Very Hard Choices

by Spider Robinson

  Lina had been about to usher us into the parlor; now she stopped. "What do you need?"

  I already knew Keith wasn't home, because he wasn't either here or bellowing greetings from the interior, but hopeably he was at least nearby. "Is himself around?" I asked hopefully.

  She shook her head. "Sorry. On the mainland for the night, helping a friend move."

  Shit. "Just what we need, too. Unfortunately, we need to move in two different directions at once. Very soon."

  "Okay, we can—"

  "And neither of them can involve the ferry, or anything in the marina."

  "I see," she lied politely. "Well, I can solve half your problem."

  "Know anybody who can solve the other?"

  She closed her eyes and thought for a full second before she said, "No," so I didn't ask if she was sure. She knew all the other boat people, and all the seaplane types, and the guy with the chopper pad.

  Shit. That was bad. Nika had to go first, or draw unwelcome attention from her sergeant, who would surely ask why she was booking off late, and would surely have an excellent bullshit detector. But that left me with nothing effective whatsoever to do—for hours—except wonder if my son was all right. Hell, until morning! Lina would get back no earlier than ten o'clock, and way too tired for me to ask her to go right back out with me. I wouldn't be—

  "—except you, anyway," Lina finished.

  "Beg pardon? I don't . . . oh. Oh dear God, I do understand." It was actually the ideal solution, really: I saw that at once. As quickly as my stomach began to protest. She was paying me an enormous compliment and doing me a serious favor at risk to herself, so I couldn't even be mad at her. There was nothing else to convert my fear into, nothing to do but suck it up.

  "How far do you have to go?"

  "To Coveney and back."

  "Not far. You'll be okay if it doesn't get any uglier out than this," she said.

  "You trust me that much? In bad weather?"

  "I figure you'll just fall overboard and drown. I can live with that. If you sink her, I'll never speak to you again."

  I wanted to find that touching, but was already getting seasick. "Thank you too much. No, just enough."

  "Chicken. You'll be fine. Anyway, the boat will. Just don't sink her."

  I smiled broadly. I looked at Nika, still smiling. "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "I'm calculating." Let it go.

  She had to ask. "Calculating what?"

  Precisely how much I'd care if you got killed by some CIA spook. "Don't ask."

  Her eyes flicked to Lina and she let it go. Quick on the uptake.

  Yeah, damn it, I'd care.

  The Encyclopedia was equipped with a little-outboard powered inflatable job (that's hyphenated correctly: it was powered by a little outboard) that Keith called the Fiendish Dinghy, and Lina called the Killer Zodiac. It was a great little conveyance, if you didn't mind bailing a lot and getting wet anyway—and assuming you never had engine trouble someplace where you'd need to paddle it more than a few meters, downstream, with the wind.

  It would suck if Nika bought it.

  I'm not a big fan of boats. I'm not even a tiny fan of tiny boats. If the tiny boat is basically a truck-tire inner tube with a floor—a rippling, inch-thick floor—and a propellor sticking out the back, I become a microfan at best.

  Okay, it would suck a lot.

  I'm gonna be the only one in the truck tire? Toward sunset, in the rain? Heading for a destination that's likely to kill me on arrival? Now I'm in the nanofan range.

  I looked at her, looking back at me.

  Detective Constable Nika Mandiç, not only not a friend, but my spiritual and psychological and emotional antipod, had once—almost the last time I'd seen her, I was ashamed to admit to myself—knowingly risked rape, torture, maiming, dismemberment, personality disintegration, soul extinction and, after what would surely have been far too long for it to be any mercy, death, for no better reason than to save me from the same fate. Well, and a family of four, also strangers. And dozens if not hundreds after that. But that night she could have just turned around and left. Gone home and made a plan, come back with reinforcements, confident that I'd be alive next morning, if not necessarily still salvageable. Nobody else on the planet suspected I had a problem, or that she knew a thing about it, or even that we'd ever met . . . save one person, who couldn't talk to anyone but me. Total available backup on the island was two RCMP officers, and the sober one was a fuckup legendary throughout the whole Lower Mainland.

  She had gone through the door. Alone. Up against that creature with nothing but a handgun, not one of its slugs cast from silver. For her trouble she'd ended up sprawled across my couch with her own handcuffs on her wrists and his on her ankles, bleeding from one ear and waiting for a brilliant, very bad death to begin.

  Face it, Russell: if she got taken out by some government golem—just because she was lucky enough to meet you, once—it would suck one holy jumping fuckofalot. Not as bad as losing Jess, not as bad as losing Susan was . . . but in that band of the spectrum.

  "Well?" Lina prompted. She'd waited more than a polite interval.

  Still meeting Nika's eyes, I felt my smile become smaller . . . but now it was genuine. She saw it at once. "I already knew the answer. It's just better if I check my math. Let's roll."

  If you've sailed, or even read a magazine with pictures of boats in it, you can probably skip the next part. The rest of you . . . this is the part Travis McGee glosses over, when he makes The Busted Flush sound like fun.

  Damn, it's tough to pull out, when the lines are all wet and tied in knots you've never seen before, and the engine's not that happy to start, and the wind is insistently advising you to remain! right here! up against! this SLIP! Where you're SAFE!, and even the wheel is saturated, and it's not looking to get better anytime soon.

  Sure, you're wearing borrowed slick yellow overalls, jacket and comedy hat that probably don't really weigh twenty kilos, and most of the water is rolling off. But while man can make a suit that will keep out Ebola virus, keep him breathing in vacuum or cool in a furnace, it is apparently fundamentally impossible to fashion a garment that will keep out more than ninety-eight percent of a British Columbia rain, which leaves about a pint a minute unaccounted for. God knows why, it seems to seek the neck area. And for some reason, sailors have not yet evolved as far as divers in intelligence: their rubber suit is way too loose for wet-suit effect to provide any warmth.

  If you've got any sense, you've changed out of the runners that have been your only footgear for over a decade now into nine-league boots. But you hate clumping around a small sailboat in boots, and you see yourself putting a booted foot through the floor (deck?) of the rubber truck tire, and if you had any sense you wouldn't be here. So each shoe holds another pint. Socks and Stanfields make great wicks: moisture is approaching your crotch from both above and below, before you've even sat on anything.

  Lina coaxes the engine into surly life, and then it all starts to happen fast. You and Nika each spring to untie one of the springlines (a little sailing humor, there). Then Nika springs to untie your springline too, while Lina curses in Greek. You don't waste seconds being mortified—there'll be plenty of time later—but spring to untie the stern line. There's just time to break a fingernail and see a half-full film-container of Kootenay Thunderfuck fall from your shirt pocket into the drink before Nika frees the bow line and comes to untie yours, apparently with a gesture, while Lina curses in classical Greek. Nika mimes: push it away from the slip and jump aboard real fast. You mime: are you fucking kidding me? Nika glares: idiot, it's not our boat—HURRY! You nod, turn to push and discover as you leave vertical that by now the boat has done fine on its own. Instantly you compute distance—as far as you can jump with a running start—form the theory that sufficient desperation is just as helpful, and decide to test it, since you're leaving the dock one way or another anyway. Total effort. Belated realization that half of effort merely pushed d
ock away from you. Joyous realization in midair that you will nonetheless reach the boat, just like in the—

  —then things happen very fast as you land on the rail on your groin and fold and your face hits both of your fists just as they hit the deck just as both knees hit the hull just as Lina guns it in reverse and you roll left which makes your body half-close and fly wide-open again like a dropped laptop so now the back of your face and groin both hurt too but there's enough rebound so that it's easy to get your elbows under you and try to sit and start sliding off the rail feetfirst toward an astonishing quantity of water and hook both forearms under the rail and find out what a great idea that was and your eyes open wide and refocus on Nika standing at the edge of the dock already a mile away just in time to see her crouch all of ten centimeters and step across the water and pass over your head—

  —and then things slow rapidly, so that by the time she's hauled you back aboard, you're reassuring yourself the extensive inventory of Places You Hurt does not seem to include either of your collapsible lungs.

  Lina bellows, "Leave the rubbers on," or something like it, from up at the wheel of the boat.

  Pause. "I'm not wearing them," you yell back with your test chestful of air.

  Pause. "Don't, take, the fucking, rubber, off yet!"

  I looked down at my groin. I hate admitting that. But I may as well—Nika caught me at it, and must have told people by now. She made a noise like swallowing something horrid she'd snorted, touched my relocating shoulder and pointed just as that sneaky dock came racing at us without warning and whacked us square in . . . the rubber bumpers hanging over the side. She was pointing with one hand, and keeping me from tumbling headfirst back onto the dock with the other, so I assume she held onto the boat with her butt-cheeks.

  We waited until Lina had put her in drive and pulled away, and then a minute more, before hauling the rubbers in and stowing them. There was being not-laughed-at by Nika, and then there was being laughed at by Lina, and if you ask me which was harder to take, I'm going to need more time. I was distracted by how hard to take wet clothes are. In the movies, boats are nearly always adequately equipped with spare dry clothing for all, in some unseen storage space. Unless the wet person is a woman with attractive breasts—and sure enough, Lina, a woman with attractive breasts, had no clothes aboard at all. Except for an orange life vest I was glad to put on, even though it made me look like a gay Imperial Storm Trooper, and a pair of boat shoes that looked even flimsier than mine but had better traction.

  "Good weather," Lina said.

  We stared.

  "It is," she insisted. "Nothing hard about sailing in the rain. Rain accompanied by high wind and waves is bad. Your timing's good, too: you'll be heading into what wind and current there is on your way to Coveney."

  "Super."

  "Would you rather they were against you on your way back, when you're tired?"

  We booted it straight out from the Salts' dock for half a klick or so, then Lina turned right, or in nautical terms, hung a right, and we began circling Heron Island. Left would have been a shorter route both for me and for Nika as the crow swims, but right, while longer, was better for me. Lina explained the wind, tide and current reasons why this was so, even drawing little caligraphic objects she believed illuminated things; I bought it, but didn't get it or bother to retain it. In only a few minutes we were rounding the point by the west-facing beach imaginatively named Sunset Beach. I went back topside. The wind picked up a little, and the rain eased off a little, and Coveney Island came into view in the declining light of late afternoon. It looked like something it would take an Apollo Program to reach.

  "Not that far," Nika said behind me. She actually sounded confident I'd have no problem.

  Maybe it wouldn't suck that much. "No."

  Strong hand on my right shoulder. "Good luck, Russell." Squeeze. "I'm really sorry."

  I tried to shrug without shrugging off the hand, and succeeded. "You and I were going to have to do something about Zudie sooner or later anyway." And each other.

  "Should have a long time ago."

  The rain let up some more. "All we needed was the faintest clue what to do."

  She snorted. "See? We didn't actually need that after all."

  "Speak for yourself."

  She cleared her throat. "Look, I'm probably going to have to send Lina home without me, and find my own transport when I can. Booking off is going to be more complicated than usual tonight, and I don't know how long it will take.''

  "The new chief?" Two days before, the mayor had appointed a new chief of police—Jim Chu, the first Chinese-Canadian ever to hold that job, in a city whose ethnic Chinese population approaches twenty percent. The transition period was bound to be a complicated time for cops.

  "Exactly. I don't know how fast I'll be able to get back out here tonight, but I promise you it'll be as fast as I can make it." Her hand squeezed my shoulder again. "I'll watch out for him."

  I was touched. And relieved. And slightly jealous. "Thank you, Nika."

  "You remember my cell number?"

  "Christ, no." I patted my hip pocket. "But mine has it and Jesse's in memory."

  The rain slacked way off, to the condition I've always called smutch, a random floating dampness like being underneath one of God's sneezes. I looked up, began to offer thanks, decided not to risk calling attention to myself, realized I was worried about a God I had not believed in for half a century, and wondered if I should be allowed out without a keeper.

  The engines slowed, then died. Lina went below, as we sailors call downstairs, and came up out of the hole thing carrying a big duffle bag. "Time to make sail. Russ, you're underfoot: why don't you jump overboard?"

  "Of course." Together we all got the inflatable over the side of the Encyclopedia without either sinking or losing it. (I wonder why boats stop being "her" when they get real small.)

  "The Fiendish Dinghy," I said admiringly.

  "The Killer Zodiac," Lina said automatically.

  "I devoutly hope not."

  "Don't be silly. I told you all you really need to know."

  "Tell me again."

  "Don't let the waves hit you from the side. Keep 'em dead ahead or dead astern. That's basically it. Long as you don't run out of gas, you'll be fine. And you won't: I checked."

  "What if a big gas leak just started now?"

  "Row." She pointed. I hoped for oars, and saw paddles.

  "How's it handle?" Nika asked.

  Lina shrugged. "Like a kid's swimming pool."

  Nika turned to me. "Have you done much rowing?"

  Politely phrased. I don't tell a lot of people about the annoying tendency of my lungs to collapse; how was she to know Lina was one of the ones I had told? I said what I always used to say when my late wife Susan asked me if a given task was within my acceptable range: "Oh, sure. No sweat." I wasn't going to have to row anyway, Lina said so.

  Unlike Susan, Nika bought it. "Good luck, then." Lina echoed her.

  I thanked them both. With their help, I managed to get into the Dinghy without soaking myself much further, learning in the process why Keith called it "Fiendish." I'd assumed it was a Beatles reference. "Where's the handle?" I yelled back up to Lina, looking the motor over for a pull-cord to yank.

  Pause. "Just under your ribs on either side," she yelled back, pointing to the ignition key.

  Pause. "I knew that!"

  I turned the key and it started up much faster and smoother than the Encyclopedia's main engine had. I heard Lina yell what must have been "We never doubted you," then figured out the throttle and went away from there.

  Somehow it took only seconds to be all alone. And no time at all to be lonesome.

  The first half of the voyage wasn't too bad. The seating was comfortable enough, once I got the damn cellphone out of my hip pocket and into my shirt pocket. Despite the overcast and the smutch there was enough light left to see where I was going. Although Lina had been right about the wind a
nd tide, the Dinghy's little motor was up to them. It sounded like a sewing machine having hysterics, but it performed more like a big chainsaw. The direction of the waves was such that by diverging only slightly from a head-on course I could approach Coveney Island. I thought at the time I was miserable, but in retrospect I was just uncomfortable, apprehensive, and heartsick.

  If I'd been miserable, I wouldn't have had attention to spare to beat myself up for having somehow dragged my son, my only remaining piece of Susan, into deadly peril. I'd awakened that morning hoping today would be the day I'd finally manage to bury the hatchet with Jesse, so Susan could finally get on with the resting-in-peace part of her afterlife. Instead we both had a fair chance of joining her—thanks to an old mess of mine I'd failed to clean up. Good one, Dad. Fortunately, after perhaps half an hour of that I was distracted by the rapid onset of mortal terror, followed almost at once by incredible peril.

  It began with the idle observation that the rain seemed to be picking back up again. Rather . . . no, very fast.

  Then the wind did too. Hard.

  Then the waves did too. Big.

  That quickly, I was in Hell. It was dark and windy and cold and noisy and active out there. The rain came down so hard it felt like a vibrator was strapped to my skull. It became a good idea to do a bit of bailing, now and again, with the hand I wasn't using to steer. Never in my life have I been more grateful that I don't get seasick. (I grew up riding subways and the Coney Island roller coaster.)

  Then the damn water began to cheat. The direction of the waves changed: to keep making for Coveney, I had to go at an ever-increasing angle from perpendicular to them. A point was going to come when I'd have to steer away from my destination to keep from being flipped, swamped, or both. After hard thought I decided when that point came, my move was to turn counterintuitively, in what felt like the wrong direction but somehow looked right. I'd be moving away from Coveney, then . . . but at least I wouldn't drift past the bastard. Past it was nothing but a whole lot of the Strait of Georgia; I could just make out the lights of Nanaimo on the horizon, but the bulk of Vancouver Island itself was too far to make out in this light. Each time I ran the problem, I got the same answer. As the angle changed, I began to get a stiff neck from keeping both my eye on the prize and my hand on the tiller.