Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 195, page 1
part #195 of Clarkesworld Series
Clarkesworld Magazine
Issue 195
Table of Contents
Law of Tongue
by Naim Kabir
Keiki’s Pitcher Plant
by Bri Castagnozzi
The Resting Place of Trees
by Ben Berman Ghan
Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness
by S.L. Huang
Upstart
by Lu Ban
Left to Die
by Vandana Singh
To Exorcise Mechanical Ghosts
by Laney Gaughan
The Lightness
by Alex Sobel
A Stroll into Unfamiliar Worlds
by Julie Nováková
Endings & Experimentations: Conversations with Bora Chung and Anton Hur
by Arley Sorg
Women Have Always Been Here: A Conversation with Lisa Yaszek
by Arley Sorg
Editor’s Desk: Wellness Check
by Neil Clarke
Rebirth
Art by Luca Monteleone
© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2022
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
Law of Tongue
Naim Kabir
The fact that they insisted we keep calling them “killer whales” should really tell you something. The orcas of Puget Sound are vicious in negotiations.
“Listen,” I say. “The talks are in two weeks. We can’t just throw away months of work when we’re so close to the finish line.”
The old matriarch spyhops once to get a good look at my face and then slips back under the boat, where the keel-mounted mic picks up her pops, rasps, and whistles.
“I may throw away whatever I wish.” The translation streams through a clunky pair of orange over-the-ear headphones. The synthesized voice is flat and computerized, giving me the impression I’m talking to a robot.
Sometimes, I’m not so sure that I’m not talking to a robot, honestly.
The whale’s scarred dorsal fin slashes out of the water and submerges again.
She says, “Find my granddaughter and I will arrive in Puget at the appointed time.”
“The ocean is a big place, ma’am.” I pinch the bridge of my nose and hope to trade an exasperated glance with Ify, my fixer-in-training. But he’s staring at the whale in total and utter fascination. He’s still just a kid, fresh out of grad school. He’s got stars in his eyes.
I address the matriarch. “Without any leads, finding your granddaughter is going to be close to impossible.”
She replies, “She is with the vagrants. I know it.”
Ify pipes in, “The Pacific transients have a huge range. They could be anywhere. Is she maybe wearing a tag we can track? Or—”
I physically shut his mouth with my hand.
The killer whale rises to the surface and blows an angry jet. “The Southern Residents do not accessorize with man-things.”
Before I can say anything to stop her, she dives deep beneath the surface.
I let out a short exhale. “Ify?” I say.
“Yes ma’am?”
“Just let me do the talking, okay?”
“Yes ma’am.”
We’re halfway up the California Hillway by the time my calls get through.
“Yung?”
“I thought you said we shouldn’t talk for a while.”
This might get delicate. I put my hand to the receiver and smile politely at Ify before leaving our cabin and making a beeline for the observation deck. It’s empty.
“Hey. I’m sorry for calling like this.” Shadows pass over the windows of the deck as the maglev weaves over and under the rolling hills. The sea legs I earned out in Monterey come in handy here, in this ocean of needlegrass and wildrye.
Yung answers after a long pause. “It’s fine. What do you want to talk about?”
“You’re still at NOAA, right?”
His voice is clipped. “You need something from me. Mayor’s business?”
No sense beating around the bush.
“Granny K’s granddaughter is missing.” I know Yung’s a bleeding heart for orcas. It’s sweet in a thick syrupy sort of way. Maybe that’s why I used to like him. “She thinks something might have happened to her.”
“What, like poachers?”
“Maybe.” But probably not. They were ancient history. Business tends to dry up when all your customers get prosecuted. But they made for a good nemesis.
“Fuckers.” Yung sighs. “Okay, how can I help?”
“Hold on.” I pull up Grandmother K’s pod information and swipe open the file on the youngest granddaughter. “Tippop.” I send Yung’s address a set of recorded vocalizations and put the phone back up to my ear. “The hydrophone array stretches all the way up North America, right? Can you run a search for these calls? Sometime in the last week.”
“The hydrophones are for research, Shaina. Not for enforcing an underwater surveillance state.”
“I’m not surveilling, I’m looking for a distress call.”
There’s a rustle over the speaker, like Yung’s just switched which side of his face the phone is on. A resigned exhale. Then three mouse clicks.
“There’s a search running,” he says.
The train peeks through Loma Mar and I catch a glimpse of tides spilling over the reef dam that splits Half Moon Bay. The ocean is foaming and violent out to sea, but inside the Pan-American Kelpwall, the waters are mirror-still and blinding in the sunlight.
It’s going to be a bright day.
The boat that takes us out of Kaktovik is a twin induction engine catamaran that runs as silent as an ice floe. There’s almost no interference when we dip the hydrophone into the freezing Alaskan water.
“There’s a lot of calls, but I’m not getting any translations,” Ify says, a gloved hand up to his earphone.
Our guide pulls the rudder in the direction of the nearest killer whale vocalizations. “It’s not dialed to this dialect,” he says. Jaco’s a local, and no stranger to the pods that run amok around here. “Tune it to another one. You might get a little dropout, but that’s fine.”
“Oh, wait,” Ify says. “There’s something else there, too. It’s not orca.”
I put an earphone up to my head, trying to keep as much of my face under the shawl as possible. Among the clicks and whistles and the chatter of my own teeth, there’s the sound of a violin being played with a fistful of barbed wire.
“It’s a bowhead,” I say. “I think they’re hunting it.”
He gulps. “Maybe we should back off until they’re done? We don’t want to interrupt dinner.”
“Smart, Ify.” He flashes a hopeful smile. “Normally I’d agree with you, but we’re running against the clock as it is. We should gun for it this time.” His smile fades.
Jaco adjusts his sunglasses and throttles the boat. We speed off in the direction of the hunting grounds.
It takes us about an hour and a half to get a positive match on Tippop’s calls, and another good hour to home in on her exact location. The place is a sunlit wasteland of thick floating ice, and soon we have to stop. We must be somewhere off the northern Canadian coastline, by now.
Jaco taps my shoulder, “Do you know how to watch for closing ice floes?”
I shake my head and he purses his lips. “This is as far as we’ll go, then.”
Still no sign of Tippop, or the pod of killer whales she’s gotten herself hitched to. We can’t turn back now. Not after nearly three hours in the biting cold.
“What’s the risk if we keep going?” I point. “I see an opening over there.”
Jaco’s smile is lopsided. “The risk is that we get crushed.” He slaps two mittened hands together and flashes crooked teeth.
We wait there in front of the ice wall for twenty minutes and I start to shiver in my seat again. Ify scoots closer and I feel the warmth roll off of him.
“Thanks.”
“I’m cold too,” he says. His hands are shaking, but he’s listening too intently to notice. “They’re getting closer. I think they’re coming to us.”
I take a peek over the side of the boat, watching for fins or white streaks. There’s nothing there. The water laps gently against the fiberglass of the hull, rocking us from side to side.
Then the ice floe next to us explodes. There, under the crack: the head of a massive bowhead whale breaking through the surface. A jet of hot steam escapes its head and I picture dragons at the edges of ancient maps.
“Hold on!” Jaco leans towards the waves rushing in from the crashing ice, and Ify and I hold on for dear life.
The boat gets caught on a wall of cresting water and sweeps out to sea.
I grit my teeth and hold on. Ify loses his grip but I grab his wrist and pull his hand back to a handle. He clenches his fists and his eyelids tight.
Jaco’s on the rudder, spinning us to face away from the wave. He surfs us out, calm and collected, and that’s when we see them. A group of whalers on a boat of sealskin and caribou bone, paddling towards the broken floe with harpoons raised and long iron rifles. Beneath them, a pack of orcas streaks out like wolves.
One of them has to be Tippop.
“Turn us around!”
Jaco obliges and we’re on the whalers’ tail. The bowhead’s disappeared.
The orcas swoop under the frigid murk and up it comes again! The ice breaks and steeples over the creature’s skull, falling away as it tries to escape whatever black and white monsters it’s seen below.
The whalers take their chance: a pair of them throw harpoons and lance it behind the blowholes, and a third levels a rifle at its struggling head.
The bowhead whale’s skull is a massive twenty-ton sledge, a pyramid of bone and muscle shaped by millions of years of evolution to be nature’s answer to the nuclear-powered icebreaker. It’s capable of crashing through two feet of ice and is covered with the thickest blubber of any animal alive or dead.
Its head splits open like a ripe melon.
Ify vomits over the side of the boat. I pat him on the back, but I doubt it helps.
The whalers tow the whale’s carcass fifty meters and anchor it to a landlocked slab of ice, and then they float. There’s the chant of what might be prayer or maybe just gratitude, and in front of them, the water churns with the black and white masses of killer whales on the move.
The water around the whale’s body darkens to a deep red. Sea-wolves, through and through. They feast with abandon.
“You’d think they’d feel a kind of kinship,” Jaco says. “Being whales ‘n all.”
I keep patting Ify as he blows chunks off the side.
“Killers are dolphins, not whales,” I say. “Different taxonomic families.”
“Oh,” he says, pretending that makes a difference.
The churn stops, and we can take the boat in closer. Ify bobs the hydrophone in the water and listens for calls—they’re all down there, somewhere.
“Welcome!” says the rifleman from the skin boat. “You’ve just witnessed the first kill of the season.”
I’m glad the shawl hides my distaste for the festivities.
“Congratulations,” I say. “My name is Shaina Williams. I’m with the Mayor’s Office of Interspecies Affairs in Seattle.”
“I’m Nanuq,” he says. He makes a sign and his crew begins to disembark, hoisting the whale’s half-eaten carcass onto the ice. It’s missing its lips and tongue. “How can I help you?”
“We’re looking for an orca from the Southern Resident community. We think she’s part of the pod that’s with you.”
“Yeah, she said to expect someone like you,” he says, looping a length of rope. “She’s made her choice. She’s staying here with us this season.”
Blunt and to the point. Nanuq might be part killer whale himself.
“You and the whales work together?” I say.
“We have a compact of sorts,” he says. “Law as old as time.”
Ify finally finishes puking and leans back in his seat.
“Law of Tongue,” he says.
I shoot him a look. “What?”
“The Aussies in grad school talked about it.” He wipes his mouth with a sleeve. “In the 1900s some whalers struck a deal with the orcas. They got the meat and blubber, and the whales got the tongue.”
Nanuq nods sagely.
“So you’re partners with the pod,” I say. “Can you convince Tippop to come home?”
He puts up his hands, “She’s her own whale. I don’t make her decisions.”
“I see. Then I’ll ask her myself.”
I take out a speaker and dangle it into the water.
“Tippop,” I say to the translator. “Your grandmother misses you. Will you come back?”
Nanuq stares at me—off-balance on the edge of my little catamaran, with a thin black wire plumbing an arctic ocean, one hand on an oversized orange earphone, and trying desperately to sound authoritative to a rebellious teenage killer whale thirty times my size—and he laughs a big belly laugh.
“Is that how you speak to them?”
I pull the earphone off and look up at him. “Yeah, why?”
He’s already pulled off his coats and skins, revealing ten-millimeter-thick neoprene clinging to his lean body, shading him matte against the wintry backdrop.
Jaco yells “Stop!” but Nanuq’s already launched himself spread-eagle, slapping against the surface of water so cold it could stop your heart.
Jaco motors towards him on pure instinct.
But before we get there Nanuq rises on the nose of an adolescent killer whale. His smiling face steams in the chill air. “Eighty percent of a killer’s communication is nonverbal,” he says.
Tippop slams her flukes against the water hard, and from the right angle, it looks like Nanuq has the swelling aura of angry seawater surging against an implacable white wall.
“Let me give you a hint as to what she said,” he chuckles, as the droplets rain down.
“You can make a deal with her,” I say. “You’re business partners. Tell her you can’t do business with this transient pod until she comes home.”
“And why would I do that, stranger?” That last word has some bite.
I try the carrot. “You’d do that because I can get you a boat just like this one.” I slap the fiberglass. “Warmer shelters. Desalination plants. Whatever you need.”
“Our home gives us what we need,” he says, shivering. “We just have to take it.”
Now I go for the stick: “You’ll help me because you are illegally hunting an endangered species and breaking about fifty different international treaties. Some nations might count this as murder.” I look him dead in his eyes. “If you don’t tell Tippop to come home, I’m bringing down the authorities.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” he says. “We’ve got twelve-hundred and seventy-three people back in town who need whale oil to warm their homes.” He jabs a finger at the sky. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the sun isn’t very strong here. Will you let them freeze?”
I shrug. “Sounds like you’ve got twelve-hundred and seventy-three reasons to comply, then,” I say.
His face darkens.
“Call your authorities,” he says. “We’ll see who aims better in snow.”
Nanuq’s pulled onto the ice by his team. A woman shoulders a long dart rifle and stares daggers at our catamaran while he gets back into his furs. A pair of men with harpoons look on impassively.
Jaco pulses the motor.
Well, that didn’t go well. I need another option.
Even if it’s a desperate one.
From the air, the American West shimmers like a green starfield.
Shining photovoltaics punctuate the vast flats of prairie clover and purple coneflower, marking bright lone plots of humanity that flow out from the emptying cities like a miniature Hubble expansion.
Our destination’s a hundred and seventy miles from the Battle Mountain Aerostat, where the veetol drops off at 10 A.M. sharp. We glide most of the way, and then the power kicks on to vector thrust us to a patch of packed dirt thousands of feet below. The doors spill us into the hot Sunbelt noon.
The cluster of buildings here is prefabbed cellcrete that was dropped by a dirigible, no doubt. They must have been planted a good year or so ago because the vegetation’s already crawling up the walls and turning the complex into a knobbly cloverleaf mound.
“Welcome to Jotham Newton,” says our host. “Our humble community.”
He has to be at least eighty years old, with a face brown and wrinkled like a raisin in the sun. His torso’s propped up by a soft-body exosuit that feeds on the grass. Chlorophyll recyclers. The thing’s solar-powered.
Other old folks mill about in the open greenery, drinking and poking at a stew boiling over the ruggedized electric heater.
“Thanks for the warm welcome,” I say, reining in my revulsion.
Jonathan Hewitt Ashbury was a poacher, retired by the time of the Urban Flight. He used to capture killer whales and sell them to the highest bidder. Now he gets to live in paradise.
“Should we go somewhere private?”
“That would be wise,” I say.
I follow the strange footsteps of half-chewed clover left behind by his exosuit, into the dank coolness of the prefab complex. We sit in a study flush with sunlight. The glittering West shines behind a triple-pane slab of argon-wafered glass.
“The Mayor’s office has agreed to your demands,” I say.
Ashbury claps his hands together. “Whoo-ee,” he says. “The air around here’s lousy with transpiration, a condenser tower will get us all the agua we need and then some.” He points through the window at a hand-pumped well, painted bright red. “Ol’ Tom there can finally be put to rest.”
“What’ll you need for the job?” I ask.
“First, I need a promise that this is what the Granny really wants.”
“I told you, she said anything goes as long as it gets her granddaughter back.”
