Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  She moved faster and faster, her actions increasingly impressive. And frightening.

  “Is it true that your people eschew all forms of technology?”

  “How many more of you are there?”

  She executed a leaping swing, her weapon falling out of her hands. Frustration? Sadness at a sore subject? The urge to murder him? And here she said something, finally. A single inarticulate roar.

  Fill

  Fill hurried down Arm One, heading for Arm Three. His errand had made him late, but it was worth it. In each hand he held a freshly minted plastic figure, the first he’d had printed in ten years. Still warm. A polar bear, and a killer whale.

  He wanted to believe. In magic, in science, in people who could bond with animals. He wanted to feel the excitement he’d had as a child, how big and crowded and possible the world had been back then.

  He didn’t, not quite, not yet, but maybe the plastic figures would help.

  He walked down the Arm’s central strip. The walkways were too crowded and he’d lost the knack for leisure since his diagnosis. His unhurried stroll had been stolen from him. He’d debated taking a zip line, but the queue at the central Hub had been too long, even at the first-class line. And there had been a demonstration—angry people in plastiprinted kaiju suits, chanting about a new wave of evictions out on Arm Seven, harassing the wealthy zip liners while they waited, because any of them could have been the shareholders responsible. Holographic monstrosities danced and scrambled in the air around them. When he was a kid, for a while, these had been everywhere. All the time. It had been years since he’d seen one.

  Fill had recognized the buildings in the placard screens that they held up. He knew exactly who the shareholder responsible was.

  Oh, Grandfather, he thought. You bastard. Whose lives are you ruining tonight?

  He couldn’t worry about that now. Life was too short to linger on ugliness. Last week, City Without a Map had talked about the crowds who gathered nightly at the end of Arm Three to watch the bright methane ventilation flares. Central Americans, mostly, with vendors selling some rich fermented purple beverage whose name he’d forgotten, and roving musicians playing a dozen rival species of son, but the street festival was popular with all kinds of recent arrivals.

  This city contains so many cities, he thought. So many lives I’ll never get to live, so many spaces I’ll never get invited into.

  “Fuck out the way!” screamed a messenger kid hurtling down the slideway, and Fill’s first thought was My goodness, that boy is hot and then Oh wait, that’s a girl and then Christ, I have no idea what that is, which led to a little internal rant about the complexities of modern gender among Qaanaaq youth.

  Fill was still meditating on that, long after the kid had vanished into the green haze of the methane-sodium streetlights, when his jaw chimed.

  Unknown caller, said the gonial implant, a flea-sized thing affixed to the corner of his jaw, like those used by all but the most wretched recent-refugee arrivals. Phone speaker and receiver all in one, conducting sound through bone to his ear and also recording what came out of his mouth. His screen’s expensive software did the rest: Thede Jackson, age twenty-five, spatial designer, North American parentage, gay, single. No previous history of contact; no flags for unsolicited commercial messaging.

  Gay, single, twenty-five; well, that was something. Maybe a friend had put them in touch, or he’d seen something about Fill and decided to take a stab in the dark. It had happened before. One of the perks of having a reputation. Fill tapped his jaw and said, “Hello?”

  The voice said, “Ram?”

  Fill said nothing. All of a sudden all the air was gone.

  “Ram? Are you there?”

  This Thede was drunk, and sounded like he was about to cry.

  “Who the hell is this?” Fill said, surprised at his own anger.

  “Ram, it’s me,” he said. “Please. I need—”

  “This isn’t Ram, asshole, as you goddamn well know.”

  Thede choked. “Um . . . what?”

  “Did Ram put you up to this? Did you steal my handle out of his screen?”

  “Ram, I—” But then Thede hung up.

  Love is the gift that keeps on giving, Fill thought—how else could a man still make you miserable even after you’d broken up? He took a moment to curse Ram and every wonderful horrible minute they’d spent together. The boy had been unstable, incapable of telling the truth about anything, ever, and whether Thede was another jilted suitor or someone Ram owed money to didn’t matter.

  A bell tolled, on one of the tidal buoys. Fill had never bothered to learn what any of them meant. There were nursery rhymes about them, Good boys ask how / Say the buoys of New Krakow or something nonsensical along those lines. Every wharf rat and skiff urchin knew them by heart, could glean all sorts of helpful information about weather and the length of the day from them, but Fill, with the best education Qaanaaq money could buy, was stone-cold illiterate when it came to the complex tidal chimes.

  Graffiti, on the side of the buoy—ORA LIVES, his screen translated from Spanish, and what could ORA be? The Qaanaaq net turned up nothing, and after ages a ping to the global net turned up a half dozen expired trade associations, dead softwares, villages and townships of the Sunken World. Someone’s name, then?

  Maybe the call had been a wrong handle, he told himself, because gay Qaanaaq was such a small world that it wasn’t inconceivable that keying in a wrong handle would bring you the ex of the person you’d meant to call, except that his handle and Ram’s were nothing alike.

  Again, his jaw pinged. Thede again, but text this time. “Read,” Fill said, and immediately regretted not saying “Delete.” But life was like that. Dumb decisions you made in a hurry and then dealt with.

  Ugh, I am so sorry. I’m drunk and disrupted and I don’t know what happened. I entered the handle myself instead of autocalling and I don’t know. I have no idea who you are so I have no idea how I got you. Except that I sort of do. Or I think I do. Call me?

  Fill kept walking. He was almost out to the end of the Arm now, running late, and his whole head felt funny, fuzzy, like something had come unmoored, and of course it was too early for him to be symptomatic, it had to be psychosomatic, but how could you know the difference with a sickness that was solely psychological?

  Another text. “Read,” Fill said, unsettled.

  Okay. You don’t want to call. I get that. But if you know Ram, you probably know him like I knew him, which means you two were fucking, which means you need to know this. I’ve got the breaks. I think I got them from him. And they’re moving fast. It’s a bad strain. I’ve been having these moments. Like just now. I swear, I remembered your number, even though I never knew it, because Ram did. It’s like I know—

  “Delete,” Fill said, though the message was less than a third of the way through, and ran the rest of the way to the end of the Arm. He turned up the latest installment of City Without a Map, letting the vortex wash over him as an old man with a bad cough read someone else’s words into his ear:

  No one rules Qaanaaq, no class or race reigns supreme. Not the Chinese laborers who built it, not the global plutocrats who could afford to get out of their doomed cities before they became hell on earth, not the successive waves of refugees who filled it. And while of course it technically belongs to the shareholders, who lease the ground that every home and business in Qaanaaq was built upon and make obscene amounts of money with every minute that passes—they are invisible. After class warfare consumed the American grid city of New Plymouth and the rich were plunged burning into the sea, Qaanaaq’s owners went to great lengths to conceal themselves.

  To minimize unrest, the city founders broke with the urban past in several surprising ways. They decided against the repressive militarized police force that most old-world cities had depended upon. They kept the burden of taxation exclusively on the hyperwealthy shareholders. They limited the depth of democracy, giving politicians such
small amounts of power that few fights broke out over elections or government action or inaction. They banned political parties, which had—in the view of the artificial intelligences that drafted these rules, anyway—been vehicles of mob rule and mediocrity more often than efficient strategies for decision making.

  And so. Here you are. Here we both are.

  Every so often, shut your eyes. Then open them, the slightest bit. Your home is gone, but it is not difficult to trick yourself into thinking you are home.

  Soq

  Fuck out the way!” Soq screamed, and giggled at the prissy way the boy hopped. People like that thought they owned the whole Arm, and maybe they did, but on the slideway Soq was supreme.

  Speed and wind made Soq’s eyes water. They laughed, out loud, and the laugh became an ululation that lasted the rest of the way down.

  Two ramps, side by side, ran down the center of every one of Qaanaaq’s eight Arms. Ten centimeters wide, capped with miniature maglev tracks. One going out from the central Hub, the other coming in from the far end. Each one started out five feet high, and over the course of the Arm’s kilometer length tapered evenly down to ground level. A five-foot incline wasn’t much, but a human of average weight could get up to some pretty astonishing speeds. In theory anyone with a pair of slide boots could use the slideway, but most people had long since abandoned it to the messengers. Slideway messengers were a barely tolerated menace, widely considered to be bloodthirsty caff addicts on errands of minimal legality who wore weighted clothing to speed them up and razor blades affixed to their clothing to casually disembowel anyone strolling near the center of the Arm without paying attention. Most messengers relished this assessment and went out of their way to embody it.

  Soq leaped, arriving at the end of the ramp. Slide boots were supposed to kill the magnetic repulsion as they arrived at the programmed destination so that you came to a calm, precise stop. Like most messengers, Soq had overclocked that function. Nothing was going to slow them down but them. Soq soared through the air, clearing the buffer zone and landing with a jolt beside a bench in the central Hub.

  A man whose head Soq had just passed over yelled, “Watch it, you—” and then paused, unclear how to gender the insult.

  Soq was beyond gender. They put it on like most people put on clothes. Some days butch and some days queen, but always Soq, always the same and always uncircumscribable underneath it all.

  New job, whispered their implant. Arm One. Number 923. Envelope; paperwork only.

  “Assign it to someone else,” Soq said. “I’m late for dinner with my mother.”

  “You don’t have a mother,” said Jeong, the on-duty human for the day, interrupting the automated dispatch software.

  “I’m sure I do,” Soq said, weaving through the evening foot traffic of the central Hub. “Everyone has a mother.”

  “So they tell me. But you’re not having dinner with yours tonight.”

  “I’m tired,” Soq said. “I can’t deal with another run past those Arm One assholes.”

  “Fine,” said Jeong, who truly did not care one way or another. He had been a messenger himself, before some kids experimenting with targeted mini-EMP software accidentally scrambled his boots and locked him in place while speeding down Arm Six at three hundred kilometers an hour, which dislocated both legs and fractured his pelvis. Now he lived vicariously through his “kids,” including the ones who were older than him. “But listen. Got a complaint from your last run. Lady said you were extremely rude.”

  “Of course she did,” Soq said. “Old nasty American thing, she didn’t like it when she used ‘he’ to describe me and I told her, very politely and patiently, because I have this conversation way fucking more often than anyone should fucking have to have it, that I prefer ‘they’ and ‘them’ pronouns.”

  “Weirdest thing. My screen conked out as I was in the middle of logging the complaint. Didn’t save to your record. I’ll have to get that thing looked at.”

  “Thanks, Jeong. Anything from Go?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “You know I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.”

  The dispatch line silenced itself. Soq pressed their gloved thumb to pinkie, and the slider boots demagged. An evening crowd ahead, a couple hundred humans passing through the central Hub, mostly from the labor arms out to the residential ones, although like everything else in Qaanaaq the flow of people was complex.

  A bad idea, Soq knew, to get so focused on Go. Didn’t mean anything that the woman whom many believed to be the city’s most powerful crime boss had sent her first lieutenant to hire Soq out for some stringer gigs. Deliveries, tails, handoffs, creating commotions to help someone escape someone else. There were no promises in this line of work. Soq was a good slide messenger, and a good messenger had many of the qualities that made a good underling—speed, fearlessness, lack of respect for the law—but that didn’t mean Go would ask Soq to formally join her organization.

  Getting crime boss patronage was like winning the lottery: it’d be great, but it probably wasn’t going to happen to you, so stop banking on it.

  Stop thinking about it. Stop imagining the day when you will be the crime boss, the feared one.

  A straight line, from Arm One to Arm Eight. An irony that never failed to amuse Soq, how simple it was to pass from gorgeous luxury to huddled crowded filth. How else would it be so easy for them to suck us dry?

  Arm One always did that. Made Soq bitter. Angry. The anger usually ebbed a bit on their return to Arm Eight. Just seeing the banner above the entrance was soothing: four of the hundred or so Mandarin characters that Soq and every other Qaanaaqian knew—新北希望, Xīnběi Xīwàng, New Northern Hope, the name the Chinese sponsors had given to their new city, just as the Thai and Swedish had done, three names for a city and none of them stuck, because the people wanted something else, something not beholden to anyone, and so the Inuit name for a Greenland coastal village that had just been swallowed up by the sea became the name of the floating city as well. Qaanaaq II, at first, or Q2, and then just plain Qaanaaq as its predecessor was forgotten.

  The smells of food hit Soq first: broth and basil, mint and trough meat. Food stalls were forbidden in several of the better Arms, and they were the primary draw for the outsiders who dared enter Eight. After that it was the crowd that calmed Soq down, its rhythm, the peculiar intangible atmosphere of energy and ease. They didn’t know Soq, these people, but they knew Soq belonged. Who knew how they knew it, but they did. Just like Soq knew who was and who wasn’t of the Arm. This was home.

  People, stacked everywhere. Sleeping capsules piled between buildings, strapped to the struts that supported the bigger ones. They looked sad and ragged, but they belonged to royalty, relatively speaking. Prime real estate; the best spots, held down since the days when Arm Eight looked like Arm Six looked now. The women and men who lived in them were the eyes and ears of the Arm, essential elements of the commerce in information.

  Farther down the Arm, Soq entered the shadow of the tenements. A twenty-year-old attempt by the Qaanaaq shareholders to provide stable indoor housing for the unfortunates of Eight, these massive buildings formed the densest population pocket. Denser than Kowloon Walled City or the South Bronx Boats or anything else the Sunken World had produced. The outsides thickly vascularized with red, black, and green pipes. Most of the families, soon after taking up tenancy in these halfway-comfortable spaces, began building walls and partitions and hanging sheets and anything else to rent out space to their neighbors. In the tenements, it was not unusual for fifty people to live inside one apartment. Soq had had friends in the tenements, come to birthday parties for them. Seen the incredible resourcefulness of the tenement dwellers: city plumbing lines “augmented” with snarls of new pipes to shuttle water and sewage and heat, the spliced power lines, the informal stairs and passageways, the sweatshops where grannies made fish balls or repurposed circuit boards in a room where ten iceboat workers slept. And even these were relatively privileg
ed positions, held to fiercely by families and the crime syndicates, who paid the shareholder fees as a gesture of goodwill to the residents.

  Three scaler kids cawed at Soq. They squatted in the struts of a building, feeding a ragged-looking monkey. Soq slowed, trying to see whether their intent was hostile, and then decided they did not care. Mostly scalers and messengers got along well, and lots of people were both, but some scalers could get nasty with the “groundbound” grid grunts they felt so superior to.

  Three-quarters of the way out the Arm, Soq stopped at a noodle stand. This one had little stools and a tarp on each side to keep some of the wind off. Soq was swallowed up in clouds of hot steam smelling of five-spice powder. Home was noodles. Home was food and warmth. Soq paid, took a stool, shut their eyes, and meditated on the moment, its beauty, its peace. The coldness of the wind and the warmth of the food and the fact that everyone eventually dies. Letting go of everything they did not have, every ugly thing they’d seen, every moment of pain they’d felt that day, the day before, every day to come.

  Soq smiled in the rising steam.

  “Hey, Charl!” they called when the first spoonfuls of soup had reached their belly, and pointed chopsticks at the greasy screen Charl had hung on a lamppost. On the news, nine military factions had submitted claims for international recognition as the legitimate successor state to the American republic. Some were as small as twenty people in a boat. “How long do you think it would take a tri-power boat to travel from where the flotilla was to Qaanaaq?”

  “’Bout a week, I’d imagine,” Charl said, for Charl loved these logistical problems. “Unless they had a ton of gas, in which case it might only be a day or two. Why—you want to go scavenge?”

  “No,” Soq said. “Just wondering when we might start to see refugees.”

  Soq was thinking of the orca. Of the woman who’d mysteriously arrived with a killer whale in tow, so soon after the flotilla bombing. Because how had the flotilla been bombed in the first place? The American fleet had lacked a lot of things—food, shelter, fuel, civil liberties—but it hadn’t lacked weapons. The global military presence that had made the pre-fall United States so powerful, and then helped cause their collapse, had left them with all sorts of terrifying toys. The battleships that circled those four hundred pieces of floating scrap metal would have had solid perimeter defense capabilities . . . but perimeter defense might not have been concerned about a killer whale.