Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  And somebody, she promised herself, is going to pay.

  Amitav said nothing. He watched her with his sunken eyes, his expression gone blank and unfathomable once more.

  Clarke sighed. “Do you really want to fuck with me, Amitav? Do you want to fuck with the people who did hit the switch? They don’t exactly have a light touch when it comes to cleaning up their messes. Right now they think I’m dead. Do you want to be around me when they find I’m not?”

  “And what is it about you,” Amitav said at last, “that makes our lives so unimportant?”

  She’d thought a lot about that. It had led her back to a bright shining moment of discovery she’d had as a child. She’d been astonished to learn that there was life on the moon: microscopic life, some kind of bacterium that had hitched a ride with the first unmanned probes. It had survived years of starvation in hard vacuum, frozen, boiled, pelted by an unending sleet of hard radiation.

  Life, she’d learned, could survive anything. At the time it had been cause for hope.

  “I think that maybe there’s something inside me,” she said now. “I think—”

  Something brushed against her leg.

  Her arm lashed out reflexively. Her fist clenched around the wrist of a young boy.

  He’d been going for the gas billy on her calf

  “Ah,” Clarke said. “Of course.”

  The boy stared back at her, petrified.

  She turned back to Amitav; the child whimpered and squirmed in her grip. “Friend of yours?”

  “I, ah—”

  “Little diversionary tactic, perhaps? You don’t have the balls to take me on, and none of your grown-up buddies will help out, so you use a fucking child?” She yanked on the small arm: the boy yelped.

  Sleepers stirred in the distance, used to chronic disturbance. None seemed to fully awaken.

  “Why should you care?” Amitav hissed. “It is not a weapon, you said so yourself. Am I a fool, to believe. such claims when you come here waving it like an ataghan? What is it? A shockprod?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said.

  She bent, still gripping the child. A depolarizing blade protruded from the tip of her glove like a gray fingernail; at its touch the sheath on her calf split as if scalpeled. The billy slid easily into her grip, a blunt ebony rod with a fluorescent band at the base of the handgrip.

  Amitav raised his hands, suddenly placating. “There is no need—”

  “Ah, but there is. Come in close, now.”

  Amitav took a step back

  “It works on contact,” Clarke said. “Injects compressed gas. Comes in handy down on the rift, when the wildlife tries to eat you.”

  She thumbed the safety on the billy, jammed the rod point down into the sand.

  With a crack like the inside of a thunderclap, the beach exploded.

  The universe rang like a tuning fork. She lay where the blast had thrown her. Her face stung as though sandblasted.

  Her eyelids were clenched. It seemed like a very long time before she could open them again.

  A crater yawned across three meters of sand, filling with groundwater.

  She climbed to her feet. The Strip had leapt awake in an instant, fled outward, turned back and congealed into a ring of shocked and frightened faces.

  Amazingly, she was still holding the billy.

  She eyed the device with numb incredulity. She’d used it more times than she could count. Whenever one of Channer Vent’s monsters had tried to take her apart she’d parried, jammed the billy home, watched as one more predator bloated and burst at her touch. It had been lethal enough to the fish, but it had never exploded with this kind of force before. Not down on the …

  Oh, shit. On the Rift.

  It had been calibrated to deliver a lethal charge at the bottom of the ocean, where five thousand PSI was a gentle burp. Down there it had been a reasonably effective weapon.

  At sea level, without all those atmospheres pushing back, it was a bomb.

  “I didn’t mean—I thought …” Clarke looked around. An endless line of faces looked back.

  Amitav lay sprawled on the opposite side of the crater. He moaned, brought one hand to his face.

  There was no sign of the boy.

  Stickman

  A thunderclap at midnight. Something exploded near a Calvin cycler just south of Gray’s Harbor. A botfly had been coming around the headland to the south; it wasn’t line of sight at detonation, but it had ears. It sent an alert to home base and turboed over to investigate.

  Sou-Hon Perreault was on duty. She’d swapped over to the graveyard shift the day she’d learned that mermaids came out at night. (Her husband, having recently learned about the special needs of vPTS victims, had accepted the change without complaint.) Now she slipped into the botfly’s perceptual sphere, and took stock.

  A shallow crater yawned across the intertidal substrate. Tracking outward: chaotic tangles of heat and bioelectricity, restless as spooked cattle. Perreault narrowed the EM to amped visible; the heat lightning resolved into a milling mass of dull gray humanity.

  The Strip had its own districts, its own self-generating ghettos within ghettos. The people here hailed mainly from the Indian subcon: Perreault set her primary filters to Punjabi, Bengali, and Urdu. She began asking questions.

  An explosion, yes. Nobody really knew for certain what had led up to it. There had been raised voices, some said. Man, woman, child. Accusations of theft. And then, suddenly, bang.

  Everyone awake after that, everyone in retreat. The woman waving some kind of shockprod like a club. The masses, keeping their distance. One man in the circle with her, blood on his face. Angry. Facing the woman, indifferent to the weapon in her hand. The child had vanished by this time, all agreed. Nobody knew who the child might have been.

  Everyone remembered the adults, though. Amitav and the mermaid.

  “Where did they go?” Perreault said; the botfly translated her words with toneless dispassion.

  To the ocean. The mermaid always goes to the ocean.

  “What about the other one? This Amitav?”

  After her. With her. To the ocean.

  Ten minutes past, perhaps.

  Perreault pulled the botfly into a steep climb, panned along the Strip from fifty meters up. The refugees dissolved into a Brownian horde; waves of motion passed through the crowd far faster than any one person could make way. There: barely discernible, a fading line of turbulence connecting the crater to the surf. Milling particles, recently disrupted by the passage of something aimed.

  She swooped down toward the waterline. Upturned faces everywhere, gray and luminous in the botfly’s photoamps, following its course like sunflowers tracking the light.

  Except for one, a ways down the beach, running south through ankle-deep foam. Not looking back.

  Perreault widened the filters: nothing mechanical in the thorax. Not the mermaid. There were other anomalies, though. She was chasing a skeleton, a ludicrous emaciated throwback to the days when malnutrition was a recognized hallmark of refugees everywhere.

  There was no need for starvation here. There’d been no need for years. This one had chosen to starve. This one was political.

  No wonder he was running.

  Perreault nudged the botfly into pursuit. It sped past its quarry in seconds, slewed around, and dropped down to block his escape. Perreault tripped the floods and pinned the refugee in twin beams of blinding halogen.

  “Amitav,” she said.

  She’d heard of them, of course. They were rare, but not too rare for a label: stickmen, they were called. Perreault had never actually seen one in the flesh before.

  Hindian. Sunken eyes, pools of sullen shadow. Blood oozing in a sheen of droplets from his face. One hand was raised to shield his eyes from the light; more blood rose from a raw stigmatum on the palm. Limbs, joints, fingers as sharp-edged and angular as origami protruding from his torn clothing. The soles of his feet had been sprayed with plastic in lieu of s
hoes.

  The ocean hemmed him in on one side; Strippers looked on curiously from all others, keeping clear of the halogen pool. Every segment of the stickman’s frame was tensed, poised between equally futile options of flight and attack.

  “Relax,” Perreault said. “I only want to ask you some questions.”

  “Ah. Questions from a police robot,” he said. Thin lips drawn back from brown teeth, the cracks between bloody. A cynical rictus. “I am relieved.”

  She blinked. “You speak English.”

  “It is not an uncommon language. Not as stylish as French these days, though, yes? What do you want?”

  Perreault disabled the translator. “What happened back there?”

  “There is no cause to worry. None of your machinery was harmed.”

  “I’m not interested in the machinery. There was an explosion.”

  “Your wonderful machines do not provide us with explosives,” Amitav pointed out.

  “There was a woman, a diver. There was a child.”

  The stickman glowered.

  “I just want to know what happened,” Perreault told him. “I’m not looking to give you any trouble.”

  Amitav spat. “Of course not. You blind me to test my eyes, yes?”

  Perreault killed the floods. Black and white faded to gray.

  “Thank you,” Amitav said after a moment.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “She said it was an accident,” Amitav said.

  “An accident?”

  “The child was—Clarke had this, I -am not sure of the word, this club. On her leg. She called it a billy.”

  “Clarke?”

  “Your diver.”

  Clarke. “Do you know her first name?”

  “No.” Amitav snorted. “Kali is as good a name as any, though.”

  “Go on.”

  “The child, he—he tried to steal it. While we were—talking.”

  “You didn’t stop him?”

  Amitav shifted uncomfortably. “I believe she was trying to show the child that the billy was dangerous,” he said. “In that she succeeded. I myself flew. It left marks.” He smiled, held up his hands once more, palms up. Flayed flesh, oozing blood.

  Amitav fell silent and looked out to sea. Perreault’s perspective bobbed slightly in a sudden breeze, as though the botfly was nodding.

  “I do not know what happened to the child,” Amitav said at last. “By the time I could stand again he was gone. Clarke was looking for him, though.”

  “Who is she?” Perreault asked softly. “Do you know her?”

  He spat. “She would not say so.”

  “But you’ve seen her before. Tonight was not the first time.”

  “Oh yes. Your pets here”—looking at the other refugees—“they come to me whenever something requires initiative, yes? They tell me where the mermaid is, so I can go and deal with her.”

  “But you two are connected somehow. You’re friends, or—”

  “We are not sheep,” Amitav said. “That is all we have in common. Here, it is enough.”

  “I want to know about her.”

  “That is wise,” Amitav said, more quietly.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she survived what you did to her. Because she knows you did it.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  The stickman waved one dismissive hand. “No matter. She will come for you anyway.”

  “What happened? What was done to her?”

  “She did not say, exactly. She says very little. And sometimes, when she does say things, she does not say them to anyone here, yes? At least, no one I can see. But they get her quite upset.”

  “She sees ghosts?”

  Amitav shrugged. “Ghosts are not uncommon here. I am speaking to one now.”

  “You know I’m no ghost.”

  “Not a real one, perhaps. You only haunt machinery.”

  Sou-Hon Perreault looked for a filter to tweak. She couldn’t find one that fit.

  “She said you caused the earthquake,” Amitav said suddenly. “She says you sent the wave that killed so many of us.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “And you would know, yes? Your leaders would share such things with the drivers of mechanical insects?”

  “Why would anyone do something like that?”

  Amitav shrugged. “Ask Clarke. If you can find her.”

  “Can you help me do that?”

  “Certainly.” He pointed to the Pacific. “She is out there.”

  “Will you see her again?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Can you let me know if you do?”

  “And how would I do that even if I wished to?”

  “Sou-Hon,” Perreault said.

  “I do not understand.”

  “That’s my name. Sou-Hon. I can program the botflies to recognize your voice. If they hear you calling me, they’ll let me know.”

  “Ah,” Amitav said.

  “Well?”

  Amitav smiled. “Don’t call us. We’ll call you.”

  An Invitation to Dance

  In South Bend, the mermaid killed a man.

  Willapa Bay ruptured the Strip like an ulcer twelve kilometers across. Official surveillance of that gap had not been designed to catch people for whom breathing was optional; now the coast was fifteen klicks behind her. This far in, the wave had been thwarted by headlands and a thick stubby island, clogging the inlet like a cyst. The Big One had merely trembled here. The wreckage and desolation was all of local origin.

  She emerged past midnight onto a dark, corroded segment of waterfront, long since abandoned to a creeping blight of premillennial toluene. Nervous late-night pedestrians glimpsed her on the edge of the city core and increased their pace from A to B. The last time Clarke had wandered civilized streets there’d been free wristwatch dispensers on every second corner, a halfhearted sop to those who’d have empowered the masses through access to information. She could find no dispensers in this place, only an old public phone standing guard in fluorescent twilight. She interrogated it. She was here, it told her. Yves Scanlon lived there, three hundred kilometers to the northeast.

  He wouldn’t be expecting her. She faded to black. Indif ferent security cameras reduced her to a transient assemblage of infrared pixels.

  She clambered back down concrete scree to an oily waterline. Something called to her as she retrieved her fins: muffled, familiar sounds from an abandoned customs office.

  It could have been the splintering of rotten pilings. Maybe a boot against ribs, with flesh getting in the way. Something knotted in Clarke’s throat. There’s no end to the things you can slam into a human body. She’d lost count of the different sounds they made.

  Almost too faint to hear, more whimper than words: “Fuck, man …” The muted hum of an electrical discharge. A groan.

  A walkway extended around the derelict office; junk piled along its length waited to trip anyone not gifted with night eyes. At the other side of the building, a dock jutted from the waterfront on wooden pilings. Two figures stood on that platform, a man and a woman. Four others lay twitching at their feet. A police botfly slept on the pier, conveniently off-line.

  Technically, of course, it was not an assault. Both aggressors wore uniforms and badges conferring the legal right to beat whomever they chose. Tonight they’d chosen an entrée of juveniles, laid out along the creosote-stained planks like gutted fish. Those bodies twitched with the spastic neural static of shockprod discharge; beyond that, they didn’t react to the boots in their sides. Clarke could hear snatches of conversation from the uniforms, talk of curfew violations and unauthorized use of the Maelstrom.

  And of trespassing.

  “On government property, no less,” remarked the male, lifting one arm in a grand gesture that took in the dock, the pilings, the derelict office, Lenie Clarke—

  —Shit he’s wearing nightshades they’re both wearing nightshades �
�

  “You!” The policeman took a single step toward the office, pointing his shockprod at the shadows in which she lay exposed. “Stand away from the building!”

  There’d been a time, not so long ago, when Lenie Clarke would have obeyed without thinking. She’d have followed orders even though she knew what was coming, because she’d learned that you deal with violence by just shutting up and getting it over with. It would hurt, of course. That was the whole point. But it was better than the chronic queasiness, the expectation, the endless interludes between assaults where you could only wait for it to happen.

  More recently, she would have simply fled. Or at least withdrawn. None of my business, she’d have told herself, and departed before anyone even knew she was there. She had done that when Mike Brander had used Gerry Fischer as a convenient proxy for those who’d made his childhood a living hell. It had been none of my business when Beebe Station resounded with the sound of Brander’s rage and Fischer’s breaking bones. It had been none of my business when Brander, shift after shift, had stood guard in the wet room, daring Fischer to come back inside. Eventually Fischer had faded from man to child to reptile, an empty inhuman cipher living on the edge of the rift. Even then, it had been none of Lenie Clarke’s business.

  But Gerry Fischer was dead now. So was Lenie Clarke, for that matter. She’d died with the others: Alice and Mike and Ken and Gerry, all turned into white-hot vapor. They were all dead, and when the stone had been rolled away and the voice had rung out, Lazarus! Come forth! it hadn’t been any of Lenie Clarke’s friends that had risen from the grave. It hadn’t even been Lenie Clarke. Not the soft squirming career victim of her dryback days, anyway. Not the opaque chrysalis gestating down on the rift. It had been something newly forged, acid-washed, some white-hot metamorph of Lenie Clarke that had never existed before.

  Now she was confronted by a familiar icon—an authority, a giver of orders, an eager practitioner of the legal right to commit violence upon her. She did not regard its challenge as an order to be obeyed. She did not consider it a situation to be avoided.