Blackfish City(19)
He unfurled a sheet of paper big enough to cover the table where they sat. She could not help but touch it, rub a corner between her fingers.
“Five or so years ago, several years into my research, I started to see the strands come together. Separate story lines uniting into one. The story of the breaks. Nothing like paper to paint a picture. I tried to put it all down. I am not sure if I succeeded.”
A map took up half the sheet. North America, the Arctic, Greenland, Northern Europe. Bloodred triangles for the grid cities; blue circles for the refugee camps. A tangled nest of many-colored lines. The rest was a dense sea of scribbled words, angry ellipses, accusatory question marks. Exclamation marks like multiple stab wounds. He talked her through it, highlighting reported cases and potential trends, tracing what he believed to be separate strains with different symptoms.
They were in his apartment. A tiny place, but on Arm Five, so the building was clean and seemed safe. He was lucky he had come so long ago.
“What’s this?” she said, pointing to a fading orange line that meandered and circled around North America before ending in Taastrup.
“Exactly!” he said.
“. . . Exactly what?”
His finger traced the orange line, trembling. “That’s the most important question you could have asked. What’s your best bet?”
“Comes up out of the USA,” Ankit said. “Some nomadic refugee group. People from one of the Black Autonomous Zones, after they got pushed out of Detroit or New Orleans or something?”
“No,” he said. “Nanobonders. Taastrup was the last known location of any of them—a small handful that survived the final massacre went there, but, surprise, there’s fundamentalist lunatics everywhere, and they got butchered, too.”
“Last known nanobonder location until our friend with the orca arrived, that is.”
“Yes.”
He scanned her face, his eyes wide, his mouth open. “I think they are the key,” he said finally, and if he was disappointed that she neither arrived at the same conclusion nor seemed floored by it now that he’d told her, he hid it well. “Nanobonder migration patterns are the most common thread between the dozen or so different places where the breaks are believed to have sprung up. I think that their unique nanite signature was a trigger, somehow. A key ingredient in the pharmaceutical stew that led to the creation of the breaks.”
“I thought that the nanobonded were . . . endogamous.” She was proud of herself for remembering the word. “Insular. Never interacted with outsiders. So they’d never have taken random meds.”
“Popular consensus holds that this is a myth,” Barron said. “Justification for atrocities. Throughout history, ‘They keep to themselves, they think they’re better than us, they hate us,’ has been a common rationale for why a group of people constitute a threat, and therefore should be expelled or perhaps exterminated. But even if it’s true, we know they established trade with some other diasporic communities, many of whom were known pharma subjects during Deregulation. They could have been dosed with something without their consent or knowledge.”
“I know so little about them,” Ankit said.
“And I know far too much. I’ve done so much research on them, spoken to so many people. How they originated, where they moved, who they interacted with. How they were targeted. Why. By whom.” Here his face grew very serious, and tight with an anger that looked out of place on such an old and kind man. And then it passed. “But it’s all academic now. Archaeology, as opposed to anthropology.”
“I bet you’d like very much to talk to her,” she said. “The woman with the orca.”
“I would,” he said. “But I don’t fancy being butchered like the hundreds of people she killed in the grid cities she visited before coming here.”
“Is that true? I heard those reports, but I thought—”
Barron shrugged. “I accept as a fundamental fact of Qaanaaq life that I will never know if anything is true,” he said. “Most of it is rumor. Even when you read it in the supposedly legitimate news outlets. I learned that long before arriving here, to be honest. Life becomes significantly less stressful when you accept that your ignorance will always dwarf your knowledge.”
“Tell me about New York,” Ankit said. She didn’t know why she said it. As soon as she did, she knew it was wrong. He hadn’t mentioned the place. Only his accent had given it away.
His face seemed to break. First it tightened, as though he was growing angry again, and then it broke.
“I . . . can’t” was all he managed to say.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and he turned his head away, nodded as she stood up, thanked him profusely for his time, his insight, apologized again, promised to return.
Why, she wondered, descending the narrow back stairs, why did I ask such a cruel and thoughtless question—
Why—
Because his pain is mine, she realized, when the cardamom smell of doodh pati hit her down at grid level, because the ache of what he’s lost is the same as the ache of what I’ve never had, and spent my whole life longing for. My mother is his city.
City Without a Map: Dispatches from the Qaanaaq Free Press
Depending on your definition of press, Qaanaaq hosts anywhere from five hundred to two thousand different press outlets, sites and broadsheets from every political and religious affiliation of every one of the city’s hundreds of expatriate communities. The Greater India Reunification Party, never a significant political player in its home countries, is the publisher of Qaanaaq’s most widely read news source, hated and beloved and fiercely argued about among the quarter of the city’s population hailing from the various South Asian nations, rent asunder by imperialism and Partition and the Water Wars but reunited by Qaanaaq’s xenophobia. The Final Call gives equal column space to absurd conspiracies and all-too-real genocidal actions by North American power players. Evangelize! rails endlessly against the same handful of subjects—the ease of acquiring abortifacients, the difficulty of acquiring firearms, the means by which solving the latter problem could address the former. Several popular sites urge Qaanaaq’s Han Chinese to fight back against the Tibetan takeover of the motherland.