Peter Watts - Bulk Food

Doesn’t matter. Doug’s not going to be around for any of it, he’s already halfway out of the amphitheater. From the corner of his eye he can see his competition, caught flat-footed, just starting to rise from the bleachers. Some of them, closer to the main theater entrance, would still have a chance to beat him if he was going the usual route. He’s not. Doug Largha may be the first person in recorded history to have actually read the award-winning educational displays in the underwater gallery, and that gives him all the edge he needs. That’s where he’s headed now, at top speed.

Herschel and his ten grand. Tetsuo and his lousy aim. Doug could kiss them both. When a guest makes a kill, they get to keep the carcass.

But when they fuck up, it’s whale steaks in the gift shop.

Well, no one expected the whales to be such assholes.

Certainly not Anna Marie Hamilton and her army of whale-huggers. The Gospel according to Anna Marie said that orcas (you never called them “killer whales”) were gentle, intelligent creatures who lived in harmonious matriarchal societies. Humans were ethically bound to respect their cultural autonomy. Kidnapping these creatures from the wild, tearing them from their nurturing female-centered family units and selling them into bondage for barbaric human entertainment—this went beyond mere animal abuse. This was slavery, pure and simple.

That was all before the Breakthrough, of course. These days, it’s kind of hard to rail against the enslavement of orcas when every schoolkid knows that all orca society, Resident or Transient, is based on slavery. Always has been. The matriarchs aren’t kindly nurturing feminist grandmas, they’re eight-ton black-and-white Mommie Dearests with really big teeth. And their children aren’t treasured guardians of the next generation, either. They’re genetic commodities, a common currency for trade between pods, and who knew what uses they got put to? It’s a scientific fact that almost half of all killer whales die before reaching their first birthday.

That infant-mortality stat has been a godsend to the aquarium industry ever since it was derived in the nineteen-seventies— Well of course it’s tragic that another calf died here in our habitat but you know, even in the wild killer whales just aren’t very good parents — but even the whalejailers were taken aback to be proven so utterly right. It didn’t take them long to recover from the shock, though. To embrace the irrefutable evidence of this kindred intelligence. To see the error of their ways. To reach out across that immense interspecies gulf with a business proposition.

And what do you know. The Matriarchs were more than happy to cut a deal.

SLAVERS OF THE SEVEN SEAS, a wall-sized viewscreen shouts in capital letters. Beside it, smaller screens run looped footage already seen a million times in every living room on the continent: priests and politicians and longliners and whale-huggers, riding the Friendship Flotilla out into history to sign the first formal agreement with the Matriarch of J-Pod.

On the other side of the gallery, past two-inch plexi, the pinkness in the water is already starting to fade.

Doug skids to a halt in front of an orca family tree, no less boring for its catchy backlit-pastel-on-black color scheme. He scans the headings:

There. Between G27 and G33. Evidently, municipal building codes require an emergency exit here. For some reason the aquarium has incorporated it into the Orca Family Tree, right there in plain sight as the law requires, but subtle, unobtrusive. In fact, damn near invisible to anyone who hasn’t actually read the genealogies line-by-line.

This is Doug’s secret passage. He’s done his homework; the blueprints are on file at City Hall, accessible to anyone who cares to look. On the other side of this invisible door, backstage corridors run off in three separate directions, each servicing a different gallery. All of them, eventually, end up outside. One of them opens into the gift shop.

Doug pushes at a spot on the wall. It swings open. Behind him, a muffled poomf filters through from the main tank, followed by an inhuman squeal. Doug dives through the doorway without looking back.

Turn right. Run. Backstage, the gallery displays are ugly constructions of fiberglass and PVC. Every object gurgles or hums. Salt crusts everything. Doug’s foot slips in a puddle. He starts to go over, grabs at the nearest handhold. A rack of hip waders topples in his stead. Left. Run. A row of filter pumps tears by on one side, a bank of holding tanks on the other. A dozen species of quarantined fish eye his transit with glassy indifference.

He rounds a corner. An unexpected barrier catches his shin. Doug sprawls across a stack of loose plywood. Splinters bury themselves in the balls of his hands.

“ Fuck!” He scrambles to his feet, ignoring the pain. There are worse things than pain. There’s the wrath of Alice if he comes home empty-handed.

Right there: a wood-paneled door. Not one of the crappy green metal doors that are good enough for the fishfeeders and janitors, but a nice oak job with a brass handle. That’s got to be the entrance into the gift shop. He’s almost there, and it’s even opening for him, it’s opening from the other side and he dives straight through, right into the waiting bosom of the woman coming from the other direction.

He thinks she looks familiar in the split second before they both go over. Doug catches a glimpse of someone else as a dozen vectors of force and inertia converge incompatibly on his ankle. There’s a moment of brief, bright pain—

“ Owwwww!!!!! ”

—before he hits the floor. The good news is, he lands on a carpet with a very deep pile. The bad news is, rug burn tears most of the remaining skin off his palms.

He lies there, taking collect calls from every sensory nerve in his body. Two people are looking down at him. He forgets all about the pain when he recognizes who they are.

Saint Anna. And the Devil Himself.

Dipnet has arrived.

The perimeter is all around them: a float-line demarcated by warning buoys, a limited-entry circle a kilometer across. Scientists are only sometimes permitted here. Tourists are forbidden. But the gate swings open for Dipnet .

Now she chugs towards the center of the Communion Zone. The fog has partially lifted—the perimeter gate fades astern, while a tiny white dot resolves in the distance ahead. Dipnet ’s escort remains close on either side. They’ve said nothing since that one brief message in the Strait, although the telepaths say the orcas are brimming with goodwill and harmony.

The floating dock is close enough to see clearly now, anchored in the center of the Zone, a white disk about twenty meters across.

It seems featureless, beyond a few cleats for tying up. This is the way the orcas like things. This is their place, and they don’t want it cluttered with nonessentials. A place to land, a space to stand, and Race Rocks looming out of the fog in the middle distance.

Beyond that, only orcas and ocean.

“Is there a bathroom?” someone asks. The captain of the Dipnet shakes his head, more in resignation than answer. He pulls back on the throttle while the mate, waiting on the foredeck with a coil of nylon rope, jumps onto the platform and reels Dipnet in to dock.

“This is it, folks,” the captain announces. “Everybody off.” The engine is still idling. “Aren’t you going to tie up?” Periwinkle asks.