Starfish

by Peter Watts

  “But that’s nothing,” Acton says. “Watch this.”

  He rips the starfish in half.

  Clarke pulls back, shocked and angry. But there’s something in Acton’s posture, in that barely visible outline behind his lamp, that makes her pause.

  “Don’t worry, Lenie,” he says. “I haven’t killed it. I’ve bred it.”

  He drops the torn halves. They flutter like leaves to the seabed, trailing bits of bloodless entrail.

  “They regenerate. Didn’t you know that? You can tear them into pieces and each piece grows back the missing parts. It takes time, but they recover. Only, you end up with more of them. Damn hard to kill these guys.

  “Understand, Lenie? Tear them to pieces, they come back stronger.”

  “How do you know all this?” she asks in a metallic whisper. “Where do you come from?”

  He lays an icy black hand on her arm. “Right here. This is where I was born.”

  She doesn’t think it absurd. In fact, she barely hears him. Her mind is somewhere else entirely, terrified by a sudden realization.

  Acton is touching her, and she doesn’t mind.

  * * *

  Of course, the sex is electric. It always is. The familiar has reasserted itself, here in the cramped space of Clarke’s cubby. They can’t both lie on the pallet at the same time but they manage somehow, Acton on his knees, then Clarke, squirming around each, other in a metal nest lined with ducts and vents and bundles of optical cabling. They navigate each others’ seams and scars, tonguing puckers of metal and pale flesh, unseen and all-seeing behind their corneal armor.

  For Clarke it’s a new twist, this icy ecstasy of a lover without eyes. For the first time she feels no need to avert her face, no threat to fragile intimacy; at first, when Acton moved to take out his caps, she stopped him with a touch and a whisper and he seemed to understand.

  They cannot lie together afterward so they sit side by side, leaning into each other, staring at the hatch two meters in front of them. The lights are turned too low for dryback vision; Clarke and Acton see a room suffused in pale fluorescence.

  Acton reaches out and fingers a shard of glass sticking from an empty frame on one wall. “There used to be a mirror here,” he remarks.

  Clarke nibbles his shoulder. “There were mirrors everywhere. I—took them down.”

  “Why? A few mirrors would open the place up a bit. Make it larger.”

  She points. Several torn wires, fine as threads, hang from a hole in the frame. “They had cameras behind them. I didn’t like that.”

  Acton grunts. “I don’t blame you.”

  They sit without speaking for a bit.

  “You said something outside,” she says. “You said you were born down here.”

  Acton hesitates, then nods. “Ten days ago.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “You should know,” he says. “You witnessed my birth.”

  She thinks back. “That was when the gulper got you.…”

  “Close.” Acton grins his cold eyeless grin, puts an arm around her. “Actually, the gulper sort of catalyzed it, if I remember. Think of it as a midwife.”

  An image pops into her mind: Acton in Medical, vivisecting himself.

  “Fine-tuning,” she says.

  “Uh-huh.” He gives her a squeeze. “And I’ve got you to thank for it. You gave me the idea.”

  “Me?”

  “You were my mother, Len. And my father was this spastic little shrimp that ended up way over its head. He died before I was born, actually: I killed him. You weren’t very happy about that.”

  Clarke shakes her head. “You’re not making sense.”

  “You telling me you haven’t noticed the change? You telling me I’m the same person I was when I came down?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe I’ve just gotten to know you better.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I have, too. I don’t know, Len, I just seem more … awake now, I guess. I see things differently. You must have noticed.”

  “Yeah, but only when you’re—”

  Outside.

  “You did something to your inhibitors,” she whispers.

  “Reduced the dosage a bit.”

  She grasps his arm. “Karl, those chemicals keep you from spazzing out every time you go outside. You fuck with this stuff, you’re risking a seizure as soon as the ’lock floods.”

  “I have been fucking with it, Lenie. You see any change in me that isn’t an improvement?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “It’s all about action potential,” he tells her. “Your nerves have to build up a certain charge before they can fire—”

  “And at this depth they’d fire all the time. Karl, please—”

  “Shh.” He lays a gentle finger on her lips but she brushes it away, suddenly angry.

  “I’m serious, Karl. Without those drugs your nerves short-circuit, you burn out, I know—”

  “You only know what they tell you,” he snaps. “Why don’t you try working things out yourself for once?”

  She falls silent, stung by his disapproval. A space opens between them on the pallet.

  “I’m not a fool, Lenie,” Acton says, more quietly. “I just reduced the settings a bit. Five percent. Now when I go outside it takes a bit less of a stimulus for my nerves to fire, that’s all. It—it wakes you up, Len; I’m more aware of things, I’m more alive somehow.”

  She watches him, unspeaking.

  “Of course they say it’s dangerous,” he says. “They’re scared shitless of you already. You think they’re going to give you even more of an edge?”

  “They’re not scared of us, Karl.”

  “They should be.” His arm goes back around her. “Wanna try it?”

  It’s as though she’s suddenly outside, still naked. “No.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about, Len. I’ve already done the guinea-pig work on myself. Open up to me and I could make the adjustments myself, it’d take ten minutes.”

  “I’m not up for it, Karl. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one of the others is.”

  He shakes his head. “They don’t trust me.”

  “You can’t blame them.”

  “I don’t.” He grins, showing teeth as sharp and white as eyecaps. “But even if they did trust me, they wouldn’t do anything unless you thought it was okay.”

  She looks at him. “Why not?”

  “You’re in charge here, Len.”

  “Bullshit. They never told you that.”

  “They didn’t have to. It’s obvious.”

  “I’ve been down here longer than them. So’s Lubin. That doesn’t matter to anyone.”

  Acton frowns briefly. “No, I don’t think it does. But you’re still leader of the pack, Len. Head wolf. A-fucking-kayla.”

  Clarke shakes her head. She searches her memory for something, anything, that would contradict Acton’s absurd claim. She comes up empty.

  She feels a little sick inside.

  He gives her a squeeze. “Tough luck, lover. I guess the clothes don’t fit so well after being a career victim your whole life, eh?”

  Clarke stares at the deck.

  “Think about it, anyway,” Acton whispers in her ear. “I guarantee you’ll feel twice as alive as you do now.”

  “That happens anyway,” Clarke reminds him. “Whenever I go outside. I don’t need to screw up my internals for that.” Not those internals, anyway.

  “This is different,” he insists.

  She looks at him and smiles, and hopes he doesn’t push it. How can he expect me to let him cut me open like that? she wonders, and then wonders if maybe someday she will, if the fear of losing him might somehow grow large enough to force her other fears into submission. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Twice as alive, Acton says. Hiding behind her smile, Clarke considers: Twice as much of her life. Not a great prospect, so far.

  * * *

  There’s a light from behind; it chases her
shadow out along the seabed. She can’t remember how long it’s been there. She feels a momentary chill—

  —Fischer?—

  —before common sense sets in. Gerry Fischer wouldn’t use a headlamp.

  “Lenie?”

  She revolves on her own axis, sees a silhouette hovering a few meters away. Cyclopean light glares from its forehead. Clarke hears a subvocal buzz, the corrupted equivalent of Brander clearing his throat. “Judy said you were out here,” he explains.

  “Judy.” She means it as a question, but her vocoder loses the intonation.

  “Yeah. She sort of, keeps tabs on you sometimes.”

  Clarke considers that a moment. “Tell her I’m harmless.”

  “It’s not like that,” he buzzes. “I think she just … worries…”

  Clarke feels muscles twitching at the corners of her mouth. She thinks she might be smiling.

  “So I guess we’re on shift,” she says, after a moment.

  The headlight bobs up and down. “Right. A bunch of clams need their asses scraped. More quantum science.”

  She stretches, weightless. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Lenie…”

  She looks up at him.

  “Why do you come—I mean, why here?” Brander’s headlight sweeps the bottom, comes to rest on an outcropping of bone and rotted flesh. A skeletal smile stitches its way across the lit circle. “Did you kill it, or something?”

  “Yeah, I—” She falls silent, realizing: He means the whale.

  “Nah,” she says instead. “It just died on its own.”

  * * *

  Of course, she wakes up alone. They still try to sleep together sometimes, after sex has made them too lazy to go outside. But the bunk is too small. The most they can manage is a sort of diagonal slouch: feet on the floor, necks bent up against the bulkhead, Acton cradling her like a living hammock. If they’re unlucky they really do fall asleep like that. It takes hours to get the kinks out afterward. Way more trouble than it’s worth.

  So she wakes up alone. But she misses him anyway.

  It’s early. The schedules handed down from the GA are increasingly irrelevant—circadian rhythms lose their way in the incessant darkness, fall slowly out of phase—but the rubbery timetable that remains leaves hours before her shift starts. Lenie Clarke is awake in the middle of the night. It seems like a stupid and obvious thing to say, months from the nearest sunrise, but right now it seems especially true.

  In the corridor she turns for a moment in the direction of his cubby before she remembers. He’s never in there anymore. He’s never even inside, unless he’s eating or working or being with her. He’s barely slept in his quarters almost since they got involved. He’s getting almost as bad as Lubin.

  Caraco is sitting silently in the lounge, unmoving, obeying her own inner clock. She looks up as Clarke crosses to Comm.

  “He went out about an hour ago,” she says softly.

  Sonar picks him up fifty meters southeast, barely echoing above the bottom clutter. Clarke heads for the ladder.

  “He showed us something the other day,” Caraco says after her. “Ken and me.”

  Clarke looks back.

  “A smoker, way off in one corner of the Throat. It had this weird fluted vent, and it made singing sounds, almost…”

  “Mmm.”

  “He really wanted us to know about it, for some reason. He was really excited. He’s—he’s kind of strange out there, Lenie…”

  “Judy,” Clarke says neutrally, “why are you telling me this?”

  Caraco looks away. “Sorry. I didn’t mean anything.”

  Clarke starts down the ladder.

  “Just be careful, okay?” Caraco calls after her.

  He’s curled up when Clarke reaches him, knees tucked under his chin, floating a few centimeters above a stone garden. His eyes are open, of course. She reaches out, touches him through two layers of reflex copolymer.

  He barely stirs. His vocoder emits sporadic ticking noises.

  Lenie Clarke curls herself around him. In a womb of freezing seawater, they sleep on until morning.

  Short-circuit

  I won’t give in.

  It would be so easy. She could live out there, stay the fuck away from this creaking eggshell except to eat and bathe and do whatever parts of her job demand an atmosphere. She could spend her whole life flying across the seabed. Lubin does. Brander and Caraco and even Nakata are starting to.

  Lenie Clarke knows she doesn’t belong in here. None of them do.

  But at the same time, she’s scared of what outside might do to her. I could end up like Fischer. It would be so easy to just—slip away. If a hot seep or mud slide didn’t get me first.

  Lately she’s been valuing her own life quite a lot Maybe that means she’s losing it. What kind of a rifter cares about living? But there it is: The rift is starting to scare her.

  That’s bullshit. Complete, total bullshit.

  Who wouldn’t be scared?

  Scared. Yes. Of Karl. Of what you’ll let him do to you.

  It’s been, what, a week now?—

  Two days.

  —two days since she’s slept outside. Two days since she decided to incarcerate herself in here. She goes outside to work, and comes back as soon as each shift ends. No one’s mentioned the change to her. Perhaps no one’s noticed; if they don’t come back to Beebe themselves after work, they scatter off across the seabed to do whatever they do in splendid, freezing isolation.

  She knew Acton would notice, though. He’d notice, and miss her, and follow her back inside. Or maybe he’d try and talk her back out, fight with her when she resisted. But he’s shown no sign at all. He spends as much time out there as he ever did. She still sees him, of course. At mealtimes. At the library. Once for sex, during which neither spoke of anything important. And then gone again, back into the ocean.

  He didn’t enter into any pact with her. She didn’t even tell him about her pact with herself. Still, she feels betrayed.

  She needs him. She knows what that means, sees her own footprints crowding the road ahead, but reading the signs and changing course are two completely different things. Her insides are twisting with the need to go, whether out to him or just out, she can’t say. But as long as he’s outside and she’s in Beebe, Lenie Clarke can tell herself that she’s still in control.

  It’s progress, sort of.

  Now, curled up in her cubby with the hatch sealed tight, she hears the subterranean gurgle of the airlock. She comes up off the bed as though radio-controlled.

  Noises, flesh against metal, hydraulics and pneumatics. A voice. Lenie Clarke is on her way to the wetroom.

  He’s brought a monster inside with him. It’s an anglerfish, almost two meters long, a jellylike bag of flesh with teeth half the length of Clarke’s forearm. It lies quivering on the deck, its insides exploded through its own mouth in the near vacuum of Beebe’s sea-level atmosphere. Dozens of miniature tails, twitching feebly, sprout everywhere from its body.

  Caraco and Lubin, in the middle of some task, look over from the engineering ’lock. Acton stands beside his catch; his thorax, still inflating, hisses softly.

  “How did you fit it inside the ’lock?” Clarke wonders.

  “More to the point,” Lubin says, coming over, “why bother?”

  “What’re all those tails?” Caraco says.

  Acton grins at them. “Not tails. Mates.”

  Lubin’s face doesn’t change. “Really.”

  Clarke leans forward. Not just tails, she sees now; some of them have those extra fins along the side and back. Some of them have gills. A couple of them even have eyes. It’s as though a whole school of tiny anglers are boring into this big one. Some are in only as far as their jaws, but others are buried right down to the tail.

  Another thought strikes her, even more revolting; the big fish doesn’t need its mouth anymore. It’s just engulfing the little ones across its body wall, like some giant devolving microb
e.

  “Group sex on the rift,” says Acton. “All the big ones we’ve been seeing, they’re female. The males are these little finger-sized fuckers here. Not many dating opportunities this far down, so they just latch on to the first female they can find, and they sort of fuse—their heads get absorbed, their bloodstreams link together. They’re parasites, get it? They worm into her side and they spend their whole lives feeding off her. And there’s a fuck of a lot of them, but she’s bigger than they are, she’s stronger, she could eat them alive if she just—”

  “He’s been in the library again,” Caraco remarks.

  Acton looks at her for a moment. Deliberately, he points at the bloated carcass on the deck. “That’s us.” He grabs one of the parasitic males, rips it free. “This is everyone else. Get it?”

  “Ah,” Lubin says. “A metaphor. Clever.”

  Acton takes a single step toward the other man. “Lubin, I am getting awfully fucking tired of you.”

  “Really.” Lubin doesn’t seem the least bit threatened.

  Clarke moves; not directly between them, just off to one side, forming the apex of a human triangle. She has absolutely no idea what to do if this comes to blows. She has no idea what to say to stop that from happening.

  Suddenly, she’s not even sure that she wants to.

  “Come on, you guys.” Caraco leans back against the drying rack. “Can’t you settle this some other way? Maybe you could just whip out a ruler and compare your dicks or something.”

  They stare at her.

  “Watch it, Judy. You’re getting pretty cocky there.”

  Now they’re staring at Clarke.

  Did I say that?

  For a long, long moment nothing happens. Then Lubin grunts and goes back to the workshop. Acton watches him go; then, deprived of an immediate threat, he steps back into the airlock.

  The dead angler shivers on the deck, bristling with infestation.

  “Lenie, he’s really getting weird,” Caraco says as the ’lock floods. “Maybe you should just let him go.”

  Clarke just shakes her head. “Go where?”

  She even manages a smile.

  * * *

  She was looking for Karl Acton, but somehow she’s found Gerry Fischer instead. He looks sadly down at her through the length of a long tunnel. He seems to be a whole ocean away. He doesn’t speak but she senses sadness, disappointment. You lied to me, that feeling says. You said you’d come and see me and you lied. You’ve forgotten all about me.