Peter Watts: Bulk Food

A rhythmic stomping begins from somewhere in the crowd. Ramona cranks up the smile and the volume, and forges ahead. Research and Education : that’s the aquarium’s motto, and they’re sticking to it. You don’t get to the good stuff until you’ve learned something.

“Now we’ve known since the nineteen-seventies that Transients hunt seals, dolphins, even other whales, while the Residents feed only on fish. We didn’t know why until after The Breakthrough, though. It turns out that Residents are the killer whale version of animal-rights activists!” This is obviously supposed to be a joke. Nobody’s laughed at that line since Doug started casing this place over a year ago, but the song remains the same.

Unfazed, Ramona continues: “Yes, the Residents consider it unethical to eat other mammals. Transients, on the other hand, believe that their gods have given them the right to eat anything in the ocean. Each group regards the other as immoral, and Residents and Transients have not been on speaking terms for hundreds of years. Of course, we at the Aquarium haven’t taken sides. Most humans know better than to interfere in the religious affairs of others.”

Ramona pauses. A faint chant of assembled voices drifts into the silence from beyond the outer wall:

“Hey ho— hey ho— the Ma triarchs have got to go—”

Ramona smiles. “And despite what some people might think,”

she continues, “there’s no such thing as a vegetarian orca.”

Not yet, anyway.

Dipnet chugs steadily west. Her cargo of ambassadors scans the waves for any sign of the natives, their faith too strong to falter before anything so inconsequential as zero visibility. Not everyone gets to commune with an alien intelligence. A superior intelligence, in many ways.

Not in every way, of course. Many on the Dipnet long for the good old days of moral absolutes, the days when Meat Was Murder only when Humans ate it. Everything was so clear back then, to anyone who wasn’t a puppet of the Industrial-Protein Complex. There was a ready answer to anything the Ignorantsia might ask:

How come it’s okay for sharks to kill baby seals ? Because sharks aren’t moral agents. They can’t see the ethical implications of their actions.

How come it’s not okay for people to kill baby seals ? Because we can .

Now orcas are moral agents too. They talk. They think. They reason. Not that that’s any surprise to Dipnet ’s passengers, of course—they knew the truth way back when all those bozo scientists were insisting that orcas were basically chimps with fins. But sometimes, too much insight can lead to the wrong kind of questions, questions that distract one from the truth. Questions like:

How come it’s okay for orcas to kill baby seals, but we can’t?

If only those idiot scientists hadn’t barged in and proved everything. Now there’s no choice but to get the orcas to give up meat.

The Residents have the greatest moral potential. At least they draw the line at fish. The Transients remain relentlessly bull-headed in their mammalvory, but perhaps the Residents can be brought to full enlightenment. Back on shore, one of the west coast’s best-known Kirlian nutritionists is working tirelessly on alternate ways to meet Orcinus ’ dietary requirements. She’s already had some spectacular successes with her own cats. Not only is a vegan diet vastly more efficient than conventional pet foods—the cats eat only a fraction of what they used to—but the felines have so much more energy now that they’re always out on the prowl. You hardly ever see them at home any more.

Not everything goes so well, of course. There’ve been setbacks.

In hindsight, it may have been premature to dump that thousand heads of Romaine lettuce onto A4-Pod last summer during their spring migration. Not only did the Residents fail to convert to Veganism, but apparently they’d actually been considering certain exceptions to their eat-no-mammals policy. Fortunately, everyone on the boat had made it back okay.

But that’s in the past. Live and learn. Today, it is enough to stand in solidarity with the Residents against the mammalphagous Transient foe, to add Human voices in peaceful protest for a just cause. The moral education can come later. Now it is time to make friends.

The men and women of the Dipnet have the utmost faith in their abilities in this regard. They’re ready, they’re willing, they’re the best of the best.

What else could they be? Every last one of them was hand-picked by Anna-Marie Hamilton.

Shamu sails past Doug in mid-air, his ivory belly a good two meters above water level. Their eyes meet. For all this talk about killer whale intelligence, it still looks like a big dumb fish to Doug.

It belly-flops. A small tsunami climbs the splashguards. A few scattered voices go oooooh.

“Now, Shamu is a Transient, so of course he’d never normally eat fish,” Ramona announces. This is not entirely true. Back before the Breakthrough, fish was all captive Transients ever got. A decent meal plan was one of the first things they negotiated when the language barrier fell. “So to feed him what he really wants, he knows he has to hide for a bit.”

Ramona touches a control on her belt and speaks into the mike. What’s coming out of the speakers now isn’t English. It sounds more like fingernails on a blackboard.

Shamu spits back a series of clicks and sinks below the surface.

Waves surge back and forth across the tank, playing themselves out against the walls. Doug, standing on tiptoes, can just barely make out the black-and-white shape lurking near the bottom of the tank like a squad car at a radar trap.

Peripheral movement. Doug glances up as a great chocolate-colored shape lumbers out onto the deck. It’s twice the size of the man who herds it onstage with a little help from an electric cattle prod.

“Some of you may recognize this big bruiser.” Ramona’s switched back to English. “Yes, this is a Steller sea lion . When he was just a pup, scientists from the North Pacific Fishing Consortium—one of the aquarium’s proudest sponsors— rescued him and some of his friends from the wild. They were part of a research project that was intended to promote the conservation of sea lions in the North Pacific.”

The sea lion darts its head back and forth, snorting like a horse.

Its wet, brown eyes blink stupidly.

“And not a moment too soon. As you may know from our ever-popular Pinniped habitat, Stellers were declared extinct in the wild just five years ago. This is now one of the only places in the world where you can still see these magnificent creatures, and we take our responsibility to our charges very seriously. We go to great lengths to ensure that everything about their environment is as natural as possible.

“Including…”

Ramona pauses for effect.

“…Predators.”

A ragged cheer rises up from the bleachers. Spooked, the sea lion bobs its head like a fat furry metronome. The animal wheels around the way it came, but the guy with the prod is blocking its way.

“Please try not to make any loud noises or sudden moves,” Ramona smiles belatedly.

With a few final nudges from the cattle prod, the sea lion slides into the water. It dives immediately, finally curious about its big new home.

Apparently it discovers all it wants to in about half a second, after which it shoots from the center of the pool like a Polaris missile. It doesn’t quite achieve escape velocity and hits the water running, lunging for the edge as fast as its flippers can churn.