by Peter Watts
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 lightyears. 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 Dry-backs 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 biopsych 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 under stands 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.”