The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel (30 page)

She slugged back what was left in her white-and-blue-striped
Anemone
mug, and poured it full from a square dark bottle. Rum, Sara saw. “All for one,” Tehiyah said, lifting the brimming mug, and the dark liquid topped its rim and spattered the table as the very air staggered. “To fight to the end, like Lars says. Drink, and pass.”

“Absolutely,” said Madsen, and Bodine murmured something Sara didn’t catch. The actress tilted it back for a long swallow, then handed it to Eddi. Who set the camera aside, hesitated, then took it. Her throat worked. Then she doubled, coughing. “Leave some for us,” Bodine said, and Lars chuckled. They drank next.

The mug came to Sara. She looked down into the black fluid. What they were celebrating, or ratifying, she wasn’t sure. But the vote had been taken. She raised it to her lips. The hot vaporish sweetness opened her sinuses. Her throat, her stomach, craved its warmth, its lethean forgetfulness.

Instead she lowered it without tasting. Saying nothing, just passing it on to Tehiyah. Who threw her a glance sharp as shattered glass. She lifted it in both hands, and set it down empty, exhaling, her eyes closed.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, everyone,” Lars said. “I’m not Dru Perrault. But I’ll try to do a good job.”

“You’ll do fine,” Dorée said, opening those tawny eyes to look directly into the camera. Smiling into the unwinking ruby, as
Anemone
moaned and crackled around her, whispering through the endless swells.

15

The Holocaust

The wind gusted and ebbed, but gradually blew harder, until they had to run under mere scraps of sail. Madsen held a southeast course as Bodine, secluded in the forepeak, kept at the search. The self-steerer had shown long before that it could not handle such enormous and unpredictable forces. They couldn’t steer from the dome: the ice lay too low to spot. Human eyes had to blink into the wind to find it, human minds had to anticipate the next rolling crest, human muscles had to strain to evade the frigid mountains that toppled and fell with the thunder of avalanches. The days dissolved into an endless round of watches and miserable, half-awake bunk time. Sara and Eddi and Lars and Hy took turn and turn about as the gusts came hard and the granite seas grew out of the fog behind them, towered, and then collapsed, shooting forward in violent topplings that sometimes submerged the watchstanders beneath murky, bubble-lined green. Sometimes they could manage only half an hour before sagging exhausted, arms screaming, minds blasted numb. But always
Anemone
shook off the sea’s claws, rolled upright, and breached again to the cinder-dim sky under hurtling clouds.

Two days after the conference Sara twisted as Eddi slid past her to the helm. The smaller woman’s arms bulged to take the strain Sara released. Without thought, from habit, ritual, their hands sought each other, and she felt or at least imagined through wool and rubber the disappearing-faint heat of live flesh in the midst of immense cold. Then released it as the smaller woman concentrated on the compass. Sara crumpled, nearly falling, unlocking her attention from the gray wool-skeins that blew low over the wave-tops, the writhing, troubling figures that after anguished staring had begun to haunt the banks of fog.

She picked her way down to the salon and collapsed in a weak-kneed heap on the wet deck. Water surged back and forth. No one had time to clean now. Black strands spidered across white composite, and a choking smell permeated the freezing air. A sea thundered overhead, hammering the hull so hard it flexed, cracking and popping as it bent and sprang back. How many times, she wondered, before resin fatigued. How long before carbon composite and stainless steel gave way, the mast toppled, the keel pin snapped. Nothing endured forever.

Nothing save stubborn resolve. The Dane hunched at the nav table hour after hour, the screen of the chartplotter glowing multicolored in the dim. From time to time Bodine would drag aft, metal and plastic clattering against stanchion and settee, and the two would confer over a printout. Only now and then could they pick up the electronic murmurs of their quarry. Bodine said darkly that the Japanese must be minimizing their transmissions. Kimura sat with them over the charts, all three reeling, eyes red-rimmed, lips slack. And gradually the emissions grew louder. Closer. They spread across a narrow arc of bearing Bodine said indicated they were closing in on a fleet that moved now not as a colony but as a single organism.

The clicks on the radio expanded into the burble of distant conversation, then discernible speech. Kimura huddled, eavesdropping. Bearings and longitudes went onto the chart and lines were drawn and the limits of the ice were debated.
Anemone
plunged and rose through the olivine seas. And those who ministered to her slept and rose and fought, and tried to sleep again, lying awake as the freezing waves tried to crush her under. And failed. And failed. And failed again.

But someday, Sara thought, nursing a mug of reheated cocoa without cream or sugar, something would go bang, or someone would misjudge one of those racing mountains, and over she’d topple. End over end, snapping spreaders and sheets and the long bones of those within. Or perhaps simply cut into one of these gigantic waves at a deeper angle than usual, and never emerge.

Her lids drifted closed. The boat lurched; she snapped awake as the overturned mug cascaded chocolate dark as blood over the tabletop, running first toward her, then hesitating, pausing, recoiling as the bow surged upward. She snatched a damp towel.

Bodine, at the opening of the forepeak. Hanging by long arms, legless, brachiopoid. He stared with eyes like burned-out holes. “Lars up here?”

“Haven’t seen him. Probably aft.” The Dane had taken Perrault’s cabin without comment, simply moved his sleeping bag in.

“Mind getting him up? I’m picking up sonar.”

“Sonar? Not radar?”

“You heard what I said.” He turned his gaze away, still hanging there as the boat romped. Kimura peered sleepily out from behind blue cloth, gaze unfocused; then the curtain twitched closed again.

She blinked and rubbed her face with the towel, wincing at the rancid mildew stink. Then reached her way aft, hunched to keep her center of gravity low.

Madsen was snoring. She shook him awake and told him what Bodine wanted. He stared blinking, lids crusted with brown matter, blond beard stained dark. His look was sunk away, as if she stared down at him through many fathoms of seething brit. He unzipped the dirty flap of his sleeping bag and worked chilblained feet into sea boots. “Be right out,” he mumbled.

When she followed him into the forepeak, only gradually could she make out the veteran in his accustomed seat. “What you got?” Madsen asked. Triggering a keep-silent, warding-off gesture as the bent figure glared down unblinking at the screen.

Finally it straightened. “Sonar. Close-range, high-frequency pings. Some low subsonics, too,” he muttered.

“What kind? What do you mean?”

“The kind ice makes. That full-spectrum grinding. And a funny clicking … not really sure what that is.”

Sara rubbed her face, remembering the colliding chaos that had all but swallowed
Anemone
; that even yet held their captain’s body. If the creatures of sea and sky had not yet picked his skeleton clean. Bodine oozed a knob around, spiraling in on a flickering spoke that danced, danced, slowly solidifying. “Can’t be far off. Not getting it this loud.”

“How far? How many?”

“All I can say is, more than one. We’ll see them today, we hold this speed. So best get ready, figure out what we’re going to do.”

Madsen nodded slowly.

*   *   *

Preparations took several hours, including a long time just trying to get the engines running. They started, but shut down after two or three minutes. Finally, crawling and worming through the engine room, she and Bodine discovered why. The strainers that filtered their cooling water were frozen into bronze-jacketed popsicles. As he chipped at them, and she carried boiling water from the galley, Madsen was supervising preparations on deck.

They heard the detonations from far off in the fog. Low-pitched booms, spaced minutes apart. By then they were on deck, the sail reefed hard as they slid between spaced swells. Sara balanced gripping the forestay as
Anemone
dipped and rose, scanning the sea as it emerged like rippled lavender silk from low-hanging fog. Madsen had rigged a black wire along the stay’s leading edge, running all the way to the masthead. He’d cautioned them to keep their hands away from it.

“Ice,” she shouted, and threw a glance back to make sure Lars, at the wheel now, heard. He lifted a hand. They hissed past a corroded, slowly rolling wedge of seamed malachite and ultramarine as it heaved, surrounded by a mass of greenish foam and smaller bobbing bits. A thin transparent slick rolled to and fro beneath her boots, mixed with ice fallen from the rigging. Her heart hammered in her throat. Her fingers clutched and loosened on the icy stay as another detonation boomed out, closer, though she could see nothing.

The fog thinned. They slid past another slowly heaving raft of ice to emerge into air not clear, yet not completely impenetrable.

The fog seemed to rise, to stream upward, revealing like an ascending stage curtain a scene miles across, littered with floating bergies, backdropped with the icy rampart of a great flat-topped floe. It shone like pink quartz in the reddish radiance of a low-burning sun layered with thin strips of cloud like wrappings on an infected wound. In the foreground, dozens of dark shapes huddled low in the water, herded together and facing outward, as around and among them sliced the swift hulls of the kill craft. Far off to the south, a ghostly castle rose above the fog that hung close to the sea in that quarter: the many-storied upperworks of a much larger ship than any they’d seen thus far.

“Oh my God,” Tehiyah said, from a few feet aft. Sara gazed without speaking, frozen to the stay. As they watched a
thing
darted from the bow of one of the killers, and a thin instantaneous line drew itself across air and sea. The boom echoed away into the fog. The speedily extended line arrested with a second, muted detonation, piercing a shining-black mass that instantly recoiled, flukes and tail lashing dark water into a welter that within seconds was tinged pink. Behind and beyond it a second killer rotated in swift tight circles, fastened by a second line to something beneath. That line vibrated, churning white where it met black sea, yet showing nothing of that which fought for its life below.

“Get set,” Madsen called from aft. Both women flinched and half turned. Sara wanted to look away, but couldn’t.

Half a mile distant the flurry where the line led down turned saffron, then bloody. The minke emerged, its slim sharp shape queerly small to the eye after the more massive rights and humpbacks. Still fighting, but obviously weakening. The ship ranged up to it, towering above it. A tiny figure bent over the gunwale, aiming down. The distant pop of a rifle, negligible, almost comic after the deeper detonation of the harpoon gun, snapped over the water. Then another.

She let go a shuddering breath and took another, deep, trying to steady herself as with a rustling clatter the main shook out its reefings and the deck beneath her heeled, picking up speed. Across the nearly flat water, lee’d by the masses of ice that half ringed it, were scattered smaller bits that were nonetheless large enough to punch through
Anemone
’s hull.

Behind her the remaining crew were taking their positions. They wore hard hats and flotation vests, exposure suits and safety harnesses. Eddi snapped a carabiner to lash herself to the mast, cameras dangling like cavalry pistols on fluorescent lanyards. Hy and Tehiyah were laying out hanks of mooring line. In the forward hatch Bodine weighed tear gas grenades, one in each hand. Their gazes met. He called, “
Maru Number 1
, off to port. Another killer to starboard. Can’t see who yet. That big one off by the berg, that’s the factory ship.
Ishinomaki Maru
.” He hefted one of the gray canisters. “Know how to use these?”

“No.”

“Pull this pin and throw. Fast and hard. Get it up on their deck, as close to the pilothouse as you can.”

“You throw, Mick. I have to watch for ice.”

“Hold on, we’re coming around,” Eddi called, apparently relaying word from aft. Sara braced her boots.
Anemone
heeled. With a hoarse cough the engines began to hum, and she accelerated in earnest. Sara sank to her knees, clutching the rail of the bow pulpit, bracing her knees against the deck as it tilted farther and farther, trying to cant her off into the greenblack sea that rushed past faster and faster only a few feet below. She scrabbled and only barely caught herself before she slid over.

When she looked up again the whale was almost on them. Dead, or perhaps still dying; rolling, with the sea breaking over its bloody, blown-open back. The harpoon had penetrated only shallowly before exploding, scooping a hole the size of a wheelbarrow. Blubber and flesh was peeled back, layers beneath layers, raw red and yellow beneath graphite, revealing deep within the pumping bellows of blue-veined lungs. A spring of blood welled up in pulses and lapped like a pool and ran down its sides, turning the water around the dying creature a dull red through which sinuous shapes maneuvered and twisted, bathing in scarlet slantwise prisms of sunlight that searched the green depths. Half turned on its side, pointed head parallel to the boat’s course, the animal’s tiny eye blinked up as
Anemone
rippled past, pressed by a cloud of blue and bronze and white. When she looked back Eddi had the camera on it. “You’ll be the last one to die,” Madsen yelled as they left it in their wake.

Ahead, other minkes cut from right to left, breaching to breathe in quick snorts that left puffs of vapor shredding into the mist. She caught their scent, heavy, fishy, with something else all of itself, a rich smell like fresh-turned earth that once sensed could never be forgotten.

Behind and above her the main refilled with a shuddering snap and
Anemone
leaned in the opposite direction. The engines were whining now. Another detonation rolled across the uneasy sea, and she lifted her eyes to see one of the kill ships lined fast to yet another writhing victim. Its grayblue hull and white pilothouse and black stack jarred into recognition with a physical shock that quivered in her stomach like nausea. She called back, “Is that
Number 3
?”