Signy paced through the empty house, stared at the dishes in the sink, heated cold coffee in the microwave, and went back to the studio.
The console waited. The sooner Signy got back on the damned thing, the less likely it was that she would freeze up and not be able to do it. She listened to audios that told her that Paul was running a reduction of the scrambler sequence, that told her Pilar worked at the synthesizer. Janine began rebuilding Pilar’s iceberg sequence, working from Jared’s raw transmissions.
Paul got his study reformatted and up and running again, with Pilar and Janine in it, all back to normal. But it wasn’t.
Signy picked up her headset and slipped it on. “I’m going on break for a while,” she said.
Pilar looked up from her synthesizer and nodded, her face blank, intent on whatever she was feeding into her headphones. Paul and Janine didn’t seem to hear Signy at all.
Signy tiptoed away and settled herself on the banco in the bedroom. She sat by the fireplace and stroked her mother’s blanket, purchased from Taos Pueblo years ago. Woven from strips of rabbit fur, it was dense and thick on Signy’s fingers. Yeah, regression had its uses, and curling up under a blanket was regression in the purest sense.
The blanket had traveled from Taos to Atlanta with Signy’s mother, and to Tucson, where a six-year-old Signy had found it in a box of old things and adopted it as her own. When Edges bought the house by the river, the blanket had come back to Taos. Its colors matched the colors of the mesas, and the rabbits outside were surely distant cousins to the sacrificed ones whose fur comforted her hands now.
Rabbit stew had become a staple in Taos, and not from gastronomic preference, either. There had been three cases of tularemia in Taos County in the past year. Signy pushed aside the guilt of the groceries she’d just bought, pushed away the memory of the six women blanketed in the snow outside the grocery store, still waiting late on a cold winter’s night. She couldn’t feed them all.
Paul’s voice, Janine’s voice, drifted into the bedroom.
“I think I see a way out of national quotas,” Janine said. “If I could just talk Tanaka into it.”
“Tanaka’s legal department is good. Let’s just go with what they want,” Paul said. “They’ve spent mega to get the wording; they think the population quota system for permits will control overfishing problems. You’ve got a group of cautious nations involved in the takeout if this goes through; they don’t want to blow what safety we have in this leaky food bucket,” Paul said.
“No. There’s something better. It’s a permit system the North Atlantic group worked out, based on bids, not nations, and they’re right. Tanaka’s wrong.” Janine’s voice continued, a murmur that rose and fell. Signy wondered whether they continued their talk to soothe her, whether they waited for her to return to them.
Signy had told them she was tired, and she was. Paul and Janine kept talking because they didn’t want to leave her alone and scared. But Signy was alone, and she feared the synthetic comfort of the virtuals. Always, the spaces where she worked were places of safety, of refuge. Signy had known their dangers, but overloads had been a fantasy to her, something that happened to the careless, the daring. Signy was neither.
She liked controlled reality, where emotions could be edited away. Uncomfortable things like starvation and poisoned food and tough relationships didn’t have to exist there. Except that tonight, a monster presence had slipped into her safe space and frightened her. A result of Jared’s fears, or her own, a virus, a hacker, whatever; she’d been invaded.
In this group, in these past calm years when they had just worked and loved and fought, Signy hadn’t had to deal with anyone or anything that came uninvited to her world. She’d lost some layers on a skin that had been, for most of her life, thick enough. She’d trusted her world, and trust was always, always, a mistake, damn it.
Paul and Janine weren’t here in this empty house, in this cold night. They hadn’t been affected, hadn’t felt the damned sensations crawling along Signy’s skin. They could sympathize, and they did, but their concern was an abstract thing, a response of intellectual empathy. Their voices were just voices.
And Jared? Jared was in sick bay in a ship on a frozen sea, thousands of miles away. Signy wanted him to be here, right here, warm and real, a distraction to take away her fears of the dark. She needed to leave a message for him. She needed to bring up Alan Campbell.
There was no mysterious hand in the fireplace flames. Signy was not near her keyboard and it was not coated with wax. Nobody else saw that stuff. Maybe she had scrambled her own inputs.
Sure. Like hell she had. The whole episode had a mistake, a glitch, that’s all.
In the studio, Pilar’s voice asked, “Hey, you guys going to be up much longer?”
“Maybe an hour,” Janine said.
“We’re out of coffee,” Pilar grumbled.
“I’ll go get some,” Janine said. “As soon as I finish this one bit…”
And then Janine said something that made Paul laugh. I’ll go back in in a minute, Signy told herself.
She stared at the rumpled, empty bed.
The voices from the studio quieted. Signy held on to her security blanket and went back in.
Paul’s reconstructed study was empty. Embers glowed in the New Hampshire fireplace.
Signy sat down and screened the messages waiting for Jared.
[Pilar] Could you get some visuals from under the sea? Go diving, maybe? Please, Jared, I need more than ice to look at.
[Paul] Signy says nobody’s trying to find out about the dead man. This intrigues me.
I have to tell Jared something about Alan, Signy decided. I want to tell him I need him here, with me, that I’m afraid for him. That I’m afraid, too.
[Signy] I fucked Alan Campbell last week. See if you can find out why he’s in Antarctica.
Not quite right.
[Signy] Alan Campbell is on the Siranui. He works for Gulf Coast Intersystems. Any connection with what we’re doing?
Which avoided the problem.
[Signy] Add: tell him hello.
Idiot. It was no big deal. How could she phrase this, damn it? Her eyes wandered around the dusky shadows of Paul’s study.
The silver bowl Paul had bought in Atlanta rested on a table near closed drapes of amber velvet. Sometimes he floated roses in it in the summer.
Signy remembered how it was, living with Paul in the old New England farmhouse. How it was when Paul brought Jared home, this neat guy who ran the wilderness tour Paul hadn’t wanted to go on, not really. You need to sweat some, Signy had told him, and Paul had gone to sweat, and come back with Jared.
Before the weekend ended, Paul had asked Jared if he’d like a new job.
“It’s a mosaic company that we’re starting, an interactive group of ideas and personalities that we want to build, a collection of disparate talents that can define answers and then come up with questions for people to ask about them. We want to work with the psychology of attractions, with the science of spin-doctoring, with virtual realities that can compact and condense amounts of information that would have staggered us in our childhoods.”
In a weekend, that quickly, Signy had sensed what Jared’s intense sense of life could add to what she and Paul were trying to do. Jared’s acute senses, his intense absorption in whatever he was doing made everything he did seem important.
“Yes, we’ll sell ideas, even products,” Paul said. “But there will be an integrity in it, and that integrity will come from knowledge of the subject.”
Jared had listened to all of this. He let Paul wind down, thought about the offer for a while, and said, “Yes.”
“Yes, what?” Paul had asked.
“Yes, I’ll work with you,” Jared said.
“Why?”
“I could use the money. You could use a keeper.”
The three of them had lived in the New Hampshire house for a while, and sometimes they had shared a bed.
Signy stared at the list of messages waiting for Jared’s attention. Just say what needs to be said, Signy decided. Jared will ask any questions he wants to ask. I’ll talk to him in a few hours, anyway.
[Signy] There’s a guy on the ship I met in Houston. Alan Campbell, works for Gulf Coast Intersystems. He’s the tall redhead that was in the mess yesterday. Can you find out why he’s there? By the way, I slept with him.
* * *
Signy slept hard and woke early. She wandered into the studio with her second cup of coffee and pulled up the floating raft, intending to exorcise her memories of it. Its orange fabric was faded with salt or sun. It had been hauled on the Siranui’s deck and shoved aside while Jared looked down at the dead sailor. The faded black lettering on its side puzzled her. Signy traced what curves she could, overlaid them, upped the contrast, and tried again.
She made another pot of coffee. Later, she’d get breakfast and a bath. Just after she finished this one series.
The tracings she made of the lines looked like Japanese calligraphy. Useless to her; Signy’s internal neural programming could complete the curve of an S, add the crossbars of an incomplete I, but Signy didn’t read Japanese. Maybe Paul had a program that would do it.
There were other marks below the Japanese. In a line. She searched out English letters, found them—O. O or zero, B, or P.
OBU.
Anything else was total guesswork. And Jared had powered up his skinthin rig.
Signy tried audio.
“Jared?” she asked. But Jared was recording only; Signy couldn’t talk to him until he chose to listen.
Across from him at a table, Anna de Brum spooned up the last traces of something tan and creamy from a glass dish. Anna wore a ginger yellow coverall and she had a bright red blossom behind her right ear. Dressing up for Jared, Signy figured. Anna laid down her spoon and moved the empty dish to the side of her tray.
“What are your plans for this afternoon?” Jared asked.
“I am planning to dissect some squid and weigh their ovaries,” Anna said. “Want to help?”
“No. What I’d really like to do is go diving.”
“Do you like that? Scuba diving?” Anna asked.
“Indeed I do,” Jared said.
Anna frowned. “I am so sorry,” Anna said. “But I have limitations on how many excuses I can make to go under. The ship’s divers will only go out if a net is tangled or some equipment malfunctions. And they would not like to take responsibility for you, I think. You could hitch a ride on one of the trawlers if there’s a short run scheduled. But all they do is fish, usually.” Anna looked at him over her the rim of her coffee mug. “You could take a nap.”
“Marshallese sleep on and off all day, don’t they?”
“On the atolls, yes,” Anna said. “Work a little, eat a little, sleep a little. Dream a lot.”
And they fear demons in the night, Signy had read, and will not sleep in the open. They sleep in stuffy rooms with the doors closed while Pacific winds cool the nights outside. They’re doing okay on food, so we hear. Sometimes they have mostly fish and coconuts, but at least they have fish, and coconuts.
“I guess I’ll go back to quarters and check in with my friends up north,” Jared said.
“I’ll be in the bio lab,” Anna said.
The corridors Jared traveled held overhead mazes of conduits, like the hallway in Atlanta. Signy watched Jared pull a small monitor close to the unmade bunk in Kihara’s cabin. Signy loved the look of the tight muscles of his ass, oh yes, but she reveled in the smooth motions of his shoulders, the precision of his sure touch. Jared’s grace was never that of excess effort.
He stretched out on the bunk’s rumpled off-white comforter, on mink brown sheets with a black stripe. Signals from his skinthin sent the feel of a ridge of bedding. He shrugged the comforter into a more comfortable contour. Signy and Jared were matched perfectly in height, something that had always delighted her; they met nose to nose and toe to toe.
Jared stuffed a pillow behind his neck and pulled up the message list.
Signy punched into ship’s comp and activated the mike on Kihara’s monitor. “Jared?”
“Hey.” Jared’s eyes were already scanning the screened messages; Signy saw the square letters through the cameras on his forehead.
“Oh,” Jared said. He looked a little startled, a little quizzical.
Signy sent her face to Kihara’s screen. She hadn’t combed her hair yet. She ran her fingers through it and tossed a loose curl behind her shoulder.
Signy watched Jared’s face through Kihara’s monitor cameras, and she saw her own face as Jared saw it on the flat screen of the little monitor. Signy’s face was square and her jaw always looked too determined to suit her. If she liked anything about her looks at all, she liked her eyes, true hazel, and not half bad if she remembered to wear mascara. But watching her own face was disorienting. Signy windowed her view of Kihara’s monitor to the left, so she would not be distracted by the motion of her own lips; she hated to watch herself talk.
“Tell Pilar I don’t get to dive today,” Jared said.
Signy watched him closely, his pale gray eyes, the motions of his lips. Knowing her own face so distant on the flatscreen, unable to send him touch or smell. As if I am a memory to him, she thought, as if we speak across time. His afternoon is my morning. He has lived this day and I’m just starting it.
I hate time.
Jared was thinking about something. He had that look.
“Pilar, now. You know, it occurs to me that we drive her into these messes,” Jared said. “That we always have. What we do is, we push Pilar out somewhere on a limb, and then we haul ass and get her out of trouble.”
No, Signy thought. We don’t. Yes, we do.
“That’s ugly, Jared.”
“People are ugly.”
“Then we should stop.”
“Maybe not. Maybe not. Think about it.”
Signy thought about it. What Jared said made sense. Edges had leapfrogged their way into an affluence that a younger Signy would have found frightening. A lot of their success came from Pilar’s tangential sense of creativity; Edges made her dreams real.
“I don’t think knowing it would change Pilar’s … structure,” Signy said.
“I like her structure just fine, myself,” Jared said.
“Yeah,” Signy said. And I enjoyed Alan’s, as I’ve enjoyed other “structures” now and again. That’s how we are, isn’t it? “Paul wants some numbers on tonnes of catch. I think I can pull them from ship’s comp but if you aren’t doing anything today—”
“I don’t know yet.” Jared was not fond of statistics.
“You’ll find something, it sounds like. I like Anna.”
“So do I.”
Who’s going to bring up Alan? Me, probably, Signy decided. “I pulled your views of the life raft last night and I’m trying to rebuild the lettering on it. OBU, OPU, something. And Paul is wondering if anybody’s ever going to take that corpse out of the freezer.”
“I’ll ask Anna if she’s heard anything. We signed Skylochori out of the sick-bay records, so it’s bridge business. I may not hear about it. It still has an unusual feel to it, though.” Jared pulled the pillow from behind his neck, punched it, and settled back again. His thighs felt heavy to him, to Signy as she/he let them rest on the bed.
“I’m getting weird, I guess,” Jared said. “The light, maybe, no day and night. I feel like a house officer again. But it’s only been a couple of days since this guy died. And I don’t know the ship’s policies on notifying families of sailors lost at sea.”
“If there is a family,” Signy said.
“Right. Now, about this Campbell?”
Signy heard herself speaking fast, with undertones of apology that she wished weren’t there. “Just if you run into him. I don’t know. Either he’s looking to build something for Tanaka or he’s looking for something in the tech Tanaka is using.”
“I don’t remember seeing any redheads.”
“You were in the early stages of a feeding frenzy. I’ll show you.”
Signy sent views of the short Japanese officer and Alan beside him.
“He’s a bony sucker,” Jared said. As if he wondered at Signy’s taste. “I’ve seen him before, I think.”
“He’s with Gulf Coast Intersystems,” Signy said. “We met him at a party.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Jared said. “If he’s still here. Are you going to stay in the studio for a while?”
“Most of the day,” Signy said.
“Stay with me, if you’d like. I’ll go see what I can find.”
“I’ll check in and out. Jared?”
He smiled at her. “Right here, pet.” With a halted motion of his arms, as if he would hug her.
“Right here, there.” Signy wasn’t going to tell him how scared she’d been when the virtuals got away from her, or tell him he was right to want to run like hell from whatever fears haunted him, for all fears seemed foolish in the warmth they could make together. This was just a job that needed doing, and Jared’s uneasiness, Signy’s terrors, were midnight vapors, best ignored until they vanished of their own improbability. Signy looked at Kihara’s screen and saw that she had put on an “everything’s fine” smile.
“Go to work, woman,” Jared said. “I need this screen to pull up the ship’s duty log.”
“That means I have to look through lists of dead fish for Paul, not you.”
“That’s right.”
Jared’s face vanished.
* * *
Light snow fell on the blanketed figures outside the store. Signy parked her runabout and walked to where they stood. One finger over her lips to hush, if she could, the thanks she by no means wanted, she handed each one of them a fifty.
Back home, Signy combed her hair and put on mascara. She brought a mug of hot chocolate into the studio.
Newly constructed and presumably virus free, black-and-white birds wheeled over gray ocean swells, meshed in the rhythms of Pilar’s music. They brought with them a sense of wonder, a feeling of the effortless power of tides and time.