Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  And everywhere, people dressed for the deepest ocean stood around at bus stops and drink’n’drugs, like Banquo’s fucking ghost cloned a thousand times over. They exchanged eyeless glances and chuckles and spewed the usual desperate inanities. And spoke in overloud casual voices to drown out the strange frightening sounds drifting up from the basement.

  Footprints

  Even dead, Ken Lubin had access to more resources than 99 percent of the living.

  It made perfect sense, considering his profession. Identities are such transient things after all; height, weight, ethnoskeleton could all be changed by subtle tweaks of the body’s endocrine system. Eyeprints, voiceprints, fingerprints—developmental accidents, perhaps unique at birth but hardly immutable. Even DNA could be fudged if you weighed it down with enough pseudocodons. It was too easy for one person to imitate another, and too necessary to be able to change without losing access to vital resources. Immutable identity wasn’t just useless to Ken Lubin. It was potentially life-threatening.

  For all he knew—he never bothered to keep track of such things—he’d never officially existed in the first place.

  It didn’t matter who he was anyway. Would you let a man through the door just because he’d had his pupils scanned the week before? Anything could have happened since. Maybe he’s been deconstructed and turned. Maybe he’d rather betray you than see his hostaged children executed. Maybe he’s found Allah.

  For that matter, why keep a stranger at bay? Is someone an enemy just because his eyeprints aren’t on record?

  It didn’t matter whether Ken Lubin was who he claimed to be. All that mattered was that his brain was spiked with so much Guilt Trip that it would be physiologically impossible for him to bite the hand that dosed him.

  It wasn’t the usual Trip that ran through his veins. The Community had a thousand different flavors of choice; one for Venezuela, four or five for China, probably a couple of dozen for Quebec. None of them trusted any motivator as mealymouthed as the greater good. Even those do-gooding ’lawbreakers weren’t in service to that, no matter what their training brochures said. The greater good could mean anything; hell, it could even mean the other guys.

  Ken Lubin was chemically dedicated to the welfare of certain N’AmPac interests that dealt in the generation of electrical power. Those interests had been of paramount importance ever since the Hydro War; they’d been fine-tuning the molecules for most of the twenty years since. The moment Lubin even intended to sell his services to the wrong bidders, he’d court a seizure that would make grand mal look like a nervous itch on a blind date. That was all the mechanical bloodhounds cared about when they sniffed his crotch. Not his name, or his clothes, or the accumulated heavy-metal essence of ocean that still clung to him after an extended shower in the local community center. Not any exaggerated rumors of his demise, or any unexplained return from the grave.

  All they cared about was that he was like them; loyal, obedient, trustworthy.

  They opened doors for him. They gave him funds, and access to medbooths five years ahead of anything available on the street. They gave him back his hearing and, surprisingly, a clean bill of health. They pointed him to a vacant furnished room, waiting like a convenient cocoon to any on the home team who might need a place to crash on short notice.

  Above all, they let him into Haven.

  There were certain things they wouldn’t do for anybody. A hardline to his cocoon was out of the question, for instance. Lubin had to go on-site for his research; an anonymous row of data booths embedded in the fourteenth floor of the Ridley Complex, off-limits to all but those of tailored conscience. About half the booths were occupied at any given time, dark diffuse shapes twitching behind frosted glass like larvae nestled in honeycomb. Occasionally two people would emerge into the hallway at the same time, pass each other without a word or a glance. There was no need for reassuring pleasantries here; everyone was on the same side.

  Inside the booth, headset curled snugly around jaw and eyes and ears, Kenneth Lubin logged into Haven and mumbled subvocal questions about Channer Vent. His headset read the buzz of his larynx—a bit of adjustment required, to compensate for the vocoder implanted in his throat—and sent off an agent to hunt for answers. He asked to see a list of references containing the phrase Beebe Station, and was instantly indulged. He cross-referenced those results against lists of dangerous microbes from the deep sea.

  No significant pathogens registered from Channer.

  Hmm.

  It didn’t prove anything, of course. There were lots of nasty facts that didn’t make it into Haven. There were other avenues of approach, though.

  Assume, for example, that the vent had been nuked to contain some risk. Beebe would never have gone on-line if that risk had been known beforehand; there had been some period, therefore, when the threat was spreading beneath anyone’s radar. And once the threat had been discovered, all those loose ends would have to be tied up in hindsight …

  The building contractors. Left Coast Shipyards. They wouldn’t use nukes though, not above ground.

  Fire, probably.

  He summoned forth a frequency plot of fires over time, within a five-kilometer radius of marine construction and contracting facilities along the N’AmPac coast. Haven showed him a a curious spike about three months after Beebe had gone on-line: Urchin Shipyards, Hanson Fabrication, and Showell Marine’s SanFran complex had all hosted infernos within the space of a week. A dozen other facilities had been hit by various acts of arson in the two weeks following, not to mention a couple of places that had burned off large chunks of their property as part of “ongoing renewal programs.”

  Lubin loosened the scale and ran the request again: all large fires over time, anywhere along the N’AmPac coastline.

  The map lit up.

  Oh my, he thought.

  Something had them scared to death. And it had all started down at Beebe.

  No Channer pathogens in the metabase, no nasty microscopic predators that ate your body from the inside out. But macroscopic predators: Channer’d had those in abundance. Viperfish and anglerfish and seadragons, oh my. Black toothy monsters, some studded with bioluminescent running lights, some blind as mud, some that changed sex on a whim, still others whose flesh bristled with the embedded bodies of parasitic mates. Nasty, hideous things. They were everywhere in the ocean’s middle depths, and they’d have been scary indeed if they’d ever grown to more than a few centimeters in length.

  At Channer, they had. Something had drawn those little nightmares down deeper than they went anywhere else, turned them into ravenous giants big as people. You didn’t go outside Beebe without a gas billy strapped to your leg; you rarely came back in without having used it.

  Something at Channer had created monsters. Lubin sent a message into Haven asking what it was.

  Haven wasn’t exactly sure. But there was a tech report in the gray lit that took a guess: some kind of endosymbiotic infection that increased growth energy. The phrase infectious neomitochondria popped up in the discussion.

  The authors of the report—a couple of eggs out of Rand/ Washington University—suggested that some microbe at Channer could infect cells symbiotically, providing extra growth energy to the host cell in exchange for room and board. Whatever the bug was, they claimed it would have some fairly obvious characteristics. Small enough to fit inside a eukaryotic cell, high assimilation efficiency for inorganic sulfur, that sort of thing.

  An infection that caused giantism in fish. Again, hmmm.

  One of the first things Lubin had done after coming ashore had been to check himself out for pathogens. He’d tested clean. But this Channer thing was new, and strictly speaking, not even a disease. It might not show up on the standard slate.

  Lubin’s credit was good. More extensive blood work wouldn’t be an issue.

  There were other issues, though. One of them dawned gradually as he explored, betrayed itself in the way Haven answered his questions. Sometimes the metaba
se thought for a moment or two before telling him what he wanted to know. That was normal. But other times—other times, it spat an answer back almost before he’d asked the question. Almost as though it had already been thinking along those very lines, as though it didn’t have to go and look up the relevant facts.

  Maybe, Lubin reflected, that was exactly it.

  Haven’s agents were not nearly so pressed for resources as the engines that combed Maelstrom; they could afford to cache recent searches. Very few lines of inquiry were utterly unique. If someone asked about the price of a Parkinson’s fix today, chances were someone else would want to know something similar tomorrow. Haven’s search engines held onto their executive summaries, the better to speed responses to related inquiries. Ask and it shall be given:

  —After a mean of 2.3 seconds when answering questions about giantism in deep-water fish;

  —after a mean of 3 seconds when talking about benthic sulfur-reducing microbes;

  —about a second for queries containing the phrase Channer Vent;

  —0.5 seconds for searches combining sulfur-reducing microbes with fire.

  Fire. Benthic sulfur-reducing microbes. An odd combination of terms. What relevance could fire have to life on the bottom of the ocean?

  He added a third concept, almost on a whim: shipyard.

  0.1 seconds.

  Well.

  He was following in someone’s footsteps. Someone had been in Haven before him, asking the same questions, making the same connections. Searching for answers, or looking for loose ends?

  Ken Lubin resolved to find out.

  An Archetype of Dislocation

  There had been a time when Sou-Hon Perreault had truly loved her husband. Martin had projected a serenity in those days, a gentle unwillingness to judge that made her feel safe. He’d been unfailingly supportive when she needed it (hardly ever, before the breakdown); he’d never been afraid to look at both sides of an issue. For love, he could balance on the edge of any fence.

  Even now, he’d forever hold her and whisper inane reassurances. Things couldn’t be that bad, he’d say. Quarantines and dark zones always popped up here and there, not without good reason. Sometimes restrictions were necessary for the good of everyone, she knew that—and besides, he had it on good authority that there were safeguards even on those who made the Big Decisions. As if he were privy to some grand secret, as if Maelstrom weren’t rotten with threads and rumors about the corpses and their mind-controlling drugs.

  Her caring, supportive husband. Sitting across the table, his face overflowed with loving concern. She hated the sight of him.

  “You should eat,” he said. He put a forkful of mashed Spirulina into his mouth and chewed, demonstrating.

  “Should I?”

  “You’re losing weight,” Martin told her. “I know you’re upset—goodness, you’ve got every reason to be—but starving yourself won’t make you feel any better.”

  “That’s your solution to the world’s problems? Stuff your face so we’ll all feel better?”

  “Sou—”

  “That’s right, Marty. Just eat a bit more, and everything’ll be just grand. Suck up all those cheery threads from N’AmWire and maybe they’ll lull you right into forgetting about Crys …”

  It was a low blow—Martin’s sister lived in Corvallis, which had not only been quarantined since the Big One but had dropped completely off-line for the better part of a month. The official story involved unfortunate long-term aftershocks that kept taking out the land lines; N’AmWire pictures showed the usual collage of citizens, shaken but not stirred, gamely withstanding temporary isolation. Martin hadn’t been able to get through to Crys for three weeks.

  Sou-Hon’s words should have stung him—even provoked him to anger—but he only sat there looking helpless, his hands spread. “Sou, you’ve been through so much these past few months, of course things look really grim. But I honestly think you’re putting way too much weight on a bunch of rumors. Riots, and firestorms, and—I mean, half those postings don’t even show up with address headers anymore, you can’t trust anything that comes out of Maelstrom these days—”

  “You’d rather trust N’AmWire? They don’t spit out a word without some corpse chewing it for them first!”

  “But what do you know, Sou? What have you actually seen with your own eyes? By your own admission you just got a glimpse of one big ship moving inland, and you didn’t even see it do anything—”

  “Because it shot the ’fly right out from under me!”

  “And you weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, you idiot! You’re lucky they didn’t track you down and cancel your contract on the spot!”

  He fell silent. The burble of the aquarium in the next room suddenly seemed very loud.

  He was backpedaling the next instant: “Oh Sou, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to …”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Sou-Hon shook her head, waving off the overture. “We’re done here anyway.”

  “Sou …”

  She stood up from the table. “You could do with a bit of a diet yourself, hubby. Lose some weight, clear your mind. It might even make you wonder what they’re putting in that so-called food you keep trying to force down my throat.”

  “Oh, Sou. Surely you’re not saying—”

  She went into her office and closed the door.

  I want to do something!

  She leaned back against the door and closed her eyes. Martin, safely excluded, made soft shuffling noises on the other side and faded away.

  I’ve been a voyeur my whole fucking life! All I do is watch! Everything’s falling apart and now they’re bringing in their big guns and laying waste and I’m part of it and there’s nothing I can do …

  She summoned a curse for the faulty derm she’d worn into Hongcouver. The epithet was an empty and colorless thing; even now, she couldn’t truly regret having been slapped awake. She could only rage at the things she’d seen when her eyes had opened.

  And Martin’s trying so hard to be a comfort, he’s so earnest and he probably believes that things really will get better if I go back to being a haploid sheep like him …

  She clenched her fists, savored the pain of fingernails in the flesh of her palms. Lenie Clarke’s no sheep, she thought.

  Clarke had long since left the Strip, for all Amitav’s efforts to keep her spirit alive. But she was still out there, somewhere. She had to be. How else to explain the subtle proliferation of black uniforms and empty eyes in the world? Perreault didn’t get out much but the signs were there, even the predigested pap that N’AmWire served up. Dark shapes on street corners. Eyes without pupils, staring from the crowds that always gathered in the background of newsworthy events.

  That was nothing new, of course. N’AmPac’s divers had been all over the news, almost a year before; first lauded as saviors of the new economy, fashionable icons of cutting-edge reserve. Then pitied and feared, once the rumors of abuse and psychopathy reached some threshold of public awareness. Then inevitably, forgotten.

  Just an old fad. Rifter chic had already had its day. So why this sudden new life, breathed into some dusty blip on the rearview mirror? Why the fine mycelium of innuendo threading its way through Maelstrom, whispers about someone risen from the deep sea, pregnant with apocalypse? Why the fragmentary rumors, their address headers corrupted or missing, of people taking sides?

  Perreault opened her eyes. Her headset rested on its peg, just in front of her desk. An LED blinked on its side: message waiting.

  Someone wanting to trade shifts, maybe. Some supervisor wanting to pay her overtime to keep looking the other way.

  Maybe another trashed cycler, she thought hopefully. Probably not, though. The Strip had been a much quieter place since Amitav’s corner of it had been—excised …

  She took a deep breath, one step forward, sat. She slipped on the headset:

  Souhon/Amitav (LNU)

  lucked into this avenging angel. No shit. Lenie Clarke,
her name was.

  Oh my God.

  The text had been overlaid directly onto the tactical map for the Strip. Sou-Hon forced herself to sit quietly, and shoveled dirt back into the tiny pit opening in her stomach.

  You’re back. Whoever you are.

  What do you want?

  She hadn’t made any secret of her interest in Amitav or Lenie Clarke. There’d been no need, at first; both had been legitimate topics of professional conversation, albeit apparently uninteresting ones to other ’flyers. But she’d kept quiet since Amitav had fallen into eclipse. Just barely. A big part of her had wanted to scream that atrocity into Maelstrom at full voice; afraid of repercussions, she’d settled for screaming at Martin, and hoped that whatever had shot down her botfly hadn’t bothered tracking it to source.

  This wasn’t CSIRA or the GA, though. This almost looked like a glitch of some kind.

  Another line of text appeared beneath the first two:

  She’s like some kinda amphibian, one of those rifter cyborgs.

  No obvious channel to link in to, no icon to tap. Behind the text, the familiar long chain of red pinpoints patrolled the Pacific coastline, showing no hint of the places where they went into coma.

  Les beus are looking for her, but I bet fifty QueBucks they don’t even know what she looks like under all that rifter gear. Souhon or Amitav (LNU)?

  Perhaps they’d hacked into her headset mic as well. “I’m—Sou-Hon. Hyphenated.”

  Sou-Hon.