2020 (6 page)

The Eurasian girl was kneeling on deck, scrubbing corrosion from a winch with a wire brush. The boat was still grimy, black-streaked along the waterline from the frayed truck tires used as fenders, but metal fittings shone along the route of the starboard running rigging.

“It’s a start,” Voorst said.

She grinned nervously. On the mast she’d posted the Provisional Seaworthiness Certificate he’d left on deck the night before. “I’m obliged for the thirty days,” she said.

Voorst nodded toward the scow hull blocking the channel. “That hulk should be towed out tomorrow.”

Now her smile relaxed. “F’ntastic,” she said. “That’s the one problem I could never solve. I’ve got propulsion—a set of metal film sails that’ve never seen wind, a cranky methanol inboard. . . .”

He couldn’t quite place her accent: was she a refugee from the fall of Hong Kong? He was impressed, as she went on, by what she knew about sailing, by her ambition to take the boat out single-handed. “What are you going to do for a rudder?” he asked.

She told him the original rudder was at the bottom of the harbor, just below the stern. “It’s a long story. My old boyfriend . . .”

“. . . left when the fire started on the QE III,” Voorst told her. “You can see that on the VNN tape.”

Now it was her turn to be surprised. “I’m the one who found this boat to begin with,” she said. “Stuck this way, filled with a dead man’s kip. All Dana did was lose the rudder when he tried to make room for a stabilizing vane he never did attach.”

“So what are you going to do about the rudder?”

“Dive for it,” she answered, grimacing at the slimy water.

Voorst nodded. “You’re going to need some help.”

She flushed, started to say no, I don’t, but something in her peripheral vision caught her attention. Voorst tracked her line of sight to a moving group a hundred meters away, above the debris-strewn beach, near a barricaded ramp to the docks: an Army patrol was prodding along fifty or sixty people dressed in the dingy old clothes of the homeless. The sergeant sauntering behind them hefted on his shoulder the distinctive barbed shape of a burn gun, the cruelest of the weapons.

Now the infrared gun was waved, in a familiar way, at Voorst. He spit into the dark water.

“I’m sorry I thought you were one of them,” the Eurasian girl said.

Voorst ran his hand over a piece of coaming, thinking it just needed to be scraped, sanded, and coated to look like new. During the night he’d dreamed of the
Swan
far out at sea, beyond the greasy slicks and floating carcasses, heeled over in a stiff, open-ocean breeze. “Well, if you need some help. I’d like to see this boat saved, see? I’d like to see you sail out of here.”

“Look,” she said, still watching the patrol on shore, “those soldiers make me nervous. You might as well come aboard.”

Voorst stepped over a sagging lifeline and followed her down the companionway, not expecting much. But he found antique wood paneling, blue curtains shading the ports, a spotless galley. The beamy cabin was a museum of old-time comforts like teak book racks and built-in lockers. From the oversize electronics at the aft Nav station he guessed that the boat had last been seriously cruised fifteen years before, around the turn of the 21st Century. “My name’s Rawley Voorst,” he told her.

“So I gathered from the notice. I’m Tiana Parker.”

He saw the T-shirt she’d been wearing the previous night on the forepeak bunk. “Isn’t it kind of dangerous to wear Nomad blue?”

She shook her head. “They’re just people without places to live, for Christ’s sake.”

“Or people who set fires with Lydex.”

“If you believe that . . .”

“It’s not a religion,” he said, “It’s not a matter of belief.” He realized he was repeating sentences he’d heard electronically, and caught his breath. “You must watch CBS or VNN. You must listen to journalists like Tachikara. . . .”

“I suppose you believe everything you see on VNN?”

“No . . . This is what I mean: they can manipulate the screens, but an anchorman like Tachikara with a reputation to protect, he’s not going to fabricate . . .”

“Unless he’s a construct, unless he’s fabricated himself by the Crays at VNN every day. Tako Tachikara. Christ.”

He’d heard rumors. “VNN,” he sighed.

“The technology’s a miracle,” she admitted, pulling off her workshirt, uncovering a sleeveless top and skin that glowed gold in the warm cabin light. “You know what would be splendid? Get some of that equipment, put it to use for human things. You know, people’s memories . . . Make a holotape of teaching a child how to walk, or fixing this boat up.” She leaned back against a bulkhead. “But they never let ordinary people get their hands on the equipment.”

“They know how dangerous it would be to turn an unedited camera on the cardboard shacks of East L.A. . . .” In the silence after he spoke he could feel the hull bob gently from some disturbance in the harbor.

“I’d be very grateful if you did help me,” she said.

He thought he heard someone knocking around outside. “What do you need?” he asked her.

“For starters, do you know how to mend an electronic compass?”

Footsteps sounded above on deck. Voorst pulled himself up the companionway to find that the weapon-waving sergeant who’d been hiking on the shore, and who’d made his way, alone, across the littered beach, through a barricade, and across a series of jammed-together decks to land on the
Swan
’s, was someone he knew.

“Hi,” Stringer said, looking past him to the girl, smiling unctuously. “Hi, zimmer.”

“Jesus,” Voorst said. “You’re gonna get your other ear bitten off.”

“Gimme a break,” Stringer said. “I’ve been up all night. My own men are startin’ to smell as bad as the people we move.” He smiled at Tiana, looking down into the cabin. “Nice in there.”

She only nodded, fear in her eyes.

“We’re here to protect you, see. I’m Sergeant Stringer. Where you goin’ when Rawley throws you off your boat?”

“I wasn’t aware he was,” she said.

Stringer nodded sympathetically. “Well,” he said, “you are now.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “We’re like brothers, see . . .”

“Like Cain and Abel,” Voorst laughed.

Now Stringer bit his lip. “Who the fuck’re they?”

Voorst shook his head. “Abel was a shepherd—say, Sergeant, does that make him the first Nomad? Anyway—you’ll like this part—his brother Cain murdered him.”

“Well hey,” Stringer said, “people do get pissed off, right? Anyway, lunchmeat, get your pack. Ol’ Sergeant Stringer’s gonna take you in for a while.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Voorst told her. “He’s got two sexual assault convictions. One more and he’s gelded. That’s not a chance he’s going to take.”

“Zimmer still needs a place to sleep.”

“Can’t you read the provisional certificate on the mast?” Voorst asked with flat menace. “She’s got as much right to stay here as you do in the West Hollywood Barracks. Or should we have a talk with your parole officer?”

Stringer flushed. “You can’t pull that shit on me. This whole coast’s goin’ to be wasted before thirty days. Not even a duck’s goin’ to float here. Believe me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m sayin’ you don’t know shit,” Stringer told Voorst with a sweaty grin, swinging back up the companionway.

* * *

Like a graceful creature emerging from a chrysalis, Voorst thought when he returned the next day to see that the afterdeck had been scrubbed and oiled well enough for the grain of its teak planking to emerge. Up forward a stay of bright new wire supported the mast and the bowsprit was freshly painted bright red.

“I couldn’t sleep properly,” Tiana admitted. “I kept thinking he’d show up again.”

Voorst told her he knew his man, it wouldn’t happen.

“What’s in the crates?”

With the scow hull towed away, he’d been able to motor the
Zodiac
into the channel. He’d cannibalized, off one of the half-sunk tugs, a speech-synthesized Nav system. He stepped down and passed it up to her with a set of alloy turning blocks and a coil of fresh synthetic line. He saved what he considered his real triumph for last, a shoulder-mounted, double-lensed apparatus in a padded aluminum case.

“That’s registered VNN gear,” she murmured. “Where in the world . . .”

“I had a little help from a friend. Someone in the Long Beach fire department. It’s a portable unit got left behind at the QE III site.”

He’d set aside the afternoon to help her work. Even playing with the holocam, with just a few additional repairs a seaworthy boat started taking shape. They spliced new line onto the frayed end of a jib halyard and fed it through the masthead pulley to set up the running rigging. Voorst free-dived with weights into the murky water and found the rudder—which Tiana pulled up and he re-attached with new alloy pins. Amid a floating patch of food waste and filth he scoured the harbor’s muck from the hull with ultrasonic gear. By the time she had the tiller box packed with lube and turning freely, he de-filmed and scrubbed his own skin. If the Nomads who’d been on the boat were anywhere nearby, he saw no sign of them, or of Stringer. The harbor was strangely quiet, the air still throughout the hot afternoon.

When Voorst set the boom in the old gooseneck, sweat dripping from his eyebrows, he looked up to find she’d focused the holocorder on him.

“The boat, Tiana, the boat.”

She set the camera down with a smile. “Dinnertime,” she said.

In the west the sun was indeed low in a sky feverishly bright with unnatural pastels.

In the cabin below a sturdy fold-out table occupied the center of the U-shaped settee adjacent to the galley. She served him warm cabbage soup, brownbread, and soycakes, what he was sure Stringer would call Nomad food, just the diet of the poor.

At dusk, Voorst ran a line for the topping lift through the masthead and attached the bitter end to the boom. “Look this over,” he told Tiana. “You’re ready to hoist your sails.” As she tested the rig he faced the harbor. The sky in the west had taken on an ugly, bruised quality, and in the gathering darkness fifty or sixty dim lights marked where families had reboarded illegal ships; he could hear muted voices and the dull metallic sounds of secret dinners being prepared. “I guess electronics are next,” he said. “I’ll be back in the morning.”

She put a tanned hand on his forearm. “Please stay. Stay the night.”

She had intelligent eyes, coal-black, and she was wearing a woman’s scent. When he thought about the trip up to Malibu and his sleeping cubicle at the barracks, his bones just felt heavy. What was in Malibu? Three or four hours of VNN risk games stuck in a room with fifty soldiers plugged in like electronic components and breathing bad air.

Tiana didn’t seem like just a girl anymore. While he took his second shower of the day she initiated sex like a woman of experience. Afterwards in the forepeak bunk she fell asleep, her arm across his naked chest. Only then did she appear vulnerable, as delicate as the small bones on the inside of her wrist. Who are you? he whispered in the quiet of the night. Voorst could sense the distant rhythm of the open ocean through the
Swan
’s hull, the rising and falling of the swells. The sleep into which he fell was dreamless, deeper than he’d had in years.

* * *

On Friday morning, the explosions started at eight sharp, just as Voorst was punching up the code for dispatch to schedule his day’s work for SoCal Harbors.

The concussions shook the air, sloshed water up the dock pontoons, sent debris and smoke a hundred feet high across the southern end of the harbor. Voorst braced himself against the ComNet dish he’d only just bolted onto the stern.

Another set of concussions—like a giant walking heavily along the far edge of the harbor.

Tiana looked up from the stanchion she was cleaning, gripping it tightly with one hand, breathing deeply.

“Not an accident,” he said. “Look at the color of the smoke. It’s white. I don’t think it’s an accident.” When dispatch came up on the pager, he told them to put him through to the FEMA office. He was using the ComNet dish he’d just installed as an uplink, noticed idly that it worked fine.

Sweat stung his eyes as he listened.

“There are people on those boats,” he told the FEMA administrator. “I saw them last night.” The argument was brief, punctuated by another pair of concussions.

“What
is
it?” she begged when he started throwing his gear together. On shore a crowd of homeless had gathered to watch the smoke. They were passive, listless—even though the Army was surely on its way with prods.

“The Corps of Engineers condemned the south end of the harbor,” he told her.

Her eyes widened with recognition. “The explosions. They’re sinking the boats at anchor. They drive the people out, sink their boats, fill in the harbor for apartment blocks. . . . It’s like Seattle.”

“Not quite,” he insisted. “There’s no petrofire here. The main channel is clear. There’s no cause for what they’re doing. I’m going up to Sacramento and stop those bastards.”

“Don’t leave me.”

“It’s my job,” he said. “Look: the Corps’ finished for the day. At the rate they’re working, you’re safe at this end of the harbor for weeks. I’ll be back tomorrow. It’s my job, Tiana—everybody else is lying about this—FEMA, the Army, FedHarbors, VNN, the Corps of Engineers. I’ve got to try and stop them.”

* * *

Up in Sacramento he had to endure hour-long waits on worn-out chairs in Interior Department reception rooms whose false-landscape windows shimmered painfully with waterfalls and snowy mountains. Accumulated errors in their virtual-reality programs—entire sections dropped out of forests and cliffs, pixels burned sickening shades of blue-green—made his eyes water. The bureaucrats in their gray offices, speaking their foggy language, made his temples ache. But by the end of the day, meeting with the California Harbormaster himself in his office in the capitol, Voorst felt vindicated. The balding man’s window wall might continue to display its retouched version of San Francisco Bay, but he agreed:

The harbor at Long Beach was SoCal’s largest facility, an irreplaceable resource. The Corps of Engineers data was faulty.