She said, “The man without eyes. How can he be a spy, if he can’t see?”
“He can see, all right. He just doesn’t do it the way we do.”
“He uses extrasensory perception, you mean?”
“It is something like that, yes.”
“Was he born that way?”
“Yes and no,” Enron said.
“I don’t understand,” said Jolanda. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“A splice job was done on him while he was in the womb. I don’t know who did it, or why. The time we met, it didn’t seem appropriate to ask him about it.” Enron allowed himself a quick glance in Farkas’s direction. Farkas was busy with his dinner. He seemed calm, relaxed, concentrating entirely on his meal. If he had noticed Enron’s presence, he was giving no indication of it. Enron said, “He is a very difficult man, very intelligent, very dangerous. I wonder what he is doing here. —You find his face fascinating, you say?”
“Very.”
“You want to sculpt it? You want to run your hands over his bony structure?”
“Yes. I really do.”
“Ah,” Enron said. “Well, then. Let us find a way of arranging for that to be possible, shall we?”
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.