Reefsong

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  Copyright ©1991 by Carol Severance

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  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  This story is dedicated to the grand old man of American Samoa, John A. Kneubuhl, who really did teach Angie to fly

  ...and, of course, to Puluai Craig, who held the net.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people for their assistance during the creation of this story:

  University of Hawaii at Hilo faculty members

  Dr. Daniel E. Brown, who helped Zed design the TC enzyme;

  Dr. Donald E. Hemmes, who explained the biology of the Lesaat sea;

  Dr. William D. Heacox, who provided my first glimpse of Pukui's night sky;

  And, of course, Dr. Craig J. Severance, who did his very best to keep this tale anthropologically honest.

  I would also like to say mahalo nui loa to Kahikāhealani Wight and Kauanoe Kamanā for their assistance with the Hawaiian language.

  Vonda N. McIntyre, Rhea Rose, and Dr. Thomas J. Griffin offered valuable comments and encouragement, and on two separate occasions computer specialist Annie Yu Brown rescued the entire manuscript from the ether.

  Most especially, I would like to thank John A. Kneubuhl (Sione Nupo) for sharing his time, his extraordinary storytelling skill, and his cultural insights. His was the gift of Le Fe'e.

  Any errors to be found in this story are entirely my own.

  Chapter 1

  Angie blinked as she stepped from the lift into the observation tower—first to assure herself she was fully awake, then again, rapidly, to activate the distance grid in her telescopic implants. The eastern sky was much too dark for this early morning hour.

  “Spit on the lines,” she muttered. The darkness wasn't part of any night sky. It was smoke! There was a fire in Sector Five.

  She strode to the control console at the center of the tower and keyed a system-wide alarm sequence.

  “Fire Control,” she said into the opened mike, “this is Central Forest Preserve. We have a primary alert in Sector Five. Repeat. Serious burn in Sector Five. Please order a full fire crew to the site stat. Put secondary lines on standby. I'm transmitting fire coordinates now.”

  She keyed in her visual estimates of the fire's location and dimensions, then focused the lookout tower's cameras on the site and activated a continual-update order. Her own estimates remained a steady orange glow at the top of the monitoring screen, showing that the computer-assisted camera system had verified them as accurate.

  “Central Forest,” the control watchman's voice drawled through the tower speaker; he sounded irritated, as if he'd rather not be disturbed. “Double-check your sighting and coordinates.”

  “They've been double-checked and more, Central,” she said, a little sharply; she paused to steady her voice. “Please enter an immediate scramble order before this gets out of hand.” The smoke had become a billowing silhouette against the rising sun.

  “Scrambling a full crew's pretty costly, lady,” the watchman said. “I'll need an okay from Warden Dinsman before I can proceed.” She could almost hear his slow grin. He would be up for a bonus if he could talk her out of the full crew. The forest preserve ranked low on the Company's list of priority expenditures. The only reason they supported it at all was because of pressure from the U.N., and even that was waning with the continued food shortage. The watchman probably had orders to stall or even deny all but the most serious fire calls from the preserve.

  Well, two could play the bonus-and-deduction game. “Log your name and your credit number, Watchman,” Angie said. “You're talking to Warden Dinsman.”

  There was a pause—to pull his feet off the desk, no doubt—then, rather hesitantly, a name and number appeared on her recording monitor.

  “You got my crew ordered yet, Mr. Hansen?” she asked.

  “Order confirmed,” came the instant reply.

  “Good. Tell ’em to pack their shovels. This ain't no picnic I'm invitin’ ’em to.” It was an old fire-liner's joke. The watchman wouldn't understand it, but it served to take the edge off Angie's anger and her growing concern.

  There was way too much smoke out there. It was spread over too great an area to have been started by a lightning strike during the night. And it was directly east of Tower Five. Even with the satellite alert system off-line, it should have been noticed and called in an hour before.

  Angie's right shoulder tingled as the sector lookout crews began checking in. As usual, Tower Two, far to the west, was first to make contact. Then Tower Four. Then Three, with a triple buzz, to remind her that Gates and Abada had a trainee on-site. She pressed the individual locator implants along her upper arm to acknowledge each call. The tingling stopped.

  Come on, Five, she urged silently. Where the hell are you? Wake up, Chandler!

  Chandler was alone at his station. His partner had been flown out with a broken ankle two days before, after stepping into a fireloving gopher hole. Angie pressed a finger over the Tower-Five implant, activating a search signal. A faint itch brushed her shoulder, telling her that Chandler was out there, just not responding. She keyed the alarm inside Tower Five again.

  Finally, reluctantly, she tapped the alert that would wake her own partner. She and Nori had been up most of the night repairing the grav plates on their flitter. When the jury-rigged job was complete, Nori had insisted they stay awake awhile longer to celebrate. Angie smiled slightly as she recalled the direction the celebration had quickly taken. Nori wasn't much of a mountain man, but he knew how to show a lady a good time. It hadn't been easy to leave his warm bunk when the time had come for her dawn watch.

  Angie turned away from the black smudge of burning forest and stood to walk a routine watch around the tower's perimeter. This wasn't the day to risk a trash fire in the backyard.

  A seemingly endless blanket of evergreens stretched in all directions from the tower. Acre upon acre of forest land. The trees grew too slowly for the preserve to be classified as an active CO2 farm. But the Company-owned property fell under the U.N.'s Earth Preservation Service guidelines nevertheless, simply because it was one of the very few stretches of indigenous forest left in the Northern Hemisphere. All other arable land, most of it owned or controlled by World Life, and regardless how marginal, was used for food production.

  The importation of a partial protein-conversion enzyme from the newly discovered waterplanet, Lesaat, had eased the problem somewhat. But the supply of the life-saving digestive enzyme was limited. Widespread famine still plagued Earth's ever-expanding population.

  A wisp of smoke in Sector Three caught Angie's attention. That would be the Company-run rest lodge on Lake Wendell, filled to capacity, she was sure, with well-fed World Life Company executives on holiday.

  “If they spent as much effort feeding the rest of the world as they do themselves,” she muttered, “I could retire and spend enough time up here to see that days like this never happen.” She glanced back across the tower at the rising smoke. This unexplained fire in what she considered her home territory made her angry. When she was here, she was supposed to be able to relax.

  As an environmental anthropologist Angie spent most of her time troubleshooting under a U.N. mandate to protect the planet's ever-diminishing food supply. During her twelve years of active duty, she had helped to solve everything from tree blight on th
e great South American tree farms to creeping forest fires in East Africa, from workers’ disputes in Canadian canneries to relocating rebellious New Guinea tribesmen.

  In the last case, much to the Company's dismay, she had used laws more than a half-century old to provide a way for the indigenous tribesmen to retain at least a portion of their own land. Her rate of success in preserving natural resources and thus assuring Company profits elsewhere, however, was such that even the most conservative administrators were willing to pay her deliberately exorbitant fees.

  In between jobs, though, she always came back to these high, dry mountains. She much preferred the patient, whispering pines to the explosive growth of the tropics where most of her troubleshooting work was done. Her parents had once owned a small ranch adjoining this preserve, and she had spent most of her youth hiking and camping in the nearby mountains.

  Her decision to become a troubleshooter had been based primarily on the knowledge that there were so few such wilderness areas left on Earth; she wanted to do what she could to save them. She had realized early on in her work that saving natural human resources, despite Company opposition, was equally satisfying.

  Still, Angie treasured the scattered days and weeks of isolation from human conflict that her interim fire warden's job provided. Her current two-month stay at Tower One was as long a continuous stretch as she had ever managed. She would have liked to believe that the long break in the need for her crisis-intervention services indicated some small improvement in the world situation, but she suspected it was just a fluke.

  The lift door hissed open as Angie finished her circuit of the lookout tower. Nori fumbled with the Velcro fasteners on his shirt as he stepped from the lift. His ordinarily well-groomed hair stood on end, and his eyes, for once without their fine shadow of makeup, were red rimmed from lack of sleep.

  “What's going—” He stopped when he saw the smoke. His already pale face turned paler.

  “Sorry, Watchman,” she said as she returned to the console. “Looks like we should have made it a shorter night.”

  He laid a warm hand on her shoulder. “A difficult thing to do with a woman of your talents, Warden. I'd been warned about troubleshooters’ stamina, but—” He blinked rapidly, then keyed a set of visual coordinates.

  Angie's original estimates maintained their steady glow at the top of the screen. Nori's flickered near the center, just below those of the computer-assisted cameras. They were close, but not exact.

  “You called it right,” he said. “As always.”

  She smiled. “I told you that last visual implant would make a difference.”

  “Humph! A lien on half your lifetime's savings and a ten-year mountain service indenture, all for a few meters’ accuracy. What's it good for?”

  It was an argument they had had before, and one that she was weary of. The reminder that he had accessed her personal financial records irritated Angie as it always did, but because she had deliberately structured those records to be misleading, she addressed only the second part of his complaint.

  “It's a simple contract extension,” she said. “To make sure this mountain post stays open for me.”

  “Your talents are wasted out here in this wilderness,” he said. “With your genotype and your training, you'd qualify to work anywhere in the Company system—on Earth or off. You could have any administration job you wanted.”

  “Work in admin? I'd rather shovel dung on Mensat,” she replied. “Meaning no offense to your own ambitions, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said dryly.

  Mensat's primary industry was the mining of giant guano deposits; assignment on the odoriferous planet was considered the most degrading of all forms of employment. World Life had purchased immediate use-rights to Mensat when it was first discovered, and had learned too late that while humans could survive there, they could do so only in very small numbers and in very great discomfort. The only financially viable product Mensat offered was its natural fertilizer, and it would be centuries before the Company recouped its original use-rights investment. Dedicated Company men like Nori did not like to be reminded of that crowning example of Company greed.

  Still, he persisted. “I've heard they're about to start producing a new total-conversion enzyme on Lesaat; the algae farms are bound to need new recruits. You could—”

  “Oh, Nori,” she said. “The Company's been trying to pass off that rumor for as long as I can remember. You know better than to try it on me.”

  Nori watched her for a moment, then smiled slightly and shrugged.

  “I'm not interested in going off-planet,” she told him. “Not even to a place that's being touted as ‘Earth's new South Pacific paradise.'” Nori had shown her Lesaat's most recent recruitment brochures just the afternoon before. “Nobody's going to turn me into a squid just to—”

  “The job I'm talking about is different,” he said quickly. “They need a ranking troubleshooter to—”

  “I'm not interested.” Angie suspected that the Company had already approached the other ranking shooters about this job, and been turned down. She had made it clear for years that she was not open to such requests.

  “But this is only a temporary—”

  “Give it a rest, Nori. We've been over this a hundred times. I do not want to leave Earth.”

  “Well, I wish you would at least consider—”

  “What are you trying to do?” she snapped. “Get yourself a recruitment bonus at my expense?”

  His touch disappeared from her shoulder. “You're a stubborn woman, Angie.”

  Angie sighed. She had heard that before, too. She indicated a flickering digital gauge. “Wind's up a bit.”

  “Towers check in yet?” he asked.

  “All but Five.”

  They both lifted their gazes to the fire.

  “Must have been multiple lightning strikes,” Nori said. “Burn's too big for just one.”

  “You hear any thunder last night?” Angie asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Neither did I.”

  She stood. “Take the deck. I'm going to go see what's going on out there.” Crossing to the lift, she kicked off her moccasins and stepped into one of the readied fire suits.

  Nori slid into the control seat. He touched in the change-of-deck command and activated the tower recorder—a Company man's move. “Fire Rescue is already on its way,” Nori said. “There's no reason for you to go out there.”

  “I can reach the tower at least ten minutes sooner than the rescue bus,” she replied. She sealed the heat-resistant coverall across the tops of her thighs and in a slightly off-center line down her chest. “If Chandler's in trouble, it might make a difference.” She bent to pull on double-soled boots.

  “The leading edge is damn close to the tower already, if these readings are right,” Nori said. “Let Rescue do its job, Warden.”

  Sure, she thought, by the book, regardless of the possible consequences to the guy in trouble. Nori was a Company man down to his socks. She paused just long enough to meet his gaze. “Let me do mine,” she said.

  He frowned and turned back to the console. She snapped on the fire suit's hood, a little surprised that he had given up so easily.

  “Nori,” she said as she stepped into the lift. He was still for a moment. Finally, he turned.

  “Wish me luck?”

  “You're a damn fool, Angie, why can't you just...”

  She sighed again and punched the lift doors closed. “Never let ’em get too close,” she muttered. Nori was a competent enough lineman when it counted, and he had been good company during his stay at Tower One, but his Company line and his constant attempts to recruit her for off-planet work, not to mention his veiled overprotectiveness, were becoming irritating. Despite her fondness for him, Angie was looking forward to the time when his field rotation ended.

  Never get too close, yourself, she mused.

  Angie pushed the flitter to full power as soon as she was alof
t. As she drew closer, the smoke in Sector Five appeared darker, angrier than before. It blocked the rising sun's direct rays. She activated the cabin radio.

  “Tower One, this is Tower One Flitter,” she said. “I'm about to cross the sector line.”

  “Are the grav plates holding level?” Nori responded.

  “Plates are okay, but the hatch is still sticking. I damned near broke my wrist getting it closed.”

  “It's the pneumatic springs,” he replied. “There's nothing we can do without replacements. Supply says they can't get new springs from the manufacturer until the air cargo strike is settled.”

  Angie sighed. Unlike the total cooperation she received while on troubleshooting assignments, supply problems were a way of life here on the preserve.

  About ten years before, World Life Company had agreed to maintain the area as an ecological preserve in return for full title to it and the adjoining downslope farm and industrial lands. Aside from their own rest lodge, however, they did little to keep the preserve's support facilities in good repair.

  It was rumored that the multinational World Life Company had been created by former members of the South American drug cartels around the turn of the century. As their illicit drug markets shrank and the danger of being killed or prosecuted rose, they dropped out of sight and began quietly investing in legitimate industrial and agricultural enterprises.

  The resultant, highly profit-oriented World Life Company soon became recognized as a growing force in the international money market. Other businesses, particularly large insurance companies and banks, scrambled to include themselves within its ranks.

  It was widely believed that the Company had, in those early years, encouraged the fundamentalist fervor of the times, particularly as it related to outlawing abortion and artificial birth control in many parts of the world. By doing so, they created a desperate, demanding, and entirely legal market for the carefully controlled food resources the Company was soon able to provide.