Whale Fall
Hannah Shearer
part 1
O tracker! O dream-hunter, o galaxy-dancer. You whose flight is ever steady; you who sleeps to the music of the stars; walker of nineteen galaxies; navigator of lost star-streams; diver of the Unknown Galaxy; one whose compass is never crooked and whose jet-fires always burn bright. You, witness to a thousand sun-deaths; light in the great deep darkness; voice in the silence between the worlds; planet-drifter; comet-racer; void-dancer; melody-chaser; whale-friend; finder of safe harbours.
You, whose fiery trail we watch for in the endless skies. O you, whose craft is streaked with the ichor of sun-mantas and void-gulls; whose wings are breathed with gas-clouds; the one who trips the event horizon; the one who rides alone. O you, who hear the songs in the mighty deep.
O tracker, dream-hunter, whale-chaser; O hope of your people!
* * *
In the emptiness between worlds, the whales dance.
Jenta knows the sight well, but still she pauses in her echolocation tracking to watch. The movements of the beasts as they twist, forming intricate and unknowable patterns through the gas clouds. Sparks shimmer off their blue-grey bodies like light over water-oceans, if one can picture such a thing. Smaller whales, juveniles, burst upwards through the peak of the cloud: they fling their bodies into great arcs and send light blooming into bursts of wild, shimmering iridescence.
The old stories say they dance for nothing but play. It’s a good sign. OldGirl Hakrash, who taught Jenta everything she knew, said the sign of a good migration was that the whales were happy. Follow a pod with joy in their hearts, OldGirl said, and you’ll reach a safe harbour.
The pace is steady: she can take in their antics and still have time to feed the various clicks and wails through the sonification radio. One hand remains on the dials, the other on the joystick. It’s a small craft. Cockpit barely two arm spans wide, living quarters in the rear; the frame is light enough to cause no disturbances to the songs. Hyperglass-hulled, so she can see out in every direction. Only room for one.
She taps the various vibrations through the radio. This will be received back on her people’s current harbour-planet, Kasamti-255, small and dust-blown and brown, from the little Jenta has seen, to reassure them that the pod is healthy and the migration remains blessed.
There are stories about other migrations. Pods that suffer from radiation poisoning or are injured by asteroid storms or solar-jellies and perish on the trail; pods whose queens die from old age or drift apart during leadership challenges. Pods who are simply caught in a wild, unknowable urge to migrate hundreds of light-years to some desolate spot and die, leaving a tracker cold and alone and far from home.
Sometimes a raw tracker gets too close, and the pod flees. Or an overprotective mother will sense the unwanted interloper’s presence and turn on them. Every tracker knows the stories. They’re recited by rote, breathed into the crafts in which they ride.
It’s why the tracker is sent first: alone into the great black reaches of the deep. And when they reach their safe harbour, they call to the colony to follow them home.
This is her fifth journey alone, which by rights makes Jenta an old hand; though by her calculations she’s no more than thirty-five common-years old. By the colony’s calendars, she’s lost track of her planet-age. Space twists time, and she’s never been good with numbers.
But she knows the ropes. It’s second nature now. She easily pilots her craft, her screens a constant presence at the corner of her gaze — checking her position on the star-maps, stabilizing cabin pressure, adjusting her course — so she can focus on the whales. The light of a distant supergiant bathes them in sheer crystalline blue; they cast rippling shadows upon each other’s backs. They glide effortlessly through space. Movements unaffected, majestic.
Occasionally a tail will flick, and a golden spark of gas and plasma will burst. Again Jenta thinks of light flickering across water, though it’s been a long time since she’s been on a planet so bountiful. Perhaps it’s something ancient and legendary in the whales’ bones: they still carry that perfect liquid grace even after millennia away from the oceans.
“They’re steady,” she says into a recorder on her console, “and in good temper, too; the expecting mothers remain healthy, blessings above and below.” It’s good luck to have a mother birth upon arrival. A blessing upon their new home. “No other creatures interfering on the path, either.” Jellies and gamma-sharks will sometimes track an expecting mother, and she’s not got the firepower to frighten them off.
The recording won’t be sent back: a datafile this size is too noisy, and will interfere with the crucial whalesong she pipes back to the base. She enjoys the ritual, though. Someone to talk to. OldGirl used to talk about whales passing on histories in their songs: how to hunt out the bioluminescence of spacekrill even in the brightest gas-cloud, how to avoid the more primitive systems’ whaler-crafts, how to cozen their young and find a new mate. “Trackers do the same,” OldGirl had grunted. “Planet-folk, too. We learn that from them.”
She likes that they have this in common: endless histories through stories. The whales teach them much.
Besides, she’ll listen to the recordings someday. When she has liberty to rest. Jenta imagines finding some quiet spaceport, putting her feet up with a glass of something strong — or even organic caff-in made with real water, pray the gods! — and listening to her own stories.
Several common-hours later the old matriarch begins a downwards dive: of course, “down” is a relative concept out here, but Jenta prefers to think of such things in planet-terms. The rest of the pod follows suit. They’ll do so without question, Jenta knows this: she’s been tracking this matriarch for over ten common-years, over two separate migrations. She’s accustomed to the old queen’s stately authority; even from a distance she can recognise her from the whitening streaks around her saddle, her faded toothrakes. “Alright, Queenie, alright,” she murmurs.
Jenta allows the pod some distance before adjusting the craft’s course. The artificial gravity shifts, and then the world rights itself again, down becomes onwards. She settles in for the long drop.
It’s silent in here. Silent, save for the long, slow echo of whale-song bouncing between her speakers. The craft’s sonification radio has been honed over centuries to capture whale-song even in the emptiest corners of space; trackers’ crafts lack much of a common ship’s beeping and clicking for this very reason. They can’t have anything interfering.
After a while, Jenta sets the craft on autopilot and retreats to the back of the ship to prepare food. Over her head, the hyperglass bubbles: the sheen of nebulae and star-clusters and asteroid storms dance above her. Her craft is an ocean of whale-song.
* * *
“Well then,” OldGirl had said when she submitted herself for training. Barely fourteen common-years old, sallow and spotty and raw-boned. “You like yourself, girl?”
From anyone else she would have refused to answer. But OldGirl Hakrash was the oldest tracker in the colony even then and carried herself as such, with an eccentricity that was the privilege of fame and skill. “I suppose so,” Jenta had said. “I’m decent enough company.”
“Good,” OldGirl had replied. “For you’ll never spend as much time with anyone else, if you go out there.”
* * *
It is a colonist’s greatest pride and deepest sorrow to have a tracker as kin.
The ones who return speak of the things they’ve seen. Unending sunsets over the mountains of Pyroxin; Amphitrite’s golden seas. Black holes vomiting out the remnants of long-dead stars; asteroids caught in the tentacles of great, luminous solar-jellies the size of a small moon. They whisper about Prax Laika, the first tracker to chase the whales through the skies. How he was the only tracker to venture into the dead galaxy, where only planet-corpses and decaying red stars and hook-mouthed snarlfish live.
How his craft bore the scars of glass-rains and gamma storms. How he once followed a gargantuan albino bull for twenty common-years straight, through the endless voids between galaxies and the old poisoned water-ocean beyond all known migration paths. Laika lost contact with the colony thirty common-years before Jenta was even born, but common knowledge says he’s out there still: turned ageless by space and bent time, hunting his great white whale.
With such stories echoing through her bones, Jenta wonders sometimes what it is to be planet-bound. To live with dust anchoring your feet. Or to dwell in one of the great liners drifting through a planet’s lower atmosphere, spending your entire life encased in steel. Not to become attuned to the constant hum of electricity prickling through your craft, to be blind to the swells of gas-storms and solar flares before they come.
Like having your eyes put out. Your ears stoppered.
To be a tracker is to believe in an Other with the fervency of a mystic. To trust in your forebears and their wisdoms. To step out willingly into the dark.
It frightens people. She knows that. To imagine the trackers alone, swallowed up by space’s strange waves and swells. Deep, endless black and the silent echoes of the voids between galaxies. No company save the ghosts of lost trackers. The whispering of Prax Laika. The movements of beasts bigger than worlds.
She hears that a tracker’s kin are accorded every possible respect back on the colonies, but few ever speak to outsiders of their lost family.
As for trackers themselves, their stories are most often shared with fellow deep-space voyagers: in spaceports where they make planetfall or in the watchtowers set up to guard against exosphere scavengers. Clustered around the fire and cupping something hot to their chest. Easier to explain it to someone who understands.
Always there are five or six trackers sent out at any given time, sometimes more. Hunting down pods across the oceans of space. When their whales find a safe calving ground, the tracker will send word back, and the data will be analysed and, when the system is judged safe, the colony will follow to make their new home. Established at a safe distance, of course. Nothing is more important than the thriving of the whales.
Sometimes the colony splits to follow multiple pods. Thus they multiply across the stars. Sometimes everyone follows together. And if a tracker’s calving ground is not chosen, then every attempt is made to summon you home.
Jenta’s lucky. She’s had three calving grounds chosen; the fourth time she made it safely back to the new colony. Of course, it’s always a risk. Contact between her and the base is limited: data files and video transmissions above a certain size will interfere with the whalesong. Besides, she doesn’t want to cause her family pain.
It’s rumoured that most families start the mourning period from the day a tracker makes their first hunt. It’s easier on everyone.
* * *
The old matriarch shows no signs of wavering. Sometimes a pod will endure such tangled family politics that you might think them human: struggles for leadership, a daughter in her majority abandoning the pod, family bonds are not insurmountable amongst these beasts. But here there are no signs of such strife. Queenie’s brood trusts her and yields to her leadership; the largest bull is a watchful figure at the rear of the train, supporting the stragglers and gently biffing his gigantic head against the flanks of adolescents who drift out of line.
Occasionally Jenta takes out a pad and pencil. Makes brief, careless sketches: the arch of a back, the flick of a tail, one achingly solemn eye. Shadows of space-debris dapple over her work. Her efforts aren’t likely to win any prizes: this is pleasure, not work. She already knows the whales’ behaviour in her bones. When a breach means joy and when it means aggression; the warning signals of a mother rejecting her calf. The ripples of excitement preceding one pod encountering another, which trackers call The Gathering.
Do trackers share such hard-won knowledge? Occasionally snippets pass between them. But for the most part, it’s understood that such things a tracker must learn alone, on the hunt, breathed in deep.
Jenta watches a young female who she’s taken to naming Perihelion. Peri is half a juvenile herself, barely past maturity with a lean, amber-streaked head, but sometimes there’s a shadow beneath her fin. A whisper of some tiny heartbeat at her side. A calf, Jenta thinks wonderingly, early-born and scrappy with it, to keep up with the pod on such an arduous journey.
“Never heard of a migration with a newborn,” she informs her recorder, her sole audience here. Jenta’s eyes remain fixed upon Peri, the solicitous nudges of her head towards the little bundle beneath her belly. “Not even OldGirl spoke of such a thing. Can’t imagine how much luck that brings. Too much to count.”
The juveniles swim behind Perihelion, bumping insistently at her flanks. She indulges their attentions for a while and then shoos them away when they become too rowdy.
“The calf must be doing well. Peri’s not agitated.”
A glance down reveals that her kath have smudged over her forearms. Jenta reaches to retrieve her satchel from its locker: in here are powdered dyes in sun-gold, liner-grey, birthedstar-blue. She reapplies the lines carefully with a thin brush: these are the markings worn by trackers on the hunt, upon her cheeks, her hands, her forearms. The better to keep her movements steady, her eyes bright, her ears sharp.
The patterns are those sacred to the colony and to its trackers: thick, swirling loops and knots to symbolize the weaving nature of their paths, the many-pronged points of the compass, the constellations of their millennia-abandoned planet. Next come, as always, those marks sacred only to her. The heart-sign for Secondmother, a looping song-sign for Jarn, a pair of shooting stars for Pa and Firstmother. It’s not strictly tradition, but most follow such rites. Birthdates etched upon the steel of the console, names prayed in a mantra.
Jenta once met a tracker from the Outer Quadrant who had twisted figures out of straw and wire for each of her siblings; when they had bedded together, Jenta had seen them arrayed all about the tracker’s cockpit.
“It’s an act of remembrance. A simple act: no longer in my vision but in my heart.”
“You’re lucky,” Jenta murmurs to Queenie. “Even galaxies apart, they can still hear you. Must be nice.”
The whale doesn’t respond — obviously — but it’s good to speak to someone.
Instead, Queenie permits several translucent cleaner-wrasse to bustle around her, picking at the parasitic lice collecting around her fins — something to do with radioactivity levels in this particular galaxy, they’re a delicacy favoured by the wrasse and certain exosphere albatross breeds. Far below, beneath Jenta’s feet, roils the billowing clouds of a small and distant nebula, pink-veined and bursting. In its shallows drift gargantuan, pulsing jellies; mantas skate over its crests, picking at spacekrill, sparks spinning out in their wake. Distant whale-sharks with the reflections of entire constellations picked out over their backs. Eternal, beautiful.
There is much to be found here. In such a bountiful galaxy as she tracks, there are no end of marvels.
Copyright © 2025 by Hannah Shearer
