In the pre-dawn light coming from across the river, the sheets and large jagged chunks of ice combined to look like a herd of mastodons pushing and shoving one another in a mad dash for the sea; few if any would make it; the river was their universe; the tide, an unknowable and all- powerful force.

They had arrived the second week of March, just in time for the local Saint Patrick's day bar tour. The deck boss was the youngest of the four crewmen, but not by much. The winter had been lean for him, living in a cabin in the woods outside Cordova. March meant getting on a boat and an end to hunger; working all day getting the gear ready, building and repairing, with maybe a tarp thrown up if needed to protect from the snow. Three meals a day, hot meals, plenty of meat and potatoes and gravy; coffee and tobacco, a warm bunk, and the prospect of making some good bucks; these were real, basic and fundamental, all that was needed.

On his way to the cabin to build a pot of coffee the deck boss paused to examine the ice pushing and sliding against the steel hull not five feet away. A wooden boat this size, 90 feet, would be splinters by now with the thrashing this thing's taken in the past two weeks, he thought. Or if someone were to fall in there, Jesus, he turned towards the bow where the other man was finishing the line.

In the glare from the dock light, he could see the man silhouetted against the hard edge of the caprail applying a keeper to the line on the cleat. He didn't know this man, just two weeks; he was short and thin with a long salt and pepper beard and an ornery wit; he too had had a long winter, apparently.

Coffee and tobacco and no one around to bug you, simple pleasures deeply appreciated. It was going on 6 A.M., no sense in returning to bed, the rest of the crew, and the skipper, would be up soon. This was the time the deck boss needed and took to get his head straight, to put the demons that awoke with him at bey, to push them back down, to get control. Everyone else on board, including the skipper, had quickly learned to avoid conversation with him first thing in the morning; why poke a sleeping bear with a sharp stick?

He was sitting with a cigarette in one hand, coffee mug clasped by the other. Staring at some indefinable point, he was trying to remember, something from long ago it seemed, yet very close, on the tip of his mind, a way of looking at things, life; a way to forget and forgo, to live in the here and now. But, as with many other mornings, it would not clear; there was shock and numbness and rage, and it would not rise up out of the dark turbulent morass.

There were just too many pieces, shards, murky images, each demanding scrutiny, observation in movement, consideration; this could be the key, that could be the reason, the understanding that would magically reassemble his world the way it used to be, where all the parts swirled around a center, a center of strength and knowing and acceptance.

"...PAGO PAGO and never return," came a voice from the other end of the galley table. The other crewman, Larry, had been talking; the deck boss caught just the tail end of it. Larry either had no problem with what he saw as only early morning moodiness, or, in the accelerated time zone they now lived in where formalities held little importance and perceptions were keener, he had decided to throw out a lifeline.

The deck boss lifted his head slightly to carefully peer at this wiry, crusty intruder into his sacrosanct space as he slugged down the last bit of his coffee. "What did you say?" he asked as he rose to step over to the stove where the coffee pot sat simmering.

"I'm sick of spending my winters on cannery row, if I only make enough for a ticket on this cruise, I'm headed for PAGO PAGO, never to return," Larry drawled as he busied himself rolling a cigarette. The sound of coffee pouring into a cup somehow drowned out the noise from the generator below. The deck boss turned with a slightly amused glint in his eyes. "You ever been?" He had not offered to top off Larry's cup; it never even occurred to him.

Larry placed the cigarette between his lips at the precise position he seemed to prefer above all others, lit it, and without turning to look said, "No, I had the chance two years ago, but, I met this woman in town... this time, I'm goin'. All winter long I dreamed about a thick New York steak with a baked POTATO." He accentuated and stretched out any word that ended in a vowel; it was the only time his voice shifted gears. "But now that I've had, it's time to move on to bigger and better."

The deck boss reclaimed his seat, lit another smoke, leaned forward and, with some effort, spoke softly with genuine warmth and concern, "I've never been south of the equator; there's a different sky at night, more stars, a string of islands running across to Australia, the Great Barrier Reef..."

"And women, beautiful soft-skinned women, wearing practically nothing. You don't need a wheelbarrow full of money to get their attention either; you can live on COCOnuts and KIWI fruit."

The deck boss laughed lightly. For the briefest of moments there was that old familiar rush, that sense of adventure and exploration he used to live for. There was exhilaration and enthusiasm in it, excitement and freedom, freedom from the pull of the past. He remembered that If you accelerated into the future, you ended up living in the present with the past unable to keep pace. Then it was gone, flushed and crushed to die a quick death, replaced by a flat, hard boiled resignation and a cold distant gaze. He would not be going to the southern latitudes or any other place 'outside,' for that matter; he couldn't take the chance. There was too much unfinished business, too many loose ends, right here.

They sipped coffee, staring off into different directions. Through the generator noise the skipper's alarm clock could be heard. The day had officially begun.

They had recently hired an eskimo woman as full time cook. She had showed up at the front door, so to speak, bag in hand, looking for a home. As a cook, she was decidedly mediocre, but nobody else wanted to do it. They worked a deal to pay her out of their earnings, a quarter share. Nobody asked her any hows or whys, as far as they were concerned, she was born at their door, another refugee from the storm.

It was the way of it; each took the other at face value. They had all been born at the time of their coming together for this trip. They had no past and their future was uncertain; they lived in and for the present; it was the only reality they cared or needed to know. If anyone wanted to volunteer information about his past life, that was fine, although not always appreciated; if not, that was all right too; no one would pry. What you thought about in your bunk was your business, just don't space out on the job.

She did her share of gear work, keeping up with the rest of the crew, breaking off to go cook or prepare sandwiches. Heavy muscle work was left to the men, no one minded; it was pleasant to hear a woman's voice. It did change behavior somewhat; the presence of a woman always does. The men acted more politely towards one another as a carry-over; rough language abated; there was more humor and spiritedness. It was a lift and a catalyst, almost a focal point. How her presence would affect the job at hand once the real action started could only be guessed.

She never spoke about what had happened in her life to bring her here. But she did not brood as though troubled by previous events. She was smart and learned quickly, helping where she saw the need without having to be asked or told. She was almost too good to be true. Larry had said as much in a wistful confidence to the deck boss. Had he heard an undertone of foreboding in Larry's twangy voice? Or was he genuinely pleased? From what he knew of Larry so far, he mistrusted women and good fortune equally. And here they were, a package deal.

The deck boss chose to ignore his misgivings as the sour grapes of yet another burned and mutilated victim of love. He would see her only as another crewman. If she did her job satisfactorily, there would be no trouble from his direction. He was not a babysitter or a chaperon; she was on her own, like the rest of them. But nonetheless, he didn't like the odds. One woman and five men on a fishing boat 24 hours a day with all the stress and frayed nerves that encompassed, working eighteen hour days. It was necessary, mandatory, to let the animal out in order to get the job done. Just the duty of being a seaman on the ocean was enough for that. Feelings and impulses ordinarily kept under control tend to rise to the surface in these kinds of circumstances. However, there was something to be said, afterall, about being a professional.

The deck boss knew all this, all the warnings about women on boats, the trouble it can cause. But he had so much else on his mind, trying to put this show together, that he didn't even want to think about it. We'll see what happens, he thought, when the shit hits the fan.

In spite of his belief that he could maintain harmony, her presence had gradually begun to annoy him and he honestly did not know why. Around the middle of the afternoon, with the sun beginning to set, the deck boss's irritation with the speed of progress showed itself. Black cod season opened soon and there was much left to do. Two of the crew were standing next to the starboard rail sipping coffee, laughing and chit- chatting. The deck boss approached them. "Waiting for a bus?" he asked. They stared first at him then down at the deck. "Coffee break," one of them said, smiling. They knew the score and he knew that they knew, but he was anxious and impatient, about everything. He turned to walk back to where he had been busy constructing shelves for the tubs of gear. Among other tasks, he was ship's carpenter.

The skipper also knew where they stood. He appreciated his deck boss's strong sense of responsibility and conscientiousness, but he didn't believe in getting too wound up too early. So, after overhearing comments concerning the boss's personal needs, including the physically improbable whereabouts of his head, he decided to send him to the graveyard to search for chain to make weights.

As longline gear goes out over the stern, every so often a weight is attached to the ground-line with a metal snap to help keep it on the bottom in the currents. Commonly, lead is used, but you have to pay for leads. Resourcefulness is the rule whenever possible, it goes with the territory, a common tool in any fisherman's bag. Some skippers don't bother with spreading weights, satisfied with the anchors set at each end of a string. But if you're fishing in 400 fathoms early in the season, you want to get the gear down as fast as you can, and have it stay down. Otherwise you risk pulling the world's largest ball of twine.

The deck boss flagged Larry in passing with a wave of his hand and together they proceeded up the icy steel ladder to the dock above. At this time of year there were no cannery workers; just one lone caretaker to maintain the buildings and watch the place. On the side of the cannery closest to town was a football-sized expanse of lumpy ground where machinery, abandoned and unusable fishing gear, and assorted junk were kept. Covered with snow, it did indeed have the feeling and look of a graveyard with tombstones cropping up randomly.

The deck boss said nothing on the way there except to explain the nature of their mission. Larry was glad to be off the boat for awhile, for any reason. He was a good half a foot shorter and 30 pounds lighter than the deck boss, but he had a direct deadpan way of talking that made him seem larger.

"...we'd be back before anybody noticed," the deck boss heard him mutter.

"What's this shit you're talkin' now?"

"The bar's on the other side of this field; don't tell me a shot or two don't sound good."

"You got any money?"

"No, I was hopin' you might."

"I have to borrow somebody else's pot to piss in at this stage of the game. PAGO PAGO, huh?"

They came to a halt in the center of the graveyard. The snow was doing its thing, sucking in all sound, of which there wasn't much to begin with. The everpresent noise from the boat's generator was blocked out, absorbed, three hundred yards downhill on the other side of the plant's main warehouse and halfway down to the river bottom. The boat was invisible from where they stood. Sections of sheet ice and gnarly, ragged chunks crowded one another on the river heading upstream with the tidal current.

The deck boss stood poised taking in the desolate landscape and mixed grey overcast sky, contemplating, trying to draw some weird metaphysical principle from the dynamics of the picture before him: The river, a quarter of a mile wide at this point, was flowing uphill as it did twice a day, carrying its helpless cargo of ice sheets and broken pieces, ice that had once held it captive. A glimmer of an insight showed itself teasingly, then faded away. The picture was too complex in itself and its schematic set of relationships didn't match up with anything he knew. This was a hobby of his almost, a compulsive hobby at which he had excelled, but these days, he couldn't get the wheels turning. Meanwhile, Larry had found a length of steel rod and was busy poking it into small hills of snow with all the earnestness of both a sourdough archeologist and a long-bearded monkey searching for termites.

"You ever spent much time in San Francisco," Larry asked finally, leaning on what now looked like a teacher's pointer. The deck boss spun, grateful for the interruption. At his feet lay an empty weathered beer can, the apparent object of his probing, an artifact from a bygone era, a religious icon, evidence.

"Three years,... so your plan is to rummage through this entire field rooting out beer cans until you get enough to cash in for the price of a drink? I really don't think we have the time."

"No, no, no, sir bossman, what we are going to do is alter the molecular shape of this find, plus poke two holes in it at strategic points, and create a tool, a tool that will serve to change the contours and textures of not only our surroundings but the inner eye as well." Larry's voice sounded the same, conveying the same glib attitude, only it took on a more precise tone, each word enunciated for effect. He had stepped out of character as far as the deck boss was concerned; since when should that bother me, he thought.

The deck boss backed up a bit, perceptually, to take in the larger picture, detail-wise. He thought he had nailed down this lesson about Alaska: you can't read anyone by his cover, clothes do not make the man here. He had labelled and stamped his crewmates rather hurriedly during the course of a town-wide drunk not too long ago, considered them as single- note horns in his orchestra, felt comfortable with that, then pushed it to the back of his mind, to concern himself with other more important thoughts. He had anticipated no surprises, didn't want any; but he knew that guides come in all packages, and when you least expect, especially when you least expect. He worked to configure the paradigm shift, to enlarge bandwidth, to remodulate the mitigating circumstances; he was on Pluto, afterall.

"Need a knife," he offered, taking his pocket knife out as he strode to where Larry stood.

"No, I got just the thing," pulling a fid out from inside his belt.

The deck boss intently watched Larry transform the beer can into a working pipe. He was already holding a wad of pot in his right hand. Loading the pipe he offered it over.

The deck boss took a long deep toke, handed the can back, purveyed the area, and said, "have you ever seen the movie, "Last Year at Miriambad"? there's this scene in the front court yard of some rich eccentric person's estate, polished marble of different shapes and sizes spread out surrounded by close-cropped grass, nothing else. Very cold and erie, sterile." Spreading his arms wide he continued, "here, we have machinery, spare parts, relics of engineering, testaments to a technological period frozen in time, the debris of civilization."

Larry, handing the pipe back, said, "it's supposed to be a storage yard. That's how they see it, they're storing this shit up here for later use, or if they need a part. Remember that scene in "Star Wars"? I think it was "Star Wars," anyway, there's this scene in a warehouse filled with junked robots of all descriptions. That's what this stuff is, robots that once moved and did work and had a purpose, an identity, now, they rest here, in the snow and ice, turned-off and forgotten."

The deck boss eyed Larry sideways for a moment with a sudden tilt of his head, handed the pipe over, then straightened up; feeling the earth ooze upward through his legs to his chest and shoulders, he let himself feel his body, detail-wise. He was not cold nor was he overwarm. A slab of snow dropped from a machine not far off, he heard it before he saw it; the action jerked his attention. "Do you think the notion of consciousness is too heliocentric? Do you think that maybe machines could have some nascent form of awareness?"

"Only on a four-dimensional level," Larry said, quickly and matter- of-factly, as he handed the pipe over. "Considering that pattern is fundamental, the non-linear topological constraints practically demand a manifold connectivity. Being permeates all that is as things transform, immanent at once as it is transcendent; maybe that's the measuring rod, the degree of transcendental consciousness. In any event, the whole is greater than the sum of its constituent parts."

Abandoned portions of the deck boss's mind repersonalized themselves and joined up. Monuments to apathy and disregard suddenly came alive and cumbersomely worked to rise out of the ice and snow of suppressed and abandoned memory. "If the integrity of the whole fails, however, do you think a detailed examination of the parts, or whatever parts have affected the disintegration, once you found them, with the intent of understanding what went wrong, that it would facilitate the reintegration of the whole as it existed previously?"

"Not possible, you have to pick up the pieces, and move on, let go. That's kind of like Lorentz's misunderstanding, believing that if he, or someone, but knew the present states of all existing parts of the Universe, at once, together with the physical laws that govern these parts, then the precise configuration of the Cosmos could be ascertained either in the future or the past, a mechanical, linear, predictable Universe, a repairable Universe. But in a non-linear, organic, evolving Universe, it is impossible to know what will happen, the whole may very well shift into a completely new, or at least different, form at any time and for any reason. It's Nature. You can't get back to Kansas, Toto," Larry replied quietly as he handed over the pipe.

"That's quite true, we can't even KNOW all the relating variables, or when some minor event will cause a major alteration, it's essentially irrational," the deck boss began with enthusiasm, pausing to take a deep toke. "In any non-linear system, such as Life, there must be this proclivity for asymmetric behavior, a spontaneous bifurcation into other phases, other forms and combinations. Without the presence of this spontaneity woven into the fabric of existence, if existence is indeed a reliable concept, Life and the Universe would not be. The non-linear time field is immanent; linear time, transcendent. Any now moment in time is a perpendicular cross-section of non-linear time, a horizontal slice, the sum of which composes a life. Composing, like music, like a series of three dimensional objects composing one of the fourth, to see the One in the Many." The deck boss stopped speaking, feeling slightly embarrassed. He handed the pipe over.

The flicker of self-consciousness was not lost on Larry. After taking another hit on the pipe, he proceeded, stepping softly, "Once you let the genie out of the bottle...," his voice trailed off to stillness. He tried again, "Disintegration of the whole is a springboard, I mean, it can be seen as a springboard to new opportunities. But we have to stay open in order to recognize them when they appear on the horizon. If we stop believing in ourselves, these opportunities don't occur to us, we don't see them. The whole might take a drastic curve on the road, but there are still constants running through it that never change. Like family and friends, people we share significant experiences with, people. A person can get caught up in his own power trips and cut others off; but when his life eventually, inevitably, changes direction, there's nothing to steady him, he finds himself on his own, without benefit of parole. Looking for what might be causing restraint could very well be the source of that restraint, the looking." "That's what I found living in Cordova. Nobody makes it completely by his own; you have to form alliances, family and friends, extended family, a community. I know I wouldn't've survived as long as I have on my own, not possible."

Larry wanted to say something to this. He missed my point, he thought. But a deep dark well opened before him into which he was unwilling to venture. "Maybe that's the whole, then," he said instead, "a community of folks helping one another get through, support, belief." He turned slightly to light the pipe away from the frozen breeze beginning to show itself from the direction of the river. "Wheels within wheels, circles within circles. You know, getting back to what we were talking about, if, in linear time we were to have a glimmer of non-linear relationship, within our own minds, say, our identity, for instance, we might then be able to understand and regroup; I mean, we could experience..., that is,... huh,... I lost it,... something else crossed my mind and stole it away,... ah, it's gone," he said, slowly shaking his head and smiling like a pumpkin.

"Maybe the dilithium crystal chamber needs revamping; couldst be the retroactive retriever flange has a dent in it, or the magnetic field containment capacitor blew a rod during our last hyperspace jump," Larry stated flatly, looking directly into the boss's bloodshot glistening eyes.

They both broke down laughing. The boss replied, "Yea, or maybe we're on a holodeck and all we have to say to get the fuck out o' here is, 'end program.'"

"Wouldn't that be the berries. 'Computer, initiate whore house program, and don't forget the case of bourbon.'"

"God I wish I had a couple o' bucks, maybe I can get a draw on my good looks, we could get that drink."

"Another day, perhaps, bossman. I saw some chain over yonder frozen to the ground. Let's see if we can GET IT UP," offered Larry as he headed in the direction foretold after securing the pipe in a safe hiding place.