Linda Nagata - Hooks, Nets & Time

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 83.96KB 15 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Hooks, Nets and

Time

a novelette

by Linda Nagata

The ocean ran through his dreams. The panting breath of the wavelets as they rose and fell against the

pylons became his own breath, a slow, deep rhythm in his lungs that forced him to run. His footfalls

reverberated against the black plastic photovoltaic field that doubled as a deck: a square track five

kilometers long, encompassing the perimeter of the shark pen. Starlight glinted off the water; glistened in

the film of sweat that coated his pumping arms. The rubber soles of his running shoes beat out an ancient

cursorial rhythm, a telling vibration transmitted through the deck to the perforated steel walls of the shark

pen and then to the coral foundations of the station some twelve fathoms below. Crippled Tiburon would

be lurking there near the bottom, listening, measuring the vibrations in his ancient, clever mind, waiting for

the hour when his fins had fully regrown and his strength was at once new...and old.

A thin wail twisted through the humid night. Tiburon heard it in the depths and thrashed his powerful tail.

The wail grew into a distant howl of terror.

A faint splash.

Zayder sat up abruptly. The dream peeled away like burned film, leaving him in another version of the

night. He'd fallen asleep on a lounge chair again, in the open air, on the deck of the Ocean Hazards

Collection Station that he managed alone. The blocky silhouette of the shed rose behind him. The

structure seemed to be an ugly afterthought to the automated design of the U.N. mandated OHC Station.

Still, it served him for housing, and storage for the shark farm: luxury quarters compared to the fishing

boats he'd grown up on.

Out on the water, the distant lights of a freighter interrupted the blanket of starlight. In the pen, the swish

and splash of a shark fin accented the peaceful wash of the ocean.

Zayder leaned forward, ignoring the dry moss of a hangover that clung to his tongue and the roof of his

mouth. He listened, unsure if the howl had been part of his dream. His pulse still hammered in his ears.

He'd heard howls like that before: once as a kid, when a man fell off the shark boats in the Sulu Sea. And

again, one night when Mr. Ryan came to the station. Zayder had only feigned drinking the cordial that

should have sent him into a drugged sleep. That night he'd watched surreptitiously as a bound man went

screaming to the sharks.

He listened. He thought he could detect a distant, angry voice from the direction of the freighter, but that

was all. And what if he heard more? What was he supposed to do if he discovered mayhem and murder

on the high seas? Call Mr. Ryan and complain about the neighbors?

He chose to believe that it had been a dream.

Dawn came. Zayder woke, washed his face, put on his running shoes. Another day. He would spend

the morning doing maintenance on the robotic garbage trawlers that had come into the station overnight

from their long forays into the South China Sea. In the afternoon he would mutilate sharks, harvesting the

regrown fins of the captive beasts for sale on the Chinese market -- the prized ingredient in shark fin

soup. So much to look forward to.

But first he would run.

He set off at an easy pace on the only route the station offered: a 5K lap around the photovoltaic decking

built atop the steel mesh wall of the shark pen. At high tide the deck was a meter above the water, with

the open sea on one side and the enclosed waters of the pen on the other.

Zayder had run this makeshift track twice every morning for almost a year. Boredom had been left

behind long ago. Now, his mind automatically faded into a passive altered state before he finished the first

hundred meters. Conversations rose from his past to fill his consciousness, insignificant exchanges: a joke

offered to college acquaintances in a bar; polite questioning of a professor; a cautious response to the

inquiries of a government personnel officer hiring biologists for the wildlife refuge at Moro Bay; and yet

another personnel officer, hiring for the marine sanctuary in the Gulf of California, and another and

another, until they all seemed to be different versions of the same bad news: I'm sorry. You have an

excellent record and your thesis is impressive, but I'm afraid you're not quite right for us....

He studied every word, searching for some point where -- if only he'd phrased things differently -- events

would have taken a more positive path. An absurd exercise. He already knew the point when his career

in marine biology had been lost. It had happened even before he knew what a career was, when he'd

been arrested at seventeen for poaching.

It had meant nothing to him at the time. He'd been working for his Dad, hunting pelagic sharks for a

dealer, who preserved the bodies and sold them as dramatic ornaments for coastal mansions. Zayder's

family had been deep water fishermen for generations. But as natural resources dwindled, what had been

an honest occupation gradually became a crime, and an arrest for poaching just another risk of the

business.

But the wealthy patrons who supported refuges and sanctuaries around the world didn't see it in that

practical light. No refuge manager would want his patron's newsletter to ring with the headline: Former

poacher hired as field biologist.

It had never mattered how well he did in school.

But he'd come too far in life to go back to the boats, so he'd taken a job with Mr. Ryan instead. Ryan

did not believe in nonprofit enterprises. When a U.N. mandate required every corporate entity that

generated potential ocean garbage to construct and maintain an Ocean Hazards Collection Station, Ryan

had expanded on the design by adding the shark pen.

Shark fins were much in demand and now nearly unobtainable since the wild populations had been

hunted almost to extinction. Tiburon's fins alone would fetch twice Zayder's yearly wages each time they

could be regrown and harvested. Ryan's select market held the great white shark in high esteem: no other

great white had been reported in nearly five years. Speculation held the captive animal to be the last of its

species.

But beyond the income from fins, the station was useful to Ryan in other ways. So Zayder finally found

himself employed again, master of a remote world built on a reef in the South China Sea.

The deep blue sky lightened as he ran. The pink fair-weather clouds that hugged the horizon gradually

brightened until they were bathed in brilliant white. A moment later the rim of the sun appeared above the

water. Zayder ducked his head, his thoughts blown back to the present by the sudden blast of daylight.

A hundred meters out on the sun-burnished water a black torpedo armed with a spine of pentagonal fins

scudded towards the station: one of the robotic garbage trawlers being driven home by a combination of

the light breeze against its adjustable fins, and a solar-powered engine. Its collecting tentacles trailed a

hundred meters behind it: some on the surface, some searching out the depths below. Most of them were

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Linda Nagata - Hooks, Nets & Time.pdf

共15页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Linda Nagata - Hooks, Nets & Time

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: