by Peter Watts
“Go away. You can’t stay here.”
“I can, maybe. If it works out, they said. But we have to like each other or they could send me back—”
“Good.”
She’s crying now, she’s rubbing against him so hard the bed shakes: “Please can’t you like me please I’ll do anything I’ll even—”
But he never finds out what she’ll even do because that’s when the door slams open and whatever happens after that, Gerry Fischer can’t remember.
Shadow, I’m so sorry.…
But she’s back with him now, in the cold and the dark where it’s safe. Somehow. Beebe’s a dim gray glow in the distance. She floats against that backdrop like a black cardboard cutout.
“Shadow…” Not his voice.
“No.” Not hers. “Lenie.”
“Lenie.…”
Twin crescents, thin as fingernails, reflect from her eyes. Even in two dimensions she’s beautiful.
Mangled words buzz from her throat: “You know who I am? You can understand me?”
He nods, then wonders if she can see it. “Yeah.”
“You don’t— Lately you’re sort of gone, Fischer. Like you’ve forgotten how to be human.”
He tries to laugh, but the vocoder can’t handle it. “It comes and goes, I think. I’m … lucid now, anyway. That’s the word, isn’t it?”
“You shouldn’t have come back inside.” Machinery strips any feeling from her words. “He says he’ll kill you. Maybe you should just stay out of his way.”
“Okay,” he says, and thinks it actually might be.
“I can bring food out, I guess. They don’t care about that.”
“That’s okay. I can—go fishing.”
“I’ll call for a ’scaphe. It can pick you up out here.”
“No. I can swim back up myself if I want to. Not far.”
“Then I’ll tell them to send someone.”
“No.”
A pause. “You can’t swim all the way back to the mainland.”
“I’ll stay down here … a while.…”
A tremor growls softly along the seabed.
“You sure?” Lenie says.
“Yeah.” His arm hurts. He doesn’t know why.
She turns slightly. The dim reflections vanish from her eyes for a long moment.
“I’m sorry, Gerry.”
“Okay.”
Lenie’s silhouette twists around and faces back toward Beebe. “I should get going.”
She doesn’t leave. She doesn’t say anything for almost a minute.
Then: “Who’s Shadow?”
More silence.
“She’s a.… friend. When I was young.”
“She means a lot to you.” Not a question. “Do you want me to send her a message?”
“She’s dead,” Fischer says, marveling that he’s really known it all along.
“Oh.”
“Didn’t mean to,” he says. “But she had her own mom and dad, you know, why did she need mine? She went back where she belonged. That’s all.”
“Where she belonged,” Lenie buzzes, almost too softly to hear.
“Not my fault,” he says. It’s hard to talk. It didn’t used to be this hard.
Someone’s touching him. Lenie. Her hand is on his arm, and he knows it’s impossible but he can feel the warmth of her body through his ’skin.
“Gerry.”
“Yes?”
“Why wasn’t she with her own family?”
“She said they hurt her. She always said that. That’s how she got in. She used it, it always worked.…”
Not always, Shadow reminds him.
“And then she went back,” Lenie murmurs.
“I didn’t mean to.”
A sound comes out of Lenie’s vocoder, and he has no idea what it is. “Brander’s right, isn’t he. About you and kids.”
Somehow he knows she’s not accusing him. She’s just checking.
“That’s what you—do,” he tells her. “When you really love someone.”
“Oh, Gerry. You’re so completely fucked up.”
A string of clicks taps faintly on the machinery in his chest.
“They’re looking for me,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Be careful, okay?”
“You could stay. Here.”
Her silence answers him.
“Maybe I’ll come out and visit sometimes,” she buzzes at last. She rises up into the water, turns away.
“’Bye,” Shadow says. It’s the first time she’s spoken aloud since she came inside, but Fischer doesn’t think Lenie notices the difference.
And then she’s gone, for now.
But she comes out here all the time. Alone, sometimes. He knows it isn’t over. And when she goes back and forth with the others, doing all the things he used to do, he’ll be there, off where no one can see. Checking up. Making sure she’s okay.
Like her own guardian angel. Right, Shadow?
A couple of fish flicker dimly in the distance.
Shadow…?
BALLET
DANCER
A week later Fischer’s replacement comes down on the ’scaphe. Nobody stands watch in Communications anymore; machines don’t care if they have an audience. Sudden clanking reverberates through Beebe Station and Clarke stands alone in the lounge, waiting for the ceiling to open up. Compressed nitrox hisses overhead, blowing seawater back to the abyss.
The hatch drops open. Green incandescence spills into the room. He climbs down the ladder, diveskin sealed, only his face exposed. His eyes, already capped, are featureless glass balls. But they aren’t as dead as they should be, somehow. Something stares through those blank lenses, and it almost shines. His blind eyes scan the compartment like radar dishes. They lock on to hers: “You’re Lenie Clarke?” The voice is too loud, too normal. We talk in whispers here, Clarke realizes.
They are not alone now. Lubin, Brander, Caraco have appeared at the edges of her vision, drifting into the room like indifferent wraiths. They take up positions around the edge of the lounge, waiting. Fischer’s replacement doesn’t seem to notice them. “I’m Acton,” he tells Clarke. “And I bring gifts from the overworld. Behold!” He extends his clenched fist, opens it palm up. Clarke sees five metal cylinders there, each no more than two centimeters long. Acton turns slowly, theatrically, showing his trinkets to the other rifters. “One for each of you,” he says. “They go into your chest, right next to the seawater intake.”
Overhead, the docking hatch swings shut. From behind it a postcoital tattoo, metal on metal, heralds the shuttle’s escape to the surface. They wait there for a few moments: rifters, newcomer, five new gadgets to dilute their humanity a little further. Finally, Clarke reaches out to touch one. “What do they do?” she says, her voice neutral.
Acton snaps his fingers shut, stares about the lounge with eyeless intensity. “Why, Ms. Clarke,” he replies, “they tell us when we’re dead.”
* * *
In Communications, Acton spills his trinkets onto a control console. Clarke stands behind him, filling the cubby. Caraco and Brander look in through the hatchway.
Lubin has disappeared.
“The program’s only four months old,” Acton says, “and it’s lost two people at Piccard, one each at Cousteau and Link, and Fisher makes five. Not the kind of record you want to trumpet to the world, eh?”
Nobody says anything. Clarke and Brander stand impassive; Caraco shifts on her feet. Acton sweeps his blank shiny eyes over them all. “Christ but you’re a lively lot. You sure Fischer’s the only one down here who cashed in?”
“These things are supposed to save our lives?” Clarke asks.
“Nah. They don’t care that much about us. These just help you find the bodies.”
He turns to the console, plays it with practiced fingers. The topographic display flashes to life on the main screen. “Mmmm.” Acton traces along the luminous contours with one finger. “So this is Beebe here
in the center, and this must be the rift proper—Jesus, there’s a lot of geography out here.” He points at a cluster of hard green rectangles halfway to the edge of the screen. “These are the generators?”
Clarke nods.
Acton picks up one of the little cylinders. “They say they’ve already sent down the software for these things.” Silence. “Well, I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” He fingers the object in his hand, presses one end of it.
Beebe Station screams aloud.
Clarke jerks back at the sound; her head cracks painfully against an overhead pipe. The station continues to howl, wordless and despairing.
Acton touches a control; the scream stops as if guillotined.
Clarke glances at the others, shaken. They appear unmoved. Of course. For the first time she wonders what their eyes would show, naked.
“Well,” Acton says, “we know the audio alarm works. But you get a visual signal too.” He points at the screen: Dead center, within the phosphor icon that is Beebe, a crimson dot pulses like a heart under glass.
“It keys on myoelectricity in the chest,” he explains. “Goes off automatically if your heart stops.”
Behind her, Clarke feels Brander turning for the hatchway.
“Maybe my etiquette is out of date—” Acton says.
His voice is suddenly very quiet. Nobody else seems to notice.
“—but I’ve always thought it was—rude—to walk away when someone’s talking to you.”
There’s no obvious threat in the words. Acton’s tone seems pleasant enough. It doesn’t matter. In an instant Clarke sees all the signs again: the reasoned words, the deadened voice, the sudden slight tension of a body rising to critical mass. Something familiar is growing behind Acton’s eyecaps.
“Brander,” she says quietly, “why don’t you hang around and hear the man out?”
Behind her, the sounds of motion stop.
Before her, Acton relaxes ever so slightly.
Within her, something deeper than the rift stirs in its sleep.
“They’re a snap to install,” Acton says. “It takes about five minutes. GA says deadman switches are standard issue from now on.”
I know you, she thinks. I don’t remember but I’m sure I’ve seen you before somewhere.…
A tiny knot forms in her stomach. Acton smiles at her, as though sending some secret greeting.
* * *
Acton is about to be baptized. Clarke is looking forward to it.
They stand together in the airlock, their diveskins clinging like shadows. The deadman switch, newly installed, itches in Clarke’s chest. She remembers the first time she dropped into the ocean this way, remembers the person who held her hand through that drowning ordeal.
That person is gone now. The deep sea broke her and spat her out. Clarke wonders if it will do the same to Acton.
She floods the airlock.
By now the feeling is almost sensual; her insides folding flat, the ocean rushing into her, cold and unstoppable like a lover. At 4°C the Pacific slides through the plumbing in her chest, anesthetizing the parts of her that can still feel. The water rises over her head; her eyecaps show her the submerged walls of the lock with crystal precision.
It’s not like that with Acton. He’s trying to fall in on himself; he only falls into Clarke. She senses his panic, watches him convulse, sees his knees buckle in a space far too narrow to permit collapse.
He needs more room, she thinks, smiling to herself, and opens the outer hatch. They drop.
She glides down and out, arcing away from under Beebe’s oppressive bulk. She leaves the floodlit circle behind, skims into the welcoming darkness with her headlight doused. She feels the presence of the seabed a couple of meters beneath her. She’s free again.
After a few moments she remembers Acton. She turns back the way she came. Beebe’s floodlamps stain the darkness with dirty light; the station, bloated and angular, pulls against the cables holding it down. Light pours from its lower surface like feeble rocket exhaust. Pinned facedown in that glare, Acton lies unmoving on the bottom.
Reluctantly she swims closer. “Acton?”
He doesn’t move.
“Acton?” She’s back in the light now. Her shadow cuts him in half.
At last he looks up. “It’ssss—”
He seems surprised by the sound of his own transmuted voice.
He puts his hand to his throat. “I’m not—breathing—” he buzzes.
She doesn’t answer.
He looks back down. There’s something on the bottom, a few centimeters from his face. Clarke drifts closer; a tiny shrimplike creature trembles on the substrate.
“What is it?” Acton asks.
“Something from the surface. It must have come down on the ’scaphe.”
“But it’s—dancing—”
She sees. The jointed legs flex and snap, the carapace arches to some insane inner rhythm. It seems so brittle a life; perhaps the next spasm, or the next, will shatter it.
“It’s a seizure,” she says after a while. “It doesn’t belong here. The pressure makes the nerves fire too fast, or something.”
“Why doesn’t that happen to us?”
Maybe it does. “Our implants. They pump us full of neuroinhibitors whenever we go outside.”
“Oh. Right,” Acton buzzes softly. Gently he reaches out to the creature. Takes it in the palm of his hand.
Crushes it.
Clarke hits him from behind. Acton bounces off the seabed, his hand flying open; fragments of shell, of watery flesh swirl in the water. He kicks, rights himself, stares at Clarke without speaking. His eyecaps shine almost yellow in the light.
“You asshole,” Clarke says very quietly.
“It didn’t belong here,” Acton buzzes.
“Neither do we.”
“It was suffering. You said so yourself.”
“I said the nerves fired too fast, Acton. Nerves carry pleasure as well as pain. How do you know it wasn’t dancing for fucking joy?”
She pushes off the bottom and kicks furiously into the abyss. She wants to reach into Acton’s body and tear everything out, sacrifice that gory tangle of viscera and machinery to the monsters at the rift. She can’t remember ever being so angry. She tells herself she doesn’t know why.
* * *
Gurgles and clanks from below. Clarke looks down through the lounge hatch in time to see the airlock spill open. Brander backs out, supporting Acton.
Acton’s ’skin is laid open at the thigh.
He bends over, removing his flippers. Brander’s are already off; he turns to Clarke as she climbs down the ladder. “He met his first monster. Gulper eel.”
“I met my fucking monster, all right,” Acton says in a low voice. And Clarke sees it coming a fraction of a second before—
—Acton is on Brander, left fist swinging like a bolo on the end of his arm, once twice three times and Brander’s on the floor, bleeding. Acton’s bringing his foot back when Clarke gets in front of him, her hands raised to protect herself, crying, “Stop it stop it’s not his fault!” but somehow it’s not Acton she’s pleading with it’s something inside of him coming out, and she’d do anything if it would only please God go back where it came from—
It stares through Acton’s milky eyes and snarls, “The fucker saw it coming at me! He let that thing tear my leg open!”
Clarke shakes her head. “Maybe not. You know how dark it is out there, I’ve been down here longer than anyone and they sneak up on me all the time, Acton. Why would Brander want to hurt you?”
She hears Brander coming to his feet behind her. His voice carries over her shoulder: “Brander sure as shit wants to hurt him now—”
She cuts him off. “Look, I can handle this.” Her words are for Brander; her eyes remain locked with Acton’s. “Maybe you should go to Medical, make sure you’re okay.”
Acton leans forward, tensed. The thing inside waits and watches.
“This asshole—
” Brander begins.
“Please, Mike.” It’s the first time she has ever used his first name.
There’s a moment of silence.
“Since when did you ever get involved?” he says behind her.
It’s a good question. Brander’s footsteps shuffle away before she can think of an answer.
Something in Acton goes back to sleep.
“You’d better go there too,” Clarke says to him. “Later.”
“Nah. It wasn’t that tough. I was surprised how feeble it was, after I got over the size of the fucking thing.”
“It ripped your diveskin. If it could do that, it wasn’t as weak as you think. At least check it out; your leg might be lacerated.”
“If you say so. Although I’ll bet Brander needs Medical more than I do.” He flashes a predatory grin, and moves to pass her.
“You might also consider reining in your temper,” she says as he brushes past.
Acton stops. “Yeah. I was kind of hard on him, wasn’t I?”
“He won’t be as eager to help you out the next time you get caught in a smoker.”
“Yeah,” he says again. Then: “I don’t know, I’ve always been sort of—you know—”
She remembers a word someone else used, after the fact. “Impulsive?”
“Right. But really I’m not that bad. You just have to get used to me.”
Clarke doesn’t answer.
“Anyhow,” he says, “I guess I owe your friend an apology.”
My friend. And by the time she gets over that jarring idea, she’s alone again.
* * *
Five hours later Acton’s in Medical. Clarke passes the open hatchway and glances in; he sits on the examination table, his ’skin undone to the waist. There’s something wrong with the image. She stops and leans through the hatch.
Acton has opened himself up. She can see the flesh peeled back around the water intake, the places where meat turns to plastic, the tubes that carry blood and the ones that carry antifreeze. He holds a tool in one hand; it disappears into the cavity, the spinning thing on its tip whirring quietly.
Acton hits a nerve somewhere, and jumps as if shocked.
“Are you damaged?” Clarke asks.
He looks up. “Oh. Hi.”
She points at his dissected thorax. “Did the gulper—”