by Peter Watts
Bulk Food
Peter Watts
Laurie Channer
Bulk Food
by Peter Watts & Laurie Channer
This story has that certain verissimilitude that speaks of first-hand experience.
During my brief tenure as a credentialed whore at UBC’s Marine Mammal Unit, I interacted extensively with aquarium apologists, animal rights activists, and behind-the-scenes grunts in their natural habitats. I observed them. I took notes. I resisted the temptation to toss them cookies as a reward for their performances, as I resisted the (somewhat stronger) temptation to break their fucking skulls over the endless political bullshit that kept me from doing any real biology.
What I couldn’t resist was the temptation to write this story. I had a lot of help from my collaborator—not so much on the biology perhaps, but definitely on the funny bits. “Bulk Food” first appeared in On Spec in 1999; the illustration that ran with it is on display in the Gallery.
The science—the resident/transient stuff, the infant-mortality rates, all the chrome that predates The Breakthrough—is pretty much legit. Race Rocks is a real marine mammal hangout. Those familiar with the layout of the Vancouver Public Aquarium might experience a certain sense of deja vu as they follow Doug Largha on his adventures. The characters themselves are, sadly, more real than you’d like to believe; in fact, even the names bear a certain (but utterly nonprosecutable) similarity to actual public figures on both sides of the whales-in-captivity debate.
God help me, looking back I almost miss those duplicitous scumbags.
Bulk Food
Anna Marie Hamilton, Animal Rights Microstar, bastes in the media spotlight just outside the aquarium gates. Her followers hang on every movement, their placards rising and falling like cardboard whitecaps to the rhythm of their chant: two, four, six, eight, Transients are what we hate—
One whale-hugger, bedecked in a sandwich board reading Eat the Transients, shouts over the din at a nearby reporter: “Naw, it’s not about the homeless—it’s a whale thing, man…”
The reporter isn’t really listening. Anna Marie has just opened her mouth. The chanting dies instantly. It’s always interesting to hear what Anna Marie Hamilton says. It changes so often, these days. Back before the Breakthrough, she was actually trying to free the whales. She was going around calling them prisoners, and hostages, for Christ’s sake.
“Save the whales…” she begins.
The reporter grunts, disappointed. That again…
Over at the turnstiles, Doug Largha swipes his debit card and passes through. The protesters register vaguely on his radar. Back in his student days, he considered joining, but only with the hope of scoring with some of those touchy-feely whale chicks. The things he did, back then, to get laid.
Hell. The things he does now…
* * *
A foghorn calls across the Strait. Visibility’s low on both sides of the world; the murk is gray above the waterline, green below.
The sea around Race Rocks is empty. This place used to be a wildlife sanctuary. Now it’s a DMZ.
Two hundred meters out from the islands, perimeter sensors listen patiently for intruders. There are none. The day’s too cold for tourists, too foggy for spies, too damn wet for most terrestrial mammals. Nobody tries to cross over the line. Even under the line, traffic is way down from the old days. An occasional trio of black-and-white teardrops, each the size of a school bus. Every now and then a knife-edged dorsal fin, tall as a man. Nothing else.
There was a lot more happening out here a few years ago. Race Rocks used to be crawling with seals, sea lions, Dall’s porpoises. It was a regular Who’s Who back then: Eschrichtius, Phocoena, Zalophus, Eumetopias.
All that meat has long since been cleaned out. Just one species comes through here these days: Orcinus. Nobody asks these visitors for ID. They’ve got their own way of doing things.
Five kilometers east, the commercial trawler Dipnet wallows forward at half throttle. Vague gray shapes crowd restlessly along the gunwales, slick, wet, hooded against the soupy atmosphere. Even a fog that drains all color from the world can’t dampen the enthusiasm on board. Snatches of song drift across the waves, male and female voices in chorus.
“And they’ll know we are sisters by our love, by our love…”
Twenty-five meters down, a string of clicks ratchets through the water column. It sounds like the drumming of impatient fingers.
* * *
Doug’s got everything figured. He’s found the perfect position; right next to the rim, where the gangway extends over the tank like a big fiberglass tongue. Other spectators, with less foresight or less motivation, fill the bleachers ringing the main tank. Plexi splashguards separate them from a million gallons of filtered seawater and the predatory behemoth within. On the far side of the tank, more fiberglass and a few tons of molded cement impersonate a rocky coastline. Every few moments a smooth black back rolls across the surface, its dorsal fin stiff as a horny penis. No floppy-fin syndrome here, no siree. This isn’t the old days.
The show is due to start momentarily. Doug uses the time to go over the plan once more. Twenty seconds from tongue to gallery. Another thirty-five to the gift shop. Fifty-five seconds total, if he doesn’t run into anyone. Perhaps sixty if he does. He’ll beat them all. Doug Largha is a man on a mission.
A fanfare from the poolside speakers. A perky blonde emerges through a sudden hole in the coastal facade, wearing the traditional garb of the order: white shorts and a ducky blue staff shirt. An odd-looking piece of electronics hangs off her belt. A headset mike arcs across one cheek. The crowd cheers.
Behind the blonde, some Japanese guy hovers in the wings with an equally-Japanese kid of about twelve. The woman waves them on deck as she greets the audience.
“Good afternoon!” she chirps resoundingly over the speakers.
“Welcome to the aquarium, and welcome to today’s whale show!”
More applause.
“Our special guest today is Tetsuo Yamamoto, and his father, Herschel.” The woman raises one arm over the water. “And our other special guest is, of course, Shamu!”
Doug snorts. They’re always called Shamu. The Aquarium doesn’t put much thought into naming killer whales these days.
“My name is Ramona, and I’ll be your naturalist today.” She waits for applause. There isn’t much, but she acknowledges it like a standing ovation and goes into patter. “Now of course, we’ve been able to understand Orcan ever since The Breakthrough, but we still can’t speak it—at least, not without some very expensive hardware to help us with the higher frequencies. Fortunately our state-of-the-art translation software, developed right here at the Aquarium, lets our species talk to each other. I’ll be asking Shamu to do some behaviors especially so Tetsuo here can interact with him.”
Figures the kid would be center stage. Probably some Japanese rite of passage. Number One Son looks like a typical clumsy thumb-fingered preadolescent. This could be the day.
“As you may have learned from our award-winning educational displays,” Ramona continues brightly, “our coast is home to two different orca societies, Residents and Transients. Both societies are ruled by the oldest females—the Matriarchs—but beyond that they have don’t have much in common. In fact, they actively hate each other.”
A rhythmic stomping begins from somewhere in the crowd. Ramona cranks up the smile and the volume, and forges ahead. Research and Education: that’s the aquarium’s motto, and they’re sticking to it. You don’t get to the good stuff until you’ve learned something.
“Now we’ve known since the nineteen-seventies that Transients hunt seals, dolphins, even other whales, while the Residents feed only on fish. We didn’t know why until
after The Breakthrough, though. It turns out that Residents are the killer whale version of animal-rights activists!” This is obviously supposed to be a joke. Nobody’s laughed at that line since Doug started casing this place over a year ago, but the song remains the same.
Unfazed, Ramona continues: “Yes, the Residents consider it unethical to eat other mammals. Transients, on the other hand, believe that their gods have given them the right to eat anything in the ocean. Each group regards the other as immoral, and Residents and Transients have not been on speaking terms for hundreds of years. Of course, we at the Aquarium haven’t taken sides. Most humans know better than to interfere in the religious affairs of others.”
Ramona pauses. A faint chant of assembled voices drifts into the silence from beyond the outer wall:
“Hey ho— hey ho— the Ma triarchs have got to go—”
Ramona smiles. “And despite what some people might think,”
she continues, “there’s no such thing as a vegetarian orca.”
* * *
Not yet, anyway.
Dipnet chugs steadily west. Her cargo of ambassadors scans the waves for any sign of the natives, their faith too strong to falter before anything so inconsequential as zero visibility. Not everyone gets to commune with an alien intelligence. A superior intelligence, in many ways.
Not in every way, of course. Many on the Dipnet long for the good old days of moral absolutes, the days when Meat Was Murder only when Humans ate it. Everything was so clear back then, to anyone who wasn’t a puppet of the Industrial-Protein Complex. There was a ready answer to anything the Ignorantsia might ask:
How come it’s okay for sharks to kill baby seals? Because sharks aren’t moral agents. They can’t see the ethical implications of their actions.
How come it’s not okay for people to kill baby seals? Because we can.
Now orcas are moral agents too. They talk. They think. They reason. Not that that’s any surprise to Dipnet’s passengers, of course—they knew the truth way back when all those bozo scientists were insisting that orcas were basically chimps with fins. But sometimes, too much insight can lead to the wrong kind of questions, questions that distract one from the truth. Questions like:
How come it’s okay for orcas to kill baby seals, but we can’t?
If only those idiot scientists hadn’t barged in and proved everything. Now there’s no choice but to get the orcas to give up meat.
The Residents have the greatest moral potential. At least they draw the line at fish. The Transients remain relentlessly bull-headed in their mammalvory, but perhaps the Residents can be brought to full enlightenment. Back on shore, one of the west coast’s best-known Kirlian nutritionists is working tirelessly on alternate ways to meet Orcinus’ dietary requirements. She’s already had some spectacular successes with her own cats. Not only is a vegan diet vastly more efficient than conventional pet foods—the cats eat only a fraction of what they used to—but the felines have so much more energy now that they’re always out on the prowl. You hardly ever see them at home any more.
Not everything goes so well, of course. There’ve been setbacks.
In hindsight, it may have been premature to dump that thousand heads of Romaine lettuce onto A4-Pod last summer during their spring migration. Not only did the Residents fail to convert to Veganism, but apparently they’d actually been considering certain exceptions to their eat-no-mammals policy. Fortunately, everyone on the boat had made it back okay.
But that’s in the past. Live and learn. Today, it is enough to stand in solidarity with the Residents against the mammalphagous Transient foe, to add Human voices in peaceful protest for a just cause. The moral education can come later. Now it is time to make friends.
The men and women of the Dipnet have the utmost faith in their abilities in this regard. They’re ready, they’re willing, they’re the best of the best.
What else could they be? Every last one of them was hand-picked by Anna-Marie Hamilton.
* * *
Shamu sails past Doug in mid-air, his ivory belly a good two meters above water level. Their eyes meet. For all this talk about killer whale intelligence, it still looks like a big dumb fish to Doug.
It belly-flops. A small tsunami climbs the splashguards. A few scattered voices go oooooh.
“Now, Shamu is a Transient, so of course he’d never normally eat fish,” Ramona announces. This is not entirely true. Back before the Breakthrough, fish was all captive Transients ever got. A decent meal plan was one of the first things they negotiated when the language barrier fell. “So to feed him what he really wants, he knows he has to hide for a bit.”
Ramona touches a control on her belt and speaks into the mike. What’s coming out of the speakers now isn’t English. It sounds more like fingernails on a blackboard.
Shamu spits back a series of clicks and sinks below the surface.
Waves surge back and forth across the tank, playing themselves out against the walls. Doug, standing on tiptoes, can just barely make out the black-and-white shape lurking near the bottom of the tank like a squad car at a radar trap.
Peripheral movement. Doug glances up as a great chocolate-colored shape lumbers out onto the deck. It’s twice the size of the man who herds it onstage with a little help from an electric cattle prod.
“Some of you may recognize this big bruiser.” Ramona’s switched back to English. “Yes, this is a Steller sea lion. When he was just a pup, scientists from the North Pacific Fishing Consortium—one of the aquarium’s proudest sponsors— rescued him and some of his friends from the wild. They were part of a research project that was intended to promote the conservation of sea lions in the North Pacific.”
The sea lion darts its head back and forth, snorting like a horse.
Its wet, brown eyes blink stupidly.
“And not a moment too soon. As you may know from our ever-popular Pinniped habitat, Stellers were declared extinct in the wild just five years ago. This is now one of the only places in the world where you can still see these magnificent creatures, and we take our responsibility to our charges very seriously. We go to great lengths to ensure that everything about their environment is as natural as possible.
“Including…”
Ramona pauses for effect.
“…Predators.”
A ragged cheer rises up from the bleachers. Spooked, the sea lion bobs its head like a fat furry metronome. The animal wheels around the way it came, but the guy with the prod is blocking its way.
“Please try not to make any loud noises or sudden moves,” Ramona smiles belatedly.
With a few final nudges from the cattle prod, the sea lion slides into the water. It dives immediately, finally curious about its big new home.
Apparently it discovers all it wants to in about half a second, after which it shoots from the center of the pool like a Polaris missile. It doesn’t quite achieve escape velocity and hits the water running, lunging for the edge as fast as its flippers can churn.
Shamu rises up like Shiva. One effortless chomp and the Steller explodes like a big wet piñata. A curtain of blood drenches the plexi barriers. Streamers of intestine fly through the air like shiny pink firehoses.
The audience goes wild. This is the kind of award-winning educational display they can relate to.
Shamu surges back and forth, mopping up leftover sea lion. It takes less than a minute. By the time he’s finished, Ramona has the harpoon set up on the gangway.
* * *
Two kilometers out, one of the Chosen hears a blow and alerts the others. The pilgrims again fall expectantly silent, undaunted by the fact that the first three times turned out to be the first mate blowing his nose.
To be honest, nobody here has ever heard a real orca blow, not first-hand. No civilized human being would ever patronize a whalejail, and whale-watching tours have been banned for years—they said it was a harassment issue, but everyone knows it was just Bob Finch and his aquarium industry cronies out to eliminate
the competition.
The passengers huddle quietly in the fog, straining to hear above Dipnet’s diesel cough.
Whoosh.
“There! I knew it!” And sure enough, something rolls across a fog-free patch of surface a few meters to port. “There! See?”
Whoosh. Whoosh.
Two more to starboard. Leviathan has come to greet them; her very breath seems to dispel the fog. A pale patch of tissue-paper sun lightens the sky.
There is much rejoicing. One or two people close their eyes, choosing to commune with the orcas telepathically; no truly enlightened soul would resort to crass, earth-raping technology to make contact. Several others bring out dog-eared editions of Bigg’s Guide to the Genealogy and Natural History of Killer Whales. Anna Marie has told them they’ll be meeting L1, a southern Resident pod. Hungry eyes alternately scan the pages and the rolling black flanks for telltale nicks and markings.
“Look, is that L55? See that pointy bit on the saddle patch?”
“No, it’s L2. Of course it’s L2.”
One of the telepaths speaks up. “You shouldn’t call them by their Human names. They might find it offensive.”
Chastened silence fall over the acolytes. After a moment, someone clears her throat. “Er, what should we call them then?”
The telepath looks about quickly. “Um, this one,” she points to the fin nearest the boat, “tells me she’s called, um, Sister Stargazer.”
The others ooh in unison. Their hands fly to the crystals nestled beneath their rain ponchos.
“Six-foot dorsal,” mutters the first mate. “Male.”
No one notices. “Oh, look at that big one! I think that’s the Matriarch!”
“Are you sure this is even L-Pod?” someone else asks uncertainly. “There aren’t very many of them—isn’t L1 supposed to be a big pod? And I thought I saw… that is, wasn’t that big one P-28?”
That stops everyone cold. “P-28 is Transient,” says a fortyish woman with periwinkle shells braided into her long, graying hair. “L1 is a Resident pod.” The accusation is clear. Is this man calling Anna Marie Hamilton a liar?
