Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  Awaiting my reply.

  “Dan.” He resumed sawing at a chunk of stew meat on his plate.

  “You think that’s whale?” Suzanne pointed with her fork at his meal.

  Dan gagged on the mouthful he’d just taken, then washed it down with vitamin water. “Good lord, no. We don’t eat that here. This stuff’s a protein substitute. Tough as leather for some reason.”

  “Interesting. I’ve been catching up on the rules. You’re not supposed to give the whales names, individualize them. And yet you don’t eat them. Kind of a mixed message.”

  Dan shrugged. “Whale meat’s too valuable for us lowly types. That’s part of it. The rules are there for a reason. Like we’re not supposed to call the processing area the ‘kill floor,’ but what the hell else ya gonna call it? It’s not like we tickle the whales until they turn into steak.”

  Suzanne blew a soft gust of air out her nose. Not quite a laugh.

  I bet she has a great laugh.

  “How ’bout you? A fan of whale meat?”

  “I have eaten it.”

  Not really an answer. Dan pushed the lumpy stew around his plate, appetite gone. “So, you on whale-food production, or the plastic filtering project? I heard they managed to extract a hundred pounds of particles yesterday.”

  “I heard that, too. Nope. I’m an animal behaviorist. Here to assess recent changes in communication patterns. You in whale processing?”

  “Welder. Mostly underwater. Used to work the oil rigs all over the Pacific until that work dried up.” He tore up his bun and dipped it in some beet juice. “Now it’s just the SeaRanch rotation. But since we’re stuck here they’ve got me working topside, too. How’d they get you in?”

  “Snuck me over on a chopper from a research station down near Chile. I was there for a few months. The chopper never made it back to base.”

  Dan prodded the stew with his bun and the beet stain turned brown. “The military’s out hunting, I heard. Until they wipe out that ecowarrior cell, you’re probably stuck here with the rest of us.”

  “Okay by me. You guys have a decent brain-scan lab; a few tweaks and I’ll have it set up right. Going to interview the survivors from the whale attack last week when they get back from patrol—see what they think instigated the attack. I can’t believe they’ve sent those guys out already.”

  “We’re in an all-hands-on-deck situation. A bit of roughhousing from one of the pods shouldn’t keep anyone from work.”

  “Is that what they’re telling you?” Frown lines gathered between Suzanne’s eyes. “Roughhousing?”

  Dan nodded. A needle of unease pricked his spine.

  * * *

  The shower head sprayed Dan with a fine mist. Another thing that the rig lacked—decent pressure.

  Water, water, everywhere,

  But nothing from the sink.

  At least it was hot. His feet tingled and turned red as they warmed up. Dan scrubbed mint shampoo into his scalp. The pipes pinged and gurgled. Then from somewhere deep in the plumbing came a foghorn cry. Dan stopped scrubbing and strained his scarred ears to listen.

  Nothing. Just the hiss of the showerhead.

  He grabbed the bar of soap and lathered his chest. Again, the plaintive call followed by a low bovine moan, then a reverberating chirp, louder this time. Pipes heating up? The dock rubbing against the rig’s legs?

  The faucet screeched as he cranked the shower off. In the silence, nothing sang.

  Female humpbacks will often make friends with a female from another pod. Once a year she reunites with her old friend. It’s a quiet reunion. The two females float along, side by side, eating together and taking pleasure in the company. Females who establish these kinds of friendships are healthier and birth more calves each year.

  —Dr. Suzanne Anderson, Herding Humpbacks

  Unable to sleep, Dan paced the decks. A clear night full of stars. He had a regular circuit. Once around the main, take a ladder, around the next deck twice, then up and around again. He’d descend in reverse, working his way back, ladder by ladder, to the bottom. Twelve repetitions was the most he’d ever done of his circuit. Winding himself down until he could sleep without dreaming.

  When he reached the top deck, he stopped. Suzanne leaned against a rail, gazing out over the night sea. The moon cast her hair in a ghostly halo. The breeze ruffled the fabric of her coveralls in a whisper of feathers.

  Suzanne leaning out over the water,

  Pressing into the cool air’s caress.

  “Heya,” Dan called out, dismayed when she jumped a little. He hadn’t meant to startle her.

  She turned, and frowned when she saw him, but it was a welcoming frown. “Hey, yourself. Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Nightmare. Equipment failure, slow suffocating death. If I believed in that whole self-fulfilling prophecy stuff I’d be done with diving.”

  “I can never remember my dreams, at least not what happens. Just sounds.”

  Dan grasped the railing beside her and looked down into the inky foil of the night sea. “Sounds? Like what?”

  She shrugged and turned away. “You know, it’s actually a couple pods acting up. Three different species. The attack on the harvesting boat the other day—those were orcas. But today a poacher alert came in and a patrol chopper went for a look-see. It flew low over some humpbacks, or what they thought were humpbacks, but it turned out to be a mix. Blues and humpbacks. What do you make of that?”

  “That isn’t usual?”

  “Nope. They dropped an underwater drone in. Recorded chatter. Literally. The humpbacks were singing, like they do, and the blues seemed to be listening, and responding.” Suzanne continued, talking more to herself than anything. “I’m going to add the sound files to my catalogue, as well as the visuals. See if we can get a match.”

  “A match on what?”

  “Behavior and specific bits of information. To translate more of their language.”

  Dan raised his eyebrows. “So you’ve had some luck with that?” Part of him wanted to know what the whales were singing about, and part of him didn’t.

  “Sure. Mostly with the chatter. One phrase that means ‘come’ or ‘follow.’ They say ‘over here’ a lot. The song is a whole other thing. We’re going to go dart a couple this week. Then I’ll be able to monitor brain activity. Throw that in with the sound files and behavioral patterns. We might see what’s happening out there.”

  A light blinked from the darkness of the horizon and they paused to listen to the hum of a boat going by.

  On the deck below, a door squealed open and two women in lurched out onto the walkway. They wore carver-staff coveralls—purple to camouflage blood-splatter without being morbid. Arm in arm they staggered along, singing a slurred version of an old song, repeating only the words they knew, over and over, to the familiar melody.

  “Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, oh Da-ah-ny…”

  Suzanne waved down at them, but the women didn’t notice.

  She gazed back over the sea, her smile touched by sadness. “We were seeing some of that at the research station I came over from, too. People feeling the stress. Drinking to blow off steam. That and people taking permanent leave, you know. Must be worse here.”

  “I guess. Can’t fire those two, even though they’re ignoring the rules. Eventually they’ll run out of booze, and then we’ll have a worse problem.” Statistically, carvers were most likely to take a header over the rail or hang themselves from the pipes, according to the shrinks.

  Suzanne nodded. “Seen that, too.”

  Dan had never had a friend on the rig; didn’t see the point, what with people always coming and going. Another thing the shrinks considered a problem. But for him it made sense. If you got attached, you’d miss the person when they were gone. That’s when you felt lonely.

  Yet here I am, talking to Suzanne.

  The laughter and song turned to gagging and heaving as the women took turns vomiting into the chop below. Then they hugged, slapped each
other’s backs, and resumed singing. A slamming door cut off their song and returned the night to silence.

  Moonlight fell in a silver swath across the water. Waves slipped over and were consumed by the boundless deep. Beside him, Suzanne breathed out a long sigh.

  * * *

  The struts that supported the hydraulic lift on the kill floor showed some minor cracking in the welds. Dan did a full inspection and made the call. Shut it down. Give the butchers a break. Everyone was supposed to call them carvers, but Dan didn’t think of them that way.

  Marge from maintenance helped him hoof down fresh tubing and all his welding gear.

  He lined his tools up: measuring tape, pencil, grinder, spare disks, gloves, mask, welding rod, wire brush, hammer.

  “If you need a peon,” she said, “I’ve got a few slackers who could come down right now. Otherwise, let me know when you’re done and I’ll send the paint crew.” Marge gazed out the open bay door at the grey-cast sky. “You good?”

  “Yeah. No need to send anyone. Just have to replace a few pieces. I’ll cut them myself.”

  His assistant, Brian, had gone for shore leave on the last boat, and the replacement never made it.

  Maintenance was supposed to back him up, but everyone avoided working the kill floor if they could, with its massive adjustable saws and their diamond-honed blades, the long-handled traditional knives clipped to the wall, gleaming, ready for custom orders.

  Marge sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. “Man, I wish tech would come up with some kind of cleaning product that gets rid of the stink, you know? Forget about new butchering techniques. Who cares about cost-effective ways to debone a whale? Those people have a shit-ton of money to spare.”

  Rumor was one of those TV chefs had designed an enormous fryer. He would cook a narwhal inside an orca inside a minke. Tables were priced at something like a hundred thousand a head. Proceeds were supposedly going to the plastic filtration project. A worthy cause. Dan pictured a crystal-chandeliered dining stadium. Massive steaks delivered to the linen-draped tables by forklift. CEOs, celebrities, and socialites carving delicate mouthfuls from dripping chunks of perfectly seasoned meat. His stomach lurched.

  “I’ll keep the bay doors open, air it out for the painters.”

  She slapped Dan on the back. “Well. I’ll leave you to do your thing. This place gives me the heebies.”

  Her footsteps rang hollow blows and she hummed a melancholy tune that was cut off when the interior door thudded shut—the melody so like the groans and sighs of whale song that echoed through his dreams.

  A chill wind funneled in, flapping the fabric of his grey coveralls as Dan marked spots on the struts that needed replacing.

  The platform would submerge for the harvesters to drag in their catch, then hoist the whale and pulley it forward across rollers, conveyor-belt style, to the equipment for butchering and packaging. The floor itself was a no-skid steel grating that let fluids drain away. Processing whales involved lots of fluids.

  SeaRanch butchers worked to thumps against the rig’s legs as sharks, drawn by blood, swarmed and thrashed over bits of flesh that fell through to the sea below.

  Today only the crackling buzz of Dan’s welder and the shrill wail of the saw blade ripping through metal vibrated the kill floor.

  The song of the humpback can be heard up to twenty miles away. Beluga whales love to listen to music and can imitate human speech—sometimes so effectively that divers working in aquariums have surfaced, convinced someone is yelling at them from the deck.

  —Dr. Suzanne Anderson, Whale Notes: Music of the Deep

  “See these groups of sounds. That’s a phrase.” Suzanne pointed to a graph on her monitor. Her headset lay on the control panel, and whale song leaked out. “The males repeat these phrases—together they make up a song. Other males in the pod sing the same phrases, not in a chorus or anything. Echoing the pattern, like a round.”

  She picked up an orange that rested next to her keyboard and held it to her nose. One side of the fruit had turned brown, the skin hardened in a dark continent. It had been weeks since fresh fruit had been brought to the rig. Dan missed the tart bunches of green grapes he’d take back to his quarters to snack on while he filled in his dive log. The orange must have come with her.

  Dan rocked in the swivel chair next to hers. “Can we listen to it?”

  She unplugged the headset, and the room filled with the aquatic opera. A rippling tide of goose bumps rose on Dan’s flesh. He recognized the song. The same one he’d been hearing all week. During dives, in the shower, in his dreams.

  Through the lab’s speakers, the whale song sounded diminished and eerie. Suzanne had her eyes closed, and the monitor cast grey light over her weary features.

  “You get any sleep last night?” Dan leaned in close so he could speak softly, reluctant to break the music’s spell. Her hair smelled like honey.

  “No. I headed straight here after you left. I finished uploading my data, added it to the info your guys have been collecting. Established a link with the remote EEG.” She woke up another monitor—on it flickered an irregular-shaped circle wearing multicolored blobs of varying intensity. “Brain scans. Really different when they’re singing from when they are listening to another whale sing, or when they’re talking. Your harvesting cowboys just tagged whales from three different pods this morning; the ’bots established a link about an hour ago.”

  Dan grimaced as he imagined a dart injecting a barrage of nanobots into a whale’s bloodstream, then navigating into position, spinning their organic wires, knitting through brain tissue before lighting up to interface. These maps of the whales’ brains were a real-time image of the activity. The whole thing creeped him out. Sometimes he wondered if microscopic ’bots roamed around in his bloodstream, taking readings, boring minute holes through vessel walls, riding the current of his heartbeat, to gain access to some organ or another. SeaRanch tracking their workers, like they did the whales.

  Flu shots my ass.

  “So, which is which?”

  She hit a button and four brain-shaped balls of light projected into the middle of the room. Suzanne spun her chair around and got up. Pulses of light rippled like lightning flaring in a cloud bank. She walked through the projected scans, blooms of neon bruising her features.

  Suzanne.

  Sorceress of thought and sound.

  “These are two orcas talking.” She held up both arms as though embracing the image. “This, a humpback singing. This one is listening to the song. This over here is a human brain engaged in singing with a choir.

  “Singing, for humans, creates an emotional response. It affects the brain chemistry.”

  Dan approached the brain scans of the whale singing. “I know this song. I heard it when I was diving the other day.”

  “It’s what I’m hearing from whales in this sector. Different from the songs I heard when I was stationed over in the Indian Ocean. Usually each pod has their own song, but they do sometimes teach theirs to another pod. When I get some idea what they’re singing about we’ll see if it’s at all connected to the heightened aggression.”

  She turned the volume down and sat back in front of her monitor to type, humming “Danny Boy” and frowning at the screen. Dan remembered his wife had done that at the beginning of their marriage—hummed songs she’d heard on the radio while she sorted laundry or repaired her vintage pop-up toaster. He couldn’t remember when she’d stopped.

  The rest of the day, Dan pictured Suzanne, humming in the lab, her orange pressed to her lips, Christmas colors washing over her hair as the whales sounded their mystery out to the sea.

  * * *

  In the mess, Dan served himself a healthy breakfast of oatmeal, dried figs, and a cup of green tea. The liquid rhythm of his own chewing, punctuated by the oar-lock creaks of staffers shifting in chairs, the squeal against the floor as they slid those chairs back and forth, coming and going in their red and green and purple and blue, the thump
of the swinging doors—when Dan let his gaze lose focus, let those sounds fill the space, they took on a new quality.

  Sounds making phrases. Phrases repeating, joining together, becoming song.

  The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever existed. Up to thirty meters long, heart as big as a school bus, arteries wide enough a person could float through. An elephant weighs less than their tongue. And they are getting bigger. But blue whales don’t live the longest. The bowhead whale can live more than two hundred years.

  —Dr. Suzanne Anderson, Whale of a Tale: Fun Facts for Kids

  He didn’t see Suzanne for a week. He was drawn to her, and so he avoided her. Stuck to a routine of work and sitting in his room. He filled out his dive log every night, and between entries he struggled to capture the whale song.

  Patterns echo round and round.

  Come. Over here.

  Follow.

  Round and round.

  Things said but not heard,

  Heard, but not understood.

  Come. Over here.

  Follow.

  The meaning lost.

  Lost.

  Like a memory just out of reach, the song slipped away from him.

  When he did see Suzanne, he didn’t recognize her at first. Her green jumpsuit that had once strained with the fullness of her breasts and hips now hung straight to the floor, except for a bulge in one pocket he assumed was the orange. Headphones were clamped to her ears; her hair no longer curled like sea-foam, instead it had decayed to the tallow-white cast of old bone.

  She walked quickly, despite her frail appearance, and with purpose. Dan followed.

  He wanted to ask if she’d managed to translate any of the whale song. His dreams continued, drawn every night on its current. He wanted to show her his poem. Together, perhaps, they could find the right words. And then maybe he could get a proper sleep.

  Just last night he’d dreamt that his wife shared his bed, her skin grey in the moonlight that spilled through his one small porthole. She lay beside him, eyes black and swirling with phosphorus, her dark hair in seaweed whorls across the pillow.