Blackfish City(10)

“Where did you come from?”

“Why are you here?”

“Can we have an interview?”

Only the American stepped out onto the floor. For an American, the arrival of someone like her would strike a chord—collective guilt, most likely, over the bloody war that had been waged against her kind, or instinctive hate.

“Hello!” he called, moving closer, but she did not respond.

He stopped at the edge of swinging range. “I’m Bohr Sanchez,” he said. “I run the Brooklyn Expat.”

She said nothing, just parried at the air fifteen feet from him. She leaped, stabbed, dropped, and rolled. The men and women in the stands behind him laughed, idly evaluated the odds of his being beheaded before their eyes.

“Are you nanobonded?”

Here she stopped. She stared. She took a step closer.

Bohr bit back his fear. His colleagues were watching. “I thought you had been wiped out. You’re not worried? About the people who tried to exterminate you? Qaanaaq has more than its share of zealots, you know.”

She moved faster and faster, her actions increasingly impressive. And frightening.

“Is it true that your people eschew all forms of technology?”

“How many more of you are there?”

She executed a leaping swing, her weapon falling out of her hands. Frustration? Sadness at a sore subject? The urge to murder him? And here she said something, finally. A single inarticulate roar.





Fill


Fill hurried down Arm One, heading for Arm Three. His errand had made him late, but it was worth it. In each hand he held a freshly minted plastic figure, the first he’d had printed in ten years. Still warm. A polar bear, and a killer whale.

He wanted to believe. In magic, in science, in people who could bond with animals. He wanted to feel the excitement he’d had as a child, how big and crowded and possible the world had been back then.

He didn’t, not quite, not yet, but maybe the plastic figures would help.

He walked down the Arm’s central strip. The walkways were too crowded and he’d lost the knack for leisure since his diagnosis. His unhurried stroll had been stolen from him. He’d debated taking a zip line, but the queue at the central Hub had been too long, even at the first-class line. And there had been a demonstration—angry people in plastiprinted kaiju suits, chanting about a new wave of evictions out on Arm Seven, harassing the wealthy zip liners while they waited, because any of them could have been the shareholders responsible. Holographic monstrosities danced and scrambled in the air around them. When he was a kid, for a while, these had been everywhere. All the time. It had been years since he’d seen one.

Fill had recognized the buildings in the placard screens that they held up. He knew exactly who the shareholder responsible was.

Oh, Grandfather, he thought. You bastard. Whose lives are you ruining tonight?

He couldn’t worry about that now. Life was too short to linger on ugliness. Last week, City Without a Map had talked about the crowds who gathered nightly at the end of Arm Three to watch the bright methane ventilation flares. Central Americans, mostly, with vendors selling some rich fermented purple beverage whose name he’d forgotten, and roving musicians playing a dozen rival species of son, but the street festival was popular with all kinds of recent arrivals.

This city contains so many cities, he thought. So many lives I’ll never get to live, so many spaces I’ll never get invited into.

“Fuck out the way!” screamed a messenger kid hurtling down the slideway, and Fill’s first thought was My goodness, that boy is hot and then Oh wait, that’s a girl and then Christ, I have no idea what that is, which led to a little internal rant about the complexities of modern gender among Qaanaaq youth.

Fill was still meditating on that, long after the kid had vanished into the green haze of the methane-sodium streetlights, when his jaw chimed.

Unknown caller, said the gonial implant, a flea-sized thing affixed to the corner of his jaw, like those used by all but the most wretched recent-refugee arrivals. Phone speaker and receiver all in one, conducting sound through bone to his ear and also recording what came out of his mouth. His screen’s expensive software did the rest: Thede Jackson, age twenty-five, spatial designer, North American parentage, gay, single. No previous history of contact; no flags for unsolicited commercial messaging.

Gay, single, twenty-five; well, that was something. Maybe a friend had put them in touch, or he’d seen something about Fill and decided to take a stab in the dark. It had happened before. One of the perks of having a reputation. Fill tapped his jaw and said, “Hello?”

The voice said, “Ram?”

Fill said nothing. All of a sudden all the air was gone.

“Ram? Are you there?”

This Thede was drunk, and sounded like he was about to cry.

“Who the hell is this?” Fill said, surprised at his own anger.

“Ram, it’s me,” he said. “Please. I need—”

“This isn’t Ram, asshole, as you goddamn well know.”

Thede choked. “Um . . . what?”

“Did Ram put you up to this? Did you steal my handle out of his screen?”

“Ram, I—” But then Thede hung up.

Love is the gift that keeps on giving, Fill thought—how else could a man still make you miserable even after you’d broken up? He took a moment to curse Ram and every wonderful horrible minute they’d spent together. The boy had been unstable, incapable of telling the truth about anything, ever, and whether Thede was another jilted suitor or someone Ram owed money to didn’t matter.