Blackfish City

by Sam J. Miller

  “I’ll call the Cabinet,” she said. “The process will take a little while. They might be ready for us this evening, or it might take a day or two.”

  Fyodorovna nodded. Mute with fear, probably, from imagining what awaited her.

  We’re good, Ankit scribbled, and sent the message to the cheap screen she’d loaned to Masaaraq. Come and get me.

  Soq

  Soq pretended to focus on the cone. Their screen was stocked with every article that had ever been published on the geothermal pyramid Qaanaaq was built upon, every photograph and secret document that Go’s unruly army of AI henchsoftware could dig up or blast loose or blunder into. The five watch pods, staffed by humans, that rotated around it. The repair bots that slid ceaselessly across its surface, scouring away grit and seaweed and pumping polymers into chinks and cracks and holes and aging gaskets. The complex shifting algorithms that governed the famous ten-thousand-strong aquadrone swarm that circled the pyramid watching for saboteurs both human and mechanical.

  But every eight, ten seconds, Soq’s eyes flitted up to Go’s cabin. Still no sign of her. Workers came and went, responding to messaging, but Go herself stayed hidden. Locked inside. Busy with other things. And had been, ever since Soq arrived knowing that Go was their mother.

  Soq had requested an audience. Had knocked on the door, pinged her, messaged her every way Soq knew how. Even stooped to sending a message to Dao, who was off on one of his eternal errands. No response.

  The shivers still hit Soq every half hour or so. A wash of breaks imagery that Soq could physically feel, trembling up from the soles of their feet. But different now. They had been, ever since Masaaraq dripped her blood over Soq’s wound. Less pain. Less bewilderment and confusion.

  Could it be that easy? Was nanobonder blood the cure for the breaks?

  Twenty main lines connected each Arm to the cone. Eighteen for heat, evenly spaced from end to end. Two for electricity generation, terminating at substations in the middle and at the tip of each. Big buildings like the Cabinet had dedicated lines, separate conduits that branched off from the main near the surface.

  Where was Masaaraq? Soq wanted to share what they’d found, plan assaults, ask a thousand questions about the nanites currently making millions of themselves inside Soq’s body, but she, too, was off on an errand.

  Soq deployed drones bought through third parties, sent them on collision courses with points all over the pyramid. The smaller ones were neutralized with sonic stun blasts. Suicide drones slammed into the bigger ones. Others got bogged down in clouds of synthetic hagfish slime, trawled with scrambler pulse lines, blasted with old-fashioned bullets.

  So. Lots of defense modes. Soq certainly hadn’t been able to identify all of them; the closer something got, the more violent the response that was probably waiting for it.

  Shouts from the railing. Soq sprinted in that direction.

  Masaaraq. Riding the orca—riding Atkonartok. With a woman behind her, looking terrified and entirely unprepared for the freezing water they were half-submerged in, arms tight around Masaaraq’s midsection. They got off and began the climb up the side of Go’s ship. The new woman stopped to look back, and the whale waved one sharp massive fin.

  “Get me Go,” Masaaraq said to the nearest flunky when they reached the deck. “And Kaev.”

  The crime boss came quickly. Soq thought, Maybe that’s what I need to do to get an audience with my mother. Make a grander entrance. But that was silly. Go wouldn’t talk to them no matter how spectacularly Soq asked. Because she was ashamed? In denial? Angry?

  “Here,” Masaaraq said, throwing a large wet dark bundle at Go’s feet.

  “What’s—” Go kicked at it, and then paled.

  Dao’s gray coveralls. Bloody, and soaked in saltwater. Gasps went through the crowd. Soq realized they hadn’t seen Dao for a day or two, had assumed he was off somewhere being a dick to strangers. If I’m going to succeed at syndicate life I will need to get much better about staying tuned in to the gossip mill, they realized.

  “He was going to kill her,” Masaaraq said.

  “Then probably she needed killing,” Go said, eyes wet with rage and dancing back and forth between the two wet women in front of her.

  “I came here the other day, to deliver a message,” the strange woman said. Under her arm she carried a cage with a drenched shivering monkey. “He thought I was, I don’t know, working for your enemies? He chased me, tried to choke me.”

  Soq got the sense there was more she wanted to say, but she stopped. Someone went to get a blanket, draped it over the shivering woman. She was striking, dark skin and strong proud shoulders.

  “Where’s the rest of him?” Go asked.

  Masaaraq pointed to the killer whale, her fin like an onyx knife stabbing out of the water.

  Go spat. Her hand moved to the pommel of her machete, then withdrew. “Well? What was this message that got my most trusted friend killed?”

  “That’s on him,” Masaaraq said. “He should have known better than to go around choking women. That’s a pretty good way to end up with the top of your skull sliced off.”

  “Now, you listen—” Go took a step, but then bit her lip and turned to the strange woman. “Well?”

  A door opened. Soq turned to see Kaev emerging from Go’s cabin. And something clicked. Soq saw Go see it, and more than one of the assembled henchpeople. The shoulders, the skin tone, the forever-wide-open eyes. All the same. The shivering wet woman and Kaev were siblings. They had to be. Dao might not have seen it, because Dao didn’t see people. He read people like books, saw emotions, honesty, deceit, but he didn’t see the face beneath those feelings.

  “Kaev,” Masaaraq said. “This is your sister. Ankit.”

  Soq could not recall ever having seen a smile as beautiful as the one that broke across their father’s face. The bear, too, smiled, though Soq would not have believed that polar bears could do so. It charged forward, uninhibited by human restraint, prompting screams and gasps, but Ankit held her ground, and when it reached her it stopped, pushed its head against hers, settled back onto its hind legs.

  People laughed. People clapped. Kaev followed his bear, gave his newfound sister a hug. Go looked somewhere between bored and angry.

  “I’ve known about you for some time,” Ankit said. “Since I got my job at the Arm manager’s office. I went to find you once. Tried to introduce myself. You weren’t making any sense, and you got really emotional. You were . . . I don’t know, howling. I was frightened of you. I’m sorry.”

  Kaev shook his head, looked devastated. “I am . . . I wasn’t . . .”

  “I know.”

  Soq had a family. And it kept on getting bigger. Would continue to do so, since they were about to bust someone out of an impregnable psychiatric center.

  “I have a way into the Cabinet,” Ankit said to Kaev. “I’ll be bringing someone into Protective Custody. If we time it right, I’ll be on the inside to help when you launch your assault.”

  Go sneered, and Ankit turned to her.

  “And I came to tell you that I think we have a common enemy in Martin Podlove.” Ankit took out her screen, played that video everyone had been passing around. “And I know who he is, the guy who killed his grandson.”

  “So what,” Go said. “Everybody does. He says his name, right on the recording.”

  “But he’s in hiding,” Ankit said. “Has been, ever since this. And I know how to reach him.”

  Soq hadn’t watched it. The past couple weeks, Soq had been too busy to stay in the traffic-trawling loop. They’d heard about it—some boy, burned alive by a methane flare. Soq watched now, with idle curiosity at first—and then sucked in a short shocked breath, seeing the boy before the flames consumed him.

  Fill.

  “I fucked him,” Soq said, but no one heard them.

  Kaev

  What’s the matter?”

  Go didn’t respond, didn’t roll over. Shouts and dragging sounds from the
deck, but the porthole beside the bed showed only a placid sea and sky slowly turning the deep black gray of Qaanaaq before dawn.

  “I know you’re awake. You always woke up so early. Even back then. Are you crying?”

  “No,” Go said, wiping her face.

  Kaev sat up. Her sheets were expensive and he liked the way they felt. He would gladly have stayed there all day. He would gladly have stayed there forever.

  “What if this is the last time?” Go said, and he knew how much it cost her to speak like this, to be vulnerable. “I lost you for so long—what if after all of that, one of us dies today?”

  “You didn’t lose me,” Kaev said gently, without anger, without bitterness. “Not really. You had to do what you did because somebody forced you to. If anything, I was taken from you.”

  “True,” Go said. “But I can’t let that happen again.”

  “You’d still have Soq. I mean, unless they get killed, too. Which I guess is possible.”

  Go laughed. “They hate me. Or they would, if they had any sense.”

  “They don’t hate you.”

  “Now you’re such an expert on human emotions all of a sudden?”

  “Yeah,” Kaev said, sitting up. He liked being naked. He never had, before. “All of a sudden I am.”

  “Thank god for that polar bear.”

  “Amen.”

  Go rolled over, and smiled at what she saw. “You’re magnificent.” She ran a hand along one hairy leg, up his stomach, to nestle in the forest of his chest.

  “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  Outside, the noises settled. The shouts stopped. Preparations were at an end; the operation was about to begin.

  Kaev said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  Go shrugged.

  “Why now? All these years you’ve been content with where you are. You never made a power play before like the one you’ve been making, trying to go beyond being just a syndicate boss.”

  “I was never content,” Go said. “I was always planning. Laying the groundwork for this.”

  “So . . . why now?”

  “A bunch of reasons. The time was right. There were new vulnerabilities. New . . . opportunities.”

  “Go on . . .”

  Go shut her eyes. “I’ll sound like an idiot.”

  “You always do.”

  “Shut up,” she said, softly. Had he ever seen her so vulnerable? “It’s the stupidest thing. It was City Without a Map that got me started on this. Have you ever listened to it?”

  Kaev nodded.

  “I can’t explain it. Something about the broadcasts spoke to me. And not just in the words that they said. But the way that they said it. It got me thinking. I’d been biding my time, waiting . . . for what? So many of us here, powerless and alone. Keeping our heads down, keeping to ourselves. But we aren’t separate. We are one thing, and there’s power in that.”

  Kaev stopped himself from laughing. “You sure we’re talking about the same City Without a Map? The one I’ve been listening to never said shit about crime syndicates declaring gang war on shareholders.”

  “It’s called subtext, Kaev. Did you learn that word when you got a polar bear and became a fucking genius?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  They lay there, unspeaking, for a long time.

  “This is idiotic,” Go said after a while, sitting up, and Kaev could almost hear it, feel it crackle in the air, the armor she put on, the psychic bulwark, the magic shield that protected her from harm. The walling off of every emotion, every human thing. “Why are we doing this? It’s not our fight.”

  “It’s my mother,” he whispered, surprised at how hard that word was to say, how good it felt.

  “It’s a woman you’ve never met. Who’s been locked up in the Cabinet for so long that she’s probably mentally damaged beyond hope of repair.”

  “Even if she were an empty shell—even if she weren’t my mother—I’d do it for Masaaraq. She saved my life. She rescued me from . . . I don’t know. Walking death? A lifetime of constant pain? This is the love of her life we’re talking about. Someone she’s spent thirty years hunting for. What kind of person would I be, if I took a gift like that and refused to help her?”

  “The kind of person who has a chance. With me. With a real life.”

  “We still have that,” he said, and got out of bed. The room was cold. She’d always kept her quarters cold. Uncomfortable. To discourage torpor, to spur her on to constant motion. But he enjoyed the bare concrete floor against his feet, the air that prickled his skin. He took his time getting dressed, regretting each new garment that came between them.

  “I love you,” he said, pants in hand.

  She put a hand on each muscular thigh. She pulled him closer.

  “I have to go!” he said, laughing, and hopped away.

  “Fine,” she said, laughing too, but the laugh faded fast from her voice, and by the time she said, “Have it your own way,” she was every inch the brutal granite wall who had been his heartless boss for so long.

  Masaaraq was waiting for him, standing there with the bear, staring at the door to Go’s cabin. Angry, at first, to be kept waiting for so long, but then the anger faded and she looked like she might cry. From happiness, Kaev knew, because he was such an expert on human emotions all of a sudden, because he could see how close it was, whatever majestic blissful feeling of family unity the orcamancer had spent so long stalking. He could see how much she loved him, how familiar he was to her, even if she hadn’t seen him since he was so small she could hold him in her arms.

  “Hey, Liam,” he said, throwing his arms around the bear’s neck.

  “It’s an idiotic name,” she said.

  “It’s growing on me.”

  Together they walked to the railing, climbed onto the lift. It brought them down to a little boat, the same tri-power vessel she’d come to Qaanaaq in, and then it went back up for Liam, who was too big and heavy to ride it with them.

  “Atkonartok,” she said, and a few seconds later the killer whale surfaced.

  “Good god,” Kaev whispered, realizing why some of the post-nomad settlements on North America’s west coast worshiped them as gods. “It’s incredible. Can I touch it?”

  Masaaraq nodded. He reached out his hand, slowly, more frightened than he thought he’d have been. Wet rubber, he’d been thinking, or hard plastic, but the orca felt like nothing he’d ever felt before. Some higher, better form of flesh. Surprisingly warm. Masaaraq unmoored the boat and they began to row.

  “Yesterday I went for a walk,” he said. “Along the Arm. Looking for noodles. The farther I got from Liam, the more I got this feeling. In my stomach, in my head. An ache, but physical and psychological at the same time. Like being heartbroken and having food poisoning all at once.”

  She nodded. “It’d get worse as time went on. You’d have a week or so before you started to experience cognitive difficulties.”

  “How long before I was—like I used to be?”

  “A month, if Liam was still alive. Maybe six weeks.”

  “And if he wasn’t?”

  “A lot less.”

  They rowed in silence the rest of the way. They had an hour before full dawn.

  “Go’s bots say two hours,” Kaev said. “From the time the heat cuts out to when the protocols are likely to order an evacuation.”

  Masaaraq nodded. She stood up, stripped off her thick sealskin coat. Underneath she wore clothing made of lighter, furless skins. She pulled her hair together, piled it atop her head in an intricate structure somewhere between a coil and a nest. And then she leaped into the sea.

  “You’re not going to ride her down,” Kaev said when she surfaced with the whale beside her.

  “Too deep,” she said. “But what we need her to do, it’ll be difficult. Identifying the right geothermal vent, the right pipe branching off it, and how to break it. I’ll need to be heavily involved, and that’ll be easier if I’m in the water. Seeing
what she sees. Not hearing through our human ears.”

  The aquadrones were designed to protect the cone from human and machine attacks, as well as debris from below or wreckage from above. Animals were different. They moved like none of those things. Programmers would not have taken malicious animals bent on destruction into account, so they wouldn’t have scripted the drones to engage marine life. Masaaraq had tested Atkonartok on some of the outlying drones, and confirmed that she wouldn’t trigger an attack.

  She shut her eyes. The whale swam around to touch noses. They stayed like that, eyes closed, unmoving, for what felt to Kaev like an uncomfortably long time. Then the orca dove.

  City Without a Map: Cross Fire

  This one came later, stitched into the scrapbook of my story from a boy I met a few months down the line, who came to me as so many did, in those days, having heard of the help I could provide—Zarif, a handsome weathered Uzbek sex worker, who saw Ishmael Barron moving through the noisy chaos of Arm Eight twilight, looking lost and frightened, and called him daddy.

  “I need somewhere safe,” Barron said. “People are after me.”

  “My place, then,” Zarif said. He pinged the old man on the elevator ride up, name and face pic, and found out who was looking for him. He was going to call it in right away, claim the reward and be done with it. Then he decided that the poor old thing was about to enter a world of hurt, and figured the least he could do was give him one last beautiful thing.

  “I’m far too old to do much more than look,” Barron said, and Zarif stripped and sat by the window, where nightlamp light turned him to silver.

  “This must happen a lot. Someone just wants to confess. To tell you their story.”

  “Sure,” Zarif said. “Me and the priest, we perform very similar functions.”

  “Feels like all my life, I’ve been running from Podlovsky. He’s lost a syllable, but he’s every bit as powerful and rich as he was back then. Maybe more so. What have I achieved in the interim? What have I done to tip the scales? I’ve hurt Podlove, hurt him badly, but what good does that do to anyone but me? People like Podlove still rule this city, this planet. People like me still suffer and sweat and bleed and pay until they can’t pay anymore. We’ll both die, and soon. That should be a comfort, but it isn’t.”