by Sage Walker
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For Hank,
who buoys up my dreams
with love, skill, and patience
I’d like to thank Norm Belew, Captain P. Burr Loomis (retired), USNR, and Bill Wells for Neat Stuff generously shared, and I salute the dauntless courage of the 1991 incarnation of the Very Small Array: Sally Gwylan, Pat McCraw, Karen McCue, Pati Nagle, Melinda Snodgrass, and Walter Jon Williams. Thank you, Brendan McFeely, for offering the right word at the right time. Special thanks go to Mary Rosenblum for helping build worlds and characters, and to Gardner Dozois for nudging.
PROLOGUE
This third night, not a true night, for there could be no true nights in the December summer, the changing weather of the Drake Passage gave them what they needed, squall and sleet in the dark of the moon, and seas that boiled and tossed but were as calm as these Antarctic waters would ever be in a storm.
Mihalis said he could take the Zodiac out, and he did, slipping the inflatable boat over the side of the trawler and into the blowing needles of ice. His words, whatever they were, were lost in the howl of the wind.
Psyche waited. Nikos, the brother of Mihalis, waited silent beside her in the cabin.
Mus, the boy from Naxos, was too young and too restless for waiting. He tightened the drawstring of his parka around his face and went out into the storm. Psyche watched him slip on the frozen deck and catch his balance like a cat. He stood gripping the rails with his mittened hands, looking into white nothing.
The wind increased. It roared sounds that were almost words; it whined through the rigging with a sound of giant wasps. The wind drove ice before it, rime that grew in minutes into spikes of wild white hair that coated the lines, the rails, the windward shoulder of the boy. Mus stared out into the storm as if he could see the Tanaka ship that Mihalis planned to cripple, or Mihalis himself coming back across the water. The ice scattered the dim light and made the boy’s thickly bundled shape look like a flat paper cutout. Psyche thought of calling him in, but Mus would watch for icebergs as well as for Mihalis, and it was the face of Mus that would freeze, not hers.
Psyche let the Sirena turn into the wind. The Sirena sent out false codes that made her seem to be a Tanaka ship. Mihalis had copied the chip the Tanaka woman gave him, thinking he might use the codes again someday. The fool. For all Psyche knew, the radios now marked them as Korean, or, worse, as a boat out of Chile. Mihalis trusted too much.
Mihalis had been gone too long.
The sonar was turned off, its red display dark before her, but she could sense the sweetness of the water beneath them, could feel that it was thick with buggy little krill and the larger fish that ate them. In any other time she could imagine, they would circle away from the storm, let it move past, and come back to this spot, where she knew they could load their nets as soon as they were spread.
Dull orange, a wash of light came up from the dark, a false, terrible dawn. The glare turned the frozen spindrift on the lines into dragon’s teeth stained with the colors of flame. The shadow of the boy from Naxos became a black giant ghost that scrambled across the deck.
Mus slammed the cabin door behind him as Psyche hit the throttle. The trawler’s engines rumbled as the Sirena turned toward the dark where the light had vanished. Terror waited there, possibilities of death.
The radio, tuned to search, chattered static and nothing else. The readouts still marked the Sirena with a false ID. Psyche jerked the foreign woman’s little chip out of its slot and threw it against a bulkhead. It skittered across the tilting deck and came to rest by her feet. The Sirena ran silent, anonymous, a dark and dangerous shape on anyone’s radar.
They searched for a long, long time, Psyche and the brother of Mihalis and the boy from Naxos, with their torches strobing futile circles into the sleet. They bellowed with the ship’s horns and with their voices, sounds that vanished in the roar of the storm.
They found ice, only ice, brash, and floes tossed by the sea.
Eventually, the squall forced them away.
ONE
Snow fell in Taos.
Signy pulled pine splits from the woodpile on the portal, an armload, a hundred bucks a cord and going fast. Tiny snowflakes found the sliver of exposed skin where her parka and her gloves did not meet. Melting, the flakes burned a pattern, a secret little snow message on the tender skin of her wrist. She didn’t have the patience to try to read it.
Signy hooked her foot around the edge of the door, levered it open, carried her wood inside, and shoved her butt against the door. The door slammed with a satisfying bang.
Shelter, warmth, security, the old adobe house provided it generously, but only if the house was supplied with constant infusions of money, lots of money, and this morning it seemed that nobody she loved cared about that.
One hundred dollars a cord, Signy stacked her wood by the corner fireplace. The fire burned busily, money up the chimney, gone.
A spider scrambled from beneath a stick and ran for cover. It wasn’t a black widow. Signy let it go, wondering what the hell it found to eat in a dry woodpile where the temperatures dropped below zero at night.
“Signy?”
Pilar’s voice, damn it, from the holo stage in the center of the studio. Signy kept her back to the stage and fed a log to the fire.
“You’re back,” Signy said. She shrugged out of her parka and laid it on the banco next to the logs, still not looking behind her.
“Signy, I’m sorry.”
Edges’ corporate funds were down to almost nil: Thank you, Pilar. Pilar was sorry.
“Is Jared there?” Pilar asked.
That did it. Looking for Jared, was she?
Signy stamped across the room, flung herself into the rolling chair at her console, and keyed up full resolution on the holo stage. Pilar had blown all of Edges’ money, and Pilar’s response? Guilt? Contrition? None of that. Pilar wanted Jared; he would give her comfort and hugs. There, there, he’d say, and fix the pain. Let Jared make everything feel better, right!
“Jared is up skiing,” Signy said.
A presence built of bytes and photons, Pilar, life-sized, immediate, stood isolated at center stage. Mist sparkled on her long, Hispanic-black hair. The strap of a carry-on dented the padding in the shoulder of her jacket, this one printed within a geometry of primary colors: whites, blacks, bright oranges, and blues. Mayan-looking, new, probably expensive.
Signy pulled her headset over her eyes, giving herself a full surround of Pilar’s setting. Pilar was at home in Seattle, yes, in the studio there, with its bay window and its polished wood floors.
“You’re angry,” Pilar said.
“Damned straight I’m angry! Pilar, we’re broke! What the hell happen
ed?”
“I told you. I felt I was getting stale. I wanted the presence and stress a live audience gives. The feedback. It’s different from virtual, from studio sessions and replays.”
Pilar shrugged the carry-on off her shoulder, a dancer even in that simple gesture; so graceful. Pilar, the performance artist, performing now for Signy. Just once, Signy wished, would you please just turn it off?
“And I played to empty theaters. Nobody wants live anymore; nobody wants acoustic; they want scent and touch, the whole shtick, sensory jolts and virtual icicles down their backs. That’s what they want. Or anyway, that’s what they want from me.”
Pilar retreated to a wall, braced her back against it, and slid down to sit cross-legged on the floor, theatrical dejection in every motion of those trained muscles. Signy wanted to thump her, hard.
“Look, I’m sorry your artistic sensibilities got wounded, but did you once look at what this caper cost us? Even once, Pilar?”
“No.”
“No.” The debits had just kept coming in from Pilar’s draws on Edges’ corporate credit accounts; lighting, a new guitarist at studio rates, different costumes when the first ones didn’t suit. Then the road crew, the fees for interstate use, because shipping all the gear by airfreight seemed too expensive at the time. But Pilar hadn’t bothered to figure in the cost of feeding the roadies.
“You must hate me,” Pilar said.
Signy took a deep breath. “Listen, Pilar. Just listen for a minute. We have enough money to cover one more month’s mortgate payments on the houses in Taos and Seattle. And that’s all we’ve got.” Paul’s house in New Hampshire was a family legacy of his and paid for a hundred years ago, thank goodness. “We have one more payment coming in from that bit we did for Gulf Coast Intersystems, the tweak on their negotiations with the Arian people for fuel canisters. It’s a small payment. That’s it. I don’t have time to hate you right now. I’ve got to dig around for a contract for us, or Edges goes poof!”
Signy wondered, even as the words came flying out, what the hell she was doing. Having a temper tantrum, obviously, and she knew she would feel guilty later, sick at her loss of control, contrite.
“Why didn’t you stop me?” Pilar asked.
Pilar really did look hurt. Wounded. Worried, even. Oh, damn that face of hers, perfect wedge of cheekbone, big dark eyes, her aristocratic Hispanic-Anglo features.
“Damn it, Pilar! The charges that damn near broke us came in all in the same day, and you were off-line. Out of the net. Taking that little recreation break with your new guitarist, weren’t you?”
Mendez was tasty, granted. If I’d been Pilar, Signy thought, I would have stolen a few hours in that Scottsdale hotel, the one with the good security that Paul and I couldn’t break through.
We had fun trying, Paul and I, but if we can’t get some work real fast, the fun’s over. I can’t let this group be destroyed, not without a fight, certainly not because Pilar-fucking-Videla gets urges for artistic flings. “You’re a grown-up, Pilar. It’s not my job to stop you. It isn’t Paul’s job, either.”
“Look, I said I’m sorry.” Pilar stood up and reached down for her carry-on. Tears stood in Pilar’s eyes. “You’re over the edge, Signy. We’ll talk about this later.”
“Pilar—”
Pilar dissolved, damn it, just vanished, all the feeds to Seattle blanked out, and Pilar’s dramatic exit did not help Signy’s temper at all. Signy tried an access sequence to the Seattle house, another, but the codes were tricky. She kept herself away from the emergency override, unwilling to break the unwritten rule that said, Don’t use emergency overrides unless it’s an emergency; we all need privacy sometimes.
Signy slapped at the keyboard and folded her arms against her chest. Pilar didn’t always act like a grown-up? How about Signy Thomas? Mature, reasonable Signy Thomas, terrified of losing the group, family, whatever, called Edges. Pilar and Janine. Signy and Jared. Paul. All they were to each other, strength, support, synergy; they couldn’t lose each other, damn it! Afraid of that loss, Signy had tried to hide her fear in anger, and the obvious target had been Pilar.
Signy typed a message for Seattle.
[Signy] Apologies. Contrition. I love you.
She sent it. The message would sit there until Pilar decided to respond, and that could be days; sometimes when Pilar got upset she vanished to the streets and didn’t come back until she’d settled whatever demons were after her. She’d done it before.
Janine might help, but Signy hadn’t seen her in the Seattle house. Janine had gone off to visit her folks while Pilar was out on the road, but Janine was due back—
Signy pulled up the file where Edges posted itineraries, when they remembered. Janine was due back sometime today.
Paul’s Call Me light blinked awake on Signy’s console. He was up early, for Paul. In New Hampshire, it was noon.
Paul wanted something. Okay, she’d talk to him.
[Signy] What is it, Paul?
[Paul] A contract.
[Signy] We’ll take it.
She got up and walked toward the kitchen, hoping this morning’s coffee hadn’t gone too stale.
Paul’s voice came through the speaker above the sink. “Just like that? Don’t you think you should hear what it is before we sign on?”
“Just take it, Paul. I don’t care if it’s with the Mafia, for pity’s sake. We need the money.”
Signy poured herself a cold cup of coffee and stuck it in the nuke.
“Calm down, Signy.”
Listening, was he, while she yelled at Pilar? Oh, Paul!
“I’ll try,” Signy said.
“Drink your coffee,” Paul said.
The coffee tasted bitter, old. Signy sipped at it anyway, forced it down over the lump in her throat. “Go ahead, Paul. Tell me about the job.”
“The contract is with a company called Tanaka,” Paul said. “Come in the studio and we’ll look at it.”
TWO
Settling her coffee cup on her desk in the big room in Taos, the studio with its paired desks and monitors, hers, Jared’s, set low to give a heads-up view of the holo stage. Signy expected documents, charts, Paul’s voice in overlay.
“Full interface, please,” Paul said.
Done some work on this, had he? Signy pulled on her headset and accepted the illusion of Paul Maury’s world.
Colors and white noise blurred and then cleared before Signy’s eyes, as if she blinked away a wash of tears. Paul smiled at her, his face in close focus because his face was where she had entered virtual, winter-pale skin, the black feather of an eyebrow, heavy lashes. Signy backed away. Paul wore a maroon turtleneck and rumpled tweed slacks and ragg wool socks. One of his socks was patched with duct tape.
Paul was lean elegance, but you couldn’t take him anywhere. Signy didn’t try. She wiggled her back against the familiar Queen Anne chair that had formed behind her, the feel of its burgundy leather a fiction produced by tiny pressure shifts in the skinthin she wore.
Paul had set up the library in his New Hampshire house for this, the room he favored for conversation, a familiar and polished construct. Paul sat in his leather chair by the fireplace. Reflections of firelight picked out random gleams of gold on the shadowed wall of books behind him.
“The richest waters on Earth,” Paul said.
He fashioned a globe in his hands, a blue-white Earth that he hugged in his lap as if it were a child. He turned it upside down and his fingers sank in the clouds he had imaged over the Sahara.
“The Southern Sea.”
A true master of illusion, Paul had fashioned the little world he held in his hands with great care. The Great American Desert stretched up toward Canada. The Sahara-Sahel blotted most of the African continent; California’s floating archipelago thrust its tiny islands out into the Pacific. Paul had even built a minuscule model in bas-relief of man-made Los Angeles, anchored in the shallows of Catalina Bay. Antarctica, now on top of the globe, glowed white i
n a dark green sea, and its tiny mountains pebbled the globe’s smooth surface.
“You’ve worked on this. How long did it take?” Signy asked.
“The globe? I had it filed somewhere.”
Not the globe. The job offer, Signy started to say.
“The proposal came in last night. It’s interesting, Signy.” Paul put his finger on a minuscule orange and black barber pole that marked the South Pole. It was out of scale. “It’s for some work in Antarctica.”
“Antarctica?” Signy asked.
“Well, in Lisbon. The Antarctic Treaty Commission is meeting in Lisbon this year.”
“Lisbon. Right.”
“Both places, actually. Tanaka is a Japan-based company that turns krill biomass into usable protein,” Paul said. “Tanaka, our prospective employer, wants us to help sell some changes in the Antarctic Treaty.”
“International law? Paul, do we know anyone with that sort of expertise?”
“It’s accessible. The project breaks down into bits I think we can handle,” Paul said.
“I think I’ve heard that before,” Signy said. She got out of her imaged chair and walked to the fireplace. She rested her hand against the mantel, where Paul had created the sensation of dust on polished mahoghany, gritty against her palm. Paul was no housekeeper. Even his virtuals were dusty.
“No, really. We can do this.” Paul looked at the Earth model he held in his hands. He squeezed the globe down to grapefruit size and put it on the table beside him. Signy watched the veins rise and tighten in the backs of his hands.
“What do they want us to do? Opinion shaping? Media work?” Signy asked.
Edges sold both. Sometimes phrases that an ad agency could work with, sometimes information tailored for the ears of an official who could could sway a political decision; Edges fitted answers to problems, many kinds of problems.
