Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  And what do you know: the Old Ones spake the truth.

  He fucked her so hard his cock came out bloody. He frowned, sudden concern wilting him like a stalk of old celery. “Whoa …”

  She just smiled.

  “Is that you? Are you hurt? Is it—”

  —oh crap, is it me?

  “I’m an old-fashioned girl,” she said, looking up at him.

  “What do you mean?” Surely he’d have felt it if something had cut his cock …

  “I menstruate.”

  “You—you’re kidding.” Why would anyone choose to—“I mean, that’s really TwenCen.” He stood and reached for a towel on the dresser. “You could’ve told me,” he said, wiping at himself.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Well, pick your own pleasure, by all means,” Quammen said. “It’s no big deal, I just thought—”

  She’d left her pack unzipped on the floor beside the dresser. Something glinted wet and dark from inside. He leaned slightly for a better view.

  “Ah,” he said, “—sorry if I—ah …”

  A utility clip, blade extended. Used.

  “Sure,” she said behind him. “Fine.”

  She cut herself. Before we fucked, must’ve been when I was in the bathroom. She cut her own insides.

  He turned back to the bed. Lenie was already half-dressed. Her face was a blank mask; it framed her eyes perfectly.

  She noticed his gaze. She smiled again. Marq Quammen felt a tiny chill.

  “Nice meeting you,” she said. “Go, and sin some more.”

  Mask

  The bloodhound nipped him on the finger and fixed him with one dark, suspicious eye.

  GT analog my ass, Desjardins thought. What if it doesn’t work? What if Colin’s lying, what if—

  The eye blinked and turned green.

  Colin swept past security as Desjardins’s guest. Guilt Trip wasn’t an honor bestowed upon everyone, not even upon all those who might have legitimate commerce within the halls of the Entropy Patrol. Colin passed beneath eyes that stripped flesh to the bone—thoracic implants, Desjardins noticed, although the machines seemed to think them innocuous enough—but there was no need to drink his blood or read his mind. He was, after all, in the trusted company of Achilles Desjardins, who would never dream of granting access to any potential security threat.

  This fucker could kill me, Desjardins thought.

  Colin closed the cubby door behind them; Desjardins linked his eyes into the panel and split the feed to the wall so Colin could eavesdrop. He told the board to route incoming assignments around him until further notice. The system, confident that no minion would shirk responsibility without good reason, acknowledged promptly.

  Alone again, with the man who carried long needles in his pocket.

  “What do you want to see?” Desjardins asked.

  “Everything,” Colin said.

  “That’s pretty sparse,” Colin remarked, studying the plot. “Not your usual pandemic.”

  He must have meant inland; βehemoth was sprouting everywhere along the coast.

  Desjardins shrugged. “Still has some trouble invading low-pressure habitat. Needs a few dice rolls to get a foothold.”

  “It seems to be doing well enough on the Strip.”

  “Superdense population. More dice rolls.”

  “How’s it getting around?”

  “Not sure. It didn’t book a commercial flight.” Desjardins pointed at the scattered blotches east of the Rockies. “These new hits just started showing up a couple of weeks ago, and they’re not consistent with any of the major travel corridors.” He sighed. “I suppose we’re lucky the quarantine held as long as it did.”

  “No, I mean how does it transmit? Respiratory aerosols, skin contact? Body fluids?”

  “In theory it could get around on the bottom of somebody’s boot. But you’d probably need more than a dirty boot to carry critical mass, so the secondary wouldn’t persist.”

  “Human reservoirs, then.”

  Desjardins nodded. “Alice says it’d be nice and comfy inside a body. So yeah, it’d probably spread like some kind of conventional infection. Then when a vector takes a shit or pukes in the grass, you’ve got an innoculation into the outside world.”

  “Who’s Alice?”

  “Just another ’lawbreaker. Shared the assignment.” Desjardins hoped Colin didn’t ask for details. Anyone that man got curious about might have reason to worry.

  But Colin only pointed at the display. “Your vectors. How many got past the mountains?”

  “Don’t know. Not my case anymore. I’d guess only a few, though.”

  “So who are they?”

  “I’d say people who worked on the Beebe construction contract. Infected before anyone knew there was a problem.”

  “So why aren’t they dead, if they were infected first?”

  “Good question.” Another shrug. “Maybe they aren’t infected. Maybe they’re carrying it some other way.”

  “In a jar or something?” Lubin seemed almost amused by that. “Johnny Appleseed with a grudge?”

  Desjardins didn’t know and didn’t ask. “Wouldn’t have to be deliberate, necessarily. Maybe just some dirty piece of heavy equipment that gets moved around a lot.”

  “But you’d be able to track that. Even a bunch of infected contract workers should be easy enough to track down.”

  “You’d think.” Didn’t seem to be much of a problem to the guys with the flamethrowers, anyway …

  “Yet you couldn’t find any candidates in the record.”

  “No living ones, anyway.”

  “What about the rifters?” Colin suggested. “That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days. Maybe there’s a connection.”

  “They were all—”

  —killed in the quake. But the bottom dropped out of his stomach before he could finish the thought.

  What about the rifters?

  The scanners at security had seen machinery in Colin’s chest.

  Desjardins, you idiot.

  The rifters.

  One of them was standing right at his shoulder.

  A single petrified moment to wonder which road had led to this:

  Let’s-call-him-Colin had risen from the ashes of Beebe Station and was pursuing his own apocalyptic agenda. Johnny Appleseed with a grudge, whatever the fuck that meant—

  Or:

  Let’s-call-him-Colin hadn’t been stationed at Beebe at all, he just had a—a personal interest. A friend, perhaps, a fellow rifter sacrificed for the greater good. But maybe Colin wasn’t satisfied with the greater good. Maybe Colin wanted closure.

  Or:

  Thoracic implants didn’t necessarily equal an amphibious lifestyle. Maybe Let’s-call-him-Colin wasn’t even a rifter. He sure as shit wasn’t an ordinary one, anyway. How many of those neurotic headcases would have been able to find Desjardins in the first place? How many could have broken into his home, laid him out, read his mind, threatened his very life without breaking a sweat?

  Am I infected? Am I dying? Am I leaving traces for someone like me to sniff out?

  Nearly a second had passed since the words had died in Desjardins’s throat

  I’ve got to say something. Jesus, what do I say?

  “Actually—” he began.

  He wants me to search Beebe’s personnel files. What if he’s in there? Of course he won’t be, he wouldn’t blow his own cover that wouldn’t make sense—

  “—I’m way—”

  Whatever he wants, he doesn’t want me to know he wants it, oh no, he’s being way too casual about this, just another possibility to follow up, right—

  He won’t push. He won’t force it—

  “—ahead of you on that,” Desjardins finished easily. “I checked the rifters already. I checked everyone who had anything to do with Beebe. Nothing. Nobody’s touched their bank accounts, no watch transactions, nothing at all since the quake.”

  He glanced up at Col
in, kept his voice level. “But they were pretty much at Ground Zero when the Big One went off. Why would you think they’d survive?”

  Colin looked back neutrally. “No reason. Just being systematic.”

  “Mmm.” Desjardins drummed his fingers absently on the edge of the board. His inlays lit with visual confirmation: he’d opened a channel directly to his visual cortex without—he glanced at the wall just to be sure—without sending an echo to any external displays.

  “You know, I was thinking.” Another idle tap on the panel; a luminous keypad sprang up in his head, invisible beyond his own flesh. “About why the primary vectors aren’t dying as fast as the people on the Strip.” His eyes darted subtly across the pad, focusing for the merest instant here, and here, and here on the characters. Letters brightened at his glance, began forming a command. “Maybe a nastier strain’s developed out there.” B—e—e—“Maybe the higher population density—all those extra dice rolls—maybe they just led to a higher mutation rate.”

  Beebe Station.

  Private menus bloomed around the edge of his vision. He focused on Personnel.

  Let’s-call-him-Colin grunted.

  Four women, four men. Desjardins brought up the men; whoever was standing next to him probably hadn’t changed that much.

  “And if there’s two separate strains, our propagation models are probably wrong,” he said aloud.

  Employee headshots. All faces unfamiliar. But the eyes …

  He looked up. Let’s-call-him-Colin looked back through a luminous palimpsest.

  Those eyes …

  The flesh had been reconstructed around them. The irises were darker. But for all that, the differences were cosmetic; a flaw in the iris left unchanged, a telltale capillary snaking across the sclera. And the overall aspect ratio of the face was identical. A casual change in appearance, more disguise than reconstruction. A new face, a new pair of socks, and—

  “Something wrong?” asked Kenneth Lubin.

  Desjardins swallowed.

  “Uh, the caffeine,” he managed. “Sort of sneaks up on you. I’ll be right back.”

  He barely saw the corridors scroll past. He missed the washroom entirely.

  Oh God. He’s been in my home he’s breathed in my face he even stabbed me in the neck with something and he’s probably rotten with βehemoth, it’s probably growing in me now it’s probably—

  Shut up. Focus. You can deal with this.

  If Lubin were infected, he’d be dead already. He’d said as much himself So he probably wasn’t a carrier. That was something.

  He could still be packing, of course: Johnny Appleseed with a grudge, lugging βehemoth around in a petri dish. But what if he was? Why would he cross a continent just to innoculate Achilles Desjardins of all people? If he’d wanted Desjardins dead for some reason, he could have done it while the ’lawbreaker was laid out on his own living room floor.

  That was something, too.

  Probably both of them were clean. Desjardins allowed himself a moment to feel sick with relief, then opened the door to Jovellanos’s cubby.

  It was empty; she’d taken the day to burn off some accumulated overtime. Achilles Desjardins thanked the Forces of Entropy for small mercies. He could use her board, at least for a few minutes. For however long one might reasonably be expected to spend on the toilet.

  He hooked his account and considered:

  Lubin wanted him to see Beebe’s personnel files. Didn’t he realize that Desjardins would make the connection, once the ID photos came up? Maybe not. He was only human, after all. Maybe he’d forgotten about the pattern-matching enhancements that ’lawbreakers came equipped with these days. Maybe he’d never known in the first place.

  Or maybe he had wanted Desjardins to see through his new identity. Maybe this was some twisted loyalty test courtesy of Patricia Rowan after all.

  Still. It seemed more plausible that Col—that Lubin was interested in the other rifters. He either wanted to know something about them, or he wanted Achilles Desjardins to know something about them.

  Desjardins fed names to the matchmaker and sent it hunting.

  “Semen-sucking savior,” he whispered two seconds later.

  She was proliferating in plain sight She’d been reported on half a dozen continents in a single day. Lenie Clarke was on the run in Australia. She was making friends in N’AmPac and planning an insurrection in Mexico City. She was wanted in connection with an assault in HongCouver. She was a porn star who’d been snuffed at eleven years of age.

  More ominously, Lenie Clarke was ending the world. And nobody—at least as far as Desjardins could tell—had actually noticed.

  Nobody that mattered, anyway. The official news threads, jam-packed with the latest on this terrorist group or that arboviral outbreak, had nothing to say about her at all. The intel channels listed a few scattered acts of violence or sabotage, backtracked to anarchists and malcontents who’d cited the name as inspiration. But bad times bred dime-store messiahs like roaches, and there were thousands with more of a profile than Lenie Clarke.

  Hell, none of the official outlets had even bothered to issue a denial on the subject.

  It didn’t make sense. Even the wildest rumors had to come out of the gate somewhere—how could all these people have started trumpeting the same thing at the same time? There’d been no media coverage, and there was way too much traffic for mere word-of-mouth to account for.

  There was so much stuff on Lenie Clarke, in fact, that he almost didn’t notice Ken Lubin and Mike Brander peeping over the lower edge of the scope. There wasn’t much on them—a few hundred threads, all starting within the past couple of days. But they, too, seemed strangely susceptible to corrupted address headers and blocked-sender syndrome. And they, too, were proliferating.

  What about the rifters? That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days …

  Lubin’s words. Achilles Desjardins was the one with the optimized wetware, and still Lubin had had to connect the dots for him. All Desjardins had seen was a bunch of sick tragic fucks in the news, slick uniforms—a fashion thing, he’d thought. A fad. It had never occurred to him that there might be individuals at the center of it all.

  Okay. Now you know. Where does that get you?

  He leaned back in Jovellanos’ seat, ran his fingers along his scalp. No obvious correlation between rifter sightings and βehemoth outbreaks, as far as he could tell. Unless—

  His feet hit the floor with a thump. That’s it.

  His hands danced across the panel, almost autonomously. Axes rose from the swampy baseline, stretched to credible limits, sank back into the mud. Variables clustered together, fell apart like swarms of starlings. Desjardins grabbed them, shook them out, stretched them along a single thread called time.

  That’s it. The sightings cluster in time.

  Now,’ take the first sighting from each cluster and throw away the rest. GPS them on a map.

  “Will you look at that,” he murmured.

  A rough zigzag, trending east to west across temperate North America, then veering south. βehemoth bloomed along the same trajectory.

  Someone was watching Maelstrom for sightings of Lenie Clarke. And whenever they found one, they dropped a whole cluster of fake sightings into the system to muddy the waters. Someone was trying to hide her tracks and make her famous at the same time.

  Why, for God’s sake?

  In the back of his head, synapses fired.

  Something else lurked in that data, something that coalesced along the same axis. The homegrown parts of Achilles Desjardins glimpsed that shape and recoiled, refusing the insight. The optimized parts couldn’t look away.

  Maybe a coincidence, he thought, inanely. Maybe—

  Someone knocked on the door. Desjardins froze.

  It’s him.

  He didn’t why he was so certain. Could’ve been anyone, really.

  It’s him. He knows where I am. Of course he knows, he’s probably got me radiotagged, I b
et he’s got me pegged to the centimeter—And he knows I lied to him.

  Lubin had to know. Lenie Clarke was all over Maelstrom; there was no way on Earth Desjardins could have run a check and found nothing at all since the quake.

  Knock. Knock.

  The door wouldn’t unlock for anyone who didn’t have CSIRA clearance. The door wasn’t unlocking.

  Oh yeah. It’s him all right.

  He didn’t speak. God knew what kind of snoops Lubin might have pressed up against the door. He opened an outside line and began tapping. It only took a few seconds.

  Send.

  Someone grunted softly on the other side of the door. Footsteps faded down the hall.

  Desjardins checked his watch: he’d been away from his office for almost six minutes. Much longer and it would start to look suspicious.

  Look suspicious? He knows, you idiot! That’s why he was at the door, just to—let you know. You didn’t fool him for a second.

  And yet … if Lubin had known, he hadn’t said anything. He’d played along. For whatever cold-blooded fucked-in-thehead rifter reason, he’d maintained the pretense.

  Maybe—oh please God—he’d continue to do so.

  Desjardins waited another thirty seconds on the chance that his message might net an immediate reply. It didn’t. He crept back into an empty corridor.

  Patricia Rowan must have been otherwise engaged.

  Scalpel

  The door to Desjardins’s cubby was closed.

  Hey there, Ken—er, Colin—

  Yeah, I used the upstairs john, the stalls play better ads up there for some reason—Alice’s office? She asked me to check her mail, they don’t let us link in from outside—

  He took a breath. No point in getting ahead of himself Lubin might not even bring it up. That might not even have been Lubin.

  Yeah, right.