Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  Software handled most of them. Drafted automated responses, since the vast majority were things beyond the scope of Fyodorovna’s limited power (No, we can’t help you normalize your status if you came here unregistered; no, we can’t get you a Hardship housing voucher), or flagged them for human follow-up. A flunky would make a call or send a strongly worded message.

  But the Bashirs had earned themselves a personal visit from Fyodorovna’s chief of staff. Their building was densely populated, with a lot of American and South Asian refugees, and those were high-priority constituencies, and it was an election year. Word would spread, of her visit, of Fyodorovna’s attentiveness.

  She wasn’t there to help. She was PR.

  “Our landlord raised the rent,” Mrs. Bashir said, and waited for the screen to translate. Even the poorest of arrivals, the ones who couldn’t afford jaw implants or screens of their own, had a high degree of experience with technology. They’d have dealt with a lot of screens by now, throughout the process of gaining access to Qaanaaq. And anyway, her voice was sophisticated, elegant. She might have been anything, before her world caught fire. “We’ve only been here three months. I thought they couldn’t do that.”

  Ankit smiled sadly and launched into her standard spiel about how Qaanaaq imposed almost no limits on what a landlord could or couldn’t do. But that, rest assured, Fyodorovna’s number one priority is holding irresponsible landlords accountable, and the Arm manager will make the call to the landlord herself, to ask, and that if Mrs. Bashir or any of her neighbors have any other problems, they should please message our office immediately . . .

  Then she broke off, to ask, “What’s this?” of a child drawing on a piece of plastislate. Taksa, according to the file. Six-year-old female. Sloppily coloring in a black oval.

  “It’s an orca,” she said.

  “You’ve heard the stories, then,” Ankit said, and smiled. “About the lady? With the killer whale?”

  Taksa nodded, eyes and smile wide. The woman was the stuff of legend already. Ample photos of her arrival, but no sign of her since. How do you vanish in a city so crowded, especially when you travel with a polar bear and a killer whale?

  “What do you think she came for?”

  Taksa shrugged.

  “Everyone has a theory.”

  “She came to kill people!” said Taksa’s older brother, Jagajeet.

  “Shh,” his mother said. “She’s an immigrant just like us. She only wants a place to be safe.” But she smiled like she had more dramatic theories of her own.

  The children squabbled lovingly. Ankit felt a rush of longing, of envy, at their obvious bond, but swiftly pushed it away. Thinking about her brother brought her too close to thinking about her mother.

  Taksa put her crayon down and shut her eyes. Opened them, looked around as though surprised by what she saw. And then she said something that made her parents gasp. The screen paused as the translation software struggled to parse the unexpected language. Finally Russian flashed on the screen, and its voice, usually so comforting, translated Who are you people? into Tamil and then Swedish.

  Three seconds passed before anyone could say a thing. Taksa blinked, shook her head, began to cry.

  “What the hell was that?” Ankit asked, after the mother led the girl into the bathroom.

  The father hung his head. Taksa’s brother solemnly took over the drawing she’d abandoned.

  “Has this happened before?”

  The man nodded.

  Ankit’s heart tightened. “Is it the breaks?”

  “We think so,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you call a doctor? Get someone to—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” the man said, his bitterness only now crippling his self-control. “You know why not. You know what they do to those kids. What happens to those families.”

  “Aren’t the breaks . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence, hated even having started it.

  “Sexually transmitted,” the father said. “They are. But that’s not the only way. The resettlement camp, you can’t imagine the conditions. The food. The bathrooms. Less than a foot between the beds. One night the woman beside my daughter started vomiting, spraying it everywhere, and . . .”

  He trailed off, and Ankit was grateful. Her heart was thumping far too loudly. This was the sixth case she’d seen in the past month. “We’ll get her the help she needs.”

  “You know there’s nothing,” he said. “We read the outlets, same as you. Think we aren’t checking every day, for news? Waiting for your precious robot minds to make a decision? For three years now, when there is an announcement at all, it is always the same: Softwares from multiple agencies, including Health, Safety, and Registration, are still gathering information, conducting tests, in order to draft new protocols for the handling and treatment of registrants suffering from this and other newly identified illnesses. Meanwhile, people die in the streets.”

  “You and your family will be fine. We wouldn’t—”

  “You’re young,” the father said, his face hard. “You mean well, I am sure. You just don’t understand anything about this city.”

  I’ve lived here my whole life and you’ve only been here six months, she stopped herself from saying.

  Because I feel bad for him, she thought. But really it was because she wasn’t entirely certain he was wrong.

  The bathroom door opened, and out came Taksa. Smiling, tears dried, mortal illness invisible. She ran over to her brother, seized the plastislate. They laughed as they fought over it.

  “May I?” Ankit asked, raising her screen in the universal sign of someone who wanted to take a picture. The mother gave a puzzled nod.

  She could have taken dozens. The kids were beautiful. Their happiness made her head spin. She took only one: the little girl’s face a laughing blur, her brother’s hands firmly and lovingly resting on her shoulders.

  Kaev

  Nothing was certain but the beam he stood on.

  The gong sounded and Kaev opened his eyes. The lights came up slowly. A pretty standard beam configuration for this fight: Rows of stable columns and intermittent hanging logs. Poles big enough for someone to plant one foot upon. Three platforms, each large enough for two people to grapple on. He pressed his soles into the bare wood and breathed. A spotlight opened on his opponent, a small Chinese kid he’d been hearing about for weeks. Young but rising fast. The unseen crowd screamed, roared, stamped, blasted sound from squeeze speakers. Ten thousand Qaanaaq souls, their eyes on him. Or at least, his opponent. A hundred thousand more watching at home, in bars, standing in street corner clumps and listening on cheap radios. He could see them. He could see them all.

  The city would not go away. Kaev’s mind throbbed with it, with the pain of so much life surrounding him. So many things to be afraid of. So many things to want. He kept his lips pressed tight together, because otherwise he would scream.

  Somewhere in the crowd, Go was watching him. She’d have one eye on her screen, but the other one would be on him. And she’d smile, to see him step forward, to watch her script act itself out.

  Kaev leaped to the next beam. His opponent stood still, waiting for Kaev to come to him. Cocky; clueless. The poor dumb thing thought he was smart enough to anticipate what would happen when. He had no idea who Go was, how much energy and money went into making sure the fight played out a certain way.

  America has fallen and I don’t feel so good myself.

  The news had stuck with him in a way news didn’t, usually. Because what was America to Kaev? Just one more place he might have come from. Every Qaanaaq orphan had a head full of origin stories, the countries they fled, the wealthy powerful people their parents had been, the immense conspiracies that had put them where they were. Kaev was thirty-three now, too old for fantasies about what might have been. He knew what was, and what was was miserable. He ran along the length of the hanging log, hands back, spine straight and low, trying to push it all out of his head.

  A
nd as he drew near to the kid, the fog lifted. The din hushed. Fighting was where the pieces came together. The kid jumped, landed on the far end of the hanging log. A roar from the crowd. Kaev couldn’t hear the radio broadcaster’s commentary, but he knew precisely what he would say.

  This kid is utterly unafraid! He leaps directly into the path of his opponent, landing in a flawless horse stance. There’s no knocking this guy into the drink . . .

  Kaev always listened to his fights after they were over, a day or two later, when the buzz had faded altogether. Hearing Shiro describe his own efforts, even in the brisk, empty language of sports announcers, brought him a certain measure of peace. A flimsy, lesser cousin of the joy of fighting.

  Instants before colliding with his opponent, Kaev leaped into the air and whirled his legs around. Smirking, the boy dropped to his knees and let Kaev’s jump kick pass harmlessly over him—but did not turn around fast enough. In the instant Kaev landed he was already pinioning around, delivering an elbow to the boy’s back. Not rooted, not completely balanced, nothing to cause real damage, but enough to make the kid wobble a little and stagger a step back.

  A different kind of roar from the crowd: begrudging respect. Kaev was not their favorite, but he had gotten off a good shot and they acknowledged that. The imaginary Shiro in his head said, I think Hao will proceed with a little more caution from here on out, folks!

  Now the younger fighter pursued him away from the center of the arena. At the outer ring of posts Kaev turned and kicked, but Hao effortlessly swerved to the side. At the precise instant that the momentum of the kick had ebbed, he leaned into Kaev’s leg and broke his balance. Anywhere else and he would have been finished, but at the outer ring the posts were close enough that Kaev could stumble-step to the next one.

  Yes. Yes. This!

  He bellowed. He was an animal, a monster, part polar bear. Unstoppable.

  In his dreams, sometimes, he was a polar bear. And lately he’d been having those dreams more and more. He’d spent six hours, the day before, wandering up and down the Arms in search of the woman who was said to have come to Qaanaaq with a killer whale and a polar bear, but found nothing.

  He sniffed the air, his head full of pheromonic information from his opponent, and charged.

  A dance. A religious ritual. Whatever it was, Kaev was free for as long as he fought. He wasn’t thinking about how the spasms were getting worse, until he could barely speak a normal sentence. He wasn’t worrying about how the money wasn’t coming in the way it needed to, and pretty soon he’d have to move out of his Arm Seven shipping container and sleep in an Arm Eight capsule tenement or worse. He wasn’t thinking about Go, and how much he hated her, and what an idiot he’d been for being so in love with her once.

  He was one with his opponent and the attention of the crowd. And the whisper of cold salt water, thirty feet below.

  They grappled until the gong sounded, and they separated. This was not some savage skiff-bed fight, after all. The Yi He Tuan Arena beam fights were Qaanaaq’s most distinctive and beloved sport, and their champions won by agility and balance and swift punishing blows, not the frenzied grappling of street fighters. Kaev weighed more and his reflexes were better, but the kid had grace, had speed; Kaev could see why everyone liked him, why he’d been set out on this path to stardom.

  Stars make money, Go had said five years ago. People pay to see someone they recognize, someone they can root for. And you can’t make a winner without a lot of losers.

  Which is how Kaev’s life as a journeyman fighter began. The guy who other fighters fought when they needed to learn the ropes and build a lossless record at the same time. Not the worst career. Journeymen had a much longer shelf life than the stars, who usually fizzled out fast from one thing or another, but the stars tended to have handsome bank accounts to fall back on when they went bust. Journeymen were lucky to have a month’s rent as backup.

  He didn’t mind the losing. He loved the fights, loved the way his opponent helped him step outside himself, and something about the fall into freezing water provided an almost orgasmic release.

  What Kaev minded was the hunger, the anger, the empty feeling. What he minded, what he could never forgive Go or the crowds or the whole fucking city of Qaanaaq for, was that he hadn’t had an option.

  Hao was tiring, he could tell. The kid was too new, too rough. Kaev switched into stamina mode, feigning defense while modeling how to conserve energy and catch your breath while you’re winded. Hao followed suit, probably without realizing what he was doing. A new trick he’d learned tonight. In moments like this, Kaev was proud of what he was. A rare and sophisticated skill, letting someone else win without the crowd knowing it. Hao’s kicks connected with his thighs and side and the onlookers surged to their feet and for a few short instants Kaev was the king of Qaanaaq.

  The kid got it. Kaev saw him get it. The instant when it all became clear; when he saw what Kaev was doing, and his attitude changed from cocky contempt to humbled respect. His eyes went wide, went soft. He paused—and Kaev could have kicked him in the back of the knee and followed up with a punch to the side of the head, sent him sprawling into the sea below; he saw precisely how to do it, even lifted his leg to unleash the attack—but do that and he’d cost Go millions, probably get a hit put out on him, and for what? A record of 37–3 instead of 38–2? Kaev pulled his wrist back, anchored himself; the crowd lost its mind, he could win it, their golden boy could be finished—

  Laughter trembled up through Kaev. Joy threatened to split his skin wide open. He was a bird, he was bliss, he was so much more than this battered body and broken brain. In the split-second pause that gave away his advantage, he wanted to howl from happiness.

  Hao’s face looked sad as he leaped in close and slammed home an uppercut. Kaev had given him that, the humility of a genuine warrior. That was what made a true artist, the kind of fighter who would mean something to the cold wet salt-stinking people of Qaanaaq. Falling, Kaev focused on that. On Hao’s career—like the careers of dozens of bright young boys who’d fought Kaev before him. What they might go on to do.

  Kaev caught a glimpse of a woman graffitied onto the underside of the platform he’d fallen from. Clever placement: the sort of spot where no one but a falling fighter would see it. Programmed into an amphibious tagger-drone that swam in from the sea below and flew up to paint her in that secret nook. She was beautiful. Older, bald, dressed in either a monastic shift or a hospital robe, one hand raised, her face projecting saintliness. Beside her, three letters—ORA. Initials? For what?

  He saw the metal fretwork that held up the bleachers, the places where the walls of the arena plunged down below the surface, the walkway around the edge where the fight doctor waited to fish the loser out of the water. He heard the howls of the crowd. But none of that was real. The water was all that was real. It rose up to him now, overjoyed to be embracing him again. Water was as much his native element as air. He was amphibious. He was a polar bear. He felt his body break the surface, felt the electric jolt of cold, and then he was gone, vanished, his body abandoned, its spasms and inadequacies and unfulfillable needs and mental fumblings all erased in a wash of stark bare ecstasy.

  Ankit

  Being a good scaler was easy. Ankit had been good. She was strong and she had decent reflexes. She could vault over barricades, evade drone cams, scamper along railings barely wider than a tightrope.

  The difference between a good scaler and a great one was fear. Ankit was afraid. Fear held her back. She’d never been able to truly let go. She’d never been able to fly. She wanted to—wanted so bad it made her stomach heavy and her limbs freeze, poised at the edge of the abyss, unable to move.

  She felt it now: the wanting. Standing between two tall ramshackle buildings, staring up at the handholds and footrests taunting her. The wanting, and the fear.

  A whiff of pine needle smoke hit her before his voice did. “Hey, kid,” he said from the dark space between two building struts.<
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  “Hey,” Ankit said, vaguely gratified to still be called a kid by someone. This guy had been doing errands for her since she actually was one. She stepped forward, out of the stream of traffic, into the cold wet dark of Qaanaaq’s interstitial commerce. Clatter of Chinese chess tiles from the street behind her; ahead, in the deeper dark, two men grunting together.

  “Missed you lately,” he said. He wore three hoodies; their shadow softened the lines in his face.

  “New delivery,” she said, and handed him a screen. Small, cheap, used, its network connections all fried, but with a long battery and a solar-charger skin.

  “What’s on it?” he asked, smiling, excited. The guy was old, old enough to have had a whole life somewhere else before he came to the city. His pine needle cigarettes were resettlement-camp mainstays, smoked proudly and defiantly by recent arrivals, but as a result they had a certain outlaw appeal and even privileged Lower Arm kids could be seen smoking them.

  “Books,” she said. “Enough books to last a lifetime.”

  “You know her restrictions say only approved tech. She gets caught with this—”

  “That’s her call to make. If she doesn’t want to take the risk, she can refuse it. In which case, give it back to me, if you’re feeling generous, or just sell it. I’ll never know anyway.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and took the screen from her. “You’re so trusting. All these years, I could just be stealing your money and pocketing your stuff. You have no way of knowing if any of it ever gets to her.”

  “You keep saying that,” she said. They could not smell the methane stink of the nightlamps, out there. The darkness held her in its mouth; the sea wound around her like a cloak. Here was bliss, was freedom: a sliver of the thrill she’d felt when scaling. The pleasure she never felt in daylight, in the scripted comings and goings of her job. “I can’t tell if it’s your twisted way of making a confession, or some kind of criminal code of honor thing you want to stress.” And even this felt good, the not knowing, the wondering. The city’s rigid certainties were robotic, unforgiving.