, and gave me a pair of sunshades.
“From this day, there will be no frailty, pity, or mercy in your eyes,” he declared.
The Advocate had a staff, which she put into my hand.
“From this day, you will strike down the guilty but spare those tippers who are in truth victims.”
Only one in four hundred passed through my mind.
Last of all was the Auditor General with my cowl.
“From this day you are an Auditor, shielded from the sun because you are without blame for its ravages.”
* * * *
That night, I was exhausted at many levels, yet dreading what would come with sleep. I was given a tent in the victims’ enclosure, but I could not relax in it. I had slept in the open for too long, so now I went outside to try to sleep. The Wardens did not like the idea, but nobody argues with an Auditor.
Even lying on the sand beneath the new moon and first stars, I could not sleep. I got up and paced around my tent. At last I had the answer to the many puzzles that my dark visitor had been posing, yet he did not appear. A Warden came over and asked if I was all right. It was Olivia.
“Can’t sleep,” I replied curtly, now suspicious of her smiles and concern.
“I can call a counselor,” she suggested.
“No. No, I . . . I’m just a bit edgy about being on the other side of the audit tomorrow.”
“Why not rehearse?”
“Sorry?”
“Others do it. Walk down to the audit bench and sit there for a while. Practice speaking, like you’re in a real audit.”
“That’s a good idea. Thank you.”
“I’ll make sure you’re not disturbed. Just don’t wander any farther out.”
She escorted me out of the victims’ enclosure and away to the audit space. She then left me and walked on to the outer perimeter to make sure that I went no farther. I was an Auditor and could go where I liked, but shadows in the wrong place got shot, no matter who they were. The bench was empty and unguarded. I sat down. Out in the glasshouse fields, someone was still alive and screaming. A figure in black came walking toward me from the victims’ enclosure. As he got closer, I could see his face in the weak moonlight. As I expected, it was my face.
“So, do you understand yet?” I asked.
The figure nodded unhappily.
“Death was not coming for me; I was becoming Death,” he said.
“True.”
“Death will sit among the Auditors on the bench tomorrow. Jason Hall is Precedent, the standard by which they will audit. Jason Hall is Death.”
“That is what you wanted—”
“No! I didn’t realize that being Precedent means providing instant, brutal decisions. Instead of giving borderline tippers a proper hearing, the Auditors will just check if they measure up to Jason Hall. Thousands of borderlines who would have died of natural causes will now be re-audited and executed.”
“Some will get service, branding, or pardoning.”
“Handfuls out of thousands. Dozens out of millions. This is not what I wanted. I wanted to give hope to tippers.”
“You have done that.”
“You told me I was a hard act to follow. Now I understand. Hardly any tippers measure up against what I did. I can already see millions of frightened, desperate, pleading eyes staring at me.”
The horned moon touched the western horizon, then sank out of sight. Jason became just a dark shape.
“I can’t take it,” he said. “I can’t live with that.”
“Can Death claim himself ?” I asked.
“I can, and I will.”
I now saw that he was merging with the shadows around him. His voice was becoming faint, and the white patch that was his face had lost focus.
“You fought so hard against the audit, but now you give up?” I said, suddenly afraid of losing him.
“This world is no place for tippers,” said his fading voice. “Even those who are pardoned must kill themselves by abandoning their pasts, values, lifestyles, achievements, attitudes. . . .”
“Wait!” I called. “Without you, I will not be human.”
There was no reply. He was already gone.
“Sir?”
It was Olivia’s voice. I shook my head and looked up.
“Sir, you were asleep. We should get back to the victims’ enclosure.”
We began to walk through the darkness. Olivia’s goggles were enhanced for night vision, so she guided me along the path.
“Did you rehearse well, sir?” she asked.
“Not really. I was thinking about tippers, and the danger that their story might soon be lost and forgotten.”
“No bad thing, sir.”
“Forgetting what the tippers did to the Earth means forgetting the lessons they left us, Warden. We need to remember what not to do, or it could all happen again.”
She did not reply. The tippers had not left much to the world that was worthwhile, but they had to be remembered. The thought was not a palatable one, but the alternative was more terrifying than death.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SEAN MCMULLEN is an Australian author with twenty books and seven dozen stories published in over a dozen countries. He has won fifteen Australian and international awards for his fiction, and been nominated for the Hugo, BSFA, and Sidewise awards. He is best known for his neo-steampunk novel Souls in the Great Machine (1999), and his two most recent books are the collections Colours of the Soul (2013) and Ghosts of Engines Past (2013). For three decades Sean had a career in scientific computing in parallel with his science fiction and fantasy writing, but resigned to become a full time author in 2014. Before he began writing, Sean was a professional singer and actor, performing in venues as diverse as the Victorian State Opera and the folk-rock band Joe Wilson’s Mates. He lives in Melbourne, and has one daughter, Catherine.
HOT SKY
ROBERT SILVERBERG
Out there in the chilly zone of the southern Pacific, somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii, the sea was a weird goulash of currents, streams of cold stuff coming up from the Antarctic and coolish upwelling spirals out of the ocean floor and little hot rivers rolling off the sun-blasted continental shelf far to the east. Sometimes, you could see steam rising in places where cold water met warm. It was a cockeyed place to be trawling for icebergs. But the albedo readings said there was a berg somewhere around there, and so the Tonopah Maru was there too.
Carter sat in front of the scanner, massaging the numbers in the cramped cell that was the ship’s command center. He was the trawler’s captain, a lean thirtyish man, yellow hair, brown beard, skin deeply tanned and tinged with the iridescent greenish-purple of his armoring buildup, the protective layer that the infra/ultra drugs gave you. It was midmorning. The shot of Screen he’d taken at dawn still simmered like liquid gold in his arteries. He could almost feel it as it made its slow journey outward to his capillaries and went trickling cozily into his skin, where it would carry out the daily refurbishing of the body armor that shielded him against ozone crackle and the demon eye of the sun.
This was only his second year at sea. The company liked to move people around. In the past few years, he’d been a desert jockey in bleak, forlorn Spokane, running odds reports for farmers betting on the month the next rainstorm would turn up, and before that a cargo dispatcher for one of the company’s L-5 shuttles, and a chip-runner before that. And one of these days, if he kept his nose clean, he’d be sitting in a corner office atop the Samurai pyramid in Kyoto. Carter hated a lot of the things he’d had to do in order to play the company game. But he knew th
at it was the only game there was.
“We got maybe a two thousand–kiloton mass there,” he said, looking into the readout wand’s ceramic-fiber cone. “Not bad, eh?”
“Not for these days, no,” Hitchcock said. He was the oceanographer/navigator, a grizzled flat-nosed Afro-Hawaiian whose Screen-induced armor coloring gave his skin a startling midnight look. Hitchcock was old enough to remember when icebergs were never seen farther north than the latitude of southern Chile, and always glad to let you know about it. “Man, these days, a berg that’s still that big all the way up here must have been three counties long when it broke off the fucking polar shelf. But you sure you got your numbers right, man?”
The implied challenge brought a glare to Carter’s eyes, and something went curling angrily through his interior, leaving a hot little trail. Hitchcock never thought Carter had done anything right the first time. Though he often denied it—too loudly—it was pretty clear Hitchcock had never quite gotten over his resentment at being bypassed for captain in favor of an outsider. Probably he thought it was racism. But it wasn’t. Carter was managerial track; Hitchcock wasn’t. That was all there was to it.
Sourly, he said, “You want to check the screen yourself ? Here. Here, take a look.”
He offered Hitchcock the wand. But Hitchcock shook his head. “Easy, man. Whatever the screen says, that’s okay for me.” He grinned disarmingly, showing mahogany snags. On the screen, impenetrable whorls and jiggles were dancing, black on green, green on black, the occasional dazzling bloom of bright yellow. The Tonopah Maru’s interrogatory beam was traveling 22,500 miles straight up to Nippon Telecom’s big marine scansat, which had its glassy unblinking gaze trained on the whole eastern Pacific, looking for albedo differentials. The reflectivity of an iceberg is different from the reflectivity of the ocean surface. You pick up the differential, you confirm it with temperature readout, you scan for mass to see if the trip’s worthwhile. If it is, you bring your trawler in fast and make the grab before someone else does.
This berg was due to go to San Francisco, which was in a bad way for water just now. The whole West Coast was. There hadn’t been any rain along the Pacific seaboard in ten months. Most likely the sea around here was full of trawlers, Seattle, San Diego, LA. The Angelenos kept more ships out than anybody. The Tonopah Maru had been chartered to them by Samurai Industries until last month. But the trawler was working for San Francisco this time.
The lovely city by the bay, dusty now, sitting there under that hot soupy sky full of interesting-colored greenhouse gases, waiting for the rain that almost never came anymore.
Carter said, “Start getting the word around. That berg’s down here, south-southwest. We get it in the grapple tomorrow, we can be in San Francisco with it by a week from Tuesday.”
“If it don’t melt first. This fucking heat.”
“It didn’t melt between Antarctica and here, it’s not gonna melt between here and Frisco. Get a move on, man. We don’t want LA coming in and hitting it first.”
* * * *
By midafternoon, they were picking it up optically, first an overhead view via the Weather Department spysat, then a sea-level image bounced to them by a Navy relay buoy. The berg was a thing like a castle afloat, stately and serene, all pink turrets and indigo battlements and blue-white pinnacles, rising high up above the water. The dry-dock kind of berg, it was, two high sides with a valley between, and it was maybe two hundred meters long, sitting far up above the water. Steaming curtains of fog shrouded its edges and the ship’s ear was able to pick up the sizzling sound of the melt effervescence that was generated as small chunks of ice went slipping off its sides into the sea. The whole thing was made of glacial ice, which is compacted snow, and when it melted, it melted with a hiss. Carter stared at the berg in wonder. It was the biggest one he’d seen so far. For the last couple of million years, it had been perched on top of the South Pole, and it probably hadn’t ever expected to go cruising off toward Hawaii like this. But the big climate shift had changed a lot of things for everybody, the Antarctic ice pack included.
“Jesus,” Hitchcock said. “Can we do it?”
“Easy,” said Nakata. He was the grapple technician, a sleek beady-eyed cat-like little guy. “It’ll be a four-hook job, but so what? We got the hooks for it.”
The Tonopah Maru had hooks to spare. Most of its long cigar-shaped hull was taken up by the immense rack-and-pinion gear that powered the grappling hooks, a vast, silent mechanism capable of hurling the giant hooks far overhead and whipping them down deep into the flanks of even the biggest bergs. The deck space was given over almost entirely to the great spigots that were used to spray the bergs with a sintering of melt-retardant mirror-dust. Down below was a powerful fusion-driven engine, strong enough to haul a fair-sized island halfway around the world.
Everything very elegant, except there was barely any room left over for the crew of five. Carter and the others were jammed into odd little corners here and there. For living quarters, they had cubicles not much bigger than the coffin-sized sleeping capsules you got at an airport hotel, and for recreation space, they all shared one little blister dome aft and a pacing area on the foredeck. A sardine-can kind of life, but the pay was good and at least you could breathe fresh air at sea, more or less, instead of the dense grayish-green murk that hovered over the habitable parts of the West Coast.
They were right at the mid-Pacific cold wall. The sea around them was blue, the sign of warm water. Just to the west, though, where the berg was, the water was a dark rich olive green with all the microscopic marine life that cold water fosters. The line of demarcation was plainly visible.
Carter was running triangulations to see if they’d be able to slip the berg under the Golden Gate Bridge when Rennett appeared at his elbow and said, “There’s a ship, Cap’n.”
“What you say?”
He wondered if he was going to have to fight for his berg. That happened at times. This was open territory, pretty much a lawless zone where old-fashioned piracy was making a terrific comeback.
Rennett was maintenance/operations, a husky, broad-shouldered little kid out of the Midwest dust bowl, no more than chest-high to him, very cocky, very tough. She kept her scalp shaved, the way a lot of them did nowadays, and she was brown as an acorn all over, with the purple glint of Screen shining brilliantly through, making her look almost fluorescent. Brown eyes bright as marbles and twice as hard looked back at him.
“Ship,” she said, clipping it out of the side of her mouth as if doing him a favor. “Right on the other side of the berg. Caskie’s just picked up a message. Some sort of SOS.” She handed Carter a narrow strip of yellow radio tape with just a couple of lines of bright red thermoprint typing on it. The words came up at him like a hand reaching out of the deck. He read them out loud.
CAN YOU HELP US TROUBLE ON SHIP MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH URGENT YOU COME ABOARD SOONEST KOVALCIK ACTING CAPTAIN CALAMARI MARU
“What the fuck?” Carter said. “Calamari Maru? Is it a ship or a squid?”
Rennett didn’t crack a smile. “We ran a check on the registry. It’s owned out of Vancouver by Kyocera-Merck. The listed captain is Amiel Kohlberg, a German. Nothing about any Kovalcik.”
“Doesn’t sound like a berg-trawler.”
“It’s a squid ship, Cap’n,” she said, voice flat with a sharp edge of contempt on it. As if he didn’t know what a squid ship was. He let it pass. It always struck him as funny, the way anybody who had two days more experience at sea than he did treated him like a greenhorn.
He glanced at the printout again. Urgent, it said. Matter of life and death. Shit. Shit shit shit.
The idea of dropping everything to deal with the problems of some strange ship didn’t sit well with him. He wasn’t paid to help other captains out, especially Kyocera-Merck captains. Samurai Industries wasn’t fond of K-M these days. Something about the Gobi reclamation contract, industrial espionage, some crap like that. Besides, he had a berg to deal wi
th. He didn’t need any other distractions just now.
And then too, he felt an edgy little burst of suspicion drifting up from the basement of his soul, a tweak of wariness. Going aboard another ship out here, you were about as vulnerable as you could be. Ten years in corporate life had taught him caution.
But he also knew you could carry caution too far. It didn’t feel good to him to turn his back on a ship that had said it was in trouble. Maybe the ancient laws of the sea, as well as every other vestige of what used to be common decency, were inoperative concepts here in this troubled, heat-plagued year of 2133, but he still wasn’t completely beyond feeling things like guilt and shame. Besides, he thought, what goes around comes around. You ignore the other guy when he asks for help, you might just be setting yourself up for a little of the same later on.
They were all watching him, Rennett, Nakata, Hitchcock.
Hitchcock said, “What you gonna do, Cap’n? Gonna go across to ’em?” A gleam in his eye, a snaggly mischievous grin on his face.
What a pain in the ass, Carter thought.
Carter gave the older man a murderous look and said, “So, you think it’s legit?”
Hitchcock shrugged blandly. “Not for me to say. You the cap’n, man. All I know is, they say they in trouble, they say they need our help.”
Hitchcock’s gaze was steady, remote, noncommittal. His blocky shoulders seemed to reach from wall to wall. “They calling for help, cap’n. Ship wants help, you give help, that’s what I always believe, all my years at sea. Of course, maybe it different now.”
Carter found himself wishing he’d never let Hitchcock come aboard. But screw it. He’d go over there and see what was what. He had no choice, never really had.
To Rennett he said, “Tell Caskie to let this Kovalcik know that we’re heading for the berg to get claiming hooks into it. That’ll take about an hour and a half. And after that, we have to get it mirrored and skirted. While that’s going on, I’ll come over and find out what his problem is.”
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