Hot Sky at Midnight

15

toward sunset carpenter 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 threw 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 at a single snort Carpenter wished he’d worn a face-lung. But who expected to need one out at sea, where you were supposed to be able to breathe reasonably decent air?

He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that the smell was coming from the Calamari Maru’s own bones and tissues, that its hull and deck and superstructure and everything else were covered with rotting loathsome pustules bubbling with decay. But in fact there seemed nothing much wrong with the ship aside from general neglect and slovenliness: black stains on the deck, gray swirls of dust everywhere, some nasty rust-colored patches of ozone attack that needed work. The reek came from the squid themselves.

The heart of the ship was a vast tank, a huge squid-peeling factory occupying the whole mid-deck. Carpenter had seen ships like this one at anchor in the Port of Oakland— Samurai Industries ran dozens of them—but he had never thought much about what it would be like actually to be aboard one.

Looking down into the tank, he saw a nightmare world of marine life, battalions of hefty many-tentacled squid swimming in herds, big-eyed pearly boneless phantoms, scores of them shifting direction suddenly and simultaneously in their squiddy way. Glittering mechanical flails moved among them, seizing and slicing, efficiently locating and cutting out the nerve tissue, flushing the edible remainder toward the meat-packing facility at the far end of the tank. The stench was astonishing. The whole thing was a tremendous processing machine. With the onetime 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 so much of its food, harvesting the sea was essential. Carpenter understood that. But he hadn’t expected a squid ship to smell so 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 Carpenter, and this is Rennett, maintenance/ops. Where’s Kovalcik?”

“I’m Kovalcik,” the woman said.

Carpenter’s eyes widened. She seemed to be amused by his show of surprise.

Kovalcik was rugged and sturdy looking, more than average height for a woman, strong cheekbones, eyes set very far apart, expression very cool and controlled, but significant strain evident behind the control. She was wearing a sacklike jumpsuit of some coarse gray fabric. About thirty, Carpenter guessed. Her hair was black and close-cropped and her skin was fair, strangely fair, hardly any trace of Screen showing in it. He saw signs of sun damage, signs of ozone crackle, red splotches of burn. Two members of her crew stood behind her, also women, also jumpsuited, also oddly fair-skinned. Their skins 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 the trace of a European accent, hard to place, something that had originated east of Vienna but was otherwise unspecifiable.

“We’ll help out if we can,” Carpenter told her.

He perceived 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 anger and he felt a muscle quiver 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 jolly jamboree and getting a net instead.

“Some butchering operation you’ve got here,” Carpenter said.

Kovalcik said, a little curtly, “Meat is not all we produce. The squid we catch here has value as food, of course, but also we strip the nerve fibers, the axons, we bring 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, the largest kind of nerve fiber in the world, the most massive signal system of any animal there is. They are like single-cell computers, the squid axons. 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 companion-way. Carpenter 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 had an ominous hum. There was a new odor now, a tang of something chemical, sweet but not a pleasing kind of sweet, more a burned kind of sweet than anything else, cutting sharply across the heavy squid stench the way a piccolo might cut 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 that was hanging askew on its hinges. “We have drink first, yes?”

The size of the cabin bedazzled Carpenter, 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 visor, everything nicely spread out with actual floor space you could move around in. The visor had been kicked in. Kovalcik took a flask of Peruvian brandy from a cabinet and Carpenter 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 had said. But the air was rank and close despite the spaciousness of the cabin, thick soupy goop that was a struggle to breathe. Something’s wrong with the ventilating system too, Carpenter 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,” Carpenter 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 any more 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.”

Carpenter blinked and caught his breath up 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, her 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, Carpenter thought, feeling a little sick What have I walked into here?

“Sounds just like mutiny to me,” Rennett said.

Carpenter shushed her. Kovalcik was starting to bristle and there was no telling at what point that glacial poise of hers would turn into volcanic fury. Plainly she was very dangerous if she had managed to put her captain away, and most of her officers besides. Even these days mutiny was serious business. 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, not only for us, even for himself. 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. It was like razors coming out of the sky. 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.”

Carpenter tried to imagine what that was like, sailing around under the ferocious sky of these tropical latitudes without body armor. The daily injections withheld, the unshielded skin of these people exposed to the full fury of the greenhouse climate—the defective ozone layer, the punishing sun. 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 it 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 belowdeck 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,” Kovalcik said. “But what can we do? This is Captain Kohlberg.” Captain Kohlberg was heavy-set, Teutonic-looking, groggy-eyed. “He is calm now, but only because we sedate him,” Kovalcik explained. “We sedate all of them, fifty cc of omnipax every day. 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,” Carpenter 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?”

Kovalcik gave him a look of sudden strange intensity, fierce, compelling, unsettling.

“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.”

Carpenter 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 who had been pushed off their ship by mutineers. Kyocera-Merck men at that. Aid and succor to the great corporate enemy? The head Samurai Industries agent in Frisco would really love it when he came chugging into port with five K-M men on board. He’d especially want to hear that Carpenter had done it for humanitarian reasons.

Besides, he had no room for them. 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,” Carpenter said carefully. “Aside from the legalities of the thing, we’ve got no space for extra personnel. We barely have enough room for ourselves.”

“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 provide 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—”

She didn’t go on.

“Otherwise?” Carpenter 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 slow, thickly accented English, the words painfully framed: “Help. She will kill us all.”

“Delirium?” Carpenter said.

Kovalcik’s eyes grew even chillier. Drawing an ultrasonic syringe from a cabinet in the wall, she slapped it against Kohlberg’s arm and pressed. There was a small buzzing sound. Kohlberg subsided into sleep. Snuffling snores rose from his bunk.

Kovalcik smiled. Now that the captain was unconscious again 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 merely telling him: This is the situation, you have heard the story, the ball is now in your court, Captain Carpenter.

What a stinking squalid mess, Carpenter thought.

But he was greatly surprised 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 every one of them, for the whole damned fucking poisoned heat-blighted world they had all been born into. 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. They had rucked the world in one long merry carnival of rape, and then had tossed us the battered remains. And never even had known what they were doing. And wouldn’t have given a shit about it if they had.

Then the moment passed. What the hell could he do? Did Kovalcik think he was Jesus Christ? He had no room for these people. He had no extra Screen or food. And the basic thing was that this was none of his business. San Francisco was waiting for its iceberg. The berg was melting even as they dithered here. It was time to move along. Tell her anything, just get out of here.

“All right,” Carpenter said. “I see your problem. I’m not entirely sure I can help out, but I’ll do what I can. I’ll check our supplies and let you know what we’re able to do. Okay?” He looked at Rennett, who for a time seemed to have disappeared into some alternate dimension. Rennett had returned, now. She was staring at Carpenter in a coldly curious way, as though trying to see into his skull and read his mind. Her expression was challenging, truculent. She wanted to know how he was going to cope with this.

So did he, as a matter of fact.

Kovalcik said, “You will give me your answer this evening?”

“First thing in the morning,” said Carpenter. “Best I can do. Too late tonight for working it all out.”

“You will call me, then.”

“Yes. I’ll call you.”

To Rennett he said, “Come on. Let’s get back to the ship.”