Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  Anna nodded and sent an acknowledgment to the bridge.

  On Signy’s wrist, Paul’s monitoring light glowed; a watcher, a listener, a source of security that had not protected Jared. Signy stood up and reached for Alan’s hand. He accepted the contact. Signy planned never, never, to be out of Alan’s reach while she remained in Antarctica.

  “Are you okay?” Alan asked.

  “Yes,” Signy said. “I suppose I am.”

  “You’re scheduled for a tour at 0800,” Anna said. “I can go with you; Kihara’s back in an hour or so. Let’s go talk to Trent.”

  Signy and Allan followed her, up twisting metal stairways, empty and cold and ringing with memories of echoes, as if a gong had been struck in the dark spaces of the ship just moments before. Signy listened, hard, but she heard only her own breath and the soft sounds of their padded boots as they climbed. Was it day or night here? Her watch said late evening, but the bridge had carried the feel of a busy midday. Signy was not tired, not sleepy, not hungry. She felt she would never need to sleep again, not while Jared waited, somewhere. Her next breath was a deep, surprising yawn.

  A sign marked the exit to the flight deck. Alan set his gloved hands on the wheel.

  “No,” Anna said, behind them on the stairs. “Go up.”

  Anna’s face carried a look of grim concentration. Not from the effort of climbing stairs, surely. From something else, some internal effort. They climbed past three more landings, until the ladders ended at a small landing and a closed hatch. Anna undogged it, and they stepped out into a bitter cold that made Signy gasp. Beneath her feet, a square of open metal mesh led to ladders that zigzagged down toward the Siranui’s decks. They stood just above the bridge; a curve of black glass panes fanned out from the white roof directly beneath them. Three more steps led up to the base of a rotating dish, its bowl slick with ice. Steam rose from the housings at its base, from heated gears protected from the cold.

  The Siranui dipped down into a swell and rose again, a huge thing in an immense world of leaden sky and black slick water. The light seemed to be that of evening, and Signy could not see the sun. The cold brought tears that she blinked away. Anna was busy pulling up the hood of her parka, and Signy tugged her hand away from Alan, got her own hood snugged tight, and then grabbed Alan’s hand again.

  The hatch opened. Trent joined them. “Hello, Signy Thomas. Hello, Alan. What are we doing?” he asked Anna.

  “See if you can jockey the schedule so you get to pilot us around tomorrow,” Anna said.

  “Sure. Is that all you wanted?”

  “I wanted to warn you that being around Miss Thomas could be dangerous,” Anna said. “But I’d like you to take us around, if you would.”

  “You got my ass up here in the cold to ask me to fly?” Trent asked. “Anna, I like to fly.”

  “I also wanted to tell you, while your buddies aren’t listening, that that the orders on hushing up the Oburu’s sinking came from Tanaka headquarters in Kobe.”

  “Did they, now?” Trent asked.

  “And I wanted to tell you that Dr. Balchen is alive. Within a hundred miles of the ship, we believe.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Trent said. “You think he’s on the Kasumi?”

  “Is it in the area?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll find out,” Trent said.

  “It isn’t,” Paul said.

  “Be discreet, Trent,” Anna pleaded.

  “I’m the epitome of discretion,” Trent said. “Can we go get warm now?”

  “Not yet,” Anna said. She stared at the horizon, waiting for something.

  Signy turned, thinking to look behind her at the great length of the ship. A whale’s back, massive and glistening, cut the water about a hundred yards away. “Oh,” Signy whispered.

  It rose, silent and wonderful, and she heard the steam-engine hiss of its breath. The whale sank from sight.

  “He is a humpback,” Anna said. “He’ll be up again. Wait.” Anna pulled a pair of field glasses from her parka and handed them to Signy. Signy scanned the water, wondering, Where? Where will you be?

  “There.” Anna announced the whale’s rising in a calm flat voice. Signy turned to where Anna pointed, knowing her camera headband would get an unmagnified view of what she saw through the field glasses in intimate detail.

  The whale surfaced closer this time. He rolled in the water, giving them the measure of his length, the lighter colors of his belly before he puffed out his breath and sank again. Anna closed her eyes and lifted her face toward the gunmetal sky. “Three times,” Anna said. “He will blow three times for us.”

  The whale appeared again, close enough to the ship that he could have nudged it. Defying his massive bulk and the water’s pull, he lifted his impossible head from the water with the sound of a tidal wave.

  As if he moved in slow motion, he gave them the view of his bulk, slowly, inch by inch; of his rheumy, dull eye, of his fissured, scarred hide, of half-healed and fresh ulcers, their red craters sticky with yellow mucus and longer than a man’s thigh, running down his sides. He sank, and sank, and his dark shadow in the water disappeared.

  A scent of rotting sewage rose in the air, a whiff of putrefaction and sickening decay. A sudden breeze took it away, and Signy sneezed and then breathed in clean, icy sea air, pulled it in deep and fast.

  The humans waited while the ship moved up and over a huge swell, up and over another one. Anna stepped back from the rail, and the watchers accepted that the whale was truly gone.

  “I’ve never seen one that big,” Trent said, “and I’ve scouted a lot of whales.”

  “He is a visitor,” Anna said, her voice certain, knowing. “An old man. Not one that we’ve counted before.” She hugged herself tightly with her arms and looked down at the icy deck. “I think.”

  Anna knew. She knew.

  “He is dying,” Signy said.

  Anna hunched up her shoulders and turned away from the sea. They went below.

  TWENTY

  Pilar marveled at the mixture of urgency and fear, apprehension and awakening, that permeated Signy’s transmissions from Antarctica. Signy seemed to balance on some precarious edge of intuition, in tides of sorrow and grief, mixed with guilt when the sights around her distracted her from her goal of finding her lost lover. Signy anticipated loss with every motion.

  Distilled, what would this clash of sensations bring to—a kinetic work, say? A geometry of planes of colored light for an interactor to walk through, bathe in, push against? Pilar saw a palette for a room-sized space of primary stained-glass colors, transparent, razored, angular, and brittle. Her fingers itched to begin it.

  Her own emotions were less planar, more muted. What did she feel for Jared? What had she ever felt for him? Joy at the way his body worked, delight in the clean water-mammal lines of him; Jared the sleek. Astonishment at his naive pleasures, the Jared who would, if undisturbed, spend half an hour gazing at the intricacies of a stalk of yucca in blossom, spend half a night entranced by the patterns of flames in a well-made fire. Pilar wanted to look at him again, to trace out the textures and curves of his face—Pilar had no time for that, not now.

  Jimmy worked at Janine’s Seattle console, tracing out webs of probability from the transmissions to and from the Siranui, to and from McMurdo base. In the ordinary, workaday words that came floating to him, he sought traces of a man he didn’t know. Jimmy spun his way through the nets with the frenzy of a dancing Shiva. He dances, Pilar realized, to win me. How sad.

  Jimmy found his way into McMurdo’s recordings of air approaches and departures, a litany of laconic comments. “Zulu Tango turning final to McMurdo,” Pilar heard, and then “Roger. Cleared to land.”

  Jimmy’s noodling around cost; each ticking minute charged, eventually, to Edges. Yet to be paid was Whiteline, whose fees could not be deducted on anyone’s standard IRS form; yet to be totaled were the data reductions for the upcoming talks in Lisbon, the cost of Signy’s tickets to Mc
Murdo; all the busy little debits climbing, climbing. For finances, Paul was the designated worrier, but somehow, Pilar couldn’t quit thinking about the bottom lines on the last statements she’d seen.

  Jimmy winced at something a pilot said, far south of here and peripherally, if at all, connected to finding Jared or getting Tanaka’s contract finished, paid, and banked.

  “Supposed to be English,” Jimmy muttered.

  “Say again?” Pilar asked, but Jimmy hadn’t heard her. He stayed lost in the screen over Janine’s console.

  Janine’s console? Janine wouldn’t recognize it as the one she left, and Pilar forthwith stored a macro of the way it looked last week into the Seattle outputs, to protect Janine from a sure sense of territorial violation. Jimmy had invaded, not just Janine’s space, but Pilar’s. Jimmy artifacts lay in rows on Janine’s desk, on a bookshelf he’d confiscated to hold various Important Things. He wasn’t at all messy. He just occupied a lot of volume, and Pilar itched to randomize the room back into something she could find comfortable. But she didn’t.

  She was thinking about anything but Jared.

  “Pilar Videla, you are not dealing with the fact that Jared is alive,” she said aloud. “Why is that?” Her musing gave her no answers that she wanted to hear.

  Pilar turned back to her console and found Janine on-line in real time. Pilar slipped her goggles over her eyes: Portugal.

  —drifting mists swirled above wet sand. A close-up of expensive black poplin, the shoulder of Kazi’s raincoat. In the background; a view of a harbor, where fishing boats painted in primary colors were pulled on shore for the night.

  “You convinced him. You convinced the Old Man himself. If the ban goes through, we will transfer our energies to aquaculture, and take the loss on the wild fishery,” Kazi said.

  “I was scared,” Janine said. “I was afraid Mr. Tanaka would hang up.”

  “Well, he didn’t.” Kazi frowned at Janine. “You’ve caused a lot of changes, my little engineer. This will cause an upheaval in the company. Many jobs will change. It helped that you coached me to suggest transferring some of the ships to the North Pacific fisheries. The factories there will be happy to have the best of the southern ships.”

  “It was too easy. He’s a formidable man, your Yoshiro Tanaka. Why did he go for it?” Janine asked.

  “I will second-guess my company’s president,” Kazi said. “He thinks we will not change the Treaty Commission’s position. We will gain favorable publicity for taking the ultimate conservation stance, and we will keep on fishing.”

  That’s how Pilar figured it. In Seattle, she leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. Janine’s wet outdoor walk looked cold, and Pilar felt chilled.

  “I think we will have little difficulty with the nations that have fishing fleets in other waters. They will applaud us, because their profits will be protected. The Africans will be difficult,” Kazi said.

  “And Pakistan,” Janine said, “and Japan, and the Koreas, and the European block, and—”

  “You sound as if you must approach each of these problems by yourself,” Kazi said. “We have a knowledgeable staff, Janine. They are building dossiers on the representatives, tonight. Based on Mr. Maury’s specifications, which we find … intriguing.”

  “Mr. Maury’s specifications? Oh, how male,” Pilar grumbled for the benefit of Janine’s ear speaker.

  Edges’ dossiers were not résumés, they were models that predicted the mutability of a psyche. Put another way, Edges knew how to find buttons in people that a knowledgeable manipulator could push. What a negotiator got was a short list of quick-and-dirty suggestions. The suggestions came from the jungle-gym structure that Edges filled with all sorts of facts. The lattice was Paul’s work, yes, and also it was a synthesis of Signy’s knowledge of neurophysiology, Janine’s working models of gates and critical pressures in systems, and Jared’s feel for the reactions of an organism under stress.

  “No extra charge,” Janine murmured.

  “I’m sorry?” Kazi asked.

  “We’re glad you find the dossiers useful. We try to give full value,” Janine said. “But I think you know that.”

  They stopped at an overlook, and Janine leaned her forearms on a marble railing. She looked down at the bobbing lights in the harbor, at the colored stains they left on the smooth water.

  “Tell me about the Oburu,” Janine said.

  “That’s blunt enough,” Pilar whispered.

  “Pardon me?” Kazi asked. He gripped the rail and stared straight out at the harbor.

  “The Oburu. A trawler that went down somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Part of your fleet.”

  Kazi hesitated. “It … sank.”

  “Yes, so we hear. Was Mihalis Skylochori listed as a crew member? We didn’t find his name anywhere,” Janine said.

  Pilar heard a rustle of fabric, Kazuyuki’s raincoat moving over his shoulders as he straightened his posture.

  “No.”

  “I see,” Janine said. “I asked because Edges works by collecting disparate bits of information and connecting them to other bits in unexpected ways. The game is chaotic and often unproductive, but sometimes it gets us what we need. I am collecting information for your company, Kazi. For you. Help me.”

  “I can’t help you with the Oburu. I have told you all that I know.”

  “Predict for me. What will happen to you if there is no fishing?”

  “I direct the activities of the Fishery and the Aquaculture division,” Kazi said. “If there is no fishing, I will direct the Aquaculture division.”

  “Whose current head is San-Li Tanaka? Will she battle you to keep her position?”

  “Your information is not current,” Kazi said. “San-Li was transferred to the fishery two weeks ago.”

  “Was she?”

  “Hoo-boy,” Pilar said.

  “Yes. Yoshiro Tanaka himself asked her to transfer. He felt it was time for her to gain experience on a working harvester.”

  Pilar spun in her chair. Jimmy had begun to hum the tune from “Shelter,” on pitch but out of rhythm. “Jimmy, get your ass over here,” Pilar said.

  He stopped humming and got up from his chair without taking his eyes from his screen. “What is it?”

  “San-Li Tanaka is with the fleet.”

  Jimmy blinked and got to Pilar’s screen, fast, leaning over her shoulder.

  A foghorn sounded in the Portuguese night, sad and mournful above an insect background noise that Pilar identified, for the first time, as a constant hum of traffic.

  “San-Li Tanaka was sent to the Siranui?” Janine asked.

  “Yes,” Itano said.

  “Two weeks ago,” Pilar said. “Just after the Oburu sank.”

  “Thank you,” Janine said to Kazi. She reached up and kissed his cheek.

  “For telling you where San-Li is?” Kazi sounded puzzled.

  “Yes. I would like to meet her sometime,” Janine said.

  “Why?” Kazi asked.

  “To ask her why she sank the Oburu,” Pilar muttered.

  Janine tucked her arm into the crook of Kazi’s elbow. They turned away from the harbor and walked back toward the hotel’s walled courtyards. “Oh, because I’ve never met an heiress apparent,” Janine said.

  Pilar switched screens and checked in on Signy, the Siranui:

  —sounds of clattering tableware. Signy’s cameras showed Alan and Anna, seated across a table. Signy was very still, perhaps not much awake.

  Pilar left her there; this news could wait for a few minutes.

  Portugal: Janine lagged behind Kazi while he opened the hotel gates with a keycard.

  “Hey, Pilar,” Janine whispered. “Was that what you wanted?”

  “You betcha,” Pilar said. “That’s what I wanted. Goodnight, hon. Sleep well.”

  “What about Jared?” Janine asked.

  “Nothing new. Signy’s going looking for him tomorrow.”

  “We’ve got the first
round of talks scheduled. I’ll be in meetings all day.”

  “So rest tonight.”

  “I’ll try.” Kazi turned, waiting for Janine. Janine walked into the quiet courtyard of the hotel, where lighted windows marked the location of Tanka employees, working on into the night.

  “Sank the Oburu?” Jimmy asked. “Pilar, how do you figure that?”

  “One of those connections Edges makes,” Pilar said.

  “She’s Evergreen,” Jimmy said. “Son of a bitch.” Jimmy lurched back toward Janine’s console, his hands in front of him as if he were sleepwalking. “Pilar, I’m an idiot sometimes. Evergreen told me she worked in the Seychelles. If I were going to get data out of the Seychelles, and not make it all that easy to trace—”

  “If you were going to get data out of the Seychelles at all, you’d run it from…” Pilar called up the netmap, glowing lines that bound the world’s cities. “Sri Lanka.”

  “Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. I would indeed.” Jimmy began to hum again, searching for San-Li Tanaka, known on the net, perhaps, as Evergreen.

  * * *

  Signy wasn’t sleepy. She wasn’t hungry. Led, protesting, to the mess by Alan and Anna, Signy knew that all she wanted to do was to keep going, to walk the corridors of the ship, to keep moving until something happened. But a bowl of garnished noodles appeared in front of her, covered with stir-fried vegetables and sautéed chicken and spiced nuts, smoking hot, and the food was wonderful.

  Anna and Alan said polite little things while they ate. They did not discuss the whale, or Jared, or the six hours left until the helo would rise. Signy sipped at a cup of aromatic tea. It was too soothing, too pleasant. She wondered if the whale were still near the ship. How much did it hurt, to be that big and that sick? Signy heard the whale’s breath, and imagined a plea in it. Her eyelids suddenly felt sanded, and she shook her head.

  “Hello?” Alan smiled at her.

  “Hi. I’m back.”

  “Good. I wasn’t looking forward to carrying you to bed. But I think that’s where you should go, and soon.”