Whiteout

by Sage Walker

  “Who did?” Janine asked.

  “Tanaka is not the only fishing fleet. We don’t know, yet.”

  “You’re making excuses for her, Kazi. Did she get permission from anyone before she pulled this shit?”

  Kazi looked down at his hands, locked together in his lap.

  “It’s your company; I know,” Janine said. “So you have to defend it. But I had expected more of you.”

  That hurt him. Janine watched his eyes narrow, his face smooth into an expressionless mask.

  “I would not expect you to accept the words of the Greek woman without confirmation, Itano-san.” San-Li Tanaka’s face appeared on a flatscreen.

  Kazi blinked once; he did not answer.

  “Seek it, if you will. I am shamed by your assumptions. I trust you will verify them before your unkind thoughts punish me further.”

  The young woman lowered her eyes. She had sent only a view of her face, in close-up, with a background of a shoji screen.

  “Got her,” Jimmy whispered. “She’s in the Tanaka office at McMurdo.”

  Signy, watching as the helo sped there under gray skies, asked, “Will she greet me, do you think? Will she offer her condolences in person?”

  San-Li swallowed, her throat moving as if her mouth were very, very dry. “Janine Hull, I am sorry that Cordova was not able to return your friend to safety. I sent Cordova to rescue him, once we had located Dr. Balchen’s position from the transmissions he was able to send.

  “I failed. I have sent a copy of the events of the crash to Kobe. Our technicians will analyze the motions of the helo. They suspect a fuel failure of some sort.”

  “Holy shit,” Jimmy whispered.

  The transmission from the office at McMurdo switched to a more distant camera, showing San-Li’s head and shoulders, her hands, short unpolished nails and chapped, reddened knuckles, one of them scabbed like a child’s knee. San-Li toyed with a silver letter opener, an ornate dragon with a sharp blade of a tail. Someone reached from offscreen and laid a finger on San-Li’s wrist. She put the letter opener down.

  “Some alternatives are closed to her,” Kazi said.

  San-Li raised her head and looked at Kazi. “I must go now. Señor Abeyta, the delegate from Chile? Watched the scenes in the raft. And the rest. You may need to change your strategy with him.”

  San-Li disappeared.

  Kazi shrugged. “But I think she would not suicide if her guardians left her. She is a fighter, San-Li.”

  Gianni appeared, panting, with a huge snifter and a dusty bottle. Kazi took it from him and observed the label. “Thank you,” he said to Gianni. “Could you leave us for a little while?”

  Gianni ducked his head and left.

  Kazi closed the door and sat down, his fingers working at the cork on the dusty bottle. “This will help, Janine.” He sniffed at the bottle’s neck and poured out a good inch of dark amber fluid. “You will not need to come to the assembly this afternoon.”

  Janine sat very still, waiting, and heard Pilar’s voice in her ear speaker, a whisper, “Let’s hear it, Kazi old boy.”

  “There will be little new business. The delegates must assimilate some new material that is just now being circulated on the mineral-rights section of the treaty.”

  “Something you knew about?” Janine asked.

  “Yes. It’s not important right now.”

  Janine frowned at him.

  “Yes, Janine, you can see this material when you are ready,” Kazi said.

  “More stuff? Babe, I don’t think any of us can handle treaty language right now,” Pilar said.

  “This was not how or when I planned to tell you why we have opposed the ban. This is not a good time. You see, Janine, Tanaka has other interests in the Southern Ocean. The fishing is profitable, yes, and for now, we must ask that it continue.” Kazi handed her the snifter.

  Brandy fumes rose from it, warming and rich. Little beads formed in the condensation and rolled back down the sides of the glass; it seemed to be an excellent brandy. Janine cupped her hands around the bowl of the snifter and stared into its tawny depths. Waiting Kazi out. She sipped, a tiny mouthful, then a swallow.

  “We must oppose the fishing ban,” Kazi said. “At the same time, we must present the possibility that the harvest could fall to nothing if the seas are not carefully managed. For this, your work is excellent. We have faith that it will do what we want it to do. It does not need to be changed.”

  “It’s designed to help sell a ban, Kazi. We believe in such a ban, my friends and I.”

  “Yes. Your work is passionate. Because of it, the motion to stop fishing the Antarctic may pass. If it does, we will make a loud outcry, but we will be pleased.

  “But you have done enough, today. As have I. You should lie down, Janine. You should not try to think.”

  Not think? Janine listened to Pilar’s hoarse, flat voice. “We shouldn’t try to deal with this now, he’s right about that. But he ain’t telling the whole story. Be careful, kid.” Janine watched Pilar’s light go dark on her wrist.

  “Do what he says, Janine.” Signy, sounding so detached, so numb.

  “I don’t want to be alone,” Janine said.

  “No one does,” Kazi said.

  “Bring the brandy?”

  “Of course.”

  Janine let Kazi lead her away. Back toward her room, its blue and white tiles, its blank console tuned to nothing.

  * * *

  Fresh tracks from a vacuum cleaner marked the surface of the carpet in the Tanaka suite at McMurdo. San-Li and her escort had left no sense of presence; not a damp towel in the bathroom, not a trace of human heat in the air. Console and sleeping alcove, two chairs; Signy worried that there were only two chairs for four people. Hostess, was she?

  The absurdity of it made her smile. She sat down on the carpet and braced her back against the wall. The little room was crowded, filled with parkas and big clumsy boots tracking back and forth to obliterate the cleaner’s tracks. Shoes on this carpet seemed strange.

  Signy felt invisible sitting there, sheltered by a little cave she made of her parka thrown over her shoulders, motionless while the others shifted and circled, sorting themselves into activities, plans, the business of what came next. Her plans? She must trace how and when Cordova had been sabotaged. She must do that, soon. Cordova had been sabotaged; Signy was sure of it. Someone had fucked over that helo of his. When? When Cordova came to the Siranui, when Signy and Anna had watched the whale rising? The timing, the timing, someone had to know Cordova would pick up Jared. Or did they care? Was Cordova a target and Jared’s death truly only an accident?

  Jared’s death was Signy’s fault. She had killed Jared, killed him by sending him into some stupid business intrigue.

  A different part of her mind went—Oh, yeah? Jared got a chance to come to the ice, to the last true wilderness. Do you really think you could have stopped him?

  Did San-Li have an agent on the Sirena? Cordova had gone somewhere in a hurry, maybe to Psyche’s boat, to wait until he was called to his “rescue” mission.

  Anna handed a mug of coffee to Signy. “We’ll get you home. You need to be home.”

  Signy nodded and held the mug.

  Trent woke the console and talked to the Siranui. Signy couldn’t hear the replies. Alan sat down beside her. Signy leaned against him, watching the blank holo stage, watching how Trent and Anna stepped around it, coming and going, and then Anna called a view of the Hotel California.

  —Marty, the bartender, sloshed soapy water over the floor. He wore a different shirt this time, reef fish swimming into and out of giant pink orchids.

  “Hello, Marty. Get me to New Hampshire,” Signy said.

  “Hello, camera lady.” Marty propped the mop in a bucket and wiped his hands on the thighs of his khakis. “East Coast U.S., right?”

  “Yes.”

  “New Hampshire,” Alan said.

  “Yes,” Signy said.

  Marty and Anna
discussed flights and pilots with Base Ops. A charter plane was coming in. There was room on it, yes, for a return passenger. A few hours, yes.

  Paul’s light had stayed aggressively off, for hours now.

  * * *

  Pilar drifted through the streets, carried by eddies and currents in the patterns of passing strangers, clumps and knots and shifting single-file formations. She walked.

  And walked, listening to the cadence of her heels on pavement, on old brick, on patches of soggy grass. Time to go. New places, new faces; begin again. Jared died, her fault; Jared died trying to make back money Pilar had blown. Jared died; but he would have gone to that miserable expanse of sea and ice anyway, intrigued by a chance to see something he hadn’t seen before, do something he hadn’t done. Too confusing, too complex, time to go.

  Pilar thought of hotel lobbies, of airport shuttles weaving nets that entangled cities, fates, destinations, picking up and spitting out interchangeable faces, interchangeable tasks, futile, futile. Yeah. Fly, get gone. Pilar fingered the credit chip in her pocket. Kazi said Edges still had a job. She didn’t believe it for a minute.

  Hungry, cold, Pilar followed the path of least resistance: down. Looking out at sea wrack crusted on the bases of the old logs under the empty piers, from where her feet had brought her, the little park on a spit of land that jutted out into the harbor just beyond the Pike Street Market.

  Glowing space heaters stood on pedestals set in concrete, a city’s afterthought designed to comfort tourists. The heaters cast globes of red light into the fog. Motionless figures stood around them, solid obelisks in a liquid landscape of silence and shadow. Under the curve of an amphitheater designed to suggest a seashell, three tall men played—steel drums, steel drums, and a flute, its keys worn down to base metal that gleamed yellow through the silver. Pilar could see the pink pads of the flutist’s fingers through the holes he’d cut in the fingertips of his gloves. The flutist capered as he played, a thin Kokopelli with no hunch to his back. The band played to pass the time, or to keep warm, listlessly waiting for an occasional tossed and crumpled dollar. Pilar swayed with the music, her motions muffled under her parka. One of the drummers smiled at her, a tired, reluctant smile in a face that made her think Masai.

  The drummer appraised her, her face? A question rose in his eyes; Pilar nodded.

  “Pilar,” she mouthed, soundlessly. The drummer smiled again, not so tired-looking this time. Pilar’s braid had fallen forward over her shoulder. She loosened it and shook out her hair and dropped her parka beside the drums. The sea air chilled the warm spots on her skinthin, the creases between thigh and pelvis, the back of her neck, the soft skin under her arms and between her breasts. Pilar kicked off her shoes and began to dance.

  No lights, no staging, costumed in her wired skinthin of flesh-colored Lycra, Pilar danced. Tried, feeling the drummers’ eyes on her, to pull the little band to her rhythms; yes. They picked up her changes, responsive, resilient, oh, yes. Dancing for pennies; Pilar Videla belonged here. Here, not in the mazes of finance and intrigue where she had never belonged, where coyotes from Nambe had no business trying to compete.

  The flute rose above basso drumtalk, trilling a descant, and Pilar scribed out arcs of implied geometries, sang, in the silent voices of muscle and sweat, a language of her own devising.…

  Of the flight of austral birds, of sea creatures suspended in liquid grace, of simple trusts and the rhythms of surf and breath. Of nights where hunters waited in the grass, where blood and fire were fated, inevitable, redeeming.

  Melody, rhythm, motion; Pilar and the drums and the flute rode each other’s energies, shifting seamless from rhythm to rhythm, from transition to transition, and a wall formed around her now, watchers, a solid wall; some of them smiled. Riding the necessities of breath and melody, triumphant. Tonic minor chord, glissando on the drums, major. Enough.…

  Breathless, Pilar spun outside the circle she had created, out of the applause and into the shadows.

  * * *

  Redlighted by the glow of the heaters, Jimmy’s soft and earnest face, worried, frowned at her. Jimmy tilted his head toward home.

  “Must I?” Pilar asked.

  “I guess not. You were going to leave, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well. I’ll come with you.”

  They wandered through the interstices of the crowd, where tropisms of warmth and cold moved the watchers like a disturbed school of fish; the process reestablished positions at the heaters.

  A man in purposeful motion intersected their path. Street person? Mugger? Jimmy half-turned as the man approached, shifting to put his bulk between Pilar and a possible threat.

  “Dancer?” His gloved hands full of bills, the tall drummer held them out to her. “Your share. Pilar.” The drummer said her name as if he believed it was really her for the first time, now that he was close enough to touch her.

  “I—”

  “Thanks,” Jimmy said. He took the sheaf of bills and tucked them in the pocket of her parka. “Thanks, man.” Jimmy’s hand on Pilar’s elbow steered her out of the crowd, away from the drummer. Pilar smiled over her shoulder at the man’s dark face.

  Away from noise, until the streets were empty around them; they walked uphill.

  Jimmy was out of shape. Pilar could hear him breathe hard, climbing the steep pavement, both of them leaning forward against the slope.

  Pilar stopped at an empty corner, thinking to turn down the street, away. To leave him.

  “I don’t need the money,” Pilar said.

  “Yes, you do. It’s pride.”

  “I have no pride.”

  “Yeah, I know. But he does.”

  Rain began to fall, the cold, quiet rain of winter. Her feet hurt. Jimmy reached out his hand, and she took it, their netted fingers touching, mesh on mesh. His hand was warm.

  “Let’s go, Jimmy.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  When they were gone, Anna back to the Siranui with Trent, Alan out to scrounge up food that Signy didn’t want, Signy was left alone with the neat little holo stage and console in the Tanaka suite.

  Signy clutched her parka over her shoulders and powered up the console. No one’s signal showed on her wrist. Not Jimmy or Pilar, certainly not Paul. Paul had shut down all of his lines. Signy even tried the public access number, and frowned at Paul’s smiling, younger face on the answering machine.

  In Lisbon, Signy found Janine sitting with her notebook in her room, the camera showing Janine’s face, tearless and intent, and the empty room behind her.

  “Where’s Kazi?” Signy asked.

  “Gone,” Janine said. “For the weekend. He was called back to headquarters, or so he said.”

  “What are you going to do, kid?”

  “Stay.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yeah. I don’t have to.” Janine did not say, There’s nobody home, nobody—“Have you heard from Pilar?” Janine stuck out her jaw, defiant, waiting.

  “No, babe. I guess she’s out walking. Or something. Do you know any way we can get into Paul’s system?”

  “No—Signy, I’m okay. There’s this mineral-rights stuff; I haven’t looked at it yet. I’m staying. I want to. There’s not much going on until the Monday session.”

  Signy imagined Janine drifting around the emptying hotel, wandering the mazes of Lisbon streets.

  “It’s not like Jared and I were lovers, Signy. I loved him, yes. But I can handle it. And if someone needs to find me, I’ll be here.”

  Someone, meaning Pilar, or Paul. Paul wasn’t going to come on-line.

  “Okay. I’ll let them know, if they check in.”

  “Have a good flight, Signy.”

  “Right.”

  Janine vanished.

  Signy heard a knock, and she jumped, thinking, That’s Alan, thinking, It sounds like there’s solid steel behind that wood paneling. The security camera showed a view of Alan, alone, holding foam containers and spoons. Signy
keyed the door open.

  Alan brought the containers to the desk, pulled off a lid, and released the scent of—chile. Chile con carne.

  “I found this, poking around. A Filipino guy makes it. He says it’s too hot. It isn’t.”

  Because Alan looked so worried, Signy tried a spoonful. It wasn’t too hot. It wasn’t half bad, either. Signy dug under the counter for the Glenfiddich. The bottle she pulled out was new, its seals intact. She handed it to Alan.

  “Am I still on the job?” Alan asked.

  “I don’t know. It looks like we don’t have much to offer. We said we’d open our files on Tanaka to you. We’ll do that.” If she could get Paul’s system up and running, she’d get the files. Most of Paul’s files were duplicated in Taos, automatic download, but Signy didn’t know what Paul might have deleted. Paul’s withdrawal spoke of depression, or worse. Reclusive, dependent on Jared and the rest of the motile members of the organism that was Edges for input from the outside world, when had they last seen him in fleshtime? It had been at least a year. At least two years.

  “I doubt as I’d much want to work with Tanaka myself, or let any of my people loose in one of their ships. But we could still sell them a few things, I guess. Do you have another job in mind for me? Somehow you look like you do.”

  “We could be monitored.” Signy tilted her head toward the screen.

  “Likely.” Alan poured Scotch for both of them and they sipped it. Signy closed her eyes and let the burn of the liquor slide down her throat. It hurt her raw stomach. Fine. Signy wasn’t at all sure that Alan would be wise to keep working with Edges, even if that’s what he wanted to do. If the company still existed. What was Edges now? A loose coalition between a psychotic recluse lawyer, a woman who had once done some fair neurochemical research, one dead doc, a media has-been, and a little blond girl who loved her.

  God, what were we when we were good? As soon as I nail San-Li on this murder, I’m going to—I sent Jared to his death.

  I can’t live with that.