Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Why are you here? I didn’t send a request for a visitor.” Dan’s skin tingled with the cool wash of her breath.

  She lay still, her wrists bound in the cuffs of gauze she’d been wearing when he signed the cremation order, her pearled skin threaded with dark veins.

  The sheets rustled, though she hadn’t moved. She stared at him the way she always did, with sad, lonely eyes—wanting something, expecting it. She opened her mouth, her throat contracted, and out came her song. Low, hollow flute tones, like wind across a bottle top, short foghorn blasts, shuddering squeaks like skin slipping around in a bathtub, then a rasping exhale that flooded the room with the dank brine perfume of the sea.

  Dan woke that morning, his porthole open, his bed dampened by sea air and sweat. Each day he rose exhausted, the whale song robbing him of a proper rest.

  He hoped Suzanne could provide some insight as to why the song tormented him, trailing in his wake as he attended to his duties, day in, day out.

  Suzanne stepped out onto the deck near the kill floor loading bay. Dan joined her. She didn’t notice him at first, as she leaned over the railing to look at the sea under the rig. Below them, a small pod of bowhead whales schooled around the rig legs. Suzanne put her hand over her mouth and shook her head, then looked up at Dan, her eyes wide and empty.

  “What’s going on?” Dan had never seen whales behave this way.

  “A special rush order came in. For meat prepared the traditional Inuit way. The pod followed the harvesters here. Attacked the boat and tried to capsize them, from what I heard.” She stalked down the hall to the kill floor.

  “Hey, c’mon. Let’s go to the cafeteria—or to your lab to see what the song’s doing. If there’s any new chatter.”

  “I know what the song is doing, with this pod anyway.” She tapped the headphones. “They’ve stopped singing. One or two of them had taken it up, but then the cowboys rode in and ’pooned a female. That’s why I came to check it out. No chatter at all. But their brains are flaring like a fireworks show.”

  She shoved open the double doors and stepped onto the kill floor.

  The flensing had already begun. Four carvers stood atop the whale, with long knives like curved hockey sticks, slicing deep into the whale’s side, the blades sliding through in long lines a few inches apart.

  “She’s dead. But look at them.” Suzanne pointed down.

  Through the metal grate he could see the pod that had followed the harvesting boat surge and strain for the kill floor, mouths open, before they slipped back under. Their bodies collided, stirring great spumes gone pink with blood.

  As the carvers pried long slabs free and wrestled them into the shed-sized cooler containers, the whales below calmed, then dove from sight.

  Suzanne cocked her head and held up a finger. “Oh. Now … one of them is singing again.” She pulled a remote screen from her pocket and tapped it. “And the blue whales out in sector thirty-eight have picked up the refrain. It still spreading, you know. More and more pods are singing the same song. Like a virus moving through the population. And those that aren’t singing are diving. Have you heard? As a group, diving and never coming up. I can’t stop it. Can’t save them.” She pulled the bud from her ear. “You want to listen? This is a pod of minke whales out near Japan. The song sounds different, they don’t have the same range. But they try. They just keep singing and singing.” She stared out the loading bay door, over the water, her unwashed hair slack on her shoulders.

  Dan shook his head. He could hear the song without the headset—or feel it. A memory echo that quaked up from the metal grating, shivering through him.

  “Hey, what’s with the orange?” A feeble attempt to distract himself.

  Her hand went reflexively to her pocket and tapped it. “The smell helps me think. My daughter loved them. Cut up with the skin still on. She’d put a whole wedge in her mouth and smile an orange-peel smile. She never got to see whales. The ones in the zoo were long gone to breeding programs, and we lived so far from the ocean.”

  “I’m sorry.” Dan almost reached out to touch her, offer some kind of comfort.

  Suzanne sighed and walked away, the doors thudding shut behind her.

  The carvers sliced another long strip. All but Dan were oblivious to the song.

  He stared into the dead whale’s eye, a dark pool surrounded by a nimbus of blue. The butcher-shop stench of raw burger and coagulating blood still held lingering traces of the whale’s dying breaths—fish rot and sewage.

  The floor seemed to surge and recede as he made his way to the door, arms out to keep balance. The phantom song thrummed in his eardrums as he lurched down the hall, away from the dead whale and the wet smack of blades through flesh. He slid one shoulder along the wall or he would have fallen in a sweaty, nauseous heap on the floor.

  There was a reason staff were supposed to stay away from the kill floor. And a reason why all the butchers had to go for regular shrink visits.

  On the main deck he leaned his forehead against the cool steel rail. The vertigo, and the song, subsided as he took deeper and deeper breaths of the fresh sea air.

  Somewhere in the ocean there is a solitary whale. Its calls transmit at a frequency no other whales transmit at. Scientists call it the world’s loneliest whale.

  —Dr. Suzanne Anderson, Whale Outliers: A Natural History

  The song had spread to all sectors in the Pacific. Speculation among the crew included theories that the whales were coordinating for attack, or escape. They were communicating with aliens. They were evolving. They were regressing.

  A helicopter full of harvesters rushed to Sector 82 when the com-tech noted evasive swim patterns from one pod. Poachers. About 50 percent of SeaRanch whales had GPS chips so the company could track them and send harvesters to fill meat orders. Before the harvesters could get there, the whales had swum off, leaving a capsized boat, and a bunch of happy sharks feeding on the contents of the fish hold, as well as a few of the crew.

  Rescuing poachers was not in the harvesters’ mandate, so they left the men waving up in distress, and followed the pod to make sure none had been injured. The whales had joined with two pods from Sector 85. Some breached and lobtailed up out of the water, then dove amongst the massive herd, their song thundering through the monitor’s headset so loud the tech wearing them had to cut his feed.

  And that morning, the mess crew had discovered two of the women carvers dead in the kitchen. They’d each sat on a floor drain and used fileting knives on their femoral arteries, their last bottle of whiskey empty beside them.

  A quick hosing down and the kitchen floor was spotless again, but the mood at breakfast was dark.

  “No matter how much overtime they pay us, it’s not worth the headache. If a relief crew doesn’t show soon, I’m going to swim for it,” Marge joked, her voice flat, gaze hollow.

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea with the whales acting like they are. I have to go under the docks to do some repairs, and I gotta say, I’m a little nervous.” Dan stirred his oatmeal, the brown sugar an inky swirl in the clotted white of powdered creamer. “Not that they’ll hurt me or anything, but if they come too close, that song’ll rip into my eardrums and rattle my brain.”

  Marge spoke through a mouthful of reconstituted eggs. “What song?”

  “The one they’ve all been singing. They’ve got a scientist working on it. Sink or sing. She can’t figure out the why of either. You haven’t heard it?”

  “Nah. My crew’s more worried about the vandals. Someone’s been writing on the walls, using paint from our supply closet. Weird shit. About the whales and how they’re coming for us. About how they can hear us, they know what we’re planning. I have to send a bunch of my people in for eval with the shrink in case we’ve got another person itching for self-annihilation. Once they’re done with maintenance, I think they’re planning to haul the rest of the crew in, one by one, for a good shrinking. You won’t be able to skip out this time. The
higher-ups are thinking we’ll start offing ourselves. So they’re watching all of us now, not just the carvers. I think, as a deterrent, they might withdraw the suicide comp package.”

  Dan put down his spoon and knit his hands together, remembering his wife’s wrists, like mouths split wide, blood already dried in a blackened sheet so he had to pry her from the floor. He remembered how she was the last time he saw her alive. Remote. Fixed on something inside, already done with trying to bridge the distance between them.

  The last thing she’d said to him. “I worry about you, out there on that rig. That the loneliness will catch up to you, and you’ll do something stupid.”

  He’d shrugged and picked up his bag, the door already open. “It’s not stupid if it’s the best option. Anyway, I could use a little alone time. I’ll see you in a few.”

  And that was how they’d left it—him thinking she was nuts for worrying. He’d missed what she was really saying, just like he always did.

  Whales seem to exhibit empathy and grief. Sperm whales once adopted a bottle-nosed dolphin who had been cast out by his pod, likely due to a spine-curvature deformity.

  Female belugas, perhaps to recover from the grief of losing a calf, will make surrogate babies out of objects, carrying planks or stones, even caribou skeletons, on their heads and backs, like they would their young.

  —Dr. Suzanne Anderson, Beneath the Surface: Whales as Emotional Beings

  Dan kept an eye out for Suzanne at the mess, on deck, even down in the hold. He had a new poem he wanted to show her, folded up in his pocket. Finally, after two busy days repairing the corrosion of the rig’s leg and overseeing the tethering of a new bucket of sacrificial metal, he went to her lab.

  The darkened room wore the bitter perfume of fresh orange peel. Suzanne’s movements as she worked the controls on her keyboard seemed sluggish.

  “The song isn’t translatable. At least not in human terms. I kept thinking it must be instructions, locations, something like that … but now I think it’s emotion. How can we comprehend what goes on for whales on an emotional level? Is it anger? Sadness? Regret? Any sense we make of it is likely anthropomorphism or projection. A mirror of ourselves.” Her words slurred together. She leaned in close to the display, squinting at the dots that littered the oceans of the world, pods migrating through their territories, but not free.

  “I brought you some tea.” Dan held out the cup, but she ignored it.

  He pushed some papers aside on her desk and set the cup and his poem down next to the orange, its skin torn open to expose the brownish pulp of inner flesh.

  “The aggressive behavior has ceased; did you know that? I’ve looked at old research done when rats become overpopulated. First aggression, even toward each other, cannibalism, then pathological withdrawal.” Her words came faster, fueled by her frustration. “They become despondent. Don’t eat, except in the company of other rats. Infant mortality climbs as high as 96 percent. Or there’s the learned-helplessness experiments done on dogs, who would eventually just lay down and whine when they realized there was nothing they could do to stop the shocks.” She wiped her eyes and looked at her fingers as though surprised to find them dry. “Now most pods are singing the song. But there are new anomalies. An entire pod up north beached itself. Another in Australia … more reports of cows diving as they deliver their calves. Too low for the babies to make it to the surface in time for the air to touch their skin and get them breathing. At least ten calves in three different pods … birthed, then drowned in the past two days … trying to determine if these pods are singing the song. It appears they aren’t.”

  When she stood, she tilted to the side, almost fell, but grabbed the back of her chair, knocking it against the table. Tea sloshed from the cup onto his poem. His words blurred and bled through, merging in a dark stain.

  Dan moved to help Suzanne. She waved him off.

  “This is the limbic lobe.” She extended her hand into one of the projections; a sputtering blue light bloomed and died on her open palm. “Emotional expression, empathy, the formation of memories. This one’s an orca. The lobe is proportionally much larger than in humans, made up of three different parts. I was seeing a lot of activity that suggested anger, fear, frustration. Or the whale equivalent. Not anymore. I don’t know what this is. Acceptance. Despair. Surrender.”

  The chair shifted as Suzanne slumped against it, the wheels sliding away. Dan caught her around the waist and helped her to the floor.

  “What did you take?” He felt her wrist for her pulse, a light, irregular flutter. Her skin, cool and spongy with sweat, had a grey cast to it, as though filtered through underwater dusk. “I’ll call the medic. Hold on.”

  “No, no, no. Really.” She pulled her hand free and gazed up at the EEG readings. They rippled with light like storm clouds. “All the wonder, the joy, it’s gone. It’s too late. We’ve eroded their spirit. There’s nothing left for them but to sing until harvest time. You don’t need to stay. But please, turn up the volume before you go.”

  Dan moved to the instrument panel. He hesitated, hand over the com-link. Instead he turned up the song until it quaked in his stomach, drummed along his spine.

  Then he sat on the floor beside Suzanne and took her hand. He closed his eyes for a moment, listened to the music. Creaks, groans, echoing calls, asked then answered. The whales singing together. For one another. With one another.

  The song may be all they have, but they have it. They have something. They are not alone.

  “I’m here. I’ll stay with you.” He spoke into her ear and squeezed her hand tight.

  Suzanne took a slow shuddering breath, her eyes glassy reflections of the storm above. She didn’t squeeze back.

  Feeling foolish, but knowing he must, Dan joined in the song, attempting the rumbling moans—like tectonic plates rubbing against one another in a slow dance—the bright chirps. His voice rose to meet the whale’s music, his throat ached as he strained to match it, note for note.

  No words for the song. Just sounds. Sensations.

  He imagined the song ringing down the rusted piers, vibrations transmitted through water, calling the whales. He turned up the volume until the floor shuddered and rippled. Perhaps the whales were already here, bodies pressing against metal, calling to him.

  Suzanne’s expression changed from puzzled to one full of sadness and wonder as she slipped from here to gone.

  Dan and the whales’ voices surged together, their song carrying her over to the deeps.

  About the Author

  Erinn L. Kemper is a Canadian who now lives on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica where she wakes with the toucans and howler monkeys, writes in her hammock, walks her dog on the beach, and drinks ridiculous amounts of coffee, at least until happy hour. Erinn has sold stories to Cemetery Dance Magazine and Black Static and appears in various anthologies including Adam’s Ladder and Behold! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders.

  Copyright © 2019 by Erinn L. Kemper

  Art copyright © 2019 by Mary Haasdyk

  Articulated Restraint

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  MOON COLONY EXPANDS TO 100 COLONISTS

  Sep. 26, 1960 (AP) — The International Aerospace Coalition announced today that the lunar colony, established last year, is ready to expand to hold 100 colonists. This is the next step in preparing to colonize Mars, although many still question the necessity of such an endeavor…

  Six thirty in the morning was a brutal time to start work even without a sprained ankle. Ruby Donaldson tried to tell herself that being sore and exhausted was good practice as an astronaut. Limping up to the third floor of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, she gave thanks that no one else was in the stairwell so she could lean against the metal rail. It was hard enough balancing work and life without people questioning her choices.

  All she wanted was to do the NBL training run and then collapse in bed, but someho
w she’d agreed to another lindy-hop dance rehearsal tonight. It was just hard to disappoint a friend that you’d been dancing in competitions with since before the Meteor struck, and she didn’t have that many pieces of Before left in her life.

  At least, the benefit of being a doctor was that she could diagnose and treat her own injuries. She didn’t have to risk getting grounded if she admitted to a flight surgeon that she’d twisted her ankle practicing a Charleston Flip. All they would have done was exactly what she did. Ice. Wrap. Analgesic.

  As she came out on the pool level, the smell of chlorine met Ruby at the door. The massive football field–sized pool hummed with activity as dozens of divers and suit techs prepped for the run.

  Wait— There were too many people here.

  And there were four EVA suits on the bright yellow donning stands by the pool. There should only be two, because her run had been scheduled with just one other astronaut. All she and Eugene were supposed to be doing was a simulated spacewalk to work out the procedure for attaching cameras to the outside of the station.

  Across the pool, Jason Tsao turned from where he was talking with one of the astronauts who had done a run yesterday and shouldn’t even be at the NBL today. His tie was undone and his cuffs were rolled up past his elbows. She had never seen the test conductor look even marginally rumpled.

  What the hell was wrong?

  He beckoned her over with his sheaf of papers. “Ruby, morning. Change of plans, as I’m sure you probably expected.”

  She had missed something—a message left with her roommate, a briefing update, something—and whatever it was did not look good. She snapped into the sort of focus she felt in the operating room. “What sort of change?”

  Jason’s shoulders tightened. “Sorry. I assumed you had seen the news.”