“Okay. Fine.” Rhodes sounded very nervous, as though he had begun to imagine this conversation already being discussed on the highest Company levels. “Hey, Paul, thanks for everything you’ve said. I know that you were telling me things that it was important for me to hear. I just don’t know if I can act on them.”
“That’s up to you, isn’t it, fellow?”
“I suppose it is.” A wan smile crossed Rhodes’ face. “Listen, take care of yourself out there on the high seas. Bring back an iceberg for me, will you? A little one.”
“This big,” Carpenter said. He held up his thumb and forefinger, a couple of inches apart. “Good luck to you, Nick.”
“Thanks,” said Rhodes. “For everything.”
The visor went blank. Carpenter shrugged, shook his head. A burst of pity for Nick Rhodes suffused him, and an inexorable sense of the futility of all he had just said. Rhodes was suffering, yes; but he was too weak, really, too muddled, too wounded, to be able to walk away from the things that were hurting him. The breakup of his marriage had damned near killed him; and so on the rebound he had tied himself up with one of your basic airbrained San Francisco radicals, and here he was, hopeless prisoner of Isabelle Marline’s enchanted pussy, coming home from his adapto lab each night to listen to her wild screeds against gene-splicing. Terrific. And in the midst of all that, worrying that the work of his research group might actually be successful, and by its very success give Samurai Industries a deathgrip on the world economy. It all bespoke an element of masochism in Rhodes’ psychic makeup that Carpenter had never consciously noticed before.
Shit, Carpenter thought Rhodes worries too much, that’s the real truth. He’ll worry himself right into an early grave. But he seems to like to worry. That was a difficult thing for Carpenter to understand.
He went upstairs to see if the rest of his crew had shown up.
Apparently they had. As Carpenter came up the ladder he heard voices, Hitchcock’s gruff rasping one and Nakata’s light tenor, but also two female ones. Carpenter paused to listen.
“We’ll make out all right anyway,” Hitchcock was saying.
“But if he’s just a dumb Company asshole—” Female voice.
“Asshole, yes. Probably not dumb.” That was Nakata. “You don’t get to be an Eleven, being dumb.”
“What I don’t like,” Hitchcock said, “is how they keep sending up these fucking salarymen instead of picking a real sailor to be captain. Just because they’ve sort of learned which buttons to push don’t mean goddamn shit, and they ought to understand that.”
“Look, as long as he does his job right and lets us be—” Woman’s voice, different one.
Yeah, Carpenter thought. I’ll push the buttons I’m supposed to push and I’ll let you be so long as you push yours, and we’ll all be happy. Okay? Do we have a deal?
Their grousing didn’t trouble him. It was what they were supposed to do, when a new boss came on board. Any other reaction would have been surprising. They had no reason to love him at first sight. He would simply have to make them see that he was just doing his job, same as them, and that he didn’t want to be here any more than they wanted him to. But he was here. For a while, anyhow. And all the responsibility for running this ship fell to him. He was the one whose feet the Company would put to the fire, if anything went wrong on the voyage.
But what could go wrong? This was just an iceberg trawler.
Carpenter clambered the rest of the way to the deck, doing it noisily enough to give them some warning he was coming. The decktop conversation died away as soon as the clattering echoes of his approach could be heard.
He emerged into the blaze of afternoon. The humid air was thick and gross and a swollen greenish sun stood speared atop one of San Francisco’s pointy high-rises across the bay.
“Cap’n,” Hitchcock said. “This here’s Caskie, communications. And Rennett, maintenance/ops. Cap’n Carpenter.”
“At ease,” Carpenter said. It sounded like the right thing to say.
Caskie and Rennett were both on the small side, but that was where their resemblance ended. Rennett was a husky, broad-shouldered little kid, less than chest-high to him, who looked very belligerent, very tough. Most likely, Carpenter figured, she had come out of one of the dust-bowl areas of the Midwest: they all had that chip-on-the-shoulder look back there. She kept her scalp shaved, the way a lot of them did nowadays, and she was brown as an acorn all over, with the purple glint of Screen shining brilliantly through, making her look almost fluorescent. But for her height you might not have thought she was female at all.
Brown eyes bright as marbles and twice as hard looked back at him. “Sorry I was late getting back,” she said, not sounding sorry at all.
Caskie, the communications operator, was slight and almost dainty, with a much softer, distinctly more feminine look about her: glossy black hair and lots of it, no bare scalp for her. Her face was on the plain side, with a wide mouth and an odd little button of a nose, and her skin was spotty and flaked from too much sun, but despite all that there was an agreeable curvy attractiveness to her.
Carpenter had wondered, upon first hearing that he was getting a crew of two men and two women, how you kept sexual tensions from becoming a problem aboard ship, and now, looking at Caskie, he thought about that once more. But the answer came to him in another moment, and it was so obvious he reproached himself for not having seen it instantly. These two, Caskie and Rennett, were a couple, a closed system. There wouldn’t be any flirtations on the Tonopah Maru, any sort of sexual rivalries, to make life complicated for him.
He said, “As I think all of you know, this is my first time at sea. That doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of a captain’s duties and responsibilities, though, only that I haven’t exercised them before. You’re an experienced crew and you have a record of working well together, and I’m not going to pretend that I know your jobs better than you do. Where I need practical advice and have only theoretical data to fall back on, I won’t be ashamed to ask for your help. I just want you to remember two things: that I’m a fast learner, and that ultimately I’m the one who will have to stand up and account for the voyage before the Company if our performance isn’t up to mode.”
“Do you think we’d slack off, just because we’ve got a new man in charge?” Rennett asked. Midwest, yes: he could hear it in her voice, the dry flat tone. Raised in dust-bowl poverty, vile dirty air, crumbling shanties, broken windows, the endless uncertainty of the next meal.
“I didn’t say that you would. But I don’t want you telling yourselves that this is going to be anything less than a profitable voyage because of my supposed inexperience. We’re going to be okay. We’ll do our work properly and well and we’ll get damned fine bonuses when we get back to San Francisco.” Carpenter snapped them a formal smile. “I’m glad to have met you and I’m damned pleased to be shipping out with such a capable crew. That’s all I have to say. We’ll clear port at 1800 hours. Dismissed.”
He saw them exchange glances with one another before they broke ranks, but he was unable to interpret their expressions. Relief, that the new captain wasn’t an absolute jerk? Confirmation of their suspicion that he was? Formation of an alliance of the true workers against the loathed parasitic eleventh-level salaryman?
No sense trying to read their minds, Carpenter told himself. Take the voyage day by day, do the work as it comes, stay on top of things, and all will be well.
His first order of duty was to file the official notice of embarkation with the harbormaster. He went down to his cabin to take care of that, making his way with difficulty through the narrow, cramped, and unfamiliar belowdecks spaces, jammed everywhere as they were with materiel and instruments.