Seven hours of sleep weren’t going to cut it, but Signy was wide awake, alert and jittery and groggy at the edges. No messages waited on the screens. Janine was off-line. Paul and Pilar weren’t answering.
Not all of the water had cooked out of the little teapot. Signy refilled it and drank two cups of instant coffee and scrubbed at the liquor stain on the carpet. She peeled out of her skinthin and found the shower to be hot, generous, and unmetered. The local time was 0700. Clean, dressed, and at loose ends, she paced the confines of the little suite, sipping at more coffee. Anna wasn’t due to get here for hours. And was not on the Siranui, the watch officer told her, audio only.
“Where is she?” Signy asked.
“Corpsman de Brum is on her way to McMurdo.”
“Thank you,” Signy said. She had her finger poised over the cutoff key.
“She left a message for you,” the officer said. “It says—‘Meet me at the Hotel California.’”
“I’ll do that. Thanks.” Signy thought she could find the place again.
There was no food in the suite. There had to be a cafeteria or something somewhere in this maze. Signy picked up her keycard and turned it over. A map of the station was printed on the back of it. Snead’s forbidden sections were marked in color, three buildings away from her. The cafeteria was just past the entry doors. Fine.
The breakfast crowd buzzed with the tensions of business. The place felt like a combination of a university coffee shop and a construction-site canteen. Bearded men sat in clusters, shoveling food and talking with their heads together. Women in flannels and bulky padded clothes sat in clusters of their own, in unconscious separatism.
Signy carried her laden tray to an empty table. She felt studiously ignored, and in a fit of exasperation, pulled her camera headband into position, focused on faces, groups, framed them in an idle documentary of morning on McMurdo. Bits of conversations floated to her while she ate scrambled eggs that had traveled here in frozen cartons.
Technobabble filled the room, talk of mats of algae under the ice of freshwater lakes in the dry valleys, populations of krill that had pigmented in response to UV excess, new construction up on the slopes of Erebus.
“There’s lava tubes in there, some of them big enough to be decent hallways. Makes the excavations a lot easier,” someone said.
“What about stability?”
“Oh, hell, a volcano is a volcano. But if you got the sensors up all the time and don’t mind moving in a hurry, it wouldn’t be a bad place to live.”
“Geothermal luxury, fuckin’ A.”
But no one was supposed to live here. The treaty permitted no permanent inhabitants; Signy remembered. She would ask Paul to look at lists of repeated visits—Paul liked that sort of sleuthing. No real privacy, no true sense of unlimited space existed anywhere in the world, and a presumably empty continent might appeal to some markedly weird money.
Janine’s light awakened on Signy’s wrist. Signy considered talking to her, right here in the middle of the feeding arena where she was already getting studied glances that quickly looked away. Signy deliberately touched the mike taped to her throat and said, “Good morning. Want some eggs?”
[Janine] Ugh.
Janine’s eyes scanned a room full of Japanese sararimen, showing Signy a meeting in progress around a long oval table, Kazi at its head. The air was thick with tobacco smoke. Printouts competed for table space with teacups, ashtrays, and various models of notepads. The room and the faces looked late and tired. Janine’s vision wandered to a steel and thermopane window that looked out at a walled stone castle, a crumbling fairy-tale building set high on a rocky slope above a messy urban sprawl. Then her fingers flew on her notepad, sending typescript to the heads-up display in the corner of Signy’s vision.
[Janine] Tense here. U.S. and U.K. reports came in. Not enough fish. Projections say that current harvesting will decrease the mature fish populations down past danger levels in five years. They’re talking 5% of netted fish mature enough to reproduce—as bad as the cod stats in 1993, and that’s bad.
Very bad. There were a few surviving cod, hopefully reproducing as best they could in the abandoned North Sea. Still pirated by some of the Scandinavians, but the great schools that had fed Northern Europe for centuries were gone and would likely never return.
In Lisbon, a bearded Anglo man spoke to a conference table surrounded by intent Japanese faces. “The gentoo penguin populations show a greater decline than the chinstraps. We have no explanation for this; their diets are much the same. It is possible that we know less of penguin population dynamics than we thought. But it seems likely that food supply is in question—penguin populations increased at the height of whaling activity and entered a status of true population explosion, then declined again when the whales began to return.”
[Janine] We can do it. We can sell a moratorium on fishing in the Southern Ocean. No Fishing: Satellite monitors run by the U.N. Paul still wants it. I’ll forget the low-bid system. No Fishing is the only way.
Paul had made that decision when he was ranting about sabotaging Tanaka. What the hell did he really want Janine to do? Blow the contract?
“Let me talk to Paul before you push it,” Signy said. “I imagine he has some new thoughts on all this by now.”
[Janine] Paul’s off-line. So is Seattle. Is okay. I’m just watching, here.
“Well, don’t make any moves yet. Not until we talk about it, all of us.” Signy wondered if Paul had thought it over since last night and still wanted to push a moratorium. No way to know, right now.
Janine’s cameras focused on Kazi, who sat across the table from her. Kazi cleared his throat. “The penguin specimens are healthy when sampled? This is not a disease of some sort that is decimating their populations?” he asked.
“No,” the bearded man said. “The specimens we have sacrificed have been fat and healthy.”
“What of the whales?” Kazi asked.
“The counts for the polar regions are not in. Preliminary reports say that calving seems to be at normal levels in the minke populations.”
“Tanaka will go broke if they don’t fish,” Signy said to Janine. Janine shook her head slightly, causing the Japanese businessman who sat next to her to turn toward her and blink in surprise.
“Won’t they?” Signy asked. A man at the next table in the McMurdo cafeteria looked up at Signy and then looked down at his plate again.
[Janine] No. Tanaka won’t.
“What chance of fish population recovery if they are left alone?” Signy asked. “Do you have the stats?”
[Janine] Ozone, oceanic warming, current changes? Difficult trends to extrapolate. Chances are good. In 50 years.
And would the “recovered” populations be as poisoned as most coastal fish were now? Toxins combined, diffused, and changed in the sea, and climbed the food chain, altering the balance of the seas’ populations in complex ways. The sea remained the Final Solution, the Universal Solvent, for Earth, at least. Difficult trends to extrapolate, indeed.
Signy stacked her dishes on her tray and carried them to the scullery window, where clatters, bangs, and mariachi music competed with pidgin chatter. A waft of steamy air carried the smell of soapsuds and roasting meat.
“What about Kazi?” Signy asked Janine. “What sort of help has he offered? About Jared?”
[Janine] Told the Kasumi to stay in the area. All he could do, he said.
“That’s all?” Signy asked.
Janine’s attention turned to Kazi, who studiously ignored her as he closed down the day’s conference.
[Janine] That’s all so far. Leaving now. Get Paul to tweak some of this meeting’s worries into the crane sequence; I’ll show it to Kazi after tea.
“What happened last night?” Signy asked.
[Janine] Politics and sex. I’ll dump it to your address. It will take me a few minutes, okay?
“Okay,” Signy said.
She had—three hours, the clock on the wall told her, to kill until Anna came to get her.
Aimless, Signy wandered out of the cafeteria and walked a few hallways. Politics and sex, whatever Janine had learned about Tanaka and sent unedited would be something to sort through, something to distract her for a time.
Signy turned down a walkway toward the forbidden zones, trying for a shortcut to the Tanaka office. The forbidden zones were not marked in any special way, and the buildings that Snead had said were closed to her looked no different from any other prefabs in McMurdo’s maze. Signy thought about walking in, just to see what would happen, and then decided physical access wouldn’t tell her as much as her system would, once she keyed it to search out McMurdo secrets. The keycard she held probably recorded her attempts to open any door; she didn’t want to blow her status here, whatever it might be.
Back in the claustrophobic Tanaka suite, Signy accessed Janine’s night, the tensions of a businesslike seduction, ritualized compliments, Janine’s quick editing, idle chatter in a bedroom.
—Janine and Kazi shared reminisences of student days at Stanford, of hot California wind and sun and shadowed courtyards where the bright and young gathered in flocks, dressed in the faded cottons of that year’s fashion. Changing the world, they thought, or at least learning to manipulate it. Signy extrapolated tensions in Kazi’s voice, picked up a faint xenophobia from him when he was confronted with the reality of Janine’s creamy skin, her total blondness.
[Janine] Skilled. Thorough.
Janine had done some editing on the bed-with-Kazi sequence, it seemed.
[Janine] Cut to payoff.
Signy smiled. Janine had planted a single mike in the Lisbon bedroom, no camera.
New Hampshire and Seattle were still quiet; Signy called up the empty rooms there while she listened to Kazi follow Janine’s postcoital invitation to speak of his dreams for the future, to delineate his importance in Tanaka’s world.
“I could become the CEO,” Kazi’s voice said. “If things go well, if I am cautious and efficient.”
“You rank that highly?” Janine asked.
“Yoshiro Tanaka has placed all the divisions of Tanaka in competition. For profits, of course, but also for growth. He is getting older, and says that he wants Tanaka to become a colossus, to be an institution that prospers for centuries. We have a goal. We would bring the world safely through this current crisis of hunger and back into a balance of resources and demands.”
The speech sounded rehearsed, a ritual recitation of a religious creed. Which, Signy figured, it was. More or less.
“Current crisis?” Janine asked. “We have centuries of exploitation and waste behind us. What’s current about it?”
“We strive for a new, consciously directed exploitation. Our vision is the directed use of exploitation in the service of ecologic balance.”
Kazuyuki Itano actually seemed to believe the words he’d just said. His tones were convinced, earnest, and not at all cynical. We may have done better with our careful fisherman than we thought, Signy decided.
“Who rules, in this new balance?” Janine asked.
“Ah, those who control food and access to it; they rule,” Kazi said.
“Benevolently, I hope.”
“Efficiently,” Kazi said. “And my division, fisheries, we are very efficient.”
Kazi sighed over the sound of rustling bedclothes. “Of course, there is the problem of the biomass division, vat foods. They show a larger profit margin than the fisheries this year. But we can conquer that problem, I think.”
“We?” Janine asked.
The sound of ice tinkling in a glass. “I am Stanford, yes, Janine, but I am also Japanese and we work in teams in ways that are difficult for a U.S. woman to understand. We, yes, fishing and aquaculture. My team includes Tanaka’s daughter, and we are close to our director’s vision; I am sure of it.”
What’s her name, Signy wondered?
“Daughter?” Janine asked, but her words were muffled and Kazi laughed.
[Janine] End.
[Signy] Seattle! Hey, you guys! Is somebody working on Tanaka’s daughter’s name? Priority. We need to find it, okay?
No one answered. This anonymous Tanaka office irritated Signy; she felt homeless, an Antarctic bag lady with nowhere to go. There was little else she could do here.
Signy placed a few codes in the room’s system, access if and when she might need it. She loaded her duffel and got her parka, and went to the Hotel California.
* * *
Plastic palms flourished in metal oilcans filled with sand. The foamed insulation on the walls was covered, here and there, with woven mats, their bright dyes faded. The mirrored bar was long and well stocked. There were no customers. No music played. A short dark man sat at one of the Formica tables. He wore a Hawaiian shirt over long-sleeved thermals. Three sets of knitted cuffs lined up over his thick wrists, gray, gray, and black. A flatscreen mounted behind the bar showed a crowd of bare-legged men chasing a soccer ball.
The bartender turned and nodded as Signy came in. Polynesian, she thought, or Filipino. He gave her a shy half-smile but he did not stand up.
“You’re open?” Signy said.
“Sure I’m open. What would you like?”
Not booze, Signy thought. The salt in the eggs had made her thirsty. She had had plenty of coffee, though, enough to make her a little shaky. “Iced tea?” she asked.
“You want lemonade,” he said.
“Okay.”
Signy sat at one of the tables while he rummaged behind the bar and clinked ice. A coconut hung from a coat-hanger wire in one of the palm trees. It was marked with a yellow and black biohazard symbol.
The bartender sat a tall glass down in front of her.
“What’s wrong with the coconut?” Signy asked.
“From Bikini,” he said. “Genuine U.S.A. radioactive coconut.”
“Is it going to give me cancer?” Signy asked.
“Just don’t eat him,” the bartender said. He looked back toward the flatscreen. “Very important game,” he said. “Excuse me?”
“Sure,” Signy said.
He sat down again. Signy sipped her lemonade. The bartender watched the game; Signy watched him. She had nothing to do but watch, nothing to play but the hurry-up-and-wait game that seemed normal here, the timing of this place measured by the movements of helos and ships, not by clock hours. Signy sensed the rhythms of the humans that worked here, their schedules shaped by implacable ice and the dictates of transportation, tied to the pace of machines that could go where a walking man could not. No traffic came in and out today, so this bartender rested and waited, and so must she.
“Ah!” he said as something happened onscreen. “Twenty dollars for me.” The announcer chattered in Spanish. The bartender flicked a remote at the screen and turned it off. “Now you can ask questions. You’re waiting for somebody?”
“Yes. Someone’s coming to get me.”
“Short time here, then.”
“Just this morning, I think.”
He nodded. “You like Antarctica?”
Jared liked it. Everything he had sent them had carried an intensity of interest, a fascination with the glimpses he had seen of the wild ice. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen anything but the airfield and my room.”
“I think you will like it,” he said. “You have that sort of face, I think. Some people can’t stay here; some people can’t stay away.”
“What is there to like?” Signy asked.
“Penguins, seals, beautiful ice. Not the wind,” the man said. “Take off your nose, your ears, this razor wind here. But everything else is okay. You’ll get pretty pictures.”
He had observed her headband, the sensor hooked to her eyelid. Signy had forgotten she wore the familiar equipment. The bartender had ignored her lenses and mikes; most people got self-conscious when they thought they were being recorded.
“How long have you been here?” Signy asked.
“Nine years,” he said. “I go home to Truc and see my wife, my babies, every April. Love my wife, make a new baby, come back in October.”
“What happens here? What do people do?”
“Work like crazy fools, mostly. Then come here after work, or go hide out. Some people go out on the ice for a while, make up some excuse to do that. Those ones are nuts, most of them.”
“What are they building on Erebus?”
“I don’t know,” he said. His eyes shifted around the room, as if looking for cobwebs was preferable to talking about Erebus.
Then he looked up and smiled, all sunshine and plenty of gold in his teeth, at the woman who opened the door. “Long time, de Brum,” he said. He got up to greet her.
“Long time, Marty. You taking care of my friend?”
“I treat her pretty good. The usual?”
Marty grinned; Anna grinned; they stood about two feet apart, arms at their sides, not hugging, not touching. They looked like courting penguins, to Signy’s eyes.
“I can’t stay,” Anna said. “Sorry, Marty.” Anna reached for the doorknob. “The pilot’s waiting.”
Signy stood up and grabbed at the strap on her duffel.
“You’re Signy,” Anna said. “Come with me, please.”
“De Brum, next time you stay and talk,” the bartender said.
Anna smiled at him and hustled Signy through the door. “Get your hood up,” Anna said. “We’re loaded and ready to leave.”
The helo waited in a wasteland of mud and slushy snow, flimsy on its skids and tiny against a bank of clouds that barriered the—southern, of course, Signy reminded herself—southern horizon. They lifted and turned, swaying as they rose. Beyond the domes of McMurdo, the helo flew over ice-flecked seas.
“I watched Jared on the Kasumi,” Anna said. “I think you are right. Someone else was in the water.” Anna spoke into her mike, her voice muffled by the roar of the engine.
Signy looked forward to where the pilot sat, hunched forward and listening to them, she assumed.
Anna saw Signy’s automatic frown and her stare in Trent’s direction. “Trent flew with us to the Kasumi,” Anna said.
“I wonder if what happened on the Kasumi is connected, some way, to what happened to the Oburu?” The pilot did not look back at the two women; he kept his attention on the skies. Signy watched his lips move and heard his voice in her earphones.
“Oburu?” Signy asked. OBO, OPO, her reconstruction of a life raft’s faded letters; she remembered their outlines on orange fabric.
“A Tanaka trawler. That’s the one that went down with all hands.”
“The dead sailor,” Signy said.
“You knew about that?” Trent asked.
“We watched you bring him up.”
“I would not be happy to think that my ship is subject to sabotage,” Anna said. “I am concerned that there has been no investigation of the Oburu’s loss. That I have heard about.”
“Things around the fleet are as quiet as a Mafia war,” Trent said. “But with the treaty under review, you’d think Tanaka would be yelling bloody murder. Asking for a U.N. escort, or some such.”
The woman and the pilot shared the gossip with Signy, seemingly without concern. This must be a truly lonely place, Signy decided. A newcomer must want to be here, and by definition had business here. Therefore it was okay to talk to any new face, Signy guessed. “The waters have never been policed,” Signy said. “Perhaps Tanaka wants them left alone.” Left alone to be harvested down to the last fish, the last tonne of krill. It had nearly happened in the North Pacific, it had happened, for all practical purposes, in the North Atlantic. And it would happen here, the rich waters empty, even the plankton strained up as soon as it formed. The waters would go clear and sterile, the barren ice would become truly barren.
Broken ice stretched across the sea beneath her. The helo traversed a wilderness of ocean where people were fragile intruders, lethally unfit to survive. This was no place for landbased humans. The world’s poverty could be measured in this, that the seas here should be stripped of their harvest.
They followed another helo down to the Siranui. Three figures scuttled away from it and a crew rolled it into its docking bay.
“It’s Uchida,” Trent said. “He’s back from the Kasumi.” He brought the helo down on the X. Signy climbed out and followed Anna to a hatch, and looked up at the man who waited there.
“Hello, Alan,” she said.
His skin was tanned and dried by the sun and the cold; he looked older, and thinner, than he had in Houston. He kept his face an expressionless mask that covered a slight degree of grief, perhaps. No, she was reading too much into his apparent concern. Alan, who had hardly known Jared, would want to get back to business as usual, and was here for reasons of his own that had nothing to do with a drowned medic.
“I heard you would be here,” Alan said. “I asked to come back—to meet you.”
“You found nothing,” she said.
“Nothing at all.”
Anna herded them down a passageway. “We will go to Kihara’s cabin,” she said. “You wanted to look through anything Jared might have left there.”
“Come with me, Alan,” Signy said, aware of him close behind her, hearing the small creaks and rustles of his padded clothing and hers. Alive, so alive.
Inside the small cabin, on the tightly made bunk, Jared’s personal items were laid out in neat rows. Anna’s work, perhaps. The array depressed her. Jared’s shaving gear and pocket clutter seemed intimately personal and at the same time anonymous, an assortment of mass-produced artifacts that meant nothing. Signy grabbed Jared’s skinthin and searched for storage chips. There were none. She tossed the skinthin back on the bunk and powered up the cabin screen, New Hampshire:
Paul smiled at her, his face clean-shaven and his hair still wet from a recent shampoo. His crab sigil blinked in a corner of the screen, pincers around a folded slip of paper.
“Hello,” Paul said. “Hello, Anna, Signy. Alan Campbell? Nice to meet you.”
“I needed to talk to you, hours ago,” Signy said. “But not now. Just wait, okay?” She started to turn Paul off. “You’d better get on-line with Janine,” Signy said. “She’s getting busy about now.” Signy blanked the screen.
“Who’s that?” Alan asked. He stood near the doorway and tossed his gloves from one hand to the other in an uneasy rhythm.
“Paul Maury,” Signy said. “My partner. Anna, could we look through sick bay as well? There may be recordings there, messages only I would know to look for.”
“Yes,” Anna said. “Although I think there isn’t anything there that belonged to Jared.” She led them to sick bay. Anna watched while Signy ran checks on the screens. Alan sat on a chair in the little waiting room alcove, seeming content to wait for her all day. No one, Signy thought, but me can do a damned thing around here. She accepted that sort of internal bitching as a sign of frustration, of guilt. I got Jared into this, she remembered. My fault, it’s all my fault.
“There’s nothing here,” Signy said. “Nothing that we haven’t downloaded at home already. Thank you, Anna. Could I go back to Kihara’s cabin? I would like to talk to my people in the U.S., and it’s already set up for that.”
“Kihara will not return today,” Anna said. “Yes, go there if you like. I need to stay in sick bay. But come back when you feel hungry. I’ll take you to eat and then show you whatever I can.”
The passageways carried the déjà vu of Jared’s remembered journeys through them, their strange familiarity altered by the presence of Alan beside her. Signy needed allies. She needed a fleshtime associate, and Alan would do if she could recruit him. Paul would hate the idea. Just us, he always said. We’re all we need. “Just us” wasn’t going to work anymore. Paul would have to live with a new face or two. Signy opened Kihara’s cabin door, ushered Alan in, and shut the door behind her.
“I think Jared is alive,” Signy said. She could see the doubt on Alan’s face, the presumption that he dealt with a grief-crazed fool.
“There’s some sort of sabotage going on in this fleet, in this company. You’re working for them; you could possibly be in as much danger as Jared.”
“Can you explain why you think this?” Campbell asked.
“Not in five words or less. I want to find Jared. If he’s alive, I don’t have time to censor what I tell you. I don’t have time to keep secrets. I have an offer; will you listen?”
Signy realized she was speaking as if she were onscreen in a bulletin board, empowered and anonymous, forgetting all the niceties of face-to-face communication. Still, she watched Alan Campbell’s face for clues, and saw a glimmer of interest, a willingness to give her the benefit of, at least, doubt.
“Let’s hear it.” A tall man in a low room, he stood by the silent screen, touching nothing, a visitor in someone else’s territory.
“You help me. We pay with access to all our files on Tanaka. Information shared with you as soon as we get it.” Not enough, his face told her. “We’ll sell Tanaka on your product, if you decide to ask for a contract to make subs for them. That’s what you want to do, isn’t it?”
“It’s a small profit we’re looking at,” he said. “The market for submersibles is minuscule, compared to some of the boosters Gulf Coast makes. We’re more after systems comparisons—the subs are good test systems for developing long-distance vehicles—but I’ve seen a lot of what I wanted to see here. Why should I stay?”
“Let me try to convince you. Please. Do you have a screen in your cabin?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s get out of here, then.” Signy motioned to the cabin screen and Alan moved aside. “I’ll need to change a few things here—what’s your access number?”
Alan told her. Signy transferred Edges’ codes to his terminal. “There. Let’s go. This cabin bothers me.” Jared’s absence seemed a palpable thing in the air. Chemical traces of him teased at Signy’s hindbrain, unscented pheromones spoke directly to triggers below consciousness. Her responses were chemically inevitable, a cellular uneasiness, and she wanted to be somewhere else.
“What about this stuff?” Alan motioned to the clutter on the bed.
“Bring it,” she said. “Just throw it into something. Jared can sort through it when I get him back.”
Alan found a sack in the tiny bathroom and loaded up the gear, obedient, perhaps responsive to Signy’s sudden surge of energy. Signy felt she could conquer the world, the ice, anything. Motion and tasks, they shaped a type of confidence; Signy realized in part that she was responding to the complex nuances of real-time experience. Yes, she had traveled these passageways with Jared; yes, they were different when experienced in her own flesh. Signy walked the distance to Alan’s cabin at a quick-march, slammed herself down in the only chair, and brought up New Hampshire.
Paul answered her on the instant. He’d been listening throughout the sick-bay visit, he said, and he had heard her talk with Alan. He didn’t look happy.
“We’re hiring Alan Campbell,” Signy said. “For assistance in locating Jared. That’s if we can convince him we can pay what he wants.”
“I am hesitant, Signy,” Paul said.
“You know I’ll need help here. Alan is a Done Thing. His employment by us is not a matter for argument. I need his help.”
“I understand,” Paul said.
Pilar checked in, in a corner window. She sat in lotus, busy with the multiple outputs of a synthesizer. Signy nodded in her direction. “You haven’t heard this, Pilar. The ship that went down was a Tanaka trawler. Named Oburu. Question: Was Skylochori a crewman? Also, question: Is Janine available? We need to have Janine quiz Itano about this.”
Janine sent a graphic, a large ear that sported a faux diamond earring.
[Janine] All ears. Can’t talk, though.
Janine was working on good old Kazi, Signy figured. Or working with him.
“Hi, Janine. I’ll tag a note on the Oburu for you, babe. Pick it up when you can,” Signy said. Alan leaned toward the screen and braced an arm on the desk. Signy shifted out of his way as best she could. “Alan, just hang on, we’ll fill you in as fast as we can. For starts, Paul, outline the Master Plan for Alan’s waiting ears, okay?”
“I’m not sure I have it in a brief form.”
“Don’t give me that.”
“Yes, Lioness. The Master Plan is to arrange an international moratorium on all fishing in Antarctic waters for a minimum of thirty years. Convince Tanaka they’ll make money out of that scenario, and then sell it to the Antarctic Treaty Commission. While finding Jared, of course.”
“How do you figure they get more money for no fish than they’re getting for fish?” Alan asked.
“Nudge them to increase aquaculture in the temperate latitudes. That would fit in with what Tanaka’s daughter wants. Yeah, Signy. I found her. But the moratorium will play hob with Itano’s position,” Paul said.
“Anything in it for Gulf Coast? Life-support systems, subs?” Signy asked.
“Work up some fish-herding subs for them, is an offhand possibility.…”
Signy could almost hear the little gears spinning in Paul’s head. He might explore scenarios for Gulf Coast involvement in the Tanaka empire for twenty minutes, if she didn’t stop him. “Paul, fill us in on Tanaka’s mysterious daughter, okay? I have a strange feeling about her.” Signy got her arms out of her parka and hung it over the back of her chair, staring at the screen while she twisted out of the bulky jacket.
Paul imaged up his crab persona. The crab settled a pair of large black-rimmed spectacles on its protruding eyestalks and opened its slip of paper with a skillful claw. “The name is San-Li Tanaka. Don’t look to blackmail the old man with just knowing he’s got no sons, only a daughter; her status as his only get is common knowledge among the sararimen. Tanaka seems to hate her. He holds out the carrot that the company goes to the most productive manager; San-Li is in competition with every exec in the company and may not make the grade. She handles the aquaculture farms.”
“I think unscrambling her importance to us is for later,” Pilar said. “It’s time to get a program for Janine to sell old Kazi, here.” Pilar punctuated her words with a chorus of voices that argued up and down a pentatonic scale.
[Janine] Old Kazi got all choked up over the crane sequence. Music did him in.
“Congrats to McKenna,” Paul said.
“I’ll tell him when he gets back. Jimmy’s out shopping,” Pilar said.
“Janine, here’s how we sell our moratorium. Have Tanaka pressure the North Pacific fisheries to let the Tanaka fleet into U.S. waters, under paper transfers of ownership to U.S. canneries—Tanaka owns a few of them, anyway.” Paul set up a coastal map of the Pacific Northwest on his side of the screen, starred with tiny shore-based factories that had legal access to the limited North Pacific catch. “That would give Tanaka some slack; they could let the pressure up on Antarctic waters until the stocks recover.”
On Paul’s map, small black-suited men erupted from the factory roofs and stalked to the left side of the screen, to stand under a paper parasol marked with the Tanaka logo. The parasol was held by a spiny fugu fish that sported a fat-lipped grin.
Pilar had left her synthesizer. She windowed the Seattle studio into a corner, a view that showed her frowning at the flatscreen. Pilar chewed at a purple marker that left stains like bruises at the corner of her lip. She reached down and worked at the Seattle inputs. Pilar’s face disappeared, and Paul’s little factories erupted in flames and drifted away in smudges of black smoke. Pilar added a voice-over. “Wouldn’t the U.S. canneries hate that?” Pilar asked.
“Yes.” Paul replaced Pilar’s smoke with a view of hot-air balloons marked with Japanese, U.S., and E.C. flags. The balloons drifted over Europe, tossing down grinning silver fish equipped with tiny parachutes. “This outcome is equally possible,” Paul said.
“U.S.–Euro cooperation with Japan would take one hell of a lot of work,” Signy said.
A man’s hand covered the map, the balloons. “You’re being monitored,” Jimmy said. “In case you didn’t know.”
“Oh,” Paul said. “Yes, I see. Hmm, let me fix this a bit. Can’t get too creative, not with Signy’s stuff coming in from the Siranui’s lines.”
“Hullo, Jimmy. How was shopping?” Pilar asked.
“I got ice cream,” Jimmy said. “And fudge sauce.”
Jimmy appeared behind Pilar in the corner screen, Jimmy’s arms filled with bulging sacks of groceries.
“McKenna?” Signy asked. “Have you found Evergreen yet?”
“Jesus. You’re on my case as much as Paul—I’ve looked everywhere. I told you guys that,” Jimmy said.
“Try to find her here—on the Siranui,” Signy said.
Jimmy put the grocery sacks down on the floor. “Oh, shit,” he said. “The one place I didn’t look.…”
The little screen in Alan’s cabin went white and blank, Paul’s overrides shielding the system, for what it was worth. The audios stayed up.
“You have an address for the Siranui, Jimmy,” Signy said. “You used it to get us on the bridge.”
“Give me some time, okay?” Jimmy pleaded.
Everyone fell silent, waiting. Alan leaned away from the screen. He settled on the bunk behind Signy and rested his elbows on his knees. Signy watched Alan watching the white, empty screen.
“Jimmy’s looking for our saboteur,” Signy said.
“Saboteur?” Alan asked. “What’s going on here?”
“Someone glitched our system. We think it was a woman called Evergreen,” Signy said. “I don’t know how she fits into the business with Jared, if she does. But this one random scrambling sequence is all we have.…”
Alan raised his eyebrows with a skeptical look. “You guys always carry on like this? Fishes and fires and stuff?”
“Pretty much,” Signy said. The semblance of normalcy made her happy. In the nonsense and chatter that had filled the little screen, Signy felt at home, safe, on familiar ground. One wacko family, except for the empty space that no one but Jared would ever fill.
Signy looked down at her wrist, at the dark pip that marked Jared’s absence. Jared’s light suddenly blinked.