Starfish

by Peter Watts

  “How did you know it was coming?” Scanlon asks.

  “They always come,” Caraco says. “The sound fools them. And the light.”

  “I mean, how did you know which direction? In advance?”

  A moment’s silence.

  “You just get a feel for it after a while,” Clarke says finally.

  “That,” Caraco adds, “and this.” She holds up a sonar pistol, tucks it back under her belt.

  The convoy re-forms. There’s a prescribed drop-off point for monsters, a hundred meters away from the Throat. (The GA has never been keen on letting outsiders wander too far into its home turf.) Once again the vampires leave light for darkness, Scanlon in tow. They travel through a world utterly without form, save for the scrolling circle of mud in his headlight. Suddenly Clarke turns to Caraco.

  “I’ll go,” she buzzes, and peels away into the void.

  Scanlon throttles his squid, edges up beside Caraco.

  “Where’s she off to?”

  “Here we are,” Caraco says. They coast to a halt. Caraco fins back to the droned squid and touches a control; buckles disengage, straps retract. The canister floats free. Caraco cranks down the buoyancy and it settles down on a clump of tubeworms.

  “Len— Uh, Clarke,” Scanlon prods.

  “They need an extra hand back at the Throat. She went to help out.”

  Scanlon checks his modem channel. Of course it’s the right one; if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t be able to hear Caraco. Which means that Clarke and the vampires at the Throat must have been using a different frequency. Another safety violation.

  But he’s not a fool, he knows the story. They’ve only switched channels because he’s here. They’re just trying to keep him out of the loop.

  Par for the course. First the fucking GA, now the hired help—

  A sound, from behind. A faint electrical whine. The sound of a squid starting up.

  Scanlon turns around. “Caraco?”

  His headlamp sweeps across canister, squid, seabed, water.

  “Caraco? You there?”

  Canister. Squid. Mud.

  “Hello?”

  Empty water.

  “Hey! Caraco! What the hell—”

  A faint thumping, very close by.

  He tries to look everywhere at once. One leg presses against the coffin.

  The coffin is rocking.

  He lays his helmet against its surface. Yes. Something inside, muffled, wet. Thumping. Trying to get out.

  It can’t. No way. It’s just dying in there, that’s all.

  He pushes away, drifts up into the water column. He feels very exposed. A few stiff-legged kicks take him back to the bottom. Slightly better.

  “Caraco? Come on, Judy—”

  Oh Jesus. She left me here. She just fucking left me out here.

  He hears something moaning, very close by.

  Inside his helmet, in fact.

  TRANS/OFFI/230850:2026

  I accompanied Judy Caraco and Lenie Clarke outside today, and witnessed several events that concern me. Both participants swam through unlit areas without headlamps and spent significant periods of time isolated from dive buddies; at one point, Caraco simply left me on the seabed without warning. This is potentially life-threatening behavior, although of course I was able to find my way back to Beebe using the homing beacon.

  I have yet to receive an explanation for all this. The v———The other personnel are presently gone from the station. I can find two or three of them on sonar; I suppose the rest are just hidden in the bottom clutter. Once again, this is extremely unsafe behavior.

  Such recklessness appears to be typical here. It implies a relative indifference to personal welfare, an attitude entirely consistent with the profile I developed at the onset of the rifter program. (The only alternative is that they simply do not appreciate the dangers involved in this environment, which is unlikely.)

  It is also consistent with a generalized post-traumatic addiction to hostile environments. This doesn’t constitute evidence per se, of course, but I have noted one or two other things which, taken together, may be cause for concern. Michael Brander, for example, has a history which ranges from caffeine and sympathomimetic abuse to limbic hot-wiring. He’s known to have brought a substantial supply of phencyclidine derms with him to Beebe; I’ve just located it in his cubby and I was surprised to find that it has barely been touched. Phencyclidine is not, physiologically speaking, addictive—exogenous-drug addicts are screened out of the program—but the fact remains that Brander had a habit when he came down here, a habit which he has since abandoned. I have to wonder what he’s replaced it with.

  The wetroom.

  “There you are. Where did you go?”

  “Had to recover this cartridge. Bad sulfide head.”

  “You could have told me. I was supposed to come along on your rounds anyway, remember? You just left me out there.”

  “You got back.”

  “That’s— That’s not the point, Judy. You don’t leave someone alone at the bottom of the ocean without a word. What if something had happened to me?”

  “We go out alone all the time. It’s part of the job. Watch that, it’s slippery.”

  “Safety procedures are also part of the job. Even for you. And especially for me, Judy, I’m a complete fish out of water here, heh-heh. You can’t expect me to know my way around.”

  “…”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re shorthanded, remember? We can’t always afford to buddy up. And you’re a big strong man—well, you’re a man, anyway. I didn’t think you needed baby-sit—”

  “Shit! My hand!”

  “I told you to be careful.”

  “Ow. How much does the fucking thing weigh?”

  “About ten kilos, without all the mud. I guess I should’ve rinsed it off.”

  “I guess so. I think one of the heads gouged me on the way down. Shit, I’m bleeding.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Yeah. Well, look, Caraco. I’m sorry if baby-sitting rubs you the wrong way, but a little more baby-sitting and Acton and Fisher might still be alive, you know? A little more baby-sitting and—Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “From outside. That—moaning, sort of—”

  “…”

  “Come on, C— Judy. You must’ve heard it!”

  “Maybe the hull shifted.”

  “No. I heard something. And this isn’t the first time, either.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “You’d— Where are you going? You just came in! Judy…”

  Clank. Hiss.

  “… don’t go.…”

  TRANS/OFFI/250850:2120

  I’ve asked each of the participants to submit to a routine sweep under the Medical scanner—or rather, I’ve asked most of them directly, and asked them to pass the word on to Ken Lubin, whom I’ve seen a few times now but haven’t actually spoken to yet. (I have twice attempted to engage Mr. Lubin in conversation, without success.) The participants know, of course, that Medical scans do not require physical contact on my part, and they’re well able to run them at their own convenience without me even being present. Still, although no one has explicitly refused my request, there has been a notable lack of enthusiasm in terms of actual compliance. It’s fairly obvious (and entirely consistent with my profile) that they consider it something of an intrusion, and will avoid it if possible. To date I’ve managed to get rundowns on only Alice Nakata and Judy Caraco. I’ve appended their binaries to this entry; both show elevated production of dopamine and norepinephrine, but I can’t establish whether this began before or after their present tour of duty. GABA and other inhibitor levels were slightly up, too, left over from their previous dive (less than an hour before the scan).

  The others, so far, haven’t been able to “find the time” for an exam. In the meantime I’ve resorted to going over stored scanner records of old injuries. Not surprisingly, physic
al injuries are common down here, although they’ve become much less frequent as of late. There are no cases of head trauma on record, however—at least, nothing that would warrant an NMR. This effectively limits my brain-chemistry data to what the participants are willing to provide on request—not much, so far. If this doesn’t change, the bulk of my analysis will have to be based on behavioral observations. As medieval as that sounds.

  Who could it be? Who?

  When Yves Scanlon first sank into the abyss he had two questions on his mind. He’s chasing the second one now, lying in his cubby, shielded from Beebe by a pair of eyephones and the personal database in his shirt pocket. For now, he’s gone mercifully blind to plumbing and condensation.

  He’s not deaf, though. Unfortunately. Every now and then he hears footsteps, or low voices, or—just maybe—the distant cry of something unimaginable in pain; but then he speaks a little louder into the pickup, drowns unwelcome sounds with barked commands to scroll up, link files, search for keywords. Personnel records dance across the inside of his eyes, and he can almost forget where he is.

  His interest in this particular question has not been sanctioned by his employers. They know about it, though—yes sirree they know. They just don’t think I do.

  Rowan and her cronies are such assholes. They’ve been lying to him from the start. Scanlon doesn’t know why. He’d have been okay with it, if they’d just leveled with him. But they kept it under wraps. As though he wouldn’t be able to figure it out for himself.

  It’s bloody obvious. There’s more than one way to make a vampire. Usually you take someone who’s fucked in the head, and you train them. But why couldn’t you take someone who’s already trained, and then fuck them in the head? It might even be cheaper.

  You can learn a lot from a witch hunt. All that repressed-memory hysteria back in the nineteen nineties, for example: so many people suddenly remembering abuse, or alien abduction, or dear old grandma stirring a cauldron of stewed babies. It didn’t take much, no one had to go in and physically rewire the synapses; the brain’s gullible enough to rewire itself if you coax it. Most of those poor bozos didn’t even know they were doing it. These days, it only takes a few weeks’ worth of hypnotherapy. The right suggestions, delivered just the right way, can inspire memories to build themselves out of bits and pieces. Sort of a neurological cascade effect. And once you think you’ve been abused, well, why wouldn’t your psyche shift to match?

  It’s a good idea. Someone else thought so, too, at least that’s what Scanlon heard from Mezzich a couple of weeks ago. Nothing official, of course, but there may already be a few prototypes in the system. Someone right here in Beebe, maybe, a walking testament to Induced False Memory Syndrome. Maybe Lubin. Maybe Clarke. Could be anyone, really.

  They should have told me.

  They told him, all right. They told him, when he first started, that he was coming in on the ground floor. You’ll have input on pretty much everything, was what Rowan had promised. The design work, the follow-ups. They even offered him automatic coauthorship on all unclassified publications. Yves Scanlon was supposed to be a fucking equal. And then they shut him off in a little room, mumbling to recruits while they made all the decisions up on the thirty-fifth fucking floor.

  Standard corporate mentality. Knowledge was power. Corpses never told anybody anything.

  I was an idiot to believe them as long as I did. Sending up my recommendations, waiting for them to honor a promise or two. And this is the bone they throw me. Stick me at the bottom of the fucking ocean with these post-traumatic head cases because no one else wants to get shit on their hands.

  I mean, fuck. I’m so far out of the loop I have to coax rumors from a has-been hack like Mezzich?

  Still. He wonders who it might be. Brander or Nakata, maybe. Her record shows a background in geothermal engineering and high-pressure tech, and he’s got a master’s in systems ecology with a minor in genomics. Too much education for your average vampire. Assuming there is such a thing.

  Wait a second. Why should I trust these flies? After all, if Rowan’s keeping this thing under wraps she might not be stupid enough to leave clues lying around in the GA personnel records.

  Scanlon ponders the question. Suppose the files have been modified. Maybe he should check out the least likely candidates. He orders an ascending sort by educational background. Lenie Clarke. Premed dropout, basic virtual-tech ed. The GA hired her away from the Hongcouver aquarium. PR department.

  Hmm. Someone with Lenie Clarke’s social skills, in public relations? Not likely. I wonder if—

  Jesus. There it is again.

  Yves Scanlon strips the ’phones from his eyes and stares at the ceiling. The sound seeps in through the hull, barely audible.

  I’m almost getting used to it, actually.

  It sighs through the bulkhead, recedes, dies. Scanlon waits. He realizes he’s holding his breath.

  There. Something very far away. Something very—

  Lonely. It sounds so lonely.

  He knows how it feels.

  * * *

  The lounge is empty, but something casts a faint shadow through the Communications hatchway. A soft voice from inside: Clarke, it sounds like. Scanlon eavesdrops for a few seconds. She’s reciting supply consumption rates, listing the latest bits of equipment to break down. A routine call up to the GA, from the sound of it. She hangs up just before he steps into view.

  She’s sitting slumped in her chair, a cup of coffee within easy reach. They eye each other for a moment, without speaking.

  “Anyone else around?” Scanlon wonders.

  She shakes her head.

  “I thought I heard something, a few minutes ago.”

  She turns back to face the console. A couple of icons flash on the main display.

  “What are you doing?”

  She makes a vague gesture to the console. “Running tender. Thought you’d like that, for a change.”

  “Oh, but I said—”

  “Not to change the routine,” Clarke cuts in. She seems tired. “Do you always expect blind obedience from your subjects?”

  “Is that what you think I meant?”

  She snorts softly, still not looking back.

  “Look,” Scanlon says, “Are you sure you didn’t hear something, like—like—” like a ghost, Clarke? A sound like poor dead Acton might make, watching his own remains rotting out there on the rift?

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says.

  Aha. “So you did hear something.” She knows what it is, too. They all do.

  “What I hear,” she says, “is my own concern.”

  Take a hint, Scanlon. But there’s nowhere else to go, except back to his cubby. And the prospect of being alone, right now— Somehow, even the company of a vampire seems preferable.

  She turns around to face him again. “Something else?”

  “Not really. Just can’t seem to sleep.” Scanlon dons a disarming smile. “Just not used to the pressure, I guess.” That’s right. Put her at ease. Acknowledge her superiority.

  She just stares at him

  “I don’t know how you take it, month after month,” he adds.

  “Yes you do. You’re a psychiatrist. You chose us.”

  “Actually, I’m more of a mechanic.”

  “Of course,” she says, expressionless. “It’s your job to keep things broken.”

  Scanlon looks away.

  She stands up and takes a step toward the hatchway, her tending duties apparently forgotten. Scanlon stands aside. She brushes past, somehow avoiding physical contact in the cramped space.

  “Look,” he blurts out, “how about a quick review of the tending procedure? I’m not all that familiar with this equipment.”

  It’s too obvious. He knows she sees through it before the words are even out of his mouth. But it’s also a perfectly reasonable request from someone in his role. Routine evaluation, after all.

  She watches him for a moment, her head cocked a bit t
o one side. Her face, expressionless as usual, somehow conveys the impression of a slight smile. Finally she sits down again.

  She taps on a menu. “This is the Throat.” A cluster of luminous rectangles nested in a background of contour lines. “Thermal readout.” The image erupts into psychedelic false color, red and yellow hot spots pulsing at irregular intervals along the main fissure. “You don’t usually bother with thermal when you’re tending,” Clarke explains. “When you’re out there you find that stuff out sooner firsthand anyway.” The psychedelia fades back to green and gray.

  And what happens if someone gets taken by surprise out there and you don’t have the readings in here to know they’re in trouble? Scanlon doesn’t ask aloud. Just another cut corner.

  Clarke pans, finds a pair of alphanumeric icons. “Alice and Ken.” Another red hot-spot slides into view in the upper left corner of the display.

  No, wait a minute; she turned thermal off.…

  “Hey,” Scanlon says, “that’s a deadman switch—”

  No audio alarm. Why isn’t there an alarm?— His eyes dart across the half-familiar console. Where is it, where— Shit—

  The alarm’s been disabled.

  “Look!” Scanlon points at the display. “Can’t you—”

  Clarke looks up at him, almost lazily. She doesn’t seem to understand.

  He jabs his thumb down. “Somebody just died out there!”

  She looks at the screen, slowly shakes her head. “No—”

  “You stupid bitch, you cut off the alarm!”

  He hits a control icon. The station starts howling. Scanlon jumps back, startled, bumps the bulkhead. Clarke watches him, frowning slightly.

  “What’s wrong with you?” He reaches out and grabs her by the shoulders. “Do something! Call Lubin, call—” The alarm is deafening. He shakes her, hard, pulls her up out of the chair—

  And remembers, too late: You don’t touch Lenie Clarke.

  Something happens in her face. It almost crumples, right there in front of him. Lenie Clarke the ice queen is suddenly nowhere to be seen. In her place there’s only a beaten, blind little kid, body shaking, mouth moving in the same pattern over and over, he can’t hear over the alarm but her lips shape the words, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—