Shiver on the Sky

by David Haywood Young

Chapter Forty-Five

  (Another Monday—Owen)

  Owen lifted his paddle and set it in his kayak, then got Aaron to help him move the kayak to the dock. One end had been too close to the fire. But it was fiberglass, and salvageable. Too much else wouldn’t be.

  The Fusty Navel sagged in its slip. Bullet holes, burn scars, broken railings…on top of it all rain had poured through shattered windows during the three days the police wouldn’t let him go aboard. Most of Owen’s possessions, including his books, were soaked. Alcohol from the Hermit’s broken bottles hadn’t helped them much either.

  Having the boat fixed would cost more than it was worth. But Owen had started in, doing the repairs himself. Once the reporters had quit coming by, Aaron had shown up most afternoons after school to help. Owen still didn’t know if he wanted to live on the boat again—he was enjoying himself at Martina’s place—but it seemed important to make it right, with his own hands, before he decided.

  Aaron left to do his homework. Owen glanced at the sun and kept working. He had another couple of good hours, anyway.

  He found a patch of rotted plywood when part of the Fusty Navel’s forward deck flexed under his feet. The now-burned fiberglass that had covered it had also disguised its condition. He poked his finger through, thinking of Faulkner. The cancer they’d found riddling his body, when they’d gone in to remove a bullet from his gut, hadn’t shown any outward signs either.

  Faulkner had gone into a coma during surgery. Owen hadn’t known him well, but he couldn’t put it out of his mind. A few voracious cells had at some point lost all sense of purpose and restraint. They had ravened through Faulkner’s tissues, intent only on egotistic survival and reproduction, unable to grasp that in losing their identity as parts of a whole they were also making their own destruction inevitable.

  Faulkner had lingered for only three days, and had probably never been aware of what had happened to him. Owen wondered what it would have been like to know the man better. He’d tried to find Gordon to offer condolences, and see if he could do anything to help whatever family Faulkner might have had. But Gordon had gone somewhere on an extended vacation.

  “Mr. Tremaine? Ah—excuse me—Owen?”

  Owen looked up, caught in an undignified squat. “Viktor!” What was Junior’s dad doing here? Even with what he knew about Viktor, Owen had never imagined running into him at the marina. Viktor seemed too much a creature of the boardroom and the office. But he certainly seemed comfortable standing here now.

  Owen straightened up, wishing his knees didn’t pop quite so audibly. “Uh, I’d welcome you aboard, but”— he gestured at the mess on deck—“it might not be safe.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe that will be a problem.” Viktor casually stepped aboard. “I have come to discuss a possible business venture.”

  “Involving CyberLook?” Owen asked.

  Viktor gave him an oddly crooked smile. “Ah…yes.” After a moment his smile widened. “Briefly, I suggest we have you paid. I have a proposal you may find to have merit, though of course you will have an opportunity for rebuttal.”

  “Paid?” What was the old man talking about? And why was this so amusing to him? Owen wasn’t sure he’d ever found out what Viktor had wanted him to, and he’d certainly never made any reports. “For what?”

  Shadow woke from a nap he’d been taking inside and ran out to fawn over Viktor. Viktor pursed his lips at Shadow’s largely-missing left ear, torn off by the bullet that had creased his head but done no other serious damage, but stuck to the point. “It depends, actually. You own five percent of CyberLook. I am not able to run the business myself, for various reasons I may or may not make clear later.” He paused. “If you are interested, I would like you to return and, well, take over.”

  Shadow whined and rolled over for Viktor. So. The Friends of Shadow had gained another member.

  Viktor sat on the gunwale and held up a hand, petting Shadow with the other. “But if you are not interested, Mr. Tremaine—Owen—I would like very much to buy your interest in CyberLook. I believe it might be, ah, disruptive to the new management if you are left waiting in the wings. Closure on this issue would be beneficial to the company.”

  Go back to CyberLook? Now? Owen grinned. Martina wanted him to replace Shawna as her partner at Signs & Portraits—and that sounded like a whole lot more fun than working for the government. “What are you offering for my five percent?”

  Viktor named a figure. It was ridiculously high.

  “Viktor…what is it you’re trying to accomplish?”

  Viktor shrugged. “Closure. That is all.”

  Heh. Maybe he should take the job. It might be a good idea to keep an eye on what they built at CyberLook, and for whom. But Owen suspected Viktor could sometimes be a dangerous person to cross. And he’d discovered within himself a curious liking and respect for Junior’s father. The man was fair, by his lights. It was too late for Owen to repair his friendship with Junior. But maybe he didn’t need to fight with Viktor.

  At least…not overtly. What would Viktor do if—no, when—he discovered what Owen was doing about CyberLook and its software? “I might be interested in your offer, Viktor. Can you give me a couple of weeks to think about it?”

  “Certainly. I’ll let you get on with your repairs.”

  Viktor picked up a walking stick from the deck. Owen hadn’t noticed it before. The foot was silver, with a black rubber plug. The shaft had been painted with red and white stripes, as if it were a barber pole. Or a candy cane.

  Viktor hopped off the boat, not using the cane at all. He noticed Owen’s interest in it, and…was that a smirk? “Look here, Mr. Tremaine.” He shoved the head of the cane toward Owen, who barely controlled an impulse to flinch.

  The grip was a knob of some dark wood, maybe walnut. Under that was a band of silver, on which were engraved…Owen moved closer…swimming hammerheads.

  Viktor reversed his grip on the cane, grasping the walnut knob. “I like to keep them under my thumb,” he explained.

  Owen was paralyzed by the fantastic affectation. He couldn’t even smile. “That’s . . .”

  “Absurd?” Viktor twitched an eyebrow jauntily, his pale eyes focused inward. “In any hierarchy peopled by intelligent beings, absurdity is both the life and death of order. But…well.” He shrugged. A fleeting melancholy lurked in the depths of the old man’s gaze. “In the end, death is inevitable.”

  Owen met his eyes. Had that meant something? But Viktor waved briskly and strode off, poking at the dock with his cane as if doing battle with ants.

  He swayed for a moment, halfway to the ramp, and Owen noticed he’d switched the cane from his left hand to his right. Viktor moved more slowly after that.

  Johnny would soon quit his job at CyberLook. He planned to join Owen and Martina at Signs & Portraits. They could do some good for local businesses, and keep their own company small enough to be enjoyable.

  Besides, Signs & Portraits would just be their day job.

  They couldn’t stop CyberLook from developing its software. But Johnny wanted to start up an open-source project, that would let programmers all over the world join in, to duplicate what CyberLook was creating—for anybody who wanted it, and for free. Owen figured he and Johnny understood it all better than anybody left at CyberLook, and the challenge would be interesting. They had some new ideas already, mostly about sharing anonymous data-storage space all over the world, with the data broken up and encrypted so only its owner could pull it together or decrypt it. And if any one computer was hacked or seized, only one set of data—never the whole system, and never data that didn’t belong to the owner of that specific machine—would be compromised.

  Maybe, if the NSA objected, they’d have to be sure the project was hosted somewhere out of the country…but transferring and protecting information was exactly what their software would do best. And the Internet had no real borders. To block their data transmissions, the government would also have to block
CyberLook’s. And all web browsing.

  And that probably couldn’t be done. Even if there was a way, Owen was willing to bet a worldwide rabble of tail-twisting programmers could adjust their code faster than any government contractor.

  Owen hoped Viktor wouldn’t take it personally. But it shouldn’t matter to him all that much—once CyberLook got the NSA contract Johnny said was in the wind, they’d probably get paid whether their product was ever used as originally intended or not. Besides…other people, with more repressive governments, really needed this stuff.

  The thought came to Owen that Viktor and the Hermit were alike in many ways. He was beginning to suspect they were both aware of aspects of reality, patterns really, that others couldn’t see—or perhaps chose not to see. Being a bit of an outsider, or a leader, might make it easier to bear the truth.

  The hammerheads had behaved as they’d done in the past. The porpoises had listened to their Cousins, the whales, and behaved according to their nature. Things had played out pretty much the way they’d had to, if you viewed events from the proper perspective. Viktor had handled the challenge to his position. And the Hermit had stepped in to resolve pieces of the situation (and of Frank Serno) when needed. Maybe it had all been foreordained, on some level.

  The Hermit had said something about that once, as the whiskey flowed late into the night on the Nameless—years ago, before Owen’s father had died. “A man doesn’t have to love himself,” he’d declaimed. “But he should at least find his place in the world, and learn to adequately fill it.” Owen’s father had agreed.

  As for Owen…he wasn’t going to disagree, not completely. But then again, it could be that even the Hermit’s place wasn’t quite where he thought it was.

  Because, damnit, not all truths were created equal. And clarity of vision didn’t invalidate dreams. Maybe the world wasn’t under any obligation to make sense to a mere human. But Owen was pretty sure he’d go on looking for deeper meaning and significance in it, regardless of the Hermit’s patented rant about monkey-shaped phantasms spun from foggy perceptions. Owen thought Viktor might approve.

  The Hermit hadn’t spoken to Owen since the night they’d rescued Katie. His speedboat had disappeared from the dock one morning, about a week afterward. Maybe he’d had enough social interaction for a while.

  But Owen was going to rent a kayak for the weekend, if his own wasn’t fixed by then, and wander south along the Laguna Madre. Sam Guillermo, owner of a thirty-two-foot sloop he kept near the Fusty Navel, had seen the Hermit’s boat out that way a few days ago.

  He didn’t intend to argue with the Hermit about the value of dreams and aspirations, or what a quest for the essentially unknowable might have to offer. Or ask questions about a Great White in the Bay. But Owen would go out there and find the Nameless, carrying along a bottle of single-malt Bushmills in a dry-bag in the bow of his kayak—and also a CD of something marketed as “WhaleSong.”

  The CD wasn’t what the Hermit had confessed a longing for, that night on his houseboat when they’d had an informal wake for Shawna. It was just recorded sounds, with no hope of translation.

  Aaron had listened to it carefully, shrugged, then said he couldn’t make any sense of it as a human, and his thoughts as a porpoise didn’t convert well. Owen had formed the impression from talking to him that a lot of the meaning depended on context. And they were about as far out of context as it was possible to get.

  But there was no way for Owen to give the Hermit what he truly yearned for, and sometimes you just had to do what you could.

  Old George had finally divulged a secret he’d kept for decades, and was probably uncomfortable about it. But Owen would just be out paddling around. Accidents could happen.

  Couldn’t they?

  ***