Starfish

by Peter Watts

  He’s wrong. She hasn’t forgotten him at all. She’s only tried to.

  She doesn’t say it aloud, of course, but somehow he reacts to it anyway. His feelings change; sadness fades, something colder seeps up in its place, something so deep and so old that she can’t think of words to describe it.

  Something pure.

  From behind, a touch on her shoulder. She spins, instantly alert, hand closing around her billy.

  “Hey, calm down. It’s me.” Acton’s silhouette hangs against a faint wash of light from the direction of the Throat. Clarke relaxes, pushes gently at his chest. Says nothing.

  “Welcome back,” Acton says. “Haven’t seen you out here for a while.”

  “I was—I was looking for you,” she says.

  “In the mud?”

  “What?”

  “You were just floating there, facedown.”

  “I was—” She feels a vestige of disquiet, but she can’t remember what to attach it to. “I must have drifted off. I was dreaming. It’s been so long since I slept out here, I—”

  “Four days, I think. I missed you.”

  “Well, you could have come inside.”

  Acton nods. “I tried. But I could never get all of me through the airlock, and the part that I could—well, it was sort of a poor substitute. If you’ll remember.”

  “I don’t know, Karl. You know how I feel—”

  “Right. And I know you like it out here as much as I do. Sometimes I feel like I could just stay out here forever.” He pauses for a moment, as if weighing alternatives. “Fischer’s got it right.”

  Something goes cold. “Fischer?”

  “He’s still out here, Len. You know that.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “Not often. He’s pretty skittish.”

  “When do … I mean—”

  “Only when I’m alone. And pretty far from Beebe.”

  She looks around, inexplicably frightened. Of course you can’t see him. He isn’t here. And even if he was, it’s still too dark to …

  She forces herself to leave her headlamp doused.

  “He’s … I think he’s really hooked in to you, Len. But I guess you know that too.”

  No. No, I didn’t. I don’t. “He talks to you?” She doesn’t know why she’d resent that.

  “No.”

  “Then how?”

  Acton doesn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t know. I just got that impression. But he doesn’t talk. It’s … I don’t know, Len. He just hangs around out there and watches us. I don’t know if he’s what we’d consider … sane, I guess—”

  “He watches us,” she says, buzzing low and level.

  “He knows we’re together. I think … I think he figures that connects me and him somehow.” Acton is silent for a bit. “You cared about him, didn’t you?”

  Oh yes. It always starts off so innocently. You cared about him, that’s nice, and then it’s did you find him attractive and then well you must have done something or he wouldn’t keep hitting on you and then you fucking slut I’ll—

  “Lenie,” Acton says. “I’m not trying to start anything.”

  She waits and watches.

  “I know there was nothing going on. And even if there was, I know it’s no threat.”

  She’s heard this part before, too.

  “Now that I think about it, that’s always been my problem,” Acton muses. “I always had to go on what other people told me, and people— People lie all the time, Len, you know that. So no matter how many times she swears she’s not fucking around on you, or even that she doesn’t want to fuck around on you, how can you ever really know? You can’t. So the default assumption is, she’s lying. And being lied to all the time, that’s a damn good reason for—well, for doing what I do sometimes.”

  “Karl—you know—”

  “I know you don’t lie to me. You don’t even hate me. That’s kind of a change.”

  She reaches out to touch the side of his face. “I’d say that’s a good call. I’m glad you trust me.”

  “Actually, Len, I don’t have to trust you. I just know.”

  “What do you mean? How?”

  “I’m not sure,” he says. “It’s something to do with the changes.”

  He waits for her to respond.

  “What are you saying, Karl?” she says at last. “Are you saying you can read my mind?”

  “No. Nothing like that. I just, well, I identify with you more. I can— It’s kind of hard to explain—”

  She remembers him levitating beside a luminous smoker: The Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?

  He’s tuned in, she realizes. To everything. He’s even tuned in to the bloody worms, that’s what he—

  He’s tuned in to Fischer—

  She tongues the light switch. A bright cone stabs into the abyss. She sweeps the water around them. Nothing.

  “Have the others seen him?”

  “I don’t know. I think Caraco caught him on sonar once or twice.”

  “Let’s go back,” Clarke says.

  “Let’s not. Stay awhile. Spend the night.”

  She looks straight into his empty lenses. “Please, Karl. Come with me. Sleep inside for a bit.”

  “He’s not dangerous, Len.”

  “That’s not it.” At least, that’s not all.

  “What, then?”

  “Karl, has it ever occurred to you that you might be developing some sort of dependence on this nerve rush of yours?”

  “Come on, Len. The rift gives us all a rush. That’s why we’re down here.”

  “We get a rush because we’re fucked in the head. That doesn’t mean we should go out of our way to augment the effect.”

  “Lenie—”

  “Karl.” She lays her hands on his shoulders. “I don’t know what happens to you out here. But whatever it is, it scares me.”

  He nods. “I know.”

  “Then please, please try it my way. Try sleeping inside again, just for a while. Try not to spend every waking moment climbing around on the bottom of the ocean, okay?”

  “Lenie, I don’t like myself inside. You don’t even like me inside.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I just— I just don’t know how to deal with you when you’re like this.”

  “When I’m not about to beat the shit out of anyone? When I’m acting like a rational human being? If we’d had this conversation back at Beebe we’d be throwing things at each other by now.” He falls silent for a moment. Something changes in his posture. “Or do you miss that somehow?”

  “No. Of course not,” she says, surprised at the thought.

  “Well, then—”

  “Please. Just indulge me. What harm can it do?”

  He doesn’t answer. But she has a sneaking suspicion that he could.

  * * *

  She has to give him credit. His reluctance shows in every move, but he’s even first through the airlock. Something happens to him as it drains, though; the air rushes into him and—displaces something else, somehow. She can’t quite put her finger on it. She wonders why she’s never noticed it before.

  As a reward, she takes him directly into her cubby. He fucks her up against the bulkhead, violently, with no discretion at all. Animal sounds echo through the hull. She wonders, as he comes, if the noise is bothering the others.

  * * *

  “Have any of you,” Acton says, “thought about why things are so fucking grotty down here?”

  It’s a strange and wondrous occasion, as rare as a planetary conjunction. All the circadian clocks have drifted together for an hour or two, drawn everyone to dinner at the same time. Almost everyone; Lubin is nowhere to be seen. Not that he ever contributes much to the conversation anyway.

  “What do you mean?” Caraco says.

  “What do you think I mean? Look around, for Christ’s sake!” Acton waves his arm, taking in the lounge. “The place is barely big enough to st
and up in. Everywhere you look there’s fucking pipes and cables. It’s like living in a service closet.”

  Brander frowns around a mouthful of rehydrated potato.

  “They were on a very strict schedule,” Nakata suggests. “It was important to get everything online as quickly as possible. Perhaps they just didn’t have time to make everything as cushy as they could have.”

  Acton snorts. “Come on, Alice. How much extra time would it take to program the blueprints for decent headroom?”

  “I feel a conspiracy theory coming on,” Brander remarks. “So go on, Karl. Why’s the GA going out of its way to make us bump our heads all the time? They breeding us for short height, maybe? So we’ll eat less?”

  Lenie Clarke feels Acton tensing; it’s like a small shock wave pushed out by his clenching muscles, a pulse of tension that ripples through the air and breaks against her ’skin. She rests one calming hand casually on his thigh, under the table. It’s a calculated risk, of course. It would piss him off even more if Acton thought he was being patronized.

  This time he relaxes a little. “I think they’re trying to keep us off balance. I think they deliberately designed Beebe to stress us out.”

  “Why?” Caraco again, tense but civil.

  “Because it gives them an advantage. The more time we spend being on edge, the less time we have to think about what we could do to them if we really wanted to.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Use your head, Judy. We could black out the grid from the Charlottes down to Portland.”

  “They’d just switch feeds,” Brander says. “There are other deep stations.”

  “Yeah. And they’re all staffed by people just like us.” Acton slaps the table with one hand. “Come on, you guys. They don’t want us down here. They hate us, we’re sickos that beat up our wives and eat our babies for breakfast. If it weren’t for the fact that anyone else would flip out down here—”

  Clarke shakes her head. “But they could get us out of the loop completely if they wanted. Just automate everything.”

  “Hallelujah.” Acton brings his hands together in sarcastic applause. “The woman’s got it at last.”

  Brander leans back in his chair. “Give it a rest, Acton. Haven’t you ever worked for the GA before? You ever work for any sort of bureaucracy?”

  Acton’s gaze swivels, locks on to the other man. “What’s your point?”

  Brander looks back with a hint of a sneer on his face. “My point, Karl, is that you’re reading way too much into this. So they made the ceiling too low. So their interior decorator’s not worth shit. So what else is new? The GA just isn’t that scared of you.” He takes in Beebe with a wave of his arm. “This isn’t some subtle psychological war. Beebe was just designed by incompetent bozos.” Brander stands up, takes his plate to the galley. “If you don’t like the headroom, stay outside.”

  Acton looks at Lenie Clarke, his face utterly devoid of expression. “Oh, I’d like to. Believe me.”

  * * *

  He’s hunched over the library terminal, ’phones on his ears, ’phones on his eyes, the flatscreen blanked as usual to hide his litsearch from view. As if anything in the database could really be personal. As if the GA would ever ration out any fact worth hiding.

  She’s learned not to bother him when he’s like this. He’s hunting in there, he resents any distraction, as though the files he’s after might somehow escape if he looks the other way. She doesn’t touch him. She doesn’t run a gentle finger along his arm or try to work the knots from his shoulders. Not anymore. There are some mistakes that Lenie Clarke can learn from.

  He’s actually helpless in a strange way; cut off from the rest of Beebe, deaf and blind to the presence of people who are by no means friends. Brander could come up behind him right now and plant a knife in his back. And yet everyone leaves him alone. It’s as though his sensory exile, this self-imposed vulnerability, is some sort of brazen dare that no one has the guts to take him up on. So Acton sits at the keyboard—tapping at first, now stabbing—in his own private datasphere, and his deaf blind presence somehow dominates the lounge out of all proportion to his physical size.

  “FUCK!”

  He tears the ’phones from his face and slams his fist down on the console. Nothing even cracks. He glares around the lounge, white eyes blazing, and settles on Nakata over in the galley. Lenie Clarke, wisely, has avoided eye contact.

  “This database is fucking ancient! They stick us down this fucking black anus for months at a time and they don’t even give us a link to the Net!”

  Nakata spreads her hands. “The Net’s infected,” she says, nervously. “They send us scrubbed downloads every month or s—”

  “I fucking know that.” Acton’s voice is suddenly, ominously calm. Nakata takes the hint and falls silent.

  He stands up. The whole room seems to shrink down around him. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he says at last. He takes a step toward the ladder, glances at Clarke. “Coming?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Suit yourself.”

  * * *

  Caraco, maybe. She’s made overtures in the past.

  Not that Clarke ever took them. But things are changing. There aren’t just two Karl Actons anymore. There used to be; all of her partners have been twosomes, in fact. There’s always been a host, some magnetic chassis whose face and name never mattered because it would change without warning. And providing continuity, riding along behind each twinkling pair of eyes, there’s always been the thing inside, and it never changes. Nor, to be honest, would Lenie Clarke know what to do if it did.

  Now there’s something new: the thing outside. So far at least, it has shown no trace of violence. It does seem to have X-ray vision, which could be even worse.

  Lenie Clarke has always slept with the thing inside. Until now, she’d always just assumed it was for want of an alternative.

  She taps lightly on Caraco’s hatch. “Judy? You there?” She should be; she’s nowhere else in Beebe, and sonar can’t find any trace of her outside.

  No answer.

  It can wait.

  No. It’s waited long enough.

  How would I feel if—

  She isn’t me.

  The hatch is closed but not dogged. Clarke pulls it open a few centimeters and peers inside.

  Somehow they’ve managed to pull it off. Alice Nakata and Judy Caraco spoon around each other on that tiny bunk. Their eyes dart restlessly beneath closed lids. Nakata’s dreamer stands guard beside them, its tendrils pasted to their bodies.

  Clarke lets the hatch hiss shut again.

  It was a stupid idea anyhow. What would she know?

  She wonders how long they’ve been together, though. She never even saw that coming.

  * * *

  “Your boyfriend isn’t here,” Lubin calls in. “We were supposed to top up the coolant on number seven.”

  Clarke calls up the topographic display. “How long ago?”

  “Oh four hundred.”

  “Okay.” Acton’s half an hour late. That’s unusual; he’s been going out of his way to be punctual these days, a grudging concession to Clarke in the name of group relations. “I can’t find him on sonar,” she reports. “Unless he’s hugging the bottom. Hang on.”

  She leans out of the Comm cubby. “Hey. Anybody see Karl?”

  “He left a while ago,” Brander calls from the wetroom. “Maintenance on seven, I think.”

  Clarke punches back into Lubin’s channel. “He’s not here. Brander says he left already. I’ll keep looking.”

  “Okay. At least his deadman switch hasn’t gone off.” Clarke can’t tell whether Lubin thinks that’s good or bad.

  Movement at the corner of her eye. She looks up; Nakata’s standing in the hatchway.

  “Have you found him?” she asks.

  Clarke shakes her head.

  “He was in Medical, just before he left,” Nakata says. “He was open. He said he was making som
e adjustments—”

  Oh God.

  “He said they improved performance outside, but he didn’t explain. He said he would show me later. Maybe something went wrong.”

  External camera display, ventral view. The image flickers for a moment, then clears; on the screen, a scalloped circle of light lies across a flat muddy plain, transected by the knife-edge shadows of anchor cables. Near the edge of that circle is a black human figure, facedown, its hands held to either side of its head.

  She wakes up the close acoustics. “Karl! Karl, can you hear me?”

  He reacts. His head twists around, faces up into the floods; his eyecaps reflect featureless white glare into the camera. He’s shaking.

  “His vocoder,” Nakata says. There’s sound coming from the speaker, soft, repetitive, mechanical. “It’s—stuttering—”

  Clarke’s already in the wetroom. She knows what Acton’s vocoder is saying. She knows, because the same word is repeating over and over in her own head.

  No. No. No. No. No.

  * * *

  No obvious motor impairment. He’s able to make it back inside on his own; stiffens, in fact, when Clarke tries to help him. He strips his gear and follows her into Medical without a word.

  Nakata, diplomatically, closes the hatch behind them

  Now he sits on the examination table, stone-faced. Clarke knows the routine; get his ’skin off, his eyecaps out. Check autonomic pupil response and reflex arcs. Stab him, draw off the usual samples: blood gases, acetylcholine, GABA, lactic acid.

  She sits down beside him. She doesn’t want his eyecaps out. She doesn’t want to see behind them.

  “Your inhibitors,” she says at last. “How far down are they?”

  “Twenty percent.”

  “Well.” She tries for a light touch. “At least we know your limit now. Just nudge them back up to normal.”

  Almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Too late. I went over some sort of threshold. I don’t think—it doesn’t feel reversible.”