Whale Fall

Hannah Shearer

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

“Where’s the best,” her half-brother Jarn asks, swinging between two chairs in Secondmother’s kitchen, “you ever made planetfall?”

Ness Secondmother is pretending to programme the old solar panels for winter rather than admit she’s eavesdropping, frantically praying that Jarn doesn’t follow in his sister’s footsteps. And Jenta can’t even blame her, because Secondmother raised her from when she was four years old and her birth-mother died in a mechanical fire, and because Secondmother is the only parent she has now Pa has passed, and because when Jenta announced she was going to be a tracker, Secondmother wept solidly for three weeks.

“Amphitrite,” she says: something uncontroversial, well-known, boring. They’ve all heard of this planet since school days. “It’s every bit as pretty as they say and more. No land at all, the settlers had to float their cities. Just oceans as far as the eye can see.”

“Oh well,” Larn pretends to yawn, “everyone’s heard of Amphitrite.” He’s sixteen years old and has already seen two migrations in his lifetime; he’s as bored with the familiar as any boy his age.

“You don’t appreciate the beauty of it.” She smiles over the top of Larn’s head to meet Ness’ eyes: he’ll never be a tracker, Ness, you needn’t worry. A merchant or liner-captain, maybe. Larn has friends in every spaceport, but he’s too planet-bound, too sociable; he’ll never confine himself to the outer reaches. If Larn was abandoned in the empty oceans, his self-chatter would drown out the whalesong.

“I’m doing a study placement on Xerxes-2 next month.”

“Linguistics,” Ness explains. “The school thinks he has a future as a translator. They’re very impressed.”

“The nightlife’s supposed to be fantastic. Their cities are the size of continents.”

Jenta suppresses a grimace; Ness shakes her head in disapproval. “Too crowded by half. Now there’s a planet crying out for a migration.”

“I don’t like too many people.”

“You don’t like any people,” Larn says, more succinctly, “except me and Ness. Because you’re weird.”

“Maybe,” she admits. “Beasts are easier.” With a wicked grin, she adds: “Did I tell you about the time my pod led me into empty space, where only the void-Humboldt live? They feed on the older types of jet fuel, and if they can’t scavenge any from abandoned shuttles — well, as I saw it, sooner or later they’ll entangle each other in their own tentacles and begin to feed—”

Ness shudders. “I don’t know how you can do that.” She was born with her feet locked to the ground, Ness, gets nervous even on a liner.

“They’re beautiful creatures. Almost entirely see-through. And they keep their distance! For the most part.”

“’Most part’! You wouldn’t have me going out there on the say-so of ‘most part’, my girl.”

“Yes, yes,” Jenta says tolerantly, as if she were the adult and Ness, the child. It’s the nearest either of them will come to admit it: too much time in space brings with it age fluctuations, confusions, and the gap between them is closing.

Larn’s snub nose scrunches, oblivious. “I can’t be having with all that,” he says. “It’s Xerxes-2 for me.”

“Good for you.”

Jenta knows she’s a distant figure to him. He has his friends, his cousins: and instead Larn views her as a figure of odd celebrity, someone whose stories he can repeat at parties, whose absence will never plague him, whose image he will never chase across the stars. She won’t watch him age or begin a family; he’ll never know what it is to navigate blind through a gamma-ray storm, or to hear the echoing, metallic groan of a black hole just beyond the event horizon. That’s how it should be.

* * *

“Let’s see what we can do here,” she murmurs, easing the joystick forward. The craft glides closer. It’s a risky manoeuvre, one young trackers are warned against, but she’s accustomed to the pod. And she likes to think they’re accustomed to her.

Not a flinch, not a ripple of distress. Steadily she steers her craft beneath the pod, sailing directly beneath Perihelion’s glossy, golden underbelly. Through the dome, she sees all clearly: the easy glide of Peri’s tail, the baby calf tucked beneath her mother’s fin. Still tiny, smaller even than her craft. Paler than her mother, glow-pale as moonlight. Shy, clumsy.

Jenta laughs for joy.

Swimming above them, the pod’s shadows fall like the myths of angel wings over the new mother’s back. Jenta spends a good three hours flying low so she can sketch the figure of mother and beautiful child from below. When she is done she pulls back to a safe distance.

The whales have begun to breach through a comet shower. Magnificent bodies arch and twist like children at play. Streams of dust spray around them, casting rainbows over their hides. O, it is beautiful.

* * *

In these rare visits home, Ness will press a kiss to Jenta’s cheek at the precise moment of slipping something into her hand, so Jenta will never see her doing it. Spiced honey cakes or chunks of syruped nougat, something non-regulation and delicious. Most families don’t trouble with such kindness. “Stay safe,” she will urge, “stay whole. If you come to an unexpected landing we’ll send you the money to fetch you back.”

“I know, Ness.” It’s always at this point when she realises with shock just how Secondmother has shrunk: there are new lines creasing her eyes, the dark hair hanging to her waist is now threaded with frost. She becomes dwarven, solid as a stone.

Hugging Ness is painful: Jenta’s muscles chafe under the embrace. The effects of so many years beyond gravity’s claim. These strange differences they notice.

Ness nods vaguely, pats her cheek. “Just keep your feet on the ground,” she says.

Jenta would like to tell Secondmother about these glorious sights, but it would only pain her.

* * *

Back on the harbour planets, folks say that the saddest sight in the galaxies is a lone whale. Space-beasts are notoriously social; it’s too big out here, horizons stretching beyond understanding, beyond time itself, no wonder everything from jellies to gamma-sharks travel in packs. Only occasionally may a tracker see a lone whale: an unlucky sight, as other races might typify magpies.

She’s seen colonists cluster around photographs at exploration-expos. Eyes softening, automatically reaching for the hand of someone close by, borrowed loneliness twisting their hearts. The beast always looks so small amongst the stars. “Poor creature,” they murmur, “poor, lonely creature.”

It’s a sentiment born out of affection, the everlasting gratitude they have for the whales. So Jenta has never troubled to tell them: whalesong can span galaxies, spin through birthing stars and the bones of planets. There’s never a time where the whales are truly alone, when they don’t know that there’s always the possibility of coming home.

* * *

She wakes after a sufficient sleep period. The craft, an ancient wreck by any decent standards, is still fully equipped with sleep aids: glass-blockers and dimmers and eye masks and ear shields to dim the whale song to a softer and sweeter melody. The process is a scientific one; trackers are trained to settle their body quickly into sleep. She can’t imagine what it’s like to be planet-bound, sleeping at the whim of a shifting sun’s capricious moods. Whenever she returns to the colony, she always finds herself sick and disoriented at nighttime, bereft of the whalesong.

Still, when she examines the endless horizon, Jenta discovers there is a distant sunrise occurring somewhere: a single far-off star peering around a tiny purpling planet. She boils herself a pot of caff-in. The first time she’d told Secondmother about it, Ness had burst into tears: saying that she didn’t know how Jenta could stand it, using reconstituted liquids in place of good old planet-grown caff-in. And Jenta hadn’t even joked about how did Ness think luxury cruisers produced their beverages while turning a profit, because she knew Secondmother wasn’t even crying about that.

All things considered, and her own bodily fluids aside, Jenta quite enjoys sipping on caff-in and watching the sunrise. It’s something she so rarely gets to do anymore. The distant shimmering of some unknown sun makes her smile.

The whales sleep. They hang from nothing in their queer vertical fashion; the strangest sight in the world. She can’t imagine what unconscious effort of biology it must take to not float off while they sleep. She’s seen whalefall, of course: that moment when a dead whale drifts into the endless reeling of space until some great gravitational pull draws it into its wake. Scavengers live around the outer atmospheres of moons and smaller planets for this very reason: sharks and exosphere-birds and whatever else, not to mention whale-poachers on the more primitive planets, may the gods curse them.

Jenta taps out a rare message back home; it’s easier to send with no whalesong to disturb. “The gods above keep you, and I hope that Larn has enjoyed X2 and come home safely now,” she types clumsily. “Keep yourselves happy and healthy. There are twenty-five whales to the pod, four of them young ones, a most lucky migration. I have a drawing of the smallest calf. We passed the jellys two planet-months back: there is a picture included. The last human ship I passed six planet-months ago. It’s a quiet hunt. All is well with me.”

She glances up. Oort, the new calf, has woken first to snuffle around his mother and try to wake her for milk. Greedy tyke; Peri will have none of it. Instead he swims about her in circles, testing his strength.

Jenta begins the work of scanning her sketches into the craft’s computer. She hopes Ness and Larn likes them: it’s doubtful anyone else will care. People prefer a tracker to be mysterious, separate, unknowable. It makes it easier when they don’t return.

If she finds a safe harbour, she will signal to the colony, and they will follow her. And when they reach their new home, the territory will be named after the commander who led the fleet. Her name will be a footnote, a curio for academics.

The whales are awakening. Starlight ripples over their great hides as they stir. Just in time Jenta switches the radio back to capture their song, and settles in for the journey ahead.

* * *

It was something she’d asked OldGirl when she was just setting out: “Why should admirals and commanders and other such planet-bound folk be so remembered?” The disdain dripped through her voice. “Why should they claim such glory? We’re the ones to do all the work.”

OldGirl grunted. “People see them at work,” she’d said. “Folk think the highest of what they see. Prerogative of rank, they call it.”

“And that doesn’t make you angry?”

“I was offered something called a stipend after my tenth journey, and a position amongst commanders of the fleet. They do the same for all of us. Never heard of any taking the offer.” OldGirl had smirked. “You’ll see why.”

As she gathers up her sketches one slips through her fingers to the floor. It’s a vague impression of the basking sharks often found lurking in the outer atmosphere of dying gas giants. They’re known to be shy, nigh-on unspottable.

Jenta thinks she understands the old girl very well now.

* * *

The computer has kept track of their shared journey, hers and the whales’; it becomes easy to predict where that glowing red line on the star-maps will pass over the following months and years. The whales have preferred calving grounds, and an unerring ability to share information as to which are safe and which not between the pods. Some they use over and over; some they use just the once and then flee months before some unknowable disaster. Like the “barometers” historians say ancient water-travellers used to predict danger, space-colonists use the whales.

She runs a few predictions for possible destinations and recognises a familiar system. Maybe a century or two ago — she was never good at solid facts and figures, whispered tales are all she knows — the whales led them here before. Was there some disaster to drive them away all those years ago? Whatever it was, it’s safe now.

Jenta sends another rare message back to base. There will be no embarkation until the destination is confirmed, but best they be prepared.

She’s seen a Settling before. Scouts will be sent to explore the system, setting up posts on uninhabited planets: checking, measuring, studying. The great colony-arks will hang up in the everlasting skies. The storage of provisions, the grind of metal. Activity, noise. Fuss.

According to the map, there are inhabited systems nearby. Larn will enjoy that. And once the long, arduous journey is done, Ness will plant the offcuts of seedlings from her own garden, and watch a proper sunrise with a proper cup of caff-in. Twin sunrises, casting blue in a gaseous atmosphere. She’ll like that.

She hopes they’re happy. Jenta won’t be there to see it. Likely she will stay long enough to see the first settlements built and then she’ll be off again.

It’s a tracker’s life. To seek out fresh pastures but rarely let your feet rest upon them.

The whales are diving into a thick, purpling-yellow gas cloud to feed; she watches the beasts dive to gulp down mouthfuls of the glowing spacekrill, multicoloured flecks of light rippling over their skin as they dance. Flush with the thrill of the hunt, they breach out from the cloud in great, arching crests.

OldGirl grunted in amusement at her indignation. “There’s sights out there that no commander or admiral will ever delight in,” she said. “It’s the greatest burden and the greatest privilege, doing what we do.”

Jenta scans a rare picture of the whales to include in the data package detailing their predicted destination. It’ll annoy the technicians, “a waste of data clogging the system,” they’ll call it, and the more fools they, if they do. And what would she do, given the choice? Become planet-bound? Encase herself several miles deep in steel, unable to hear the songs?

Her journey is a beautiful one. Even if none of them see it, they cannot take that away from her. Smiling, she follows the whales into the night.