Bo Balder Read online

  Quantum Fish

  — by Bo Balder —

  When Havi came back, eleven years after having fled five wormhole hops away, Malala wormhole hub didn’t look very different. Maybe a bit shabbier, a bit more crowded.

  The coldsleep hangover crashed down on her like a barrel of fish and she changed her plans into sleep first, right now. She headed for the rack of sleep drawers outside the port offices—colloquially known as coffins—and was about to crawl in when The Briny Everything caught her eye.

  The restaurant was still there. She’d eaten her final meal in-system there, before she’d embarked on her great adventure. Going to study at the last university on Chong Kong Long. Or running away from home and responsibilities, as her parents had called it. Suddenly food seemed even more important than sleep.

  She shoved her luggage into the coffin, ordered her medical app to dispense a pick-me-up, and headed for The Briny Everything. Living on a distant wormhole hub meant she hadn’t tasted real fish for eleven years. Her home planet of Knossos exported thousands of tons of the most famous delicacy in the universe, but lightyears of distance made it too expensive even for a fairly successful journalist like Havi.

  But here, it was only a short hop to the planet’s surface, and she could eat the real thing before facing her family. What could be more important than a fish meal?

  The Briny Everything was the real deal. If you asked them for fish from the Clan Morotai channel, they wouldn’t serve you the ones from Clan Antjie a few kilometers away. They knew their stuff, and they respected customers who did as well.

  Havi was from Clan Skuja, and that was what she was hoping to eat tonight. The taste of home, without actually having to face her family. Of course Havi hadn’t traversed half of known space to not visit her home planet. Of course she missed it and her old friends. But with every wormhole hop the likelihood diminished of the reunion going well. She’d run off from her family, her planned career in fish care, everything she’d ever known, eleven years ago. Why would anyone be glad to see her? Damn that therapist. She should have just written a debriefing letter and left it at that.

  She scanned the menu. The Briny had a great selection, and thankfully Skuja fish were on it. She ordered a full Skuja sashimi spread and a local beer. Time to sit back with her hands behind her head and grab a few minutes of doing absolutely nothing while her fish was prepared.

  Her platter looked fantastic when it arrived, satiny orange flesh with rainbow glimmers over it, the skin separately roasted and spread around the kernel of flesh like a flower. She looked closer. How had they disguised the cuts where the ring of eyes around the middle had been removed? New technique maybe.

  She picked up a morsel with her chopsticks and settled it on her tongue, waiting for it to melt and burst into flavor.

  It was more of a whimper than a bang.

  Hm. Maybe not enough garum? She dipped the second piece into more sauce, and tried again. No.

  No way.

  This wasn’t Skuja terroir, nor was it any of the fifty-four terroirs whose taste her parents had drilled into her in endless lessons. Even though she’d made it clear early on that she wasn’t going to be a fish farmer.

  She gestured to the server. The woman must have read her face, because she approached, looking worried.

  “This isn’t Skuja terroir. Or any of the others. Did you print it? That’s fraud.”

  The plate was whisked away at high speed. “Our apologies. The beer will be on the house. Can we offer you anything else to eat?”

  Havi raised her brows. “A bowl of plain rice. I can stomach that from the printer.”

  She waited for her rice, sipping her beer. Why had she come here? The urge to feel solid ground under her feet, wind in her hair, and sun on her face had been stronger than her career and circle of friends. Yet how was she going to find a job on the planet without running into her parents? She hadn’t made any progress in solving that hurdle.

  The server coughed. She and another woman stood at the table. “Mx? The owner would like a word.”

  Havi opened her eyes.

  “I’m so very sorry, esteemed lady. We are out of stock on Skuja fish. We shouldn’t have served you printed stuff. Please don’t write about it. We’re trying to solve the problem quietly.”

  Havi sat up straighter. What problem? The owner bent closer. “There are complications with delivery. We just can’t get any. Something’s going down on Knossos and nobody’s been able to tell us what. ‘Service suspended for the time being.’ So what can we do? We’re a fish restaurant. We serve printed copies of Knossos fish, genetically exact copies, let me tell you, to the people from out-system. But you knew. You tasted the difference. I guess you are from Knossos?”

  “Indeed I am. Skuja Clan, in fact.”

  The owner reddened.

  “Okay, sorry to hear that. I’ll go and visit Fishy, then.”

  “Oh, no, no dear lady,” the proprietress hastened to say. “Nobody’s been getting fish deliveries. We’re all in the same boat.”

  There was an opportunity here. “What have you done so far to figure out the trouble? Anybody been talking to the fish farms?” Havi asked.

  “The Restaurateurs’ Association has tried. But it feels like they’re stalling. Maybe there’s a problem with production? Or they’ve sold all their stock to a new buyer?”

  “Have you gone down to investigate?”

  “Me, into the gravity well? Oh no, lady, too rich for my blood. Open skies and who knows if you’d ever get back up . . . ”

  Havi leaned forward. “What if I go down and investigate for you? I feel that the Restaurateurs’ Association might benefit from having an ear and an eye on the ground, so to speak.”

  Her earnings and kudos had been pretty much spent on the trip. She needed work. How could she pass up this opportunity?

  She couldn’t.

  * * *

  Maybe Havi had never been the smartest or most diligent of students. But she had moments of great insight, though not always ones she could use. For instance, when she was sixteen, experiencing her first date with handsome jock Dara under the rainbow of summer moons. Dara’s body, glistening with sweat, was poised right above her. Havi lay back, waiting while he took a selfie of his moonlit body, maybe a little bit bemused by the whole thing, but interested and willing. They’d finally managed to ditch Havi’s little sister, swum to one of the few Paal temples above water, and were occupying the altar-like slab in the top room.

  Havi waited and stared through the triangular window. She blinked at the three stars shining through, also arranged like a triangle. Like the ones at the wormhole. She had one of her first flashes of insight. Not the first, that had been at twelve, when she realized her parents were human beings just like herself and therefore capable of massive confusion and getting things completely wrong. This one was about herself and what she was doing here down in the gravity well. It was like a prison. One she needed to escape from.

  She wriggled out from under Dara and started taking pictures of the star formation.

  Dara never forgave her. Knossos was never the same after the starships started arriving and the derelict wormhole hub orbiting the sun got fixed up. Knossos fish became a galactic delicacy. Her parents became rich. Havi ran away from home.

  * * *

  Havi stepped out of the shuttle onto the floating shuttle dock of Continent Five. After haggling with the restaurant owner until they’d reached an agreeable compromise, she’d stumbled to her coffin hotel and slept like a human being. Most aliens, or fish for that matter, never slept. She’d dialed up some random breakfast and made it to the shuttle transfer to Knossos station and down planet just in time.

  Continent was a big word. There was no dry land on Knossos.
On continents, the sea was from an inch to two meters deep, in oceans up to kilometers. Every bit of its submerged surface was completely covered in Paal labyrinths. And fish. Humans, limping through the galaxy, fleeing the Katabiotic destruction of their home planet, had been delighted to find any intact planet that didn’t outright kill them. They had settled on it in spite of the obvious downsides.

  Havi blinked against the bright sun. She’d forgotten how dim everything had seemed when first leaving her home world, but she’d adjusted. She dialed up her cornea protection and resigned herself to a few days of glare headache.

  The shuttle port floated on lightly ruffled, turquoise wavelets, small spokes radiating out from its hub for stability and to serve as docks for hovercraft. If you didn’t look too closely, the labyrinth beneath the waves was invisible. Today she was the only person getting off, nobody got on, no hovers were docked. It might be a random lull in traffic, or was she seeing the results of an economic slump?

  She was here to find that out. And she might as well head home right away. Get it over with. Face the recriminations.

  She stepped off the dock onto the top of the Paal labyrinth wall and started sloshing through the warm sea. The tops of the walls were about ten to fifteen centimeters under water, and thirty centimeters wide. She’d done this barefoot all her life, but mindful of her space-tenderized soles, she’d brought water shoes.

  “Mx! Mx!” The shuttle field attendant called out. “It’s not safe. There are currents. Wait for the hover boat!”

  Currents? Pfft. She waved her thanks. “I grew up here. I’ll be fine.”

  The attendant emailed her a rights waiver, which she signed. Safety first, though it seemed a little over the top. As she splashed through the shallows on top of the labyrinth walls, jumping over the narrow corridors, on the fastest route to Skuja Farm, she set her inphone to access the local webs. It was a three-hour walk; she might as well use the time to update herself on the latest news.

  First, she skimmed the feeds. What she didn’t find was news about the fish shortage. Nothing about fish whatsoever. Back in the day, the Continent Five news had shared weekly tidbits about particularly good catches, fish populations, taste changes, currents, and winds. That column seemed to have gone.

  Conclusion: something was definitely going on. Well, she’d be home in less than three hours and her parents would update her on the situation.

  Her foot slid off the wall and she plunged down into the corridor. The water should have been no more than a meter deep, but the wall went up and up before her surprised eyes and she was at least three meters deep before her feet hit bottom. The whole of Continent Five didn’t have a labyrinth that deep. The Paal labyrinths had always been just under water. So how could the walls be so high here? Had they grown? Or had the sea bottom washed away?

  Havi swam up, sputtering seawater, and hoisted herself back up the wall. Hm. Maybe the shuttle port attendant had been right. Maybe she didn’t know the current circumstances well enough to be walking in a vast desert of sea-covered labyrinth walls.

  The horizon lay featureless and hazy in the late afternoon light.

  Late afternoon? Drat. She’d forgotten to sync to planet time. It might have been morning on Malala hub, but that meant nothing to a planet that twirled through space regardless of human time.

  This was not the moment to panic. She knew this place like the taste of her family’s fish, if need be in the middle of a moonless night. She used to, anyway.

  Havi flicked a few drops of briny onto her tongue. She was where she thought she was. Every farm in the labyrinth had its own terroir, which gave the fish of Knossos their famous flavor. She was still good at this. She’d just have to follow her gut and ignore the minor changes eleven years had wrought.

  She got up, adjusted her backpack, dialed up her shades. Onward.

  An hour or so ahead was the old temple where she and Dara had had their failed tryst. If all went wrong, she could sleep there. The altar slab would be hard, but at least dry.

  More than an hour went by. No temple in sight. Still not a problem. Havi was sure she was walking slightly slower due to her time in space and different gravities, and maybe she was taking a bit more care after her fall. It wasn’t an issue.

  Dusk drizzled down quicker than she remembered. Still no temple. She’d taken a wrong turn, or the temple was gone, or she was only half as fast as she thought she was. If only she hadn’t signed that shuttle port waiver. She was getting tired. A rescue by hover boat would have been pretty nice right now.

  Still, she wasn’t in any real danger. She’d only be sore and tired after perching on a wall all night. It was just odd that all the corridors had gotten so much deeper.

  She slipped again and hit her chin, hard, on the wall in front of her. She didn’t fall off, but only barely. Checking her jaws for loose teeth, she tasted blood in her mouth. Her skull rang and she had to blink away dizziness. That really hurt.

  Time to regroup. She rummaged in her backpack for a salve and filled her purifier with seawater. The UBI ration bars from the coffin hotel that she’d over-cautiously thrown in would now be her dinner. She gnawed on the flat-tasting bars and tried to ignore her stinging chin and bitten tongue. Not to mention her scraped knees from the earlier fall.

  She wouldn’t die but it still wasn’t fun. She’d arrive home by morning. Everybody knew the shuttle schedule and would wonder, but still. No harm done. No need to call the people she specifically didn’t want to ask for help.

  She could walk for a bit until true night and then wait for the moons to rise. Revived after her dinner, she set off again. The last reflected glow of the sun, to her back on the left, assured her she was still on track. With the darkness growing, a faint scent started to rise from the briny, and a murmur she hadn’t heard before. The surface looked strange as well, in a way she couldn’t put her finger on right away. When Baby Moon rose, it illuminated the sea with its pink glow.

  Now the cause of the scents and the murmuring became clear. The water around her had a current. To her left, the water rushed glimmering to the west. Now what? It wasn’t migration season; she’d at least checked up on that. The seas had always been warm, silent, the currents running unnoticed. Funny peculiar, that was for sure.

  The warm water lapped her ankles. Maybe it was a little deeper than before?

  The next few steps brought the water swirling up until her knees. Havi stopped to consider her options. Within half a minute the water was up to her thighs. What could possibly cause this? The moons’ tides were negligible. The labyrinth itself?

  She groaned. If she started swimming, she’d lose contact with the labyrinth and anyway, she couldn’t swim all night. Now she had to call the people she didn’t want to. She turned on her locator beacon and sent out a call to her parents’ fish farm.

  The phone was picked up immediately.

  “I heard from Alexa down at the port you’d gone walking. Need picking up?” her sister said.

  Havi’s cheeks burned. So she had been recognized after all. Her foolishness was all over the fishing community already. Wait. If Ivete knew, and knew about the changed conditions, she could have picked Havi up hours ago. The asshole. Ivete had deliberately let it come to this. Was this payback for Havi’s leaving? Great.

  “Thanks sis. Got my location?”

  “Yup.”

  Lights went on about half a kilometer in the direction of her family’s house and started moving toward her. Oh, the hover boat had been waiting for her with doused lights?

  Havi looked down at the water now tugging at her waist. If she hadn’t called, they’d probably have swooped in a minute later anyway. She had no clue what was going on with the labyrinth, but it was clearly unsafe as hell.

  She stood waiting as the water rose up to her chest, already starting to float when the boat whispered up and someone threw a lit life buoy over to her. As the boat winched her in, she unclenched her jaws. No need to let them know she was angry. They
knew. They wanted it that way.

  Her father and sister hauled Havi up to the deck. She stood dripping and just looked at them.

  “Guess you didn’t lose your sense of direction,” her father said. “If the eddies hadn’t started up, you would have walked straight home.”

  That sounded pretty close to an olive branch. Havi wasn’t sure if she was ready to take it after these childish shenanigans. She held out her hand anyway. Her father shook it, no expression on his face. Still keeping things tightly bottled up. Yeah, she wasn’t going to give him a hug until he started it.

  Ivete, her sister, stood at the wheel and barely nodded.

  Havi punched Ivete lightly in the shoulder. “Hey.”

  Ivete punched Havi back. Unnecessarily hard. “Welcome home, sib,” Ivete said. It sounded way too perky after the mean punch, which would leave a bruise.

  “A warning would have been nice,” Havi said.

  “You telling us you were visiting would have been nice. Or a Christmas card every other year?”

  Havi had stopped sending them after she never got any replies.

  So they weren’t fine. She got the message. But why, after all these years? Havi felt a surge of anger. What old beef could possibly be worth nearly letting her drown? Their own daughter and sister? Come on.

  The hover took off. Havi relaxed and watched Blue Moon rise. Lilac night was the best time of night. Glarus, the big green moon, wouldn’t be up until early morning.

  “I could use a second dinner,” she said. “Anything in the fridge?”

  Her dad and Ivete exchanged looks.

  “It’s not been a good year. The fish are acting weird. And last year was bad too. The Fish Migration Guard must have let a stranger fish through, and the offspring tasted weird. We had to taste each and every one, so we sold only fillets that year. This year, with the eddies and the labyrinth acting up, we’re just not in control of the fish anymore. Most of them got away.”

  Havi opened her mouth to respond, but didn’t.