Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

Proofed By MadMaxAU

THE WAR came and left but returned for him eighteen years later.

Folger should have known when the clouds of smaller fish disappeared. He should have guessed but he was preoccupied stabilizing the cage at ten meters, then sliding out the upper hatch. Floating free, he stared into the gray-green South Atlantic. Nothing. With his tongue he keyed the mike embedded in his mouthpiece. The sonex transmitter clipped to his tanks coded and beamed the message: “Query—Valerie—location.” He repeated it. Electronics crackled in his ear, but there was no response.

Something moved to his right—something a darker gray, a darker green than the water. Then Folger saw the two dark eyes. Her body took form in the murk. A blunt torpedo shape gliding, she struck impossibly fast.

It was Folgers mistake and nearly fatal. He had hoped she would circle first. The great white shark bore straight in, mouth grinning open. Folger saw the teeth, only the teeth, rows of ragged white. “Query—” he screamed into the sonex.

Desperately he brought the shark billy in his right hand forward. The great white jaws opening and closing, triangular teeth knifing, whipped past soundlessly.

Folger lifted the billy—tried to lift it—saw the blood and the white ends protruding below his elbow and realized he was seeing surgically sawed bone.

The shock made everything deceptively easy. Folger reached behind him, felt the cage, and pulled himself up toward the hatch. The shark flowed into the distance.

One-handed, it was difficult entering the cage. He was half through the hatch and had turned the flotation control all the way up when he blacked out.

Her name, like that of half the other women in the village, was Maria. For more than a decade she had kept Folger’s house. She cleaned, after a fashion. She cooked his two meals a day, usually boiled potatoes or mutton stew. She loved him with a silent, bitter, unrequited passion. Over all the years, they had never talked of it. They were not lovers; each night after fixing supper, she returned to her clay-and-stone house in the village. Had Folger taken a woman from the village, Maria would have knifed both of them as they slept That problem had never arisen.

“People for you,” said Maria.

Folger looked up from his charts. “Who?”

“No islanders.”

Folger hadn’t had an off-island visitor since two years before, when a Brazilian journalist had come out on the semiannual supply boat.

“You want them?” said Maria.

“Can I avoid it?”

Maria lowered her voice. “Government.”

“Shit,” said Folger. “How many?”

“Just two. You want the gun?” The sawed-off twelve-gauge, swathed in oilcloth, leaned in the kitchen closet

“No.” Folger sighed. “Bring them in.”

Maria muttered something as she turned back through the doorway.

“What?”

She shook her matted black hair. “One is a woman!” she spat.

Valerie came to his quarters later in the afternoon. The project manager had already spoken to Folger. Knowing what she would say, Folger had two uncharacteristically stiff drinks before she arrived. “ You can’t be serious,” was the first thing he said.

She grinned. “So they told you.”

He said, “I can’t allow it.”

The grin vanished. “Don’t talk as though you owned me.”

“I’m not, I’m just—“ He floundered. “Damn it, it’s a shock.”

She took his hand and drew him down beside her on the couch. “Would I deny your dreams?”

His voice pleaded. “You’re my lover.”

Valerie looked away. “It’s what I want.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You can be an oceanographer,” she said. “Why can’t I be a shark?”

Maria ushered in the visitors with ill grace. “Get along,” she said out in the hallway. “Señor Folger is a busy man.”

“We will not disturb him long,” said a woman’s voice.

The visitors, as they entered, had to duck to clear the doorframe. The woman was nearly two meters in height; the man half a head taller. Identically clad in gray jump-suits, they wore identical smiles. They were—Folger searched for the right word—extreme. Their hair was too soft and silkily pale; their eyes too obviously blue, teeth too white and savage.

The pair looked down at Folger. “I am Inga Lindfors,” said the woman. “My brother, Per.” The man nodded slightly.

“Apparently you know who I am,” said Folger.

“You are Marcus Antonius Folger,” Inga Lindfors said.

“It was supposed to be Marcus Aurelius,” Folger said irrelevantly. “My father never paid close attention to the classics.”

“The fortune of confusion,” said Inga. “I find Mark Antony the more fascinating. He was a man of decisive action.”

Bewildered, Maria stared from face to face.

“You were a component of the Marine Institute on East Falkland,” said Per.

“I was. It was a long time ago.”

“We wish to speak with you,” said Inga, “as representatives of the Protectorate of Old America.”

“So? Talk “

“We speak officially.”

“Oh.” Folger smiled at Maria. “I must be alone with these people.”

The island woman looked dubiously at the Lindfors. “I will be in the kitchen,” she said.

“It is a formidable journey to Tres Rocas,” said Per. “Our airboat left Cape Pembroke ten hours ago. Unfavorable winds.”

Folger scratched himself and said nothing.

Inga laughed, a young girl’s laugh in keeping with her age. “Marcus Antonius Folger, you’ve been too long away from American civilization.”

“I doubt it,” said Folger. “You’ve obviously gone to a lot of trouble to find me. Why?”

Why?

She always asked him questions when they climbed the rocks above the headland. Valerie asked and Folger answered and usually they both learned. Why the Falklands’ seasonal temperature range was only ten degrees; what were quasars; how did third-generation computers differ from second; how dangerous were manta rays; when would the universe die. Today she asked a new question:

“What about the war?”

He paused, leaning into a natural chimney. “What do you mean?” The cold passed into his cheeky numbed his jaw, made the words stiff.

Valerie said, “I don’t understand the war.”

“Then you know what I know.” Folger stared down past the rocks to the sea. How do you explain masses of people killing other people? He could go through the glossary—romary, secondary, tertiary targets; population priorities; death-yields—but so what? It didn’t give credence or impact to the killing taking place on the land, in space, and below the seas.

“I don’t know anything” said Valerie somberly. “Only what they tell us.”

“Don’t question them,” said Folger. “They’re a little touchy.”

“But why?”

“The Protectorate remembers its friends,” said Per.

Folger began to laugh. “Don’t try to snow me. At the peak of my loyalty to the Protectorate—or what the Protectorate was then—I was apolitical.”

“Twenty years ago, that would have been treason.”

“But not now,” said Inga quickly. “Libertarianism has made a great resurgence.”

“So I hear. The boat brings magazines once in a while.”

“The years of reconstruction have been difficult. We could have used your expertise on the continent.”