Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “The pleasure is always mine, believe me,” he said, and handed back the empty bowl. “Thank you. The noodles were delicious.”

  Eventually she too departed, taking back the tarp with an apology, telling him she didn’t want to see him there when she returned in the morning.

  It happened soon enough after her departure that he knew they’d been waiting for it. Twelve men, dressed in the nondescript black of syndicate security, clutching obvious weaponry inside their jackets. One of them was Dao, who smiled and did not hurry. Kaev’s thigh muscles tightened, preparing to leap into horse stance. He took off his hood, which would impair his peripheral vision. Cold wind sharpened his senses.

  Something came up from the water across the Arm from him. A sea lion, he thought at first, turning around, because there were lots of those that lived on Qaanaaq’s garbage and fish-gut castoffs. But it was big, bigger than any sea lion, bigger than any animal Kaev had ever seen alive, up close, and white—

  The polar bear opened his eyes and looked at Kaev.

  In the instant of that eye contact, Kaev felt like he had broken free of his body. A happiness surged through him, warm as the sun, blissful as a thousand orgasms. The peace he’d felt while sitting there had been ten times greater than the joy of fighting, but this new sensation was ten times greater than that peace had been.

  “Hello, Kaev,” Dao said. He and his soldiers had their backs to the grid edge; they could not see the polar bear. “You’ve been sitting here for a long time. I’ve got to presume that means you wanted us to find you.”

  But Kaev could not hear him.

  We are one, he thought, eyes locked with the animal’s.

  And it felt: Different. Stable. Like if he looked away, like if he took a step back, it would not diminish. Like now that he’d found it, now that they’d recognized each other, they were linked, and nothing on earth could break that connection. Like nothing could hurt him anymore ever. Like nothing confused him; like he saw how the world worked in a whole new way.

  “Dao,” he said, blinking, turning. “You should probably leave now.”

  The man laughed. A couple of his soldiers followed suit. “That’s not going to happen, Kaev.” He held up a handful of zip ties. “Are you going to let us put these on you? Or is it going to be a whole thing?”

  “You need to leave. Now.”

  More laughter. Kaev took a step forward. One of Dao’s men shot his arm out, flung something, a sharpened shard of windscreen glass, Qaanaaq’s own homegrown answer to the shuriken. It struck him in the cheek with terrifying precision—a warning shot, but a stern one.

  Kaev grunted in pain, but the grunt was bigger than him. With a roar, the polar bear pulled itself out of the water mere feet from where the men stood. Water coursed off it, like it was made of water. And it was as fast as water, as implacable. It swung its bulk around to knock the man into the sea and then dove in after him, all before any of the others had had time to aim and shoot.

  And Kaev shut his eyes and he was in the water, he was biting into the man’s arm and pulling him down, down, until he could feel the warmth of the geothermal cone, until the man ran out of air and opened his mouth and breathed in water, and the bear released him and swam for the surface—

  Kaev opened his eyes to see the men scrambling, aiming weapons into the water. Nervous, yelling, unsure where the bear would emerge next. And Kaev knew, somehow, that the bear could see what he saw, could tell where the men were standing. So it knew the safest place to emerge, to take them by surprise. In the instant before it did, Kaev gave out a shout. He ran at them so that they turned, aimed weapons. One of the men was yanked back before he could pull the trigger, the bear grabbing hold of his leg and pulling him into the water, breaking that leg effortlessly and then the other one, and Kaev was crouching down to avoid the shots from the others, slamming into another man, knocking him off balance, taking the gun from his hands and turning it toward the man’s accomplices, holding down the trigger so that bullets splattered indiscriminately.

  He grinned at the fear on their faces, caught between him and the bear. Two expert killing machines. One thing, one organism. Acting in concert in ways that had nothing to do with language, planning, rational thought. One animal. Dao was yelling orders—Focus on the bear!—even as he ran for safety, saving his own skin—but they were not enough; these people with their mighty weapons and separate fragile minds could not get past themselves, could not trust one another, could not know what someone else was supposed to do. One bullet, two, struck the bear. Kaev felt the pain of them, but he also felt the animal’s comforting fearlessness.

  Animals exist in the moment. They don’t worry about whether they will bleed to death, whether they will die. The wounds were minor. Their enemies fell swiftly, terribly.

  Fill

  Round doors. Frosted windows that let in light but nothing else. Leather straps, stinking of the fear-sweat of strangers.

  The breaks caused dreams to creep into waking life, made him wonder whether anything he was seeing was really there, whether anything he remembered was really his—but they also changed his dreams. Stretched them out, tightened their walls. A short nap might leave him with hours and hours’ worth of remembered dreams. And Fill could no longer wake up from a nightmare, no matter how hard he tried.

  Injections. Isolation. A dark shape flapping past the window.

  This one was the worst. An instant before, he had been dozing on a bench in a greenhouse park boat, and then—blink of the eyes—he was here. Confined, chained, bound like Prometheus. Strapped to a bed, knowing in his gut that no one was coming to rescue him. Praying for it anyway.

  The Cabinet—it had to be. Days and days of it. Months. Years.

  Who was he? These memories belonged to someone. They had to. He ran his fingers over his face, tried to piece together what he looked like, but his mind was numb with pain and loneliness. He could remember himself. His name. His research: the Disappeared; shareholder privilege; no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.

  Most people see only one Qaanaaq. They live their lives inside of it. The Arm where they reside, the nook where they work, the friends and family who make up their world. A private Qaanaaq, uniquely theirs, shaped by history and mental health and their socioeconomic positioning. Some people manage to move to a second Qaanaaq, when fortunes shift in one direction or another. Perhaps it will be a better Qaanaaq; usually it is an uglier one.

  You and I are fortunate. We can see so many. We can move from city to city, Qaanaaq to Qaanaaq, see what our neighbors see, step into their stories. Randomly at first, too fast to control, but soon you will learn to summon them like memories.

  Something else was happening to him. Something more exhilarating than frightening. He was hearing City Without a Map differently now. He no longer felt so much like an outsider. Sometimes he even thought the broadcasts were meant for him.

  Maybe they were wrong, all of them, imagining it to be a guide for new arrivals. Maybe the broadcasts weren’t meant for immigrants at all. What if they were meant for people with the breaks, whether they were newcomers or not?

  Somewhere before dawn, his jaw buzzed.

  “What do you know about the Reader Hunters?” Barron asked, his voice excited, attenuated.

  “Waste of time,” Fill said, deciding not to get indignant over being called so fucking early. “City Without a Map aficionados who make it their business to hunt down the people who narrate the episodes, in the hopes that talking to them will help them track down the origins of the broadcast.”

  “You don’t think that’s intriguing?”

  “I think it’s unlikely to yield anything helpful. And even if you could track one down, I have to imagine that the Author instructed them to never reveal their origins. Or that there are double blinds in place, and they’ve never even had any interaction with the Author.”

  “Perhaps,” Barron said. “But wouldn’t you like to try? If you could track down a Reader?” />
  “Of course.”

  “Well. I have one.”

  “You . . . found a Reader?”

  Barron made an affirmative noise. Fill said nothing. His mouth felt dry. He drank coffee. It did not help. Why was his heart so loud? “You . . . yourself?”

  “A friend of mine, from one of the forums I’m part of. A total coincidence, really. A casual listener, he had just heard a broadcast, and then went to a fruit vendor, and when the woman opened her mouth, he knew.”

  “If that’s true, and he published her location and identity, she’d already be besieged by City devotees. By the time we got to her . . .”

  “That’s just it. He didn’t publish it. He told me directly.”

  This felt too good to be true, but Fill was feeling melodramatic, self-pitying, heedless of consequence. He got the alleged Reader’s address and agreed to meet Barron there.

  The dream again. Plunged back into it, like the floor opened up and dropped him into the frigid sea. Shifting, speeding up, coming to a stop. Whoever they were, this person whose memories he was locked into, things had changed, for her, ten years after arriving there. Her isolation ended. She was let into the light. Change in staff; change in policy; an obscure order from inscrutable software. Access to common areas, supervised at first, and then not. Conversations. Friends. A slate, even—unnetworkable, but loaded with approved texts, and a stylus for drawing. Fill watched thousands of sketches shuffle past. Birds, over and over.

  Eagle, flying. Eagle standing over its nest. Eagle falling.

  Grief: crippling, murderous. Pain like nothing he’d ever felt before. Pain—and guilt.

  This was real. People lived like this. In his city, the one that belonged to him, the one that had fed and pampered him, given him everything he ever desired, the city his grandfather had helped build.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and he was, and he screamed it, and that was when he woke up.

  Masaaraq

  People still came with cameras, in those days, telling us they were going to Tell the Whole World about what had happened to us, what was still happening to us. The poor oppressed nanobonders! Helpless victims of a savage slaughter! They came, young and full of energy and faith, not to blame for having spent their lives in enclaves of safety when the rest of us were sunk deep in utter shit. They always seemed dissatisfied with us, sad we weren’t more grateful, resentful of our sullen faces that ranged between apathy and hostility. Offended that we didn’t smile, shake hands, make friendly small talk, treat them with the openness of spirit that must have been common where they came from. It wasn’t their fault that they were ignorant of how the world really worked. They didn’t see how courtesy assumes a certain degree of common ground. Everyone can afford to be nice to each other, when no one is trying to exterminate anybody.

  They thought we’d befriend them. Every one of them thought we’d make them one of us. They wanted to be bonded, to be special, to fly with eagles or howl with wolves. They saw my orca and thought I was a god. I wasn’t a god. Gods can’t be killed. Gods don’t live like refugees, watching their loved ones murdered.

  None of us bothered to explain it. They wouldn’t have understood, wouldn’t have believed. They wanted so badly to think that what they were doing would make a difference, that once they Told the Whole World something would happen, someone would save us. We were a Good Story. They thought that was enough. Victims of the Multifurcation. One of thousands of communities trying to do its own thing, being pursued by another one (or more) of those communities, with the federal government completely gutted of its ability to protect anyone. The beast was starved, its claws and fangs plucked, the Supreme Court unable to muster much respect for its rulings ever since the bombings forced it into hiding.

  They didn’t understand, these pretty kids, but they’d find out, sooner or later. And there was no point in befriending them, opening up our hearts, because sooner or later they’d be leaving. And never coming back. When they stopped coming we were relieved, and sorry for whatever new poor fucks were the latest Good Story. Alone, we didn’t feel the need to keep our faces hard, our emotions buried, our fear fettered.

  In the mornings it would be the worst, when Ora would bring the kids to the school that was barely worthy of the name, one room where every child from five to fifteen sat and tried their best to learn from a man who’d never taught a day in his life before the troubles came, and we hunters would head out ourselves, sometimes only six or seven of us, our animals scraggly and thin and hungry, their friends gone, their hunger and their loneliness echoing heavy inside our heads.

  That’s when I felt it so hard I thought my heart would break. When I knew how fragile it was, what we had, what was left, and how swiftly it could slip through our fingers.

  And then I’d come home from the hunt and see the massive bird circling in the sky, Ora’s black-chested buzzard eagle, its impossibility, its magnificence, and think that if such a perfect creature could come into existence maybe we had half a shot, maybe the world wasn’t fundamentally, existentially fucked.

  They went on and on, those abandoned suburbs, those rows of emptied houses where the water was poisoned or the highways gone, those communities that depended on dismantled transit systems, jobs in cities that had become savage hellholes, each one hosting a series of small-scale civil wars that added up to mass evacuations, warlord takeovers, synth-biowarfare retaliation. We stayed in those beautiful houses for as long as we could, and then we moved on.

  We’d been in that particular village for six months then, and there were only forty of us. Six months back, before the last surprise slaughter, we’d been a hundred. A year before, more than two hundred. Again and again they found us.

  Sometimes we’d meet other communities, nomads like ourselves or settlers clinging hard to a single block or spread of buildings. Some of them were awful, although the worst of the warlords stayed south of the old border from a malignant, terminal case of patriotism, which was part of why we fled to Canada in the first place. Most of those we met up there were decent, good people trying to survive, usually with some kind of unusual belief or practice or technological thing that had gotten them ostracized from wherever they came from. Once in a while, when the winter was bad or a crop needed working and our communities decided to link up temporarily, we’d talk internally about opening up to them. Admitting them. Sharing our blood; letting them bond.

  Blasphemy, unthinkable. Some of us, the thought of it made our skin crawl. But that wasn’t why I said no. I said no because sharing our blood meant passing on a death sentence.

  We knew they’d never stop. They’d find us, they’d come for us. The Scourge, the Plague, the Pestilent, they called themselves all kinds of names they thought sounded scary, but we knew them for what they were: poor dumb hungry fools like us, who’d had everything taken from them, just like us, whose anger turned outward because it’d been carefully stoked that way. Powerful people made bad decisions that brought the whole country sputtering to a bloody standstill, thousands of people who had been part of the problem, caused something catastrophically bad to happen, and every one of them found a scapegoat. A few got caught, sent to jail, strung up, kidnapped, and beheaded on the net for all to see, but mostly the Bad Guys sicced their victims against each other and snuck away while the poor fucks were scratching each other’s eyes out.

  For the pharma corps, that was us. Us, and a handful of other communities of people who’d gotten terrible afflictions or terrifying gifts, or, more often, one that was actually the other. Deregulation had been ugly. People were tested on without their knowledge, or lied to about what was being tested and why.

  We shouldn’t have existed. We were proof that somebody had been up to something terrible. And that somebody skillfully inflamed the passions of a bunch of fundamentalist gun nuts, talked about us as abominations, breaches of God’s law that mankind should have dominion over the animals, and of course those poor stupid fucks were only too happy to believe
it, too eager to blame a bunch of people who were different and just wanted to be left alone. Ages ago, it had been the Immigrants, or the Blacks, always someone to push around, what this country was built on, I’ve taken everything from you and now I’m going to tell you it’s your neighbor’s fault because he looks different from you.

  Kids at school, Ora working, and me out on the hunt, that’s when I felt the fear. That’s when I knew how helpless we were. I felt it all through me and I wanted to stay home, never let them go, stand in the doorway waiting with my weapon for the bad men and women who would dare try to hurt the ones I loved, even if I knew there were too many of them, that they had weapons we should have been terrified of, that I’d die swiftly.

  A couple of traders, heading north, told us they’d seen the Plague ships. Dozens of pelts hanging from the sides. The skinned animal companions of our dead comrades.

  “Could be a trap,” some hunters said, so most of them stayed behind. I was the only one left with an orca, the one with the best chance of scoring intel and escaping, or inflicting real damage if it came to a battle. They sent me and I didn’t say a word, not even when I held Ora and the babies to me and knew we might never see each other again. But that’s what we were, what we lived with, what those kids with cameras could never capture. That’s what we’d never let them see, because they had no right to it. No one did. Not them and not the people who would watch their work, the Whole World they were going to Tell, who would see us, and feel sad for us, and then go on merrily pretending the world wasn’t burning down around them.

  We went south along the coast. The waters got worse the farther we went, thick with toxic sludge, the food scarcer. We never found any sign of the Plague ships. We turned around, went back. Went home. The last place home had been.