Blackfish City(35)
He didn’t know, either. He’d have been born long after and raised on stories. Soq had seen those documentaries. The narratives of fear, of lies, of They Want to Destroy Us. There were so many movies about how easy it is to manipulate people, and what atrocities you could get them to cheerfully commit while believing they did it for the sake of their children’s survival.
Soq shut their eyes and they could smell her, the orcamancer, in the room with them—could feel her rage, the righteous thrill of hurting the people who hurt her people. She was not a young woman. She’d traveled for so many years. Had vengeance been the only thing, the only thread pulling her forward? Soq opened their eyes. That couldn’t be all. There had to be more to her than bloodshed, violence, punishing the guilty. Soq couldn’t say why they thought that, why they wanted so badly to believe it.
She is looking for something. Someone.
“She didn’t say anything else?”
“Nothing.”
“Thanks,” Soq said, putting a hand on his shoulder. They regretted not asking the man’s name.
The bearded man said nothing. Tears were rolling down his face. He cupped his hands in his lap, an oddly pacific gesture for a man so full of hard angles and coiled anger.
Soq left. Dao waited on the deck in a cloud of pine needle smoke.
“Got something?”
“Something,” Soq said. “I’ll write it up for Go.”
What would that write-up say? Talking to this man, standing in that space, I gained a profound spiritual understanding of who the Blackfish Woman is and it is of absolutely no strategic or practical value to you.
Soq hopped from the boat to the grid. “And Dao?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever you do to him? I don’t want to know.”
Dao frowned. “You won’t always be able to hide, Soq. From the consequences of our actions.”
“I know!” Soq said. “But I want to hide today.”
Kaev
For the third time in twelve hours, Kaev crossed the Arm to pee into the ocean. Even those few steps cost him, caused a slight shrinking of that blissful calm, and as soon as he was done he hurried back to the bare metal bar he’d been sitting on.
He was pretty sure he’d slept, some. Hard to say. His body felt like it needed nothing, not sleep and not food and not sex, and not fighting, which for the first time in his life held no appeal for him. Everything ached, but nothing hurt. A noodle stall had set up beside him, and occasional wafts of warm sweet-savory air hit him, and those were nice, but when they weren’t there he didn’t miss them.
Narcissus. The man who fell in love with his own reflection and wasted away staring into the water. Why did he remember that? Why did his mind work now? Why did school, math, history, myth, all the things that had eluded him, refused to cohere in his mind, suddenly make sense? Where memory had been a churning sea, uncontrollable, spitting up unwanted objects and hiding the things he most desired, it now yielded easily to his wishes. He thought about his childhood, and there it was. Foster homes. Even: further back, to times he’d never been able to call to mind, to places that weren’t so much memories of things as of feelings, of safety, of fear, of flight. Other people: a mother, a sibling—or were they a grandmother and a pet? Because in that stage of pre-memory there were no words to attach to things, no societal structure to plug people into.
“Hemorrhoids,” said the noodle vendor. “Sit on cold metal too long, you’ll get hemorrhoids.”
“Thanks,” Kaev said, but he did not move. She took a crinkly green tarp, folded it into an approximate rectangle, handed it over. He took it, bowed in gratitude, and sat on it. And it did feel better.
She was popular. The docking bar and every other surface people could sit on were crowded with customers slurping down bowls of broth. But they came and went, for even people with nowhere to go weren’t eager to remain in the cold too long.
Kaev knew that he could not stay there forever. Sooner or later Safety would come, tell him he had to move along. And when he refused, they’d send Health. The windscreen magnified the sun’s heat by day, but now the sun was setting, and people who chose to stay unsheltered overnight could be deemed ipso facto insane and taken off the grid by force. And Kaev could not afford another trip to the Cabinet right now. Even if it had helped, slightly, before. The cost was too great. And whatever benefit he’d derived from his time there was gone the second he left the building. So if Health or Safety showed up and tried to force him to move from this spot, he’d be obliged to beat them senseless. And then he’d have an even bigger problem.
“You’re new,” the noodle vendor said.
“I’m old,” Kaev said.
“Not as old as me,” she said, and laughed. He’d been sitting on the tarp for an hour, maybe two, for all he knew a week. The flow of customers had ebbed. Once again Arm Eight looked empty, though he knew it wasn’t.
“Here,” she said, and handed him a bowl.
“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have any money.”
“Of course you don’t,” she said, and laughed again, and he loved her, but then again, in that stretch of bliss he loved everyone. “My noodles are irresistible. If you had any money, you wouldn’t have been able to go this long without buying a bowl.”