Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “Maybe,” she said. “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”

  The software broker came in second, calling near midnight the next evening. Her friend at Safety never got back to her at all.

  “Sending you something now,” the software broker said. “More than I thought I’d find, actually.”

  For a split second, Ankit debated saving it for the morning. She was exhausted, and the message Mana sent held dozens of files. But she knew she’d never be able to fall asleep, wondering what she had. She couldn’t even finish brushing her teeth before doubling back to the bedroom and opening the first folder.

  Four hours later, Ankit was still awake.

  Two hours after that, Ankit called in sick.

  Which wasn’t a lie. Dizziness made her light-headed; the whole city seemed to be spinning. Staggering, sickening, the information she held in her hands.

  Too weird. Too fucking weird.

  The whole thing felt wrong, uncanny, like a dream where the world was sideways in some subtle, unsettling way.

  Maybe her job wasn’t in danger. Maybe Fyodorovna could win. Maybe she could get her mother out.

  One solution to all her problems. All she had to do was bring down a shareholder. Simple. What did it matter that it had never been done before? She had a weapon now. Maybe a couple of them. Maybe there was a chink in Martin Podlove’s armor.

  And anyway, lots of things had never been done before, and then they were done.

  Soq

  Blackfish Woman was a ghost. Glimpsed from afar. Impossible to touch. Every day new sightings. In the water, on boats, on the grid. With the polar bear or astride her whale or alone, but never without her blade. Always moving. Since the slaughter on the Sports Platform she’d been impossible to pin down. If anyone knew where she slept, where she moved her rig to, money or fear or respect kept their mouths shut.

  Soq made maps. Drew lines connecting the dots of the places she’d been seen. Looked for patterns. Found none.

  Soq collected pictures. Soq asked questions. Noodle vendors and ice scrapers and boatmen and algae vat stirrers were all only too happy to talk Soq’s ear off with every little detail of their sightings. Nor was Soq the only one asking them to. All of Qaanaaq was talking about the orcamancer. Soq wondered how many of them were asking from simple curiosity and how many were like Soq, working for someone else, crime bosses or shareholders or the intelligence agencies of foreign nations, for whom the orcamancer represented an unsettling, inexplicable, existential threat.

  There was one thing Soq knew, that none of them knew. That Go didn’t know. That Soq kept secret, without knowing why.

  Killer Whale Woman was afraid of the polar bear. The polar bear would kill her if it had the chance.

  What did that mean?

  Impossible to research her without delving deep into who the nanobonded were, how their tech or magic worked. But what was real and what was lies, legend, misunderstanding? Many sources said they could each bond to only one animal. Others told stories of women bonded to whole flocks of birds, a man who headed a pack of wolves. At any rate, killer whale woman was clearly not bonded to the polar bear. So . . . why was she traveling with it?

  All of this was extracurricular. Soq still made slide deliveries. Dao had not discussed a pay rate for Soq’s research when he handed over the assignment.

  Nor did he mention one four days later, when he buzzed Soq.

  “Progress report,” he barked. “What have you got?”

  “A whole lot of not very much,” Soq said, stopping at the entrance to Arm Three. They kicked at the cylinders set into the ground, the thick forest of bollards that could be raised in times of trouble to divert demonstrations or thin out unruly crowds. Soq delivered a long list of scraps, so flimsy that they felt compelled to apologize for it.

  “That’s fine,” Dao said. “That’s excellent, actually.”

  “No, it’s not,” Soq said. “I’ve got nothing. Nothing Go couldn’t find out herself by doing some half-assed web searches.”

  “What would it take, to get more?” Dao asked.

  Soq laughed. “If money was no object I’d say send me to Nuuk. That’s the last grid city she went to before coming here. Killed a couple of families of boat people. Let one guy live. Allegedly. Number one lesson learned here is that nothing is ever certain when it comes to her.”

  There was a long pause, like maybe Dao was writing something down.

  “So . . . are you going to send me to Nuuk?”

  Dao laughed. “No, Soq. She doesn’t want you traveling yet.”

  Yet. Soq trembled at the promise in that word.

  Two days later, though, Jeong pinged Soq an address. “Not a delivery,” he said. “Dao says it’s a meeting.”

  “Huh,” Soq said.

  “When did you get so important that you get to have meetings?” Jeong said. His chuckle was not without pride.

  “When I became a spy,” Soq said. Their sense of power lasted all the way down Arm Seven, to the address Jeong pinged, past a blue-striped monkey fighting with an otter and a wild-haired woman asking passersby to help burn it all down, and onto a decent-sized old houseboat and in the door, and then burst like a bubble at the sight of a man strapped to a chair.

  “You made it, good,” said Dao, playing with a shape-memory polymer perched on a windowsill. He tapped at his screen and it transformed from a bird to a ballerina, then he grabbed it and crushed it in his fist. “I brought you what you asked for.”

  Bruises crisscrossed the man’s face. There was blood on his clothes. “What I . . . asked for?”

  “The survivor. From Nuuk.”

  “Shit, Dao,” Soq said. “What the fuck did you do to this guy? I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt—”

  And Soq knew, hearing the words come out, how stupid they sounded. Dao at least did Soq the favor of not saying any of the things Soq knew he could have said. Did you think working for a crime boss would be bloodless, painless? Did you think your hands would never get dirty? What did you think we do here, exactly?

  Dao did say: “He’s yours now. See what you can get from him just by being nice, and call me if you need some help or advice being . . . not so nice.”

  “And then you’ll . . . ?”

  “Shoot him in the head; take him home and give him a bubble bath; I don’t know, Soq. We’ll have that conversation when we have it.”

  Dried fish guts caked the floor. Crab or lobster shells cracked underfoot. On an ancient wooden table, a methane burner and a wok and two green glass bottles. Did the boat belong to him, the poor beat-up man bound in front of Soq? Had Dao’s soldiers dragged it all the way from Nuuk? Or was it one of a thousand syndicate hiding places here in Qaanaaq, perfect for carrying out all kinds of illicit activity?

  “Untie him,” Soq said.

  Dao bowed and did so. “I’ll be outside,” he said to the man. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  The guy was young. Bearded, burly; his head wrapped in an American flag bandanna. It was faded and filthy.

  “Tell me about the orcamancer,” Soq said.

  His mouth opened like he had something smart to say, but then he thought better of it. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Soq. I work for an entrepreneur here in Qaanaaq.”

  “Uh-huh, entrepreneur. And your people brought me all the way here to talk about the person who killed my parents. Why is that?”

  Soq was about to answer, but then realized—they didn’t know why Go was so interested. Dao said Go didn’t want any unknown variables introduced into the equation of her power play, but what if that was untrue, or half-true? What if Soq’s information gathering would be used to harm the orcamancer? Now wasn’t the moment to ponder that question too seriously. And in any event, one of the many life skills Soq had learned in foster care: the best way to get information out of someone is to tell them what they want to hear. “Maybe my employer sees her as a threat. Maybe she has a vendetta
against her for something. Maybe she wants to destroy her, and your information could help us achieve that.”

  He smiled. “I was at work. I clean lobster pots. I came home—my parents, they brought this boat with them from America—and they were . . . dead. My grandparents, too. And she was still there. Like she was waiting for me. Sitting right where you’re standing now.”

  Soq looked around. So this was where it happened. They shut their eyes and tried to picture it.

  “It stank in here, so bad. She was sitting on the floor, covered in blood, looking like she was praying, or meditating, or, I don’t know, taking a fucking nap.”

  “The reports all said she hit you with the butt of her staff, and left.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She didn’t say anything to you first? She waited for you, knocked you out, and then left? Why wait for you at all?”

  He looked up at Soq, his eyes steely. Bracing himself for pain.

  “She didn’t say anything to you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Hey,” Soq said, pulling up a stray chair, scorched battered white plastic. Had it been there, then? “Come on. Help us out. We can help avenge them. Any little bit of information you might have, we could use it. Maybe she threatened to hurt you, if you told anyone—”

  He spat out: “She didn’t. She wanted me to tell.”

  “So tell me. You’re safe now. We’ll protect you.”

  He laughed, and Soq knew he was right to laugh. “You can’t. My family, they weren’t soft. They had guns. Weapons. Lots of them. And they’d . . . done things. Vicious things. To survive. But she took them out easy. Without using her damn . . . fucking . . . animals. Whatever she wants, whatever she came here for, she’s going to get it. Fuck any entrepreneurs who stand in her way.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  He nodded. “She said my family deserved what she’d done to them, but I didn’t. Told me to make sure everybody knew it.”

  “. . . And?”

  His face, a practiced mask of masculine hardness, sagged. Reddened. Broke.

  “She asked about my uncle,” he said, in gasps, like he was about to cry. “Asked where she could find him.”

  “And you didn’t tell her. At first.”

  “At first. But she . . .”

  “She hurt you,” Soq said.

  “She hurt me. She threatened . . .”

  “To hurt you worse.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you told her. Where to find your uncle.”

  He was weeping now. “He was working an ice ship. I told her the name of it. That’s all.”

  “And then you heard . . .”

  “I heard he was killed. Week, two weeks later. He was all alone on the glacier, working an ice saw, and they said he must have fallen . . . Forty stories high, that glacier. Onto ice. Happens all the time, they said. And he’d been out there for a couple of days by the time they found him. Said those bite marks, those missing chunks, anything could have gotten to him after he fell.”

  Soq stepped closer. Tapped his bandanna. “Your family—they’re from the States.”

  “Proud Americans,” he said. “Always will be.”

  “Even when there is no America?”

  “It’s in our hearts.”

  Soq imagined the hearts of his parents, and grandparents, skewered and plucked from their bodies through a shattered rib cage and stomped on.

  “Religious?”

  “Sure.”

  Of course. They participated in the nanobonder slaughter. That’s why they were butchered. Soq swooned to think that the Killer Whale Woman was strong and wise enough to find and punish the guilty, even decades later.

  “What did they do, I wonder? During the migration?”

  He sniffed, a wet thick sound. “What they had to do.”

  “Including killing people?”

  “You soft fucking city people can’t even imagine. What it was like. Everybody trying to kill everybody. Blacks against whites, immigrants against citizens. If you didn’t have guns—lots of them—you were going to lose everything you loved.”

  He didn’t know, either. He’d have been born long after and raised on stories. Soq had seen those documentaries. The narratives of fear, of lies, of They Want to Destroy Us. There were so many movies about how easy it is to manipulate people, and what atrocities you could get them to cheerfully commit while believing they did it for the sake of their children’s survival.

  Soq shut their eyes and they could smell her, the orcamancer, in the room with them—could feel her rage, the righteous thrill of hurting the people who hurt her people. She was not a young woman. She’d traveled for so many years. Had vengeance been the only thing, the only thread pulling her forward? Soq opened their eyes. That couldn’t be all. There had to be more to her than bloodshed, violence, punishing the guilty. Soq couldn’t say why they thought that, why they wanted so badly to believe it.

  She is looking for something. Someone.

  “She didn’t say anything else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Thanks,” Soq said, putting a hand on his shoulder. They regretted not asking the man’s name.

  The bearded man said nothing. Tears were rolling down his face. He cupped his hands in his lap, an oddly pacific gesture for a man so full of hard angles and coiled anger.

  Soq left. Dao waited on the deck in a cloud of pine needle smoke.

  “Got something?”

  “Something,” Soq said. “I’ll write it up for Go.”

  What would that write-up say? Talking to this man, standing in that space, I gained a profound spiritual understanding of who the Blackfish Woman is and it is of absolutely no strategic or practical value to you.

  Soq hopped from the boat to the grid. “And Dao?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Whatever you do to him? I don’t want to know.”

  Dao frowned. “You won’t always be able to hide, Soq. From the consequences of our actions.”

  “I know!” Soq said. “But I want to hide today.”

  Kaev

  For the third time in twelve hours, Kaev crossed the Arm to pee into the ocean. Even those few steps cost him, caused a slight shrinking of that blissful calm, and as soon as he was done he hurried back to the bare metal bar he’d been sitting on.

  He was pretty sure he’d slept, some. Hard to say. His body felt like it needed nothing, not sleep and not food and not sex, and not fighting, which for the first time in his life held no appeal for him. Everything ached, but nothing hurt. A noodle stall had set up beside him, and occasional wafts of warm sweet-savory air hit him, and those were nice, but when they weren’t there he didn’t miss them.

  Narcissus. The man who fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away staring into the water. Why did he remember that? Why did his mind work now? Why did school, math, history, myth, all the things that had eluded him, refused to cohere in his mind, suddenly make sense? Where memory had been a churning sea, uncontrollable, spitting up unwanted objects and hiding the things he most desired, it now yielded easily to his wishes. He thought about his childhood, and there it was. Foster homes. Even: further back, to times he’d never been able to call to mind, to places that weren’t so much memories of things as of feelings, of safety, of fear, of flight. Other people: a mother, a sibling—or were they a grandmother and a pet? Because in that stage of pre-memory there were no words to attach to things, no societal structure to plug people into.

  “Hemorrhoids,” said the noodle vendor. “Sit on cold metal too long, you’ll get hemorrhoids.”

  “Thanks,” Kaev said, but he did not move. She took a crinkly green tarp, folded it into an approximate rectangle, handed it over. He took it, bowed in gratitude, and sat on it. And it did feel better.

  She was popular. The docking bar and every other surface people could sit on were crowded with customers slurping down bowls of broth. But they came and went, for even people with nowhere to go weren�
��t eager to remain in the cold too long.

  Kaev knew that he could not stay there forever. Sooner or later Safety would come, tell him he had to move along. And when he refused, they’d send Health. The windscreen magnified the sun’s heat by day, but now the sun was setting, and people who chose to stay unsheltered overnight could be deemed ipso facto insane and taken off the grid by force. And Kaev could not afford another trip to the Cabinet right now. Even if it had helped, slightly, before. The cost was too great. And whatever benefit he’d derived from his time there was gone the second he left the building. So if Health or Safety showed up and tried to force him to move from this spot, he’d be obliged to beat them senseless. And then he’d have an even bigger problem.

  “You’re new,” the noodle vendor said.

  “I’m old,” Kaev said.

  “Not as old as me,” she said, and laughed. He’d been sitting on the tarp for an hour, maybe two, for all he knew a week. The flow of customers had ebbed. Once again Arm Eight looked empty, though he knew it wasn’t.

  “Here,” she said, and handed him a bowl.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have any money.”

  “Of course you don’t,” she said, and laughed again, and he loved her, but then again, in that stretch of bliss he loved everyone. “My noodles are irresistible. If you had any money, you wouldn’t have been able to go this long without buying a bowl.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “And anyway, you paid for it already.”

  “I did?”

  “You gave me something just as valuable,” she said. “I saw you fight. Hao Wufan. Shame about him.”

  “Terrible,” Kaev said, lowering his face to the broth, letting the steam warm him, wondering what shameful fate had befallen the boy.

  “Some people aren’t ready for success,” she said. “You fight beautifully, though. I’ve seen you before.”

  “I told you,” he said. “I’m old. Been fighting forever.”

  “A journeyman,” she said, and so she was a true fight follower, someone who could appreciate his role in the ecosystem. A rare thing. He still got recognized sometimes, and that was always nice, but most casual fight fans considered him a chump, a loser. “The noodles are a belated payment, for all the pleasure I took in watching you fight.”