“They speak with my father’s voice,” Jimmy said. “What they say, goes.”
“So, why is your father trying to shut down fishing on St. Cloud?” Casey asked.
“That’s an easy one. So they can get all of us off the planet,” Tony said. “The interestin’ question is why do they want the South Coast cleared of people?”
Jimmy shook his head. “That’d be easy to do,” Jimmy said. “Under our charter, the Company has the right to terminate operations here at the discretion of the Board of Directors. That gets a little dicey because it’s a joint board set up here with the Allied Agriculture people who have the big farms and sheep herds, so it’s not directly controlled by Pirano.”
“But the board could vote to terminate their partnership and Pirano would be forced off the planet,” Tony finished. “It would be expensive. There’s penalty clauses built in to make it a kind of poison pill so neither board can boot the other company out.”
A particularly violent blast of wind rasped sleet across the windows and conversation lapsed until Casey asked, “But why?”
“Why, indeed?” Jimmy said.
The terminal on Jimmy’s desk bleeped once, and Jimmy blinked when he saw the origination tag. He slapped the receive button and looked into the pickup lens.
“Violet! What a surprise!”
A middle aged woman in a classic business suit looked out of the screen. “Hello, Jimmy! Satellite says you’re getting a bit of weather down that way.”
The wind died down at that point making the absence of noise a punctuation in what had become a comfortable background rumble. “Just a bit of sleet. And some wind. How’re things down on the farm?”
“We got the fall crops in just in time, and the flocks over on the Eastern Reaches are going to set records for production of fleece and mutton. Thanks for asking.”
Jimmy noted that the smile on her mouth didn’t reach her eyes. In a sudden burst of intuition, he asked, “You’re going to make your quotas?”
Violet raised her eyebrows a bit and curled the tip of her tongue around her incisor. “Funny you should mention that.”
“A bit higher than might be expected?”
Violet nodded into the pickup. “They’re going to be a challenge, for certain, but we’re doing the best we can. And you?”
Jimmy nodded back. “You know fishing. It’s an iffy business when you’re out on the water, but all the accountants know about is the landings.”
“Oh, yeah. The accountants.” Violet gave a short laugh.
Tony, as one of the accountants in question was about to say something, but Jimmy held up a hand out of sight of the pickup and Tony subsided.
Casey just looked confused.
“Listen, Jimmy, the reason I’m calling is that we’re having a little get together here to celebrate the harvest this weekend and we’d really like to have you and some of your people up to celebrate with us. Any chance you can flit up? We’re having a party on Saturday night, nothing fancy. Just a few of the office staff and some of the producers.”
“And you’d like me to bring the fish?” he asked
“I’ll give you some lamb chops to take back if you like.”
“Throw in some sweet potatoes and you’re on.”
“Deal. We’re gathering at Fairfax. The Hotel has rented us the ballroom and we’ve secured a room block, so you can just flit up on Saturday and plan to spend the night.”
“Sounds like a plan, Violet. That’ll give us a chance to catch up.”
“Oh, yes. It should be great fun.”
“How many people should I plan to bring with me?”
“Bring as many as you like. I think we can cope with anything up to twenty, but be sure to bring Tony Spinelli and maybe some of the captains.”
“Let ’em see how the other half lives?”
Violet winked. “Something like that.”
“Okay, Violet, I’ll put together a manifest of goods and have it sent to your office so your people can coordinate with the hotel staff on the fish.”
“Perfect. Use my address and I’ll make sure it gets where it needs to be. Let me send you a schedule for the weekend and a list of available rooms and confirmation codes for your people to use at the Fairfax. We’re planning on feeding about a hundred people here and we’ll be having a dance afterwards.”
“Sounds like quite a shindig. Go ahead and send that list to me. I’ll make sure Tony and a few of the gang are in Fairfax on Saturday. Be good to get away for a few days.”
There was about a two heart beat pause before she asked, “Did you really take a boat out for the last of the season, Jim?”
“What? You think I forgot how?”
She shook her head. “Not in the least. Just surprised when I heard. I thought you’d given that up.”
“I’ll tell ya about it this weekend.”
“Good. I’ll look forward to it. Thanks, Jim.”
“My pleasure, Violet. See ya.”
She cut the connection from the other end and the window closed.
Jimmy looked at Tony. “You doin’ anything this weekend?”
“Well, I’d have to check my social calendar, but I think I can make it.”
“Casey?” Jimmy asked, “Want to pay a visit to our country cousins?”
“That was Violet Austin?” she asked. “The St. Cloud coordinator for Allied Agriculture?”
Jimmy nodded. “Yep, that’s Violet.”
“And you’re asking a wharf rat to go to a dinner party with a hundred of her people?”
Jimmy shrugged. “Tony and me, we’re wharf rats, too. And they’re just farmers. What’s the problem?”
Casey blinked several times. “There’s something else going on.”
“Something wrong with friends getting together to celebrate the end of season?”
“She didn’t call you up to talk about the weather, did she?” Casey asked, pressing her point.
“No,” Jimmy said. “She called to invite me to dinner.” His inbox chimed as a new message dropped into it and when he saw it was from Violet, he opened it. The first page of the spreadsheet was the schedule, and the second was a list of rooms and confirmation numbers, just as she’d promised. The third was the quota assessment for Allied Agriculture for the coming year.
As his eyes ran down the columns, he began to shake his head.
“What is it?” Tony asked.
“Looks like we’re not the only ones with quota problems.”
Tony came around the desk to look at the report, over Jimmy’s shoulder. He whistled.
“Tony, would you have Georgie and Angela put together a nice pack of tasties for us to take to Fairfax this weekend?”
Tony never took his eyes off the screen, but nodded slowly. “Yeah. I’d be happy to. And should I send that list to Violet?”
“Yeah, if you wouldn’t mind lettin’ her know...” Jimmy nodded at the screen and Tony nodded back.
Casey looked back and forth between the two men. “What the hell is going on?”
“Let’s just say that we’re going to go compare notes with the other half of the planet,” Jimmy said.
“About quotas? But I thought you said ours are impossible.”
“They are.”
“Then what are you going to talk about?”
“Theirs are, too,” Tony said.
The lull in the storm outside passed and the wind rattled the wall while sleety pebbles bounced off the glazing.
“That makes no sense,” Casey said.
Jimmy shook his head. “No, it makes perfect sense to somebody. Our problem is that we don’t know how it makes perfect sense or to whom. Once we do, we’ll have a better idea of what we’re up against.”
Chapter Thirteen
Callum’s Cove
November 23, 2304
The satellite showed the storm finally beginning to push past and out to the east. After two hours of sitting in the warm kitchen with his mother working quietly on the
’Net, Otto had had about enough of listening to the wind whistling around the corners of their snug cottage. He stood up from the kitchen table where he’d been working a word puzzle on his peeda. “I think I’ll go see what Father’s up to out there.”
His mother looked at the clock. “He probably wants a cuppa. Why don’t you brew some and take a pot out to him?”
The kettle was warm on the back of the stove so it was only a matter of a tick or two. While the herb tea steeped, his mother helped him set up a tray with cups, honey, and some scones that she’d just baked that morning. He smiled his thanks as he slipped into his heavy coat for the short walk out to the shop. His mother clipped a lid over the tray and rested the warm pot of tea on top for extra weight, and when he was ready, opened the door for him so he could scoot out into the storm.
The icy pellets stung his cheeks and hands although his shock of dark hair protected his scalp, for the most part. He walked briskly, balancing the tray against the buffeting of the wind that tried to catch the tray like a sail. Gratefully, he stepped into the lee of the shop and slipped in quickly, shouldering the door closed behind him.
“Cuppa tea, Father?” he asked.
His father had looked up when the door opened from where he was sitting beside the stove. Small flakes of wood were scattered across his lap and onto the floor. The small room was filled with the smell of fresh cut wood, wood smoke, and that aroma Otto associated with his father. Richard smiled when he saw Otto and laid his work on the side table. “Just what the doctor ordered!” he exclaimed, clapping his palms together once and rubbing them together comically. “How’d you know?”
Otto laughed. “Just a hunch. Actually, it was Mother’s idea to send the tray. I was just going to come out and pester you myself.”
Richard smiled. “Well, as long as you brought the refreshments, I can’t say ‘no’ to a bit of pestering, now can I?”
Otto eased the tray down on the workbench and slipped the hot pot of tea off the top of the pile. A little of it had slopped, but not enough to matter, and the few drips disappeared readily in the stained wood of the workbench. He poured hot tea for both of them, handing the mug to his father who turned down honey, but took a scone.
Otto added a goodly dollop of honey to his own mug, and helped himself to a scone as well. He snaked one foot around the leg of the bench stool and pulled it out where he could sit on it. He settled down to an easy silence while he drank tea, ate scones, and listened to the wind howl outside. In the lulls between gusts Otto heard the faint crackling in the small woodstove in the corner. It provided more than enough warmth to take the bite out of the cold seeping in from outside.
The wall beside the door was stacked high with firewood, split and cut to length. All the small bits of wood and shell had been sorted and put into buckets, some of which were hung from pegs in the rafters and others were stacked back in the corners. The dampest bits had been dried in mesh bags. Some of those still hung over head, here and there, like some woody hams hung up to smoke.
Richard finished his scone, set the mug of tea on the table, and took up his knife and wood again. He looked up at his son and smiled his approval. “You did really well with this collection, Otto.”
“Glad to help.” Otto felt pleased that he seemed to be getting the hang of “The Shaman Thing.” He thought back over the final weeks of the season, before the weather had turned and beached all the fishing boats. His daily routine of walking the beach and fishing from the point had turned from necessary chore to anticipated pleasure. The tide told him when to fish and when to walk. The air carried the scents of imminent winter where ever he went, and the long stroll down the beach each day almost always showed him something interesting. One day, it was a group of crabs dancing on the beach–scuttling back and forth, waiving pincers and bobbing their bodies. Sometimes flocks of seabirds dived and wheeled over schools of fish just offshore. In spite of his initial misgivings, he almost always filled his bag with interesting bits of wood and shell.
Each day, he’d catch something for dinner. Sometimes a simple bottom fish or two, and other times the area would have schools of dancers, jack, or ocean bream. One day, his mother suggested that he visit Mary Murray and ask her about crabs. He’d spent the better part of a week learning about the coastal shellfish, mobile and otherwise, from her. They’d even teamed up on a couple of occasions to harvest bivalves from the weedy rocks west of town, and she’d shown him how to cook them with a bit of water in a pot full of rockweed. Even his mother had been impressed with the homemade crab nets he’d made to catch the tasty coastal crabs. They’d eaten well, and the fall bounty filled their deep freeze. Some of that bounty came home from the boats, and more of it Otto had harvested and prepared himself.
Eventually, the weather became too harsh, the winds too heavy, and the air too cold to be worth fishing. The risks to life and property dictated that the fleet be hauled ashore, winterized, and wrapped against the elements. The twenty three vessels that made up the Callum’s Cove fleet were all cocooned in neat rows behind the jetty crane that handled the craft. Each fall, it lifted them gently from the water and placed them in antigrav cradles. The yard tractors towed them to assigned storage areas, and the yard workers locked them down. After seeing to the fluids and electronics, maintenance crews shrink-wrapped the hulls against the weather and let them sleep through the harshest season. Come spring, the process would be reversed and the boats would, one-by-one, be plucked from their cradles and re-floated, re-fueled, and begin their work again.
“So, how was it–out on the boat, I mean?” Otto asked.
His father snorted a little laugh. “It was okay. It was a lot of work, but also rather satisfying. The extra money will certainly come in handy, too.”
Otto hadn’t really thought of the money. Of course, the crews got paid—both in salary and shares of the catch. Otto knew that, but hadn’t really realized what it meant. It hadn’t changed the way they lived, really. His mother had gotten a new PlanetNet terminal, and with it a new level of access that gave them more news, information, and entertainment from off planet. They’d also made a new weekly ritual of dining out once a week when the boats took holiday. He supposed most of the money was being invested against future uncertainty.
“Do you think the company is going to kick everybody off the planet?” Otto asked, his train of thought going from money, to job, to quotas, to the probability of catastrophe.
His father stopped his carving and looked up with a shake of his head. “Dunno, Otto. It doesn’t seem possible, but everybody on the water thinks the quotas are unreasonable.”
“If you don’t make quota, you can’t keep your job?”
“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Each boat is given a share of the total landings requirement. If the skipper doesn’t make quota, there’s a range of responses. If you only miss by a little, nothing much happens. If you miss it by a lot, the skipper can lose his boat. With these quotas? Everybody is going to miss it by a lot.”
“But why?” Otto asked. “That makes no sense.”
His father shrugged. “That’s the question everybody is asking. Nobody has any answers.” He took a sip of his tea and went back to his careful application of knife to wood.
“And if you lose your job, you get deported.”
Richard sighed. “Well, yes. Although I’m not sure what that means for us. I’m not a normal company employee. As the shaman, I’m not subject to the same rules as the fishermen.”
“But Mother is a company employee.”
Richard nodded. “True. She’d be able to stay with me. So would you, but seriously, if all the fishermen lose their boats and get deported, then I have no job and your mother has no market to analyze. The company can’t make us leave, but we can’t stay here alone either.”
In the ensuing silence, the wind rattled outside and drew the fire up the chimney, momentarily brightening the glow from the stove. Otto stood and pulled a couple of sticks fro
m the pile, carefully stoking the firebox. He topped his cup with the cooling tea and provided the same service for his father.
“Do you think I might try my hand at carving?” he asked, trying not to look too interested, but dying to get his hands on a knife. All through the fall, he’d thought about the idea of carving the wood he was so diligently retrieving from Sandy Long. Something stopped him from even trying it then. Now, watching the chips and shavings falling from his father’s hands, seeing the fresh carvings lined up on the bench, and smelling the new cut wood, he was nearly overcome with the desire to have wood and steel in his hands.
His father raised one eyebrow and looked long and hard at his son. “Don’t expect to be carving whelkies, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t learn a few of the basics. There’s a knife in that drawer that you can use,” he pointed to a drawer in the workbench with the tip of his blade. “You’ll have to sharpen it first.”
Otto went to the indicated drawer and pulled out a folding knife. It had a short, sturdy blade that hinged and folded into the handle so that, when folded, no points or edges were exposed. The handle itself was some kind of composite material that warmed to his touch quickly, and fairly glowed with a patina of age.
“Your Grandfather Krugg used that to carve his whelkies.”
“Why aren’t you using it?” Otto asked.
“I’d already started carving with my own knife when he died,” he said. “Didn’t want to change knives just for the sake of changing.” He pointed to the whetstone mounted to the bench. “Get that a little wet and sharpen the blade on it.”
Otto looked at the stone and spit on it, leaving a small blob of saliva on the smooth rock.
His father laughed. “Usually, I just spill a little water on it, but that works, too.” He pointed to a bottle of water that Otto hadn’t noticed. “Just cut the knife across the stone an equal number of strokes on each side.”
Otto had seen his father do it before and did his best to mimic what he remembered. He cut three strokes on each side of the blade, then three more. He held the blade up to the light to see the silvery new metal in a bright line down the edge of the blade. His father looked at it over his shoulder. “Good. Now grab a bit of kindling and see what you can do with it. Remember, little bits at a time. You can always take a little more out, but you can’t put it back.” Richard settled back into his chair.
South Coast (Shaman's Tales From The Golden Age Of The Solar Clipper Book 1) Page 8
