And if anything could get past the innumerable aquadrones that protected Qaanaaq’s geocone—that engineering marvel, which captured the massive energy expended by the thermal vent and used it for heating the whole city, providing the power for its lights and machines—it was an orca. If anything could get an explosive onto the cone, it was an orca.
Soq slurped down the last of the noodles, lowered the bowl, let the wind hit their face. Crossed the Arm to where the open ocean lay.
Two hundred thousand people on Arm Eight, if you believed the official statistics, which Soq didn’t, and half of them fantasized daily about watching Qaanaaq sink beneath the waves. The other half dreamed of conquering it. A wonder it had lasted as long as it had.
Soq wondered which one they were, and decided they were both. I will dominate this city or I will destroy it, break its legs, send it sinking into the burning sea we stand over.
Soq stepped down into the only sleeping boat with any openings. The woman who owned the flat-bottom smiled, recognizing Soq, and held out her hob for screen scanning.
The boat was mostly square, not built for moving. It had been anchored in the same place for twenty years. On its surface stood ten rows of ten boxes. A square meter and a half, with wooden sides covered in canvas. Qaanaaq’s poorest slept in boats like this, their bodies folded up uncomfortably, with a breathable lid they could pull over themselves to keep the worst of the wind off and hold body heat in. Soq was lucky to be short. Taller people had a hell of a time in the boxes.
Soq sat. The box was dank and wet. It smelled of the cheap spray the owner used when its previous occupant vacated in the morning, but underneath that Soq could smell the funk of the occupant himself. They’d had to choose between being hungry in a capsule hotel or sated in a box, and had chosen the bowl of noodles.
They were happy with their choice. They were angry that they’d had to make it at all.
The bitterness started to come back. What had been an idle imaginary scenario five minutes before became a deep and fervent desire. Fuck them, all of them, the people who make us live like this. Who sleep in beds with whole meters of empty space around them.
Blow up the geocone and the city would be uninhabitable by nightfall. Soq stared into their screen, scrolling through photos of the cone from concept to execution to periodic well-publicized repair work. Prickly defensive columns of polymerized salt; thick swarms of weaponized aquadrones. Two hundred miles of pipes in and around the cone alone, to say nothing of the ones that took water and heat through the twisted tangle of the city above. A million valves for releasing heat and pressure. Dynamic responsive systems to match surges and ebbs in demand.
Such a marvel; such a target.
Soq fell asleep like that, in the fetal position, knowing their knees would ache in the morning, smiling to the imaginary sound of a million people screaming for help as they drowned.
Destroy this city, or conquer it—which one would I prefer?
Fill
The purple drink did not contain alcohol, to Fill’s surprise, but it seemed to make him drunk all the same. The sweetness of it, maybe, the taste of cloves and corn, or the night itself, the crowds, the cold wind and the music, so many musicians that he felt like he was standing in the center of a scattered symphony orchestra, their separate melodies adding up to something, some futuristic form of music with no beginning, no end, no structure, only a thousand gorgeous pieces crashing into each other.
City Without a Map had not steered him wrong. This place was electric, alive. A beautiful boy, seated on a rough and brightly patterned blanket, caught Fill staring. He smiled, a complicit and friendly smile that somehow underscored Fill’s outsider status.
Boom. A memory. Triggered by that boy’s pretty face. Pornography, one of the first clips little Fill ever saw, a similarly pretty face, eyes closed, face upturned, waiting, frightened—brave—excited, and then a spray of semen across his cheeks, another, several. The memory-boy smiled, laughed.
Fill flushed, embarrassed, unsure whether anyone could see his half erection in the darkened crowd. He scanned the crowd—no one looking in his direction but a well-maintained and very old man at the grid’s edge.
Boom. Another image flashed in his mind’s eye. Another pretty face, seen from above, turned up. A total stranger, someone Fill had no memory of, although that meant little considering how much he’d done while out of his mind on some combination of alcohol and drugs and actual ecstasy, and anyway, Fill was usually the face being sprayed, not the one spraying the face. Not pornography, either—too real for that, too vivid, with smells attached, and sounds, the roar of a distant train, a subway car, but what the hell, there were no subways left . . .
Boom. Children looking down from the windows of burning buildings.
Boom. Soldiers shooting crowds that tried to breach a roadblock. Broad, bizarre cityscapes rising in the distance, the original Shanghai, the vanished São Paulo. Not dreams, not hallucinations. Memories. Someone else’s memories.
Fill began to cry. He cried for a long time.
“Hello,” said the old man, speaking New York English. At some point, he had come over to stand beside Fill. “I’m sorry to intrude. Let me guess—City Without a Map brought you here.”
Fill nodded, then regretted it. He squeezed the last few tears out, gathered his wits, searched for something suitably devastating to slay this sad troll with. But the troll had placed his hand on Fill’s, was looking into his eyes, was opening his mouth, and before Fill could hiss, Get the fuck out of my face you disgusting ancient queen, the old man said, “It’s the breaks, isn’t it?”
Which made Fill burst back into tears. He nodded, and the man leaned forward to hug him. The hug was kind, grandmotherly, sexless.
“Forgive my presumption. But I had many similar experiences, early in my diagnosis. And I know how alienating it can be. My name is Ishmael Barron. Most people call me by my last name. It is so much more dramatic.”
“Fill.” Shaking the man’s talcum-powdery hand, he felt afraid he might break the thing. And did Barron’s eyes widen from pain, from lecherous pleasure, from something else entirely? “It felt like memories. So vivid. But nothing I experienced. Stuff that happened a long time before I was born. How is that possible?”
“Them’s the breaks,” the old man said, and smiled, so Fill figured there was probably an old joke he didn’t get in there, so he wrung out a laugh. The length of the man’s ears was truly preposterous, and his nose seemed superhuman, as though extreme old age was sucking life and skin away from the rest of his face and flooding those places. “Talking helps. I had no one, when I was diagnosed. Do you want to get a caffè alghe? Talk about this?”
“We can get real coffee,” Fill said. “I hate that toasted algae stuff, and I don’t mind paying.”
Barron shrugged. “Well okay, Your Excellency.”
“Think nothing of it,” Fill said, standing up straighter, because manners were easy, this is what they were there for; the genteel affectations of wealth were a suit of armor you could wear when the world threatened to wash you away.
“IT’S PROBABLY BEEN FIVE YEARS since I tasted this,” the old man said. “And before that it was probably another five years.”
“We’ll do this again in five years,” Fill said, knowing neither one of them would be alive then.
“Would you believe I used to have five or six cups of this a day?”
“Wow,” Fill said, barely hiding his boredom, because he hated when old people talked about How Awesome Everything Used to Be. Yeah, but you also used to die from cancer and get hangovers and spend your whole life unable to understand 80 to 99 percent of the people in the world when they spoke, so good luck with that nostalgia thing.
But he couldn’t hold on to any anger, not for this man, his baby-pink skin and senile good cheer, and Fill liked speaking New York English, it made him feel close to his grandfather. Above them, at street level, a rather delicious dark bearded thing caught Fil
l’s eye. He must think I’m a rent boy, Fill thought with a flush of pride, paid by this old thing to whip him bloody or sit naked by a window or something.
“I believe the breaks have been around longer than people suspect,” Barron said. “Fifteen years, twenty. It went unnoticed, or was mistaken for schizophrenia or adolescent-onset Alzheimer’s because the symptoms are psychological. My theory is that it’s not one disease but several, originating in a number of different locations, and when one person becomes infected with multiple strains, a new, hybrid strain is formed. Far stronger than the two that created it.”
I think I got them from him. And they’re moving fast. It’s a bad strain.
Fill frowned into his coffee, remembering that stranger’s messages, the boy who said he’d gotten the breaks from the same person as Fill. Although that was crazy. How could this random stranger know such a thing? It’s not like Ram had infected him with information along with a disease. And yet—he had known Fill’s private handle.
“I think . . .” Fill said, but didn’t know how to say it, certainly not in the language he rarely spoke outside of his home. I think I am remembering things that happened to other people. “Have you ever . . .”
The bearded man from before had come into the coffee shop, was sitting on a bench. Not buying anything, of course. The kind of person Fill was most attracted to could never have afforded anything in a place like this.
“You’ve an admirer,” Barron said. “I daresay you have many admirers.” He seemed quite transfixed by the new arrival, and occasionally turned from him to Fill and smiled deeply, no doubt at an imagined pornographic tussle between the two young men.
“Some people think that the visions you get from the breaks come from the person who infected you. Or the person who infected them . . . or someone somewhere along the chain. Is that possible, or am I crazy?”
“Yes,” Barron said, stirring his coffee unnecessarily, seeming to have moved on from that topic of conversation altogether.
“Yes . . . it’s possible?”
“Oh, look!” Barron said, barely listening. “It seems that I have frightened your admirer away. I have that effect on young men these days. Punishment for my own youthful cruelty, I believe. We always get what’s coming to us, darling. What is your last name, by the way?”
Fill breathed out, promised himself patience. “Podlove.”
Barron’s eyes widened, and his jaw dropped, but who could say whether that was an involuntary old-man response, or whether the doomed ancient creature wouldn’t have been equally shocked by a last name like Wang or Smith, or the fact that tomorrow was Thursday. “Podlove,” he repeated, eyes narrowing. “An interesting name. Was it ever anything else?”
“Something egregiously Slavic, I’m afraid. Grandfather castrated it before he got here. Chopped off a pair of low-hanging syllables. Is it possible that the breaks—”
“At any rate,” Barron said swiftly, “you must have things to do. Pursue that swarthy fellow, perhaps. I hope you won’t fault me if I sit here a little longer? The legs, you know. They betray one so bitchily as the years go by.”
“Of course,” Fill said, standing, feeling weirdly like he was being dismissed, when it was his money that had bought them the coffee that earned this ridiculous specimen the right to occupy that space in the first place.
Ankit
The monkey stared at Ankit through the glass. A Kaapori capuchin, one of the smaller, tougher tribes of feral monkeys that had fled captivity in the gilded cages of Qaanaaq’s wealthiest. This one had a broad blue stripe down its back, tapering to a point between its eyes, where the owner had chemically seeded the skin’s melanin layer. Ankit had made the mistake of feeding it once, and it must have smelled her weakness, her kindness, because it kept coming back to her window. And because she was weak, because she was kind, she kept feeding it.
Her screen would not stop chiming. Dawn; she’d been up all night; she’d long ago stopped responding to the incoming messages from subordinates, donors, friends, and foes. None from her boss herself, of course, but once Fyodorovna waddled into the office Ankit would be hearing from her.
The monkey stepped in through the open window and sat. She gave it three seaweed squares, which it dropped indignantly into the sea below, and a string of seal jerky, which it rolled into a ball and stuffed into its mouth.
Fyodorovna’s campaign was in free fall. Her opponent had seized on the Taksa photo Ankit had posted, generated a script, talking points, sent them out to faith leaders and tenant association presidents and anyone else on Arm Seven who had half an audience, so now her feed was full of assholes squawking about how Fyodorovna cares more about criminals and perverts than our hardworking families; Seven needs an Arm manager who will work for us, not for the twisted individuals whose bad choices brought the wrath of God down upon them. For an entire hour she’d watched the bot poll scores plummet, and then she’d put her screen under a pillow.
Ankit had anticipated that this might happen. The possibility had flickered in the back of her brain, briefly, before she posted the photo. She’d considered it unlikely—and in that moment, in her anger, at Fyodorovna, at the breaks, at the fear that had always held her back, at the whole shitty city and the rich and powerful people whose ignorance shaped the lives of so many people and whose asses she was compelled to unceasingly kiss, she had posted the photo anyway.
Minutes after the office opened, Ankit’s screen chimed. A subordinate, one she was fond of, who never bothered her with bullshit. She accepted the call and there he was, looking stricken.
“Don’t ask, Theerasul,” she said. “I’m sick.”
“You’re not,” he said. “But I don’t give a shit about that. You have a visitor. She says she has an appointment with you?”
“She’s lying,” Ankit said.
“Of course I know that. But it’s one of the ones you handle better than any of us. I always end up pissing them off or making them—”
“Put her on.”
A crabapple face filled her screen: Maria. Ankit winced.
“God bless you,” the creepy woman said.
“God bless you.”
Maria had a storefront church halfway down the Arm. How she held on to it was a mystery to all. She rarely held services, and when she did they were not attended. By anyone. Ankit had two guesses as to why the deranged old fundie had an unused space as her own private kingdom when it could have been making somebody tens of thousands a month in rent. Either the place was a forgotten holding of one of the former American megachurches, which had bought up property at the height of their power and wealth and then promptly dissolved, its rent paid in full for the next fifty years and Maria sent to be the pastor of a flock that would never come, gone mad awaiting further instructions and resources . . . or she was a maintenance squatter, paid by a shareholder to occupy a space they intended to keep empty. Those were usually thugs or illicit businesses, people who could pay and still be ejected with no notice—but if you wanted to keep a space vacant long-term without attracting Safety’s attention, you couldn’t do much better than a pit bull religious fanatic.
“Evil has come to Qaanaaq,” the weird old woman said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ankit said, smiling. Fyodorovna never let them say even the most remotely negative thing to her constituents, no matter how crazy or malevolent they were. God forbid some fundie lunatic decide she hated her, start putting up flyers, spouting web hate.
“I want to know what she’s going to do about it,” Maria said.
“Did you submit a notice on her page? You know she takes constituent notices very seriously.”
“I will do so,” Maria said. “And then I will come back to find out what she’s going to do about it.”
“Great,” Ankit said, wondering just what evil had stirred up the wasps in the woman’s head this time. Islamic or Israeli refugees bearing insidious infidel ideas, most likely, or a fishmonger selling a new splice animal that a fundi
e sect had decided violated some weird sentence in Leviticus. Certainly not the breaks. Fundies didn’t care about that. Most of them welcomed it. Ankit thought of Taksa, blurred and happy and doomed.
Against her better judgment, Ankit asked, “What kind of evil?”
“That woman. That abomination. Who has wedded herself to Satan. Who rejects the dominion God gave us over the animals and uses witchcraft to merge with them. A killer whale and a polar bear. They have come here to kill, to hunt down decent Christians, and they must be stopped.”
“Of course.”
Ankit clicked off.
The monkey stood, screeched affably, and leaped fearlessly into the abyss. Ankit whimpered; reached out as if to save it. But the thing was safely scaling her neighbor’s window frame, scampering off to wander its city.
Kaev
Kaev walked in the direction of the vortex. Even with the windscreen, Qaanaaq’s gusts could be extreme, forming sudden swirling gyres that could push people off balance, stop them in their tracks, make a single step impossible. But one of Kaev’s favorite leisure activities was to walk with the wind, submit to it, let its violence and sudden shifts dictate his path. On reflection, he’d come to recognize it as an extension of the pleasure he took from fighting. The thrill of submission, of abdicating control, of letting the mind with all its capricious insatiable demands fall away. And it was good training. It took agility, dexterity, to keep from smashing into any of the people struggling against the wind. It took wisdom to know how and when to yield.
Blackfish City Page 5