Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  “They’ll be for competition; at least in posture. The resurgent capitalist ethic,” Pilar said.

  “Anyway, we don’t know what Janine is going to get Itano to agree to buy,” Paul said. Paul’s beard looked like it had grown another quarter of an inch. “Signy, we need to let this go and see what Janine is doing.”

  “We don’t have time, old friend. Oh, listen in with her if you want.”

  “You do it,” Paul countered.

  “I don’t want to. I’m afraid she’s pushing Itano to find Jared and if she gets Itano’s dander up we’re likely to get fired. Then we’ll never find Jared. Never find what happened to him. Never know—” Signy swallowed hard. “Oh, why not go with this crane thingie? Work it up for aristocrats. Appeal to the innate snobbery of the well fed. I’ll check in on Janine.”

  Signy disappeared them; Paul, Pilar, Jimmy.

  * * *

  Janine looked across the rim of a wineglass and watched Itano’s chopsticks pluck something green and slippery from the rice bowl held at his lower lip. He put the bowl down and laid his chopsticks in their porcelain holder, ah so precisely.

  Janine had placed a little notebook on the table beside her, giving Signy a way to type messages to her.

  Japanese etiquette, even at dinner, found net access acceptable. Itano’s business suit might have carried a set of cameras. If so, they didn’t show. Maybe he wasn’t recording anything. His status made such a thing possible.

  “Piracy still exists,” Itano said. “There are ports where one can sit in a dockside hotel and examine the ships that come and go. And make requests for their delivery dates. Oh, not highly publicized, these pirates. Even the owners of the ships that disappear do not call attention to the fact.”

  “Why?” Janine asked. She put her wineglass down and circled its rim with her finger.

  “Such information disturbs stockholders. And the ships are seldom destroyed. Their names are changed and their registries. It is possible, on occasion, to reclaim them.”

  “Would one hire another set of pirates to do that?”

  Itano winked and sipped his tea. Winked? U.S. born and educated, his language and gestures mixed Asian and West Coast gestures in ways that made him difficult to read. Signy wanted to send Janine a warning about that, but she didn’t want to disturb Janine’s concentration.

  “Has Tanaka lost any ships to pirates?” Janine asked.

  Itano swirled his bowl of tea in his hands. It was half empty. He frowned at it for a moment. “I am a mediator, in this work your group brings to us. Your teacher, if you’ll permit me; and it would be wise of you to permit me such a role.” The epicanthic folds of his eyes contrasted with his narrow nose; damn, his face was a cultural mix, and Signy wondered about mixed blood. “You may ask me direct questions, Janine Hull, but remember, I have California sensibilities. Do not be so direct if you should speak to Mr. Tanaka himself.”

  “Point taken,” Janine said. She picked up her tea and sipped at it. From somewhere in the background came the wailing sound of a samisen. The couple at the table next to theirs chatted in Japanese, attentive to each other. They were handsome. They were perfect. They, Signy realized, were Tanaka security.

  “Will I speak to Mr. Tanaka himself?” Janine asked.

  “I don’t know,” Itano said.

  [Signy] Pour tea for him. Come on, be the blond geisha he’s wanted all his life.

  Janine picked up the teapot and, as she did so, lifted an imaginary kimono sleeve away from her arm. Now where did she learn to do that? Signy wondered. Janine tapped out a “leave me alone” signal on her wrist, flourished her phantom sleeve, and handed the cup to Itano.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Piracy, theft, misleading reports on what is harvested from the sea, hunger,” Janine said. “What’s the answer to that hunger, Mr. Itano?”

  “Why do you avoid my first name?” he asked. “I would like for you to use it. We are not adversaries, Janine.”

  “Because I can’t say your first name, or at least I don’t think I can.”

  “Kazuyuki,” he said. “Ah. Call me Kazi. That’s easier to say.”

  “Kazi. What’s your answer? Not the corporate answer. You’re as Yank as I am; you have lived in Palo Alto between the seawalls and the campus fences. You have seen the faces beyond those fences get thinner and thinner. How do we keep everyone fed?”

  “We won’t keep everyone fed.” Kazi frowned and looked down at the table. “We can’t do it now; we won’t be able to do it for another twenty or thirty years. We won’t be able to do it then, unless there are fewer people to feed. Janine, you know this.”

  He didn’t mention Africa. No one did, these days. Starving bands swept across the African deserts, the remaining tribes consolidated in holy wars against outsiders. The world knew the winner’s names: Yoruba, Masai, Zulu. A continent of early death and earlier breeding; the rest of the world tried to ignore Africa, to let the chaos boil undisturbed. Someday, Signy knew, that would not be possible. What New Man might arise there, to cast judgment on those who turned their backs?

  “Yes,” Janine said. “I know it.”

  “Even if the sea life survives, and it may not, there must be other resources as well. Vat foods, tailored krill, irrigation of marginal lands with seawater.”

  “I’ve seen some of that land. It’s ruined forever.”

  “Yes. Land that will be submerged in a hundred years anyway, as the seas rise.”

  “If the seas continue to rise,” Janine said.

  “Saltwater irrigation of brine-tolerant plants produces biomass for the vats. In the vats, one can produce tonnes of carrot cells, corn cells.” Kazi looked at Janine and answered what must have been a smile with a rueful grin of his own. “You know as many answers as I do.”

  “I hope for more,” Janine said.

  “Hope is a curse.”

  “Is that a Japanese proverb?”

  “Perhaps,” Kazi said.

  Janine leaned forward across the narrow table and very, very cautiously placed her fingers on the back of Itano’s hand. “I like you,” Janine said.

  “You are beautiful.”

  “I am—assertive. Help me find out what happened to Jared.”

  He drew his hand away. “Your missing cameraman? I’m sorry to hear that he met with misfortune, but compensation for accidental death is included in your contract. Surely it is adequate.”

  A payoff? A workman’s comp settlement, so sorry, here’s the cash. Signy found she was gripping the arms of her airline seat. Just biz, Itano seemed to be saying. But Jared wasn’t just biz, Edges wasn’t just a company. Edges, she realized, is family. We have each other, and that’s all we have.

  “Compensation? Compensation?” Janine asked. “Money has nothing to do with this!”

  “I don’t understand,” Itano said.

  “He is my friend,” Janine whispered.

  “Your lover?” Itano asked.

  “My friend.”

  “I see.”

  Itano reached for Janine’s hand and held it as if it might break. “I will try to help you, Janine Hull.”

  “It’s not just business,” Janine said. “We’re a team. We’re very close.”

  “Ah, loyalty. Yes.”

  “You are surprised?” Janine asked.

  “I am pleased.”

  And he looked it. Janine had just scored points in Itano’s eyes. The bastard was misty in the eye and looked ready to eat from Janine’s slightly callused hand.

  [Signy] So what the hell are we selling in the morning?

  “Restraint,” Janine said aloud. Itano looked puzzled. “Is necessary in some things and not in others.” Janine finished her sentence for Itano’s ears. “Let’s make love, Kazi. Let’s leave this restaurant and go to my little room and make love.”

  [Signy]!!!

  Itano was on his feet in an instant. He came to Janine’s side of the table and held her chair for her as she stood.


  [Signy] I’ll help get your presentation together. Bye.

  * * *

  Down to Christchurch. Signy walked across runway asphalt that was called macadam in this part of the world and smelled the same anywhere, oily old dinosaur sludge pulled up to swelter in the sun’s heat. The airport put her in a van and sent her into town for a meal. Clean hills, clean streets, the buildings seemed transported whole from a London suburb to perch here, as confused about their dislocation as Signy was.

  An hour later, blinking in the sunlight, she thought the Air Australis plane squatting on the runway looked rather little, the one that waited to go down toward McMurdo, where, Signy was assured, someone would pick her up and carry her to the Siranui.

  “Up here, there’s a girl,” the mustached pilot said as he put out an arm to help her climb the steps roughed into the top of the wing. The pilot’s skin was red and freckled and blotched, a sun-damaged ruin; his eyes were faded to colorless, squinted tight and rimmed by blond lashes. He had a nice grin and Signy tried to smile at him. “No, I’ll have the duffel,” the pilot said. He reached out a hand for it, the duffel that Signy had tried to push through the plane’s door. “Goes in the back, is how it goes.”

  Signy nodded and took one of the six seats. She heard thumping noises behind her. The plane rocked as the pilot stepped over her legs and into his seat. Jesus, what year was this thing built?

  “You look a bit tired, if you don’t mind my saying so,” the pilot said.

  “I am. Very tired.”

  “Tuck back, then.” He pushed a lever and the seat back dropped to near-flat.

  “Isn’t there a regulation about this or something?”

  “Not in my plane, love. Let’s be off.”

  “Right,” Signy said. The motors were very damned loud. She let her back relax against the seat and wiggled her stretched-out legs; oh, joy. She felt the rising plane make her heavy, and luxuriated in the feeling. Closer to Jared with every passing hour.

  SIXTEEN

  Pilar and Jimmy napped in shifts, collapsing on the cushions in the Seattle studio, Pilar rousing now and again to scan Whiteline’s translations of talk from the Siranui, nothing useful. Jared had to be dead. Signy flew on toward nowhere, and would find nothing.

  Pilar found an absence inside, a blank spot, where feelings of sorrow or anger or outrage might grow later, but not yet.

  Late in the day, she and Jimmy, without discussing it, began to pick up the pace of work again. Pilar made a fresh pot of coffee and sent Jimmy to rummage through the kitchen for anything he could find to eat.

  Whiteline’s screen, empty of words, made her think he had fallen asleep.

  [Pilar] Whiteline, you there, man?

  [Whiteline] Nothing to say. All quiet down south.

  [Pilar] You work long hours, when you work.

  [Whiteline] Empress, you are so right. I gotta crash.

  [Pilar] Okay. You saving?

  [Whiteline] I’m saving. ZZZZ now. More later.

  She let him go. Pilar sipped coffee and listened to Jimmy and Paul, who traced the available reports of diplomatic positions in Lisbon as if the Treaty Convention were a stock market. Or some sort of racing form. They sounded like bettors at some weird jockey club. They worked like demons, like business as usual. Paul seemed to be operating under the tenets of a demented solipsism: If we keep busy, last night will not have happened. Paul’s manic mood seemed almost an act of faith. He laughed at something Jimmy said. The interchange sounded like old friends yucking it up.

  Paul didn’t bond easily with anyone; Jimmy seemed to be disarming him with quiet displays of graphic skills, with placid calm. While Jimmy worked, obsessed, he treated Paul and Pilar as if they were useful databases, nothing more. His obliviousness to the rituals of getting acquainted gave Pilar the impression that he’d been around for years. For a kid with serious social dyslexia, he was doing quite well.

  Pilar looked in at their workspace:

  A beam balance, the kind that blind justice usually holds, only this time a mermaid held it. Paul’s crab and a frog-thing, presumably Jimmy, dumped packets of information into boxes marked with bright national flags. They stacked the boxes on one or the other pan of the balance. The boxes were familiar: the jungle-gym lattices that Edges used as personality constructs.

  The crab became aware of Pilar’s presence and tossed a bucket of papers in her direction.

  “What’s it for?” Pilar asked.

  “We’re simulating the vote while we’re prepping cheat sheets for Tanaka’s staff,” Paul said.

  “Sure,” Pilar said. “Whatever you say.” Pilar helped file diplomat’s names, educational records, shopping habits, and hobbies, if known, into Paul’s lattice boxes of known facts that, fitted together, gave shape and direction to the group of individuals slated to attend the Antarctic Treaty Convention. The crab picked the boxes when they were filled, turned them in his claws, and piled them on the balance pans. The pans and the mermaid who held them swayed back and forth in an unseen current, and a box that Pilar had just finished stuffing (Mexico) fell off and drifted away.

  “Hey!” Pilar said.

  “It’s a tidal effect,” Paul said. “A combination of grain futures, currency fluctuations, newsnet stories, and a mix of other stuff that might ‘sway’ opinions. Nice, eh?”

  “Nice.”

  Pilar emptied her bucket and exited. Somewhere in the distance, a crab and frog made cries of protest. Pilar ignored them. Signy was off-line, and hopefully sleeping at McMurdo by now. Janine? Pilar switched to Lisbon.

  Janine’s world was a view of a basket of pastries resting on white linen next to a giant cup of coffee. Janine sat at a small table in a restaurant, in a room with low ceilings, emerald green walls, and blue and white tilework, furnished with ancient heavy wood and a plethora of silver. Japanese men in black suits sat at nearby tables. In the background, black-haired waiters in ill-fitting white jackets hovered with pots of coffee.

  “What’s your schedule?” Pilar asked.

  Janine wiped her hands on a thick white napkin and typed on her notepad.

  [Janine] Meeting with Kazi’s team in four hours. Then high tea with the Brits.

  “What’s the meeting about?”

  [Janine] Prep. I’m just there to listen. Not presenting, thanks.

  “Thanks, indeed,” Pilar said. “Okay. Tune us in, and we’ll put what you hear into the crane sequence, if we need to. I think we’ll have it ready for you, hon.”

  [Janine] Jared?

  “Nothing, Engineer. Sorry.”

  Kazuyuki Itano, crisp in a dark gray suit, smiled as he came to the table and sat down next to Janine.

  “I have spoken with the captain of the Siranui,” Kazi said. “He will do everything possible for your friend. But he says that recovering Dr. Balchen’s body is—unlikely.”

  “I see. Thank you.” Janine reached down and flipped the notebook closed.

  Dr. Balchen’s body. Corpse, cadaver, meat. Pilar lifted her headset away and rubbed at the bridge of her nose. Jared as a corpse, dissolving into nothing; Pilar had all too clear a vision of yellowish bone showing through torn red muscle, Jared a meal for the creatures of the sea. No! The dead, her dead, just dissappeared; they went into a space called “nothing,” where flesh was not a matter of concern. Ashes to ashes. Her own delicate bones reassured her, the texture of her skin under her fingertips, the soft downy feel of the pale hairs that grew between her eyebrows; this was her own dear and living flesh, warm and real.

  Jimmy, in his skinthin and headset and gloves, looked less alive than your average cockroach. He paced around the perimeter of the holo stage, nudging invisible objects into an invisible mass. Pilar slipped back into the world behind her headset, to find the crab and the frog still swimming around their mermaid.

  “Hello, Empress,” Paul said. “The vote looks close.”

  “Close which way?” Pilar asked.

  “The U.S., the E.C., and Japan can get a mora
torium on fishing. If they agree to agree. The E.C. can foul us up, but they won’t be able to block the moratorium unless India intervenes.”

  “Will they?” Pilar asked.

  “No. Because India is farming her coast and isn’t importing krill.”

  The balance pan swayed and rocked in their information currents, and the mermaid smiled. The creature had scales all over; they didn’t stop at her waist. She looked sort of like Signy on a bad hair day.

  “Jimmy?” Paul asked. Paul’s crab grew larger, and crept into a conch where a small frog sat, blinking its huge and luminous eyes. “I have a need to persecute someone. I’m paranoid, and I’ve got a friend missing. I don’t like that. It’s time we had a little chat.”

  “I’ve told you everything I can think of about that music,” Jimmy said. “Honest. Everything I know.”

  “Tell me again,” the crab said. “Start now.”

  “Let us out of this aquarium, then. I need a little more reality in my space, you know?” The Jimmy-frog popped away. The Paul-crab lurched in a circle, and the holo stage darkened to black. “You didn’t glitch the music,” Paul’s disembodied voice said. “This Evergreen of yours ran a key into it, one that linked Edges to her, or to whoever listened for her. The link was designed to wake up when Edges contacted the Siranui. So Evergreen belongs to Tanaka, we think. What do you think?”

  Unadorned, Jimmy’s face filled the holo stage. Paul had blocked his own from view.

  “It fits,” Jimmy said.

  “I think I would like to talk to Evergreen,” Paul said. “I truly would like to talk to her. Soon. Can you find her?”

  “I can try,” Jimmy said. He looked down and away.

  “You do that,” Paul said.

  Paul let Jimmy’s face fade, let the world go totally black. “Jimmy?” he asked.