Blackfish City(11)
A bell tolled, on one of the tidal buoys. Fill had never bothered to learn what any of them meant. There were nursery rhymes about them, Good boys ask how / Say the buoys of New Krakow or something nonsensical along those lines. Every wharf rat and skiff urchin knew them by heart, could glean all sorts of helpful information about weather and the length of the day from them, but Fill, with the best education Qaanaaq money could buy, was stone-cold illiterate when it came to the complex tidal chimes.
Graffiti, on the side of the buoy—ORA LIVES, his screen translated from Spanish, and what could ORA be? The Qaanaaq net turned up nothing, and after ages a ping to the global net turned up a half dozen expired trade associations, dead softwares, villages and townships of the Sunken World. Someone’s name, then?
Maybe the call had been a wrong handle, he told himself, because gay Qaanaaq was such a small world that it wasn’t inconceivable that keying in a wrong handle would bring you the ex of the person you’d meant to call, except that his handle and Ram’s were nothing alike.
Again, his jaw pinged. Thede again, but text this time. “Read,” Fill said, and immediately regretted not saying “Delete.” But life was like that. Dumb decisions you made in a hurry and then dealt with.
Ugh, I am so sorry. I’m drunk and disrupted and I don’t know what happened. I entered the handle myself instead of autocalling and I don’t know. I have no idea who you are so I have no idea how I got you. Except that I sort of do. Or I think I do. Call me?
Fill kept walking. He was almost out to the end of the Arm now, running late, and his whole head felt funny, fuzzy, like something had come unmoored, and of course it was too early for him to be symptomatic, it had to be psychosomatic, but how could you know the difference with a sickness that was solely psychological?
Another text. “Read,” Fill said, unsettled.
Okay. You don’t want to call. I get that. But if you know Ram, you probably know him like I knew him, which means you two were fucking, which means you need to know this. I’ve got the breaks. I think I got them from him. And they’re moving fast. It’s a bad strain. I’ve been having these moments. Like just now. I swear, I remembered your number, even though I never knew it, because Ram did. It’s like I know—
“Delete,” Fill said, though the message was less than a third of the way through, and ran the rest of the way to the end of the Arm. He turned up the latest installment of City Without a Map, letting the vortex wash over him as an old man with a bad cough read someone else’s words into his ear:
No one rules Qaanaaq, no class or race reigns supreme. Not the Chinese laborers who built it, not the global plutocrats who could afford to get out of their doomed cities before they became hell on earth, not the successive waves of refugees who filled it. And while of course it technically belongs to the shareholders, who lease the ground that every home and business in Qaanaaq was built upon and make obscene amounts of money with every minute that passes—they are invisible. After class warfare consumed the American grid city of New Plymouth and the rich were plunged burning into the sea, Qaanaaq’s owners went to great lengths to conceal themselves.
To minimize unrest, the city founders broke with the urban past in several surprising ways. They decided against the repressive militarized police force that most old-world cities had depended upon. They kept the burden of taxation exclusively on the hyperwealthy shareholders. They limited the depth of democracy, giving politicians such small amounts of power that few fights broke out over elections or government action or inaction. They banned political parties, which had—in the view of the artificial intelligences that drafted these rules, anyway—been vehicles of mob rule and mediocrity more often than efficient strategies for decision making.
And so. Here you are. Here we both are.
Every so often, shut your eyes. Then open them, the slightest bit. Your home is gone, but it is not difficult to trick yourself into thinking you are home.
Soq
Fuck out the way!” Soq screamed, and giggled at the prissy way the boy hopped. People like that thought they owned the whole Arm, and maybe they did, but on the slideway Soq was supreme.
Speed and wind made Soq’s eyes water. They laughed, out loud, and the laugh became an ululation that lasted the rest of the way down.
Two ramps, side by side, ran down the center of every one of Qaanaaq’s eight Arms. Ten centimeters wide, capped with miniature maglev tracks. One going out from the central Hub, the other coming in from the far end. Each one started out five feet high, and over the course of the Arm’s kilometer length tapered evenly down to ground level. A five-foot incline wasn’t much, but a human of average weight could get up to some pretty astonishing speeds. In theory anyone with a pair of slide boots could use the slideway, but most people had long since abandoned it to the messengers. Slideway messengers were a barely tolerated menace, widely considered to be bloodthirsty caff addicts on errands of minimal legality who wore weighted clothing to speed them up and razor blades affixed to their clothing to casually disembowel anyone strolling near the center of the Arm without paying attention. Most messengers relished this assessment and went out of their way to embody it.
Soq leaped, arriving at the end of the ramp. Slide boots were supposed to kill the magnetic repulsion as they arrived at the programmed destination so that you came to a calm, precise stop. Like most messengers, Soq had overclocked that function. Nothing was going to slow them down but them. Soq soared through the air, clearing the buffer zone and landing with a jolt beside a bench in the central Hub.