by Sage Walker
No “Hi, how are you?” from either of them. No “How was your trip?” They were wrapped up in their work, and real time meant so little to either of them. “The dead man,” Signy said. “Okay.”
She left them and entered:
—a sick bay. Brought to her hands, to her muscles, Signy accessed Jared’s familiar body language and saw his views, unedited, of a small white room and a still white face.
Jared seemed relaxed and calm. His interested distance from problems like this amazed her, still, annoyed her, sometimes. Just biz, to him. Death, pain, human misery—just biz. Signy let Jared’s suit’s transmissions feed to hers, accepting the simple signals of tensions at knee and wrist that told of Jared’s motions, the complex sensors that gave her his touch, the crisp finish of the nylon that wrapped the corpse and the strange feel of a cold and broken hand. Jared’s tension levels increased while he was doing the post mortem, but he didn’t seem all that spooked. No more than anyone would be, exploring an everyday death at sea.
Signy dipped in and out of Jared’s evening and picked up his increase in alertness when he met Anna de Brum. Scanning through Jared’s journey to the deck, to watch Kihara leave, Signy felt Jared’s fascination with and fear of the icebergs, acute sensations. Because Jared had felt a primitive terror, Signy did. It wasn’t like Jared to fear anything. But the ice had moved so silently, been so massive.
“Signy?” Paul asked, an intrusive voice that seemed to come from overhead. “Can you get an output from the bridge? Maybe they’re looking for this guy.”
“I’ll try.” Signy transferred her awareness away from Jared’s sleep and brought herself back to real time in the Taos house. She fed the output from the Siranui’s bridge to a speaker and listened in for a while, but all she heard was chatter, mostly in Japanese, interspersed with occasional pidgin comments about a storm. She set a capture on the word Skylochori, left the audio pickups awake in Jared’s cabin, and switched back to the New Hampshire studio.
“Hello,” Paul said.
Janine looked up and smiled. “I’m glad you’re back. How was the trip?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“What’s Jared doing now?” Janine asked.
“He’s sleeping,” Signy said. “You can pick him up if you want; he fell asleep with his skinthin on,” Signy said.
“He didn’t upload his trip yet,” Janine said. “What we got is just the autopsy. You’d better look at it, Signy.”
“I did already.” Post mortems always made her feel like a perverted voyeur. Signy didn’t like watching them.
Paul, in his warm, safe, American room, stayed intent on his flatscreen, where columns of pounds and yen scrolled past with dizzying rapidity.
“Paul, you act like this guy was murdered or something,” Signy said.
“I don’t know,” Paul said. “But Tanaka lost a ship three days ago, or so the Internet says. Tanaka hasn’t made much flap about it. They haven’t called for a search, nothing like that. Now there’s a drowned man and the Tanaka mother harvester just happens to pick him up. I’m interested.”
“So I see. I’ll check the bridge again, Paul.” Signy listened to the Siranui’s bridge for a while, and heard a story, in English, about a sailor and a woman in Christchurch with remarkable and highly unlikely attributes.
“Nothing,” Signy said.
“Odd.” Paul stared at his flatscreen.
Janine’s image lay sprawled on a cushion on Paul’s worn China trade carpet, her elbows guarding a reader screen.
“Janine, what are you doing?” Signy asked.
“Looking through this treaty stuff,” Janine said. “You’ve read it?”
“I’ve skimmed it,” Signy said.
“I’m looking at documentation on the Antarctic Accord of 1991. Strange, strange.”
“Where’s Pilar?” Signy asked.
“Out. Walking, I guess.” Janine dropped her head and began to read again.
And Paul hunted for Skylochori. Warburg-Paribas security gave him nothing, he reported. Nothing about the size of the man’s account, or when or where deposits had been made. Paul tried hotel registries, starting at Chile’s Teniente Rodolfo Marsh station, southernmost of public hostels, and circled outward, placing little red question marks on the South Polar map as he went from destination to destination. Ushuaia, in Argentina, Punta Arenas, in Chile. The question marks buzzed like bees as he left them. Paul’s queries jumped across the map to New Zealand’s South Island, where he searched hotels and job-call rosters in Christchurch. Nada.
Paul would be at his search for days if nothing distracted him. Signy sent a black patent high-heeled shoe to his display and tapped it impatiently. “Get off it,” Signy said. “We’ll hear what the ship finds out about this Skylochori sooner or later. And we’re not working for him, whoever he was.”
Paul transformed the shoe into a pink and blue nursery butterfly and fluttered it out of his way. “Ushuaia,” he said. “Skylochori, debit for three cases of Henessey XO brandy. My, it’s expensive.”
Signy closed her eyes. Jared’s view of sick bay came to haunt her, the sound of water dripping from a dead man’s hand. For distraction, she pulled up dossiers on Tanaka’s execs in the company’s offices in San Diego and Honolulu, profiles that she might need to know. They seemed a dull bunch, by and large.
“The treaty negotiations were so polite,” Janine said.
“Yeah,” Signy said. “I’ve looked through some stuff on them. It was easy to be noble, I guess, when there wasn’t anything down there to want.”
But now there was.
The ice at the end of the world had a strange history, due to get stranger. The hard-won and ridiculous balance of interests that had produced the Antarctic Treaty had changed in the past thirty years. Sentiment for banning mankind entirely from the white desert was rising. The seas, though, with their protein riches, inspired complex parameters of greed and confusion.
“Old solutions,” Janine reported, “the weirdest set of gentleman’s agreements you’re ever likely to run across.”
At the height of the cold war, the U. S. and Russia had agreed to set aside territorial claims in Antarctica and share information that they gleaned from scientific research in the International Geophysical Year of 1957. When Britain and Argentina were shooting at each other in the Falklands, their representatives came to the conference table each day and discussed wildlife protection on the continent. When Chile made territorial claims and had a pregnant woman deliver a child on “their” part of Antarctica, the bombastics were politely ignored. The place inspired strange courtesies; Signy had read that mutual survival was all that counted there. Usually.
“I’m beginning to believe that our client thinks he wants something that won’t work,” Janine said. “Any quota system that involves portioning out the harvest by nation, for God’s sake, is going to get the diplomats up on their soapboxes. There’s got to be a better way. I just haven’t found it yet.”
“Does anyone know how flexible our client is?” Signy asked.
“No,” Janine said.
“I guess I’ll start trying to find out,” Signy said.
“I’ll get on it.” Janine stuck her tongue out at the screen and faded away from the New Hampshire floor.
Paul kept manipulating the smattering of information he had on the man named Skylochori.
“Are you still at that?” Signy asked him.
“Maybe Jared’s on to something,” Paul said. “Skullduggery at sea, or somebody’s secrets.”
“You’re woolgathering, Paul. This is just a contract, not a study in conspiracy theory.”
“But Jared’s instincts are good, Lioness.”
If Signy fussed about Jared, Paul would defend him. If they both got on his case, Janine would become Jared’s champion. Pilar seemed, always, to ignore all the interactions, to exist in her own little space, and tonight Pilar was out walking. Thinking of music? Of sculpture? Whatever, all of them would tiptoe ar
ound Pilar’s definition of personal territory, would inconvenience themselves to make sure she had it.
“There’s something funny about this Skylochori’s purchase, I think.” Paul pointed at something on his New Hampshire screen, but he forgot to send views of whatever he was looking at. “Skylochori bought his brandy from a little shop that sells, uh-huh, Euro perfumes, tinned caviar…”
“Does this have anything to do with the contract, Paul?”
“Who knows?”
“Tanaka lost a ship. We don’t know how often fishing ships go down, or what the procedures are when they do. Jared will probably find out and then we can quit worrying about it,” Signy said.
“I’m sure he’ll do just that,” Paul said. “He’s an inquisitive soul, our Jared.”
It’s just a contract, Signy told herself. We needed it, we took it, we’ll work it out. Paul’s just anxious because we don’t know all that much about Tanaka yet.
Paul kept on noodling with maps, vocal about it, and unaware he was making any noise at all. Signy ignored him and looked at her capture file on the Siranui for any mention of Skylochori. The file was blank.
Janine reappeared on Paul’s carpet. “Our client is a visionary, by his own standards,” Janine said.
Janine held a brown bread and cheese sandwich in one hand and grabbed salted peanuts with the other. Signy remembered she was hungry, herself.
“He’s a tad unconventional,” Janine said. “Yoshiro-san’s company started out in manufacturing, which is what he learned from Daddy. Yoshiro is a lesser son. On his own, he’s wrested power away from his older brothers. He’s gotten religion about the sea, it seems. Figured from way back that it would be the primary food source for humanity. He’s been keeping fishing operations going at scant profit to get long-term rights.”
“So he’s flexible,” Signy said.
“Not necessarily. He could be as stubborn as a mule if he thinks we’re calling it wrong.” Janine licked salt from her fingers. She picked up a glass of some bright red drink and sipped at it.
“Interesting,” Paul said. “The store at Ushuaia has sold eight hundred cases of brandy in the past nine months. And it has purchased—thirty.”
“So they smuggle,” Signy said.
“I think you are right, Miss Thomas. The question is, what do they smuggle?” Paul’s face dissolved, replaced by the stylized crab sigil Paul used when he wanted to be left alone. The crab clicked its claws in Signy’s direction and scuttled away into infinity.
SEVEN
Kihara’s alarm beeped in the little cabin. Jared rolled over and slapped at it, feeling the tug of his skinthin against his arm. He’d fallen asleep in it. The skinthin still held a cache of stuff from the trip, recordings of the helo’s landing, the tethered lifeboat with its unfortunate sea anchor.
Jared located Kihara’s coffeemaker and started it brewing. He diddled with the cabin console until he got the upload function working, peeled out of his skinthin, dumped the suit’s information to New Hampshire, and ran his shower hot and long.
Not late, though he felt as if he were, Jared traced the maze of the ship’s passageways toward sick bay. Flat bright light came through the portholes, a restless brightness that implied noon. He knew the constant light disturbed some people. It disturbed him. He felt as if he had overslept.
Anna de Brum frowned at his forehead lenses. Her eyes followed the lead wires that ran down his neck and vanished under the collar of his skinthin.
“Don’t worry,” Jared said. “I don’t record any visits with patients.” Well, the drowned man? The recordings went only to Edges, and private storage. “But this rig is complicated to get on, so it goes on first thing every morning.” And sometimes, after several thousand travel miles, he slept in it, but he didn’t tell her that. He’d changed into his spare after his shower.
“You are a human camera?” Anna asked.
“I suppose that’s a good enough description,” Jared said.
“Dr. Kihara told me that you would be recording much of what you see. But I didn’t expect…”
“All this gear.” Jared waved his hand toward his forehead.
“Yes.”
“Do we have anyone scheduled?”
“No.” Anna smiled at him. Her smile was warm and generous. He felt forgiven.
“But we have a patient waiting,” Anna said.
Competent, deliberate in her motions, Anna made a courteous point of having him approve her treatment of the morning’s visitor, a crewwoman, Japanese, a muscular specimen who kept her eyes downcast. She had a sprained wrist.
“From work?” Jared asked.
“No,” the woman said. Her noninjured hand came up to hide her face in a practiced gesture of shyness. “Volleyball.”
Anna’s laugh diffused the woman’s formal embarrassment. Jared checked the X ray and approved Anna’s choice of medication and her application of a wrist splint. No other patients appeared. He examined supplies and chart formats, and learned, hands on, the arrangement of crash equipment, the locations of emergency medications.
While the agenda of establishing his role with Anna continued. No, I have no intention of disrupting your routines; yes, I will let you function at your considerable level of competence; no, I won’t let you feel you’re stuck with decisions that should be mine to make.
When he felt that Anna had finished checking him out, and that he was comfortable enough with the layout, he called the session to a halt. They had learned enough of each other’s abilities to get through the next day, at least. “What’s next?” Jared asked.
“We’re finished here,” Anna said. “Unless someone is hurt or needs us. And then I will be called.”
“My other job here is to see things,” Jared said. “Where do I go first?”
“The bridge says you can go where you like.”
“And they probably said somebody’s supposed to keep me out of trouble. Who’s my chaperone?”
“I am.” She said it with a grin.
“Then I’ll follow you around,” Jared said. “If you wouldn’t mind. Just chase me away when you’re tired of me.”
Knowing, because he’d done this before, that the major stress of a ship’s doc’s job was boredom. Days and days of nothing to do. So you found things to keep busy; poker, gossip, plans for writing the Great American Novel. Anything.
“I do some biology research,” Anna said. “I was going to pick up some specimens from the ship’s freezer. It could be a sort of tour, I guess.”
“After you,” Jared said.
* * *
Jared followed Anna through a maze of near-empty passageways in this floating city of a ship. They came through a hatch and onto a catwalk that spanned the Siranui’s sea factory. Brightly lit, the working space below was as big as a modest college field house. A door slid open at one end and a wall of fish and water poured into a vat, bringing with it a clean briny smell and a rush of activity in the space below.
“Whoa!” Jared said.
Anna stopped on the catwalk and smiled at him. “A lot, isn’t it? We can process one hundred and fifty tons every forty minutes,” Anna said.
“That’s a lot,” Jared said. He was in range of the ship’s power and he switched his suit’s transmission to real time. On his wrist, Signy’s light glowed; she was back from Houston, he guessed.
“Some of the factory ships are bigger. Tanaka is not such a big company.”
The scene beneath him looked like something out of Escher, belts and corners and angles running every which way. The space was filled with machines, workers, and fish. Nobody spoke. The workers were dressed in masks, gloves, and slick green waterproof coveralls. They looked like a surgical team. There were sounds of machinery, but less noise than Jared might have expected.
“It’s simple to follow,” Anna said. “See, there, the size nets?”
Jared looked where she pointed. The fish fell through nets of varying sizes and were beheaded, one by one and at great
speed, by workers who fed them to buzzing saws.
“Then they run through a filleting machine, and a skinner.”
“What about krill?” Jared asked.
“That comes in in blocks, from different trawlers,” Anna said. The fillets emerged on a belt and passed over a transparent sheet of plastic lit from beneath. A worker watched the pale fillets go by, and now and again flipped one from the line and into a waiting bucket. “Candlers,” Anna said. “Looking for blood spots or parasites, or whatever.”
“What happens to the discards?” Jared asked.
“They come to me,” Anna said.
The approved fillets were packed into boxes and shuttled into a flash freezer. Above a half-filled box, one set of dark eyes looked up at Jared and Anna. Woman? Man? The look was not friendly. Woman, Jared decided. The hairs went up on the back of his neck at something those eyes told him. The woman looked down, her hands quick in the piles of fish.
“Are there many problems with the harvest?” Jared asked. “It seems like the competition is stiff out here.”
“The ocean is large,” Anna said. “What sort of problems do you mean?”
“Oh, fights and territory stuff.”
“That’s not my field,” Anna said. She moved on across the catwalk and opened an insulated door that led into a walk-in freezer. Metal shelves, like library stacks, bulged with irregular plastic packages. Jared’s breath frosted around him.
In bins and on racks, specimens waited their turns at investigation. All labeled, all marked with tags that listed date, species, time and location of collection. Jared found himself face-to-face with a dead crab-eater seal pup, packaged in shrinkwrap.
“My pilot said something about a ship that sank.”
“Yes.” Anna busied herself with sacks and labels.
“Do you know anything about it?”
“Very little.” Anna looked up at him, her hand, holding a thick inkstick, motionless. She looked down again. “Very little.”
