by Neil Clarke
Rick stayed for lunch. It was an uncomfortable lunch, since the scientists didn’t seem to want to talk very much. Only Carl—Julie’s husband—held up the conversation. Vince was very quiet. Varsha thought uncomfortably that perhaps he felt betrayed by her excursion with Rick. She wanted very badly to reassure him. After Rick left, she gave herself time to collect her wits, and went to talk to Vincent.
He was in his office. Packing boxes sat on the floor and on chairs. Vincent had his back to her, looking at a large map on the wall. But when she came into the office, he turned, although she hadn’t made any sound.
“About my copter ride with Rick Walters,” she said. “I wanted to let you know. He was all charm, but I didn’t tell him anything. He showed off his TRex and brought us back, that’s all. I wouldn’t let Rima down in a million years.”
Slowly he smiled.
“It’s been very tough,” he said. “The last year and a half it’s been one thing after another. It’s not for me to tell you what to do. But thanks for being smart about Rick Walters.”
“What is it that he wants to know, anyway? What are we hiding from him?”
“Rick’s an information gatherer,” he said. “He collects all kinds of details indiscriminately, in the hope that they will come in useful someday. That’s kind of how he swung the deal for North Point. In short, he’s nosey.” He pointed at the map. “I unrolled it and put it back on the wall after he left. Just to look at again before I pack it away. It’s Rima and Jimmy’s work. They called it the Map of Anomalies. Rick would love to get his hands on it.”
It was a map of the coastline, rich with markings and symbols in a rainbow of colors. Lines traced the migration pathways of the bowheads—different shades of blue indicating how the paths were shifting every year. Rima and Jimmy would follow the bowheads in a boat, or track them with drones and underwater robots, explained Vince. Little red triangles indicated sites of killer whale attacks—red squares were ship injuries, and red lines were TRex trajectories across the shallow seas.
Event markers were in mysterious purple symbols.
“This one—this was the most recent one, after Rima and Jimmy were lost. I put it in. Just this past October, at the time of the Fall whaling. These are places where Jimmy’s drones picked up bowhead whales in formations that have never been seen before, sounding together. Those symbols over there are TRexes that malfunctioned without warning. Rick’s not the only one interested in the TRexes.”
Another symbol off the shore of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic indicated a crossing point, where migration routes of belugas, the small white whales of the North, intersected the new bowhead pathways. There were similar intersections with humpback routes in the North Pacific.
“It’s a pattern-recognition exercise,” Varsha said, remembering games from childhood. “I wish I could see a little of what they saw.”
On her third day at North Point, Varsha made a discovery. She had left the bookshelf for last. She started to make two piles on the bed—books to give to Vincent, if he wanted them, and books she would take back with her. On the bottom shelf she found something she had given to her aunt the summer before last—a fat tome that was not a book: Adventures in the Real and the Unreal. With shaking hands she opened it. There was her handwriting on the first page—“with love from Varsha—may you have musst adventures!” The first few pages were real—but in the middle of the book was a hollow compartment. Inside was a small book with a red-brown cover—a diary. There were also some thin, parchment-like pieces of paper, carefully folded.
She opened the diary first. Her grandparents had given it to Rima when she had visited them, the summer before her disappearance. The last time I saw her, Varsha thought, and I didn’t even know it. She remembered Nanu handing his daughter the book. “I know you are too busy to keep a diary,” he had said, “but at least write something in it from time to time. When you think of us, write something for us. No engineering diagrams, but just what you are thinking and doing. Fill it up until your next trip home. Then bring it so we can all read it.”
It was less than half full. Rima’s small, neat handwriting, interspersed with little cartoons. The first entry:
My greetings to the guava tree, the Bossy Pack, and the Human Horde of Chandragupta Park. No engineering diagrams, only deep thoughts in these pages. As promised! Right now I am on a plane back to Alaska, but I will write more when there is something worth sharing with you all. . .
She couldn’t read any further. She set the journal down and fell to her knees and wept, with her face against the bed, hard, angry sobs. She grabbed the pillow and held it to her. Her chest hurt. I could die with grief, she thought, and close on that came the thought of her grandparents. They had survived the terrible news—how? She thought of her Nanu’s face when they got the news, how it seemed to have shrunk. She thought of what he’d kept repeating, over and over, the first week or so—they didn’t find the body, they haven’t found the body—And then the discovery of the black box, the relaying of the last words, and the solidity, the incomprehensibility of grief. Her grandmother, who had seemed so fragile, suddenly appeared stronger, weeping her sorrow with a fierceness that kept them from going under. She had taken up knitting with a vengeance. The shawl she was knitting for Rima, that was half complete—she took it up again. Last Varsha heard, she was still at it—the shawl was the size of a blanket by now, and growing larger, as though it was possible for her grandmother to knit her way across the abyss that had opened in their lives. Even the pariah-dog pack that lived in the neighborhood, the Bossys, had howled for three nights. Her parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, the neighbors with whom the children had grown up, all shared the burden of grief. And someone or other would keep saying—look, Rima wouldn’t want us to fall apart, we’ve got to go on for her—and again—how could it be? She was the most alive person I knew—
But there’s nobody I can share this with, she thought angrily. She was far away from everyone.
At lunch she asked Vincent—
“Is there a gym? A track or someplace I can run?”
“There’s a treadmill on the upper floor. I think it’s still there. You can use it. The only gym’s going to be in Utqiagvik.”
“You okay?” Julie, sitting next to her, gave her a quick, worried look.
“I’m fine—well, as fine as I can be anyway. I just need—I have this habit, see, of running every day. They might bring the Boston Marathon back this year, so I’ve been training. I get a little crazy if I can’t run.”
Later Vincent said: “You only have a couple more days here. I’m going home tomorrow evening. Come have dinner with my wife and me then.”
She felt much better after the exercise. Back in her aunt’s room, she read some more pages of the diary. She carefully unfolded the sheets of paper—they were thin but tough, like cloth. They were blueprints of some kind, but hand-drawn. There was a delicate and precise sketch of a boat—but what a strange boat! It had flippers, and some kind of sail. A series of drawings showed the boat closing up from the top, like a convertible. There were other fine pages of notes, in a different handwriting, presumably Jimmy’s, because she couldn’t understand the words. Iñupiaq? There were sketches of whales of various types, and waveforms of sound waves. There was a list in her aunt’s writing—people and research institutions around the world—a Kartik Sahay at Marine Research Labs Chennai, a Skip Johnson at a facility in California, others in places as far away as Finland, Siberia, South Africa. Her aunt had thought all this was important enough to hide from prying eyes. Varsha remembered Rick Walters’ offer of help. Fuck off, she told him silently. On the other hand, what did she know about Vincent? He was not a scientist; he was the Coordinator for the Native Science Collaboration—they matched Native Elders with scientists. Whatever for? There was so much she didn’t understand about this place, these people. She was almost sure Rima had mentioned Vincent during her last trip home. She had talked about Jimmy, showed them pictures
, and Vincent had been mentioned, and Julie. That was as close to an endorsement she was going to get, unless the diary provided any clues.
She would probably have to trust someone eventually, but for now she would keep the existence of the diary and the papers a secret.
In the afternoon there was some excitement. Matt reported that bowheads had been seen in the waters off Utqiagvik. The whaling camps were still being set up; it was a little early for the whales to have left their wintering grounds in the Bering Sea. A couple of whales were heading east along the coast now. There was a general rush to the observation bubble on the seabed.
The sun’s light percolated dimly through the ice above their heads. The water was dark, washed with blue where the ice was thin enough to let in some light. Matt turned on the external lights, but very dim, so that the golden radiance allowed them to see about ten meters further into the water. Fish swam by on the other side of the wall, their pale bellies agleam in the light.
“There!” Vincent said. “Agviq!”
And a dark, mountainous shape loomed just beyond their field of vision, and swam with cloud-like grace toward them. It came deliberately, straight to them, a huge, thirty-foot bulk with its flipper brushing the wall, its great eye looking in. In all her life Varsha would never forget that moment when she looked into the eye of the whale. Near her the others were talking quietly, exultantly.
“She’s looking well—look at that healed propeller scar—”
There was another whale behind this one. The two whales took turns looking into the lighted room. There was a low, long, booming sound, like a distant cello. Varsha could feel the walls vibrate. The whales were calling. They must have circled the observation dome for a good fifteen minutes before moving away into the dark.
“Wow,” said Varsha, finding her breath. “I’ve never—I’ve never seen anything like this. How do you know one whale from another?”
“Marks on the fluke—the tail,” Vincent said.
“Are they all so curious?”
“Whales are individuals,” said Matt. “Most of them keep away from here, but these two, and there are three others—they stop and say hello whenever they are passing by.”
“We have hydrophones set up all along the coast,” Julie said. “Here—I’ll play the recording.”
She pressed a button on the computer keyboard. A waveform scrolled across the screen, and the sound filled the air. It was the strangest call Varsha had ever heard. It filled the room, filled her being.
“It feels as though I ought to understand it, but I don’t,” she said, shaking her head.
She thought of her aunt standing here, watching the whales, hearing them sing.
One of my former engineering professors, who looked like the crazy prof in the movie 3 Idiots, had this huge construct in his lab made from odds and ends—a Rube-Goldberg machine on steroids. If you dropped a certain ball onto a ramp, the machine would light up and there would be wheels turning, pulleys spinning, weights flying into the air to hit specific targets and so on. The grand finale was that a dart would fly out and bury itself in a large picture of Isaac Newton on a Styrofoam board. The damn thing made a great racket. Isaac’s face was so perforated with dart strikes that his visage had mostly disappeared. We loved the machine, and part of our spare time was always spent tinkering with it. The crazy prof called it “Newton’s Engine.”
I realized when I was quite young that there were two classes of problems, broadly speaking, simple ones and complex ones. Machines are good at solving simple problems. But throw in enough complexity and all bets are off. I went into biomimicry-based engineering because I wanted to challenge this realization. It’s only when I got to the Arctic that I realized my first instinct had been right. You can’t solve complex problems with machines, without breeding more problems of increasing intractability. Complexity is the spanner in the works of Newton’s Engine. But it goes beyond that. You might think a sufficiently advanced AI would think its way through some of the failures (I happen to know they are not just rumors) that are plaguing GaiaCorp’s Project Terra. GaiaCorp has invested so much in its intelligent geoengineering systems, but I think it is inconceivable for autocrats to realize that their slaves might not march to their orders. AIs are a fundamentally different kind of intelligence than humans. We have more in common with the whales than with our household robots.
I think our main problem may be that we think of the Earth itself like a Newton’s Engine, something we can tinker with and fix. Jimmy says that even biologists fall into this trap—of putting living creatures into rigid categories of structure and behavior, motivated by simplistic evolutionary imperatives. To him, to understand the whale would mean not just the kind of work he did for his PhD at San Diego, but also traveling with the whale through its great migrations around the North Pole, being part of its way of being, without any preconceived notions. “You see things differently when you are part of them,” he says. “Explain,” I say, and he laughs and says he can express these ideas better in Iñupiaq. It is so much more precise a language. Jimmy is not a talker—not in English anyway—I think because he dislikes sloppiness. He likes to say things right. You should hear him chattering with his nieces and nephews whenever there is a big family gathering. As I take the first baby steps learning Iñupiaq, I remember what you always used to say, Papa: that every language is a different way of seeing the world.
It turned out that Vincent’s wife, Emma, worked in the town government. Vincent had a room at North Point that he used when the weather was bad, but his home was in Utqiagvik. The clouds had cleared a little. It was still -6° F but that was normal, that was balmy for an early spring.
So it was thus that Varsha found herself in Vincent’s Land Rover, being driven along the coast road. The sea ice stretched as far as she could see, but it was breaking up in places farther out from shore. A long, narrow channel of seawater had appeared where there hadn’t been one before. The sun lay low in the sky, and the light was murky. But the sky was clear, a dim, hazy, ethereal blue.
“Want to walk on the ice?” At her nod he pulled over and stopped. Her boots crunched on the low rise that separated the land ice from the sea ice.
“Walk where I walk,” Vincent said. “The sea ice is all right close to the shore, but it is thinner than it should be.”
She followed him out onto the plain. The wind was a cold knife in her face. She felt her toes turn numb. The ice sheet was vast, its immensity broken only by cairns of ice chunks that were carelessly piled up all over the plain. But the sky was clear and she could see the horizon, separating sea from sky.
“You are walking on frozen seawater,” Vincent yelled over the wind. He pointed. “There’s water under the ice. See, you can tell by the broken up piles of ice chunks. That’s the wind and the currents breaking up the ice from below.”
It was the worst cold she had ever experienced, and it was incredible. Vincent pointed.
“Over there. Do you see those tracks? That’s polar bear.”
She saw the broad, regular tracks a short run away from where they were standing. The tracks disappeared toward the sea.
“Probably hunting seal. Not that many seal now, because we haven’t had much ice. They pup out on the ice to avoid bear, in little dens under the snow. This winter Kenny said there are a few.”
She thought of little seal pups under the snow, and the polar bear sniffing the ground.
In the truck the warm blast of heat was welcome. They met no traffic until they got to the outskirts of Utqiagvik.
Home for Vincent was a small, warm, compact house on stilts, on a street with similar houses. Emma greeted them wreathed in cooking fragrances that were surprisingly familiar.
Emma was small and round, with a mobile, humorous face.
“Vince is a better cook than me,” she said, “but when he comes home after a bit I do the cooking. I thought you might like to try whale stew with a bit of curry. There’s fish too.”
“W
hale stew?”
“Goodness, don’t tell me you’re vegetarian? Vince, did you think to ask?”
“Oh, I eat everything,” Varsha said quickly. “I’ve been cutting down on meat lately, but this smells great!”
“It’s the last of the spice powder Rima made for us,” Vince said, taking her coat. “She told us what is called curry here in America is garbage. So she sent for some spices from Anchorage and roasted and mixed them. Made us whale curry. It was amazing!”
“This meat is from last year,” Emma said. “Come, sit down. Are you warm enough? Vincent’s uncle is a whale captain. They were fortunate because it had been a poor harvest the year before. With the waters warming, the whales have changed their routes. We see a lot more killer whales coming up from the Pacific, hunting the bowheads. And now there’s more shipping and the new searches for oil and gas.”
“Noise disturbs them,” said Vincent. “We were blessed this one came to us. We sent whale meat to the other villages that didn’t have a good catch.”
Among the family pictures on the mantel was one of Rima and Jimmy, along with four young people, sitting on top of a harvested whale.
The wine was good. The table was neatly laid with a flowered table cloth. Vincent brought the dishes to the table. The fragrance rose in the air.
“This is so nice of you,” Varsha said, taking a ladle of whale curry. “The smells remind me of home!”
“This is the same whale as the one in the picture,” Vincent said, indicating the framed photos on the mantel. “Your aunt’s eaten of this whale.”
The meat was like nothing she had ever tasted. It was melt-in-the-mouth soft and redolent with cumin and coriander, cinnamon and ginger and nutmeg. Tears came into her eyes.
“It’s incredible!” she said. Vincent and Emma looked at each other, then they both smiled at her.
“It means a lot to us, the whale,” Vincent said, chewing reverently. “It’s part of Eskimo identity, a sacred beast that makes us who we are.”