Starfish

by Peter Watts

  Most of the protuberances are smoothed back into hydrodynamic teardrops. Close up, though, there’s no shortage of handholds. Caraco’s smoldering headlight is the first to settle down onto the machine; her squid paces along above her. Clarke sets her own squid to heel and joins the others on the hull. So far there’s been no obvious reaction to their presence.

  They huddle together, heads close to converse above the ambient noise.

  “Where’s it from?” Brander wonders.

  “Probably Korea,” Nakata buzzes back. “I did not see any registry markings, but it would take a long time to check the whole hull.”

  Caraco: “Bet you wouldn’t find anything anyway. If they were going to risk sneaking it this far into foreign territory, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to leave a return address.”

  The rumbling metal landscape pulls them along. A couple of meters up, barely visible, their riderless squids trail patiently behind.

  “Does it know we’re here?” asks Clarke.

  Alice shakes her head. “It kicks up a lot of shit from the bottom so it ignores close contacts. Bright light might scare it, though. It is trespassing. It might associate light with getting caught.”

  “Really.” Brander lets go for a moment, drifts back a few meters before catching another handhold. “Hey Judy, want to go exploring?”

  Caraco’s vocoder emits static; Lenie feels the other woman’s laughter from inside. Caraco and Brander leap away into the murk like black gremlins.

  “It moved very fast,” Nakata says. There’s a sudden small blot of insecurity radiating from inside her, but she talks over it. “When if first showed up on sonar. It was moving way too fast. It wasn’t safe.”

  “Safe?” Lenie frowns to herself. “It’s a machine, right? No one inside.”

  Nakata shakes her head. “Too fast for a machine in complex terrain. A person could do it.”

  “Come on, Alice. These things are robots. Besides, if there was anyone inside we’d be able to feel them, right? You feel anyone other than the four of us?” Nakata tends to be a bit more sensitive than the others in matters of fine-tuning.

  “I—don’t think so,” Nakata says, but Clarke senses uncertainty. “Maybe I— It’s a big machine, Lenie. Maybe the pilot is just too far away—”

  Brander and Caraco are plotting something. They’re both out of sight—even their squids have left to keep them in range—but they’re easily close enough for Clarke to sense a rising anticipation. She and Nakata exchange looks.

  “We better see what they’re up to,” Clarke says. The two of them head off across the muckraker.

  A few moments later, Brander and Caraco materialize in front of them. They’re crouched to either side of a metal dome about thirty centimeters across. Several dark fisheyes stare out from its surface.

  “Cameras?” Clarke asks.

  “Nope,” Caraco says.

  “Photocells,” Brander adds.

  Lenie feels the beat before a punchline. “Are you sure this is a good—”

  “Let there be light!” cries Judy Caraco. Beams stab out from her headlamp and Brander’s, bathing the fisheyes at full intensity.

  The muckraker stops dead. Inertia pushes Clarke forward; she grabs and regains her balance, unexpected silence ringing in her ears. In the wake of that incessant noise, she feels almost deaf.

  “Whoa,” Brander buzzes into the stillness. Something ticks through the hull once, twice, three times.

  The world lurches back into motion. The landscape rotates around them, throws them together in a tangle of limbs. By the time they’ve sorted themselves out they’re accelerating. The muckraker is grumbling again, but with a different voice; no lazy munching on polymetallics now, just a straight beeline for international waters. Within seconds Clarke is hanging on for dear life.

  “Yee-haw!” Caraco shouts.

  “Bright light might scare it?” Brander calls from somewhere behind. “I would say so!”

  Strong feelings on all sides. Lenie Clarke tightens her grip and tries to sort out which ones are hers. Exultation spiked with primal, giddy fear; that’s Brander and Caraco. Alice Nakata’s excited almost despite herself, but with more worry in the mix; and here, buried somewhere down deep, almost a sense of … She can’t tell, really.

  Discontent? Unhappiness?

  Not really.

  Is that me? But that doesn’t feel right either.

  Bright light pins Clarke’s shadow to the hull, disappears an instant later. She looks back; Brander’s up above her somehow, swinging back and forth on a line trailing up into the water—could’ve sworn that wasn’t there before—his beam waving around like a demented lighthouse. Ribbons of muddy water stream past just above the deck, their edges writhing in textbook illustrations of turbulent flow.

  Caraco pushes off the hull and flies back up into the water. Her silhouette vanishes into the murk, but her headlamp comes to rest and starts dipping around just behind Brander’s. Clarke looks over at Nakata, still plastered against the hull. Nakata’s feeling a little sick now, and even more worried about something.…

  “It is not happy!” Nakata shouts.

  “Hey; come on, groundhogs!” Caraco’s voice buzzes faintly. “Fly!”

  Discontent. Something not expected.

  Who is that? Clark wonders.

  “Come on!” Caraco calls again.

  What the hell. Can’t hang on much longer anyway. Clarke lets go, pushes off; the top of the muckraker races on beneath. Heavy water drags the momentum from her. She kicks for altitude, feels sudden expectation from behind—and in the next second something slams against her back, pushing her forward again. Implants lurch against her rib cage.

  “Jesus Christ!” Brander buzzes in her ear. “Get a grip, Lenie!”

  He’s caught her on his way past. Clarke reaches out and grabs the line that he and Caraco are attached to. It’s only as thick as her finger, and too slippery to hang on to. She looks back and sees that the other two have looped it around their chests and under their arms, leaving their hands more or less free. She tries the same trick, drag arching her back, while Caraco calls out to Nakata.

  Nakata is not eager to let go. They can feel that, even though they can’t see her. Brander angles back and forth, tacking his body like a rudder; the three of them swing in a grand, barely controlled arc, knotted into the middle of their tether. “Come on, Alice! Join the human kite! We’ll catch you!”

  And Nakata’s coming, she’s coming, but she’s doing it her own way. She’s climbed sideways against the current, hand over hand, until she found the place where the line joins the deck. Now she’s letting drag push her back along the filament to them.

  Clarke has finally secured herself in a loop. Speed digs the line into her flesh; it’s already starting to hurt. She doesn’t feel much like a human kite. Bait on a hook is more like it. She twists around to Brander, points at the line: “What is this, anyway?”

  “VLF antennae. Unspooled when we scared it. Probably crying for help.”

  “It won’t get any, will it?”

  “Not on this side of the ocean. It’s probably just making a last call so its owners’ll know what happened. Sort of a suicide note.”

  Caraco, entangled a bit farther back, twists around at that. “Suicide? You don’t suppose these things self-destruct?”

  Sudden concern settles over the human kite. Alice Nakata tumbles into them.

  “Maybe we ought to let it go,” Clarke says.

  Nakata nods emphatically. “It is not happy.” Her disquiet radiates through the others like a warning light.

  It takes a few moments to disentangle themselves from the antennae. It whips past and away, trailing a small float like a traffic cone. Clarke tumbles, lets the water brake her. Machine roars recede into grumbles, into mere tremors.

  The rifters hang in empty midwater, silence on all sides.

  Caraco points a sonar pistol straight down, fires. “Jeez. We’re almost thirty meters off the
bottom.”

  “We lose the squids?” Brander says. “That thing was really moving.”

  Caraco raises her pistol, takes a few more readings. “Got ’em. They’re not all that far off, actually, I— Hey.”

  “What?”

  “There’s five of them. Closing fast.”

  “Ken?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well. He’s saving us a swim, anyway,” Brander says.

  “Did anyone—”

  They turn. Alice Nakata starts again: “Did anyone else feel it?”

  “Feel what?” Brander begins, but Clarke is nodding.

  “Judy?” Nakata says.

  Caraco radiates reluctance. “I— There was something, maybe. Didn’t get a good fix on it. I assumed it was one of you guys.”

  “What,” Brander says. “The muckraker? I thought—”

  A black cipher rises in their midst. His squid cruises straight up from underneath like a slow missile. It hovers overhead when he releases it. A couple of meters below, four other squids bob restlessly at station-keeping, noses up.

  “You lost these,” Lubin buzzes.

  “Thanks,” Brander replies.

  Clarke concentrates, tries to tune Lubin in. She’s only going through the motions, of course. He’s dark to them. He’s always been dark, fine-tuning didn’t change him a bit. Nobody knows why.

  “So what’s going on?” he asks. “Your note said something about a muckraker.”

  “It got away from us,” Caraco says.

  “It was not happy,” Nakata repeats.

  “Yeah?”

  “Alice got some sort of feeling off of it,” Caraco says. “Lenie and me too, sort of.”

  “Muckrakers are unmanned,” Lubin remarks.

  “Not a man,” Nakata says. “Not a person. But…” She trails off.

  “I felt it,” Clarke says. “It was alive.”

  * * *

  Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, alone again. Really alone. She can remember a time, not so long ago, when she reveled in this kind of isolation. Who would have thought that she’d miss feelings?

  Even if they are someone else’s.

  And yet it’s true. Every time Beebe takes her in, some vital part of her falls away like a half-remembered dream. The airlock clears, her body reinflates, and her awareness turns flat and muddy. The others just vanish. It’s strange; she can see them, hear them the way she always could. But if they don’t move and she closes her eyes, she’s got no way of knowing they’re here.

  Now her only company is herself. Just one set of signals to process in here. Nothing jamming her.

  Shit.

  Blind, or naked. That was the choice. It nearly killed her. My own damn fault, of course. I was just asking for it.

  She was, too. She could have just left everything the way it was, quietly deleted Acton’s file before anyone else found out about it. But there’d been this debt. Something owed to the ghost of the Thing Outside, the thing that didn’t snarl or blame or lash out, the thing that, finally, took the Thing Inside away where it couldn’t hurt her anymore. Part of Lenie Clarke still hates Acton for that, on some sick level where conditioned reflex runs the show; but even down there, she thinks maybe he did it for her. Like it or not, she owed him.

  So she paid up. She called the others inside and played the file. She told them what he’d said, that last time, and she didn’t ask them to turn their backs on his offering even though she desperately hoped they would. If she had asked, perhaps, they might have listened. But one by one, they split themselves open and made the changes. Mike Brander, out of curiosity. Judy Caraco, out of skepticism. Alice Nakata, afraid of being left behind. Ken Lubin, unsuccessfully, for reasons he kept to himself.

  She clenches her eyelids, remembers rules changing overnight. Careful appearances suddenly meant nothing; blank eyes and ninja masks were just cosmetic affectations, useless as armor. How are you feeling, Lenie Clarke? Horny, bored, upset? So easy to tell, though your eyes are hidden behind those corneal opacities. You could be terrified. You could be pissing in your ’skin and everyone would know.

  Why did you tell them? Why did you tell them? Why did you tell them?

  Outside, she watched the others change. They moved around her without speaking, one connecting smoothly with another to lend a hand or a piece of equipment. When she needed something from one of them, it was there before she could speak. When they needed something from her they had to ask aloud, and the choreography would falter. She felt like the token cripple in a dance troupe. She wondered how much of her they could see, and was afraid to ask.

  Inside, sometimes, she would try. It was safer there; the thread that connected the rest of them fell apart in atmosphere, put everyone back on equal terms. Brander spoke of a heightened awareness of the presence of others; Caraco compared it to body language. “Just sort of makes up for the eyecaps,” she said, apparently expecting Clarke to feel reassured at that.

  But it was Alice Nakata who finally remarked, almost offhandedly, that other people’s feelings could be … distracting.…

  Lenie Clarke’s been tuned for a while now. It’s not so bad. No precise telepathic insights, no sudden betrayals. It’s more like the sensation from a ghost limb, the ancestral memory of a tail you can almost feel behind you. And Clarke knows now that Nakata was right. Outside, the feelings of the others trickle into her, masking, diluting. Sometimes she can even forget she has any of her own.

  There’s something else, too, a familiar core in each of them, dark and writhing and angry. That doesn’t surprise her. They don’t even talk about it. Might as well discuss the fact that they all have five fingers on each hand.

  * * *

  Brander’s busy at the library; Clarke can hear Nakata in Comm, on the phone.

  “According to this,” Brander says, “they’ve started putting smart gels in muckrakers.”

  “Mmm?”

  “It’s a pretty old file,” he admits. “It’d be nice if the GA would download a bit more often, infections or no infections. I mean, we are single-handedly keeping the Western world safe from brownouts, it wouldn’t kill them to—”

  “Gels,” Clarke prompts.

  “Right. Well, they’ve always needed neural nets in those things, you know, they wander around some pretty hairy topography—you hear about those two muckrakers that got caught up in the Aleutian Trench?—anyway, navigation through complex environments generally needs a net of some sort. Usually it’s gallium-arsenide–based, but even those don’t come close to matching a human brain for spatial stuff. They still just crawled when it came to figuring seamounts, that sort of thing. So they’ve started replacing them with smart gels.”

  Clarke grunts. “Alice said it was moving too fast for a machine.”

  “Probably was. And smart gels are made out of real neurons, so I guess we tune in to them the same way we tune in to each other. At least, judging by what you guys felt—Alice said it wasn’t happy.”

  “It wasn’t.” Clarke frowns. “It wasn’t unhappy either, actually. It wasn’t really an emotion at all, it was just—well, surprised, I guess. Like, like a sense of—divergence. From what was expected.”

  “Hell, I did feel that,” Brander says. “I thought it was me.”

  Nakata emerges from Comm. “Still no word on Karl’s replacement. They say the new recruits still are not through training. Cutbacks, they say.”

  By now it’s a running joke. The GA’s new recruits have to be the slowest learners since the eradication of Down’s syndrome. Almost four months now and Acton’s replacement still hasn’t materialized.

  Brander waves one hand dismissively. “We’ve been doing okay with five.” He shuts down the library and stretches. “Anyone seen Ken, by the way?”

  “He is just outside,” Nakata says. “Why?”

  “I’m with him next shift; got to set up a time. His rhythm’s been a bit wonky the past couple of days.”

  “How far out is he?” Clarke asks sudd
enly.

  Nakata shrugs. “Maybe ten meters, when I last checked.”

  He’s in range. There are limits to fine-tuning. You can’t feel someone in Beebe from as far as the Throat, for example. But ten meters, easy.

  “He’s usually farther out, isn’t he?” Clarke speaks softly, as if afraid of being overheard. “Almost off the scope, most times. Or working on that weird contraption of his.”

  They don’t know why they can’t tune Lubin in. He says they’re all dark to him, too. Once, about a month ago, Brander suggested doing an exploratory NMR; Lubin said he’d rather not. He sounded pleasant enough, but there was something about his tone, and Brander hasn’t brought the subject up since.

  Now Brander points his eyecaps at Clarke, a half-smile on his face. “I dunno, Len. Do you want to call him a liar to his face?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “Oh.” Nakata breaks the silence before it can get too awkward. “There is something else. Until our replacement arrives they are sending someone down for … They called it routine evaluation. That doctor, the one who—you know—”

  “Scanlon.” Lenie is careful not to spit out the word.

  Nakata nods.

  “What the hell for?” Brander growls. “It’s not enough we’re already shorthanded, we’ve got to sit still while Scanlon has another go at us?”

  “It’s not like before, they say. He’s just going to observe. While we work.” Nakata shrugs. “They say it is completely routine. No interviews or sessions or anything.”

  Caraco snorts. “There better not be. I’d let them cut out my other lung before I’d take another session with that prick.”

  “So, you were repeatedly buggered by a trained Dobermans while your mom charged admission,’” Brander recites in a fair imitation of Scanlon’s voice. “‘And how did that make you feel, exactly?’”

  “‘Actually I’m more of a mechanic,’” Caraco chimes in. “Did he give you that line?”

  “He seemed nice enough to me,” Nakata says hesitantly.

  “Well, that’s his job: to seem nice.” Caraco grimaces. “He’s just no fucking good at it.” She looks over at Clarke. “So what do you think, Len?”