by Peter Watts
He shakes his head. “No. No, it just bruised my leg a bit. I’m just making some adjustments.”
“Adjustments?”
“Fine-tuning.” He smiles. “Settling-in stuff.”
It doesn’t work. The smile is hollow somehow. Muscles stretch lips in the usual way, but the gesture’s imprisoned in the lower half of his face. Above it, his capped eyes stare cold as drifted snow, innocent of any topography. She wonders why it’s never bothered her before, and realizes that this is the first time she’s ever seen a rifter smile.
“That’s not supposed to be necessary,” she says.
“What’s not?” Acton’s smile is beginning to wear on her.
“Fine-tuning. We’re supposed to be self-adjusting.”
“Exactly. I’m adjusting myself.”
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean,” Acton says. “I’m—customizing the job.” His hand moves around inside his rib cage as if autonomous, tinkering. “I figure I can get better performance if I nudge the settings just a bit outside the approved specs.”
Clarke hears a brief, lilliputian screech of metal against metal.
“How?” she asks.
Acton withdraws his hand, folds flesh back over the hole. “Not exactly sure yet.” He runs another tool along the seam in his chest, sealing himself. He shrugs back into his ’skin, seals that as well. Now he’s as whole as any rifter.
“I’ll let you know next time I go outside,” he says, laying a casual hand on Clarke’s shoulder as he squeezes past.
She almost doesn’t flinch.
Acton stops. He seems to look right around her.
“You’re nervous,” he says slowly.
“Am I.”
“You don’t like being touched.” His hand rests on her collarbone like an insult.
She remembers: She has the same armor that he does. She relaxes fractionally. “It’s not a general thing,” she lies. “Just some people.”
Acton seems to weigh the gibe, decide whether it’s worthy of a response. His hand withdraws.
“Kind of an unfortunate quirk in a place as small as this,” he says, turning away.
Small? I’ve got the whole goddamn ocean! But Acton’s already climbing upstairs.
* * *
The new smoker is erupting again. Water shoots scalding from the chimney at the north end of the Throat, curdles and mixes with deep icy saline; microbes caught in the turbulence luminesce madly. The water fills with the hiss of unformed steam, aborted by the weight of three hundred atmospheres.
Acton is ten meters above the seabed, awash in rippling blue light.
She glides up from underneath. “Nakata said you were still out here,” she buzzes at him. “She said you were waiting for this thing to go off.”
He doesn’t even look at her. “Right.”
“You’re lucky it did. You could have been waiting out here for days.” Clarke turns away, aims herself at the generators.
“And I think,” Acton says, “it’ll stop in a minute or two.”
She twists around and faces him. “Look, all these eruptions are…” She rummages for the word, “chaotic.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You can’t predict them.”
“Hey, the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“They can tell when something’s going to blow. Take a look around sometime, you’ll see for yourself. They react before it even happens.”
She looks around. The clams are acting just like clams. The worms are acting just like worms. The brachyurans scurry around the bottom the way brachyurans always do. “React how?”
“Makes sense, after all. These vents can feed them or parboil them. After a few million years they’ve learned to read the signs, right?”
The smoker hiccoughs. The plume wavers, light dimming at its edges.
Acton looks at his wrist. “Not bad.”
“Lucky guess,” Clarke says, her vocoder hiding uncertainty.
The smoker manages a couple of feeble bursts and subsides completely.
Acton drifts closer. “You know, when they first sent me down here I thought this place would be a real shithole. I figured I’d just knuckle down and do my time and get out. But it’s not like that. You know what I mean, Lenie?”
I know. But she doesn’t answer.
“I thought so,” he says, as though she has. “It’s really kind of … well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know ’em. We’re all beautiful.”
He seems almost gentle.
Clarke dredges her memory for some sort of defense. “You couldn’t have known,” she says. “Way too many variables. It’s not computable. Nothing down here’s computable.”
An alien creature looks down at her and shrugs. “Computable? Probably not. But knowable—”
There’s no time for this, Clarke tells herself. I’ve got to get to work.
“—that’s something else again,” Acton says.
* * *
She never figured him for a bookworm. Still, there he is again, plugged into the library. Stray light from the eyephones leaks across his cheeks.
He seems to be spending a lot of time in there these days. Almost as much time as he spends outside.
Clarke glances down at the flatscreen as she wanders past. It’s dark.
“Chemistry,” Brander says from across the lounge.
She looks at him.
Brander jerks his thumb at the oblivious Acton. “That’s what he’s into. Weird shit. Boring as hell.”
That’s what Ballard was into, just before … Clarke fingers a spare headset from the next terminal.
“Ooh, you’re walking a fine line there,” Brander remarks. “Mr. Acton doesn’t like people reading over his shoulder.”
Then Mr. Acton will be in privacy mode and I won’t be able to. She sits down and slips the headset on. Acton has not invoked privacy; Clarke taps into his line without any trouble. The eyephone lasers etch text and formulae across her retinas. Serotonin. Acetylcholine. Neuropeptide moderation. Brander’s right: it’s really boring.
Someone’s touching her.
She does not yank the headset off. She removes it calmly. She doesn’t even flinch, this time. She will not give him the satisfaction.
Acton has turned in his chair to face her, headset dangling around his neck. His hand is on her knee.
“Glad to see we have common interests,” he says quietly. “Not that surprising, though. We do share a certain … chemistry…”
“That’s true.” She stares back, safe behind her eyecaps. “Too bad I’m allergic to shitheads.”
He smiles. “Of course, it would never work. The ages are all wrong.” He stands up, returns the headset to its hook.
“I’m not nearly old enough to be your father.”
He crosses the lounge and climbs downstairs.
“What an asshole,” Brander remarks.
“He’s more of a prick than Fischer ever was. I’m surprised you’re not picking fights with him all the time.”
Brander shrugs. “Different dynamic. Acton’s just an asshole. Fischer was a fucking pervert.”
Not to mention that Fischer never fought back. She keeps the insight to herself.
* * *
Concentric circles, glowing emerald. Beebe Station sits on the bull’s-eye. Intermittent blobs of weaker light litter the display: fissures and jagged rock outcroppings, endless muddy plains, the Euclidean outlines of human machinery all reduced to a common acoustic currency.
There’s something else out there too, part Euclid, part Darwin. Clarke zooms in. Human flesh is too much like seawater to return an echo, but bones show up okay. The machinery inside is even clearer, it shouts at the faintest sonar signal. Clarke focuses the display, points at a translucent green skeleton with clockwork in its chest.
“That him?” Caraco says.
Clarke shakes her head.
“Maybe it is. Everyone else is—”
“It’s not him.” Clarke touches a control. The display zooms back to maximum range. “You sure he’s not in his quarters?”
“He left the station seven hours ago. Hasn’t been back since.”
“Maybe he’s just hugging the bottom. Maybe he’s behind a rock.”
“Maybe.” Caraco sounds unconvinced.
Clarke leans back in her chair. The back of her head touches the rear wall of the cubby. “Well, he’s doing his job okay. When he’s off shift he can go wherever he likes, I guess.”
“Yeah, but this is the third time. He’s always late. He just wanders in whenever he likes—”
“So what?” Clarke, suddenly tired, rubs the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. “We don’t run on dryback schedules here, you know that. He pulls his weight, don’t fuck with him.”
“Well, Fischer was always getting shit for being l—”
“Nobody cared if Fischer was late,” Clarke cuts in. “They just—wanted an excuse.”
Caraco leans forward. “I don’t like him,” she confides.
“Acton? No reason you should. He’s psycho. We all are, remember?”
“But he’s different, somehow. You know that.”
“Lubin nearly killed his wife down at Galápagos before they assigned him here. Brander’s got a history of attempted suicide.”
Something changes in Caraco’s stance. Clarke can’t be sure, but the other woman’s gaze seems to have dropped to the deck. Touched a nerve there, I guess.
She continues, more gently. “You’re not worried about the rest of us, are you? So what’s so special about Acton?”
“Oh,” Caraco says. “Look.”
On the tactical display, something has just moved into range.
Clarke zooms in on the new reading; it’s too distant for good resolution, but there’s no mistaking the hard metallic blip in its center.
“Acton,” she says.
“Um … how far?” Caraco asks in a hesitant voice.
Clarke checks. “He’s about nine hundred meters out. Not too bad, if he’s using a squid.”
“He’s not. He never does.”
“Hmm. At least he seems to be beelining in.” Clarke looks up at Caraco. “You two are on shift when?”
“Ten minutes.”
“No big deal. He’ll be fifteen minutes late. Half hour, tops.”
Caraco stares at the display. “What’s he doing out there?”
“I don’t know,” Clarke says. She wonders, not for the first time, if Caraco really belongs down here. She just doesn’t seem to get it sometimes.
“I was wondering if you could maybe talk to him,” Caraco says.
“Acton? Why?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Okay.” Clarke rises from the Communications chair. Caraco backs out of the hatchway to let her past.
“Um, Lenie…”
Clarke turns.
“What about you?” Caraco asks.
“Me?”
“You said Lubin nearly killed his wife. Brander tried to kill himself. What did you do, I mean, to … qualify?”
Clarke watches her steadily.
“I mean, I guess, if it’s not too—”
“You don’t understand,” Clarke says, her voice absolutely level. “It’s not how much shit you’ve raised that suits you for the rift. It’s how much you’ve survived.”
“I’m sorry.” Caraco manages, with eyes utterly devoid of feeling, to look abashed.
Clarke softens a bit. “In my case,” she says, “mostly I just learned to roll with the punches. I haven’t done much worth bragging about, you know?”
I’m sure enough working on it, though.
* * *
She doesn’t know how it could have happened so fast. He’s been here only two weeks, yet the ’lock can barely contain his eagerness to get outside. The chamber floods, she feels a single shiver scurry along his body; and before she can move, Acton hits the latch and they drop outside.
He coasts out from under the station, his trajectory an effortless parallel of her own. Clarke fins off toward the Throat. She feels Acton at her side, although she cannot see him. His headlamp, like hers, stays dark; for her it’s become a gesture of respect to the more delicate lanterns that dwell here.
She doesn’t know what Acton’s reasoning is.
He doesn’t speak until Beebe’s a dirty yellow smudge behind them. “Sometimes I wonder why we ever go back inside.”
It can’t be happiness in that voice. How could any emotion make it through the mechanical gauntlet that lets people speak out here?
“I fell asleep near the Throat yesterday,” he says.
“You’re lucky something didn’t eat you,” she tells him.
“They’re not so bad. You just have to know how to relate to them.”
Clarke wonders if he relates to other species with the same subtlety that he relates to his own. She keeps the question to herself.
They swim through sparse, living starlight for a while. Another smudge glimmers ahead, weak and sullen; the Throat, dead on target. It’s been months now since Clarke has even thought of the guide rope that’s supposed to lead them back and forth, like blind troglodytes. She knows where it is, but she never uses it. Other senses come awake down here. Rifters don’t get lost.
Except Fischer, maybe. And Fischer was lost long before he came down here.
“So what happened to Fischer, anyway?” Acton says.
The chill starts in her chest, reaches her fingers before the sound of Acton’s voice has died away. It’s a coincidence. It’s a perfectly normal question to ask.
“I said—”
“He disappeared,” Clarke says.
“They told me that much,” Acton buzzes back. “I thought you might have a bit more insight.”
“Maybe he fell asleep outside. Maybe something ate him.”
“I doubt that.”
“Really? And what makes you such an expert, Acton? You’ve been down here for what, two weeks now?”
“Only two weeks? Seems longer. Time stretches when you’re outside, doesn’t it?”
“At first,” Clarke says.
“You know why Fischer disappeared?”
“No.”
“He outlived his usefulness.”
“Ah.” Her machine parts turn it into half creak, half growl.
“I’m serious, Lenie.” Acton’s mechanical voice does not change. “You think they’re going to let you stay down here forever? You think they’d let people like us down here at all if they had any choice?”
She stops kicking. Her body continues to coast. “What are you talking about?”
“Use your head, Lenie. You’re smarter than I am, inside at least. You’ve got the keys to the city here—you’ve got the keys to the whole fucking seaboard, and you’re still acting like a victim.” Acton’s vocoder gurgles indecipherably—a laugh, mistransposed? A snarl?
More words: “They count on that, you know.”
Clarke starts kicking again, stares ahead to the brightening glow of the Throat.
It isn’t there.
There’s a moment’s disorientation—We can’t be lost, we were headed right for it, has the power gone out?—before she sees the familiar streak of coarse yellow light, bearing four o’clock.
How could I have gotten turned around like that?
“We’re here,” Acton says.
“No. The Throat’s way over—”
A nova flares beside her, drenching the abyss with blinding light. It takes Clarke’s eyecaps a moment to adjust; when the star-bursts have faded from her eyes, the ocean is a muddy black backdrop for the bright cone from Acton’s headlamp.
“Don’t,” she says. “It gets so dark when you do that, you can’t see anything—”
“I know. I’ll turn it off in a moment. Just look.”
His beam shines down on a smal
l rocky outcropping rising from the mud, no more than two meters across. Jagged cookie-cutter flowers litter its surface, radial clusters shining garish, red and blue in the artificial light. Some of them lie flat along the rock face. Others are contorted into frozen calcareous knots, clenched around things Clarke can’t see.
Some of them move, slowly.
“You brought me out here to look at starfish?” She tries, and fails, to squeeze some hint of bored contempt through the vocoder. But inside, there’s a distant, frightened amazement that he has led her here, that she could be guided, utterly unsuspecting, so completely off course. And how did he find this place? No sonar pistol, compass doesn’t work worth shit this close to the Throat …
“I figured you probably hadn’t looked at them very closely before,” Acton says. “I thought you might be interested.”
“We don’t have time for this, Acton.”
His hands reach down into the light and lock on to one of the starfish. They peel it slowly from the rock; there are filaments of some kind along the creature’s underside, anchoring it to the substrate. Acton’s efforts tear them free, a few at a time.
He holds the animal up for Clarke’s inspection. Its upper surface is colored stone, encrusted with calcareous spicules. Acton flips it over. The underside writhes with hundreds of thick squirming threads, jammed into dense rows along the length of each arm. Each thread has a tiny sucker at its tip.
“A starfish,” Acton tells her, “is the ultimate democracy.”
Clarke stares, quietly repelled.
“This is how they move,” Acton is saying. “They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy.”
Rows of squirming maggots. A forest of translucent leeches, groping blindly into the water.
“So there’s nothing to coordinate the tube feet, they all move independently. Usually that’s not a problem; they all tend to go toward food, for example. But it’s not unusual for a third of these feet to be pulling in some direction entirely. The whole animal’s a living tug-of-war. Sometimes, some really stubborn tube feet just don’t give up, and they literally get torn out at the roots when the others move the body someplace they don’t want to go. But hey: majority rules, right?”
Clarke extends a tentative finger. Half a dozen tube feet latch on to it. She can’t feel them through her ’skin. Anchored, they look almost delicate, like filaments of milky glass.