To S.J. van S.
… Mother Earth still has her pride, and she still has her looks. All you gotta do is glance down there to see ‘em.
—Ham from Sunward
The hours in Clever Hands were long and thankless. Not that I really expected to be thanked. Not after what I’d done.
[And continue to do,] Praetoria reminded me.
Never one to mince words, my muse.
[You should help her.] She gave me a mental shove toward the artificial sea where one of my co-pharmers swam in increasing agony, unable to give birth. You could see where the baby dolphin uplift was stuck, halfway in and halfway out of his mother. I’d switched off her distress cries and those of the other pharmers a few minutes ago. I was still deciding what to do.
[Why, P? Why should I help?]
[Because you have hands.]
I sighed. Some of the other pharmers had extensible nets, which they sometimes used for pharming the nano-krill that Somatek grew here. But those arms wouldn’t really work for the kind of job that needed doing here.
[Because you know it would make Eager Randalsson happy].
Eager. Ganesh have mercy. His had been the first face I’d seen when I woke up from the resleeving and realized they’d taken my true body away. He’d leered as the air knifed into my lungs in a way it never had when I lived seaside.
“Get used to it,” he’d said. When I’d tried to climb up and away and fallen on my stupid legs, he’d laughed and said, “To them, too.”
It was Eager who’d allowed Avenyara to get pregnant right under my nose. He’d wanted to see what I would do.
So here I was zipping into my suit, even as I growled aloud, “I’m no bleeding midwife.”
P’s amusement was clear. [Looks like you are now.]
Never one to spare my feelings either, my muse.
It was gravest irony as I swam up to Avenyara with my awkward, scissoring legs and flat-paddle hands. That’s the thing about human bodies. The proportions are all wrong; the mechanics of their movements are idiotic. Humans were never meant to swim.
And I knew it so painfully. I had once been similar to the dolphin uplift I reached into. A sperm whale uplift, I had once swum in an ocean even greater than this, pharming creatures far more exotic than nano-krill to pay off my indenture to Somatek. (P would always laugh at that. No one ever manages to pay them off.) I made an … error in judgment, shall we say … which landed me in an ego hunter’s hold and ultimately back here. Only this time, they took away my body and gave me this ape suit to walk around in.
I turned the dolphin-child gently, trying to help him out of the birth canal without causing damage to mother or child. Avenyara squeaked her gratitude and fear as the baby slid out in a cloud of rusty blood. The other pharmers of our pod rushed to congratulate her as the boy twisted out of my hands so that his mother could bump him to the surface for his first breath.
My silly hands with their frond-fingers tingled with the memory of his skin—the unblemished, holy aliveness of him, the soft resistance. I wanted to both hold him in my arms and glide alongside him at once. But I could do neither. Somatek had forbidden me from breeding.
That was part of why I’d fled last time. And also why they’d resleeved me in this wretched human morph as punishment when their ego hunter caught me.
[You were stupid.] P said. [Still are.]
[Thanks, P.]
[At least they let you live. They didn’t have to, you know.]
P was always trying to make me grateful for what I had, rather than focusing on what I didn’t.
[For an indenture, you sure have some high-class dreams,] she’d say. I had learned to be more careful lately in my thoughts.
I’d been a good worker since they’d resleeved me. No muss, no fuss. I pharmed alongside the rest of my pod, raising the nano-krill that people took to erase brain plaque and lower cholesterol.
I thought maybe if I showed Eager my own eagerness, he’d report my good behavior to the higher-ups. Maybe then they’d give me back my whale morph and let me pharm the deep ocean tanks again. I dared not even imagine life as a wild uplift, breeding perhaps on Enceladus or Europa, living as our ancestors had lived on Earth before the Fall.
Perhaps it was because of my experience in the deep waters that Eager had decided to entrust me with the secrets of the nether depths, the dark places beneath these innocuous krill-farms where Somatek raised...other things.
[He’s testing you,] P would say. [Don’t fuck it up.]
It was a bonus for Eager to have a neo-cetacean accustomed to pharming deep ocean environments resleeved in a human morph with hands and feet.
Not so much a bonus for me.
Avenyara and her baby were doing well when P signaled that something had been delivered to my cubicell. I glanced at the artificial moonlights surging on across the vast pharm. Gears ground as the dividers slid up to isolate the various species of nano-krill in the water column. They’d soon be rising to feed on the phytoplankton mist raining down from the ceiling. So many generations of engineering had not been able to re-program their circadian urges.
[May as well call it a night. No getting into the gen-pharm now.]
[Too right.] P sent me a vid-series of the new baby swimming with his mom. To torment me or set me dreaming again, I was not sure which.
At my cubicell, nothing seemed to be waiting there.
[A fluke of the mesh?] Even the enhanced eyes of this morph, designed for seeing things in deep water and detecting small anomalies, could find nothing.
[Maybe. Let me check.] P sounded concerned. She scanned inside. [Something’s under your pillow.]
[My what? Scan!]
She scanned further. [Seems inert. Not getting much from it, really. Certainly not an explosive. Some unusual DNA signatures on the outside I can’t read. All you can do is use those man-hands of yours and open it.]
[Great. Thanks, P.]
[De nada.]
I stalked cautiously through the door and into the tiny cell I called home. Somatek allotted these to its pharmers. The human ones, anyway. The cetaceans didn’t need anything like this, of course. The best pharmers came cheap.
I reached under my pillow with that eerie, spidery precision I hated about fingers and clutched at the thing. Half-expecting it to blow my hand off. Half-wishing it would.
I withdrew something the like of which I knew very well—its feel, its weight, and heft. Something I’d lost what seemed like ages ago, but was surely now just a few solar years.
A sperm whale tooth. A tooth so yellow with age that my breath caught. It might have come from Earth.
[Transmission coming through,] P said. Her tone was unusually mild, almost as if she was scared.
My fingers searched out the scrimshaw on the tooth’s other side. I flipped it and saw etched in a tooth the familiar emblem of the old Earth tale Moby Dick. A white whale rising from the depths to swallow a whaling ship whole.
[Receive.]
[From the Tooth Fairy.]
[What?]
P seemed to be searching the mesh. [Tooth Fairy: An old Earth custom …]
[I know about the Tooth Fairy,] I interrupted. [Who is the Tooth Fairy in this case?]
There was silence as P searched all the signatures of the mesh. [No data].
I hefted it again in my palm. There could be no doubt, but I asked anyway. [Contraband?]
[Most likely.]
[Recent?]
P scanned again, though I’m sure the DNA signature of my sleeve wasn’t helping.
[Fairly. I detect that this was on Earth not too long ago. It still bears traces of Earth dust, organic particles … they should have washed off if by now if this had been an heirloom for generations.]
[Great.] Who can possibly be fucking with me now? Haven’t they had enough?
P answered my thought, even though it wasn’t directed at her. [Apparently not.]
I couldn’t have this in my possession. If it was found—and it would be!—who knew what Eager would do? Or what he’d think I’d done. This looked like payment for some kind of Earth-obsessed informant. Which I was not. Anymore, that is.
They’d fixed all that with this latest morph.
[Hide it,] P cautioned. [Where?] There was nowhere to hide it here. In fact, it surprised me that no one had already come to inquire about it.
[In the gen-pharms. Deep in the deepest depths where no one goes anymore. Get rid of it.]
I turned it in my hand. So smooth, so sleek, and yet so rutted with age. It was worth a small fortune, I was sure. But I had no means anymore to get what it was worth, even if the payment would have meant something to me. I doubted it was enough to get me free.
[Hide it against a time of need. Then you can rationalize that you didn’t throw it away. You were just saving it for a rainy day.] The sardonic smile in P’s voice was maddening.
I was still in my wetsuit. Might as well.
The moonlight on the artificial sea was almost like Earth, close enough to trick someone less well-versed in Earth lore. Many a night had I fallen asleep to a holoscreen of the moon making its path on the water, long before humans had invented the technology that had given them the wizardry to put a whale into a suit of human flesh.
I slipped in as quietly as I could, careful not to disturb the rest of the pod, which drowsed with its new addition on the other side of the sea. They might sense me, but hopefully they would be too filled with joy over the new birth that they’d not bother me to ask questions. I drifted down through the columns of krill. It was much easier to find the locks to the nether levels when they weren’t clouding the water.
The seal was often sticky. I tugged at it, the extra strength in my reinforced joints making the turn easier. After the seal was the biolock—it scanned me backwards and forwards, my history unreeling before me.
[Neo-cetacean uplift, Genus: Physeter, Class: Sapiens, ID: 576894CH-12].
The biolock opened, pulling me in on a dark tide. I slid through, alert. Once, one of the subjects managed to break free of its restraints. I had a devil of a time getting her back in.
This time it was quiet. P adjusted my eye filters without being asked, tuning them so I could see in the low, hellish light. My ancestors dove to the sunless depths, but this brought an absolutely new meaning to the notion.
From an alcove, I grabbed a stunning stick just in case, picked up the collection bag to make it look like I was working. The thin hoses trailed like tentacles. I floated down the corridors, scanning with sonar to make sure nothing awaited me in the darker corners. Most of the creatures here were resigned to their fates, barely cognizant that they existed.
But there was one, a chimera I could not resist looking upon. She floated in the corner of her cell, gill trees flaring like delicate red coral fans.
I didn’t know her entire history. She was bred from the hybridization of some sort of cetacean uplift crossed with an unknown alien lifeform. What they used her for now must have something to do with oxygen in the blood or the strength of bone under duress. Some new genetic system under development.
She could move freely in her cage; she was not confined. She was conditioned to respond to my requests, but she had her own conditions.
I had to speak with her. I had to give her something personal before she would allow me to take samples.
She knew I was there, but she took a long while to turn.
[Don’t talk about that again with her, Rani].
Last time, talk of what Somatek would and would not do had induced a hysterical rage.
[What do you have there?] the chimera asked in her lilting, lulling tone.
[Nothing,] I whispered. Something from the Tooth Fairy, I wanted to say. But it was too ridiculous.
Still, P did not like the compulsion. [Rani, move on].
I turned away from her, began moving toward the deep pit that was the central well of the artificial sea.
[You will not be childless forever,] the chimera murmured behind me.
I whipped around. As well as one can in the water in a human body.
[What?]
A strange hope welled up before I saw the reflection in her large eyes, the deeper shadow looming in the glass behind me. Before the tentacles unfurled and slammed my head repeatedly against the glass until all I saw was darkness the color of blood.
—
I woke to an insistent beeping in my head that I first read as pain.
It took a good deal of time to sort through the screaming of pain to realize that the noise was actually noise.
A wall of water—some vast containment area—rose above me. An orca’s face leaned out of it. He looked at me critically.
“Not yet,” he said to something or someone I couldn’t see.
The beeping faded away again.
—
The second time the beep was distant but it came with words. [Incoming message.]
The timestamp was days off.
[What in the 28 Hells is going on, P?]
Silence.
[P?]
The nictitating membranes on my eyes, a service pack upgrade engineered from shark genes, snapped shut at the sound of his voice.
“Ah,” he said. “You’re awake.”
The words left a trail of pain in their wake, all of my neurons alive and firing first in alarm and now the remembrance of pain.
The pain was not as great, certainly, as it had been.
“And you needn’t summon your muse. We’ve … ah … removed her, so to speak.”
“You what?” My rubbery human lips could barely shape the words.
P. Praetoria. My warrior-sharp mama muse.
“I will be your muse now,” the man said.
“What?” The insistent throbbing in my forehead began again. A bubble of voices rose to a cacophony until I could barely think, much less speak. It was as if the entire mesh was pouring into my brain all at once. P had always filtered it, diluted it. Now there was nothing where she had been in my mind, a great, numb void.
“What in the 28 Hells …” I mumbled out loud.
Then, it was as though someone had turned off a switch. Inside my head was pure silence.
“This is preferable, I presume,” the orca said.
It was and it wasn’t. The hole where P had been was there, whether there was silence or not.
“You killed my muse? Why?”
He shrugged. “Let us just say I am not fond of snitches.”
I flexed my fingers. I wasn’t tied down. I was on a slab, the way I’d been so many times, but I could sit, if I wished. So, I did.
The pain in my head roared to life. A synthmorph slid a hospital tray on my lap and I vomited. It handed me a handkerchief to wipe my mouth after.
The sheer wall of a vast tank towered above me, the blue waters backlit to a soft, hazy glow.
I considered how I could kill the orca who hovered above me, but I was far too weak, then. Revenge, if I was to have it, would have to come later.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Deep Current Black. Also known as the Tooth Fairy.”
My eyes must have flared because he gave me an orca-grin.
“Yes, the very one,” he said.
“How? Why?” I whispered. It was still hard to form complete sentences.
All neo-cetaceans knew of him, though to some he was just a legend. He was quite possibly the greatest smuggler who had ever lived. He was probably most responsible for all the relics and nostalgia pieces from Earth that filtered onto the black markets. Somehow, he had gotten free of all the restraints that bound him. That had always seemed the most legendary thing to me.
“There is a thing I want, a thing of great value and importance to you and to me. To all our kind.”
I didn’t say anything. I was feeling around the hole where P had been in my mind, like a child slowly putting her fingers and toes out into the dark.
A vidscreen descended from the shadows in the ceiling. At first, I thought I was looking at static, and then saw an image rise up, almost like krill rising through the water column back at Clever Hands.
It was long and white. It cleaved through the gray waves with purpose, like a ship or old Earth submarine. A spume of mist rose from it and disappeared into the gray vastness of the sea.
“It’s …” I could barely speak. “Where is this from? Where did you get this?”
The screen switched off and disappeared back into nothingness. Then he smiled at me again.
“Earth.”
“But it can’t … that cannot have survived on Earth. Not after everything that was done.”
“Apparently, it can and it has. There is a sperm whale down there—a white whale, no less. I want him.”
I close my eyes against the throbbing pain this knowledge engenders. Put my hands to my temples. “What has all this to do with me?”
“I have heard you are an excellent keeper of secrets. An excellent finder of things. Much like me. Somatek did not realize the treasure they had in you.”
“But I’m just a pharmer! And what does this whale have to do with me? How would I even begin to …” I put my head in my hands again.
“You are more than just a pharmer.” He opens the vidscreen again, shows me flashes of previous selves. Contraband infomorph mule, opera singer in the Martian enclaves, and even further back, diplomat to a Venusian delegation. That was before everything went wrong, before everything degraded …
There was no point in denying I was those things. Except that I was not any of them now.
“You are quite capable of doing what I need. And you have an axe to grind, as the old Earth saying goes, don’t you? Something about children, I recall?”
I blanched at that. I had wondered what he might use against me. It had come to this. P had warned me against speaking of it so openly. And they had taken P away…I wanted to weep at the silence, but instead I whispered, “Yes.”
It all came rushing back then, the emptiness, the silence in my cubicell. I was not romantically involved with another pharmer. I did not have a partner with whom I wanted to create a child to cement our bond. It was nothing like that. It was something even more primal. I wanted what I had been; I wanted some semblance of that to go on. And at the same time, I wanted my child to be better, to be whole and unbroken, to flower in a way I never quite had. I wanted the beautiful future for him or her that I had been promised but never quite achieved.
I felt Avenyara’s son slide out into my horrid human hands and again wished he had been mine.
But when I had requested the genetic service pack from Somatek to be allowed to breed, they refused. It would have made more sense they said, if I’d found a mate. Or if there was anything special about me that warranted duplicating. But I was a run-of-the-mill uplift, a pharmer. There was nothing about me they found particularly worthy of reproducing.
“It is not a hard thing you’re asking,” Black said. “Find this Moby Dick of a whale for me, and I will give you back your body. With the service pack you’ve been denied.”
He grinned. I felt both sick and a shiver of excitement at once.
He leaned close again. “And I promise you this—your child will be free.”
You will not be childless forever, the Chimera whispered.
I didn’t know what it all meant for me. I didn’t care. The lure was too tempting.
“All you want is for me to find this whale?” I said. “Then what?”
“Communicate with him. Offer him the chance he’s been denied. Mate with him, if you like. We’ll bring you both back and your offspring, too. But first, you must be resleeved. We’ll beam your infomorph down …”
“Wait. Why? Why should I trust you in this?” I clutched the scrimshaw so tightly it felt as though it might fuse to my fingers.
The orca-grin again. “Sweetmeat, I never reveal all the cards. Deal or no deal? I could of course use far less pleasant methods to ensure your compliance, but I find that people with will are far more motivated than those without. Obviously.”
Sad to say, he didn’t have to do much more to coax me. I knew even if he released me, I would have nowhere to go. I would be on the run again. And when Somatek found me, I had no idea what they would do. Without P to warn me or filter out the noise of the mesh, I doubted I’d survive more than a day.
“Are you in or not?”
I lay back down on the table, trying to peer up into the vaulted ceiling of what I supposed was a ship. It was as blank as the blackness in my mind.
“In.”
—
I don’t know how they managed to egocast me past the cordon. I can’t imagine who or what Black must have bribed, how much he must have spent. I’d guess I rode down on a drone packed with swarmanoid morphs to help me break through the barrier. Maybe I hid in a cloud of ash to avoid nanoswarms. Could be I narrowly avoided the killsats.
However they managed it, I woke up in my true body again in a resleeving facility off the coast of what had once been Japan. Shikoku—the feeding grounds of my ancestors and the hunting ground of the legendary Bake-Kujira, the whale skeleton that caused entire villages to crumple up and burn away with plague.
We were deep, deep undersea. The pressure was delightful and familiar, even as I knew I had never experienced anything quite like it before. I also knew, though my vast lungs billowed with air, I would have to surface in an hour or so to breathe.
[Rani.] Whoever spoke was looking out from a reinforced bubble in a station the size and technology of which I could only guess. I was in a large resleeving containment area, but I could sense that the doors opened out onto the deep.
My mouth curved in what would have been a grin on a human to think that one of the genus Orcinus had liberated me. Orcinus, who had been worshipped long ago as the Lord of the Depths. I liked to think P would have reminded me of that, had she been around still.
And soon, I would be seeking the lone whale—though surely he could not be alone, could he?—who remained of all that Lord’s vast empire.
[Rani,] the command center said again.
[Acknowledged].
[Black has joined with our reclamation group in hopes of establishing a cetacean-human cooperative society here below. You were one of the few sperm whale uplifts easily available to perform this task. If you can find Moby, that would go a long way toward giving our colony a foothold].
[Yes]. One couldn’t nod in the depths of the sea. I had no need to nod or bow my head ever again.
[Godspeed, then,] the man said.
The doors opened, and I was free.
I called to him, unsure if the calls I remembered were familiar enough to lure him, unsure if he frequented these waters.
I listened. In the final days of Earth before the TITANs, the waters had been so clogged with noise that whalekind could no longer hear one another. They had sometimes languished on opposite sides of the world, listening for songs that never came.
I held the image of him in my mind as I swept up from the abyss, very like the image of the whale on the scrimshaw Black had sent, as invitation or warning I still wasn’t sure. For why would he have sent me? The lowliest of pharmers, deemed too insignificant even to breed?
Nevertheless, it was not long before I heard a distant answer. I surfaced.
It was a moonless night. It was always a moonless night here now. Luna could not penetrate the thick nuclear cloud. Ash rained down, and little fish—impossible fish—leaped up to catch it as if it was a swarm of insects suddenly blown down from the sky.
His clicks grew louder and I moved toward him, just below the surface, ever cognizant of killsats, of nanoswarms, of killing machines.
[Rani, have you made contact?]
Click. Click. Click.
Locating me, homing in on me, cleaving a path like the moon burning through water.
He was upon me then, coming from a direction I hadn’t anticipated. I called to him again, speaking in the wild language I’d nearly forgotten.
I turned toward him, only to see a mass of tentacles like a vast white web shooting forth from the whale’s head. The sheer look of glee in Moby’s blue eye filled me with almost worse terror than the tentacles that snared me and drew me ever closer.
The white suckers closed over me, wrenching at my flesh.
[Rani?]
[Rani!]
—
It was true what the chimera said.
I would not be childless for much longer.
But what horror would I give birth to, now that all the whales were truly gone?