Signy punched in the codes to access Jared in a frenzy of frantic caution. Her hands trembled, afraid of the idiosyncrasies of an unfamiliar system. The keys beneath her fingers were dusty. Campbell, if he had pulled any data at all, hadn’t accessed it here. Faint, blurred sensations came to Signy’s awareness. The screen reversed fields and went to total black.
Signy entered:
—a world with no voice, no vision. Jared’s muscular body signaled to her in patterns of singular and unmistakable familiarity. Signy knew his signature in the sensations of pressure on his shoulders and in the particular spacing of the bony prominences marching down his back, the stretch of his skinthin over his thighs. He lay on his back somewhere and he seemed to be without hands.
Signy felt a knot of anger burn in her belly, outrage and fear at the partial sensations of a mutilated body, and then realized, no. Jared is sending just with his suit, he’s not wearing his gloves, his mike, or his lenses.
The patterns of pressure transmitted to her skinthin’s sensors told her that Jared shifted his weight to his left side and curled up in a fetal position, stretched his arm to reach for—
Gone.
* * *
Jared heard something nearby, some rhythmic sound that came from his right, muffled thuds in a walking cadence. Padded boots on thick snow? He tried shifting his weight and couldn’t get his arms free of what felt like a soft straitjacket.
Irritation rose through what had been a good sleep, a deep sleep. He hated mummy bags. The damned things were well named.
Jared flexed his hands and found them wrapped in layers of soft wadding. They hurt terribly and distantly and he realized he’d been drugged, that his disinterest in the pain must be a result of some opiate or other.
His hands were frostbitten, that’s what was wrong. Frostbite was so difficult to treat. He hated frostbite. He moved his clumsy, clumsy hands and found the battery pack, but he couldn’t remember if he was recording. He pushed at the switches and wondered why they were made so damned small.
Signy would worry if he didn’t talk to her soon. Soft Signy, she was so soft for a thin girl. She made it so hard for him to talk sometimes. Jared loved her. Love, that was a hard word to say to Signy. Love. Jared could see, so clearly, the way Signy’s eyebrows arched, so that she always looked surprised; he could see the fine high lines of her cheekbones and the seashell curve of her ears. He loved Signy’s ears. He wanted to tell her that, soon.
A continuous line of pressure circled Jared’s eyes and traced the ridge of his frontal bone. He wore goggles, he realized; not his camera headband. The goggles were tinted for snow. Through their lenses Jared saw a series of curved arches above him and beyond that a painfully bright sky, transparent blue.
Jared closed his eyes against the glare. There were some positive things about a thick down mummy bag, warm and soft. Someone tried to help him with the battery switch. Nice of them. He thought about saying thanks.
Someone had cold hands and Jared wasn’t sure if they had turned his skinthin on or off.
He slept again.
* * *
Silence, while they took a collective breath, while fingers flew over keyboards linked across three continents. Gone, couldn’t reach Jared again; no combination seemed to work.
Campbell’s cabin mikes erupted in babble; Janine, Paul, Pilar, all their voices tangled in feedback loops. Paul muttered repetitive curses, as if he were praying, and pounded his fist on something hollow. Pilar argued with Jimmy, her voice as shrill as razor wire in a wind. “What the hell do you mean you can’t get a location from that signal?” Pilar yelled.
“I’ll need more than one burst. He’s wearing a battery-pack transmitter, and if he’s got a GPS monitor, he didn’t turn it on.” Jimmy strobed through the Seattle screens, hunting God knew what, flashing through menus and accesses like a demented demon with a TV remote tuned to Fast Forward.
“I should have said something. I should have told him we picked up his signal,” Signy said. But Jared couldn’t have heard her without a live speaker on him somewhere, and surely whoever had grabbed him would have seen an ear speaker on him, and removed it.
“What’s going on?” Alan asked.
“Jared,” Signy said. No visuals of Jared had appeared on the screens. The group’s sudden flurry of activity would have been completely opaque to a watcher. “We got a signal from him. Now it’s gone again.”
“You’re sure it’s him?” Alan asked.
“We know,” Signy said. Those were not the random motions of a suit on a dead man. No one else moved like Jared, no one in the whole world. The certainty of Jared’s life overwhelmed her, real, immediate. She felt a sudden wave of nausea; beads of chill sweat popped out on her forehead. Signy leaned forward in her chair and found a wastebasket under the desk. She hooked it close with the toe of her boot and threw up breakfast.
Behind her, she heard Alan scramble off the bunk. Signy held tight to the plastic-lined can. She never got seasick. She didn’t feel seasick now. The sound of running water came from the tiny bathroom, and Alan’s hurried footsteps.
Signy reached for the washcloth Alan handed her, ran the welcome wet cloth across her neck and her mouth, and smiled up at him.
“What the hell?” Alan asked. His face showed the dismay of a man confounded by a pregnant wife. Well, Signy remembered, he has a daughter. This can’t look that strange to him.
“I feel better,” Signy said. “I’m fine. You see, I didn’t really think Jared was alive.” She reached down to tie the plastic bag closed. “Where can I dump this?” she asked.
“Just sit there, okay? I’ve got it.” Alan grabbed the can from her hands and went out the door.
He was a good man, Alan. Signy shouldn’t let him clean up her messes, but she tried to stand and felt a little wobbly. Where was Jared? Where? Signy clung to the edge of the desk and took a deep breath or two. She searched out access to the bridge and sorted through the ship’s operations, coded, safe, not easily accessible to manipulation, just displays. Sidetracked, damn it, Signy found herself wading through a list of readings on fuel feeds and diesel mixtures. She got out of that screen and found a list of coordinates in degrees, that ticked on and off in measured rhythm.
“Thanks,” Paul’s voice said.
Paul brought up a map of the Southern Ocean. A tiny ship traveled a blue, blue sea, trailed by the segmented lines of its recent path across the water. Its coordinates glowed in a corner of the screen. Paul used the same graphics Signy had seen on the map behind Snead’s head at McMurdo—Huh?
“Paul?” Signy asked. She would ask if he’d been eavesdropping, silent when she needed his voice, silent when she needed his support last night.
“Got him!” Jimmy yipped. “Got him, within a hundred miles.”
Jimmy graphed a blurry purple circle on Paul’s map, centered over the Siranui’s trail in the water. The tiny ship pushed at the margin of the circle, as if it were a stylized sperm trying to exit an ovum in an odd reverse fertilization.
“How?” Paul asked. “What did you…”
“Jared’s signal came in to the Siranui and got boosted from there. That puts some limits on him. Now that we’ve got the location on the ship, he’s in here somewhere.” Jimmy circled his circle with an invisible stylus that left a trail of rapidly fading red.
“Good work,” Paul said.
* * *
The curved arches above Jared angled sharply and then tapered as they neared the ground. They were the craziest tent supports he’d ever seen. He stared at the one directly overhead.
“It’s a rib, specifically the sixth rib, Jared. Observe the rough line, there at the angle where the rib curves forward, for the attachment of the iliocostalis muscle.” Professor Lachman’s thick German accent cut through the music the wind made, playing through the giant harp of bone.
I beg your pardon, Professor. I do not know if whales possess an iliocostalis muscle. That is whale bone, Herr Professor. No, not baleen, a whale’s bones. I am lying flat on my back in the vanished belly of a vanished leviathan in the worst virtual I’ve ever even thought about. The symbolism sucks. And by the way, people who have been dead for twenty years don’t give anatomy lectures. You’re a hallucination. You can’t fool me.
“The ribs and terrors in the whale,
Arched over me a dismal gloom.”
That’s Melville but there ain’t no gloom around here. Arched over me, arched over me—
* * *
Signy heard the door open. Alan came back in and sat down. On the screen, the Siranui was out of the circle Jimmy had drawn, heading east.
“Now what, Paul?” Signy asked. “Jared’s stationary, on land somewhere, or he’s on this damned ship, within reach. Which is it?”
Paul expanded the blue map where the Siranui traveled. “There are islands near where you were. Islets, rather. They are quite small.”
“I think Jared’s on the Siranui. Occam’s razor,” Pilar said.
“Okay.” Signy set Alan’s cabin console to take her suit’s transmissions and forward them to Paul. She spun the swivel chair and looked up at Alan Campbell. “Okay, I’ve got a partner who’s alive and I’ve got a shipload of people who are telling me he’s dead. I don’t know whether it’s a deliberate attempt to ignore what’s happened to him or whether it’s inertia. I don’t even know whether Jared was the man who was supposed to fall off that boat, or whether it was you. Do you have any thoughts about that?”
Alan wrapped his hands around one of his knees and gave her a level, appraising look. “I can’t think of any competing bidders for what I was looking at down here. So no, I don’t think they were after me.”
“But you’re in this equation, if whoever took Jared knows you were with him.”
“You just may have something there,” Alan said. “The way you’re putting this together makes it sound like my hide and yours may be on the market fairly cheap. But I don’t know if I can buy your scenario without some—verification.”
“I don’t know how to get that for you,” Signy said.
Alan reached behind him and fumbled with his parka. It looked like he was getting ready to leave. Signy had convinced Alan that he was dealing with a bunch of warped screenfreaks, she figured, and part of her didn’t blame him for backing out.
Alan unfolded himself from the bunk and stretched. “It seems to me we should go find your man. Then we can ask him if your story fits the facts.”
Just like that. Alan seemed to heading somewhere. Signy stood up, wondering what he had in mind.
“Let’s go talk to the captain,” Alan said.
“What if he’s not any help?” Signy asked.
“Than we’ll know more than we do now.” Alan waited while Signy got her parka.
[Paul] Leave screen on.
Signy did.
The narrow, empty corridor looked familiar and functional, painted metal surfaces and mazes of pipes that Signy had seen through Jared’s eyes. But Jared’s view of the place hadn’t told Signy that she would feel she stood inside the arteries and organs of some huge beast. She felt like a Jonah.
“Oh, shit,” Signy said. “I don’t know my etiquette. Do we just march in? Do we request the captain’s permission to talk to him, or what? There are rules about all this, aren’t there?”
Alan shoved his hands in the front pockets of the bulky tan parka he wore. “We’ll ask the bridge for a small piece of the captain’s time. He’ll talk to us or he won’t. That’s all the etiquette there is, as long as you keep in mind that he’s God, more or less. The other thing is, if somebody’s doing something, don’t get in their way. If he doesn’t want to see us right now, well, Anna said to come back to sick bay. Maybe we’ll do that.”
Walking along in the cadence of Alan’s steps, her three to his two, and Signy could tell Alan was slowing down for her. She found she was watching her feet. Paul and Pilar watched in real time. Signy remembered she should be eyes for them, not just stare at the floor. Jared was the cameraman; he always managed to present a total setting, always found the interesting details to highlight. There just didn’t seem to be much interesting detail in the flat surfaces around here. “This is going to call for some doublespeak,” Signy said. “What’s the polite way to say ‘I think you’ve got a kidnapped man on your ship and I want to look for him’?”
“Is that what you think?” Alan asked.
“Yeah.”
“I guess it sounds better than saying, ‘I think you kidnapped my old man and you’ve got him tied up somewhere.’”
Alan seemed to be looking for something at the far end of the passageway. Signy caught his eye and smiled. “I’ll try to keep it civil. I guess.”
“It’s fine with me if you don’t,” Alan said. “His name’s Mineta, by the way. Jiro Mineta.”
Easy, lanky Alan. Signy felt, well championed, walking beside him. Granted, he was a little rawboned for a knight in shining armor, and Signy hated her archaic response to him—but she felt secure, with Alan at her side. In danger, seek a protector. The message was an old one, and danger cut through to the primitive, the biologic response. Signy felt like a threatened protohominid seeking out a dominant male.
Alan needed a haircut. His silky auburn hair was beginning to form curls behind his ears. It was not the sort of detail that would have interested Jared.
* * *
All sound had vanished. The world seemed very lonely. Shadows of the sheltering ribs above him moved across dirty white snow and shaded Jared’s face and then did not shade his face. He licked his lips and tasted salt. His tongue explored cracks and dry textures that felt as numb and distant as if he’d been injected with lidocaine. That meant frostbite, but superimposed on the whale’s ribs he remembered the intricacy of the rich red capillary networks of a human face and he knew his face would heal.
Sunburn on top of frostbite? Kihara liked to do backwoods plastic work, maybe Kihara would get a chance to play with this mess of a face.…
* * *
The watch had changed on the bridge. The crew’s faces were all strange; no one Signy had seen from her cameras in Taos worked at the screens. Alan asked to see Captain Mineta, and one of the officers nodded and spoke rapidly into a phone.
Outside the windows, bright sky arched over brighter water and the sun danced on tiny ripples. An island appeared to starboard. It seemed to float in the sea, a mass of ice and rock. Was Jared there? Signy clenched her fists inside her pockets.
“Miss Thomas? Mr. Campbell?” Signy turned to the ladder behind her. The Japanese man who stood there had a lot of gold on his black coverall. “You will follow me, please.” Captain Mineta was about forty, Signy figured. Politely stated, Mineta was portly. He was not smiling.
“Thank you, Captain,” Alan said.
The room they entered was paneled in teak and furnished in a style that Signy thought of as office anonymous, chairs upholstered in easily cleaned synthetic leather, a desk of dull finished metal. The captain motioned for them to sit.
“Welcome to the Siranui,” Captain Mineta said. He spoke with a growling, guttural accent. “How may we assist you?” His eyes flicked to Signy and then back to Alan. Signy accepted his assumption that Alan was in charge and held her tongue. Brusque words, no courtesies, his behavior was rudely abrupt for any Asian culture. The accent was Scandinavian, she realized suddenly, and she remembered that many fishing ships carried Norwegian officers. Maybe Mineta had learned his English that way.
“Miss Thomas has just received a transmission from Dr. Balchen,” Alan said. “He’s alive. We would like to ask your help in locating him.”
The captain’s face was a stone mask. He settled back in his chair and tented his fingers together across his ample lap. His mouth tightened somewhat. “Dr. Balchen fell into waters that are known to kill in minutes. I find this news difficult to believe.”
“There was a boat in the water,” Signy said. “Someone pulled him out. We sent the footage; surely you’ve seen it.”
The captain took his time before he answered.
“I have seen the film,” the captain said. “I saw dark water. Somewhat blurred, as I recall. I appreciate your grief, Miss Thomas, but I fear your loss has caused you to overinterpret shadows seen by a dying man. It is our opinion, mine and my officers, that there was nothing in those waters.”
Nothing? And the Oburu’s sinking hadn’t occurred, either.
“But he was on-line, transmitting, not five minutes ago!”
“This is truly astonishing. I am happy for you. What message did he give you?” the captain asked.
“He didn’t say anything. Just body motion—” Which would make no sense to anyone who didn’t know Jared, in fact. Muscular sensations, isolated in a black space; that was the only proof Signy had of Jared’s life. A mirage, a shared delusion, to an outsider.
And Captain Mineta must have monitored their conversations. Not an underling, the captain himself, or he could not have been so quick with his question about messages. Signy wondered if Paul had caught the inference. “Captain, Jared Balchen is alive and he is within a hundred miles of our current location.”
The man raised a quizzical eyebrow at Alan. He had not made eye contact with Signy and seemed determined to respond only to the male half of this duet.
“We are in the Southern Ocean. It is uninhabited,” the captain said. “I do not see how this could be.”
“Perhaps he’s here on the ship,” Alan said.
“No one but you and Miss Thomas has arrived on this ship since the unfortunate incident with Dr. Balchen.”
Wups, Signy thought, he just told us not to tell him what happens on his ship. Now what? Back off? There isn’t time to do that. “Then perhaps he’s on a nearby island,” Signy said. “But I tell you again, he is alive.”
Captain Mineta sat as still as a contemplative Buddha. Okay, challenge him, then.
“Edges is trying to fulfill a contract for Tanaka,” Signy said. “In the process of researching our work, we study all information that comes our way, however peripheral it may seem at the time. We are aware of the loss of the Oburu and we fear that Jared’s disappearance may be related in some way.”
Signy tried to interpret the expression on Mineta’s face, but she could see only a small tightening of the muscles around his eyes.
“I can see no connection,” the captain said. “The Oburu sank. Investigations are under way in regards to that sinking. Nothing has been found. Nothing. No, no, there is no connection at all.” Mineta lifted his hands from his lap and fluttered his fingers as if he had picked up something hot. “You are being very—speculative, Miss Thomas.” He stood up, and Alan rose as well.
Mihalis Skylochori’s body rested in the freezer, unless someone had moved it by now. The dead sailor was not connected to this, either.
“We will discuss this at some other time,” the captain said.
Signy got up from her chair, defeated.
“Please continue with your work for Tanaka,” Mineta said. “Good afternoon, Miss Thomas. Mr. Campbell.”
He ushered them out the door and closed it behind them. Then he vanished up the ladder toward the bridge, dismissing them completely.
Paul and Pilar both spoke at once, creating a confusion of sound in the speaker behind Signy’s ear.
“Shit,” Signy said.
“Yeah.” Alan saw her fingers reach up to tap at the speaker behind her ear, and he stopped talking.
“Signy, get out of there,” Paul’s voice said. “Get off that ship. Come home.”
“You’ll never get anywhere with him,” Pilar said. “You’re just a nosy little tourist, is how I read him. Signy, unless you get some more status from somewhere, and in a hurry, Mineta’s not going to listen to anything you say.”
“I gathered that,” Signy said. Mineta knew something about the disappearances; Signy could feel that he did. He couldn’t be happy about the lost trawler, no matter how it had happened to sink. “Pilar, did Janine get the files on the Oburu?”
“You didn’t leave any,” Pilar said.
“Yikes!”
“So I told Janine what I knew. I told her,” Pilar said. “She’ll interrogate our Mr. Itano about it.”
Alan seemed to be headed for sick bay. Signy kept up with him. “Paul, I don’t care if Mineta wants me out of here. I can’t leave now,” Signy said. “Even if I wanted to. And I don’t.”
“You’re in danger.” Paul sounded scared.
“So is Jared. Now, don’t bother me for a little while, okay?”
“Right,” Pilar said. Paul didn’t say anything at all.
From the holds, Signy heard rumbling and mechanical growls, the Siranui chewing up more tons of fish. The passageways were deserted. People worked hard here; they had jobs and they did them. Signy Thomas was extraneous, in the way, a nosy intruder. The captain wasn’t going to be any help.
A man gone; so sorry, on with business. Mineta’s reaction was like Kazi Itano’s, like Kazi’s simple wonder that Edges didn’t just take the hazard pay for accidental death and go about their business. People died all the time, so sorry, but it’s time for the next shift now.
If you didn’t love someone deeply, that was the only attitude that made sense. If you did? You struggled to keep them well, fought for them when they couldn’t fight for themselves—
I love Jared, Signy thought. I’ll find him.
Signy followed Alan into sick bay and shut the door behind her with a sense of relief. The tiny waiting room felt like a refuge. Anna looked up from her desk console, and she seemed not at all surprised to see them.
“Anna, we’ve been in contact with Jared. He’s alive,” Signy said.
“Your friend Pilar told me. He is nearby, she said that, too.”
“Where?” Signy asked her. “Where might he be, Anna?”
“I don’t know,” Anna said. She shook her head from side to side, and she looked upset.
Signy slumped into one of the waiting room chairs. Alan folded himself into the chair beside her.
“I don’t think he’s on the ship,” Anna said. “I would like to help you find him, Signy, but there is nothing I can think of except to search the nearby islands. If the captain permits. The captain called.” Anna stopped, apparently distracted in mid-thought by something or other.
“Go on,” Signy said.
“He said to tell you that the XO is personally inspecting every closet and drawer in the ship.”
“Please give him my thanks,” Signy said.
“He also said Mr. Itano in Lisbon sends his regards.”
Itano had been on Mineta’s case already, it seemed. That might explain some of the reaction Signy had gotten. Anna seemed to want to say more. Her expression was a puzzle. Guilt? Hope? Signy waited; for something, something complicated, seemed to be on Anna’s mind.
“I know your plans for the treaty,” Anna said. “Pilar told me while you were with the captain. Do you really plan to ask the Treaty Commission to shut down the fishing?”
Pilar had brought Anna into the calculations, that quickly? On what thread of trust? On Jared’s response to her? No matter. “We seem to be coming to that,” Signy said.
“You must try,” Anna said. “You must. The pressures on life here are near the breaking point. I thought—we thought, many of the researchers who work here—that we were being ignored.”
“Ignored?” Signy asked.
“We find so many confusing things.… There seems to be a pressure toward neoteny in some of the bony fishes. There are unusual shifts in the percentages of zooplankton varieties. We do not know if they are part of a long-term cycle because we do not have information that goes back more than a century, and a century can be only a short time in an ocean’s system of balance. Some researchers think the populations are overstressed and on the brink of collapse. Others think the current harvests are tolerable. Those researchers seem to get more funding,” Anna said.
“What are you trying to say?”
“That the sea dies around us and perhaps she cannot be healed.”
Anna spoke with the conviction of grief and certain knowledge. For her, there was no uncertainty. The sea was dying. “I fear for Jared,” Anna said. “I fear for you. You will make people angry; you will take away their jobs, their food, if you chase away the boats. It might not help. But I hope you can do it.”
Jared and Anna had talked about the sea, now and again. Jared had envied Anna because Anna dived beneath the ice, and knew the strange world beneath it. “Did Jared know your fears about the harvesting?” Signy asked.
“I didn’t tell him. No. I wish I had. Now that I know what you want to do.”
“And Jared’s been kidnapped because we considered shutting down the fishing here? Anna, we were just thinking about that.” Thinking, speaking, together. Together, with no listeners except Jimmy’s mysterious—
“Evergreen,” Paul said. “Maybe you’re looking at her.”
Not Anna. Signy would have bet her life on it. There was such hope in Anna’s face.
“Something’s happening on the bridge,” Pilar said. “Signy, get to a screen. You’d better watch this.”
“Anna, I need the console, okay?” Signy started for it. Anna shifted out of her way as she came charging around the desk. Signy slid into the still-warm chair Anna had just vacated. The keys gave her access to the bridge speakers; a rattle of Japanese, the captain, she thought, and a woman’s staccato speech.
“Pardon me,” Signy muttered in Anna’s direction. Whiteline’s translation, scrolling past in its implacable block letters, brought both Anna and Alan to peer over her shoulder.
THE CAPTAIN SAYS HE HAS ORDERS TO SEND MISS THOMAS ON A HELO TOUR OF NEARBY ISLANDS.
Visuals from the bridge popped up behind the script. Captain Mineta paced back and forth, speaking to a man who stood at parade rest, his back to the bridge cameras.
CAPTAIN PISSED. WANTS ALL FOREIGNERS GONE.
Which was how Whiteline interpreted the burst of words.
“He is telling the XO that such a trip will waste fuel, but will get this gaijin witch out of his hair.” Anna paused for a moment, then continued. “He wishes Itano would not instruct him on how to deal with the foreign woman. Too much interference in the harvester’s schedules—he is still unhappy about the breach of usual procedures regarding Skylochori—and what?—”
PROTOCOL ERRORS WITH? SKYLO? SOMETHING
“—he is unhappy with the stories Kobe has told the families of the men who died on the Oburu.”
SOMETHING ABOUT OBURU MARU
Captain Mineta left the bridge.
“I’m to be sent on a wild-goose chase, huh?” Signy asked.
“What?” Anna frowned. “Oh. Yes, it seems so. Signy, I must call Trent. I think he would wish to be our pilot.”
Our pilot, was it? Signy smiled and spoke to the screen. “Get out of our way, guys. Anna needs the board.”
“Damn, where’s Janine?” Pilar said. Pilar’s face appeared, and then the screen went blank again. Signy pushed back from the console and left the keyboard to Anna.
“I’ll go with you, if Kihara gets back in time,” Anna said. “Wups, there’s a message from the Old Man. The captain. I think we aren’t here for a few moments.… I want to talk to Trent before we answer the bridge.” Anna picked up a portable phone and spoke rapidly in Japanese to someone not onscreen.
Alan stood up and rubbed the small of his back with both hands. “I’m coming along on this tour of yours,” Alan said.
“What if the bridge objects?” Signy asked.
“Then I’ll be a stowaway,” Alan said. “I’ve always wanted to be a stowaway, come to think of it.”
“Hello, Trent. Could you meet us on the deck in about—fifteen minutes?” Anna waited. “Thanks.”
MESSAGE WAITING, a window on the screen insisted. Anna looked up at Signy. “What do we tell Captain Mineta?”
“Tell him fine, sure, whatever he suggests,” Signy said. Signy wondered if she could bribe Trent to take her where she wanted to go, once she knew where that was. She wondered what arrangements had been made for her. Would she “fall” overboard, or “fall” out of a helicopter, or would she simply end up with Jared, somewhere, somehow, both of them reported missing and a fiction developed from their records, a virtual that showed them alive and well in Paris, or some damned thing?
Anna nodded and sent an acknowledgment to the bridge.
On Signy’s wrist, Paul’s monitoring light glowed; a watcher, a listener, a source of security that had not protected Jared. Signy stood up and reached for Alan’s hand. He accepted the contact. Signy planned never, never, to be out of Alan’s reach while she remained in Antarctica.
“Are you okay?” Alan asked.
“Yes,” Signy said. “I suppose I am.”
“You’re scheduled for a tour at 0800,” Anna said. “I can go with you; Kihara’s back in an hour or so. Let’s go talk to Trent.”
Signy and Allan followed her, up twisting metal stairways, empty and cold and ringing with memories of echoes, as if a gong had been struck in the dark spaces of the ship just moments before. Signy listened, hard, but she heard only her own breath and the soft sounds of their padded boots as they climbed. Was it day or night here? Her watch said late evening, but the bridge had carried the feel of a busy midday. Signy was not tired, not sleepy, not hungry. She felt she would never need to sleep again, not while Jared waited, somewhere. Her next breath was a deep, surprising yawn.
A sign marked the exit to the flight deck. Alan set his gloved hands on the wheel.
“No,” Anna said, behind them on the stairs. “Go up.”
Anna’s face carried a look of grim concentration. Not from the effort of climbing stairs, surely. From something else, some internal effort. They climbed past three more landings, until the ladders ended at a small landing and a closed hatch. Anna undogged it, and they stepped out into a bitter cold that made Signy gasp. Beneath her feet, a square of open metal mesh led to ladders that zigzagged down toward the Siranui’s decks. They stood just above the bridge; a curve of black glass panes fanned out from the white roof directly beneath them. Three more steps led up to the base of a rotating dish, its bowl slick with ice. Steam rose from the housings at its base, from heated gears protected from the cold.
The Siranui dipped down into a swell and rose again, a huge thing in an immense world of leaden sky and black slick water. The light seemed to be that of evening, and Signy could not see the sun. The cold brought tears that she blinked away. Anna was busy pulling up the hood of her parka, and Signy tugged her hand away from Alan, got her own hood snugged tight, and then grabbed Alan’s hand again.
The hatch opened. Trent joined them. “Hello, Signy Thomas. Hello, Alan. What are we doing?” he asked Anna.
“See if you can jockey the schedule so you get to pilot us around tomorrow,” Anna said.
“Sure. Is that all you wanted?”
“I wanted to warn you that being around Miss Thomas could be dangerous,” Anna said. “But I’d like you to take us around, if you would.”
“You got my ass up here in the cold to ask me to fly?” Trent asked. “Anna, I like to fly.”
“I also wanted to tell you, while your buddies aren’t listening, that that the orders on hushing up the Oburu’s sinking came from Tanaka headquarters in Kobe.”
“Did they, now?” Trent asked.
“And I wanted to tell you that Dr. Balchen is alive. Within a hundred miles of the ship, we believe.”
“Son of a bitch,” Trent said. “You think he’s on the Kasumi?”
“Is it in the area?” Anna asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll find out,” Trent said.
“It isn’t,” Paul said.
“Be discreet, Trent,” Anna pleaded.
“I’m the epitome of discretion,” Trent said. “Can we go get warm now?”
“Not yet,” Anna said. She stared at the horizon, waiting for something.
Signy turned, thinking to look behind her at the great length of the ship. A whale’s back, massive and glistening, cut the water about a hundred yards away. “Oh,” Signy whispered.
It rose, silent and wonderful, and she heard the steam-engine hiss of its breath. The whale sank from sight.
“He is a humpback,” Anna said. “He’ll be up again. Wait.” Anna pulled a pair of field glasses from her parka and handed them to Signy. Signy scanned the water, wondering, Where? Where will you be?
“There.” Anna announced the whale’s rising in a calm flat voice. Signy turned to where Anna pointed, knowing her camera headband would get an unmagnified view of what she saw through the field glasses in intimate detail.
The whale surfaced closer this time. He rolled in the water, giving them the measure of his length, the lighter colors of his belly before he puffed out his breath and sank again. Anna closed her eyes and lifted her face toward the gunmetal sky. “Three times,” Anna said. “He will blow three times for us.”
The whale appeared again, close enough to the ship that he could have nudged it. Defying his massive bulk and the water’s pull, he lifted his impossible head from the water with the sound of a tidal wave.
As if he moved in slow motion, he gave them the view of his bulk, slowly, inch by inch; of his rheumy, dull eye, of his fissured, scarred hide, of half-healed and fresh ulcers, their red craters sticky with yellow mucus and longer than a man’s thigh, running down his sides. He sank, and sank, and his dark shadow in the water disappeared.
A scent of rotting sewage rose in the air, a whiff of putrefaction and sickening decay. A sudden breeze took it away, and Signy sneezed and then breathed in clean, icy sea air, pulled it in deep and fast.
The humans waited while the ship moved up and over a huge swell, up and over another one. Anna stepped back from the rail, and the watchers accepted that the whale was truly gone.
“I’ve never seen one that big,” Trent said, “and I’ve scouted a lot of whales.”
“He is a visitor,” Anna said, her voice certain, knowing. “An old man. Not one that we’ve counted before.” She hugged herself tightly with her arms and looked down at the icy deck. “I think.”
Anna knew. She knew.
“He is dying,” Signy said.
Anna hunched up her shoulders and turned away from the sea. They went below.