Blackfish City(13)
Three scaler kids cawed at Soq. They squatted in the struts of a building, feeding a ragged-looking monkey. Soq slowed, trying to see whether their intent was hostile, and then decided they did not care. Mostly scalers and messengers got along well, and lots of people were both, but some scalers could get nasty with the “groundbound” grid grunts they felt so superior to.
Three-quarters of the way out the Arm, Soq stopped at a noodle stand. This one had little stools and a tarp on each side to keep some of the wind off. Soq was swallowed up in clouds of hot steam smelling of five-spice powder. Home was noodles. Home was food and warmth. Soq paid, took a stool, shut their eyes, and meditated on the moment, its beauty, its peace. The coldness of the wind and the warmth of the food and the fact that everyone eventually dies. Letting go of everything they did not have, every ugly thing they’d seen, every moment of pain they’d felt that day, the day before, every day to come.
Soq smiled in the rising steam.
“Hey, Charl!” they called when the first spoonfuls of soup had reached their belly, and pointed chopsticks at the greasy screen Charl had hung on a lamppost. On the news, nine military factions had submitted claims for international recognition as the legitimate successor state to the American republic. Some were as small as twenty people in a boat. “How long do you think it would take a tri-power boat to travel from where the flotilla was to Qaanaaq?”
“’Bout a week, I’d imagine,” Charl said, for Charl loved these logistical problems. “Unless they had a ton of gas, in which case it might only be a day or two. Why—you want to go scavenge?”
“No,” Soq said. “Just wondering when we might start to see refugees.”
Soq was thinking of the orca. Of the woman who’d mysteriously arrived with a killer whale in tow, so soon after the flotilla bombing. Because how had the flotilla been bombed in the first place? The American fleet had lacked a lot of things—food, shelter, fuel, civil liberties—but it hadn’t lacked weapons. The global military presence that had made the pre-fall United States so powerful, and then helped cause their collapse, had left them with all sorts of terrifying toys. The battleships that circled those four hundred pieces of floating scrap metal would have had solid perimeter defense capabilities . . . but perimeter defense might not have been concerned about a killer whale.
And if anything could get past the innumerable aquadrones that protected Qaanaaq’s geocone—that engineering marvel, which captured the massive energy expended by the thermal vent and used it for heating the whole city, providing the power for its lights and machines—it was an orca. If anything could get an explosive onto the cone, it was an orca.
Soq slurped down the last of the noodles, lowered the bowl, let the wind hit their face. Crossed the Arm to where the open ocean lay.
Two hundred thousand people on Arm Eight, if you believed the official statistics, which Soq didn’t, and half of them fantasized daily about watching Qaanaaq sink beneath the waves. The other half dreamed of conquering it. A wonder it had lasted as long as it had.
Soq wondered which one they were, and decided they were both. I will dominate this city or I will destroy it, break its legs, send it sinking into the burning sea we stand over.
Soq stepped down into the only sleeping boat with any openings. The woman who owned the flat-bottom smiled, recognizing Soq, and held out her hob for screen scanning.
The boat was mostly square, not built for moving. It had been anchored in the same place for twenty years. On its surface stood ten rows of ten boxes. A square meter and a half, with wooden sides covered in canvas. Qaanaaq’s poorest slept in boats like this, their bodies folded up uncomfortably, with a breathable lid they could pull over themselves to keep the worst of the wind off and hold body heat in. Soq was lucky to be short. Taller people had a hell of a time in the boxes.
Soq sat. The box was dank and wet. It smelled of the cheap spray the owner used when its previous occupant vacated in the morning, but underneath that Soq could smell the funk of the occupant himself. They’d had to choose between being hungry in a capsule hotel or sated in a box, and had chosen the bowl of noodles.
They were happy with their choice. They were angry that they’d had to make it at all.
The bitterness started to come back. What had been an idle imaginary scenario five minutes before became a deep and fervent desire. Fuck them, all of them, the people who make us live like this. Who sleep in beds with whole meters of empty space around them.
Blow up the geocone and the city would be uninhabitable by nightfall. Soq stared into their screen, scrolling through photos of the cone from concept to execution to periodic well-publicized repair work. Prickly defensive columns of polymerized salt; thick swarms of weaponized aquadrones. Two hundred miles of pipes in and around the cone alone, to say nothing of the ones that took water and heat through the twisted tangle of the city above. A million valves for releasing heat and pressure. Dynamic responsive systems to match surges and ebbs in demand.
Such a marvel; such a target.
Soq fell asleep like that, in the fetal position, knowing their knees would ache in the morning, smiling to the imaginary sound of a million people screaming for help as they drowned.
Destroy this city, or conquer it—which one would I prefer?
Fill
The purple drink did not contain alcohol, to Fill’s surprise, but it seemed to make him drunk all the same. The sweetness of it, maybe, the taste of cloves and corn, or the night itself, the crowds, the cold wind and the music, so many musicians that he felt like he was standing in the center of a scattered symphony orchestra, their separate melodies adding up to something, some futuristic form of music with no beginning, no end, no structure, only a thousand gorgeous pieces crashing into each other.