Blackfish City(52)
“You have some time to think about it,” Masaaraq said, removing a series of strange tools from the box. Syringe, bottles, droppers, other things Ankit had no words for. “For now I’ll just take a sample of your nanites so we can start the culture process.”
“No,” Ankit gasp-yelled, and turned to run—and then turned back, and told Masaaraq precisely how to find her, where she lived and where she worked, and stammered some profuse apologies, and turned, and ran.
Kaev
Kaev had wondered, once, what it was like for the superstar champion fighters. The ones everybody recognized, the ones crowds parted for, the ones who made people break into wide-open smiles of amazement, gratitude. Fear. His buddy Ananka had come close, back when both of them were just starting out, and passersby were always stopping to stare at her, but he knew it was nothing like the universal awe that the biggest beam fighters were held in.
And even that would be trivial compared to the attention he was getting now. Half the population of Qaanaaq was totally oblivious to the beam fights, yet not a single one of them could be oblivious to a polar bear.
So here he came, strutting down the grid with a polar bear padding beside him. Not a little one, either. And the legendary orcamancer, bone-blade staff in hand. And a street urchin slide-messenger-turned-criminal-errand-kid who happened to be his child.
Everybody stopped. Everybody stared. Many screamed. Many tapped their jaws, dialing Safety. People took pictures with screens and hat cams and oculars. Children began to cry. There was a polar bear in the Floating Zoos, but it was small and sickly and unhappy.
Soq had suggested whistling for a jaunt skiff, but the orcamancer—Masaaraq, Kaev quickly corrected himself, she has a name, she is a person, not the mythic figure everyone tells stories about—said no.
Masaaraq had been in a foul mood, returning from some nebulous errand that had upset her greatly, and she snapped, “Let them see us.”
My city finally knows who I am. Everyone is looking at me, and not because I’m about to be beaten by some pretty-boy kid. This will be in all the outlets in instants.
Once or twice he turned to look at Soq, this other magnificent creature who’d just entered his life, and each time, he saw Soq look away swiftly.
At least I’m not the only one who doesn’t know how to handle this, he thought, and smiled. The bear stopped to sniff a red chrome pipe and snarled at the absent dog whose scent it found.
“It’s crazy,” Kaev said. “I can feel him, how he wants to attack these people. How they all look like meat to him. How they smell. But he can feel me, too. And he knows he can’t do that. So he doesn’t. How is that possible? People spend years trying to tame wild animals, and this one became tame . . .”
“Instantaneously,” Masaaraq said. “But he isn’t tame. A bonded animal is only as tame as its human is. And humans can be very, very wild.”
“True.”
“And you want to be careful. It goes both ways. You influence his behavior, but he can influence yours. Usually humans assert emotional dominance effortlessly, but you need to stay vigilant.”
He put his hand on the bear’s shoulder, and they walked proudly through the Hub and onto Arm Five. At the entrance a Safety officer stopped them, tapping for backup and visibly trembling.
“There’s nothing in the registration consent agreement that says it’s illegal to have a polar bear,” Kaev said. Masaaraq had talked him through this already. She’d done a lot of research before she came to Qaanaaq. “I can vouch for its behavior. It won’t hurt anyone.”
“Unlicensed wildlife,” the officer mumbled, unconvinced, eyes out for assistance. His hand moved to the zapper strapped to his belt, but that was barely good enough to take down a chubby drunk. It’d just irk the bear, and irking the bear was probably not something he wanted to do.
“Licensing terms only apply to registered residents,” Kaev said, another Masaaraq talking point. “This belongs to my friend here, who is visiting.”
“. . . wanted in connection with more than one instance of multiple fatalities . . .”
“No proof that this was the same polar bear.”
They kept walking. In ten minutes they’d be off the grid, and Safety couldn’t do a thing about it. It’d take the combined zappers of twenty officers to slow the bear down, or authorization from HQ to use lethal weaponry, both of which would require a lot more time than that to procure. Kaev quickened his pace, but not by much.
A lot of food processing happened on Arm Five. The smells of cooking fish and caramelizing soy sauce made the bear grumble with hunger. Kaev could feel that, too, the bear’s hunger distinct from his own, and when he focused on it he could feel his own hunger grow. A loop. An echo chamber, hunger bouncing off hunger and magnifying, multiplying, and if he just shut his eyes and let it happen the bear would be able to reach out one arm and effortlessly satisfy their hunger—
Pain jolted him back; Masaaraq had struck him with the butt of her weapon. “Hey!”
The bear watched her as they walked, its hostility tingling in Kaev’s elbows, like, I’ll remember that—and I still haven’t forgotten how you had my head in a cage for all that time. Soq put a hand on the bear’s other shoulder. Kaev felt this, too, the animal’s blunt mammalian happiness at the touch of someone it liked, not so different from a dog’s. A beautiful thing to be inside of.