The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Sourly he said, “You want to check the screen yourself? Here. Here, take a look.” He offered Hitchcock the wand.

  Hitchcock shook his head. “Easy, man. Whatever the screen says, that’s OK for me.” He grinned disarmingly, showing mahogany snags. On the screen, impenetrable whorls and jiggles were dancing, black on green, green on black, the occasional dazzling bloom of bright yellow. The Tonopah Maru’s interrogatory beam was traveling 22,500 miles straight up to Nippon Telecom’s big marine scansat, which had its glassy, unblinking gaze trained on the entire eastern Pacific, looking for albedo differentials. The reflectivity of an iceberg is different from the reflectivity of the ocean surface. You pick up the differential, you confirm it with temperature readout, you scan for mass to see if the trip’s worth while. If it is, you bring your trawler in fast and make the grab before someone else does.

  This berg was due to go, to San Francisco, which was in a bad way for water just now. The entire West Coast was. There hadn’t been any rain along the Pacific Seaboard in ten months. Most likely, the sea around here was full of trawlers—Seattle, San Diego, L.A. The Angelenos kept more ships out than anybody else. The Tonopah Maru had been chartered to them by Samurai Industries until last month. But the trawler was working for San Francisco this time. The lovely city by the bay, dusty now, sitting there under that hot, soupy sky full of interesting-colored greenhouse gases, waiting for the rain that almost never came anymore.

  Carter said, “Start getting the word around. That berg’s down here, south-southwest. We get it in the grapple tomorrow, we can be in San Francisco with it by a week from Tuesday.”

  “If it don’t melt first. This fucking heat.”

  “It didn’t melt between Antarctica and here, it’s not gonna melt between here and Frisco. Get a move on, man. We don’t want L.A. coming in and hitting it first.”

  * * *

  By midafternoon, they were picking up an overhead view via the Weather Department spysat, then a sea-level image bounced to them by a Navy relay buoy. The berg was a thing like a castle afloat, maybe 200 meters long, stately and serene, all pink turrets and indigo battlements and blue-white pinnacles, rising high above the water. Steaming curtains of fog shrouded its edges. For the past couple of million years, it had been sitting on top of the South Pole, and it probably hadn’t ever expected to go cruising off toward Hawaii like this. But the big climate shift had changed a lot of things for everybody, the antarctic ice pack included.

  “Jesus,” Hitchcock said. “Can we do it?”

  “Easy,” said Nakata. He was the grapple technician, a sleek, beady-eyed, cat-like little guy. “It’ll be a four-hook job, but so what? We got the hooks for it.”

  The Tonopah Maru had hooks to spare. Most of its long, cigar-shaped hull was taken up by the immense rack-and-pinion gear that powered the grappling hooks, a vast, silent mechanism capable of hurling the giant hooks far overhead and whipping them down deep into the flanks of even the biggest bergs. The deck space was given over almost entirely to the great spigots that were used to spray the bergs with a sintering of melt-retardant mirror dust. Down below was a powerful fusion-driven engine, strong enough to haul a fair-sized island halfway around the world.

  Everything very elegant, except there was barely any room left over for the crew of five. Carter and the others were jammed into odd little corners here and there. For living quarters, they had cubicles not much bigger than the coffin-sized sleeping capsules you got at an airport hotel, and for recreation space, they all shared one little blister dome aft and a pacing area on the foredeck. A sardine-can kind of life, but the pay was good and at least you could breathe fresh air at sea, more or less, instead of the dense grayish-green murk that hovered over the habitable parts of the West Coast.

  They were right at the mid-Pacific cold wall. The sea around them was blue, the sign of warm water. Just to the west, though, where the berg was, the water was a dark, rich olive green with all the microscopic marine life that cold water fosters. The line of demarcation was plainly visible.

  Carter was running triangulations to see if they’d be able to slip the berg under the Golden Gate Bridge when Rennett appeared at his elbow and said, “There’s a ship, Cap’n.”

  “What you say?”

  He wondered if he were going to have to fight for his berg. That happened at times. This was open territory, pretty much a lawless zone where old-fashioned piracy was making a terrific comeback.

  Rennett was maintenance/operations, a husky, broad-shouldered little kid out of the Midwest dust bowl, no more than chest-high to him, very cocky, very tough. She kept her scalp shaved, the way a lot of them did nowadays, and she was as brown as an acorn all over, with the purple glint of Screen shining brilliantly through, making her look almost fluorescent. Brown eyes as bright as marbles and twice as hard looked back at him.

  “Ship,” she said, clipping it out of the side of her mouth as if doing him a favor. “Right on the other side of the berg. Caskie’s just picked up a message. Some sort of S O S.” She handed Carter a narrow strip of yellow radio tape with a couple of lines of bright-red thermoprint typing on it. The words came up at him like a hand reaching out of the deck. He read them out loud.

  “CAN YOU HELP US TROUBLE ON SHIP MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH URGENT YOU COME ABOARD SOONEST

  “KOVALCIK, ACTING CAPTAIN, CALAMARI MARU”

  “What the fuck?” Carter said. “Calamari Maru? Is it a ship or a squid?”

  Rennett didn’t crack a smile. “We ran a check on the registry. It’s owned out of Vancouver by Kyocera-Merck. The listed captain is Amiel Kohlberg, a German. Nothing about any Kovalcik.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a berg trawler.”

  “It’s a squid ship, Cap’n,” she said, voice flat with a sharp edge of contempt on it. As if he didn’t know what a squid ship was. He let it pass. It always struck him as funny, the way anybody who had two days’ more experience at sea than he did treated him like a greenhorn.

  He glanced at the print-out again. Urgent, it said. Matter of life and death. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  The idea of dropping everything to deal with the problems of some strange ship didn’t sit well with him. He wasn’t paid to help other captains out, especially Kyocera-Merck captains. Samurai Industries wasn’t fond of K-M these days. Something about the Gobi reclamation contract, industrial espionage, some crap like that. Besides, he had a berg to deal with. He didn’t need any other distractions just now.

  And then, too, he felt an edgy little burst of suspicion drifting up from the basement of his soul, a tweak of wariness. Going aboard another ship out here, you were about as vulnerable as you could be. Ten years in corporate life had taught him caution.

  But he also knew you could carry caution too far. It didn’t feel good to him to turn his back on a ship that had said it was in trouble. Maybe the ancient laws of the sea, as well as every other vestige of what used to be common decency, were inoperative concepts here in this troubled, heat-plagued year of 2133, but he still wasn’t completely beyond feeling things like guilt and shame. Besides, he thought, what goes around comes around. You ignore the other guy when he asks for help, you might just be setting yourself up for a little of the same later on.

  They were all watching him—Rennett, Nakata, Hitchcock.

  Hitchcock said, “What you gonna do, Cap’n? Gonna go across to ’em?” A gleam in his eye, a snaggly, mischievous grin on his face.

  What a pain in the ass, Carter thought. He gave the older man a murderous look and said, “So you think it’s legit?”

  Hitchcock shrugged blandly. “Not for me to say. You the cap’n, man. All I know is, they say they in trouble, they say they need our help.”

  Hitchcock’s gaze was steady, remote, noncommittal. His blocky shoulders seemed to reach from wall to wall. “They calling for help, Cap’n. Ship wants help, you give help, that’s what I always believe, all my years at sea. Of course, maybe it different now.”

  Carter found himself
wishing he’d never let Hitchcock come aboard. But screw it. He’d go over there and see what was what. He had no choice, never really had.

  To Rennett he said, “Tell Caskie to let this Kovalcik know that we’re heading for the berg to get claiming hooks into it. That’ll take about an hour and a half. And after that, we have to get it mirrored and skirted. While that’s going on, I’ll go over and find out what his problem is.”

  “Got it,” Rennett said and went below.

  New berg visuals had come in while they were talking. For the first time now, Carter could see the erosion grooves at the water line on the berg’s upwind side, the undercutting, the easily fractured overhangings that were starting to form. The undercutting didn’t necessarily mean the berg was going to flip over—that rarely happened with big dry-dock bergs like this—but they’d be in for some lousy oscillations, a lot of rolling and heaving, choppy seas, a general pisser all around. The day was turning very ugly very fast.

  “Jesus,” Carter said, pushing the visuals across to Nakata. “Take a look at these.”

  “No problem. We got to put our hooks on the lee side, that’s all.”

  “Yeah. Sounds good.” He made it seem simple. Carter managed a grin.

  * * *

  The far side of the berg was a straight high wall, a supreme white cliff as smooth as porcelain that was easily 100 meters high, with a wicked tongue of ice jutting out about 40 meters into the sea like a breakwater. That was what the Calamari Maru was using it for, too. The squid ship rode at anchor just inside that tongue.

  Carter signaled to Nakata, who was standing way down fore by his control console.

  “Hooks away!” Carter called. “Sharp! Sharp!”

  There came the groaning sound of the grapple-hatch opening and the deep rumbling of the hook gimbals. Somewhere deep in the belly of the ship, immense mechanisms were swinging around, moving into position. The berg sat motionless in the calm sea.

  Then the entire ship shivered as the first hook came shooting up into view. It hovered overhead, a tremendous taloned thing filling half the sky, black against the shining brightness of the air. Nakata hit the keys again, and the hook, having reached the apex of its curve, spun downward with slashing force, heading for the breast of the berg.

  It hit and dug and held. The berg recoiled, quivered, rocked. The shower of loose ice came tumbling off the upper ledges. As the impact of the hooking was transmitted to the vast hidden mass of the berg undersea, the entire thing bowed forward a little farther than Carter had been expecting, making a nasty sucking noise against the water, and when it pulled back again, a geyser came spuming up about 20 meters.

  Down by the bow, Nakata was making his I-got-you gesture at the berg, the middle finger rising high.

  A cold wind was blowing from the berg now. It was like the exhalation of some huge wounded beast, an aroma of ancient times, a fossil-breath wind.

  They moved on a little farther along the berg’s flank.

  “Hook two,” Carter told him.

  The berg was almost stable again now. Carter, watching from his viewing tower by the aft rail, waited for the rush of pleasure and relief that came from a successful claiming, but this time it wasn’t there. All he felt was impatience, an eagerness to get all four hooks in and start chugging on back to the Golden Gate.

  The second hook flew aloft, hovered, plunged, struck, bit.

  A second time, the berg slammed the water, and a second time, the sea jumped and shook. Carter had just a moment to catch a glimpse of the other ship popping around like a floating cork and wondered if that ice tongue they found so cozy were going to break off and sink them. It would have been smarter of the Calamari Maru to anchor somewhere else. But to hell with them. They’d been warned.

  The third hook was easier.

  “Four,” Carter called. One last time, a grappling iron flew through the air, whipping off at a steep angle to catch the far side of the berg over the top, and then they had it, the entire monstrous floating island of ice snaffled and trussed.

  * * *

  Toward sunset, Carter left Hitchcock in charge of the trawler and went over to the Calamari Maru in the sleek little silvery kayak that they used as the ship’s boat. He took Rennett with him.

  The stink of the other ship reached his nostrils long before he went scrambling up the gleaming woven-monofilament ladder that they had thrown over the side for him: a bitter, acrid reek, a miasma so dense that it was almost visible. Breathing it was something like inhaling all of Cleveland in a single snort. Carter wished he’d worn a facelung. But who expected to need one out at sea, where you were supposed to be able to breathe reasonably decent air?

  The Calamari Maru didn’t look too good, either. At one quick glance, he picked up a sense of general neglect and slovenliness: black stains on the deck, swirls of dust everywhere, some nasty rust-colored patches of ozone attack that needed work. The reek, though, came from the squids themselves.

  The heart of the ship was a vast tank, a huge squid-peeling factory occupying the entire mid-deck. Carter had been on one once before, long ago, when he was a trainee. Samurai Industries ran dozens of them. He looked down into the tank and saw battalions of hefty squids swimming in herds, big-eyed pearly phantoms, scores of them shifting direction suddenly and simultaneously in their squiddy way. Glittering mechanical flails moved among them, seizing and slicing, cutting out the nerve tissue, flushing the edible remainder toward the meat-packing facility. The stench was astonishing. The entire thing was a tremendous processing machine. With the one-time farming heartland of North America and temperate Europe now worthless desert, and the world dependent on the thin, rocky soil of northern Canada and Siberia for its crops, harvesting the sea was essential. But the smell was awful. He fought to keep from gagging.

  “You get used to it,” said the woman who greeted him when he clambered aboard. “Five minutes, you won’t notice.”

  “Let’s hope so,” he said. “I’m Captain Carter, and this is Rennett, maintenance/ops. Where’s Kovalcik?”

  “I’m Kovalcik,” the woman said.

  His eyes widened. She seemed to be amused by his reaction.

  Kovalcik was rugged and sturdy-looking, more than average height, strong cheekbones, eyes set very far apart, expression very cool and controlled, but strain evident behind the control. She was wearing a sacklike jump suit of some coarse gray fabric. About 30, Carter guessed. Her hair was black and close-cropped and her skin was fair, strangely fair, hardly any trace of Screen showing. He saw signs of sun damage, signs of ozone, crackly, red splotches of burn. Two members of her crew stood behind her, also women, also jump-suited, also oddly fair-skinned. Their skin didn’t look so good, either.

  Kovalcik said, “We are very grateful you came. There is bad trouble on this ship.” Her voice was flat. She had just a trace of a European accent, hard to place.

  “We’ll help out if we can,” Carter told her.

  He became aware now that they had carved a chunk out of his berg and grappled it up onto the deck, where it was melting into three big aluminum runoff tanks. It couldn’t have been a millionth of the total berg mass, not a ten millionth, but seeing it gave him a quick little stab of proprietary fury and he felt a muscle flicker in his cheek. That reaction didn’t go unnoticed, either. Kovalcik said quickly, “Yes, water is one of our problems. We have had to replenish our supply this way. There have been some equipment failures lately. You will come to the captain’s cabin now? We must talk of what has happened, what must now be done.”

  She led him down the deck, with Rennett and the two crew women following along behind.

  The Calamari Maru was pretty impressive. It was big and long and sleek, built somewhat along the lines of a squid itself, a jet-propulsion job that gobbled water into colossal compressors and squirted it out behind. That was one of the many low-fuel solutions to maritime transport problems that had been worked out for the sake of keeping CO2 output down in these difficult times. Immense things
like flying buttresses ran down the deck on both sides. These, Kovalcik explained, were squid lures, covered with bioluminescent photophores: You lowered them into the water and they gave off light that mimicked the glow of the squids’ own bodies, and the slithery tentacular buggers came jetting in from vast distances, expecting a great jamboree and getting a net instead.

  “Some butchering operation you got here,” Carter said.

  Kovalcik said a little curtly, “Meat is not all we produce. The squids we catch here have value as food, of course, but also we strip the nerve fibers, we take them back to the mainland, they are used in all kinds of biosensor applications. They are very large, those fibers, a hundred times as thick as ours. They are like single-cell computers. You have a thousand processors aboard your ship that use squid fiber, do you know? Follow me, please. This way.”

  They went down a ramp, along a narrow companionway. Carter heard thumpings and pingings in the walls. A bulkhead was dented and badly scratched. The lights down here were dimmer than they ought to be and the fixtures hummed ominously. There was a new odor now, a tang of something chemical, sweet but not a pleasing kind of sweet, more a burnt kind of sweet than anything else, cutting sharply across the boom of drums. Rennett shot him a somber glance. This ship was a mess, all right.

  “Captain’s cabin is here,” Kovalcik said, pushing back a door hanging askew on its hinges. “We have drink first, yes?”

  The size of the cabin amazed Carter after all those weeks bottled up in his little hole on the Tonopah Maru. It looked as big as a gymnasium. There was a table, a desk, shelving, a comfortable bunk, a sanitary unit, even an entertainment screen, everything nicely spread out with actual floor space you could move around in. The screen had been kicked in. Kovalcik took a flask of Peruvian brandy from a cabinet. Carter nodded and she poured three stiff ones. They drank in silence. The squid odor wasn’t so bad in here, or else he was getting used to it, just as she’d said. But the air was rank and close despite the spaciousness of the cabin, thick, soupy stuff that was a struggle to breathe. Something’s wrong with the ventilating system, too, Carter thought.