THE LAST HARBOR (Bantam Spectra Book) - Softcover

Foy, George

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553379313 ISBN 13: 9780553379310

Verlag: Random House, Inc., 2008

Inhaltsangabe

When his seeming perfect life collapses around him, Slocum, who had worked for X-Corp Multimedia - a producer of interactive virtual-reality entertaiment, flees to a small New England town on his tiny sloop and is soon plunged into a bizarre mystery when a huge luxury liner docks beside him with only one passenger - a beautiful woman who is being held captive and who is the key to his salvation. Original.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

One of today's most distinguished science fiction writers, George Foy is the author of five acclaimed thrillers and two well-received literary novels. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for 1994-95.

Aus dem Klappentext

et you free -- or imprison you forever....

The acclaimed author of The Shift and Contraband delivers a brilliant new novel set in an edgy future where nothing is more dangerous than a dream....

Slocum had it all: the perfect family, the perfect home, and the perfect job with X-Corp Multimedia -- a major producer of interactive virtual-reality entertainment. In a world divided between protected enclaves of luxury and blighted, decaying landscapes, the ubiquitous 3-D telecasts over the Flash hold millions in thrall with their packaged, programmed dreams.

Once Slocum helped devise those dreams, until his career at X-Corp self-destructed and with it his marriage. Now his world has shrunk to a tiny sloop berthed in the dingy harbor of a dying New England seafaring town, where the main attraction is a virtual-whaling theme park. In his solitary cabin he studies the legendary Smuggler's Bible and dreams of sailing off to a life of freedom.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Slocum stared at his diesel engine.

It lay cold and inert in the cave of his engine room. The glow of the engine-room light evoked a smug shine from the arcs of small drives: the alternator, the fuel pump. It left shadow behind the metal casings that protected the cylinders, and beside them, like succubi nestling closer to protect the addiction they themselves had both crafted and subverted, the injectors and pipes that fed his pistons the oil without which they could not fire.

Slocum picked up a wrench and gave a quarter-turn to the banjo nut clamping the fuel pipe to the top of his Number One fuel injector. Today the engine reminded him of some brute and overwhelmingly stubborn animal that had decided to lie down and that no amount of kicking or pulling or even whipping could persuade to move. On other days it had reminded him, respectively, of a prehistoric beast; of a coded relic from a murderous civilization; of an instrument of sexual torture from an inquisition no one remembered. Always such images were dark and ugly. Always they drew on a rage that built up in him in inverse ratio to his ability to fix the engine. The best he ever got, after cleaning fuel lines, reaming the filter, disassembling the part of the injector he could get to and steaming that out, was a half hour of smooth running. Then the injector would seize up, the flow of fuel would dwindle by half, the engine would run rough. Eventually it would stop dead.

Slocum wormed his torso out of the engine hatch. The rage was still dark in him. He threw his wrench at the deck so hard it bounced. He glanced at the clock on the forward bulkhead. It read 08:48. The Mechanic was almost two hours late. Slocum felt like picking up the wrench and throwing it down harder; so hard it made a hole in the deck, rocketed into the bilge below, and stabbed through the fiberglass skin of his hull, letting in the harbor water to fill his boat. The water would be cold and laden with poisonous chemicals and it would sink everything he had left at this point but at least it would flow, move, create change. It did not matter to Slocum in this second if the change was good or bad. What maddened him was the feeling of being stuck, unable to go forward or backward.

He climbed the four steps to the sloop's cockpit and peered up and down the length of Coggeshall Wharf to where, in the fog that lay thick on this harbor before noon, the dock's structure got confused with the buildings of Town.

No sign of the Mechanic or his brilliantly lit truck. It did not surprise him. The Mechanic had shown up only once, the very first time, ten days after Slocum had first e-mailed him. He had told Slocum what was wrong with the injector and vowed to return the following week with the spare part he needed. He did not show up that week, or the next, or in the weeks after that. Since his first visit Slocum had e-mailed and telephoned almost daily and never succeeded in talking to the Mechanic again; only to digital mailboxes that took his messages and made machine promises in return. On the two occasions Slocum got a message back, and a response to his reply, the Mechanic had set up a time for his next visit, and then failed to turn up or even explain his absence.

He was the only mechanic in Town or in the surrounding area who condescended to service the small marine diesels, made by the MarDyne Corporation, of the type that powered Slocum's sloop.

The harbor wind was damp and cold on Slocum's shoulders. He went below again. He picked up a box of rusted parts the Mechanic had left on his first visit. They were not MarDyne parts but bits of injectors of different makes. The idea had been that Slocum would save the Mechanic time by trying each and every part that might possibly fit his injector, in case it came close, in which case the Mechanic might lathe away the differences. In this fashion they could bypass the bottleneck of ordering spares from MarDyne, which took a year to fill orders and then often as not would send the wrong part.

Slocum had tried every part in the box, twice. None came close. Today, he had gotten out the three parts that were least different, in case the Mechanic could see there an opportunity to retool the metal, to make one of them do the job. He stowed the box in the tool locker under the forward port settee.

Slocum switched off the engine-room light, replaced the movable companionway that led over the engine's hatch to the cockpit, added a couple of briquettes to the coal stove on the forward saloon bulkhead. Despite the control of his housekeeping actions, the anger was still great in him. It was not a good anger, the kind that tightened the focus of problems and also steamed up pressure inside until you were forced to derail from the steel tracks of what you were locked into and plow off in a different and unexpected direction. No, it was the worst kind, the blocked kind, that condensed and lived off the fat of everything that had gone wrong and finally grew so bitter that it must end up corroding the vessel that contained it. Slocum picked a battered coffeepot off the stove and poured the grounds into his waste bucket. He opened the box of Antioquia coffee he had bought from a smuggler in the Sunset Tap, spooned out a heap, set the percolator on a burner, and lit the flame. As he did so he heard a thump from forward. Because the sloop was small he saw the agent of that sound almost as soon as he heard it. A creature that looked at first like a ridge of bone and scars bound together by fur and a startling, malevolent golden stare ambled from the forward cabin, where it had been snoozing in the V-berth, and aimed its gauntness toward the companionway leading outside. Seen close-up it resolved into something feline, a cat by any other name, an animal changed by habits of aggression. This cat, to judge by its wounds, had been involved in every scrap and civil war on the stretch of coast between Bangor and Biloxi; after which it must have started a few extra brawls just to keep its paw in. It had lost its left eye and one incisor and part of its tail. Both ears were so tattered they resembled pennants left up in the rigging of a ghost ship abandoned centuries ago. A long scar on which no fur grew disfigured its left hindquarter, and its right forepaw had stiffened in healing from a break so that it had to jump a little on the left to keep its balance. Slocum, whenever he saw the cat, was struck by the sense that this animal always carried, in metaphor if not in fact, a swordbelt and a rusted cutlass and a brace of black-powder pistols with which to board ships that took its fancy.

"Hello, Ralfie," Slocum said. The animal, without looking at him, uttered the long "raaaalf" which -- together with its habit of throwing up every couple of days on any surface that looked clean -- had earned it its name. The cat took the steps with a disjointed movement that, in its co-opting of different motions to produce forward vector, achieved an empirical grace. Its footsteps pitted forward on the deck overhead. Slocum, muttering "shitgoddamn," hastily followed the cat's path underneath the deck, down the saloon's length, past the head, into the forward cabin. He reached up to shut the forward hatch, which was propped on its own screwhook to let in air.

He was too late. With a cavernous groan the discharge pipe from the processing plant cleared its throat and hawked out several hundred gallons of washdown water that had accumulated in a holding tank from the night shift. The pipe opened onto the harbor ten feet forward of Slocum's sloop, but the convection of its length often swirled the sludge in such a way as to spray the bow, or fire onto Slocum's deck a rope of hake intestine or a scrod head, which Ralfie would promptly snag.

Sighing, Slocum sponged up the slop that had sprayed through the hatch....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House, Inc.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0553379313
• ISBN 13: 9780553379310
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar