by Peter Watts
It didn’t matter. Tracy knew: Lenie was looking right through the darkness. Right at her.
“Daddy,” she whispered, and her dad mumbled something in his sleep and gave her a squeeze, but he didn’t wake up.
“Daddy,” she whispered again, afraid to speak up. Afraid to scream.
The moonbeams were back.
Across the cabin, the door opened without a sound. Lenie stepped inside. Even in the dark her outlines seemed too smooth, too empty. It was like she’d taken off all her clothes and there was nothing but blackness underneath.
One of her hands was holding something. The other went to her lips.
“Shhh,” she said.
Monster
The monster had Tracy in his clutches. He thought he was safely hidden, curled up there in the dark with his victim, but Lenie Clarke could see him bright as an overcast day.
She stepped softly across the cabin, leaving ice-water footprints. She’d donned the rest of her diveskin to cut the chill; a cleansing fire spread through her limbs, hot blood burning its way back into frozen flesh.
She liked the feeling.
Tracy stared up from her father’s embrace. Her eyes were like saucers, imploring beacons full of fear and paralysis.
It’s okay, little friend. He doesn’t get away with it anymore.
First step …
Clarke leaned in close.
… free the hostage.
She ripped the covers away. The monster opened his eyes, blinking stupidly against a darkness that had suddenly turned against him. Tracy lay stock-still in her pajamas, still too frightened to move.
PJ’s, Clarke thought wryly. Nice touch. On his best behavior when company’s present.
Present company wasn’t fooled.
Quick as a snake, she took Tracy by the wrist. Then the child was safe beside her, Clarke’s free arm protectively around her shoulder.
Tracy howled.
“What the hell …” The monster was reaching for the lightstick beside the cot. Fine. Let him have light enough to see the tables, turning …
The cabin flared, blinding her for a moment before her eyecaps adjusted. Gordon was rising from the cot. Clarke raised the billy. “Don’t you fucking move.”
“Daddy!” Tracy cried.
The monster spread his hands, placating, buying time. “Lenie—listen, I don’t know what you want—”
“Really?” She’d never felt so strong in her whole life. “I sure as shit know what you want.”
He shook his head. “Listen, just let Tracy go, okay? Whatever it is, there’s no need to involve her—”
Clarke stepped forward; Tracy bumped along at her side, whimpering. “No need to involve her? It’s a little late for that, asshole. It’s way too fucking late.”
The monster stopped still for a second. Then, slowly, as if in dawning awareness: “What do you—do you think I—”
Clarke laughed. “Good one.”
“You don’t think—”
Tracy pulled. “Daddy, help!”
Clarke held on. “It’s okay, Tracy. He can’t hurt you.”
The monster took a step forward. “It’s okay, Lima-Bean. She just doesn’t underst—”
“Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
He stepped back, hands up, palms front. “Okay, okay—just don’t—”
“I understand, asshole. I understand way fucking better than you think.”
“That’s crazy, Lenie. Just look at her, why don’t you? Is it me she’s scared of? Is she acting like she wants to be rescued? Use your eyes! What in God’s name made you think—”
“You think I don’t know? You think I don’t remember how it feels, when you don’t know any better? You think because you’ve brainwashed your own daughter into thinking this is normal that I’m going to—”
“I never touched her!”
Tracy twisted free and ran. Clarke, off-balance, reached after her.
Suddenly Gordon was in the way.
“You goddamned psycho,” he snarled, and hit her in the face.
Something cracked, deep at the base of her jaw. She staggered. Salty warmth flooded her mouth. In a moment there’d be pain.
But now there was only a sudden, paralyzing fear, resurrected from the dawn of time.
No, she thought. You’re stronger than him. You’re stronger than he ever was, you don’t have to put up with his vile shit one instant longer. You’re going to teach him a lesson he won’t ever fucking forget just jam him in the belly and watch him expl—
“Lenie, no!” Tracy cried. Clarke glanced aside, distracted.
A mountain smashed against the side of her head. Somehow the billy wasn’t in her hand anymore; it was following some crazy parabola through a world spinning uncontrollably sideways. The rough wooden planking of the cabin floor drove splinters into Clarke’s face. Off in some unfathomably distant part of the world, a child was screaming Daddy …
“Daddy,” Clarke mumbled through pulpy lips. It had been so many years, but he was back at last. And nothing had really changed after all.
It was my own damn fault, she thought dully. I was just asking for it.
If she could only have one moment to live again, she knew, she’d get it right. She’d hang on to the billy this time, she’d make him pay like that cop in West Bend I got him all right, his whole middle just a big cloud of chunky soup, nothing left but a raw bleeding backbone holding two ends together and he’s not gonna be throwing his weight around after that, what little weight there is left hahaha …
But that was then. This was now, and a big rough hand on her shoulder was flipping her onto her back. “You twisted piece of shit!” the monster roared. “You lay a hand on my daughter and I’ll fucking kill you!” He dragged her off the floor and slammed her against the wall. His daughter was crying somewhere in the background, his own daughter but of course he didn’t care about that he only wanted …
She squirmed and twisted and the next blow glanced off her shoulder and suddenly she was free, the open door was right in front of her and all that safe darkness on the other side, monsters can’t see in the dark but I can—
Something tripped her and she went down again but she didn’t stop, she just scuttled out the door like a crab with half its legs gone, while Daddy bellowed and crashed close on her heels.
Her hand, pushing off against the ground, touched something—The billy it flew all the way out here I’ve got it now I can show him—
—but she didn’t. She just grabbed it and ran, vomiting with fear and her own cowardice, she ran into a welcoming night where everything was bright silver and gray under the moon. She ran to the lake and she didn’t even remember to seal her face flap until the whole world was spray and ice water.
Straight down, clawing the water as though it, too, were an enemy. It was mere moments before the bottom came into view, it was only a lake after all and it wasn’t deep enough, Daddy would just stroll down to the shore and reach down with his hands …
She beat against the substrate. Waterlogged detritus billowed around her. She attacked the rock for days, for years, while some distant part of her shook its head at her own stupidity.
Eventually she lost even the strength to panic.
I can’t stay here.
Her jaw felt stiff and swollen in its socket.
I’ve got the edge in the dark, at least. He won’t leave the cabin before daybreak.
Something smooth and artificial lay nearby, its outlines hazed by distance and resettled sediment. The billy. She must have dropped it when she sealed her hood. She slipped it back into its sheath.
Not that it did me any good last time …
She pushed off the bottom.
There’d been an old topographic map tacked up on one wall of the cabin, she remembered. It had shown other cabins dotted intermittently along some forestry patrol route. Probably empty most of the time. There was one up north along—what had it been called—Nigel Creek. She could get away, she coul
d leave the monster far behind
—and Tracy—
Oh, God. Tracy.
She broke the surface.
Her knapsack lay on the shore where she’d left it. The cabin squatted at the far end of the clearing, its door shut tight. The lights were on inside; curtains had been drawn on the window, but the glow leaking around them would be obvious even without eyecaps.
She crawled from the lake. A dozen kinds of pain welcomed her return to gravity. She ignored them, keeping her eyes on the window. She was too far away to see the edge of the curtain pulling back, just enough to afford a view to some hidden eye. She saw it anyway.
Tracy was in there.
Lenie Clarke had not rescued her. Lenie Clarke had barely gotten away herself, and Tracy—Tracy still belonged to Gordon.
Help her.
It had seemed so easy, before. If only she hadn’t lost the billy …
You’ve got it now. It’s right there on your leg. Help her, for God’s sake …
Breath caught in her throat.
You know what he does to her. You know. Help her …
She drew her knees to her chest and hugged them, but her shoulders wouldn’t stop shaking. Her sobs sounded far too loud in the silver clearing.
From the shuttered, silent cabin there was no reaction at all.
Help her, you coward. You worthless piece of shit. Help her …
After a very long time she reached for her pack. Then she got to her feet and walked away.
Warhorse
For over a month Ken Lubin had been waiting to die. He’d never lived so fully as he had in that time.
Prevailing winds had carved the island’s facets into intricate frescoes, full of spires and fossilized honeycomb. Gulls and cormorants roosted in alcoves of arched sandstone. There were no eggs to be had—evidently the birds didn’t breed in autumn—but meat at least, was plentiful. Fresh water was no problem; Lubin had only to slip into the ocean and awaken the desalinator in his chest. The diveskin was still functional, if a bit tattered. Its pores let distilled water past to sluice him clean, kept caustic salts at bay. While bathing he supplemented his diet with crustaceans and seaweeds. He was no biologist but his survival enhancements were cutting-edge; any natural toxin he couldn’t taste, his employers had probably immunized him against.
He slept under a sky so full of stars they outblazed the light-haze leaking from the eastern horizon. The very wildlife glowed at night. He hadn’t realized that at first; his eyecaps robbed him of darkness, turned nighttime into colorless daylight. One night he’d grown tired of that relentless clarity, pulled the caps from his corneas, and seen dim blue light radiating from a colony of harbor seals on the shoreline below.
Most of the seals were festooned with tumors and abscesses. Lubin didn’t know whether it was a natural condition or just another consequence of living too close to the effluent of the twenty-first century. He was pretty sure that sores weren’t supposed to luminesce, though. These did. The growths oozed raw and red in daylight, but at night the ichor glowed like the photophores of deep-water fish. And more than the tumors; when the seals looked back at him, their very eyes shone sapphire.
A small part of Ken Lubin couldn’t help but try and cobble together some sort of explanation: bioluminescent bacteria, freshly mutated. Lateral gene transfer from whatever microbes had lit St. Elmo’s Fire, back before rampant ultraviolet had sent them packing. Molecules of luciferin, fluorescing with exposure to oxygen: that would account for the glow of open sores, the glow of eyes packed dense with capillaries.
A larger part of him simply marveled at the sheer absurdity of cancer made beautiful.
His body repaired itself faster than that of any normal man; tissues knitted and regrew almost like tumors themselves. Lubin gave thanks for cells forcibly overcrowded with mitochondria, for trimeric antibodies, for macrophage and lymphokine and fibroblast production cranked up to twice the mammalian norm. Sound returned to him within days, clear and beautiful at first, then fading as the proliferating cells of his eardrums—urged into overdrive by a dozen retroviral tweaks—just kept going. By the time they’d remembered to quit, Lubin’s eardrums felt as though they’d been built of chipboard.
He didn’t resent it. He could still hear, after a fashion, and even total deafness would have been a fair trade-off for a body made more resilient in other respects. Nature had even provided him with an example of the alternative, should he grow ungrateful: a sea lion, an old bull, that showed up on the south end of the island about a week after Lubin himself came ashore. It was easily five times the size of the harbor seals that hauled out elsewhere, and it had led a life of greater violence; some recent battle had snapped its lower jaw off at the base. The jaw hung like a vicious swollen tongue, studded with teeth. Skin and muscle and ligaments were all that held it to the creature’s head. Those tissues swelled and festered with each passing day; ruptures would open in the skin, ooze white and orange fluids, knit together again as utterly natural defenses struggled to seal the breach.
Three hundred kilograms of predator, doomed in the prime of life. Starvation or infection were its only options, and it didn’t even have a choice over those. As far as Lubin knew, deliberate suicide was a strictly human endeavor.
Most of the time it just lay there, breathing. Every now and then the bull would return to the ocean for a few hours. Lubin wondered what it could possibly be doing there. Was it still trying to hunt? Didn’t it know it was dead already, were its instincts so completely inflexible?
And yet, for some reason Lubin felt a sense of kinship with the dying animal. Sometimes both of them seemed to lose track of time. The sun steered cautiously around the island on its descent into the western sea, and two tired and broken creatures—watching each other with endless, fatalistic patience—barely noticed when night fell.
After a while he began to think he might live.
It had been a month, and his only obvious symptom had been intermittent diarrhea. He’d begun to find roundworms in his shit. Not a pleasant discovery, but not exactly life-threatening either. These days, some people even inflicted such infections on themselves deliberately. Something about exercising the immune response.
Perhaps his reinforced immune system had kept him free of whatever had scared the GA into hot-zone mode. Perhaps he’d simply been lucky. It was even remotely possible that his analysis of the whole situation was wrong. Thus far he’d been resigned to terminal exile, an uneasy balance between an instinct for survival and the belief that his employers wouldn’t approve of Ken Lubin spreading infectious apocalypse throughout the world. But maybe there was no apocalypse, no infection. Maybe he was safe.
Maybe there was something else going on.
Maybe, he thought, I should find out what it is.
At night, looking east, he could sometimes see running lights twinkling near the horizon. The route they followed was predictable, as stereotypic as an animal pacing within a cage: kelp harvesters. Low-slung robots that mowed the ocean. No security to speak of, assuming you could get past those ventral rows of scissoring teeth. Vulnerable to any sufficiently motivated hitchhikers who might find themselves stranded over the Pacific conshelf.
Guilt Trip poked him halfheartedly in the belly. He was making assumptions, it whispered. One asymptomatic month hardly proved a clean bill of health. Countless maladies had longer incubation times.
And yet …
And yet there was no ironclad evidence of any infection here. There was only a mystery, and an assumption that those in control wanted him out of the picture. There’d been no orders, no directives. Lubin’s gut could wonder at what his masters intended, but it could not know—and not knowing, it left him to his own decisions.
The first of these was a mercy killing.
He’d seen ribs emerging from the flanks as the sea lion wasted over time. He’d seen the fleshy hinge of the lower jaw seize up in tiny increments, swollen into position by massive infection and the chaotic regrowth
of twisted bone. When he’d first laid eyes on the bull, its jaw had dangled. Now it merely protruded, stiff and immobile, from a twisted bole of gangrenous flesh. Lesions gaped along the body.
By now the old bull barely lifted its head from the shore; when it did, pain and exhaustion were evident in every movement. One dull milky eye watched Lubin approach from the landward side. There might have been recognition there, or merely indifference.
Lubin stopped a couple of meters from the animal, holding a length of driftwood as thick as his forearm, carefully splintered to a point at one end. The stink was appalling. Maggots squirmed in every sore.
Lubin laid the point of his weapon on the back of the animal’s neck.
“Hi,” he said softly, and jammed it home.
Amazingly, it still had strength to fight. It reared up, roaring, caught Lubin in the chest with the side of its head, knocked him effortlessly into the air. Black skin, stretched across the twisted ruin of the lower jaw, split on impact Pus sprayed from the breach. The bull’s roar slid across the scale from defiance to agony.
Lubin hit the shore rolling, came up safely outside the sea lion’s attack radius. The animal had hooked its upper jaw around the shaft embedded in its neck, and was trying to dislodge it. Lubin circled, came up from behind. The bull saw him coming, wheeled clumsily like a battered tank. Lubin feinted; the bull charged weakly to the left. Lubin spun back, jumped, grabbed: the wood sent splinters into his palms as he jammed it down with all of his weight.
The bull rolled screaming onto its back, pinning one of Lubin’s legs under a body that—even at half its normal weight—could still crush a man. A monstrous face, full of pain and infection, lunged at him like a battering ram.
He struck at the base of the jaw, felt bone tearing through flesh. Some deep pocket of corruption burst in his face like a stinking geyser.
The battering ram was gone. The weight shifted from his leg. Thalidomide limbs flailed at the gravel by Lubin’s face.