Starfish

by Peter Watts

  “Carac—”

  Brander slams him hard against the wall.

  Caraco, her foot on the bottom rung, turns and watches for a moment. A smile ghosts across her face. “Don’t look at me, Gerry my man. This is your problem.” She climbs away overhead.

  Brander’s face hovers a few centimeters away. His hood is still sealed, except for the mouth flap. His eyes look like translucent glass balls embedded in black plastic. He tightens his grip.

  “So, cocksucker?”

  “I’m … sorry—” Fischer stammers.

  “You’re sorry.” Brander glances over his shoulder, includes Nakata in the joke. “He’s sorry.”

  Nakata laughs, too loudly.

  Lubin clanks in the locker, still ignoring them all. The airlock begins cycling.

  “I don’t think,” Brander says, raising his voice over the sudden gurgle, “that you’re sorry enough.”

  The ’lock swings open. Lenie Clarke steps out, fins in one hand. Her blank eyes sweep across the room; they don’t pause at Fischer. She carries her fins to the drying rack without a word.

  Brander punches Fischer in the stomach. Fischer doubles over, gasping; his head smashes into the airlock hatch. He can’t catch his breath. The deck scrapes his cheek. Brander’s boot is almost touching his nose.

  “Hey.” Lenie’s voice, distant, not particularly interested.

  “Hey yourself, Lenie. He’s got it coming.”

  “I know.” A moment passes. “Still.”

  “Judy got nailed by a viperfish, looking for him. She could’ve been killed.”

  “Maybe.” Lenie sounds as if she’s very tired. “So why isn’t Judy here?”

  “I’m here,” Brander says.

  Fischer’s lung is working again. Gulping air, he pushes himself up against the bulkhead. Brander glares at him. Lubin’s back in the room now, just off to one side. Watching.

  Lenie stands in the middle of the ready room. She shrugs.

  “What?” Brander demands.

  “I don’t know.” She glances indifferently at Fischer. “It’s just, he … he just fucked up. He didn’t mean any har—”

  She stops. Fischer gets the sense that she’s looking straight through him, through the bulkhead, right out into the abyss itself to something only she can see. Whatever it is, she doesn’t like it much.

  “Ah, fuck it.” She heads for the ladder. “None of my business anyway.”

  Lenie, please …

  Brander turns back to Fischer as she climbs out of sight. Fischer stares back. Endless seconds go by. Brander’s fist hovers in mid-air.

  It lashes out almost too fast to see. Fischer reels, catches himself on a conduit. Lights swarm across his left eye. He blinks them away, hanging on to the bulkhead. Everything hurts.

  Brander unclenches his fist. “Lenie’s way too nice,” he remarks, flexing his fingers. “Personally, I don’t care whether you meant any harm or not.”

  Doppelgänger

  Beebe’s almost as soundproof as the inside of an echo chamber.

  Lenie Clarke sits on her bunk and listens to the walls. She can’t hear any actual words, but a sudden impact of flesh against metal was clear enough a few minutes ago. Now, low voices converse out in the lounge. Water gurgles through a pipe somewhere.

  She thinks she hears something moving downstairs.

  She lays her ear against a random pipe. Nothing. Another; a hiss of compressed gas. A third; the faint, tinny echo of slow footsteps, scraping across the lower deck. After a moment a muted hum vibrates through the plumbing.

  The medical scanner.

  It’s none of my business. It’s between them. Brander’s got his reasons, and Fischer—

  He didn’t mean any harm.

  Fischer’s nothing. He’s a pathetic, twisted asshole, nobody’s problem but his own. It’s too bad he gets under Brander’s skin like that, but life’s not guaranteed to be fair. No one knows that better than Lenie Clarke. She knows what it’s like. She remembers the fists out of nowhere, the million little things you didn’t even know you’d done wrong until it was too late. Nobody helped her. She’d managed, though. Sex worked, sometimes, as a diversionary tactic. Other times you just had to run.

  He didn’t mean any harm.

  She shakes her head.

  Well I fucking didn’t either!

  The sound sinks in before the pain does. A dull, solid thud, like a fish hitting a floodlight. Blood oozes from the torn skin of her knuckles, the droplets almost black to her filtered vision. The stinging that follows is a welcome distraction.

  The bulkhead, of course, is completely unmarked.

  Out in the lounge, the conversation has stopped. Clarke sits rigid on the pallet, sucking her hand. Eventually, the voices start up again.

  Almost time to go on shift with Nakata and Brander. Clarke looks around her cubby, hesitating. There’s something she has to do before she opens the hatch, something important, and she can’t quite remember what it is. Her eyes keep coming back to the same wall, looking for something that isn’t—

  The mirror. For some reason, she wants to see what she looks like. That’s odd. She can’t remember feeling that way for—well, for a long time. But it’s no big deal. She’ll just sit here until the feeling goes away. She doesn’t have to step outside, she doesn’t even have to stand up, until she feels normal again.

  When in doubt, stay out of sight.

  * * *

  “Alice?”

  The hatch is closed. There’s no answer.

  “She’s in there.” Brander stands at the end of the corridor, the lounge behind him. “She didn’t go in more than ten minutes ago.”

  Clarke knocks again, harder. “Alice? It’s almost time.”

  Brander turns on his heel—“I’ll go get our stuff together”—and steps out of sight.

  Beebe’s hatches do not lock, for safety reasons. Still, Clarke hesitates. She knows how she’d feel if someone just walked into her private space without being invited.

  But she said she was up for another shift. And I did knock.…

  She spins the wheel in the center of the hatch. The mimetic seal around the rim softens and retracts. Clarke pulls the hatch open, peers inside.

  Alice Nakata lies twitching on her bunk, eyes closed, ’skin partially peeled. Leads trail from insertion points on her face and wrists, drape away to a lucid dreamer on the bedside shelf.

  She goes to sleep ten minutes before her shift starts? It doesn’t make sense. Besides, Nakata was just downstairs with the rest of them. With Fischer. How could anyone fall asleep after that?

  Clarke steps closer, studies the telltales on the device; induced REMs cranked to maximum and the alarms disabled. Nakata would have been out in seconds. Hell, at those settings she’d drift off in the middle of a gang rape.

  Lenie Clarke nods approvingly. Nice trick.

  Reluctantly she touches the wake-up stud. Sleep drains from Nakata’s face; her expression changes abruptly. Asian eyes flicker, open wide and dark.

  Clarke steps back, startled. Alice Nakata has taken her eyecaps off.

  “Time to go, Alice,” she says softly. “Sorry to wake you.…”

  She is, too. She’s never seen Nakata smile before. It would have been nice if it could have lasted.

  * * *

  Brander’s sealing a broadband sensor into its casing when Clarke drops into the lounge. “She’ll catch up with us,” she tells him, and turns to the drying rack for her fins.

  Directly in front of her, the Med hatch is sealed. No sounds, human or mechanical, filter through from inside.

  “Oh yeah. He’s still in there.” Brander raises his voice a fraction. “Good fucking thing, too, while I’m around.”

  “He didn’t m—” Shut up! Shut the fuck up!

  “Lenie?”

  She turns to see his hand dropping away. Brander’s actually a lot more touchy-feely than you’d expect, sometimes he almost forgets himself around her.

  But it�
�s okay. He doesn’t mean any harm either.

  “Nothing,” Clarke says, grabbing her fins.

  Brander carries the sensor over to the airlock, drops it in with some other trinkets and cycles them through. Gurgles and clunks accompany their passage into the abyss.

  “Only—”

  He looks at her, his face framing a question around empty eyes.

  “What have you got against Fischer?” she says, nearly whispering.

  You know exactly what he’s got against Fischer. It’s none of your business. Stay out of it.

  Brander’s face hardens like setting cement. “He’s a fucking freak. He diddles little kids.”

  I know. “Who says?”

  “Nobody has to say. I can see his kind coming ten klicks away.”

  “If you say so.” Clarke listens to her own voice. Cool. Distant, almost bored. Good.

  “He looks at me funny. Hell, have you seen the way he looks at you?” Metal clanks against metal. “If he so much as touches me I’ll fucking kill him.”

  “Yeah. Well, it wouldn’t take much. He just sits there and takes whatever you dish out, you know, he’s so—passive.…”

  Brander snorts. “Why do you care, anyway? He creeps you out as much as the rest of us. I saw what happened in Medical last week.”

  The airlock hisses. A green light flashes on its side

  “I don’t know,” Lenie says. “You’re right, I guess. I know what he is.”

  Brander swings the ’lock open and steps inside. Clarke holds the edge of the hatch.

  “There’s something else, though,” she says, almost to herself. “Something’s—missing. He doesn’t fit.”

  “None of us fits,” Brander growls. “That’s the whole fucking point.”

  She closes the hatch. There’s enough room for two in there—the other Rifters generally drop out in pairs—but she prefers to go through alone. It’s a small thing. Nobody comments on it.

  Not his fault. Not Brander’s, not Fischer’s. Not Dad’s. Not mine.

  Nobody’s fucking fault.

  The airlock flushes beside her.

  Angel

  The seabed is glowing. Cracks in the rock flicker comforting shades of orange, like hot coals, and he knows that’s thermal; the scalding rivulets feel warm even through his ’skin, his thermistor leaps around every time the current twitches. But there are places here where the rocks shine green, and others where they shine blue. He doesn’t know whether to thank biology or geochemistry. All he knows is that it’s beautiful. It’s a city from high up, at night. It’s a vid of the northern lights he saw once, only sharper and brighter. It’s a brush fire in emeralds.

  In a way he’s almost grateful to Brander. If it weren’t for Brander he’d never have come upon this place. He’d be sitting in Beebe with the rest of them, hooked into the library or hiding in his cubby, safe and dry.

  But Beebe’s no refuge with Brander inside. Beebe’s a gauntlet. So today Fischer just stayed away when his shift ended, crawled off across the ocean floor, exploring. Now, somewhere far from the Throat, he discovers real sanctuary.

  Don’t fall asleep, Shadow says. If you miss your shift again it’ll just give him an excuse.

  So what? He won’t find me out here.

  You can’t stay outside forever. You’ve got to eat sometime.

  I know, I know. Be quiet.

  He’s the only person to have ever seen this place. How long has it been here? How many millions of years has this little oasis been glowing peacefully in the night, a pocket universe all to itself?

  Lenie would like it out here, Shadow says.

  Yeah.

  A rattail cruises into view about half a meter up, its underside a jigsaw of reflected color. It thrashes once, suddenly; violent shivers run the length of its body. The water around it shimmers with heat distortion. The fish spins lopsidedly, tail-down, in the wake of the little eruption. Its body turns white in seconds, begins to fray at the edges.

  Four hundred eight degrees Centigrade: that’s maximum recorded temperature for hot seeps on the Juan de Fuca rift. Fischer thinks back for the temperature rating on diveskin copolymer.

  One-fifty.

  He sculls up into the water column a bit, just in case. As soon as he clears bottom clutter he feels the faint, regular tapping of Beebe’s sonar against his insides.

  That’s odd. This far out, he shouldn’t be able to feel the signal, not unless they’d really cranked it up. And they wouldn’t do that unless—

  He checks the time.

  Oh no. Not again.

  By the time he makes it back to the Throat they’re halfway through stripping number four. They open a space on the line for him. Lenie doesn’t want to hear his apologies. She doesn’t want to talk to him at all. That hurts, but Fischer can’t really blame her. Maybe he can make it up to her soon. Maybe he can take her sight-seeing.

  It’s not Brander’s shift, thank God. He’s back at Beebe. But Fischer’s getting hungry again.

  * * *

  Maybe he’s in his cubby. Maybe I can just eat and go to bed. Maybe—

  He’s sitting right there, all alone in the lounge, glaring up from his meal as soon as Fischer climbs into the room.

  Don’t get him mad.

  Too late. He’s always mad.

  “I—thought we should clear some things up,” he tries.

  “Fuck off.”

  Fischer reaches the galley table, pulls out a chair.

  “Don’t bother,” Brander says.

  “Look, this place is small enough as it is. We’ve got to at least try to get along, you know? I mean, that’s assault. It’s illegal.”

  “So arrest me.”

  “Maybe you’re not really mad at me at all,” Fischer stops for a moment, surprised. Maybe that’s it. “Maybe you’ve mixed me up with someone—”

  Brander stands up.

  Fischer pushes on: “Maybe someone else did something to you once, and—”

  Brander comes around the table, very deliberately.

  “I haven’t got you mixed up with anybody. I know exactly what you are.”

  “No, you don’t, we never even saw each other until a couple of weeks ago!” Of course that’s it. It’s not me at all, it’s someone else! “Whatever happened to you—”

  “Is none of your fucking business, and if you say one more word I’ll fucking kill you.”

  Let’s just go, Shadow pleads. Let’s leave, this is only making things worse.

  But Fischer stands his ground. Suddenly everything seems so clear. “It wasn’t me,” he says quietly. “What happened—I’m sorry. But it wasn’t me, you know it wasn’t.”

  For a moment he thinks he might actually be getting through. Brander’s face untwists a little, the knots of flesh and eyebrow unkinking just a bit around those featureless white eyes, and Fischer can almost see that face wearing something other than rage.

  But then he feels something moving, it’s his own arm reaching out Shadow no you’ll ruin everything but Shadow’s not listening, she’s crooning, Don’t get him mad, don’t get him mad don’t get him mad—

  This is what you do.

  The growl starts low in Brander’s throat, rising, like a distant wave pushed higher and higher out of the sea as it rushes shoreward.

  “… don’t you Fucking TOUCH ME!”

  And nothing goes dead fast enough.

  * * *

  It stings at first. Then he feels clotted blood break around his eyelid, sees a fuzzy line of red light. He tries to bring his hand to his face. It hurts.

  Something cold and wet, soothing. More clots come away.

  “Nnnnnn…”

  Someone is poking at his eyes. He tries to struggle, but all he can do is move his head feebly from side to side. That hurts even more.

  “Don’t move.”

  Lenie’s voice.

  “Your right eyecap’s damaged. It could be gouging your cornea.”

  He relents. Lenie’s fingers push betwe
en lids that feel as puffy as pillows. There’s a sudden pressure on his eyeball, a tug of suction. A slurping sound, and the feel of ragged edges dragged across his pupil.

  The world goes dark. “Hang on,” Lenie says. “I’ll turn up the lights.”

  There’s still a reddish tinge to everything, but at least he can see.

  He’s in his cubby. Lenie Clarke leans over him, a bit of glistening wet membrane in one hand.

  “You were lucky. He’d have ripped your costochondrals if your implants hadn’t been packed in behind them.” She drops the ruined cap out of sight, picks up a cartridge of liquid skin. “As it is, he only broke a couple of ribs. Lots of bruises. Mild concussion, maybe, but you’ll have to go to Medical to be sure. Oh, and I’m pretty sure he broke your cheekbone too.”

  She sounds as if she’s reading a grocery list.

  “Why not—” Warm salt floods his mouth. His tongue does some careful exploring; his teeth are still intact, at least. “—in Medical now?”

  “It would have been a bitch getting you down the ladder. Brander wasn’t going to help. Everyone else is outside.” She sprays foam across his bicep. It pulls his skin as it dries.

  “Not that they’d be any help either,” she adds.

  “Thanks…”

  “I didn’t do anything. Just dragged you in here, basically.”

  He wants desperately to touch her.

  “What is it with you, Fischer?” she asks after a while. “Why don’t you ever fight back?”

  “Wouldn’t work.”

  “Are you kidding? You know how big you are? You could take Brander apart if you just stood up to him.”

  Shadow says it only makes things worse. You fight back, it only gets them madder.

  “Shadow?” Lenie says.

  “What?”

  “You said—”

  “Didn’t say anything…”

  She watches him for a few moments.

  “Okay,” she says at last. She stands up. “I’ll call up and send for a replacement.”

  “No. That’s okay.”

  “You’re injured, Fischer.”

  Medical tutorials whisper inside his head. “We’ve got stuff downstairs.”