The stripe of frothing, raging water was closer now. Albie judged it to be about twenty meters across, so he let his scow drift westward to open the mouth of the net a little wider. Thirty meters seaward to his right lay the anchor boat manned by Lars Zaro, the only man in the crew older than Albie. The floats on the net trailed in a giant semi-circle between and behind them, a cul-de-sac ringed with ten scows of Albie’s own design – flat-bottomed with a centerboard for greater stability – each carrying one gaff man and one freezer man. The two new hands were on freezer duty, of course. They had a long way to go before they could be trusted with a gaff.
Albie checked the men’s positions – all twenty-six, counting himself, were set. Then he glanced again at the big ship standing out toward the horizon. He could vaguely make out GelkCo I emblazoned across the stern. He wondered why it was there.
"INCREDIBLE! THAT SCHOOL’S heading right for him!"
"Told you."
Two men huddled before an illuminated screen in a dark room, one seated, the other leaning over his shoulder, both watching the progress of the season’s first chispen run.
The main body of the run was a fat, jumbled streak of light to the right of center on the screen, marking its position to seaward in the deeper part of the trench. They ignored that. It was the slim arc that had broken from the run a few kilometers northward and was now heading directly for a dot representing Albie and his crew that gripped their attention.
"How does he do it?" the seated man asked. "How does he know where they’re going to be?"
"You’ve just asked the question we’d all like answered. Albie uses outdated methods, decrepit equipment, and catches more than anyone else on the water. The average chispen fisher brings home enough to support himself and his family; Albie is rich and the two dozen or so who work for him are living high."
"Well, we’ll be putting an end to that soon enough, I guess."
"I suppose we will."
"It’s almost a shame." The seated man pointed to the screen. "Just look at that! The school’s almost in his net! Damn! It’s amazing! There’s got to be a method to it!"
"There is. And after seeing this, I’m pretty sure I know what it is."
But the standing man would say no more.
ALBIE RETURNED HIS ATTENTION to the onrushing school, mentally submerging and imagining himself at one with the chispies. He saw glistening blue-white fusiform shapes darting through the water around him in tightly packed formation just below the surface. Their appearance at this point differed markedly from the slow, graceful, ray-like creatures that glide so peacefully along the seabottoms of their winter spawning grounds to the south or the summer feeding grounds to the north. With their triangular wings spread wide and gently undulating, the chispies are the picture of tranquillity at the extremes of their habitat.
But between those extremes…
When fall comes after a summer of gorging at the northern shoals, the chispen wraps its barbed wings around its fattened body and becomes a living, twisting missile hurtling down the twelve-hundred-kilometer trench that runs along the coast of Gelk’s major landmass.
The wings stay folded around the body during the entire trip. But should something bar the chispies’ path – a net, for instance – the wings unfurl as they swerve and turn and loop in sudden trapped confusion. The ones who can build sufficient momentum break the surface and take to the air in a short glide to the open sea. The chispen fisher earns his hazard pay then – the sharp barbed edges of those unfurled wings cut through flesh almost as easily as air.
With the school almost upon him, Albie turned his attention to the net floats and waited. Soon it came: a sudden erratic bobbing along the far edge of the semi-circle. There were always a few chispies traveling well ahead of their fellows and these were now in the net.
Time to move.
"Everybody hold!" he yelled and started moving his throttle forward. He had to establish some momentum before the main body of the school hit, or else he’d never get the net closed in time.
As the white water speared into the pocket of net and boats, Albie threw the impeller control onto full forward and gripped the wheel with an intensity that bulged the muscles of his forearms.
The hit came, tugging his head back and causing the impeller to howl in protest against the sudden reverse pull. As Albie turned his boat hard to starboard and headed for Zaro’s anchorboat to complete the circle, the water within began to foam like green tea in a blender. He was tying up to Zaro’s craft when the first chispies began breaking water and zooming overhead. But the circumscribed area was too small to allow many of them to get away like that. Only those who managed to dart unimpeded from the deep to the surface could take to the air. The rest thrashed and flailed their wings with furious intensity, caroming off the fibrous mesh of the net and colliding with each other as the gaffers bent to their work.
The game was on.
The boats rocked in the growing turbulence and this was when the men appreciated the added stability of centerboards on the flat-bottomed scows. Their helmets would protect their heads, the safety wires gave them reasonable protection against being pulled into the water, but if a boat capsized… any man going into that bath of sharp swirling seawings would be ribbon-meat before he could draw a second breath.
Albie finished securing his boat to Zaro’s, then grabbed his gaff and stood erect. He didn’t bother with a helmet, depending rather on forty years of experience to keep his head out of the way of airborne chispies, but made sure his safety wire was tightly clipped to the back of his belt before leaning over the water to put his gaff to work.
There was an art to the gaffing, a dynamic synthesis of speed, skill, strength, courage, agility, and hand-eye coordination that took years to master. The hook at the end of the long pole had to be driven under the scales with a cephalad thrust at a point forward of the chispen’s center of gravity. Then the creature’s momentum had to be adjusted – never countered – into a rising arc that would allow the gaff-handler to lever it out of the water and onto the deck of his scow. The freezer man – Zaro in Albie’s case – would take it from there, using hand hooks to slide the flopping fish onto the belt that would run it through the liquid nitrogen bath and into the insulated hold below.
Albie worked steadily, rhythmically, his eyes methodically picking out the shooting shapes, gauging speed and size. The latter was especially important: Too large a fish and the pole would either break or be torn from his hands; too small and it wasn’t worth the time and effort. The best size was in the neighborhood of fifty kilos – about the weight of a pubescent human. The meat then had body and tenderness and brought the highest price.
Wings slashed, water splashed, droplets flashed through the air and caught in Albie’s beard. Time was short. They had to pull in as many as they could before the inevitable happened. Insert the hook, feel the pull, lever the pole, taste the spray as the winged beastie angrily flapped the air on its way to the deck, free the hook and go back for the next. It was the first time all year Albie had truly felt alive.
Then it happened as it always happened: The furious battering opened a weak spot in the net and the school leaked free into the sea. That, too, was part of the game. After a moment of breath-catching, the men hauled in the remains of the net to pick up the leftovers, the chispies too battered and bloodied by their confused and frantic companions to swim after them.
"Look at that, will you?" the seated man said. "They broke out and now they’re heading back to the main body of the run! How do you explain that?" The standing man said nothing and the seated one looked up at him. "You used to work for Albie, didn’t you?"
A nod in the dimness. "Once. Years ago. That was before I connected with GelkCo."
"Why don’t you pay him a visit? Never know… he might come in handy."
"I might do that – if he’ll speak to me."
"Oh? He get mad when you quit?"
"Didn’t quit. The old boy fired me."
"HELLO, ALBIE."
Albie looked up from where he sat on the sand in a circle of his men, each with a pile of tattered net on his lap. The sun was lowering toward the land and the newcomer was silhouetted against it, his features in shadow. But Albie recognized him.
"Vic? That you, Vic?"
"Yeah, Albie, it’s me. Mind if I sit down?"
"Go ahead. Sand’s free." Albie gave the younger man a careful inspection as he made himself comfortable. Vic had been raised a beach rat but that was hard to tell now. A tall man in his mid-thirties, he was sleek, slim, and dark with blue eyes and even features. The one-piece suit he wore didn’t belong on the beach. His black hair was slicked back, exposing a right ear bereft of its upper third, a physical trait acquired during his last year on the chispen nets. Restoration would have been no problem had he desired it, but apparently he preferred to flaunt the disfigurement as a badge of sorts. It seemed to Albie that he had broken Vic in on the nets only a few days ago, and had sacked him only yesterday. But it had been years… eleven of them.
He tossed Vic a length of twine. "Here. Make yourself useful. Can I trust you to do it right?"
"You never let a man forget, do you?" Vic said through an uncertain smile.
"That’s because I don’t forget!" Albie knew there was a sharp edge on his voice; he refused to blunt it with a smile of his own.
The other men glanced at each other, frowning. Albie’s mellow temperament was legend among the fishermen up and down the coast, yet here he was, glowering and suffusing the air with palpable tension. Only Zaro knew what lay behind the animosity.
"Time for a break, boys," Zaro said. "We’ll down a couple of ales and finish up later."
Albie never allowed dull-witted men out on the nets with him: They took the hint and walked off.
"What brings you back?" he asked when they were alone.
"That." Vic pointed toward the ship on the horizon.
Albie kept his eyes down, concentrating on repairing the net. "Saw it this morning. What’s GelkCo I mean?"
"She’s owned by the GelkCo Corporation."
"So they call it GelkCo I? How imaginative."
Vic shrugged and began patching a small hole in the net before him, his expression registering surprise and pleasure with the realization that his hands still knew what to do.
"The Council of Advisors put GelkCo together so the planet could deal on the interstellar market as a corporation."
"Since when do you work for the C. of A.?"
"Since my fishing career came to an abrupt halt eleven years ago." His eyes sought Albie’s but couldn’t find them. "I went into civil service then. Been on a research and development panel for the Council."
"Civil service, eh?" Albie squinted against the reddening light. "So now you get taxes put into your pay instead of taken out."
Vic was visibly stung by the remark. "Not fair, Albie. I earn my pay."
"And what’s this corporation supposed to sell?" Albie said, ignoring the protest.
"Filet of chispen."
Albie smiled for the first time. "Oh, really? You mean they’ve still got chispies on their minds?"
"That’s all they’ve got on their minds! And since I spent a good number of years with the best chispen fisher there is, it seemed natural that I be put in charge of developing the chispen as a major export."
"And that ship’s going to do it?"
"It has to!" Vic said emphatically. "It must. Everything else was tried before they came to me–”
"Came to me first."
"I know." Vic could not suppress a smile. "And your suggestions were recorded as not only obscene, but physically impossible as well."
"That’s because they really aren’t interested in anything about those fish beyond the price per kilo."
"Perhaps you’re right, Albie. But that boat out there is unique and it’s going to make you obsolete. You won’t get hurt financially, I know. You could’ve retired years ago… and should have. Your methods have seen their day. That ship’s going to bring this industry up to date."
"Obsolete!" The word escaped behind a grunt of disgust.
Albie seriously doubted the C. of A.’s ability to render anything obsolete… except maybe efficiency and clear thinking. For the past few years he had been keeping a careful eye on the Council’s abortive probes into the chispen industry, had watched with amusement as it tried every means imaginable to obtain a large supply of chispen filet short of actually going out and catching the fish.
The chispies, of course, refused to cooperate, persisting in migratory habits that strictly limited their availability. They spawned in the southern gulf during the winter and fattened themselves on the northern feeding shoals during the summer, and were too widely dispersed at those two locales to be caught in any significant numbers. Every spring they grouped and ran north but were too lean and fibrous from a winter of mating, fertilizing and hatching their eggs.
Only in the fall, after a full summer of feasting on the abundant bait fish and bottom weed indigenous to their feeding grounds, were they right for eating, and grouped enough to make it commercially feasible to go after them. But Gelk’s Council of Advisors was convinced there existed an easier way to obtain the filet than casting nets on the water. It decided to raise chispen just like any other feed animal. But chispies are stubborn. They won’t breed in captivity, nor will they feed in captivity. This held true not only for adult fish captured in the wild, but for eggs hatched and raised in captivity, and even for chispen clones as well.
The Council moved on to tissue cultures of the filet but the resultant meat was said to be nauseating.
It eventually became evident to even the most dunderheaded member of the Council that there weren’t going to be any shortcuts here. The appeal of chispen filet was the culmination of myriad environmental factors: The semi-annual runs along the coast gave the meat body and texture; the temperature, water quality, and bottom weed found only on their traditional feeding shoals gave it the unique euphorogenic flavor that made it such a delicacy.
No, there was only one way to supply the discriminating palates of Occupied Space with filet of chispen and that was to go out on the sea and catch them during the fall runs. They had to be pulled out of the sea and flash-frozen alive before an intestinal enzyme washed a foul odor into the bloodstream and ruined the meat. No shortcuts. No easy way out.
"I didn’t come to gloat, Albie. And I mean you no ill will. In fact, I may be able to offer you a job."
"And how could a lowly old gaffer possibly help out on a monstrosity like that?" He turned back to his net repair.
"By bringing fish into it."
Albie glanced up briefly, then down again. He said nothing.
"You can’t fool me, Albie. Maybe all the rest, but not me. I used to watch you… used to see you talking to those fish, bringing them right into the net."
"You think I’m a psi or something?" The voice had laughter all around the edges.
"I know it! And what I saw on the tracking screen this morning proves it!"
"Crazy."
"No. You’re a psi! Maybe you don’t even know it, but you’ve got some sort of influence over those fish. You call them somehow and they come running. That’s why you’re the best."
"You’ll never understand, will you? It’s–”
"But I do understand! You’re a psi who talks to fish!"
Albie’s dark lids eclipsed his eyes until only slim crescents of light gray remained.
"Then why," he said in a low voice, "did I have such a rotten season eleven years ago? Why did I have to fire the best first mate I ever had? If I’m a psi, why couldn’t I call the chispies into the net that season? Why?"
Vic was silent, keeping his eyes focused on the dark ship off shore. As he waited for an answer, Albie was pulled pastward to the last time the two of them had spoken.
It had been Albie’s worst season since he began playing the game. After an excellent start, th
e numbers of chispen flowing into the freezers had declined steadily through the fall until that one day at season’s end when they sat in their boats and watched the final schools race by, free and out of reach.
That was the day Albie hauled in the net out there on the water and personally gave it a close inspection, actually cutting off samples of net twine and unraveling them. What he found within sent him into a rage.
The first mate, a young man named Vic who was wearing a bandage on his right ear, admitted to replacing the usual twine with fiber-wrapped wire. As Albie approached him in a menacing half-crouch, he explained quickly that he thought too many fish had been getting away. He figured the daily yield could be doubled if they reinforced the net with something stronger than plain twine. He knew Albie had only one hard-and-fast rule among his crew and that was to repair the net exclusively with the materials Albie provided – no exceptions. So Vic opted for stealth, intending to reveal his ploy at season’s end when they were all richer from the extra fish they had caught.
Albie threw Vic into the sea that day and made him swim home. Then he cut the floats off the net and let it sink to the bottom. Since that day he had made a practice of being present whenever the net was repaired.
A long time passed before Albie started feeling like himself again. Vic had been in his crew for six years. Albie had taken him on as a nineteen-year-old boy and had watched him mature to a man on the nets. He was a natural. Raised along the coast and as much at home on the sea as he was on land, he was soon a consummate gaffer and quickly rose to be the youngest first mate Albie had ever had. He watched over Vic, worried about him, bled with him when a chispie wing took a piece of his ear, and seriously considered taking him in as a partner after a few more years. Childless after a lifelong marriage to the sea, Albie felt he had found a son in Vic.