Bo Balder

by Quantum Fish (html)

If it was like that all over the world, that certainly explained why nobody on Knossos was sending their fish up into space. This was going to ruin the planet’s reputation. Her parents’ business would go under. Everybody’s business would go under. It was more serious than the Restaurateurs’ Association had made it sound.

  So maybe the reunion with her parents was going to be more worst-case scenario than pink-tinted, but she had to get to the bottom of this mystery. She was still a Knossos girl at heart.

  As the boat rushed over the waters, the violent glimmering on the water surface indicated that something a little more powerful than “eddies” was going on. Havi personally would have called them maelstroms or vortices. In hindsight, she felt a thrill of fear over her recent ordeal. That would have ended very badly if her family hadn’t shown up in time. She considered suing dumbass Alexa from the spaceport. Just sending a rights waiver wasn’t really sufficient customer care. If she’d really been an outworlder . . . but no, Alexa, last name unknown, had apparently recognized her as a scion of the Skuja family.

  “What’s Alexa spaceport’s last name?”

  “Thinking of revenge?” Ivete said. “Don’t. We persuaded her not to send out a rescue.”

  What had Havi ever done to deserve a family like this? Leave home to pursue an education and a career away from fish? Big whoop.

  Ivete’s face broke into a wide, smug grin, painted lilac by the moons. “And anyway, she’s Dara’s little sister.”

  Havi rolled her eyes. “Not him again. Ever.”

  The serrated outlines of the family farm popped up on the horizon, the lit contours stark white against the purple sky.

  * * *

  The next morning, Havi squinted against the sun glaring off the solar arrays as the stared down at the family farm. Everything was different. The corridors were at least two meters deep, and the fish didn’t swim their usual figure eight, but something far more complicated. She knelt down on her floater pad and swiped a pink fish from the shoal. She headed, gutted, and filleted it. The first raw bite definitely tasted different. Good, but not the taste of home farm.

  When she’d come home last night, her father had cooked a meal entirely without fish or garum, the salty, spicy sauce made from fish remnants.

  Mom had also refused to talk shop that late at night. Mom was the boss, so everyone trooped meekly to bed after feeding Havi. Havi had thought it prudent to eat breakfast before talking to Mom.

  Yes. Strange tastes, strange swimming patterns, seabed dropping. How was that even possible? Havi went inside and called up tidal stats. They made no sense anymore. The three moons had always exerted a gentle pull on the planet’s shallow oceans, but the last year, tidal movements had splintered into much smaller whirlings and eddies and strange weaves of shallow and deepwater streams. Oceanographers were still exploring the patterns and the cause of the change.

  Changes didn’t happen out of nowhere. Havi called up meteorologist reports, astronomers’ blogs, but they reported nothing out of the ordinary.

  She enlarged the live tidal display from the satellite network. Zoomed out more. If she looked at the whole hemisphere at once, it almost seemed like there was a pattern. But it wasn’t complete. It seemed broken, interrupted. She zoomed in on one of the pattern breaks. Osaka Barrier. A recent, human-made, barricade to keep the fish from swarming, intermingling, and ruining their famous taste.

  Time to talk to the farm manager. Mom.

  Her mother was seated, frowning, behind a big screen showing the flow inside the family farm. The shoal swam around and around, as always, but there was a distinct pause at the closed tidal gate.

  “It’s as if they want to leave,” Havi said. “But why? They’ve been fine here all their lives.”

  Mom looked up at Havi. “Step away from the monitor. Don’t you know it’s rude to look over people’s shoulders? And this farm is not yours anymore, as you made very clear, so none of your business.”

  “It’s not random curiosity, Mom! Don’t you realize your livelihood is in danger? As well as everybody else’s, including restaurateurs all over known space?”

  “I do. But I only share family secrets with people involved in the family business. Go try the neighbors to see if they want you poking around.”

  Jesus.

  “They might be more open, not having a baseless grudge against me,” Havi snapped. “Isn’t there a worldwide concern? Aren’t you guys working together to find out the cause for this?”

  “Of course we are. We’re negotiating agreements to keep our trade secrets safe. When we’ve got a covenant, we’ll start our own investigation.”

  “What trade secrets?” Havi asked. She couldn’t think of any she didn’t already know, having spent her youth as unpaid labor on the farm. “And when are you expecting this covenant to emerge?”

  “As I said, not unless you want to join the family business.”

  Like hell she was.

  “And what do you mean by random grudge? As if you didn’t realize what you were doing to us. As if you don’t know how hard it was to keep Ivete out of jail after that shuttle port business,” her mother said.

  “Jail? What shuttle port business?”

  “Yes, pretend to be innocent. Good Havi, who ignores everything that’s going on under her nose.”

  “Mom, are you even taking this seriously? If things go on like this, you won’t have a business.”

  “Don’t be dramatic, dear, you should have outgrown that by now. Things have always been fine. Of course we will find a way to get back to normal. Build another barrier, maybe, or another way to control the swarming and the eddies. They’re only fish.”

  Havi got up and went out, before she said things she’d regret. She knelt down by one of the enclosed corridors where the family grew earth produce: seaweed, sea potatoes and limpets, gene engineered to provide human beings with the right nutrients. The Paal fish were the most important ingredients to give this diet variety and flavor.

  She took off her shoes, stepped down into the lukewarm water of the basin, sun blazing down on her neck, and inhaled the fragrance that rose up from the water gardens. Seaweed in all colors between pink and dark green waved gently in the current. Limpets and shells pocked the sides.

  She put some pinkies, strands of grassy kelp, and a limpet in her mouth and chewed furiously. Why did her parents, and possibly most of their fellow fish keepers, refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation? She couldn’t understand it. It stared them right in the face.

  But then again, they’d seen things get worse so slowly they might have failed to notice the enormous gap between how things had been eleven years ago and now.

  Would there be any point in talking to other families? Might they have noticed other phenomena that would clarify the situation? She’d better, even if she didn’t think it would yield new info, just to be complete. She needed other points of view. She’d covered weather, water, and fishing. What else? The Paal, their labyrinths, and the fish themselves.

  After filling herself up, she clambered out and looked back with a frown. Current, what current? Hadn’t her mom always told her the earth gardens were kept completely separate from the rest of the briny? Sure, the doors kept the fish out. But if there was a current, earth nutrients could get into the ocean. Another strike on the tally of human influence of Knossos’ “natural”, that is, Paal-instigated, processes. Hm. Wouldn’t proliferating bacteria or the kitchen gardens’ waste ruin the terroir?

  She ran back over the tops of the labyrinth to the main house. It floated over the shadow gardens, where fungi grew. Fish genetics weren’t her first priority, but her sister who could tell her all about it, was right here. She swallowed. Time to face the music.

  The door opened right after knocking. Havi hadn’t expected that. She stepped inside slowly and coughed.

  “Hey Ivete. How are you doing?”

  “No small talk,” Ivete said. “Just ask your questions.”

  No truce th
en. Fish talk first, then the family questions.

  “I’m glad you’re willing to talk to me. Mom just shooed me out. Why are you guys still mad at me? I don’t see choosing a different career path as such a big crime. And what about the shuttle port?”

  Ivete took a deep breath. “You can’t let go, can you? Just when I was being the better person, putting business interests over my own feelings. Did you ever think you were making a major impact on my life? That by choosing to leave, you took away my choice?”

  Such hot waves of anger came off Ivete that Havi almost took a step backward. “I didn’t force you to do anything. If you wanted another career, Mom and Dad would just have had to sell the business. It’s your life. As it’s mine.”

  Ivete slammed her hand on the desk. “So hurray, you’re better at withstanding parental pressure than me.”

  “And the shuttle port?”

  Ivete shrugged. “I tried to blow up the shuttle port after you left. I was just a kid. Not the port’s fault, I see that now.”

  Whoa. Havi didn’t know what to say. That was a little more than youthful high spirits. She’d never thought about the impact her leaving would have had on Ivete. She still didn’t doubt her right to choose her own life, but she wished she’d been able to support Ivete more.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Ivete only huffed.

  Havi took a deep breath. She couldn’t undo this old damage with a single apology. She was going to ask the questions she’d come for. “I’m looking into the mysterious fish behavior and taste. Is there anything interesting about their genetics you can tell me?”

  “Nobody ever asks,” Ivete said. “But yes, I can.”

  She opened up a tree chart on a large screen. Havi didn’t know what she was looking at until she zoomed in on the top branch. “Skuja” it said.

  “This is what humans found when they landed here.” A struggling fleet of mere thousands, the last survivors of the destroyed Earth, fleeing the Katabiotics.

  “The Paal had engineered the minimalist but still functioning ecosystem, consisting of no more than the fish, several branches of seaweeds, algae, and slime, no more than twenty-three bacteria. That was all. And so far, impervious to human bacteria, viruses, and fungi.”

  Havi thought she understood, even though she didn’t know where this fact was leading.

  “Of course we fish farmers are actively trying to maintain that unique genetic signature, for its flavor. So since the advent of humanity, two hundred years ago, the Fish Migration Guard tracks down and destroys stray fish or shoals. That’s why Osaka Barrier was put up. Me and Dad helped build it.

  “But we can also track the fishes’ genetic history for far longer, even back to when the Paal created them. They made sixty-five unique species, so far less than we have now.

  “Since the origin of these fish, so many hybrids have originated that only a few of the original mixes still exist. The rest is all hybridized. We can tentatively conclude that the Paal intended for hybridization to happen. How they made the fish capable of mating is a fascinating story.”

  “For another day,” Havi said quickly.

  “Or how they made it so that many types of aliens, among others the humans and the Gukke, could eat and enjoy the fish.”

  “Also another day.”

  Havi couldn’t tell from Ivete’s neck if she was disappointed in Havi’s curtailing of her digressions.

  “So do these facts shed any light on what’s going on with the fish?”

  Ivete shrugged. “Not that I know of. I’ve sequenced dozens of wrong-tasting fish. They’re all hybrids from existing strains. It’s odd that they are breeding out of season, but well, who knows why?”

  “Isn’t that also biology?”

  “It’s observed behavior, ecology. I’m all about the genetics.”

  “No insights about the labyrinths rising, or the seabed falling? The eddies?”

  Ivete looked unconcerned. Why would she pretend that?

  Havi waited. Nothing more was forthcoming from her sister’s averted back.

  It didn’t feel as if the past issues had been resolved even a little bit.

  * * *

  Havi sat down at her mother’s desk and fired off messages to universities and researchers. An urgency tugged at her. She couldn’t pinpoint the source of it. After all, the fish scarcity had been going on for months, the gradual rising of the labyrinths for years. There was no rational explanation for her sense of hurry. But her gut was her best guide, so she always took it seriously.

  The astronomer and the meteorologist reacted the quickest. Sadly, they lived on the other side of the planet, but she made appointments to face-call them. In her career as a journalist, she’d noticed she got a better rapport and more information if she met people in the flesh. Something about the subliminal scents and body language of an actual human being, maybe. The archeologist, who hadn’t replied, was a short hover boat ride away. Havi decided to visit her first, welcome or not.

  She left a note saying she’d borrowed Ivete’s hover and left. The archaeologist’s floating camp was near the Paal temple she knew so well. People knew so little about the Paal, even after living on Knossos for two hundred years.

  The platform wobbled as she stepped onto it. A chunky machine sitting on the other edge churbled along quietly. Probably diving equipment. Before long, the tone of the diving monitor changed.

  The first divers didn’t even notice her sitting there until they’d taken off their helmets and deactivated their suits.

  Havi coughed. “I’d like to speak to Dr. Furuzan?”

  The oldest of the women stuck up her hand.

  “Hi, I’m Havi Kuja. I’ve been commissioned to look into the past years’ fish troubles. One of the things that stood out was the labyrinth changes. Do you have time to talk to me about that? Is it something you’ve noticed?”

  Furuzan laughed. “Writing about it is the only thing that got me sponsors and students, so yeah.”

  “Did you realize it also had an effect on the fish farms? The fish have changed behavior and taste different.”

  “I heard some rumors, but since we don’t have money for real fish, I didn’t think anything of it. Wow. How interesting. Do you have proof that the two are interrelated?” Furuzan asked.

  “Not scientific proof, no. This is just a preliminary investigation. But it seems pretty unlikely that two such events are coincidental, doesn’t it, after millennia of stasis?”

  Furuzan waggled her head. “We think millennia of stasis. Those few satellite photos we have from the Gukke don’t really prove nothing happened in between. And don’t forget the arrival of humans as agents of change. But I get your point.”

  “So, what can you tell me about the Paal? Why did they build these labyrinths, why they designed this specific ecosystem?”

  “I wish! We don’t even know what they looked like, since the Gukke, who actually met living Paal a couple of thousand years ago, never bothered to film them or preserve the memory.”

  “I’m investigating for the fishing and restaurant industry. Knossos’ economy is going to collapse if the fish problem continues. Anything you can tell me about the Paal and the labyrinths,” Havi said.

  “You probably knew the labyrinths extend several meters down into the soil? So they haven’t been growing. The continents’ seafloor has been slowly sucked out by currents. I have a hunch that the labyrinths have some connection with wind, tides, and currents. The currents in the briny are fueled by massive water vortices in the oceans. Where, as you also were aware, I assume, the labyrinths continue. All over the globe.”

  “Has anyone ever completely charted them?” Havi asked.

  “Not really.”

  “I wonder why the first settlers never bothered to explore further. I would have.”

  Furuzan shrugged. “They were refugees from Earth, fleeing the Katabiotics, probably had lived in cramped ship clouds for generations. They were just happy to find a h
abitable planet, to be free of the Katabiotics.”

  “So did the Katabiotic aliens also kill the Paal?”

  “We don’t know that the Paal are extinct. We only know they’re gone from this planet. But where they are, all dead, sublimed to another plane of existence, moved to the Magellan Cloud . . . nobody knows.”

  Havi felt a stirring of instinct. Something here. “We have found very few intact planets, haven’t we? Almost all destroyed by the Katabiotics. I wonder why this planet is still here.”

  “Interesting question, but outside my purview. We’re just cataloging the newly accessible labyrinths walls. “

  “Can you show me?” Havi asked. The stirring inside her was fainter now, but it wasn’t gone.

  “Sure. For example, the structure the locals call the temple. Let me show you what it looks like now.” Furuzan gestured to the water, where something triangular stuck up about twenty meters away. It was about ten meters wide and three high. Must be the remnant of the temple.

  “I can’t dive,” Havi said.

  “It’s a short walk and it’s only submerged up to the chest. Well, you’re tall. To the waist.”

  They balanced over the labyrinth walls and clambered through the temple’s windows into a triangular space that stretched away to its point about fifteen meters away. The stone floor was completely submerged now.

  Havi landed in warm water, slick stone beneath her feet. The slab where she and Dara had not made love was only visible as a disturbance in the water’s gentle eddying.

  The pictorials on the wall were fuzzier and less deep than she remembered. She moved closer to the left-hand walls. They’d always been called pictorials, she wasn’t sure why. The shapes she saw were abstract and organic, created by thousands of little triangular stones or bricks.

  “Look at the walls, and then at this picture. The reliefs on the wall have moved two millimeters.”

  Havi had already seen it. “I used to hang out in this place all the time. They’ve moved a lot more than two millimeters. The design is completely different.”

  She waded toward the far wall, where once a beautiful spiraling relief mural had been, and now only faint bumps were visible. The bumps didn’t even make a picture anymore. “Don’t touch it!” Furuzan cried out.