by Peter Watts
That craving. That desire for revenge against the world at large: did it ever go away? Lenie Clarke was once driven by such a desire; quenched by a billion deaths or more, it has no hold on her now. But she wonders whether recent events have forced a couple of cancer-sticks into Lubin's mouth despite himself. She wonders how the smoke tasted after all this time, and if Lubin, perhaps, is remembering how good it once felt...
Clarke shakes her head sadly. "It can't be anyone else, Alyx. It has to be me."
"Why?"
Because next to what I did, genocide is a misdemeanor. Because the world's been dying in my wake while I hide down here. Because I'm sick of being a coward.
"I'm the one that did it," she says at last.
"So what? Is going back gonna undo any of it?" Alex shakes her head in disbelief. "What's the point?" She stands there, looking down like some fragile china magistrate on the verge of shattering.
Lenie Clarke wants very much to reach out to her right now. But Lenie Clarke isn't that stupid. "I—I have to face up to what I did," she says weakly.
"Bullshit," Alyx says. "You're not facing up to anything. You're running away."
"Running away?"
"From me, for one thing."
And suddenly even Lenie Clarke, professional idiot, can see it. Alyx isn't worried about what Lubin might do to Lenie Clarke; she's worried about what Clarke might do to herself. She's not stupid, she's known Clarke for years and she knows the traits that make a rifter. Lenie Clarke was once suicidal. She once hated herself enough to want to die, and that was before she'd even done anything deserving of death. Now she's about to re-enter a world of reminders that she's killed more people than all the Lubins who ever lived. Alyx Rowan is wondering, understandably, if her best friend is going to open her own wrists when that happens.
To be honest, Clarke wonders about that too.
But she only says, "It's okay, Lex. I won't—I mean, I've got no intention of hurting myself."
"Really?" Alyx asks, as if she doesn't dare to hope.
"Really." And now, promises delivered, adolescent fears calmed, Lenie Clarke reaches out and takes Alyx's hands in hers.
Alyx no longer seems the slightest bit fragile. She stares calmly down at Clarke's reassuring hands clasped around her limp, unresponsive ones, and grunts softly.
"Too bad," she says.
Incoming
The missiles shot from the Atlantic like renegade fireworks, heading west. They erupted in five discrete swarms, beginning a ten-minute game of speed chess played across half a hemisphere. They looped and corkscrewed along drunken trajectories that would have been comical if it didn't make them so damned hard to intercept.
Desjardins did his best. Half a dozen orbiting SDI antiques had been waiting for him to call back ever since he'd seduced them two years before, in anticipation of just this sort of crisis. Now he only had to knock on their back doors; on command, they spread their legs and wracked their brains.
The machines turned their attention to the profusion of contrails scarring the atmosphere below. Vast and subtle algorithms came into play, distinguishing wheat from chaff, generating target predictions, calculating intercept vectors and fitness functions. Their insights were profound but not guaranteed; the enemy had its own thinking machines, after all. Decoys mimicked destroyers in every possible aspect. Every stutter of an attitude jet made point-of-impact predictions that much murkier. Desjardins's date-raped battellites dispatched their own countermeasures—lasers, particle beams, missiles dispatched from their own precious and nonrenewable stockpiles—but every decision was probabilistic, every move a product of statistics. When playing the odds, there is no certainty.
Three made it through.
The enemy scored two strikes on the Florida panhandle and another in the Texan dust belt. Desjardins won the New England semifinals hands-down—none of those attacks even made it to the descending arc—but the southern strikes could easily be enough to tilt the balance if he didn't take immediate ground action. He dispatched eight lifters with instructions to sterilise everything within a twenty-k radius, waited for launch confirmations, and leaned back, exhausted. He closed his eyes. Statistics and telemetry flickered uninterrupted beneath his lids.
Nothing so pedestrian as ßehemoth, not this time. A new bug entirely. Seppuku.
Thank you, South fucking Africa.
What was it with those people? They'd been a typical third-world country in so many ways, enslaved and oppressed and brutalised like all the others. Why couldn't they have just thrown off their shackles in the usual way, embraced violent rebellion with a side order of blood-soaked retribution? What kind of crazy-ass people, after feeling the boot on their necks for generations, struck back at their oppressors with—wait for it— reconciliation panels? It made no sense.
Except, of course, for the fact that it worked. Ever since the rise of Saint Nelson the S'Africans had become masters at the sidestep, accomodating force rather than meeting it head-on, turning enemy momentum to their own advantage. Black belts in sociological judo. For half a century they'd been sneaking under the world's guard, and hardly anyone had noticed.
Now they were more of a threat than Ghana and Mozambique and all the other M&M regimes combined. Desjardins understood completely where those other furious backwaters were coming from. More than that, he sympathised: after all, the western world had sat around making tut-tut noises while the sex plagues burned great smoking holes out of Africa's age structure. Only China had fared worse (and who knew what was brewing behind those dark, unresponsive borders?). It was no surprise that the Apocalypse Meme resonated so strongly over there; the stunted generation struggling up from those ashes was over seventy percent female. An avenging goddess turning the tables, serving up Armageddon from the ocean floor—if Lenie Clarke hadn't provided a ready-made template, such a perfect legend would have erupted anyway through sheer spontaneous combustion.
Impotent rage he could handle. Smiley fuckers with hidden agendas were way more problematic, especially when they came with a legacy of bleeding-edge biotech that extended all the way back to the world's first heart transplant, for fuck's sake, almost a century before. Seppuku worked pretty much the way its S'African creators did: a microbial judo expert and a poser, something that smiled and snuck under your guard on false pretenses and then...
It wasn't the kind of strategy that would ever have occured to the Euros or the Asians. It was too subtle for the descendants of empire, too chickenshit for anyone raised on chest-beating politics. But it was second nature to those masters of low status manipulation, lurking down at the toe of the dark continent. It had seeped from their political culture straight into their epidemiological ones, and now Achilles Desjardins had to deal with the consequences.
Gentle warm pressure against his thigh. Desjardins opened his eyes: Mandelbrot stood on her hind legs at his side, forepaws braced against him. She meeped and leapt into his lap without waiting for permission.
Any moment now his board would start lighting up. It had been years since Desjardins had answered to any official boss, but eyes from Delhi to McMurdo were watching his every move from afar. He'd assured them all he could handle the missiles. Way off across any number of oceans, 'lawbreakers in more civilized wastelands—not to mentioned their Leashes—would be clicking on comsats and picking up phones and putting through incensed calls to Sudbury, Ontario. None of them would be interested in his excuses.
He could deal with them. He had dealt with far greater challenges in his life. It was 2056, a full ten years since he had saved the Med and turned his private life around. Half that time since ßehemoth and Lenie Clarke had risen arm-in-arm on their apocalyptic crusade against the world. Four years since the disappearance of the Upper Tier, four years since Desjardins's emancipation at the hands of a lovesick idealist. A shade less than that since Rio and voluntary exile among the ruins. Three years since the WestHem Quarantine. Two since the N'Am Burn. He had dealt with them all, and more.
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But the South Africans—they were a real problem. If they'd had their way, Seppuku would already be burning across his kingdom like a brushfire, and he couldn't seem to come up with a scenario that did any more than postpone the inevitable. He honestly didn't think he'd be able to hold them off for much longer.
It was just as well that he'd planned for his retirement.
* * *
Seppuku
"The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another."
—E.O. Wilson
"I would gladly lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins."
—J.D.S. Haldane
* * *
Dune
Phocoena runs silent out of Atlantis, threading between peaks and canyons that cover and impede her progress in equal measure. Their course is a schizoid amalgam of conflicting priorities, the need for speed scraping incompatibly against the drive to survive. To Lenie Clarke it seems as though their compass bearing at any given moment could be the work of a random number generator; but over time the net vector resolves to southwest.
At some point Lubin decides that they're safely out of the neighborhood. Haste becomes the better part of discretion; Phocoena climbs into open water. She skims west down the slopes of the Mid Atlantic Ridge, occasionally twisting this way or that to avoid moguls the size of orbital lifters. Mountains give way to foothills; foothills, to a vast endless expanse of mud. Clarke sees none of it through the ports, of course—Lubin hasn't bothered to turn on the outside lights—but the topography scrolls past on the nav panel in a garish depth-synched spectrum. Jagged red peaks, so high that their tips almost rise above darkness, lie well out of range behind them. Transitional slopes, segueing indiscernibly from yellow to green, fade to stern. The abyssal plain flows beneath them like an endless blue carpet, hypnotic and restful.
For long merciful hours, there is no virulent microbe to track; no betrayal to withstand; no desperate battle to fight. There is nothing to do but dwell on the microcosm receding behind them, on friends and foes brought finally into war-weary alignment—not through negotiation or reconciliation, but through the sudden imminence of the greater threat, the threat from outside. The threat Phocoena races towards even now.
Perhaps not such a blessing after all, this interlude.
Eventually the seabed rises before them into a color-banded escarpment swelling across the screen. There's a gap in the wall ahead, a great underwater canyon splitting the Scotian conshelf like God's own icepick. Nav lists it as The Gulley. Clarke remembers that name; it's got one of the biggest shortstop arrays this side of Fundy. Lubin indulges her, edges a few degrees off-course to intersect one of the colossal structures halfway up the canyon's throat. He flashes the forward floods as they drift past. The seamill looms huge in the beams, the visible arc of its perimeter so slight that Clarke could have taken it for a straight line. One of its great blades passes above them, its base and its tip lost in darkness to either side. It barely moves.
There was a time when this was the competition. Not so long ago the currents of the Gulley produced almost as many Joules-per-second as a good-sized geothermal plant. Then the climate changed, and the currents with it. Now the array is nothing but a tourist stop for amphibious cyborgs: weightless derelicts, slumbering in the long dark.
That's us, Clarke reflects as they pass. For just this one moment she and Lubin are weightless too, poised precisely between two gravitational fields. Behind them: Atlantis, the failed refuge. Ahead—
Ahead, the world they've been hiding from.
Five years since she's been ashore. Back then the apocalypse was just getting under way; who knows how wild the party's grown by now? They've learned a few things—broad strokes, dark rumors, bits and pieces filtered from that fraying patch of the telecom spectrum that spans the Atlantic. All of North America is quarantined. The rest of the world bickers over whether to put it out of its misery or simply let it die on its own. Most still fight to keep ßehemoth at bay; others have embraced that doomsday microbe, have seemingly embraced Armageddon itself.
Clarke isn't quite sure what to make of that. Some death-wish buried in the collective unconscious, perhaps. Or maybe just the grim satisfaction that even the doomed and downtrodden can take in payback. Death is not always defeat; sometimes, it is the chance to die with your teeth buried in your oppressor's throat.
There is much dying, back on the surface. There is much baring of teeth. Lenie Clarke does not know their reasons. She knows only that some of them act in her name. She knows only that their numbers are growing.
She dozes. When she opens her eyes again the cockpit glows with diffuse emerald light. Phocoena has four bow ports, two dorsal two ventral, great perspex teardrops radiating back from the nose. A dim green void presses down on the upper ports; below, a corrugated expanse of sand rushes past beneath Clarke's footrest.
Lubin has disabled the color-codes. On nav, Phocoena races up a gentle monochrome slope. The depth gauge reads 70m and rising.
"How long have I been sleeping?" Clarke asks.
"Not long." Fresh red scars radiate from the corners of Lubin's eyes, the visible aftermath of an operation that slid neuroelectric inlays into his optic nerves. Clarke still winces inwardly at the sight; she's not sure she would've trusted the corpses's surgeons even if they are all on the same side now. Lubin obviously thinks the additional data-gathering capacity was worth the risk. Or maybe it's just one of those extras he's always wanted, but never been cleared for in his past life.
"We're at Sable already?" Clarke says.
"Almost."
Bleating from nav: hard echo up the slope at two o'clock. Lubin throttles back and slews to starboard. Centrifugal force swings Clarke to the side.
Thirty meters. The sea outside looks bright and cold. It's like staring into green glass. Phocoena crawls up the slope at a few sluggish knots, sniffing northwest towards a wireframe assembly of tubes and struts swelling on nav. Clarke leans forward, peers through shafts of murky light. Nothing.
"What's the viz out there?" she wonders.
Lubin, intent on his piloting, doesn't look over. "Eight point seven."
Twenty meters from the surface. The water ahead darkens suddenly, as though an eclipse were in progress. An instant later that darkness resolves into the toe of a giant: the rounded end of a cylindrical structure half-buried in drifting sand, fuzzed with sponges and seaweed, curving away into the hazy distance. Nav pegs it at eight meters high.
"I thought it floated," Clarke says.
Lubin pulls back on the stick: Phocoena climbs into the water alongside the structure. "They beached it when the well ran dry."
So this great sunken pontoon must be flooded. Girders and struts stand on its upper surface, a monstrous scaffold rising into daylight. Lubin maneuvers the sub between them as though threading a needle. Nav shows them entering a submerged arena enclosed by four such structures arranged in a square. Clarke can see their dim outlines through the water. Pylons and trusses rise on all sides like the bars of a cage.
Phocoena breaks the surface. The outside world ripples as water sheets down the acrylic, then wavers into focus. They've come up directly beneath the rig; its underbelly forms a metal sky a little less than ten meters overhead, held from the earth by a network of support pylons.
Lubin climbs from his seat and grabs a fanny pack off a nearby utility hook. "Back in a few minutes," he says, popping the dorsal hatch. He climbs away. Clarke hears a splash through the opening.
He still isn't happy about her presence here. She ignores his safe-distancing maneuver and rises to follow.
The air wafting through the hatch blows cold against her face. She climbs onto the sub's back and looks around. The sky—what she can see of it, through the girders and pylons—is gray and overcast; the ocean beneath is gunmetal to the horizon. But there are sounds, behind her. A distant, pulsing roar. A faint squawking, like some kind of alarm. It's
familiar, but she can't quite put her finger on it. She turns.
Land.
A strip of sandy shore, maybe fifty meters past the jacket of the rig. She can see tufts of weathered, scrubby brush above the high-tide line. She can see moraines of driftwood, pushed into little strips along the beach. She can see surf pounding endlessly against it all.
She can hear birds, calling. She'd almost forgotten.
Not N'Am, of course. The mainland's still a good two or three hundred kilometers away. This is just a way station, some lonely little archipelago on the Scotian Shelf. And yet, to see living things without either fins or fists—she marvels at the prospect, even as she marvels at her own overreaction.
A steep metal staircase winds around the nearest pylon. Clarke dives into the ocean, not bothering with hood or gloves. The Atlantic slaps her face, a delicious icy sting across her exposed skin. She revels in the sensation, crosses to the pylon with a few strokes.
The stairs lead onto a walkway that runs the perimeter of the rig. Wind strums the railing's cables; the structure clatters like some arrhythmic percussion instrument. She reaches an open hatchway, peers into the dark interior: a segmented metal corridor, bundles of pipe and fiberop running along the ceiling like plexii of nerves and arteries. A t-junction at the far end leading off to unknown, opposite destinations.
Wet footprints on the deck lead in here, and turn left. Clarke follows.
Sound and vision fade as she penetrates deeper into the hulk. Bulkheads muffle the sound of the surf and the miraculous squawking of the gulls. Her enhanced vision fares better—the overcast ambience from outside follows her around a half-dozen corners, peeps in through portholes at the end of unexplored corridors—but the desaturation of color in her surroundings tells her that she's moving through darkness too deep for dryback eyes. That reversion to black-and-white must be why she didn't notice it sooner—dark streaks on the walls and floors could be anything, from rust to the remains of an enthusiastic game of paintball. But now, following the last smudged footprints to a hatch yawning open in the bulkhead, the realization sinks in: