Bulk Food

by Peter Watts

  The heretic falters in the stony silence. “Well, that’s what the Guide says.” He holds the document out like a protective amulet.

  “Give me that.” Periwinkle snatches the book away, riffles through the pages. “This is the old edition.” She waves the copyright page. “This was printed back in the nineteen -eighties, for Goddess’ sake! You’re supposed to have the new edition, the one Anna Marie approved. This is definitely L1.” Periwinkle throws the discredited volume over the side. “Bob Finch had a hand in all those old guides until ’02. You can’t trust anything from before then.”

  The wheelhouse hatch swings open. Dipnet’s captain, a gangly old salt whose ears look as though they’ve been attached upside-down, clears his throat. “Got a message coming in,” he announces over the growl of the engine. “I’ll put it on the speakers.” The hatch swings shut.

  A message! Of course, Dipnet has all the technology, the hydrophones, the computers, everything it needs for the unenlightened to communicate with both species. There’s a speaker mounted on the roof of the cabin, pointing down at the rear deck. It burps static for a moment, then:

  “Sisters. Hurry.” A squeal of feedback. “Grandmother. Says. Hello.”

  Count on crass western technology to turn a beautiful alien tongue into pidgin English.

  “Ooh,” says someone at the gunwales. “Look.” The orcas are pacing Dipnet on either side, rolling and breathing in perfect synch.

  “They want us to follow them,” Periwinkle says excitedly.

  “Yes, they do,” intones one of the telepaths. “I can feel it.”

  The orcas are so close to the boat they’re almost touching the hull. Dipnet plows straight ahead. Just as well. The whales aren’t leaving enough room for course changes anyway.

  * * *

  The chair on the gangway is obviously not meant for children.

  Ramona fusses with the straps, cranks the cross-hairs down to child-height. She offers patient instruction in the use of the harpoon. Papa-san hollers up instructions of his own in Japanese. Conflicting ones, apparently; Tetsuo, bouncing excitedly in the harness, gives nothing but grief. Herschel continues his cheerful instigation: Hey, lady, we pay ten grand for this, we do it our way thank you so much. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that Ramona’s smile shows more teeth than usual.

  This looks very promising. Doug glances back over his shoulder; the route’s still clear. Fifty-five seconds…

  Shamu rolls past on the other side of the plexi.

  The crowd laughs. Doug turns back to center stage. Ramona’s had enough; she’s jumped down from Tetsuo’s perch and is barking at Herschel in Japanese. Or maybe in sea lion. Herschel backs away, hands held up placatingly against Ramona’s advance. It’s entertaining enough, but Doug keeps his eyes on Tetsuo. The kid is the key. Adult squabbles don’t interest a ten-year-old, he’s strapped in at the controls of the best bloody video game since the parents’ groups came down on Nintendo. If it’s going to happen at all, Doug knows, it’s going to happen—

  Tetsuo squeezes the trigger.

  —Now.

  Ramona turns just in time to see the harpoon strike home. The crowd cheers. Tetsuo shrieks in delight. Shamu just shrieks, thrashing. A pink cloud puffs from his blowhole.

  Doug is already half-turned, one foot raised to motor. He checks himself: Wait for it, it still might be clean…

  “Shit! You were supposed to wait!” Ramona’s mike is off-line but it doesn’t matter; you could hear that yell all the way over in the Arctic Exhibit. She brings her translator online, barks syllables. The ringside speakers chirp and whistle. Shamu whistles back, spasming as though electrocuted. His flukes churn the water into pink froth.

  “His lung’s punctured,” Ramona calls over to the guy with the cattle prod. Prodmeister disappears backstage. Ramona wheels on Tetsuo. “You were supposed to wait until I told him to hold still! Do you want him to suffer? It’ll take days to die from a hit like that!”

  That’s it. Go.

  He knows what’s coming. Herschel, out his ten thousand dollars, will demand that his son get another chance. The Aquarium will stand firm; ten grand buys one shot, not one kill. No, sir, you can’t try again unless you’re willing to pay.

  Herschel’s own shrieks will go ultrasonic. Prodmeister will come back with another harpoon, a bigger, no-nonsense harpoon this time. Perhaps the Guests will try and wrestle it away. That’s resulted in an unfortunate accident or two.

  Doesn’t matter. Doug’s not going to be around for any of it, he’s already halfway out of the amphitheater. From the corner of his eye he can see his competition, caught flat-footed, just starting to rise from the bleachers. Some of them, closer to the main theater entrance, would still have a chance to beat him if he was going the usual route. He’s not. Doug Largha may be the first person in recorded history to have actually read the award-winning educational displays in the underwater gallery, and that gives him all the edge he needs. That’s where he’s headed now, at top speed.

  Herschel and his ten grand. Tetsuo and his lousy aim. Doug could kiss them both. When a guest makes a kill, they get to keep the carcass.

  But when they fuck up, it’s whale steaks in the gift shop.

  * * *

  Well, no one expected the whales to be such assholes.

  Certainly not Anna Marie Hamilton and her army of whale-huggers. The Gospel according to Anna Marie said that orcas (you never called them “killer whales”) were gentle, intelligent creatures who lived in harmonious matriarchal societies. Humans were ethically bound to respect their cultural autonomy. Kidnapping these creatures from the wild, tearing them from their nurturing female-centered family units and selling them into bondage for barbaric human entertainment—this went beyond mere animal abuse. This was slavery, pure and simple.

  That was all before the Breakthrough, of course. These days, it’s kind of hard to rail against the enslavement of orcas when every schoolkid knows that all orca society, Resident or Transient, is based on slavery. Always has been. The matriarchs aren’t kindly nurturing feminist grandmas, they’re eight-ton black-and-white Mommie Dearests with really big teeth. And their children aren’t treasured guardians of the next generation, either. They’re genetic commodities, a common currency for trade between pods, and who knew what uses they got put to? It’s a scientific fact that almost half of all killer whales die before reaching their first birthday.

  That infant-mortality stat has been a godsend to the aquarium industry ever since it was derived in the nineteen-seventies— Well of course it’s tragic that another calf died here in our habitat but you know, even in the wild killer whales just aren’t very good parents— but even the whalejailers were taken aback to be proven so utterly right. It didn’t take them long to recover from the shock, though. To embrace the irrefutable evidence of this kindred intelligence. To see the error of their ways. To reach out across that immense interspecies gulf with a business proposition.

  And what do you know. The Matriarchs were more than happy to cut a deal.

  * * *

  SLAVERS OF THE SEVEN SEAS, a wall-sized viewscreen shouts in capital letters. Beside it, smaller screens run looped footage already seen a million times in every living room on the continent: priests and politicians and longliners and whale-huggers, riding the Friendship Flotilla out into history to sign the first formal agreement with the Matriarch of J-Pod.

  On the other side of the gallery, past two-inch plexi, the pinkness in the water is already starting to fade.

  Doug skids to a halt in front of an orca family tree, no less boring for its catchy backlit-pastel-on-black color scheme. He scans the headings:

  G12 Pod

  G12

  G8 G27 [EXIT] G33

  There. Between G27 and G33. Evidently, municipal building codes require an emergency exit here. For some reason the aquarium has incorporated it into the Orca Family Tree, right there in plain sight as the law requires, but subtle, unobtrusive. In fact, damn near invisib
le to anyone who hasn’t actually read the genealogies line-by-line.

  This is Doug’s secret passage. He’s done his homework; the blueprints are on file at City Hall, accessible to anyone who cares to look. On the other side of this invisible door, backstage corridors run off in three separate directions, each servicing a different gallery. All of them, eventually, end up outside. One of them opens into the gift shop.

  Doug pushes at a spot on the wall. It swings open. Behind him, a muffled poomf filters through from the main tank, followed by an inhuman squeal. Doug dives through the doorway without looking back.

  Turn right. Run. Backstage, the gallery displays are ugly constructions of fiberglass and PVC. Every object gurgles or hums. Salt crusts everything. Doug’s foot slips in a puddle. He starts to go over, grabs at the nearest handhold. A rack of hip waders topples in his stead. Left. Run. A row of filter pumps tears by on one side, a bank of holding tanks on the other. A dozen species of quarantined fish eye his transit with glassy indifference.

  He rounds a corner. An unexpected barrier catches his shin. Doug sprawls across a stack of loose plywood. Splinters bury themselves in the balls of his hands.

  “Fuck!” He scrambles to his feet, ignoring the pain. There are worse things than pain. There’s the wrath of Alice if he comes home empty-handed.

  Right there: a wood-paneled door. Not one of the crappy green metal doors that are good enough for the fishfeeders and janitors, but a nice oak job with a brass handle. That’s got to be the entrance into the gift shop. He’s almost there, and it’s even opening for him, it’s opening from the other side and he dives straight through, right into the waiting bosom of the woman coming from the other direction.

  He thinks she looks familiar in the split second before they both go over. Doug catches a glimpse of someone else as a dozen vectors of force and inertia converge incompatibly on his ankle. There’s a moment of brief, bright pain—

  “Owwwww!!!!!”

  —before he hits the floor. The good news is, he lands on a carpet with a very deep pile. The bad news is, rug burn tears most of the remaining skin off his palms.

  He lies there, taking collect calls from every sensory nerve in his body. Two people are looking down at him. He forgets all about the pain when he recognizes who they are.

  Saint Anna. And the Devil Himself.

  * * *

  Dipnet has arrived.

  The perimeter is all around them: a float-line demarcated by warning buoys, a limited-entry circle a kilometer across. Scientists are only sometimes permitted here. Tourists are forbidden. But the gate swings open for Dipnet.

  Now she chugs towards the center of the Communion Zone. The fog has partially lifted—the perimeter gate fades astern, while a tiny white dot resolves in the distance ahead. Dipnet’s escort remains close on either side. They’ve said nothing since that one brief message in the Strait, although the telepaths say the orcas are brimming with goodwill and harmony.

  The floating dock is close enough to see clearly now, anchored in the center of the Zone, a white disk about twenty meters across.

  It seems featureless, beyond a few cleats for tying up. This is the way the orcas like things. This is their place, and they don’t want it cluttered with nonessentials. A place to land, a space to stand, and Race Rocks looming out of the fog in the middle distance.

  Beyond that, only orcas and ocean.

  “Is there a bathroom?” someone asks. The captain of the Dipnet shakes his head, more in resignation than answer. He pulls back on the throttle while the mate, waiting on the foredeck with a coil of nylon rope, jumps onto the platform and reels Dipnet in to dock.

  “This is it, folks,” the captain announces. “Everybody off.” The engine is still idling. “Aren’t you going to tie up?” Periwinkle asks.

  The captain shakes his head. “You’re the ambassadors. We’re just the taxi. They don’t want us in the zone while you commune.”

  Periwinkle smiles patiently. She hears the resentment in the captain’s voice, but she understands. It must be hard, seeing the Chosen Few going to make history while he just drives the boat.

  She feels sorry for him. She resolves to chant with him when he comes back to pick them up.

  The captain grunts and waves her away. He sniffs and wonders, not for the first time, if this woman remembered to clean the snails out of those shells before incorporating them into her own personal fashion statement. Or maybe it’s one of those natural fragrances they’re advertising these days.

  The passengers file onto the platform. The first mate, still holding Dipnet’s leash, leaps back onto the foredeck. The boat growls backwards, changes gear, and wallows off into the haze. The sound of her engine fades with distance.

  Eventually all is quiet again. The Chosen look about eagerly, not wanting to speak in this holy place. The orcas that guided them here have disappeared. Swells lap against the floats. The Race Rocks Lighthouse complains about the fog.

  “Hey, you guys.” It’s the heretic again. He’s watching the boat recede “When exactly are they supposed to be coming back for us?”

  The others don’t answer. This is a quiet moment, a sacred moment. It’s no time to chatter about logistics. This guy doesn’t know the first thing about reverence. Really, sometimes they wonder how he ever made the cut.

  * * *

  One whole Plexiglas wall looks into the turquoise arena of the killer whale tank; a pair of tail flukes disappear up through the surface in ratcheting increments. The opposite wall serves as little more than a frame for the biggest flatscreen monitor Doug has ever seen. Murky green water swirls across that display. Wriggling wavelight reflects off a glass coffee table in the middle of the room. An antique oak desk looms behind it like a small wooden mesa.

  In the middle of it all, Doug looks up from the floor at Anna Marie Hamilton and Bob Finch, executive director of the Aquarium. Anna Marie Hamilton and Bob Finch look back. This goes on for a moment or two.

  “Can I help you, sir?” Finch asks at last.

  “I—I think I got lost,” Doug says, experimentally putting his foot down on the floor. It hurts, but it feels limpable, not broken.

  “The viewing gallery is that way,” Anna Marie announces, pointing to a different door than the one through which Doug arrived. “And I’m in the middle of some very tough negotiating, fighting for the freedom of our spiritual sib—”

  “Actually, Ann—Ms. Hamilton, I suspect that Mr.—Mr. …”

  “Largha,” Doug says weakly.

  “I suspect that Mr. Largha isn’t all that interested in the boring details of our, er, negotiations.” Finch extends a hand, helps Doug up off the carpet. Doug stands unsteadily.

  “I was looking for—the gift shop!” His mission! Precious seconds, precious minutes irretrievably lost while all those other dorks and bozos line up to lay claim for his meat! If he doesn’t come home with the steaks, he’ll be sleeping on the sofa for a week. Doug turns and lunges towards the door he came through.

  He forgets all about his ankle for the half-second it takes for him to try and run on it. By the end of that same second he’s on the floor again. “My steaks—” he whimpers. “I was going to be at the head of the line… I had it planned to the second…”

  “Well, I must say,” Finch extends a helping hand again, “it’s heartening to see someone so enthusiastic about the Aquarium’s new programs. Not everyone is, you know. Let me see what I can do.”

  Anna Marie Hamilton stands with her arms folded, sighing impatiently. “Mister Finch,” she says, “if you think I’m going to let this distract me from the liberation of—”

  “Not now, Ms. Hamilton. This will only take a moment. And then I promise, we can get right back to your tough and uncompromising negotiations.” Finch takes a step towards the door, turns back to Doug. “Say, Mr. Largha, would you like to talk to a killer whale while you’re waiting? A Matriarch? We have a live link to Juan de Fuca.” He raises an arm to the flatscreen on one wall.
<
br />   “Uh, live?” Emotions squabble in Doug’s cortex. The pain of failure. The hope of salvation. And now, a vague discomfort. “I don’t know. I mean, they are okay with this, aren’t they? The whole whale show thing?”

  “Mr. Largha, not only are they okay with it—it was their idea.

  So how about it? A conversation with a real, alien intelligence?”

  “I don’t know,” Doug stammers. “I don’t know what I’d say—”

  Anna Marie snorts.

  Finch draws a remote control from his blazer. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.” He points the remote at the flatscreen, thumbs a control.

  Nothing obvious happens.

  “Back in a moment,” Finch promises, and closes the door behind him.

  Anna Marie turns her back. Doug wonders if maybe she’s offended by someone who would be in such a rush to line up for orca steaks.

  Or maybe she just doesn’t like people very much.

  A long, mournful whistle. “Sister Predator,” intones an artificial voice.

  Doug turns to the flatscreen. A black-and-white shape looms up in the murky green wash of Juan de Fuca Strait. Lipless jaws open a crack; a zigzag crescent of conical teeth reflects gray in the dim light.

  That whistle again. In one corner of the flatscreen, a flashing green tag: Receiving. “Fellow Sister Predator. Welcome.”

  Doug gawks.

  Clicks. Two rapid-fire squeals. A moan. More clicks.

  Receiving.

  “I am Second Grandmother. I trust you enjoy Aquarium and its many award-winning educational displays—”

  Bzzt. In the upper left-hand corner of the screen: Line Interrupt. Silence.

  At a panel on Finch’s desk, Anna Marie Hamilton takes her finger off a red button.

  “Wow,” Doug says. “It was really talking.”

  Anna Marie rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well, it’s not like they’re going to beat us on the SAT’s or anything.”