I still almost missed her; I hadn’t expected her to be with another person, another woman, and we were loading the Vinland existence, so in July they were more accurately in a state of undress than anything else, but I spotted her all the same. Jackie Carliner, one of the barmaids and a pretty good artist, had sketched her from the one time she’d seen the girl and we’d made copies for everyone.
Even so, I had my loading duties to finish first—there was no one else. But, as soon as we were underway and I’d raised the stern ramp, I made my way topside and to the lower stern deck. I took my walkie-talkie off the belt clip and called the Captain.
“Sir, this is Dalton,” I called. “I’ve seen our suicide girl.”
“So what else is new?” grumbled the Captain. “You know policy on that by now.”
“But, sir!” I protested. “I mean still alive. Still on board. It’s barely sundown, and we’re a good half hour from the point yet.”
He saw what I meant. “Very well,” he said crisply. “But you know we’re short-handed. I’ll put Caldwell on the bow station this time, but you better get some results or I’ll give you so much detail you won’t have time to meddle in other people’s affairs.”
I sighed. Running a ship like this one hardened most people. I wondered if the Captain, with twenty years on the run, ever understood why I cared enough to try and stop this girl I didn’t know from going in.
Did I know, for that matter?
As I looked around at the people going by, I thought about it. I’d thought about it a great deal before.
Why did I care about these faceless people? People from so many different worlds and cultures that they might as well have been from another planet. People who cared not at all about me, who saw me as an object, a cipher, a service, like those robots I mentioned. They didn’t care about me. If I were perched on that rail and a crowd was around, most of them would probably yell “Jump!”
Most of the crew, too, cared only about each other, to a degree, and about the Orcas, our rock of sanity. I thought of that world gone in some atomic fire. What was the measure of an anonymous human being’s worth?
I thought of Joanna and Harmony. With pity, yes, but I realized now that Joanna, at least, had been a vampire. She’d needed me, needed a rock to steady herself, to unburden herself to, to brag to. Someone steady and understanding, someone whose manner and character suggested that solidity. She’d never really even considered that I might have my own problems, that her promiscuity and lifestyle might be hurting me. Not that she was trying to hurt me—she just never considered me.
Like those people going by now. If they stub their toe, or have a question, or slip, or the boat sinks, they need me. Until then, I’m just a faceless automaton to them.
Ready to serve them, to care about them, if they needed somebody.
And that was why I was out here in the surprising chill, out on the stern with my neck stuck out a mile, trying to prevent a suicide I knew would happen, knew because I’d seen it three times before.
I was needed.
That was the measure of a human being’s true worth, I felt sure. Not how many people ministered to your needs, but how many people you could help.
That girl—she had been brutalized, somehow, by society. Now I was to provide some counterbalance.
It was the surety of this duty that had kept me from blowing myself up with the old Delaware ferry, or jumping off that stern rail myself.
I glanced uneasily around and looked ahead. There was Shipshead light, tall and proud this time in the darkness, the way I liked it. I thought I could almost make out the marker buoys already. I started to get nervous.
I was certain that she’d jump. It’d happened every time before that we’d known. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, in this existence she won’t.
I had no more than gotten the thought through my head when she came around the corner of the deck housing and stood in the starboard corner, looking down.
She certainly looked different this time. Her long hair was blond, not dark, and braided in large pigtails that drooped almost to her waist. She wore only the string bikini and transparent cape the Vinlanders liked in summer, and she had several gold rings on each arm, welded loosely there, I knew, and a marriage ring around her neck.
That was interesting, I thought. She looked so young, so despairing, that I’d never once thought of her as married.
Her friend, as thin and underdeveloped as she was stout, was with her. The friend had darker hair and had it twisted high atop her head. She wore no marriage ring.
I eased slowly over, but not sneakily. Like I said, nobody notices the crewman of a vessel; he’s just a part of it.
“Luok, are yo sooure yu don’ vant to halve a drink or zumpin?” the friend asked in that curious accent the Vinlanders had developed through cultural pollution by the dominant English and French.
“Naye, I yust vant to smell da zee-zpray,” the girl replied. “Go on. I vill be alonk before ze zhip iz docking.”
The friend was hesitant; I could see it in her manner. But I could also see she would go, partly because she was chilly, partly because she felt she had to show some trust to her friend.
She walked off. I looked busy checking the stairway supports to the second deck, and she paid me no mind whatsoever.
There were a few others on deck, but most had gone forward to see us come in, and the couple dressed completely in black sitting there on the bench was invisible to the girl as she was to them. She peered down at the black water and started to edge more to the starboard side engine wake, then a little past, almost to the center. Her upper torso didn’t move, but I saw a bare, dirty foot go up on the lower rail.
I walked casually over. She heard me, and turned slightly to see if it was anyone she needed to be bothered with.
I went up to her and stood beside her, looking out at the water.
“Don’t do it,” I said softly, not looking directly at her. “It’s too damned selfish a way to go.”
She gave a small gasp and turned to look at me in wonder.
“How—how didt yu—?” she managed.
“I’m an old hand at suicides,” I told her, that was no lie. Joanna, then almost me, then this woman seven other times.
“I vouldn’t really haff—” she began, but I cut her off.
“Yes, you would. You know it and I know it. The only thing you know and I don’t is why.”
We were inside Shipshead light now. If I could keep her talking just a few more minutes we’d clear the channel markers and slow for the turn and docking. The turn and the slowdown would make it impossible for her to be caught in the propwash, and, I felt, the cycle would be broken, at least for her.
“Vy du yu care?” she asked, turning again to look at the dark sea, only slightly illuminated by the rapidly receding light.
“Well, partly because it’s my ship, and I don’t like things like that to happen on my ship,” I told her. “Partly because I’ve been there myself, and I know how brutal a suicide is.”
She looked at me strangely. “Dat’s a fonny t’ing tu zay,” she responded. “Jost vun qvick jomp and pszzt! All ofer.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “Besides, why would anyone so young want to end it?”