Late in the day, tired from the flight back from Houston, Signy shuffled toward the house at Taos through a light, fresh snowfall. The dry winter air gave her a few minutes of false energy. She contemplated shoveling the walks and didn’t.
In the bedroom, she dropped the equipment bag and her duffel in the corner, a platform for her parka. She shrugged out of her red silk jacket and rolled it into a loose bundle to send to the cleaners.
Something hard in the inseam pocket thumped against the dresser. Susanna’s chip, and Jimmy McKenna’s gift. Signy had forgotten about that little puzzler. What whim had caused that quiet boy to give her this?
In the studio, Signy sat at her console for a little while, looking at the pale soft-plastered walls and the ashes she’d left in the fireplace. She felt tired, but it was an honest, pleasant tired, an aftermath of hard work and physical pleasure. Her body sent her the tiny sweet discomforts that resulted from enthusiastic sex. To be alone in the house was unusual and it felt good. Signy stretched and smiled.
Sex with Jared was a good and wonderful thing, always. Sex with Alan had, as promised, carried the spice of the unexpected, the delightful uncertainties of someone different. If work brought Alan back into her real-time space, yes, she would find another taste of that complex man worthwhile. If not? She’d had a good night. Signy hoped Alan had. Simple pleasures were a gift not to be rejected, or denied, or analyzed to death.
The Tanaka contract waited. Some of the delegates had already set up their territories in Lisbon, beginning the process of feeling each other out, testing each other for agreements and oppositions, looking for ways to build coalitions, blocs, alliances. There wasn’t much time for Edges to catch up and get ready to help Tanaka do its own modeling and nudging.
Why did everyone in the whole damned world want everything yesterday? The Antarctic Treaty Commission met every thirty years. So Tanaka had given them less than a month to get a complex job ready. It figured. Signy punched keys and woke the system.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
She got typescript, not a voice.
[Paul] Signy, scan Jared the minute you get in.
Followed by Jared’s current address in a subdirectory of a ship called the Siranui.
Signy found him. Jared lay on his back, in bed, most likely, sending no visuals. Jared slept well, or so she could hope. Signy fast-scanned his suit’s transmissions for the past hour. Jared had hooked his right arm around something solid. The sensors showed a flex and release at his elbow, a pattern that might reflect sleep responses to a tilting bed.
[Signy] Paul, Jared’s asleep. Talk to me.
The intimate space behind her headset became Paul in his study, slouched in his leather chair, with his laptop perched on his knees. A lock of his black hair fell across his forehead, a forehead that was higher than it used to be.
“Oh, sure,” Paul said. “Jared’s dead man has been a real problem. Have you looked at the exam?”
“Dead man? Paul, I just walked in the door.”
“Well, catch up with us, Signy, my sweet. There’s a problem with Skylochori.”
“With what?”
“The dead man.” Janine’s voice answered. The screen split and Janine appeared next to Paul, Janine in the Seattle studio, backlighted by the tall bay window where sometimes Mount Rainier could be seen.
Talking to them both in the same setting was easier on Signy’s sense of rightness, so she switched Janine back to the New Hampshire study, to Paul’s familiar and convenient macros of a room that Signy knew well, and liked. Janine wore bulky gray sweats and hadn’t bothered with makeup.
No “Hi, how are you?” from either of them. No “How was your trip?” They were wrapped up in their work, and real time meant so little to either of them. “The dead man,” Signy said. “Okay.”
She left them and entered:
—a sick bay. Brought to her hands, to her muscles, Signy accessed Jared’s familiar body language and saw his views, unedited, of a small white room and a still white face.
Jared seemed relaxed and calm. His interested distance from problems like this amazed her, still, annoyed her, sometimes. Just biz, to him. Death, pain, human misery—just biz. Signy let Jared’s suit’s transmissions feed to hers, accepting the simple signals of tensions at knee and wrist that told of Jared’s motions, the complex sensors that gave her his touch, the crisp finish of the nylon that wrapped the corpse and the strange feel of a cold and broken hand. Jared’s tension levels increased while he was doing the post mortem, but he didn’t seem all that spooked. No more than anyone would be, exploring an everyday death at sea.
Signy dipped in and out of Jared’s evening and picked up his increase in alertness when he met Anna de Brum. Scanning through Jared’s journey to the deck, to watch Kihara leave, Signy felt Jared’s fascination with and fear of the icebergs, acute sensations. Because Jared had felt a primitive terror, Signy did. It wasn’t like Jared to fear anything. But the ice had moved so silently, been so massive.
“Signy?” Paul asked, an intrusive voice that seemed to come from overhead. “Can you get an output from the bridge? Maybe they’re looking for this guy.”
“I’ll try.” Signy transferred her awareness away from Jared’s sleep and brought herself back to real time in the Taos house. She fed the output from the Siranui’s bridge to a speaker and listened in for a while, but all she heard was chatter, mostly in Japanese, interspersed with occasional pidgin comments about a storm. She set a capture on the word Skylochori, left the audio pickups awake in Jared’s cabin, and switched back to the New Hampshire studio.
“Hello,” Paul said.
Janine looked up and smiled. “I’m glad you’re back. How was the trip?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“What’s Jared doing now?” Janine asked.
“He’s sleeping,” Signy said. “You can pick him up if you want; he fell asleep with his skinthin on,” Signy said.
“He didn’t upload his trip yet,” Janine said. “What we got is just the autopsy. You’d better look at it, Signy.”
“I did already.” Post mortems always made her feel like a perverted voyeur. Signy didn’t like watching them.
Paul, in his warm, safe, American room, stayed intent on his flatscreen, where columns of pounds and yen scrolled past with dizzying rapidity.
“Paul, you act like this guy was murdered or something,” Signy said.
“I don’t know,” Paul said. “But Tanaka lost a ship three days ago, or so the Internet says. Tanaka hasn’t made much flap about it. They haven’t called for a search, nothing like that. Now there’s a drowned man and the Tanaka mother harvester just happens to pick him up. I’m interested.”
“So I see. I’ll check the bridge again, Paul.” Signy listened to the Siranui’s bridge for a while, and heard a story, in English, about a sailor and a woman in Christchurch with remarkable and highly unlikely attributes.
“Nothing,” Signy said.
“Odd.” Paul stared at his flatscreen.
Janine’s image lay sprawled on a cushion on Paul’s worn China trade carpet, her elbows guarding a reader screen.
“Janine, what are you doing?” Signy asked.
“Looking through this treaty stuff,” Janine said. “You’ve read it?”
“I’ve skimmed it,” Signy said.
“I’m looking at documentation on the Antarctic Accord of 1991. Strange, strange.”
“Where’s Pilar?” Signy asked.
“Out. Walking, I guess.” Janine dropped her head and began to read again.
And Paul hunted for Skylochori. Warburg-Paribas security gave him nothing, he reported. Nothing about the size of the man’s account, or when or where deposits had been made. Paul tried hotel registries, starting at Chile’s Teniente Rodolfo Marsh station, southernmost of public hostels, and circled outward, placing little red question marks on the South Polar map as he went from destination to destination. Ushuaia, in Argentina, Punta Arenas, in Chile. The question marks buzzed like bees as he left them. Paul’s queries jumped across the map to New Zealand’s South Island, where he searched hotels and job-call rosters in Christchurch. Nada.
Paul would be at his search for days if nothing distracted him. Signy sent a black patent high-heeled shoe to his display and tapped it impatiently. “Get off it,” Signy said. “We’ll hear what the ship finds out about this Skylochori sooner or later. And we’re not working for him, whoever he was.”
Paul transformed the shoe into a pink and blue nursery butterfly and fluttered it out of his way. “Ushuaia,” he said. “Skylochori, debit for three cases of Henessey XO brandy. My, it’s expensive.”
Signy closed her eyes. Jared’s view of sick bay came to haunt her, the sound of water dripping from a dead man’s hand. For distraction, she pulled up dossiers on Tanaka’s execs in the company’s offices in San Diego and Honolulu, profiles that she might need to know. They seemed a dull bunch, by and large.
“The treaty negotiations were so polite,” Janine said.
“Yeah,” Signy said. “I’ve looked through some stuff on them. It was easy to be noble, I guess, when there wasn’t anything down there to want.”
But now there was.
The ice at the end of the world had a strange history, due to get stranger. The hard-won and ridiculous balance of interests that had produced the Antarctic Treaty had changed in the past thirty years. Sentiment for banning mankind entirely from the white desert was rising. The seas, though, with their protein riches, inspired complex parameters of greed and confusion.
“Old solutions,” Janine reported, “the weirdest set of gentleman’s agreements you’re ever likely to run across.”
At the height of the cold war, the U. S. and Russia had agreed to set aside territorial claims in Antarctica and share information that they gleaned from scientific research in the International Geophysical Year of 1957. When Britain and Argentina were shooting at each other in the Falklands, their representatives came to the conference table each day and discussed wildlife protection on the continent. When Chile made territorial claims and had a pregnant woman deliver a child on “their” part of Antarctica, the bombastics were politely ignored. The place inspired strange courtesies; Signy had read that mutual survival was all that counted there. Usually.
“I’m beginning to believe that our client thinks he wants something that won’t work,” Janine said. “Any quota system that involves portioning out the harvest by nation, for God’s sake, is going to get the diplomats up on their soapboxes. There’s got to be a better way. I just haven’t found it yet.”
“Does anyone know how flexible our client is?” Signy asked.
“No,” Janine said.
“I guess I’ll start trying to find out,” Signy said.
“I’ll get on it.” Janine stuck her tongue out at the screen and faded away from the New Hampshire floor.
Paul kept manipulating the smattering of information he had on the man named Skylochori.
“Are you still at that?” Signy asked him.
“Maybe Jared’s on to something,” Paul said. “Skullduggery at sea, or somebody’s secrets.”
“You’re woolgathering, Paul. This is just a contract, not a study in conspiracy theory.”
“But Jared’s instincts are good, Lioness.”
If Signy fussed about Jared, Paul would defend him. If they both got on his case, Janine would become Jared’s champion. Pilar seemed, always, to ignore all the interactions, to exist in her own little space, and tonight Pilar was out walking. Thinking of music? Of sculpture? Whatever, all of them would tiptoe around Pilar’s definition of personal territory, would inconvenience themselves to make sure she had it.
“There’s something funny about this Skylochori’s purchase, I think.” Paul pointed at something on his New Hampshire screen, but he forgot to send views of whatever he was looking at. “Skylochori bought his brandy from a little shop that sells, uh-huh, Euro perfumes, tinned caviar…”
“Does this have anything to do with the contract, Paul?”
“Who knows?”
“Tanaka lost a ship. We don’t know how often fishing ships go down, or what the procedures are when they do. Jared will probably find out and then we can quit worrying about it,” Signy said.
“I’m sure he’ll do just that,” Paul said. “He’s an inquisitive soul, our Jared.”
It’s just a contract, Signy told herself. We needed it, we took it, we’ll work it out. Paul’s just anxious because we don’t know all that much about Tanaka yet.
Paul kept on noodling with maps, vocal about it, and unaware he was making any noise at all. Signy ignored him and looked at her capture file on the Siranui for any mention of Skylochori. The file was blank.
Janine reappeared on Paul’s carpet. “Our client is a visionary, by his own standards,” Janine said.
Janine held a brown bread and cheese sandwich in one hand and grabbed salted peanuts with the other. Signy remembered she was hungry, herself.
“He’s a tad unconventional,” Janine said. “Yoshiro-san’s company started out in manufacturing, which is what he learned from Daddy. Yoshiro is a lesser son. On his own, he’s wrested power away from his older brothers. He’s gotten religion about the sea, it seems. Figured from way back that it would be the primary food source for humanity. He’s been keeping fishing operations going at scant profit to get long-term rights.”
“So he’s flexible,” Signy said.
“Not necessarily. He could be as stubborn as a mule if he thinks we’re calling it wrong.” Janine licked salt from her fingers. She picked up a glass of some bright red drink and sipped at it.
“Interesting,” Paul said. “The store at Ushuaia has sold eight hundred cases of brandy in the past nine months. And it has purchased—thirty.”
“So they smuggle,” Signy said.
“I think you are right, Miss Thomas. The question is, what do they smuggle?” Paul’s face dissolved, replaced by the stylized crab sigil Paul used when he wanted to be left alone. The crab clicked its claws in Signy’s direction and scuttled away into infinity.