From Lisbon, Pilar let Janine’s images run unedited and real-time: Janine working at a frenzied pace and seldom saying anything except to give instructions to the techs who surrounded her. The hotel suite Tanaka had rented became a wonderland, a place to influence visitors who might be persuaded to change one vote, or part of an opinion.
On a normal job, in a normal time, Edges would be hovering over the screens right now, chewing on nuances and fine-tuning the presentations, with Signy worrying, Jared reassuring her and everyone else, and Paul pulling new information out of nanoland and tossing it in at seeming random. Paul tossed, usually, while Janine sorted Paul’s information into neat, usable piles. Not now, not with Jared gone, Signy off in a futile chase, and Paul revising delegate profiles and sending updates to Lisbon as they came in.
“What are you doing, Pilar?” Jimmy asked.
“Worrying.”
“About what?”
“About this contract. The lineup on votes is so damned close.”
“I wish I could help,” Jimmy said, “but I don’t do politics.”
“Everyone does politics,” Pilar said. In fact, Jimmy wouldn’t be much help right now. Signy would be, but she was asleep. Paul always had the eye for this stuff, if Jared was around to keep him from careening off at some oblique angle. Jared would say, “There, there,” and listen, and things would get clear.
Janine finished a lighting check in the Lisbon hotel, put her hands on her hips, and turned in a circle.
“How’s it look?” Janine asked.
The anonymous rented rooms held a fortune in virtual equipment, and a fortune in the presence of a pair of sleek Tanaka security guards, a carefully bland man and a muscular woman, unobtrusive. The guards, and Pilar couldn’t figure out how many there actually were, worked rotating shifts, around the clock.
Waiting, in stored sequences of light and sound, waiting to go onstage, vistas of clean mosaic ice impeded the progress of a masted ship, ice whose patterns became infinity, ice that covered and obscured the horizons of rooms filled with the scent of clean brine and the tang of sea air. Seals played there, and birds flew, and an offstage sun slanted the light into kaleidoscopes of pristine colors.
Janine had set the heating on the warm side, after one of the techs, a dark-eyed and rather plump person from Milan, had come on shift wearing a thick sweater.
Conversation areas with chairs and hassocks upholstered in hot, campfire colors offered shelter from the vast, cold surroundings.
“Beautiful,” Pilar said. “Sound?”
“You won’t get all the harmonics. Not on remote,” Janine said. “But here goes.”
The Lisbon room filled with music, low volume, but pervasive. Pilar had used a few motifs from Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica, some of the choral sections. She had worked them into Jimmy’s music, deep whispers of melody that underlay the scenes, caressed them, the music Jimmy said he had learned from a woman, or a dream.
Paul sent an intruder to the Seattle screens, a crab that scuttled back and forth across Pilar’s synthesizer keyboard and sat down firmly on a C chord. The crab wiped drops of sweat from its nonexistent forehead. “The E.C. is going to ask for a fishing ban,” Paul said.
“Are you sure?” Pilar asked.
“Yes. I got the word from an open transmission to the Journal of Aquaculture; the British delegate is friends with the editor. Britain wants it leaked before morning, from the timing.” Paul sent his words over text, scrolling past Pilar’s eyes toward a Save function. Pilar bit at her lip as she read. She forwarded the text to Janine.
In Tanaka’s Lisbon suite, Janine sat curled in an orange armchair. She had her notebook propped on her knees. She accepted a cup of something from an offscreen arm, and muttered, “Thanks.”
Pilar windowed Janine away and looked at Paul’s text—
The E.C. planned to introduce a proposal for a ban. Britain had pushed hard for it, for reasons that had much to do with sentiment, and much to do with its subsidies of aquaculture in the Indian Ocean.
“I hoped the E.C. would do this,” Paul said.
Most of the krill harvest went to the Third World, anyhow, although significant quantities showed up, disguised and flavorless, in protein supplements. Soy could be used in its place, and purchasing it from water-thrifty countries would be a neutral factor in Euro trade.
“We’ve got the E.C., it sounds like. The trick is to swing the Mideastern votes,” Paul said.
“What’s our plan for that?” Pilar asked.
“We don’t have one,” Paul said.
No one had ever figured out the Mideast, no one could predict if its countries were in mortal opposition to each other this week, or bosom partners in a new coalition since yesterday. Edges couldn’t figure them, but losing the vote on a new Mideast configuration was a no-fault situation.
“Plan? The plan is, for better or worse, we go with what we have. This is done.” Janine waved her arm, vaguely, at the Tanaka suite. “We’ve got a little time. All night, anyway, if Britain pulls its little surprise in today’s session. They may wait until Monday, but that’s asking for a miracle, I guess. Paul, Pilar, get lost for a while. I’m going to shower and change for breakfast.” Janine turned them off, firmly.
“Me, too,” Paul said. “The shower, I mean.”
They were gone. Pilar sipped cold coffee and looked in on Alan Campbell’s cabin on the Siranui.
Signy, crowded in a narrow bunk next to Alan, murmured something in her sleep, now, which was last night to her, and Gods knew what here—
Pilar left that place. The yellowish glare of a night city came through her bare Seattle window. Pilar wished she had time to tweak the sets in the Lisbon room. She wished the contract’s success was built on stronger foundations, that the secret key to making the ban a reality was in her hand. Search, Pilar told herself, go freewheel and find a lever.
Tanaka, lost ships, sabotage that didn’t make sense, a daughter that figured in here somewhere. San-Li, a daughter with a name that wasn’t Japanese. Pilar searched for a bio on San-Li’s mother, and didn’t find one.
Why would San-Li Tanaka have a jones for growth hormone? Why would anyone? Jared was the medic; he would know.
Pilar started to access Jared, and stopped herself with a nervous little laugh. Wrong move of the fingers, but she found herself in Signy’s old files:
Tucked away under Stuff, a topic that Signy filled with things that didn’t fit anywhere—Pilar found a view of herself, a couple of days ago, staring out the Seattle window.
Garbage.
Pilar set a search function for “growth hormone”:
More or less in reverse order, images scrolled past, younger Pilars and Janines, some views of the Taos house and Jared up to his elbows in mud plaster, and then New Hampshire, bright foliage, a leaf-peeping tour of the lakeside, and Jared’s voice.
Pilar settled into her headset, and accepted Signy’s experience of the day, the feel of Signy’s angular body, the pleasure Signy had felt, walking between her two lovers through the blatant colors of a New England autumn morning.
* * *
“Longevity,” Signy said, years before today, over the crunch of fallen leaves. “Ah, Jared, you know as much about that as I do.”
“Starvation’s one way,” Jared said.
“Yeah. Paul’s a candidate.”
Signy’s imaged hands felt cold and Signy/Pilar stuffed them in her pockets. Shadows dappled Jared’s shoulders; he squinted up at the sun. Paul made a hrummphing noise and kicked at a drift of crimson.
“Then there’s the little nanomachines to trot around and clean out free radicals,” Jared said.
“I’m still waiting for those to get built,” Signy said. “Until then, there’s keeping slightly under lean body weight. Get yourself a perfect blood chemistry by fair means or foul…”
“Signy’s advocating drugs, Paul,” Jared said.
“Again?” Paul asked.
“… and some of the anabolic steroids have been tried. Growth hormone, too.”
“You did some work on that, didn’t you?” Paul asked her.
Pilar could feel the tension rise in Signy’s shoulders, in the back of her neck, the muscles of her jaw.
“In Atlanta. Yeah.” Signy walked on for a while, staring down at granite and dying leaves. “We got some good results, too. We built some really fucking geriatric rats.”
Signy reached down and picked up a rock, and flung it side-armed toward the lake with all the energy of sudden rage. It skipped once and sank.
* * *
Pilar, in the quiet hours of a foggy Seattle night, sighed and tried to call up Signy’s old research papers. Either Signy hadn’t bothered to save them, or she had them locked away under some obscure title.
A knot burned in its familiar place between Pilar’s shoulders. She leaned back, stretched, and whimpered.
“Is something wrong?” Jimmy asked.
“I could use a neck rub,” Pilar said.
Jimmy’s hands lifted from his keyboard. He let them settle back again and ducked his chin. “I—in a little while, okay? I thought you wanted me to look for Jared.”
The concept of fleshtime touch seemed to threaten him. Pilar considered pushing him and decided against it. “I do want you to find Jared. I want somebody to find Jared. And I want you to find this Tanaka bitch.” Pilar looked at her hands, her thin brown fingers. They reminded her of talons; they were designed to grasp and tear. Jared had seen them that way; he had seen her as a bird of prey and imaged her, once, in plumage and steel.
Jared’s description had been fair. Pilar was not kind, in her own eyes. Or if she was, she knew her kindness as a measured thing, calculated for response and gain.
“If she’s on that ship, she hides real well,” Jimmy said.
“Kazi’s her boss. She’s got to call him sometime or the other. She’s got to call Papa.”
“The old man is guarded, max. I’ve tried him,” Jimmy said.
“Good man,” Pilar said, and she let her pleasure ride in her voice. A measured, calculated pleasure. Jimmy grinned. Stimulus: response. Pilar regretted how predictable it was.
* * *
And looked at Lisbon, where the sun was up. If there had been roosters, they would be crowing now.
Janine and Kazi walked toward the Palacio. Janine, scrubbed and shiny clean, seemed bemused by crowds of morning workers, people with thick white skins and dank black hair that marked a population whose faces did not look Spanish. The crowded streets could have been in any city, but for those faces. In late January, the land and the wan light hinted of autumn and the sea. Ancient rococo archways led into mazed streets of decaying stone.
There was little, in Lisbon, left from the days of sea rovers and gold bullion, the days of the rape of the New World. An earthquake had destroyed it, and started some sort of religious rebellion. So many innocents had died, and the question rose—Where was God?
Pilar smelled fresh coffee. Jimmy put a cup down beside her.
“Thanks,” Pilar said.
Jimmy laid his palms against her neck and kneaded her tight muscles. He was good at it.
“Really, thanks.” Jimmy’s fingers worked at Pilar’s temples, tilting her headset, and her view of Lisbon. Pilar batted at his hands. “No, no. You’re messing the focus.”
“Sorry,” Jimmy said. He pulled his hands away.
* * *
Lisbon:
Itano’s face looked closed and grim. The Tanaka delegation, with blond Janine in their midst, climbed the steps into the new Palacio, which had been designed to keep every stone-carver in Europe busy for a decade. It had.
* * *
“Jimmy, the meeting starts now,” Pilar said. “I’ll be with Janine. I’m going to stay with her for a while.”
Pilar dismissed Jimmy from her reality, Jimmy’s fears, his earnest, sincere presence.
* * *
A helo chukkered somewhere high above the ship. Signy squinted up through the too-bright light and saw it coming down. She found a spot in the sun outside the hangar doors where she thought she wouldn’t be in the way. Her layers of parka and coveralls should have kept the cold from her, but it seeped in anyhow, a pervasive wet reality breathed into the air from land and water that never warmed. Signy turned her back toward the sun, hoping for some solar gain.
The helo rocked itself onto the deck like a big-bellied bug. Signy watched the landing through her headset, which gave her a heads-up display from home as well, a small square screen in her peripheral vision.
Trent, Anna, and Alan were the only humans Signy expected to deal with today. They were familiar with camera gear, and not likely to ask for privacy clauses or recording contracts. Signy wanted the visuals, and access to printscreens if she needed them, so she stood there looking as much like a bug as the helo did, she figured.
Trent and Alan waited near the coffeepot in the hangar.
Alan a murderer? A saboteur? Anna? The concepts didn’t fit. Staying alive and unmaimed in the thin shell of a helo, or dealing with the growling machinery that ground up the sea harvest, damn it, just working here should provide enough stress to keep life precious, to keep some tone in anyone’s neurotransmitters. Jared’s disappearance could be, in this sane and busy setting, just a glitch. A fixable glitch.
* * *
Pilar, riding Janine’s senses, entered a cavernous auditorium, an oval amphitheater. Broad terraces held ranks of padded conference chairs that looked down into a center arena. Polished marble walls and hangings in dark reds and ambers sought to produce a climate for stately deliberation and the enactment of noble deeds. In the great hall in Lisbon, the world’s movers and shakers gathered to discuss the health and well-being of a community of crustaceans, a citizenry whose members were the size of jelly beans.
The delegates to the Antarctic Treaty Convention sat at a long oval table, whose central holo stage was currently filled with a model of a fine specimen of Euphasia superba. The room was designed like a stadium, and Janine sat in a cheering section, a wedge formation of black suits ranked behind the Japanese delegate. Half of the section wore headsets. Janine looked right at home.
“What’s doing?” Pilar asked.
[Janine] Zzz.
Janine fed the hall’s audio to Seattle. A man with a proper British voice described pigment variations in krill. He reported that he didn’t know what the new pigments meant, just that they had changed. Janine looked at the speaker, who was somewhat colorless in hair, eyes, and voice.
“What, no pretty costumes?” Pilar asked.
Janine circled the arena with her eyes. Behind placards that listed name and nation, the delegates wore Western business suits; the women wore tunics in primary colors. Not a single caftan, sari, or fez relieved the monotony.
[Janine] Conformity is in, this year.
The krill vanished from the stage. France, a muscular and totally bald gentleman who was the designated chairperson for this meeting of the august Antarctic Treaty Commission, rapped his gavel. En Français, he declared the preliminary reports on the health of the ecosystem fini, with no time for commentaire. Janine ran the translator’s voice in tandem with his. English and French words clashed and combined. Pilar liked the effect. It was time, France said, to discuss changes in the treaty. France hoped there would be none.
Pilar approved his futile plea for brevity, and wondered if he suffered a slight and patriotic indisposition of the liver. It would explain his desire for haste, and be a sufficient cause for a wish for miracles.
With due deliberation, the Commission decided to consider new motions. Colorless Britain took the floor and requested a ban on fishing in Antarctica.
[Janine] Here we go.
Delegates rumbled as they heard what Britain asked. A second wave of grumbling followed the first, as those few who needed, or pretended to need, translation, responded to the words.
“… for a period of time to be not less than the next scheduled meeting of this august body thirty years from this date, that no marine life of any kind whatsoever be removed from the waters southerly of fifty-five degrees,” Britain said.
[Janine] That cuts off a lot of home water from Chile and Argentina. They’re bound to bitch.
They didn’t, not immediately. Chile got up from his chair and went to Argentina, who was a solid-looking woman with glossy black hair. She wore it in a dancer’s knot at the back of her neck. Chile bent over and spoke rapidly in the woman’s ear. She said something that Janine’s mikes didn’t pick up.
Chile stood up and backed away. The man from Chile and the Argentine woman gestured at each other with much nodding and waving of hands. Chile returned to his chair.
Australia gave the U.K. a second. France opened the floor for discussion. The Japanese delegate was on his feet in the instant. He was a ramrod straight, very small man. Pilar couldn’t get a look at his face.
In English, he said, “Mr. Chairman, such a proposal is unconscionable. World hunger demands the use of available resources, including those of Antarctica. Japan, as a member of the Treaty Commission, opposes any change in the current apportionment of the valuable harvest from the Southern Ocean.”
“Huh?” Pilar asked.
Janine looked from face to impassive face, scanning the Japanese delegation. Tanaka’s men did not seem surprised. Kazi crossed his arms and would not look at her.
The Japanese delegate spoke on, with a formal and passionate anger. He finished his initial barrage of objections, and did not bow as he sat down.
[Janine] Oh, shit. Now what?
“You didn’t have a clue?” Pilar asked.
[Janine] Zero, zilch clues. Kazi = Bastard.
“Amen.”
[Janine] SHIT!
“Just sit there, okay? Kazi has to explain this. I hope,” Pilar said.
[Janine] He’d better.
There went the contract.
Failure, failure, Pilar was getting fucking tired of failure. First the damned tour, and then Jared, who, alive or dead, was damaging them all so painfully. Now this. Pilar bent forward as if her stomach hurt. It didn’t.
One of the houses would have to be sold. Not this one, Pilar hoped. But Paul wouldn’t let go of the family place in New Hampshire without a fight. The house in Taos was the least expensive to maintain, and it was the biggest. Paul wouldn’t sell, he would cash out before he would let that old colonial go. If he left, quit, said goodbye? Paul wouldn’t, he couldn’t.
Paul might.
Then what happens to the rest of us?
Pilar found herself wondering about Jimmy’s income, his resources, and hated herself for it. But she liked Jimmy. Pilar was growing fond of him, in a mild way. Now she would never know if she would ever see a true Jimmy, a person of his own. Jimmy had become a construct defined by the shapes of his potential uses.
[Janine] I’m scared.
“Me, too,” Pilar said.
* * *
Anna went out to meet Kihara, who hustled toward her, a bouncy, quick man. Kihara looked happy. No reason he wouldn’t; he had had a couple of days of R&R, and the news of Jared’s disappearance would have meant little to him. Unfortunate, an inconvenience; no more than that. Jared and Kihara had been casual buddies, not close friends. And anyway, he wouldn’t recognize Signy Thomas, a bundled woman in a parka; Kihara wouldn’t know that Signy was Jared’s worried masked lover. Why did Signy think everyone’s routines would change for one missing man?
Through the glare of the helo’s windscreen, Signy could make out the shape of the pilot’s mustache and the line of his jaw. Signy watched him talk into his mike, impatient. It was Cordova, and he didn’t shut the helo down. The helo whined with increased revs, lifted again, and turned away from the ship, rising toward the sun. Signy looked away, blinking from the bright light, and sneezed.
“Bless you,” Jimmy said.
“It’s Cordova,” Signy told her throat mike. “Jared’s pilot.”
“Is it? He just told the flight officer he was in a hurry. Had some business, he said.”
Signy pulled back the cuff of her parka and looked at her wrist. Jimmy was her only observer.
“Where’s Pilar?” Signy asked.
“With Janine. The conference has gotten weird.”
“Weird how?” Signy asked.
“Japan is opposing a fishing ban.”
“Huh?” Signy asked. “That isn’t the plan. Japan is supposed to push for a ban. Everything we’ve done is tailored to sell a goddamned ban.…” Did this mean Edges was fired? If that happened, what would happen to her? Tanaka would get her home, away from here, maybe at her own expense, and it wouldn’t be Tanaka’s money that continued a search for a man overboard. Edges’ line of credit—the last time Signy had checked, there had been enough left to buy her a search of her own. Maybe.
What was Janine going to do? Signy started to ask Jimmy to hook into Lisbon real-time. So that she could—could do absolutely nothing helpful. Pilar would have to help handle the problem, whatever it was. Pilar could do it. Pilar had to.
Signy wished that the crew would hurry and get the Siranui’s helo into the air, before it was called back.
Anna left Kihara at the hangar door. Signy waved at her.
“Jimmy, Pilar and Paul can deal with Lisbon. They’ll figure something out.” Pilar and Paul could blow Lisbon to hell and gone, and they probably would. Janine was obviously in deep shit, and so was everything else. The contract? Gone, probably. “I want to help. But I’ll be looking only for Jared, and I can’t do any research for them, not from the helo. Just feed me the high points of all this, would you?”
“At your service,” Jimmy said.
Anna waited beside Signy while the flight crew moved Trent’s helo out to the deck. Somewhere, in the process of getting clearance to follow Cordova’s helo up and away from the ship, Signy lost Jimmy, lost contact with home. She felt an emotional lurch, cut off for what seemed like a long, blank time, but Jimmy’s light came back on, and his voice in her ear. “Gotcha,” he said. “Had to run through McMurdo. You know somebody named Marty?”
“Marty? He’s a bartender.”
“He’s also got a real fine setup for monitoring damned near anything. He says ‘Hi, Anna.’”
“I’ll tell her,” Signy said. What the hell was going on in Lisbon? In the turmoil, the group hadn’t done an in-depth analysis of Tanaka corporation, of the personalities involved in it. No funny stuff on Tanaka’s part had been assumed, so Signy’s preliminary scan on the company men had been all that Edges had looked at. And when the funny stuff had come along, Signy, and Janine and Pilar too, had chosen to ignore it, over Jared’s insistence that something was wrong. But no one had listened to Jared, or Paul, and therefore, there was no inhouse simulation against which to play this puzzling scenario. Damn, there hadn’t been time to make one.
Worried, distracted, Signy watched the Siranui grow smaller as the helo rose. A trawler approached it, ready to unload another few tons of fish. The helo’s noise, that the people beside her endured in silence, the sense of watchful waiting inside this flimsy flying bubble, brought her back to current concerns. Jared lived. Signy planned to find him.
Trent turned the helo away from the ship, on a path Signy could see in her mind, a grid on the waters where the Kasumi had fished for submarines. She remembered it well.
* * *
Jimmy wanted Pilar’s attention. Pilar ignored him, and stayed in the drama playing itself out in Lisbon.
The Third World nations aligned themselves, predictably, on the lines of hunger. Famines were mentioned. Subsidies were suggested for landlocked countries who were willing to support the ban. Britain pointed out that food distribution was a U.N. function. The U.S. hadn’t said a word yet. Janine sat frozen, listening to the arguments back and forth, back and forth. Pilar let Lisbon fade away.
“I’m listening,” Pilar said.
“Signy’s out on her search. I’m following her through McMurdo. That means I can’t watch the Siranui at the same time, so I’m saving the stuff from there.”
“Yeah. Do that.”
Jimmy went back to his console; Pilar spoke to Janine.
“Babe, I’m going to get Paul in on this, now,” Pilar said.
[Janine] Please. Do it.
Pilar stripped off her headset and wandered around the Seattle room for a minute, trying to get the world back into place. All of the presentations would need to be changed if Japan stuck with its position, and Pilar wasn’t sure Paul was going to be any help getting the works retuned. Choreographed for the joy of solitude, for half-forgotten luxuries of time and distance, the set pieces were designed to say, This is ours, this is our heritage, Earth has grandeur and can survive.
To change the sets, the sounds, the slants? Hours of work, days, would be needed, even if the work was still wanted. Had Edges been fired last night at some wee-hour meeting? Wouldn’t Kazi have said something, if that’s what had happened?
Pilar pulled her headset back on and called New Hampshire:
* * *
Paul’s crab climbed through the lattices of an amoeboid, strangely soft-edged thing. The interior of the construct seemed to be a cavern, braced with struts of curved elastic bars that looked like steel and had the sueded feel of latex.
“What the…?” Pilar asked.
“I can’t make it linear, Empress. There’s too much coming in.”
The space went tilt. Pilar grabbed for a rope that writhed, blood-warm and resilient, in her hands.
“Reductions of English-language newspapers in Chile and Argentina; you’d be amazed at some of the battles that go on in the fishing grounds. They have territorial boundaries as clearly marked as those of wolf packs, and devil take anyone who puts their nets in the wrong waters on the wrong day.”
Moist veils of some pinkish membrane drifted across Pilar’s shoulders. Pilar struggled, suddenly tiny, trying to reach the Paul-crab.
“The fishing packs are multinational, multicompany, Pilar, did you know that? They group up on friendship and superstition, once they’re out of port.” The crab flung itself to another strut in the half-formed maze, and the angle of the construct rotated bottoms up or inside out, Pilar couldn’t tell which. She felt everted, and she didn’t like the feeling at all.
“And to make it more fun, over here we’ve got maritime insurance company reports from last year. A whole subculture I never suspected. There are pirates in the world, Pilar; they work out of the Malacca straits; that’s one place, but the companies don’t turn in loss reports from piracy. It makes the stockholders nervous. Didn’t you hear Itano talk about them?” The crab extruded a human hand from inside a claw and adjusted a knot of sticky caramel-colored optic cable that hung from a curving bar above its head.
Balanced, teetering, on the support Pilar’s feet found beneath her, she backed away from an endless drop into a whirlpool. The whirlpool was green and sucked away anything nearby, sheets of printout, translucent fish bones, camo uniforms that spread into parodies of soldiers as they fell.
Pilar looked away, fast, catching a glimpse of rigid brocade skirts done in bas-relief. Paul had dressed her as a Chinese empress carved out of ivory. Pilar could see tiny gold nails in the joints of her fingers.
Paul’s words tumbled out, staccato, rapid.
“… Of course, the vector analysis of the geometry of interpersonal space has not yet been defined in this way, but sooner or later, Empress, it leads back to us. To Jared, if we stretch the strings in the proper way.”
Pilar had seen Paul Maury wired, but not like this, had not seen him, ever, lost in a frantic jumble of images like these, whose speed, tumbling across the construct she had entered, frightened her.
The crab bounced in place, like a kid with a full bladder. “And there, there in the distance is the German company that sells explosives to a mining company in Zaire that get black-marketed as fertilizer to an export dealer in Taiwan, that get packaged as XO brandy and sold to the store in Ushuaia. See? That’s what Skylochori bought. The dead, dead man. He blew something up, ka-boom!”
Paul had gone spla. Loony. Mentally ill. Someone had to do something about this. Signy? Signy was busy. Pilar couldn’t deal with crazy; Pilar heard a little voice in her head saying, Poor baby, poor baby, get someone to help him.
“Paul! Paul, stop it!” Pilar yelled.
Paul sent silence that burned in her ears. A lump formed in Pilar’s throat, a big hot lump with sharp edges.
“What’s the matter?” He sounded so calm, so reasonable.
“You sound crazy.” Pilar untangled herself from the tendrils of the construct and ripped her headset away from her face.
“Oh, sorry,” Paul’s voice said, blessedly otherwhere, now that Pilar was safe again, in her own body, in her own head. “This isn’t quite together yet, is it?”
Paul seemed contrite, apologetic, and sane.
“No.”
“What’s the matter, Empress?”
Paul wasn’t totally nuts. Frightened, Pilar sought for a rationalization, for any thread of reasoning to explain what the hell was happening to him, and she knew, while her mind built frames around this, walled it off, that she was lying to herself.
Paul needed what Jared gave him, chiding hints that kept him sane. Pilar didn’t often see Paul’s work this raw, this unfinished. Her stuff looked fairly bizarre while she was actually getting it together. This weird? Yeah, probably. But Paul—this was different, and Pilar knew it, and Paul’s craziness scared her. Pilar didn’t want to think about what might happen if Paul lost it completely.
She shoved her fear deep into the background and said, “Japan is objecting to the fishing ban. They want the present quotas, they say.”
Silence.
“Paul?”
“I’m sure they have their reasons, Empress.”
“But what can we do?”
“I think, my dear, that we can wait. At least until lunch.”
“You’ll watch Janine with me?”
“Oh, yes,” Paul said. “Yes, indeed.”
* * *
Five meters high, about twenty meters long, the floe was scant shelter. It was an undistinguished, smallish, frozen lump of a floe, but shelter it was, and therefore beautiful. Jared cut the throttle back as the floe hid the Zodiac from shore. He didn’t want to get back into open water, just yet. The channel curved ahead and lost itself between glacier and promontory. A smallish berg ahead looked promising as the potential next hiding place. But which way was out? Ahead? Back past the tent?
In rapid succession, three shots echoed off the ice cliffs. Shouts carried from the men onshore, echoed and multiplied so that they sounded like a company of infantry.
Even with the throttle kicked back to almost idle, the Zodiac was running out of iceberg. The range of a good hunting rifle, its accuracy if properly sighted, left Jared in danger of a careful shot. The Zodiac was a bigger, easier target.
Presumably, rafts had safety features. Jared doubted a rifle could sink this little toy tub, but losing air from a compartment or two could make the Zodiac list. Sloshing around in liquid ice seemed an unfortunate idea.
The echoes of the rifles died away, leaving only the sounds of the Zodiac’s motor, a dead certain indicator of Jared’s location, except that, like the rifle shots, the sound of it bounced off the glacier in confusing ways. Around him, a magic beauty existed, a panorama of ice and shadows stained in colors of burnt oranges, ambers, deep greens.
Jared figured he would like to head in the direction of McMurdo, if he knew which way that was. Where had the Kasumi been and how far might these people have carried him, drugged and unconscious?
The floe traveled in a patch of open water. Ahead, a small berg waited, across an empty expanse that would silhouette the Zodiac against the background of the promontory’s white, white ice. Jared was aware of how soft he was, far too aware of the potential damage that could be created by a high-velocity missile driving its shock wave through human flesh. He thought of trying to stay here, behind this friendly little floe.
Out in the open water, the whale rose just under the surface and rolled on its side without raising a ripple on the water. It didn’t seem to be injured. Without warning, it broached, rising half out of the water and falling back with a crash. By then, Jared had the Zodiac halfway to the iceberg. He heard a rifle crack; once, twice.
When he reached the shelter of the berg, Jared twisted so that he could see the water behind him, deep green and not stained with the whale’s blood. The tent was hidden behind a curve in the channel. Jared couldn’t see any pursuers, and he sped along beside the berg until he passed its sheltering bulk. An abrupt twist in the channel carried the Zodiac out past the cove, or passage, or whatever the hell it was. Behind him were men with guns, ahead was broken ice and a sea running high. An offshore wind bit at his ears and his bare hands. The clouds were lowering and they had taken all the colors away.
The woman grabbed for a handhold as the Zodiac sank down over the first big roller. Jared reached with one hand and pulled at the ties of her gag.
“Get that damned thing off!” he shouted.
The woman pulled it loose and hurled herself toward the edge of the boat. Jared thought for a minute she was going overboard, but she retched, repeatedly, instead. She took a deep breath, spat, wiped her mouth, and sank back into the Zodiac as it rode another wave.
Jared kept the shore to starboard and cut the Zodiac’s speed back. The glacier, a sheer wall of layered ice, its seaward face kilometers wide, emptied itself into the sea. The Zodiac’s little motor hummed along, steady. It had been kept well tuned, a fact for which Jared was deeply grateful. The motor had no fuel gauge, and Jared spent some long minutes wondering if one of the tarps hid a can of gasoline.
Distance didn’t calm him. Jared felt irritable; he wanted—drugs, of course. He wanted the nice smooth feeling he’d had for three or four days, according to the length of his beard, which had gotten past the stubbly stage and felt soft to his fingers.
Past the glacier, the sea butted against overhangs of pack ice. Jared watched the shore for potential landing spots. The swells were getting too high for his liking, and the clouds lowered themselves toward the sea. The light faded as he watched. Now that Jared no longer dreaded the tearing agony of a bullet in his back, he remembered that he didn’t know if the Zodiac carried food, or flares, or anything that could be used as a shelter. Seals could legally be killed to feed man or dog, except dogs had been banned here for thirty years. Even without weapons, he could probably batter one to death with an oar if he had to do it. They probably tasted fishy. Jared didn’t want to kill a seal, and he didn’t know where the hell he was.
The woman might know. She hadn’t said anything. She watched the shore, not him, but she hadn’t tried to fight him.
Jared mused on stupidity and wondered why he’d been so hell-bent to leave the nice warm tent, where the only danger was immediate death. He’d only wanted to escape, waking helpless and trapped, a feeling made worse because of his bound hands.
He’d been an idiot. His captors could have killed him at any time, and they hadn’t.
The shoreline curved inward, and gave a faint hope of shelter. A sudden break in the clouds showed a glimpse of high, distant mountain peaks above the shore, blinding white. The water brightened from gray to green and went back to gray as the clouds settled on the water again, close and low.
Snow began to fall, pellets driven by the wind to pepper Jared’s face. He blinked sleety water away from his eyes, and hoped he could get the Zodiac to shore before shore disappeared.
Something black broke the monotony of the ice, and Jared aimed for it. Closer in, he saw it for what it was, a leopard seal hauled out on the ice. If a seal could get onshore, Jared figured he could.
He surfed the Zodiac shoreward, intent on watching the waves form offshore, waiting, waiting. Not this one, not yet; now. Here we go.
Jared gunned the motor to catch the wave he wanted. It carried the Zodiac onshore with a satisfying rush.
All that was needed, Jared figured, as the inflatable skidded onto a patch of bare rock, was a palm tree or two, and a girl in a bikini.