by Peter Watts
The next time he got the spear he hung onto it, pulled from side to side, felt the deep scrape of wood over bone. The bull heaved and bucked beneath him; in a confusion of agony from so many sources, it didn’t seem to know where its tormentor was. Suddenly the point slid into a groove between cervical vertebrae. Once more, with all the strength left to him, Lubin pushed.
Just like that, the heaving mass beneath him went limp.
It wasn’t completely dead. Its eye still followed him, dull and resigned as he circled the animal’s head. He’d merely paralyzed it from the neck down, deprived it of breath and motion. A diving mammal. Adapted over how many millions of years to survive extended periods without breathing? How long would it take that eye to stop moving?
He had an answer. Sea lions were just like other mammals in any number of ways. They had that opening at the base of the skull, that place where the spinal cord climbed up into the brain. The foramen magnum, it was called; such anatomical tidbits were always coming in handy to people in Lubin’s line of work.
He pulled his weapon free of the flesh and repositioned it near the back of the skull.
The eye stopped moving about three seconds later.
He felt a brief stinging in his own eyes as he prepared to leave the island, a lump in his throat that the tightness of his diveskin couldn’t quite account for. The feeling was regret, he knew. He had not wanted to do what he’d just done.
Nobody who encountered him was likely to believe that, of course. He was, among other things, a murderer. When called for. People who learned that about Ken Lubin rarely tried to get to know him any better.
But in fact he had never wanted to kill anything in his life. He regretted every death he had caused. Even the death of some big, stupid, incompetent predator who hadn’t been able to meet the standards of its own species. There was never any choice in such matters, of course. Those were the only times he ever did it; when there was no choice.
And when that was the case—when all other avenues had been exhausted, when the only way to get the job done was through a necessary death—surely there was nothing wrong with doing the job efficiently, and well. Surely there was nothing wrong with even enjoying it a little.
It wasn’t even his fault, he reflected as he waded into the surf. He’d simply been programmed that way. His masters had as much as admitted it themselves, when they’d sent him on sabbatical.
Back onshore, a hillock of decomposing flesh caught the corner of his eye. There’d been no choice. He had ended suffering. One good deed, to pay back the place that had kept him alive these past weeks.
Good-bye, he thought.
Now he sealed his hood and tripped his implants. His sinuses, bronchi, GI tract all writhed in brief confusion, then surrendered. The Pacific sluiced through his chest with reassuring familiarity; tiny sparks shocked bonded molecules of oxygen and hydrogen apart, handed the useful bits off to his pulmonary vein.
He didn’t know how long it would take him to reach that intermittent line of sparkles near the horizon. He didn’t know how long it would take them to carry him back to the mainland. He didn’t even know exactly what he’d do when he got there. For the time being, knowing one thing was enough:
Ken Lubin—lover of all life, Guilt-Tripped assassin, cannon so loose that even Black Ops had been compelled to store him on the seabed like radioactive waste—
Ken Lubin was going home.
PHYSALIA
Zeus
SOU-HON Perreault was closing on a riot when they shut her down.
It was Amitav, of course. She knew that the moment she saw the location of the disturbance: a Calvin cycler in trouble at Grenville Point, less than two klicks from his last known position. She jumped into the nearest botfly and rode it down.
Somehow the refs had uprooted a lightstand and used it as a battering ram; the cycler had been skewered through the heart. A dozen brands of amino goop oozed viscously from the wound, a pussy mix of ochers and browns. Underweight refugees—some oozing blood from scabby sores—shouted and pushed against the front of the wounded machine, toppling it.
The larger crowd on all sides drew back, rudderless and confused, as powerless as ever.
“kholanA ApakA netra, behen chod!”
Amitav, climbing onto the fallen cycler. Perreault’s botfly parsed phonemes, settled on Hindi.
“Open your eyes, sisterfuckers! Is it not bad enough you should eat their poison? Will you sit here with your hands up your asses while they send another wave to finish the job! Lenie Clarke wasn’t enough for you, yes? She survived the center of the storm itself, she told you who the enemy was! She fights them while you sleep on the dirt! What will it take to wake you up?”
Amitav’s disciples shouted ragged approval; the others milled and murmured among themselves. Amitav, Perreault thought, you’ve crossed the line.
The stickman glanced skyward and threw up one spindly arm, pointing at Perreault’s descending botfly. “Look! They send machines to tell us what to do! They—”
Sudden darkness, silent and unrelieved.
She waited. After a few seconds, two lines of luminous text began blinking against the void:
CSIRA Containment Zone
(N’AmPac Biohazards Act, 2040)
She’d run into dark zones before, of course. Some ’fly she was riding would drop suddenly into shadow, floating serenely blind and deaf for fifty meters or twenty klicks. Then, safely out of insight’s way, it would come back on-line.
But why cite the Biohazards Act over a trashed cycler?
Unless it isn’t about the cycler …
She linked into the next ’fly back in line: CSIRA Containment Zone flashed against unwelcome darkness. She relinked to one before that, and the one after, bouncing back and forth toward the edges of the blackout.
Eight-point-one-eight kilometers from end to end.
Now she was sighted and riding southbound, just beyond the northern perimeter. She topped out the whole spectrum, stared through a tangle of false-color infra and X and UV, poked into the fog with radar—
There—
Something in the sky. A brief image, fading almost immediately to black.
CSIRA Containment Zone …
She backjumped again, set her defaults to repeat the maneuver whenever visual went down. She saw it again, and again: a great curtain, darkness. A billowing wall descending to earth, darkness. An inflatable barrier, swelling smoothly across the width of the Strip.
Darkness. CSIRA Containment Z—
She considered.
They’d cut off eight kilometers of Strip, a segment nearly nine hundred meters wide. It would take several dampers to cover that much area, assuming they were squelching tightbeam as well as broadband. The dampers would probably be mounted on the wall itself.
Chances were their coverage wouldn’t extend out to sea very far.
A northbound ’fly had just emerged from eclipse. Perreault mounted it and rode west off the path, keeping low. Surf pounded close beneath; then she was past the breakers and cruising over a low oily swell. She turned south.
There was traffic out here after all. An assault chopper with ambiguous markings hovered threateningly over a pair of retreating pleasure boats, a damper dome disfiguring its hull like a tumor. A smattering of botflies flitted closer to shore, of a different sort than Sou-Hon Perreault rode. None of them took any notice of her; or if they did, they credited her ’fly with higher pedigree than it deserved.
She was eight hundred meters offshore, still skimming the swells. Due west of Amitav’s latest insurrection. Perreault slowed her mount and came about, heading inland.
Breakers in the distance, a smear of muddy sand, a boil of motion farther up the shore. She cut the throttle and hovered, her senses still intact.
Mag: motion resolved into melee.
Everyone was running. Perreault had never seen such a high level of activity on the Strip before. There was no net direction to the movement, no exodus. Nowher
e, apparently, to go. Some of the Strippers were splashing into the surf; the botflies she’d seen earlier were forcing them back. Most were just going back and forth.
Something in the clouds was stabbing the mob with flashes of green light.
She panned up, almost missing it: a fast-moving botfly disappearing to the south. And now her own ’fly was bleating, something coming up behind, big and low-flying and stealthed—
Of course it’s stealthed, or radar would have caught it sooner—
—and way too close to escape from now.
She spun the ’fly around and saw it coming not two hundred meters out: a lifter headed for shore like a levitating whale. Rows of portholes lined its belly, strange brassy things from another age, soft orange gaslight flickering behind the glass. She squinted in her headset, tried to dispel the Victorian image. Sudden electricity crackled from a knob on the airship’s hull; blinding light flared and died in Perreault’s eyes. Alphanumerics persisted briefly in the darkness, the last gibbering cough of the ’fly’s navigational system. Then nothing but a flashing epitaph:
Link Down. Link Down. Link Down.
She barely noticed. She didn’t try to reconnect—by now the ’fly was on its way to the bottom. She didn’t even jump to another channel. She was too busy thinking about what she’d seen. She was too busy imagining what she hadn’t.
Not portholes after all. The wide-bore muzzles of industrial flamethrowers. Their pilot lights had flickered like hot tongues.
Jiminy Cricket
Variations on a theme:
The Oregon Strip, shrouded in fog. Evening’s light was a diffuse and steely gray, not even a bright smudge on the horizon to suggest a sun. Refugees accreted around the feeding stations, warding off the dampness by the soft orange glow of portable space heaters. Their apparent humanity faded with distance; the fog reduced them to silhouettes, to gray shadows, to vague hints of endless convection. Motion that went nowhere. They were silent and resigned.
Achilles Desjardins saw it all through the telemetry feeds.
He saw what happened next, too. A soft whine, louder than the usual botflies, and higher up. Turbulence in the human sea beneath it; faces suddenly upturned, trying to squeeze signal from gray chaos. Rumors exchanged: This happened before, three days south. This was how it began. We never heard from them again … Murmurs of apprehension; some of the human particles began to jostle, some to run.
Fear enough, finally, to break through the chemical placidity that had domesticated them for so long.
Not that it did any good. The zone had already been walled off. No good panicking now, no avenue for sensible flight reflexes. They’d only been alerted a few seconds ago, and already it was nearly over.
Lancing down through the clouds, a precise turquoise stutter of laser light hemstitched its way down a transect ten kilometers long. Tiny aliquots of sand and flesh incinerated where it touched. Droplets in the saturated air caught the beams in transit and turned them visible to human eyes: threads of argon so brilliant and beautiful that even looking at them risked sheer perfect blindness. They were fast, too; the light show was over before the cries of pain had even begun.
The principle was simple: everything burns. In fact, everything burns with its own distinct spectrum, subtle interplays of boron and sodium and carbon luminescing on their own special wavelengths, a harmony of light unique to any object cast into flame. In theory, even the combustion of identical twins would generate different spectra, as long as they’d had different dietary preferences in life.
Present purposes, of course, didn’t require nearly that much resolution.
Look here: a strategic patch of real estate. Is it enemy territory? Draw a line through it, but make sure your transect extends into safe land at both ends. Good. Now, sample along the whole path. Turn matter to energy. Read the flames. The ends of your transect are the baselines, the ground-truth zones; their light is the light of friendly soil. Subtract those wavelengths from whatever you read in between. Pour your numbers through the usual statistics to account for heterogeneities in the local environment.
Jovellanos had worked up a distance-spec mug shot of βehemoth from her sample slurries. There was one sure way to tell if any given transect came up clean against that benchmark: half an hour later, the space around it would not have been doused with halothane and burned to the bedrock.
The test was a little over 90 percent reliable. The Powers That Be said that was good enough.
Even Achilles Desjardins, master of the minimum response time, marveled at how much had changed in a couple of months.
Word was leaking, of course. Nothing consistent, and certainly nothing official. Quarantines and diebacks and crop failures had been old news for years. A day hardly went by without some bug or other making a comeback—tired old genes revitalized in a terrorist lab, or brought into new alliances by viral mediators with no respect for the reproductive isolation of species. You could hide a lot of new outbreaks against a background that muddled.
But the mix was changing. The twenty-first century had been a lush smorgasbord of calamities, epidemics and exotics and dust storms dogpiling onto humanity from all different directions. Now, though, one particular threat seemed to be growing quietly under all the others. Certain types of containment were happening more often. Fires burned along the west coast, unconnected by any official commonality; some were attributed to pest control, some to terrorism, some merely to N’Am’s ongoing desiccation. But still: so many fires, along the coast? So many quarantines and purges that happened to run north-south along the Rockies? Very strange, very strange.
Some dark entropic monoculture was growing beneath the wider riot of usual breakdowns, invisible but for the wake of its passing. People were starting to notice.
Guilt Trip kept Desjardins’s mouth shut for him, of course. He wasn’t assigned to βehemoth anymore—he and Jovellanos had done their job, presented their results, and been sent back to field whatever random catastrophes the Router sent their way—but gut imperatives didn’t change with job assignments. So at the end of his shift he’d retire to the welcoming bowels of Pickering’s Pile and get pleasantly buzzed and make nice with the locals—he even let Gwen talk him into trying real sex again, which even she admitted was a disaster—and listened to rumors of impending apocalypse.
And while he sat and did nothing, the world began to fill with black empty-eyed counterfeits.
It hadn’t sunk in at first. The first time he’d met Gwen she’d been dolled up like that; rifter chic, she’d called it. She’d only been the first. The trend had really taken off the past couple of months. Now it seemed like everyone and their organcloner was getting into body stockings and photocollagen. K’s mostly, but the number of posing r’s was going up as well. Desjardins had even seen a few people decked out in real reflex copolymer. That stuff was almost alive. It changed its own permeability to maintain optimum thermal and ionic gradients, it healed when torn. It kind of slithered around you when you put it on, wriggling into the snuggest fit, seams and edges seeking each other out for bonding. It was as though some pharm had crossed an amoeba with an oil slick. He’d heard the stuff even bonded against eyes.
When he thought about it, he shuddered. He didn’t think about it often, though. The sight of each new poseur twisted knives much keener than mere revulsion.
Six of them died, the knives whispered as they slid around in his gut. Maybe they didn’t have to. Maybe it wasn’t enough. Either way, you know. Six of them died, and now thousands more, and you played a part in that, Achilles my man. You don’t know if what you did was right or wrong, you don’t even know what it was you did exactly, but you were involved, oh yes. Some of that blood is on your hands.
It shouldn’t have bothered him. He’d done his job as he always had; Absolution was supposed to handle the aftershocks. And besides, he hadn’t made any actual decisions of life and death, had he? He’d been given a task to do, a statistical problem really. Number crunch
ing. He’d done it, he’d done it well, and now he was onto other things.
Just following orders, and what a shame about the Cree.
Except he wasn’t following orders, not exactly. He couldn’t let it go. He kept βehemoth at the edge of his vision, a little window down in one corner of tactical, open and running like a pixelated sore. He picked at it during the lulls between other assignments; satcam enhances, Bayesian probability contours, subtle blights and blatant fires dotting the west coast.
Moving east, now.
It moved sporadically, feinting, disappearing, resurfacing in entirely unexpected places. One massive outbreak south of Mendocino died of natural causes overnight. A tiny stronghold blossomed near South Bend and refused to vanish even after the Lasers of the Inquisition came calling. Crops had begun mysteriously failing in the northwest; fifty-odd hectares of Olympic Park forest had been burned to control a sudden bark-beetle infestation. Malnutrition was inexplicably on the rise in some well-fed corner of Oregon state. Something new was racking up kills along the coast, and was proving almost impossible to pin down. It had almost as many symptoms as victims; its diffuse pathology disappeared against a background of diseases with clearer focus. Hardly anyone seemed to notice.
βehemoth’s signature was starting to appear in fields and wetlands, farther inland: Agassiz. Centralia. Hope. Sometimes it seemed to follow rivers, but upstream. Sometimes it moved against the wind. Sometimes the only thing that made any sense was that someone was carrying it around. A vector. Maybe more than one.
He passed that insight onto Rowan’s address. She didn’t answer. Doubtless she knew already. And so Achilles Desjardins went from day to day, a tornado here, a red tide there, a tribal massacre some other place—everywhere the need for his own polymorphic bag of tricks. No time to dwell on past accomplishments. No time to dwell on that shape coming up from underneath, glimpsed on the fly between other crises. Never mind, never mind; they know what they’re doing, these people that drank your blood and changed it and enslaved you to the good of all mankind. They know what they’re doing.