Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
Dedication
For Deborah Miller - writer and warrior; my mother, my hero.
Epigraph
There is nothing safe about the darkness of this city and its stink. Well, I have abrogated all claim to safety, coming here. It is better to discuss it as though I had chosen. That keeps the scrim of sanity before the awful set. What will lift it?
—Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
People Would Say
People would say she came to Qaanaaq in a skiff towed by a killer whale harnessed to the front like a horse. In these stories, which grew astonishingly elaborate in the days and weeks after her arrival, the polar bear paced beside her on the flat bloody deck of the boat. Her face was clenched and angry. She wore battle armor built from thick scavenged plastic.
At her feet, in heaps, were the kind of weird weapons and machines that refugee-camp ingenuity had been producing; strange tools fashioned from the wreckage of Manhattan or Mumbai. Her fingers twitched along the walrus-ivory handle of her blade. She had come to do something horrific in Qaanaaq, and she could not wait to start.
You have heard these stories. You may even have told them. Stories are valuable here. They are what we brought when we came here; they are what cannot be taken away from us.
The truth of her arrival was almost certainly less dramatic. The skiff was your standard tri-power rig, with a sail and oars and a gas engine, and for the last few miles of her journey to the floating city it was the engine that she used. The killer whale swam beside her. The polar bear was in chains, a metal cage over its head and two smaller ones boxing in its forepaws. She wore simple clothes, the skins and furs preferred by the people who had fled to the north when the cities of the south began to burn or sink. She did not pace. Her weapon lay at her feet. She brought nothing else with her. Whatever she had come to Qaanaaq to accomplish, her face gave no hint of whether it would be bloody or beautiful or both.
Fill
After the crying, and the throwing up, and the scrolling through his entire contacts list and realizing there wasn’t a single person he could tell, and the drafting and then deleting five separate long graphic messages to all his contacts, and the deciding to kill himself, and the deciding not to, Fill went out for a walk.
Qaanaaq’s windscreen had been shifted to the north, and as soon as Fill stepped out onto Arm One he felt the full force of the subarctic wind. His face was unprotected and the pain of it felt good. For five minutes, maybe more, he stood there. Breathing. Eyes shut, and then eyes open. Smelling the slight methane stink of the nightlamps; letting his teeth chatter in the city’s relentless, dependable cold. Taking in the sights he’d been seeing all his life.
I’m going to die, he thought.
I’m going to die soon.
The cold helped distract him from how much his stomach hurt. His stomach and his throat, for that matter, where he was pretty sure he had torn something in the half hour he’d spent retching. A speaker droned from a storefront: a news broadcast, the latest American government had fallen, pundits predicting it’d be the last, the flotilla disbanded after the latest bombing, and he didn’t care, because why should he, why should he care about anything?
People walked past him. Bundled up expensively. Carrying polyglass cages in which sea otters or baby red pandas paced, unhappy lucky animals saved from extinction by Qaanaaq’s elite. All of whom were focused on getting somewhere, doing something, the normal self-important bustle of ultra-wealthy Arm One. Something he despised, or did on every other day. Deaf to the sea that surged directly beneath their feet and stretched on into infinity on either side of Qaanaaq’s narrow metal arms. He’d been so proud of his indolent life, his ability to stop and stand on a street corner for no reason at all. Today he didn’t hate them, these people passing him by. He didn’t pity them.
Fill wondered: How many of them have it?
A child tapped his hip. “Orca, mister!” A pic tout, selling blurry shots of the lady with the killer whale and the polar bear. Fill bought one from the girl on obscure impulse—part pity, part boredom. Something else, too. A glimmer of buoyant wanting. Remembered joy, his childhood fascination with the stories of people emotionally melded with animals thanks to tiny machines in their blood. Collecting pedia entries and plastiprinted figures . . . and scowls, from his grandfather, who said nanobonding was a stupid, naive myth. His plastic figures gone one morning. Grandfather was sweet and kind, but Grandfather tolerated no impracticality.
On some level, the diagnosis hadn’t been a surprise. Of course he had the breaks. No one in any of the grid cities could have as much sex as he had, and be as uncareful as he was, without getting it. And he’d lived in fear for so long. Spent so much time imagining his grisly fate. He was shocked, really, to have such a visceral reaction.
Tapping his jaw bug, Fill whispered, “Play City Without a Map, file six.”
A woman’s voice filled his ears, old and strange and soothing, the wobble in her Swedish precise enough to mark her as someone who’d come to Qaanaaq decades ago.
You are new here. It is overwhelming, terrifying. Don’t be afraid.
Shut your eyes. I’m here.
Pinch your nose shut. Its smell is not the smell of your city. You can listen, because every city sounds like chaos. You will even hear your language, if you listen long enough.