Blackfish City(27)
Someone recognized him, or ran facial rec with their screen. She called his name. Others heard her, joined in. Kaev shut his eyes and basked in it.
For once, they were cheering for him.
Fill
Whales swam through the air above him, white against the dark blue twilight. Thick powdery snow, the best kind for the light projections. Their simple AIs pinged on the shape of a child and turned to swim circles around her. Fill felt oddly abandoned. When he was that age, he’d believed the snow projections loved him and him alone.
Behind him, the sea lions barked.
He loaded the latest episode of City Without a Map, broadcast in Mandarin. He didn’t like the ones recorded in languages he didn’t speak. His implant had the best translation software—even replicated perfectly the voice of the original speaker—but something did not survive the transition. No machine could match the earnestness, the hunger, of the original Readers.
Fill could feel the wet gathering in his clothes. A mark of his privilege, that this happened so rarely. The rich could have expensive dehumidifiers and lattices of salt polymer in their walls, to help strip away the ever-present damp. Everyone else in Qaanaaq just put up with being wet all the time. Having eczema. Having worse.
The little girl screamed with happiness as the whales combined into a tyrannosaurus and proceeded to chase her.
When I’m dead, the snow projections will still be here. This whole city will keep on working.
Fill had spent his whole life believing the city belonged to him. After a certain point he’d started to think maybe it was the other way around, but that was wrong, too. He meant nothing to Qaanaaq. Qaanaaq did not see him, did not know him, and nothing would change when he was slotted into his plastic sleeve and weighted with salt and dropped into the sea at the end of his Arm. He watched the waters churn. The water that would swallow him.
“Fill,” said a rusted familiar voice, and then he was being hugged.
“Grandfather.”
He settled into the embrace. Startlingly strong. Fill knew that his grandfather was as mortal as any man, yet he could not imagine any sickness or weapon that could reduce him.
“You still love the sea lions,” the old man observed.
“Of course,” Fill said, conscious for the first time of the rapt expression on his face, watching the piers where giant mammals flopped and dozed and barked.
But he hadn’t loved them, not always. There had been a time when the sea lions were kid’s stuff, something he couldn’t be bothered with. Every kid went through that, he imagined, but when had he come out the other end? When had he become adult enough to give in to childish joy? Once again the eerie feeling came over him: the suspicion that what he felt might not be his. An unwholesome tingle traveled up the length of his spine, amplifying itself as it went, until his shoulders shook and his teeth came together in a sharp clack, cleaving open the side of his tongue.
“Everything okay?” his grandfather said, feeling him flinch, touching his sleeve.
Fill swallowed blood. “Of course. Just cold is all.”
“Shall we go inside?”
“No. I like it.”
What would he think, dear old Grandfather, if he learned I had the breaks? The dirty dirty taint of the poor? Smile politely, walk away, run home, burn his clothes, and cut all ties with me? What does he think when he sees them, the sick and dying, the men and women huddled on the grid about to break free of their bodies? Does he sneer, does he blame them for their bad decisions? Does he see them at all?
“How are you really, Grandfather?” Fill asked. “What takes up your time these days?”
“Managing my empire,” he said with a grim laugh.
“I thought you had people for that.”
“That’s true—well, then, I spend my time looking over the shoulders of the people who manage my empire.”
“That sounds boring.”
“I wish it were.”
“What’s been going on?”
Grandfather spent a long time looking at the sea lions. Then he seemed to come to some kind of internal decision. “I’m under attack. Nothing I can’t handle, but it’s annoying all the same. A crime boss has gotten too big for her britches. This happens. Somebody wants more than the niche they’ve already carved out for themselves, and they make a move on a shareholder.”
“What does one do in a situation like that?”
“We bide our time, typically. People get tired of throwing pebbles at a brick wall, eventually.”
“Are you really that invincible?”
“No one’s invincible. But we set this city up. Everything’s stacked in our favor. Patience is all we need—maybe a trip out of town, if things really heat up, or a Protective Custody stint in one of the cushier suites in the Cabinet.”
“So that urban legend is true? That the Cabinet has posh rooms to hide VIPs in, alongside the overcrowded wards full of screaming lunatics?”
“Very true.” The old man looked at his hands. “Of course, once in a while a shareholder will go a little crazy. Meet violence with violence; slaughter his or her enemies. A separate part of the playbook. That’s not my style.”
Fill looked down onto a shifter skiff. Portions of the boat floor rose, fell. A worker from Recreations controlled it all from the rows of subdermals up and down her arms. Platforms circled and spun as she did. Children cavorted there, but they avoided eye contact with her. Augmentation was minimized in Qaanaaq, looked down upon, considered uncouth. In some grid cities, and most of the still-peopled places in the Sunken World, augmentation was much more accepted. Even obligatory. Fill wondered where she’d come from, whether she’d chosen them willingly. Whether she liked them.