Blackfish City(12)
A man whose head Soq had just passed over yelled, “Watch it, you—” and then paused, unclear how to gender the insult.
Soq was beyond gender. They put it on like most people put on clothes. Some days butch and some days queen, but always Soq, always the same and always uncircumscribable underneath it all.
New job, whispered their implant. Arm One. Number 923. Envelope; paperwork only.
“Assign it to someone else,” Soq said. “I’m late for dinner with my mother.”
“You don’t have a mother,” said Jeong, the on-duty human for the day, interrupting the automated dispatch software.
“I’m sure I do,” Soq said, weaving through the evening foot traffic of the central Hub. “Everyone has a mother.”
“So they tell me. But you’re not having dinner with yours tonight.”
“I’m tired,” Soq said. “I can’t deal with another run past those Arm One assholes.”
“Fine,” said Jeong, who truly did not care one way or another. He had been a messenger himself, before some kids experimenting with targeted mini-EMP software accidentally scrambled his boots and locked him in place while speeding down Arm Six at three hundred kilometers an hour, which dislocated both legs and fractured his pelvis. Now he lived vicariously through his “kids,” including the ones who were older than him. “But listen. Got a complaint from your last run. Lady said you were extremely rude.”
“Of course she did,” Soq said. “Old nasty American thing, she didn’t like it when she used ‘he’ to describe me and I told her, very politely and patiently, because I have this conversation way fucking more often than anyone should fucking have to have it, that I prefer ‘they’ and ‘them’ pronouns.”
“Weirdest thing. My screen conked out as I was in the middle of logging the complaint. Didn’t save to your record. I’ll have to get that thing looked at.”
“Thanks, Jeong. Anything from Go?”
“Nothing,” he said. “You know I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.”
The dispatch line silenced itself. Soq pressed their gloved thumb to pinkie, and the slider boots demagged. An evening crowd ahead, a couple hundred humans passing through the central Hub, mostly from the labor arms out to the residential ones, although like everything else in Qaanaaq the flow of people was complex.
A bad idea, Soq knew, to get so focused on Go. Didn’t mean anything that the woman whom many believed to be the city’s most powerful crime boss had sent her first lieutenant to hire Soq out for some stringer gigs. Deliveries, tails, handoffs, creating commotions to help someone escape someone else. There were no promises in this line of work. Soq was a good slide messenger, and a good messenger had many of the qualities that made a good underling—speed, fearlessness, lack of respect for the law—but that didn’t mean Go would ask Soq to formally join her organization.
Getting crime boss patronage was like winning the lottery: it’d be great, but it probably wasn’t going to happen to you, so stop banking on it.
Stop thinking about it. Stop imagining the day when you will be the crime boss, the feared one.
A straight line, from Arm One to Arm Eight. An irony that never failed to amuse Soq, how simple it was to pass from gorgeous luxury to huddled crowded filth. How else would it be so easy for them to suck us dry?
Arm One always did that. Made Soq bitter. Angry. The anger usually ebbed a bit on their return to Arm Eight. Just seeing the banner above the entrance was soothing: four of the hundred or so Mandarin characters that Soq and every other Qaanaaqian knew—新北希望, Xīnběi Xīwàng, New Northern Hope, the name the Chinese sponsors had given to their new city, just as the Thai and Swedish had done, three names for a city and none of them stuck, because the people wanted something else, something not beholden to anyone, and so the Inuit name for a Greenland coastal village that had just been swallowed up by the sea became the name of the floating city as well. Qaanaaq II, at first, or Q2, and then just plain Qaanaaq as its predecessor was forgotten.
The smells of food hit Soq first: broth and basil, mint and trough meat. Food stalls were forbidden in several of the better Arms, and they were the primary draw for the outsiders who dared enter Eight. After that it was the crowd that calmed Soq down, its rhythm, the peculiar intangible atmosphere of energy and ease. They didn’t know Soq, these people, but they knew Soq belonged. Who knew how they knew it, but they did. Just like Soq knew who was and who wasn’t of the Arm. This was home.
People, stacked everywhere. Sleeping capsules piled between buildings, strapped to the struts that supported the bigger ones. They looked sad and ragged, but they belonged to royalty, relatively speaking. Prime real estate; the best spots, held down since the days when Arm Eight looked like Arm Six looked now. The women and men who lived in them were the eyes and ears of the Arm, essential elements of the commerce in information.
Farther down the Arm, Soq entered the shadow of the tenements. A twenty-year-old attempt by the Qaanaaq shareholders to provide stable indoor housing for the unfortunates of Eight, these massive buildings formed the densest population pocket. Denser than Kowloon Walled City or the South Bronx Boats or anything else the Sunken World had produced. The outsides thickly vascularized with red, black, and green pipes. Most of the families, soon after taking up tenancy in these halfway-comfortable spaces, began building walls and partitions and hanging sheets and anything else to rent out space to their neighbors. In the tenements, it was not unusual for fifty people to live inside one apartment. Soq had had friends in the tenements, come to birthday parties for them. Seen the incredible resourcefulness of the tenement dwellers: city plumbing lines “augmented” with snarls of new pipes to shuttle water and sewage and heat, the spliced power lines, the informal stairs and passageways, the sweatshops where grannies made fish balls or repurposed circuit boards in a room where ten iceboat workers slept. And even these were relatively privileged positions, held to fiercely by families and the crime syndicates, who paid the shareholder fees as a gesture of goodwill to the residents.