Blackfish City
Page 28
Ankit recognized it, this look on Soq’s face. This fearlessness that probably wasn’t really fearlessness. More like—the excitement outweighed the fear, the potential positive outcomes overshadowed the potential negative ones. She didn’t share it, but she’d seen it before. On her scaler friends, the ones who came from even less than she did, the orphans who hadn’t lucked into a family or had ended up in an awful one. The ones who climbed the buildings beside her and stood there looking out at Qaanaaq without the sick feeling in the pit of their stomachs, the fear of falling, the fear of imprisonment, who had nothing but the open-armed embrace of the night to come, with whatever good or awful things waited for them inside it.
Soq squatted down beside Kaev. He looked at Soq, looked through them. “Shhhh,” Soq said, and put their hands on their father’s shoulders. So much muscle in there, so much strength. Yet here he was, helpless. Whispering a word that sounded like God? Chim climbed down from Ankit’s shoulder to huddle up against Kaev, poking him tenderly from time to time, warming herself with his body heat.
Green flares spouted intermittently at the end of an Arm, unscheduled methane ventilations, less spectacular by daylight. Snow fell faster now.
“She wouldn’t have hesitated to kill us all,” Soq said, and Ankit saw tears streaming down their face. “Or most of us. I’m a maybe, Go might have thought she could scare me into silence, but you two . . .” Soq pointed to Ora and Masaaraq, grief wracking every word. “She’d have done her damnedest to put the blame somewhere else, and that would have been a lot easier if the Killer Whale Woman and her Cabinet-escapee lover were corpses who couldn’t tell a different story.”
“He won’t care,” Ora said, touching Kaev’s sweaty forehead. “All he knows is, he loved her.”
Soq nodded. Their face was a blotchy knot of guilt, sadness, rage. “Is there . . . can we . . . do . . . anything?”
“He’ll be in a lot of pain for a very long while. When I was in the Cabinet, and my eagle was sick, I was lucky enough to know it was happening. To have some time, to help ease the transition. By bonding people, I built up the kind of bonds that soothed the trauma, but it happened slowly. Having been through what he’s just been through, Kaev might not be able to last that long.”
“. . . Last?”
“He might choose . . . not to stick around,” she said sadly. “Not to be. I almost did, ten times or more.”
“But people need him,” Ankit said. “There’s a lot of people with the breaks, suffering really badly. He can help them, and they’ll help him.”
“We’ll get to work,” Soq said, pressing a cool hand to their father’s hot forehead. “As soon as we get back. I know some of Go’s soldiers must have the breaks. And then we’ll head to Arm Eight, where lots of people have it.” Soq stood, and Ankit’s heart caught in her throat, to see the power that Soq radiated. Power, and something else. Lots of people had power. Fyodorovna had power; Go did. What Soq had was different. Power, and something more—the strength to do the right thing, the hard thing, the wisdom to know what that was. “We’re going to fix him.”
Ankit looked up from her screen and said to Soq, “They’re finished. Your friend Jeong finished processing all the escapees. He’s taking advantage of the chaos, got half of Go’s soldiers ferrying them to their new homes. Word is, he can get pretty bossy.”
“He can,” Soq said. “And it’s good to hear that they’re already obeying him.”
“The two of you might have a shot.”
“We can’t stay here,” Masaaraq said, the first words she’d uttered since regaining consciousness.
“We can’t leave,” Ora said. “We have work to do. People to heal. Kaev most of all.”
“And then we go,” Masaaraq said.
“Why?”
Masaaraq opened her mouth, like it was the easiest question she’d ever heard, the most obvious answer, but then she said nothing. She looked out at the open sea. She must yearn for it the way her orca does, Ankit thought. “We’re nomads,” she said, finally. “Home is where we make it. Where we’re together.”
“Exactly,” Ora said. “That’s the great gift of living life as a nomad—you don’t get attached to things, don’t believe that you’re safe because you have a roof over your head today. You don’t put your faith in a physical space when home is something you can take with you. But it also means that you accept what comes your way. You make the most of the places you end up in. And now we’re here. In Qaanaaq. Maybe it isn’t forever. But maybe it is.”
Masaaraq did not respond. Ankit wondered if she knew already, that the argument was over, the battle won, and not by her. She loved Ora. That was the most important thing. Every other consideration was secondary to that.
“Forgive me if I’m out of line,” Ankit said to her, to this person who was one of her mothers, “but you really never stopped? Twenty years, thirty years, you never said fuck it and spent a decade or so living on a beach or working in a steel mill or something?”
“Odd jobs here and there,” Masaaraq said. “Waiting out the winter, or saving up money when I couldn’t find any syndicate shipments to raid. My hands didn’t stay clean, mind you.”
“Polar bear kibble is expensive,” Ora said solemnly, and Masaaraq shocked everyone by chuckling.
“And you?” Ankit asked, her heart full and glorious, unspeakably happy. “Did you ever stop believing she’d come?”
“I stopped waiting for it,” Ora said. “For the longest time, I was certain that it would happen. Eventually I stopped being certain. I stopped thinking to myself, If not today, soon. But I still woke up every morning and thought, Maybe today. Before I thought anything else.”
Soq said, “I hated it, at first. City Without a Map. Didn’t know what you were trying to do. But now I love it. I don’t know if that’s maturity, or it’s just because . . . well, because the person who gave me the breaks loved it. I can feel him, sometimes. Hear him. Not like memories. Like something still alive. Is that possible?”
“They live in us,” Ora said. “We carry them in our hearts, even after they are gone. Our ancestors do not depart. Our people knew that long before the breaks.”
“Can I ask you a question about the broadcast?”
Ora smiled, touched her grandchild’s hand. “Of course.”
“Who are you talking to? Who’s your audience? At first I—he—we—thought it was intended for immigrants. New arrivals. Then I thought it was about people with the breaks. Now . . .”
Ora shrugged. “I don’t know, either. In the beginning I was talking to other people in the Cabinet with me. People who were struggling. Sick, sad, hungry. Then I realized . . . it’s more than that.”
Soq awaited additional information. Ora’s smile was deep and distant. Snow made the city into a shadow, a jagged mountain ridge studded with light. The four of them huddled closer in the boat, around Kaev, each with one hand pressed to his body. They made a square, a circle, a coven, a brigade, and Ankit felt confident that there was nothing they could not accomplish when they stood together.
“Tell me a story,” Soq said, leaning back to rest between Ora’s legs. “I bet you’re full of them.”
“I am,” Ora said. Her eyes were on Qaanaaq, and they saw so much more than Ankit did. Ora saw the city as a hundred different people had seen it, arriving at twilight or departing at dawn, as exiled kings and political prisoners and wide-eyed children. She shut her eyes and began to speak.
“People would say she came to Qaanaaq in a skiff towed by a killer whale harnessed to the front like a horse . . .”
Acknowledgments
Books have big families. Here are the people who helped make this one happen:
Seth Fishman, again, and always. The most magnificent man and agent and writer all in one. The Gernert Company team of Will Roberts and Rebecca Gardner and Ellen Coughtrey and Jack Gernert.
Zachary Wagman, who loved this book—and whose editorial eye and ear made it much more worthy of being
loved. Big love too to Ecco comrades Meghan Deans, Emma Janaskie, Miriam Parker, and Martin Wilson.
Neil Gaiman, who knows why.
Bradley Teitelbaum of White Rabbit Tattoo, who put a gorgeous permanent orca on my arm to commemorate this book. Look him up before you decide where to get your next—or first—tattoo. Kalyani-Aindri Sanchez, genius photographer, for the mind-blowingly awesome author shots. James Tracy—role model in organizing, role model in writing, and one hell of a model American.
Sheila Williams, wise and magnificent editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction, who published “Calved,” the short story that was my first visit to the fictional floating city of Qaanaaq. And Gardner Dozois, Neil Clarke, and Jonathan Strahan, for including “Calved” in their best-of-the-year anthologies.
Lisa Bolekaja, who slapped some sense into me about the title of that story when absolutely everyone else wanted me to call it “Ice Is the Truth of Water” (which, besides being an objectively less-awesome title, would almost certainly have earned me a cease-and-desist letter from Ted Chiang’s attorneys for straying too close to his titles “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” and “Hell is the Absence of God”).
The Wyrd Words Writing Retreat, which gave me the chance to work out the kinks on this hot mess in an enchanted castle fellowship with incredibly gifted writers and readers. Eric San Juan, Craig Laurence Gidney, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Stephen Segal, Valya Lupescu, Scott Woods, and K. Tempest Bradford all gave me vital advice and support and critique and “definitely don’t do this.”
My beloved Israelis, who—in addition to a lifetime of fantasticness—hosted me during the difficult time that this book was on submission and distracted me with tons of delicious food and strong coffee and tourism and love: Lynne, Avshalom, Oded, Shmuela, Leah, Miri, Liat, Amit, Gal, Dror, Mia, Yonatan, Roy, Daniel, Noam, Tamir, Romi, Ori, and Shira!
My sister, Sarah, and her husband, Eric—and my nephew, Hudson, for whose sake I’ll keep on fighting like hell to keep a future like this one from coming to be.
My mother, Deborah Miller—survivor and inspiration.
Finally and forever, my husband, Juancy—firebender, crystal gem, roustabout—who I know would bend the sky and break the sea and the laws of physics to come rescue me, even if it took thirty years, no matter how many evildoers he had to slaughter in the process. Love you more than the earth we stand on.
About the Author
SAM J. MILLER’s short stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and Locus Awards. He’s the recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. His young-adult novel, The Art of Starving, was released in 2017.
WWW.SAMJMILLER.COM
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BLACKFISH CITY. Copyright © 2018 by Sam J. Miller. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-book.
FIRST EDITION
Cover Design by Will Staehle
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, Sam J., author.
Title: Blackfish City : a novel / Sam J. Miller.
Description: First edition. | New York : Ecco Press, [2018] | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017016495 (print) | LCCN 2017031059 (ebook)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Dystopias.
Classification: LCC PS3613.I55288 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.I55288 B57 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.56—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017016495
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Digital Edition APRIL 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-268484-4
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-268482-0
Version 04022018
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