Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “This one’s a classic,” Soq said, flashing a file to Fill’s screen. “The Book of Jeremy. Do you know it? This gay guy, after his best friend, Jeremy, died—Jeremy was straight—he got into his email—Jeremy had given him the password—and deleted all the boring bits to condense this guy’s whole adult life—from fifteen to thirty-seven, when Jeremy died working a shale oil rig in one of the hydraulic fracturing earthquakes in upstate New York—and he interjected his own commentary between emails. It’s super hot, and super sad.”

  “Amazing,” Fill said, and read out loud: “‘Jeremy’s profanity is preserved here precisely as it was in life; a bawdy, inappropriate, usually humorous but sometimes profoundly moving knack for saying the earthiest things with such innocence that you feel like a bad person for finding it smutty. Nowhere is this more evident than in his emails to girlfriends, where he says things like, “Kath I miss you like crazy lately, never saw a bitch so keen to get her hair pulled,” and you somehow know that Kath took no offense at this, can in fact picture her reading it, flushing red, remembering Jeremy.’”

  “Great stuff to jerk off to, and then cry.”

  Fill put Soq on his account for the most expensive app on the market, beamed it directly to their slate. “This is how I found City Without a Map,” he said. “Do you listen to it?”

  “Tried to. Didn’t do much for me. I don’t need a guide to this city. And I don’t need all that poetry.”

  Fill nodded, smiling. His eyes full of wanting.

  The noodles arrived. Soq conceded that they were still perfect. They ate them in great gulping bites, both of them hungrier than they’d realized, looking up only when they were finished.

  “You’re really hot, you know that?”

  “So they tell me,” Soq said, furiously computing how to respond, what to do—the kid was hot, sweet, sad, they’d had a good time, but rich, unspeakably so, and probably not fond of being turned down, denied something he wanted, and what if after all this lovely quality friendship time he turned around and called Safety on Soq? So Soq stood, butched up as much as possible, and growled, “What are you going to do about it?”

  Hours later, after several bouts of switching back and forth between fucking and sleeping, Soq was getting dressed in thin winter daylight when they heard Fill say:

  “What the fuck even was that? Was that . . . you?”

  “’Course it was,” Soq said, pushing up the black leather armband and adjusting the spikes on their hooded coat.

  “Like . . . biologically you? Like, you were born with it, or . . .” He craned his neck, trying to get a glimpse. “I’ve heard that there are some pretty crazy surgeries you can get these days—”

  Soq kicked him, hard, a swift blow to the shoulder that made him yelp. “Don’t be rude.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I give you my handle?”

  Soq shrugged. The kid was out of bed, heading for the coffee maker, practically preening. Full-on courtship behavior, but Soq was already strapping on their slide boots, washing their face, moving on.

  Fifteen minutes later they were halfway down the Arm One slide when their jaw bug buzzed.

  “This is the last one,” Soq said.

  “You’ll still owe me,” Jeong said fondly, sending the details. A briefcase from a floating lab off Arm Two, which as far as Soq knew dealt in genome-customized party-booster drug regimens, to a semi-famous musician on Arm Five. “Till the day you die you’ll owe me.”

  “Maybe,” Soq said, leaping off the slide and dancing through the Hub. “But I’ll have to find another way to pay that off. Because this? This is the last one.”

  They had dreamed of leaving the slide messenger life behind entirely, immediately, but they didn’t feel strong enough to turn Jeong down. Soq would never have survived long enough to land a role in Go’s army if Jeong hadn’t helped them a million times, in a thousand ways, over the past several years.

  There was no nostalgia to it, no sadness at the life Soq was leaving behind. Messengering had been fun, exciting, the best possible way to make money within the limitations of being unregistered. But the pay was shit unless you worked twelve hours a day or more; the people were assholes; the risk of death was constant. And Dao had already wired Soq’s first week’s salary. And it was astonishing.

  Technically all Soq needed to do was hold down the empty apartment. But Go had explicitly said that Soq didn’t need to stay there all the time, and like a good ambitious underling Soq wanted to find ways to impress the boss. Besides, Soq didn’t want to risk a repeat of last night’s random hookup.

  It had been stupid. Dangerous. Fun, but dangerous. Soq told themself they had mostly only slept with him to keep him from calling Safety.

  And what had been up with that collapse? Was he sick? He’d sworn he was just dehydrated, a three-day disruptor bender, but wasn’t that precisely the lie Soq would have used if they had the breaks or neosyph or a contagious botched gut flora hack?

  More important: Soq knew the signs, when someone fell hard. Those macho gay hypocrites were the worst—fetishizing masculinity, sneering at trans boys and femmes and anybody else insufficiently butch, but let them get a taste of something like Soq and all their biases got blown out of the water. The boy was smitten, and Soq wanted no part of it. Love, relationships, even friendships—and they would have been good friends, Soq knew it, even if Soq would have spent most of the time hating Fill intensely for his money—Soq couldn’t have any of that right now. They were finally poised to leave it all behind, the pain and the hunger and the wondering.

  Soq leaned into the wind, descending the slide and cleaving the vortex like a machete blade, Go’s: a weapon, a tool, a soldier, unencumbered by the emotional baggage that made everyone else so miserable.

  At least they’d gotten a damn good traffic trawling app out of the experience.

  Once the briefcase was safely in the hands of its twitchy, strung-out recipient, freshly wealthy Soq settled down for a ginger beer on a heated replica of a Bangkok floating market. Someplace Soq had passed a thousand times and never been able to afford. A maddening smell came from below them, where a chubby woman who couldn’t have been more than five years removed from the Chao Phraya River splatted noodles down into a skillet. Geothermal heat swirled around them, but every minute or so the wind shifted slightly and a cold gust sent a chill up Soq’s spine. Incense burned beneath the table. Purely ornamental, here, with no insects to scatter the way it would back in Thailand.

  How did Soq know so much about Thailand? With a start, they sat up. Had they fallen asleep? Dreamed? Sense impressions swarmed their mind, vivid memories of things they’d never experienced. Out of nowhere, their head ached exquisitely.

  The pad Thai was the best Soq had ever eaten, but at the same time it tasted like a pale echo of something else. Fresher spices, the flesh of richer fish. Bangkok, the capital of the world, the heart of the country that weathered the global storm of rising sea levels better than any other. Home of the mightiest military, the most fiercely defended borders. A source of constant fascination to Soq, as it was to many in Qaanaaq, the way London would have been to a colonial American—the colonized’s distant, foolish pride in its patron commonwealth. But now it felt like a place Soq had been.

  I am a spy, Soq thought later, making their way down Arm Eight. High on good food, pockets not empty, Soq was approaching some ill-defined idea of “the good life” that they’d spent their whole life striving for. Confidential agent. Criminal mastermind. One of this city’s secret rulers. The black leather armband marked Soq as Go’s, as invincible.

  Soq used Fill’s program to troll for recent orcamancer sightings. One was only a couple of hours old. Soq let the vortex take them in that direction.

  No orca, unsurprisingly. Killer whales don’t stay still. They circle; they hunt. Soq did a sweep of the immediate area, and then widened the sweep. How much of this came from movies versus books versus life experience, they couldn’t say. All the tangle
d threads of Soq’s life had finally resolved into a pattern. A texture. They wandered through the under-building caverns, emptying their mind and letting their body go where it wanted. Soq had stumbled into a part of Arm Eight that they’d never seen before, the kind of place they’d have worked hard to avoid not so long ago. The smell of bottom-grade trough meat was thick and pungent in the air, and the few familiar glyphs graffitied onto the walls and pylons belonged to the city’s savagest gangs and societies.

  But now Soq wasn’t afraid. Who would fuck with one of Go’s drones?

  This guy, apparently. Some battered fighter dude who had been doing pull-ups in the chilly twilight from the low-hanging crossbeam of a building support platform, who dropped when he saw Soq. His hands made fists. “She sent you?” he said, reddening at the sight of Soq’s armband.

  Something—roared. A shadow moved in the dark forest of building stilts—came forward, grew brighter. Roared again. A polar bear. The polar bear.

  “She didn’t send me,” Soq said, throat dry. Knowing it wouldn’t matter. Whatever grudge this guy had against Go, he and his polar bear would not be talked down from this peak of rage. The bear ran forward, stood over Soq. Roared again. It smelled like rotten sea lion meat, and something else. Something mammalian, something close to human. It hadn’t been hostile with Soq before, but now it was with its human, and its human was furious. With Soq. The bear lowered its head, its mouth wide enough to fit around Soq’s face and then bite it right off.

  Soq shut their eyes.

  The bear’s nose pressed against Soq’s face. It sniffed, tracing a wet smear from side to side.

  Soq decided that it was a trick, to get them to open their eyes, because the bear wanted to see the mortal terror in the moment that it ended Soq’s life. Soq would not be fooled. They did not open their eyes.

  “What the hell?” the man said.

  “I thought so,” said a voice—female, heavily accented, gravelly and wise. The orcamancer.

  For once, Soq thought. For once I followed a sighting and actually found her.

  “Thought what? Go sent this little asshole to kill me, and—”

  “This little asshole is your child, Kaev.”

  Soq still didn’t open their eyes.

  City Without a Map: Archaeology

  The beer is weak and has a salty taste to it. The ceiling is low. You’re hungry. Someone vomited at a table near yours, and no one is coming to clean it up. The only windows in the place have green-black ocean water on the other side of the glass. Your thoughts are melancholy—

  —What will save us from this gray city, these long nights, this wind that cleaves memory from bone, the cold and wet that will never forsake us, these dappled shadows falling on aging faces? What will bring us joy? What will keep the fire burning in each of us?—

  But then they take the stage, women with guitars and synthesizers and percussion instruments, and a man on bass, and they smile, and start. And you smile, shut your eyes, let the songs happen to you.

  Maybe they’re not great. You can’t tell. You are gone from here, from this subsurface dive bar, from this floating city, from this fallen world. Strains of Celtic folk songs tease your ears; American soul; post-reunification Korean gugak-yangak.

  Archaeology. The most distinct and vibrant of Qaanaaq’s newborn musical traditions. Digging deep into the hundreds of musical heritages that people brought to this city. No singing, no lyrics. They don’t even speak between songs, and you understand this, you appreciate it, because you know as soon as they opened their mouths they would cease to belong to everyone. The language they used, their accents, would place them definitively in a box, mark them off as coming from one continent or another, one city, possibly this one, and a cheer would go up, from the people who belong to that same box, and everyone else would feel the slightest bit less included in the tight warm embrace of the song. Music is the common property of all humanity, but people come from particular groups. For as long as the song lasts, for as long as they say nothing, you can pretend you are part of the same group.

  They don’t play songs so much as expeditions. Digging from one song into another, one century to the next. Late-1980s video game tunes become High Church Slavonic liturgical chants. The ruins of Troy, you remember reading, before the sea swallowed them back up, were actually seven cities, each one built around the bowels of its predecessor, and you imagine that this is a similar slow stroll from one epoch into another.

  Word is, they’ve spent weeks at a time with different refugee communities, all over Qaanaaq. Learning, listening. Sucking up every song and scrap of indigenous style they can find. The Khmer surf revival. Nahuatl ballads dating to before Columbus. Bachata, where the notes run fast as raindrops. At every show they bring them up onstage to play a song or two, these inadvertent cultural treasures, these people who are all that remains of entire vanished musical genres. You see them now, sitting alongside the stage, smiling with pride and sadness.

  You are alone, here. Your family was supposed to follow you, but it’s been five years, and the Water Wars became civil wars and then the whole eastern half of your country went silent. Every week you visit the registries, scroll through the lists of new arrivals, petitions for registration. You scan every sad face, every trembling lip, every stony resigned stare. You know there are many more who do not consent to be included in the registries, people wanted by rogue governments and warlords and syndicates, and you wonder if something like that has happened, if whatever desperate compromises they had to make to get out might have put them in mortal danger, if they’re in hiding, if they’re already dead.

  You were sick. You went to the hospital. You hid your symptoms, because you feared it was the breaks, and you knew what they would do to you if it was. You didn’t tell them about the strange memories crowding your head, how they threatened to break you open. You told them it was overwork, exhaustion, dehydration, a history of violent abuse manifesting itself. They put you in the Cabinet.

  You know this song, this scrap of melody. A Somali dhaanto, pentatonic perfection, the synthesizer effortlessly approximating the sounds of the oud lute.

  A cellmate used to sing this song. An immigrant laborer back home, a fellow political prisoner.

  The Cabinet is where you met me. Sitting in the corner of the rec room, eyes shut, the same corner I’ve been sitting in every afternoon for far longer than you’ve lived in this city. I saw you; knew what you were really dealing with. I cut my forearm, cut yours, pressed our forearms together. Made us blood siblings.

  Since then, you do not fear the memories of strangers.

  The beer, for all its seeming weakness, packs an unexpected punch. When you finish it you feel strangely blissfully happy. When you shut your eyes—

  Memories fade in, fade out. Stirred by the songs. It doesn’t matter that they’re not your own. You belong to Qaanaaq now. Its people are your people. Their pain is yours, and so are their songs.

  Fill

  Fill should have been miserable. He should have felt ashamed, guilty; he should have been taking concrete action to ameliorate the consequences of his irresponsible actions.

  But he didn’t. He wasn’t.

  When had he become such a monster? Knowing he had a fatal sexually transmitted disease, he’d had unprotected sex with someone. He hadn’t warned them. He hadn’t even told them after. And instead of being eaten up with remorse—instead of feeling bad about what he’d done, here he stood, leaning against the guardrail, watching the sunset, admiring the fractal rainbow arcing slowly down the side of the windscreen.

  What was he becoming?

  Part of it was, he didn’t truly blame himself. The circumstances had been so strange. While he’d been incredibly turned on by the danger of it, a part of him had also been offended. Angry, even, with this criminal. An intruder, after all. In his grandfather’s secret apartment. A gorgeous, prickly, impoverished creature who turned his whole idea of gender on its head. It had felt like pornograph
y, like a dream, like a horror story.

  But still. They were real; it had really happened. The breaks were probably already manifesting themselves in Soq.

  So, what? Why did he feel so strangely fine?

  Tomorrow night I’ll have my answer, he told himself. My grandfather will say yes or no to the absurd amount of money I’m asking him for.

  He’d wanted to just message Grandfather the request, but Barron said that seemed unceremonious. Too easy, unworthy of the momentous event those funds would facilitate. So instead he’d asked Fill to arrange a meeting, for himself and his grandfather and Barron, so they could make their pitch together.

  A delay tactic, most likely. Barron was as scared as he was, probably, to get to the bottom of what Choek could or couldn’t do for them. They were both terrified that the trail could be cold, might not lead them anywhere, or—worse—that Choek could indeed lead them to the origin of City Without a Map.

  The sun was down. The sky was still bright. His heart danced with the water, with the rippling light. It’s the breaks, he thought. I feel them trembling through me. Cracking open all my defenses, breaking down the walls I built between me and the world. Shaking me loose from my self, from my ego, from this tiny isolated flickering flame, so I can see how I am the sun. We are the sun.

  So sad, to think that it took this, this, to make me see how beautiful our world is.

  She came to him more and more as the sickness progressed. In dreams, in crowds, in memories that didn’t belong to him. The ghost woman: a guide, but a guide to what? She took him places, told him stories without words. He could feel her in him. Most of the time she was peace, profound and terrifying, a radical reconciliation more divine than anything Christ could have managed, something that could only have come from unspeakable suffering. Sometimes she slipped, cracked, refracted, and he gasped at the river of rage that roared beneath her surface. The things she had suffered. Not repressed, not forgotten, but no longer present.