Collected Short Fiction, page 1244
Carter signaled to Nakata, who was standing way down fore by his control console.
“Hooks away!” Carter called. “Sharp! Sharp!”
There came the groaning sound of the grapple-hatch opening and the deep rumbling of the hook gimbals. Somewhere deep in the belly of the ship, immense mechanisms were swinging around, moving into position. The berg sat motionless in the calm sea.
Then the entire ship shivered as the first hook came shooting up into view. It hovered overhead, a tremendous taloned thing filling half the sky, black against the shining brightness of the air. Nakata hit the keys again, and the hook, having reached the apex of its curve, spun downward with slashing force, heading for the breast of the berg.
It hit and dug and held. The berg recoiled, quivered, rocked. The shower of loose ice came tumbling off the upper ledges. As the impact of the hooking was transmitted to the vast hidden mass of the berg undersea, the entire thing bowed forward a little farther than Carter had been expecting, making a nasty sucking noise against the water, and when it pulled back again, a geyser came spuming up about 20 meters.
Down by the bow, Nakata was making his I-got-you gesture at the berg, the middle finger rising high.
A cold wind was blowing from the berg now. It was like the exhalation of some huge wounded beast, an aroma of ancient times, a fossil-breath wind.
They moved on a little farther along the berg’s flank.
“Hook two,” Carter told him.
The berg was almost stable again now. Carter, watching from his viewing tower by the aft rail, waited for the rush of pleasure and relief that came from a successful claiming, but this time it wasn’t there. All he felt was impatience, an eagerness to get all four hooks in and start chugging on back to the Golden Gate.
The second hook flew aloft, hovered, plunged, struck, bit.
A second time, the berg slammed the water, and a second time, the sea jumped and shook. Carter had just a moment to catch a glimpse of the other ship popping around like a floating cork and wondered if that ice tongue they found so cozy were going to break off and sink them. It would have been smarter of the Calamari Maru to anchor somewhere else. But to hell with them. They’d been warned.
The third hook was easier.
“Four,” Carter called. One last time, a grappling iron flew through the air, whipping off at a steep angle to catch the far side of the berg over the top, and then they had it, the entire monstrous floating island of ice snaffled and trussed.
Toward sunset, Carter left Hitchcock in charge of the trawler and went over to the Calamari Maru in the sleek little silvery kayak that they used as the ship’s boat. He took Rennett with him.
The stink of the other ship reached his nostrils long before he went scrambling up the gleaming woven-monofilament ladder that they had thrown over the side for him: a bitter, acrid reek, a miasma so dense that it was almost visible. Breathing it was something like inhaling all of Cleveland in a single snort. Carter wished he’d worn a facelung. But who expected to need one out at sea, where you were supposed to be able to breathe reasonably decent air?
The Calamari Maru didn’t look too good, either. At one quick glance, he picked up a sense of general neglect and slovenliness: black stains on the deck, swirls of dust everywhere, some nasty rust-colored patches of ozone attack that needed work. The reek, though, came from the squids themselves.
The heart of the ship was a vast tank, a huge squid-peeling factory occupying the entire mid-deck. Carter had been on one once before, long ago, when he was a trainee. Samurai Industries ran dozens of them. He looked down into the tank and saw battalions of hefty squids swimming in herds, big-eyed pearly phantoms, scores of them shifting direction suddenly and simultaneously in their squiddy way. Glittering mechanical flails moved among them, seizing and slicing, cutting out the nerve tissue, flushing the edible remainder toward the meat-packing facility. The stench was astonishing. The entire thing was a tremendous processing machine. With the one-time farming heartland of North America and temperate Europe now worthless desert, and the world dependent on the thin, rocky soil of northern Canada and Siberia for its crops, harvesting the sea was essential. But the smell was awful. He fought to keep from gagging.
“You get used to it,” said the woman who greeted him when he clambered aboard. “Five minutes, you won’t notice.”
“Let’s hope so,” he said. “I’m Captain Carter, and this is Rennett, maintenance/ops. Where’s Kovalcik?”
“I’m Kovalcik,” the woman said.
His eyes widened. She seemed to be amused by his reaction.
Kovalcik was rugged and sturdy-looking, more than average height, strong cheekbones, eyes set very far apart, expression very cool and controlled, but strain evident behind the control. She was wearing a sacklike jump suit of some coarse gray fabric. About 30, Carter guessed. Her hair was black and close-cropped and her skin was fair, strangely fair, hardly any trace of Screen showing. He saw signs of sun damage, signs of ozone, crackly, red splotches of burn. Two members of her crew stood behind her, also women, also jump-suited, also oddly fair-skinned. Their skin didn’t look so good, either.
Kovalcik said, “We are very grateful you came. There is bad trouble on this ship.” Her voice was flat. She had just a trace of a European accent, hard to place.
“We’ll help out if we can,” Carter told her.
He became aware now that they had carved a chunk out of his berg and grappled it up onto the deck, where it was melting into three big aluminum runoff tanks. It couldn’t have been a millionth of the total berg mass, not a ten millionth, but seeing it gave him a quick little stab of proprietary fury and he felt a muscle flicker in his cheek. That reaction didn’t go unnoticed, either. Kovalcik said quickly, “Yes, water is one of our problems. We have had to replenish our supply this way. There have been some equipment failures lately. You will come to the captain’s cabin now? We must talk of what has happened, what must now be done.”
She led him down the deck, with Rennett and the two crew women following along behind.
The Calamari Maru was pretty impressive. It was big and long and sleek, built somewhat along the lines of a squid itself, a jet-propulsion job that gobbled water into colossal compressors and squirted it out behind. That was one of the many low-fuel solutions to maritime transport problems that had been worked out for the sake of keeping CO2 output down in these difficult times. Immense things like flying buttresses ran down the deck on both sides. These, Kovalcik explained, were squid lures, covered with bioluminescent photophores: You lowered them into the water and they gave off light that mimicked the glow of the squids’ own bodies, and the slithery tentacular buggers came jetting in from vast distances, expecting a great jamboree and getting a net instead.
“Some butchering operation you got here,” Carter said.
Kovalcik said a little curtly, “Meat is not all we produce. The squids we catch here have value as food, of course, but also we strip the nerve fibers, we take them back to the mainland, they are used in all kinds of biosensor applications. They are very large, those fibers, a hundred times as thick as ours. They are like single-cell computers. You have a thousand processors aboard your ship that use squid fiber, do you know? Follow me, please. This way.”
They went down a ramp, along a narrow companionway. Carter heard thumpings and pingings in the walls. A bulkhead was dented and badly scratched. The lights down here were dimmer than they ought to be and the fixtures hummed ominously. There was a new odor now, a tang of something chemical, sweet but not a pleasing kind of sweet, more a burnt kind of sweet than anything else, cutting sharply across the boom of drums. Rennett shot him a somber glance. This ship was a mess, all right.
“Captain’s cabin is here,” Kovalcik said, pushing back a door hanging askew on its hinges. “We have drink first, yes?”
The size of the cabin amazed Carter after all those weeks bottled up in his little hole on the Tonopah Maru. It looked as big as a gymnasium. There was a table, a desk, shelving, a comfortable bunk, a sanitary unit, even an entertainment screen, everything nicely spread out with actual floor space you could move around in. The screen had been kicked in. Kovalcik took a flask of Peruvian brandy from a cabinet. Carter nodded and she poured three stiff ones. They drank in silence. The squid odor wasn’t so bad in here, or else he was getting used to it, just as she’d said. But the air was rank and close despite the spaciousness of the cabin, thick, soupy stuff that was a struggle to breathe. Something’s wrong with the ventilating system, too, Carter thought.
“You see the trouble we have,” said Kovalcik.
“I see there’s been trouble, yes.”
“You don’t see half. You should see command room, too. Here, have more brandy, then I take you there.”
“Never mind the brandy,” Carter said. “How about telling me what the hell’s been going on aboard this ship?”
“First come see command room,” Kovalcik said.
The command room was one level down from the captain’s cabin. It was an absolute wreck.
The place was all but burned out. There were laser scars on every surface and gaping wounds in the structural fabric of the ceiling. Glittering strings of program cores were hanging out of data cabinets like broken necklaces, like spilled guts. Everywhere there were signs of some terrible struggle, some monstrous, insane civil war that had raged through the most delicate regions of the ship’s mind centers.
“It is all ruined,” Kovalcik said. “Nothing works anymore except the squid-processing programs, and as you see, those work magnificently, going on and on, the nets and flails and cutters and so forth. But everything else is damaged. Our water synthesizer, the ventilators, our navigational equipment, much more. We are making repairs, but it is very slow.”
“I can imagine it would be. You had yourselves one hell of a party here, huh?”
“There was a great struggle. From deck to deck, from cabin to cabin. It became necessary to place Captain Kohlberg under restraint and he and some of the other officers resisted.”
Carter blinked and caught his breath short at that. “What the fuck are you saying? That you had a mutiny aboard this ship?”
For a moment, the charged word hung between them like a whirling sword.
Then Kovalcik said, voice flat as ever, “When we had been at sea for a while, the captain became like a crazy man. It was the heat that got to him, the sun, maybe the air. He began to ask impossible things. He would not listen to reason. And so he had to be removed from command for the safety of all. There was a meeting and he was put under restraint. Some of his officers objected and they had to be put under restraint, too.”
Son of a bitch, Carter thought, feeling a little sick. What have I walked into here?
“Sounds just like mutiny to me,” Rennett said.
Carter shushed her. This had to be handled delicately. To Kovalcik he said, “They’re still alive, the captain, the officers?”
“Yes. I can show them to you.”
“That would be a good idea. But first maybe you ought to tell me some more about these grievances you had.”
“That doesn’t matter now, does it?”
“To me it does. I need to know what you think justifies removing a captain.”
She began to look a little annoyed. “There were many things, some big, some small. Work schedules, crew pairings, the food allotment. Everything worse and worse for us each week. Like a tyrant, he was. A Caesar. Not at first, but gradually, the change in him. It was sun poisoning he had, the craziness that comes from too much heat on the brain. He was afraid to use very much Screen, you see, afraid that we would run out before the end of the voyage, so he rationed it very tightly, for himself, for us, too. That was one of our biggest troubles, the Screen.” Kovalcik touched her cheeks, her forearms, her wrists, where the skin was pink and raw. “You see how I look? We are all like that. Kohlberg cut us to half ration, then half that. The sun began to eat us. The ozone. We had no protection, do you see? He was so frightened there would be no Screen later on that he let us use only a small amount every day, and we suffered, and so did he, and he got crazier as the sun worked on him, and there was less Screen all the time. He had it hidden, I think. We have not found it yet. We are still on quarter ration.”
Carter tried to imagine what that was like, sailing around under the ferocious sky without body armor. The daily injections withheld, the unshielded skin of these people exposed to the full fury of the greenhouse climate. Could Kohlberg really have been so stupid, or so loony? But there was no getting around the raw pink patches on Kovalcik’s skin.
“You’d like us to let you have a supply of Screen, is that it?” he asked uneasily.
“No. We would not expect that of you. Sooner or later, we will find where Kohlberg has hidden it.”
“Then what is it you do want?”
“Come,” Kovalcik said. “Now I show you the officers.”
The mutineers had stashed their prisoners in the ship’s infirmary, a stark, humid room far below deck with three double rows of bunks along the wall and some nonfunctioning medical mechs between them. Each of the bunks but one held a sweat-shiny man with a week’s growth of beard. They were conscious, but not very. Their wrists were tied.
“It is very disagreeable for us, keeping them like this,” Kolvacik said. “But what can we do? This is Captain Kohlberg.” He was heavy-set, Teutonic-looking, groggy-eyed. “He is calm now, but only because we sedate him. We sedate all of them, fifty c.c.s of omnipax. But it is a threat to their health, the constant sedation. And in any case, the drugs, we are running short. Another few days and then we will have none, and it will be harder to keep them restrained, and if they break free, there will be war on this ship again.”
“I’m not sure if we have any omnipax on board,” Carter said. “Certainly not enough to do you much good for long.”
“That is not what we are asking, either,” said Kovalcik.
“What are you asking, then?”
“These five men, they threaten everybody’s safety. They have forfeited the right to command. This I could show, with playbacks of the time of struggle on this ship. Take them.”
“What?”
“Take them onto your ship. They must not stay here. These are crazy men. We must rid ourselves of them. We must be left to repair our ship in peace and do the work we are paid to do. It is a humanitarian thing, taking them. You are going back to San Francisco with the iceberg? Take them, these troublemakers. They will be no danger to you. They will be grateful for being rescued. But here they are like bombs that must sooner or later go off.”
Carter looked at her as if she were a bomb that had already gone off. Rennett had simply turned away, covering what sounded like a burst of hysterical laughter by forcing a coughing fit.
That was all he needed, making himself an accomplice in this thing, obligingly picking up a bunch of officers pushed off their ship by mutineers. Kyocera-Merck men at that. Aid and succor to the great corporate enemy? The Samurai Industries agent in Frisco would really love it when he came steaming into port with five K-M men on board. He’d especially want to hear that Carter had done it for humanitarian reasons.
Besides, where the fuck were these men going to sleep? On deck between the spigots? Should he pitch a tent on the iceberg, maybe? What about feeding them, for Christ’s sake? What about Screen? Everything was calibrated down to the last molecule.
“I don’t think you understand our situation,” Carter said carefully. “Aside from the legalities of the thing, we’ve got no space for extra personnel. We barely have enough for us.”
“It would be just for a short while, no? A week or two?”
“I tell you we’ve got every millimeter allotted. If God Himself wanted to come on board as a passenger, we’d have a tough time figuring out where to put Him. You want technical help patching your ship back together, we can try to do that. We can even let you have some supplies. But taking five men aboard—”
Kovalcik’s eyes began to look a little wild. She was breathing very hard now. “You must do this for us! You must! Otherwise—”
“Otherwise?” Carter prompted.
All he got from her was a bleak stare, no friendlier than the green-streaked ozone-crisp sky.
“Hilfe,” Kohlberg muttered just then, stirring unexpectedly in his bunk.
“What was that?”
“It is delirium,” said Kovalcik.
“Hilfe. Hilfe. In Gottes Namen, hilfe!” And then, in thickly accented English, the words painfully framed: “Help. She will kill us all.”
“Delirium?” Carter said.
Kovalcik’s eyes grew even chillier. Drawing an ultrasonic syringe from a cabinet in the wall, she slapped it against Kohlberg’s arm. There was a small buzzing sound. Kohlberg subsided into sleep. Snuffling snores rose from his bunk. Kovalcik smiled. She seemed to be recovering her self-control. “He is a madman. You see what my skin is like. What his madness has done to me, has done to every one of us. If he got loose, if he put the voyage in jeopardy—yes, yes, we would kill him. We would kill them all. It would be only self-defense, you understand me? But it must not come to that.” Her voice was icy. You could air-condition an entire city with that voice. “You were not here during the trouble. You do not know what we went through. We will not go through it again. Take these men from us, Captain.”
She stepped back, folding her arms across her chest. The room was very quiet, suddenly, except for the pingings and thumpings from the ship’s interior and an occasional snore out of Kohlberg. Kovalcik was completely calm again, the ferocity and iciness no longer visible. As though she were simply telling him, “This is the situation, the ball is now in your court, Captain Carter.”
What a stinking, squalid mess, Carter thought.
But he was startled to find, when he looked behind the irritation he felt at having been dragged into this, a curious sadness where he would have expected anger to be. Despite everything, he found himself flooded with surprising compassion for Kovalcik, for Kohlberg, for all of them, for the whole fucking poisoned, heat-blighted world. Who had asked for any of this—the heavy green sky, the fiery air, the daily need for Screen, the million frantic improvisations that made continued life on earth possible? Not us. Our great-great-grandparents had, maybe, but not us. Only they’re not here to know what it’s like, and we are.
