Blackfish City(44)

Bored, Fill thought back to what his grandfather had told him, wondered where he fit into this story. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. More like it all seemed so remote, something that had nothing to do with him. Qaanaaq was what he wanted: a story he was part of, something he belonged to.

“We tried to fight back. We came together. We put our bodies on the line. We took the fight to them.”

Barron’s voice was rising, his face reddening.

“And we won! We got the mayor to block the budget the landlords were lobbying for, which would have paid them full market rate on all the newly worthless property they owned. We got the city council to vote against it. But that’s the thing. You can win against people. You can’t win against money. Money is a monster, a shape-shifting hydra whose heads you can never cut off. Money can only behave one way.”

Fill felt chills dance along his neck. The old man’s anger was unsettling.

“We watched from our roofs, the day they blew the Flood Locks,” Barron said, standing up straighter. Suddenly he seemed a different, younger man. “We saw the explosions, the water pouring in. I’d imagined the Red Sea, Charlton Heston, a wall of water wiping us out. Really it wasn’t that much. Looked more like a bathtub overflowing. Only enough to render two-thirds of the city uninhabitable. By nightfall, the governor had declared a state of emergency. The feds spent a week working out an aid appropriation package that bought the landlords’ buildings off them—at full market value. Exactly as the landlords had planned. By the end of the week, the bloodshed had begun in earnest. Food couldn’t come in. Water supplies all contaminated. People desperate to get out, forced to abandon everything and take only what fit in one suitcase. I watched this one family—”

“What do you want?”

A woman stood beside the conical shack. Fill hadn’t even noticed her approaching.

“Are you Choek?” Barron asked.

She nodded.

“Robert sent us. Said he spoke to you—about the recording you did?”

“Come inside,” she said, scuttling backward into the teepee.

“Oh hell no,” said Fill.

“Don’t be such a baby,” Barron said, squatting and waddling in after her with remarkable agility for a man of his years. Fill counted to ten and then held his breath and followed.

Barron and Fill sat on the floor; the woman sat on a tatami. Her shack was barely big enough for the three of them. Fill could not have stood if he’d tried. Shelves hung from the ceiling, dangling all around him, heightening his claustrophobia. Her expression seemed empty, void of interest or even fear. Fill babbled, “Tell us about City Without a Map. Who told you to read that text?” He knew he should proceed with more tact, but he also knew that he was overwhelmed, frightened, stranded in a strange place he might not ever find his way back from.

“What did it mean to you?” Barron said, more gently.

“No one told me to read it,” she said. Her hands rested anxiously in her lap. “I read it because I wanted to.”

“But who wrote it?” Fill asked. “Did you write it?”

Choek looked at him, seeing him as if for the first time. “I can’t tell you any more than that,” she said. “I promised.”

“You promised who?” Fill whispered. This woman had touched her, talked to her—or him—but probably her?—the Author.

“I can’t,” she said. “You need to go.”

Fill looked to Barron, whose face seemed torn by rival impulses. To flee, to apologize, to beg . . . Finally he bowed his head and said, “We really appreciate your agreeing to speak with us.”

Just like that. It was over.

“Money,” Fill said. “How much would it cost for you to tell us?”

Choek looked at them for a long time, her eyes wracked with pain, before shaking her head.

Barron said, “Thank you for your—”

Fill blurted out a figure. A big one. A dangerously big one, the kind that he’d have to really beg his grandfather for. And might not get.

But big enough that her eyes went wide. With wonder, and then with anger, and then with sadness. Because there was no way to turn that much money down. No matter whom she had to betray. Single Author, rogue collective, evil robot overlord.

“Did you make this?” Barron said, placatory, pointing to a sculpture cobbled together from ancient circuit board. “What does it mean?”

“Don’t know. Just started seeing them. Dreams. Someone else’s. They’re about the Sunken World, I think. How all those people got buried alive in their own things. Or couldn’t let go of them when the waters started rising, when the flames came, and died clutching them.”

“Magnificent,” Barron said. “And you just started making the things you saw?”

“No,” Choek said. “For so long it was just visions, glimpses, images I could see but not understand. A compulsion to make something I had no idea how to make. I didn’t start sculpting them until I was in the Cabinet.”

“Wait,” Fill said. “You said someone else’s dreams. So you have the breaks?”

“Had,” she said, and smiled.

“You . . . had? You’re cured now?”

“In the Cabinet,” she said. “But I’ve said too much. Go. Come back with the money and maybe I’ll talk more. Maybe.”