by Neil Clarke
They bumped along the coast road. The sun was higher in the sky today. It would edge up over the horizon a little every day, until it vanquished the night for nearly six months of the year.
“What odd things?”
“Unusual behavior among some whales. Bowheads hanging out with humpbacks. Blue whales down in the Atlantic lowering their call notes—they call much more bass than bowheads—so they reached right across an ocean basin. Jimmy thought it was logical that the whales had noticed the conditions of climate change—the warming ocean, the changing currents and chemistry. How could they not? Maybe they had always talked to each other. Modern humans are the only species that keeps apart from the others. Not so the other animals. The white man doesn’t see what’s not in his scheme of things.
“Don’t get me wrong. I like civilization—I’m not blaming it for everything. Among my people there is a lot of division on such issues—how do we find balance between the benefits of the modern way of life and the wisdom of the traditional teachings? But back to Jimmy.
“So Jimmy had this idea that if humans are to understand whales, you’ve got to do it as much as possible in the whale’s environment. Drones, underwater robots, tracking, all that’s great, but if you can’t follow the whales on their Arctic migrations, if you can’t dive deep with them, or swim under the ice, you won’t know the context in which they sing their songs. More than anything you won’t have a relationship with them of mutuality. All true knowing is mutual, Jimmy used to say.”
“I hear that bowheads live very long,” Varsha said. “In her diary my aunt wonders what they think about, talk about, for two hundred years.”
“Yes, that was the sort of thing that fascinated Jimmy. He wanted to understand how whales talked to each other and to other species, if there was maybe a common language among the sea mammals.”
“But why the need for secrecy? Doesn’t GaiaCorp already have amphibious boats?”
“Not like this one—energy efficient, small and compact, but with enough room for an extended stay. And Jimmy is—was—a hunter, he could keep them alive—”
He looked out over the great vista rolling past them, and was silent.
“I don’t understand why—if they really meant to go out deliberately into the ocean and fake their deaths—why?”
“Jimmy suspected that the bowhead whales were learning from the humpbacks how to disable the TRexes. Humpbacks use sound to stun fish. Sound means everything to whales. When the TRexes use their airgun arrays, it’s like having an explosion happen ten times a second. Sometimes for weeks or months. If whales are close enough they would get deafened. A whale uses sound for communication and to find its way in the dark under the ice. A deaf whale is better dead.
“Meanwhile Rima learned from scientists in other places around the world that GaiaCorp’s geoengineering is failing. Not just that, but the crop failures in your part of the world, and the toxic algal blooms in the South Atlantic, are a direct result of it. Worse, the geoengineers knew they would fail. It’s all about money and power, in the end.”
“So they can’t afford to let the TRexes be destroyed?”
“We can’t afford to let it get out that it’s not just other humans but potentially other species who are fighting back. The white man almost wiped out the bowheads in the time of the Yankee whalers. Do you think they would hesitate to do so again?”
“This is crazy. This is just crazy.”
“This is the world.”
“You’ve just destroyed everything I took for granted about the world.”
“Rima used to say: never take anything for granted.”
She looked out over the frozen sea. Somewhere beyond the horizon was open water. It was hard to imagine that somewhere on the open sea, or perhaps inside it, two people in an amphibious boat were sailing with the bowhead whales.
The town came up suddenly around them. Over the sea ice, tiny figures could be seen on snowmobiles, hauling sleds behind them.
“They’re cutting the trails,” Vincent said. “If you were staying longer you could have gone on a whale hunt.”
“I don’t know how much—how much more I can take of the world,” Varsha said. She cupped her hands over her eyes for a moment. Then, as Vince pulled up at the airport parking, she looked at him.
“What do I tell my parents? My grandparents?”
“That’s your call. Just—don’t let it get around, what I’ve told you. You can tell them, if you like, that maybe there’s a chance they are alive. But keep the other things to yourself. This is for their sake as well as yours. There are larger forces here at play than you and I.”
“I feel like I’m in an Augs adventure story. Except there’s nothing like this in the files.”
“I enjoy VR games from time to time. But you got to live in the world.”
“Thanks for everything, Vince. I am glad we talked, and I’m very glad I got to meet Emma. If—if you hear anything—”
“Of course.”
He helped her into the check-in line with her two suitcases. The small airport was filled with people—men in the uniforms of Arctic Energy, a knot of coast guard officials, and Eskimo families hauling supplies in sacks and boxes, laughing and chattering. It no longer felt quite so strange.
“We’ll meet again, I have a feeling,” Vince said, “so I’ll say ‘see you later,’ not good-bye.”
He shook her hand, smiled at her, a sudden, warm smile. Then he was gone. She blinked back tears and set her chin.
In the plane she thought of the diary and the diagrams in her backpack, and the secrets they carried. She thought of Chester waiting hopefully at the airport, and what she would have to say to him, and the life she had mapped out for herself. She thought of the house in Patna, and the aging faces of her grandparents.
The tundra dipped and glittered in the sun as the plane turned upward into the sky. The houses vanished. At this height, she saw the open water at the edge of the shore ice, and the expanse of the Arctic, broken here and there by white patches of floating ice. She thought of the great whales traveling in circles through the cold, dark waters, feeding and calling, dreaming and singing. Perhaps at this very moment her aunt and uncle were flying through the water in their little craft, hoping she would have deciphered what they couldn’t openly say, that would bring this shattering clarity to her life, and the faint thread of hope to their families, to the world.
Erin Roberts is a Black speculative fiction writer based in Washington, DC. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, The Dark, and PodCastle; her interactive fiction has been published in Sub-Q and is forthcoming from Choice of Games; and her essays have appeared on Tor. com and in People of Colo(u)r Destroy Fantasy, among others. She is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program and the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and the winner of the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2017 Diverse Worlds and Diverse Writers Grants. Her musings on life and writing can be found at writingwonder.com or on Twitter at @nirele.
SOUR MILK GIRLS
Erin Roberts
The new girl showed up to the Agency on a Sunday, looking like an old dishrag and smelling like sour milk. Not that I could really smell her from three floors up through the mesh and bars, but there’s only three types of girls here, and she was definitely the sour milk kind. Her head hung down like it was too much work to raise it, and her long black hair flopped around so you couldn’t see her face. I’d have bet a week’s credits she had big ol’ scaredy-cat eyes, but she never bothered to look up, just let Miss Miranda lead her by the elbow through the front doors. Didn’t even try to run. Sour milk all the way.
Even sour milk new girls were good, though; anything new was good. The last one, Hope, might have been dull as old paint, but at least she’d been something different to talk about. I’d even won a day’s credits from Flash by betting the girl wouldn’t make it to fourteen without some foster trying her out and keeping her. Anyone could tell Hope smelled like cinnamon an
d honey, same as those babies on the first floor and the second-floor girls with their pigtails and missing-tooth smiles. Sure enough, only took six months before the Reynolds came and took Hope off to their nice house with the big beds and the white fence and those stupid yapping dogs, leaving just me and Whispers and Flash to stare at each other and count all the months and years ’til we’d finally turn eighteen. Flash should’ve known it would go that way—cinnamon and honey’s something fosters can’t resist.
Whispers said this new girl was officially called Brenda, but that was just as stupid as all the other Agency names, and the girl wouldn’t remember it after Processing anyway. At first I said we should call her Dishrag or Milkbreath, but even Flash thought that was too mean, and Flash is as nasty as hot sauce and lye. She’s the one who named me Ghost, on account of I’m small and shadow-dark and she thinks I creep around too much in the night. She got her name ’cause that’s how fast fosters send her back after their cat turns up dead and they realize the devil has blond hair and dimples.
“What’s in her file?” I asked Whispers, who was still leaned up against the wall by the window. She never bothered to look out anymore. Not even for new girls.
“I’m just supposed to clean the office,” she said. “Files are confidential.”
“Must be good if you’re holding back,” said Flash, blowing out air as she tried to whistle.
“Maybe,” Whispers said, with a lopsided shrug. Then she murmured something nobody could hear while staring down at her shoes. That meant we weren’t getting any more from her for at least an hour, not even if Flash threatened to throw her out the window or hang her with the sheets from one of the empty beds. No use pushing her ’til she started banshee-screaming, so Flash just practiced whistling and I played around some with our crap computers and we let Whispers go all sour milk and talk to her invisible friends.
By the time Flash got a half-whistle half-spit sound to come out of her mouth and I’d finished up my hack of the first-floor baby cams for when things got boring, new girl was being led off the elevator by Miss Miranda, head still down. Flash and I lined up in front of the room same as always—hands behind our backs, chests up and out, heads forward, eyes wide. Even Whispers came out of her murmuring and straightened up against the wall. Agency folks didn’t care about much as far as us third-floors were concerned, but they were total nuts for protocol.
Miss Miranda started by doing her normal speech-troduction. This is Brenda, she’s fifteen years old, and she’s going to stay with us for a while. These are the girls, they’re all trying to get new homes too. And we just know it’ll work out for you all any day now. When she said that last bit, her voice always got real high, like someone talking after they took a gulp of air from a circus balloon.
We ask you to stay on the third floor when you’re in the building unless you’re doing chores downstairs or get called to the office. But don’t worry—there’s so much to do up here, you won’t even notice. Her voice went even higher for that part, ’cause even an idiot could see there wasn’t anything on the floor but twenty empty beds, two long white lunch tables, a couple of old computers on splintery desks covered with the names of old third-floors, and the door to the world’s grimiest bathroom.
As long as you maintain good grades and proper behavior in school, you’re free to come and go as you please until seven PM curfew. You’ll get a few credits each day for transit and meals. If you need additional learning help or assistance with your homework, the computers in the back row have plenty to offer. Age-appropriate stuff only, of course. She looked straight at me when she said it, like it was my fault the security on the things was shit and I’d figured out a way to order vapes and liquor pops and get R-rated videos.
Now you girls get along, and try not to kill each other. She looked at Flash for that one, even though Flash hadn’t really tried to kill anyone for at least a year. She’d barely even talked to Hope. Either she was getting soft now that we were in high school, or she was gonna burn the whole place down someday. Maybe both.
As soon as she got the last words out of her mouth, Miss Miranda spun around on her high heels and got out of there as fast as she could. I thought the new girl would fall over as soon as Miss Miranda left, but she put her hands behind her back and stuck her chest out same as the rest of us. Her eyes weren’t nearly as scaredy-cat as I thought they’d be. She smelled like sour milk for sure, but hot sauce and honey a little bit too.
“I’m Brenda,” she said. “Brenda Nevins.”
“That’s a stupid name,” said Flash.
“It’s what my daddy called me,” said new girl, thrusting her chest out even more, like it would cover the way her voice got all wobbly.
“Yeah? Well where’s your daddy now?” Flash asked. The new girl’s head dropped forward. We hadn’t made a bet on whether someone could make her cry, but there were some things Flash would do for free.
“She doesn’t remember,” I told Flash. “You know that.”
“I remember fine,” said the new girl. “It’s just that . . . it just happened. He just died, I mean.”
Flash rolled her eyes.
“No way you remember that shit,” she said. “Not anymore.” She put on her best Miss Miranda impression, high pitched and piercing. “Your memories of your time before joining the Agency are being held for safekeeping until you reach adulthood and can properly integrate them into your daily life.”
“What are you talking about?” new girl said. “I remember my dad. He was a—”
“Spare me the bullshit,” Flash said, voice back low. “Miss Miranda tell you how in your file it says your daddy was a famous reccer? Or a Wall Street corp? Or a doctor? Bet if you looked in the ’grams she took from you, you’d find out he left you chained up in the basement. Or he liked to beat on your mama. Or maybe you ain’t never had no daddy at all.”
I felt my eyes get hot, just a little, but new girl didn’t blink.
“My daddy was a good man,” she said. “Not my fault if yours wasn’t worth shit.”
I backed up two steps so as not to get hit when the fists started flying. A fight was gonna mean discipline and lights-out and early curfew for at least two weeks. Nothing worse than that and having a black eye. But Flash just laughed.
“Damn, girl,” she said. “You got balls. Gonna be hard coming up with a name for you.”
“My dad—”
“Your dad won’t know any different.” I tried to stare some sense into the girl before Flash flipped back to serious and threw her across the room, or started working out how to smother her in the middle of the night. “Leave his name for him and ours for us. I’m Ghost. She’s Flash. That’s Whispers. We’ll figure something out for you.”
It took two weeks, but in the end, we called her Princess. Flash said it was from some fairy-tale book she’d read as a little kid, but I’d been to the Reynolds’ for a tryout same as she had, and Princess was the name of the dumb fat poodle they all fed under the table. Plus Flash said it like a curse, with a sparkle in her eye that any idiot could tell meant trouble. I told Princess not to worry, though; I’d watch her back. Not sure why. Maybe ’cause if Princess turned up dead it was back to just Whispers and Flash to talk to. Maybe ’cause I used to be a bit of a sour milk girl too.
Me and Princess almost pinky-swore on the whole thing, but I told her that was just for little kids and losers. Even if you were too poor to get wired up soon as you turned fourteen so you could swap ’grams of every stupid thing you did with all your besties in the school cafeteria, anybody could put together the credits for a memory share at one of the public booths. Sure, all the MemCorps signs said with adult supervision only, ’cause fooling around in your head like that could mess you up when your brain was still growing, but I just told the guy at the front we were over eighteen and gave him a two-cred tip. And Princess let him look down her shirt a little when he asked to see our pretty little smiles.
We got hooked up to our chairs in one of
the side-by-sides. They were sticky, but it felt like old candy, not blood or anything, so I locked in. I had to show Princess how, but she caught on quick—straps on, headset up, earpieces in. I didn’t get into all the MemCorps does this and your brain cells do that and then you see the memory clear as if it happened to you part, ’cause Princess might have been a little sad looking, but she didn’t seem dumb.
“Your session has begun,” said the booth voice, all high and cool, like if Miss Miranda had turned into a robot.
I started first, since I knew how to work the thing. Shared my memory of the time I pulled some stupid rich girl’s chair out at school and she fell back and her legs went one way and her arms went another and her mouth made a big O shape and I laughed for about an hour. Princess giggled right along with me, but there was no way to tell how much of that was real and how much was the machine—easy enough to get swept away in a share without halfway trying.
“That’s all you got, Ghost?” she said, when we were finished laughing. “Some girl falling over?”
“It’s funny.”
“Yeah, but you said we’re supposed to be swapping something real.”
“It’s a memory booth, dumbass,” I said, smiling so she knew I didn’t mean something by it like Flash would. “Of course it’s real.” And it was, even if I didn’t share the part where Miss Miranda found out and made my head ache for a week. I liked Princess fine, but you couldn’t give everything to some new girl in one go.
“Not real like true,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Real like important. Like my daddy.”
