Starfish

by Peter Watts

  She doesn’t like it. It seems raw and out of place down here. Clarke puts her eyecaps back in, dims the lights to their usual minimal glow. The bulkhead fades to a comforting wash of blue pastels.

  Just as well. Shouldn’t get too careless anyway.

  In a couple of days Beebe will be crawling with a full staff. She doesn’t want to get used to exposing herself.

  ROME

  NEOTENOUS

  IT didn’t look human at first. It didn’t even look alive. It looked like a pile of dirty rags someone had thrown against the base of the Cambie pylon. Gerry Fischer wouldn’t have looked twice if the Sky-train hadn’t hissed overhead at exactly the right moment, strobing the ground with segmented strips of light.

  He stared. Eyes, flashing in and out of shadow, stared back.

  He didn’t move until the train had slid away along its overhead track. The world fell back into muddy low contrast. The sidewalk. The strip of kudzu4 below the track, gray and suffocating under countless drizzlings of concrete dust. Feeble cloudbank reflections of neon and laser from Commercial.

  And this thing with the eyes, this rag pile against the pylon. A boy.

  A young boy.

  This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow always said. After all, the kid could die out here.

  “Are you okay?” he said at last.

  The pile of rags shifted a little, and whimpered.

  “It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.”

  “I’m lost,” it said, in a very strange voice.

  Fischer took a step forward. “You a ref?” The nearest refugee strip was over a hundred kilometers away, and well guarded, but sometimes someone would get out.

  The eyes swung from side to side: no.

  But then, Fischer thought, what else would he say? Maybe he’s afraid I’ll turn him in.

  “Where do you live?” he asked, and listened closely to the answer:

  “Orlando.”

  No hint of Asian or Hindian in that voice. Back when Fischer was a kid his mom would always tell him that disasters were color-blind, but he knew better now. The kid sounded N’Am; not a ref, then. Which meant there would probably be people looking for him.

  Which, in a way, was too—

  Stop it.

  “Orlando,” he repeated aloud. “You are lost. Where’s your mom and dad?”

  “Hotel.” The rag pile detached itself from the pylon and shuffled closer. “Vanceattle.” The words came out half-whistled, as though the kid was speaking through his sinuses. Maybe he had one of those, those—Fischer groped for the words—cleft palates, or something.

  “Vanceattle? Which one?”

  Shrug.

  “Don’t you have a watch?”

  “Lost it.”

  You’ve got to help him, Shadow said.

  “Well, um, look.” Fischer rubbed at his temples. “I live close by. We can call from there.”

  There weren’t that many Vanceattles in the lower mainland. The police wouldn’t have to find out. And even if they did, they wouldn’t charge him. Not for this. What was he supposed to do, leave the kid for body parts?

  “I’m Gerry,” Fischer said.

  “Kevin.”

  Kevin looked about nine or ten. Old enough that he should know how to use a public terminal, anyway. But there was something wrong with him. He was too tall and skinny, and his limbs tangled up in themselves when he walked. Maybe he was brain-damaged. Maybe one of those nanotech babies that went bad. Or maybe his mother just spent too much time outdoors when she was pregnant.

  Fischer led Kevin up to his two-room timeshare. Kevin dropped onto the couch without asking. Fischer checked the fridge: root beer. The boy took it with a nervous smile. Fischer sat down beside him and put a reassuring hand on Kevin’s lap.

  The expression drained from Kevin’s face as though someone had pulled a plug.

  Go on, Shadow said. He’s not complaining, is he?

  Kevin’s clothes were filthy. Caked mud clung to his pants. Fischer reached over and began picking it off. “We should get you out of these clothes. Get you cleaned up. We can only take showers on even days here, but you could always take a sponge bath…”

  Kevin just sat there. One hand gripped his drink, bony fingers denting the plastic; the other rested motionless on the couch.

  Fischer smiled. “It’s okay. This is what you do when you really—”

  Kevin stared at the floor, trembling.

  Fischer found a zipper, pulled. Pressed, gently. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

  Kevin stopped shaking. Kevin looked up.

  Kevin smiled.

  “I’m not the one who should be worried here, asshole,” he said in his whistling child’s voice.

  The jolt threw Fischer to the floor. Suddenly he was staring at the ceiling, fingers twitching at the ends of arms that had turned, magically, into dead weights. His whole nervous system sang like a tracery of high-tension wires embedded in flesh.

  His bladder let go. Wet warmth spread out from his crotch.

  Kevin stepped over him and looked down, all trace of awkwardness gone from his movements. One hand still held the plastic cup. The other held a shockprod.

  Very deliberately, Kevin upended his drink. Fischer watched the liquid snake down, almost casually, and splash across his face. His eyes stung; Kevin was a spindly blur in a wash of weak acid. Fischer tried to blink, tried again, finally succeeded.

  One of Kevin’s legs was swinging back at the knee.

  “Gerald Fischer, you are under arrest—”

  It swung forward. Pain erupted in Fischer’s side.

  “—for indecent assault of a minor—”

  Back. Forward. Pain.

  “—under Sections 151 and 152 of the N’Am Pacific Criminal Code.”

  The child knelt down and glared into his face. Up close the telltales were obvious; the depth of the eyes, the size of the pores in the skin, the plastic resilience of adult flesh soaked in androgen suppressants.

  “Not to mention violation of yet another restraining order,” Kevin added.

  How long? Fischer wondered absently. Neural aftershock draped the whole world in gauze. How many months did it take to stunt back down from man to child?

  “You have the right to— Ah, fuck.”

  And how long to reverse the reversal? Could Kevin ever grow up again?

  “You know your fucking rights better than I do.”

  This wasn’t happening. The police wouldn’t go this far, they didn’t have the money, and anyway, why? How could anyone be willing to change themselves like that? Just to get Gerry Fischer? Why?

  “I suppose I should call you in, shouldn’t I? Then again, maybe I’ll just let you lie here in your own piss for a while…”

  Somehow, he got the feeling that Kevin was hurting more than he was. It didn’t make sense.

  It’s okay, Shadow told him softly. It’s not your fault. They just don’t understand.

  Kevin was kicking him again, but Fischer could hardly feel it. He tried to say something, anything, that would make his tormentor feel a little better, but his motor nerves were still fried.

  He could still cry, though. Different wiring.

  * * *

  It was different this time. It started out the same, the scans and the samples and the beatings, but then they took him out of the line and cleaned him up, and put him in a side room. Two guards sat him down at a table, across from a dumpy little man with brown moles all over his face.

  “Hello, Gerry,” he said, pretending not to notice Fischer’s injuries. “I’m Dr. Scanlon.”

  “You’re a shrink.”

  “Actually, I’m more of a mechanic.” He smiled, a prissy little smile that said, I’ve just been very clever but you’re probably too stupid to get the joke. Fischer decided he didn’t like Scanlon much.

  Still, his type had been useful before, with all their talk about “competence” and “criminal responsibility.” It’s not so much what yo
u did, Fischer had learned, as why you did it. If you did things because you were evil, you were in real trouble. If you did the same things because you were sick, though, the doctors would sometimes cover for you. Fischer had learned to be sick.

  Scanlon pulled a headband out of his breast pocket. “I’d like to talk to you for a little while, Gerry. Would you mind putting this on for me?”

  The inside of the band was studded with sensor pads. It felt cool across his forehead. Fischer looked around the room, but he couldn’t see any monitors or readouts.

  “Great.” Scanlon nodded to the guards. He waited until they’d left before he spoke again.

  “You’re a strange one, Gerry Fischer. We don’t run into too many like you.”

  “That’s not what the other doctors said.”

  “Oh? What did they say?”

  “They said I was typical. They said, they said lots of the 151s used the same rationale.”

  Scanlon leaned forward. “Well, you know, that’s true. It’s a classic line: ‘I was teaching her about her awakening sexuality, Doctor’. ‘It’s the parents’ job to instruct their children, Doctor.’ ‘They don’t like school, either, but it’s for their own good.’”

  “I never said those things. I don’t even have kids.”

  “No, you don’t. But the point is, pedophiles often claim to be acting in the best interests of the children. They turn sexual abuse into an act of altruism, if you will.”

  “It’s not abuse. It’s what you do if you really love someone.”

  Scanlon leaned back in his chair and studied Fischer for a few moments.

  “That’s what’s so interesting about you, Gerry.”

  “What?”

  “Everyone uses that line. You’re the only person I’ve met who might actually believe it.”

  * * *

  In the end, they said they could take care of the charges. He knew there had to be more to it than that, of course; they’d make him volunteer for some sort of experiment, or donate some of his organs, or submit to voluntary castration first. But the catch, when it came, wasn’t any of those things. He almost couldn’t believe it.

  They wanted to give him a job.

  “Think of it as community service,” Scanlon said. “Restitution to all of society. You’d be underwater most of the time, but you’d be well-equipped.”

  “Underwater where?”

  “Channer Vent. About forty kilometers north of the Axial Volcano, on the Juan de Fuca Rift. Do you know where that is, Gerry?”

  “How long?”

  “One year, minimum. You could extend that if you wanted to.”

  Fischer couldn’t think of any reason why he would, but it didn’t matter. If he didn’t take this deal they’d stick a governor in his head for the rest of his life. Which might not be that long, when you thought about it.

  “One year,” he said. “Underwater.”

  Scanlon patted his arm. “Take your time, Gerry. Think about it. You don’t have to decide until this afternoon.”

  Do it, Shadow urged. Do it or they’ll cut into you and you’ll change.

  But Fischer wasn’t going to be rushed. “So what do I do for one year, underwater?”

  Scanlon showed him a vid.

  “Jeez,” Fischer said. “I can’t do any of that.”

  “No problem.” Scanlon smiled. “You’ll learn.”

  * * *

  He did, too.

  A lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night they’d give him an injection, to help him learn, Scanlon said. Afterward a machine beside his bed would feed him dreams. He could never exactly remember them but something must have stuck, because every morning he’d sit at the console with his tutor—a real person, though, not a program—and all the text and diagrams she showed him would be strangely familiar. Like he’d known it all years ago, and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything: plate tectonics and subduction zones, Archimedes Principle, the thermal conductivity of two-percent hydrox. Aldosterone.

  Alloplasty.

  He remembered his left lung after they cut it out, and the technical specs on the machines they put in its place.

  Afternoons, they’d attach leads to his body and saturate his striated muscles with low-amp current. He was starting to understand what was going on now; the term was “induced isometrics,” and its meaning had come to him in a dream.

  A week after the operation he woke up with a fever.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Scanlon told him. “That’s just the last stage of your infection.”

  “Infection?”

  “We shot you up with a retrovirus the day you came here. Didn’t you know?”

  Fischer grabbed Scanlon’s arm. “Like a disease? You—”

  “It’s perfectly safe, Gerry.” Scanlon smiled patiently, disentangling himself. “In fact, you wouldn’t last very long down there without it; human enzymes don’t work well at high pressure. So we loaded some extra genes into a tame virus and sent it in. It’s been rewriting you from the inside out. Judging by your fever I’d say it’s nearly finished. You should be feeling better in a day or so.”

  “Rewriting?”

  “Half your enzymes come in two flavors now. They got the genes from one of those deepwater fish. Rattails, I think they’re called.” Scanlon patted Fischer on the shoulder. “So how does it feel to be part fish, Gerry?”

  “Coryphaenoides armatus,” Fischer said slowly.

  Scanlon frowned. “What was that?”

  “Rattails.” Fischer concentrated. “Mostly dehydrogenases, right?”

  Scanlon glanced at the machine by the bed. “I’m, um, not sure.”

  “That’s it. Dehydrogenases. But they tweaked them to reduce the activation energy.” He tapped his temple. “It’s all here. Only I haven’t done the tutorial yet.”

  “That’s great,” Scanlon said; but he didn’t sound like he meant it.

  * * *

  One day they put him in a tank built like a piston, five stories tall; its roof could press down like a giant hand, squeezing whatever was inside. They sealed the hatch and flooded the tank with seawater.

  Scanlon had warned him about the change. “We flood your trachea and your head cavities, but your lung and intestines aren’t rigid so they just squeeze down. We’re immunizing you against pressure, you see? They say it’s a bit like drowning, but you get used to it.”

  It wasn’t that bad, actually. Fischer’s guts twisted in on themselves, and his sinuses burned like hell, but he’d take that over another bout with Kevin any day.

  He floated there in the tank, seawater sliding through the tubes in his chest, and reflected on the queasy sensation of not breathing.

  “They’re getting some turbulence.” Scanlon’s voice came at him from all directions, as if the walls themselves were talking. “From your exhaust port.”

  A fine trail of bubbles was trickling from Fischer’s chest. His eyecaps made everything seem marvelously clear, like a hallucination. “Just a bit of—”

  Not his voice. His words, but spoken by something else, some cheap machine that didn’t know about harmonics. One hand went automatically to the disk embedded in his throat.

  “—hydrogen,” he tried again. “No problem. Pressure’ll squeeze them down when I get deep enough.”

  “Yeah. Still.” Other words, muffled, as Scanlon spoke to someone else. Fischer felt something vibrate softly in his chest. The bubbles grew larger, then smaller. Then disappeared.

  Scanlon was back. “Better?”

  “Yeah.” Fischer didn’t know how he felt about this, though. He didn’t really like having a chest full of machinery. He didn’t really like having to breathe by chopping water into chunks of hydrogen and oxygen. But he really didn’t like the idea of some tech he’d never even met, fiddling with his insides by remote control, reaching into his body and messing around in there without even asking. It made him feel—

  Violated, right?

  Sometimes Shadow was
just a bitch. As if she hadn’t been the one to put him up to it in the first place.

  “We’re going to kill the lights now, Gerry.”

  Darkness. The water hummed with the sound of vast machinery.

  After a few moments he noticed a cold blue spark winking at him from somewhere overhead. It seemed to cast a lot more light than it should. As he watched, the inside of the tank reappeared in hazy shades of blue-on-black.

  “Photoamps working okay?” Scanlon wanted to know.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What can you see?”

  “Everything. The inside of the tank. The hatch. Sort of bluish.”

  “Right. Luciferin light source.”

  “It’s not very bright,” Fischer said. “Everything’s sort of like, dusk.”

  “Well, it’d be pitch-black without your eyecaps.”

  And suddenly, it was.

  “Hey.”

  “Don’t worry, Gerry. Everything’s fine. We just shut the light off.”

  He lay there in utter darkness. Floaters wriggled at the corner of his eye.

  “How are you feeling, Gerry? Any sensation of falling? Claustrophobia?”

  He felt almost peaceful.

  “Gerry?”

  “No. Nothing. I feel—fine—”

  “Pressure’s at two thousand meters.”

  “I can’t feel it.”

  This might not be so bad after all. One year. One year …

  “Dr. Scanlon,” he said after a while. He was even getting used to the metallic buzz of his new voice.

  “Right here.”

  “Why me?”

  “What do you mean, Gerry?”

  “I wasn’t, you know, qualified. Even after all this training I bet there’s lots of people who’d be better at this than me. Real engineers.”

  “It’s not so much what you know,” Scanlon said. “It’s what you are.”

  He knew what he was. People had been telling him for as long as he could remember. He didn’t see what the fuck that had to do with anything. “What’s that, then?”

  At first he thought he wasn’t going to get an answer. But Scanlon finally spoke, and when he did there was something in his voice that Fischer had never heard before.

  “Pre-adapted,” was what he said.