Tobias Buckell - Arctic Rising

Anika locked Karl’s bike up to a lamppost and joined the line at the velvet rope.

Five stories tall, The Greenhouse was exactly what the name implied. In the past it was used to grow fresh greens here in Arctic Bay, but as the roads and shipping got better, and the farms in lower Baffin started up, it had been abandoned.

So it had been repurposed as a club.

Anika pulled out a plastic card and showed it to the bouncer, a vaguely Eastern European bodybuilder with black-light tattoos of wildlife on his forearms that fluoresced with the grow lights that had been jacked into a computer running them through some Fibonacci sequence.

He looked it over. The Greenhouse didn’t use RFID tags, or social technologies, or your phone, as a pass. They actually printed up these physical membership badges once they “adopted” you. Very retro. Very coveted if you wanted to jump the line.

“You’re one of those Smurf pilots, yah?” the bouncer asked. The Eastern Europeans called anyone in the UN military Smurfs, thanks to the damn blue helmets and please-shoot-me blue uniforms.

Anika nodded as he handed back her badge and she slipped it into her jacket. He looked her up and down, clearly not liking her sense of fashion, but sighed and waved her in anyway.

The wall of noise being delivered by locationally targeted speakers aimed right at the foyer just about knocked her off her feet, but she took a few steps to the right, into a virtual corridor of dead silence created by reverse noise-canceling zones.

Three feet to the right, people were jumping into the air to the music. Others walking the corridor of silence nodded wryly at her, a sort of instant bond between those who liked the clubs, but couldn’t handle the distorted sound.

She stepped out into the atrium and glanced up. The twilight trickled in, boosted by mirrors and grow lights. And everywhere in the niches and nooks and crannies tropical plants bloomed and grew. Banana trees, rich with green clumps ripening away. The smell of mangos and nutmeg drifted around, intoxicating for their exotic smells so far from the tropics.

Flowers and fruit of every color was all the decoration The Greenhouse needed.

Since she’d discovered it, Anika had been coming here for the smell of something like home. Not all the trees and fruits were things she recognized. She’d never been to South America, or the Caribbean. But there were things in common.

And the tropical heat, partially generated by the sweaty dancing bodies constantly inhabiting The Greenhouse, made her feel more at home than sitting in her tiny box on base with the heat turned up to max. Because at base those drafts of cold air still seeped in through the cracks and mixed with the heat like oil and water, caressing and chilling her, reminding her where she was even while she was slick with sweat.

A couple of girls wearing jackets with large Chinese flags on the back were feeding meat to a pitcher plant in one of the nooks along the stairway. Anika walked past them up to the second level and along the railings to the bar.

From up here, away from the coherent sound speakers targeting their music at specific spots on the floor with sound, the dancing masses on the ground floor looked like an insane, but eerily quiet mob.

Anika stopped at the second floor bar, which was framed by bird-of-paradise flowers and hibiscus threaded through self-watering and self-feeding glass-tube trellises.

A lean, but whip-muscular older First Nations man with wolf eye contacts and deep creases around his eyes, a look gained from a lifetime lived outside, leaned over the polished mahogany. “What do you want?”

“Vy.”

He straightened up and folded his arms. “Who’s asking?”

“Anika.”

An arm draped itself across her back, and Anika stiffened. “Hello there, little Smurf,” Vy said into her ear, then nodded at the bartender. “It’s okay, Eric. Two Belladonnas?”

“I don’t need a drink,” Anika said, still facing the bar. There were hundreds of bottles, all shades of liquors, catching the grow lights against a back mirror, sparkling and dazzling the air.

“Oh, you need a drink,” Vy said. “Heard what you’ve been through. You really, really need a drink. You’ll like this, the pineapple juice in here is fresh squeezed, made right here in The Greenhouse.”

Anika could see herself in the mirror behind the pyramids of bottles, her hair haloed out around her face, the black jacket loose and unzipped, and Vy slipping onto the stool next to her.

Vy had a strong jaw and Midwest girl-next-door features. Her impossibly straight blond hair hung loose just above her chin in a pageboy cut. Anika almost suspected she had pompoms in a closet somewhere, and that until the recent cut, her hair was kept back in a ponytail.

There was a short, bubbly cheerfulness to her that seemed at odds to the crisp Armani suit and executive look she had right now. And it also seemed at odds with the fact that Violet was the biggest drug dealer in Arctic Bay.

The Belladonna, all real fruit juice and rich, expensive rum, settled over Anika like a faint haze. She grabbed Vy by the crook of her arm and guided her to a couch in a niche dominated by tiny palm trees in large plastic tubs.

So Vy had already scanned the news. She rubbed Anika’s shoulder, concern in her eyes. “I’m glad you’re okay. Some of us were worried about you. They’re saying the navy hunted the bastards down, right?”

Here in the niche, in the humid air, silenced from the outer party, Anika relaxed.

“They had me fly out to take a look. The Americans do have the people who fired at us.”

Vy grinned. “U.S.A. for the motherfucking win!” Vy was from somewhere in the southern United States. Anika had heard the accent in her voice the first time they’d met, when Vy had been drunk. Her slurring had strange cadences to it that weren’t there when she was sober and alert.

“But there’s something that doesn’t make sense,” Anika said. “They said these guys were running drugs.”

“Really? What kind?”

Anika leaned forward and buried her face in her hands, frustrated. “Shit, I didn’t think to ask.”

“Well, they’re not moving weed, not by ship. Anywhere in the Canadian Polar Circle, it’s all grown locally. Look at me: I have a license to sell. Pay taxes. I mean, you can think of me as the CEO of a very lucrative series of farms and pharmacies here in North Baffin. No sense in shipping it when you can grow it. The harder stuff, that usually comes smuggled up from the States, via the Midwest. That’s how I got my start, actually.”

“What gets shipped, then?”

Vy frowned. “Not much. Counterfeit pharmaceuticals, sometimes? Opiates from Afghanistan. But they usually ship them with regular shipments. Stick a container in the middle of a crapload of other containers. Smuggling via anonymity. It’s pretty awesome at getting your stuff where it needs to be.”

“So this chartered drug boat stuff, it’s bullshit.”

“I don’t know for sure. But my guess is: yes, it’s bullshit. I mean, I’m not hearing about it. It’s ridiculous, risky, expensive, and totally pointless. Particularly now that the UNPG has such a strong presence.”

Anika finished up the Belladonna and set it on the small table catercorner to the couch. “Okay. Thank you. I guess … I owe you? I’m not good at this sort of thing.” She stood up.

Vy sprang up next to her. “You’re not going to stay, are you?” She sounded disappointed.

Anika looked over at her. “I can’t.”

Vy’s eyes flicked around, and then she smiled ruefully. “You look determined. I won’t press it.” Then she leaned over, grabbed Anika’s hand and kissed the back of it. Anika closed her eyes for a second. “Well, I’d tell you that you know where to find me but it’s been two months since I last said that and you came to visit. Take my card.”