The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “Congratulations!” Skip said, hitting me across my shoulder blades as I gasped and choked. “Your first rainblow!”

  This astonishing experience made me wonder: knowing their bloody and tragic experience with our species, what moved these whales to seek us out, to be so forgiving? Was it one individual’s bright idea to try to befriend the enemy?

  Jimmy thinks none of this is surprising. Living such long lives, some of the whales may have acquired what we call wisdom. It’s rare enough in our species! And why should humans be the only ones with a sense of agency, a desire to make things better for themselves? We already know that whales have culture—different pods of the same species have different habits and tastes in food.

  Here’s another story—a dolphin was observed apparently assisting a young sperm whale that had lost its way in a saltwater marsh, somewhere off an island in the Indian Ocean. Scientists who received the video (from a fisherman) said that it was inconclusive. But Jimmy has seen it. He’s not one to jump to conclusions, but it supports his hypothesis that whales communicate with other species. After all, they live in an environment rich with biodiversity. Wouldn’t they want or need to communicate with other species sometimes?

  I tell him about how I grew up, in the old house in Patna with the sunlight-yellow walls. How, first thing in the morning, I’d be woken up by mynahs yelling outside the window, and the parakeets in the neem trees. The pariah dogs would be waiting at the back door, ancestors of the current Bossy Pack. We had a parakeet with a broken wing when I was ten, and he would sit on the windowsill and scold the dogs, and drop roasted chana or bits of toast for them. Ma, you would have already been up before dawn, watering the tulsi in the courtyard, and the radio would be playing in the dining room. Apart from the neighbors’ conversations wafting through the open windows, and the bells of the rickshaw-wallahs, there were so many living creatures around us, talking to each other. This is why I could believe the old stories as a child, in which animals are speakers and players.

  Jimmy had such a different upbringing, here in the Far North, and yet we understand each other so well. He, too, grew up with stories in which animals talk to humans and each other, across the species gap. Some sympathies bridge the distance between cultures. Perhaps it is the same between species, and we modern humans simply don’t notice.

  “We’re in the lowest level of the station. Sorry it looks like a dungeon here, but the best part is just ahead.”

  “Did my aunt work here?”

  “Her lab’s upstairs,” Julie said. “You’ve seen it—one of the big rooms, empty now. But she loved it down here. She and Jimmy spent as much time here as possible, planning and arguing and observing. Just past this door—”

  A large steel door opened at the press of a metal knob set in the wall. There was a small space beyond, and another steel door. The first door closed behind them with a slow hiss, and the second one opened.

  There was nothing beyond it but an ordinary passageway. Puzzled, Varsha followed Julie. Lights turned on as they walked into the dark corridor. There were no doors on either side, just the tunnel going forward into the dark, into the—

  “The sea—this is going seaward?”

  Julie turned, grinned.

  “Yes—hold your horses, we’re almost there.”

  And suddenly they were in a broad open space filled with diffuse light that came in through transparent walls. The roof was a glass dome. It was literally a bubble at the bottom of the sea.

  Varsha caught her breath. There were tiny things moving in the water outside—small, streamlined silhouettes against what seemed to be a dank white ceiling, a few feet above the roof of the dome. It was suffused with a faint blue glow in places.

  “We’re under the sea ice,” Julie said. She flicked a switch and suddenly the outside was lit. The floating ice above them discolored with gray-green smudges on the underside. In some places the ice had thickened, forming extrusions that hung in the water like chandeliers. In the light the ice crystals glittered like so many diamonds. Beyond the circle of light, the water was murky, mysterious with small, moving shadows.

  “Wow,” Varsha whispered. Julie looked satisfied.

  “Never fails to impress visitors,” she said triumphantly. “If you’re lucky you’ll see more than a few fish or krill. We’ve seen a swimming polar bear. And during the spring migration there’s bowheads that always stop here. Since about ten years ago they’ve been venturing closer to the Beaufort coast. Same with belugas.”

  Varsha looked around the observation chamber. There were desks and instrumentation around the circular perimeter. In the middle was a table with a microwave, coffee maker, and the attendant supplies.

  “Your aunt spent a bunch of time here,” Julie said. “She and Jimmy used to joke that it wasn’t fair for humans to observe the whales and other creatures. We should give them a chance to understand us. You should have seen the two of them dance around the room for the whales! The whales must think humans are deranged.”

  She laughed.

  “Bowheads are wary creatures. They live over two hundred years. Some of them still remember the days of the Yankee whalers, when they were nearly wiped out. So you can’t blame them if they keep their distance. But they’re intelligent creatures. They’re curious. So some of them—it’s always the same ones—they come and hang out and look at us, and talk about us.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Only a little. Whales have a sophisticated communication system. Don’t you know what your aunt was doing? Jimmy had a mission—to decipher the communication system of the bowhead whale. Humans can now speak a little gibbonese—white-handed gibbons, you know? South Asia? No? Well, more people should know about that! We’re finally beginning to decode languages of other species. Whales and dolphins are hard—their languages are likely to be more complex than ours. Jimmy was a marine biologist, your aunt was an engineer—they were perfect for the project.”

  “I thought she was working on alternative-energy systems!”

  “That was ongoing. She worked with a group of students at the college in Utqiagvik—there’s a really good tribal college in Utqiagvik—they developed some prototypes of wind generation that can work with gusty winds in a place like this. Town’s looking into it. She also—here, let me show you.”

  The outside lights turned off, except for the ones close to the sea bed. Julie gestured to Varsha to get closer to the walls. On the sea bed was an array of two-foot-high devices that looked like Japanese fans mounted on flexible stems. They were swaying gently with the current.

  “Wave-generator prototypes developed by Rima,” Julie said. “She worked on boat design too—her unofficial project—propeller-free boats that wouldn’t injure marine animals. You should’ve seen her lab. There was this bathyscaph shaped like a squid that used water propulsion. She used to get all kinds of junk from online auctions, naval junkyards, and such. She got interested in whale communication after she went on her first boat ride with Jimmy. They would sit in this room and draw designs of all kinds of crazy stuff. Boats with flippers and wings.”

  “Did she actually build any of this?”

  “There were so many prototypes being tested and taken apart and tested again that I lost count. After—afterwards I heard they sent most of her stuff to the tribal college. They wouldn’t have, if she’d completed the project. If they’d lived—she and Jimmy—there’s no telling how much they would have accomplished . . .”

  “What was he like? Jimmy?”

  “I never felt I really got to know him. I feel like that sometimes with the Natives here. It makes me realize we European descendants are the newbies, that this was their home first, and still is. The Native Resistance has been felt here too, even though it is so far away from the action. Vincent I can relate to, he lived for so long down south. But Jimmy, he just went down to California to study what the science of the whites could teach him, and hotfooted it back here. He was quiet. Thoughtful. Don’t
get me wrong, he could crack a joke and all, but he was a bit of an introvert. No-small-talk kind of guy. Passionate.”

  “Did he—did they get to decipher whale talk?”

  “They made some headway. He’s published quite a bit on it. Their tapes and the papers they worked on are all with Vince. But you should talk to Vince or Matt—I’m just a microbiologist. Matt’s focus is how land mammals are affected by climate change—caribou, moose, polar bears, seals, and the impact of moose coming up from the South. The three of them would talk up a storm about species communication.”

  Julie turned the lights off. In the dim natural light filtered through the sea ice, the observation room seemed a world unto itself.

  “I just heard on the radio that bowhead whales have been spotted west of Utqiagvik,” Julie said. “It’s early for them to be coming here, but apparently they are coming. You might get lucky.”

  I feel her here, Varsha thought. She’s here, Rima Mausi, in this place. She took a deep breath.

  “I hope I see a whale,” Varsha said, as they started back up the tunnel.

  As the light grew stronger and the thin shore ice started melting back with a distressing rapidity, there came news that the whales were already on the move from their wintering areas in the Bering strait. Vince and Tom and Irene were in Utqiagvik, where the mood was festive. I joined them later in the day. The sun was out and half the town was on the beach. The whale radio had declared that one of the whaling crews was headed back with whales in tow.

  At last we saw the first boat chugging toward us over the ocean, the flag waving. Vince was standing next to me and let up a great shout, and everyone started yelling “hey-hey-hey!” It was Vince’s uncle, Tom Jones, who was captain of that boat. Kids were running around shouting, it was like a festival. Then I saw the dark bulk of the whale in tow behind the boat, and the red float bobbing close to it. As it came toward land, the man in the forklift drove closer to the water’s edge, and we moved out of the way. I couldn’t see anything for the crowd for a while, and then I saw the whale’s great carcass slide past me, pulled up by ropes attached to the forklift. It lay like a black mountain. Vince came through the crowds with his grand-nephew, a boy of five, on his shoulders. “It was a good catch,” he said to me, smiling. He said something in Iñupiaq. “That’s a thank-you to the whale for the gift of its life,” he said. “The whale captain says that over the body when it is lashed to the boat. It was a good death—it died quickly.”

  The whale was already being cut up. Long, black strips lined with pink blubber were being hauled off on ropes. The men worked efficiently with triangular cutters on poles. Blood stained the white snow. There was shouting and singing.

  “We will eat well this winter,” Marie said. Marie works at the grocery store, and is Irene’s aunt. That first whaling season was a bewildering time for an omnivore-turned vegan Indian scientist raised in the sub-tropics and freshly arrived from California. I remember asking Jimmy when I first came to Utqiagvik: “How can you bear to eat such amazing creatures?” He just looked at me in his thoughtful, considering way, and replied: “Because we are not apart, we are a part.” It took me some time to figure out what he meant. Since then I’ve attended many a whale carving and blanket toss, and helped cut and prepare whale to feed the community. In the dead of winter, in a place still mostly only accessible by small aircraft, the sole source of fresh food is meat. And because the whale is sacred, it is never sold, only shared. I had a lot of whale that winter, parboiled and dunked into soy sauce, or cut frozen straight from the ice cellar and into the mouth. I have a lot more respect for the hunter who brings in the wild kill and says his prayers over it, than for those who trap animals into constant, unrelieved suffering in their thousands in factory farms.

  Thus I am made of many things—mother’s milk, fruit of guava and mango trees, rice of the Indian Gangetic Plain, vegetables of splendid variety, meat of many creatures, and now—bowhead whale!

  Next morning Rick showed up. Varsha was in her aunt’s room, folding clothes and shoes into cardboard boxes. He smiled at her from the door.

  “Hey, want to come for a helicopter ride?”

  He was charming, even if he couldn’t be trusted. She should say no—but what harm was there in a helicopter ride? She was sick of this room, sick of grief. She could handle this man—she had known men like him during three years working in industry, before the MS program, before America. Before.

  She was glad not to run into anyone else as they went up to the roof of the building.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just over the sea. Quick trip out to the nearest TRex and back. You’re here for such a short time, you should see a little of the Arctic.”

  On the rooftop the cold breeze took her breath away. She stumbled—Rick steadied her, his face unreadable behind the goggles. She climbed into the helicopter, a compact yellow-and-black giant bumble-bee of a machine, with “Arctic Energy” painted on the sides, and the circular insignia of GaiaCorp.

  “You know how to fly this thing?” she yelled over the engine’s roar.

  He grinned.

  “Want to inspect my license?”

  She shook her head.

  “Just get me back safe and sound,” she yelled as they rose into the air. “In time for lunch!”

  “Much as I’d like to spend more time with the most attractive woman in fifty square miles, I fully intend to get us back for lunch,” he said, laughing. “Although I could get you a better meal in Utqiagvik.”

  “Mr. Walters, you’re flirting,” she said. Below them the ice sheet was a great, white wing, fraying at the edges where it met the liquid sea. North Point station had vanished behind them.

  “Sorry,” he said. He sounded unrepentant. “Look, we’re over the ocean now. Those little white patches are part of the shore ice that separated, floated off.”

  The ocean was incomprehensibly vast, stretching away to the curve of the horizon. Above their heads the helicopter blades were a blur through the transparent walls of the cockpit.

  “Why are we going to see the TRex?”

  “We’ve had some trouble with a couple of them, we don’t know why. System failures, mechanical wear, hydrophones non-functional. I like to reconnoiter at least semi-regularly. Despite the Big Melt the Arctic is still a really inhospitable place—well, I don’t need to tell you that—”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Hang on, we’re here.”

  The craft fell like a stone. Varsha clutched the edge of her seat, but the helicopter slowed and hovered over the dark sea. The tops of the waves glittered in the low-angled sunlight. She gasped.

  Before them, rising out of the water like a creature from a mechanized Jurassic nightmare, stood the TRex. It was the one she had seen from the window of her aunt’s office. Its long snout swiveled toward them and its optical sensors glittered with iridescence like the compound eyes of an insect. Rick’s fingers flashed over the copter’s dashboard, and the TRex abruptly bent its head. Its neck collapsed inward until was several meters shorter.

  “It’s pulling its legs in—I’ve put it in search mode, so you can see how it works,” Rick said. “Look!”

  Floats inflated on either side of the machine. It began to move, through some invisible propeller mechanism, purposefully across the sea. The copter followed it.

  There was a deafening series of booms below them. A milky froth appeared in the water around the TRex.

  “That’s the airgun array—don’t worry, I’ve turned it off now. Sound waves penetrate the seabed and are reflected back. See the buoys around it? Hydrophones, receiving the sound, giving it a picture of the sea floor, hundreds of meters down.”

  “Pretty impressive,” Varsha said. “But damaging to whales, I hear.”

  “Yes, but the TRex has a 360-degree sensor that detects whale pods,” Rick said. “It’s not just the Iñupiaq who care about whales, you know. We spend a lot of R&D money making sure we don’t damage
the environment.”

  His fingers moved over the dashboard controls again.

  “There, it’s back to doing sampling. Good, it passed the test, and you got to see it in action.”

  On the way back she asked him whether he’d looked at TRexes self-diagnostics.

  “You’re smart,” he said. “Like your aunt. The diagnostics don’t tell us anything, because the non-functionality comes without warning.”

  “It could be a kind of cascade failure,” she said. “I’ve worked with some sophisticated Augs programs—complexity can cause all kinds of sudden failures.”

  He looked at her.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this,” he said, “but I’ve seen some internal reports—problems with some of the Geoengineering projects that nobody understands. Warming spikes instead of cooling in the upper atmosphere. Plankton die-offs where you expect a bloom. Winds changing in unexpected ways. We could use people like you.”

  “I thought you were just the transition liaison,” she said, mocking him. “I didn’t realize you were the CEO of GaiaCorp!”

  He threw his head back and laughed. The sky above them was a deep azure. Below and ahead lay the ice, swathed with the sun’s gold light.

  “I like you, Varsha,” he said, looking at her. “I think we’re going to be friends.”