Benthos
Duet
Constrictor
When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal groan.
Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometers of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the Rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge and she hears Beebe's armor shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is Physics.
How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come down here? But she already knows the answer.
She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life under control. She almost seems happy down here.
Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when you're three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.
It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what they've done to her.
It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where her left lung used to be. She's so acclimated to the chronic ache in her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves, that she's scarcely aware of them any more. She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.
Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in Beebe; they're supposed to increase the apparent size of one's personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn't help. She clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering her eyes like smooth white cataracts.
She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the usual air of confidence.
Ballard stands up. "Ready to go?"
"You're in charge," Clarke says.
"Only on paper." Ballard smiles. "No pecking order down here, Lenie. As far as I'm concerned, we're equals." After two days on the rift Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation. It doesn't always seem real.
Something hits Beebe from the outside.
Ballard's smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud through the station's titanium skin.
"It takes a while to get used to," Ballard says, "doesn't it?"
And again.
"I mean, that sounds big—"
"Maybe we should turn the lights off," Clarke suggests. She knows they won't. Beebe's exterior floodlights burn around the clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can't see it from inside—Beebe has no windows— but somehow they draw comfort from the knowledge of that unseen fire—
Thud!
— most of the time.
"Remember back in training?" Ballard says over the sound, "When they told us that the fish were usually so—small…"
Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a while. There's no other sound.
"It must've gotten tired," Ballard says. "You'd think they'd figure it out." She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.
Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender. She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one? The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into jelly. Any time.
Better to face it outside, where she knows what's coming. All she can do in here is wait for it to happen.
* * *
Going outside is like drowning, once a day.
Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector; the ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.
When she catches her breath, and loses it.
When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.
It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.
She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream. The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke falls writhing into the abyss.
* * *
They come out of the freezing darkness, headlights blazing, into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand over twenty meters high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled structures in perpetual twilight.
They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided them here.
"I'll never get used to it," Ballard grates in a caricature of her usual voice.
Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. "Thirty four Centigrade." The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so wrong to talk without breathing.
Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light. After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.
There's so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes; seawater boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful centimeters each year. Human machinery does not make energy, here at Dragon's Throat; it merely hangs on and steals some insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.
Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of boulders, crimson worms three meters long crowd the seabed between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulfur, lace the water with milky veils.
The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.
It doesn't sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harp string is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming, through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:
"LENIE—"
Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth that seems impossibly huge.
Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares into a scaly black face half a meter across. Some tiny dispassionate part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails. How can it see me? she wonders.
Then the pain reaches her.
She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.
She goes limp. Please get it over with if you're going to kill me just please God make it quick— She feels the urge to vomit, but the 'skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won't let her.
She shuts out the pain. She's had plenty of practice. She pulls inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic. There's another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife—you know, a knife, like the one you've got strapped to your leg and completely forgot about—and suddenly the monster is gone, its grip broken.
Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It's like operating a marionette. Her head turns. She sees Ballard locked in combat with something as big as she is. Only — Ballard is tearing it to pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with smoke-trails of suspended gore.
The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass. Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.
Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any trouble. I've had worse, she thinks.
Then: Why am I still alive?
Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like photophores themselves.
"Jesus Christ," Ballard says in a distorted whisper. "Lenie? You okay?"
Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But surprisingly, she feels intact. "Yeah."
And if not, she knows, it's her own damn fault. She just lay there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.
She's always asking for it.
* * *
Back in the airlock, the water recedes around them. And within them; Clarke's stolen breath, released at last, races back along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.
Ballard splits the face seal on her 'skin and her words tumble into the wetroom. "Jesus. Jesus! I don't believe it! My God, did you see that thing! They get so huge around here!" She passes her hands across her face; her corneal caps come off, milky hemispheres dropping from enormous hazel eyes. "And to think they're usually just a few centimeters long…"
She starts to strip down, unzipping her 'skin along the forearms, talking the whole time. "And yet it was almost fragile, you know? Hit it hard enough and it just came apart! Jesus!" Ballard always removes her uniform indoors. Clarke suspects she'd rip the recycler out of her own thorax if she could, throw it in a corner with the 'skin and the eyecaps until the next time it was needed.
Maybe she's got her other lung in her cabin, Clarke muses. Maybe she keeps it in a jar, and she stuffs it back into her chest at night… She feels a bit dopey; probably just an aftereffect of the neuroinhibitors her implants put out whenever she's outside. Small price to pay to keep my brain from shorting out— I really shouldn't mind…
Ballard peels her 'skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyser intake pokes out through her ribcage.
Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard's flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again.
Prickly numbness is spreading, leaking through her shoulder into her chest and neck. Clarke shakes her head, once, to clear it.
She sags suddenly, against the hatchway.
Am I in shock? Am I fainting?
"I mean—" Ballard stops, looks at Clarke with an expression of sudden concern. "Jesus, Lenie. You look terrible. You shouldn't have told me you were okay if you weren't."
The tingling reaches the base of Clarke's skull. "I'm — okay," she says. "Nothing broke. I'm just bruised."
"Garbage. Take off your 'skin."
Clarke straightens, with effort. The numbness recedes a bit. "It's nothing I can't take care of myself."
Don't touch me. Please don't touch me.
Ballard steps forward without a word and unseals the 'skin around Clarke's forearm. She peels back the material and exposes an ugly purple bruise. She looks at Clarke with one raised eyebrow.
"Just a bruise," Clarke says. "I'll take care of it, really. Thanks anyway." She pulls her hand away from Ballard's ministrations.
Ballard looks at her for a moment. She smiles ever so slightly.
"Lenie," she says, "there's no need to feel embarrassed."
"About what?"
"You know. Me having to rescue you. You going to pieces when that thing attacked. It was perfectly understandable. Most people have a rough time adjusting. I'm just one of the lucky ones."
Right. You've always been one of the lucky ones, haven't you? I know your kind, Ballard, you've never failed at anything…
"You don't have to feel ashamed about it," Ballard reassures her.
"I don't," Clarke says, honestly. She doesn't feel much of anything any more. Just the tingling. And the tension. And a vague sort of wonder that she's even alive.
* * *
The bulkhead is sweating.
The deep sea lays icy hands on the metal and, inside, Clarke watches the humid atmosphere bead and run down the wall. She sits rigid on her bunk under dim fluorescent light, every wall of the cubby within easy reach. The ceiling is too low. The room is too narrow. She feels the ocean compressing the station around her.
And all I can do is wait…
The anabolic salve on her injuries is warm and soothing. Clarke probes the purple flesh of her arm with practiced fingers. The diagnostic tools in the Med cubby have vindicated her. She's lucky, this time; bones intact, epidermis unbroken. She seals up her 'skin, hiding the damage.
She shifts on the pallet, turns to face the inside wall. Her reflection stares back at her through eyes like frosted glass. She watches the image, admires its perfect mimicry of each movement. Flesh and phantom move together, bodies masked, faces neutral.
That's me, she thinks. That's what I look like now. She tries to read what lies behind that glacial facade. Am I bored, horny, upset? How to tell, with her eyes hidden behind those corneal opacities? She sees no trace of the tension she always feels. I could be terrified. I could be pissing in my 'skin and no one would know.
She leans forward. The reflection comes to meet her. They stare at each other, white to white, ice to ice. For a moment, they almost forget Beebe's ongoing war against pressure. For a moment, they don't mind the claustrophobic solitude that grips them.
How many times, Clarke wonders, have I wanted eyes as dead as these?
* * *
Beebe's metal viscera crowd the corridor beyond her cubby. Clarke can barely stand erect. A few steps bring her into the lounge.
Ballard, back in shirtsleeves, is at one of the library terminals. "Rickets," she says.
"What?"
"Fish down here don't get enough trace elements. They're rotten with deficiency diseases. Doesn't matter how fierce they are. They bite too hard, they break their teeth on us."
Clarke stabs buttons on the food processor; the machine grumbles at her touch. "I thought there was all sorts of food at the rift. That's why things got so big."
"There's a lot of food. Just not very good quality."
A vaguely edible lozenge of sludge oozes from the processor onto Clarke's plate. She eyes it for a moment. I can relate.
"You're going to eat in your gear?" Ballard asks, as Clarke sits down at the lounge table.
Clarke blinks at her. "Yeah. Why?"
"Oh, nothing. It would just be nice to talk to someone with pupils in their eyes, you know?"
"Sorry. I can take them off if you —"
"No, it's no big thing. I can live with it." Ballard turns off the library and sits down across from Clarke. "So, how do you like the place so far?"
Clarke shrugs and keeps eating.
"I'm glad we're only down here for a year," Ballard says. "This place could get to you after a while."
"It could be worse."
"Oh, I'm not complaining. I was looking for a challenge, after all. What about you?"
"Me?"
"What brings you down here? What are you looking for?"
Clarke doesn't answer for a moment. "I don't know, really," she says at last. "Privacy, I guess."
Ballard looks up. Clarke stares back, her face neutral.
"Well, I'll leave you to it, then," Ballard says pleasantly.
Clarke watches her disappear down the corridor. She hears the sound of a cubby hatch hissing shut.
Give it up, Ballard, she thinks. I'm not the sort of person you really want to know.
* * *
Almost start of the morning shift. The food processor disgorges Clarke's breakfast with its usual reluctance. Ballard, in Communications, is just getting off the phone. A moment later she appears in the hatchway.
"Management says—" She stops. "You've got blue eyes."
Clarke smiles faintly. "You've seen them before."
"I know. It's just kind of surprising, it's been a while since I've seen you without your caps in."
Clarke sits down with her breakfast. "So, what does Management say?"
"We're on schedule. Rest of the crew comes down in three weeks, we go online in four." Ballard sits down across from Clarke. "I wonder sometimes why we're not online right now."
"I guess they just want to be sure everything works."
"Still, it seems like a long time for a dry run. And you'd think that — well, they'd want to get the geothermal program up and running as fast as possible, after all that's happened."
After Lepreau and Winshire melted down, you mean.
"And there's something else," Ballard says. "I can't get through to Piccard."
Clarke looks up. Piccard Station is anchored on the Galapagos Rift; it is not a particularly stable mooring.
"You ever meet the couple there?" Ballard asks. "Ken Lubin, Lana Cheung?"
Clarke shakes her head. "They went through before me. I never met any of the other Rifters except you."
"Nice people. I thought I'd call them up, see how things were going at Piccard, but nobody can get through."
"Line down?"
"They say it's probably something like that. Nothing serious. They're sending a 'scaphe down to check it out."
Maybe the seabed opened up and swallowed them whole, Clarke thinks. Maybe the hull had a weak plate—one's all it would take—
Something creaks, deep in Beebe's superstructure. Clarke looks around. The walls seem to have moved closer while she wasn't looking.
"Sometimes," she says, "I wish we didn't keep Beebe at surface pressure. Sometimes I wish we were pumped up to ambient. To take the strain off the hull." She knows it's an impossible dream; most gases kill outright when breathed at three hundred atmospheres. Even oxygen would do you in if it got above one or two percent.
Ballard shivers dramatically. "If you want to risk breathing ninety-nine percent hydrogen, you're welcome to it. I'm happy the way things are." She smiles. "Besides, you have any idea how long it would take to decompress afterwards?"
In the Systems cubby, something bleats for attention.
"Seismic. Wonderful." Ballard disappears into Comm. Clarke follows.
An amber line is writhing across one of the displays. It looks like the EEG of someone caught in a nightmare.
"Get your eyes back in," Ballard says. "The Throat's acting up."
* * *
They can hear it all the way to Beebe; a malign, almost electrical hiss from the direction of the Throat. Clarke follows Ballard towards it, one hand running lightly along the guide rope. The distant smudge of light that marks their destination seems wrong, somehow. The color is different. It ripples.
They swim into its glowing nimbus and see why. The Throat is on fire.
Sapphire auroras slide flickering across the generators. At the far end of the array, almost invisible with distance, a pillar of smoke swirls up into the darkness like a great tornado.
The sound it makes fills the abyss. Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, and hears rattlesnakes.
"Jesus!" Ballard shouts over the noise. "It's not supposed to do that!"
Clarke checks her thermistor. It won't settle; water temperature goes from four degrees to thirty eight and back again, within seconds. A myriad ephemeral currents tug at them as they watch.
"Why the light show?" Clarke calls back.
"I don't know!" Ballard answers. "Bioluminescence, I guess! Heat-sensitive bacteria!"
Without warning, the tumult dies.
The ocean empties of sound. Phosphorescent spiderwebs wriggle dimly on the metal and vanish. In the distance, the tornado sighs and fragments into a few transient dust devils.
A gentle rain of black soot begins to fall in the copper light.
"Smoker," Ballard says into the sudden stillness. "A big one."
They swim to the place where the geyser erupted. There's a fresh wound in the seabed, a gash several meters long, between two of the generators.
"This wasn't supposed to happen," Ballard says. "That's why they built here, for crying out loud! It was supposed to be stable!"
"The rift's never stable," Clarke replies. Not much point in being here if it was.
Ballard swims up through the fallout and pops an access plate on one of the generators. "Well, according to this there's no damage," she calls down, after looking inside. "Hang on, let me switch channels here—"
Clarke touches one of the cylindrical sensors strapped to her waist, and stares into the fissure. I should be able to fit through there, she decides.
And does.
"We were lucky," Ballard is saying above her. "The other generators are okay too. Oh, wait a second; number two has a clogged cooling duct, but it's not serious. Backups can handle it until—get out of there!"
Clarke looks up, one hand on the sensor she's planting. Ballard stares down at her through a chimney of fresh rock.
"Are you crazy?" Ballard shouts. "That's an active smoker!"
Clarke looks down again, deeper into the shaft. It twists out of sight in the mineral haze. "We need temperature readings," she says, "from inside the mouth."
"Get out of there! It could go off again and fry you!"
I suppose it could at that, Clarke thinks. "It already blew," she calls back. "It'll take a while to build up a fresh head." She twists a knob on the sensor; tiny explosive bolts blast into the rock, anchoring the device.
"Get out of there, now!"
"Just a second." Clarke turns the sensor on and kicks up out of the seabed. Ballard grabs her arm as she emerges, starts to drag her away from the smoker.
Clarke stiffens and pulls free. "Don't—" touch me! She catches herself. "I'm out, okay? You don't have to—"
"Further." Ballard keeps swimming. "Over here."
They're near the edge of the light now, the floodlit Throat on one side, blackness on the other. Ballard faces Clarke. "Are you out of your mind? We could have gone back to Beebe for a drone! We could have planted it on remote!"
Clarke doesn't answer. She sees something moving in the distance behind Ballard. "Watch your back," she says.
Ballard turns, and sees the gulper sliding toward them. It undulates through the water like brown smoke, silent and endless; Clarke can't see the creature's tail, although several meters of serpentine flesh have come out of the darkness.
Ballard goes for her knife. After a moment, Clarke does too.
The gulper's jaw drops open like a great jagged scoop.
Ballard begins to launch herself at the thing, knife upraised.
Clarke puts her hand out. "Wait a minute. It's not coming at us."
The front end of the gulper is about ten meters distant now. Its tail pulls free of the murk.
"Are you crazy?" Ballard moves clear of Clarke's hand, still watching the monster.
"Maybe it isn't hungry," Clarke says. She can see its eyes, two tiny unwinking spots glaring at them from the tip of the snout.
"They're always hungry. Did you sleep through the briefings?"
The gulper closes its mouth and passes. It extends around them now, in a great meandering arc. The head turns back to look at them. It opens its mouth.
"Fuck this," Ballard says, and charges.
Her first stroke opens a meter-long gash in the creature's side. The gulper stares at Ballard for a moment, as if astonished. Then, ponderously, it thrashes.
Clarke watches without moving. Why can't she just let it go? Why does she always have to prove she's better than everything?
Ballard strikes again; this time she slashes into a great tumorous swelling that has to be the stomach.
She frees the things inside.
They spill out through the wound; two huge giganturids and some misshapen creature Clarke doesn't recognize. One of the giganturids is still alive, and in a foul mood. It locks its teeth around the first thing it encounters.
Ballard. From behind.
"Lenie!" Ballard's knife hand is swinging in staccato arcs. The giganturid begins to come apart. Its jaws remain locked. The convulsing gulper crashes into Ballard and sends her spinning to the bottom.
Finally, Clarke begins to move.
The gulper collides with Ballard again. Clarke moves in low, hugging the bottom, and pulls the other woman clear.
Ballard's knife continues to dip and twist. The giganturid is a mutilated wreck behind the gills, but its grip remains unbroken. Ballard can't twist around far enough to reach the skull. Clarke comes in from behind and takes the creature's head in her hands.
It stares at her, malevolent and unthinking.
"Kill it!" Ballard shouts. "Jesus, what are you waiting for?"
Clarke closes her eyes, and clenches. The skull in her hand splinters like cheap plastic.
There is a silence.
After a while, she opens her eyes. The gulper is gone, fled back into darkness to heal or die. But Ballard's still there, and Ballard is angry.
"What's wrong with you?" she says.
Clarke unclenches her fists. Bits of bone and jellied flesh float about her fingers.
"You're supposed to back me up! Why are you so damned — passive all the time?"
"Sorry." Sometimes it works.
Ballard reaches behind her back. "I'm cold. I think it punctured my diveskin—"
Clarke swims behind her and looks. "A couple of holes. How are you otherwise? Anything feel broken?"
"It broke through the diveskin," Ballard says, as if to herself. "And when that gulper hit me, it could have—" She turns to Clarke and her voice, even distorted, carries a shocked uncertainty. " — I could have been killed. I could have been killed!"
For an instant, it's as though Ballard's 'skin and eyes and self-assurance have all been stripped away. For the first time Clarke can see through to the weakness beneath, growing like a delicate tracery of hairline cracks.
You can screw up too, Ballard. It isn't all fun and games. You know that now.
It hurts, doesn't it?
Somewhere inside, the slightest touch of sympathy. "It's okay," Clarke says. "Jeanette, it's—"
"You idiot!" Ballard hisses. She stares at Clarke like some malign and sightless old woman. "You just floated there! You just let it happen to me!"
Clarke feels her guard snap up again, just in time. This isn't just anger, she realizes. This isn't just the heat of the moment. She doesn't like me. She doesn't like me at all.
And then, dully surprised that she hasn't seen it before:
She never did.
A Niche
Beebe Station floats tethered above the seabed, a gunmetal-gray planet ringed by a belt of equatorial floodlights. There's an airlock for divers at the south pole and a docking hatch for 'scaphes at the north. In between there are girders and anchor lines, conduits and cables, metal armor and Lenie Clarke.
She's doing a routine visual check on the hull; standard procedure, once a week. Ballard is inside, testing some equipment in the communications cubby. This is not entirely within the spirit of the buddy system. Clarke prefers it this way. Relations have been civil over the past couple of days—Ballard even resurrects her patented chumminess on occasion—but the more time they spend together, the more forced things get. Eventually, Clarke knows, something is going to break.
Besides, out here it seems only natural to be alone.
She's examining a cable clamp when a razormouth charges into the light. It's about two meters long, and hungry. It rams directly into the nearest of Beebe's floodlamps, mouth agape. Several teeth shatter against the crystal lens. The razormouth twists to one side, knocking the hull with its tail, and swims off until barely visible against the dark.
Clarke watches, fascinated. The razormouth swims back and forth, back and forth, then charges again.
The flood weathers the impact easily, doing more damage to its attacker. Over and over again the fish batters itself against the light. Finally, exhausted, it sinks twitching down to the muddy bottom.
"Lenie? Are you okay?"
Clarke feels the words buzzing in her lower jaw. She trips the sender in her diveskin: "I'm okay."
"I heard something out there," Ballard says. "I just wanted to make sure you were—"
"I'm fine," Clarke says. "Just a fish."
"They never learn, do they?"
"No. I guess not. See you later."
"See—"
Clarke switches off her receiver.
Poor stupid fish. How many millennia did it take for them to learn that bioluminescence equals food? How long will Beebe have to sit here before they learn that electric light doesn't?
We could keep our headlights off. Maybe they'd leave us alone—
She stares out past Beebe's electric halo. There is so much blackness there. It almost hurts to look at it. Without lights, without sonar, how far could she go into that viscous shroud and still return?
Clarke kills her headlight. Night edges a bit closer, but Beebe's lights keep it at bay. Clarke turns until she's face to face with the darkness. She crouches like a spider against Beebe's hull.
She pushes off.
The darkness embraces her. She swims, not looking back, until her legs grow tired. She doesn't know how far she's come.
But it must be light-years. The ocean is full of stars.
Behind her, the station shines brightest, with coarse yellow rays. In the opposite direction, she can barely make out the Throat, an insignificant sunrise on the horizon.
Everywhere else, living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls blink sexual advertisements at two-second intervals. Here, a sudden flash leaves diversionary afterimages swarming across Clarke's field of view; something flees under cover of her momentary blindness. There, a counterfeit worm twists lazily in the current, invisibly tied to the roof of some predatory mouth.
There are so many of them.
She feels a sudden surge in the water, as if something big has just passed very close. A delicious thrill dances through her body.
It nearly touched me, she thinks. I wonder what it was. The rift is full of monsters who don't know when to quit. It doesn't matter how much they eat. Their voracity is as much a part of them as their elastic bellies, their unhinging jaws. Ravenous dwarves attack giants twice their own size, and sometimes win. The abyss is a desert; no one can afford the luxury of waiting for better odds.
But even a desert has oases, and sometimes the deep hunters find them. They come upon the malnourishing abundance of the rift and gorge themselves; their descendants grow huge and bloated over such delicate bones—
My light was off, and it left me alone. I wonder—
She turns it back on. Her vision clouds in the sudden glare, then clears. The ocean reverts to unrelieved black. No nightmares accost her. The beam lights empty water wherever she points it.
She switches it off. There's a moment of absolute darkness while her eyecaps adjust to the reduced light. Then the stars come out again.
They are so beautiful. Lenie Clarke rests on the bottom of the ocean and watches the abyss sparkle around her. And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it's only dark when the lights are on.
* * *
"What the hell is wrong with you? You've been gone for over three hours, did you know that? Why didn't you answer me?"
Clarke bends over and removes her fins. "I guess I turned my receiver off," she says. "I was—wait a second, did you say—"
"You guess? Have you forgotten every safety reg they drilled into us? You're supposed to have your receiver on from the moment you leave Beebe until you get back!"
"Did you say three hours?"
"I couldn't even come out after you, I couldn't find you on sonar! I just had to sit here and hope you'd show up!"
It only seems a few minutes since she pushed off into the darkness. Clarke climbs up into the lounge, suddenly chilled.
"Where were you, Lenie?" Ballard demands, coming up behind her. Clarke hears the slightest plaintive tone in her voice.
"I–I must've been on the bottom," Clarke says. "that's why sonar didn't get me. I didn't go far."
Was I asleep? What was I doing for three hours?
"I was just — wandering around. I lost track of the time. I'm sorry."
"Not good enough. Don't do it again."
There's a brief silence. It's ended by the sudden, familiar impact of flesh on metal.
"Christ!" Ballard snaps. "I'm turning the externals off right now!"
Whatever it is gets in two more hits by the time Ballard reaches Comm. Clarke hears her punch a couple of buttons.
Ballard comes back into the lounge. "There. Now we're invisible."
Something hits them again. And again.
"Or maybe not," Clarke says.
Ballard stands in the lounge, listening to the rhythm of the assault. "They don't show up on sonar," she says, almost whispering. "Sometimes, when I hear them coming at us, I tune it down to extreme close range. But it looks right through them."
"No gas bladders. Nothing to bounce an echo off of."
"We show up just fine out there, most of the time. But not those things. You can't find them, no matter how high you turn the gain. They're like ghosts."
"They're not ghosts." Almost unconsciously, Clarke has been counting the beats: eight — nine—
Ballard turns to face her. "They've shut down Piccard," she says, and her voice is small and tight.
"What?"
"The grid office says it's just some technical problem. But I've got a friend in Personnel. I phoned him when you were outside. He says Lana's in the hospital. And I get the feeling—" Ballard shakes her head. "It sounded like Ken Lubin did something down there. I think maybe he attacked her."
Three thumps from outside, in rapid succession. Clarke can feel Ballard's eyes on her. The silence stretches.
"Or maybe not," Ballard says. "We got all those personality tests. If he was violent, they would've picked it up before they sent him down."
Clarke watches her, listens to the pounding of an intermittent fist.
"Or maybe — maybe the rift changed him somehow. Maybe they misjudged the pressure we'd all be under. So to speak." Ballard musters a feeble smile. "Not the physical danger so much as the emotional stress, you know? Everyday things. Just being outside could get to you after a while. Seawater sluicing through your chest. Not breathing for hours at a time. It's like—living without a heartbeat—"
She looks up at the ceiling; the sounds from outside are a bit more erratic, now.
"Outside's not so bad," Clarke says. At least you're incompressible. At least you don't have to worry about the plates giving in.
"I don't think you'd change suddenly. It would just sort of sneak up on you, little by little. And then one day you'd just wake up changed, you'd be different somehow, only you'd never have noticed the transition. Like Ken Lubin."
She looks at Clarke, and her voice drops a bit.
"And you."
"Me." Clarke turns Ballard's words over in her mind, waits for the onset of some reaction. She feels nothing but her own indifference. "I don't think you have much to worry about. I'm not the violent type."
"I know. I'm not worried about my own safety, Lenie. I'm worried about yours."
Clarke looks at her from behind the impervious safety of her lenses, and doesn't answer.
"You've changed since you came down here," Ballard says. "You're withdrawing from me, you're exposing yourself to unnecessary risks. I don't know exactly what's happening to you. It's almost like you're trying to kill yourself."
"I'm not," Clarke says. She tries to change the subject. "Is Lana Cheung all right?"
Ballard studies her for a moment. She takes the hint. "I don't know. I couldn't get any details."
Clarke feels something knotting up inside her.
"I wonder what she did to set him off?" she murmurs.
Ballard stares at her, openmouthed. "What she did? I can't believe you said that!"
"I only meant—"
"I know what you meant."
The outside pounding has stopped. Ballard does not relax. She stands hunched over in those strange, loose-fitting clothes that Drybacks wear, and stares at the ceiling as though she doesn't believe in the silence. She looks back at Clarke.
"Lenie, you know I don't like to pull rank, but your attitude is putting both of us at risk. I think this place is really getting to you. I hope you can get back online here, I really do. Otherwise I may have to recommend you for a transfer."
Clarke watches Ballard leave the lounge. You're lying, she realizes. You're scared to death, and it's not just because I'm changing.
It's because you are.
* * *
Clarke finds out five hours after the fact: something has changed on the ocean floor.
We sleep and the earth moves she thinks, studying the topographic display. And next time, or the time after, maybe it'll move right out from under us.
I wonder if I'll have time to feel anything.
She turns at a sound behind her. Ballard is standing in the lounge, swaying slightly. Her face seems somehow disfigured by the concentric rings in her eyes, by the dark hollows around them. Naked eyes are beginning to look alien to Clarke.
"The seabed shifted," Clarke says. "There's a new outcropping about two hundred meters west of us."
"That's odd. I didn't feel anything."
"It happened about five hours ago. You were asleep."
Ballard glances up sharply. Clarke studies the haggard lines of her face. On second thought…
"I — would've woken up," Ballard says. She squeezes past Clarke into the cubby and checks the topographic display.
"Two meters high, twelve long," Clarke recites.
Ballard doesn't answer. She punches some commands into a keyboard; the topographic image dissolves, reforms into a column of numbers.
"Just as I thought," she says. "No heavy seismic activity for over forty-two hours."
"Sonar doesn't lie," Clarke says calmly.
"Neither does seismo," Ballard answers.
There's a brief silence. There's a standard procedure for such things, and they both know what it is.
"We have to check it out," Clarke says.
But Ballard only nods. "Give me a moment to change."
* * *
They call it a squid; a jet-propelled cylinder about a meter long, with a headlight at the front end and a towbar at the back. Clarke, floating between Beebe and the seabed, checks it over with one hand. Her other hand grips a sonar pistol. She points the pistol into blackness; ultrasonic clicks sweep the night, give her a bearing.
"That way," she says, pointing.
Ballard squeezes down on her own squid's towbar. The machine pulls her away. After a moment Clarke follows. Bringing up the rear, a third squid carries an assortment of sensors in a nylon bag.
Ballard's traveling at nearly full throttle. The lamps on her helmet and squid stab the water like twin lighthouse beacons. Clarke, her own lights doused, catches up about halfway to their destination. They cruise along a couple of meters over the muddy substrate.
"Your lights," Ballard says.
"We don't need them. Sonar works in the dark."
"Are you breaking regs for the sheer thrill of it, now?"
"The fish down here, they key on things that glow—"
"Turn your lights on. That's an order."
Clarke doesn't answer. She watches the beams beside her, Ballard's squid shining steady and unwavering, Ballard's headlamp slicing the water in erratic arcs as she moves her head—
"I told you," Ballard says, "turn your—Christ!"
It was just a glimpse, caught for a moment in the sweep of Ballard's headlight. She jerks her head around and it slides back out of sight. Then it looms up in the squid's beam, huge and terrible.
The abyss is grinning at them, teeth bared.
A mouth stretches across the width of the beam, extends into darkness on either side. It is crammed with conical teeth the size of human hands, and they do not look the least bit fragile.
Ballard makes a strangled sound and dives into the mud. The benthic ooze boils up around her in a seething cloud; she disappears in a torrent of planktonic corpses.
Lenie Clarke stops and waits, unmoving. She stares transfixed at that threatening smile. Her whole body feels electrified, she's never been so explicitly aware of herself. Every nerve fires and freezes at the same time. She is terrified.
But she's also, somehow, completely in control of herself. She reflects on this paradox as Ballard's abandoned squid slows and stops itself, scant meters from that endless row of teeth. She wonders at her own analytical clarity as the third squid, with its burden of sensors, decelerates past and takes up position beside Ballard's.
There in the light, the grin does not change.
Clarke raises her sonar pistol and fires. We're here, she realizes, checking the readout. That's the outcropping.
She swims closer. The smile hangs there, enigmatic and enticing. Now she can see bits of bone at the roots of the teeth, and tatters of decomposed flesh trailing from the gums.
She turns and backtracks. The cloud on the seabed is starting to settle.
"Ballard," she says in her synthetic voice.
Nobody answers.
Clarke reaches down through the mud, feeling blind, until she touches something warm and trembling.
The seabed explodes in her face.
Ballard erupts from the substrate, trailing a muddy comet's tail. Her hand rises from that sudden cloud, clasped around something glinting in the transient light. Clarke sees the knife, twists almost too late; the blade glances off her 'skin, igniting nerves along her ribcage. Ballard lashes out again. This time Clarke catches the knife-hand as it shoots past, twists it, pushes. Ballard tumbles away.
"It's me!" Clarke shouts; the vocoder turns her voice into a tinny vibrato.
Ballard rises up again, white eyes unseeing, knife still in hand.
Clarke holds up her hands. "It's okay! There's nothing here! It's dead!"
Ballard stops. She stares at Clarke. She looks over to the squids, to the smile they illuminate. She stiffens.
"It's some kind of whale," Clarke says. "It's been dead a long time."
"A — a whale?" Ballard rasps. She begins to shake.
There's no need to feel embarrassed, Clarke almost says, but doesn't. Instead, she reaches out and touches Ballard lightly on the arm. Is this how you do it?, she wonders.
Ballard jerks back as if scalded.
I guess not—
"Um, Jeanette—" Clarke begins.
Ballard raises a trembling hand, cutting Clarke off. "I'm okay. I want to g — I think we should get back now, don't you?"
"Okay," Clarke says. But she doesn't really mean it.
She could stay out here all day.
* * *
Ballard is at the library again. She turns, passing a casual hand over the brightness control as Clarke comes up behind her; the display darkens before Clarke can see what it is. Clarke glances at the eyephones hanging from the terminal, puzzled. If Ballard doesn't want her to see what she's reading, she could just use those.
But then she wouldn't see me coming…
"I think maybe it was a Ziphiid," Ballard's saying. "A beaked whale. Except it had too many teeth. Very rare. They don't dive this deep."
Clarke listens, not really interested.
"It must have died and rotted further up, and then sank." Ballard's voice is slightly raised. She looks almost furtively at something on the other side of the lounge. "I wonder what the chances are of that happening."
"What?"
"I mean, in all the ocean, something that big just happening to drop out of the sky a few hundred meters away. The odds of that must be pretty low."
"Yeah. I guess so." Clarke reaches over and brightens the display. One half of the screen glows softly with luminous text. The other holds the rotating image of a complex molecule.
"What's this?" Clarke asks.
Ballard steals another glance across the lounge. "Just an old biopsyche text the library had on file. I was browsing through it. Used to be an interest of mine."
Clarke looks at her. "Uh huh." She bends over and studies the display. Some sort of technical chemistry. The only thing she really understands is the caption beneath the graphic.
She reads it aloud: "True Happiness."
"Yeah. A tricyclic with four side chains." Ballard points at the screen. "Whenever you're happy, really happy, that's what does it to you."
"When did they find that out?"
"I don't know. It's an old book."
Clarke stares at the revolving simulacrum. It disturbs her, somehow. It floats there over that smug stupid caption, and it says something she doesn't want to hear.
You've been solved, it says. You're mechanical. Chemicals and electricity. Everything you are, every dream, every action, it all comes down to a change of voltage somewhere, or a — what did she say — a tricyclic with four side chains—
"It's wrong," Clarke murmurs. Or they'd be able to fix us, when we broke down—
"Sorry?" Ballard says.
"It's saying we're just these — soft computers. With faces."
Ballard shuts off the terminal.
"That's right," she says. "And some of us may even be losing those."
The jibe registers, but it doesn't hurt. Clarke straightens and moves towards the ladder.
"Where you going? You going outside again?" Ballard asks.
"The shift isn't over. I thought I'd clean out the duct on number two."
"It's a bit late to start on that, Lenie. The shift will be over before we're even half done." Ballard's eyes dart away again. This time Clarke follows the glance to the full-length mirror on the far wall.
She sees nothing of particular interest there.
"I'll work late." Clarke grabs the railing, swings her foot onto the top rung.
"Lenie," Ballard says, and Clarke swears she hears a tremor in that voice. She looks back, but the other woman is moving to Comm. "Well, I'm afraid I can't go with you," she's saying. "I'm in the middle of debugging one of the telemetry routines."
"That's fine," Clarke says. She feels the tension starting to rise. Beebe is shrinking again. She starts down the ladder.
"Are you sure you're okay going out alone? Maybe you should wait until tomorrow."
"No. I'm okay."
"Well, remember to keep your receiver open. I don't want you getting lost on me again—"
Clarke is in the wetroom. She climbs into the airlock and runs through the ritual. It no longer feels like drowning. It feels like being born again.
* * *
She awakens into darkness, and the sound of weeping.
She lies there for a few minutes, confused and uncertain. The sobs come from all sides, soft but omnipresent in Beebe's resonant shell. She hears nothing else except her own heartbeat.
She's afraid. She's not sure why. She wishes the sounds would go away.
Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles at the hatch. It opens into a semi-darkened corridor; meager light escapes from the lounge at one end. The sounds come from the other direction, from deepening darkness. She follows them through an infestation of pipes and conduits.
Ballard's quarters. The hatch is open. An emerald readout sparkles in the darkness, bestowing no detail upon the hunched figure on the pallet.
"Ballard," Clarke says softly. She doesn't want to go in.
The shadow moves, seems to look up at her. "Why won't you show it?" it says, its voice pleading.
Clarke frowns in the darkness. "Show what?"
"You know what! How — afraid you are!"
"Afraid?"
"Of being here, of being stuck at the bottom of this horrible dark ocean—"
"I don't understand," Clarke whispers. Claustrophobia begins to stir in her, restless again.
Ballard snorts, but the derision seems forced. "Oh, you understand all right. You think this is some sort of competition, you think if you can just keep it all inside you'll win somehow — but it isn't like that at all, Lenie, it isn't helping to keep it hidden like this, we've got to be able to trust each other down here or we're lost—"
She shifts slightly on the bunk. Clarke's eyes, enhanced by the caps, can pick out some details now; rough edges embroider Ballard's silhouette, the folds and creases of normal clothing, unbuttoned to the waist. She thinks of a cadaver, half-dissected, rising on the table to mourn its own mutilation.
"I don't know what you mean," Clarke says.
"I've tried to be friendly," Ballard says. "I've tried to get along with you, but you're so cold, you won't even admit — I mean, you couldn't like it down here, nobody could, why can't you just admit—"
"But I don't, I–I hate it in here. It's like Beebe's going to — to clench around me. And all I can do is wait for it to happen."
Ballard nods in the darkness. "Yes, yes, I know what you mean." She seems somehow encouraged by Clarke's admission. "And no matter how much you tell yourself—" She stops. "You hate it in here?"
Did I say something wrong? Clarke wonders.
"Outside is hardly any better, you know," Ballard says. "Outside is even worse! There's mudslides and smokers and giant fish trying to eat you all the time, you can't possibly — but — you don't mind all that, do you?"
Somehow, her tone has turned accusing. Clarke shrugs.
"No, you don't," Ballard is speaking slowly now. Her voice drops to a whisper: "You actually like it out there. Don't you?"
Reluctantly, Clarke nods. "Yeah. I guess so."
"But it's so — the rift can kill you, Lenie. It can kill us. A hundred different ways. Doesn't that scare you?"
"I don't know. I don't think about it much. I guess it does, sort of."
"Then why are you so happy out there?" Ballard cries. "It doesn't make any sense…"
I'm not exactly 'happy', Clarke thinks. "I don't know. It's not that weird, lots of people do dangerous things. What about free-fallers? What about mountain climbers?"
But Ballard doesn't answer. Her silhouette has grown rigid on the bed. Suddenly, she reaches over and turns on the cubby light.
Lenie Clarke blinks against the sudden brightness. Then the room dims as her eyecaps darken.
"Jesus Christ!" Ballard shouts at her. "You sleep in that fucking costume now?"
It's something else Clarke hasn't thought about. It just seems easier.
"All this time I've been pouring my heart out to you and you've been wearing that machine's face! You don't even have the decency to show me your goddamned eyes!"
Clarke steps back, startled. Ballard rises from the bed and takes a single step forward. "To think you could actually pass for human before they gave you that suit! Why don't you go find something to play with out in your fucking ocean!"
And slams the hatch in Clarke's face.
Lenie Clarke stares at the sealed bulkhead for a few moments. Her face, she knows, is calm. Her face is usually calm. But she stands there, unmoving, until the cringing thing inside of her unfolds a little.
"Okay," she says at last, very softly. "I guess I will."
* * *
Ballard is waiting for her as she emerges from the airlock. "Lenie," she says quietly, "we have to talk. It's important."
Clarke bends over and removes her fins. "Go ahead."
"Not here. In my cubby."
Clarke looks at her.
"Please."
Clarke starts up the ladder.
"Aren't you going to take—" Ballard stops as Clarke looks down. "Never mind. It's okay."
They ascend into the lounge. Ballard takes the lead. Clarke follows her down the corridor and into her cabin. Ballard dogs the hatch and sits on her bunk, leaving room for Clarke.
Clarke looks around the cramped space. Ballard has curtained over the mirrored bulkhead with a spare sheet.
Ballard pats the bed beside her. "Come on, Lenie. Sit down."
Reluctantly, Clarke sits. Ballard's sudden kindness confuses her. Ballard hasn't acted this way since…
…Since she had the upper hand.
"— might not be easy for you to hear," Ballard is saying, "but we have to get you off the rift. They shouldn't have put you down here in the first place."
Clarke doesn't reply.
"Remember the tests they gave us?" Ballard continues. "They measured our tolerance to stress; confinement, prolonged isolation, chronic physical danger, that sort of thing."
Clarke nods slightly. "So?"
"So," says Ballard, "Did you think for a moment they'd test for those qualities without knowing what sort of person would have them? Or how they got to be that way?"
Inside, Clarke goes very still. Outside, nothing changes.
Ballard leans forward a bit. "Remember what you said? About mountain climbers, and free-fallers, and why people deliberately do dangerous things? I've been reading up, Lenie. Ever since I got to know you I've been reading up—"
Got to know me?
"— and do you know what thrillseekers have in common? They all say that you haven't lived until you've nearly died. They need the danger. It gives them a rush."
You don't know me at all—
"Some of them are combat veterans, some were hostages for long periods, some just spent a lot of time in dead zones for one reason or another. And a lot of the really compulsive ones—"
Nobody knows me.
"— the ones who can't be happy unless they're on the edge, all the time — a lot of them got started early, Lenie. When they were just children. And you, I bet— you don't even like being touched—"
Go away. Go away.
Ballard puts her hand on Clarke's shoulder. "How long were you abused, Lenie?" she asks gently. "How many years?"
Clarke shrugs off the hand and does not answer. He didn't mean any harm. She shifts on the bunk, turning away slightly.
"That's it, isn't it? You don't just have a tolerance to trauma, Lenie. You've got an addiction to it. Don't you?"
It only takes Clarke a moment to recover. The 'skin, the eyecaps make it easier. She turns calmly back to Ballard. She even smiles a little.
"Abused," she says. "Now there's a quaint term. Thought it died out after the witch-hunts. You some sort of history buff, Jeanette?"
"There's a mechanism," Ballard tells her. "I've been reading about it. Do you know how the brain handles stress, Lenie? It dumps all sorts of addictive stimulants into the bloodstream. Beta-endorphins, opioids. If it happens often enough, for long enough, you get hooked. You can't help it."
Clarke feels a sound in her throat, a jagged coughing noise a bit like tearing metal. After a moment, she recognizes it as laughter.
"I'm not making it up!" Ballard insists. "You can look it up yourself if you don't believe me! Don't you know how many abused children spend their whole lives hooked on wife beaters or self-mutilation or free-fall—"
"And it makes them happy, is that it?" Clarke says, still smiling. "They enjoy getting raped, or punched out, or—"
"No, of course you're not happy! But what you feel, that's probably the closest you've ever come. So you confuse the two, you look for stress anywhere you can find it. It's physiological addiction, Lenie. You ask for it. You always asked for it."
I ask for it. Ballard's been reading, and Ballard knows: Life is pure electrochemistry. No use explaining how it feels. No use explaining that there are far worse things than being beaten up. There are even worse things than being held down and raped by your own father. There are the times between, when nothing happens at all. When he leaves you alone, and you don't know for how long. You sit across the table from him, forcing yourself to eat while your bruised insides try to knit themselves back together; and he pats you on the head and smiles at you, and you know the reprieve's already lasted too long, he's going to come for you tonight, or tomorrow, or maybe the next day.
Of course I asked for it. How else could I get it over with?
"Listen." Clarke shakes her head. "I—" But it's hard to talk, suddenly. She knows what she wants to say; Ballard's not the only one who reads. Ballard can't see it through a lifetime of fulfilled expectations, but there's nothing special about what happened to Lenie Clarke. Baboons and lions kill their own young. Male sticklebacks beat up their mates. Even insects rape. It's not abuse, really, it's just— biology.
But she can't say it aloud, for some reason. She tries, and she tries, but in the end all that comes out is a challenge that sounds almost childish:
"Don't you know anything?"
"Sure I do, Lenie. I know you're hooked on your own pain, and so you go out there and keep daring the rift to kill you, and eventually it will, don't you see? That's why you shouldn't be here. That's why we have to get you back."
Clarke stands up. "I'm not going back." She turns to the hatch.
Ballard reaches out toward her. "Listen, you've got to stay and hear me out. There's more."
Clarke looks down at her with complete indifference. "Thanks for your concern. But I don't have to stay. I can leave any time I want to."
"You go out there now and you'll give everything away, they're watching us! Haven't you figured it out yet?" Ballard's voice is rising. "Listen, they knew about you! They were looking for someone like you! They've been testing us, they don't know yet what kind of person works out better down here, so they're watching and waiting to see who cracks first! This whole program is still experimental, can't you see that? Everyone they've sent down — you, me, Ken Lubin and Lana Cheung, it's all part of some cold-blooded test—"
"And you're failing it," Clarke says softly. "I see."
"They're using us, Lenie—don't go out there!"
Ballard's fingers grasp at Clarke like the suckers of an octopus. Clarke pushes them away. She undogs the hatch and pushes it open. She hears Ballard rising behind her.
"You're sick!" Ballard screams. Something smashes into the back of Clarke's head. She goes sprawling out into the corridor. One arm smacks painfully against a cluster of pipes as she falls.
She rolls to one side and raises her arms to protect herself. But Ballard just steps over her and stalks into the lounge.
I'm not afraid, Clarke notes, getting to her feet. She hit me, and I'm not afraid. Isn't that odd—
From somewhere nearby, the sound of shattering glass.
Ballard's shouting in the lounge. "The experiment's over! Come on out, you fucking ghouls!"
Clarke follows the corridor, steps out of it. Pieces of the lounge mirror hang like great jagged stalactites in their frame. Splashes of glass litter the floor.
On the wall, behind the broken mirror, a fisheye lens takes in every corner of the room.
Ballard is staring into it. "Did you hear me? I'm not playing your stupid games any more! I'm through performing!"
The quartzite lens stares back impassively.
So you were right, Clarke muses. She remembers the sheet in Ballard's cubby. You figured it out, you found the pickups in your own cubby, and Ballard, my dear friend, you didn't tell me.
How long have you known?
Ballard looks around, sees Clarke. "You've got her fooled, all right," she snarls at the fisheye, "but she's a goddamned basket case! She's not even sane! Your little tests don't impress me one fucking bit!"
Clarke steps toward her.
"Don't call me a basket case," she says, her voice absolutely level.
"That's what you are!" Ballard shouts. "You're sick! That's why you're down here! They need you sick, they depend on it, and you're so far gone you can't see it! You hide everything behind that — that mask of yours, and you sit there like some masochistic jellyfish and just take anything anyone dishes out—you ask for it—"
That used to be true, Clarke realizes as her hands ball into fists. That's the strange thing. Ballard begins to back away; Clarke advances, step by step. It wasn't until I came down here that I learned that I could fight back. That I could win. The rift taught me that, and now Ballard has too—
"Thank you," Clarke whispers, and hits Ballard hard in the face.
Ballard goes over backwards, collides with a table. Clarke calmly steps forward. She catches a glimpse of herself in a glass icicle; her capped eyes seem almost luminous.
"Oh Jesus," Ballard whimpers. "Lenie, I'm sorry."
Clarke stands over her. "Don't be," she says. She sees herself as some sort of exploding schematic, each piece neatly labeled. So much anger in here, she thinks. So much hate. So much to take out on someone.
She looks at Ballard, cowering on the floor.
"I think," Clarke says, "I'll start with you."
But her therapy ends before she can even get properly warmed up. A sudden noise fills the lounge, shrill, periodic, vaguely familiar. It takes a moment for Clarke to remember what it is. She lowers her foot.
Over in the Communications cubby, the telephone is ringing.
* * *
Jeanette Ballard is going home today.
For half an hour the 'scaphe has been dropping deeper into midnight. Now the Comm monitor shows it settling like a great bloated tadpole onto Beebe's docking assembly. Sounds of mechanical copulation reverberate and die. The overhead hatch drops open.
Ballard's replacement climbs down, already mostly 'skinned, staring impenetrably from eyes without pupils. His gloves are off; his 'skin is open up to the forearms. Clarke sees the faint scars running along his wrists, and smiles a bit inside.
Was there another Ballard up there, waiting, she wonders, in case I had been the one who didn't work out?
Out of sight down the corridor, a hatch hisses open. Ballard appears in shirtsleeves, one eye swollen shut, carrying a single suitcase. She seems about to say something, but stops when she sees the newcomer. She looks at him for a moment. She nods briefly. She climbs into the belly of the 'scaphe without a word.
Nobody calls down to them. There are no salutations, no morale-boosting small talk. Perhaps the crew have been briefed. Perhaps they've figured it out on their own. The docking hatch swings shut. With a final clank, the 'scaphe disengages.
Clarke walks across the lounge and looks into the camera. She reaches between mirror fragments and rips its power line from the wall.
We don't need this any more, she thinks, and she knows that somewhere far away, someone agrees.
She and the newcomer appraise each other with dead white eyes.
"I'm Lubin," he says at last.
Housecleaning
So. They say you're a beater.
Lubin stands in front of her, his duffel bag at his feet. Slavic; dark hair, pale skin, a face planed out by an underskilled woodworker. One thick eyebrow shading both eyes. Not tall— a hundred and eighty centimeters, maybe— but solid.
You look like a beater.
Scars. Not just on the wrists, on the face too. Very faint, a webwork echo of old injuries. Too subtle for deliberate decoration, even if Lubin's tastes run to that, but too obvious for reconstructive work; medical technology learned how to erase such telltales decades ago. Unless— unless the injuries were really bad.
Is that it? Did something chew your face down to the bone, a long time ago?
Lubin reaches down, picks up his bag. His covered eyes betray nothing.
I've known beaters in my day. You fit. Sort of.
"Any preference which cubby I take?" he asks. It's strange, hearing that voice coming out of a face like his. It sounds almost pleasant.
Clarke shakes her head. "I'm second on the right. Take any of the others."
He steps past her. Daggers of reflective glass protrude from the edges of the far wall; within them, Lubin's fractured image disappears into the corridor at Clarke's back. She moves across the lounge to that jagged wall. I should really clean this up one of these days…
She used to like the way the mirror's worked since Ballard's adjustments. The jigsaw reflections seem more creative, somehow. More impressionistic. Now, though, they're beginning to wear on her. Maybe it's time for another change.
A piece of Ken Lubin stares at her from the wall. Without thinking, she drives her fist into the glass. A shower of fragments tinkles to the floor.
You could be a beater. Just try it. Just fucking try it.
"Oh," Lubin says, behind her. "I—"
There's still enough mirror left to check; her face is free of any expression. She turns to face him.
"I'm sorry if I startled you," Lubin says quietly, and withdraws.
He does seem sorry, at that.
So. You're not a beater. Clarke leans against the bulkhead. At least, not my kind of beater. She's not exactly sure how she knows. There's some vital chemistry missing between them. Lubin, she thinks, is a very dangerous man. Just not to her.
She smiles to herself. Beating means never having to say you're sorry.
Until it's too late, of course.
* * *
She's tired enough of sharing the cubby with herself. Sharing it with someone else is something she likes even less.
Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk and scans the length of her own body. Past her toes, another Lenie Clarke stares coolly back. The jumbled topography of the forward bulkhead frames her reflected face like a tabletop junkyard turned on edge.
The camera behind that mirror must see the same thing she does, but distorted around the edges. Clarke figures on a wide-angle lens; the GA wouldn't want to leave the corners out of range. What's the point of running an experiment if you can't keep tabs on your subject animals?
She wonders if anyone's watching her now. Probably not; at least, nobody human. They'll have some machine, tireless and dispassionate, something that watches with relentless attention as she works or shits or gets herself off. It will be programmed to call flesh and blood if she does anything interesting.
Interesting. Who defines that parameter? Is it strictly in keeping with the nature of the experiment, or has someone programmed more personal tastes on the side? Does anyone else get off when Lenie Clarke does?
She twists on the bed and faces the headboard bulkhead. A spaghetti bundle of optical filaments erupts from the floor beside her pallet and crawls up the middle of the wall, disappearing into the ceiling; the seismic feeds, on their way to the communications cubby. The air conditioning inlet sighs across her cheek, just to one side. Behind it, a metal iris catches strips of light sectioned by the grating, ready to sphincter shut the moment delta-p exceeds some critical number of millibars per second. Beebe is a mansion with many rooms, each potentially self-isolating in case of emergency.
Clarke lies back on the bunk and lets her fingers drop to the deck. The telemetry cartridge on the floor is almost dry now, fine runnels of salt crusting its surface as the seawater evaporates. It's a basic broad-spectrum model, studded with half a dozen senses: seismic, temperature, flow, the usual sulfates and organics. Sensor heads disfigure its housing like the spikes on a mace.
Which is why it's here, now.
She closes her fingers around the carrying handle, lifts the cartridge off the deck. Heavy. Neutrally buoyant in seawater, of course, but 9.5 kilos in atmosphere according to the specs. Mostly pressure casing, very tough. An active smoker at five hundred atmospheres wouldn't touch it.
Maybe it's a bit of overkill, sending it up against one lousy mirror. Ballard started the job with her bare hands, after all.
Odd that they didn't make them shatterproof.
But convenient.
Clarke sits up, hefting the cartridge. Her reflection looks back at her; its eyes, blank but not empty, seem somehow amused.
* * *
"Ms. Clarke? You okay?" It's Lubin. "I heard—"
"I'm fine," she says to the sealed hatch. There's glass all over the cubby. One stubborn shard, half a meter long, hangs in its frame like a loose tooth. She reaches out (mirror fragments tumble off her thighs) and taps it with one hand. It crashes to the deck and shatters.
"Just housecleaning," she calls.
Lubin says nothing. She hears him move away up the corridor.
He's going to work out fine. It's been a few days now and he's been scrupulous about keeping his distance. There's no sexual chemistry at all, nothing to set them at each other's throats. Whatever Ken Lubin did to Lana Cheung— whatever those two did to each other— won't be an issue here. Lubin's tastes are too specific.
For that matter, so are Clarke's.
She stands up, head bent to avoid the metal encrustations on the ceiling. Glass crunches under her feet. The bulkhead behind the mirror, freshly exposed, looks oily in the fluorescent light; a ribbed gray face with only two distinguishing features. The first is a spherical lens, smaller than a fingernail, tucked up in one corner. Clarke pulls it from its socket, holds it between thumb and forefinger for a second. A tiny glass eyeball. She drops it to the glittering deck.
There's also a name, stamped into one of the alloy ribs: Hansen Fabrication.
It's the first time she's seen see a brand name since she arrived here, except for the GA logos pressed into the shoulders of their diveskins. That seems odd, somehow. She checks the lightstrip running the length of the ceiling; white and featureless. An emergency hydrox tank next to the hatch: DOT test date, pressure specs, but no manufacturer.
She doesn't know if she should attach any significance to this.
Alone, now. Hatch sealed, surveillance ended — even her own reflection shattered beyond repair. For the first time, Lenie Clarke feels a sense of real safety here in the station's belly. She doesn't quite know what to do with it.
Maybe I could let my guard down a bit. Her hands go to her face.
At first she thinks she's gone blind; the cubby seems so dark to her uncapped eyes, walls and furniture receding into mere suggestions of shadow. She remembers turning the lights down in increments in the days since Ballard's departure, darkening this room, darkening every other corner of Beebe Station. Lubin's been doing it too, although they never talk about it.
For the first time she wonders at their actions. It doesn't make sense; eyecaps compensate automatically for changes in ambient light, always serve up the same optimum intensity to the retina. Why choose to live in a darkness you don't even perceive?
She nudges the lights up a bit; the cubby brightens. Bright colors jar the eye against a background of gray on gray. The hydrox tank reflects fluorescent orange; readouts wink red and blue and green; the handle on the bulkhead locker is a small exclamation of yellow. She can't remember the last time she noticed color; eyecaps draw the faintest images from darkness, but most of the spectrum gets lost in the process. Only now, when the lights are up, can color reassert itself.
She doesn't like it. It seems raw and out of place down here. Clarke puts her eyecaps back in, dims the lights to their usual minimal glow. The bulkhead fades to a comforting wash of blue pastels.
Just as well. Shouldn't get too careless anyway.
In a couple of days Beebe will be crawling with a full staff. She doesn't want to get used to exposing herself.
Constrictor
When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal groan.
Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometers of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the Rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge and she hears Beebe's armor shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is Physics.
How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come down here? But she already knows the answer.
She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life under control. She almost seems happy down here.
Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when you're three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.
It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what they've done to her.
It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where her left lung used to be. She's so acclimated to the chronic ache in her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves, that she's scarcely aware of them any more. She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.
Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in Beebe; they're supposed to increase the apparent size of one's personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn't help. She clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering her eyes like smooth white cataracts.
She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the usual air of confidence.
Ballard stands up. "Ready to go?"
"You're in charge," Clarke says.
"Only on paper." Ballard smiles. "No pecking order down here, Lenie. As far as I'm concerned, we're equals." After two days on the rift Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation. It doesn't always seem real.
Something hits Beebe from the outside.
Ballard's smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud through the station's titanium skin.
"It takes a while to get used to," Ballard says, "doesn't it?"
And again.
"I mean, that sounds big—"
"Maybe we should turn the lights off," Clarke suggests. She knows they won't. Beebe's exterior floodlights burn around the clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can't see it from inside—Beebe has no windows— but somehow they draw comfort from the knowledge of that unseen fire—
Thud!
— most of the time.
"Remember back in training?" Ballard says over the sound, "When they told us that the fish were usually so—small…"
Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a while. There's no other sound.
"It must've gotten tired," Ballard says. "You'd think they'd figure it out." She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.
Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender. She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one? The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into jelly. Any time.
Better to face it outside, where she knows what's coming. All she can do in here is wait for it to happen.
Going outside is like drowning, once a day.
Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector; the ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.
When she catches her breath, and loses it.
When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.
It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.
She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream. The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke falls writhing into the abyss.
They come out of the freezing darkness, headlights blazing, into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand over twenty meters high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled structures in perpetual twilight.
They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided them here.
"I'll never get used to it," Ballard grates in a caricature of her usual voice.
Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. "Thirty four Centigrade." The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so wrong to talk without breathing.
Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light. After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.
There's so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes; seawater boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful centimeters each year. Human machinery does not make energy, here at Dragon's Throat; it merely hangs on and steals some insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.
Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of boulders, crimson worms three meters long crowd the seabed between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulfur, lace the water with milky veils.
The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.
It doesn't sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harp string is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming, through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:
"LENIE—"
Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth that seems impossibly huge.
Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares into a scaly black face half a meter across. Some tiny dispassionate part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails. How can it see me? she wonders.
Then the pain reaches her.
She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.
She goes limp. Please get it over with if you're going to kill me just please God make it quick— She feels the urge to vomit, but the 'skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won't let her.
She shuts out the pain. She's had plenty of practice. She pulls inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic. There's another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife—you know, a knife, like the one you've got strapped to your leg and completely forgot about—and suddenly the monster is gone, its grip broken.
Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It's like operating a marionette. Her head turns. She sees Ballard locked in combat with something as big as she is. Only — Ballard is tearing it to pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with smoke-trails of suspended gore.
The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass. Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.
Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any trouble. I've had worse, she thinks.
Then: Why am I still alive?
Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like photophores themselves.
"Jesus Christ," Ballard says in a distorted whisper. "Lenie? You okay?"
Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But surprisingly, she feels intact. "Yeah."
And if not, she knows, it's her own damn fault. She just lay there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.
She's always asking for it.
Back in the airlock, the water recedes around them. And within them; Clarke's stolen breath, released at last, races back along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.
Ballard splits the face seal on her 'skin and her words tumble into the wetroom. "Jesus. Jesus! I don't believe it! My God, did you see that thing! They get so huge around here!" She passes her hands across her face; her corneal caps come off, milky hemispheres dropping from enormous hazel eyes. "And to think they're usually just a few centimeters long…"
She starts to strip down, unzipping her 'skin along the forearms, talking the whole time. "And yet it was almost fragile, you know? Hit it hard enough and it just came apart! Jesus!" Ballard always removes her uniform indoors. Clarke suspects she'd rip the recycler out of her own thorax if she could, throw it in a corner with the 'skin and the eyecaps until the next time it was needed.
Maybe she's got her other lung in her cabin, Clarke muses. Maybe she keeps it in a jar, and she stuffs it back into her chest at night… She feels a bit dopey; probably just an aftereffect of the neuroinhibitors her implants put out whenever she's outside. Small price to pay to keep my brain from shorting out— I really shouldn't mind…
Ballard peels her 'skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyser intake pokes out through her ribcage.
Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard's flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again.
Prickly numbness is spreading, leaking through her shoulder into her chest and neck. Clarke shakes her head, once, to clear it.
She sags suddenly, against the hatchway.
Am I in shock? Am I fainting?
"I mean—" Ballard stops, looks at Clarke with an expression of sudden concern. "Jesus, Lenie. You look terrible. You shouldn't have told me you were okay if you weren't."
The tingling reaches the base of Clarke's skull. "I'm — okay," she says. "Nothing broke. I'm just bruised."
"Garbage. Take off your 'skin."
Clarke straightens, with effort. The numbness recedes a bit. "It's nothing I can't take care of myself."
Don't touch me. Please don't touch me.
Ballard steps forward without a word and unseals the 'skin around Clarke's forearm. She peels back the material and exposes an ugly purple bruise. She looks at Clarke with one raised eyebrow.
"Just a bruise," Clarke says. "I'll take care of it, really. Thanks anyway." She pulls her hand away from Ballard's ministrations.
Ballard looks at her for a moment. She smiles ever so slightly.
"Lenie," she says, "there's no need to feel embarrassed."
"About what?"
"You know. Me having to rescue you. You going to pieces when that thing attacked. It was perfectly understandable. Most people have a rough time adjusting. I'm just one of the lucky ones."
Right. You've always been one of the lucky ones, haven't you? I know your kind, Ballard, you've never failed at anything…
"You don't have to feel ashamed about it," Ballard reassures her.
"I don't," Clarke says, honestly. She doesn't feel much of anything any more. Just the tingling. And the tension. And a vague sort of wonder that she's even alive.
The bulkhead is sweating.
The deep sea lays icy hands on the metal and, inside, Clarke watches the humid atmosphere bead and run down the wall. She sits rigid on her bunk under dim fluorescent light, every wall of the cubby within easy reach. The ceiling is too low. The room is too narrow. She feels the ocean compressing the station around her.
And all I can do is wait…
The anabolic salve on her injuries is warm and soothing. Clarke probes the purple flesh of her arm with practiced fingers. The diagnostic tools in the Med cubby have vindicated her. She's lucky, this time; bones intact, epidermis unbroken. She seals up her 'skin, hiding the damage.
She shifts on the pallet, turns to face the inside wall. Her reflection stares back at her through eyes like frosted glass. She watches the image, admires its perfect mimicry of each movement. Flesh and phantom move together, bodies masked, faces neutral.
That's me, she thinks. That's what I look like now. She tries to read what lies behind that glacial facade. Am I bored, horny, upset? How to tell, with her eyes hidden behind those corneal opacities? She sees no trace of the tension she always feels. I could be terrified. I could be pissing in my 'skin and no one would know.
She leans forward. The reflection comes to meet her. They stare at each other, white to white, ice to ice. For a moment, they almost forget Beebe's ongoing war against pressure. For a moment, they don't mind the claustrophobic solitude that grips them.
How many times, Clarke wonders, have I wanted eyes as dead as these?
Beebe's metal viscera crowd the corridor beyond her cubby. Clarke can barely stand erect. A few steps bring her into the lounge.
Ballard, back in shirtsleeves, is at one of the library terminals. "Rickets," she says.
"What?"
"Fish down here don't get enough trace elements. They're rotten with deficiency diseases. Doesn't matter how fierce they are. They bite too hard, they break their teeth on us."
Clarke stabs buttons on the food processor; the machine grumbles at her touch. "I thought there was all sorts of food at the rift. That's why things got so big."
"There's a lot of food. Just not very good quality."
A vaguely edible lozenge of sludge oozes from the processor onto Clarke's plate. She eyes it for a moment. I can relate.
"You're going to eat in your gear?" Ballard asks, as Clarke sits down at the lounge table.
Clarke blinks at her. "Yeah. Why?"
"Oh, nothing. It would just be nice to talk to someone with pupils in their eyes, you know?"
"Sorry. I can take them off if you —"
"No, it's no big thing. I can live with it." Ballard turns off the library and sits down across from Clarke. "So, how do you like the place so far?"
Clarke shrugs and keeps eating.
"I'm glad we're only down here for a year," Ballard says. "This place could get to you after a while."
"It could be worse."
"Oh, I'm not complaining. I was looking for a challenge, after all. What about you?"
"Me?"
"What brings you down here? What are you looking for?"
Clarke doesn't answer for a moment. "I don't know, really," she says at last. "Privacy, I guess."
Ballard looks up. Clarke stares back, her face neutral.
"Well, I'll leave you to it, then," Ballard says pleasantly.
Clarke watches her disappear down the corridor. She hears the sound of a cubby hatch hissing shut.
Give it up, Ballard, she thinks. I'm not the sort of person you really want to know.
Almost start of the morning shift. The food processor disgorges Clarke's breakfast with its usual reluctance. Ballard, in Communications, is just getting off the phone. A moment later she appears in the hatchway.
"Management says—" She stops. "You've got blue eyes."
Clarke smiles faintly. "You've seen them before."
"I know. It's just kind of surprising, it's been a while since I've seen you without your caps in."
Clarke sits down with her breakfast. "So, what does Management say?"
"We're on schedule. Rest of the crew comes down in three weeks, we go online in four." Ballard sits down across from Clarke. "I wonder sometimes why we're not online right now."
"I guess they just want to be sure everything works."
"Still, it seems like a long time for a dry run. And you'd think that — well, they'd want to get the geothermal program up and running as fast as possible, after all that's happened."
After Lepreau and Winshire melted down, you mean.
"And there's something else," Ballard says. "I can't get through to Piccard."
Clarke looks up. Piccard Station is anchored on the Galapagos Rift; it is not a particularly stable mooring.
"You ever meet the couple there?" Ballard asks. "Ken Lubin, Lana Cheung?"
Clarke shakes her head. "They went through before me. I never met any of the other Rifters except you."
"Nice people. I thought I'd call them up, see how things were going at Piccard, but nobody can get through."
"Line down?"
"They say it's probably something like that. Nothing serious. They're sending a 'scaphe down to check it out."
Maybe the seabed opened up and swallowed them whole, Clarke thinks. Maybe the hull had a weak plate—one's all it would take—
Something creaks, deep in Beebe's superstructure. Clarke looks around. The walls seem to have moved closer while she wasn't looking.
"Sometimes," she says, "I wish we didn't keep Beebe at surface pressure. Sometimes I wish we were pumped up to ambient. To take the strain off the hull." She knows it's an impossible dream; most gases kill outright when breathed at three hundred atmospheres. Even oxygen would do you in if it got above one or two percent.
Ballard shivers dramatically. "If you want to risk breathing ninety-nine percent hydrogen, you're welcome to it. I'm happy the way things are." She smiles. "Besides, you have any idea how long it would take to decompress afterwards?"
In the Systems cubby, something bleats for attention.
"Seismic. Wonderful." Ballard disappears into Comm. Clarke follows.
An amber line is writhing across one of the displays. It looks like the EEG of someone caught in a nightmare.
"Get your eyes back in," Ballard says. "The Throat's acting up."
They can hear it all the way to Beebe; a malign, almost electrical hiss from the direction of the Throat. Clarke follows Ballard towards it, one hand running lightly along the guide rope. The distant smudge of light that marks their destination seems wrong, somehow. The color is different. It ripples.
They swim into its glowing nimbus and see why. The Throat is on fire.
Sapphire auroras slide flickering across the generators. At the far end of the array, almost invisible with distance, a pillar of smoke swirls up into the darkness like a great tornado.
The sound it makes fills the abyss. Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, and hears rattlesnakes.
"Jesus!" Ballard shouts over the noise. "It's not supposed to do that!"
Clarke checks her thermistor. It won't settle; water temperature goes from four degrees to thirty eight and back again, within seconds. A myriad ephemeral currents tug at them as they watch.
"Why the light show?" Clarke calls back.
"I don't know!" Ballard answers. "Bioluminescence, I guess! Heat-sensitive bacteria!"
Without warning, the tumult dies.
The ocean empties of sound. Phosphorescent spiderwebs wriggle dimly on the metal and vanish. In the distance, the tornado sighs and fragments into a few transient dust devils.
A gentle rain of black soot begins to fall in the copper light.
"Smoker," Ballard says into the sudden stillness. "A big one."
They swim to the place where the geyser erupted. There's a fresh wound in the seabed, a gash several meters long, between two of the generators.
"This wasn't supposed to happen," Ballard says. "That's why they built here, for crying out loud! It was supposed to be stable!"
"The rift's never stable," Clarke replies. Not much point in being here if it was.
Ballard swims up through the fallout and pops an access plate on one of the generators. "Well, according to this there's no damage," she calls down, after looking inside. "Hang on, let me switch channels here—"
Clarke touches one of the cylindrical sensors strapped to her waist, and stares into the fissure. I should be able to fit through there, she decides.
And does.
"We were lucky," Ballard is saying above her. "The other generators are okay too. Oh, wait a second; number two has a clogged cooling duct, but it's not serious. Backups can handle it until—get out of there!"
Clarke looks up, one hand on the sensor she's planting. Ballard stares down at her through a chimney of fresh rock.
"Are you crazy?" Ballard shouts. "That's an active smoker!"
Clarke looks down again, deeper into the shaft. It twists out of sight in the mineral haze. "We need temperature readings," she says, "from inside the mouth."
"Get out of there! It could go off again and fry you!"
I suppose it could at that, Clarke thinks. "It already blew," she calls back. "It'll take a while to build up a fresh head." She twists a knob on the sensor; tiny explosive bolts blast into the rock, anchoring the device.
"Get out of there, now!"
"Just a second." Clarke turns the sensor on and kicks up out of the seabed. Ballard grabs her arm as she emerges, starts to drag her away from the smoker.
Clarke stiffens and pulls free. "Don't—" touch me! She catches herself. "I'm out, okay? You don't have to—"
"Further." Ballard keeps swimming. "Over here."
They're near the edge of the light now, the floodlit Throat on one side, blackness on the other. Ballard faces Clarke. "Are you out of your mind? We could have gone back to Beebe for a drone! We could have planted it on remote!"
Clarke doesn't answer. She sees something moving in the distance behind Ballard. "Watch your back," she says.
Ballard turns, and sees the gulper sliding toward them. It undulates through the water like brown smoke, silent and endless; Clarke can't see the creature's tail, although several meters of serpentine flesh have come out of the darkness.
Ballard goes for her knife. After a moment, Clarke does too.
The gulper's jaw drops open like a great jagged scoop.
Ballard begins to launch herself at the thing, knife upraised.
Clarke puts her hand out. "Wait a minute. It's not coming at us."
The front end of the gulper is about ten meters distant now. Its tail pulls free of the murk.
"Are you crazy?" Ballard moves clear of Clarke's hand, still watching the monster.
"Maybe it isn't hungry," Clarke says. She can see its eyes, two tiny unwinking spots glaring at them from the tip of the snout.
"They're always hungry. Did you sleep through the briefings?"
The gulper closes its mouth and passes. It extends around them now, in a great meandering arc. The head turns back to look at them. It opens its mouth.
"Fuck this," Ballard says, and charges.
Her first stroke opens a meter-long gash in the creature's side. The gulper stares at Ballard for a moment, as if astonished. Then, ponderously, it thrashes.
Clarke watches without moving. Why can't she just let it go? Why does she always have to prove she's better than everything?
Ballard strikes again; this time she slashes into a great tumorous swelling that has to be the stomach.
She frees the things inside.
They spill out through the wound; two huge giganturids and some misshapen creature Clarke doesn't recognize. One of the giganturids is still alive, and in a foul mood. It locks its teeth around the first thing it encounters.
Ballard. From behind.
"Lenie!" Ballard's knife hand is swinging in staccato arcs. The giganturid begins to come apart. Its jaws remain locked. The convulsing gulper crashes into Ballard and sends her spinning to the bottom.
Finally, Clarke begins to move.
The gulper collides with Ballard again. Clarke moves in low, hugging the bottom, and pulls the other woman clear.
Ballard's knife continues to dip and twist. The giganturid is a mutilated wreck behind the gills, but its grip remains unbroken. Ballard can't twist around far enough to reach the skull. Clarke comes in from behind and takes the creature's head in her hands.
It stares at her, malevolent and unthinking.
"Kill it!" Ballard shouts. "Jesus, what are you waiting for?"
Clarke closes her eyes, and clenches. The skull in her hand splinters like cheap plastic.
There is a silence.
After a while, she opens her eyes. The gulper is gone, fled back into darkness to heal or die. But Ballard's still there, and Ballard is angry.
"What's wrong with you?" she says.
Clarke unclenches her fists. Bits of bone and jellied flesh float about her fingers.
"You're supposed to back me up! Why are you so damned — passive all the time?"
"Sorry." Sometimes it works.
Ballard reaches behind her back. "I'm cold. I think it punctured my diveskin—"
Clarke swims behind her and looks. "A couple of holes. How are you otherwise? Anything feel broken?"
"It broke through the diveskin," Ballard says, as if to herself. "And when that gulper hit me, it could have—" She turns to Clarke and her voice, even distorted, carries a shocked uncertainty. " — I could have been killed. I could have been killed!"
For an instant, it's as though Ballard's 'skin and eyes and self-assurance have all been stripped away. For the first time Clarke can see through to the weakness beneath, growing like a delicate tracery of hairline cracks.
You can screw up too, Ballard. It isn't all fun and games. You know that now.
It hurts, doesn't it?
Somewhere inside, the slightest touch of sympathy. "It's okay," Clarke says. "Jeanette, it's—"
"You idiot!" Ballard hisses. She stares at Clarke like some malign and sightless old woman. "You just floated there! You just let it happen to me!"
Clarke feels her guard snap up again, just in time. This isn't just anger, she realizes. This isn't just the heat of the moment. She doesn't like me. She doesn't like me at all.
And then, dully surprised that she hasn't seen it before:
She never did.
A Niche
Beebe Station floats tethered above the seabed, a gunmetal-gray planet ringed by a belt of equatorial floodlights. There's an airlock for divers at the south pole and a docking hatch for 'scaphes at the north. In between there are girders and anchor lines, conduits and cables, metal armor and Lenie Clarke.
She's doing a routine visual check on the hull; standard procedure, once a week. Ballard is inside, testing some equipment in the communications cubby. This is not entirely within the spirit of the buddy system. Clarke prefers it this way. Relations have been civil over the past couple of days—Ballard even resurrects her patented chumminess on occasion—but the more time they spend together, the more forced things get. Eventually, Clarke knows, something is going to break.
Besides, out here it seems only natural to be alone.
She's examining a cable clamp when a razormouth charges into the light. It's about two meters long, and hungry. It rams directly into the nearest of Beebe's floodlamps, mouth agape. Several teeth shatter against the crystal lens. The razormouth twists to one side, knocking the hull with its tail, and swims off until barely visible against the dark.
Clarke watches, fascinated. The razormouth swims back and forth, back and forth, then charges again.
The flood weathers the impact easily, doing more damage to its attacker. Over and over again the fish batters itself against the light. Finally, exhausted, it sinks twitching down to the muddy bottom.
"Lenie? Are you okay?"
Clarke feels the words buzzing in her lower jaw. She trips the sender in her diveskin: "I'm okay."
"I heard something out there," Ballard says. "I just wanted to make sure you were—"
"I'm fine," Clarke says. "Just a fish."
"They never learn, do they?"
"No. I guess not. See you later."
"See—"
Clarke switches off her receiver.
Poor stupid fish. How many millennia did it take for them to learn that bioluminescence equals food? How long will Beebe have to sit here before they learn that electric light doesn't?
We could keep our headlights off. Maybe they'd leave us alone—
She stares out past Beebe's electric halo. There is so much blackness there. It almost hurts to look at it. Without lights, without sonar, how far could she go into that viscous shroud and still return?
Clarke kills her headlight. Night edges a bit closer, but Beebe's lights keep it at bay. Clarke turns until she's face to face with the darkness. She crouches like a spider against Beebe's hull.
She pushes off.
The darkness embraces her. She swims, not looking back, until her legs grow tired. She doesn't know how far she's come.
But it must be light-years. The ocean is full of stars.
Behind her, the station shines brightest, with coarse yellow rays. In the opposite direction, she can barely make out the Throat, an insignificant sunrise on the horizon.
Everywhere else, living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls blink sexual advertisements at two-second intervals. Here, a sudden flash leaves diversionary afterimages swarming across Clarke's field of view; something flees under cover of her momentary blindness. There, a counterfeit worm twists lazily in the current, invisibly tied to the roof of some predatory mouth.
There are so many of them.
She feels a sudden surge in the water, as if something big has just passed very close. A delicious thrill dances through her body.
It nearly touched me, she thinks. I wonder what it was. The rift is full of monsters who don't know when to quit. It doesn't matter how much they eat. Their voracity is as much a part of them as their elastic bellies, their unhinging jaws. Ravenous dwarves attack giants twice their own size, and sometimes win. The abyss is a desert; no one can afford the luxury of waiting for better odds.
But even a desert has oases, and sometimes the deep hunters find them. They come upon the malnourishing abundance of the rift and gorge themselves; their descendants grow huge and bloated over such delicate bones—
My light was off, and it left me alone. I wonder—
She turns it back on. Her vision clouds in the sudden glare, then clears. The ocean reverts to unrelieved black. No nightmares accost her. The beam lights empty water wherever she points it.
She switches it off. There's a moment of absolute darkness while her eyecaps adjust to the reduced light. Then the stars come out again.
They are so beautiful. Lenie Clarke rests on the bottom of the ocean and watches the abyss sparkle around her. And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it's only dark when the lights are on.
"What the hell is wrong with you? You've been gone for over three hours, did you know that? Why didn't you answer me?"
Clarke bends over and removes her fins. "I guess I turned my receiver off," she says. "I was—wait a second, did you say—"
"You guess? Have you forgotten every safety reg they drilled into us? You're supposed to have your receiver on from the moment you leave Beebe until you get back!"
"Did you say three hours?"
"I couldn't even come out after you, I couldn't find you on sonar! I just had to sit here and hope you'd show up!"
It only seems a few minutes since she pushed off into the darkness. Clarke climbs up into the lounge, suddenly chilled.
"Where were you, Lenie?" Ballard demands, coming up behind her. Clarke hears the slightest plaintive tone in her voice.
"I–I must've been on the bottom," Clarke says. "that's why sonar didn't get me. I didn't go far."
Was I asleep? What was I doing for three hours?
"I was just — wandering around. I lost track of the time. I'm sorry."
"Not good enough. Don't do it again."
There's a brief silence. It's ended by the sudden, familiar impact of flesh on metal.
"Christ!" Ballard snaps. "I'm turning the externals off right now!"
Whatever it is gets in two more hits by the time Ballard reaches Comm. Clarke hears her punch a couple of buttons.
Ballard comes back into the lounge. "There. Now we're invisible."
Something hits them again. And again.
"Or maybe not," Clarke says.
Ballard stands in the lounge, listening to the rhythm of the assault. "They don't show up on sonar," she says, almost whispering. "Sometimes, when I hear them coming at us, I tune it down to extreme close range. But it looks right through them."
"No gas bladders. Nothing to bounce an echo off of."
"We show up just fine out there, most of the time. But not those things. You can't find them, no matter how high you turn the gain. They're like ghosts."
"They're not ghosts." Almost unconsciously, Clarke has been counting the beats: eight — nine—
Ballard turns to face her. "They've shut down Piccard," she says, and her voice is small and tight.
"What?"
"The grid office says it's just some technical problem. But I've got a friend in Personnel. I phoned him when you were outside. He says Lana's in the hospital. And I get the feeling—" Ballard shakes her head. "It sounded like Ken Lubin did something down there. I think maybe he attacked her."
Three thumps from outside, in rapid succession. Clarke can feel Ballard's eyes on her. The silence stretches.
"Or maybe not," Ballard says. "We got all those personality tests. If he was violent, they would've picked it up before they sent him down."
Clarke watches her, listens to the pounding of an intermittent fist.
"Or maybe — maybe the rift changed him somehow. Maybe they misjudged the pressure we'd all be under. So to speak." Ballard musters a feeble smile. "Not the physical danger so much as the emotional stress, you know? Everyday things. Just being outside could get to you after a while. Seawater sluicing through your chest. Not breathing for hours at a time. It's like—living without a heartbeat—"
She looks up at the ceiling; the sounds from outside are a bit more erratic, now.
"Outside's not so bad," Clarke says. At least you're incompressible. At least you don't have to worry about the plates giving in.
"I don't think you'd change suddenly. It would just sort of sneak up on you, little by little. And then one day you'd just wake up changed, you'd be different somehow, only you'd never have noticed the transition. Like Ken Lubin."
She looks at Clarke, and her voice drops a bit.
"And you."
"Me." Clarke turns Ballard's words over in her mind, waits for the onset of some reaction. She feels nothing but her own indifference. "I don't think you have much to worry about. I'm not the violent type."
"I know. I'm not worried about my own safety, Lenie. I'm worried about yours."
Clarke looks at her from behind the impervious safety of her lenses, and doesn't answer.
"You've changed since you came down here," Ballard says. "You're withdrawing from me, you're exposing yourself to unnecessary risks. I don't know exactly what's happening to you. It's almost like you're trying to kill yourself."
"I'm not," Clarke says. She tries to change the subject. "Is Lana Cheung all right?"
Ballard studies her for a moment. She takes the hint. "I don't know. I couldn't get any details."
Clarke feels something knotting up inside her.
"I wonder what she did to set him off?" she murmurs.
Ballard stares at her, openmouthed. "What she did? I can't believe you said that!"
"I only meant—"
"I know what you meant."
The outside pounding has stopped. Ballard does not relax. She stands hunched over in those strange, loose-fitting clothes that Drybacks wear, and stares at the ceiling as though she doesn't believe in the silence. She looks back at Clarke.
"Lenie, you know I don't like to pull rank, but your attitude is putting both of us at risk. I think this place is really getting to you. I hope you can get back online here, I really do. Otherwise I may have to recommend you for a transfer."
Clarke watches Ballard leave the lounge. You're lying, she realizes. You're scared to death, and it's not just because I'm changing.
It's because you are.
Clarke finds out five hours after the fact: something has changed on the ocean floor.
We sleep and the earth moves she thinks, studying the topographic display. And next time, or the time after, maybe it'll move right out from under us.
I wonder if I'll have time to feel anything.
She turns at a sound behind her. Ballard is standing in the lounge, swaying slightly. Her face seems somehow disfigured by the concentric rings in her eyes, by the dark hollows around them. Naked eyes are beginning to look alien to Clarke.
"The seabed shifted," Clarke says. "There's a new outcropping about two hundred meters west of us."
"That's odd. I didn't feel anything."
"It happened about five hours ago. You were asleep."
Ballard glances up sharply. Clarke studies the haggard lines of her face. On second thought…
"I — would've woken up," Ballard says. She squeezes past Clarke into the cubby and checks the topographic display.
"Two meters high, twelve long," Clarke recites.
Ballard doesn't answer. She punches some commands into a keyboard; the topographic image dissolves, reforms into a column of numbers.
"Just as I thought," she says. "No heavy seismic activity for over forty-two hours."
"Sonar doesn't lie," Clarke says calmly.
"Neither does seismo," Ballard answers.
There's a brief silence. There's a standard procedure for such things, and they both know what it is.
"We have to check it out," Clarke says.
But Ballard only nods. "Give me a moment to change."
They call it a squid; a jet-propelled cylinder about a meter long, with a headlight at the front end and a towbar at the back. Clarke, floating between Beebe and the seabed, checks it over with one hand. Her other hand grips a sonar pistol. She points the pistol into blackness; ultrasonic clicks sweep the night, give her a bearing.
"That way," she says, pointing.
Ballard squeezes down on her own squid's towbar. The machine pulls her away. After a moment Clarke follows. Bringing up the rear, a third squid carries an assortment of sensors in a nylon bag.
Ballard's traveling at nearly full throttle. The lamps on her helmet and squid stab the water like twin lighthouse beacons. Clarke, her own lights doused, catches up about halfway to their destination. They cruise along a couple of meters over the muddy substrate.
"Your lights," Ballard says.
"We don't need them. Sonar works in the dark."
"Are you breaking regs for the sheer thrill of it, now?"
"The fish down here, they key on things that glow—"
"Turn your lights on. That's an order."
Clarke doesn't answer. She watches the beams beside her, Ballard's squid shining steady and unwavering, Ballard's headlamp slicing the water in erratic arcs as she moves her head—
"I told you," Ballard says, "turn your—Christ!"
It was just a glimpse, caught for a moment in the sweep of Ballard's headlight. She jerks her head around and it slides back out of sight. Then it looms up in the squid's beam, huge and terrible.
The abyss is grinning at them, teeth bared.
A mouth stretches across the width of the beam, extends into darkness on either side. It is crammed with conical teeth the size of human hands, and they do not look the least bit fragile.
Ballard makes a strangled sound and dives into the mud. The benthic ooze boils up around her in a seething cloud; she disappears in a torrent of planktonic corpses.
Lenie Clarke stops and waits, unmoving. She stares transfixed at that threatening smile. Her whole body feels electrified, she's never been so explicitly aware of herself. Every nerve fires and freezes at the same time. She is terrified.
But she's also, somehow, completely in control of herself. She reflects on this paradox as Ballard's abandoned squid slows and stops itself, scant meters from that endless row of teeth. She wonders at her own analytical clarity as the third squid, with its burden of sensors, decelerates past and takes up position beside Ballard's.
There in the light, the grin does not change.
Clarke raises her sonar pistol and fires. We're here, she realizes, checking the readout. That's the outcropping.
She swims closer. The smile hangs there, enigmatic and enticing. Now she can see bits of bone at the roots of the teeth, and tatters of decomposed flesh trailing from the gums.
She turns and backtracks. The cloud on the seabed is starting to settle.
"Ballard," she says in her synthetic voice.
Nobody answers.
Clarke reaches down through the mud, feeling blind, until she touches something warm and trembling.
The seabed explodes in her face.
Ballard erupts from the substrate, trailing a muddy comet's tail. Her hand rises from that sudden cloud, clasped around something glinting in the transient light. Clarke sees the knife, twists almost too late; the blade glances off her 'skin, igniting nerves along her ribcage. Ballard lashes out again. This time Clarke catches the knife-hand as it shoots past, twists it, pushes. Ballard tumbles away.
"It's me!" Clarke shouts; the vocoder turns her voice into a tinny vibrato.
Ballard rises up again, white eyes unseeing, knife still in hand.
Clarke holds up her hands. "It's okay! There's nothing here! It's dead!"
Ballard stops. She stares at Clarke. She looks over to the squids, to the smile they illuminate. She stiffens.
"It's some kind of whale," Clarke says. "It's been dead a long time."
"A — a whale?" Ballard rasps. She begins to shake.
There's no need to feel embarrassed, Clarke almost says, but doesn't. Instead, she reaches out and touches Ballard lightly on the arm. Is this how you do it?, she wonders.
Ballard jerks back as if scalded.
I guess not—
"Um, Jeanette—" Clarke begins.
Ballard raises a trembling hand, cutting Clarke off. "I'm okay. I want to g — I think we should get back now, don't you?"
"Okay," Clarke says. But she doesn't really mean it.
She could stay out here all day.
Ballard is at the library again. She turns, passing a casual hand over the brightness control as Clarke comes up behind her; the display darkens before Clarke can see what it is. Clarke glances at the eyephones hanging from the terminal, puzzled. If Ballard doesn't want her to see what she's reading, she could just use those.
But then she wouldn't see me coming…
"I think maybe it was a Ziphiid," Ballard's saying. "A beaked whale. Except it had too many teeth. Very rare. They don't dive this deep."
Clarke listens, not really interested.
"It must have died and rotted further up, and then sank." Ballard's voice is slightly raised. She looks almost furtively at something on the other side of the lounge. "I wonder what the chances are of that happening."
"What?"
"I mean, in all the ocean, something that big just happening to drop out of the sky a few hundred meters away. The odds of that must be pretty low."
"Yeah. I guess so." Clarke reaches over and brightens the display. One half of the screen glows softly with luminous text. The other holds the rotating image of a complex molecule.
"What's this?" Clarke asks.
Ballard steals another glance across the lounge. "Just an old biopsyche text the library had on file. I was browsing through it. Used to be an interest of mine."
Clarke looks at her. "Uh huh." She bends over and studies the display. Some sort of technical chemistry. The only thing she really understands is the caption beneath the graphic.
She reads it aloud: "True Happiness."
"Yeah. A tricyclic with four side chains." Ballard points at the screen. "Whenever you're happy, really happy, that's what does it to you."
"When did they find that out?"
"I don't know. It's an old book."
Clarke stares at the revolving simulacrum. It disturbs her, somehow. It floats there over that smug stupid caption, and it says something she doesn't want to hear.
You've been solved, it says. You're mechanical. Chemicals and electricity. Everything you are, every dream, every action, it all comes down to a change of voltage somewhere, or a — what did she say — a tricyclic with four side chains—
"It's wrong," Clarke murmurs. Or they'd be able to fix us, when we broke down—
"Sorry?" Ballard says.
"It's saying we're just these — soft computers. With faces."
Ballard shuts off the terminal.
"That's right," she says. "And some of us may even be losing those."
The jibe registers, but it doesn't hurt. Clarke straightens and moves towards the ladder.
"Where you going? You going outside again?" Ballard asks.
"The shift isn't over. I thought I'd clean out the duct on number two."
"It's a bit late to start on that, Lenie. The shift will be over before we're even half done." Ballard's eyes dart away again. This time Clarke follows the glance to the full-length mirror on the far wall.
She sees nothing of particular interest there.
"I'll work late." Clarke grabs the railing, swings her foot onto the top rung.
"Lenie," Ballard says, and Clarke swears she hears a tremor in that voice. She looks back, but the other woman is moving to Comm. "Well, I'm afraid I can't go with you," she's saying. "I'm in the middle of debugging one of the telemetry routines."
"That's fine," Clarke says. She feels the tension starting to rise. Beebe is shrinking again. She starts down the ladder.
"Are you sure you're okay going out alone? Maybe you should wait until tomorrow."
"No. I'm okay."
"Well, remember to keep your receiver open. I don't want you getting lost on me again—"
Clarke is in the wetroom. She climbs into the airlock and runs through the ritual. It no longer feels like drowning. It feels like being born again.
She awakens into darkness, and the sound of weeping.
She lies there for a few minutes, confused and uncertain. The sobs come from all sides, soft but omnipresent in Beebe's resonant shell. She hears nothing else except her own heartbeat.
She's afraid. She's not sure why. She wishes the sounds would go away.
Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles at the hatch. It opens into a semi-darkened corridor; meager light escapes from the lounge at one end. The sounds come from the other direction, from deepening darkness. She follows them through an infestation of pipes and conduits.
Ballard's quarters. The hatch is open. An emerald readout sparkles in the darkness, bestowing no detail upon the hunched figure on the pallet.
"Ballard," Clarke says softly. She doesn't want to go in.
The shadow moves, seems to look up at her. "Why won't you show it?" it says, its voice pleading.
Clarke frowns in the darkness. "Show what?"
"You know what! How — afraid you are!"
"Afraid?"
"Of being here, of being stuck at the bottom of this horrible dark ocean—"
"I don't understand," Clarke whispers. Claustrophobia begins to stir in her, restless again.
Ballard snorts, but the derision seems forced. "Oh, you understand all right. You think this is some sort of competition, you think if you can just keep it all inside you'll win somehow — but it isn't like that at all, Lenie, it isn't helping to keep it hidden like this, we've got to be able to trust each other down here or we're lost—"
She shifts slightly on the bunk. Clarke's eyes, enhanced by the caps, can pick out some details now; rough edges embroider Ballard's silhouette, the folds and creases of normal clothing, unbuttoned to the waist. She thinks of a cadaver, half-dissected, rising on the table to mourn its own mutilation.
"I don't know what you mean," Clarke says.
"I've tried to be friendly," Ballard says. "I've tried to get along with you, but you're so cold, you won't even admit — I mean, you couldn't like it down here, nobody could, why can't you just admit—"
"But I don't, I–I hate it in here. It's like Beebe's going to — to clench around me. And all I can do is wait for it to happen."
Ballard nods in the darkness. "Yes, yes, I know what you mean." She seems somehow encouraged by Clarke's admission. "And no matter how much you tell yourself—" She stops. "You hate it in here?"
Did I say something wrong? Clarke wonders.
"Outside is hardly any better, you know," Ballard says. "Outside is even worse! There's mudslides and smokers and giant fish trying to eat you all the time, you can't possibly — but — you don't mind all that, do you?"
Somehow, her tone has turned accusing. Clarke shrugs.
"No, you don't," Ballard is speaking slowly now. Her voice drops to a whisper: "You actually like it out there. Don't you?"
Reluctantly, Clarke nods. "Yeah. I guess so."
"But it's so — the rift can kill you, Lenie. It can kill us. A hundred different ways. Doesn't that scare you?"
"I don't know. I don't think about it much. I guess it does, sort of."
"Then why are you so happy out there?" Ballard cries. "It doesn't make any sense…"
I'm not exactly 'happy', Clarke thinks. "I don't know. It's not that weird, lots of people do dangerous things. What about free-fallers? What about mountain climbers?"
But Ballard doesn't answer. Her silhouette has grown rigid on the bed. Suddenly, she reaches over and turns on the cubby light.
Lenie Clarke blinks against the sudden brightness. Then the room dims as her eyecaps darken.
"Jesus Christ!" Ballard shouts at her. "You sleep in that fucking costume now?"
It's something else Clarke hasn't thought about. It just seems easier.
"All this time I've been pouring my heart out to you and you've been wearing that machine's face! You don't even have the decency to show me your goddamned eyes!"
Clarke steps back, startled. Ballard rises from the bed and takes a single step forward. "To think you could actually pass for human before they gave you that suit! Why don't you go find something to play with out in your fucking ocean!"
And slams the hatch in Clarke's face.
Lenie Clarke stares at the sealed bulkhead for a few moments. Her face, she knows, is calm. Her face is usually calm. But she stands there, unmoving, until the cringing thing inside of her unfolds a little.
"Okay," she says at last, very softly. "I guess I will."
Ballard is waiting for her as she emerges from the airlock. "Lenie," she says quietly, "we have to talk. It's important."
Clarke bends over and removes her fins. "Go ahead."
"Not here. In my cubby."
Clarke looks at her.
"Please."
Clarke starts up the ladder.
"Aren't you going to take—" Ballard stops as Clarke looks down. "Never mind. It's okay."
They ascend into the lounge. Ballard takes the lead. Clarke follows her down the corridor and into her cabin. Ballard dogs the hatch and sits on her bunk, leaving room for Clarke.
Clarke looks around the cramped space. Ballard has curtained over the mirrored bulkhead with a spare sheet.
Ballard pats the bed beside her. "Come on, Lenie. Sit down."
Reluctantly, Clarke sits. Ballard's sudden kindness confuses her. Ballard hasn't acted this way since…
…Since she had the upper hand.
"— might not be easy for you to hear," Ballard is saying, "but we have to get you off the rift. They shouldn't have put you down here in the first place."
Clarke doesn't reply.
"Remember the tests they gave us?" Ballard continues. "They measured our tolerance to stress; confinement, prolonged isolation, chronic physical danger, that sort of thing."
Clarke nods slightly. "So?"
"So," says Ballard, "Did you think for a moment they'd test for those qualities without knowing what sort of person would have them? Or how they got to be that way?"
Inside, Clarke goes very still. Outside, nothing changes.
Ballard leans forward a bit. "Remember what you said? About mountain climbers, and free-fallers, and why people deliberately do dangerous things? I've been reading up, Lenie. Ever since I got to know you I've been reading up—"
Got to know me?
"— and do you know what thrillseekers have in common? They all say that you haven't lived until you've nearly died. They need the danger. It gives them a rush."
You don't know me at all—
"Some of them are combat veterans, some were hostages for long periods, some just spent a lot of time in dead zones for one reason or another. And a lot of the really compulsive ones—"
Nobody knows me.
"— the ones who can't be happy unless they're on the edge, all the time — a lot of them got started early, Lenie. When they were just children. And you, I bet— you don't even like being touched—"
Go away. Go away.
Ballard puts her hand on Clarke's shoulder. "How long were you abused, Lenie?" she asks gently. "How many years?"
Clarke shrugs off the hand and does not answer. He didn't mean any harm. She shifts on the bunk, turning away slightly.
"That's it, isn't it? You don't just have a tolerance to trauma, Lenie. You've got an addiction to it. Don't you?"
It only takes Clarke a moment to recover. The 'skin, the eyecaps make it easier. She turns calmly back to Ballard. She even smiles a little.
"Abused," she says. "Now there's a quaint term. Thought it died out after the witch-hunts. You some sort of history buff, Jeanette?"
"There's a mechanism," Ballard tells her. "I've been reading about it. Do you know how the brain handles stress, Lenie? It dumps all sorts of addictive stimulants into the bloodstream. Beta-endorphins, opioids. If it happens often enough, for long enough, you get hooked. You can't help it."
Clarke feels a sound in her throat, a jagged coughing noise a bit like tearing metal. After a moment, she recognizes it as laughter.
"I'm not making it up!" Ballard insists. "You can look it up yourself if you don't believe me! Don't you know how many abused children spend their whole lives hooked on wife beaters or self-mutilation or free-fall—"
"And it makes them happy, is that it?" Clarke says, still smiling. "They enjoy getting raped, or punched out, or—"
"No, of course you're not happy! But what you feel, that's probably the closest you've ever come. So you confuse the two, you look for stress anywhere you can find it. It's physiological addiction, Lenie. You ask for it. You always asked for it."
I ask for it. Ballard's been reading, and Ballard knows: Life is pure electrochemistry. No use explaining how it feels. No use explaining that there are far worse things than being beaten up. There are even worse things than being held down and raped by your own father. There are the times between, when nothing happens at all. When he leaves you alone, and you don't know for how long. You sit across the table from him, forcing yourself to eat while your bruised insides try to knit themselves back together; and he pats you on the head and smiles at you, and you know the reprieve's already lasted too long, he's going to come for you tonight, or tomorrow, or maybe the next day.
Of course I asked for it. How else could I get it over with?
"Listen." Clarke shakes her head. "I—" But it's hard to talk, suddenly. She knows what she wants to say; Ballard's not the only one who reads. Ballard can't see it through a lifetime of fulfilled expectations, but there's nothing special about what happened to Lenie Clarke. Baboons and lions kill their own young. Male sticklebacks beat up their mates. Even insects rape. It's not abuse, really, it's just— biology.
But she can't say it aloud, for some reason. She tries, and she tries, but in the end all that comes out is a challenge that sounds almost childish:
"Don't you know anything?"
"Sure I do, Lenie. I know you're hooked on your own pain, and so you go out there and keep daring the rift to kill you, and eventually it will, don't you see? That's why you shouldn't be here. That's why we have to get you back."
Clarke stands up. "I'm not going back." She turns to the hatch.
Ballard reaches out toward her. "Listen, you've got to stay and hear me out. There's more."
Clarke looks down at her with complete indifference. "Thanks for your concern. But I don't have to stay. I can leave any time I want to."
"You go out there now and you'll give everything away, they're watching us! Haven't you figured it out yet?" Ballard's voice is rising. "Listen, they knew about you! They were looking for someone like you! They've been testing us, they don't know yet what kind of person works out better down here, so they're watching and waiting to see who cracks first! This whole program is still experimental, can't you see that? Everyone they've sent down — you, me, Ken Lubin and Lana Cheung, it's all part of some cold-blooded test—"
"And you're failing it," Clarke says softly. "I see."
"They're using us, Lenie—don't go out there!"
Ballard's fingers grasp at Clarke like the suckers of an octopus. Clarke pushes them away. She undogs the hatch and pushes it open. She hears Ballard rising behind her.
"You're sick!" Ballard screams. Something smashes into the back of Clarke's head. She goes sprawling out into the corridor. One arm smacks painfully against a cluster of pipes as she falls.
She rolls to one side and raises her arms to protect herself. But Ballard just steps over her and stalks into the lounge.
I'm not afraid, Clarke notes, getting to her feet. She hit me, and I'm not afraid. Isn't that odd—
From somewhere nearby, the sound of shattering glass.
Ballard's shouting in the lounge. "The experiment's over! Come on out, you fucking ghouls!"
Clarke follows the corridor, steps out of it. Pieces of the lounge mirror hang like great jagged stalactites in their frame. Splashes of glass litter the floor.
On the wall, behind the broken mirror, a fisheye lens takes in every corner of the room.
Ballard is staring into it. "Did you hear me? I'm not playing your stupid games any more! I'm through performing!"
The quartzite lens stares back impassively.
So you were right, Clarke muses. She remembers the sheet in Ballard's cubby. You figured it out, you found the pickups in your own cubby, and Ballard, my dear friend, you didn't tell me.
How long have you known?
Ballard looks around, sees Clarke. "You've got her fooled, all right," she snarls at the fisheye, "but she's a goddamned basket case! She's not even sane! Your little tests don't impress me one fucking bit!"
Clarke steps toward her.
"Don't call me a basket case," she says, her voice absolutely level.
"That's what you are!" Ballard shouts. "You're sick! That's why you're down here! They need you sick, they depend on it, and you're so far gone you can't see it! You hide everything behind that — that mask of yours, and you sit there like some masochistic jellyfish and just take anything anyone dishes out—you ask for it—"
That used to be true, Clarke realizes as her hands ball into fists. That's the strange thing. Ballard begins to back away; Clarke advances, step by step. It wasn't until I came down here that I learned that I could fight back. That I could win. The rift taught me that, and now Ballard has too—
"Thank you," Clarke whispers, and hits Ballard hard in the face.
Ballard goes over backwards, collides with a table. Clarke calmly steps forward. She catches a glimpse of herself in a glass icicle; her capped eyes seem almost luminous.
"Oh Jesus," Ballard whimpers. "Lenie, I'm sorry."
Clarke stands over her. "Don't be," she says. She sees herself as some sort of exploding schematic, each piece neatly labeled. So much anger in here, she thinks. So much hate. So much to take out on someone.
She looks at Ballard, cowering on the floor.
"I think," Clarke says, "I'll start with you."
But her therapy ends before she can even get properly warmed up. A sudden noise fills the lounge, shrill, periodic, vaguely familiar. It takes a moment for Clarke to remember what it is. She lowers her foot.
Over in the Communications cubby, the telephone is ringing.
Jeanette Ballard is going home today.
For half an hour the 'scaphe has been dropping deeper into midnight. Now the Comm monitor shows it settling like a great bloated tadpole onto Beebe's docking assembly. Sounds of mechanical copulation reverberate and die. The overhead hatch drops open.
Ballard's replacement climbs down, already mostly 'skinned, staring impenetrably from eyes without pupils. His gloves are off; his 'skin is open up to the forearms. Clarke sees the faint scars running along his wrists, and smiles a bit inside.
Was there another Ballard up there, waiting, she wonders, in case I had been the one who didn't work out?
Out of sight down the corridor, a hatch hisses open. Ballard appears in shirtsleeves, one eye swollen shut, carrying a single suitcase. She seems about to say something, but stops when she sees the newcomer. She looks at him for a moment. She nods briefly. She climbs into the belly of the 'scaphe without a word.
Nobody calls down to them. There are no salutations, no morale-boosting small talk. Perhaps the crew have been briefed. Perhaps they've figured it out on their own. The docking hatch swings shut. With a final clank, the 'scaphe disengages.
Clarke walks across the lounge and looks into the camera. She reaches between mirror fragments and rips its power line from the wall.
We don't need this any more, she thinks, and she knows that somewhere far away, someone agrees.
She and the newcomer appraise each other with dead white eyes.
"I'm Lubin," he says at last.
Housecleaning
So. They say you're a beater.
Lubin stands in front of her, his duffel bag at his feet. Slavic; dark hair, pale skin, a face planed out by an underskilled woodworker. One thick eyebrow shading both eyes. Not tall— a hundred and eighty centimeters, maybe— but solid.
You look like a beater.
Scars. Not just on the wrists, on the face too. Very faint, a webwork echo of old injuries. Too subtle for deliberate decoration, even if Lubin's tastes run to that, but too obvious for reconstructive work; medical technology learned how to erase such telltales decades ago. Unless— unless the injuries were really bad.
Is that it? Did something chew your face down to the bone, a long time ago?
Lubin reaches down, picks up his bag. His covered eyes betray nothing.
I've known beaters in my day. You fit. Sort of.
"Any preference which cubby I take?" he asks. It's strange, hearing that voice coming out of a face like his. It sounds almost pleasant.
Clarke shakes her head. "I'm second on the right. Take any of the others."
He steps past her. Daggers of reflective glass protrude from the edges of the far wall; within them, Lubin's fractured image disappears into the corridor at Clarke's back. She moves across the lounge to that jagged wall. I should really clean this up one of these days…
She used to like the way the mirror's worked since Ballard's adjustments. The jigsaw reflections seem more creative, somehow. More impressionistic. Now, though, they're beginning to wear on her. Maybe it's time for another change.
A piece of Ken Lubin stares at her from the wall. Without thinking, she drives her fist into the glass. A shower of fragments tinkles to the floor.
You could be a beater. Just try it. Just fucking try it.
"Oh," Lubin says, behind her. "I—"
There's still enough mirror left to check; her face is free of any expression. She turns to face him.
"I'm sorry if I startled you," Lubin says quietly, and withdraws.
He does seem sorry, at that.
So. You're not a beater. Clarke leans against the bulkhead. At least, not my kind of beater. She's not exactly sure how she knows. There's some vital chemistry missing between them. Lubin, she thinks, is a very dangerous man. Just not to her.
She smiles to herself. Beating means never having to say you're sorry.
Until it's too late, of course.
She's tired enough of sharing the cubby with herself. Sharing it with someone else is something she likes even less.
Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk and scans the length of her own body. Past her toes, another Lenie Clarke stares coolly back. The jumbled topography of the forward bulkhead frames her reflected face like a tabletop junkyard turned on edge.
The camera behind that mirror must see the same thing she does, but distorted around the edges. Clarke figures on a wide-angle lens; the GA wouldn't want to leave the corners out of range. What's the point of running an experiment if you can't keep tabs on your subject animals?
She wonders if anyone's watching her now. Probably not; at least, nobody human. They'll have some machine, tireless and dispassionate, something that watches with relentless attention as she works or shits or gets herself off. It will be programmed to call flesh and blood if she does anything interesting.
Interesting. Who defines that parameter? Is it strictly in keeping with the nature of the experiment, or has someone programmed more personal tastes on the side? Does anyone else get off when Lenie Clarke does?
She twists on the bed and faces the headboard bulkhead. A spaghetti bundle of optical filaments erupts from the floor beside her pallet and crawls up the middle of the wall, disappearing into the ceiling; the seismic feeds, on their way to the communications cubby. The air conditioning inlet sighs across her cheek, just to one side. Behind it, a metal iris catches strips of light sectioned by the grating, ready to sphincter shut the moment delta-p exceeds some critical number of millibars per second. Beebe is a mansion with many rooms, each potentially self-isolating in case of emergency.
Clarke lies back on the bunk and lets her fingers drop to the deck. The telemetry cartridge on the floor is almost dry now, fine runnels of salt crusting its surface as the seawater evaporates. It's a basic broad-spectrum model, studded with half a dozen senses: seismic, temperature, flow, the usual sulfates and organics. Sensor heads disfigure its housing like the spikes on a mace.
Which is why it's here, now.
She closes her fingers around the carrying handle, lifts the cartridge off the deck. Heavy. Neutrally buoyant in seawater, of course, but 9.5 kilos in atmosphere according to the specs. Mostly pressure casing, very tough. An active smoker at five hundred atmospheres wouldn't touch it.
Maybe it's a bit of overkill, sending it up against one lousy mirror. Ballard started the job with her bare hands, after all.
Odd that they didn't make them shatterproof.
But convenient.
Clarke sits up, hefting the cartridge. Her reflection looks back at her; its eyes, blank but not empty, seem somehow amused.
"Ms. Clarke? You okay?" It's Lubin. "I heard—"
"I'm fine," she says to the sealed hatch. There's glass all over the cubby. One stubborn shard, half a meter long, hangs in its frame like a loose tooth. She reaches out (mirror fragments tumble off her thighs) and taps it with one hand. It crashes to the deck and shatters.
"Just housecleaning," she calls.
Lubin says nothing. She hears him move away up the corridor.
He's going to work out fine. It's been a few days now and he's been scrupulous about keeping his distance. There's no sexual chemistry at all, nothing to set them at each other's throats. Whatever Ken Lubin did to Lana Cheung— whatever those two did to each other— won't be an issue here. Lubin's tastes are too specific.
For that matter, so are Clarke's.
She stands up, head bent to avoid the metal encrustations on the ceiling. Glass crunches under her feet. The bulkhead behind the mirror, freshly exposed, looks oily in the fluorescent light; a ribbed gray face with only two distinguishing features. The first is a spherical lens, smaller than a fingernail, tucked up in one corner. Clarke pulls it from its socket, holds it between thumb and forefinger for a second. A tiny glass eyeball. She drops it to the glittering deck.
There's also a name, stamped into one of the alloy ribs: Hansen Fabrication.
It's the first time she's seen see a brand name since she arrived here, except for the GA logos pressed into the shoulders of their diveskins. That seems odd, somehow. She checks the lightstrip running the length of the ceiling; white and featureless. An emergency hydrox tank next to the hatch: DOT test date, pressure specs, but no manufacturer.
She doesn't know if she should attach any significance to this.
Alone, now. Hatch sealed, surveillance ended — even her own reflection shattered beyond repair. For the first time, Lenie Clarke feels a sense of real safety here in the station's belly. She doesn't quite know what to do with it.
Maybe I could let my guard down a bit. Her hands go to her face.
At first she thinks she's gone blind; the cubby seems so dark to her uncapped eyes, walls and furniture receding into mere suggestions of shadow. She remembers turning the lights down in increments in the days since Ballard's departure, darkening this room, darkening every other corner of Beebe Station. Lubin's been doing it too, although they never talk about it.
For the first time she wonders at their actions. It doesn't make sense; eyecaps compensate automatically for changes in ambient light, always serve up the same optimum intensity to the retina. Why choose to live in a darkness you don't even perceive?
She nudges the lights up a bit; the cubby brightens. Bright colors jar the eye against a background of gray on gray. The hydrox tank reflects fluorescent orange; readouts wink red and blue and green; the handle on the bulkhead locker is a small exclamation of yellow. She can't remember the last time she noticed color; eyecaps draw the faintest images from darkness, but most of the spectrum gets lost in the process. Only now, when the lights are up, can color reassert itself.
She doesn't like it. It seems raw and out of place down here. Clarke puts her eyecaps back in, dims the lights to their usual minimal glow. The bulkhead fades to a comforting wash of blue pastels.
Just as well. Shouldn't get too careless anyway.
In a couple of days Beebe will be crawling with a full staff. She doesn't want to get used to exposing herself.
Rome
Neotenous
It didn't look human at first. It didn't even look alive. It looked like a pile of dirty rags someone had thrown against the base of the Cambie pylon. Gerry Fischer wouldn't have looked twice if the skytrain hadn't hissed overhead at exactly the right moment, strobing the ground with segmented strips of light.
He stared. Eyes, flashing in and out of shadow, stared back.
He didn't move until the train had slid away along its overhead track. The world fell back into muddy low contrast. The sidewalk. The strip of kudzu4 below the track, gray and suffocating under countless drizzlings of concrete dust. Feeble cloudbank reflections of neon and laser from Commercial.
And this thing with the eyes, this rag-pile against the pylon. A boy.
A young boy.
This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow always said. After all, the kid could die out here.
"Are you okay?" he said at last.
The pile of rags shifted a little, and whimpered.
"It's okay. I won't hurt you."
"I'm lost," it said, in a very strange voice.
Fischer took a step forward. “You a ref?” The nearest refugee strip was over a hundred kilometers away, and well guarded, but sometimes someone would get out.
The eyes swung from side to side: no.
But then, Fischer thought, what else would he say? Maybe he’s afraid I’ll turn him in.
"Where do you live?" he asked, and listened closely to the answer:
"Orlando."
No hint of Asian or Hindian in that voice. Back when Fischer was a kid his mom would always tell him that disasters were color-blind, but he knew better now. The kid sounded N’Am; not a ref, then. Which meant there would probably be people looking for him.
Which, in a way, was too—
Stop it.
"Orlando,” he repeated aloud. “You are lost. Where's your mom and dad?"
"Hotel." The rag pile detached itself from the pylon and shuffled closer. "Vanceattle." The words came out half-whistled, as though the kid was speaking through his sinuses. Maybe he had one of those, those — Fischer groped for the words — cleft palates, or something.
"Vanceattle? Which one?"
Shrug.
"Don't you have a watch?"
"Lost it."
You've got to help him, Shadow said.
"Well, um, look." Fischer rubbed at his temples. "I live close by. We can call from there."
There weren't that many Vanceattles in the lower mainland. The police wouldn't have to find out. And even if they did, they wouldn't charge him. Not for this. What was he supposed to do, leave the kid for body parts?
"I'm Gerry," Fischer said.
"Kevin."
Kevin looked about nine or ten. Old enough that he should know how to use a public terminal, anyway. But there was something wrong with him. He was too tall and skinny, and his limbs tangled up in themselves when he walked. Maybe he was brain damaged. Maybe one of those nanotech babies that went bad. Or maybe his mother just spent too much time outdoors when she was pregnant.
Fischer led Kevin up to his two-room timeshare. Kevin dropped onto the couch without asking. Fischer checked the fridge: root beer. The boy took it with a nervous smile. Fischer sat down beside him and put a reassuring hand on Kevin's lap.
The expression drained from Kevin's face as though someone had pulled a plug.
Go on, Shadow said. He's not complaining, is he?
Kevin's clothes were filthy. Caked mud clung to his pants. Fischer reached over and began picking it off. "We should get you out of these clothes. Get you cleaned up. We can only take showers on even days here, but you could always take a sponge bath…"
Kevin just sat there. One hand gripped his drink, bony fingers denting the plastic; the other rested motionless on the couch.
Fischer smiled. "It's okay. This is what you do when you really—"
Kevin stared at the floor, trembling.
Fischer found a zipper, pulled. Pressed, gently. "It's okay. It's okay. Don't worry."
Kevin stopped shaking. Kevin looked up.
Kevin smiled.
"I'm not the one who should be worried here, asshole," he said in his whistling child's voice.
The jolt threw Fischer to the floor. Suddenly he was staring at the ceiling, fingers twitching at the ends of arms that had turned, magically, into dead weights. His whole nervous system sang like a tracery of high-tension wires embedded in flesh.
His bladder let go. Wet warmth spread out from his crotch.
Kevin stepped over him and looked down, all trace of awkwardness gone from his movements. One hand still held the plastic cup. The other held a shockprod.
Very deliberately, Kevin upended his drink. Fischer watched the liquid snake down, almost casually, and splash across his face. His eyes stung; Kevin was a spindly blur in a wash of weak acid. Fischer tried to blink, tried again, finally succeeded.
One of Kevin's legs was swinging back at the knee.
"Gerald Fischer, you are under arrest—"
It swung forward. Pain erupted in Fischer's side.
"— for indecent assault of a minor—"
Back. Forward. Pain.
"— under sections 151 and 152 of the N'Am Pacific Criminal Code."
The child knelt down and glared into his face. Up close the telltales were obvious; the depth of the eyes, the size of the pores in the skin, the plastic resilience of adult flesh soaked in androgen suppressants.
"Not to mention violation of yet another restraining order," Kevin added.
How long, Fischer wondered absently. Neural aftershock draped the whole world in gauze. How many months did it take to stunt back down from man to child?
"You have the right to— ah, fuck."
And how long to reverse the reversal? Could Kevin ever grow up again?
"You know your fucking rights better than I do."
This wasn't happening. The police wouldn't go this far, they didn't have the money, and anyway, why? How could anyone be willing to change themselves like that? Just to get Gerry Fischer? Why?
"I suppose I should call you in, shouldn't I? Then again, maybe I'll just let you lie here in your own piss for a while…"
Somehow, he got the feeling that Kevin was hurting more than he was. It didn't make sense.
It's okay, Shadow told him softly. It's not your fault. They just don't understand.
Kevin was kicking him again, but Fischer could hardly feel it. He tried to say something, anything, that would make his tormentor feel a little better, but his motor nerves were still fried.
He could still cry, though. Different wiring.
* * *
It was different this time. It started out the same, the scans and the samples and the beatings, but then they took him out of the line and cleaned him up, and put him in a side room. Two guards sat him down at a table, across from a dumpy little man with brown moles all over his face.
"Hello, Gerry," he said, pretending not to notice Fischer's injuries. "I'm Dr. Scanlon."
"You're a shrink."
"Actually, I'm more of a mechanic." He smiled, a prissy little smile that said I've just been very clever but you're probably too stupid to get the joke. Fischer decided he didn't like Scanlon much.
Still, his type had been useful before, with all their talk about competence and criminal responsibility. It's not so much what you did, Fischer had learned, as why you did it. If you did things because you were evil, you were in real trouble. If you did the same things because you were sick, though, the doctors would sometimes cover for you. Fischer had learned to be sick.
Scanlon pulled a headband out of his breast pocket. "I'd like to talk to you for a little while, Gerry. Would you mind putting this on for me?"
The inside of the band was studded with sensor pads. It felt cool across his forehead. Fischer looked around the room, but he couldn't see any monitors or readouts.
"Great." Scanlon nodded to the guards. He waited until they'd left before he spoke again.
"You're a strange one, Gerry Fischer. We don't run into too many like you."
"That's not what the other doctors said."
"Oh? What did they say?"
"They said I was typical. They said, they said lots of the one-fifty-one's used the same rationale."
Scanlon leaned forward. "Well you know, that's true. It's a classic line: 'I was teaching her about her awakening sexuality, doctor. 'It's the parents' job to instruct their children, doctor. 'They don't like school either, but it's for their own good. "
"I never said those things. I don't even have kids."
"No you don't. But the point is, pedophiles often claim to be acting in the best interests of the children. They turn sexual abuse into an act of altruism, if you will."
"It's not abuse. It's what you do if you really love someone."
Scanlon leaned back in his chair and studied Fischer for a few moments.
"That's what's so interesting about you, Gerry."
"What?"
"Everyone uses that line. You're the only person I've met who might actually believe it."
* * *
In the end, they said they could take care of the charges. He knew there had to be more to it than that, of course; they'd make him volunteer for some sort of experiment, or donate some of his organs, or submit to voluntary castration first. But the catch, when it came, wasn't any of those things. He almost couldn't believe it.
They wanted to give him a job.
"Think of it as community service," Scanlon said. "Restitution to all of society. You'd be underwater most of the time, but you'd be well-equipped."
"Underwater where?"
"Channer Vent. About forty kilometers north of the Axial Volcano, on the Juan de Fuca Rift. Do you know where that is, Gerry?"
"How long?"
"One year minimum. You could extend that if you wanted to."
Fischer couldn't think of any reason why he would, but it didn't matter. If he didn't take this deal they'd stick a governor in his head for the rest of his life. Which might not be that long, when you thought about it.
"One year," he said. "Underwater."
Scanlon patted his arm. "Take your time, Gerry. Think about it. You don't have to decide until this afternoon."
Do it, Shadow urged. Do it or they'll cut into you and you'll change…
But Fischer wasn't going to be rushed. "So what do I do for one year, underwater?"
Scanlon showed him a vid.
"Geez," Fischer said. "I can't do any of that."
"No problem." Scanlon smiled. "You'll learn."
* * *
He did, too.
A lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night they'd give him an injection, to help him learn, Scanlon said. Afterwards a machine beside his bed would feed him dreams. He could never exactly remember them but something must have stuck, because every morning he'd sit at the console with his tutor — a real person, though, not a program — and all the text and diagrams she showed him would be strangely familiar. Like he'd known it all years ago, and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything: plate tectonics and subduction zones, Archimedes Principle, the thermal conductivity of two percent hydrox. Aldosterone.
Alloplasty.
He remembered his left lung after they cut it out, and the technical specs on the machines they put in its place.
Afternoons, they'd attach leads to his body and saturate his striated muscles with low-amp current. He was starting to understand what was going on, now; the term was induced isometrics, and its meaning had come to him in a dream.
A week after the operation he woke up with a fever.
"Nothing to worry about," Scanlon told him. "That's just the last stage of your infection."
"Infection?"
"We shot you up with a retrovirus the day you came here. Didn't you know?"
Fischer grabbed Scanlon's arm. "Like a disease? You—"
"It's perfectly safe, Gerry." Scanlon smiled patiently, disentangling himself. "In fact, you wouldn't last very long down there without it; human enzymes don't work well at high pressure. So we loaded some extra genes into a tame virus and sent it in. It's been rewriting you from the inside out. Judging by your fever I'd say it's nearly finished. You should be feeling better in a day or so."
"Rewriting?"
"Half your enzymes come in two flavors now. They got the genes from one of those deep-water fish. Rattails, I think they're called." Scanlon patted Fischer on the shoulder. "So how does it feel to be part fish, Gerry?"
"Coryphaenoides armatus," Fischer said slowly.
Scanlon frowned. "What was that?"
"Rattails." Fischer concentrated. "Mostly dehydrogenases, right?"
Scanlon glanced at the machine by the bed. "I'm, um, not sure."
"That's it. Dehydrogenases. But they tweaked them to reduce the activation energy." He tapped his temple. "It's all here. Only I haven't done the tutorial yet."
"That's great," Scanlon said; but he didn't sound like he meant it.
* * *
One day they put him in a tank built like a piston, five stories tall: its roof could press down like a giant hand, squeezing whatever was inside. They sealed the hatch and flooded the tank with seawater.
Scanlon had warned him about the change. "We flood your trachea and your head cavities, but your lung and intestines aren't rigid so they just squeeze down. We're immunizing you against pressure, you see? They say it's a bit like drowning, but you get used to it."
It wasn't that bad, actually. Fischer's guts twisted in on themselves, and his sinuses burned like hell, but he'd take that over another bout with Kevin any day.
He floated there in the tank, seawater sliding through the tubes in his chest, and reflected on the queasy sensation of not breathing.
"They're getting some turbulence." Scanlon's voice came at him from all directions, as if the walls themselves were talking. "From your exhaust port."
A fine trail of bubbles was trickling from Fischer's chest. His eyecaps made everything seem marvelously clear, like a hallucination. "Just a bit of—"
Not his voice. His words, but spoken by something else, some cheap machine that didn't know about harmonics. One hand went automatically to the disk embedded in his throat.
"— hydrogen," he tried again. "No problem. Pressure'll squeeze them down when I get deep enough."
"Yeah. Still." Other words, muffled, as Scanlon spoke to someone else. Fischer felt something vibrate softly in his chest. The bubbles grew larger, then smaller. Then disappeared.
Scanlon was back. "Better?"
"Yeah." Fischer didn't know how he felt about this, though. He didn't really like having a chest full of machinery. He didn't really like having to breathe by chopping water into chunks of hydrogen and oxygen. But he really didn't like the idea of some tech he'd never even met fiddling with his insides by remote control, reaching into his body and messing around in there without even asking. It made him feel—
Violated, right?
Sometimes Shadow was just a bitch. As if she hadn't been the one to put him up to it in the first place.
"We're going to kill the lights now, Gerry."
Darkness. The water hummed with the sound of vast machinery.
After a few moments he noticed a cold blue spark winking at him from somewhere overhead. It seemed to cast a lot more light than it should. As he watched, the inside of the tank reappeared in hazy shades of blue-on-black.
"Photoamps working okay?" Scanlon wanted to know.
"Uh huh."
"What can you see?"
"Everything. The inside of the tank. The hatch. Sort of bluish."
"Right. Luciferin light source."
"It's not very bright," Fischer said. "Everything's sort of like, dusk."
"Well, it'd be pitch black without your eyecaps."
And suddenly, it was.
"Hey."
"Don't worry, Gerry. Everything's fine. We just shut the light off."
He lay there in utter darkness. Floaters wriggled at the corner of his eye.
"How are you feeling, Gerry? Any sensation of falling? Claustrophobia?"
He felt almost peaceful.
"Gerry?"
"No. Nothing. I feel—fine—"
"Pressure's at two thousand meters."
"I can't feel it."
This might not be so bad after all. One year. One year…
"Doctor Scanlon," he said after a while. He was even getting used to the metallic buzz of his new voice.
"Right here."
"Why me?"
"What do you mean, Gerry?"
"I wasn't, you know, qualified. Even after all this training I bet there's lots of people who'd be better at this than me. Real engineers."
"It's not so much what you know," Scanlon said. "It's what you are."
He knew what he was. People had been telling him for as long as he could remember. He didn't see what the fuck that had to do with anything. "What's that, then?"
At first he thought he wasn't going to get an answer. But Scanlon finally spoke, and when he did there was something in his voice that Fischer had never heard before.
"Pre-adapted," was what he said.
Elevator Boy
The Pacific Ocean slopped two kilometers under his feet. He had a cargo of blank-eyed psychotics sitting behind him. And the lifter was being piloted by a large pizza with extra cheese. Joel Kita liked it all about as much as could be expected.
At least he had been expecting it, this time. For once the GA hadn't sprung one of their exercises in chaos theory onto his life without warning. He'd seen it coming almost a week in advance, when they'd sprung one onto Ray Stericker instead. Ray had been in this very cockpit, watching the pizza being installed and no doubt wondering when the term "job security" had become an oxymoron.
"I'm supposed to baby-sit it for a week," he had said then. Joel had climbed up into the 'scaphe for the usual preflight check and found his friend waiting by the controls. Ray had gestured up through the open hatchway to the lifter's cockpit, where a couple of techs were busy interfacing something to the controls. "Just in case it screws up in the field. Then I'm gone."
"Gone where?" Joel couldn't believe it. Ray had been on the Juan de Fuca run forever, even before the geothermal program. He’d even been an employee, back when such things were commonplace.
"Probably the Gorda circuit for a while. After that, who knows? They'll be upgrading everything before long."
Joel glanced up through the hatch. The techs were playing with a square vanilla box, half a meter on a side and about twice as thick as Kita's wrist. "What is the fucking thing? Some kind of autopilot?"
"With a difference. This takes off and lands. And all sorts of lovely things in between."
This was not good news. Humans had always been able to integrate three-D spatial information better than the machines that kept trying to replace them. Not that machines couldn't recognize a tree or a building when such objects were pointed out to them, but they got real confused whenever you rotated any of those objects a few degrees. The shapes changed, contrast and shadow shifted, and it always took way too long for any of those arsenide pretenders to update its spatial maps and recognize that yes, it's still a tree, and no, it didn't morph into something else, dummy, you just changed your point of view.
In some places that wasn't a problem. Ocean surfaces, for example. Or controlled-access highways where the cars had their own ID transponders. Or even lashed to the underside of a giant squashed doughnut filled with buoyant vacuum, floating in mid-air. These had been respected and venerable environments for autopilots since well before the turn of the century.
Take-offs and landings were a different scene altogether, though. Too many real objects going by too fast, too many things to keep an eye on. A few billion years of natural selection still had the edge when the fast lane got that crowded.
Until now, apparently.
"Let's get out of here." Ray dropped down onto the landing pad. Joel followed him out to the edge of the roof. Green tangled blankets of kudzu4 spread out around them, shrouding the roofs of surrounding buildings. It always made Joel think post-apocalypse — weeds and ivy crawling back in from the wilderness to strangle the residue of some fallen civilization. Except, of course, these particular weeds were supposed to save civilization.
Way out by the coast, barely visible, streamers of smoke dribbled into the sky from the refugee strip. So much for civilization.
"It's one of those smart gels," Ray said at last.
"Smart gels?"
"Head cheese. Cultured brain cells on a slab. The same things they've been plugging into the Net to firewall infections."
"I know what they are, Ray. I just can't fucking believe it."
"Well, believe it. They'll be coming for you too, give 'em enough time."
"Yeah. Probably." Joel let it sink in. "I wonder when."
Ray shrugged. "You've got some breathing space. All that unpredictable volcanic shit, things blowing up under you. Nastier than flying a hoover. Harder to replace you."
He looked back at the lifter, and the 'scaphe nestled into its underbelly.
"Won't take long, though."
Joel fished a derm out of his pocket; a tricyclic with a mild lithium chaser. He held it out without a word.
Ray just spat. "Thanks anyway. I want to feel pissed for a while, you know?"
* * *
And now, eight days later, Ray Stericker was gone.
He'd disappeared after his last shift, just the day before. Joel had tried to track him down, drag him out, piss him up, but he hadn't been able to find the man on site and Ray wasn't answering his watch. So here was Joel Kita, back on the job, alone except for his cargo; four very strange people in black suits, blank white lenses covering their eyes. They all had identical GA logos stamped onto their shoulders, tags with their surnames printed just below. At least the surnames were different, although the difference seemed trivial; male, female, large or small, they all seemed minor variants of the same make and model. Ah yes, the Mk-5 was always such a nice boy. Kind of quiet, kept to himself. Who would've thought…
Joel had seen rifters before. He'd ferried a couple out to Beebe about a month ago, just after construction had ended. One of them had seemed almost normal, had gone out of her way to chat and joke around as if trying to compensate for the fact that she looked like a zombie. Joel had forgotten her name.
The other one hadn't said a word.
One of the 'scaphe's tactical screens beeped a progress report. "Bottom's rising again," Joel called back. "Thirty five hundred. We're almost there."
"Thanks," one of them — Fischer, according to his shoulder tag — said. Everyone else just sat there.
A pressure hatch separated the 'scaphe's cockpit from the passenger compartment. If you sealed it you could use the aft chamber as an airlock, or even pressurize it for saturation dives if you didn't mind the hassle of decompression. You could also just swing the hatch shut if you wanted a bit of privacy, if you didn't like leaving your back exposed to certain passengers. That would be bad manners, of course. Joel tried idly to think of some socially acceptable excuse for slamming that big metal disk in their faces, but gave up after a few moments.
Now, the dorsal hatch — the one leading up into the lifter's cockpit — that one was closed, and that felt wrong. Usually they kept it open until just before the drop. Ray and Joel would shoot the shit for however long the trip would take — three hours, if you were going to Channer.
Yesterday, without warning, Ray Stericker had dropped the hatch shut fifteen minutes into the flight. He hadn't said an unnecessary word the whole time, had barely even used the intercom. And today — well, today there wasn't anyone up there to talk to any more.
Joel looked out one of the side ports. The skin of the lifter blocked his view just a few centimeters on the other side; metal fabric stretched across carbon-fiber ribs, a gray expanse sucked into concave squares by the hard vacuum inside. The 'scaphe rode tucked into an oval hollow in the lifter's center. The only port that showed anything but gray skin was the one between Joel's feet; ocean, a long way down.
Not so far down now, though. He could hear the hisses and sighs of the lifter's ballast bags deflating overhead. Sharper sounds, more distant, cracked through the hull as electrical arcs heated the air in a couple of trim bags. This was still regular autopilot territory, but Ray used to do it all himself anyway. If it weren't for the closed hatch, Joel couldn't have told the difference.
The head cheese was doing a bang-up job.
He'd actually seen it a few days ago, during a delivery to an undersea rig just out of Gray's Harbor. Ray had hit a stud and the top of the box had slid away like white mercury, slipping back into a little groove at the edge of the casing and revealing a transparent panel underneath.
Beneath that panel, packed in clear fluid, was a ridged layer of goo, a bit too gray to be mozzarella. Dashes of brownish glass perforated the goo in neat parallel rows.
"I'm not supposed to open it up like this," Ray had said. "But fuck 'em. It's not as though the blighter's photosensitive."
"So what are those little brown bits?"
"Indium tin oxide over glass. Semiconductor."
"Jesus. And it's working right now?"
"Even as we speak."
"Jesus," Joel had said again. And then: "I wonder how you program something like this."
Ray had snorted at that. "You don't. You teach it. Learns through positive reinforcement, like a bloody baby."
A sudden, smooth shift in momentum. Joel pulled back to the present; the lifter was hanging stable, five meters over the waves. Right on target. Nothing but empty ocean on the surface, of course; Beebe's transponder was thirty meters straight down. Shallow enough to home in on, too deep to be a navigational hazard. Or to serve as a midwater hitching post for charter boats hunting Channer's legendary sea monsters.
The cheese printed out a word on the 'scaphe's tactical board: Launch?
Joel's finger wavered over the OK key, then came down. Docking latches clanked open; the lifter reeled Joel Kita and his cargo down to the water. Sunlight squinted through viewports for a few seconds as the 'scaphe swung in its harness. A wavetop batted at the forward port.
The world jerked once, slewed sideways, and turned green.
Joel opened the ballast tanks and looked back over his shoulder. "Going down, folks. Your last glimpse of sunlight. Enjoy it while you can."
"Thanks," said Fischer.
Nobody else moved.
Crush
Pre-adapted.
Even now, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, Fischer doesn't know what Scanlon meant by that.
He doesn't feel pre-adapted, not if that means he's supposed to be at home here. Nobody even talked to him on the way down. Nobody talked much to anyone else, either, but when they didn't talk to Fisher it seemed especially personal. And one of them, Brander— it's hard to tell with the eyecaps and all, but Fischer thinks Brander keeps looking at him, like they know each other from somewhere. Brander looks mean.
Everything's out in the open down here; pipes and cable bundles and ventilation ducts are all tacked onto the bulkheads in plain sight. He saw it on the vids before he came down, but those somehow left the impression of a brighter place, full of light and mirrors. The wall he's facing now, for instance; there should be a mirror there. But it's just a gray metal bulkhead with a greasy, unfinished sheen to it.
Fischer shifts his weight from one foot to the other. At one end of the lounge Lubin leans against a library pedestal, his capped eyes pointed at them with blank disinterest. Lubin's said only one thing to them in the five minutes they've been here:
"Clarke's still outside. She's coming in."
Something clanks under the floor. Water and nitrox mix, gurgling, nearby. The sound of a hatch swinging open, movement from below.
She climbs up into the lounge, droplets beading across her shoulders. Her diveskin paints her black below the neck, a skinny silhouette, almost sexless. Her hood is undone; blond hair, plastered against her skull, frames a face paler than Fischer's ever seen. Her mouth is a wide thin line. Her eyes, capped like his own, are blank white ovals in a child's face.
She looks around at them: Brander, Nakata, Caraco, Fischer. They look back, waiting. There's something in Nakata's face, Fischer thinks, something like recognition, but Lenie Clarke doesn't seem to notice. She doesn't seem to notice any of them, really.
She shrugs. "I'm changing the sodium on number two. A couple of you could come along, I guess."
She doesn't seem exactly human. There is something familiar about her, though.
What do you think, Shadow? Do I know her?
But Shadow isn't talking.
* * *
There's a street where none of the buildings have windows. The streetlamps shine down with a sick coppery light on masses of giant clams and big ropy brownish things emerging from mucous-gray cylinders (tube worms, he remembers: Riftia fuckinghugeous, or something). Natural chimneys rise here and there above the invertebrate multitudes, pillars of basalt and silicon and crystallized sulfur. Every time Fischer visits the Throat, he thinks of really bad acne.
Lenie Clarke leads them on a flight down Main Street: Fischer, Caraco, a couple of cargo squids on remote. The generators lean up over them on both sides. A dark curtain billows across the road directly ahead, and it sparkles. A school of small fish darts around the edges of the streaming cloud.
"That's the problem," Lenie buzzes. She looks back at Fischer and Caraco. "Mud plume. Too big to redirect."
They've come past eight generators so far. That leaves six up ahead, drowning in silt. Double shift, even if they call out Lubin and Brander.
He hopes they don't have to. Not Brander, anyway.
Lenie fins off towards the plume. The squids whine softly behind, dragging their tools. Fischer steels himself to follow.
"Shouldn't we check thermal?" Caraco calls out. "I mean, what if it's hot?"
He was wondering that himself, actually. He's been wondering about such things ever since he overheard Caraco and Nakata comparing rumors from the Mendocino fracture. Nakata heard it was a really old minisub, with Plexiglas ports. Caraco heard they were thermoacrylate. Nakata said it got wedged inside the center of the rift zone. Caraco said no, it was just cruising over the seabed and a smoker blew up under it.
They agreed on how fast the viewports melted, though. Even the skeletons went to ash. Which didn't make much difference anyway, since every bone in every body had already been smashed by the ambient pressure.
Caraco makes a lot of sense, in Fischer's opinion, but Lenie Clarke doesn't even answer. She just fins off into that black sparkly cloud and disappears. At the spot she disappears the mud glows suddenly, a phosphorescent wake. The fish swarm towards it.
"She doesn't even care, sometimes," Fischer buzzes softly. "Like, whether she lives or dies…"
Caraco looks at him for a moment, then kicks off towards the plume.
Clarke's voice buzzes out of the cloud. "Not much time."
Caraco dives into the roiling wall with a splash of light. A knot of fish— a couple of them are a fair size now, Fischer sees— swirl in her wake.
Go on, Shadow says.
Something moves.
He spins around. For a moment there's only Main Street, fading in distance.
Then something big and black and…and lopsided appears from behind one of the generators.
"Jeez." Fischer's legs move of their own volition. "They're coming!" he tries to yell. The vocoder scales it down to a croak.
Stupid. Stupid. They warned us, the sparkles bring in the little fish and the little fish bring in the big fish and if we don't watch it we just get in the way.
The plume is right in front of him now, a wall of sediment, a river on the bottom of the ocean. He dives in. Something nips lightly at his calf.
Everything goes black, with occasional sparkles. He turns his headlight on; the flowing mud swallows the beam half a meter from his face.
But Clarke can see it, somehow: "Turn it off."
"I can't see—"
"Good. Maybe they won't either."
He kills the light. In the darkness he gropes the gas billy from its sheath on his leg.
Caraco, from a distance: "I thought they were blind…"
"Some of them."
And they've got other senses to fall back on. Fischer runs through the list: smell, sound, pressure waves, bioelectric fields… Nothing relies on vision down here. It's just one of the options.
He hopes the plume blocks more than just light.
But even as he watches, the darkness is lifting. Black murk turns brown, then almost gray. Faint light filters in from the floodlamps on Main Street.
It's the eyecaps, he realizes. They're compensating. Cool.
He still can't see very far, though. It's like being caught in dirty fog.
"Remember." Clarke, very close. "They're not as tough as they look. They probably won't do much real damage."
A sonar pistol stutters nearby. "I'm not getting anything," Caraco buzzes. Milky sediment swirls on all sides. Fischer puts his arm out; it fades at the elbow.
"Oh shit." Caraco.
"Are you—"
"Something's on my leg something's Christ it's big—"
"Lenie—" Fischer cries.
A bump from behind. A slap on the back of his head. A shadow, black and spiny, fades into the murk.
Hey, that wasn't so—
Something clamps onto his leg. He looks down: jaws, teeth, a monstrous head fading away into the murk.
Oh Jeez—
He jams his billy against scaly flesh. Something gives, like gelatin. A soft thump. The flesh bloats, ruptures; bubbles explode from the rip.
Something else smashes him from behind. His chest is in a vise. He lashes out, blindly. Mud and ash and black blood billow into his face.
He grabs blindly, twists. There's a broken tooth in his hand, half as long as his forearm; he tightens his grip and it splinters. He drops it, brings the billy around and jams it into the thing on his side. Another explosion of meat and compressed CO2.
The pressure lifts from his chest. Whatever's clamped onto his leg isn't moving. Fischer lets himself sink, drifts down against the base of a barite chimney.
Nothing charges him.
"Everyone okay." Lenie's vocoded monotone. Fischer grunts yes.
"Thank God for bad nutrition," Caraco buzzes. "We're fucked if these guys ever get enough vitamins."
Fischer reaches down, pries the dead monster's jaws off his calf. He wishes he had breath to catch.
Shadow?
Right here.
Was this what it was like for you?
No. This didn't take so long.
He lies against the bottom and tries to shut his eyes. He can't; the diveskin bonds to the surface of the eyecaps, traps the eyelids in little cul-de-sacs. I'm sorry, Shadow. I'm so sorry.
I know, she says. It's okay.
* * *
Lenie Clarke stands naked in Medical, spraying the bruises on her leg. No, not naked; the caps are still on her eyes. All Fischer can see is skin.
It's not enough.
A trickle of blood crawls down her side from just below the water intake. She absently wipes it away and reloads the hypo.
Her breasts are small, almost adolescent, bumps. No hips. Her body's as pale as her face, except for the bruises and the fresh pink seams that access the implants. She looks anorexic.
She's the first adult Fischer's ever wanted.
She looks up and sees him in the doorway. "Strip down," she tells him, and goes back to work.
He splits his 'skin and starts to peel. Lenie finishes with her leg and stabs an ampoule into the cut in her side. The blood clots like magic.
"They warned us about the fish," Fischer says, "but they said they were really fragile. They said we could just beat them off with our hands if we had to."
Lenie sprays the cut in her side with a hypo, wipes off the residue. "You're lucky they told you that much." She pulls her diveskin tunic off a hanger, slides into it. "They barely mentioned the giantism when they sent us down."
"That's stupid. They must've known."
"They say this is the only vent where the fish get this big. That they've found, anyway."
"Why? What's so special here?"
Lenie shrugs.
Fischer has stripped to the waist. Lenie looks at him. "Leggings too. It got your calf, right?"
He shakes his head. "That's okay."
She looks down. His diveskin's only a couple of millimeters thick, it doesn't hide anything. He feels his erection going soft under her gaze.
Lenie's cold white eyes track back to his face. Fischer feels his face heating before he remembers: she can't see his eyes. No one can.
It's almost safe in here.
"Bruising's the biggest problem," Lenie says at last. "They don't puncture the diveskin all that often, but the force of the bite still gets through." Her hand is on his arm, firm and professional, probing the edges of Fischer's injury. It hurts, but he doesn't mind.
She uncaps a tube of anabolic salve. "Here. Rub this in."
The pain fades on contact. His flesh goes warm and tingly where he applies the ointment. He reaches out, a little bit scared, and touches Lenie's arm. "Thanks."
She twists out of reach without a word, bending down to seal the 'skin on her leg. Fischer watches the leggings slide up her body. They seem almost alive. They are almost alive, he remembers. The 'skin's got these reflexes, changes its permeability and thermal conductivity in response to body temperature. Maintains, what's the word, homeostasis.
Now he watches it swallowing Lenie's body like some slick black amoebae but she's showing through underneath, black ice instead of white but still the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. She's so far away. There's someone inside telling him to watch it—
— Go away, Shadow—
— but he can't help himself, he can almost touch her, she's bent over sealing her boots and his hand caresses the air just above her shoulder, traces the outline of her curved back so close it could feel her body heat if that stupid diveskin wasn't in the way, and—
And she straightens, bumping into his hand. Her face comes up; something burns behind her eyecaps. He pulls back but it's too late; her whole body's gone rigid and furious.
I just touched her. I didn't do anything wrong I just touched her—
She takes a single step forward. "Don't do that again," she says, her voice so flat he wonders for a second how her vocoder could work out of the water.
"I'm not—I didn't—"
"I don't care," she says. "Don't do it again."
Something moves at the corner of his eye. "Problem, Lenie? Need a hand?" Brander's voice.
She shakes her head. "No."
"Okay, then." Brander sounds disappointed. "I'll be upstairs."
Movement again. Sounds, receding.
"I'm sorry," Fischer says.
"Fine," Lenie says, and brushes past him into the wet room.
Autoclave
Nakata nearly bumps into her at the base of the ladder. Clarke glares; Nakata moves aside, baring teeth in a submissive primate smile.
Brander's in the lounge, pecking at the library: "You—?"
"I'm fine." She isn't, but she's getting there. This anger is nowhere near critical mass; it's just a reflex, really, a spark budded off from the main reservoir. It decays exponentially with elapsed time. By the time she reaches her cubby she's almost feeling sorry for Fischer.
Not his fault. He didn't mean any harm.
She closes the hatch behind her. It's safe to hit something now, if she wants. She looks around half-heartedly for a target, finally just drops onto her bunk and stares at the ceiling.
Someone raps on metal. "Lenie?"
She rises, pushes at the hatch.
"Hey Lenie, I think I've got a bad slave channel on one of the squids. I was wondering if you could—"
"Sure." Clarke nods. "Fine. Only not right now, okay, um—"
"Judy," says Caraco, sounding slightly miffed.
"Right. Judy." In fact, Clarke hasn't forgotten. But Beebe's way too crowded these days. Lately Clarke's learned to lose the occasional name. It helps keep things comfortably distant.
Sometimes.
"Excuse me," she says, brushing past Caraco. "I've got to get outside."
* * *
In a few places, the rift is almost gentle.
Usually the heat stabs up in boiling muddy pillars or jagged bolts of superheated liquid. Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass. Not here, though. In this one spot, nestled between lava pillows and safe from Beebe's prying ears, the heat wafts up through the mud like a soft breeze. The underlying bedrock must be porous.
She comes here when she can, keeping to the bottom en route to foil Beebe's sonar. The others don't know about this place yet; she'd just as soon keep it that way. Sometimes she comes here to watch convection stir the mud into lazy curlicues. Sometimes she splits the seals on her 'skin, basks face and arms in the thirty-degree seep.
Sometimes she just comes here to sleep.
She lies with the shifting mud at her back, staring up into blackness. This is how you fall asleep when you can't close your eyes; you stare into the dark, and when you start seeing things you know you're dreaming.
Now she sees herself, the high priestess of a new troglodyte society. She was the first one here, deep at peace while the others were still being cut open and reshaped by grubby Dryback hands. She's the founding mother, the template against which other, rawer recruits trace themselves. They come down and they see that her eyes are always capped, and they go and do likewise.
But she knows it isn't true. The rift is the real creative force here, a blunt hydraulic press forcing them all into shapes of its own choosing. If the others are anything like her it's because they're all being squeezed in the same mold.
And let's not forget the GA. If Ballard was right, they made sure we weren't too different to start with.
There are all the superficial differences, of course. A bit of racial diversity. Token beaters, token victims, males and females equally represented…
Clarke has to smile at that. Count on Management to jam a bunch of sexual dysfunctionals together and then make sure the gender ratio is balanced. Nice of them to try and see that nobody gets left out.
Except for Ballard, of course.
But at least they learn from their mistakes. Dozing at three thousand meters, Lenie Clarke wonders what their next one will be.
* * *
Sudden, stabbing pain in the eyes. She tries to scream; smart implants feel tongue and lips in motion, mistranslate:
"Nnnnaaaaah…"
She knows the feeling. She's had it once or twice before. She dives blindly on a random heading. The pain in her head leaps from intense to unbearable.
"Aaaaaa—"
She twists back in the opposite direction. A bit better. She trips her headlamp, kicking as hard as she can. The world turns from black to solid brown. Zero viz. Mud seething on all sides. Somewhere close by she hears rocks splitting open.
Her headlamp catches the outcropping looming up a split second before she hits it. The shock rocks her skull, runs down her spine like a small earthquake. There's a different flavor of pain up there now, mingling with the searing in her eyes. She gropes blindly around the obstacle, keeps going. Her body feels— warm—
It takes a lot of heat to get through a diveskin, especially a class four. Those things are built for thermal stress.
Eyecaps, on the other hand…
Black. The world is black again, and clear. Clarke's headlamp stabs out across open space, lays a jiggling footprint on the mud a good ten meters away.
The view's still rippling, though.
The pain seems to be fading. She can't be sure. So many nerves have been screaming for so long that even the echoes are torture. She clutches her head, still kicking; the movement twists her around to face the way she came.
Her secret hideaway has exploded into a wall of mud and sulfur compounds, boiling up from the seabed. Clarke checks her thermister; 45 °C, and she's a good ten meters away. Boiled fish skeletons spin in the thermals. Geysers hiss further in, unseen.
The seep must have burst through the crust in an instant; any flesh caught in that eruption would have boiled off the bone before anything as elaborate as a flight reflex could cut in. A shudder shakes Clarke's body. Another one.
Just luck. Just stupid luck I was far enough away. I could be dead now. I could be dead I could be dead I could be dead—
Nerves fire in her thorax; she doubles over. But you can't sob without breathing. You can't cry with your eyes pinned open. The routines are all there, stuttering into action after years of dormancy, but the pieces they work on have all been changed. The whole body wakes up in a straitjacket.
— dead dead dead—
That small, remote part of her kicks in, the part she saves for these occasions. It wonders, off in the distance, at the intensity of her reaction. This was hardly the first time that Lenie Clarke thought she was going to die.
But this was the first time in years that it seemed to matter.
Waterbed
Taking off his diveskin is like gutting himself.
He can't believe how much he's come to depend on it, how hard it is to come out from inside. The eyecaps are even harder. Fischer sits on his pallet, staring at the sealed hatch while Shadow whispers it's okay, you're alone, you're safe. Half an hour goes by before he can bring himself to believe her.
Finally, when he bares his eyes, the cubby lights are so dim he can hardly see. He turns them up until the room is twilit. The eyecaps sit in the palm of his hand, pale and opaque in the semidarkness, like jellied circles of eggshell. It's strange to blink without feeling them under his eyelids. He feels so exposed.
He has to do it, though. It's part of the process. That's what this is all about; opening yourself up.
Lenie's in her cubby, just centimeters away. If it wasn't for this bulkhead Fischer could reach right out and touch her.
This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow said way back then. So he does it now, to himself. For Shadow.
Thinking about Lenie.
Sometimes he thinks Lenie's the only other real person on the whole rift. The others are robots; glass robot eyes, matte black robot bodies, lurching through programmed routines that do nothing but keep other, bigger machines running. Even their names sound mechanical. Nakata. Caraco.
Not Lenie, though. There's someone inside her 'skin, her eyes may be glassed-in but they're not glass. She's real. Fischer knows he can touch her.
Of course, that's why he keeps getting into trouble. He keeps touching. But Lenie would be different, if only he could break through. She's more like Shadow than all the others ever were. Older, though.
No older than I'd be now, Shadow murmurs, and maybe that's it.
His mouth moves — I'm so sorry, Lenie— and no sound comes out. Shadow doesn't correct him.
This is what you do, she'd said, and then she'd begun to cry. As Fischer cries now. As he always does, when he comes.
* * *
The pain wakes him, sometime later. He's curled up on the pallet, and something's cutting into his cheek: a little piece of broken glass.
A mirror.
He stares at it, confused. A silver glass shard with a dark bloody tip, like a small tooth. There's no mirror in his cubby.
He reaches up and touches the bulkhead behind his pillow. Lenie's there, Lenie's just the other side. But here, on this side there's a dark line, a rim of shadow he never noticed before. His eyes follow it around the edge of the wall, a gap about half a centimeter wide. Here and there little bits of glass are still wedged into that space.
There used to be a mirror covering this whole bulkhead. Just like Scanlon's vids. And it wasn't just removed, judging from the little fragments left behind. Somebody smashed it out.
Lenie. She went through the whole station, before the rest of them came down, and she smashed all the mirrors. He doesn't know why he's so sure, but somehow it seems like exactly the sort of thing Lenie Clarke would do when no one was looking.
Maybe she doesn't like to see herself. Maybe she's ashamed.
Go talk to her, Shadow says.
I can't.
Yes you can. I'll help you.
He picks up the tunic of his 'skin. It slithers around his body, its edges fusing together along the midline of his chest. He steps over the sleeves and leggings still spilled across the deck, reaches down for his eyecaps.
Leave them there.
No!
Yes.
I can't, she'll see me…
That's what you want, isn't it? Isn't it?
She doesn't even like me, she'll just—
Leave them. I said I'll help you.
He leans against the closed hatch, eyes shut, his breathing loud and rapid in his ears.
Go on. Go on.
The corridor outside is in deep twilight. Fischer moves along it to Lenie's sealed hatch. He touches it, afraid to knock.
From behind, someone taps his shoulder.
"She's out," Brander says. His 'skin is done right up to his neck, arms and legs completely sealed. His capped eyes are blank and hard. And there's the usual edge in his voice, that same familiar tone saying Just give me an excuse, asshole, just do anything…
Maybe he wants Lenie too.
Don't get him mad, Shadow says.
Fischer swallows. "I just wanted to talk to her."
"She's out."
"Okay. I'll…I'll try later."
Brander reaches out, pokes Fischer's face. His finger comes away sticky.
"You're cut," he says.
"It's nothing. I'm okay."
"Too bad."
Fischer tries to edge past Brander to his own cubby. The corridor pushes them together.
Brander clenches his fists. "Don't you fucking touch me."
"I'm not, I'm just trying to— I mean…" Fischer falls silent, glances around. No one else anywhere.
Deliberately, Brander relaxes.
"And for Christ's sake put your eyes back in," he says. "Nobody wants to look in there."
He turns and walks away.
* * *
They say Lubin sleeps out here. Lenie too, sometimes, but Lubin hasn't slept in his bunk since the rest of them came down. He keeps his headlight off, and he stays away from the lit part of the Throat, and nothing bothers him. Fischer heard Nakata and Caraco talking about it on the last shift.
It's starting to sound like a good idea. The less time he spends in Beebe these days, the better.
The station is a dim faraway blotch, glowing to Fischer's left. Brander's in there. He goes on duty in three hours. Fischer figures he can just stay out here until then. He doesn't really need to go inside much. None of them do. There's a little desalinator piggybacked on his electrolyser in case he gets thirsty, and a bunch of flaps and valves that do things he doesn't want to think about, when he has to piss or take a dump.
He's getting a bit hungry, but he can wait. He's fine out here as long as nothing attacks him.
Brander just won't let him alone. Fischer doesn't know what Brander's got against him—
Oh yes you do, says Shadow.
— but he knows that look. Brander wants him to fuck up real bad.
The others keep out of it, for the most part. Nakata, the nervous one, just keeps out of everyone's way. Caraco acts like she couldn't care less if he boiled alive in a smoker. Lubin just sits there, looking at the floor and smoldering; even Brander leaves him alone.
And Lenie. Lenie's cold and distant as a mountaintop. No, Fischer's not getting any help with Brander. So when it comes to a choice between the monsters out here or the one in there, it's an easy call.
Caraco and Nakata are doing a hull check back at the station. Their distant voices buzz distractingly along Fischer's jaw. He shuts his receiver off and settles down behind an outcropping of basalt pillows.
Later, he can't remember drifting off.
* * *
"Listen, cocksucker. I just did two shifts end to end because you didn't show up for work when you were supposed to. Then half another shift looking for you. We thought you were in trouble. We assumed you were in trouble. Don't tell me—"
Brander pushes Fischer up against the wall.
"Don't tell me," he says again, "that you weren't. You don't want to say that."
Fischer looks around the ready room. Nakata watches from the opposite bulkhead, jumpy as a cat. Lubin rattles around in the equipment lockers, his back to the proceedings. Caraco racks her fins and edges past them to the ladder.
"Carac—"
Brander slams him hard against the wall.
Caraco, her foot on the bottom rung, turns and watches for a moment. A smile ghosts across her face. "Don't look at me, Gerry my man. This is your problem." She climbs away overhead.
Brander's face hovers a few centimeters away. His hood is still sealed, except for the mouth flap. His eyes look like translucent glass balls embedded in black plastic. He tightens his grip.
"So, cocksucker?"
"I'm…sorry—" Fischer stammers.
"You're sorry." Brander glances over his shoulder, includes Nakata in the joke. "He's sorry."
Nakata laughs, too loudly.
Lubin clanks in the locker, still ignoring them all. The airlock begins cycling.
"I don't think," Brander says, raising his voice over the sudden gurgle, "that you're sorry enough."
The 'lock swings open. Lenie Clarke steps out, fins in one hand. Her blank eyes sweep across the room; they don't pause at Fischer. She carries her fins to the drying rack without a word.
Brander punches Fischer in the stomach. Fischer doubles over, gasping; his head smashes into the airlock hatch. He can't catch his breath. The deck scrapes his cheek. Brander's boot is almost touching his nose.
"Hey." Lenie's voice, distant, not particularly interested.
"Hey yourself, Lenie. He's got it coming."
"I know." A moment passes. "Still."
"Judy got nailed by a viperfish, looking for him. She could've been killed."
"Maybe." Lenie sounds as if she's very tired. "So why isn't Judy here?"
"I'm here," Brander says.
Fischer's lung is working again. Gulping air, he pushes himself up against the bulkhead. Brander glares at him. Lubin's back in the room now, just off to one side. Watching.
Lenie stands in the middle of the ready room. She shrugs.
"What?" Brander demands.
"I don't know." She glances indifferently at Fischer. "It's just, he…he just fucked up. He didn't mean any har—"
She stops. Fischer gets the sense that she's looking straight through him, through the bulkhead, right out into the abyss itself to something only she can see. Whatever it is, she doesn't like it much.
"Ah, fuck it." She heads for the ladder. "None of my business anyway."
Lenie, please…
Brander turns back to Fischer as she climbs out of sight. Fischer stares back. Endless seconds go by. Brander's fist hovers in mid-air.
It lashes out almost too fast to see. Fischer reels, catches himself on a conduit. Lights swarm across his left eye. He blinks them away, hanging onto the bulkhead. Everything hurts.
Brander unclenches his fist. "Lenie's way too nice," he remarks, flexing his fingers. "Personally, I don't care whether you meant any harm or not."
Doppelgänger
Beebe's almost as soundproof as the inside of an echo chamber.
Lenie Clarke sits on her bunk and listens to the walls. She can't hear any actual words, but a sudden impact of flesh against metal was clear enough a few minutes ago. Now, low voices converse out in the lounge. Water gurgles through a pipe somewhere.
She thinks she hears something moving downstairs.
She lays her ear against a random pipe. Nothing. Another; a hiss of compressed gas. A third; the faint, tinny echo of slow footsteps, scraping across the lower deck. After a moment a muted hum vibrates through the plumbing.
The medical scanner.
It's none of my business. It's between them. Brander's got his reasons, and Fischer—
He didn't mean any harm.
Fischer's nothing. He's a pathetic, twisted asshole, nobody's problem but his own. It's too bad he gets under Brander's skin like that, but life's not guaranteed to be fair. No one knows that better than Lenie Clarke. She knows what it's like. She remembers the fists out of nowhere, the million little things you didn't even know you'd done wrong until it was too late. Nobody helped her. She'd managed, though. Sex worked, sometimes, as a diversionary tactic. Other times you just had to run.
He didn't mean any harm.
She shakes her head.
Well I fucking didn't either!
The sound sinks in before the pain does. A dull, solid thud, like a fish hitting a floodlight. Blood oozes from the torn skin of her knuckles, the droplets almost black to her filtered vision. The stinging that follows is a welcome distraction.
The bulkhead, of course, is completely unmarked.
Out in the lounge, the conversation has stopped. Clarke sits rigid on the pallet, sucking her hand. Eventually, the voices start up again.
Almost time to go on shift with Nakata and Brander. Clarke looks around her cubby, hesitating. There's something she has to do before she opens the hatch, something important, and she can't quite remember what it is. Her eyes keep coming back to the same wall, looking for something that isn't—
The mirror. For some reason, she wants to see what she looks like. That's odd. She can't remember feeling that way for — well, for a long time. But it's no big deal. She'll just sit here until the feeling goes away. She doesn't have to step outside, she doesn't even have to stand up, until she feels normal again.
When in doubt, stay out of sight.
* * *
"Alice?"
The hatch is closed. There's no answer.
"She's in there." Brander stands at the end of the corridor, the lounge behind him. "She didn't go in more than ten minutes ago."
Clarke knocks again, harder. "Alice? It's almost time."
Brander turns on his heel — "I'll go get our stuff together." — and steps out of sight.
Beebe's hatches do not lock, for safety reasons. Still, Clarke hesitates. She knows how she'd feel if someone just walked into her private space without being invited.
But she said she was up for another shift. And I did knock…
She spins the wheel in the center of the hatch. The mimetic seal around the rim softens and retracts. Clarke pulls the hatch open, peers inside.
Alice Nakata lies twitching on her bunk, eyes closed, 'skin partially peeled. Leads trail from insertion points on her face and wrists, drape away to a lucid dreamer on the bedside shelf.
She goes to sleep ten minutes before her shift starts? It doesn't make sense. Besides, Nakata was just downstairs with the rest of them. With Fischer. How could anyone fall asleep after that?
Clarke steps closer, studies the telltales on the device; induced REM's cranked to maximum and the alarm's disabled. Nakata would have been out in seconds. Hell, at those settings she'd drift off in the middle of a gang-rape.
Lenie Clarke nods approvingly. Nice trick.
Reluctantly, she touches the wake-up stud. Sleep drains from Nakata's face; her expression changes abruptly. Asian eyes flicker, open wide and dark.
Clarke steps back, startled. Alice Nakata has taken her eyecaps off.
"Time to go, Alice" she says softly. "Sorry to wake you…"
She is, too. She's never seen Nakata smile before. It would have been nice if it could have lasted.
* * *
Brander's sealing a broadband sensor into its casing when Clarke drops into the lounge. "She'll catch up with us," she tells him, and turns to the drying rack for her fins.
Directly in front of her, the Med hatch is sealed. No sounds, human or mechanical, filter through from inside.
"Oh yeah. He's still in there." Brander raises his voice a fraction. "Good fucking thing, too, while I'm around."
"He didn't m—" Shut up! Shut the fuck up!
"Lenie?"
She turns to see his hand dropping away. Brander's actually a lot more touchy-feely than you'd expect, sometimes he almost forgets himself around her.
But it's okay. He doesn't mean any harm either.
"Nothing," Clarke says, grabbing her fins.
Brander carries the sensor over to the airlock, drops it in with some other trinkets and cycles them through. Gurgles and clunks accompany their passage into the abyss.
"Only—"
He looks at her, his face framing a question around empty eyes.
"What have you got against Fischer?" she says, nearly whispering.
You know exactly what he's got against Fischer. It's none of your business. Stay out of it.
Brander's face hardens like setting cement. "He's a fucking freak. He diddles little kids."
I know. "Who says?"
"Nobody has to say. I can see his kind coming ten klicks away."
"If you say so." Clarke listens to her own voice. Cool. Distant, almost bored. Good.
"He looks at me funny. Hell, have you seen the way he looks at you?" Metal clanks against metal. "If he so much as touches me I'll fucking kill him."
"Yeah. Well, it wouldn't take much. He just sits there and takes whatever you dish out, you know, he's so— passive…"
Brander snorts. "Why do you care, anyway? He creeps you out as much as the rest of us. I saw what happened in Medical last week."
The airlock hisses. A green light flashes on its side
"I don't know," Lenie says. "You're right, I guess. I know what he is."
Brander swings the 'lock open and steps inside. Clarke holds the edge of the hatch.
"There's something else, though," she says, almost to herself. "Something's— missing. He doesn't fit."
"None of us fits," Brander growls. "That's the whole fucking point."
She closes the hatch. There's enough room for two in there — the other rifters generally drop out in pairs — but she prefers to go through alone. It's a small thing. Nobody comments on it.
Not his fault. Not Brander's, not Fischer's. Not dad's. Not mine.
Nobody's fucking fault.
The airlock flushes beside her.
Angel
The seabed is glowing. Cracks in the rock flicker comforting shades of orange, like hot coals, and he knows that's thermal; the scalding rivulets feel warm even through his 'skin, his thermister leaps around every time the current twitches. But there are places here where the rocks shine green, and others where they shine blue. He doesn't know whether to thank biology or geochemistry. All he knows is that it's beautiful. It's a city from high up, at night. It's a vid of the northern lights he saw once, only sharper and brighter. It's a brush fire in emeralds.
In a way he's almost grateful to Brander. If it weren't for Brander he'd never have come upon this place. He'd be sitting in Beebe with the rest of them, hooked into the library or hiding in his cubby, safe and dry.
But Beebe's no refuge with Brander inside. Beebe's a gauntlet. So today Fischer just stayed away when his shift ended, crawled off across the ocean floor, exploring. Now, somewhere far from the Throat, he discovers real sanctuary.
Don't fall asleep, Shadow says. If you miss your shift again it'll just give him an excuse.
So what? He won't find me out here.
You can't stay outside forever. You've got to eat sometime.
I know, I know. Be quiet.
He's the only person to have ever seen this place. How long has it been here? How many millions of years has this little oasis been glowing peacefully in the night, a pocket universe all to itself?
Lenie would like it out here, Shadow says.
Yeah.
A rattail cruises into view about half a meter up, its underside a jigsaw of reflected color. It thrashes once, suddenly; violent shivers run the length of its body. The water around it shimmers with heat distortion. The fish spins lopsidedly, tail-down, in the wake of the little eruption. Its body turns white in seconds, begins to fray at the edges.
Four hundred eight degrees Centigrade: that's maximum recorded temperature for hot seeps on the Juan de Fuca rift. Fischer thinks back for the temperature rating on diveskin copolymer.
One fifty.
He sculls up into the water column a bit, just in case. As soon as he clears bottom clutter he feels the faint, regular tapping of Beebe's sonar against his insides.
That's odd. This far out, he shouldn't be able to feel the signal, not unless they'd really cranked it up. And they wouldn't do that unless—
He checks the time.
Oh no. Not again.
By the time he makes it back to the Throat they're halfway through stripping number four. They open a space on the line for him. Lenie doesn't want to hear his apologies. She doesn't want to talk to him at all. That hurts, but Fischer can't really blame her. Maybe he can make it up to her soon. Maybe he can take her sightseeing.
It's not Brander's shift, thank God. He's back at Beebe. But Fischer's getting hungry again.
* * *
Maybe he's in his cubby. Maybe I can just eat and go to bed. Maybe—
He's sitting right there, all alone in the lounge, glaring up from his meal as soon as Fischer climbs into the room.
Don't get him mad.
Too late. He's always mad.
"I— thought we should clear some things up," he tries.
"Fuck off."
Fischer reaches the galley table, pulls out a chair.
"Don't bother," Brander says.
"Look, this place is small enough as it is. We've got to at least try to get along, you know? I mean, that's assault. It's illegal."
"So arrest me."
"Maybe you're not really mad at me at all," Fischer stops for a moment, surprised. Maybe that's it. "Maybe you've mixed me up with someone—"
Brander stands up.
Fischer pushes on: "Maybe someone else did something to you, once, and—"
Brander comes around the table, very deliberately.
"I haven't got you mixed up with anybody. I know exactly what you are."
"No, you don't, we never even saw each other until a couple of weeks ago!" Of course that's it. It's not me at all, it's someone else! "Whatever happened to you—"
"Is none of your fucking business, and if you say one more word I'll fucking kill you."
Let's just go, Shadow pleads. Let's leave, this is only making things worse.
But Fisher stands his ground. Suddenly everything seems so clear. "It wasn't me," he says quietly. "What happened— I'm sorry. But it wasn't me, you know it wasn't."
For a moment he thinks he might actually be getting through. Brander's face untwists a little, the knots of flesh and eyebrow unkinking just a bit around those featureless white eyes, and Fischer can almost see that face wearing something other than rage.
But then he feels something moving, it's his own arm reaching out Shadow no you'll ruin everything but Shadow's not listening, she's crooning Don't get him mad, don't get him mad don't get him mad—
This is what you do.
The growl starts low in Brander's throat, rising, like a distant wave pushed higher and higher out of the sea as it rushes shoreward.
"…don't you Fucking TOUCH ME!"
And nothing goes dead fast enough.
* * *
It stings at first. Then he feels clotted blood break around his eyelid, sees a fuzzy line of red light. He tries to bring his hand to his face. It hurts.
Something cold and wet, soothing. More clots come away.
"Nnnnnn…"
Someone is poking at his eyes. He tries to struggle, but all he can do is move his head feebly from side to side. That hurts even more.
"Don't move."
Lenie's voice.
"Your right eyecap's damaged. It could be gouging your cornea."
He relents. Lenie's fingers push between lids that feel as puffy as pillows. There's a sudden pressure on his eyeball, a tug of suction. A slurping sound, and the feel of ragged edges dragged across his pupil.
The world goes dark. "Hang on," Lenie says. "I'll turn up the lights."
There's still a reddish tinge to everything, but at least he can see.
He's in his cubby. Lenie Clarke leans over him, a bit of glistening wet membrane in one hand.
"You were lucky. He'd have ripped your costochondrals if your implants hadn't been packed in behind them." She drops the ruined cap out of sight, picks up a cartridge of liquid skin. "As it is, he only broke a couple of ribs. Lots of bruises. Mild concussion, maybe, but you'll have to go to Medical to be sure. Oh, and I'm pretty sure he broke your cheekbone too."
She sounds as if she’s reading a grocery list.
“Why not—” Warm salt floods his mouth. His tongue does some careful exploring; his teeth are still intact, at least. “—in Medical, now?”
“It would have been a bitch getting you down the ladder. Brander wasn’t going to help. Everyone else is outside.” She sprays foam across his bicep. It pulls his skin as it dries.
“Not that they’d be any help,” she adds.
“Thanks…”
“I didn’t do anything. Just dragged you in here, basically.”
He wants desperately to touch her.
“What is it with you, Fischer?” she asks after a while. "Why don't you ever fight back?"
"Wouldn’t work."
"Are you kidding? You know how big you are? You could take Brander apart if you just stood up to him."
Shadow says it only makes things worse. You fight back, it only gets them madder.
"Shadow?" Lenie says.
"What?"
"You said—"
“Didn’t say anything…”
She watches him for a few moments.
"Okay," she says at last. She stands up. “I'll call up and send for a replacement."
“No. That’s okay.”
“You’re injured, Fischer."
Medical tutorials whisper inside his head. “We've got stuff downstairs."
"You still wouldn't be able to work for a week. More than twice that before you'd be fully healed."
"They planned for accidents. When they set up the schedules."
"And how are you going to keep clear of Brander until then?"
"I'll stay outside more," he says. "Please, Lenie."
She shakes her head. "You're crazy, Fischer." She turns to the hatch, undogs it. "None of my business, of course. I just don't think—"
Turns back.
“Do you like it down here?” she asks.
“What?”
“Do you get off, being down here?”
It should be a stupid question. Especially now. Somehow it isn’t.
“Sort of,” he says at last, realizing it for the first time.
She nods, blinking over white space. “Dopamine rush.”
“Dopa—?”
“They say we get hooked on it. Being down here. Being— scared, I guess.” She smiles faintly. “That’s the rumor, anyway.”
Fischer thinks about that. “Not so much I get off on it. More like, just used to it. You know?”
“Yeah.” She turns and pushes the hatch open. “For sure.”
* * *
There's this praying mantis a meter long, all black with chrome trim, hanging upside-down from the ceiling of the medical cubby. It's been sleeping up there ever since Fischer first arrived. Now it hovers over his face, jointed arms clicking and dipping like crazy articulated chopsticks. Every now and then one of its feelers winks red light, and Fischer can smell the scent of his own flesh cauterizing. It kind of bothers him. What's even worse is, he can't move his head. The neuroinduction field in the Med table has got him paralyzed from the neck up. He keeps wondering what would happen if the focus slipped, if that damping energy ended up pointing at his lungs. At his heart.
The mantis stops in midmotion, its antennae quivering. It keeps completely still for a few seconds. "Hello, er— Gerry, isn't it?" it says at last. "I'm Dr. Troyka."
It sounds like a woman.
"How are we doing here?" Fischer tries to answer, but his head and neck are still just so much dead meat. "No, don't try to answer," the mantis says, "Rhetorical question. I'm checking your readouts now."
Fischer remembers: the medical equipment can't always do everything on its own. Sometimes, when things get too complicated, it calls up the line to a human backup.
"Wow," says the mantis. "What happened to you? No, don't answer that either. I don't want to know." An accessory arm springs into sight and passes back and forth across Fischer's line of sight. "I'm going to override the damping field for a moment. It might hurt a bit. Try not to move when that happens, except to answer my questions."
Pain floods across Fischer's face. It's not too bad. Familiar, even. His eyelids feel scratchy, and his tongue is dry. He tries blinking; it works. He closes his mouth, rubs his tongue against swollen cheeks. Better.
"I don't suppose you want to come back up?" Dr. Troyka asks, hundreds of kilometers away. "You know these injuries are bad enough to warrant a recall."
Fischer shakes his head. "That's okay. I can stay here."
"Uh huh." The mantis doesn't sound surprised. "I've been hearing that a fair bit lately. Okay, I'm going to wire your cheekbone back together, and I'll be planting a little battery under your skin. Just below the right eye. It'll basically kick your bone cells into overdrive, speed up the healing process. It's just a couple of millimeters across, you'll feel like you've got sort of a hard pimple. It may itch, but try not to pick at it. When you're healed up you can just squeeze it out like a zit. Okay?"
"Okay."
"All right, Gerry. I'm going to turn the field back on and get to work." The mantis whirrs in anticipation.
Fischer holds up a hand. "Wait."
"What is it, Gerry?"
"What…what time is it, up there?" he asks.
"It's oh five ten. Pacific daylight. Why?"
"It's early."
"Sure is."
"I guess I got you up," Fischer says. "Sorry."
"Nonsense." Digits on the end of mechanical arms wiggle absently. "I've been up for hours. Graveyard shift."
"Graveyard?"
"We're on duty around the clock, Gerry. There's a lot of geothermal stations out there, you know. You— you keep us pretty busy, as a rule."
"Oh," Fischer says. "Sorry."
"Forget it. It's my job." There's a humming, somewhere in the back of his head; for a moment Fischer can feel the muscles of his face going slack. Then everything goes numb, and the mantis swoops down him like a predator.
* * *
He knows better than to open up outside.
It doesn't kill you, not right away. But seawater's a lot saltier than blood; let it inside and osmosis sucks the water from the epithelial cells, shrivels them down to viscous little blobs. Rifter kidneys are modified to speed up water reclamation when that happens, but it's not a long-term solution and it costs. Organs wears out faster, urine turns to oil. It's best to just keep sealed up. Your insides soak in seawater too long, they sort of corrode, implants or no implants.
But that's another one of Fischer's problems. He never takes the long view.
The face seal is a single macromolecule fifty centimeters long. It wraps back and forth along the line of the jaw like the two sides of a zipper, with hydrophobic side-chains for teeth. A little blade on the index of Fischer's left glove can split them apart. He runs it along the seal and the 'skin opens neatly around his mouth.
He doesn't feel much of anything at first. He was half-expecting the ocean to charge up his nose and burn his sinuses, but of course all his body cavities are already packed with isotonic saline. The only immediate change is that his face gets cold, numbing the chronic ache of torn flesh a bit. Deeper pain pulses under one eye, where Dr. Troyka's wires hold the bones of his face together; microelectricity tingles along those lines, press-gangs bonebuilding osteoblasts into high gear.
After a couple of moments he tries to gargle; that doesn't work, so he settles for gaping like a fish and wriggling his tongue around. That does it. He gets his first taste of raw ocean, coarse and saltier than the stuff that pumps him up inside.
On the seabed in front of him, a swarm of blind shrimp feeds in the current from a nearby vent. Fischer can see right through them. They're like little chunks of glass with blobs of organs jiggling around inside.
It must be fourteen hours since he's eaten, but there's no fucking way he's going back to Beebe with Brander still inside. The last time he tried, Brander was actually standing guard in the lounge, waiting for him.
What the hell. It's just like krill. People eat this stuff all the time.
They have a strange taste. Fischer's mouth is going numb from the cold, but there's still a faint sense of rotten eggs, dilute and barely detectable. Not bad other than that, though. Better than Brander by a long shot.
When the convulsions hit fifteen minutes later, he's not so sure.
* * *
"You look like shit," Lenie says.
Fischer hangs onto the railing, looks around the lounge. "Where—"
"At the Throat. On shift with Lubin and Caraco."
He makes it to the couch.
"Haven't seen you for a while," Lenie remarks. "How's your face doing?"
Fischer squints at her through a haze of nausea. Lenie Clarke is actually making small talk. She's never done that before. He's still trying to figure out why when his stomach clamps down again and he pitches onto the floor. By now nothing comes up but a few dribbles of sour fluid.
His eyes trace the pipes tangling along the ceiling. After a while Lenie's face blocks the view, looking down from a great height.
"What's wrong?" She seems to be asking out of idle curiosity, no more.
"Ate some shrimp," he says, and retches again.
"You ate— from outside?" She bends down and pulls him up. His arms drag along behind on the deck. Something hard bumps his head; the railing around the downstairs ladder.
"Fuck," Lenie says.
He's on the floor again, alone. Receding footsteps. Dizziness. Something presses against his neck, pricks him with a soft hiss.
His head clears almost instantly.
Lenie's leaning in, closer than she's ever been. She's even touching him, she's got one hand on his shoulder. He stares down at that hand, feeling a stupid sort of wonder, but then she pulls it away.
She's holding a hypo. Fischer's stomach begins to settle.
"Why," she says softly, "would you do a stupid thing like that?"
"I was hungry."
"So what's wrong with the dispenser?"
He doesn't answer.
"Oh," Lenie says. "Right."
She stands up and snaps the spent cartridge out of the hypo. "This can't go on, Fischer. You know that."
"He hasn't got me in two weeks."
"He hasn't seen you in two weeks. You only come in when he's on shift. And you're missing your own shifts more and more. Doesn't make you too popular with the rest of us." She cocks her head as Beebe creaks around them. "Why don't you just call up and get them to take you home?"
Because I do things to children, and if I leave here they'll cut me open and change me into something else…
Because there are things outside that almost make it worthwhile…
Because of you…
He doesn't know if she'd understand any of those reasons. He decides not to risk it.
"Maybe you could talk to him," he manages.
Lenie sighs. "He wouldn't listen."
"Maybe if you tried, at least—"
Her face hardens. "I have tried. I—"
She catches herself.
"I can't get involved," she whispers. "It's none of my business."
Fischer closes his eyes. He feels as if he's going to cry. "He just doesn't let up. He really hates me."
"It's not you. You're just— filling in."
"Why did they put us together? It doesn't make sense!"
"Sure it does. Statistically."
Fischer opens his eyes. "What?"
Lenie's pulling one hand down across her face. She seems very tired.
"We're not people here, Fischer. We're a cloud of data points. Doesn't matter what happens to you or me or Brander, just as long as the mean stays where it's supposed to and the standard deviation doesn't get too big."
Tell her, Shadow says.
"Lenie—"
"Anyway." Lenie shrugs the mood away. "You're crazy to eat anything that near a rift zone. Didn't you learn about hydrogen sulfide?"
He nods. "Basic training. The vents spit it out."
"And it builds up in the benthos. They're toxic. Which I guess you know now anyway."
She starts down the ladder, stops on the second rung.
"If you really want to go native, try feeding further from the rift. Or go for the fish."
"The fish?"
"They move around more. Don't spend all their time soaking in the hot springs. Maybe they're safe."
"The fish," he says again. He hadn't thought of that.
"I said maybe."
* * *
Shadow I'm so sorry…
Shush. Just look at all the pretty lights.
So he looks. He knows this place. He's on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He's back in fairyland. He thinks he comes here a lot now, watches the lights and bubbles, listens to the deep rocks grinding against each other.
Maybe he'll stay this time, watch the whole thing working, but then he remembers he's supposed to be somewhere else. He waits, but nothing specific comes to him. Just a feeling that he should be doing something somewhere else. Soon.
It's getting harder to stay here anyway. There's a vague pain hanging around his upper body somewhere, fading in and out. After a while he realizes what it is. His face hurts.
Maybe this beautiful light is hurting his eyes.
That can't be right. His caps should take care of all that. Maybe they're not working. He seems to remember something that happened to his eyes a while back, but it doesn't really matter. He can always just leave. Suddenly, wonderfully, all of his problems have easy answers.
If the light hurts, all he has to do is stay in the dark.
Feral
"Hey," Caraco buzzes as they come around the corner. "Number four."
Clarke looks. Four's fifteen meters away and the water's a bit murky this shift. Still, she can see something big and dark sticking to the intake vent. Its shadow twitches down along the casing like an absurdly stretched black spider.
Clarke fins forward a few meters, Caraco at her side. The two women exchange looks.
Fischer, hanging upside down against the mesh. It's been four days since anyone's seen him.
Clarke gently sets down her carry bag; Caraco follows her lead. Two or three kicks bring them to within five meters of the intake. Machinery hums omnipresently, makes a sound deep enough to feel.
He's facing away from them, drifting from side to side, tugged by the gentle suction of the intake vent. The vent's grillwork is fuzzy with rooted growing things; small clams, tube worms, shadow crabs. Fischer pulls squirming clumps from the intake, leaves them to drift or to fall to the street below. He's cleaned maybe two meters square so far.
It's nice to see he still takes some duties seriously.
"Hey. Fischer," Caraco says.
He spins around as if shot. His forearm flails toward Clarke's face; she raises her own just in time. In the next instant he's bowled past her. She kicks, steadies herself. Fischer's heading for the darkness without looking back.
"Fischer," Clarke calls out. "Stop. It's okay."
He stops kicking for a moment, looks back over his shoulder.
"It's me," she buzzes. "And Judy. We won't hurt you."
Barely visible now, he rotates to a stop and turns to face them. Clarke risks a wave.
"Come on, Fischer. Give us a hand."
Caraco comes up behind her. "Lenie, what are you doing?" She's turned her vocoder down to a hiss. "He's too far gone, he's—"
Clarke cranks her own vocoder down. "Shut up, Judy." Up again. "What do you say, Fischer? Earn your pay."
He's coming back into the light, hesitantly, like a wild animal lured by the promise of food. Closer, Clarke can see the line of his jaw moving up and down under his hood. The motions are jerky, erratic, as though he's learning them for the first time.
Finally a noise comes out. "Oh— kay—"
Caraco goes back and retrieves their gear. Clarke offers a scraper to Fischer. After a moment, he takes it, clumsily, and follows them to number four.
"Jussst like," Fischer buzzes. "Old. T— times."
Caraco looks at Clarke. Clarke says nothing.
* * *
Near the end of the shift she looks around. "Fischer?"
Caraco pokes her head out from an access tunnel. "He's gone?"
"When did you see him last?"
Caraco's vocoder ticks a couple of times; the machinery always misinterprets hmmm. "Half hour ago, maybe."
Clarke puts her own vocoder on high. "Hey Fischer! You still around?"
No answer.
"Fischer, we're heading back in a bit. If you want to come along…"
Caraco just shakes her head.
Shadow
It's a nightmare.
There's light everywhere, blinding, painful. He can barely move. Everything has such hard edges, and everywhere he looks the boundaries are too sharp. Sounds are like that too, clanks and shouts, every noise an exclamation of pain. He barely knows where he is. He doesn't know why he's there.
He's drowning.
"UNNNNNSEEEEELLLLLHHHHHIZZZZZMMMMOOUUUUUTH…"
The tubes in his chest suck at emptiness. The rest of his insides strain to inflate, but there's nothing there to fill them. He thrashes, panicky. Something gives with a snap. Sudden pain resonates in some faraway limb, floods the rest of his body a moment later. He tries to scream, but there's nothing inside to push out.
"HHIZZMMMOUTHFORRRKKRRIISSAAAAAKHEEEZSSUFFUKKATE—"
Someone pulls part of his face off. His insides fill with a rush; not the cold saline he's used to, but it helps. The burning in his chest eases.
"BIGGFFUKKINNGGMMISSTTAAKE—"
Pressure, painful and uneven. Things are holding him down, holding him up, banging into him. The noise is tinny, deafening. He remembers a sound—
— gravity—
— that applies somehow, but he doesn't know what it means. And then everything's spinning, and everything's familiar and horrible except for one thing, one glimpse of a face that calms him somehow—
Shadow?
— and the weight's gone, the pressure's gone, icewater calms his insides as he spirals back with her, outside again, where she used to be years ago—
She's showing him how to do it. She creeps into his room after the shouting stops, she crawls under the covers with him and she starts stroking his penis.
"Dad says this is what you do when you really love somebody," she whispers. And that scares him because they don't even like each other, he just wants her to go away and leave them all alone.
"Go away. I hate you," he says, but he’s too afraid to move.
"That's okay, then you don't have to do it for me." She’s trying to laugh, trying to pretend he was just kidding.
And then, still stroking: "Why are you always so mean to me?”
"I'm not mean."
"Are too."
"You're not supposed to be here."
"Can't we just be friends?" She rubs up against him. "I can do this whenever you want—"
"Go away. You can’t stay here."
"I can, maybe. If it works out, they said. But we have to like each other or they could send me back—”
"Good."
She's crying now, she's rubbing against him so hard the bed shakes, "Please can't you like me please I'll do anything I'll even—"
But he never finds out what she'll even do because that's when the door slams open and whatever happens after that, Gerry Fischer can't remember.
Shadow, I'm so sorry…
But she's back with him now, in the cold and the dark where it's safe. Somehow. Beebe's a dim gray glow in the distance. She floats against that backdrop like a black cardboard cutout.
"Shadow…" Not his voice.
"No." Not hers. "Lenie."
"Lenie…"
Twin crescents, thin as fingernails, reflect from her eyes. Even in two dimensions she's beautiful.
Mangled words buzz from her throat: "You know who I am? You can understand me?"
He nods, then wonders if she can see it. "Yeah."
"You don't— lately you're sort of gone, Fischer. Like you've forgotten how to be human."
He tries to laugh, but the vocoder can't handle it. "It comes and goes, I think. I'm…lucid now, anyway. That's the word, isn't it?"
"You shouldn't have come back inside." Machinery strips any feeling from her words. "He says he'll kill you. Maybe you should just stay out of his way."
"Okay," he says, and thinks it actually might be.
"I can bring food out, I guess. They don't care about that."
"That's okay. I can — go fishing."
"I'll call for a 'scaphe. It can pick you up out here."
"No. I can swim back up myself if I want to. Not far."
"Then I'll tell them to send someone."
"No."
A pause. "You can't swim all the way back to the mainland."
"I'll stay down here…a while…"
A tremor growls softly along the seabed.
"You sure?" Lenie says.
"Yeah." His arm hurts. He doesn't know why.
She turns slightly. The dim reflections vanish from her eyes for a long moment.
"I'm sorry, Gerry."
"Okay."
Lenie's silhouette twists around and faces back towards Beebe. "I should get going."
She doesn't leave. She doesn't say anything for almost a minute.
Then: "Who's Shadow?"
More silence.
"She's a…friend. When I was young."
"She means a lot to you." Not a question. "Do you want me to send her a message?"
"She's dead," Fischer says, marveling that he's really known it all along.
"Oh."
"Didn't mean to," he says. "But she had her own mom and dad, you know, why did she need mine? She went back where she belonged. That's all."
"Where she belonged," Lenie buzzes, almost too softly to hear.
"Not my fault," he says. It's hard to talk. It didn't used to be this hard.
Someone's touching him. Lenie. Her hand is on his arm, and he knows it's impossible but he can feel the warmth of her body through his 'skin.
"Gerry."
"Yes?"
"Why wasn't she with her own family?"
"She said they hurt her. She always said that. That's how she got in. She used it, it always worked…"
Not always, Shadow reminds him.
"And then she went back," Lenie murmurs.
"I didn't mean to."
A sound comes out of Lenie's vocoder, and he has no idea what it is. "Brander's right, isn't he. About you and kids."
Somehow, he knows she's not accusing him. She's just checking.
"That's what you— do," he tells her. "When you really love someone."
"Oh, Gerry. You're so completely fucked up."
A string of clicks taps faintly on the machinery in his chest.
"They're looking for me," she says.
"Okay."
"Be careful, okay?"
"You could stay. Here."
Her silence answers him.
"Maybe I'll come out and visit sometimes," she buzzes at last. She rises up into the water, turns away.
"Bye," Shadow says. It's the first time she's spoken aloud since she came inside, but Fischer doesn't think Lenie notices the difference.
And then she's gone, for now.
But she comes out here all the time. Alone, sometimes. He knows it isn't over. And when she goes back and forth with the others, doing all the things he used to do, he'll be there, off where no one can see. Checking up. Making sure she's okay.
Like her own guardian angel. Right, Shadow?
A couple of fish flicker dimly in the distance.
Shadow…?
Neotenous
It didn't look human at first. It didn't even look alive. It looked like a pile of dirty rags someone had thrown against the base of the Cambie pylon. Gerry Fischer wouldn't have looked twice if the skytrain hadn't hissed overhead at exactly the right moment, strobing the ground with segmented strips of light.
He stared. Eyes, flashing in and out of shadow, stared back.
He didn't move until the train had slid away along its overhead track. The world fell back into muddy low contrast. The sidewalk. The strip of kudzu4 below the track, gray and suffocating under countless drizzlings of concrete dust. Feeble cloudbank reflections of neon and laser from Commercial.
And this thing with the eyes, this rag-pile against the pylon. A boy.
A young boy.
This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow always said. After all, the kid could die out here.
"Are you okay?" he said at last.
The pile of rags shifted a little, and whimpered.
"It's okay. I won't hurt you."
"I'm lost," it said, in a very strange voice.
Fischer took a step forward. “You a ref?” The nearest refugee strip was over a hundred kilometers away, and well guarded, but sometimes someone would get out.
The eyes swung from side to side: no.
But then, Fischer thought, what else would he say? Maybe he’s afraid I’ll turn him in.
"Where do you live?" he asked, and listened closely to the answer:
"Orlando."
No hint of Asian or Hindian in that voice. Back when Fischer was a kid his mom would always tell him that disasters were color-blind, but he knew better now. The kid sounded N’Am; not a ref, then. Which meant there would probably be people looking for him.
Which, in a way, was too—
Stop it.
"Orlando,” he repeated aloud. “You are lost. Where's your mom and dad?"
"Hotel." The rag pile detached itself from the pylon and shuffled closer. "Vanceattle." The words came out half-whistled, as though the kid was speaking through his sinuses. Maybe he had one of those, those — Fischer groped for the words — cleft palates, or something.
"Vanceattle? Which one?"
Shrug.
"Don't you have a watch?"
"Lost it."
You've got to help him, Shadow said.
"Well, um, look." Fischer rubbed at his temples. "I live close by. We can call from there."
There weren't that many Vanceattles in the lower mainland. The police wouldn't have to find out. And even if they did, they wouldn't charge him. Not for this. What was he supposed to do, leave the kid for body parts?
"I'm Gerry," Fischer said.
"Kevin."
Kevin looked about nine or ten. Old enough that he should know how to use a public terminal, anyway. But there was something wrong with him. He was too tall and skinny, and his limbs tangled up in themselves when he walked. Maybe he was brain damaged. Maybe one of those nanotech babies that went bad. Or maybe his mother just spent too much time outdoors when she was pregnant.
Fischer led Kevin up to his two-room timeshare. Kevin dropped onto the couch without asking. Fischer checked the fridge: root beer. The boy took it with a nervous smile. Fischer sat down beside him and put a reassuring hand on Kevin's lap.
The expression drained from Kevin's face as though someone had pulled a plug.
Go on, Shadow said. He's not complaining, is he?
Kevin's clothes were filthy. Caked mud clung to his pants. Fischer reached over and began picking it off. "We should get you out of these clothes. Get you cleaned up. We can only take showers on even days here, but you could always take a sponge bath…"
Kevin just sat there. One hand gripped his drink, bony fingers denting the plastic; the other rested motionless on the couch.
Fischer smiled. "It's okay. This is what you do when you really—"
Kevin stared at the floor, trembling.
Fischer found a zipper, pulled. Pressed, gently. "It's okay. It's okay. Don't worry."
Kevin stopped shaking. Kevin looked up.
Kevin smiled.
"I'm not the one who should be worried here, asshole," he said in his whistling child's voice.
The jolt threw Fischer to the floor. Suddenly he was staring at the ceiling, fingers twitching at the ends of arms that had turned, magically, into dead weights. His whole nervous system sang like a tracery of high-tension wires embedded in flesh.
His bladder let go. Wet warmth spread out from his crotch.
Kevin stepped over him and looked down, all trace of awkwardness gone from his movements. One hand still held the plastic cup. The other held a shockprod.
Very deliberately, Kevin upended his drink. Fischer watched the liquid snake down, almost casually, and splash across his face. His eyes stung; Kevin was a spindly blur in a wash of weak acid. Fischer tried to blink, tried again, finally succeeded.
One of Kevin's legs was swinging back at the knee.
"Gerald Fischer, you are under arrest—"
It swung forward. Pain erupted in Fischer's side.
"— for indecent assault of a minor—"
Back. Forward. Pain.
"— under sections 151 and 152 of the N'Am Pacific Criminal Code."
The child knelt down and glared into his face. Up close the telltales were obvious; the depth of the eyes, the size of the pores in the skin, the plastic resilience of adult flesh soaked in androgen suppressants.
"Not to mention violation of yet another restraining order," Kevin added.
How long, Fischer wondered absently. Neural aftershock draped the whole world in gauze. How many months did it take to stunt back down from man to child?
"You have the right to— ah, fuck."
And how long to reverse the reversal? Could Kevin ever grow up again?
"You know your fucking rights better than I do."
This wasn't happening. The police wouldn't go this far, they didn't have the money, and anyway, why? How could anyone be willing to change themselves like that? Just to get Gerry Fischer? Why?
"I suppose I should call you in, shouldn't I? Then again, maybe I'll just let you lie here in your own piss for a while…"
Somehow, he got the feeling that Kevin was hurting more than he was. It didn't make sense.
It's okay, Shadow told him softly. It's not your fault. They just don't understand.
Kevin was kicking him again, but Fischer could hardly feel it. He tried to say something, anything, that would make his tormentor feel a little better, but his motor nerves were still fried.
He could still cry, though. Different wiring.
It was different this time. It started out the same, the scans and the samples and the beatings, but then they took him out of the line and cleaned him up, and put him in a side room. Two guards sat him down at a table, across from a dumpy little man with brown moles all over his face.
"Hello, Gerry," he said, pretending not to notice Fischer's injuries. "I'm Dr. Scanlon."
"You're a shrink."
"Actually, I'm more of a mechanic." He smiled, a prissy little smile that said I've just been very clever but you're probably too stupid to get the joke. Fischer decided he didn't like Scanlon much.
Still, his type had been useful before, with all their talk about competence and criminal responsibility. It's not so much what you did, Fischer had learned, as why you did it. If you did things because you were evil, you were in real trouble. If you did the same things because you were sick, though, the doctors would sometimes cover for you. Fischer had learned to be sick.
Scanlon pulled a headband out of his breast pocket. "I'd like to talk to you for a little while, Gerry. Would you mind putting this on for me?"
The inside of the band was studded with sensor pads. It felt cool across his forehead. Fischer looked around the room, but he couldn't see any monitors or readouts.
"Great." Scanlon nodded to the guards. He waited until they'd left before he spoke again.
"You're a strange one, Gerry Fischer. We don't run into too many like you."
"That's not what the other doctors said."
"Oh? What did they say?"
"They said I was typical. They said, they said lots of the one-fifty-one's used the same rationale."
Scanlon leaned forward. "Well you know, that's true. It's a classic line: 'I was teaching her about her awakening sexuality, doctor. 'It's the parents' job to instruct their children, doctor. 'They don't like school either, but it's for their own good. "
"I never said those things. I don't even have kids."
"No you don't. But the point is, pedophiles often claim to be acting in the best interests of the children. They turn sexual abuse into an act of altruism, if you will."
"It's not abuse. It's what you do if you really love someone."
Scanlon leaned back in his chair and studied Fischer for a few moments.
"That's what's so interesting about you, Gerry."
"What?"
"Everyone uses that line. You're the only person I've met who might actually believe it."
In the end, they said they could take care of the charges. He knew there had to be more to it than that, of course; they'd make him volunteer for some sort of experiment, or donate some of his organs, or submit to voluntary castration first. But the catch, when it came, wasn't any of those things. He almost couldn't believe it.
They wanted to give him a job.
"Think of it as community service," Scanlon said. "Restitution to all of society. You'd be underwater most of the time, but you'd be well-equipped."
"Underwater where?"
"Channer Vent. About forty kilometers north of the Axial Volcano, on the Juan de Fuca Rift. Do you know where that is, Gerry?"
"How long?"
"One year minimum. You could extend that if you wanted to."
Fischer couldn't think of any reason why he would, but it didn't matter. If he didn't take this deal they'd stick a governor in his head for the rest of his life. Which might not be that long, when you thought about it.
"One year," he said. "Underwater."
Scanlon patted his arm. "Take your time, Gerry. Think about it. You don't have to decide until this afternoon."
Do it, Shadow urged. Do it or they'll cut into you and you'll change…
But Fischer wasn't going to be rushed. "So what do I do for one year, underwater?"
Scanlon showed him a vid.
"Geez," Fischer said. "I can't do any of that."
"No problem." Scanlon smiled. "You'll learn."
He did, too.
A lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night they'd give him an injection, to help him learn, Scanlon said. Afterwards a machine beside his bed would feed him dreams. He could never exactly remember them but something must have stuck, because every morning he'd sit at the console with his tutor — a real person, though, not a program — and all the text and diagrams she showed him would be strangely familiar. Like he'd known it all years ago, and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything: plate tectonics and subduction zones, Archimedes Principle, the thermal conductivity of two percent hydrox. Aldosterone.
Alloplasty.
He remembered his left lung after they cut it out, and the technical specs on the machines they put in its place.
Afternoons, they'd attach leads to his body and saturate his striated muscles with low-amp current. He was starting to understand what was going on, now; the term was induced isometrics, and its meaning had come to him in a dream.
A week after the operation he woke up with a fever.
"Nothing to worry about," Scanlon told him. "That's just the last stage of your infection."
"Infection?"
"We shot you up with a retrovirus the day you came here. Didn't you know?"
Fischer grabbed Scanlon's arm. "Like a disease? You—"
"It's perfectly safe, Gerry." Scanlon smiled patiently, disentangling himself. "In fact, you wouldn't last very long down there without it; human enzymes don't work well at high pressure. So we loaded some extra genes into a tame virus and sent it in. It's been rewriting you from the inside out. Judging by your fever I'd say it's nearly finished. You should be feeling better in a day or so."
"Rewriting?"
"Half your enzymes come in two flavors now. They got the genes from one of those deep-water fish. Rattails, I think they're called." Scanlon patted Fischer on the shoulder. "So how does it feel to be part fish, Gerry?"
"Coryphaenoides armatus," Fischer said slowly.
Scanlon frowned. "What was that?"
"Rattails." Fischer concentrated. "Mostly dehydrogenases, right?"
Scanlon glanced at the machine by the bed. "I'm, um, not sure."
"That's it. Dehydrogenases. But they tweaked them to reduce the activation energy." He tapped his temple. "It's all here. Only I haven't done the tutorial yet."
"That's great," Scanlon said; but he didn't sound like he meant it.
One day they put him in a tank built like a piston, five stories tall: its roof could press down like a giant hand, squeezing whatever was inside. They sealed the hatch and flooded the tank with seawater.
Scanlon had warned him about the change. "We flood your trachea and your head cavities, but your lung and intestines aren't rigid so they just squeeze down. We're immunizing you against pressure, you see? They say it's a bit like drowning, but you get used to it."
It wasn't that bad, actually. Fischer's guts twisted in on themselves, and his sinuses burned like hell, but he'd take that over another bout with Kevin any day.
He floated there in the tank, seawater sliding through the tubes in his chest, and reflected on the queasy sensation of not breathing.
"They're getting some turbulence." Scanlon's voice came at him from all directions, as if the walls themselves were talking. "From your exhaust port."
A fine trail of bubbles was trickling from Fischer's chest. His eyecaps made everything seem marvelously clear, like a hallucination. "Just a bit of—"
Not his voice. His words, but spoken by something else, some cheap machine that didn't know about harmonics. One hand went automatically to the disk embedded in his throat.
"— hydrogen," he tried again. "No problem. Pressure'll squeeze them down when I get deep enough."
"Yeah. Still." Other words, muffled, as Scanlon spoke to someone else. Fischer felt something vibrate softly in his chest. The bubbles grew larger, then smaller. Then disappeared.
Scanlon was back. "Better?"
"Yeah." Fischer didn't know how he felt about this, though. He didn't really like having a chest full of machinery. He didn't really like having to breathe by chopping water into chunks of hydrogen and oxygen. But he really didn't like the idea of some tech he'd never even met fiddling with his insides by remote control, reaching into his body and messing around in there without even asking. It made him feel—
Violated, right?
Sometimes Shadow was just a bitch. As if she hadn't been the one to put him up to it in the first place.
"We're going to kill the lights now, Gerry."
Darkness. The water hummed with the sound of vast machinery.
After a few moments he noticed a cold blue spark winking at him from somewhere overhead. It seemed to cast a lot more light than it should. As he watched, the inside of the tank reappeared in hazy shades of blue-on-black.
"Photoamps working okay?" Scanlon wanted to know.
"Uh huh."
"What can you see?"
"Everything. The inside of the tank. The hatch. Sort of bluish."
"Right. Luciferin light source."
"It's not very bright," Fischer said. "Everything's sort of like, dusk."
"Well, it'd be pitch black without your eyecaps."
And suddenly, it was.
"Hey."
"Don't worry, Gerry. Everything's fine. We just shut the light off."
He lay there in utter darkness. Floaters wriggled at the corner of his eye.
"How are you feeling, Gerry? Any sensation of falling? Claustrophobia?"
He felt almost peaceful.
"Gerry?"
"No. Nothing. I feel—fine—"
"Pressure's at two thousand meters."
"I can't feel it."
This might not be so bad after all. One year. One year…
"Doctor Scanlon," he said after a while. He was even getting used to the metallic buzz of his new voice.
"Right here."
"Why me?"
"What do you mean, Gerry?"
"I wasn't, you know, qualified. Even after all this training I bet there's lots of people who'd be better at this than me. Real engineers."
"It's not so much what you know," Scanlon said. "It's what you are."
He knew what he was. People had been telling him for as long as he could remember. He didn't see what the fuck that had to do with anything. "What's that, then?"
At first he thought he wasn't going to get an answer. But Scanlon finally spoke, and when he did there was something in his voice that Fischer had never heard before.
"Pre-adapted," was what he said.
Elevator Boy
The Pacific Ocean slopped two kilometers under his feet. He had a cargo of blank-eyed psychotics sitting behind him. And the lifter was being piloted by a large pizza with extra cheese. Joel Kita liked it all about as much as could be expected.
At least he had been expecting it, this time. For once the GA hadn't sprung one of their exercises in chaos theory onto his life without warning. He'd seen it coming almost a week in advance, when they'd sprung one onto Ray Stericker instead. Ray had been in this very cockpit, watching the pizza being installed and no doubt wondering when the term "job security" had become an oxymoron.
"I'm supposed to baby-sit it for a week," he had said then. Joel had climbed up into the 'scaphe for the usual preflight check and found his friend waiting by the controls. Ray had gestured up through the open hatchway to the lifter's cockpit, where a couple of techs were busy interfacing something to the controls. "Just in case it screws up in the field. Then I'm gone."
"Gone where?" Joel couldn't believe it. Ray had been on the Juan de Fuca run forever, even before the geothermal program. He’d even been an employee, back when such things were commonplace.
"Probably the Gorda circuit for a while. After that, who knows? They'll be upgrading everything before long."
Joel glanced up through the hatch. The techs were playing with a square vanilla box, half a meter on a side and about twice as thick as Kita's wrist. "What is the fucking thing? Some kind of autopilot?"
"With a difference. This takes off and lands. And all sorts of lovely things in between."
This was not good news. Humans had always been able to integrate three-D spatial information better than the machines that kept trying to replace them. Not that machines couldn't recognize a tree or a building when such objects were pointed out to them, but they got real confused whenever you rotated any of those objects a few degrees. The shapes changed, contrast and shadow shifted, and it always took way too long for any of those arsenide pretenders to update its spatial maps and recognize that yes, it's still a tree, and no, it didn't morph into something else, dummy, you just changed your point of view.
In some places that wasn't a problem. Ocean surfaces, for example. Or controlled-access highways where the cars had their own ID transponders. Or even lashed to the underside of a giant squashed doughnut filled with buoyant vacuum, floating in mid-air. These had been respected and venerable environments for autopilots since well before the turn of the century.
Take-offs and landings were a different scene altogether, though. Too many real objects going by too fast, too many things to keep an eye on. A few billion years of natural selection still had the edge when the fast lane got that crowded.
Until now, apparently.
"Let's get out of here." Ray dropped down onto the landing pad. Joel followed him out to the edge of the roof. Green tangled blankets of kudzu4 spread out around them, shrouding the roofs of surrounding buildings. It always made Joel think post-apocalypse — weeds and ivy crawling back in from the wilderness to strangle the residue of some fallen civilization. Except, of course, these particular weeds were supposed to save civilization.
Way out by the coast, barely visible, streamers of smoke dribbled into the sky from the refugee strip. So much for civilization.
"It's one of those smart gels," Ray said at last.
"Smart gels?"
"Head cheese. Cultured brain cells on a slab. The same things they've been plugging into the Net to firewall infections."
"I know what they are, Ray. I just can't fucking believe it."
"Well, believe it. They'll be coming for you too, give 'em enough time."
"Yeah. Probably." Joel let it sink in. "I wonder when."
Ray shrugged. "You've got some breathing space. All that unpredictable volcanic shit, things blowing up under you. Nastier than flying a hoover. Harder to replace you."
He looked back at the lifter, and the 'scaphe nestled into its underbelly.
"Won't take long, though."
Joel fished a derm out of his pocket; a tricyclic with a mild lithium chaser. He held it out without a word.
Ray just spat. "Thanks anyway. I want to feel pissed for a while, you know?"
And now, eight days later, Ray Stericker was gone.
He'd disappeared after his last shift, just the day before. Joel had tried to track him down, drag him out, piss him up, but he hadn't been able to find the man on site and Ray wasn't answering his watch. So here was Joel Kita, back on the job, alone except for his cargo; four very strange people in black suits, blank white lenses covering their eyes. They all had identical GA logos stamped onto their shoulders, tags with their surnames printed just below. At least the surnames were different, although the difference seemed trivial; male, female, large or small, they all seemed minor variants of the same make and model. Ah yes, the Mk-5 was always such a nice boy. Kind of quiet, kept to himself. Who would've thought…
Joel had seen rifters before. He'd ferried a couple out to Beebe about a month ago, just after construction had ended. One of them had seemed almost normal, had gone out of her way to chat and joke around as if trying to compensate for the fact that she looked like a zombie. Joel had forgotten her name.
The other one hadn't said a word.
One of the 'scaphe's tactical screens beeped a progress report. "Bottom's rising again," Joel called back. "Thirty five hundred. We're almost there."
"Thanks," one of them — Fischer, according to his shoulder tag — said. Everyone else just sat there.
A pressure hatch separated the 'scaphe's cockpit from the passenger compartment. If you sealed it you could use the aft chamber as an airlock, or even pressurize it for saturation dives if you didn't mind the hassle of decompression. You could also just swing the hatch shut if you wanted a bit of privacy, if you didn't like leaving your back exposed to certain passengers. That would be bad manners, of course. Joel tried idly to think of some socially acceptable excuse for slamming that big metal disk in their faces, but gave up after a few moments.
Now, the dorsal hatch — the one leading up into the lifter's cockpit — that one was closed, and that felt wrong. Usually they kept it open until just before the drop. Ray and Joel would shoot the shit for however long the trip would take — three hours, if you were going to Channer.
Yesterday, without warning, Ray Stericker had dropped the hatch shut fifteen minutes into the flight. He hadn't said an unnecessary word the whole time, had barely even used the intercom. And today — well, today there wasn't anyone up there to talk to any more.
Joel looked out one of the side ports. The skin of the lifter blocked his view just a few centimeters on the other side; metal fabric stretched across carbon-fiber ribs, a gray expanse sucked into concave squares by the hard vacuum inside. The 'scaphe rode tucked into an oval hollow in the lifter's center. The only port that showed anything but gray skin was the one between Joel's feet; ocean, a long way down.
Not so far down now, though. He could hear the hisses and sighs of the lifter's ballast bags deflating overhead. Sharper sounds, more distant, cracked through the hull as electrical arcs heated the air in a couple of trim bags. This was still regular autopilot territory, but Ray used to do it all himself anyway. If it weren't for the closed hatch, Joel couldn't have told the difference.
The head cheese was doing a bang-up job.
He'd actually seen it a few days ago, during a delivery to an undersea rig just out of Gray's Harbor. Ray had hit a stud and the top of the box had slid away like white mercury, slipping back into a little groove at the edge of the casing and revealing a transparent panel underneath.
Beneath that panel, packed in clear fluid, was a ridged layer of goo, a bit too gray to be mozzarella. Dashes of brownish glass perforated the goo in neat parallel rows.
"I'm not supposed to open it up like this," Ray had said. "But fuck 'em. It's not as though the blighter's photosensitive."
"So what are those little brown bits?"
"Indium tin oxide over glass. Semiconductor."
"Jesus. And it's working right now?"
"Even as we speak."
"Jesus," Joel had said again. And then: "I wonder how you program something like this."
Ray had snorted at that. "You don't. You teach it. Learns through positive reinforcement, like a bloody baby."
A sudden, smooth shift in momentum. Joel pulled back to the present; the lifter was hanging stable, five meters over the waves. Right on target. Nothing but empty ocean on the surface, of course; Beebe's transponder was thirty meters straight down. Shallow enough to home in on, too deep to be a navigational hazard. Or to serve as a midwater hitching post for charter boats hunting Channer's legendary sea monsters.
The cheese printed out a word on the 'scaphe's tactical board: Launch?
Joel's finger wavered over the OK key, then came down. Docking latches clanked open; the lifter reeled Joel Kita and his cargo down to the water. Sunlight squinted through viewports for a few seconds as the 'scaphe swung in its harness. A wavetop batted at the forward port.
The world jerked once, slewed sideways, and turned green.
Joel opened the ballast tanks and looked back over his shoulder. "Going down, folks. Your last glimpse of sunlight. Enjoy it while you can."
"Thanks," said Fischer.
Nobody else moved.
Crush
Pre-adapted.
Even now, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, Fischer doesn't know what Scanlon meant by that.
He doesn't feel pre-adapted, not if that means he's supposed to be at home here. Nobody even talked to him on the way down. Nobody talked much to anyone else, either, but when they didn't talk to Fisher it seemed especially personal. And one of them, Brander— it's hard to tell with the eyecaps and all, but Fischer thinks Brander keeps looking at him, like they know each other from somewhere. Brander looks mean.
Everything's out in the open down here; pipes and cable bundles and ventilation ducts are all tacked onto the bulkheads in plain sight. He saw it on the vids before he came down, but those somehow left the impression of a brighter place, full of light and mirrors. The wall he's facing now, for instance; there should be a mirror there. But it's just a gray metal bulkhead with a greasy, unfinished sheen to it.
Fischer shifts his weight from one foot to the other. At one end of the lounge Lubin leans against a library pedestal, his capped eyes pointed at them with blank disinterest. Lubin's said only one thing to them in the five minutes they've been here:
"Clarke's still outside. She's coming in."
Something clanks under the floor. Water and nitrox mix, gurgling, nearby. The sound of a hatch swinging open, movement from below.
She climbs up into the lounge, droplets beading across her shoulders. Her diveskin paints her black below the neck, a skinny silhouette, almost sexless. Her hood is undone; blond hair, plastered against her skull, frames a face paler than Fischer's ever seen. Her mouth is a wide thin line. Her eyes, capped like his own, are blank white ovals in a child's face.
She looks around at them: Brander, Nakata, Caraco, Fischer. They look back, waiting. There's something in Nakata's face, Fischer thinks, something like recognition, but Lenie Clarke doesn't seem to notice. She doesn't seem to notice any of them, really.
She shrugs. "I'm changing the sodium on number two. A couple of you could come along, I guess."
She doesn't seem exactly human. There is something familiar about her, though.
What do you think, Shadow? Do I know her?
But Shadow isn't talking.
There's a street where none of the buildings have windows. The streetlamps shine down with a sick coppery light on masses of giant clams and big ropy brownish things emerging from mucous-gray cylinders (tube worms, he remembers: Riftia fuckinghugeous, or something). Natural chimneys rise here and there above the invertebrate multitudes, pillars of basalt and silicon and crystallized sulfur. Every time Fischer visits the Throat, he thinks of really bad acne.
Lenie Clarke leads them on a flight down Main Street: Fischer, Caraco, a couple of cargo squids on remote. The generators lean up over them on both sides. A dark curtain billows across the road directly ahead, and it sparkles. A school of small fish darts around the edges of the streaming cloud.
"That's the problem," Lenie buzzes. She looks back at Fischer and Caraco. "Mud plume. Too big to redirect."
They've come past eight generators so far. That leaves six up ahead, drowning in silt. Double shift, even if they call out Lubin and Brander.
He hopes they don't have to. Not Brander, anyway.
Lenie fins off towards the plume. The squids whine softly behind, dragging their tools. Fischer steels himself to follow.
"Shouldn't we check thermal?" Caraco calls out. "I mean, what if it's hot?"
He was wondering that himself, actually. He's been wondering about such things ever since he overheard Caraco and Nakata comparing rumors from the Mendocino fracture. Nakata heard it was a really old minisub, with Plexiglas ports. Caraco heard they were thermoacrylate. Nakata said it got wedged inside the center of the rift zone. Caraco said no, it was just cruising over the seabed and a smoker blew up under it.
They agreed on how fast the viewports melted, though. Even the skeletons went to ash. Which didn't make much difference anyway, since every bone in every body had already been smashed by the ambient pressure.
Caraco makes a lot of sense, in Fischer's opinion, but Lenie Clarke doesn't even answer. She just fins off into that black sparkly cloud and disappears. At the spot she disappears the mud glows suddenly, a phosphorescent wake. The fish swarm towards it.
"She doesn't even care, sometimes," Fischer buzzes softly. "Like, whether she lives or dies…"
Caraco looks at him for a moment, then kicks off towards the plume.
Clarke's voice buzzes out of the cloud. "Not much time."
Caraco dives into the roiling wall with a splash of light. A knot of fish— a couple of them are a fair size now, Fischer sees— swirl in her wake.
Go on, Shadow says.
Something moves.
He spins around. For a moment there's only Main Street, fading in distance.
Then something big and black and…and lopsided appears from behind one of the generators.
"Jeez." Fischer's legs move of their own volition. "They're coming!" he tries to yell. The vocoder scales it down to a croak.
Stupid. Stupid. They warned us, the sparkles bring in the little fish and the little fish bring in the big fish and if we don't watch it we just get in the way.
The plume is right in front of him now, a wall of sediment, a river on the bottom of the ocean. He dives in. Something nips lightly at his calf.
Everything goes black, with occasional sparkles. He turns his headlight on; the flowing mud swallows the beam half a meter from his face.
But Clarke can see it, somehow: "Turn it off."
"I can't see—"
"Good. Maybe they won't either."
He kills the light. In the darkness he gropes the gas billy from its sheath on his leg.
Caraco, from a distance: "I thought they were blind…"
"Some of them."
And they've got other senses to fall back on. Fischer runs through the list: smell, sound, pressure waves, bioelectric fields… Nothing relies on vision down here. It's just one of the options.
He hopes the plume blocks more than just light.
But even as he watches, the darkness is lifting. Black murk turns brown, then almost gray. Faint light filters in from the floodlamps on Main Street.
It's the eyecaps, he realizes. They're compensating. Cool.
He still can't see very far, though. It's like being caught in dirty fog.
"Remember." Clarke, very close. "They're not as tough as they look. They probably won't do much real damage."
A sonar pistol stutters nearby. "I'm not getting anything," Caraco buzzes. Milky sediment swirls on all sides. Fischer puts his arm out; it fades at the elbow.
"Oh shit." Caraco.
"Are you—"
"Something's on my leg something's Christ it's big—"
"Lenie—" Fischer cries.
A bump from behind. A slap on the back of his head. A shadow, black and spiny, fades into the murk.
Hey, that wasn't so—
Something clamps onto his leg. He looks down: jaws, teeth, a monstrous head fading away into the murk.
Oh Jeez—
He jams his billy against scaly flesh. Something gives, like gelatin. A soft thump. The flesh bloats, ruptures; bubbles explode from the rip.
Something else smashes him from behind. His chest is in a vise. He lashes out, blindly. Mud and ash and black blood billow into his face.
He grabs blindly, twists. There's a broken tooth in his hand, half as long as his forearm; he tightens his grip and it splinters. He drops it, brings the billy around and jams it into the thing on his side. Another explosion of meat and compressed CO2.
The pressure lifts from his chest. Whatever's clamped onto his leg isn't moving. Fischer lets himself sink, drifts down against the base of a barite chimney.
Nothing charges him.
"Everyone okay." Lenie's vocoded monotone. Fischer grunts yes.
"Thank God for bad nutrition," Caraco buzzes. "We're fucked if these guys ever get enough vitamins."
Fischer reaches down, pries the dead monster's jaws off his calf. He wishes he had breath to catch.
Shadow?
Right here.
Was this what it was like for you?
No. This didn't take so long.
He lies against the bottom and tries to shut his eyes. He can't; the diveskin bonds to the surface of the eyecaps, traps the eyelids in little cul-de-sacs. I'm sorry, Shadow. I'm so sorry.
I know, she says. It's okay.
Lenie Clarke stands naked in Medical, spraying the bruises on her leg. No, not naked; the caps are still on her eyes. All Fischer can see is skin.
It's not enough.
A trickle of blood crawls down her side from just below the water intake. She absently wipes it away and reloads the hypo.
Her breasts are small, almost adolescent, bumps. No hips. Her body's as pale as her face, except for the bruises and the fresh pink seams that access the implants. She looks anorexic.
She's the first adult Fischer's ever wanted.
She looks up and sees him in the doorway. "Strip down," she tells him, and goes back to work.
He splits his 'skin and starts to peel. Lenie finishes with her leg and stabs an ampoule into the cut in her side. The blood clots like magic.
"They warned us about the fish," Fischer says, "but they said they were really fragile. They said we could just beat them off with our hands if we had to."
Lenie sprays the cut in her side with a hypo, wipes off the residue. "You're lucky they told you that much." She pulls her diveskin tunic off a hanger, slides into it. "They barely mentioned the giantism when they sent us down."
"That's stupid. They must've known."
"They say this is the only vent where the fish get this big. That they've found, anyway."
"Why? What's so special here?"
Lenie shrugs.
Fischer has stripped to the waist. Lenie looks at him. "Leggings too. It got your calf, right?"
He shakes his head. "That's okay."
She looks down. His diveskin's only a couple of millimeters thick, it doesn't hide anything. He feels his erection going soft under her gaze.
Lenie's cold white eyes track back to his face. Fischer feels his face heating before he remembers: she can't see his eyes. No one can.
It's almost safe in here.
"Bruising's the biggest problem," Lenie says at last. "They don't puncture the diveskin all that often, but the force of the bite still gets through." Her hand is on his arm, firm and professional, probing the edges of Fischer's injury. It hurts, but he doesn't mind.
She uncaps a tube of anabolic salve. "Here. Rub this in."
The pain fades on contact. His flesh goes warm and tingly where he applies the ointment. He reaches out, a little bit scared, and touches Lenie's arm. "Thanks."
She twists out of reach without a word, bending down to seal the 'skin on her leg. Fischer watches the leggings slide up her body. They seem almost alive. They are almost alive, he remembers. The 'skin's got these reflexes, changes its permeability and thermal conductivity in response to body temperature. Maintains, what's the word, homeostasis.
Now he watches it swallowing Lenie's body like some slick black amoebae but she's showing through underneath, black ice instead of white but still the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. She's so far away. There's someone inside telling him to watch it—
— Go away, Shadow—
— but he can't help himself, he can almost touch her, she's bent over sealing her boots and his hand caresses the air just above her shoulder, traces the outline of her curved back so close it could feel her body heat if that stupid diveskin wasn't in the way, and—
And she straightens, bumping into his hand. Her face comes up; something burns behind her eyecaps. He pulls back but it's too late; her whole body's gone rigid and furious.
I just touched her. I didn't do anything wrong I just touched her—
She takes a single step forward. "Don't do that again," she says, her voice so flat he wonders for a second how her vocoder could work out of the water.
"I'm not—I didn't—"
"I don't care," she says. "Don't do it again."
Something moves at the corner of his eye. "Problem, Lenie? Need a hand?" Brander's voice.
She shakes her head. "No."
"Okay, then." Brander sounds disappointed. "I'll be upstairs."
Movement again. Sounds, receding.
"I'm sorry," Fischer says.
"Fine," Lenie says, and brushes past him into the wet room.
Autoclave
Nakata nearly bumps into her at the base of the ladder. Clarke glares; Nakata moves aside, baring teeth in a submissive primate smile.
Brander's in the lounge, pecking at the library: "You—?"
"I'm fine." She isn't, but she's getting there. This anger is nowhere near critical mass; it's just a reflex, really, a spark budded off from the main reservoir. It decays exponentially with elapsed time. By the time she reaches her cubby she's almost feeling sorry for Fischer.
Not his fault. He didn't mean any harm.
She closes the hatch behind her. It's safe to hit something now, if she wants. She looks around half-heartedly for a target, finally just drops onto her bunk and stares at the ceiling.
Someone raps on metal. "Lenie?"
She rises, pushes at the hatch.
"Hey Lenie, I think I've got a bad slave channel on one of the squids. I was wondering if you could—"
"Sure." Clarke nods. "Fine. Only not right now, okay, um—"
"Judy," says Caraco, sounding slightly miffed.
"Right. Judy." In fact, Clarke hasn't forgotten. But Beebe's way too crowded these days. Lately Clarke's learned to lose the occasional name. It helps keep things comfortably distant.
Sometimes.
"Excuse me," she says, brushing past Caraco. "I've got to get outside."
In a few places, the rift is almost gentle.
Usually the heat stabs up in boiling muddy pillars or jagged bolts of superheated liquid. Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass. Not here, though. In this one spot, nestled between lava pillows and safe from Beebe's prying ears, the heat wafts up through the mud like a soft breeze. The underlying bedrock must be porous.
She comes here when she can, keeping to the bottom en route to foil Beebe's sonar. The others don't know about this place yet; she'd just as soon keep it that way. Sometimes she comes here to watch convection stir the mud into lazy curlicues. Sometimes she splits the seals on her 'skin, basks face and arms in the thirty-degree seep.
Sometimes she just comes here to sleep.
She lies with the shifting mud at her back, staring up into blackness. This is how you fall asleep when you can't close your eyes; you stare into the dark, and when you start seeing things you know you're dreaming.
Now she sees herself, the high priestess of a new troglodyte society. She was the first one here, deep at peace while the others were still being cut open and reshaped by grubby Dryback hands. She's the founding mother, the template against which other, rawer recruits trace themselves. They come down and they see that her eyes are always capped, and they go and do likewise.
But she knows it isn't true. The rift is the real creative force here, a blunt hydraulic press forcing them all into shapes of its own choosing. If the others are anything like her it's because they're all being squeezed in the same mold.
And let's not forget the GA. If Ballard was right, they made sure we weren't too different to start with.
There are all the superficial differences, of course. A bit of racial diversity. Token beaters, token victims, males and females equally represented…
Clarke has to smile at that. Count on Management to jam a bunch of sexual dysfunctionals together and then make sure the gender ratio is balanced. Nice of them to try and see that nobody gets left out.
Except for Ballard, of course.
But at least they learn from their mistakes. Dozing at three thousand meters, Lenie Clarke wonders what their next one will be.
Sudden, stabbing pain in the eyes. She tries to scream; smart implants feel tongue and lips in motion, mistranslate:
"Nnnnaaaaah…"
She knows the feeling. She's had it once or twice before. She dives blindly on a random heading. The pain in her head leaps from intense to unbearable.
"Aaaaaa—"
She twists back in the opposite direction. A bit better. She trips her headlamp, kicking as hard as she can. The world turns from black to solid brown. Zero viz. Mud seething on all sides. Somewhere close by she hears rocks splitting open.
Her headlamp catches the outcropping looming up a split second before she hits it. The shock rocks her skull, runs down her spine like a small earthquake. There's a different flavor of pain up there now, mingling with the searing in her eyes. She gropes blindly around the obstacle, keeps going. Her body feels— warm—
It takes a lot of heat to get through a diveskin, especially a class four. Those things are built for thermal stress.
Eyecaps, on the other hand…
Black. The world is black again, and clear. Clarke's headlamp stabs out across open space, lays a jiggling footprint on the mud a good ten meters away.
The view's still rippling, though.
The pain seems to be fading. She can't be sure. So many nerves have been screaming for so long that even the echoes are torture. She clutches her head, still kicking; the movement twists her around to face the way she came.
Her secret hideaway has exploded into a wall of mud and sulfur compounds, boiling up from the seabed. Clarke checks her thermister; 45 °C, and she's a good ten meters away. Boiled fish skeletons spin in the thermals. Geysers hiss further in, unseen.
The seep must have burst through the crust in an instant; any flesh caught in that eruption would have boiled off the bone before anything as elaborate as a flight reflex could cut in. A shudder shakes Clarke's body. Another one.
Just luck. Just stupid luck I was far enough away. I could be dead now. I could be dead I could be dead I could be dead—
Nerves fire in her thorax; she doubles over. But you can't sob without breathing. You can't cry with your eyes pinned open. The routines are all there, stuttering into action after years of dormancy, but the pieces they work on have all been changed. The whole body wakes up in a straitjacket.
— dead dead dead—
That small, remote part of her kicks in, the part she saves for these occasions. It wonders, off in the distance, at the intensity of her reaction. This was hardly the first time that Lenie Clarke thought she was going to die.
But this was the first time in years that it seemed to matter.
Waterbed
Taking off his diveskin is like gutting himself.
He can't believe how much he's come to depend on it, how hard it is to come out from inside. The eyecaps are even harder. Fischer sits on his pallet, staring at the sealed hatch while Shadow whispers it's okay, you're alone, you're safe. Half an hour goes by before he can bring himself to believe her.
Finally, when he bares his eyes, the cubby lights are so dim he can hardly see. He turns them up until the room is twilit. The eyecaps sit in the palm of his hand, pale and opaque in the semidarkness, like jellied circles of eggshell. It's strange to blink without feeling them under his eyelids. He feels so exposed.
He has to do it, though. It's part of the process. That's what this is all about; opening yourself up.
Lenie's in her cubby, just centimeters away. If it wasn't for this bulkhead Fischer could reach right out and touch her.
This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow said way back then. So he does it now, to himself. For Shadow.
Thinking about Lenie.
Sometimes he thinks Lenie's the only other real person on the whole rift. The others are robots; glass robot eyes, matte black robot bodies, lurching through programmed routines that do nothing but keep other, bigger machines running. Even their names sound mechanical. Nakata. Caraco.
Not Lenie, though. There's someone inside her 'skin, her eyes may be glassed-in but they're not glass. She's real. Fischer knows he can touch her.
Of course, that's why he keeps getting into trouble. He keeps touching. But Lenie would be different, if only he could break through. She's more like Shadow than all the others ever were. Older, though.
No older than I'd be now, Shadow murmurs, and maybe that's it.
His mouth moves — I'm so sorry, Lenie— and no sound comes out. Shadow doesn't correct him.
This is what you do, she'd said, and then she'd begun to cry. As Fischer cries now. As he always does, when he comes.
The pain wakes him, sometime later. He's curled up on the pallet, and something's cutting into his cheek: a little piece of broken glass.
A mirror.
He stares at it, confused. A silver glass shard with a dark bloody tip, like a small tooth. There's no mirror in his cubby.
He reaches up and touches the bulkhead behind his pillow. Lenie's there, Lenie's just the other side. But here, on this side there's a dark line, a rim of shadow he never noticed before. His eyes follow it around the edge of the wall, a gap about half a centimeter wide. Here and there little bits of glass are still wedged into that space.
There used to be a mirror covering this whole bulkhead. Just like Scanlon's vids. And it wasn't just removed, judging from the little fragments left behind. Somebody smashed it out.
Lenie. She went through the whole station, before the rest of them came down, and she smashed all the mirrors. He doesn't know why he's so sure, but somehow it seems like exactly the sort of thing Lenie Clarke would do when no one was looking.
Maybe she doesn't like to see herself. Maybe she's ashamed.
Go talk to her, Shadow says.
I can't.
Yes you can. I'll help you.
He picks up the tunic of his 'skin. It slithers around his body, its edges fusing together along the midline of his chest. He steps over the sleeves and leggings still spilled across the deck, reaches down for his eyecaps.
Leave them there.
No!
Yes.
I can't, she'll see me…
That's what you want, isn't it? Isn't it?
She doesn't even like me, she'll just—
Leave them. I said I'll help you.
He leans against the closed hatch, eyes shut, his breathing loud and rapid in his ears.
Go on. Go on.
The corridor outside is in deep twilight. Fischer moves along it to Lenie's sealed hatch. He touches it, afraid to knock.
From behind, someone taps his shoulder.
"She's out," Brander says. His 'skin is done right up to his neck, arms and legs completely sealed. His capped eyes are blank and hard. And there's the usual edge in his voice, that same familiar tone saying Just give me an excuse, asshole, just do anything…
Maybe he wants Lenie too.
Don't get him mad, Shadow says.
Fischer swallows. "I just wanted to talk to her."
"She's out."
"Okay. I'll…I'll try later."
Brander reaches out, pokes Fischer's face. His finger comes away sticky.
"You're cut," he says.
"It's nothing. I'm okay."
"Too bad."
Fischer tries to edge past Brander to his own cubby. The corridor pushes them together.
Brander clenches his fists. "Don't you fucking touch me."
"I'm not, I'm just trying to— I mean…" Fischer falls silent, glances around. No one else anywhere.
Deliberately, Brander relaxes.
"And for Christ's sake put your eyes back in," he says. "Nobody wants to look in there."
He turns and walks away.
They say Lubin sleeps out here. Lenie too, sometimes, but Lubin hasn't slept in his bunk since the rest of them came down. He keeps his headlight off, and he stays away from the lit part of the Throat, and nothing bothers him. Fischer heard Nakata and Caraco talking about it on the last shift.
It's starting to sound like a good idea. The less time he spends in Beebe these days, the better.
The station is a dim faraway blotch, glowing to Fischer's left. Brander's in there. He goes on duty in three hours. Fischer figures he can just stay out here until then. He doesn't really need to go inside much. None of them do. There's a little desalinator piggybacked on his electrolyser in case he gets thirsty, and a bunch of flaps and valves that do things he doesn't want to think about, when he has to piss or take a dump.
He's getting a bit hungry, but he can wait. He's fine out here as long as nothing attacks him.
Brander just won't let him alone. Fischer doesn't know what Brander's got against him—
Oh yes you do, says Shadow.
— but he knows that look. Brander wants him to fuck up real bad.
The others keep out of it, for the most part. Nakata, the nervous one, just keeps out of everyone's way. Caraco acts like she couldn't care less if he boiled alive in a smoker. Lubin just sits there, looking at the floor and smoldering; even Brander leaves him alone.
And Lenie. Lenie's cold and distant as a mountaintop. No, Fischer's not getting any help with Brander. So when it comes to a choice between the monsters out here or the one in there, it's an easy call.
Caraco and Nakata are doing a hull check back at the station. Their distant voices buzz distractingly along Fischer's jaw. He shuts his receiver off and settles down behind an outcropping of basalt pillows.
Later, he can't remember drifting off.
"Listen, cocksucker. I just did two shifts end to end because you didn't show up for work when you were supposed to. Then half another shift looking for you. We thought you were in trouble. We assumed you were in trouble. Don't tell me—"
Brander pushes Fischer up against the wall.
"Don't tell me," he says again, "that you weren't. You don't want to say that."
Fischer looks around the ready room. Nakata watches from the opposite bulkhead, jumpy as a cat. Lubin rattles around in the equipment lockers, his back to the proceedings. Caraco racks her fins and edges past them to the ladder.
"Carac—"
Brander slams him hard against the wall.
Caraco, her foot on the bottom rung, turns and watches for a moment. A smile ghosts across her face. "Don't look at me, Gerry my man. This is your problem." She climbs away overhead.
Brander's face hovers a few centimeters away. His hood is still sealed, except for the mouth flap. His eyes look like translucent glass balls embedded in black plastic. He tightens his grip.
"So, cocksucker?"
"I'm…sorry—" Fischer stammers.
"You're sorry." Brander glances over his shoulder, includes Nakata in the joke. "He's sorry."
Nakata laughs, too loudly.
Lubin clanks in the locker, still ignoring them all. The airlock begins cycling.
"I don't think," Brander says, raising his voice over the sudden gurgle, "that you're sorry enough."
The 'lock swings open. Lenie Clarke steps out, fins in one hand. Her blank eyes sweep across the room; they don't pause at Fischer. She carries her fins to the drying rack without a word.
Brander punches Fischer in the stomach. Fischer doubles over, gasping; his head smashes into the airlock hatch. He can't catch his breath. The deck scrapes his cheek. Brander's boot is almost touching his nose.
"Hey." Lenie's voice, distant, not particularly interested.
"Hey yourself, Lenie. He's got it coming."
"I know." A moment passes. "Still."
"Judy got nailed by a viperfish, looking for him. She could've been killed."
"Maybe." Lenie sounds as if she's very tired. "So why isn't Judy here?"
"I'm here," Brander says.
Fischer's lung is working again. Gulping air, he pushes himself up against the bulkhead. Brander glares at him. Lubin's back in the room now, just off to one side. Watching.
Lenie stands in the middle of the ready room. She shrugs.
"What?" Brander demands.
"I don't know." She glances indifferently at Fischer. "It's just, he…he just fucked up. He didn't mean any har—"
She stops. Fischer gets the sense that she's looking straight through him, through the bulkhead, right out into the abyss itself to something only she can see. Whatever it is, she doesn't like it much.
"Ah, fuck it." She heads for the ladder. "None of my business anyway."
Lenie, please…
Brander turns back to Fischer as she climbs out of sight. Fischer stares back. Endless seconds go by. Brander's fist hovers in mid-air.
It lashes out almost too fast to see. Fischer reels, catches himself on a conduit. Lights swarm across his left eye. He blinks them away, hanging onto the bulkhead. Everything hurts.
Brander unclenches his fist. "Lenie's way too nice," he remarks, flexing his fingers. "Personally, I don't care whether you meant any harm or not."
Doppelgänger
Beebe's almost as soundproof as the inside of an echo chamber.
Lenie Clarke sits on her bunk and listens to the walls. She can't hear any actual words, but a sudden impact of flesh against metal was clear enough a few minutes ago. Now, low voices converse out in the lounge. Water gurgles through a pipe somewhere.
She thinks she hears something moving downstairs.
She lays her ear against a random pipe. Nothing. Another; a hiss of compressed gas. A third; the faint, tinny echo of slow footsteps, scraping across the lower deck. After a moment a muted hum vibrates through the plumbing.
The medical scanner.
It's none of my business. It's between them. Brander's got his reasons, and Fischer—
He didn't mean any harm.
Fischer's nothing. He's a pathetic, twisted asshole, nobody's problem but his own. It's too bad he gets under Brander's skin like that, but life's not guaranteed to be fair. No one knows that better than Lenie Clarke. She knows what it's like. She remembers the fists out of nowhere, the million little things you didn't even know you'd done wrong until it was too late. Nobody helped her. She'd managed, though. Sex worked, sometimes, as a diversionary tactic. Other times you just had to run.
He didn't mean any harm.
She shakes her head.
Well I fucking didn't either!
The sound sinks in before the pain does. A dull, solid thud, like a fish hitting a floodlight. Blood oozes from the torn skin of her knuckles, the droplets almost black to her filtered vision. The stinging that follows is a welcome distraction.
The bulkhead, of course, is completely unmarked.
Out in the lounge, the conversation has stopped. Clarke sits rigid on the pallet, sucking her hand. Eventually, the voices start up again.
Almost time to go on shift with Nakata and Brander. Clarke looks around her cubby, hesitating. There's something she has to do before she opens the hatch, something important, and she can't quite remember what it is. Her eyes keep coming back to the same wall, looking for something that isn't—
The mirror. For some reason, she wants to see what she looks like. That's odd. She can't remember feeling that way for — well, for a long time. But it's no big deal. She'll just sit here until the feeling goes away. She doesn't have to step outside, she doesn't even have to stand up, until she feels normal again.
When in doubt, stay out of sight.
"Alice?"
The hatch is closed. There's no answer.
"She's in there." Brander stands at the end of the corridor, the lounge behind him. "She didn't go in more than ten minutes ago."
Clarke knocks again, harder. "Alice? It's almost time."
Brander turns on his heel — "I'll go get our stuff together." — and steps out of sight.
Beebe's hatches do not lock, for safety reasons. Still, Clarke hesitates. She knows how she'd feel if someone just walked into her private space without being invited.
But she said she was up for another shift. And I did knock…
She spins the wheel in the center of the hatch. The mimetic seal around the rim softens and retracts. Clarke pulls the hatch open, peers inside.
Alice Nakata lies twitching on her bunk, eyes closed, 'skin partially peeled. Leads trail from insertion points on her face and wrists, drape away to a lucid dreamer on the bedside shelf.
She goes to sleep ten minutes before her shift starts? It doesn't make sense. Besides, Nakata was just downstairs with the rest of them. With Fischer. How could anyone fall asleep after that?
Clarke steps closer, studies the telltales on the device; induced REM's cranked to maximum and the alarm's disabled. Nakata would have been out in seconds. Hell, at those settings she'd drift off in the middle of a gang-rape.
Lenie Clarke nods approvingly. Nice trick.
Reluctantly, she touches the wake-up stud. Sleep drains from Nakata's face; her expression changes abruptly. Asian eyes flicker, open wide and dark.
Clarke steps back, startled. Alice Nakata has taken her eyecaps off.
"Time to go, Alice" she says softly. "Sorry to wake you…"
She is, too. She's never seen Nakata smile before. It would have been nice if it could have lasted.
Brander's sealing a broadband sensor into its casing when Clarke drops into the lounge. "She'll catch up with us," she tells him, and turns to the drying rack for her fins.
Directly in front of her, the Med hatch is sealed. No sounds, human or mechanical, filter through from inside.
"Oh yeah. He's still in there." Brander raises his voice a fraction. "Good fucking thing, too, while I'm around."
"He didn't m—" Shut up! Shut the fuck up!
"Lenie?"
She turns to see his hand dropping away. Brander's actually a lot more touchy-feely than you'd expect, sometimes he almost forgets himself around her.
But it's okay. He doesn't mean any harm either.
"Nothing," Clarke says, grabbing her fins.
Brander carries the sensor over to the airlock, drops it in with some other trinkets and cycles them through. Gurgles and clunks accompany their passage into the abyss.
"Only—"
He looks at her, his face framing a question around empty eyes.
"What have you got against Fischer?" she says, nearly whispering.
You know exactly what he's got against Fischer. It's none of your business. Stay out of it.
Brander's face hardens like setting cement. "He's a fucking freak. He diddles little kids."
I know. "Who says?"
"Nobody has to say. I can see his kind coming ten klicks away."
"If you say so." Clarke listens to her own voice. Cool. Distant, almost bored. Good.
"He looks at me funny. Hell, have you seen the way he looks at you?" Metal clanks against metal. "If he so much as touches me I'll fucking kill him."
"Yeah. Well, it wouldn't take much. He just sits there and takes whatever you dish out, you know, he's so— passive…"
Brander snorts. "Why do you care, anyway? He creeps you out as much as the rest of us. I saw what happened in Medical last week."
The airlock hisses. A green light flashes on its side
"I don't know," Lenie says. "You're right, I guess. I know what he is."
Brander swings the 'lock open and steps inside. Clarke holds the edge of the hatch.
"There's something else, though," she says, almost to herself. "Something's— missing. He doesn't fit."
"None of us fits," Brander growls. "That's the whole fucking point."
She closes the hatch. There's enough room for two in there — the other rifters generally drop out in pairs — but she prefers to go through alone. It's a small thing. Nobody comments on it.
Not his fault. Not Brander's, not Fischer's. Not dad's. Not mine.
Nobody's fucking fault.
The airlock flushes beside her.
Angel
The seabed is glowing. Cracks in the rock flicker comforting shades of orange, like hot coals, and he knows that's thermal; the scalding rivulets feel warm even through his 'skin, his thermister leaps around every time the current twitches. But there are places here where the rocks shine green, and others where they shine blue. He doesn't know whether to thank biology or geochemistry. All he knows is that it's beautiful. It's a city from high up, at night. It's a vid of the northern lights he saw once, only sharper and brighter. It's a brush fire in emeralds.
In a way he's almost grateful to Brander. If it weren't for Brander he'd never have come upon this place. He'd be sitting in Beebe with the rest of them, hooked into the library or hiding in his cubby, safe and dry.
But Beebe's no refuge with Brander inside. Beebe's a gauntlet. So today Fischer just stayed away when his shift ended, crawled off across the ocean floor, exploring. Now, somewhere far from the Throat, he discovers real sanctuary.
Don't fall asleep, Shadow says. If you miss your shift again it'll just give him an excuse.
So what? He won't find me out here.
You can't stay outside forever. You've got to eat sometime.
I know, I know. Be quiet.
He's the only person to have ever seen this place. How long has it been here? How many millions of years has this little oasis been glowing peacefully in the night, a pocket universe all to itself?
Lenie would like it out here, Shadow says.
Yeah.
A rattail cruises into view about half a meter up, its underside a jigsaw of reflected color. It thrashes once, suddenly; violent shivers run the length of its body. The water around it shimmers with heat distortion. The fish spins lopsidedly, tail-down, in the wake of the little eruption. Its body turns white in seconds, begins to fray at the edges.
Four hundred eight degrees Centigrade: that's maximum recorded temperature for hot seeps on the Juan de Fuca rift. Fischer thinks back for the temperature rating on diveskin copolymer.
One fifty.
He sculls up into the water column a bit, just in case. As soon as he clears bottom clutter he feels the faint, regular tapping of Beebe's sonar against his insides.
That's odd. This far out, he shouldn't be able to feel the signal, not unless they'd really cranked it up. And they wouldn't do that unless—
He checks the time.
Oh no. Not again.
By the time he makes it back to the Throat they're halfway through stripping number four. They open a space on the line for him. Lenie doesn't want to hear his apologies. She doesn't want to talk to him at all. That hurts, but Fischer can't really blame her. Maybe he can make it up to her soon. Maybe he can take her sightseeing.
It's not Brander's shift, thank God. He's back at Beebe. But Fischer's getting hungry again.
Maybe he's in his cubby. Maybe I can just eat and go to bed. Maybe—
He's sitting right there, all alone in the lounge, glaring up from his meal as soon as Fischer climbs into the room.
Don't get him mad.
Too late. He's always mad.
"I— thought we should clear some things up," he tries.
"Fuck off."
Fischer reaches the galley table, pulls out a chair.
"Don't bother," Brander says.
"Look, this place is small enough as it is. We've got to at least try to get along, you know? I mean, that's assault. It's illegal."
"So arrest me."
"Maybe you're not really mad at me at all," Fischer stops for a moment, surprised. Maybe that's it. "Maybe you've mixed me up with someone—"
Brander stands up.
Fischer pushes on: "Maybe someone else did something to you, once, and—"
Brander comes around the table, very deliberately.
"I haven't got you mixed up with anybody. I know exactly what you are."
"No, you don't, we never even saw each other until a couple of weeks ago!" Of course that's it. It's not me at all, it's someone else! "Whatever happened to you—"
"Is none of your fucking business, and if you say one more word I'll fucking kill you."
Let's just go, Shadow pleads. Let's leave, this is only making things worse.
But Fisher stands his ground. Suddenly everything seems so clear. "It wasn't me," he says quietly. "What happened— I'm sorry. But it wasn't me, you know it wasn't."
For a moment he thinks he might actually be getting through. Brander's face untwists a little, the knots of flesh and eyebrow unkinking just a bit around those featureless white eyes, and Fischer can almost see that face wearing something other than rage.
But then he feels something moving, it's his own arm reaching out Shadow no you'll ruin everything but Shadow's not listening, she's crooning Don't get him mad, don't get him mad don't get him mad—
This is what you do.
The growl starts low in Brander's throat, rising, like a distant wave pushed higher and higher out of the sea as it rushes shoreward.
"…don't you Fucking TOUCH ME!"
And nothing goes dead fast enough.
It stings at first. Then he feels clotted blood break around his eyelid, sees a fuzzy line of red light. He tries to bring his hand to his face. It hurts.
Something cold and wet, soothing. More clots come away.
"Nnnnnn…"
Someone is poking at his eyes. He tries to struggle, but all he can do is move his head feebly from side to side. That hurts even more.
"Don't move."
Lenie's voice.
"Your right eyecap's damaged. It could be gouging your cornea."
He relents. Lenie's fingers push between lids that feel as puffy as pillows. There's a sudden pressure on his eyeball, a tug of suction. A slurping sound, and the feel of ragged edges dragged across his pupil.
The world goes dark. "Hang on," Lenie says. "I'll turn up the lights."
There's still a reddish tinge to everything, but at least he can see.
He's in his cubby. Lenie Clarke leans over him, a bit of glistening wet membrane in one hand.
"You were lucky. He'd have ripped your costochondrals if your implants hadn't been packed in behind them." She drops the ruined cap out of sight, picks up a cartridge of liquid skin. "As it is, he only broke a couple of ribs. Lots of bruises. Mild concussion, maybe, but you'll have to go to Medical to be sure. Oh, and I'm pretty sure he broke your cheekbone too."
She sounds as if she’s reading a grocery list.
“Why not—” Warm salt floods his mouth. His tongue does some careful exploring; his teeth are still intact, at least. “—in Medical, now?”
“It would have been a bitch getting you down the ladder. Brander wasn’t going to help. Everyone else is outside.” She sprays foam across his bicep. It pulls his skin as it dries.
“Not that they’d be any help,” she adds.
“Thanks…”
“I didn’t do anything. Just dragged you in here, basically.”
He wants desperately to touch her.
“What is it with you, Fischer?” she asks after a while. "Why don't you ever fight back?"
"Wouldn’t work."
"Are you kidding? You know how big you are? You could take Brander apart if you just stood up to him."
Shadow says it only makes things worse. You fight back, it only gets them madder.
"Shadow?" Lenie says.
"What?"
"You said—"
“Didn’t say anything…”
She watches him for a few moments.
"Okay," she says at last. She stands up. “I'll call up and send for a replacement."
“No. That’s okay.”
“You’re injured, Fischer."
Medical tutorials whisper inside his head. “We've got stuff downstairs."
"You still wouldn't be able to work for a week. More than twice that before you'd be fully healed."
"They planned for accidents. When they set up the schedules."
"And how are you going to keep clear of Brander until then?"
"I'll stay outside more," he says. "Please, Lenie."
She shakes her head. "You're crazy, Fischer." She turns to the hatch, undogs it. "None of my business, of course. I just don't think—"
Turns back.
“Do you like it down here?” she asks.
“What?”
“Do you get off, being down here?”
It should be a stupid question. Especially now. Somehow it isn’t.
“Sort of,” he says at last, realizing it for the first time.
She nods, blinking over white space. “Dopamine rush.”
“Dopa—?”
“They say we get hooked on it. Being down here. Being— scared, I guess.” She smiles faintly. “That’s the rumor, anyway.”
Fischer thinks about that. “Not so much I get off on it. More like, just used to it. You know?”
“Yeah.” She turns and pushes the hatch open. “For sure.”
There's this praying mantis a meter long, all black with chrome trim, hanging upside-down from the ceiling of the medical cubby. It's been sleeping up there ever since Fischer first arrived. Now it hovers over his face, jointed arms clicking and dipping like crazy articulated chopsticks. Every now and then one of its feelers winks red light, and Fischer can smell the scent of his own flesh cauterizing. It kind of bothers him. What's even worse is, he can't move his head. The neuroinduction field in the Med table has got him paralyzed from the neck up. He keeps wondering what would happen if the focus slipped, if that damping energy ended up pointing at his lungs. At his heart.
The mantis stops in midmotion, its antennae quivering. It keeps completely still for a few seconds. "Hello, er— Gerry, isn't it?" it says at last. "I'm Dr. Troyka."
It sounds like a woman.
"How are we doing here?" Fischer tries to answer, but his head and neck are still just so much dead meat. "No, don't try to answer," the mantis says, "Rhetorical question. I'm checking your readouts now."
Fischer remembers: the medical equipment can't always do everything on its own. Sometimes, when things get too complicated, it calls up the line to a human backup.
"Wow," says the mantis. "What happened to you? No, don't answer that either. I don't want to know." An accessory arm springs into sight and passes back and forth across Fischer's line of sight. "I'm going to override the damping field for a moment. It might hurt a bit. Try not to move when that happens, except to answer my questions."
Pain floods across Fischer's face. It's not too bad. Familiar, even. His eyelids feel scratchy, and his tongue is dry. He tries blinking; it works. He closes his mouth, rubs his tongue against swollen cheeks. Better.
"I don't suppose you want to come back up?" Dr. Troyka asks, hundreds of kilometers away. "You know these injuries are bad enough to warrant a recall."
Fischer shakes his head. "That's okay. I can stay here."
"Uh huh." The mantis doesn't sound surprised. "I've been hearing that a fair bit lately. Okay, I'm going to wire your cheekbone back together, and I'll be planting a little battery under your skin. Just below the right eye. It'll basically kick your bone cells into overdrive, speed up the healing process. It's just a couple of millimeters across, you'll feel like you've got sort of a hard pimple. It may itch, but try not to pick at it. When you're healed up you can just squeeze it out like a zit. Okay?"
"Okay."
"All right, Gerry. I'm going to turn the field back on and get to work." The mantis whirrs in anticipation.
Fischer holds up a hand. "Wait."
"What is it, Gerry?"
"What…what time is it, up there?" he asks.
"It's oh five ten. Pacific daylight. Why?"
"It's early."
"Sure is."
"I guess I got you up," Fischer says. "Sorry."
"Nonsense." Digits on the end of mechanical arms wiggle absently. "I've been up for hours. Graveyard shift."
"Graveyard?"
"We're on duty around the clock, Gerry. There's a lot of geothermal stations out there, you know. You— you keep us pretty busy, as a rule."
"Oh," Fischer says. "Sorry."
"Forget it. It's my job." There's a humming, somewhere in the back of his head; for a moment Fischer can feel the muscles of his face going slack. Then everything goes numb, and the mantis swoops down him like a predator.
He knows better than to open up outside.
It doesn't kill you, not right away. But seawater's a lot saltier than blood; let it inside and osmosis sucks the water from the epithelial cells, shrivels them down to viscous little blobs. Rifter kidneys are modified to speed up water reclamation when that happens, but it's not a long-term solution and it costs. Organs wears out faster, urine turns to oil. It's best to just keep sealed up. Your insides soak in seawater too long, they sort of corrode, implants or no implants.
But that's another one of Fischer's problems. He never takes the long view.
The face seal is a single macromolecule fifty centimeters long. It wraps back and forth along the line of the jaw like the two sides of a zipper, with hydrophobic side-chains for teeth. A little blade on the index of Fischer's left glove can split them apart. He runs it along the seal and the 'skin opens neatly around his mouth.
He doesn't feel much of anything at first. He was half-expecting the ocean to charge up his nose and burn his sinuses, but of course all his body cavities are already packed with isotonic saline. The only immediate change is that his face gets cold, numbing the chronic ache of torn flesh a bit. Deeper pain pulses under one eye, where Dr. Troyka's wires hold the bones of his face together; microelectricity tingles along those lines, press-gangs bonebuilding osteoblasts into high gear.
After a couple of moments he tries to gargle; that doesn't work, so he settles for gaping like a fish and wriggling his tongue around. That does it. He gets his first taste of raw ocean, coarse and saltier than the stuff that pumps him up inside.
On the seabed in front of him, a swarm of blind shrimp feeds in the current from a nearby vent. Fischer can see right through them. They're like little chunks of glass with blobs of organs jiggling around inside.
It must be fourteen hours since he's eaten, but there's no fucking way he's going back to Beebe with Brander still inside. The last time he tried, Brander was actually standing guard in the lounge, waiting for him.
What the hell. It's just like krill. People eat this stuff all the time.
They have a strange taste. Fischer's mouth is going numb from the cold, but there's still a faint sense of rotten eggs, dilute and barely detectable. Not bad other than that, though. Better than Brander by a long shot.
When the convulsions hit fifteen minutes later, he's not so sure.
"You look like shit," Lenie says.
Fischer hangs onto the railing, looks around the lounge. "Where—"
"At the Throat. On shift with Lubin and Caraco."
He makes it to the couch.
"Haven't seen you for a while," Lenie remarks. "How's your face doing?"
Fischer squints at her through a haze of nausea. Lenie Clarke is actually making small talk. She's never done that before. He's still trying to figure out why when his stomach clamps down again and he pitches onto the floor. By now nothing comes up but a few dribbles of sour fluid.
His eyes trace the pipes tangling along the ceiling. After a while Lenie's face blocks the view, looking down from a great height.
"What's wrong?" She seems to be asking out of idle curiosity, no more.
"Ate some shrimp," he says, and retches again.
"You ate— from outside?" She bends down and pulls him up. His arms drag along behind on the deck. Something hard bumps his head; the railing around the downstairs ladder.
"Fuck," Lenie says.
He's on the floor again, alone. Receding footsteps. Dizziness. Something presses against his neck, pricks him with a soft hiss.
His head clears almost instantly.
Lenie's leaning in, closer than she's ever been. She's even touching him, she's got one hand on his shoulder. He stares down at that hand, feeling a stupid sort of wonder, but then she pulls it away.
She's holding a hypo. Fischer's stomach begins to settle.
"Why," she says softly, "would you do a stupid thing like that?"
"I was hungry."
"So what's wrong with the dispenser?"
He doesn't answer.
"Oh," Lenie says. "Right."
She stands up and snaps the spent cartridge out of the hypo. "This can't go on, Fischer. You know that."
"He hasn't got me in two weeks."
"He hasn't seen you in two weeks. You only come in when he's on shift. And you're missing your own shifts more and more. Doesn't make you too popular with the rest of us." She cocks her head as Beebe creaks around them. "Why don't you just call up and get them to take you home?"
Because I do things to children, and if I leave here they'll cut me open and change me into something else…
Because there are things outside that almost make it worthwhile…
Because of you…
He doesn't know if she'd understand any of those reasons. He decides not to risk it.
"Maybe you could talk to him," he manages.
Lenie sighs. "He wouldn't listen."
"Maybe if you tried, at least—"
Her face hardens. "I have tried. I—"
She catches herself.
"I can't get involved," she whispers. "It's none of my business."
Fischer closes his eyes. He feels as if he's going to cry. "He just doesn't let up. He really hates me."
"It's not you. You're just— filling in."
"Why did they put us together? It doesn't make sense!"
"Sure it does. Statistically."
Fischer opens his eyes. "What?"
Lenie's pulling one hand down across her face. She seems very tired.
"We're not people here, Fischer. We're a cloud of data points. Doesn't matter what happens to you or me or Brander, just as long as the mean stays where it's supposed to and the standard deviation doesn't get too big."
Tell her, Shadow says.
"Lenie—"
"Anyway." Lenie shrugs the mood away. "You're crazy to eat anything that near a rift zone. Didn't you learn about hydrogen sulfide?"
He nods. "Basic training. The vents spit it out."
"And it builds up in the benthos. They're toxic. Which I guess you know now anyway."
She starts down the ladder, stops on the second rung.
"If you really want to go native, try feeding further from the rift. Or go for the fish."
"The fish?"
"They move around more. Don't spend all their time soaking in the hot springs. Maybe they're safe."
"The fish," he says again. He hadn't thought of that.
"I said maybe."
Shadow I'm so sorry…
Shush. Just look at all the pretty lights.
So he looks. He knows this place. He's on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He's back in fairyland. He thinks he comes here a lot now, watches the lights and bubbles, listens to the deep rocks grinding against each other.
Maybe he'll stay this time, watch the whole thing working, but then he remembers he's supposed to be somewhere else. He waits, but nothing specific comes to him. Just a feeling that he should be doing something somewhere else. Soon.
It's getting harder to stay here anyway. There's a vague pain hanging around his upper body somewhere, fading in and out. After a while he realizes what it is. His face hurts.
Maybe this beautiful light is hurting his eyes.
That can't be right. His caps should take care of all that. Maybe they're not working. He seems to remember something that happened to his eyes a while back, but it doesn't really matter. He can always just leave. Suddenly, wonderfully, all of his problems have easy answers.
If the light hurts, all he has to do is stay in the dark.
Feral
"Hey," Caraco buzzes as they come around the corner. "Number four."
Clarke looks. Four's fifteen meters away and the water's a bit murky this shift. Still, she can see something big and dark sticking to the intake vent. Its shadow twitches down along the casing like an absurdly stretched black spider.
Clarke fins forward a few meters, Caraco at her side. The two women exchange looks.
Fischer, hanging upside down against the mesh. It's been four days since anyone's seen him.
Clarke gently sets down her carry bag; Caraco follows her lead. Two or three kicks bring them to within five meters of the intake. Machinery hums omnipresently, makes a sound deep enough to feel.
He's facing away from them, drifting from side to side, tugged by the gentle suction of the intake vent. The vent's grillwork is fuzzy with rooted growing things; small clams, tube worms, shadow crabs. Fischer pulls squirming clumps from the intake, leaves them to drift or to fall to the street below. He's cleaned maybe two meters square so far.
It's nice to see he still takes some duties seriously.
"Hey. Fischer," Caraco says.
He spins around as if shot. His forearm flails toward Clarke's face; she raises her own just in time. In the next instant he's bowled past her. She kicks, steadies herself. Fischer's heading for the darkness without looking back.
"Fischer," Clarke calls out. "Stop. It's okay."
He stops kicking for a moment, looks back over his shoulder.
"It's me," she buzzes. "And Judy. We won't hurt you."
Barely visible now, he rotates to a stop and turns to face them. Clarke risks a wave.
"Come on, Fischer. Give us a hand."
Caraco comes up behind her. "Lenie, what are you doing?" She's turned her vocoder down to a hiss. "He's too far gone, he's—"
Clarke cranks her own vocoder down. "Shut up, Judy." Up again. "What do you say, Fischer? Earn your pay."
He's coming back into the light, hesitantly, like a wild animal lured by the promise of food. Closer, Clarke can see the line of his jaw moving up and down under his hood. The motions are jerky, erratic, as though he's learning them for the first time.
Finally a noise comes out. "Oh— kay—"
Caraco goes back and retrieves their gear. Clarke offers a scraper to Fischer. After a moment, he takes it, clumsily, and follows them to number four.
"Jussst like," Fischer buzzes. "Old. T— times."
Caraco looks at Clarke. Clarke says nothing.
Near the end of the shift she looks around. "Fischer?"
Caraco pokes her head out from an access tunnel. "He's gone?"
"When did you see him last?"
Caraco's vocoder ticks a couple of times; the machinery always misinterprets hmmm. "Half hour ago, maybe."
Clarke puts her own vocoder on high. "Hey Fischer! You still around?"
No answer.
"Fischer, we're heading back in a bit. If you want to come along…"
Caraco just shakes her head.
Shadow
It's a nightmare.
There's light everywhere, blinding, painful. He can barely move. Everything has such hard edges, and everywhere he looks the boundaries are too sharp. Sounds are like that too, clanks and shouts, every noise an exclamation of pain. He barely knows where he is. He doesn't know why he's there.
He's drowning.
"UNNNNNSEEEEELLLLLHHHHHIZZZZZMMMMOOUUUUUTH…"
The tubes in his chest suck at emptiness. The rest of his insides strain to inflate, but there's nothing there to fill them. He thrashes, panicky. Something gives with a snap. Sudden pain resonates in some faraway limb, floods the rest of his body a moment later. He tries to scream, but there's nothing inside to push out.
"HHIZZMMMOUTHFORRRKKRRIISSAAAAAKHEEEZSSUFFUKKATE—"
Someone pulls part of his face off. His insides fill with a rush; not the cold saline he's used to, but it helps. The burning in his chest eases.
"BIGGFFUKKINNGGMMISSTTAAKE—"
Pressure, painful and uneven. Things are holding him down, holding him up, banging into him. The noise is tinny, deafening. He remembers a sound—
— gravity—
— that applies somehow, but he doesn't know what it means. And then everything's spinning, and everything's familiar and horrible except for one thing, one glimpse of a face that calms him somehow—
Shadow?
— and the weight's gone, the pressure's gone, icewater calms his insides as he spirals back with her, outside again, where she used to be years ago—
She's showing him how to do it. She creeps into his room after the shouting stops, she crawls under the covers with him and she starts stroking his penis.
"Dad says this is what you do when you really love somebody," she whispers. And that scares him because they don't even like each other, he just wants her to go away and leave them all alone.
"Go away. I hate you," he says, but he’s too afraid to move.
"That's okay, then you don't have to do it for me." She’s trying to laugh, trying to pretend he was just kidding.
And then, still stroking: "Why are you always so mean to me?”
"I'm not mean."
"Are too."
"You're not supposed to be here."
"Can't we just be friends?" She rubs up against him. "I can do this whenever you want—"
"Go away. You can’t stay here."
"I can, maybe. If it works out, they said. But we have to like each other or they could send me back—”
"Good."
She's crying now, she's rubbing against him so hard the bed shakes, "Please can't you like me please I'll do anything I'll even—"
But he never finds out what she'll even do because that's when the door slams open and whatever happens after that, Gerry Fischer can't remember.
Shadow, I'm so sorry…
But she's back with him now, in the cold and the dark where it's safe. Somehow. Beebe's a dim gray glow in the distance. She floats against that backdrop like a black cardboard cutout.
"Shadow…" Not his voice.
"No." Not hers. "Lenie."
"Lenie…"
Twin crescents, thin as fingernails, reflect from her eyes. Even in two dimensions she's beautiful.
Mangled words buzz from her throat: "You know who I am? You can understand me?"
He nods, then wonders if she can see it. "Yeah."
"You don't— lately you're sort of gone, Fischer. Like you've forgotten how to be human."
He tries to laugh, but the vocoder can't handle it. "It comes and goes, I think. I'm…lucid now, anyway. That's the word, isn't it?"
"You shouldn't have come back inside." Machinery strips any feeling from her words. "He says he'll kill you. Maybe you should just stay out of his way."
"Okay," he says, and thinks it actually might be.
"I can bring food out, I guess. They don't care about that."
"That's okay. I can — go fishing."
"I'll call for a 'scaphe. It can pick you up out here."
"No. I can swim back up myself if I want to. Not far."
"Then I'll tell them to send someone."
"No."
A pause. "You can't swim all the way back to the mainland."
"I'll stay down here…a while…"
A tremor growls softly along the seabed.
"You sure?" Lenie says.
"Yeah." His arm hurts. He doesn't know why.
She turns slightly. The dim reflections vanish from her eyes for a long moment.
"I'm sorry, Gerry."
"Okay."
Lenie's silhouette twists around and faces back towards Beebe. "I should get going."
She doesn't leave. She doesn't say anything for almost a minute.
Then: "Who's Shadow?"
More silence.
"She's a…friend. When I was young."
"She means a lot to you." Not a question. "Do you want me to send her a message?"
"She's dead," Fischer says, marveling that he's really known it all along.
"Oh."
"Didn't mean to," he says. "But she had her own mom and dad, you know, why did she need mine? She went back where she belonged. That's all."
"Where she belonged," Lenie buzzes, almost too softly to hear.
"Not my fault," he says. It's hard to talk. It didn't used to be this hard.
Someone's touching him. Lenie. Her hand is on his arm, and he knows it's impossible but he can feel the warmth of her body through his 'skin.
"Gerry."
"Yes?"
"Why wasn't she with her own family?"
"She said they hurt her. She always said that. That's how she got in. She used it, it always worked…"
Not always, Shadow reminds him.
"And then she went back," Lenie murmurs.
"I didn't mean to."
A sound comes out of Lenie's vocoder, and he has no idea what it is. "Brander's right, isn't he. About you and kids."
Somehow, he knows she's not accusing him. She's just checking.
"That's what you— do," he tells her. "When you really love someone."
"Oh, Gerry. You're so completely fucked up."
A string of clicks taps faintly on the machinery in his chest.
"They're looking for me," she says.
"Okay."
"Be careful, okay?"
"You could stay. Here."
Her silence answers him.
"Maybe I'll come out and visit sometimes," she buzzes at last. She rises up into the water, turns away.
"Bye," Shadow says. It's the first time she's spoken aloud since she came inside, but Fischer doesn't think Lenie notices the difference.
And then she's gone, for now.
But she comes out here all the time. Alone, sometimes. He knows it isn't over. And when she goes back and forth with the others, doing all the things he used to do, he'll be there, off where no one can see. Checking up. Making sure she's okay.
Like her own guardian angel. Right, Shadow?
A couple of fish flicker dimly in the distance.
Shadow…?
Ballet
Dancer
A week later Fischer's replacement comes down on the 'scaphe. Nobody stands watch in Communications any more; machines don't care if they have an audience. Sudden clanking reverberates through Beebe Station and Clarke stands alone in the lounge, waiting for the ceiling to open up. Compressed nitrox hisses overhead, blowing seawater back to the abyss.
The hatch drops open. Green incandescence spills into the room. He climbs down the ladder, diveskin sealed, only his face exposed. His eyes, already capped, are featureless glass balls. But they are not as dead as they should be, somehow. Something stares through those blank lenses, and it almost shines. His blind eyes scan the compartment like radar dishes. They lock onto hers: "You're Lenie Clarke?" The voice is too loud, too normal. We talk in whispers here, Clarke realizes.
They are not alone now. Lubin, Brander, Caraco have appeared at the edges of her vision, drifting into the room like indifferent wraiths. They take up positions around the edge of the lounge, waiting. Fischer's replacement doesn't seem to notice them. "I'm Acton," he tells Clarke. "And I bring gifts from the overworld. Behold!" He extends his clenched fist, opens it palm up. Clarke sees five metal cylinders there, each no more than two centimeters long. Acton turns slowly, theatrically, showing his trinkets to the other Rifters. "One for each of you," he says. "They go into your chest, right next to the seawater intake."
Overhead, the docking hatch swings shut. From behind it a postcoital tattoo, metal on metal, heralds the shuttle's escape to the surface. They wait there for a few moments: Rifters, newcomer, five new gadgets to dilute their humanity a little further. Finally, Clarke reaches out to touch one. "What do they do?" she says, her voice neutral.
Acton snaps his fingers shut, stares about the lounge with eyeless intensity. "Why, Ms. Clarke," he replies, "They tell us when we're dead."
* * *
In Communications, Acton spills his trinkets onto a control console. Clarke stands behind him, filling the cubby. Caraco and Brander look in through the hatchway.
Lubin has disappeared.
"The program's only four months old," Acton says, "and it's lost two people at Piccard, one each at Cousteau and Link, and Fischer makes five. Not the kind of record you want to trumpet to the world, eh?"
Nobody says anything. Clarke and Brander stand impassive; Caraco shifts on her feet. Acton sweeps his blank shiny eyes over them all. "Christ but you're a lively lot. You sure Fischer's the only one down here who cashed in?"
"These things are supposed to save our lives?" Clarke asks.
"Nah. They don't care that much about us. These just help you find the bodies."
He turns to the console, plays it with practiced fingers. The topographic display flashes to life on the main screen. "Mmmm." Acton traces along the luminous contours with one finger. "So this is Beebe here in the center, and this must be the rift proper—Jesus, there's a lot of geography out here." He points at a cluster of hard green rectangles halfway to the edge of the screen. "These are the generators?"
Clarke nods.
Acton picks up one of the little cylinders. "They say they've already sent down the software for these things." Silence. "Well, I guess we'll find out, won't we?" He fingers the object in his hand, presses one end of it.
Beebe Station screams aloud.
Clarke jerks back at the sound; her head cracks painfully against an overhead pipe. The station continues to howl, wordless and despairing.
Acton touches a control; the scream stops as if guillotined.
Clarke glances at the others, shaken. They appear unmoved. Of course. For the first time she wonders what their eyes would show, naked.
"Well," Acton says, "we know the audio alarm works. But you get a visual signal too." He points at the screen: dead center, within the phosphor icon that is Beebe, a crimson dot pulses like a heart under glass.
"It keys on myoelectricity in the chest," he explains. "Goes off automatically if your heart stops."
Behind her, Clarke feels Brander turning for the hatchway.
"Maybe my etiquette is out of date—" Acton says.
His voice is suddenly very quiet. Nobody else seems to notice.
"— but I've always thought it was—rude—to walk away when someone's talking to you."
There's no obvious threat in the words. Acton's tone seems pleasant enough. It doesn't matter. In an instant Clarke sees all the signs again; the reasoned words, the deadened voice, the sudden slight tension of a body rising to critical mass. Something familiar is growing behind Acton's eyecaps.
"Brander," she says quietly, "why don't you hang around and hear the man out?"
Behind her, the sounds of motion stop.
Before her, Acton relaxes ever so slightly.
Within her, something deeper than the Rift stirs in its sleep.
"They're a snap to install," Acton says. "It takes about five minutes. GA says deadman switches are standard issue from now on."
I know you, she thinks. I don't remember but I'm sure I've seen you before somewhere…
A tiny knot forms in her stomach. Acton smiles at her, as though sending some secret greeting.
* * *
Acton is about to be baptized. Clarke is looking forward to it.
They stand together in the airlock, their diveskins clinging like shadows. The deadman switch, newly installed, itches in Clarke's chest. She remembers the first time she dropped into the ocean this way, remembers the person who held her hand through that drowning ordeal.
That person is gone now. The deep sea broke her and spat her out. Clarke wonders if it will do the same to Acton.
She floods the airlock.
By now the feeling is almost sensual; her insides folding flat, the ocean rushing into her, cold and unstoppable like a lover. At 4 °C the Pacific slides through the plumbing in her chest, anesthetizing the parts of her that can still feel. The water rises over her head; her eyecaps show her the submerged walls of the lock with crystal precision.
It's not like that with Acton. He's trying to fall in on himself; he only falls into Clarke. She senses his panic, watches him convulse, sees his knees buckle in a space far too narrow to permit collapse.
He needs more room, she thinks, smiling to herself, and opens the outer hatch. They drop.
She glides down and out, arcing away from under Beebe's oppressive bulk. She leaves the floodlit circle behind, skims into the welcoming darkness with her headlight doused. She feels the presence of the seabed a couple of meters beneath her. She's free again.
After a few moments she remembers Acton. She turns back the way she came. Beebe's floodlamps stain the darkness with dirty light; the station, bloated and angular, pulls against the cables holding it down. Light pours from its lower surface like feeble rocket exhaust. Pinned face-down in that glare, Acton lies unmoving on the bottom.
Reluctantly, she swims closer. "Acton?"
He doesn't move.
"Acton?" She's back in the light now. Her shadow cuts him in half.
At last he looks up. "It'ssss—"
He seems surprised by the sound of his own transmuted voice.
He puts his hand to his throat. "I'm not—breathing—" he buzzes.
She doesn't answer.
He looks back down. There's something on the bottom, a few centimeters from his face. Clarke drifts closer; a tiny shrimplike creature trembles on the substrate.
"What is it?" Acton asks.
"Something from the surface. It must have come down on the 'scaphe."
"But it's—dancing—"
She sees. The jointed legs flex and snap, the carapace arches to some insane inner rhythm. It seems so brittle a life; perhaps the next spasm, or the next, will shatter it.
"It's a seizure," she says after a while. "It doesn't belong here. The pressure makes the nerves fire too fast, or something."
"Why doesn't that happen to us?"
Maybe it does. "Our implants. They pump us full of neuroinhibitors whenever we go outside."
"Oh. Right," Acton buzzes softly. Gently, he reaches out to the creature. Takes it in the palm of his hand.
Crushes it.
Clarke hits him from behind. Acton bounces off the seabed, his hand flying open; fragments of shell, of watery flesh swirl in the water. He kicks, rights himself, stares at Clarke without speaking. His eyecaps shine almost yellow in the light.
"You asshole," Clarke says very quietly.
"It didn't belong here," Acton buzzes.
"Neither do we."
"It was suffering. You said so yourself."
"I said the nerves fired too fast, Acton. Nerves carry pleasure as well as pain. How do you know it wasn't dancing for fucking joy?"
She pushes off the bottom and kicks furiously into the abyss. She wants to reach into Acton's body and tear everything out, sacrifice that gory tangle of viscera and machinery to the monsters at the rift. She can't remember ever being so angry. She tells herself she doesn't know why.
* * *
Gurgles and clanks from below. Clarke looks down through the lounge hatch in time to see the airlock spill open. Brander backs out, supporting Acton.
Acton's 'skin is laid open at the thigh.
He bends over, removing his flippers. Brander's are already off; he turns to Clarke as she climbs down the ladder. "He met his first monster. Gulper eel."
"I met my fucking monster all right," Acton says in a low voice. And Clarke sees it coming a fraction of a second before—
— Acton is on Brander, left fist swinging like a bolo on the end of his arm, once twice three times and Brander is on the floor, bleeding. Acton's bringing his foot back when Lenie gets in front of him, her hands raised to protect herself, crying "Stop it stop it's not his fault!" but somehow it's not Acton she's pleading with it's something inside of him coming out, and she'd do anything if it would only please God go back where it came from—
It stares through Acton's milky eyes and snarls, "The fucker saw it coming at me! He let that thing tear my leg open!"
Lenie shakes her head. "Maybe not. You know how dark it is out there, I've been down here longer than anyone and they sneak up on me all the time, Acton. Why would Brander want to hurt you?"
She hears Brander coming to his feet behind her. His voice carries over her shoulder: "Brander sure as shit wants to hurt him n—"
She cuts him off. "Look, I can handle this." Her words are for Brander; her eyes remain locked with Acton's. "Maybe you should go to Medical, make sure you're okay."
Acton leans forward, tensed. The thing inside waits and watches.
"This asshole—" Brander begins.
"Please, Mike." It's the first time she has ever used his first name.
There's a moment of silence.
"Since when did you ever get involved?" he says behind her.
It's a good question. Brander's footsteps shuffle away before she can think of an answer.
Something in Acton goes back to sleep.
"You'd better go there too," Clarke says to him. "Later."
"Nah. It wasn't that tough. I was surprised how feeble it was, after I got over the size of the fucking thing."
"It ripped your diveskin. If it could do that, it wasn't as weak as you think. At least check it out; your leg might be lacerated."
"If you say so. Although I'll bet Brander needs Medical more than I do." He flashes a predatory grin, and moves to pass her.
"You might also consider reining in your temper," she says as he brushes past.
Acton stops. "Yeah. I was kind of hard on him, wasn't I?"
"He won't be as eager to help you out the next time you get caught in a smoker."
"Yeah," he says again. Then: "I don't know, I've always been sort of—you know—"
She remembers a word someone else used, after the fact. "Impulsive?"
"Right. But really I'm not that bad. You just have to get used to me."
Clarke doesn't answer.
"Anyhow," he says, "I guess I owe your friend an apology."
My friend. And by the time she gets over that jarring idea, she's alone again.
* * *
Five hours later Acton's in Medical. Clarke passes the open hatchway and glances in; he sits on an examination table, his 'skin undone to the waist. There's something wrong with the image. She stops and leans through the hatch.
Acton has opened himself up. She can see the flesh peeled back around the water intake, the places where meat turns to plastic, the tubes that carry blood and the ones that carry antifreeze. He holds a tool in one hand; it disappears into the cavity, the spinning thing on its tip whirring quietly.
Acton hits a nerve somewhere, and jumps as if shocked.
"Are you damaged?" Clarke asks.
He looks up. "Oh. Hi."
She points at his dissected thorax. "Did the gulper—"
He shakes his head. "No. No, it just bruised my leg a bit. I'm just making some adjustments."
"Adjustments?"
"Fine-tuning." He smiles. "Settling-in stuff."
It doesn't work. The smile is hollow, somehow. Muscles stretch lips in the usual way, but the gesture's imprisoned in the lower half of his face. Above it, his capped eyes stare cold as drifted snow, innocent of any topography. She wonders why it has never bothered her before, and realizes that this is the first time she's ever seen a Rifter smile.
"That's not supposed to be necessary," she says.
"What's not?" Acton's smile is beginning to wear on her.
"Fine-tuning. We're supposed to be self-adjusting."
"Exactly. I'm adjusting myself."
"I mean—"
"I know what you mean," Acton says. "I'm—customizing the job." His hand moves around inside his rib cage as if autonomous, tinkering. "I figure I can get better performance if I nudge the settings just a bit outside the approved specs."
Clarke hears a brief, Lilliputian screech of metal against metal.
"How?" she asks.
Acton withdraws his hand, folds flesh back over the hole. "Not exactly sure yet." He runs another tool along the seam in his chest, sealing himself. He shrugs back into his 'skin, seals that as well. Now he's as whole as any rifter.
"I'll let you know next time I go outside," he says, laying a casual hand on Clarke's shoulder as he squeezes past.
She almost doesn't flinch.
Acton stops. He seems to look right around her.
"You're nervous," he says, slowly.
"Am I."
"You don't like being touched." His hand rests on her collarbone like an insult.
She remembers: she has the same armor that he does. She relaxes fractionally. "It's not a general thing," she lies. "Just some people."
Acton seems to weigh the jibe, decide whether it's worthy of a response. His hand withdraws.
"Kind of an unfortunate quirk in a place as small as this," he says, turning away.
Small? I've got the whole goddamn ocean! But Acton's already climbing upstairs.
* * *
The new smoker is erupting again. Water shoots scalding from the chimney at the north end of the Throat, curdles and mixes with deep icy saline; microbes caught in the turbulence luminesce madly. The water fills with the hiss of unformed steam, aborted by the weight of three hundred atmospheres.
Acton is ten meters above the seabed, awash in rippling blue light.
She glides up from underneath. "Nakata said you were still out here," she buzzes at him. "She said you were waiting for this thing to go off."
He doesn't even look at her. "Right."
"You're lucky it did. You could have been waiting out here for days." Clarke turns away, aims herself at the generators.
"And I think," Acton says, "it'll stop in a minute or two."
She twists around and faces him. "Look, all these eruptions are…" she rummages for the word, "chaotic."
"Uh huh."
"You can't predict them."
"Hey, the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?"
"What are you talking about?"
"They can tell when something's going to blow. Take a look around sometime, you'll see for yourself. They react before it even happens."
She looks around. The clams are acting just like clams. The worms are acting just like worms. The brachyurans scurry around the bottom the way brachyurans always do. "React how?"
"Makes sense, after all. These vents can feed them or parboil them. After a few million years they've learned to read the signs, right?"
The smoker hiccoughs. The plume wavers, light dimming at its edges.
Acton looks at his wrist. "Not bad."
"Lucky guess," Clarke says, her vocoder hiding uncertainty.
The smoker manages a couple of feeble bursts and subsides completely.
Acton drifts closer. "You know, when they first sent me down here I thought this place would be a real shithole. I figured I'd just knuckle down and do my time and get out. But it's not like that. You know what I mean, Lenie?"
I know. But she doesn't answer.
"I thought so," he says, as though she has. "It's really kind of…well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know 'em. We're all beautiful."
He seems almost gentle.
Clarke dredges her memory for some sort of defense. "You couldn't have known," she says. "Way too many variables. It's not computable. Nothing down here's computable."
An alien creature looks down at her and shrugs. "Computable? Probably not. But knowable…"
There's no time for this, Clarke tells herself. I've got to get to work.
"…that's something else again," Acton says.
* * *
She never figured him for a bookworm. Still, there he is again, plugged into the library. Stray light from the eyephones leaks across his cheeks.
He seems to be spending a lot of time in there these days. Almost as much time as he spends outside.
Clarke glances down at the flatscreen as she wanders past. It's dark.
"Chemistry," Brander says from across the lounge.
She looks at him.
Brander jerks his thumb at the oblivious Acton. "That's what he's into. Weird shit. Boring as hell."
That's what Ballard was into, just before… Clarke fingers a spare headset from the next terminal.
"Ooh, you're walking a fine line there," Brander remarks. "Mr. Acton doesn't like people reading over his shoulder."
Then Mr. Acton will be in privacy mode and I won't be able to. She sits down and slips the headset on. Acton has not invoked privacy; Clarke taps into his line without any trouble. The eyephone lasers etch text and formulae across her retinas. Serotonin. Acetylcholine. Neuropeptide moderation. Brander's right: it's really boring.
Someone's touching her.
She does not yank the headset off. She removes it calmly. She doesn't even flinch, this time. She will not give him the satisfaction.
Acton has turned in his chair to face her, headset dangling around his neck. His hand is on her knee.
"Glad to see we have common interests," he says quietly. "Not that surprising, though. We do share a certain… chemistry…"
"That's true." She stares back, safe behind her eyecaps. "Too bad I'm allergic to shitheads."
He smiles. "Of course, it would never work. The ages are all wrong." He stands up, returns the headset to its hook.
"I'm not nearly old enough to be your father."
He crosses the lounge and climbs downstairs.
"What an asshole," Brander remarks.
"He's more of a prick than Fischer ever was. I'm surprised you're not picking fights with him all the time."
Brander shrugs. "Different dynamic. Acton's just an asshole. Fischer was a fucking pervert."
Not to mention that Fischer never fought back. She keeps the insight to herself.
* * *
Concentric circles, glowing emerald. Beebe Station sits on the bullseye. Intermittent blobs of weaker light litter the display: fissures and jagged rock outcroppings, endless muddy plains, the Euclidean outlines of human machinery all reduced to a common acoustic currency.
There's something else out there too, part Euclid, part Darwin. Clarke zooms in. Human flesh is too much like seawater to return an echo, but bones show up okay. The machinery inside is even clearer, it shouts at the faintest sonar signal. Clarke focuses the display, points at a translucent green skeleton with clockwork in its chest.
"That him?" Caraco says.
Clarke shakes her head.
"Maybe it is. Everyone else is—"
"It's not him." Clarke touches a control. The display zooms back to maximum range. "You sure he's not in his quarters?"
"He left the station seven hours ago. Hasn't been back since."
"Maybe he's just hugging the bottom. Maybe he's behind a rock."
"Maybe." Caraco sounds unconvinced.
Clarke leans back in her chair. The back of her head touches the rear wall of the cubby. "Well, he's doing his job okay. When he's off shift he can go wherever he likes, I guess."
"Yeah, but this is the third time. He's always late. He just wanders in whenever he likes—"
"So what?" Clarke, suddenly tired, rubs the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. "We don't run on dryback schedules here, you know that. He pulls his weight, don't fuck with him."
"Well, Fischer was always getting shit for being l—"
"Nobody cared if Fischer was late," Clarke cuts in. "They just— wanted an excuse."
Caraco leans forward. "I don't like him," she confides.
"Acton? No reason you should. He's psycho. We all are, remember?"
"But he's different, somehow. You know that."
"Lubin nearly killed his wife down at Galapagos before they assigned him here. Brander's got a history of attempted suicide."
Something changes in Caraco's stance. Clarke can't be sure, but the other woman's gaze seems to have dropped to the deck. Touched a nerve there, I guess.
She continues, more gently. "You're not worried about the rest of us, are you? So what's so special about Acton?"
"Oh," Caraco says. "Look."
On the tactical display, something has just moved into range.
Clarke zooms in on the new reading; it's too distant for good resolution, but there's no mistaking the hard metallic blip in its center.
"Acton," she says.
"Um…how far?" Caraco asks in a hesitant voice.
Clarke checks. "He's about nine hundred meters out. Not too bad, if he's using a squid."
"He's not. He never does."
"Hmm. At least he seems to be beelining in." Clarke looks up at Caraco. "You two are on shift when?"
"Ten minutes."
"No big deal. He'll be fifteen minutes late. Half hour tops."
Caraco stares at the display. "What's he doing out there?"
"I don't know," Clarke says. She wonders, not for the first time, if Caraco really belongs down here. She just doesn't seem to get it, sometimes.
"I was wondering if you could maybe talk to him," Caraco says.
"Acton? Why?"
"Nothing. Forget it."
"Okay." Clarke rises from the Communications chair. Caraco backs out of the hatchway to let her past.
"Um, Lenie…"
Clarke turns.
"What about you?" Caraco asks.
"Me?"
"You said Lubin nearly killed his wife. Brander tried to kill himself. What did you do, I mean, to…qualify?"
Clarke watches her steadily.
"I mean, I guess, if it's not too—"
"You don't understand," Clarke says, her voice absolutely level. "It's not how much shit you've raised that suits you for the rift. It's how much you've survived."
"I'm sorry." Caraco manages, with eyes utterly devoid of feeling, to look abashed.
Clarke softens a bit. "In my case," she says, "Mostly I just learned to roll with the punches. I haven't done much worth bragging about, you know?"
I'm sure enough working on it, though.
* * *
She doesn't know how it could have happened so fast. He's been here only two weeks, yet the 'lock can barely contain his eagerness to get outside. The chamber floods, she feels a single shiver scurry along his body; and before she can move, Acton hits the latch and they drop outside.
He coasts out from under the station, his trajectory an effortless parallel of her own. Clarke fins off towards the Throat. She feels Acton at her side, although she cannot see him. His headlamp, like hers, stays dark; for her it's become a gesture of respect to the more delicate lanterns that dwell here.
She doesn't know what Acton's reasoning is.
He doesn't speak until Beebe's a dirty yellow smudge behind them. "Sometimes I wonder why we ever go back inside."
It can't be happiness in that voice. How could any emotion make it through the mechanical gauntlet that lets people speak out here?
"I fell asleep near the Throat yesterday," he says.
"You're lucky something didn't eat you," she tells him.
"They're not so bad. You just have to know how to relate to them."
Clarke wonders if he relates to other species with the same subtlety that he relates to his own. She keeps the question to herself.
They swim through sparse, living starlight for a while. Another smudge glimmers ahead, weak and sullen; the Throat, dead on target. It's been months now since Clarke has even thought of the guide rope that's supposed to lead them back and forth, like blind troglodytes. She knows where it is, but she never uses it. Other senses come awake down here. Rifters don't get lost.
Except Fischer, maybe. And Fischer was lost long before he came down here.
"So what happened to Fischer, anyway?" Acton says.
The chill starts in her chest, reaches her fingers before the sound of Acton's voice has died away. It's a coincidence. It's a perfectly normal question to ask.
"I said—"
"He disappeared," Clarke says.
"They told me that much," Acton buzzes back. "I thought you might have a bit more insight."
"Maybe he fell asleep outside. Maybe something ate him."
"I doubt that."
"Really? And what makes you such an expert, Acton? You've been down here for what, two weeks now?"
"Only two weeks? Seems longer. Time stretches when you're outside, doesn't it?"
"At first," Clarke says.
"You know why Fischer disappeared?"
"No."
"He outlived his usefulness."
"Ah." Her machine parts turn it into half creak, half growl.
"I'm serious, Lenie." Acton's mechanical voice does not change. "You think they're going to let you stay down here forever? You think they'd let people like us down here at all if they had any choice?"
She stops kicking. Her body continues to coast. "What are you talking about?"
"Use your head, Lenie. You're smarter than I am, inside at least. You've got the keys to the city here—you've got the keys to the whole fucking seaboard, and you're still acting like a victim." Acton's vocoder gurgles indecipherably—a laugh, mistransposed? A snarl?
More words: "They count on that, you know."
Clarke starts kicking again, stares ahead to the brightening glow of the Throat.
It isn't there.
There's a moment's disorientation — We can't be lost, we were headed right for it, has the power gone out? — before she sees the familiar streak of coarse yellow light, bearing four o'clock.
How could I have gotten turned around like that?
"We're here," Acton says.
"No. The Throat's way over—"
A nova flares beside her, drenching the abyss with blinding light. It takes Clarke's eyecaps a moment to adjust; when the starbursts have faded from her eyes, the ocean is a muddy black backdrop for the bright cone from Acton's headlamp.
"Don't," she says. "It gets so dark when you do that, you can't see anything—"
"I know. I'll turn it off in a moment. Just look."
His beam shines down on a small rocky outcropping rising from the mud, no more than two meters across. Jagged cookie-cutter flowers litter its surface, radial clusters shining garish red and blue in the artificial light. Some of them lie flat along the rock face. Others are contorted into frozen calcareous knots, clenched around things Clarke can't see.
Some of them move, slowly.
"You brought me out here to look at starfish?" She tries, and fails, to squeeze some hint of bored contempt through the vocodor. But inside there's a distant, frightened amazement that he has led her here, that she could be guided, utterly unsuspecting, so completely off course. And how did he find this place? No sonar pistol, compass doesn't work worth shit this close to the Throat…
"I figured you probably hadn't looked at them very closely before," Acton says. "I thought you might be interested."
"We don't have time for this, Acton."
His hands reach down into the light and lock onto one of the starfish. They peel it slowly from the rock; there are filaments of some kind along the creature's underside, anchoring it to the substrate. Acton's efforts tear them free, a few at a time.
He holds the animal up for Clarke's inspection. Its upper surface is colored stone, encrusted with calcareous spicules. Acton flips it over. The underside writhes with hundreds of thick squirming threads, jammed into dense rows along the length of each arm. Each thread has a tiny sucker at its tip.
"A starfish," Acton tells her, "is the ultimate democracy."
Clarke stares, quietly repelled.
"This is how they move," Acton is saying. "They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy."
Rows of squirming maggots. A forest of translucent leeches, groping blindly into the water.
"So there's nothing to coordinate the tube feet, they all move independently. Usually that's not a problem; they all tend to go towards food, for example. But it's not unusual for a third of these feet to be pulling in some other direction entirely. The whole animal's a living tug-o-war. Sometimes, some really stubborn tube feet just don't give up, and they literally get torn out at the roots when the others move the body someplace they don't want to go. But hey: majority rules, right?"
Clarke extends a tentative finger. Half a dozen tube feet latch onto it. She can't feel them through her 'skin. Anchored, they look almost delicate, like filaments of milky glass.
"But that's nothing," Acton says. "Watch this."
He rips the starfish in half.
Clarke pulls back, shocked and angry. But there's something in Acton's posture, in that barely visible outline behind his lamp, that makes her pause.
"Don't worry, Lenie," he says. "I haven't killed it. I've bred it."
He drops the torn halves. They flutter like leaves to the seabed, trailing bits of bloodless entrail.
"They regenerate. Didn't you know that? You can tear them into pieces and each piece grows back the missing parts. It takes time, but they recover. Only you end up with more of them. Damn hard to kill these guys.
"Understand, Lenie? Tear them to pieces, they come back stronger."
"How do you know all this?" she asks in a metallic whisper. "Where do you come from?"
He lays an icy black hand on her arm. "Right here. This is where I was born."
She doesn't think it absurd. In fact, she barely hears him. Her mind is somewhere else entirely, terrified by a sudden realization.
Acton is touching her, and she doesn't mind.
* * *
Of course, the sex is electric. It always is. The familiar has reasserted itself, here in the cramped space of Clarke's cubby. They can't both lie on the pallet at the same time but they manage somehow, Acton on his knees, then Clarke, squirming around each other in a metal nest lined with ducts and vents and bundles of optical cabling. They navigate each others' seams and scars, tonguing puckers of metal and pale flesh, unseen and all-seeing behind their corneal armor.
For Clarke it's a new twist, this icy ecstasy of a lover without eyes. For the first time she feels no need to avert her face, no threat to fragile intimacy; at first, when Acton moved to take out his caps, she stopped him with a touch and a whisper and he seemed to understand.
They cannot lie together afterwards so they sit side-by-side, leaning into each other, staring at the hatch two meters in front of them. The lights are turned too low for dryback vision; Clarke and Acton see a room suffused in pale fluorescence.
Acton reaches out and fingers a shard of glass sticking from an empty frame on one wall. "There used to be a mirror here," he remarks.
Clarke nibbles his shoulder. "There were mirrors everywhere. I—took them down."
"Why? A few mirrors would open the place up a bit. Make it larger."
She points. Several torn wires, fine as threads, hang from a hole in the frame. "They had cameras behind them. I didn't like that."
Acton grunts. "I don't blame you."
They sit without speaking for a bit.
"You said something outside," she says. "You said you were born down here."
Acton hesitates, then nods. "Ten days ago."
"What did you mean?"
"You should know," he says. "You witnessed my birth."
She thinks back. "That was when the gulper got you…"
"Close." Acton grins his cold eyeless grin, puts an arm around her. "Actually, the gulper sort of catalyzed it, if I remember. Think of it as a midwife."
An image pops into her mind: Acton in Medical, vivisecting himself.
"Fine-tuning," she says.
"Uh huh." He gives her a squeeze. "And I've got you to thank for it. You gave me the idea."
"Me?"
"You were my mother, Len. And my father was this spastic little shrimp that ended up way over its head. He died before I was born, actually: I killed him. You weren't very happy about that."
Clarke shakes her head. "You're not making sense."
"You telling me you haven't noticed the change? You telling me I'm the same person I was when I came down?"
"I don't know," she says. "Maybe I've just gotten to know you better."
"Maybe. Maybe I have too. I don't know, Len, I just seem more…awake now, I guess. I see things differently. You must have noticed."
"Yeah, but only when you're—"
Outside.
"You did something to your inhibitors," she whispers.
"Reduced the dosage a bit."
She grasps his arm. "Karl, those chemicals keep you from spazzing out every time you go outside. You fuck with this stuff, you're risking a seizure as soon as the 'lock floods."
"I have been fucking with it, Lenie. You see any change in me that isn't an improvement?"
She doesn't answer.
"It's all about action potential," he tells her. "Your nerves have to build up a certain charge before they can fire—"
"And at this depth they'd fire all the time, Karl, please—"
"Shh." He lays a gentle finger on her lips but she brushes it away, suddenly angry.
"I'm serious, Karl. Without those drugs your nerves short-circuit, you burn out, I know—"
"You only know what they tell you," he snaps. "Why don't you try working things out yourself for once?"
She falls silent, stung by his disapproval. A space opens between them on the pallet.
"I'm not a fool, Lenie," Acton says, more quietly. "I just reduced the settings a bit. Five percent. Now, when I go outside it takes a bit less of a stimulus for my nerves to fire, that's all. It…it wakes you up, Len; I'm more aware of things, I'm more alive somehow."
She watches him, unspeaking.
"Of course they say it's dangerous," he says. "They're scared shitless of you already. You think they're going to give you even more of an edge?"
"They're not scared of us, Karl."
"They should be." His arm goes back around her. "Wanna try it?"
It's as though she's suddenly outside, still naked. "No."
"There's nothing to worry about, Len. I've already done the guinea pig work on myself. Open up to me and I could make the adjustments myself, it'd take ten minutes."
"I'm not up for it, Karl. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one of the others is."
He shakes his head. "They don't trust me."
"You can't blame them."
"I don't." He grins, showing teeth as sharp and white as eyecaps. "But even if they did trust me, they wouldn't do anything unless you thought it was okay."
She looks at him. "Why not?"
"You're in charge here, Len."
"Bullshit. They never told you that."
"They didn't have to. It's obvious."
"I've been down here longer than them. So's Lubin. That doesn't matter to anyone."
Acton frowns briefly. "No, I don't think it does. But you're still leader of the pack, Len. Head wolf. A-fucking-kayla."
Clarke shakes her head. She searches her memory for something, anything, that would contradict Acton's absurd claim. She comes up empty.
She feels a little sick inside.
He gives her a little squeeze. "Tough luck, lover. I guess the clothes don't fit so well after being a career victim your whole life, eh?"
Clarke stares at the deck.
"Think about it, anyway," Acton whispers in her ear. "I guarantee you'll feel twice as alive as you do now."
"That happens anyway," Clarke reminds him. "Whenever I go outside. I don't need to screw up my internals for that." Not those internals, anyway.
"This is different," he insists.
She looks at him and smiles, and hopes he doesn't push it. How can he expect me to let him cut me open like that? she wonders, and then wonders if maybe someday she will, if the fear of losing him might somehow grow large enough to force her other fears into submission. It wouldn't be the first time.
Twice as alive, Acton says. Hiding behind her smile, Clarke considers: twice as much of her life. Not a great prospect, so far.
* * *
There's a light from behind; it chases her shadow out along the seabed. She can't remember how long it's been there. She feels a momentary chill—
— Fischer? —
— before common sense sets in. Gerry Fischer wouldn't use a headlamp.
"Lenie?"
She revolves on her own axis, sees a silhouette hovering a few meters away. Cyclopean light glares from its forehead. Clarke hears a subvocal buzz, the corrupted equivalent of Brander clearing his throat. "Judy said you were out here," he explains.
"Judy." She means it as a question, but her vocoder loses the intonation.
"Yeah. She sort of, keeps tabs on you sometimes."
Clarke considers that a moment. "Tell her I'm harmless."
"It's not like that," he buzzes. "I think she just… worries…"
Clarke feels muscles twitching at the corners of her mouth. She thinks she might be smiling.
"So I guess we're on shift," she says, after a moment.
The headlight bobs up and down. "Right. A bunch of clams need their asses scraped. More skilled labor."
She stretches, weightless. "Okay. Let's go."
"Lenie…"
She looks up at him.
"Why do you come— I mean, why here?" Brander's headlight sweeps the bottom, comes to rest on an outcropping of bone and rotted flesh. A skeletal smile stitches its way across the lit circle. "Did you kill it, or something?"
"Yeah, I—" She falls silent, realizing: He means the whale.
"Nah," she says instead. "It just died on its own."
* * *
Of course she wakes up alone. They still try to sleep together sometimes, after sex has made them too lazy to go outside. But the bunk is too small. The most they can manage is a sort of diagonal slouch: feet on the floor, necks bent up against the bulkhead, Acton cradling her like a living hammock. If they're unlucky they really do fall asleep like that. It takes hours to get the kinks out afterwards. Way more trouble than it's worth.
So she wakes up alone. But she misses him anyway.
It's early. The schedules handed down from the GA are increasingly irrelevant — circadian rhythms lose their way in the incessant darkness, fall slowly out of phase — but the rubbery timetable that remains leaves hours before her shift starts. Lenie Clarke is awake in the middle of the night. It seems like a stupid and obvious thing to say, months from the nearest sunrise, but right now it seems especially true.
In the corridor she turns for a moment in the direction of his cubby before she remembers. He's never in there any more. He's never even inside, unless he's eating or working or being with her. He hasn't slept in his quarters almost since they got involved. He's getting almost as bad as Lubin.
Caraco is sitting silently in the lounge, unmoving, obeying her own inner clock. She looks up as Clarke crosses to Comm.
"He went out about an hour ago," she says softly.
Sonar picks him up fifty meters southeast, barely echoing above the bottom clutter. Clarke heads for the ladder.
"He showed us something the other day," Caraco says after her. "Ken and me."
Clarke looks back.
"A smoker, way off in one corner of the Throat. It had this weird fluted vent, and it made singing sounds, almost…"
"Mmm."
"He really wanted us to know about it, for some reason. He was really excited. He's — he's kind of strange out there, Lenie…"
"Judy," Clarke says neutrally, "Why are you telling me this?"
Caraco looks away. "Sorry. I didn't mean anything."
Clarke starts down the ladder.
"Just be careful, okay?" Caraco calls after her.
He's curled up when Clarke reaches him, knees tucked under his chin, floating a few centimeters above a stone garden. His eyes are open, of course. She reaches out, touches him through two layers of reflex copolymer.
He barely stirs. His vocoder emits sporadic ticking noises.
Lenie Clarke curls herself around him. In a womb of freezing sea water, they sleep on until morning.
Short Circuit
I won't give in.
It would be so easy. She could live out there, stay the fuck away from this creaking eggshell except to eat and bathe and do whatever parts of her job demand an atmosphere. She could spend her whole life flying across the seabed. Lubin does. Brander and Caraco and even Nakata are starting to.
Lenie Clarke knows she doesn't belong in here. None of them do.
But at the same time, she's scared of what outside might do to her. I could end up like Fischer. It would be so easy to just— slip away. If a hot seep or mud slide didn't get me first.
Lately she's been valuing her own life quite a lot. Maybe that means she's losing it. What kind of a rifter cares about living? But there it is: the rift is starting to scare her.
That's bullshit. Complete, total bullshit.
Who wouldn't be scared?
Scared. Yes. Of Karl. Of what you'll let him do to you.
It's been, what, a week now?—
Two days.
— two days since she's slept outside. Two days since she decided to incarcerate herself in here. She goes outside to work, and comes back as soon as each shift ends. No one's mentioned the change to her. Perhaps no one's noticed; if they don't come back to Beebe themselves after work, they scatter off across the sea bed to do whatever they do in splendid, freezing isolation.
She knew Acton would notice, though. He'd notice, and miss her, and follow her back inside. Or maybe he'd try and talk her back out, fight with her when she resisted. But he's shown no sign at all. He spends as much time out there as he ever did. She still sees him, of course. At mealtimes. At the library. Once for sex, during which neither spoke of anything important. And then gone again, back into the ocean.
He didn't enter into any pact with her. She didn't even tell him about her pact with herself. Still, she feels betrayed.
She needs him. She knows what that means, sees her own footprints crowding the road ahead, but reading the signs and changing course are two completely different things. Her insides are twisting with the need to go, whether out to him or just out she can't say. But as long as he's outside and she's in Beebe, Lenie Clarke can tell herself that she's still in control.
It's progress, sort of.
Now, curled up in her cubby with the hatch sealed tight, she hears the subterranean gurgle of the airlock. She comes up off the bed as though radio-controlled.
Noises, flesh against metal, hydraulics and pneumatics. A voice. Lenie Clarke is on her way to the wet room.
He's brought a monster inside with him. It's an anglerfish, almost two meters long, a jellylike bag of flesh with teeth half the length of Clarke's forearm. It lies quivering on the deck, its insides exploded through its own mouth in the near vacuum of Beebe's sea-level atmosphere. Dozens of miniature tails, twitching feebly, sprout everywhere from its body.
Caraco and Lubin, in the middle of some task, look over from the engineering 'lock. Acton stands beside his catch; his thorax, still inflating, hisses softly.
"How did you fit it inside the 'lock?" Clarke wonders.
"More to the point," Lubin says, coming over, "why bother?"
"What're all those tails?" Caraco says.
Acton grins at them. "Not tails. Mates."
Lubin's face doesn't change. "Really."
Clarke leans forward. Not just tails, she sees now; some of them have those extra fins along the side and back. Some of them have gills. A couple of them even have eyes. It's as though a whole school of tiny anglers are boring into this big one. Some are in only as far as their jaws, but others are buried right down to the tail.
Another thought strikes her, even more revolting; the big fish doesn't need its mouth any more. It's just engulfing the little ones across its body wall, like some giant devolving microbe.
"Group sex on the rift," says Acton. "All the big ones we've been seeing, they're female. The males are these little finger-sized fuckers here. Not many dating opportunities this far down, so they just latch on to the first female they can find, and they sort of fuse — their heads get absorbed, their bloodstreams link together. They're parasites, get it? They worm into her side and they spend their whole lives feeding off her. And there's a fuck of a lot of them, but she's bigger than they are, she's stronger, she could eat them alive if she just—"
"He's been in the library again," Caraco remarks.
Acton looks at her for a moment. Deliberately, he points at the bloated carcass on the deck. "That's us." He grabs one of the parasitic males, rips it free. "This is everyone else. Get it?"
"Ah," Lubin says. "A metaphor. Clever."
Acton takes a single step towards the other man. "Lubin, I am getting awfully fucking tired of you."
"Really." Lubin doesn't seem the least bit threatened.
Clarke moves; not directly between them, just off to one side, forming the apex of a human triangle. She has absolutely no idea what to do if this comes to blows. She has no idea what to say to stop that from happening.
Suddenly, she's not even sure that she wants to.
"Come on, you guys." Caraco leans back against the drying rack. "Can't you settle this some other way? Maybe you could just whip out a ruler and compare your dicks or something."
They stare at her.
"Watch it, Judy. You're getting pretty cocky there."
Now they're staring at Clarke.
Did I say that?
For a long, long moment nothing happens. Then Lubin grunts and goes back to the workshop. Acton watches him go; then, deprived of an immediate threat, he steps back into the airlock.
The dead angler shivers on the deck, bristling with infestation.
"Lenie, he's really getting weird," Caraco says as the 'lock floods. "Maybe you should just let him go."
Clarke just shakes her head. "Go where?"
She even manages a smile.
* * *
She was looking for Karl Acton, but somehow she's found Gerry Fischer instead. He looks sadly down at her through the length of a long tunnel. He seems to be a whole ocean away. He doesn't speak but she senses sadness, disappointment. You lied to me, that feeling says. You said you'd come and see me and you lied. You've forgotten all about me.
He's wrong. She hasn't forgotten him at all. She's only tried to.
She doesn't say it aloud, of course, but somehow he reacts to it anyway. His feelings change; sadness fades, something colder seeps up in its place, something so deep and so old that she can't think of words to describe it.
Something pure.
From behind, a touch on her shoulder. She spins, instantly alert, hand closing around her billy.
"Hey, calm down. It's me." Acton's silhouette hangs against a faint wash of light from the direction of the Throat. Clarke relaxes, pushes gently at his chest. Says nothing.
"Welcome back," Acton says. "Haven't seen you out here for a while."
"I was— I was looking for you," she says.
"In the mud?"
"What?"
"You were just floating there, face down."
"I was—" She feels a vestige of disquiet, but she can't remember what to attach it to. "I must have drifted off. I was dreaming. It's been so long since I slept out here, I—"
"Four days, I think. I missed you."
"Well, you could have come inside."
Acton nods. "I tried. But I could never get all of me through the airlock, and the part that I could— well, it was sort of a poor substitute. If you'll remember."
"I don't know, Karl. You know how I feel—"
"Right. And I know you like it out here as much as I do. Sometimes I feel like I could just stay out here forever." He pauses for a moment, as if weighing alternatives. "Fischer's got it right."
Something goes cold. "Fischer?"
"He's still out here, Len. You know that."
"You've seen him?"
"Not often. He's pretty skittish."
"When do…I mean—"
"Only when I'm alone. And pretty far from Beebe."
She looks around, inexplicably frightened. Of course you can't see him. He isn't here. And even if he was, it's still too dark to…
She forces herself to leave her headlamp doused.
"He's…I think he's really hooked in to you, Len. But I guess you know that too."
No. No, I didn't. I don't. "He talks to you?" She doesn't know why she'd resent that.
"No."
"Then how?"
Acton doesn't answer for a moment. "I don't know. I just got that impression. But he doesn't talk. It's…I don't know, Len. He just hangs around out there and watches us. I don't know if he's what we'd consider… sane, I guess—"
"He watches us," she says, buzzing low and level.
"He knows we're together. I think…I think he figures that connects me and him somehow." Acton is silent for a bit. "You cared about him, didn't you?"
Oh yes. It always starts off so innocently. You cared about him, that's nice, and then it's did you find him attractive and then well you must have done something or he wouldn't keep hitting on you and then you fucking slut I'll—
"Lenie," Acton says. "I'm not trying to start anything."
She waits and watches.
"I know there was nothing going on. And even if there was, I know it's no threat."
She's heard this part before, too.
"Now that I think about it, that's always been my problem," Acton muses. "I always had to go on what other people told me, and people— people lie all the time, Len, you know that. So no matter how many times she swears she's not fucking around on you, or even that she doesn't want to fuck around on you, how can you ever really know? You can't. So the default assumption is, she's lying. And being lied to all the time, that's a damn good reason for — well, for doing what I do sometimes."
"Karl — you know—"
"I know you don't lie to me. You don't even hate me. That's kind of a change."
She reaches out to touch the side of his face. "I'd say that's a good call. I'm glad you trust me."
"Actually, Len, I don't have to trust you. I just know."
"What do you mean? How?"
"I'm not sure," he says. "It's something to do with the changes."
He waits for her to respond.
"What are you saying, Karl?" she says at last. "Are you saying you can read my mind?"
"No. Nothing like that. I just, well, I identify with you more. I can— it's kind of hard to explain—"
She remembers him levitating beside a luminous smoker: the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?
He's tuned in, she realizes. To everything. He's even tuned into the bloody worms, that's what he—
He's tuned in to Fischer—
She tongues the light switch. A bright cone stabs into the abyss. She sweeps the water around them. Nothing.
"Have the others seen him?"
"I don't know. I think Caraco caught him on sonar once or twice."
"Let's go back," Clarke says.
"Let's not. Stay a while. Spend the night."
She looks straight into his empty lenses. "Please, Karl. Come with me. Sleep inside for a bit."
"He's not dangerous, Len."
"That's not it." At least, that's not all.
"What, then?"
"Karl, has it ever occurred to you that you might be developing some sort of dependence on this nerve rush of yours?"
"Come on, Len. The rift gives us all a rush. That's why we're down here."
"We get a rush because we're fucked in the head. That doesn't mean we should go out of our way to augment the effect."
"Lenie—"
"Karl." She lays her hands on his shoulders. "I don't know what happens to you out here. But whatever it is, it scares me."
He nods. "I know."
"Then please, please try it my way. Try sleeping inside again, just for a while. Try not to spend every waking moment climbing around on the bottom of the ocean, okay?"
"Lenie, I don't like myself inside. You don't even like me inside."
"Maybe. I don't know. I just — I just don't know how to deal with you when you're like this."
"When I'm not about to beat the shit out of anyone? When I'm acting like a rational human being? If we'd had this conversation back at Beebe we'd be throwing things at each other by now." He falls silent for a moment. Something changes in his posture. "Or do you miss that, somehow?"
"No. Of course not," she says, surprised at the thought.
"Well, then—"
"Please. Just— indulge me. What harm can it do?"
He doesn't answer. But she has a sneaking suspicion that he could.
* * *
She has to give him credit. His reluctance shows in every move, but he's even first through the airlock. Something happens to him as it drains, though; the air rushes into him and — displaces something else, somehow. She can't quite put her finger on it. She wonders why she's never noticed it before.
As a reward, she takes him directly into her cubby. He fucks her up against the bulkhead, violently, with no discretion at all. Animal sounds echo through the hull. She wonders, as he comes, if the noise is bothering the others.
* * *
"Have any of you," Acton says, "thought about why things are so fucking grotty down here?"
It's a strange and wondrous occasion, as rare as a planetary conjunction. All the circadian clocks have drifted together for an hour or two, drawn everyone to dinner at the same time. Almost everyone; Lubin is nowhere to be seen. Not that he ever contributes much to the conversation anyway.
"What do you mean?" Caraco says.
"What do you think I mean? Look around, for Chrissake!" Acton waves his arm, taking in the lounge. "The place is barely big enough to stand up in. Everywhere you look there's fucking pipes and cables. It's like living in a service closet."
Brander frowns around a mouthful of rehydrated potato.
"They were on a very strict schedule," Nakata suggests. "It was important to get everything online as quickly as possible. Perhaps they just didn't have time to make everything as cushy as they could have."
Acton snorts. "Come on, Alice. How much extra time would it take to program the blueprints for decent headroom?"
"I feel a conspiracy theory coming on," Brander remarks. "So go on, Karl. Why's the GA going out of its way to make us bump our heads all the time? They breeding us for short height, maybe? So we'll eat less?"
Lenie Clarke feels Acton tensing; it's like a small shockwave pushed out by his clenching muscles, a pulse of tension that ripples through the air and breaks against her 'skin. She rests one calming hand casually on his thigh, under the table. It's a calculated risk, of course. It would piss him off even more if Acton thought he was being patronized.
This time he relaxes a little. "I think they're trying to keep us off balance. I think they deliberately designed Beebe to stress us out."
"Why?" Caraco again, tense but civil.
"Because it gives them an advantage. The more time we spend being on edge, the less time we have to think about what we could do to them if we really wanted to."
"And what's that?"
"Use your head, Judy. We could black out the grid from the Charlottes down to Portland."
"They'd just switch feeds," Brander says. "There are other deep stations."
"Yeah. And they're all staffed by people just like us." Acton slaps the table with one hand. "Come on, you guys. They don't want us down here. They hate us, we're sickos that beat up our wives and eat our babies for breakfast. If it weren't for the fact that anyone else would flip out down here—"
Clarke shakes her head. "But they could get us out of the loop completely if they wanted. Just automate everything."
"Hallelujah." Acton brings his hands together in sarcastic applause. "The woman's got it at last."
Brander leans back in his chair. "Give it a rest, Acton. Haven't you ever worked for the GA before? You ever work for any sort of bureaucracy?"
Acton's gaze swivels, locks on to the other man. "What's your point?"
Brander looks back with a hint of a sneer on his face. "My point, Karl, is that you're reading way too much into this. So they made the ceilings too low. So their interior decorator's not worth shit. So what else is new? The GA just isn't that scared of you." He takes in Beebe with a wave of his arm. "This isn't some subtle psychological war. Beebe was just designed by incompetent bozos." Brander stands up, takes his plate to the galley. "If you don't like the headroom, stay outside."
Acton looks at Lenie Clarke, his face utterly devoid of expression. "Oh, I'd like to. Believe me."
* * *
He's hunched over the library terminal, 'phones on his ears, 'phones on his eyes, the flatscreen blanked as usual to hide his litsearch from view. As if anything in the database could really be personal. As if the GA would ever ration out any fact worth hiding.
She's learned not to bother him when he's like this. He's hunting in there, he resents any distraction as though the files he's after might somehow escape if he looks the other way. She doesn't touch him. She doesn't run a gentle finger along his arm or try to work the knots from his shoulders. Not any more. There are some mistakes that Lenie Clarke can learn from.
He's actually helpless in a strange way; cut off from the rest of Beebe, deaf and blind to the presence of people who are by no means friends. Brander could come up behind him right now and plant a knife in his back. And yet everyone leaves him alone. It's as though his sensory exile, this self-imposed vulnerability is some sort of brazen dare that no one has the guts to take him up on. So Acton sits at the keyboard— tapping at first, now stabbing— in his own private datasphere, and his deaf blind presence somehow dominates the lounge out of all proportion to his physical size.
"FUCK!"
He tears the 'phones from his face and slams his fist down on the console. Nothing even cracks. He glares around the lounge, white eyes blazing, and settles on Nakata over in the galley. Lenie Clarke, wisely, has avoided eye contact.
"This database is fucking ancient! They stick us down this fucking black anus for months at a time and they don't even give us a link to the net!"
Nakata spreads her hands. "The net's infected," she says, nervously. "They send us scrubbed downloads every month or s—"
"I fucking know that." Acton's voice is suddenly, ominously calm. Nakata takes the hint and falls silent.
He stands up. The whole room seems to shrink down around him. "I've got to get out of here," he says at last. He takes a step towards the ladder, glances at Clarke. "Coming?"
She shakes her head.
"Suit yourself."
* * *
Caraco, maybe. She's made overtures in the past.
Not that Clarke ever took them. But things are changing. There aren't just two Karl Actons any more. There used to be; all of her partners have been twosomes, in fact. There's always been a host, some magnetic chassis whose face and name never mattered because it would change without warning. And providing continuity, riding along behind each twinkling pair of eyes, there's always been the thing inside, and it never changes. Nor, to be honest, would Lenie Clarke know what to do if it did.
Now there's something new: the thing outside. So far at least, it has shown no trace of violence. It does seem to have x-ray vision, which could be even worse.
Lenie Clarke has always slept with the thing inside. Until now, she'd always just assumed it was for want of an alternative.
She taps lightly on Caraco's hatch. "Judy? You there?" She should be; she's nowhere else in Beebe, and sonar can't find any trace of her outside.
No answer.
It can wait.
No. It's waited long enough.
How would I feel if—
She isn't me.
The hatch is closed but not dogged. Clarke pulls it open a few centimeters and peers inside.
Somehow they've managed to pull it off. Alice Nakata and Judy Caraco spoon around each other on that tiny bunk. Their eyes dart restlessly beneath closed lids. Nakata's dreamer stands guard beside them, its tendrils pasted to their bodies.
Clarke lets the hatch hiss shut again.
It was a stupid idea, anyhow. What would she know?
She wonders how long they've been together, though. She never even saw that coming.
* * *
"Your boyfriend isn't here," Lubin calls in. "We were supposed to top up the coolant on number seven."
Clarke calls up the topographic display. "How long ago?"
"Oh four hundred."
"Okay." Acton's half an hour late. That's unusual; he's been going out of his way to be punctual these days, a grudging concession to Clarke in the name of group relations. "I can't find him on sonar," she reports. "Unless he's hugging the bottom. Hang on."
She leans out of the comm cubby. "Hey. Anybody see Karl?"
"He left a while ago," Brander calls from the wet room. "Maintenance on seven, I think."
Clarke punches back into Lubin's channel. "He's not here. Brander says he left already. I'll keep looking."
"Okay. At least his deadman switch hasn't gone off." Clarke can't tell whether Lubin thinks that's good or bad.
Movement at the corner of her eye. She looks up; Nakata's standing in the hatchway.
"Have you found him?" she asks.
Clarke shakes her head.
"He was in Medical, just before he left," Nakata says. "He was open. He said he was making some adjustments—"
Oh God.
"He said they improved performance outside, but he didn't explain. He said he would show me later. Maybe something went wrong."
External camera display, ventral view. The image flickers for a moment, then clears; on the screen, a scalloped circle of light lies across a flat muddy plain, transected by the knife-edge shadows of anchor cables. Near the edge of that circle is a black human figure, face down, its hands held to either side of its head.
She wakes up the close acoustics. "Karl! Karl, can you hear me?"
He reacts. His head twists around, faces up into the floods; his eyecaps reflect featureless white glare into the camera. He's shaking.
"His vocoder," Nakata says. There's sound coming from the speaker, soft, repetitive, mechanical. "It's— stuttering—"
Clarke's already in the wet room. She knows what Acton's vocoder is saying. She knows, because the same word is repeating over and over in her own head.
No. No. No. No. No.
* * *
No obvious motor impairment. He's able to make it back inside on his own; stiffens, in fact, when Clarke tries to help him. He strips his gear and follows her into Medical without a word.
Nakata, diplomatically, closes the hatch behind them
Now he sits on the examination table, stonefaced. Clarke knows the routine; get his 'skin off, his eyecaps out. Check autonomic pupil response and reflex arcs. Stab him, draw off the usual samples: blood gases, acetylcholine, GABA, lactic acid.
She sits down beside him. She doesn't want his eyecaps out. She doesn't want to see behind them.
"Your inhibitors," she says at last. "How far down are they?"
"Twenty percent."
"Well." She tries for a light touch. "At least we know your limit now. Just nudge them back up to normal."
Almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.
"Why not?"
"Too late. I went over some sort of threshold. I don't think — it doesn't feel reversible."
"I see." She puts one tentative hand on his arm. He doesn't react. "How do you feel?"
"Blind. Deaf."
"You're not, though."
"You asked how I felt," he says, still expressionless.
"Here." She takes the NMR helmet down from its hook. Acton lets her strap it across his skull. "If there's anything wrong, this should—"
"There's something wrong, Len."
"Well." The helmet writes its impressions across the diagnostic display. Clarke's got the same medical expertise they all have, stuffed into her mind by machines that hijacked her dreams. Still, the raw data mean nothing to her. It's almost a minute before the display prints out an executive summary.
"Your synaptic calcium's way down." She's careful not to show her relief. "Makes sense, I guess. Your neurons fire too often, eventually they run out of something."
He looks at the screen, saying nothing.
"Karl, it's okay." She leans toward his ear, one hand on his shoulder. "It'll fix itself. Just put your inhibitors back up to normal; demand goes down, supply keeps up. No harm done."
He shakes his head again. "Won't work."
"Karl, look at the readout. You're going to be fine."
"Please don't touch me," he says, not moving at all.
Critical Mass
She catches a glimpse of fist before it hits her eye. She staggers back against the bulkhead, feels some protruding rivet or valve catch the back of her head. The world drowns in explosions of afterlight.
He's lost control, she thinks dully. I win. Her knees collapse under her; she slides down the wall, sits with a heavy thud on the deck. She considers it a matter of some pride that she's kept utterly silent through all this.
I wonder what I did to set him off. She can't remember. Acton's fist seems to have knocked the past few minutes out of her head. Doesn't matter anyway. Same old dance.
But this time there seems to be someone on her side. She can hear shouts, sounds of a scuffle. She hears the sick jarring thud of flesh against bone against metal, and for once, none of it seems to be hers.
"You cocksucker! I'll rip your fucking balls off!"
Brander's voice. Brander is sticking up for her. He always was the gallant one. Clarke smiles, tastes salt. Of course, he never quite forgave Acton for that tiff over the gulper, either…
Her vision is starting to clear, in one eye at least. There's a leg right in front of her, another to one side. She looks up; the legs meet at Caraco's crotch. Acton and Brander are in her cubby too; Clarke's amazed that they can all fit.
Acton, his mouth bloody, is under siege. Brander's hand is at his throat. Acton has the wrist of that hand caught in a grip of his own; while Clarke watches, his other arm lashes out and glances off Brander's jaw.
"Stop it," she mumbles.
Caraco hits Acton's temple twice in rapid succession. Acton's head snaps sideways, snarls, but he doesn't release his grip on Brander.
"I said stop it!"
This time they hear her. The struggle slows, pauses; fists remain poised, no holds break, but they're all looking at her now.
Even Acton. Clarke looks up into his eyes, looks behind them. She can see nothing staring back but Acton himself. You were there before, she remembers. I'm almost sure of it. Count on you to get Acton into a losing fight and then bugger off…
She braces herself against the bulkhead and pushes slowly erect. Caraco moves aside, helps her up.
"I'm flattered by all the attention, folks," Clarke says, "and I want to thank you for stopping by, but I think we can handle this on our own from here on in."
Caraco puts a protective hand on her shoulder. "You don't have to put up with this shit." Her eyes, somehow venomous through the shielding, are still locked on Acton. "None of us do."
One corner of Acton's mouth pulls back in a small, bloody sneer.
Clarke endures Caraco's touch without flinching. "I know that. And thanks for stepping in. But please, just leave us alone for a while."
Brander doesn't loosen his grip on Acton's throat. "I don't think that a very good—"
"Will you get your fucking hands off him and leave us alone!"
They back off. Clarke glares after them, dogs the hatch to keep them out. "Goddamned nosy neighbors," she grumbles, turning back to Acton.
His body sags in the sudden privacy, all the anger and bravado evaporating as she watches.
"Want to tell me why you're being such an asshole?" she says.
Acton collapses on her pallet. He stares at the deck, avoiding her eyes. "Don't you know when you're being fucked over?"
Clarke sits down beside him. "Sure. Getting punched out is pretty much a giveaway."
"I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to help all of you." He turns and hugs her, body shaking, cheek pressed against hers, face aimed at the bulkhead behind her shoulder. "Oh God Lenie I'm so sorry you're the last person in the whole fucking world I want to hurt—"
She strokes him without speaking. She knows he means it. They always do. She still can't bring herself to blame any of them.
He thinks he's alone in there. He thinks it's all his own doing.
Briefly, an impossible thought: Maybe it is…
"I can't go on with this," he says. "Staying inside."
"It'll get better, Karl. It's always hard at first."
"Oh God, Len. You don't have a clue. You still think I'm some sort of junkie."
"Karl—"
"You think I don't know what addiction is? You think I can't tell the difference?"
She doesn't answer.
He manages a small, sad laugh. "I'm losing it, Len. You're forcing me to lose it. Why in God's name do you want me this way?"
"Because this is who you are, Karl. Outside isn't you. Outside's a distortion."
"Outside I'm not an asshole. Outside I don't make everyone hate me."
"No." She hugs him. "If controlling your temper means seeing you turn into something else, seeing you doped up all the time, then I'll take my chances with the original."
Acton looks at her. "I hate this. Jesus Christ, Len. Won't you ever get tired of people who kick the shit out of you?"
"That's a really nasty thing to say," she remarks quietly.
"I don't think so. I can remember some things I saw out there, Len. It's like you need — I mean God, Lenie, there's so much hate in all of you…"
She's never heard him speak like this. Not even outside. "You've got a bit of that in you too, you know."
"Yeah. I thought it made me different. I thought it gave me…an edge, you know?"
"It does."
He shakes his head. "Oh, no. Not next to you."
"Don't underrate yourself. You don't see me trying to take on the whole station."
"That's just it, Len. I blow it off all the time, I waste it on stupid shit like this. But you— you hoard it." His expression changes, she's not exactly sure what to. Concern, maybe. Worry. "Sometimes you scare me more than Lubin does. You never lash out, or beat on anybody — Christ, it's a major event when you even raise your voice — so it just builds up. It's got its up side, I guess." He manages a soft laugh. "Hatred's a great fuel source. If anything ever—activated you, you'd be unstoppable. But now, you're just—toxic. I don't think you really know how much hate you've got in you."
Pity?
Something inside her goes suddenly cool. "Don't play therapist with me, Karl. Just because your nerves fire too fast doesn't mean you've got second sight. You don't know me that well."
Of course not. Or you wouldn't be with me.
"Not in here." He smiles, but that strange sick expression keeps showing through behind. "Outside, at least, I can see things. In here I'm blind."
"You're in the land of the blind." She says curtly. "It's not a drawback."
"Really? Would you stay here if it meant getting your eyes cut out? Would you stay some place that rotted your brain out piece by piece, turned you from a human being into a fucking monkey?"
Clarke considers. "If I was a monkey to begin with, maybe."
Uh oh. Sounded too flippant by half, didn't I?
Acton looks at her for a moment. Something else does too, drowsily, with one eye open.
"At least I don't get my endorphins by playing victim," he says, slowly. "You should really be a bit more careful who you choose to look down on."
"And you," Clarke replies, "should save the pious lectures for those rare occasions when you actually know what you're talking about."
He rises off the bed and glares at her, fists carefully unclenched.
Clarke does not move. She feels her whole body hardening from the inside out. She deliberately lifts her head until she's looking straight into Acton's hooded eyes.
It's in there now, fully awake. She can't see Acton at all any more. Everything's back to normal.
"Don't even try," she says. "I gave you a couple of shots for old times' sake, but if you lay a hand on me again I swear I'll fucking kill you."
She marvels inwardly at the strength in her voice; it sounds like iron.
They stare at each other for an endless moment.
Acton's body turns on its heel and undogs the hatch. Clarke watches it step out of the cubby; Caraco, waiting in the corridor, lets it by without a word. Clarke holds herself utterly still until she hears the 'lock beginning to cycle.
He didn't call my bluff.
Except this time, she's not sure that that's all it was.
* * *
He doesn't see her.
It's been days since they've said anything to each other. Even their shift schedules have diverged. Tonight, as she was trying to sleep, she heard him come out of the abyss again and climb up into the lounge like some invading sea creature. He does it now and then when the place is deserted, when everyone is either outside or sealed into their cubicles. He sits there at the library, diving through his 'phones down endless virtual avenues, desperation in every movement. It's as though he has to hold his breath whenever he comes inside; once she saw him tear the headset off his skull and flee outside as though his chest would burst. When she picked up the abandoned headset, the results of his litsearch were still glowing in the eyephones. Chemistry.
Another time he turned on his way out to see her standing in the corridor. He smiled. He even said something: " — sorry—" is what she heard, but there may have been more. He didn't stay.
Now his hands rest, unmoving, on the keyboard. His shoulders are shaking. He doesn't make any sound at all. Lenie Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, wondering whether to approach him. When she looks again the lounge is empty.
* * *
She can tell exactly where he's going. His icon buds off of Beebe and crawls away across the display, and there's only on thing in that direction.
When she gets there he's crawling across its back, digging a hole with his knife. Clarke's eyecaps can barely find enough light to see by, this far from the Throat; Acton cuts and slices in the light of her headlamp, his shadow writhing away across a horizon of dead flesh.
He's dug a crater, maybe half a meter across, half a meter deep. He's cut through the stratum of blubber below the skin and is tearing through the brown muscle beneath. It's been months now since this creature landed here. Clarke marvels at its preservation.
The abyss likes extremes, she muses. If it isn't a pressure cooker, it's a fridge.
Acton stops digging. He just floats there, staring down at his handiwork.
"What a stupid idea," he buzzes at last. "I don't know what gets into me sometimes." He turns to face her; his eyecaps reflect yellow. "I'm sorry, Lenie. I know this place was special to you somehow, I didn't mean to…well, desecrate it, I guess."
She shakes her head. "It's okay. It's not important."
Acton's vocoder gurgles; in air, it would be a sad laugh. "I give myself too much credit sometimes, Len. Whenever I'm inside, and I'm fucking up and I don't know what to do, I figure all I've got to do is come outside and the scales will fall off my eyes. It's like, religious faith almost. All the answers. Right out here."
"It's okay," Clarke says again, because it seems better than saying nothing.
"Only sometimes the answer doesn't really do much for you, you know? Sometimes the answer's just: Forget it. You're fucked." Acton looks back down at the dead whale. "Would you turn the light off?"
The darkness swallows them like a blanket. Clarke reaches through it and brings Acton to her. "What were you trying to do?"
That mechanical laugh again. "Something I read. I was thinking—"
His cheek brushes against hers.
"I don't know what I was thinking. When I'm inside I'm a fucking lobo case, I get these stupid ideas and even when I get back out it takes a while before I really wake up and realize what a dork I've been. I wanted to study an adrenal gland. Thought it would help me figure out how to counter ion depletion at the synapse junctions."
"You know how to do that."
"Well, it was just bullshit anyway. I can't think straight in there."
She doesn't bother to argue.
"I'm sorry," Acton buzzes after a while.
Clarke strokes his back. It feels like two sheets of plastic rubbing together.
"I think I can explain it to you," he adds. "If you're interested."
"Sure." But she knows it won't change anything.
"You know how there's this strip in your brain that controls movement?"
"Okay."
"And if, say, you became a concert pianist, the part that runs your fingers would actually spread out, take up more of the strip to meet the increased demand for finger control. But you lose something, too. The adjacent parts of the strip get crowded out. So maybe you couldn't wiggle your toes or curl your tongue as well as you could before you started practicing."
Acton falls silent. Clarke feels his arms, cradling her loosely from behind.
"I think something like that happened to me," he says after a while.
"How?"
"I think something in my brain got exercised, and it spread out and crowded some other parts away. But it only works in a high-pressure environment, you see, it's the pressure that makes the nerves fire faster. So when I go back inside, the new part shuts down and the old parts have been — well, lost."
Clarke shakes her head. "We've been through this, Karl. Your synapses just ran low on calcium."
"That's not all that happened. That's not even a problem any more, I've brought my inhibitors up again. Not all the way, but enough. But I still have this new part, and I still can't find the old ones." She feels his chin on the top of her head. "I don't think I'm exactly human any more, Len. Which, considering the kind of human I was, is probably just as well."
"And what does it do, exactly? This new part?"
He takes a while to answer. "It's almost like getting an extra sense organ, except it's… diffuse. Intuition, only with a really hard edge."
"Diffuse, with a hard edge."
"Yeah, well. That's the problem when you try to explain smell to someone without a nose."
"Maybe it's not what you think. I mean, something's changed, but that doesn't mean you can really just — look into people like that. Maybe it's just some sort of mood disorder. Or a hallucination, maybe. You can't know."
"I know, Len."
"Then you're right." Anger trickles up from her internal reservoir. "You're not human any more. You're less than human."
"Lenie—"
"Humans have to trust, Karl. There's no big deal about putting your faith in something you know for certain. I want you to trust me."
"Not know you."
She tries to hear sadness on that synthetic voice. In Beebe, maybe, it would have come through. But in Beebe he would never had said that.
"Karl—"
"I can't come back."
"You're not yourself out here." She pushes away, spins around; she can just barely distinguish his silhouette.
"You want me to be—" She hears confusion in the words, even through the vocoder, but she knows it's not a question. " — hateful."
"Don't be an idiot. I've had more than my fill of assholes, believe me. But Karl, this is just some kind of cheap trick. Step out of the magic booth, you're Mr. Nice Guy. Step back in, you're the SeaTac Strangler. It's not real."
"How do you know?"
She keeps her distance, suddenly knowing the answer. It's only real if it hurts. It's only real if it happens slowly, painfully, each step carved in shouts and threats and thrown punches.
It's only real if Lenie Clarke is the one to make him change.
She doesn't tell him any of this, of course. But she's afraid, as she turns and leaves him there, that she doesn't have to.
* * *
She comes instantly out of sleep, tense and completely alert. There's darkness — the lights are off, she's even blanked the readouts on the wall — but it's the close, familiar darkness of her own cubby. Something is tapping on the hull, regular and insistent.
From outside.
Out in the corridor there's light enough for rifter eyes. Nakata and Caraco stand motionless in the lounge. Brander sits at the library; the screens are dark, the headsets all hanging on their pegs.
The sound ticks through the lounge, fainter than before but easily audible.
"Where's Lubin?" Clarke asks softly. Nakata tilts her head towards the hull: outside somewhere.
Clarke climbs downstairs and into the airlock.
* * *
"We thought you'd gone over," she says. "Like Fischer."
They float between Beebe and the sea floor. Clarke reaches out to him. Acton reaches back.
"How long has it been?" The words come out as faint, metallic sighs.
"Six days. Maybe seven. I've been putting off— calling up for a replacement—"
He doesn't react.
"We saw you on sonar sometimes," she adds. "For a while. Then you disappeared."
Silence.
"Did you get lost?" she asks after a while.
"Yeah."
"But you're back now."
"No."
"Karl—"
"I need you to promise me something, Lenie."
"What?"
"Promise me you'll do what I did. The others too. They'll listen to you."
"You know I can't—"
"Five percent, Lenie. Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you'll do okay. Promise."
"Why, Karl?"
"Because I wasn't wrong about everything. Because sooner or later they're going to have to get rid of you, and you need every edge you can get."
"Come inside. We can talk about it inside, everyone's there."
"There's strange things happening out there, Len. Out past sonar range, they're — I don't know what they're doing. They don't tell us…"
"Come inside, Karl."
He shakes his head. He seems almost unused to the gesture.
"— can't—"
"Then don't expect me—"
"I left a file in the library. It explains things. As much as I could, when I was in there. Promise me, Len."
"No. You promise. Come inside. Promise we'll work it out."
"It kills too much of me," he sighs. "I pushed it too far. Something burned out, I'm not even completely whole out here any more. But you'll be okay. Five or ten percent, no more."
"I need you," she buzzes, very quietly.
"No," he says. "You need Karl Acton."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You need what he did to you."
All the warmth goes out of her then. What's left is a slow, freezing boil.
"What is this, Karl? Some grand insight you got while spirit-walking around in the mud? You think you know me better than I do?"
"You know—"
"Because you don't, you know. You don't know shit about me, you never did. And you don't really have the balls to find out, so you run off into the dark and come back spouting all this pretentious bullshit." She's goading him, she knows she's goading him but he's just not reacting. Even one of his outbursts would be better than this.
"It's saved under Shadow," he says.
She stares at him without speaking.
"The file," he adds.
"What's wrong with you?" She's beating at him now, pounding as hard as she can but he's not hitting back, he's not even defending himself for Chrissakes why don't you fight back asshole why don't you just get it over with, just beat the shit out of me until the guilt covers us both and we'll promise never to do it again and—
But even anger deserts her now. The inertia of her attack pushes them away from each other. She catches herself on an anchor cable. A starfish, wrapped around the line, reaches blindly out to touch her with the tip of one arm.
Acton continues to drift.
"Stay," she says.
He brakes and holds position without answering, dim and gray and distant.
There are so many things denied her out here. She can't cry. She can't even close her eyes. So she stares at the sea bed, watches her own shadow stretch off into the darkness. "Why are you doing this?" she asks, exhausted, and wonders who she meant the question for.
His shadow flows across her own. A mechanical voice answers:
"This is what you do when you really love someone."
She jerks her head up in time to see him disappear.
* * *
Beebe's quiet when she returns. The wet slap of her feet on the deck is the only sound. She climbs into the lounge and finds it empty. She takes a step towards the corridor that leads to her cubby.
Stops.
In Comm, a luminous icon inches towards the Throat. The display lies for effect; in reality Acton is dark and unreflective, no more luminous than she is.
She wonders again if she should try and stop him. She could never overpower him by force, but perhaps she just hasn't thought of the right thing to say. Perhaps if she just gets it right she can call him back, compel his return through words alone. Not a victim any more, he said once. Perhaps she's a siren instead.
She can't think of anything to say.
He's almost there now. She can see him gliding between great bronze pillars, bacterial nebulae swirling in his wake. She imagines his face aimed down, scanning, relentless, hungry. She can see him homing in on the north end of Main Street.
She shuts off the display.
She doesn't have to watch this. She knows what's going on, and the machines will tell her when it's over. She couldn't stop them if she tried, not unless she smashed them into junk. That, in fact, is exactly what she wants to do. But she controls herself. Quiet as stone, Lenie Clarke sits in the command cubby staring at a blank screen, waiting for the alarm.
Dancer
A week later Fischer's replacement comes down on the 'scaphe. Nobody stands watch in Communications any more; machines don't care if they have an audience. Sudden clanking reverberates through Beebe Station and Clarke stands alone in the lounge, waiting for the ceiling to open up. Compressed nitrox hisses overhead, blowing seawater back to the abyss.
The hatch drops open. Green incandescence spills into the room. He climbs down the ladder, diveskin sealed, only his face exposed. His eyes, already capped, are featureless glass balls. But they are not as dead as they should be, somehow. Something stares through those blank lenses, and it almost shines. His blind eyes scan the compartment like radar dishes. They lock onto hers: "You're Lenie Clarke?" The voice is too loud, too normal. We talk in whispers here, Clarke realizes.
They are not alone now. Lubin, Brander, Caraco have appeared at the edges of her vision, drifting into the room like indifferent wraiths. They take up positions around the edge of the lounge, waiting. Fischer's replacement doesn't seem to notice them. "I'm Acton," he tells Clarke. "And I bring gifts from the overworld. Behold!" He extends his clenched fist, opens it palm up. Clarke sees five metal cylinders there, each no more than two centimeters long. Acton turns slowly, theatrically, showing his trinkets to the other Rifters. "One for each of you," he says. "They go into your chest, right next to the seawater intake."
Overhead, the docking hatch swings shut. From behind it a postcoital tattoo, metal on metal, heralds the shuttle's escape to the surface. They wait there for a few moments: Rifters, newcomer, five new gadgets to dilute their humanity a little further. Finally, Clarke reaches out to touch one. "What do they do?" she says, her voice neutral.
Acton snaps his fingers shut, stares about the lounge with eyeless intensity. "Why, Ms. Clarke," he replies, "They tell us when we're dead."
In Communications, Acton spills his trinkets onto a control console. Clarke stands behind him, filling the cubby. Caraco and Brander look in through the hatchway.
Lubin has disappeared.
"The program's only four months old," Acton says, "and it's lost two people at Piccard, one each at Cousteau and Link, and Fischer makes five. Not the kind of record you want to trumpet to the world, eh?"
Nobody says anything. Clarke and Brander stand impassive; Caraco shifts on her feet. Acton sweeps his blank shiny eyes over them all. "Christ but you're a lively lot. You sure Fischer's the only one down here who cashed in?"
"These things are supposed to save our lives?" Clarke asks.
"Nah. They don't care that much about us. These just help you find the bodies."
He turns to the console, plays it with practiced fingers. The topographic display flashes to life on the main screen. "Mmmm." Acton traces along the luminous contours with one finger. "So this is Beebe here in the center, and this must be the rift proper—Jesus, there's a lot of geography out here." He points at a cluster of hard green rectangles halfway to the edge of the screen. "These are the generators?"
Clarke nods.
Acton picks up one of the little cylinders. "They say they've already sent down the software for these things." Silence. "Well, I guess we'll find out, won't we?" He fingers the object in his hand, presses one end of it.
Beebe Station screams aloud.
Clarke jerks back at the sound; her head cracks painfully against an overhead pipe. The station continues to howl, wordless and despairing.
Acton touches a control; the scream stops as if guillotined.
Clarke glances at the others, shaken. They appear unmoved. Of course. For the first time she wonders what their eyes would show, naked.
"Well," Acton says, "we know the audio alarm works. But you get a visual signal too." He points at the screen: dead center, within the phosphor icon that is Beebe, a crimson dot pulses like a heart under glass.
"It keys on myoelectricity in the chest," he explains. "Goes off automatically if your heart stops."
Behind her, Clarke feels Brander turning for the hatchway.
"Maybe my etiquette is out of date—" Acton says.
His voice is suddenly very quiet. Nobody else seems to notice.
"— but I've always thought it was—rude—to walk away when someone's talking to you."
There's no obvious threat in the words. Acton's tone seems pleasant enough. It doesn't matter. In an instant Clarke sees all the signs again; the reasoned words, the deadened voice, the sudden slight tension of a body rising to critical mass. Something familiar is growing behind Acton's eyecaps.
"Brander," she says quietly, "why don't you hang around and hear the man out?"
Behind her, the sounds of motion stop.
Before her, Acton relaxes ever so slightly.
Within her, something deeper than the Rift stirs in its sleep.
"They're a snap to install," Acton says. "It takes about five minutes. GA says deadman switches are standard issue from now on."
I know you, she thinks. I don't remember but I'm sure I've seen you before somewhere…
A tiny knot forms in her stomach. Acton smiles at her, as though sending some secret greeting.
Acton is about to be baptized. Clarke is looking forward to it.
They stand together in the airlock, their diveskins clinging like shadows. The deadman switch, newly installed, itches in Clarke's chest. She remembers the first time she dropped into the ocean this way, remembers the person who held her hand through that drowning ordeal.
That person is gone now. The deep sea broke her and spat her out. Clarke wonders if it will do the same to Acton.
She floods the airlock.
By now the feeling is almost sensual; her insides folding flat, the ocean rushing into her, cold and unstoppable like a lover. At 4 °C the Pacific slides through the plumbing in her chest, anesthetizing the parts of her that can still feel. The water rises over her head; her eyecaps show her the submerged walls of the lock with crystal precision.
It's not like that with Acton. He's trying to fall in on himself; he only falls into Clarke. She senses his panic, watches him convulse, sees his knees buckle in a space far too narrow to permit collapse.
He needs more room, she thinks, smiling to herself, and opens the outer hatch. They drop.
She glides down and out, arcing away from under Beebe's oppressive bulk. She leaves the floodlit circle behind, skims into the welcoming darkness with her headlight doused. She feels the presence of the seabed a couple of meters beneath her. She's free again.
After a few moments she remembers Acton. She turns back the way she came. Beebe's floodlamps stain the darkness with dirty light; the station, bloated and angular, pulls against the cables holding it down. Light pours from its lower surface like feeble rocket exhaust. Pinned face-down in that glare, Acton lies unmoving on the bottom.
Reluctantly, she swims closer. "Acton?"
He doesn't move.
"Acton?" She's back in the light now. Her shadow cuts him in half.
At last he looks up. "It'ssss—"
He seems surprised by the sound of his own transmuted voice.
He puts his hand to his throat. "I'm not—breathing—" he buzzes.
She doesn't answer.
He looks back down. There's something on the bottom, a few centimeters from his face. Clarke drifts closer; a tiny shrimplike creature trembles on the substrate.
"What is it?" Acton asks.
"Something from the surface. It must have come down on the 'scaphe."
"But it's—dancing—"
She sees. The jointed legs flex and snap, the carapace arches to some insane inner rhythm. It seems so brittle a life; perhaps the next spasm, or the next, will shatter it.
"It's a seizure," she says after a while. "It doesn't belong here. The pressure makes the nerves fire too fast, or something."
"Why doesn't that happen to us?"
Maybe it does. "Our implants. They pump us full of neuroinhibitors whenever we go outside."
"Oh. Right," Acton buzzes softly. Gently, he reaches out to the creature. Takes it in the palm of his hand.
Crushes it.
Clarke hits him from behind. Acton bounces off the seabed, his hand flying open; fragments of shell, of watery flesh swirl in the water. He kicks, rights himself, stares at Clarke without speaking. His eyecaps shine almost yellow in the light.
"You asshole," Clarke says very quietly.
"It didn't belong here," Acton buzzes.
"Neither do we."
"It was suffering. You said so yourself."
"I said the nerves fired too fast, Acton. Nerves carry pleasure as well as pain. How do you know it wasn't dancing for fucking joy?"
She pushes off the bottom and kicks furiously into the abyss. She wants to reach into Acton's body and tear everything out, sacrifice that gory tangle of viscera and machinery to the monsters at the rift. She can't remember ever being so angry. She tells herself she doesn't know why.
Gurgles and clanks from below. Clarke looks down through the lounge hatch in time to see the airlock spill open. Brander backs out, supporting Acton.
Acton's 'skin is laid open at the thigh.
He bends over, removing his flippers. Brander's are already off; he turns to Clarke as she climbs down the ladder. "He met his first monster. Gulper eel."
"I met my fucking monster all right," Acton says in a low voice. And Clarke sees it coming a fraction of a second before—
— Acton is on Brander, left fist swinging like a bolo on the end of his arm, once twice three times and Brander is on the floor, bleeding. Acton's bringing his foot back when Lenie gets in front of him, her hands raised to protect herself, crying "Stop it stop it's not his fault!" but somehow it's not Acton she's pleading with it's something inside of him coming out, and she'd do anything if it would only please God go back where it came from—
It stares through Acton's milky eyes and snarls, "The fucker saw it coming at me! He let that thing tear my leg open!"
Lenie shakes her head. "Maybe not. You know how dark it is out there, I've been down here longer than anyone and they sneak up on me all the time, Acton. Why would Brander want to hurt you?"
She hears Brander coming to his feet behind her. His voice carries over her shoulder: "Brander sure as shit wants to hurt him n—"
She cuts him off. "Look, I can handle this." Her words are for Brander; her eyes remain locked with Acton's. "Maybe you should go to Medical, make sure you're okay."
Acton leans forward, tensed. The thing inside waits and watches.
"This asshole—" Brander begins.
"Please, Mike." It's the first time she has ever used his first name.
There's a moment of silence.
"Since when did you ever get involved?" he says behind her.
It's a good question. Brander's footsteps shuffle away before she can think of an answer.
Something in Acton goes back to sleep.
"You'd better go there too," Clarke says to him. "Later."
"Nah. It wasn't that tough. I was surprised how feeble it was, after I got over the size of the fucking thing."
"It ripped your diveskin. If it could do that, it wasn't as weak as you think. At least check it out; your leg might be lacerated."
"If you say so. Although I'll bet Brander needs Medical more than I do." He flashes a predatory grin, and moves to pass her.
"You might also consider reining in your temper," she says as he brushes past.
Acton stops. "Yeah. I was kind of hard on him, wasn't I?"
"He won't be as eager to help you out the next time you get caught in a smoker."
"Yeah," he says again. Then: "I don't know, I've always been sort of—you know—"
She remembers a word someone else used, after the fact. "Impulsive?"
"Right. But really I'm not that bad. You just have to get used to me."
Clarke doesn't answer.
"Anyhow," he says, "I guess I owe your friend an apology."
My friend. And by the time she gets over that jarring idea, she's alone again.
Five hours later Acton's in Medical. Clarke passes the open hatchway and glances in; he sits on an examination table, his 'skin undone to the waist. There's something wrong with the image. She stops and leans through the hatch.
Acton has opened himself up. She can see the flesh peeled back around the water intake, the places where meat turns to plastic, the tubes that carry blood and the ones that carry antifreeze. He holds a tool in one hand; it disappears into the cavity, the spinning thing on its tip whirring quietly.
Acton hits a nerve somewhere, and jumps as if shocked.
"Are you damaged?" Clarke asks.
He looks up. "Oh. Hi."
She points at his dissected thorax. "Did the gulper—"
He shakes his head. "No. No, it just bruised my leg a bit. I'm just making some adjustments."
"Adjustments?"
"Fine-tuning." He smiles. "Settling-in stuff."
It doesn't work. The smile is hollow, somehow. Muscles stretch lips in the usual way, but the gesture's imprisoned in the lower half of his face. Above it, his capped eyes stare cold as drifted snow, innocent of any topography. She wonders why it has never bothered her before, and realizes that this is the first time she's ever seen a Rifter smile.
"That's not supposed to be necessary," she says.
"What's not?" Acton's smile is beginning to wear on her.
"Fine-tuning. We're supposed to be self-adjusting."
"Exactly. I'm adjusting myself."
"I mean—"
"I know what you mean," Acton says. "I'm—customizing the job." His hand moves around inside his rib cage as if autonomous, tinkering. "I figure I can get better performance if I nudge the settings just a bit outside the approved specs."
Clarke hears a brief, Lilliputian screech of metal against metal.
"How?" she asks.
Acton withdraws his hand, folds flesh back over the hole. "Not exactly sure yet." He runs another tool along the seam in his chest, sealing himself. He shrugs back into his 'skin, seals that as well. Now he's as whole as any rifter.
"I'll let you know next time I go outside," he says, laying a casual hand on Clarke's shoulder as he squeezes past.
She almost doesn't flinch.
Acton stops. He seems to look right around her.
"You're nervous," he says, slowly.
"Am I."
"You don't like being touched." His hand rests on her collarbone like an insult.
She remembers: she has the same armor that he does. She relaxes fractionally. "It's not a general thing," she lies. "Just some people."
Acton seems to weigh the jibe, decide whether it's worthy of a response. His hand withdraws.
"Kind of an unfortunate quirk in a place as small as this," he says, turning away.
Small? I've got the whole goddamn ocean! But Acton's already climbing upstairs.
The new smoker is erupting again. Water shoots scalding from the chimney at the north end of the Throat, curdles and mixes with deep icy saline; microbes caught in the turbulence luminesce madly. The water fills with the hiss of unformed steam, aborted by the weight of three hundred atmospheres.
Acton is ten meters above the seabed, awash in rippling blue light.
She glides up from underneath. "Nakata said you were still out here," she buzzes at him. "She said you were waiting for this thing to go off."
He doesn't even look at her. "Right."
"You're lucky it did. You could have been waiting out here for days." Clarke turns away, aims herself at the generators.
"And I think," Acton says, "it'll stop in a minute or two."
She twists around and faces him. "Look, all these eruptions are…" she rummages for the word, "chaotic."
"Uh huh."
"You can't predict them."
"Hey, the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?"
"What are you talking about?"
"They can tell when something's going to blow. Take a look around sometime, you'll see for yourself. They react before it even happens."
She looks around. The clams are acting just like clams. The worms are acting just like worms. The brachyurans scurry around the bottom the way brachyurans always do. "React how?"
"Makes sense, after all. These vents can feed them or parboil them. After a few million years they've learned to read the signs, right?"
The smoker hiccoughs. The plume wavers, light dimming at its edges.
Acton looks at his wrist. "Not bad."
"Lucky guess," Clarke says, her vocoder hiding uncertainty.
The smoker manages a couple of feeble bursts and subsides completely.
Acton drifts closer. "You know, when they first sent me down here I thought this place would be a real shithole. I figured I'd just knuckle down and do my time and get out. But it's not like that. You know what I mean, Lenie?"
I know. But she doesn't answer.
"I thought so," he says, as though she has. "It's really kind of…well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know 'em. We're all beautiful."
He seems almost gentle.
Clarke dredges her memory for some sort of defense. "You couldn't have known," she says. "Way too many variables. It's not computable. Nothing down here's computable."
An alien creature looks down at her and shrugs. "Computable? Probably not. But knowable…"
There's no time for this, Clarke tells herself. I've got to get to work.
"…that's something else again," Acton says.
She never figured him for a bookworm. Still, there he is again, plugged into the library. Stray light from the eyephones leaks across his cheeks.
He seems to be spending a lot of time in there these days. Almost as much time as he spends outside.
Clarke glances down at the flatscreen as she wanders past. It's dark.
"Chemistry," Brander says from across the lounge.
She looks at him.
Brander jerks his thumb at the oblivious Acton. "That's what he's into. Weird shit. Boring as hell."
That's what Ballard was into, just before… Clarke fingers a spare headset from the next terminal.
"Ooh, you're walking a fine line there," Brander remarks. "Mr. Acton doesn't like people reading over his shoulder."
Then Mr. Acton will be in privacy mode and I won't be able to. She sits down and slips the headset on. Acton has not invoked privacy; Clarke taps into his line without any trouble. The eyephone lasers etch text and formulae across her retinas. Serotonin. Acetylcholine. Neuropeptide moderation. Brander's right: it's really boring.
Someone's touching her.
She does not yank the headset off. She removes it calmly. She doesn't even flinch, this time. She will not give him the satisfaction.
Acton has turned in his chair to face her, headset dangling around his neck. His hand is on her knee.
"Glad to see we have common interests," he says quietly. "Not that surprising, though. We do share a certain… chemistry…"
"That's true." She stares back, safe behind her eyecaps. "Too bad I'm allergic to shitheads."
He smiles. "Of course, it would never work. The ages are all wrong." He stands up, returns the headset to its hook.
"I'm not nearly old enough to be your father."
He crosses the lounge and climbs downstairs.
"What an asshole," Brander remarks.
"He's more of a prick than Fischer ever was. I'm surprised you're not picking fights with him all the time."
Brander shrugs. "Different dynamic. Acton's just an asshole. Fischer was a fucking pervert."
Not to mention that Fischer never fought back. She keeps the insight to herself.
Concentric circles, glowing emerald. Beebe Station sits on the bullseye. Intermittent blobs of weaker light litter the display: fissures and jagged rock outcroppings, endless muddy plains, the Euclidean outlines of human machinery all reduced to a common acoustic currency.
There's something else out there too, part Euclid, part Darwin. Clarke zooms in. Human flesh is too much like seawater to return an echo, but bones show up okay. The machinery inside is even clearer, it shouts at the faintest sonar signal. Clarke focuses the display, points at a translucent green skeleton with clockwork in its chest.
"That him?" Caraco says.
Clarke shakes her head.
"Maybe it is. Everyone else is—"
"It's not him." Clarke touches a control. The display zooms back to maximum range. "You sure he's not in his quarters?"
"He left the station seven hours ago. Hasn't been back since."
"Maybe he's just hugging the bottom. Maybe he's behind a rock."
"Maybe." Caraco sounds unconvinced.
Clarke leans back in her chair. The back of her head touches the rear wall of the cubby. "Well, he's doing his job okay. When he's off shift he can go wherever he likes, I guess."
"Yeah, but this is the third time. He's always late. He just wanders in whenever he likes—"
"So what?" Clarke, suddenly tired, rubs the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. "We don't run on dryback schedules here, you know that. He pulls his weight, don't fuck with him."
"Well, Fischer was always getting shit for being l—"
"Nobody cared if Fischer was late," Clarke cuts in. "They just— wanted an excuse."
Caraco leans forward. "I don't like him," she confides.
"Acton? No reason you should. He's psycho. We all are, remember?"
"But he's different, somehow. You know that."
"Lubin nearly killed his wife down at Galapagos before they assigned him here. Brander's got a history of attempted suicide."
Something changes in Caraco's stance. Clarke can't be sure, but the other woman's gaze seems to have dropped to the deck. Touched a nerve there, I guess.
She continues, more gently. "You're not worried about the rest of us, are you? So what's so special about Acton?"
"Oh," Caraco says. "Look."
On the tactical display, something has just moved into range.
Clarke zooms in on the new reading; it's too distant for good resolution, but there's no mistaking the hard metallic blip in its center.
"Acton," she says.
"Um…how far?" Caraco asks in a hesitant voice.
Clarke checks. "He's about nine hundred meters out. Not too bad, if he's using a squid."
"He's not. He never does."
"Hmm. At least he seems to be beelining in." Clarke looks up at Caraco. "You two are on shift when?"
"Ten minutes."
"No big deal. He'll be fifteen minutes late. Half hour tops."
Caraco stares at the display. "What's he doing out there?"
"I don't know," Clarke says. She wonders, not for the first time, if Caraco really belongs down here. She just doesn't seem to get it, sometimes.
"I was wondering if you could maybe talk to him," Caraco says.
"Acton? Why?"
"Nothing. Forget it."
"Okay." Clarke rises from the Communications chair. Caraco backs out of the hatchway to let her past.
"Um, Lenie…"
Clarke turns.
"What about you?" Caraco asks.
"Me?"
"You said Lubin nearly killed his wife. Brander tried to kill himself. What did you do, I mean, to…qualify?"
Clarke watches her steadily.
"I mean, I guess, if it's not too—"
"You don't understand," Clarke says, her voice absolutely level. "It's not how much shit you've raised that suits you for the rift. It's how much you've survived."
"I'm sorry." Caraco manages, with eyes utterly devoid of feeling, to look abashed.
Clarke softens a bit. "In my case," she says, "Mostly I just learned to roll with the punches. I haven't done much worth bragging about, you know?"
I'm sure enough working on it, though.
She doesn't know how it could have happened so fast. He's been here only two weeks, yet the 'lock can barely contain his eagerness to get outside. The chamber floods, she feels a single shiver scurry along his body; and before she can move, Acton hits the latch and they drop outside.
He coasts out from under the station, his trajectory an effortless parallel of her own. Clarke fins off towards the Throat. She feels Acton at her side, although she cannot see him. His headlamp, like hers, stays dark; for her it's become a gesture of respect to the more delicate lanterns that dwell here.
She doesn't know what Acton's reasoning is.
He doesn't speak until Beebe's a dirty yellow smudge behind them. "Sometimes I wonder why we ever go back inside."
It can't be happiness in that voice. How could any emotion make it through the mechanical gauntlet that lets people speak out here?
"I fell asleep near the Throat yesterday," he says.
"You're lucky something didn't eat you," she tells him.
"They're not so bad. You just have to know how to relate to them."
Clarke wonders if he relates to other species with the same subtlety that he relates to his own. She keeps the question to herself.
They swim through sparse, living starlight for a while. Another smudge glimmers ahead, weak and sullen; the Throat, dead on target. It's been months now since Clarke has even thought of the guide rope that's supposed to lead them back and forth, like blind troglodytes. She knows where it is, but she never uses it. Other senses come awake down here. Rifters don't get lost.
Except Fischer, maybe. And Fischer was lost long before he came down here.
"So what happened to Fischer, anyway?" Acton says.
The chill starts in her chest, reaches her fingers before the sound of Acton's voice has died away. It's a coincidence. It's a perfectly normal question to ask.
"I said—"
"He disappeared," Clarke says.
"They told me that much," Acton buzzes back. "I thought you might have a bit more insight."
"Maybe he fell asleep outside. Maybe something ate him."
"I doubt that."
"Really? And what makes you such an expert, Acton? You've been down here for what, two weeks now?"
"Only two weeks? Seems longer. Time stretches when you're outside, doesn't it?"
"At first," Clarke says.
"You know why Fischer disappeared?"
"No."
"He outlived his usefulness."
"Ah." Her machine parts turn it into half creak, half growl.
"I'm serious, Lenie." Acton's mechanical voice does not change. "You think they're going to let you stay down here forever? You think they'd let people like us down here at all if they had any choice?"
She stops kicking. Her body continues to coast. "What are you talking about?"
"Use your head, Lenie. You're smarter than I am, inside at least. You've got the keys to the city here—you've got the keys to the whole fucking seaboard, and you're still acting like a victim." Acton's vocoder gurgles indecipherably—a laugh, mistransposed? A snarl?
More words: "They count on that, you know."
Clarke starts kicking again, stares ahead to the brightening glow of the Throat.
It isn't there.
There's a moment's disorientation — We can't be lost, we were headed right for it, has the power gone out? — before she sees the familiar streak of coarse yellow light, bearing four o'clock.
How could I have gotten turned around like that?
"We're here," Acton says.
"No. The Throat's way over—"
A nova flares beside her, drenching the abyss with blinding light. It takes Clarke's eyecaps a moment to adjust; when the starbursts have faded from her eyes, the ocean is a muddy black backdrop for the bright cone from Acton's headlamp.
"Don't," she says. "It gets so dark when you do that, you can't see anything—"
"I know. I'll turn it off in a moment. Just look."
His beam shines down on a small rocky outcropping rising from the mud, no more than two meters across. Jagged cookie-cutter flowers litter its surface, radial clusters shining garish red and blue in the artificial light. Some of them lie flat along the rock face. Others are contorted into frozen calcareous knots, clenched around things Clarke can't see.
Some of them move, slowly.
"You brought me out here to look at starfish?" She tries, and fails, to squeeze some hint of bored contempt through the vocodor. But inside there's a distant, frightened amazement that he has led her here, that she could be guided, utterly unsuspecting, so completely off course. And how did he find this place? No sonar pistol, compass doesn't work worth shit this close to the Throat…
"I figured you probably hadn't looked at them very closely before," Acton says. "I thought you might be interested."
"We don't have time for this, Acton."
His hands reach down into the light and lock onto one of the starfish. They peel it slowly from the rock; there are filaments of some kind along the creature's underside, anchoring it to the substrate. Acton's efforts tear them free, a few at a time.
He holds the animal up for Clarke's inspection. Its upper surface is colored stone, encrusted with calcareous spicules. Acton flips it over. The underside writhes with hundreds of thick squirming threads, jammed into dense rows along the length of each arm. Each thread has a tiny sucker at its tip.
"A starfish," Acton tells her, "is the ultimate democracy."
Clarke stares, quietly repelled.
"This is how they move," Acton is saying. "They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy."
Rows of squirming maggots. A forest of translucent leeches, groping blindly into the water.
"So there's nothing to coordinate the tube feet, they all move independently. Usually that's not a problem; they all tend to go towards food, for example. But it's not unusual for a third of these feet to be pulling in some other direction entirely. The whole animal's a living tug-o-war. Sometimes, some really stubborn tube feet just don't give up, and they literally get torn out at the roots when the others move the body someplace they don't want to go. But hey: majority rules, right?"
Clarke extends a tentative finger. Half a dozen tube feet latch onto it. She can't feel them through her 'skin. Anchored, they look almost delicate, like filaments of milky glass.
"But that's nothing," Acton says. "Watch this."
He rips the starfish in half.
Clarke pulls back, shocked and angry. But there's something in Acton's posture, in that barely visible outline behind his lamp, that makes her pause.
"Don't worry, Lenie," he says. "I haven't killed it. I've bred it."
He drops the torn halves. They flutter like leaves to the seabed, trailing bits of bloodless entrail.
"They regenerate. Didn't you know that? You can tear them into pieces and each piece grows back the missing parts. It takes time, but they recover. Only you end up with more of them. Damn hard to kill these guys.
"Understand, Lenie? Tear them to pieces, they come back stronger."
"How do you know all this?" she asks in a metallic whisper. "Where do you come from?"
He lays an icy black hand on her arm. "Right here. This is where I was born."
She doesn't think it absurd. In fact, she barely hears him. Her mind is somewhere else entirely, terrified by a sudden realization.
Acton is touching her, and she doesn't mind.
Of course, the sex is electric. It always is. The familiar has reasserted itself, here in the cramped space of Clarke's cubby. They can't both lie on the pallet at the same time but they manage somehow, Acton on his knees, then Clarke, squirming around each other in a metal nest lined with ducts and vents and bundles of optical cabling. They navigate each others' seams and scars, tonguing puckers of metal and pale flesh, unseen and all-seeing behind their corneal armor.
For Clarke it's a new twist, this icy ecstasy of a lover without eyes. For the first time she feels no need to avert her face, no threat to fragile intimacy; at first, when Acton moved to take out his caps, she stopped him with a touch and a whisper and he seemed to understand.
They cannot lie together afterwards so they sit side-by-side, leaning into each other, staring at the hatch two meters in front of them. The lights are turned too low for dryback vision; Clarke and Acton see a room suffused in pale fluorescence.
Acton reaches out and fingers a shard of glass sticking from an empty frame on one wall. "There used to be a mirror here," he remarks.
Clarke nibbles his shoulder. "There were mirrors everywhere. I—took them down."
"Why? A few mirrors would open the place up a bit. Make it larger."
She points. Several torn wires, fine as threads, hang from a hole in the frame. "They had cameras behind them. I didn't like that."
Acton grunts. "I don't blame you."
They sit without speaking for a bit.
"You said something outside," she says. "You said you were born down here."
Acton hesitates, then nods. "Ten days ago."
"What did you mean?"
"You should know," he says. "You witnessed my birth."
She thinks back. "That was when the gulper got you…"
"Close." Acton grins his cold eyeless grin, puts an arm around her. "Actually, the gulper sort of catalyzed it, if I remember. Think of it as a midwife."
An image pops into her mind: Acton in Medical, vivisecting himself.
"Fine-tuning," she says.
"Uh huh." He gives her a squeeze. "And I've got you to thank for it. You gave me the idea."
"Me?"
"You were my mother, Len. And my father was this spastic little shrimp that ended up way over its head. He died before I was born, actually: I killed him. You weren't very happy about that."
Clarke shakes her head. "You're not making sense."
"You telling me you haven't noticed the change? You telling me I'm the same person I was when I came down?"
"I don't know," she says. "Maybe I've just gotten to know you better."
"Maybe. Maybe I have too. I don't know, Len, I just seem more…awake now, I guess. I see things differently. You must have noticed."
"Yeah, but only when you're—"
Outside.
"You did something to your inhibitors," she whispers.
"Reduced the dosage a bit."
She grasps his arm. "Karl, those chemicals keep you from spazzing out every time you go outside. You fuck with this stuff, you're risking a seizure as soon as the 'lock floods."
"I have been fucking with it, Lenie. You see any change in me that isn't an improvement?"
She doesn't answer.
"It's all about action potential," he tells her. "Your nerves have to build up a certain charge before they can fire—"
"And at this depth they'd fire all the time, Karl, please—"
"Shh." He lays a gentle finger on her lips but she brushes it away, suddenly angry.
"I'm serious, Karl. Without those drugs your nerves short-circuit, you burn out, I know—"
"You only know what they tell you," he snaps. "Why don't you try working things out yourself for once?"
She falls silent, stung by his disapproval. A space opens between them on the pallet.
"I'm not a fool, Lenie," Acton says, more quietly. "I just reduced the settings a bit. Five percent. Now, when I go outside it takes a bit less of a stimulus for my nerves to fire, that's all. It…it wakes you up, Len; I'm more aware of things, I'm more alive somehow."
She watches him, unspeaking.
"Of course they say it's dangerous," he says. "They're scared shitless of you already. You think they're going to give you even more of an edge?"
"They're not scared of us, Karl."
"They should be." His arm goes back around her. "Wanna try it?"
It's as though she's suddenly outside, still naked. "No."
"There's nothing to worry about, Len. I've already done the guinea pig work on myself. Open up to me and I could make the adjustments myself, it'd take ten minutes."
"I'm not up for it, Karl. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one of the others is."
He shakes his head. "They don't trust me."
"You can't blame them."
"I don't." He grins, showing teeth as sharp and white as eyecaps. "But even if they did trust me, they wouldn't do anything unless you thought it was okay."
She looks at him. "Why not?"
"You're in charge here, Len."
"Bullshit. They never told you that."
"They didn't have to. It's obvious."
"I've been down here longer than them. So's Lubin. That doesn't matter to anyone."
Acton frowns briefly. "No, I don't think it does. But you're still leader of the pack, Len. Head wolf. A-fucking-kayla."
Clarke shakes her head. She searches her memory for something, anything, that would contradict Acton's absurd claim. She comes up empty.
She feels a little sick inside.
He gives her a little squeeze. "Tough luck, lover. I guess the clothes don't fit so well after being a career victim your whole life, eh?"
Clarke stares at the deck.
"Think about it, anyway," Acton whispers in her ear. "I guarantee you'll feel twice as alive as you do now."
"That happens anyway," Clarke reminds him. "Whenever I go outside. I don't need to screw up my internals for that." Not those internals, anyway.
"This is different," he insists.
She looks at him and smiles, and hopes he doesn't push it. How can he expect me to let him cut me open like that? she wonders, and then wonders if maybe someday she will, if the fear of losing him might somehow grow large enough to force her other fears into submission. It wouldn't be the first time.
Twice as alive, Acton says. Hiding behind her smile, Clarke considers: twice as much of her life. Not a great prospect, so far.
There's a light from behind; it chases her shadow out along the seabed. She can't remember how long it's been there. She feels a momentary chill—
— Fischer? —
— before common sense sets in. Gerry Fischer wouldn't use a headlamp.
"Lenie?"
She revolves on her own axis, sees a silhouette hovering a few meters away. Cyclopean light glares from its forehead. Clarke hears a subvocal buzz, the corrupted equivalent of Brander clearing his throat. "Judy said you were out here," he explains.
"Judy." She means it as a question, but her vocoder loses the intonation.
"Yeah. She sort of, keeps tabs on you sometimes."
Clarke considers that a moment. "Tell her I'm harmless."
"It's not like that," he buzzes. "I think she just… worries…"
Clarke feels muscles twitching at the corners of her mouth. She thinks she might be smiling.
"So I guess we're on shift," she says, after a moment.
The headlight bobs up and down. "Right. A bunch of clams need their asses scraped. More skilled labor."
She stretches, weightless. "Okay. Let's go."
"Lenie…"
She looks up at him.
"Why do you come— I mean, why here?" Brander's headlight sweeps the bottom, comes to rest on an outcropping of bone and rotted flesh. A skeletal smile stitches its way across the lit circle. "Did you kill it, or something?"
"Yeah, I—" She falls silent, realizing: He means the whale.
"Nah," she says instead. "It just died on its own."
Of course she wakes up alone. They still try to sleep together sometimes, after sex has made them too lazy to go outside. But the bunk is too small. The most they can manage is a sort of diagonal slouch: feet on the floor, necks bent up against the bulkhead, Acton cradling her like a living hammock. If they're unlucky they really do fall asleep like that. It takes hours to get the kinks out afterwards. Way more trouble than it's worth.
So she wakes up alone. But she misses him anyway.
It's early. The schedules handed down from the GA are increasingly irrelevant — circadian rhythms lose their way in the incessant darkness, fall slowly out of phase — but the rubbery timetable that remains leaves hours before her shift starts. Lenie Clarke is awake in the middle of the night. It seems like a stupid and obvious thing to say, months from the nearest sunrise, but right now it seems especially true.
In the corridor she turns for a moment in the direction of his cubby before she remembers. He's never in there any more. He's never even inside, unless he's eating or working or being with her. He hasn't slept in his quarters almost since they got involved. He's getting almost as bad as Lubin.
Caraco is sitting silently in the lounge, unmoving, obeying her own inner clock. She looks up as Clarke crosses to Comm.
"He went out about an hour ago," she says softly.
Sonar picks him up fifty meters southeast, barely echoing above the bottom clutter. Clarke heads for the ladder.
"He showed us something the other day," Caraco says after her. "Ken and me."
Clarke looks back.
"A smoker, way off in one corner of the Throat. It had this weird fluted vent, and it made singing sounds, almost…"
"Mmm."
"He really wanted us to know about it, for some reason. He was really excited. He's — he's kind of strange out there, Lenie…"
"Judy," Clarke says neutrally, "Why are you telling me this?"
Caraco looks away. "Sorry. I didn't mean anything."
Clarke starts down the ladder.
"Just be careful, okay?" Caraco calls after her.
He's curled up when Clarke reaches him, knees tucked under his chin, floating a few centimeters above a stone garden. His eyes are open, of course. She reaches out, touches him through two layers of reflex copolymer.
He barely stirs. His vocoder emits sporadic ticking noises.
Lenie Clarke curls herself around him. In a womb of freezing sea water, they sleep on until morning.
Short Circuit
I won't give in.
It would be so easy. She could live out there, stay the fuck away from this creaking eggshell except to eat and bathe and do whatever parts of her job demand an atmosphere. She could spend her whole life flying across the seabed. Lubin does. Brander and Caraco and even Nakata are starting to.
Lenie Clarke knows she doesn't belong in here. None of them do.
But at the same time, she's scared of what outside might do to her. I could end up like Fischer. It would be so easy to just— slip away. If a hot seep or mud slide didn't get me first.
Lately she's been valuing her own life quite a lot. Maybe that means she's losing it. What kind of a rifter cares about living? But there it is: the rift is starting to scare her.
That's bullshit. Complete, total bullshit.
Who wouldn't be scared?
Scared. Yes. Of Karl. Of what you'll let him do to you.
It's been, what, a week now?—
Two days.
— two days since she's slept outside. Two days since she decided to incarcerate herself in here. She goes outside to work, and comes back as soon as each shift ends. No one's mentioned the change to her. Perhaps no one's noticed; if they don't come back to Beebe themselves after work, they scatter off across the sea bed to do whatever they do in splendid, freezing isolation.
She knew Acton would notice, though. He'd notice, and miss her, and follow her back inside. Or maybe he'd try and talk her back out, fight with her when she resisted. But he's shown no sign at all. He spends as much time out there as he ever did. She still sees him, of course. At mealtimes. At the library. Once for sex, during which neither spoke of anything important. And then gone again, back into the ocean.
He didn't enter into any pact with her. She didn't even tell him about her pact with herself. Still, she feels betrayed.
She needs him. She knows what that means, sees her own footprints crowding the road ahead, but reading the signs and changing course are two completely different things. Her insides are twisting with the need to go, whether out to him or just out she can't say. But as long as he's outside and she's in Beebe, Lenie Clarke can tell herself that she's still in control.
It's progress, sort of.
Now, curled up in her cubby with the hatch sealed tight, she hears the subterranean gurgle of the airlock. She comes up off the bed as though radio-controlled.
Noises, flesh against metal, hydraulics and pneumatics. A voice. Lenie Clarke is on her way to the wet room.
He's brought a monster inside with him. It's an anglerfish, almost two meters long, a jellylike bag of flesh with teeth half the length of Clarke's forearm. It lies quivering on the deck, its insides exploded through its own mouth in the near vacuum of Beebe's sea-level atmosphere. Dozens of miniature tails, twitching feebly, sprout everywhere from its body.
Caraco and Lubin, in the middle of some task, look over from the engineering 'lock. Acton stands beside his catch; his thorax, still inflating, hisses softly.
"How did you fit it inside the 'lock?" Clarke wonders.
"More to the point," Lubin says, coming over, "why bother?"
"What're all those tails?" Caraco says.
Acton grins at them. "Not tails. Mates."
Lubin's face doesn't change. "Really."
Clarke leans forward. Not just tails, she sees now; some of them have those extra fins along the side and back. Some of them have gills. A couple of them even have eyes. It's as though a whole school of tiny anglers are boring into this big one. Some are in only as far as their jaws, but others are buried right down to the tail.
Another thought strikes her, even more revolting; the big fish doesn't need its mouth any more. It's just engulfing the little ones across its body wall, like some giant devolving microbe.
"Group sex on the rift," says Acton. "All the big ones we've been seeing, they're female. The males are these little finger-sized fuckers here. Not many dating opportunities this far down, so they just latch on to the first female they can find, and they sort of fuse — their heads get absorbed, their bloodstreams link together. They're parasites, get it? They worm into her side and they spend their whole lives feeding off her. And there's a fuck of a lot of them, but she's bigger than they are, she's stronger, she could eat them alive if she just—"
"He's been in the library again," Caraco remarks.
Acton looks at her for a moment. Deliberately, he points at the bloated carcass on the deck. "That's us." He grabs one of the parasitic males, rips it free. "This is everyone else. Get it?"
"Ah," Lubin says. "A metaphor. Clever."
Acton takes a single step towards the other man. "Lubin, I am getting awfully fucking tired of you."
"Really." Lubin doesn't seem the least bit threatened.
Clarke moves; not directly between them, just off to one side, forming the apex of a human triangle. She has absolutely no idea what to do if this comes to blows. She has no idea what to say to stop that from happening.
Suddenly, she's not even sure that she wants to.
"Come on, you guys." Caraco leans back against the drying rack. "Can't you settle this some other way? Maybe you could just whip out a ruler and compare your dicks or something."
They stare at her.
"Watch it, Judy. You're getting pretty cocky there."
Now they're staring at Clarke.
Did I say that?
For a long, long moment nothing happens. Then Lubin grunts and goes back to the workshop. Acton watches him go; then, deprived of an immediate threat, he steps back into the airlock.
The dead angler shivers on the deck, bristling with infestation.
"Lenie, he's really getting weird," Caraco says as the 'lock floods. "Maybe you should just let him go."
Clarke just shakes her head. "Go where?"
She even manages a smile.
She was looking for Karl Acton, but somehow she's found Gerry Fischer instead. He looks sadly down at her through the length of a long tunnel. He seems to be a whole ocean away. He doesn't speak but she senses sadness, disappointment. You lied to me, that feeling says. You said you'd come and see me and you lied. You've forgotten all about me.
He's wrong. She hasn't forgotten him at all. She's only tried to.
She doesn't say it aloud, of course, but somehow he reacts to it anyway. His feelings change; sadness fades, something colder seeps up in its place, something so deep and so old that she can't think of words to describe it.
Something pure.
From behind, a touch on her shoulder. She spins, instantly alert, hand closing around her billy.
"Hey, calm down. It's me." Acton's silhouette hangs against a faint wash of light from the direction of the Throat. Clarke relaxes, pushes gently at his chest. Says nothing.
"Welcome back," Acton says. "Haven't seen you out here for a while."
"I was— I was looking for you," she says.
"In the mud?"
"What?"
"You were just floating there, face down."
"I was—" She feels a vestige of disquiet, but she can't remember what to attach it to. "I must have drifted off. I was dreaming. It's been so long since I slept out here, I—"
"Four days, I think. I missed you."
"Well, you could have come inside."
Acton nods. "I tried. But I could never get all of me through the airlock, and the part that I could— well, it was sort of a poor substitute. If you'll remember."
"I don't know, Karl. You know how I feel—"
"Right. And I know you like it out here as much as I do. Sometimes I feel like I could just stay out here forever." He pauses for a moment, as if weighing alternatives. "Fischer's got it right."
Something goes cold. "Fischer?"
"He's still out here, Len. You know that."
"You've seen him?"
"Not often. He's pretty skittish."
"When do…I mean—"
"Only when I'm alone. And pretty far from Beebe."
She looks around, inexplicably frightened. Of course you can't see him. He isn't here. And even if he was, it's still too dark to…
She forces herself to leave her headlamp doused.
"He's…I think he's really hooked in to you, Len. But I guess you know that too."
No. No, I didn't. I don't. "He talks to you?" She doesn't know why she'd resent that.
"No."
"Then how?"
Acton doesn't answer for a moment. "I don't know. I just got that impression. But he doesn't talk. It's…I don't know, Len. He just hangs around out there and watches us. I don't know if he's what we'd consider… sane, I guess—"
"He watches us," she says, buzzing low and level.
"He knows we're together. I think…I think he figures that connects me and him somehow." Acton is silent for a bit. "You cared about him, didn't you?"
Oh yes. It always starts off so innocently. You cared about him, that's nice, and then it's did you find him attractive and then well you must have done something or he wouldn't keep hitting on you and then you fucking slut I'll—
"Lenie," Acton says. "I'm not trying to start anything."
She waits and watches.
"I know there was nothing going on. And even if there was, I know it's no threat."
She's heard this part before, too.
"Now that I think about it, that's always been my problem," Acton muses. "I always had to go on what other people told me, and people— people lie all the time, Len, you know that. So no matter how many times she swears she's not fucking around on you, or even that she doesn't want to fuck around on you, how can you ever really know? You can't. So the default assumption is, she's lying. And being lied to all the time, that's a damn good reason for — well, for doing what I do sometimes."
"Karl — you know—"
"I know you don't lie to me. You don't even hate me. That's kind of a change."
She reaches out to touch the side of his face. "I'd say that's a good call. I'm glad you trust me."
"Actually, Len, I don't have to trust you. I just know."
"What do you mean? How?"
"I'm not sure," he says. "It's something to do with the changes."
He waits for her to respond.
"What are you saying, Karl?" she says at last. "Are you saying you can read my mind?"
"No. Nothing like that. I just, well, I identify with you more. I can— it's kind of hard to explain—"
She remembers him levitating beside a luminous smoker: the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?
He's tuned in, she realizes. To everything. He's even tuned into the bloody worms, that's what he—
He's tuned in to Fischer—
She tongues the light switch. A bright cone stabs into the abyss. She sweeps the water around them. Nothing.
"Have the others seen him?"
"I don't know. I think Caraco caught him on sonar once or twice."
"Let's go back," Clarke says.
"Let's not. Stay a while. Spend the night."
She looks straight into his empty lenses. "Please, Karl. Come with me. Sleep inside for a bit."
"He's not dangerous, Len."
"That's not it." At least, that's not all.
"What, then?"
"Karl, has it ever occurred to you that you might be developing some sort of dependence on this nerve rush of yours?"
"Come on, Len. The rift gives us all a rush. That's why we're down here."
"We get a rush because we're fucked in the head. That doesn't mean we should go out of our way to augment the effect."
"Lenie—"
"Karl." She lays her hands on his shoulders. "I don't know what happens to you out here. But whatever it is, it scares me."
He nods. "I know."
"Then please, please try it my way. Try sleeping inside again, just for a while. Try not to spend every waking moment climbing around on the bottom of the ocean, okay?"
"Lenie, I don't like myself inside. You don't even like me inside."
"Maybe. I don't know. I just — I just don't know how to deal with you when you're like this."
"When I'm not about to beat the shit out of anyone? When I'm acting like a rational human being? If we'd had this conversation back at Beebe we'd be throwing things at each other by now." He falls silent for a moment. Something changes in his posture. "Or do you miss that, somehow?"
"No. Of course not," she says, surprised at the thought.
"Well, then—"
"Please. Just— indulge me. What harm can it do?"
He doesn't answer. But she has a sneaking suspicion that he could.
She has to give him credit. His reluctance shows in every move, but he's even first through the airlock. Something happens to him as it drains, though; the air rushes into him and — displaces something else, somehow. She can't quite put her finger on it. She wonders why she's never noticed it before.
As a reward, she takes him directly into her cubby. He fucks her up against the bulkhead, violently, with no discretion at all. Animal sounds echo through the hull. She wonders, as he comes, if the noise is bothering the others.
"Have any of you," Acton says, "thought about why things are so fucking grotty down here?"
It's a strange and wondrous occasion, as rare as a planetary conjunction. All the circadian clocks have drifted together for an hour or two, drawn everyone to dinner at the same time. Almost everyone; Lubin is nowhere to be seen. Not that he ever contributes much to the conversation anyway.
"What do you mean?" Caraco says.
"What do you think I mean? Look around, for Chrissake!" Acton waves his arm, taking in the lounge. "The place is barely big enough to stand up in. Everywhere you look there's fucking pipes and cables. It's like living in a service closet."
Brander frowns around a mouthful of rehydrated potato.
"They were on a very strict schedule," Nakata suggests. "It was important to get everything online as quickly as possible. Perhaps they just didn't have time to make everything as cushy as they could have."
Acton snorts. "Come on, Alice. How much extra time would it take to program the blueprints for decent headroom?"
"I feel a conspiracy theory coming on," Brander remarks. "So go on, Karl. Why's the GA going out of its way to make us bump our heads all the time? They breeding us for short height, maybe? So we'll eat less?"
Lenie Clarke feels Acton tensing; it's like a small shockwave pushed out by his clenching muscles, a pulse of tension that ripples through the air and breaks against her 'skin. She rests one calming hand casually on his thigh, under the table. It's a calculated risk, of course. It would piss him off even more if Acton thought he was being patronized.
This time he relaxes a little. "I think they're trying to keep us off balance. I think they deliberately designed Beebe to stress us out."
"Why?" Caraco again, tense but civil.
"Because it gives them an advantage. The more time we spend being on edge, the less time we have to think about what we could do to them if we really wanted to."
"And what's that?"
"Use your head, Judy. We could black out the grid from the Charlottes down to Portland."
"They'd just switch feeds," Brander says. "There are other deep stations."
"Yeah. And they're all staffed by people just like us." Acton slaps the table with one hand. "Come on, you guys. They don't want us down here. They hate us, we're sickos that beat up our wives and eat our babies for breakfast. If it weren't for the fact that anyone else would flip out down here—"
Clarke shakes her head. "But they could get us out of the loop completely if they wanted. Just automate everything."
"Hallelujah." Acton brings his hands together in sarcastic applause. "The woman's got it at last."
Brander leans back in his chair. "Give it a rest, Acton. Haven't you ever worked for the GA before? You ever work for any sort of bureaucracy?"
Acton's gaze swivels, locks on to the other man. "What's your point?"
Brander looks back with a hint of a sneer on his face. "My point, Karl, is that you're reading way too much into this. So they made the ceilings too low. So their interior decorator's not worth shit. So what else is new? The GA just isn't that scared of you." He takes in Beebe with a wave of his arm. "This isn't some subtle psychological war. Beebe was just designed by incompetent bozos." Brander stands up, takes his plate to the galley. "If you don't like the headroom, stay outside."
Acton looks at Lenie Clarke, his face utterly devoid of expression. "Oh, I'd like to. Believe me."
He's hunched over the library terminal, 'phones on his ears, 'phones on his eyes, the flatscreen blanked as usual to hide his litsearch from view. As if anything in the database could really be personal. As if the GA would ever ration out any fact worth hiding.
She's learned not to bother him when he's like this. He's hunting in there, he resents any distraction as though the files he's after might somehow escape if he looks the other way. She doesn't touch him. She doesn't run a gentle finger along his arm or try to work the knots from his shoulders. Not any more. There are some mistakes that Lenie Clarke can learn from.
He's actually helpless in a strange way; cut off from the rest of Beebe, deaf and blind to the presence of people who are by no means friends. Brander could come up behind him right now and plant a knife in his back. And yet everyone leaves him alone. It's as though his sensory exile, this self-imposed vulnerability is some sort of brazen dare that no one has the guts to take him up on. So Acton sits at the keyboard— tapping at first, now stabbing— in his own private datasphere, and his deaf blind presence somehow dominates the lounge out of all proportion to his physical size.
"FUCK!"
He tears the 'phones from his face and slams his fist down on the console. Nothing even cracks. He glares around the lounge, white eyes blazing, and settles on Nakata over in the galley. Lenie Clarke, wisely, has avoided eye contact.
"This database is fucking ancient! They stick us down this fucking black anus for months at a time and they don't even give us a link to the net!"
Nakata spreads her hands. "The net's infected," she says, nervously. "They send us scrubbed downloads every month or s—"
"I fucking know that." Acton's voice is suddenly, ominously calm. Nakata takes the hint and falls silent.
He stands up. The whole room seems to shrink down around him. "I've got to get out of here," he says at last. He takes a step towards the ladder, glances at Clarke. "Coming?"
She shakes her head.
"Suit yourself."
Caraco, maybe. She's made overtures in the past.
Not that Clarke ever took them. But things are changing. There aren't just two Karl Actons any more. There used to be; all of her partners have been twosomes, in fact. There's always been a host, some magnetic chassis whose face and name never mattered because it would change without warning. And providing continuity, riding along behind each twinkling pair of eyes, there's always been the thing inside, and it never changes. Nor, to be honest, would Lenie Clarke know what to do if it did.
Now there's something new: the thing outside. So far at least, it has shown no trace of violence. It does seem to have x-ray vision, which could be even worse.
Lenie Clarke has always slept with the thing inside. Until now, she'd always just assumed it was for want of an alternative.
She taps lightly on Caraco's hatch. "Judy? You there?" She should be; she's nowhere else in Beebe, and sonar can't find any trace of her outside.
No answer.
It can wait.
No. It's waited long enough.
How would I feel if—
She isn't me.
The hatch is closed but not dogged. Clarke pulls it open a few centimeters and peers inside.
Somehow they've managed to pull it off. Alice Nakata and Judy Caraco spoon around each other on that tiny bunk. Their eyes dart restlessly beneath closed lids. Nakata's dreamer stands guard beside them, its tendrils pasted to their bodies.
Clarke lets the hatch hiss shut again.
It was a stupid idea, anyhow. What would she know?
She wonders how long they've been together, though. She never even saw that coming.
"Your boyfriend isn't here," Lubin calls in. "We were supposed to top up the coolant on number seven."
Clarke calls up the topographic display. "How long ago?"
"Oh four hundred."
"Okay." Acton's half an hour late. That's unusual; he's been going out of his way to be punctual these days, a grudging concession to Clarke in the name of group relations. "I can't find him on sonar," she reports. "Unless he's hugging the bottom. Hang on."
She leans out of the comm cubby. "Hey. Anybody see Karl?"
"He left a while ago," Brander calls from the wet room. "Maintenance on seven, I think."
Clarke punches back into Lubin's channel. "He's not here. Brander says he left already. I'll keep looking."
"Okay. At least his deadman switch hasn't gone off." Clarke can't tell whether Lubin thinks that's good or bad.
Movement at the corner of her eye. She looks up; Nakata's standing in the hatchway.
"Have you found him?" she asks.
Clarke shakes her head.
"He was in Medical, just before he left," Nakata says. "He was open. He said he was making some adjustments—"
Oh God.
"He said they improved performance outside, but he didn't explain. He said he would show me later. Maybe something went wrong."
External camera display, ventral view. The image flickers for a moment, then clears; on the screen, a scalloped circle of light lies across a flat muddy plain, transected by the knife-edge shadows of anchor cables. Near the edge of that circle is a black human figure, face down, its hands held to either side of its head.
She wakes up the close acoustics. "Karl! Karl, can you hear me?"
He reacts. His head twists around, faces up into the floods; his eyecaps reflect featureless white glare into the camera. He's shaking.
"His vocoder," Nakata says. There's sound coming from the speaker, soft, repetitive, mechanical. "It's— stuttering—"
Clarke's already in the wet room. She knows what Acton's vocoder is saying. She knows, because the same word is repeating over and over in her own head.
No. No. No. No. No.
No obvious motor impairment. He's able to make it back inside on his own; stiffens, in fact, when Clarke tries to help him. He strips his gear and follows her into Medical without a word.
Nakata, diplomatically, closes the hatch behind them
Now he sits on the examination table, stonefaced. Clarke knows the routine; get his 'skin off, his eyecaps out. Check autonomic pupil response and reflex arcs. Stab him, draw off the usual samples: blood gases, acetylcholine, GABA, lactic acid.
She sits down beside him. She doesn't want his eyecaps out. She doesn't want to see behind them.
"Your inhibitors," she says at last. "How far down are they?"
"Twenty percent."
"Well." She tries for a light touch. "At least we know your limit now. Just nudge them back up to normal."
Almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.
"Why not?"
"Too late. I went over some sort of threshold. I don't think — it doesn't feel reversible."
"I see." She puts one tentative hand on his arm. He doesn't react. "How do you feel?"
"Blind. Deaf."
"You're not, though."
"You asked how I felt," he says, still expressionless.
"Here." She takes the NMR helmet down from its hook. Acton lets her strap it across his skull. "If there's anything wrong, this should—"
"There's something wrong, Len."
"Well." The helmet writes its impressions across the diagnostic display. Clarke's got the same medical expertise they all have, stuffed into her mind by machines that hijacked her dreams. Still, the raw data mean nothing to her. It's almost a minute before the display prints out an executive summary.
"Your synaptic calcium's way down." She's careful not to show her relief. "Makes sense, I guess. Your neurons fire too often, eventually they run out of something."
He looks at the screen, saying nothing.
"Karl, it's okay." She leans toward his ear, one hand on his shoulder. "It'll fix itself. Just put your inhibitors back up to normal; demand goes down, supply keeps up. No harm done."
He shakes his head again. "Won't work."
"Karl, look at the readout. You're going to be fine."
"Please don't touch me," he says, not moving at all.
Critical Mass
She catches a glimpse of fist before it hits her eye. She staggers back against the bulkhead, feels some protruding rivet or valve catch the back of her head. The world drowns in explosions of afterlight.
He's lost control, she thinks dully. I win. Her knees collapse under her; she slides down the wall, sits with a heavy thud on the deck. She considers it a matter of some pride that she's kept utterly silent through all this.
I wonder what I did to set him off. She can't remember. Acton's fist seems to have knocked the past few minutes out of her head. Doesn't matter anyway. Same old dance.
But this time there seems to be someone on her side. She can hear shouts, sounds of a scuffle. She hears the sick jarring thud of flesh against bone against metal, and for once, none of it seems to be hers.
"You cocksucker! I'll rip your fucking balls off!"
Brander's voice. Brander is sticking up for her. He always was the gallant one. Clarke smiles, tastes salt. Of course, he never quite forgave Acton for that tiff over the gulper, either…
Her vision is starting to clear, in one eye at least. There's a leg right in front of her, another to one side. She looks up; the legs meet at Caraco's crotch. Acton and Brander are in her cubby too; Clarke's amazed that they can all fit.
Acton, his mouth bloody, is under siege. Brander's hand is at his throat. Acton has the wrist of that hand caught in a grip of his own; while Clarke watches, his other arm lashes out and glances off Brander's jaw.
"Stop it," she mumbles.
Caraco hits Acton's temple twice in rapid succession. Acton's head snaps sideways, snarls, but he doesn't release his grip on Brander.
"I said stop it!"
This time they hear her. The struggle slows, pauses; fists remain poised, no holds break, but they're all looking at her now.
Even Acton. Clarke looks up into his eyes, looks behind them. She can see nothing staring back but Acton himself. You were there before, she remembers. I'm almost sure of it. Count on you to get Acton into a losing fight and then bugger off…
She braces herself against the bulkhead and pushes slowly erect. Caraco moves aside, helps her up.
"I'm flattered by all the attention, folks," Clarke says, "and I want to thank you for stopping by, but I think we can handle this on our own from here on in."
Caraco puts a protective hand on her shoulder. "You don't have to put up with this shit." Her eyes, somehow venomous through the shielding, are still locked on Acton. "None of us do."
One corner of Acton's mouth pulls back in a small, bloody sneer.
Clarke endures Caraco's touch without flinching. "I know that. And thanks for stepping in. But please, just leave us alone for a while."
Brander doesn't loosen his grip on Acton's throat. "I don't think that a very good—"
"Will you get your fucking hands off him and leave us alone!"
They back off. Clarke glares after them, dogs the hatch to keep them out. "Goddamned nosy neighbors," she grumbles, turning back to Acton.
His body sags in the sudden privacy, all the anger and bravado evaporating as she watches.
"Want to tell me why you're being such an asshole?" she says.
Acton collapses on her pallet. He stares at the deck, avoiding her eyes. "Don't you know when you're being fucked over?"
Clarke sits down beside him. "Sure. Getting punched out is pretty much a giveaway."
"I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to help all of you." He turns and hugs her, body shaking, cheek pressed against hers, face aimed at the bulkhead behind her shoulder. "Oh God Lenie I'm so sorry you're the last person in the whole fucking world I want to hurt—"
She strokes him without speaking. She knows he means it. They always do. She still can't bring herself to blame any of them.
He thinks he's alone in there. He thinks it's all his own doing.
Briefly, an impossible thought: Maybe it is…
"I can't go on with this," he says. "Staying inside."
"It'll get better, Karl. It's always hard at first."
"Oh God, Len. You don't have a clue. You still think I'm some sort of junkie."
"Karl—"
"You think I don't know what addiction is? You think I can't tell the difference?"
She doesn't answer.
He manages a small, sad laugh. "I'm losing it, Len. You're forcing me to lose it. Why in God's name do you want me this way?"
"Because this is who you are, Karl. Outside isn't you. Outside's a distortion."
"Outside I'm not an asshole. Outside I don't make everyone hate me."
"No." She hugs him. "If controlling your temper means seeing you turn into something else, seeing you doped up all the time, then I'll take my chances with the original."
Acton looks at her. "I hate this. Jesus Christ, Len. Won't you ever get tired of people who kick the shit out of you?"
"That's a really nasty thing to say," she remarks quietly.
"I don't think so. I can remember some things I saw out there, Len. It's like you need — I mean God, Lenie, there's so much hate in all of you…"
She's never heard him speak like this. Not even outside. "You've got a bit of that in you too, you know."
"Yeah. I thought it made me different. I thought it gave me…an edge, you know?"
"It does."
He shakes his head. "Oh, no. Not next to you."
"Don't underrate yourself. You don't see me trying to take on the whole station."
"That's just it, Len. I blow it off all the time, I waste it on stupid shit like this. But you— you hoard it." His expression changes, she's not exactly sure what to. Concern, maybe. Worry. "Sometimes you scare me more than Lubin does. You never lash out, or beat on anybody — Christ, it's a major event when you even raise your voice — so it just builds up. It's got its up side, I guess." He manages a soft laugh. "Hatred's a great fuel source. If anything ever—activated you, you'd be unstoppable. But now, you're just—toxic. I don't think you really know how much hate you've got in you."
Pity?
Something inside her goes suddenly cool. "Don't play therapist with me, Karl. Just because your nerves fire too fast doesn't mean you've got second sight. You don't know me that well."
Of course not. Or you wouldn't be with me.
"Not in here." He smiles, but that strange sick expression keeps showing through behind. "Outside, at least, I can see things. In here I'm blind."
"You're in the land of the blind." She says curtly. "It's not a drawback."
"Really? Would you stay here if it meant getting your eyes cut out? Would you stay some place that rotted your brain out piece by piece, turned you from a human being into a fucking monkey?"
Clarke considers. "If I was a monkey to begin with, maybe."
Uh oh. Sounded too flippant by half, didn't I?
Acton looks at her for a moment. Something else does too, drowsily, with one eye open.
"At least I don't get my endorphins by playing victim," he says, slowly. "You should really be a bit more careful who you choose to look down on."
"And you," Clarke replies, "should save the pious lectures for those rare occasions when you actually know what you're talking about."
He rises off the bed and glares at her, fists carefully unclenched.
Clarke does not move. She feels her whole body hardening from the inside out. She deliberately lifts her head until she's looking straight into Acton's hooded eyes.
It's in there now, fully awake. She can't see Acton at all any more. Everything's back to normal.
"Don't even try," she says. "I gave you a couple of shots for old times' sake, but if you lay a hand on me again I swear I'll fucking kill you."
She marvels inwardly at the strength in her voice; it sounds like iron.
They stare at each other for an endless moment.
Acton's body turns on its heel and undogs the hatch. Clarke watches it step out of the cubby; Caraco, waiting in the corridor, lets it by without a word. Clarke holds herself utterly still until she hears the 'lock beginning to cycle.
He didn't call my bluff.
Except this time, she's not sure that that's all it was.
He doesn't see her.
It's been days since they've said anything to each other. Even their shift schedules have diverged. Tonight, as she was trying to sleep, she heard him come out of the abyss again and climb up into the lounge like some invading sea creature. He does it now and then when the place is deserted, when everyone is either outside or sealed into their cubicles. He sits there at the library, diving through his 'phones down endless virtual avenues, desperation in every movement. It's as though he has to hold his breath whenever he comes inside; once she saw him tear the headset off his skull and flee outside as though his chest would burst. When she picked up the abandoned headset, the results of his litsearch were still glowing in the eyephones. Chemistry.
Another time he turned on his way out to see her standing in the corridor. He smiled. He even said something: " — sorry—" is what she heard, but there may have been more. He didn't stay.
Now his hands rest, unmoving, on the keyboard. His shoulders are shaking. He doesn't make any sound at all. Lenie Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, wondering whether to approach him. When she looks again the lounge is empty.
She can tell exactly where he's going. His icon buds off of Beebe and crawls away across the display, and there's only on thing in that direction.
When she gets there he's crawling across its back, digging a hole with his knife. Clarke's eyecaps can barely find enough light to see by, this far from the Throat; Acton cuts and slices in the light of her headlamp, his shadow writhing away across a horizon of dead flesh.
He's dug a crater, maybe half a meter across, half a meter deep. He's cut through the stratum of blubber below the skin and is tearing through the brown muscle beneath. It's been months now since this creature landed here. Clarke marvels at its preservation.
The abyss likes extremes, she muses. If it isn't a pressure cooker, it's a fridge.
Acton stops digging. He just floats there, staring down at his handiwork.
"What a stupid idea," he buzzes at last. "I don't know what gets into me sometimes." He turns to face her; his eyecaps reflect yellow. "I'm sorry, Lenie. I know this place was special to you somehow, I didn't mean to…well, desecrate it, I guess."
She shakes her head. "It's okay. It's not important."
Acton's vocoder gurgles; in air, it would be a sad laugh. "I give myself too much credit sometimes, Len. Whenever I'm inside, and I'm fucking up and I don't know what to do, I figure all I've got to do is come outside and the scales will fall off my eyes. It's like, religious faith almost. All the answers. Right out here."
"It's okay," Clarke says again, because it seems better than saying nothing.
"Only sometimes the answer doesn't really do much for you, you know? Sometimes the answer's just: Forget it. You're fucked." Acton looks back down at the dead whale. "Would you turn the light off?"
The darkness swallows them like a blanket. Clarke reaches through it and brings Acton to her. "What were you trying to do?"
That mechanical laugh again. "Something I read. I was thinking—"
His cheek brushes against hers.
"I don't know what I was thinking. When I'm inside I'm a fucking lobo case, I get these stupid ideas and even when I get back out it takes a while before I really wake up and realize what a dork I've been. I wanted to study an adrenal gland. Thought it would help me figure out how to counter ion depletion at the synapse junctions."
"You know how to do that."
"Well, it was just bullshit anyway. I can't think straight in there."
She doesn't bother to argue.
"I'm sorry," Acton buzzes after a while.
Clarke strokes his back. It feels like two sheets of plastic rubbing together.
"I think I can explain it to you," he adds. "If you're interested."
"Sure." But she knows it won't change anything.
"You know how there's this strip in your brain that controls movement?"
"Okay."
"And if, say, you became a concert pianist, the part that runs your fingers would actually spread out, take up more of the strip to meet the increased demand for finger control. But you lose something, too. The adjacent parts of the strip get crowded out. So maybe you couldn't wiggle your toes or curl your tongue as well as you could before you started practicing."
Acton falls silent. Clarke feels his arms, cradling her loosely from behind.
"I think something like that happened to me," he says after a while.
"How?"
"I think something in my brain got exercised, and it spread out and crowded some other parts away. But it only works in a high-pressure environment, you see, it's the pressure that makes the nerves fire faster. So when I go back inside, the new part shuts down and the old parts have been — well, lost."
Clarke shakes her head. "We've been through this, Karl. Your synapses just ran low on calcium."
"That's not all that happened. That's not even a problem any more, I've brought my inhibitors up again. Not all the way, but enough. But I still have this new part, and I still can't find the old ones." She feels his chin on the top of her head. "I don't think I'm exactly human any more, Len. Which, considering the kind of human I was, is probably just as well."
"And what does it do, exactly? This new part?"
He takes a while to answer. "It's almost like getting an extra sense organ, except it's… diffuse. Intuition, only with a really hard edge."
"Diffuse, with a hard edge."
"Yeah, well. That's the problem when you try to explain smell to someone without a nose."
"Maybe it's not what you think. I mean, something's changed, but that doesn't mean you can really just — look into people like that. Maybe it's just some sort of mood disorder. Or a hallucination, maybe. You can't know."
"I know, Len."
"Then you're right." Anger trickles up from her internal reservoir. "You're not human any more. You're less than human."
"Lenie—"
"Humans have to trust, Karl. There's no big deal about putting your faith in something you know for certain. I want you to trust me."
"Not know you."
She tries to hear sadness on that synthetic voice. In Beebe, maybe, it would have come through. But in Beebe he would never had said that.
"Karl—"
"I can't come back."
"You're not yourself out here." She pushes away, spins around; she can just barely distinguish his silhouette.
"You want me to be—" She hears confusion in the words, even through the vocoder, but she knows it's not a question. " — hateful."
"Don't be an idiot. I've had more than my fill of assholes, believe me. But Karl, this is just some kind of cheap trick. Step out of the magic booth, you're Mr. Nice Guy. Step back in, you're the SeaTac Strangler. It's not real."
"How do you know?"
She keeps her distance, suddenly knowing the answer. It's only real if it hurts. It's only real if it happens slowly, painfully, each step carved in shouts and threats and thrown punches.
It's only real if Lenie Clarke is the one to make him change.
She doesn't tell him any of this, of course. But she's afraid, as she turns and leaves him there, that she doesn't have to.
She comes instantly out of sleep, tense and completely alert. There's darkness — the lights are off, she's even blanked the readouts on the wall — but it's the close, familiar darkness of her own cubby. Something is tapping on the hull, regular and insistent.
From outside.
Out in the corridor there's light enough for rifter eyes. Nakata and Caraco stand motionless in the lounge. Brander sits at the library; the screens are dark, the headsets all hanging on their pegs.
The sound ticks through the lounge, fainter than before but easily audible.
"Where's Lubin?" Clarke asks softly. Nakata tilts her head towards the hull: outside somewhere.
Clarke climbs downstairs and into the airlock.
"We thought you'd gone over," she says. "Like Fischer."
They float between Beebe and the sea floor. Clarke reaches out to him. Acton reaches back.
"How long has it been?" The words come out as faint, metallic sighs.
"Six days. Maybe seven. I've been putting off— calling up for a replacement—"
He doesn't react.
"We saw you on sonar sometimes," she adds. "For a while. Then you disappeared."
Silence.
"Did you get lost?" she asks after a while.
"Yeah."
"But you're back now."
"No."
"Karl—"
"I need you to promise me something, Lenie."
"What?"
"Promise me you'll do what I did. The others too. They'll listen to you."
"You know I can't—"
"Five percent, Lenie. Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you'll do okay. Promise."
"Why, Karl?"
"Because I wasn't wrong about everything. Because sooner or later they're going to have to get rid of you, and you need every edge you can get."
"Come inside. We can talk about it inside, everyone's there."
"There's strange things happening out there, Len. Out past sonar range, they're — I don't know what they're doing. They don't tell us…"
"Come inside, Karl."
He shakes his head. He seems almost unused to the gesture.
"— can't—"
"Then don't expect me—"
"I left a file in the library. It explains things. As much as I could, when I was in there. Promise me, Len."
"No. You promise. Come inside. Promise we'll work it out."
"It kills too much of me," he sighs. "I pushed it too far. Something burned out, I'm not even completely whole out here any more. But you'll be okay. Five or ten percent, no more."
"I need you," she buzzes, very quietly.
"No," he says. "You need Karl Acton."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You need what he did to you."
All the warmth goes out of her then. What's left is a slow, freezing boil.
"What is this, Karl? Some grand insight you got while spirit-walking around in the mud? You think you know me better than I do?"
"You know—"
"Because you don't, you know. You don't know shit about me, you never did. And you don't really have the balls to find out, so you run off into the dark and come back spouting all this pretentious bullshit." She's goading him, she knows she's goading him but he's just not reacting. Even one of his outbursts would be better than this.
"It's saved under Shadow," he says.
She stares at him without speaking.
"The file," he adds.
"What's wrong with you?" She's beating at him now, pounding as hard as she can but he's not hitting back, he's not even defending himself for Chrissakes why don't you fight back asshole why don't you just get it over with, just beat the shit out of me until the guilt covers us both and we'll promise never to do it again and—
But even anger deserts her now. The inertia of her attack pushes them away from each other. She catches herself on an anchor cable. A starfish, wrapped around the line, reaches blindly out to touch her with the tip of one arm.
Acton continues to drift.
"Stay," she says.
He brakes and holds position without answering, dim and gray and distant.
There are so many things denied her out here. She can't cry. She can't even close her eyes. So she stares at the sea bed, watches her own shadow stretch off into the darkness. "Why are you doing this?" she asks, exhausted, and wonders who she meant the question for.
His shadow flows across her own. A mechanical voice answers:
"This is what you do when you really love someone."
She jerks her head up in time to see him disappear.
Beebe's quiet when she returns. The wet slap of her feet on the deck is the only sound. She climbs into the lounge and finds it empty. She takes a step towards the corridor that leads to her cubby.
Stops.
In Comm, a luminous icon inches towards the Throat. The display lies for effect; in reality Acton is dark and unreflective, no more luminous than she is.
She wonders again if she should try and stop him. She could never overpower him by force, but perhaps she just hasn't thought of the right thing to say. Perhaps if she just gets it right she can call him back, compel his return through words alone. Not a victim any more, he said once. Perhaps she's a siren instead.
She can't think of anything to say.
He's almost there now. She can see him gliding between great bronze pillars, bacterial nebulae swirling in his wake. She imagines his face aimed down, scanning, relentless, hungry. She can see him homing in on the north end of Main Street.
She shuts off the display.
She doesn't have to watch this. She knows what's going on, and the machines will tell her when it's over. She couldn't stop them if she tried, not unless she smashed them into junk. That, in fact, is exactly what she wants to do. But she controls herself. Quiet as stone, Lenie Clarke sits in the command cubby staring at a blank screen, waiting for the alarm.
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