Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [198]
They dropped yet again, toward a big landing pad on a tanker called the Hugo Chavez, an Ultra Large Crude Carrier with a gigantic bridge at its stern. From this height the ships around them looked longer than ever, all plowing broad white wakes into a swell from the north that seemed miniature in proportion to the ships, but began to look substantial the lower they got. Hovering just over the Hugo Chavez’s landing pad, it became clear from the windcaps and spray that the salt armada was in fact crashing through high seas and a stiff wind, almost a gale. Looking in the direction of the sun the scene turned black-and-white, like one of those characteristically windblown chiaroscuro moments in Victory At Sea.
When they got out of the helo the wind blasted through their clothes, and chased them upstairs to the bridge’s control quarters. There a crowd of visitors larger than the crew of the ship had a fine view over a broad expanse of ocean, crowded with immense ships all carrying salt.
Looking away from the sun the sea was a cobalt color, a deep and pure Adriatic blue, without any hint of the blackness that mysteriously seeped into both the polar seas.
The Hugo Chavez, seen from its bridge, looked like an aircraft carrier with the landing deck removed. The quarterdeck or sterncastle under the bridge was tall, but only a tiny part of the craft; the forecastle looked like it was a mile away. The intervening distance was interrupted by a skeletal rig that resembled a loading crane, but also reminded Frank of the giant irrigation sprayers one saw in California’s central valley. The salt in the hold was being vacuumed into this device, then cast out in powerful white jets, a couple hundred meters to both sides. The hardrock salt had been milled to sizes ranging from table salt to rock salt to bowling balls, but because most of it came from salt pans, it was mostly crystalline and pretty fine. In the holds it looked like dirty white gravel and sand. In the air it looked almost like dirty water or slush, arching out and splashing in a satisfyingly broad swath. Between the salt fall and the ship’s wakes, and the whitecaps, the deep blue of the ocean surface was infinitely mottled by white. Looking aft, in the direction of the sun, it turned to silver on pewter and lead.
Diane watched the scene with her nose almost on the glass, deeply hooded in a blue heavy jacket. She smiled at Frank. “You can smell the salt.”
“The ocean always smells like this.”
“It seems like more today.”
“Maybe so.” She had grown up in San Francisco, he remembered. “It must smell like home.” She nodded happily.
They followed their hosts up a metal staircase to a higher deck of the bridge, a room with windows on all sides that had a view like that from an airport control tower. It was this room that made the Hugo Chavez the designated visitor or party ship, and now the big glass-walled room was crowded with dignitaries and officials of all kinds. Here they could best view the long ships on all sides of them, all the way out to the horizon, where more ships were visible only at fore and stern, or by the white jets of salt. Each ship cast two long curving jets out to the sides from its bow, like the spouts of right whales; and every element was repeated so symmetrically that it seemed as if they had fallen into an M. C. Escher world.
The tankers flanking theirs seemed nearer than they really were because of their great size. They were completely steady in the long swells. The air around the ships was filled with a white haze that drifted down the wake for a kilometer or so before sinking away. Diane pointed out that the diesel exhaust stayed in the air while the salt mist did not. “They look so dirty. I wonder if we couldn’t go back to sails again someday, and just let everything go slower by sea.”
“Labor costs,” Frank suggested. “Uncertainty. Maybe even danger.”
“Would they be more dangerous? I bet you could make them so big and solid they wouldn’t be any more dangerous than these.”
“These were reckoned pretty dangerous.”
“I don’t hear