Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  Pilar approved his futile plea for brevity, and wondered if he suffered a slight and patriotic indisposition of the liver. It would explain his desire for haste, and be a sufficient cause for a wish for miracles.

  With due deliberation, the Commission decided to consider new motions. Colorless Britain took the floor and requested a ban on fishing in Antarctica.

  [Janine] Here we go.

  Delegates rumbled as they heard what Britain asked. A second wave of grumbling followed the first, as those few who needed, or pretended to need, translation, responded to the words.

  “… for a period of time to be not less than the next scheduled meeting of this august body thirty years from this date, that no marine life of any kind whatsoever be removed from the waters southerly of fifty-five degrees,” Britain said.

  [Janine] That cuts off a lot of home water from Chile and Argentina. They’re bound to bitch.

  They didn’t, not immediately. Chile got up from his chair and went to Argentina, who was a solid-looking woman with glossy black hair. She wore it in a dancer’s knot at the back of her neck. Chile bent over and spoke rapidly in the woman’s ear. She said something that Janine’s mikes didn’t pick up.

  Chile stood up and backed away. The man from Chile and the Argentine woman gestured at each other with much nodding and waving of hands. Chile returned to his chair.

  Australia gave the U.K. a second. France opened the floor for discussion. The Japanese delegate was on his feet in the instant. He was a ramrod straight, very small man. Pilar couldn’t get a look at his face.

  In English, he said, “Mr. Chairman, such a proposal is unconscionable. World hunger demands the use of available resources, including those of Antarctica. Japan, as a member of the Treaty Commission, opposes any change in the current apportionment of the valuable harvest from the Southern Ocean.”

  “Huh?” Pilar asked.

  Janine looked from face to impassive face, scanning the Japanese delegation. Tanaka’s men did not seem surprised. Kazi crossed his arms and would not look at her.

  The Japanese delegate spoke on, with a formal and passionate anger. He finished his initial barrage of objections, and did not bow as he sat down.

  [Janine] Oh, shit. Now what?

  “You didn’t have a clue?” Pilar asked.

  [Janine] Zero, zilch clues. Kazi = Bastard.

  “Amen.”

  [Janine] SHIT!

  “Just sit there, okay? Kazi has to explain this. I hope,” Pilar said.

  [Janine] He’d better.

  There went the contract.

  Failure, failure, Pilar was getting fucking tired of failure. First the damned tour, and then Jared, who, alive or dead, was damaging them all so painfully. Now this. Pilar bent forward as if her stomach hurt. It didn’t.

  One of the houses would have to be sold. Not this one, Pilar hoped. But Paul wouldn’t let go of the family place in New Hampshire without a fight. The house in Taos was the least expensive to maintain, and it was the biggest. Paul wouldn’t sell, he would cash out before he would let that old colonial go. If he left, quit, said goodbye? Paul wouldn’t, he couldn’t.

  Paul might.

  Then what happens to the rest of us?

  Pilar found herself wondering about Jimmy’s income, his resources, and hated herself for it. But she liked Jimmy. Pilar was growing fond of him, in a mild way. Now she would never know if she would ever see a true Jimmy, a person of his own. Jimmy had become a construct defined by the shapes of his potential uses.

  [Janine] I’m scared.

  “Me, too,” Pilar said.

  * * *

  Anna went out to meet Kihara, who hustled toward her, a bouncy, quick man. Kihara looked happy. No reason he wouldn’t; he had had a couple of days of R&R, and the news of Jared’s disappearance would have meant little to him. Unfortunate, an inconvenience; no more than that. Jared and Kihara had been casual buddies, not close friends. And anyway, he wouldn’t recognize Signy Thomas, a bundled woman in a parka; Kihara wouldn’t know that Signy was Jared’s worried masked lover. Why did Signy think everyone’s routines would change for one missing man?

  Through the glare of the helo’s windscreen, Signy could make out the shape of the pilot’s mustache and the line of his jaw. Signy watched him talk into his mike, impatient. It was Cordova, and he didn’t shut the helo down. The helo whined with increased revs, lifted again, and turned away from the ship, rising toward the sun. Signy looked away, blinking from the bright light, and sneezed.

  “Bless you,” Jimmy said.

  “It’s Cordova,” Signy told her throat mike. “Jared’s pilot.”

  “Is it? He just told the flight officer he was in a hurry. Had some business, he said.”

  Signy pulled back the cuff of her parka and looked at her wrist. Jimmy was her only observer.

  “Where’s Pilar?” Signy asked.

  “With Janine. The conference has gotten weird.”

  “Weird how?” Signy asked.

  “Japan is opposing a fishing ban.”

  “Huh?” Signy asked. “That isn’t the plan. Japan is supposed to push for a ban. Everything we’ve done is tailored to sell a goddamned ban.…” Did this mean Edges was fired? If that happened, what would happen to her? Tanaka would get her home, away from here, maybe at her own expense, and it wouldn’t be Tanaka’s money that continued a search for a man overboard. Edges’ line of credit—the last time Signy had checked, there had been enough left to buy her a search of her own. Maybe.

  What was Janine going to do? Signy started to ask Jimmy to hook into Lisbon real-time. So that she could—could do absolutely nothing helpful. Pilar would have to help handle the problem, whatever it was. Pilar could do it. Pilar had to.

  Signy wished that the crew would hurry and get the Siranui’s helo into the air, before it was called back.

  Anna left Kihara at the hangar door. Signy waved at her.

  “Jimmy, Pilar and Paul can deal with Lisbon. They’ll figure something out.” Pilar and Paul could blow Lisbon to hell and gone, and they probably would. Janine was obviously in deep shit, and so was everything else. The contract? Gone, probably. “I want to help. But I’ll be looking only for Jared, and I can’t do any research for them, not from the helo. Just feed me the high points of all this, would you?”

  “At your service,” Jimmy said.

  Anna waited beside Signy while the flight crew moved Trent’s helo out to the deck. Somewhere, in the process of getting clearance to follow Cordova’s helo up and away from the ship, Signy lost Jimmy, lost contact with home. She felt an emotional lurch, cut off for what seemed like a long, blank time, but Jimmy’s light came back on, and his voice in her ear. “Gotcha,” he said. “Had to run through McMurdo. You know somebody named Marty?”

  “Marty? He’s a bartender.”

  “He’s also got a real fine setup for monitoring damned near anything. He says ‘Hi, Anna.’”

  “I’ll tell her,” Signy said. What the hell was going on in Lisbon? In the turmoil, the group hadn’t done an in-depth analysis of Tanaka corporation, of the personalities involved in it. No funny stuff on Tanaka’s part had been assumed, so Signy’s preliminary scan on the company men had been all that Edges had looked at. And when the funny stuff had come along, Signy, and Janine and Pilar too, had chosen to ignore it, over Jared’s insistence that something was wrong. But no one had listened to Jared, or Paul, and therefore, there was no inhouse simulation against which to play this puzzling scenario. Damn, there hadn’t been time to make one.

  Worried, distracted, Signy watched the Siranui grow smaller as the helo rose. A trawler approached it, ready to unload another few tons of fish. The helo’s noise, that the people beside her endured in silence, the sense of watchful waiting inside this flimsy flying bubble, brought her back to current concerns. Jared lived. Signy planned to find him.

  Trent turned the helo away from the ship, on a path Signy could see in her mind, a grid on the waters where the Kasumi had fishe
d for submarines. She remembered it well.

  * * *

  Jimmy wanted Pilar’s attention. Pilar ignored him, and stayed in the drama playing itself out in Lisbon.

  The Third World nations aligned themselves, predictably, on the lines of hunger. Famines were mentioned. Subsidies were suggested for landlocked countries who were willing to support the ban. Britain pointed out that food distribution was a U.N. function. The U.S. hadn’t said a word yet. Janine sat frozen, listening to the arguments back and forth, back and forth. Pilar let Lisbon fade away.

  “I’m listening,” Pilar said.

  “Signy’s out on her search. I’m following her through McMurdo. That means I can’t watch the Siranui at the same time, so I’m saving the stuff from there.”

  “Yeah. Do that.”

  Jimmy went back to his console; Pilar spoke to Janine.

  “Babe, I’m going to get Paul in on this, now,” Pilar said.

  [Janine] Please. Do it.

  Pilar stripped off her headset and wandered around the Seattle room for a minute, trying to get the world back into place. All of the presentations would need to be changed if Japan stuck with its position, and Pilar wasn’t sure Paul was going to be any help getting the works retuned. Choreographed for the joy of solitude, for half-forgotten luxuries of time and distance, the set pieces were designed to say, This is ours, this is our heritage, Earth has grandeur and can survive.

  To change the sets, the sounds, the slants? Hours of work, days, would be needed, even if the work was still wanted. Had Edges been fired last night at some wee-hour meeting? Wouldn’t Kazi have said something, if that’s what had happened?

  Pilar pulled her headset back on and called New Hampshire:

  * * *

  Paul’s crab climbed through the lattices of an amoeboid, strangely soft-edged thing. The interior of the construct seemed to be a cavern, braced with struts of curved elastic bars that looked like steel and had the sueded feel of latex.

  “What the…?” Pilar asked.

  “I can’t make it linear, Empress. There’s too much coming in.”

  The space went tilt. Pilar grabbed for a rope that writhed, blood-warm and resilient, in her hands.

  “Reductions of English-language newspapers in Chile and Argentina; you’d be amazed at some of the battles that go on in the fishing grounds. They have territorial boundaries as clearly marked as those of wolf packs, and devil take anyone who puts their nets in the wrong waters on the wrong day.”

  Moist veils of some pinkish membrane drifted across Pilar’s shoulders. Pilar struggled, suddenly tiny, trying to reach the Paul-crab.

  “The fishing packs are multinational, multicompany, Pilar, did you know that? They group up on friendship and superstition, once they’re out of port.” The crab flung itself to another strut in the half-formed maze, and the angle of the construct rotated bottoms up or inside out, Pilar couldn’t tell which. She felt everted, and she didn’t like the feeling at all.

  “And to make it more fun, over here we’ve got maritime insurance company reports from last year. A whole subculture I never suspected. There are pirates in the world, Pilar; they work out of the Malacca straits; that’s one place, but the companies don’t turn in loss reports from piracy. It makes the stockholders nervous. Didn’t you hear Itano talk about them?” The crab extruded a human hand from inside a claw and adjusted a knot of sticky caramel-colored optic cable that hung from a curving bar above its head.

  Balanced, teetering, on the support Pilar’s feet found beneath her, she backed away from an endless drop into a whirlpool. The whirlpool was green and sucked away anything nearby, sheets of printout, translucent fish bones, camo uniforms that spread into parodies of soldiers as they fell.

  Pilar looked away, fast, catching a glimpse of rigid brocade skirts done in bas-relief. Paul had dressed her as a Chinese empress carved out of ivory. Pilar could see tiny gold nails in the joints of her fingers.

  Paul’s words tumbled out, staccato, rapid.

  “… Of course, the vector analysis of the geometry of interpersonal space has not yet been defined in this way, but sooner or later, Empress, it leads back to us. To Jared, if we stretch the strings in the proper way.”

  Pilar had seen Paul Maury wired, but not like this, had not seen him, ever, lost in a frantic jumble of images like these, whose speed, tumbling across the construct she had entered, frightened her.

  The crab bounced in place, like a kid with a full bladder. “And there, there in the distance is the German company that sells explosives to a mining company in Zaire that get black-marketed as fertilizer to an export dealer in Taiwan, that get packaged as XO brandy and sold to the store in Ushuaia. See? That’s what Skylochori bought. The dead, dead man. He blew something up, ka-boom!”

  Paul had gone spla. Loony. Mentally ill. Someone had to do something about this. Signy? Signy was busy. Pilar couldn’t deal with crazy; Pilar heard a little voice in her head saying, Poor baby, poor baby, get someone to help him.

  “Paul! Paul, stop it!” Pilar yelled.

  Paul sent silence that burned in her ears. A lump formed in Pilar’s throat, a big hot lump with sharp edges.

  “What’s the matter?” He sounded so calm, so reasonable.

  “You sound crazy.” Pilar untangled herself from the tendrils of the construct and ripped her headset away from her face.

  “Oh, sorry,” Paul’s voice said, blessedly otherwhere, now that Pilar was safe again, in her own body, in her own head. “This isn’t quite together yet, is it?”

  Paul seemed contrite, apologetic, and sane.

  “No.”

  “What’s the matter, Empress?”

  Paul wasn’t totally nuts. Frightened, Pilar sought for a rationalization, for any thread of reasoning to explain what the hell was happening to him, and she knew, while her mind built frames around this, walled it off, that she was lying to herself.

  Paul needed what Jared gave him, chiding hints that kept him sane. Pilar didn’t often see Paul’s work this raw, this unfinished. Her stuff looked fairly bizarre while she was actually getting it together. This weird? Yeah, probably. But Paul—this was different, and Pilar knew it, and Paul’s craziness scared her. Pilar didn’t want to think about what might happen if Paul lost it completely.

  She shoved her fear deep into the background and said, “Japan is objecting to the fishing ban. They want the present quotas, they say.”

  Silence.

  “Paul?”

  “I’m sure they have their reasons, Empress.”

  “But what can we do?”

  “I think, my dear, that we can wait. At least until lunch.”

  “You’ll watch Janine with me?”

  “Oh, yes,” Paul said. “Yes, indeed.”

  * * *

  Five meters high, about twenty meters long, the floe was scant shelter. It was an undistinguished, smallish, frozen lump of a floe, but shelter it was, and therefore beautiful. Jared cut the throttle back as the floe hid the Zodiac from shore. He didn’t want to get back into open water, just yet. The channel curved ahead and lost itself between glacier and promontory. A smallish berg ahead looked promising as the potential next hiding place. But which way was out? Ahead? Back past the tent?

  In rapid succession, three shots echoed off the ice cliffs. Shouts carried from the men onshore, echoed and multiplied so that they sounded like a company of infantry.

  Even with the throttle kicked back to almost idle, the Zodiac was running out of iceberg. The range of a good hunting rifle, its accuracy if properly sighted, left Jared in danger of a careful shot. The Zodiac was a bigger, easier target.

  Presumably, rafts had safety features. Jared doubted a rifle could sink this little toy tub, but losing air from a compartment or two could make the Zodiac list. Sloshing around in liquid ice seemed an unfortunate idea.

  The echoes of the rifles died away, leaving only the sounds of the Zodiac’s motor, a dead certain indicator of Jared’s location, except that,
like the rifle shots, the sound of it bounced off the glacier in confusing ways. Around him, a magic beauty existed, a panorama of ice and shadows stained in colors of burnt oranges, ambers, deep greens.

  Jared figured he would like to head in the direction of McMurdo, if he knew which way that was. Where had the Kasumi been and how far might these people have carried him, drugged and unconscious?

  The floe traveled in a patch of open water. Ahead, a small berg waited, across an empty expanse that would silhouette the Zodiac against the background of the promontory’s white, white ice. Jared was aware of how soft he was, far too aware of the potential damage that could be created by a high-velocity missile driving its shock wave through human flesh. He thought of trying to stay here, behind this friendly little floe.

  Out in the open water, the whale rose just under the surface and rolled on its side without raising a ripple on the water. It didn’t seem to be injured. Without warning, it broached, rising half out of the water and falling back with a crash. By then, Jared had the Zodiac halfway to the iceberg. He heard a rifle crack; once, twice.

  When he reached the shelter of the berg, Jared twisted so that he could see the water behind him, deep green and not stained with the whale’s blood. The tent was hidden behind a curve in the channel. Jared couldn’t see any pursuers, and he sped along beside the berg until he passed its sheltering bulk. An abrupt twist in the channel carried the Zodiac out past the cove, or passage, or whatever the hell it was. Behind him were men with guns, ahead was broken ice and a sea running high. An offshore wind bit at his ears and his bare hands. The clouds were lowering and they had taken all the colors away.

  The woman grabbed for a handhold as the Zodiac sank down over the first big roller. Jared reached with one hand and pulled at the ties of her gag.

  “Get that damned thing off!” he shouted.