Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  She went to Vince’s office and knocked. To her surprise, Rick Walters was there. He smiled at her.

  “Sorry you’re leaving so soon. I feel we barely met. Vince, I can take Varsha to the airport. Give us a chance to have a final chat.”

  She smiled at him.

  “It’s all right,” she said, before Vince could say anything. “Vince and I have some important things to talk about. Family stuff.”

  “Of course,” he said. He shook her hand. “I have friends in Boston. Maybe I can look you up next time I’m there.”

  He gave her hand a squeeze and went out of the room. When his footsteps had died away, Vince shut the door. His face had a closed, remote look.

  “Vince,” she said. “Before we go, I have to ask you something.”

  “Sit,” he said. He still looked wary. She had to trust him. Rima had. She took the plunge.

  “I need to know what happened to my aunt’s prototype of the submersible boat,” she said. “The one that could sail on the ocean and fly under water. Julie mentioned she’d seen something being assembled in Rima’s lab. I called the machinist in Utqiagvik and asked him what parts he received. I’m no engineer but nothing he described sounded like parts of the amphibious boat she was building.”

  There was a long silence.

  “How do you know about the boat? Julie told you?”

  “Only casually. But—I have been meaning to tell you—I found my aunt’s diary and some papers. She left them for me in a place she knew I would know to look. She didn’t say she had completed the prototype. But I got the impression she had. I need to know—did she and Jimmy take the prototype with them on their last trip?”

  “They went on the research boat—you know that—the pieces were found on the seabed— there was no sign of a submersible boat.“

  “But the research boat was a large enough vessel to hold the prototype, wasn’t it? They took it with them, they must have! A book inside a book, a boat inside a boat—Vince, I need to know—my family needs to know—if there’s any chance—”

  She couldn’t speak. She swallowed hard.

  “What do you want me to say?” Vince put his head in his hands. He looked at her after a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to believe they’re both alive. Jimmy—he would tell me since he was a little kid, going to school, or a whaling trip, or California—he would tell me he’d always come back. Do you think I don’t want to believe it? But I can’t give you false hope. What would you do—tell Rima’s parents she might still be alive? What if she isn’t? True, they didn’t find the remains of the ambiphian. But the winds and the currents here are strong and unpredictable. It could take years before the rest of the debris showed up.”

  “They would have radioed you,” Varsha said. “If they were alive.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t be so easy,” Vince said. “And if they are really out there, there are reasons why they would not have wanted us to know.”

  “Not wanted us to know? My grandfather is old. I don’t know how he has survived this. My grandmother does nothing but knit all day. My parents are fighting more than ever. This is destroying us. My aunt wouldn’t keep it from us if she were alive!”

  She had raised her voice. Vince motioned her to speak softly.

  “Listen, Varsha, there’s a lot more at stake than you think,” he said. “I’m going to trust you as you have trusted me. If they wanted to hide the prototype, don’t you think they could have just dismantled it and hidden the parts? This is much bigger than you think.”

  “Please explain,” Varsha said. “I deserve this much.”

  “It’s time to go,” said Vince. “We have plenty of time to talk in the car. Please—carry Rima’s diary and the papers on your person.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “In my backpack. I’ll show you in the car.”

  After the good-byes were done, they sat in Vince’s Land Rover while the engine heated, looking at Rima’s diary and the papers. Vince grabbed a battered camera from the back seat and took some pictures. “For Emma,” he said. “And for safety. I think these names here are the people who may know something about what Jimmy and Rima intended. I’ll make some inquiries, discreetly.”

  “Vince,” Rima said, “she must have drawn the boat designs on her laptop. Through some kind of engineering software, like DesignWorks. You told me earlier her laptop had been lost with her, but she might have saved the design on a klipdrive or something. When you get back—look inside your computer—unscrew the base, and see if there’s anything small like that, tucked away.”

  Vince looked startled, then nodded. He looked at his watch, sighed, and started the Land Rover.

  The sun sent long rays over the tundra and the frozen sea. The windows of the station glowed in the yellow light. There was a wind blowing, moaning softly, whipping up skeins of last night’s snow from the ground.

  “Jimmy was interested in whale communication,” Vince said as the Land Rover lurched over the ice road. “But he was also curious about the possibility of interspecies communication. I don’t just mean human-to-whale, but whales with other species. Nobody really thinks much of that among the scientists. It’s not in the white man’s way of thinking, to think that there are other species than him, who might want to talk to each other. In our stories polar bears and whales and all the other creatures talk to each other as well as to people. To the white man that’s just kid’s stuff, or just mythology. But Jimmy, he wanted to know if it was possible. He’d noticed some odd things.”

  They bumped along the coast road. The sun was higher in the sky today. It would edge up over the horizon a little every day, until it vanquished the night for nearly six months of the year.

  “What odd things?”

  “Unusual behavior among some whales. Bowheads hanging out with humpbacks. Blue whales down in the Atlantic lowering their call notes—they call much more bass than bowheads—so they reached right across an ocean basin. Jimmy thought it was logical that the whales had noticed the conditions of climate change—the warming ocean, the changing currents and chemistry. How could they not? Maybe they had always talked to each other. Modern humans are the only species that keeps apart from the others. Not so the other animals. The white man doesn’t see what’s not in his scheme of things.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I like civilization—I’m not blaming it for everything. Among my people there is a lot of division on such issues—how do we find balance between the benefits of the modern way of life and the wisdom of the traditional teachings? But back to Jimmy.

  “So Jimmy had this idea that if humans are to understand whales, you’ve got to do it as much as possible in the whale’s environment. Drones, underwater robots, tracking, all that’s great, but if you can’t follow the whales on their Arctic migrations, if you can’t dive deep with them, or swim under the ice, you won’t know the context in which they sing their songs. More than anything you won’t have a relationship with them of mutuality. All true knowing is mutual, Jimmy used to say.”

  “I hear that bowheads live very long,” Varsha said. “In her diary my aunt wonders what they think about, talk about, for two hundred years.”

  “Yes, that was the sort of thing that fascinated Jimmy. He wanted to understand how whales talked to each other and to other species, if there was maybe a common language among the sea mammals.”

  “But why the need for secrecy? Doesn’t GaiaCorp already have amphibious boats?”

  “Not like this one—energy efficient, small and compact, but with enough room for an extended stay. And Jimmy is—was—a hunter, he could keep them alive—”

  He looked out over the great vista rolling past them, and was silent.

  “I don’t understand why—if they really meant to go out deliberately into the ocean and fake their deaths—why?”

  “Jimmy suspected that the bowhead whales were learning from the humpbacks how to disable the TRexes. Humpbacks use sound to stun fish. Sound means everything to whale
s. When the TRexes use their airgun arrays, it’s like having an explosion happen ten times a second. Sometimes for weeks or months. If whales are close enough they would get deafened. A whale uses sound for communication and to find its way in the dark under the ice. A deaf whale is better dead.

  “Meanwhile Rima learned from scientists in other places around the world that GaiaCorp’s geoengineering is failing. Not just that, but the crop failures in your part of the world, and the toxic algal blooms in the South Atlantic, are a direct result of it. Worse, the geoengineers knew they would fail. It’s all about money and power, in the end.”

  “So they can’t afford to let the TRexes be destroyed?”

  “We can’t afford to let it get out that it’s not just other humans but potentially other species who are fighting back. The white man almost wiped out the bowheads in the time of the Yankee whalers. Do you think they would hesitate to do so again?”

  “This is crazy. This is just crazy.”

  “This is the world.”

  “You’ve just destroyed everything I took for granted about the world.”

  “Rima used to say: never take anything for granted.”

  She looked out over the frozen sea. Somewhere beyond the horizon was open water. It was hard to imagine that somewhere on the open sea, or perhaps inside it, two people in an amphibious boat were sailing with the bowhead whales.

  The town came up suddenly around them. Over the sea ice, tiny figures could be seen on snowmobiles, hauling sleds behind them.

  “They’re cutting the trails,” Vincent said. “If you were staying longer you could have gone on a whale hunt.”

  “I don’t know how much—how much more I can take of the world,” Varsha said. She cupped her hands over her eyes for a moment. Then, as Vince pulled up at the airport parking, she looked at him.

  “What do I tell my parents? My grandparents?”

  “That’s your call. Just—don’t let it get around, what I’ve told you. You can tell them, if you like, that maybe there’s a chance they are alive. But keep the other things to yourself. This is for their sake as well as yours. There are larger forces here at play than you and I.”

  “I feel like I’m in an Augs adventure story. Except there’s nothing like this in the files.”

  “I enjoy VR games from time to time. But you got to live in the world.”

  “Thanks for everything, Vince. I am glad we talked, and I’m very glad I got to meet Emma. If— if you hear anything—”

  “Of course.”

  He helped her into the check-in line with her two suitcases. The small airport was filled with people—men in the uniforms of Arctic Energy, a knot of coast guard officials, and Eskimo families hauling supplies in sacks and boxes, laughing and chattering. It no longer felt quite so strange.

  “We’ll meet again, I have a feeling,” Vince said, “so I’ll say ‘see you later,’ not good-bye.”

  He shook her hand, smiled at her, a sudden, warm smile. Then he was gone. She blinked back tears and set her chin.

  In the plane she thought of the diary and the diagrams in her backpack, and the secrets they carried. She thought of Chester waiting hopefully at the airport, and what she would have to say to him, and the life she had mapped out for herself. She thought of the house in Patna, and the aging faces of her grandparents.

  The tundra dipped and glittered in the sun as the plane turned upward into the sky. The houses vanished. At this height, she saw the open water at the edge of the shore ice, and the expanse of the Arctic, broken here and there by white patches of floating ice. She thought of the great whales traveling in circles through the cold, dark waters, feeding and calling, dreaming and singing. Perhaps at this very moment her aunt and uncle were flying through the water in their little craft, hoping she would have deciphered what they couldn’t openly say, that would bring this shattering clarity to her life, and the faint thread of hope to their families, to the world.

  Publication History

  “With Fate Conspire,” Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, 2013

  “A Handful of Rice,” Steampunk Revolution, 2012

  “Peripateia,” End of the Road, 2013

  “Lifepod,” Foundation, 2007

  “Oblivion: A Journey,” Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, 2008

  “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra,” Strange Horizons, 2010

  “Are you Sannata3159?,” Postscripts: The Company He Keeps, 2010

  “Indra’s Web,” TRSF: The Best New Science Fiction, 2011

  “Ruminations in an Alien Tongue,” Clarkesworld, 2012

  “Sailing the Antarsa,” The Other Half of the Sky, 2013

  “Cry of the Kharchal,” Clarkesworld, 2013

  “Wake-Rider,” Lightspeed, 2014

  “Ambiguity Machines: An Examination,” Tor.com, 2015

  “Requiem” is published here for the first time.

  Acknowledgments

  It is my great pleasure to acknowledge the generosity of Henry Huntington, whose help and advice made it possible for me to visit Alaska in 2014 for an academic education project on climate change. Henry’s comments on my story “Requiem” were invaluable. My heartfelt gratitude also to Santanu Chakraborty for help with the setting of my story “With Fate Conspire.” Any errors of interpretation or representation are, of course, entirely my responsibility.

  My boundless gratitude, as always, for my vast clan of family and friends scattered across spacetime and species, including but not limited to parents, daughter, siblings and sib-in-laws, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, friends who’ve become family, and family dogs, without whom I would not be who I am, let alone alive and writing today. I am especially thankful to Ashok, Ramaa, and Ruchika. A so-far habitable planet of unsurpassed gorgeousness has also been crucial to the writing of this book.

  About the Author

  Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and currently lives near Boston, MA, where she professes physics and writes. Her short stories have appeared in many Best of Year anthologies including the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and she has received the Carl Brandon Parallax award. Her books include the ALA Notable book Younguncle Comes to Town and a collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet. Learn more at vandana-writes.com.