Monsters of the Week

Oh green roll the waves

For the most part, Finn got on well enough with his Danish and Norwegian co-workers, and with the local hands they picked up or contracted out to for transits like the one coming up, but part of that was making sure he followed the rules. The rule that was applicable in this case was "for the love of God, if we find you putting air through that damned dying goat indoors, it is going over the side"; Finn wasn't so happy about the sentiment or the tone, but it was a reasonable request, and the reason that he and his uilleann pipes were sitting out on the tail of the tug, and probably a significant part of the reason that he was down on the tug at all rather than one of the other guys sitting around bored in the crew quarters of Maersk Mikkel, the gray-blue mountain looming up over them and the warm blue sea. Once the traffic up ahead cleared up, he'd have to go back in and help Sven-Erik keep an eye on the tug crew and handle anything they might need to get done that would otherwise require Sven-Erik to leave the tug's bridge and go out of radio traffic with the captain – and after that they'd be nearly in Singapore, where playing bagpipes in public was illegal without a permit from the authorities. For the moment, there was no work to be done, and nobody to stop him singing.

Finn worked the bag and started in on the slow, high drones of "Castle Garden"; it was one of his favorites, and unlike some of the rebs, there was nothing in the lyrics that might worry Sven-Erik. The boss was all right most of the time, but these Scandinavians liked their settled order, and there wasn't an Irish song that wasn't about the strains on the poor low man, and like as not there were going to be some harsh words about the political or economic masters that were keeping him down. Not in "Castle Garden", though; "Castle Garden" was (at least on the surface) just about being far from home, and even Sven-Erik could understand that sentiment. When he was singing it, the cooler breeze cutting the humid tropical air could almost feel like the cold wet drafts of home, and he could half hear the other boys back home at the Duck and Drake – or the CSC up in Kennedy, which was as good as a home away from home in these waters – playing and singing along, instead of it being just him and the pipes and whatever gull came drifting along. It would be good to ship out with someone who could play along, too, but you didn't find many of those in the merchant trades, and even fewer with Maersk. Days were, you didn't go to sea without being able to play something, but those days were a hundred years gone, and most of these guys could barely play an iPod.

He finished off the last chorus and let the coda hang, the last notes drifting wistfully out over the water. That was the problem with these ballads: you couldn't quite get up to playing a fast reel after them, and you'd get stuck in a rut of playing dirges till you felt like you were going to throw yourself into the sea. "Cor!" said an unexpected voice over the side. "'At wuz luvverly – do you play more?" Finn looked around, and didn't see where it might be coming from. Even the speech was weird; like a navvy from the hemp-and-tar days getting run through a vocoder. "Oy! 'Ere, luv!" This was sharper, and Finn leaned over to look down below the stern, making eye contact – sort of – with exactly the sort of delusion lonely sailors had been fantasizing about for centuries.

Well, almost. His predecessors months, rather than weeks, away from their last port call would have found her a lot more attractive, but for a modern man with access to the deliberately-unlabeled DVD rack up in the Mikkel's rec room, her eyes were set distinctly, inhumanly far apart over a pointed face that built in a jaw of decidedly sharp, sharklike teeth, and the hand she was waving to attract his attention was webbed. In a way, that made it easier to deal with: if she had looked more like Daryl Hannah, Finn would have been more sure he was hallucinating, and less sure that he was still on the tug instead of already in the water drowning. "Oh aye; I'll never play for the all-Ireland on this, but I know the tunes. D'you have a favorite you'd like?"