Starfish

by Peter Watts

  “Sooner,” says Brander. “And that’s why I’m staying right here. Like I said, it’s safer.”

  Clarke looks from Brander to Caraco to Brander. “That is just so much bullshit.”

  “How so?” Brander doesn’t seem offended.

  “Because we’d have heard about it before now. Especially if it’s based on some kind of physical law everyone knows about. They couldn’t keep something like that under wraps, people would keep figuring it out for themselves.”

  “Oh, I think they have,” Brander says mildly, smiling from naked brown eyes. “They’d just rather not think about it too much.”

  “Where do you get all this, Mike?” Clarke asks. “The library?”

  He shakes his head. “Got a degree. Systems ecology, artificial life.”

  Clarke nods. “I always thought you were too smart to be a rifter.”

  “Hey. A rifter’s the smartest thing to be right now.”

  “So you chose to come down here? You actually applied?”

  Brander frowns. “Sure. Didn’t you?”

  “I got a phone call. Offered me this new high-paying career, even said I could go back to my old job if it didn’t work out.”

  “What was your old job?” Caraco wonders.

  “Public relations. Mostly Honquarium franchises.”

  “You?”

  “Maybe I wasn’t very good at it. What about you?”

  “Me?” Caraco bites her lip. “It was sort of a deal. One year with an option to renew, in lieu of prosecution.” The corner of her mouth twitches. “Price of revenge. It was worth it.”

  Brander leans back in his chair, looks around Clarke. “What about you, Ken? Where’d you come—”

  Clarke turns to follow Brander’s stare. The sofa’s empty. Down the corridor, Clarke can hear the shower door swinging shut.

  Shit.

  Still, it’ll only be a short wait. Lubin’s already been inside for four hours straight, he’ll be gone in no time. And it’s not as though there’s any shortage of hot water.

  “They should just shut the whole bloody Net down for a while,” Caraco is saying behind her. “Just pull the plug. Bugs wouldn’t be able to handle that, I bet.”

  Brander laughs, comfortably blind. “Probably not. Of course, neither would the rest of us.”

  Carousel

  She’s been staring at the screen for two minutes and she still can’t see what Nakata’s going on about. Ridges and fissures run along the display like long green wrinkles. The Throat returns its usual echoes, crammed especially close to center screen because Nakata’s got the range topped out. Occasionally, a small blip appears between two of the larger ones: Lubin, lazing through an uneventful shift.

  Other than that, nothing.

  Lenie Clarke bites her lip. “I don’t see any—”

  “Just wait. I know I saw it.”

  Brander looks in from the lounge. “Saw what?”

  “Alice says she’s got something bearing three-twenty.”

  Maybe it’s Gerry, Clarke muses. But Nakata wouldn’t raise the alarm over that.

  “It was just— There!” Nakata jabs her finger at the display, vindicated.

  Something hovers at the very edge of Beebe’s vision. Distance and diffraction make it hazy, but to bounce any kind of signal at that range it’s got to have a lot of metal. As Clarke watches, the contact fades.

  “Not one of us,” Clarke says.

  “It’s big.” Brander squints at the panel; his eyecaps reflect through white slits.

  “Muckraker?” Clarke suggests. “A sub, maybe?”

  Brander grunts.

  “There it is again,” Nakata says.

  “There they are,” Brander amends. Two echoes tease the edge of the screen now, almost indiscernible. Two large, unidentified objects, now rising just barely clear of the bottom clutter, now sinking back down into mere noise.

  Gone.

  “Hey,” Clarke says, pointing. There’s a tremor rippling along the seismo display, setting off sensors in a wave from the northwest. Nakata taps commands, gets a retrodict bearing on the epicenter. Three-twenty.

  “There is nothing scheduled to be out there,” she says.

  “Nothing anyone bothered to tell us about, anyway.” Clarke rubs the bridge of her nose. “So who’s coming?”

  Brander nods. Nakata shakes her head. “I’ll wait for Judy.”

  “Oh, that’s right. She’s going all the way today, isn’t she? Surface and back?”

  “Yes. She should be back in maybe an hour.”

  “Okay.” Brander’s on his way downstairs. Clarke reaches past Nakata and taps into an outside channel. “Hey, Ken. Wake up.”

  * * *

  I tell myself I know this place, she muses. I call this my home.

  I don’t know anything.

  Brander cruises just below her, lit from underneath by a seabed on fire. The world ripples with color, blues and yellows and greens so pure it almost hurts to look at them. A dusting of violet stars coalesces and sweeps across the bottom; a school of shrimp, royally luminous.

  “Has anyone been—” Clarke begins, but she feels wonder and surprise from Brander. It’s obvious he hasn’t seen this before. And Lubin—“It’s news to me,” Lubin answers aloud, as dark as ever.

  “It’s gorgeous,” Brander says. “We’ve been down here how long, and we never even knew this place existed…”

  Except Gerry, maybe. Every now and then Beebe’s sonar picks someone up in this direction, when everyone else is accounted for. Not this far out, of course, but who knows how far afield Fischer—or whatever Fischer’s become—wanders these days?

  Brander drops away from his squid and coasts down, one arm outstretched. Clarke watches him scoop something off the bottom. A faint tingle clouds her mind for a moment—that indefinable sense of some other mind working nearby—and she’s past him, her own squid towing her away.

  “Hey, Len,” Brander buzzes after her. “Check this out.”

  She releases the throttle and arcs back. Brander’s got a glassy jointed creature in the palm of his hand. It looks a bit like that shrimp Acton found, back when—

  “Don’t hurt it,” she says.

  Brander’s mask stares back at her. “Why would I hurt it? I just wanted you to see its eyes.”

  There’s something about the way Brander’s radiating. It’s as though he’s a little bit out of sync with himself somehow, as though his brain is broadcasting on two bands at once. Clarke shakes her head. The sensation passes.

  “It doesn’t have eyes,” she says, looking.

  “Sure it does. Just not on its head.”

  He flips it over, uses thumb and forefinger to pin it upside-down against the palm of his other hand. Rows of limbs—legs, maybe, or gills—scramble uselessly for purchase. Between them, where joints meet body, a row of tiny black spheres stare back at Lenie Clarke.

  “Weird,” she says. “Eyes on its stomach.”

  She’s feeling it again: a strange, almost prismatic sense of fractured awareness.

  Brander lets the creature go. “Makes sense. Seeing as how all the light down here comes from below.” Suddenly he looks at Clarke, radiating confusion. “Hey, Len, you feeling okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “You seem kind of—”

  “Split,” they say, simultaneously.

  Realization. She doesn’t know how much of it is hers and how much she’s tuning in from Brander, but suddenly they both know.

  “There’s someone else here,” Brander says unnecessarily.

  Clarke looks around. Lubin. She can’t see him.

  “Shit. You think that’s it?” Brander’s scanning the water too. “You think ol’ Ken is finally starting to tune in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “I don’t know. Who else is out here?”

  “Mike. Lenie.” Lubin’s voice, faintly, from somewhere ahead.

  Clarke
looks at Brander. Brander looks back.

  “Right here,” Brander calls, edging his volume up.

  “I found it,” Lubin says, invisibly distant.

  Clarke launches off the bottom and grabs her squid. Brander’s right beside her, sonar pistol out and clicking. “Got him,” he says after a moment. “That way.”

  “What else?”

  “Don’t know. Big, anyhow. Three, four meters. Metallic.”

  Clarke tweaks the throttle. Brander follows. A riot of fractured color unspools below them.

  “There.”

  Ahead of them, a mesh of green light sections the bottom into squares.

  “What—”

  “Lasers,” Brander says, “I think.”

  Emerald threads float perfectly straight, a luminous profusion of right angles a few centimeters off the bottom. Beneath them, drab metal pipes run along the rock; tiny prisms erupt at regular intervals along their length, like spines. Each prism, an interstice; from each interstice, four beams of coherent light, and four, and four, a wire-frame checkerboard overlaid against bedrock.

  They cruise two meters above the grid. “I’m not sure,” Brander grates, “but I think it’s all just one beam. Reflected back across itself.”

  “Mike—”

  “I see it,” he says.

  At first it’s just a fuzzy green column resolving out of the middle distance. Nearness brings clarity; the beams crisscrossing the ocean floor converge in a circle here, bend vertically up to form the luminous bars of a cylindrical cage. Within that cage a thick metal stalk rises out of the seabed. A great disk flowers at its top, spreads out like some industrial parasol. The spokes of laser light stream down from its perimeter and bounce endlessly away along the bottom.

  “It’s like a—a carousel,” Clarke buzzes, remembering an old picture from an even older time. “Without horses…”

  “Don’t block those beams,” Lubin buzzes. He’s hanging off to one side, aiming a sonar pistol at the structure. “They’re too weak to hurt you unless you get it in the eye, but you don’t want to interfere with what they’re doing.”

  “And that is?” Brander says.

  Lubin doesn’t answer.

  What in the world— But Clarke’s confusion is only partly directed at the mechanism before her. The rest dwells on a disorienting sense of alien cognition, very strong now, not her, not Brander, but somehow familiar.

  Ken? That you?

  “This isn’t what we saw on sonar,” Brander’s saying. Clarke feels his confusion even as he talks over it. “Whatever we saw was moving around.”

  “Whatever we saw was probably planting this,” Lubin buzzes. “It’s long gone by now.”

  “But what is…” Brander’s voice trails down to a mechanical croak.

  No. It’s not Lubin. She knows that now.

  “It’s thinking,” she says. “It’s alive.”

  Lubin’s got another instrument out now. Clarke can’t see the visual readout but its telltale tick tick ticking carries through the water.

  “It’s radioactive,” he says.

  * * *

  Alice Nakata’s voice comes to them in the endless darkness between Beebe and the Land of the Carousel.

  “—Judy—” it whispers, almost too faint to make out. “—scatter—lay—”

  “Alice?” Clarke’s got her vocoder cranked loud enough to hurt her own ears. “We can’t hear you. Say again?”

  “—just—no sign—”

  Clarke can barely distinguish the words. Somehow, though, she can hear the fear in them.

  A small tremor shudders past, raising clouds of mud and swamping Nakata’s signal. Lubin throttles up his squid and pulls away. Clarke and Brander follow suit. Somewhere in the darkness ahead, Beebe draws closer in decibel fractions.

  The next words they hear manage to cut through the noise: “Judy’s gone!”

  “Gone?” Brander echoes. “Gone where?”

  “She just disappeared!” The voice hisses softly from every direction. “I was talking to her. She was up above the deep scattering layer, she was— I was telling her about the signal we saw and she said she saw something too, and then she was gone…”

  “Did you check sonar?” Lubin wants to know.

  “Yes! Yes of course I checked the sonar!” Nakata’s words are increasingly clear. “As soon as she was cut off I checked but I saw nothing for sure. There was something, maybe, but the scattering layer is very thick today, I could not be sure. And it’s been fifteen minutes now and she still hasn’t come back—”

  “Sonar wouldn’t pick her up anyway,” Brander says softly. “Not through the DSL.”

  Lubin ignores him. “Listen, Alice. Did she say what she saw?”

  “No. Just something, she said, and then I heard nothing more.”

  “Your sonar contact. How big?”

  “I don’t know! It was just there for a second, and the layer—”

  “Could it have been a sub? Alice?”

  “I don’t know!” the voice cries, disembodied and anguished. “Why would it? Why would anyone?”

  Nobody answers. The squids race on.

  Ecdysis

  They dump her out of the airlock, still caught in the tangleweb. She knows better than to fight under these conditions, but the situation’s got to change pretty soon. She thinks they may have tried gassing her in the ’lock. Why else would they leave their headsets on after the lock had drained? What about that faint hiss that lasted a few seconds too long after blowdown? It’s a pretty subtle cue, but you don’t spend most of a year on the rift without learning what an airlock sounds like. There was something a bit off about that one.

  No matter. You’d be surprised how much O2 can be electrolyzed from just the little bit of water left sloshing around in the ol’ thoracic plumbing. Judy Caraco can hold her breath until the cows come home, whatever the fuck that means. And now, maybe they think their gas-chamber-that-blows-like-an-airlock has got her doped or unconscious or just very laid-back. Maybe now they’ll take her out of this fucking net.

  She waits, limp. Sure enough there’s a soft electrical cackle and the web falls away, all those sticky molecular tails polarizing flat like Velcro slicking down to cat fur. She stares out through glassy unblinking eyecaps—no cues they can read there—and counts three, with maybe more behind her.

  They’re zombies, or something.

  Their skin looks rotten with jaundice. Fingernails are barely distinguishable from fingers. Faces are slightly distorted, blurred behind stretched, yellowish membrane. Waxy, dark ovals protrude through the film where their mouths should be.

  Body condoms, Caraco realizes after a moment. What is this? Do they think I’m contagious?

  And a moment later: Am I?

  One of them reaches toward her, holding something like a handgun.

  She lashes out with one arm. She’d rather have kicked—more strength in the legs—but the refsuckers that brought her in didn’t bother taking off her flippers. She connects: A nose, it feels like. A nose under latex. A satisfying crunch. Someone’s found sudden cause to regret their own presumption.

  There’s a moment’s shocked silence. Caraco uses it, flips onto her side and swings one flippered foot backward, heel first, into the back of someone’s knee. A woman cries out, a startled face topples past, a smear of red hair plastered against its cheek, and Judy Caraco is reaching down to get those big clown-foot flippers off in time to—

  The tip of a shockprod hovers ten centimeters from her nose. It doesn’t waver a millimeter. After a moment’s indecision—how far can I push this, anyway?—Caraco stops moving.

  “Get up,” says the man with the prod. She can barely see, through the condom, shadows where his eyes should be.

  Slowly she takes off her fins and stands. She never had a chance, of course. She knew that all along. But they obviously want her alive for something, or they would never have bothered bringing her on board. And she, in turn, wants to make it clear that the
se fuckers are not going to intimidate her, no matter how many of them there are.

  There’s catharsis to be had even in a losing fight.

  “Calm down,” the man says—one of four, she sees now, including the one backing out of the compartment with a red stain spreading under his caul. “We’re not trying to hurt you. But you know you shouldn’t have tried to leave.”

  “Leave?” His clothes—all of their clothes—are uniform but not uniforms: loose-fitting white jumpsuits with an unmistakable look of disposability. No insignia. No name tags. Caraco turns her attention to the sub itself.

  “Now we’re going to get you out of that diveskin,” the prodmaster continues. “And we’re going to give you a quick medical workup. Nothing too intrusive, I assure you.”

  Not a large craft, judging from the curvature of the bulkhead. But fast. Caraco knew that from the moment it resolved out of the murk above her. She didn’t see much, then, but she saw enough. This boat has wings. It could lap an orca on steroids.

  “Who are you guys?” she asks.

  “Your cooperation would make us all very grateful,” Prodmaster says, as if she hasn’t spoken. “And then maybe you can tell us exactly what you’re trying to escape from out here in the middle of the Pacific.”

  “Escape?” Caraco snorts. “I was doing laps, you idiot.”

  “Uh-huh.” He returns his shockprod to a holster on his belt, leaves one hand resting lightly on the handle.

  The gun is back, in different hands. It looks like a cross between a staple gun and a circuit tester. The redhead pushes it firmly onto Caraco’s shoulder. Caraco controls the urge to push back. A faint electrical tingle and her diveskin drops away in pieces. There go her arms. There go her legs. Her torso splits like a molting insect and drops away, short-circuited. She stands utterly ’skinned, surrounded by strangers. A naked mulatto woman looks back at her from a mirror on the bulkhead. Somehow, even stripped, she looks strong. Her eyes, brilliant white in that dark face, are cold and invulnerable. She smiles.

  “That wasn’t too bad, was it?” There’s a trained kindness to the other woman’s voice. Almost like I didn’t just dump her on the deck.