Blackfish City(49)
A delay tactic, most likely. Barron was as scared as he was, probably, to get to the bottom of what Choek could or couldn’t do for them. They were both terrified that the trail could be cold, might not lead them anywhere, or—worse—that Choek could indeed lead them to the origin of City Without a Map.
The sun was down. The sky was still bright. His heart danced with the water, with the rippling light. It’s the breaks, he thought. I feel them trembling through me. Cracking open all my defenses, breaking down the walls I built between me and the world. Shaking me loose from my self, from my ego, from this tiny isolated flickering flame, so I can see how I am the sun. We are the sun.
So sad, to think that it took this, this, to make me see how beautiful our world is.
She came to him more and more as the sickness progressed. In dreams, in crowds, in memories that didn’t belong to him. The ghost woman: a guide, but a guide to what? She took him places, told him stories without words. He could feel her in him. Most of the time she was peace, profound and terrifying, a radical reconciliation more divine than anything Christ could have managed, something that could only have come from unspeakable suffering. Sometimes she slipped, cracked, refracted, and he gasped at the river of rage that roared beneath her surface. The things she had suffered. Not repressed, not forgotten, but no longer present.
What had happened to her?
In his mind, she was the Author. The mastermind behind City Without a Map. He was aware that this was irrational, idiotic, probably incorrect. He felt it so strongly that it couldn’t possibly be true. She was a construct, a figment of his damaged imagination, his diseased brain assembling complex narratives and characters out of the chaos of information he was drowning in.
She had to be.
Bald. Fifty-something. Just like the Author described herself.
He let go of the railing and then did something that shocked him. He sat. He reached down, dipped two fingers into the frigid waters. He touched them to his lips.
We live our whole lives suspended above the sea, he thought, but we forget the true taste of salt. Not the purified stuff we find in kitchen cabinets and restaurant counters. The bitter, foul, sea-muck stuff we crawled out of, and live beside, and one day will return to.
Soon I’ll break free of this body and be one with the sea, with the sky, with the infinite. That is the gift I was given, that I in turn gave to someone else. A bitter gift, but the best ones are.
Soq
Soq wanted: nothing.
They looked down on the city from forty stories up. They drank actual scotch, tasting like smoke and hammered bronze, and barely noticed. People all around them carried cages and polyglass bubbles bearing animals Soq had never even seen photographs of, but Soq did not care, did not look twice. Their stomach tingled, the gut fauna freshly tweaked so all the bad thoughts and feelings and bodily traumas were whisked away. Soq stood there, feeling no pain, yet somehow did not marvel at what a strange rare blessing it was to be without pain.
It was the breaks, certainly. From Fill. That fucking rich kid in that fucking warehoused unit. It had to be. There had been no one else. Soq had been far too busy for sex the last few weeks. That fucking asshole had given Soq the breaks.
That’s how Soq popped in and out of his head. That’s how Soq saw into his emptiness, his pain.
Which is why Soq’s lifetime of schemes and plans to conquer or destroy Qaanaaq suddenly felt so flimsy, so flawed.
God damn him.
“It isn’t just the fact that they did terrible things,” Soq was saying, only it wasn’t Soq’s voice at all. “That’s sort of 101, isn’t it? Something you realize right around the time you first find out what fucking is. You just assume there’s things about your family you never want to know.”
“Sure,” said a very pretty boy. Thin lines of gold light gleamed inside his face; bioluminescent bacteria or cephalopod-derived photophores, Soq wasn’t sure which; all the rage among the queer kids of Petersburg plutocrats. The microbes or bacteria or whatever lived for three days—or was it four?—and you could buy a half-ounce acu-ampule for a little less than what Soq made in six months of messengering.
“You’re not listening, Tauron,” Not-Soq said.
“Of course not,” Tauron said, and somehow Soq knew this meant that he had been listening, and good gods, why did the rich have to make everything so complicated?
“And it’s not my fault that all those bad things happened, it’s not my fault I live a good life and other people are living god-awful ones because of things my grandfather might have done . . . but . . . the real problem is, once you do know what they did, doesn’t it make you obligated to do something about it? To make things right? Otherwise, aren’t your hands as bloody as theirs are?”
The bubble they stood in rose, at the end of its long strut. Soq looked down at the sea, black beneath them, and at the lights that danced on all sides.
The city was theirs. Qaanaaq was conquered.
And they were completely miserable.
Then they opened their eyes and were back in whatever creaking dark mold-smelling corner the Killer Whale Woman had them holed up in. She was gone now. Soq remembered her leaving, even though they hadn’t been entirely conscious when she went.
They hadn’t dozed off, so much as . . . gone away.
Soq did not feel angry, to have everything snatched away. To be plunged back into the same poverty they’d always known. What they felt was grateful. To be back in their own life again, their own body. To be free of Fill’s strange and terrifying pain. To have their own familiar pain back.