“I can’t watch this either,” she said. “I have to do something.”
“I know.” I drew her hand back just for a moment and planted a kiss on the palm. “It’s hard.”
Vula nodded, and Jane, too. Eddy and Bouche both got up and hugged her. Eleanora kept her head down, hiding her tears. The electrostatic membrane crackled as Ricci left.
“Do you know some of the people down there, Doc?” asked Jane.
“Not anymore,” I said. “Not for a long time.”
We fell quiet again, watching the numbers on the countdown. Ricci had left her shadow beside me. I felt her cold absence; something missing that should be whole. I could have spied on her, see where she’d gone, but no. She deserved her privacy.
The first little quake shuddering through the sinuses told me exactly where she was.
I checked our location, blinked, and then checked it again. We were right over the mesa, above the other whales, all seventeen of them. Wind, bad luck, or instinct had had brought us there—but did it matter? Ricci—her location mattered. She was in the caudal stump, with the waste pellets, and the secondary valve.
No. Ricci, no. I slapped my breather on and launched myself out of the rumpus room, running aft as fast as I could. Don’t do that. Stop.
I lost my footing and bounced hard. You might hit them. You might…
Kill them.
When I got to the caudal stump, Ricci was just clicking the last pellet through the valve. If we’d dumped them during the pitch and ditch, none of it would have happened. But dry waste is light. We’d accumulated ten pellets, only five kilograms, so I hadn’t bothered with them.
But a half-kilo pellet falling from a height can do a lot of damage.
I fired the feed into the middle of the sinus. One whale was thrashing on the slushy mesa surface, half-obscured by the concussive debris. Two more were falling, twisting in agony, their bladders tattered and flapping. Another three would have escaped damage, but they circulated into the path of the oncoming pellets, each one burst in turn, as if a giant hand had reached down and squeezed the life out of them.
Ricci was in my arms, then. Both of us quaking, falling to our knees. Holding each other and squeezing hard, as if we could break each other’s bones with the force of our own mistakes.
Six whales. Twenty-two people. All dead.
The other eleven whales scattered. One fled east and plunged through the twilight band into night. Its skin and bladders froze and burst, and its sinus skeleton shattered on the jagged ice. Its crew had been one of the most stub-born—none had evacuated. They all died. Ten people.
In total, thirty-two died because Ricci made an unwise decision.
The remaining ten whales re-congregated over a slushy depression near the beanstalk. Ricci had bought the surviving crews a few more hours, so they tried a solution along the lines Ricci had discovered. Ice climbers use drones with controlled explosive capabilities to stabilize their climbing routes. They tried a test; it worked—the whales fled again, but in the wrong direction and re-congregated close to the leading edge of night.
In the end, the others evacuated. All seventy got in their body bags and called for evac.
By strict accounting, Ricci’s actions led to a positive outcome. I remind her of that whenever I can. She says it doesn’t matter—we don’t play math games with human lives. Dead is dead, and nothing will change that.
And she’s right, because the moment she dumped those pellets, Ricci became the most notorious murderer our planet has ever known.
The other habs insist we hand her over to a conflict resolution panel. They’ve sent negotiators, diplomats—they’ve even sent Jane—but we won’t give her up. To them, that proves we’re dangerous. Criminals. Outlaws.
But we live in the heart of the matter, and we see it a little differently.
Ricci did nothing wrong. It was a desperate situation and she made a desperate call. Any one of us might have done the same thing, if we’d been smart enough to think of it.
We’re a solid band of outlaws, now. Vula, Treasure, Chara, Eddy, Bouche, Eleanora, Ricci, and me. We refuse to play nice with the other habs. They could cut off our feedstock, power, and data, but we’re betting they won’t. If they did, our blood would be on their hands.
So none of us are going anywhere. Why would we leave? The whole planet is ours, with unlimited horizons.
A.C. Wise’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Tor.com, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2017, among other places. She has two collections published with Lethe Press, and her debut novella, Catfish Lullaby, was published by Broken Eye Books in early 2018. She’s been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and a winner of the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a monthly review column to Apex Magazine. Find her online at www.acwise.net.
A CATALOGUE OF SUNLIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD
A.C. Wise
June 21, 2232–Svalbard
T he twenty-first of June, the Summer Solstice, the longest day and the shortest night. That means less here at the top of the world where, in this season, we have sunlight twenty-four hours a day. But it seemed like an appropriate day to start this project nonetheless.
In just over a week, the generation ship Arber will depart on its journey. The docking clamps will release, and it will go sailing off into space to find the future of humanity. This is my parting gift, a catalogue of sunlight from the world left behind.
Of course the sun will still be there, getting farther away as they travel, but it won’t be the same. The people on that ship—those ships, leaving from all points above the globe—will never again see sunlight the way it looks here and now. They won’t see the sky bruise purple and hushed gold or the violent
