Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  “Sorry,” she said, but he was asking her something.

  “Was Rick Walters just here?”

  “Yes, he said he was a friend of my aunt’s. He offered to help.”

  “He’s no friend of Rima’s.” Vince frowned. “Rima hated his guts. He was on the original negotiating team for North Point. She fought hard against the buyout. He’s here to make sure everything’s accounted for. I came to warn you not to tell him anything. He stops by without warning, acts real friendly.”

  He nodded at her and left.

  In the cold and the silence, Varsha shivered. I don’t know what’s what, she told herself. There was no signal on her phone. The last text she had got from the family was a “Be careful out there” from her grandfather, and similar notes from her parents, her cousin Sanjay and her Augs Friends group. Her mother and father were fighting again, and Biru uncle was in Patna because Nanu was having a medical checkup. Chester had sent about twenty pings already, which she had ignored. She didn’t feel like resuming the Augs program or sifting through her aunt’s things. She sat down at the desk and put her head in her hands, and remembered.

  For the longest time she had shared a room with Rima, her mother’s youngest sister, every visit to Patna. They decorated the room with strange structures; there were wires suspended across the room with wheeled carts that ran up and down, a plastic monkey in a bucket that jumped out and woke them up at 7 am every morning. Anyone approaching the room, no matter how quietly, would be anticipated—thanks to an IR sensor that beeped a warning in Swedish.

  She and Rima used to invent games for the little ones. The one she was thinking of now was a winter game—they would drag a couple of razais down to the carpet to make a huge multicolored mountain, and they would hide under sections of the thick folds, while the little cousins would screech excitedly and try to find them, their fat, slippery bodies like so many wriggling fish on the satin covers. The razais were thick enough that the mountain stood without help, and they would roll the ping-pong-ball collection down from the summit, one by one, trying to guess at first where, among the folds and channels, valleys and crinkles, the balls would end up. It was sometimes tricky because you’d think the pink ball would slide just so, into the long, straight channel leading all the way to the bottom of the mountain, but a little crinkle here, or a little subtle encouragement there (from an aunt half-concealed within the folds) would send the ball careening to quite another destination. This is where Varsha learned about chance, and how a small and sudden change could lead you to quite another path.

  Rima and Varsha co-wrote a novel when Varsha was eleven. In the novel, various people and parts of the house, and trees, and stray dogs were characters. It was comic and dark and sad and hilarious, and in each chapter there was a hidden clue to the problem or mystery. The secret was that each clue was concealed by something similar to itself—a Box of Wonders was hidden in the Cube of Amazing Things, a puppy with magical powers was hidden in its mother, since it had yet to be born, and a wish-granting mango hung with other mangoes on a branch of the mango tree. The story had got out of control, with plots and subplots of labyrinthine complexity, impossible to finish. For years when Rima and Varsha would meet, they would say to each other—how did Amroodji become allergic to guavas? Or—did Mad Puppy find the Lost World inside Mobius, or outside? And they would burst out laughing. One of the other cousins had recently discovered the manuscript (copiously and laboriously illustrated) stuck between two of the eight hundred books in the drawing room, and the grandparents had been having a hilarious time re-reading it with the younger grandchildren, until after the news came. Now, life was forever divided into Before and After. The manuscript was now in Nanaji’s safe, as though fate might snatch away even this.

  My friend Skip told me this story when I was in California. There is a former killing ground off the southern coast of California in the Pacific Ocean. Here the American whalers hunted and killed thousands of gray whales in the 1850s. In the 1970s, Skip said, well after the age of whaling was over, a Mexican fisherman had an encounter with a gray whale. The whale came alongside his boat and gazed at him. Looking into the whale’s eye, the fisherman had a life-changing experience. Since then, the whales seem to wait for the humans. Whenever people in boats come to that region during the calving season, mother whales and their young will approach them. People will touch them and they seem to welcome these encounters.

  So of course we had to go there. We took a small plane down to a town in Baja California. There’s quite a tourist business out there, bringing humans to the whales. Skip and my friend Molly, who studies kelp forests, went out in a small boat with a bunch of tourists. I got to practice my Spanish and we were all laughing and having a great time, with the boat rocking wildly on a choppy sea—and then the guide yelled: whales!

  I could see nothing—the spray from the waves was in my eyes, and I was trying to keep my balance. Then as we got closer the waters parted and a leviathan surfaced, slowly, as though it had all the time in the world. I leaned over the rail. The ancient eye looked at me—a sentient, knowing, curiously gentle gaze. In that one glance, that tenuous, temporal bridge between being and being, I knew my life would change. At that moment I existed in a way I hadn’t before—in the eye of a Californian gray whale. She could have destroyed us with one flick of her massive tail, but she just hung in the water, looking at us. The kids on the boat were already leaning over and touching her, and I did too. Her skin was riddled with scars and clusters of barnacles. She must have been quite old. Later another whale surfaced close to us and blew a great, long breath. The plume of moisture bloomed like a fountain several meters into the air, soaking us. The sun came out at exactly that moment, and among the suspended water drops I saw, for a fraction of a second, a rainbow.

  “Congratulations!” Skip said, hitting me across my shoulder blades as I gasped and choked. “Your first rainblow!”

  This astonishing experience made me wonder: knowing their bloody and tragic experience with our species, what moved these whales to seek us out, to be so forgiving? Was it one individual’s bright idea to try to befriend the enemy?

  Jimmy thinks none of this is surprising. Living such long lives, some of the whales may have acquired what we call wisdom. It’s rare enough in our species! And why should humans be the only ones with a sense of agency, a desire to make things better for themselves? We already know that whales have culture—different pods of the same species have different habits and tastes in food.

  Here’s another story—a dolphin was observed apparently assisting a young sperm whale that had lost its way in a saltwater marsh, somewhere off an island in the Indian Ocean. Scientists who received the video (from a fisherman) said that it was inconclusive. But Jimmy has seen it. He’s not one to jump to conclusions, but it supports his hypothesis that whales communicate with other species. After all, they live in an environment rich with biodiversity. Wouldn’t they want or need to communicate with other species sometimes?

  I tell him about how I grew up, in the old house in Patna with the sunlight-yellow walls. How, first thing in the morning, I’d be woken up by mynahs yelling outside the window, and the parakeets in the neem trees. The pariah dogs would be waiting at the back door, ancestors of the current Bossy Pack. We had a parakeet with a broken wing when I was ten, and he would sit on the windowsill and scold the dogs, and drop roasted chana or bits of toast for them. Ma, you would have already been up before dawn, watering the tulsi in the courtyard, and the radio would be playing in the dining room. Apart from the neighbors’ conversations wafting through the open windows, and the bells of the rickshaw-wallahs, there were so many living creatures around us, talking to each other. This is why I could believe the old stories as a child, in which animals are speakers and players.

  Jimmy had such a different upbringing, here in the Far North, and yet we understand each other so well. He, too, grew up with stories in which animals talk to humans and each other, across the species
gap. Some sympathies bridge the distance between cultures. Perhaps it is the same between species, and we modern humans simply don’t notice.

  “We’re in the lowest level of the station. Sorry it looks like a dungeon here, but the best part is just ahead.”

  “Did my aunt work here?”

  “Her lab’s upstairs,” Julie said. “ You’ve seen it—one of the big rooms, empty now. But she loved it down here. She and Jimmy spent as much time here as possible, planning and arguing and observing. Just past this door—”

  A large steel door opened at the press of a metal knob set in the wall. There was a small space beyond, and another steel door. The first door closed behind them with a slow hiss, and the second one opened.

  There was nothing beyond it but an ordinary passageway. Puzzled, Varsha followed Julie. Lights turned on as they walked into the dark corridor. There were no doors on either side, just the tunnel going forward into the dark, into the—

  “The sea—this is going seaward?”

  Julie turned, grinned.

  “Yes—hold your horses, we’re almost there.”

  And suddenly they were in a broad open space filled with diffuse light that came in through transparent walls. The roof was a glass dome. It was literally a bubble at the bottom of the sea.

  Varsha caught her breath. There were tiny things moving in the water outside—small, streamlined silhouettes against what seemed to be a dank white ceiling, a few feet above the roof of the dome. It was suffused with a faint blue glow in places.

  “We’re under the sea ice,” Julie said. She flicked a switch and suddenly the outside was lit. The floating ice above them discolored with gray-green smudges on the underside. In some places the ice had thickened, forming extrusions that hung in the water like chandeliers. In the light the ice crystals glittered like so many diamonds. Beyond the circle of light, the water was murky, mysterious with small, moving shadows.

  “Wow,” Varsha whispered. Julie looked satisfied.

  “Never fails to impress visitors,” she said triumphantly. “If you’re lucky you’ll see more than a few fish or krill. We’ve seen a swimming polar bear. And during the spring migration there’s bowheads that always stop here. Since about ten years ago they’ve been venturing closer to the Beaufort coast. Same with belugas.”

  Varsha looked around the observation chamber. There were desks and instrumentation around the circular perimeter. In the middle was a table with a microwave, coffee maker, and the attendant supplies.

  “Your aunt spent a bunch of time here,” Julie said. “She and Jimmy used to joke that it wasn’t fair for humans to observe the whales and other creatures. We should give them a chance to understand us. You should have seen the two of them dance around the room for the whales! The whales must think humans are deranged.”

  She laughed.

  “Bowheads are wary creatures. They live over two hundred years. Some of them still remember the days of the Yankee whalers, when they were nearly wiped out. So you can’t blame them if keep their distance. But they’re intelligent creatures. They’re curious. So some of them—it’s always the same ones—they come and hang out and look at us, and talk about us.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Only a little. Whales have a sophisticated communication system. Don’t you know what your aunt was doing? Jimmy had a mission—to decipher the communication system of the bowhead whale. Humans can now speak a little gibbonese—white-handed gibbons, you know? South Asia? No? Well, more people should know about that! We’re finally beginning to decode languages of other species. Whales and dolphins are hard—their languages are likely to be more complex than ours. Jimmy was a marine biologist, your aunt was an engineer—they were perfect for the project.”

  “I thought she was working on alternative-energy systems!”

  “That was ongoing. She worked with a group of students at the college in Utqiagvik—there’s a really good tribal college in Utqiagvik—they developed some prototypes of wind generation that can work with gusty winds in a place like this. Town’s looking into it. She also—here, let me show you.”

  The outside lights turned off, except for the ones close to the sea bed. Julie gestured to Varsha to get closer to the walls. On the sea bed was an array of two-foot-high devices that looked like Japanese fans mounted on flexible stems. They were swaying gently with the current.

  “Wave-generator prototypes developed by Rima,” Julie said. “She worked on boat design too—her unofficial project—propeller-free boats that wouldn’t injure marine animals. You should’ve seen her lab. There was this bathyscaph shaped like a squid that used water propulsion. She used to get all kinds of junk from online auctions, naval junkyards, and such. She got interested in whale communication after she went on her first boat ride with Jimmy. They would sit in this room and draw designs of all kinds of crazy stuff. Boats with flippers and wings.”

  “Did she actually build any of this?”

  “There were so many prototypes being tested and taken apart and tested again that I lost count. After—afterwards I heard they sent most of her stuff to the tribal college. They wouldn’t have, if she’d completed the project. If they’d lived—she and Jimmy—there’s no telling how much they would have accomplished . . . ”

  “What was he like? Jimmy?”

  “I never felt I really got to know him. I feel like that sometimes with the Natives here. It makes me realize we European descendants are the newbies, that this was their home first, and still is. The Native Resistance has been felt here too, even though it is so far away from the action. Vincent I can relate to, he lived for so long down south. But Jimmy, he just went down to California to study what the science of the whites could teach him, and hotfooted it back here. He was quiet. Thoughtful. Don’t get me wrong, he could crack a joke and all, but he was a bit of an introvert. No-small-talk kind of guy. Passionate.”

  “Did he—did they get to decipher whale talk?”

  “They made some headway. He’s published quite a bit on it. Their tapes and the papers they worked on are all with Vince. But you should talk to Vince or Matt—I’m just a microbiologist. Matt’s focus is how land mammals are affected by climate change—caribou, moose, polar bears, seals, and the impact of moose coming up from the South. The three of them would talk up a storm about species communication.”

  Julie turned the lights off. In the dim natural light filtered through the sea ice, the observation room seemed a world unto itself.

  “I just heard on the radio that bowhead whales have been spotted west of Utqiagvik,” Julie said. “It’s early for them to be coming here, but apparently they are coming. You might get lucky.”

  I feel her here, Varsha thought. She’s here, Rima Mausi, in this place. She took a deep breath.

  “I hope I see a whale,” Varsha said, as they started back up the tunnel.

  As the light grew stronger and the thin shore ice started melting back with a distressing rapidity, there came news that the whales were already on the move from their wintering areas in the Bering strait. Vince and Tom and Irene were in Utqiagvik, where the mood was festive. I joined them later in the day. The sun was out and half the town was on the beach. The whale radio had declared that one of the whaling crews was headed back with whales in tow.

  At last we saw the first boat chugging toward us over the ocean, the flag waving. Vince was standing next to me and let up a great shout, and everyone started yelling “hey-hey-hey!” It was Vince’s uncle, Tom Jones, who was captain of that boat. Kids were running around shouting, it was like a festival. Then I saw the dark bulk of the whale in tow behind the boat, and the red float bobbing close to it. As it came toward land, the man in the forklift drove closer to the water’s edge, and we moved out of the way. I couldn’t see anything for the crowd for a while, and then I saw the whale’s great carcass slide past me, pulled up by ropes attached to the forklift. It lay like a black mountain. Vince came through the crowds with his grand-nephew, a boy o
f five, on his shoulders. “It was a good catch,” he said to me, smiling. He said something in Iñupiaq. “That’s a thank-you to the whale for the gift of its life,” he said. “The whale captain says that over the body when it is lashed to the boat. It was a good death—it died quickly.”

  The whale was already being cut up. Long, black strips lined with pink blubber were being hauled off on ropes. The men worked efficiently with triangular cutters on poles. Blood stained the white snow. There was shouting and singing.

  “We will eat well this winter,” Marie said. Marie works at the grocery store, and is Irene’s aunt. That first whaling season was a bewildering time for an omnivore-turned vegan Indian scientist raised in the sub-tropics and freshly arrived from California. I remember asking Jimmy when I first came to Utqiagvik: “How can you bear to eat such amazing creatures?” He just looked at me in his thoughtful, considering way, and replied: “Because we are not apart, we are a part.” It took me some time to figure out what he meant. Since then I’ve attended many a whale carving and blanket toss, and helped cut and prepare whale to feed the community. In the dead of winter, in a place still mostly only accessible by small aircraft, the sole source of fresh food is meat. And because the whale is sacred, it is never sold, only shared. I had a lot of whale that winter, parboiled and dunked into soy sauce, or cut frozen straight from the ice cellar and into the mouth. I have a lot more respect for the hunter who brings in the wild kill and says his prayers over it, than for those who trap animals into constant, unrelieved suffering in their thousands in factory farms.

  Thus I am made of many things—mother’s milk, fruit of guava and mango trees, rice of the Indian Gangetic Plain, vegetables of splendid variety, meat of many creatures, and now—bowhead whale!

  Next morning Rick showed up. Varsha was in her aunt’s room, folding clothes and shoes into cardboard boxes. He smiled at her from the door.

  “Hey, want to come for a helicopter ride?”