Loosed Upon the World

by John Joseph Adams

  “Delirium?” Carter said.

  Kovalcik’s eyes grew even chillier. Drawing an ultrasonic syringe from a cabinet in the wall, she slapped it against Kohlberg’s arm. There was a small buzzing sound. Kohlberg subsided into sleep. Snuffling snores rose from his bunk. Kovalcik smiled. She seemed to be recovering her self-control. “He is a madman. You see what my skin is like. What his madness has done to me, has done to every one of us. If he got loose, if he put the voyage in jeopardy—yes, yes, we would kill him. We would kill them all. It would be only self-defense; you understand me? But it must not come to that.” Her voice was icy. You could air-condition an entire city with that voice. “You were not here during the trouble. You do not know what we went through. We will not go through it again. Take these men from us, Captain.”

  She stepped back, folding her arms across her chest. The room was very quiet, suddenly, except for the pingings and thumpings from the ship’s interior and an occasional snore out of Kohlberg. Kovalcik was completely calm again, the ferocity and iciness no longer visible. As though she were simply telling him: This is the situation; the ball is now in your court, Captain Carter.

  What a stinking squalid mess, Carter thought.

  But he was startled to find, when he looked behind the irritation he felt at having been dragged into this, a curious sadness where he would have expected anger to be. Despite everything, he found himself flooded with surprising compassion for Kovalcik, for Kohlberg, for all of them, for the whole fucking poisoned heat-blighted world. Who had asked for any of this, the heavy green sky, the fiery air, the daily need for Screen, the million frantic improvisations that made continued life on Earth possible? Not us. Our great-great-grandparents had, maybe, but not us. Only they’re not here to know what it’s like, and we are.

  Then the moment passed. What the hell could he do? Did Kovalcik think he was Jesus Christ? He had no room for these people. He had no extra Screen or food. In any case, this was none of his business. And San Francisco was waiting for its iceberg. It was time to move along. Tell her anything; just get out of here.

  “All right,” he said. “I see your problem. I’m not entirely sure I can help out, but I’ll do what I can. I’ll check our supplies and let you know what we’re able to do. Okay?”

  * * * *

  Hitchcock said, “What I think, Cap’n, we ought to just take hold of them. Nakata can put a couple of his spare hooks into them, and we’ll tow them into Frisco along with the berg.”

  “Hold on,” Carter said. “Are you out of your mind? I’m no fucking pirate.”

  “Who’s talking about piracy? It’s our obligation. We got to turn them in, man, is how I see it. They’re mutineers.”

  “I’m not a policeman, either,” Carter retorted. “They want to have a mutiny, let them goddamn go and mutiny. I have a job to do. I just want to get that berg moving east. Without hauling a shipload of crazies along. Don’t even think I’m going to make some kind of civil arrest of them. Don’t even consider it for an instant, Hitchcock.”

  Mildly, Hitchcock said, “You know, we used to take this sort of thing seriously, once upon a time. You know what I mean, man? We wouldn’t just look the other way.”

  “You don’t understand,” Carter said. Hitchcock gave him a sharp scornful look. “No. Listen to me, and listen good,” Carter snapped. “That ship’s nothing but trouble. The woman that runs it, she’s something you don’t want to be very close to. We’d have to put her in chains if we tried to take her in, and taking her in’s not as easy as you seem to think, either. There’s five of us and I don’t know how many of them. And that’s a Kyocera-Merck ship there. Samurai isn’t paying us to pull K-M’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

  It was late morning now. The sun was getting close to noon height, and the sky was brighter than ever, fiercely hot, with some swirls of lavender and green far overhead, vagrant wisps of greenhouse garbage that must have drifted west from the noxious high-pressure air mass that sat perpetually over the midsection of the United States. Carter imagined he could detect a whiff of methane in the breeze. Just across the way was the berg, shining like polished marble, shedding water hour by hour as the mounting heat worked it over. Back in San Francisco, they were brushing the dust out of the empty reservoirs. Time to be moving along, yes. Kovalcik and Kohlberg would have to work out their problems without him. He didn’t feel good about that, but there were a lot of things he didn’t feel good about, and he wasn’t able to fix those, either.

  “You said she’s going to kill those five guys,” Caskie said. The communications operator was small and slight, glossy black hair and lots of it, no bare scalp for her. “Does she mean it?”

  Carter shrugged. “A bluff, most likely. She looks tough, but I’m not sure she’s that tough.”

  “I don’t agree,” Rennett said. “She wants to get rid of those men in the worst way.”

  “You think?”

  “I think that what they were doing anchored by the berg was getting ready to maroon them on it. Only, we came along, and we’re going to tow the berg away, and that screwed up the plan. So, now she wants to give them to us instead. We don’t take them, she’ll just dump them over the side soon as we’re gone.”

  “Even though we know the score?”

  “She’ll say they broke loose and jumped into the ship’s boat and escaped, and she doesn’t know where the hell they went. Who’s to say otherwise?”

  Carter stared gloomily. Yes, he thought, who’s to say otherwise.

  “The berg’s melting while we screw around,” Hitchcock said. “What’ll it be, Cap’n? We sit here and discuss some more? Or we pull up and head for Frisco?”

  “My vote’s for taking them on board,” said Nakata.

  “I don’t remember calling for a vote,” Carter said. “We’ve got no room for five more hands. Not for anybody. We’re packed as tight as we can possibly get. Living on this ship is like living in a rowboat as it is.” He was feeling rage beginning to rise in him. This business was getting too tangled: legal issues, humanitarian issues, a lot of messy stuff. The simple reality underneath it all was that he couldn’t take on passengers, no matter what the reason.

  And Hitchcock was right. The berg was losing water every minute. Even from here, bare eyes alone, he could see erosion going on, the dripping, the calving. The oscillations were picking up, the big icy thing rocking gently back and forth as its stability at waterline got nibbled away. Later on, the oscillations wouldn’t be so gentle. They had to get that berg sprayed with mirror-dust and wrapped with a plastic skirt at the water-line to slow down wave erosion, and start moving. San Francisco was paying him to bring home an iceberg, not a handful of slush.

  “Cap’n,” Rennett called. She had wandered up into the observation rack above them and was shading her eyes, looking across the water. “They’ve put out a boat, cap’n.”

  “No,” he said. “Son of a bitch!”

  He grabbed for his 6x30 spyglass. A boat, sure enough, a hydrofoil dinghy. It looked full up: three, four, five. He hit the switch for biosensor boost and the squid fiber in the spyglass went to work for him. The image blossomed, high resolution. Five men. He recognized Kohlberg sitting slumped in front.

  “Shit,” he said. “She’s sending them over to us. Just dumping them on us.”

  “If we doubled up somehow—” Nakata began, smiling hopefully.

  “One more word out of you and I’ll double you up,” said Carter. He turned to Hitchcock, who had one hand clamped meditatively over the lower half of his face, pushing his nose back and forth and scratching around in his thick white stubble. “Break out some lasers,” Carter said. “Defensive use only. Just in case. Hitchcock, you and Rennett get out there in the kayak and escort those men back to the squid ship. If they aren’t conscious, tow them over to it. If they are, and they don’t want to go back, invite them very firmly to go back, and if they don’t like the invitation, put a couple of holes through the side of their boat and get the hell back h
ere fast. You understand me?”

  Hitchcock nodded stonily. “Sure, man. Sure.”

  * * * *

  Carter watched the whole thing from the blister dome at the stern, wondering whether he was going to have a mutiny of his own on his hands now, too. But no. No. Hitchcock and Rennett kayaked out along the edge of the berg until they came up beside the dinghy from the Calamari Maru, and there was a brief discussion, very brief, Hitchcock doing the talking and Rennett holding a laser rifle in a casual but businesslike way. The five castoffs from the squid ship seemed more or less awake. They pointed and gestured and threw up their arms in despair. But Hitchcock kept talking and Rennett kept stroking the laser, casual but businesslike, and the men in the dinghy looked more and more dejected by the moment. Then the discussion broke up and the kayak headed back toward the Tonopah Maru, and the men in the dinghy sat where they were, no doubt trying to figure out their next move.

  Hitchcock said, coming on board, “This is bad business, man. That captain, he say the woman just took the ship away from him, on account of she wanted him to let them all have extra shots of Screen and he didn’t give it. There wasn’t enough to let her have so much, is what he said. I feel real bad, man.”

  “So do I,” said Carter. “Believe me.”

  “I learn a long time ago,” Hitchcock said, “when a man say Believe me, that’s the one thing I shouldn’t do.”

  “Fuck you,” Carter said. “You think I wanted to strand them? But we have no choice. Let them go back to their own ship. She won’t kill them. All they have to do is let her do what she wants to do and they’ll come out of it okay. She can put them off on some island somewhere, Hawaii, maybe. But if they come with us, we’ll be in deep shit all the way back to Frisco.”

  Hitchcock nodded. “Yeah. We may be in deep shit already.”

  “What you say?”

  “Look at the berg,” Hitchcock said. “At waterline. It’s getting real carved up.”

  Carter scooped up his glass and kicked in the biosensor boost. He scanned the berg. It didn’t look good. The heat was working it over very diligently.

  This was the hottest day since they’d entered these waters. The sun seemed to be getting bigger every minute. There was a nasty magnetic crackling coming out of the sky, as if the atmosphere itself was getting ionized as it baked. And the berg was starting to wobble. Carter saw the oscillations plainly, those horizontal grooves filling with water, the sea not so calm now as sky/ocean heat differentials began to build up and conflicting currents came slicing in.

  “Son of a bitch,” Carter said. “That settles it. We got to get moving right now.”

  There was still plenty to do. Carter gave the word and the mirror-dust spigots went into operation, cannoning shining clouds of powdered metal over the exposed surface of the berg, and probably all over the squid ship and the dinghy, too. It took half an hour to do the job. The squid ship was still sitting at anchor by the ice tongue, and it looked like some kind of negotiation was going on between the men in the dinghy and the people on board. The sea was still roughening, the berg was lolloping around in a mean way. But Carter knew there was a gigantic base down there out of sight, enough to hold it steady until they could get under way, he hoped.

  “Let’s get the skirt on it now,” he said.

  A tricky procedure, nozzles at the ship’s waterline extruding a thermoplastic spray that would coat the berg just where it was most vulnerable to wave erosion. The hard part came in managing the extensions of the cables linking the hooks to the ship, so they could maneuver around the berg. But Nakata was an ace at that. They pulled up anchor and started around the far side. The mirror-dusted berg was dazzling, a tremendous mountain of white light.

  “I don’t like that wobble,” Hitchcock kept saying.

  “Won’t matter a damn once we’re under way,” said Carter.

  The heat was like a hammer now, pounding the dark cool surface of the water, mixing up the thermal layers, stirring up the currents, getting everything churned around. They had waited just a little too long to get started. The berg, badly undercut, was doing a big sway to windward, bowing like one of those round-bottomed Japanese dolls, then swaying back again. God only knew what kind of sea action the squid ship was getting, but Carter couldn’t see them from this side of the berg. He kept on moving, circling the berg to the full extension of the hook cables, then circling back the way he’d come.

  When they got around to leeward again, he saw what kind of sea action the squid ship had been getting. It was swamped. The ice tongue they’d been anchored next to had come rising up out of the sea and kicked them like a giant foot.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hitchcock murmured, standing beside him. “Will you look at that. The damn fools just sat there all the time.”

  The Calamari Maru was shipping water like crazy and starting to go down. The sea was boiling with an armada of newly liberated squid, swiftly propelling themselves in all directions, heading anywhere else at top speed. Three dinghies were bobbing around in the water in the shadow of the berg.

  “Will you look at that,” Hitchcock said again.

  “Start the engines,” Carter told him. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Hitchcock stared at him, disbelievingly.

  “You mean that, Cap’n? You really mean that?”

  “I goddamn well do.”

  “Shit,” said Hitchcock. “This fucking lousy world.”

  “Go on. Get ’em started.”

  “You actually going to leave three boats from a sinking ship sitting out there in the water full of people?”

  “Yeah. You got it. Now start the engines, will you?”

  “That’s too much,” Hitchcock said softly, shaking his head in a big slow swing. “Too goddamn much.”

  He made a sound like a wounded buffalo and took two or three shambling steps toward Carter, his arms dangling loosely, his hands half cupped. Hitchcock’s eyes were slitted and his face looked oddly puffy. He loomed above Carter, wheezing and muttering, a dark massive slab of a man. Half as big as the iceberg out there was how he looked just then.

  Oh, shit, Carter thought. Here it comes. My very own mutiny, right now.

  Hitchcock rumbled and muttered and closed his hands into fists. Exasperation tinged with fear swept through Carter and he brought his arm up without even stopping to think, hitting Hitchcock hard, a short, fast jab in the mouth that rocked the older man’s head back sharply and sent him reeling against the rail. Hitchcock slammed into it and bounced. For a moment, it looked as if he’d fall, but he managed to steady himself. A kind of sobbing sound but not quite a sob, more of a grunt, came from him. A bright dribble of blood sprouted on his white-stubbled chin.

  For a moment, Hitchcock seemed dazed. Then his eyes came back into focus and he looked at Carter in amazement.

  “I wasn’t going to hit you, Cap’n,” he said, blinking hard. There was a soft stunned quality to his voice. “Nobody ever hits a Cap’n, not ever. Not ever. You know that, Cap’n.”

  “I told you to start the engines.”

  “You hit me, Cap’n. What the hell you hit me for?”

  “You started to come at me, didn’t you?” Carter said.

  Hitchcock’s shining bloodshot eyes were immense in his Screen-blackened face. “You think I was coming at you? Oh, Cap’n! Oh, Jesus, Cap’n. Jesus!” He shook his head and wiped at the blood. Carter saw that he was bleeding too, at the knuckle, where he’d hit a tooth. Hitchcock continued to stare at him, the way you might stare at a dinosaur that had just stepped out of the forest. Then his look of astonishment softened into something else, sadness, maybe. Or was it pity? Pity would be even worse, Carter thought. A whole lot worse.

  “Cap’n—” Hitchcock began, his voice hoarse and thick.

  “Don’t say it. Just go and get the engines started.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, man.”

  He went slouching off, rubbing at his lip.

  “Caskie’s picking up a
n autobuoy SOS,” Rennett called from somewhere updeck.

  “Nix,” Carter yelled back furiously. “We can’t do it.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no fucking room for them,” Carter said. His voice was as sharp as an icicle. “Nix. Nix.”

  He lifted his spyglass again and took another look toward the oncoming dinghies. Chugging along hard, they were, but having heavy weather of it in the turbulent water. He looked quickly away before he could make out faces. The berg, shining like fire, was still oscillating. He thought of the hot winds sweeping across the continent to the east, sweeping all around the belly of the world, the dry, rainless winds that forever sucked up what little moisture could still be found. It was almost a shame to have to go back there. Like returning to hell after a little holiday at sea, is how it felt. It was worst in the middle latitudes, the temperate zone, once so fertile. Rain almost never fell at all there now. The dying forests, the new grasslands taking over, deserts where even the grass couldn’t make it, the polar icepacks crumbling, the lowlands drowning everywhere, dead buildings sticking up out of the sea, vines sprouting on freeways, the alligators moving northward. This fucking lousy world, Hitchcock had said. Yeah. This berg here, this oversized ice-cube, how many days’ water supply would that be for San Francisco? Ten? Fifteen?

  He turned. They were staring at him, Nakata, Rennett, Caskie, everybody but Hitchcock, who was on the bridge setting up the engine combinations.

  “This never happened,” Carter told them. “None of this. We never saw anybody else out here. Not anybody. You got that? This never happened.”

  They nodded, one by one.

  There was a quick shiver down below as the tiny sun in the engine room, the little fusion sphere, came to full power. With a groan, the engine kicked in at high. The ship started to move away, out of the zone of dark water, toward the bluer sea just ahead. Off they went, pulling eastward as fast as they could, trying to make time ahead of the melt rate. It was afternoon now. Behind them, the other sun, the real one, lit up the sky with screaming fury as it headed off into the west. That was good, to have the sun going one way as you were going the other.