Starfish

by Peter Watts

  “I see.” She puts one tentative hand on his arm. He doesn’t react. “How do you feel?”

  “Blind. Deaf.”

  “You’re not, though.”

  “You asked how I felt,” he says, still expressionless.

  “Here.” She takes the NMR helmet down from its hook. Acton lets her strap it across his skull. “If there’s anything wrong, this should—”

  “There’s something wrong, Len.”

  “Well.” The helmet writes its impressions across the diagnostic display. Clarke’s got the same medical expertise they all have, stuffed into her mind by machines that hijacked her dreams. Still, the raw data mean nothing to her. It’s almost a minute before the display prints out an executive summary.

  “Your synaptic calcium’s way down.” She’s careful not to show her relief. “Makes sense, I guess. Your neurons fire too often, eventually they run out of something.”

  He looks at the screen, saying nothing.

  “Karl, it’s okay.” She leans toward his ear, one hand on his shoulder. “It’ll fix itself. Just put your inhibitors back up to normal; demand goes down, supply keeps up. No harm done.”

  He shakes his head again. “Won’t work.”

  “Karl, look at the readout. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Please don’t touch me,” he says, not moving at all.

  Critical Mass

  Clarke catches a glimpse of fist before it hits her eye. She staggers back against the bulkhead, feels some protruding rivet or valve catch the back of her head. The world drowns in explosions of afterlight.

  He’s lost control, she thinks dully. I win. Her knees collapse under her; she slides down the wall, sits with a heavy thud on the deck. She considers it a matter of some pride that she’s kept utterly silent through all this.

  I wonder what I did to set him off. She can’t remember. Acton’s fist seems to have knocked the past few minutes out of her head. Doesn’t matter anyway. Same old dance.

  But this time there seems to be someone on her side. She can hear shouts, sounds of a scuffle. She hears the sick jarring thud of flesh against bone against metal, and for once, none of it seems to be hers.

  “You cocksucker! I’ll rip your fucking balls off!”

  Brander’s voice. Brander is sticking up for her. He always was the gallant one. Clarke smiles, tastes salt. Of course, he never quite forgave Acton for that tiff over the gulper, either …

  Her vision is starting to clear, in one eye at least. There’s a leg right in front of her, another to one side. She looks up; the legs meet at Caraco’s crotch. Acton and Brander are in her cubby too; Clarke’s amazed that they can all fit.

  Acton, his mouth bloody, is under siege. Brander’s hand is at his throat. Acton has the wrist of that hand caught in a grip of his own; while Clarke watches, his other arm lashes out and glances off Brander’s jaw.

  “Stop it,” she mumbles.

  Caraco hits Acton’s temple twice in rapid succession. Acton’s head snaps sideways, he snarls, but he doesn’t release his grip on Brander.

  “I said stop it!”

  This time they hear her. The struggle slows, pauses; fists remain poised, no holds break, but they’re all looking at her now.

  Even Acton. Clarke looks up into his eyes, looks behind them. She can see nothing staring back but Acton himself. You were there before, she remembers. I’m almost sure of it. Count on you to get Karl into a losing fight and then bugger off …

  She braces herself against the bulkhead and pushes slowly erect. Caraco moves aside, helps her up.

  “I’m flattered by all the attention, folks,” Clarke says, “and I want to thank you for stopping by, but I think we can handle this on our own from here on in.”

  Caraco puts a protective hand on her shoulder. “You don’t have to put up with this shit.” Her eyes, somehow venomous through the shielding, are still locked on Acton. “None of us do.”

  One corner of Acton’s mouth pulls back in a small, bloody sneer.

  Clarke endures Caraco’s touch without flinching. “I know that. And thanks for stepping in. But please, just leave us alone for a while.”

  Brander doesn’t loosen his grip on Acton’s throat. “I don’t think that’s a very good—”

  “Will you get your fucking hands off him and leave us alone!”

  They back off. Clarke glares after them, dogs the hatch to keep them out. “Goddamned nosy neighbors,” she grumbles, turning back to Acton.

  His body sags in the sudden privacy, all the anger and bravado evaporating as she watches.

  “Want to tell me why you’re being such an asshole?” she says.

  Acton collapses on her pallet. He stares at the deck, avoiding her eyes. “Don’t you know when you’re being fucked over?”

  Clarke sits down beside him. “Sure. Getting punched out is pretty much a giveaway.”

  “I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to help all of you.” He turns and hugs her, body shaking, cheek pressed against hers, face aimed at the bulkhead behind her shoulder. “Oh God Lenie I’m so sorry you’re the last person in the whole fucking world I want to hurt—”

  She strokes him without speaking. She knows he means it. They always do. She still can’t bring herself to blame any of them.

  He thinks he’s alone in there. He thinks it’s all his own doing.

  Briefly, an impossible thought: Maybe it is.…

  “I can’t go on with this,” he says. “Staying inside.”

  “It’ll get better, Karl. It’s always hard at first.”

  “Oh God, Len. You don’t have a clue. You still think I’m some sort of junkie.”

  “Karl—”

  “You think I don’t know what addiction is? You think I can’t tell the difference?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  He manages a small, sad laugh. “I’m losing it, Len. You’re forcing me to lose it. Why in God’s name do you want me this way?”

  “Because this is who you are, Karl. Outside isn’t you. Outside’s a distortion.”

  “Outside I’m not an asshole. Outside I don’t make everyone hate me.”

  “No.” She hugs him. “If controlling your temper means seeing you turn into something else, seeing you doped up all the time, then I’ll take my chances with the original.”

  Acton looks at her. “I hate this. Jesus Christ, Len. Won’t you ever get tired of people who kick the shit out of you?”

  “That’s a really nasty thing to say,” she remarks quietly.

  “I don’t think so. I can remember some things I saw out there, Len. It’s like you need— I mean God, Lenie, there’s so much hate in all of you.…”

  She’s never heard him speak like this. Not even outside. “You’ve got a bit of that in you, too, you know.”

  “Yeah. I thought it made me different. I thought it gave me—an edge, you know?”

  “It does.”

  He shakes his head. “Oh, no. Not next to you.”

  “Don’t underrate yourself. You don’t see me trying to take on the whole station.”

  “That’s just it, Len. I blow it off all the time, I waste it on stupid shit like this. But you—you hoard it.” His expression changes, she’s not exactly sure what to. Concern, maybe. Worry. “Sometimes you scare me more than Lubin does. You never lash out, or beat on anybody—Christ, it’s a major event when you even raise your voice—so it just builds up. It’s got its upside, I guess.” He manages a soft laugh. “Hatred’s a great fuel source. If anything ever—activated you, you’d be unstoppable. But now, you’re just—toxic. I don’t think you really know how much hate you’ve got in you.”

  Pity?

  Something inside her goes suddenly cool. “Don’t play therapist with me, Karl. Just because your nerves fire too fast doesn’t mean you’ve got second sight. You don’t know me that well.”

  Of course not. Or you wouldn’t be with me.

  “Not in here.” He smiles, but that strange, sick expression keeps
showing through behind. “Outside, at least, I can see things. In here I’m blind.”

  “You’re in the land of the blind,” she says curtly. “It’s not a drawback.”

  “Really? Would you stay here if it meant getting your eyes cut out? Would you stay someplace that rotted your brain out piece by piece, turned you from a human being into a fucking monkey?”

  Clarke considers. “If I was a monkey to begin with, maybe.”

  Uh-oh. Sounded too flippant by half, didn’t I?

  Acton looks at her for a moment. Something else does too, drowsily, with one eye open.

  “At least I don’t get my endorphins by playing victim,” he says, slowly. “You should really be a bit more careful who you choose to look down on.”

  “And you,” Clarke replies, “should save the pious lectures for those rare occasions when you actually know what you’re talking about.”

  He rises off the bed and glares at her, fists carefully unclenched.

  Clarke does not move. She feels her whole body hardening from the inside out. She deliberately lifts her head until she’s looking straight into Acton’s hooded eyes.

  It’s in there now, fully awake. She can’t see Acton at all anymore. Everything’s back to normal.

  “Don’t even try,” she says. “I gave you a couple of shots for old times’ sake, but if you lay a hand on me again I swear I’ll fucking kill you.”

  She marvels inwardly at the strength in her voice; it sounds like iron.

  They stare at each other for an endless moment.

  Acton’s body turns on its heel and undogs the hatch. Clarke watches it step out of the cubby; Caraco, waiting in the corridor, lets it by without a word. Clarke holds herself utterly still until she hears the ’lock beginning to cycle.

  He didn’t call my bluff.

  Except this time, she’s not sure that that’s all it was.

  * * *

  He doesn’t see her.

  It’s been days since they’ve said anything to each other. Even their schedules have diverged. Tonight, as she was trying to sleep, she heard him come out of the abyss again and climb up into the lounge like some invading sea creature. He does it now and then when the place is deserted, when everyone is either outside or sealed into their cubicles. He sits there at the library, diving through his ’phones down endless virtual avenues, desperation in every movement. It’s as though he has to hold his breath whenever he comes inside; once she saw him tear the headset off his skull and flee outside as though his chest would burst. When she picked up the abandoned headset, the results of his litsearch were still glowing in the eyephones. Chemistry.

  Another time he turned on his way out, to see her standing in the corridor. He smiled. He even said something: “—sorry—” is what she heard, but there may have been more. He didn’t stay.

  Now his hands rest, unmoving, on the keyboard. His shoulders are shaking. He doesn’t make any sound at all. Lenie Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, wondering whether to approach him. When she looks again the lounge is empty.

  * * *

  She can tell exactly where he’s going. His icon buds off of Beebe and crawls away across the display, and there’s only one thing in that direction.

  When she gets there he’s crawling across its back, digging a hole with his knife. Clarke’s eyecaps can barely find enough light to see by, this far from the Throat; Acton cuts and slices in the light of her headlamp, his shadow writhing away across a horizon of dead flesh.

  He’s dug a crater, maybe half a meter across, half a meter deep. He’s cut through the stratum of blubber below the skin and is tearing through the brown muscle beneath. It’s been months now since this creature landed here. Clarke marvels at its preservation.

  The abyss likes extremes, she muses. If it isn’t a pressure cooker, it’s a fridge.

  Acton stops digging. He just floats there, staring down at his handiwork.

  “What a stupid idea,” he buzzes at last. “I don’t know what gets into me sometimes.” He turns to face her; his eyecaps reflect yellow. “I’m sorry, Lenie. I know this place was special to you somehow, I didn’t mean to … well, desecrate it, I guess.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s okay. It’s not important.”

  Acton’s vocoder gurgles; in air, it would be a sad laugh. “I give myself too much credit sometimes, Len. Whenever I’m inside, and I’m fucking up and I don’t know what to do, I figure all I’ve got to do is come outside and the scales will fall off my eyes. It’s like, religious faith almost. All the answers. Right out here.”

  “It’s okay,” Clarke says again, because it seems better than saying nothing.

  “Only sometimes the answer doesn’t really do much for you, you know? Sometimes the answer’s just: ‘Forget it. You’re fucked.’” Acton looks back down at the dead whale. “Would you turn the light off?”

  The darkness swallows them like a blanket. Clarke reaches through it and brings Acton to her. “What were you trying to do?”

  That mechanical laugh again. “Something I read. I was thinking—”

  His cheek brushes against hers.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking. When I’m inside I’m a fucking lobo case, I get these stupid ideas and even when I get back out it takes awhile before I really wake up and realize what a dork I’ve been. I wanted to study an adrenal gland. Thought it would help me figure out how to counter ion depletion at the synapse junctions.”

  “You know how to do that.”

  “Well, it was just bullshit anyway. I can’t think straight in there.”

  She doesn’t bother to argue.

  “I’m sorry,” Acton buzzes after a while.

  Clarke strokes his back. It feels like two sheets of plastic rubbing together.

  “I think I can explain it to you,” he adds. “If you’re interested.”

  “Sure.” But she knows it won’t change anything.

  “You know how there’s this strip in your brain that controls movement?”

  “Okay.”

  “And if, say, you became a concert pianist, the part that runs your fingers would actually spread out, take up more of the strip to meet the increased demand for finger control. But you lose something, too. The adjacent parts of the strip get crowded out. So maybe you couldn’t wiggle your toes or curl your tongue as well as you could before you started practicing.”

  Acton falls silent. Clarke feels his arms, cradling her loosely from behind.

  “I think something like that happened to me,” he says, after a while.

  “How?”

  “I think something in my brain got exercised, and it spread out and crowded some other parts away. But it only works in a high-pressure environment, you see, it’s the pressure that makes the nerves fire faster. So when I go back inside, the new part shuts down and the old parts have been—well, lost.”

  Clarke shakes her head. “We’ve been through this, Karl. Your synapses just ran low on calcium.”

  “That’s not all that happened. That’s not even a problem anymore, I’ve brought my inhibitors up again. Not all the way, but enough. But I still have this new part, and I still can’t find the old ones.” She feels his chin on the top of her head. “I don’t think I’m exactly human anymore, Len. Which, considering the kind of human I was, is probably just as well.”

  “And what does it do, exactly? This new part?”

  He takes awhile to answer. “It’s almost like getting an extra sense organ, except it’s … diffuse. Intuition, only with a really hard edge.”

  “Diffuse, with a hard edge.”

  “Yeah, well. That’s the problem when you try to explain smell to someone without a nose.”

  “Maybe it’s not what you think. I mean, something’s changed, but that doesn’t mean you can really just—look into people like that. Maybe it’s just some sort of mood disorder. Or a hallucination, maybe. You can’t know.”

  “I know, Len.”

  “Then you’re right.” Anger tr
ickles up from her internal reservoir. “You’re not human anymore. You’re less than human.”

  “Lenie—”

  “Humans have to trust, Karl. There’s no big deal about putting your faith in something you know for certain. I want you to trust me.”

  “Not know you.”

  She tries to hear sadness on that synthetic voice. In Beebe, maybe, it would have come through. But in Beebe he would never had said that.

  “Karl—”

  “I can’t come back.”

  “You’re not yourself out here.” She pushes away, spins around; she can just barely distinguish his silhouette.

  “You want me to be—” she hears confusion in the words, even through the vocoder, but she knows it’s not a question—“hateful.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I’ve had more than my fill of assholes, believe me. But Karl, this is just some kind of cheap trick. Step out of the magic booth, you’re Mr. Nice Guy. Step back in, you’re the Sea Tac Strangler. It’s not real.”

  “How do you know?”

  She keeps her distance, suddenly knowing the answer. It’s only real if it hurts. It’s only real if it happens slowly, painfully, each step carved in shouts and threats and thrown punches.

  It’s only real if Lenie Clarke is the one to make him change.

  She doesn’t tell him any of this, of course. But she’s afraid, as she turns and leaves him there, that she doesn’t have to.

  * * *

  She comes instantly out of sleep, tense and completely alert. There’s darkness—the lights are off, she’s even blanked the readouts on the wall—but it’s the close, familiar darkness of her own cubby. Something is tapping on the hull, regular and insistent.

  From outside.

  Out in the corridor there’s light enough for rifter eyes. Nakata and Caraco stand motionless in the lounge. Brander sits at the library; the screens are dark, the headsets all hanging on their pegs.

  The sound ticks through the lounge, fainter than before but easily audible.

  “Where’s Lubin?” Clarke asks softly. Nakata tilts her head towards the hull: Outside somewhere.

  Clarke climbs downstairs and into the airlock.

  * * *

  “We thought you’d gone over,” she says. “Like Fischer.”