Blackfish City(63)

She took another syringe. When she grabbed the monkey’s arm, the animal smiled, a wide toothy smile of fear, and she screamed when Masaaraq stabbed her but did not pull away. Grid rumor said that synth drug labs tested their products on Qaanaaq monkeys, and Ankit had always chalked that up to mythmongering on the part of gossipy drug runners, or Narcotics, who wanted you to doubt the hygiene of unlicensed narcotics. Now she wasn’t so sure.

Masaaraq held up the tube of monkey blood. “You would not have had a choice, in normally functioning nanobonder society,” she said, dropping the pebble into the monkey’s blood. “An animal Other would have been allotted to you based on community need and availability. Every animal serves a purpose, brings a different kind of skill or resource. It was somebody’s responsibility to be bonded to a bunch of chickens, if you can imagine that.”

Masaaraq laughed. The sound was earthy, warming. Ankit got the impression it had been a long time since she’d made that sound.

“Old Rose. She was never quite right. Inappropriate, and mean.”

She picked up the nanite pebble gingerly. Ankit could see it, all but crushed between the two chopsticks. Masaaraq dropped it into the tube of monkey blood. “It’ll dissolve fast, now that the polymerizing agent is almost completely deactivated.”

“How did you get so lucky? I have to imagine an orca is a pretty sought-after . . . Other.”

“I had an unfair advantage. I was a stubborn child, totally uninterested in weaving, so I didn’t learn until I was nine years old . . . and by the time I did, I was smart enough to know that I didn’t want to get stuck bonded to something stupid like milk goats. So I kept it secret, pretended like I still didn’t know how to weave, and I waited until an old woman in our village who was bonded to an orca passed away. And then, Wow, look, everyone, now I know how to weave.”

Ankit laughed. They laughed together.

“But still—it wasn’t a sure thing. Three other kids had come of weaving age that year, and we would all bond at the same ceremony. The shaman would make the choice, and I couldn’t leave it up to chance. So I went to the cove where the orcas and their human Others lived—most nanobonder communities only had three or four, whereas they might have thirty wolf dogs and a couple dozen horses—and jumped into the water. There were orca babies, unbonded, and they came out to play with me, like I thought they would, except they came out to play at killing me. Would have, if a human and its adult orca hadn’t intervened. But the shaman decided that it meant I had some deep spiritual connection with the orca, so she marked me for bonding to one.”

Ankit scanned her face for a sign of that impetuous, clever child. The one who’d risk dying without stopping to weigh the pros and cons. It was still there, she decided. Buried deep. But there. Masaaraq gave the monkey blood tube a brief vigorous shake. Then she sucked the blood back up into the syringe and injected most of it back into the monkey. The last few drops she squeezed out onto the plate of seal flesh strips.

“Eat,” she said, and held out the plate to Ankit and the monkey.

“Is this hygienic?”

“No,” Masaaraq said. “But it is probably the least risky part of this entire process.”

Ankit ate a strip, salty from their blood. The monkey took one in each hand and shoved both into her mouth.

“You’ll both need to sleep now,” Masaaraq said, opening two bottles of the little over-the-counter post-opioid drink that was the closest Ankit had been able to come to the red tar opium that the ritual’s “recipe” had called for. Ankit drank hers directly from the bottle; Masaaraq poured the other one into the little bowl and the monkey lapped it up.

“Why a monkey?” Masaaraq asked. “You could have had any animal. Those boats full of functionally extinct predators—I could have gotten you a tiger, or a wild boar, or a sea snake . . .”

“Monkeys are survivors,” Ankit said, feeling tentacles of trance take hold of her already. “They’re small and resourceful. And fearless.”

She slept. Hours passed. Her dreams were glorious, vibrant, alive. More real than memories. She scaled—everything.

“I know how to do it,” Ankit said, coming awake for one brief flash between dreams. “I figured it out the other day.”

Masaaraq was there, holding her hand, watching over her and her monkey. She asked, “How to do what?”

“How to get her out.”





Soq


Soq kept lists. Document after document, stored on their screen. Soq recorded everything they saw. The info that came into their head. The data; the images.

Each new wave of imagery and sound and memories that were not theirs came with a new kind of pain, starting in some new place inside their brain. But Soq was determined to be stronger than the breaks.

Soq cataloged. Created structure. Tried to order the things into categories; to find the patterns; to make them when there weren’t any. And when they weren’t trying to impose structure on the chaos of new things surging through their mind, they played with the polar bear, who seemed perfectly happy to be named Liam. There was barely room for the two of them in the little cabin Go had given Soq, which was full of old screens and smelled like wet wood.

“Hey!” they said to Masaaraq when she came back from gods knew where, having been away for what seemed like days, looking exhausted but with an uncharacteristically blissful expression on her face. “Where’ve you been?”