Blackfish City(40)

Once, I saw one of them. The kids with cameras; not a kid anymore, and no camera. Standing over a trash barrel fire in a Scottish resettlement camp. I think she recognized me, but her face stayed as empty as mine was. I felt sad, then, for her, and angry at myself. I took that moment, that short time, to mourn, to be sad, to be angry, to feel emotions for her that I never let myself feel for me and mine, because we’d been born to this but she hadn’t, and because people who only know suffering from stories are never prepared to find themselves inside one.





Kaev


Kaev woke up in darkness. He heard water sloshing against the other side of a metal wall. Something massive breathed beside him. Where was he? How had he gotten there? He felt no fear, no anxiety. Dimly, he knew that this was wrong. He should have been terrified. But the realization vanished, and he slipped back into sleep.

To wake, hours later, to light. A narrow room. A high ceiling. The most comfortable bed he’d ever been on.

Which was breathing. Which was no bed at all, but rather a polar bear. One heavy furred arm lying across Kaev’s legs. Ebony claws more than capable of tearing him in two.

Still, no fear. He knew, on a level deeper than the human, that this animal would do him no harm. That its happiness, sleeping peacefully, was his, and his was its. He lay there for a long time. Watching it sleep. Feeling his own thoughts come easy, a smooth unbroken flow.

Remembering. Piecing together how he’d ended up here. Wandering Arm Eight, his brain cracked, thoughts leaking out like always, and then—peace. A sensation so pleasant he’d stopped in his tracks, sat down, would have stayed there until he died.

And then killing a whole bunch of people.

“Hello,” said a woman, who entered the room bearing two bowls. She was sturdy, muscle-bound. Her face was raw and bright from a lifetime of sun and wind. Long hair fell in a wide cascade down her back, with two small braids framing her face and curling under her chin.

She set the larger bowl on the ground beside the polar bear. The smaller one she handed to Kaev. “Good morning.”

The bear came awake. The first thing it did was turn its head to look into Kaev’s eyes.

He gasped. He felt tears well up.

“Can polar bears smile?” he asked.

“This one just did.”

He laughed. The bear nodded its head vigorously, like maybe that’s how polar bears laugh.

Kaev reached out his hand to touch the bear’s face. It pushed its head into his hand.

“He looks old.”

“He is old. For a polar bear.”

“Am I like you?” he asked the orcamancer.

“You are,” she said, and smiled, a smile every bit as wide and deep as his own. Like she, too, had found something she’d spent her whole life looking for. Except unlike him she’d had the privilege of knowing exactly what it was she’d been looking for.

“How?”

“You tell me,” she said. “What do you know about your family history?”

“Not much. Raised as an orphan. Ward of the city.”

“What about your mother? What do you know about her?”

Kaev shrugged. She looked disappointed in this news, somehow. But this was not surprising. If he was like her, if he was one of the nanobonded, there must have been a connection—a mutual family member, perhaps, someone she had come all this way to look for. He was a missing link; he could lead her to the person she sought. Kaev paused to revel in the clarity of his conclusions, the effortless way one idea connected to another. My mother. She is here for my mother. She must be.

For the first time, things make sense.

“Last night, I saw something,” she said. “The bear’s behavior changed. I knew that it had sensed you. Finally. I’ve been waiting for that to happen. That’s why I was watching when those people came, and why I was able to unchain it in time to take care of them. Or rather, to help you take care of them.”

He ate. The bear ate. Sea lion meat, it tasted like. Even the farmed stuff was fantastically expensive, although he suspected she hadn’t purchased this so much as sent her orca out to bring one home. His was cooked and the bear’s was raw. But he could taste what the bear tasted, feel the texture and the brine of the blood. Both were delicious.

“Kaev,” she said, and squatted beside him, and hugged him so hard they both lost their balance, toppled over, laughed. “I am so, so, so happy to have found you.”

Kaev smiled, unsure what to say. But it wasn’t the normal pain of being bewildered by words in general, of even the smallest thing being too big for him to find the words for. It felt good, right, the bliss of emotions that need not be put into words. Had he ever truly had a conversation before? Had he ever been able to talk to another human being without watching every sentence crumble on its way out of his mouth? If so, he didn’t remember it. He rolled over, from his back to his belly, arms spread wide to embrace his brother bear.





Ankit


Context is everything,” Barron said. Birds chirped in the background of wherever he was, or maybe they were people making bird noises. “To understand any social problem, you have to know what’s going on around it.”

He’d taken to sending Ankit audio files. His voice was avuncular, grandfatherly. He never answered when she asked him why he didn’t want to meet or have an actual conversation. She imagined it had to do with his sickness. Self-consciousness over maybe being unable to answer a question, or losing his train of thought too easily. She listened for ambient noise disruptions, indications that he’d edited bits out, but the city’s standard noise was chaotic and jerky enough to make it tough to tell.