Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  What had happened to her?

  In his mind, she was the Author. The mastermind behind City Without a Map. He was aware that this was irrational, idiotic, probably incorrect. He felt it so strongly that it couldn’t possibly be true. She was a construct, a figment of his damaged imagination, his diseased brain assembling complex narratives and characters out of the chaos of information he was drowning in.

  She had to be.

  Bald. Fifty-something. Just like the Author described herself.

  He let go of the railing and then did something that shocked him. He sat. He reached down, dipped two fingers into the frigid waters. He touched them to his lips.

  We live our whole lives suspended above the sea, he thought, but we forget the true taste of salt. Not the purified stuff we find in kitchen cabinets and restaurant counters. The bitter, foul, sea-muck stuff we crawled out of, and live beside, and one day will return to.

  Soon I’ll break free of this body and be one with the sea, with the sky, with the infinite. That is the gift I was given, that I in turn gave to someone else. A bitter gift, but the best ones are.

  Soq

  Soq wanted: nothing.

  They looked down on the city from forty stories up. They drank actual scotch, tasting like smoke and hammered bronze, and barely noticed. People all around them carried cages and polyglass bubbles bearing animals Soq had never even seen photographs of, but Soq did not care, did not look twice. Their stomach tingled, the gut fauna freshly tweaked so all the bad thoughts and feelings and bodily traumas were whisked away. Soq stood there, feeling no pain, yet somehow did not marvel at what a strange rare blessing it was to be without pain.

  It was the breaks, certainly. From Fill. That fucking rich kid in that fucking warehoused unit. It had to be. There had been no one else. Soq had been far too busy for sex the last few weeks. That fucking asshole had given Soq the breaks.

  That’s how Soq popped in and out of his head. That’s how Soq saw into his emptiness, his pain.

  Which is why Soq’s lifetime of schemes and plans to conquer or destroy Qaanaaq suddenly felt so flimsy, so flawed.

  God damn him.

  “It isn’t just the fact that they did terrible things,” Soq was saying, only it wasn’t Soq’s voice at all. “That’s sort of 101, isn’t it? Something you realize right around the time you first find out what fucking is. You just assume there’s things about your family you never want to know.”

  “Sure,” said a very pretty boy. Thin lines of gold light gleamed inside his face; bioluminescent bacteria or cephalopod-derived photophores, Soq wasn’t sure which; all the rage among the queer kids of Petersburg plutocrats. The microbes or bacteria or whatever lived for three days—or was it four?—and you could buy a half-ounce acu-ampule for a little less than what Soq made in six months of messengering.

  “You’re not listening, Tauron,” Not-Soq said.

  “Of course not,” Tauron said, and somehow Soq knew this meant that he had been listening, and good gods, why did the rich have to make everything so complicated?

  “And it’s not my fault that all those bad things happened, it’s not my fault I live a good life and other people are living god-awful ones because of things my grandfather might have done . . . but . . . the real problem is, once you do know what they did, doesn’t it make you obligated to do something about it? To make things right? Otherwise, aren’t your hands as bloody as theirs are?”

  The bubble they stood in rose, at the end of its long strut. Soq looked down at the sea, black beneath them, and at the lights that danced on all sides.

  The city was theirs. Qaanaaq was conquered.

  And they were completely miserable.

  Then they opened their eyes and were back in whatever creaking dark mold-smelling corner the Killer Whale Woman had them holed up in. She was gone now. Soq remembered her leaving, even though they hadn’t been entirely conscious when she went.

  They hadn’t dozed off, so much as . . . gone away.

  Soq did not feel angry, to have everything snatched away. To be plunged back into the same poverty they’d always known. What they felt was grateful. To be back in their own life again, their own body. To be free of Fill’s strange and terrifying pain. To have their own familiar pain back.

  “Thanks, brother,” Soq whispered.

  He had everything, that poor sad fuck Soq had fucked, and he was so empty inside that Soq had to fight back the urge to hunt him down and give him a hug.

  Ankit

  Ankit spent three hours shivering across the grid from the entrance to the Yi He Tuan Arena. Watching every face that went in and every face that came out. Looking for her brother. The screens flickered: Hao Wufan’s upcoming fight canceled. A damn shame, she thought. The Next Big Thing already a thing of the past, since those all-boy-sex-party photos surfaced, and the audio of his lunatic ramblings, drugged out of his mind or possibly suffering from early-stage breaks.

  The dossier from her contact at Health hadn’t had much to offer, but she’d learned a little more about her brother. That he was sick, some unspecified form of brain damage. She had a file now. Something to hand him. He could take his time, process the information. And she wouldn’t be frightened if he howled or hooted or got upset. She knew what she was dealing with.

  First she’d have to find him. She was pretty sure fighters didn’t hang around arenas when they weren’t scheduled to fight, but it was the closest thing to a lead she had. Maybe he’d come by to meet with a manager or promoter, pick up a payment, practice on the beams, train at a secret gym or battle society somewhere inside.

  It had seemed like a solid enough plan when she had arrived. But now she was freezing and hungry and her feet were sore.

  She called up a photo of him on her screen. She could see it, she thought: some sibling similarity around the eyes, a similar scoop to the sides of the face. And maybe they’d had the same nose once, before his had been broken a bunch of times.

  She leaned against the wall beside a red pipe. An old vagrant trick, soaking up the heat it radiated. But after another hour, all the warmth in the world wasn’t enough to distract from the ache in her feet and the conviction that this was a fruitless way to go about finding him. She turned and headed for the Hub.

  A girl cawed above her. Imitating crows: an old scaler taunt to frighten pedestrians. Ankit cawed back, prompting startled laughter.

  We miserable grown-ups weren’t always groundbound, she thought, and then felt happy that she still spoke scaler-speak. Sort of.

  Another revelation from that costly dossier, one she’d been avoiding examining. Sharp, prickly, cutting up her hands each time she tried to get a hold of it: before coming to Qaanaaq, her mother had spent time in Taastrup. The same place the early cases of the breaks kept pinging back to. Did that mean something? Could her mother have contracted a sort of proto-breaks, decades before the first cases started cropping up? Had her brother? Could she have been the subject of some experiment, or a survivor of some accident?

  Patient 57/301. No name; no match in any genetic identification bank. Imprisoned in the Cabinet for thirty years. Top-level classified status; authorization that could only come from one of the sponsor nations—China, which meant it could be anyone with a ton of money; Thai officials typically couldn’t be bought off like that.

  No diagnosis to appeal, no doctor to hunt down and punish. Waist-deep in bloody fantasies of how she’d hurt the person who did this, she noticed something. Someone staring at her.

  A woman, with beautiful wind-scoured light brown skin, just a few meters away. She sat—sat?—in the sea. And then she rose, and Ankit saw she wasn’t sitting in the water at all, she was riding, riding something as black and deadly and magnificent as the sea itself. The orca turned its head and stared at her, stared into her, and so did the woman, and Ankit felt gutted, stabbed through, harpooned—

  “She remembers you,” she said, the famous Blackfish Woman.

  She was real. And she was here. A
nd she was talking to Ankit.

  Ankit said, after a very long time, “What,” and her voice was much smaller than she ever remembered it being.

  “She has a very good memory. Thirty years later, she remembers someone’s smell.”

  Ankit stepped closer, squatted down. Her breath would not budge. It stuck in her lungs like lead. She shut her eyes, tried to remember. Cast her mind back as far as she could. She recalled strange rooms, cramped spaces, fear, someone’s hand across her mouth to stop her from shrieking. Footsteps overheard. Harsh male laughter. Nightmare glimpses, nothing new, things she’d carried with her and ascribed to filthy group homes and overcrowded nursery boats, things that fit right in with the long line of better-remembered ugliness that Qaanaaq’s foster care system had given her. And when she began to see wide vistas of white snow, smell smoke, hear distant animal bellowing—gunshots—the wails and the cries of the dying—how could she know whether that was memory or imagination, the nanobonder genocide so widely written about, reimagined in movies, subject of epic poems and endless analysis?

  She opened her eyes again, stared into the face of this impossible creature. Breathed out. “You’re her mate. My mother’s partner.”

  The orcamancer nodded. “I’m your mother, too.”

  “Of course,” Ankit said, awkward, uncertain about what was the proper protocol here. An embrace? A bow, a handshake, tears, wailing and the rending of garments?

  “We’ve been going up and down every Arm of this city for days. Weeks, maybe. Human time markers don’t stick in my mind. Our minds. Sniffing at the air. Looking for your scent. This city, and a hundred others before it.”

  The woman’s face—her mother’s face—her other mother’s face—was terrifying in its rawness. It hid nothing. It refused to hide. It was bare, alien, hostile to how humans behaved. More orca than person. Ankit’s cheeks reddened with emotions, and they were not all joy and love. She also felt fear. Fear of this woman, who cared nothing for social niceties or Qaanaaq or the safe life Ankit had fought tooth and nail to carve out for herself there.

  “My name is Ankit. Was that my name, before?”

  She shook her head.

  “What was my name?”

  “It’s not important now. Some other time, perhaps.” She got off the whale, climbed up onto the grid. Extended her arm stiffly, like a foreigner unaccustomed to the practice. “My name is Masaaraq.”

  They shook hands. When Masaaraq let go, she stepped forward with alarming speed to swamp Ankit in a fierce bear hug.

  They were exactly the same size.

  “And my mother? What’s her name? All these years, I’ve never known. She’s a number, to them.”

  Masaaraq looked around, as if suspicious of invisible eavesdroppers. Outsiders, especially from the underdeveloped parts of the Sunken World, believed all kinds of crazy things about Qaanaaq’s technological capacity, like that the fog could hear your every word and report it back to the evil robot overlords.

  She whispered in Ankit’s ear: “Ora.”

  “You’re here to get her out,” Ankit said. “Aren’t you?”

  Masaaraq nodded.

  “I want to help.”

  She took Ankit’s hand and squeezed it. Not hard, but implacably, her strength overwhelming. This was a woman who had never stopped, who could not be stopped, no matter what happened to her or to anyone else.

  Ankit had to take several deep breaths.

  She’d told herself that she was triumphing over the fear. She wasn’t that kid anymore, the one whom fear froze solid, the one who was ruined by it. She’d posted that photo of Taksa—she’d gone to see her mother—again and again she’d stood at the edge of a tough decision and made the leap to the next one. Done the difficult thing.

  But here she was again, up against her limit. A line she was afraid to cross. A leap that meant risking everything, leaving behind all she knew of comfort and ease, that might land her in jail or deregistered or worse. I want to help, she had said, and she did, but she couldn’t. To distract herself and Masaaraq from the bile rising in her throat, the panic she knew was visible in her face, she blurted out, “And do I get a killer whale?”

  “Polar bear,” Masaaraq said. “That’s what you were marked for bonding to. But she died before you two had a chance to bond. When we were attacked. When your mother escaped with you two. We were nomads, spending the winter in an empty town. I was away, tracking the people who were trying to wipe us out. I failed. They got to you first. Everyone died—except you two. And her.”

  “And you,” Ankit said.

  “You should count your blessings,” the killer whale woman said. “The fact that your animal died before you two had been bonded is the only reason why you didn’t spend most of your life a gibbering idiot.”

  “Like my brother,” Ankit said. “Right? Is that what’s wrong with him?”

  “You know Kaev? He doesn’t know you.”

  “Yeah. I know of him. I introduced myself, once. He . . . sort of . . .”

  “Broke down. Yes. His mind was cracked. He was incomplete, his whole life. He is complete, now, and healing. You have been incomplete as well, you just haven’t known it. I will heal you, too.”

  “I’m not incomplete,” Ankit said, feeling the grid give way beneath her. “I don’t need to be healed.”

  “You do,” the orcamancer said. “You need to be bonded.”

  “Or what?”

  Masaaraq did not answer. She took a step back.

  Ankit asked, “Do you . . . want to come over to my place? For a cup of tea?” She looked at the whale, briefly—ridiculously—imagined it in her elevator, daintily holding a teacup in one massive blade-fin, sitting at her kitchen table. “Can you . . . leave her?”

  “I can. And I will drink tea with you. But not right now. I have an errand to run. With some friends.” From behind her back, she pulled a black box that was strapped to some kind of orca saddle. “Right now we must begin the bonding process.”

  “No,” Ankit said, possibly not out loud.

  “I have no polar bear,” Masaaraq said. “And it would need to be an adult, as you are an adult. I do not know how the bond will come out. Whether it will be painful, how well it will work. Our kind has never bonded someone so late, who had never been previously bonded. Do you have an animal in mind? Something you’ve always felt a particular attraction to? Connection with?”

  “No,” Ankit said, louder now—gods, she didn’t even have a pet, she had never been interested in a romantic partner, the thought of commitment made her throat hurt, and now this strange woman who’d walked into her life five minutes ago—rode into her life on a killer whale five minutes ago—was proposing a kind of commitment more intimate and horrifying than anything she’d ever contemplated before.

  One look in Masaaraq’s eyes, and she knew—this woman was not entirely human. Being bonded to an animal turned you into something else. Something that behaved completely differently, wanted different things.

  “You have some time to think about it,” Masaaraq said, removing a series of strange tools from the box. Syringe, bottles, droppers, other things Ankit had no words for. “For now I’ll just take a sample of your nanites so we can start the culture process.”

  “No,” Ankit gasp-yelled, and turned to run—and then turned back, and told Masaaraq precisely how to find her, where she lived and where she worked, and stammered some profuse apologies, and turned, and ran.

  Kaev

  Kaev had wondered, once, what it was like for the superstar champion fighters. The ones everybody recognized, the ones crowds parted for, the ones who made people break into wide-open smiles of amazement, gratitude. Fear. His buddy Ananka had come close, back when both of them were just starting out, and passersby were always stopping to stare at her, but he knew it was nothing like the universal awe that the biggest beam fighters were held in.

  And even that would be trivial compared to the attention he was getting now. Half the population of Q
aanaaq was totally oblivious to the beam fights, yet not a single one of them could be oblivious to a polar bear.

  So here he came, strutting down the grid with a polar bear padding beside him. Not a little one, either. And the legendary orcamancer, bone-blade staff in hand. And a street urchin slide-messenger-turned-criminal-errand-kid who happened to be his child.

  Everybody stopped. Everybody stared. Many screamed. Many tapped their jaws, dialing Safety. People took pictures with screens and hat cams and oculars. Children began to cry. There was a polar bear in the Floating Zoos, but it was small and sickly and unhappy.

  Soq had suggested whistling for a jaunt skiff, but the orcamancer—Masaaraq, Kaev quickly corrected himself, she has a name, she is a person, not the mythic figure everyone tells stories about—said no.

  Masaaraq had been in a foul mood, returning from some nebulous errand that had upset her greatly, and she snapped, “Let them see us.”

  My city finally knows who I am. Everyone is looking at me, and not because I’m about to be beaten by some pretty-boy kid. This will be in all the outlets in instants.

  Once or twice he turned to look at Soq, this other magnificent creature who’d just entered his life, and each time, he saw Soq look away swiftly.

  At least I’m not the only one who doesn’t know how to handle this, he thought, and smiled. The bear stopped to sniff a red chrome pipe and snarled at the absent dog whose scent it found.

  “It’s crazy,” Kaev said. “I can feel him, how he wants to attack these people. How they all look like meat to him. How they smell. But he can feel me, too. And he knows he can’t do that. So he doesn’t. How is that possible? People spend years trying to tame wild animals, and this one became tame . . .”