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  “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.

  With the help of Lieutenant Governor Yasubu, at seven in the evening the Army Corp of Engineers was ordered, through Fed Interior, to cease demolition forthwith, pe
nding disclosure that the harbor was unnavigable due to wreckage, blocked channels, or fully documented siltation.

  Voorst dined with the balding man, an old tanker captain, in the executive cafeteria. Afterwards it was too late for a lift back to Malibu, so he accepted a barracks cubicle for the night. Stretching out on the narrow cot, Voorst felt exultant. The fantasy he’d entertained on his way up to Sacramento that morning, the fantasy of turning back and sailing the Swan to the South Pacific with Tiana, now seemed petty and selfish. The South Pacific had its own problems anyhow, a vast archipelago irradiated by the French, a toxic zone below Johnston Island where a nerve gas disposal facility had failed.

  Even when the Swan was fully refitted, he might not miss sailing away with her after all, wherever she was headed, he thought.

  Until he found a holotape tucked into the bottom of his duffel.

  He searched out an empty VNN experience room at the base Officer’s Mess. The tape she’d slipped among his work clothes was the footage they’d shot working on the Swan. Alone in the room, he could feel the pastel sun, smell the salt in the air through the rot from debris, almost touch her as she moved, smiled at the camera, waved, her almond eyes bright with life. And in just a week the Swan had been transformed from a derelict hull into a beautiful creature of the sea.

  He worried about her now, worried too about unfinished odds and ends on the boat, a loose hatchcover, frayed wiring on the inboard. Why had she given him the holotape—unless she intended to sail away later that morning?

  * * *

  At four A.M. his pager screamed its high-pitched alarm, the sharp sound of grief itself.

  He identified himself to the dispatcher as the Harbors Officer on call with SoCal Red Team.

  Yes, he was responsible for Malibu and the coastline to the south. Yet another harbor fire, he was told, coordinates forthcoming. His heart thudded unnaturally in his chest until he heard that he’d be joining Sergeant Rodriguez in turbocopter four.

  Then he felt relieved.

  Rodriguez worked the San Diego sector exclusively, two hundred clicks south of Long Beach. He never shared Stringer’s territory. So if the Army team was going to be led by Rodriguez, they’d be headed down toward the border, to Encinitas or San Diego itself. As for another fire . . . statistically, it was overdue.

  They put him on a jump jet and he caught the turbocopter at Malibu base, out at the end of the breakwater, just as he had a week before. The actual sight of Rodriguez, plump and muttering to himself as usual, was comforting. Voorst tried to sleep; he’d been able to doze on the jump jet, dreamed a dream of the Swan more vivid than the experience he’d had in the VNN room. But now he couldn’t get it back.

  Rodriguez shook him awake only minutes out of Malibu.

  The column of black smoke was visible from ten clicks away, dense and billowy, shifting in the morning wind like a dye marker in ocean currents.

  Photochemical colors in the sunrise sky: mauve and filthy pink. The old Army turbocopter rattled through the airspace above coastal L.A. descending gradually toward the source of the smoke.

  “Hey, where we goin’?” Voorst asked Rodriguez.

  “Look for y’self. Long Beach. Don’ you guys ever know nothin’?”

  “What do you mean, Long Beach. That’s Stringer’s territory. What would you be doin’ going to Long Beach? Where’s Stringer?”

  “Stringer, the guy’s totally fucked and gone, man,” Rodriguez laughed against the noise.

  Voorst swung up to the open door of the copter’s cargo area, one hand on a safety strap, squinting south through the haze at the string of makeshift harbors, the thousands of houseboats and makeshift live-aboards. Now he could see the black cloud rising from Long Beach Harbor all right, from a broad sector of the main channel. A huge vessel was blocking the harbor mouth. The QE III was bow down, sinking.

  “Jesus. What about Stringer. What do you mean?”

  “Jus’ look at this,” Rodriguez laughed on, punching up a secondary mode on the copter’s VNN summary screen. “ ’S a replay, eight minutes worth. Pix turned up on VNN real-time two hours ago, nobody sayin’ how. Jus’ look at the asshole.”

  The first shaky images showed Stringer in a skiff towing a commando float loaded with cases of Lydex.

  Someone must have fed illegal footage into the VNN broadcast loop. It was an exposé.

  The grainy night shot showed Stringer with his own hands using magnetic grapples to secure the massive charge to rusty plates behind the man-thick anchor chain hanging from the bow of a massive ship. A blue hull. The QE III.

  Stringer dumped fuel from the skiff. Then he fended off, igniting the pilot fire of petrochemicals, turning finally, shock and recognition in his eyes as he saw the camera, the side of his face gruesome, the wrong side of his face bloody in the orange light. His other ear was gone now, his temple stringy with cartilage and slick with gore. . . .

  A gaff thrown like a harpoon hit him in the chest as he tried to step away, knocked him to his knees at the gunwale. . . .

  In the foreground of the shot, Voorst recognized the deck of the Swan, swarming with blue shirts, the red bowsprit gleaming in the lurid glow.

  And he recognized the tanned hand trembling on the tiller, the small bones on the inside of a wrist as delicate as a girl’s. The screen showed the Lydex igniting, a sun spinning into a whirlpool of light, bleaching the screen into fine atom snow, a vision of white light so pure that time, for a moment, seemed to stand still.

  Blue Flyers

  THE KANGAROO, A YOUNG FEMALE, gazed at them from just beyond the electric fence which ran parallel to the tarmac at the entrance to the resort. She had liquid brown eyes with long lashes and dilated pupils. Bipedally erect, alert, she stared with inscrutable wariness at the two women who’d stopped their bright red electric skimmer on the shoulder. The older woman, who’d pulled back the skimmer’s reflective cover, tried to meet the animal’s untamed eye.

  Valerie Rampling shivered. “Is she . . . ?

  “No, she hasn’t been implanted,” her Latino driver smiled. “She’s freerange out here. In another year she’ll be ready, I suspect.” The driver—her pale plum safari shirt was adorned with the triangular BioRange symbol which crowned the entrance gate—waved a manicured hand over the scrubby Cabo San Lucas landscape toward the groups of three or four kangaroos scattered on a low hillside a click away. Some were larger animals with reddish fur and white faces. “She belongs to that mob over there—the word for a herd of kangaroos is ‘mob,’ yes? With those boomers. Males. In that species, the males are redder, the females bluer, you see?”

  “You keep them with males?” The kangaroo she was watching at the silver wire spooked her. Above its outsized haunches its tiny, perfectly articulated forepaws picked slowly at a patch of chest fur, too slowly for grooming. The blue flyer had the face of a deer or a pony. But the twitchiness of her large ears and the intensity in her eyes made Valerie think: a monkey, she reminds me of a monkey, an intelligent monkey. Valerie took a deep breath of the overheated Baja air. Under the circumstances, she decided, she should be relieved, even pleased. But she hadn’t expected to be surprised this way, especially since she’d been looking at so many pictures of kangaroos lately.

  “Under BioRange protocol,” the Latino driver said, “we don’t use freerange flyers to carry an individual fetus to term.” She laughed. “So nobody’s baby’s out there. The Carriers, the marsupials whose pouches have been genetically designed for use as surrogate human wombs, they’re kept under quite controlled conditions.”

  “Yes. Of course.” Valerie felt briefly ashamed: she knew all these things from the introductory holotapes she’d seen in New York. She remembered shots of the nurseries, buildings which were half-barn, half-hospital ward, where the implanted animals were kept in great security and health while within their pouches the human fetuses became full-sized, normal infants.

  Her OB-Gyn had agreed that having her baby this way was a particularly fine idea.
Very practical. At twelve weeks her pregnancy hadn’t, except for this flight down to Baja, interrupted her legal practice for a day. Tomorrow her fetus would be transferred to the marsupial’s pouch where it would mature without another bout of morning sickness for her, much less the loss of a single billable hour for her firm.

  Twenty minutes later the resort and clinic buildings came into view beyond a green patch of woods in a wide groin formed at the base of two hills, a change of scenery from the deserty scrub through which they’d driven from the airstrip. What she saw reassured her: an elegant Mission-style hotel, flanked on one side by pools and tennis courts, on the other by a hospital and labs. Nestled in groves against the hills sat the adobe nurseries with their red tile roofs.

  Before the bellboy could reach the skimmer, a tall fellow with a cream-colored Stetson and deep-set eyes reached into the trunk for her bags. He had a BioRange triangle embroidered on the pocket of his denim shirt, an easy smile, and a low whistle for her short silk jumpdress when she stepped onto the tiled foyer.

  “Saw you at the gate, ma’am. My name’s Cal.”

  “I’m sure it is,” she said, turning away without telling him her name, but smiling. She’d spent a summer in Wyoming once; there was something Disney City about this cowboy, though she couldn’t put her finger on just what.

  * * *

  Her pre-surgery screening was scheduled at four—the transplant would be performed the next day. Once she unpacked, Valerie decided to wash off the dust of Baja with a swim.

  Flowering mimosa trees lined the walkway to the pool, opposite Spanish fountains which spilled cooled air into the burning heat. At poolside she dropped her wrap on a chair near a group of women chatting under a market umbrella, then dove in.

  The water was in the low eighties, clean and sweet, the pool so large that when she swam under the waterfall at the far end she had to tread water for a minute to catch her breath. Everything seemed perfect now; even the anger of Kenneth, her child’s father, at her decision, even his threats, washed from her mind. As she climbed out she heard one of the women calling her name.