The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “You see the trouble we have,” said Kovalcik.

  “I see there’s been trouble, yes.”

  “You don’t see half. You should see command room, too. Here, have more brandy, then I take you there.”

  “Never mind the brandy,” Carter said. “How about telling me what the hell’s been going on aboard this ship?”

  “First come see command room,” Kovalcik said.

  * * *

  The command room was one level down from the captain’s cabin. It was an absolute wreck.

  The place was all but burned out. There were laser scars on every surface and gaping wounds in the structural fabric of the ceiling. Glittering strings of program cores were hanging out of data cabinets like broken necklaces, like spilled guts. Everywhere there were signs of some terrible struggle, some monstrous, insane civil war that had raged through the most delicate regions of the ship’s mind centers.

  “It is all ruined,” Kovalcik said. “Nothing works anymore except the squid-processing programs, and as you see, those work magnificently, going on and on, the nets and flails and cutters and so forth. But everything else is damaged. Our water synthesizer, the ventilators, our navigational equipment, much more. We are making repairs, but it is very slow.”

  “I can imagine it would be. You had yourselves one hell of a party here, huh?”

  “There was a great struggle. From deck to deck, from cabin to cabin. It became necessary to place Captain Kohlberg under restraint and he and some of the other officers resisted.”

  Carter blinked and caught his breath short at that. “What the fuck are you saying? That you had a mutiny aboard this ship?”

  For a moment, the charged word hung between them like a whirling sword.

  Then Kovalcik said, voice flat as ever, “When we had been at sea for a while, the captain became like a crazy man. It was the heat that got to him, the sun, maybe the air. He began to ask impossible things. He would not listen to reason. And so he had to be removed from command for the safety of all. There was a meeting and he was put under restraint. Some of his officers objected and they had to be put under restraint, too.”

  Son of a bitch, Carter thought, feeling a little sick. What have I walked into here?

  “Sounds just like mutiny to me,” Rennett said.

  Carter shushed her. This had to be handled delicately. To Kovalcik he said, “They’re still alive, the captain, the officers?”

  “Yes. I can show them to you.”

  “That would be a good idea. But first maybe you ought to tell me some more about these grievances you had.”

  “That doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  “To me it does. I need to know what you think justifies removing a captain.”

  She began to look a little annoyed. “There were many things, some big, some small. Work schedules, crew pairings, the food allotment. Everything worse and worse for us each week. Like a tyrant, he was. A Caesar. Not at first, but gradually, the change in him. It was sun poisoning he had, the craziness that comes from too much heat on the brain. He was afraid to use very much Screen, you see, afraid that we would run out before the end of the voyage, so he rationed it very tightly, for himself, for us, too. That was one of our biggest troubles, the Screen.” Kovalcik touched her cheeks, her forearms, her wrists, where the skin was pink and raw. “You see how I look? We are all like that. Kohlberg cut us to half ration, then half that. The sun began to eat us. The ozone. We had no protection, do you see? He was so frightened there would be no Screen later on that he let us use only a small amount every day, and we suffered, and so did he, and he got crazier as the sun worked on him, and there was less Screen all the time. He had it hidden, I think. We have not found it yet. We are still on quarter ration.”

  Carter tried to imagine what that was like, sailing around under the ferocious sky without body armor. The daily injections withheld, the unshielded skin of these people exposed to the full fury of the greenhouse climate. Could Kohlberg really have been so stupid, or so loony? But there was no getting around the raw pink patches on Kovalcik’s skin.

  “You’d like us to let you have a supply of Screen, is that it?” he asked uneasily.

  “No. We would not expect that of you. Sooner or later, we will find where Kohlberg has hidden it.”

  “Then what is it you do want?”

  “Come,” Kovalcik said. “Now I show you the officers.”

  * * *

  The mutineers had stashed their prisoners in the ship’s infirmary, a stark, humid room far below deck with three double rows of bunks along the wall and some nonfunctioning medical mechs between them. Each of the bunks but one held a sweat-shiny man with a week’s growth of beard. They were conscious, but not very. Their wrists were tied.

  “It is very disagreeable for us, keeping them like this,” Kolvacik said. “But what can we do? This is Captain Kohlberg.” He was heavy-set, Teutonic-looking, groggy-eyed. “He is calm now, but only because we sedate him. We sedate all of them, fifty c.c.s of omnipax. But it is a threat to their health, the constant sedation. And in any case, the drugs, we are running short. Another few days and then we will have none, and it will be harder to keep them restrained, and if they break free, there will be war on this ship again.”

  “I’m not sure if we have any omnipax on board,” Carter said. “Certainly not enough to do you much good for long.”

  “That is not what we are asking, either,” said Kovalcik.

  “What are you asking, then?”

  “These five men, they threaten everybody’s safety. They have forfeited the right to command. This I could show, with playbacks of the time of struggle on this ship. Take them.”

  “What?”

  “Take them onto your ship. They must not stay here. These are crazy men. We must rid ourselves of them. We must be left to repair our ship in peace and do the work we are paid to do. It is a humanitarian thing, taking them. You are going back to San Francisco with the iceberg? Take them, these troublemakers. They will be no danger to you. They will be grateful for being rescued. But here they are like bombs that must sooner or later go off.”

  Carter looked at her as if she were a bomb that had already gone off. Rennett had simply turned away, covering what sounded like a burst of hysterical laughter by forcing a coughing fit.

  That was all he needed, making himself an accomplice in this thing, obligingly picking up a bunch of officers pushed off their ship by mutineers. Kyocera-Merck men at that. Aid and succor to the great corporate enemy? The Samurai Industries agent in Frisco would really love it when he came steaming into port with five K-M men on board. He’d especially want to hear that Carter had done it for humanitarian reasons.

  Besides, where the fuck were these men going to sleep? On deck between the spigots? Should he pitch a tent on the iceberg, maybe? What about feeding them, for Christ’s sake? What about Screen? Everything was calibrated down to the last molecule.

  “I don’t think you understand our situation,” Carter said carefully. “Aside from the legalities of the thing, we’ve got no space for extra personnel. We barely have enough for us.”

  “It would be just for a short while, no? A week or two?”

  “I tell you we’ve got every millimeter allotted. If God Himself wanted to come on board as a passenger, we’d have a tough time figuring out where to put Him. You want technical help patching your ship back together, we can try to do that. We can even let you have some supplies. But taking five men aboard—”

  Kovalcik’s eyes began to look a little wild. She was breathing very hard now. “You must do this for us! You must! Otherwise —”

  “Otherwise?” Carter prompted.

  All he got from her was a bleak stare, no friendlier than the green-streaked ozone-crisp sky.

  “Hilfe,” Kohlberg muttered just then, stirring unexpectedly in his bunk.

  “What was that?”

  “It is delirium,” said Kovalcik.

  “Hilfe. Hilfe. In Gottes Namen, hilf
e!” And then, in thickly accented English, the words painfully framed: “Help. She will kill us all.”

  “Delirium?” Carter said.

  Kovalcik’s eyes grew even chillier. Drawing an ultrasonic syringe from a cabinet in the wall, she slapped it against Kohlberg’s arm. There was a small buzzing sound. Kohlberg subsided into sleep. Snuffling snores rose from his bunk. Kovalcik smiled. She seemed to be recovering her self-control. “He is a madman. You see what my skin is like. What his madness has done to me, has done to every one of us. If he got loose, if he put the voyage in jeopardy—yes, yes, we would kill him. We would kill them all. It would be only self-defense, you understand me? But it must not come to that.” Her voice was icy. You could air-condition an entire city with that voice. “You were not here during the trouble. You do not know what we went through. We will not go through it again. Take these men from us, Captain.”

  She stepped back, folding her arms across her chest. The room was very quiet, suddenly, except for the pingings and thumpings from the ship’s interior and an occasional snore out of Kohlberg. Kovalcik was completely calm again, the ferocity and iciness no longer visible. As though she were simply telling him, “This is the situation, the ball is now in your court, Captain Carter.”

  What a stinking, squalid mess, Carter thought.

  But he was startled to find, when he looked behind the irritation he felt at having been dragged into this, a curious sadness where he would have expected anger to be. Despite everything, he found himself flooded with surprising compassion for Kovalcik, for Kohlberg, for all of them, for the whole fucking poisoned, heat-blighted world. Who had asked for any of this—the heavy green sky, the fiery air, the daily need for Screen, the million frantic improvisations that made continued life on earth possible? Not us. Our great-great-grandparents had, maybe, but not us. Only they’re not here to know what it’s like, and we are.

  Then the moment passed. What the hell could he do? Did Kovalcik think he was Jesus Christ? He had no room for these people. He had no extra Screen or food. In any case, this was none of his business. And San Francisco was waiting for its iceberg. It was time to move along. Tell her anything, just get out of here.

  “All right,” he said. “I see your problem. I’m not entirely sure I can help out, but I’ll do what I can. I’ll check our supplies and let you know what we’re able to do. OK?”

  * * *

  Hitchcock said, “What I think, Cap’n, we ought to just take hold of them. Nakata can put a couple of his spare hooks into them, and we’ll tow them into Frisco along with the berg.”

  “Hold on,” Carter said. “Are you out of your mind? I’m no fucking pirate.”

  “Who’s talking about piracy? It’s our obligation. We got to turn them in, man, is how I see it. They’re mutineers.”

  “I’m not a policeman, either,” Carter retorted. “They want to have a mutiny, let them goddamn go and mutiny. I have a job to do. I just want to get that berg moving east. Without hauling a shipload of crazies along. Don’t even think I’m going to make some kind of civil arrest of them. Don’t even consider it for an instant, Hitchcock.”

  Mildly, Hitchcock said, “You know, we used to take this sort of thing seriously, once upon a time. You know what I mean, man? We wouldn’t just look the other way.”

  “You don’t understand,” Carter said. Hitchcock gave him a sharp, scornful look. “No. Listen to me,” Carter snapped. “That ship’s nothing but trouble. The woman who runs it, she’s something you don’t want to be very close to. We’d have to put her in chains if we tried to take her in, and taking her isn’t as easy as you seem to think, either. There’s five of us and I don’t know how many of them. And that’s a Kyocera-Merck ship there. Samurai isn’t paying us to pull K-M’s chestnuts out of the fire.”

  It was late morning now. The sun was getting close to noon height, and the sky was brighter than ever, fiercely hot, with some swirls of lavender and green far overhead, vagrant wisps of greenhouse garbage that must have drifted west from the noxious high-pressure air that sat perpetually over the mid-section of the United States. Carter imagined he could detect a whiff of methane in the breeze. Just across the way was the berg, shining like polished marble, shedding water hour by hour as the mounting heat worked it over. Back in San Francisco, they were brushing the dust out of the empty reservoirs. Time to be moving along, yes. Kovalcik and Kohlberg would have to work out their problems without him. He didn’t feel good about that, but there were a lot of things he didn’t feel good about, and he wasn’t able to fix those, either.

  “You said she’s going to kill those five guys,” Caskie said. The communications operator was small and slight, glossy black hair and lots of it, no bare scalp for her. “Does she mean it?”

  Carter shrugged. “A bluff, most likely. She looks tough, but I’m not sure she’s that tough.”

  “I don’t agree,” Rennett said. “She wants to get rid of those men in the worst way.”

  “You think?”

  “I think that what they were doing anchored by the berg was getting ready to maroon them on it. Only we came along, and we’re going to tow the berg away, and that screwed up the plan. So now she wants to give them to us instead. We don’t take them, she’ll just dump them over the side soon as we’re gone.”

  “Even though we know the score?”

  “She’ll say they broke loose and jumped into the ship’s boat and escaped, and she doesn’t know where the hell they went. Who’s to say otherwise?”

  Carter stared gloomily. Yes, he thought, who’s to say otherwise?

  “The berg’s melting while we screw around,” Hitchcock said. “What’ll it be, Cap’n? We sit here and discuss some more? Or we pull up and head for Frisco?”

  “My vote’s for taking them on board,” said Nakata.

  “I don’t remember calling for a vote,” Carter said. “We’ve got no room for five more hands. Not for anybody. We’re packed as tight as we can possibly get. Living on this ship is like living in a rowboat, as it is.” He was starting to feel rage rise in him. This business was getting too tangled: legal issues, humanitarian issues, a lot of messy stuff. The simple reality underneath it all was that he couldn’t take on passengers, no matter what the reason.

  And Hitchcock was right. The berg was losing water every minute. Even from here, bare eyes alone, he could see erosion going on, the dripping, the carving. The oscillations were picking up, the big icy thing rocking gently back and forth as its stability at water line got nibbled away. Later on, the oscillations wouldn’t be so gentle. They had to get that berg sprayed with mirror dust and wrapped with a plastic skirt at the water line to slow down wave erosion and start moving. San Francisco was paying him to bring home an iceberg, not a handful of slush.

  Rennett called. She had wandered up into the observation rack above them and was shading her eyes, looking across the water. “They’ve put out a boat, Cap’n.”

  “No,” he said. “Son of a bitch!”

  He grabbed for his 6 × 30 spyglass. A boat, sure enough, a hydrofoil dinghy. It looked full: three, four, five. He hit the switch for biosensor boost and the squid fiber in the spyglass went to work for him. The image blossomed, high resolution. Five men. He recognized Kohlberg sitting slumped in front.

  “Shit,” he said. “She’s sending them over to us. Just dumping them on us.”

  “If we doubled up somehow—” Nakata began, smiling hopefully.

  “One more word out of you and I’ll double you up,” said Carter. He turned to Hitchcock, who had one hand clamped meditatively over the lower half of his face, pushing his nose back and forth and scratching around in his thick white stubble. “Break out some lasers,” Carter said. “Defensive use only. Just in case. Hitchcock, you and Rennett get out there in the kayak and escort those men back to the squid ship. If they aren’t conscious, tow them over to it. If they are, and they don’t want to go back, invite them very firmly to go back, and if they don’t like the invitation, put a cou
ple of holes through the side of their boat and get the hell back here fast. You understand me?”

  Hitchcock nodded stonily. “Sure, man. Sure.”

  * * *

  Carter watched the entire thing from the blister dome at the stern, wondering whether he were going to have a mutiny of his own on his hands now, too. But no. No. Hitchcock and Rennett kayaked out along the edge of the berg until they came up beside the dinghy from the Calamari Maru, and there was a brief discussion, very brief, Hitchcock doing the talking and Rennett holding a laser rifle in a casual but businesslike way. The five castoffs from the squid ship seemed more or less awake. They pointed and gestured and threw up their arms in despair. But Hitchcock kept talking and Rennett kept stroking the laser and the men in the dinghy looked more and more dejected by the moment. Then the discussion broke up and the kayak headed back toward the Tonopah Maru, and the men in the dinghy sat where they were, no doubt trying to figure out their next move.

  Hitchcock said, coming on board, “This is bad business, man. That captain, he say the woman just took the ship away from him, on account of she wanted him to let them all have extra shots of Screen and he didn’t give it. There wasn’t enough to let her have so much, is what he said. I feel real bad, man.”

  “So do I,” said Carter. “Believe me.”

  “I learn a long time ago,” Hitchcock said, “when a man say, ‘Believe me,’ that’s the one thing I shouldn’t do.”

  “Fuck you,” Carter said. “You think I wanted to strand them? But we have no choice. Let them go back to their own ship. She won’t kill them. All they have to do is let her do what she wants to do and they’ll come out of it OK. She can put them off on some island somewhere, Hawaii, maybe. But if they come with us, we’ll be in deep shit all the way back to Frisco.”