Starfish

by Peter Watts

  All in the few scant seconds before she crystallizes.

  She seems to harden against the sound, against Scanlon’s assault. Her face goes completely blank. She rises out of the chair, centimeters taller than she should be. One hand comes up, grabs Yves Scanlon by the throat. Pushes.

  He staggers backward into the lounge, flailing. The table appears to one side; he reaches out, steadies himself.

  Suddenly, Beebe falls silent again.

  Scanlon takes a deep breath. Another vampire has appeared in his peripheral vision, standing impassively at the mouth of the corridor; he ignores it. Directly ahead, Lenie Clarke is sitting down again in Communications, her back turned. Scanlon steps forward.

  “It’s Karl,” she says before he can speak.

  It takes a moment to register: Acton.

  “But—that was months ago,” Scanlon says. “You lost him.”

  “We lost him.” She breathes, slowly. “He went down a smoker. It erupted.”

  “I’m sorry,” Scanlon says. “I—didn’t know.”

  “Yeah.” Her voice is tight with controlled indifference. “He’s too far down to— We can’t get him back. Too dangerous.” She turns to face him, impossibly calm. “Deadman switch still works, though. It’ll keep screaming until the battery runs down.” She shrugs. “So we keep the alarm off.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Scanlon says softly.

  “Imagine,” Clarke tells him, “how much your approval comforts me.”

  He turns to leave.

  “Wait,” she says. “I can zoom in for you. I can show you exactly where he died, maximum rez.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  She stabs controls. “No problem. Naturally you’re interested. What kind of mechanic wouldn’t want to know the performance specs of his own creation?” She reshapes the display like a sculptor, hones it down and down until there’s nothing left but a tangle of faint green lines and a red pulsing dot.

  “He got wedged into an ancillary crevice,” she says. “Looks like a tight fit even now, when all the flesh has been boiled away. Don’t know how he managed to get down there when he was all in one piece.” There’s no stress in her voice at all. She could be talking about a friend’s vacation.

  Scanlon can feel her eyes on him; he keeps his on the screen.

  “Fischer,” he says. “What happened to him?”

  From the corner of his eye: she starts to tense, turns it into a shrug. “Who knows? Maybe Archie got him.”

  “Archie?”

  “Archie Toothis.” Scanlon doesn’t recognize the name; it’s not in any of his files, as far as he knows. He considers, decides not to push it.

  “Did Fischer’s deadman go off, at least?”

  “He didn’t have one.” She shrugs. “The abyss can kill you any number of ways, Scanlon. It doesn’t always leave traces.”

  “I’m—I’m sorry if I upset you, Lenie.”

  One corner of her mouth barely twitches.

  And he is sorry. Even though it’s not his fault. I didn’t make you what you are, he wants to say. I didn’t smash you into junk, that was someone else. I just came along afterward and found a use for you. I gave you a purpose, more of a purpose than you ever had back there.

  Is that really so bad?

  He doesn’t dare ask aloud, so he turns to leave. And when Lenie Clarke lays one finger, very briefly, on the screen where Acton’s icon flashes, he pretends not to notice.

  TRANS/OFFI/260850:1352

  I recently had an interesting conversation with Lenie Clarke. Although she didn’t admit so openly—she is very well defended, and quite expert at hiding her feelings from laypeople—I believe that she and Karl Acton were sexually involved. This is a heartening discovery, insofar as my original profiles strongly suggested that such a relationship would develop. (Clarke has a history of relationships with Intermittent Explosives.) This adds a measure of empirical confidence to other, related predictions regarding rifter behavior.

  I have also learned that Karl Acton, rather than simply disappearing, was actually killed by an erupting smoker. I don’t know what he was doing down there—I’ll continue to investigate—but the behavior itself seems foolish at best and quite possibly suicidal. Suicide is not consistent either with Karl Acton’s DSM or ECM profiles, which must have been accurate when first derived. Suicide, therefore, would imply a degree of basic personality change. This is consistent with the trauma-addiction scenario. However, some sort of physical brain injury can not be ruled out. My search of the medical logs didn’t turn up any head injuries, but was limited to living participants. Perhaps Acton was … different …

  Oh. I found out who Archie Toothis is. Not in the personnel files at all. The library. Architeuthis: giant squid.

  I think she was kidding.

  Bulrushes

  At times like this it seems as if the world has always been black.

  It hasn’t, of course. Joel Kita caught a hint of ambient blue out the dorsal port just ten minutes ago. Right before they dropped through the deep scattering layer; pretty thin stuff compared to the old days, he’s been told, but still impressive. Glowing siphonophores and flashlight fish and all. Still beautiful.

  That’s a thousand meters above them now. Right here there’s nothing but the thin vertical slash of Beebe’s transponder line. Joel has put the ’scaphe into a lazy spin during the drop, forward floods sweeping the water in a descending corkscrew. The transponder line swings past the main viewport every thirty seconds or so, keeping time, a bright vertical line against the dark.

  Other than that, blackness.

  A tiny monster bumps the port. Needle teeth so long the mouth can’t close, an eel-like body studded with glowing photophores—fifteen, twenty centimeters long, tops. It’s not even big enough to make a sound when it hits and then it’s gone, spinning away above them.

  “Viperfish,” Jarvis says.

  Joel glances around at his passenger, hunched up beside him to take advantage of what might laughingly be called “the view.” Jarvis is some sort of cellular physiologist out of Rand/Washington U., here to collect a mysterious package in a plain brown wrapper.

  “See many of those?” he asks now.

  Joel shakes his head. “Not this far down. Kind of unusual.”

  “Yeah, well, this whole area is unusual. That’s why I’m here.”

  Joel checks tactical, nudges a trim tab.

  “Now, viperfish, they’re not supposed to get any bigger than the one you just saw,” Jarvis remarks. “But there was a guy, oh, back in the 1930s—Beebe his name was, the same guy they named—Anyway, he swore he saw one that was over two meters long.”

  Joel grunts. “Didn’t know people came down here back then.”

  “Yeah, well, they were just starting out. And everyone had always thought deepwater fish were these puny little midgets, because that’s all they ever brought up in their trawls. But then Beebe sees this big ripping viperfish, and people start thinking hey, maybe we only caught little ones because all the big ones could outswim the trawls. Maybe the deep sea really is teeming with giant monsters.”

  “It’s not,” Joel says. “At least, not that I’ve seen.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what most people think. Every now and then you get pieces of something weird washing up, though. And of course there’s Megamouth. And your garden-variety giant squid.”

  “They never get down this far. I bet none of your other giants do, either. Not enough food.”

  “Except for the vents,” Jarvis says.

  “Except for the vents.”

  “Actually,” Jarvis amends, “except for this vent.”

  The transponder line swings past, a silent metronome.

  “Yeah,” says Joel after a moment. “Why is that?”

  “Well, we’re not sure. We’re working on it, though. That’s what I’m doing here. Gonna bag one of those scaly mothers.”

  “You’re kidding. How? We going to butt it to death with
the hull?”

  “Actually, it’s already been bagged. The rifters got it for us a couple of days ago. All we do is pick it up.”

  “I could do that solo. Why’d you come along?”

  “Got to check to make sure they did it right. Don’t want the canister blowing up on the surface.”

  “And that extra tank you strapped onto my ’scaphe? The one with the biohazard stickers all over it?”

  “Oh,” Jarvis says. “That’s just to sterilize the sample.”

  “Uh-huh.” Joel lets his eyes run over the panels. “You must pull a lot of weight back onshore.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?”

  “I used to make the Channer run a lot. Pharmaceutical dives, supply trips to Beebe, ecotourism. A while back I shuttled some corpse type out to Beebe; he said he was staying for a month or so. The GA calls me three days later and tells me to go pick him up. I show up for the run and they tell me it’s canceled. No explanation.”

  “Pretty strange,” Jarvis remarks.

  “You’re the first run I’ve had to Channer in three weeks. You’re the first run anyone’s had, from what I can tell. So, you pull some weight.”

  “Not really.” Jarvis shrugs in the half-light. “I’m just a research associate. I go where they tell me, just like you. Today they told me to go and pick up an order of fish to go.”

  Joel looks at him.

  “You were asking why they got so big,” Jarvis says, deking to the right. “We figure it’s some kind of endosymbiotic infection.”

  “No shit.”

  “Say it’s easier for some microbe to live inside a fish than out in the ocean—less osmotic stress—so once inside, it’s pumping out more ATP than it needs.”

  “ATP,” Joel says.

  “High-energy phosphate compound. Cellular battery. Anyway, it spits out this surplus ATP, and the host fish can use it as extra growth energy. So maybe Channer Vent’s got some sort of unique bug that infects teleost fishes and gives ’em a growth spurt.”

  “Pretty weird.”

  “Actually, happens all the time. Every one of your own cells is a colony, for that matter. You know, nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts if you’re a plant—”

  “I’m not.” Whitecap tourists faces flash through his mind. More than I can say for some folks …

  “—those all used to be free-living microbes in their own right. A few billion years ago something ate them, but it couldn’t digest them properly so they all just kept living inside the cytoplasm. Eventually they struck up a deal with the host cell, took over housecleaning tasks and such-like, in lieu of rent. Voilà: your modern eukaryotic cell.”

  “So what happens if this Channer bug gets into a person? We all grow three meters high?”

  A polite laugh. “Nope. People stop growing when they reach adulthood. So do most vertebrates, actually. Fish, on the other hand, keep growing their whole lives. And deepwater fish—those don’t do anything except grow, if you know what I mean.”

  Joel raises his eyebrows.

  Jarvis holds up his hands. “I know, I know. Your baby finger is bigger than your average deepsea fish. But that just means they’re short of fuel; when they do gas up, believe me, they use it for growth. Why waste calories just swimming around when you can’t see anything anyway? In dark environments it makes more sense for predators to sit and wait. Whereas if you grow big enough, maybe you’ll get too big for other predators, you see?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Of course, we’re basing the whole theory on a couple of samples that got dragged up without any protection against temperature or pressure changes.” Jarvis snorts. “Might as well have sent them in a paper bag. But this time we’re doing it right— Hey, is that light I see down there?”

  There’s a vague yellow glow smudging the darkness directly below. Joel calls up a topographic display: Beebe: The geothermal array over at the rift proper lays out a sequence of hard green echoes bearing 340°. And just to the left of that, about a hundred meters off the easternmost generator, something squirts a unique acoustic signature at four-second intervals.

  Joel taps commands to the dive planes. The ’scaphe pulls out of its spiral and coasts off to the northeast. Beebe Station, never more than a bright stain, fades to stern.

  The ocean floor resolves suddenly in the ’scaphe’s headlights: bone-gray ooze slides past, occasional outcroppings, great squashed marshmallows of lava and pumice. In the cockpit a flashing point of light slo-mos toward the center of the topographic display.

  Something charges them from overhead; the dull wet sound of its impact reverberates briefly through the hull. Joel looks up through the dorsal port but sees nothing. Several more impacts, staggered. The ’scaphe whirs implacably onward.

  “There.”

  It looks almost like a lifeboat canister, almost three meters long. Readouts twinkle from a panel on one rounded end. It’s resting on a carpet of giant tubeworms, their feathery crowns extended in full filter-feeding mode. Joel thinks of the baby Moses, nestled in a clump of mutant bulrushes.

  “Wait a second,” Jarvis says. “Kill the lights first.”

  “What for?”

  “You don’t need them, do you?”

  “Well, no. I can use instruments if I have to. But why—”

  “Just do it, okay?” Jarvis, the chatterbox, is suddenly all business.

  Darkness floods the cockpit, retreats a bit before the glow of the readouts. Joel grabs a pair of eyephones off a hook to his left. The sea floor reappears before him courtesy of the ventral photoamps, faded to blue-and-black.

  He coaxes the ’scaphe into position directly above the canister, listens to the clank and creak of grapples flexing beneath the deck; metal claws the color of slate extend across his field of view.

  “Spray it before you pick it up,” Jarvis says.

  Joel reaches out and taps the control codes without looking. The ’phones show him a nozzle extending from Jarvis’s tank, taking aim like a skinny cobra.

  “Do it.”

  The nozzle ejaculates gray-blue murk, sprays back and forth along the length of the canister, sweeping the benthos on either side. The tubeworms yank back into their tunnels and shut the doors; the whole featherduster forest vanishes in an instant, leaving a crowd of sealed leathery tubes.

  The nozzle spews its venom.

  One of the tubes opens, almost hesitantly. Something dark and stringy drifts out, twitching. The gray plume sweeps across it; it sags, lifeless, across the sill of its burrow. Other tubes are opening now. Invertebrate corpses slump back into sight.

  “What’s in this stuff?” Joel whispers.

  “Cyanide. Rotenone. Some other things. Sort of a cocktail.”

  The nozzle sputters for a few seconds and runs dry. Automatically Joel retracts it.

  “Okay,” Jarvis says. “Let’s grab it and go home.”

  Joel doesn’t move.

  “Hey,” Jarvis says.

  Joel shakes his head, plays the machinery. The ’scaphe extends its arms in a metal hug, pulls the canister off the bottom. Joel strips the ’phones from his eyes and taps the controls. They begin rising.

  “That was a pretty thorough rinse,” Joel remarks after a while.

  “Yes. Well, the sample’s costing us a fair bit. Don’t want to contaminate it.”

  “I see.”

  “You can turn the lights back on,” Jarvis says. “How long before we break the surface?”

  Joel trips the floods. “Twenty minutes. Half hour.”

  “I hope the lifter pilot doesn’t get too bored.” Jarvis is all chummy again.

  “There is no pilot. It’s a smart gel.”

  “Really? You don’t say.” Jarvis frowns. “Those are scary things, those gels. You know one suffocated a bunch of people in London a few years back?”

  Yes, Joel’s about to say, but Jarvis is back in spew mode. “No shit. It was running the subway system over there, perfect operational record, and then one day it just forgets to c
rank up the ventilators when it’s supposed to. Train slides into station fifteen meters underground, everybody gets out, no air, boom.”

  Joel’s heard this before. The punch line’s got something to do with a broken clock, if he remembers it right.

  “These things teach themselves from experience, right?” Jarvis continues. “So everyone just assumed it had learned to cue the ventilators on something obvious. Body heat, motion, CO2 levels, you know. Turns out instead it was watching a clock on the wall. Train arrival correlated with a predictable subset of patterns on the digital display, so it started the fans whenever it saw one of those patterns.”

  “Yeah. That’s right.” Joel shakes his head. “And vandals had smashed the clock, or something.”

  “Hey. You did hear about it.”

  “Jarvis, that story’s ten years old if it’s a day. That was way back when they were starting out with these things. Those gels have been debugged from the molecules up since then.”

  “Yeah? What makes you so sure?”

  “Because a gel’s been running the lifter for the better part of a year now, and it’s had plenty of opportunity to fuck up. It hasn’t.”

  “So you like these things?”

  “Fuck no,” Joel says, thinking about Ray Stericker. Thinking about himself. “I’d like ’em a lot better if they did screw up sometimes, you know?”

  “Well, I don’t like ’em or trust ’em. You’ve got to wonder what they’re up to.”

  Joel nods, distracted by Jarvis’s digression. But then his mind returns to dead tube worms, and undeclared no-dive zones, and an anonymous canister drenched with enough poison to kill a fucking city.

  I’ve got to wonder what all of us are.

  Ghosts

  It’s hideous.

  Nearly a meter across. Probably smaller when Clarke started working on it, but it’s a real monster now. Scanlon thinks back to his v-school days, and remembers: Starfish are supposed to be all in one plane. Flat disks with arms. Not this one. Clarke has grafted bits and pieces together at all angles and produced a crawling Gordian knot, some pieces red, some purple, some white. Scanlon thinks the original body may have been orange, before.