Windward Passage Read online

  ALSO BY JIM NISBET

  —NOVELS—

  The Gourmet

  (aka The Damned Don’t Die)

  Ulysses’ Dog

  Lethal Injection

  Death Puppet

  The Price of the Ticket

  Prelude to a Scream

  The Syracuse Codex

  Dark Companion

  The Octopus On My Head

  —POETRY—

  Poems for a Lady

  Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley

  Morpho

  (WITH ALASTAIR JOHNSTON)

  Small Apt

  (WITH PHOTOS BY SHELLY VOGEL)

  Across the Tasman Sea

  —NONFICTION—

  Laminating the Conic Frustum

  —RECORDINGS—

  The Visitor

  For more information, as well as MP3s of

  “The Visitor” and “The Golden Gate Bridge,” visit

  NoirConeVille.com

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2010 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  Copyright © 2010 by Jim Nisbet

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-46830-298-1

  This one’s for Riley, Peelhead, Joe Ellis

  and Janwillem van de Wetering

  … Four stone originals.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The passage from The Story of a Life, by Konstantin Paustovsky, translated from the Russian by Julian Barnes, was transcribed from pp. 102-104 of the Pantheon edition of 1964. Copyright 1964 by Random House, Inc.

  Passages cited from The Odyssey by Homer arrive via Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, Anchor Books Edition, 1963, pp. 205-206.

  The four lines by Thom Gunn are from “Nights with the Speed Bros.,” which can be found on p. 32 of Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).

  The citation from Apollonaire’s “La Voyageur” is to be found on p. 75 of Alcools, University of California Press, 1965, translation by yr hmbl srvnt.

  A stolen remark and a citation come from Tom Raworth; the latter may be found in “The Conscious of a Conservative,” Tottering State, O Books, 2000, p. 105.

  Twenty Small Sailboats to Take You Anywhere, John Vigor, Paradise Cay Publications, 1999.

  Thanks to Gregg Gannon for his story about clocking the chief.

  Thanks also to Brian Toss and The Rigger’s Apprentice for the icicle hitch; Reeds’ Nautical Almanacs; Self-Steering for Sailing Craft by John S. Letcher, Jr.; and The American Heritage Dictionary; to Klutch, for Rain Forest Crunch; to Dr. Scott Stryker for some provocative science; and to George Steiner for Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

  Please visit Colin Wilson’s discussion of A.E. von Vogt’s theory of the Right Man in the former’s The Criminal History of Mankind, pp. 64-75.

  The A.C. Swinburne poem via Jack London is “From Too Much Love For Living.”

  The strophe by Mikhail Lermontov is to be found on page 167 of An Anthology of Russian Literature in the Soviet Period, B.G. Gurney (ed. and trans.), Vintage Russian Library, 1960.

  Readers! Do not pass up an opportunity to discover Leonard Clark’s The Rivers Ran East, on pp. 64-66 of which is to be found the venomous snake citation herein.

  Books and the sea, I discovered, had more

  than a little in common; both were distilled

  of silence and solitude.

  —STERLING HAYDEN, Wanderer.

  jerky people on the street

  i have not thought myself

  one of you for a long time

  —TOM RAWORTH

  A conspiracy wipes out all the titles conferred by social caprice. In those conditions, a man springs at once to the rank which his manner of facing death assigns to him. The mind loses some of its authority. …

  —STENDHAL

  There is something in a treasure that fastens upon a man’s mind. He will pray and blaspheme and still persevere, and will curse the day he ever heard of it, and will let his last hour come upon him unawares, and still believing that he missed it only by a foot. He will see it again every time he closes his eyes. He will never forget it till he is dead—and even then—Doctor, did you ever hear of the miserable gringos on Azuera, that cannot die? Ha! Ha! Sailors like myself. There is no getting away from a treasure that once fastens upon your mind.

  —JOSEPH CONRAD, Nostromo

  Lonely and far a white sail soars . …

  Beneath the azure current churns,

  Above the golden sunlight glows;

  Yet for a storm the sail still yearns—

  As though in stores one found repose . …

  —MIHAEL LERMONTOV

  There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity.

  —RAFAEL SABATINI, Captain Blood.

  CONTENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  ALSO BY JIM NISBET

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  INCIDENT AT SEA

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE WEEVIL OF HABITUDE

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PHANTOM CARAVAN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  DEAD MEN’S POCKETS

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  THE DROIDS OF Sí

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  WINDWARD PASSAGE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  AT THE EDGE OF THE PROJECTION

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  “WINNER!” “DING DING DING. …” SPOTLIGHTS SWEPT THE ASSEMBLY. “Second prize … The first civilian tour of the shrine since completion of construction!” Desultory cheers and applause. A lune of light swept over a projection of Officer Few’s face and appeared to leave him temporarily blinded. Speakers blared the inane and popular anthem of Condor Silversteed, “Mandate of Tripartism.” It was too loud. It was in bad taste. Members on the floor cheered. Members in committee skyboxes, despite the double-glazing of their one-way picture windows, swiped down the volume. The first-place winner was about to be announced, but it was preordaine
d, the fix was in, some things just cannot be left to chance. The audio discretely muted. In the skyboxes the loudest sounds to be heard were the popping of champagne corks, coarse laughter, the especial groan of an orgasm overwhelming a recalcitrant prostate, the smack of palms over a sealed deal. Attending homunculi, cued by the latter, barked like sea lions—not seals, but close enough—it is The True.

  The winner was found eventually, her coccyx identichip scanned by ceiling snurfs. The Announcer could have asked the snurfbase to pinpoint her on the auditorium grid the moment her number was announced, but why deprive the suspense of its artificiality? There was an argument that she would have been just as surprised either way, but there was a counterargument to the effect that, the sensoria of audience members being so damped as it was, her reaction time might have been sufficiently slow to mitigate proceedings already protracted by ceremonial caparison. Though unasked for its analysis, the snurfbase readily produced an inverse Fourier transform comparing an average winner’s reaction profile to a typical audience-damping effect. Though programmed from square one to encourage damping effects, management determined that this one went too far.

  Red Means glared down along the steep angle between the convention floor and the skybox—the latter which, for some reason, the Decorator had lately lined with mohair. Long, coarse, orange mohair. Better it were kelp stranded by a unusually high tide, left to fester in the sun, reeking and hopping with sand fleas and flies, than synthetic mohair that reeked, ever so slightly, of formaldehyde.

  No sign of Tipsy. They’d arrived together; she’d left him almost immediately and hadn’t reappeared.

  He listlessly sipped his Kaliq. When a man has let his life get to where his beer doesn’t taste right, matters have proceeded a lagoon too far.

  This ceremony had happened only once before, some fourteen years ago, and he knew that a great deal if not all of what he was seeing was animatronic—edited reruns with computer-generated fills. He didn’t trust what he was seeing, and he’d never trusted parades, pyrotechnics, conventions, and speeches, either.

  So she was genuinely surprised. Not to worry. Her personal squirt patch micromanipulated her reaction, much as surrounding squirt patches coped their response. (In inverse proportion to the square of their distance away from her.) Her name was Melanie Hecatomb, she was seventeen years old, and she’d lived all her life on the 74th floor of the Transbay Tower in downtown San Francisco. What a coincidence. As it happened the shrine package included three days and two nights at the Disney Pier at the foot of Bryant Street, right under the Bay Bridge. So what if, right under the Bay Bridge, there were only five or six tides per annum of sufficient height to permit even the second-largest ship in Disney’s cruise line, Scrooge McPrincess, from tying up there; each visit rang the gong to the tune of some two million Euroshells. Pressured by the Vendor Consortium informally known as frijolistas, Corporateers were working 24/7 on a series of locks, but the Bay, hydraulic manifesto that it is, was proving recalcitrant. Anyway, what a coincidence it would be, as the announcer pointed out, if the atmosphere were to be conducive to such productivity on her day of days, as it often was, in days of yore, in San Francisco, and will be again, especially after the code for the Transbay Environmental Machine Works, formerly known as Yerba Buena Island, is debugged, which will have to wait until this last bond issue is ninety percent Chineesiated; if all goes well, however, Melanie Hecatomb could walk to her Lying-in Suite! Then we’ll have a parade! And fireworks!

  The Telegates couldn’t have cheered louder if they’d thought the propaganda actually meant something. Their response, piped in with the music, almost overwhelmed the old Condor Silversteed hit, “I Need a New Patch.” The flesh-and-cartilaginous Delegates cheered because, heckadarn said and done, Melanie Hecatomb was one of their own. If it could happen to her it could happen to anybody.

  Officer Oscar Few happened to be the ped image nearest her, and though he got to her quickly, it was not before Melanie had already dispensed three or four pubic endorsements. This Thrill Allotment, as wags in the know called them, were isolated from the Assembly by a Velum cordon sanitaire just as soon as they traversed the exit corona. A Member’s patch could handle normal prophylaxis. But the Committee had yet to find a way to membranalize the inevitable endorphins released by this particular contact elation. They insisted on approaching the issue as if it were a mere hormonal imbalance, which in turn opened the door to a vast network of well-entrenched technologies and attendant no-bid contracts. Subject after subject, however, claimed that the experience eclipsed anything a synfuck had to offer, and so it was prized. The Committee caved and commissioned an entire city in India to work on the problem. Though the Velums worked well enough, they were expensive. The frijolistas whined about below-the-line shells. The Committee would issue a Report after they got back from Holidays, which kicked in right after the Party’s big San Francisco Sedulity—in other words, months from now, which was then.

  “Follow the money,” Officer Few’s image counseled Ms. Hecatomb. He pointed. A trail of glow-in-the-gloom thousand-Euroshell notes meandered away from her feet and through the crowd. “Only we can see it. Try not to stray. Even at this point, you could get tagged with Droid Under the Influence.”

  “I’m so, like, jacked up,” Ms. Hecatomb told him, with a smile Few had seen all too often. “Do I have time for a couple more endorsements?”

  Few shook a leg. “I’m afraid not.”

  Ms. Hecatomb pouted, then brightened. “What about you, big boy?”

  Few, who was five foot nine, had learned the game. “That’s possible,” he mendacioed. “But first we must leave the holotorium.”

  “I’m all wet,” Ms. Hecatomb enthused intimately. “Lead on.”

  The neural bundle known as Few had never gotten used to the New Sexuality—hell, he never gotten used to the Old Sexuality—, but he had become accustomed to ignoring its more louche manifestations, especially on the job. Still and all, what he was dealing with here was the future, which was rapidly becoming the present, and he did not like it. Within the circle of light they made their way through the crowd. The trail of lucre led them a triumviral chase, pollinating the vacuum of losers with the pheromones of her luck, wowing all rhinoported attendees post v.11, build 4. Though to any but the most cynical the path would appear as a Random Walk, the Committee had the dissemination down to parts per billion.

  “And now,” said the Announcer. “Let us preview what Ms. Hoax-at-home—.”

  A snurfcoder caught it in the delay loop and made the correction.

  “Ah.” Hearing it on his monitor, the Announcer adjusted his tie. “Hecatomb.”

  Amazing, Few thought to himself, and not for the first time, with a glance over his shoulder, they still wear ties.

  “Ms. Hecatomb of course will arrive in Basra wearing only the finest Velum, custom tailored to the results of …”—a flourish of synthetic brass interrupted the old Condor Silversteed hit, “Pedestal Elevator” that had begun, almost subliminally, to percolate throughout the hall—“… An all-expenses-paid, three-day trip to the Bird-in-egg Delight Suite high above Disney Pier.” This program, as was well-known, costs thousands of Euroshells per hour, and the audience went proportionately nuts. “After which, this girl—,” and here the Announcer threw a hand over his shoulder, palm up, toward the big screen tiling the darkness behind him, upon which cuerpometric assemblages of Ms. Hecatomb pole-danced the pixels. Anterior, posterior, lateral, there were even shots from above and below, all of which revealed, despite her tasteful pubic couture, extremely intimate details of her enhancements, many of which could be considered florid, even though scientifically derived by means of neural evaluations performed on what few celibate monks remained in captivity. “… will exhibit 99.9 percent of the physiognomy of the Three-Day It-Girl.” Now tomography of Melanie Hecatomb’s pelvic region appeared on the screen, and one of the most sophisticated programs ever developed by the Committee, the codebase of which require
d two cities in India just to maintain, began to systematically augment it. “A trim here, a tuck there, a blemish removed there, early scarring via adolescent sex there, and—wow! Ladies and gentlemen, we might just never let her mutate! Whaddya say!” The holotorium went nuts. For, after all, pheromones remained liberally distributed throughout the hall hinting to almost everybody that it could happen to anybody at any time at any place just so long as they didn’t stray too far from the Party Voxel Projection.

  “Ding ding ding ding,” declaimed appropriately tinny audio randomly dispersed through the audio sensorium, “we have a winner!” Abruptly the applause decrescendoed through isolated hand claps and exuberant exclamations until it ceased altogether. It was as if somebody had thrown a switch.

  The beer had become warm. Red dropped the unfinished bottle into the cooler and levered the cap off a cool one with his teeth. That’s all I’m going to get out of this with, he muttered to himself, my fucking teeth. He sipped the beer. Maybe.

  “After a mere three days’ total immersion in the Zygote Continuum, Melanie Hecatomb will experience her tailored Velum like—like—you got it!” Here the Annoucer pointed into the darkness as if at some individual, “like a baby goat experiences the peristalsis of ana-CON-dadada… !”

  As he took the second sip, Red snapped the crenelated cap between thumb and forefinger. It ticked against the glass and disappeared into an expanse of factory-extruded Angoralene with a slight hiss.

  Male laughter erupted from the audience, riding a wave of feminized endorsement-enthusiasm pheromones. The Announcer blinked and held up a 3x5 card (of which anachronism Party Props [PP] still keeps a stash, subdivision Anachroprop). He appeared to read it again, at arm’s length yet, squinting even, before he tossed it over his shoulder and out of the light (there to be caught, run through a hot mangler and refiled by a diligent propshadow). “Old technology,” he said, leaning into the microphone, “only there for effect,” and, despite having heard this tired synecdoche since the commencement of each of their individual axonal tracks, the audience roared their approval of this and, therefore, of all effects, special or not. Before the reaction had died down completely, the Announcer turned to contemplate a new image of Ms. Hecatomb on the screen. Now, for lack of a better term, she had been thoroughly fine-tuned. Cloaked in a chic skin indistinguishable from her designer Velum and vice versa, the program rotated her through various cuerpometric projections, X Y & Z, wooden, mechanical, and time-lapsed. Altogether, by the up-to-the-nanosecond algorithms, a four-dimensional babe. Gradually the image took on more and more posthuman characteristics, without losing entirely, however, certain animé qualities lately deemed fashionable and sexy, until she exhibited every popular salient of Committee-sanctioned Calabi-Yau Bardo humanoidism.