Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  It was the first job Edges had taken after Jared joined them. A small botanical research firm in Surinam had wanted to buy some acres along the Rio Negro. Politics intervened; none of the principals could legally purchase Brazilian land. Paul asked Pilar about it, and Pilar knew a media madam who liked to think of herself as a Concerned Individual. Sometimes.

  Edges rented a private room in an L.A. restaurant and set the forest into it. Jared invited the woman to an intime dinner and made the pitch. He’s known about madam’s penchant for aggressive execs with dominance needs and had acted precisely otherwise. He’d played her like a fish.

  Jared’s women came and went and stayed friends with him. He permitted? No, more than that, facilitated, the fulfillment of sexual fantasies, but he carried no garbage along to bed, no guilt trips or dominance games. Therefore, Susanna, who had seemed just happy to talk to him, and happy with Mark. Signy wondered about Jared’s time with the Canadian girl. Signy wanted to ask about her; she wanted a chance to ask.

  The tropical land purchase had gone through with no problems, except that madam insisted on keeping the land in her name and becoming a partner in the company. She’d always wanted to be a scientist, she said.

  Signy pulled the chip out, remembering that somewhere, there was a recording of the dinner, one where Jared pulled off the whole business and managed never to laugh. Oh, that one was such fun.

  Signy tossed the chip aside. What on earth had compelled her to bring these damn things anyway?

  Lifting the bottle of Scotch to pour out a second, smallish shot, Signy rolled the chips in her hand as if they were walnuts she was thinking about cracking. She picked out another one and slotted it.

  * * *

  Oh, damn. Oh, not this one, Signy thought.

  But Jared’s shoulders were firm and cool beneath her hands and Signy’s fingers felt the firm resilience of his skin, the smooth strands of Jared’s thick hair, her hands working at a leather thong that knotted all that black wealth. The knot came free and he shook his head. The dark waterfall of his hair slid across his shoulders and smelled, as Jared’s hair had always smelled, of forest musk.

  Oh, damn.

  But Jared’s breath was warm and sweet against her eyelids and she looked up through the screen of his hair, sheltered and alive, feeling the weight of him, seeing firelight and shadows in the room where they lay. She held her palms against his shoulders and ran them down his arms, feeling the smooth strength of his tensed muscles as he held his weight above her.

  * * *

  Pilar had filmed the sequence. It started as a joke, sex encased in skinthins and no more real touch of flesh on flesh than if they were dressed in head-to-foot condoms—but Pilar had edited all the plastic away and left sensations of lovemaking as tender as the new skin under a blister.

  Signy killed the sequence and looked, belatedly, for privacy guards on Tanaka’s office system. She found them and sealed the stage from any watchers as best she could. The chip she held in her palm was memory, was Pilar’s re-creation of something that was long behind them all; it was a fake. No, Signy decided, I won’t do this.

  There had been snow outside, and a full moon, that first winter in the Taos house. Pilar had bought the damned wreck of crumbling adobe, beautiful, but crumbling, and talked Jared and Signy into coming out from New Hampshire to look at it. They spent a hard summer fixing it up, and decided to winter there, leaving Paul alone in New Hampshire. They never discussed their reasons for leaving him; Paul seemed to want to be alone.

  None of them had wanted sleep on that bright night. Signy made spiced wine and the three of them settled next to the banco that curved around the corner fireplace. They watched cinders float up to the curved adobe blackness of the little cave-shaped firebox, flare red against the soot-varnished baked clay, and fade softly to black again. Jared lay against the rabbit-skin blanket, one arm around Signy, one around Pilar. “We have to try this sometime,” Pilar said.

  “Not me. I’m a country boy.”

  Signy had her ear pressed against Jared’s chest; his voice rumbled like a growly bear.

  “A country Canadian. The world doesn’t know how Canadians do it; you’re all so reticent. Consider it a study in comparative cultural lovemaking, Jared.”

  “Ridiculous,” Jared muttered.

  Signy found a softer place on Jared’s arm to rest her head. She stared up at the round bulk of the vigas above her, shadowy and dark. Jared wasn’t that uninterested in the idea; she could sense an anticipation in him. “I’ll film it,” Signy said.

  “No.” Pilar reached across Jared’s chest and laid her hand on Signy’s breast. “No, Signy. Let’s try it my way.” Pilar’s fingers found Signy’s nipple and traced across the flesh until it tightened. “Okay?”

  It started as a joke.

  The hell with it, Signy decided, and punched the chip to life.

  * * *

  Tangled on the low bed, with Pilar’s cameraed eyes next to them, and the shy awareness that something was different this time, that someone watched; Jared’s kisses were hesitant, her responses guarded. Soon forgotten, the watcher became another pair of hands, another set of touches; even the numbing skinthins only a minor distraction. A log cracked in the fireplace and the shadows brightened. Signy looked up, idly and from a distance, wondering whose breath was warm on her breast, but somehow it didn’t matter. Wondering whose hand was beside hers on the rigid shaft of Jared’s penis, trapped in its hateful restraining Lycra, but that didn’t matter, either, for he pushed the hands away, gently. “Slow,” he said. “We have time.”

  Slow, and better because of the frustration of muted touches through fabric, better because of the heightened sense of touch that Pilar fed them through the skinthin’s sensitive controls, they lay quiet, almost motionless. For a time, Signy sat astride him, feeling his hands on her back, her hands seeking between them for the promise trapped against his belly. For a time, she lay beneath his hands, his stroking, gentle hands. She watched Pilar’s lenses eyes focus on her throat, vulnerable and extended, she heard her own breath, and Jared’s.

  Someone’s warm fingers touched her thighs, tracing down an anatomic pathway that her nerves answered with a tingle that ran from the soles of her feet and back to the tensed muscles inside her belly where she wanted pressure, distension, a joining of flesh to fill the void, erase the ache, now, soon, now. The touch of fur came muted on her back, beneath her hips, beneath her heels.

  She begged for Jared, silently with her mouth on his, with the arch of her pelvis that strained the skinthin’s elastic fabric against tender engorged flesh. The skinthins slipped away, Pilar helping her, helping him, peel free of their sweat-slick confinement.

  The transition into Pilar’s reconstruction of the night, edited later, was flawless, superb. Pilar had scored the work with echoes of their breathing, with staccato pepperings of the sounds of the crackling fire, and the distant sound of a wooden flute, and later, the magnified soft silences of falling snow. Somewhere about here …

  The room’s air chilled Signy’s shoulders and she reached for warmth, found it in Jared’s hot skin, and pushed close against him. He nuzzled at her neck and Signy reached up to twine a hand in Pilar’s hair, brought her down to lie between them, Signy’s fingers finding wonder in the differences in the textures of Pilar’s skin, Jared’s skin, the contours of Jared’s tense arms and the softness of Pilar’s inner thighs. Jared’s arms came seeking Signy; Pilar had moved to his side and lay pressed against his back. Signy felt the calluses on Jared’s hands. He ran their roughness gently over the ridges of her ribs, her waist, reached both hands under her hips to hold her up to someone’s gentle tongue. Suddenly chilled and warmed with the moisture from someone’s nibbling lips, she felt silk touches slip away toward the dark deep spaces of her that ached to be filled.

  Silk and slip and joy at the thrust of him, quick and deep, and she pulled him into her, deeper, lost and meeting his rapid rhythm; she found herself all too
quickly at the brink of a sudden orgasm, thinking not yet, please, not yet.

  “Don’t wait,” he whispered, and thrust again, holding still against waves of her pleasure that broke against his stillness and left her gasping, someone’s cry ringing in her ears.

  Signy let him leave her warmth; aware of the rigid strength of his erection as he rolled away. She lay quiet beside him, the edge off her hunger. Jared slid his hand across her belly and cupped it over the wet curls between her thighs, his palm warm and comforting. Pilar sank down on him and he pushed up his hips to meet her. Signy rolled up on her side and slipped her hand around Jared’s thigh to cradle his scrotum in her hand. Wanting more, and hoping Pilar would not drain him, but Pilar arched away from him with a laughing sob. Jared sought Pilar with his arms, reaching like someone blind. Pilar guided him toward Signy’s opened legs. This time, Signy let the rhythm slow, let the distance between him and her need vanish completely, lost in anticipation of stroke and thrust, closer, deeper, secure in a wild faith that this would never end, never. She pushed against him with an urgency that forgot all restraint, and tried to bring him with her to the yawning wonder she entered, a cellular unknowing where all life lived, beyond sensation, into the timeless awareness of now.

  Perhaps Jared followed her. Perhaps he did, and Signy drifted somewhere, watching the fire cast shadows on the locked figures beside her, and listened to Pilar’s moans, hearing in them perhaps only the echoes of a fulfillment Signy wanted for her, for all of them.…

  * * *

  Curled on a dusty cotton futon with her fists pushed hard against her crotch. Empty and aching. She had tipped the Scotch over, and it smelled of desolation.

  EIGHTEEN

  Seven hours of sleep weren’t going to cut it, but Signy was wide awake, alert and jittery and groggy at the edges. No messages waited on the screens. Janine was off-line. Paul and Pilar weren’t answering.

  Not all of the water had cooked out of the little teapot. Signy refilled it and drank two cups of instant coffee and scrubbed at the liquor stain on the carpet. She peeled out of her skinthin and found the shower to be hot, generous, and unmetered. The local time was 0700. Clean, dressed, and at loose ends, she paced the confines of the little suite, sipping at more coffee. Anna wasn’t due to get here for hours. And was not on the Siranui, the watch officer told her, audio only.

  “Where is she?” Signy asked.

  “Corpsman de Brum is on her way to McMurdo.”

  “Thank you,” Signy said. She had her finger poised over the cutoff key.

  “She left a message for you,” the officer said. “It says—‘Meet me at the Hotel California.’”

  “I’ll do that. Thanks.” Signy thought she could find the place again.

  There was no food in the suite. There had to be a cafeteria or something somewhere in this maze. Signy picked up her keycard and turned it over. A map of the station was printed on the back of it. Snead’s forbidden sections were marked in color, three buildings away from her. The cafeteria was just past the entry doors. Fine.

  The breakfast crowd buzzed with the tensions of business. The place felt like a combination of a university coffee shop and a construction-site canteen. Bearded men sat in clusters, shoveling food and talking with their heads together. Women in flannels and bulky padded clothes sat in clusters of their own, in unconscious separatism.

  Signy carried her laden tray to an empty table. She felt studiously ignored, and in a fit of exasperation, pulled her camera headband into position, focused on faces, groups, framed them in an idle documentary of morning on McMurdo. Bits of conversations floated to her while she ate scrambled eggs that had traveled here in frozen cartons.

  Technobabble filled the room, talk of mats of algae under the ice of freshwater lakes in the dry valleys, populations of krill that had pigmented in response to UV excess, new construction up on the slopes of Erebus.

  “There’s lava tubes in there, some of them big enough to be decent hallways. Makes the excavations a lot easier,” someone said.

  “What about stability?”

  “Oh, hell, a volcano is a volcano. But if you got the sensors up all the time and don’t mind moving in a hurry, it wouldn’t be a bad place to live.”

  “Geothermal luxury, fuckin’ A.”

  But no one was supposed to live here. The treaty permitted no permanent inhabitants; Signy remembered. She would ask Paul to look at lists of repeated visits—Paul liked that sort of sleuthing. No real privacy, no true sense of unlimited space existed anywhere in the world, and a presumably empty continent might appeal to some markedly weird money.

  Janine’s light awakened on Signy’s wrist. Signy considered talking to her, right here in the middle of the feeding arena where she was already getting studied glances that quickly looked away. Signy deliberately touched the mike taped to her throat and said, “Good morning. Want some eggs?”

  [Janine] Ugh.

  Janine’s eyes scanned a room full of Japanese sararimen, showing Signy a meeting in progress around a long oval table, Kazi at its head. The air was thick with tobacco smoke. Printouts competed for table space with teacups, ashtrays, and various models of notepads. The room and the faces looked late and tired. Janine’s vision wandered to a steel and thermopane window that looked out at a walled stone castle, a crumbling fairy-tale building set high on a rocky slope above a messy urban sprawl. Then her fingers flew on her notepad, sending typescript to the heads-up display in the corner of Signy’s vision.

  [Janine] Tense here. U.S. and U.K. reports came in. Not enough fish. Projections say that current harvesting will decrease the mature fish populations down past danger levels in five years. They’re talking 5% of netted fish mature enough to reproduce—as bad as the cod stats in 1993, and that’s bad.

  Very bad. There were a few surviving cod, hopefully reproducing as best they could in the abandoned North Sea. Still pirated by some of the Scandinavians, but the great schools that had fed Northern Europe for centuries were gone and would likely never return.

  In Lisbon, a bearded Anglo man spoke to a conference table surrounded by intent Japanese faces. “The gentoo penguin populations show a greater decline than the chinstraps. We have no explanation for this; their diets are much the same. It is possible that we know less of penguin population dynamics than we thought. But it seems likely that food supply is in question—penguin populations increased at the height of whaling activity and entered a status of true population explosion, then declined again when the whales began to return.”

  [Janine] We can do it. We can sell a moratorium on fishing in the Southern Ocean. No Fishing: Satellite monitors run by the U.N. Paul still wants it. I’ll forget the low-bid system. No Fishing is the only way.

  Paul had made that decision when he was ranting about sabotaging Tanaka. What the hell did he really want Janine to do? Blow the contract?

  “Let me talk to Paul before you push it,” Signy said. “I imagine he has some new thoughts on all this by now.”

  [Janine] Paul’s off-line. So is Seattle. Is okay. I’m just watching, here.

  “Well, don’t make any moves yet. Not until we talk about it, all of us.” Signy wondered if Paul had thought it over since last night and still wanted to push a moratorium. No way to know, right now.

  Janine’s cameras focused on Kazi, who sat across the table from her. Kazi cleared his throat. “The penguin specimens are healthy when sampled? This is not a disease of some sort that is decimating their populations?” he asked.

  “No,” the bearded man said. “The specimens we have sacrificed have been fat and healthy.”

  “What of the whales?” Kazi asked.

  “The counts for the polar regions are not in. Preliminary reports say that calving seems to be at normal levels in the minke populations.”

  “Tanaka will go broke if they don’t fish,” Signy said to Janine. Janine shook her head slightly, causing the Japanese businessman who sat next to her to turn toward her and blink in surprise.r />
  “Won’t they?” Signy asked. A man at the next table in the McMurdo cafeteria looked up at Signy and then looked down at his plate again.

  [Janine] No. Tanaka won’t.

  “What chance of fish population recovery if they are left alone?” Signy asked. “Do you have the stats?”

  [Janine] Ozone, oceanic warming, current changes? Difficult trends to extrapolate. Chances are good. In 50 years.

  And would the “recovered” populations be as poisoned as most coastal fish were now? Toxins combined, diffused, and changed in the sea, and climbed the food chain, altering the balance of the seas’ populations in complex ways. The sea remained the Final Solution, the Universal Solvent, for Earth, at least. Difficult trends to extrapolate, indeed.

  Signy stacked her dishes on her tray and carried them to the scullery window, where clatters, bangs, and mariachi music competed with pidgin chatter. A waft of steamy air carried the smell of soapsuds and roasting meat.

  “What about Kazi?” Signy asked Janine. “What sort of help has he offered? About Jared?”

  [Janine] Told the Kasumi to stay in the area. All he could do, he said.

  “That’s all?” Signy asked.

  Janine’s attention turned to Kazi, who studiously ignored her as he closed down the day’s conference.

  [Janine] That’s all so far. Leaving now. Get Paul to tweak some of this meeting’s worries into the crane sequence; I’ll show it to Kazi after tea.

  “What happened last night?” Signy asked.

  [Janine] Politics and sex. I’ll dump it to your address. It will take me a few minutes, okay?

  “Okay,” Signy said.

  She had—three hours, the clock on the wall told her, to kill until Anna came to get her.

  Aimless, Signy wandered out of the cafeteria and walked a few hallways. Politics and sex, whatever Janine had learned about Tanaka and sent unedited would be something to sort through, something to distract her for a time.