Pilar marveled at the mixture of urgency and fear, apprehension and awakening, that permeated Signy’s transmissions from Antarctica. Signy seemed to balance on some precarious edge of intuition, in tides of sorrow and grief, mixed with guilt when the sights around her distracted her from her goal of finding her lost lover. Signy anticipated loss with every motion.
Distilled, what would this clash of sensations bring to—a kinetic work, say? A geometry of planes of colored light for an interactor to walk through, bathe in, push against? Pilar saw a palette for a room-sized space of primary stained-glass colors, transparent, razored, angular, and brittle. Her fingers itched to begin it.
Her own emotions were less planar, more muted. What did she feel for Jared? What had she ever felt for him? Joy at the way his body worked, delight in the clean water-mammal lines of him; Jared the sleek. Astonishment at his naive pleasures, the Jared who would, if undisturbed, spend half an hour gazing at the intricacies of a stalk of yucca in blossom, spend half a night entranced by the patterns of flames in a well-made fire. Pilar wanted to look at him again, to trace out the textures and curves of his face—Pilar had no time for that, not now.
Jimmy worked at Janine’s Seattle console, tracing out webs of probability from the transmissions to and from the Siranui, to and from McMurdo base. In the ordinary, workaday words that came floating to him, he sought traces of a man he didn’t know. Jimmy spun his way through the nets with the frenzy of a dancing Shiva. He dances, Pilar realized, to win me. How sad.
Jimmy found his way into McMurdo’s recordings of air approaches and departures, a litany of laconic comments. “Zulu Tango turning final to McMurdo,” Pilar heard, and then “Roger. Cleared to land.”
Jimmy’s noodling around cost; each ticking minute charged, eventually, to Edges. Yet to be paid was Whiteline, whose fees could not be deducted on anyone’s standard IRS form; yet to be totaled were the data reductions for the upcoming talks in Lisbon, the cost of Signy’s tickets to McMurdo; all the busy little debits climbing, climbing. For finances, Paul was the designated worrier, but somehow, Pilar couldn’t quit thinking about the bottom lines on the last statements she’d seen.
Jimmy winced at something a pilot said, far south of here and peripherally, if at all, connected to finding Jared or getting Tanaka’s contract finished, paid, and banked.
“Supposed to be English,” Jimmy muttered.
“Say again?” Pilar asked, but Jimmy hadn’t heard her. He stayed lost in the screen over Janine’s console.
Janine’s console? Janine wouldn’t recognize it as the one she left, and Pilar forthwith stored a macro of the way it looked last week into the Seattle outputs, to protect Janine from a sure sense of territorial violation. Jimmy had invaded, not just Janine’s space, but Pilar’s. Jimmy artifacts lay in rows on Janine’s desk, on a bookshelf he’d confiscated to hold various Important Things. He wasn’t at all messy. He just occupied a lot of volume, and Pilar itched to randomize the room back into something she could find comfortable. But she didn’t.
She was thinking about anything but Jared.
“Pilar Videla, you are not dealing with the fact that Jared is alive,” she said aloud. “Why is that?” Her musing gave her no answers that she wanted to hear.
Pilar turned back to her console and found Janine on-line in real time. Pilar slipped her goggles over her eyes: Portugal.
—drifting mists swirled above wet sand. A close-up of expensive black poplin, the shoulder of Kazi’s raincoat. In the background; a view of a harbor, where fishing boats painted in primary colors were pulled on shore for the night.
“You convinced him. You convinced the Old Man himself. If the ban goes through, we will transfer our energies to aquaculture, and take the loss on the wild fishery,” Kazi said.
“I was scared,” Janine said. “I was afraid Mr. Tanaka would hang up.”
“Well, he didn’t.” Kazi frowned at Janine. “You’ve caused a lot of changes, my little engineer. This will cause an upheaval in the company. Many jobs will change. It helped that you coached me to suggest transferring some of the ships to the North Pacific fisheries. The factories there will be happy to have the best of the southern ships.”
“It was too easy. He’s a formidable man, your Yoshiro Tanaka. Why did he go for it?” Janine asked.
“I will second-guess my company’s president,” Kazi said. “He thinks we will not change the Treaty Commission’s position. We will gain favorable publicity for taking the ultimate conservation stance, and we will keep on fishing.”
That’s how Pilar figured it. In Seattle, she leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. Janine’s wet outdoor walk looked cold, and Pilar felt chilled.
“I think we will have little difficulty with the nations that have fishing fleets in other waters. They will applaud us, because their profits will be protected. The Africans will be difficult,” Kazi said.
“And Pakistan,” Janine said, “and Japan, and the Koreas, and the European block, and—”
“You sound as if you must approach each of these problems by yourself,” Kazi said. “We have a knowledgeable staff, Janine. They are building dossiers on the representatives, tonight. Based on Mr. Maury’s specifications, which we find … intriguing.”
“Mr. Maury’s specifications? Oh, how male,” Pilar grumbled for the benefit of Janine’s ear speaker.
Edges’ dossiers were not résumés, they were models that predicted the mutability of a psyche. Put another way, Edges knew how to find buttons in people that a knowledgeable manipulator could push. What a negotiator got was a short list of quick-and-dirty suggestions. The suggestions came from the jungle-gym structure that Edges filled with all sorts of facts. The lattice was Paul’s work, yes, and also it was a synthesis of Signy’s knowledge of neurophysiology, Janine’s working models of gates and critical pressures in systems, and Jared’s feel for the reactions of an organism under stress.
“No extra charge,” Janine murmured.
“I’m sorry?” Kazi asked.
“We’re glad you find the dossiers useful. We try to give full value,” Janine said. “But I think you know that.”
They stopped at an overlook, and Janine leaned her forearms on a marble railing. She looked down at the bobbing lights in the harbor, at the colored stains they left on the smooth water.
“Tell me about the Oburu,” Janine said.
“That’s blunt enough,” Pilar whispered.
“Pardon me?” Kazi asked. He gripped the rail and stared straight out at the harbor.
“The Oburu. A trawler that went down somewhere in the Southern Ocean. Part of your fleet.”
Kazi hesitated. “It … sank.”
“Yes, so we hear. Was Mihalis Skylochori listed as a crew member? We didn’t find his name anywhere,” Janine said.
Pilar heard a rustle of fabric, Kazuyuki’s raincoat moving over his shoulders as he straightened his posture.
“No.”
“I see,” Janine said. “I asked because Edges works by collecting disparate bits of information and connecting them to other bits in unexpected ways. The game is chaotic and often unproductive, but sometimes it gets us what we need. I am collecting information for your company, Kazi. For you. Help me.”
“I can’t help you with the Oburu. I have told you all that I know.”
“Predict for me. What will happen to you if there is no fishing?”
“I direct the activities of the Fishery and the Aquaculture division,” Kazi said. “If there is no fishing, I will direct the Aquaculture division.”
“Whose current head is San-Li Tanaka? Will she battle you to keep her position?”
“Your information is not current,” Kazi said. “San-Li was transferred to the fishery two weeks ago.”
“Was she?”
“Hoo-boy,” Pilar said.
“Yes. Yoshiro Tanaka himself asked her to transfer. He felt it was time for her to gain experience on a working harvester.”
Pilar spun in her chair. Jimmy had begun to hum the tune from “Shelter,” on pitch but out of rhythm. “Jimmy, get your ass over here,” Pilar said.
He stopped humming and got up from his chair without taking his eyes from his screen. “What is it?”
“San-Li Tanaka is with the fleet.”
Jimmy blinked and got to Pilar’s screen, fast, leaning over her shoulder.
A foghorn sounded in the Portuguese night, sad and mournful above an insect background noise that Pilar identified, for the first time, as a constant hum of traffic.
“San-Li Tanaka was sent to the Siranui?” Janine asked.
“Yes,” Itano said.
“Two weeks ago,” Pilar said. “Just after the Oburu sank.”
“Thank you,” Janine said to Kazi. She reached up and kissed his cheek.
“For telling you where San-Li is?” Kazi sounded puzzled.
“Yes. I would like to meet her sometime,” Janine said.
“Why?” Kazi asked.
“To ask her why she sank the Oburu,” Pilar muttered.
Janine tucked her arm into the crook of Kazi’s elbow. They turned away from the harbor and walked back toward the hotel’s walled courtyards. “Oh, because I’ve never met an heiress apparent,” Janine said.
Pilar switched screens and checked in on Signy, the Siranui:
—sounds of clattering tableware. Signy’s cameras showed Alan and Anna, seated across a table. Signy was very still, perhaps not much awake.
Pilar left her there; this news could wait for a few minutes.
Portugal: Janine lagged behind Kazi while he opened the hotel gates with a keycard.
“Hey, Pilar,” Janine whispered. “Was that what you wanted?”
“You betcha,” Pilar said. “That’s what I wanted. Goodnight, hon. Sleep well.”
“What about Jared?” Janine asked.
“Nothing new. Signy’s going looking for him tomorrow.”
“We’ve got the first round of talks scheduled. I’ll be in meetings all day.”
“So rest tonight.”
“I’ll try.” Kazi turned, waiting for Janine. Janine walked into the quiet courtyard of the hotel, where lighted windows marked the location of Tanka employees, working on into the night.
“Sank the Oburu?” Jimmy asked. “Pilar, how do you figure that?”
“One of those connections Edges makes,” Pilar said.
“She’s Evergreen,” Jimmy said. “Son of a bitch.” Jimmy lurched back toward Janine’s console, his hands in front of him as if he were sleepwalking. “Pilar, I’m an idiot sometimes. Evergreen told me she worked in the Seychelles. If I were going to get data out of the Seychelles, and not make it all that easy to trace—”
“If you were going to get data out of the Seychelles at all, you’d run it from…” Pilar called up the netmap, glowing lines that bound the world’s cities. “Sri Lanka.”
“Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. I would indeed.” Jimmy began to hum again, searching for San-Li Tanaka, known on the net, perhaps, as Evergreen.
* * *
Signy wasn’t sleepy. She wasn’t hungry. Led, protesting, to the mess by Alan and Anna, Signy knew that all she wanted to do was to keep going, to walk the corridors of the ship, to keep moving until something happened. But a bowl of garnished noodles appeared in front of her, covered with stir-fried vegetables and sautéed chicken and spiced nuts, smoking hot, and the food was wonderful.
Anna and Alan said polite little things while they ate. They did not discuss the whale, or Jared, or the six hours left until the helo would rise. Signy sipped at a cup of aromatic tea. It was too soothing, too pleasant. She wondered if the whale were still near the ship. How much did it hurt, to be that big and that sick? Signy heard the whale’s breath, and imagined a plea in it. Her eyelids suddenly felt sanded, and she shook her head.
“Hello?” Alan smiled at her.
“Hi. I’m back.”
“Good. I wasn’t looking forward to carrying you to bed. But I think that’s where you should go, and soon.”
“No!” Signy’s voice surprised her. She sounded like a petulant child. “I mean, please, not yet. I want to look around a little.”
“Signy, you won’t find Jared in a broom closet. And you’re about to fall over,” Alan said.
“I am going to bed now.” Anna stood up. “Let me show you to your cabin, Signy.”
“I don’t want to be alone,” Signy said. “I’ll stay with Alan.”
Anna nodded. “I think that would be a good thing for you to do.” She picked up the trays and left.
Signy watched her thread her way through the tables in the quiet room. “I like her,” Signy said.
“Anna? She seems sharp enough,” Alan said.
Pilar’s voice came through Signy’s ear patch. “San-Li Tanaka is on board,” she said.
“Where?” Signy asked.
“Damned if I know,” Pilar said. “No address that we can find.”
“Can you get a picture of her?” Signy asked. “Send it to Alan’s cabin when you do.”
“Looking,” Pilar said. On Signy’s wrist, Pilar’s light went dull. Alan waited for Signy to explain what she’d been muttering to herself about.
“Tanaka’s daughter is here, somewhere,” Signy said.
“Does that mean anything?”
Signy pushed back her chair and stood up. She felt clumsy and very, very slow. “I don’t know.”
* * *
Jared roused from a deep sleep and found himself in the familiar confines of a man-made cave. High above his head, green fabric stretched taut on a pop-up frame. They had pitched the old tent on the banks of the Copper River and gone to bed early; all of them tired after muscling their way past some good stretches of white water. He could hear someone snoring, probably Laughlin, the fat Texan. Laughlin wasn’t a man he could warm up to; but Kihara, quick with his words and wilderness-wise, Kihara he liked.
Jared’s hands were on fire and his face burned. His bladder was achingly full and he was nowhere near the Copper River.
He shoved himself up on his elbows. Three men slept in the tent, dark shapes around a glowing heater. The bandages on Jared’s hands made working a zipper impossible. He shrugged and kicked his way out of the sleeping bag. He crouched on his knees and bit at the bandages on his hands but they wouldn’t come loose. Rucksacks and opened packs lay around the tent, over a rolled-out length of some spongy stuff, an insulating layer. It worked; the tent was steamy. He didn’t see weapons. He didn’t see his battery pack.
Jared could assume that these people had kept him alive for some reason. He could also assume they had trapped him in the water to begin with, or he would be back on the Siranui by now. He had to get outside but he needed a parka for that. Freezing to death wasn’t a good idea.
Jared turned, still kneeling, and found his parka folded at the foot of his rumpled mummy bag. He grabbed the parka between his clumsy fists. It rustled damnably, but the sounds of quiet breathing behind him did not change. Still, he knew before he turned that someone watched him.
One of the sleepers was a woman. She had rolled up on her elbows and she aimed a gun at his middle. The black circle of the barrel looked as large as her head. Jared knew it wasn’t, but damn it, guns pointed directly at a person tended to expand in apparent size.
“Shhh.” The woman mouthed the sound and shook her head in negation.
Jared held up his bandaged hands, patted his crotch, and motioned toward the tent flap. The woman nodded and unzipped the door. No one seemed to wake. Jared got the parka over his shoulders and crawled outside.
He could hear the woman follow him, out onto packed snow, in purple twilight. Jared walked in a straight line away from the tent until he heard her steps slow behind him. If that was as far as she wanted him to go, no problem. Jared felt acutely aware of the woman’s tensions; he tried to read her steps, to know her emotions from her body language in the brief, over the shoulder glimpses he caught while she walked behind him. The limits of the woman’s patience were very important to him.
A glacier hung above the campsite, close, immense. The tent stood on a little island, in a canyon formed by a promontory on one side and the glacier on the other. The flat oval of the beached Zodiac lay on a pebbled beach, dwarfed by the white bones of a whale’s skeleton. Likely a victim of long-gone whalers, the skeleton could have lain there since the 1800s, some part of Jared’s mind told him, since before flensing became an onboard operation and the summer oil factories had gone the way of the dodo.
Jared saw these things while he wondered what he could do with his zipper. He pawed at it, helpless. The woman stepped in front of him and bent her head to inspect his fly. She had olive skin and a hawk nose and long black eyelashes. She was thirtyish and not pretty, Jared noticed, while she got the zipper undone with her cold hands and held him while he pissed. It was a hell of an introduction.
Both her hands were busy, Jared reflected, while between the two of them they got him repacked into his layers of clothing. Both her hands were free; therefore, the gun was inside the tent. Or she had stashed it in her clothes somewhere. That would be stupid, but Jared had learned, over the years, never to underestimate the power of stupidity. The woman started to step away from him. Jared hooked an elbow behind her neck and clamped his other hand over her nose and mouth. His knee slammed into the bend of her knee and they went down together.
She twisted like a cat, but he got his weight stretched out on top of her in a strange parody of a missionary position. Jared kept the woman’s mouth covered with one bandaged hand while he pawed and patted at her, but he could find nothing that felt like a gun. He sat up astride her and pushed the gauzy bandaged wad of his hand up against her nose to extend her neck, forcing the back of her head into the packed snow. He put the heel of his other hand directly on her trachea, and pushed, gently. The woman grabbed at his forearms.
“Don’t scream,” Jared whispered. He pushed at her throat just a little more, for emphasis. “Don’t scream. Reach up, slow now, and undo the bandages on this hand.” He rocked the cartilage of her windpipe back and forth with his left hand, to help her understand. “This hand, okay?”
She blinked rapidly and tried to nod.
The bandages were fastened with clear tape. Jared kept an eye on the silent tent while the woman unwrapped lengths of stretch gauze. Glacier, beach, the sea; they were camped on a small island, somewhere near the continent in the empty, frozen south. The diffuse light gave no directional clues. He saw no seals or penguins. Did that mean anything?
The air struck Jared’s hand, and he examined it. The damage was nasty, an observation that he made with clinical detachment. The skin over the distal phalanx on his left fifth finger had turned dead white. Blisters had formed on the finger pads, but the thumb had been spared.
Jared flexed his hand and watched the woman until she inhaled. He switched hands, and felt the blister on his index finger break as his bare hand clamped across her face.
“Now the other one,” he said.
The sensory functions of his index finger had survived. The texture of her cheek under his exposed raw finger pad felt like acid sandpaper. She got the second bandage off. His right hand appeared to be no more damaged than his left, and the fifth finger wasn’t blistered.
The woman stared up at him, her pupils dilated wide in her brown eyes, and the indelibly imprinted physician inside Jared noted those wide pupils, an effect of catecholamines on the woman’s central nervous system. He could feel a small branch of her facial artery throb at the edge of her jaw. Her pulse rate was nicely elevated.
He might have to kill this woman and he couldn’t quite see himself doing it. Then he remembered a hand on his collar and how he had tried to relax in the water, and how this woman, this woman, had forced him under again. Bitch.
Jared reached up and put the heel of his free hand on the woman’s forehead, so that his fingers rested over her eyes. Just beneath the ridge of her eyebrows, his tender fingers sought the notches where tiny nerve bundles curved upward to send sensory branches across the forehead. Jared put pressure there. The woman tried to push the back of her head deeper into the snow. Fine.
Jared stretched out on top of her, carefully, pushing his legs between hers and letting his weight settle against her chest. Her arms pounded at his sides and her heels kicked at his thighs. These motions were a minor annoyance. Jared let go of her throat and covered her mouth with his. His damaged lip cracked when he opened his mouth and clamped it on hers. It hurt.
Jared grabbed the wad of soiled gauze and shook loose a free end. When the gag was in place, he checked the knots with a certain degree of satisfaction and gently wiped a smear of his blood away from the woman’s temple.
“We will get up now,” Jared said. “We will walk close together, like lovers.” He kept his voice low, but it shook with rage. He took a deep breath. Rage would not serve him well, just now. He spoke with his mouth close to her ear. “We will go down to the beach. We will take the Zodiac. Yes, you can try to make noise when we are working with the boat, because I plan to let you loose then. I will stay close to you. You can hope that your friends can wake, get out of the tent, and kill me before I kill you, if you hit something or drop anything. You can hope that, but you will be wrong. You see, I will kill you if you make noise. I will kill you if you run. I will kill you if you do anything that alarms me in any way. I would very much like for one of these things to happen. Do you understand me?”
The woman kept her dilated eyes on him and nodded.
Jared rolled off of her and they struggled to their feet. He twisted her arms up behind her and held them there. He kept the pace slow, because they were clumsy, walking together like this. Even if he didn’t kill her, he planned to let her feel that icy water, at least once. He hoped the Zodiac’s motor held gas. He hoped it was equipped with emergency flares, or a radio, or some such.
They walked down toward the beach, circling away from the tent, their steps bringing up soft whispers from the summer snow.