by Peter Watts
Ouellette shook her head. "They don't need us."
"Can we go in there?" For all its lost stature, Augusta must still have portals into the pipe. Lubin might have been better off sticking with them after all.
"You mean, like shore leave? Stop by on our way through for some VR and a hot whirlpool?" The doctor laughed softly. "Doesn't work that way. They'd probably let us in if there were some kind of emergency, but everybody kind of sticks to their own these days. Miri's out of Boston."
"So you could get into Boston." Even better.
"It is kind of beautiful at night, though," Ouellette remarked. "For all its carcinogenic properties. Almost like the northern lights."
Clarke watched her without speaking.
"Don't you think?"
She decided not to push it. "Night looks pretty much like day to me. Just not as much color."
"Right. The eyes." Ouellette gave her a sideways look. "Don't you ever get tired of daylight all the time?"
"Not really."
"You should try taking them out now and then, just for a change. Sometimes when you see too much, you miss a lot."
Clarke smiled. "You sound like a fortune cookie."
Ouellette shrugged. "It wouldn't hurt your bedside manner, either. Patients might relate to you better without the affect, you know?"
"There's not much I can do for your patients anyway."
"Oh, that's not—"
"And if there is," Clarke continued, her voice conspicuously neutral, "then they can accept my help without dictating my wardrobe."
"Rrrright," Ouellette said after a moment. "Sorry."
They sat in silence for a while. Finally Ouellette threw Miri back into gear and cued her music— an adrenaline discord of saxophone and electric percussion at serious odds with her usual tastes.
"We're not stopping here?" Clarke asked.
"Goosebumps keep me awake. Probably not all that good for Miri either. I just thought you'd enjoy the view, is all."
They headed further along the road. The prickling of Clarke's skin faded in moments.
Ouellette kept driving. The music segued into a spoken interlude with musical accompaniment—some story about a hare who’d lost his spectacles, whatever those were. "What is this?" Clarke asked.
"TwenCen stuff. I can turn it off if you—"
"No. That’s fine."
Ouellette killed it anyway. Miri drove on in silence.
"We could stop anytime," Clarke said after a few minutes.
"A little further. It's dangerous around the cities."
"I thought we were past the field."
"Not cancer. People." Ouellette tripped the autopilot and sat back in the bucket seat. "They tend to hang around just outside the claves and get envious."
"Miri can't handle them?"
"Miri can slice and dice them a dozen ways to Sunday. I'd just as soon avoid the confrontation."
Clarke shook her head. "I can't believe Augusta wouldn't have let us in."
"I told you. The claves keep to themselves."
"Then why even bother sending you out? If everyone up here is so bloody self-centered, why help out the wildlands in the first place?"
Ouellette snorted softly. "Where've you been for the past five years?" She held up her hand: "Stupid question. We're not out here for altruism, Laurie. The MI fleet, the salt licks—"
"Salt licks?"
"Feeding stations. It's all just to keep the ferals from storming the barricades. If we bring them a few morsels, maybe they won't be quite so motivated to bring ßehemoth into our own backyards."
It made the usual sense, Clarke had to admit. And yet...
"No. They wouldn't send their best and brightest out for a lousy crowd-control assignment."
"You got that right."
"Yeah, but you—"
"Me? I'm the best and the brightest?" Ouellette slapped her forehead. "What in the name of all that's living gave you that idea?"
"I saw you work"
"You saw me take orders from a machine without screwing up too much. A few day's training, I could teach you to do as well for most of these cases."
"That's not what I meant. I've seen doctors in action before, Taka. You're different. You—" One of Ouellette's own phrases popped into her head: bedside manner.
"You care," she finished simply.
"Ah." Ouellette said. And then, looking straight ahead: "Don't confuse compassion with competence, Laurie. It's dangerous."
Clarke studied her. "Dangerous. That's a strange word to use."
"In my profession, competence doesn't kill people," Ouellette said. "Compassion can."
"You killed someone?"
"Hard to tell. That's the thing about incompetence. It's not nearly so clear-cut as deliberate malice."
"How many?" Clarke asked.
Ouellette looked at her. "Are you keeping score?"
"No. Sorry." Clarke looked away.
But if I was, she thought, I'd blow you out of the water. She knew it wasn't a fair comparison. One death, she supposed, could be a greater burden than a thousand if it mattered enough to you. If you bothered to get involved.
If you had compassion.
Finally they pulled into a remote clearing further up the slope. Ouellette folded down her pallet and turned in with a few monosyllables. Clarke sat unmoving in her seat, watching the gray-on-gray clarity of the nightscape beyond the windshield: gray meadow grasses, charcoal ranks of spindly conifer, scabby outcroppings of worn bedrock. Overcast, tissue-paper sky.
From behind, faint snores.
She fished behind her seat and snagged her backpack. The eyecap vial had settled to the very bottom, a victim of chronic inattention. She held it in her hand for a long time before popping it open.
Each eyecap covered the entire visible cornea, and then some. Suction tugged at her eyeballs as she pulled them off; they broke free with a soft popping sound.
It was as if her eyes, not just their coverings, had been pulled out. It was like going blind. It was like being in the deep sea, far from any light.
It wasn't altogether unpleasant.
At first there was nothing, anywhere; irises grow lazy when photocollagen does all their heavy lifting. After a while, though, they remembered to dilate. A swathe of dark gray brightened the void directly ahead: faint nocturnal light, through the windshield.
She felt her way out of the MI and leaned against its flank. She let the door hiss shut as softly as possible. The night air cooled her face and hands.
Diffuse brightness registered at the corner of her eye, fading every time she focused on it. Before long she could tell the sky from the treeline. Dim, roiling gray over serrated shadow; it seemed marginally brighter to the east.
She wandered a few meters and looked back: Miri's smooth, startling edges almost glimmered against this fractal landscape. To the west, through a break in the cloud, she saw stars.
She walked.
She tripped over roots and holes half a dozen times, for want of illumination. But the color scheme was pretty much the same as that served up by her eyecaps, gray on gray on black. The only difference was that contrast and brightness were cranked way down.
When the sky began brightening to the east she saw that she'd been climbing up a denuded gravelly hillside populated by stumps, an old clear-cut that had never recovered. It must have been like this long before ßehemoth had arrived on the scene.
Everything's dying, she'd said.
And Ouellette had replied That was happening anyway...
Clarke looked down the way she'd come. Miri sat like a toy on the edge of what must have been an old logging road. Brown trees lined the far side of the road, and the hill she stood on to either side; they'd been razored away down the swath she'd just climbed.
Suddenly she had a shadow. It stretched down the slope like the outline of a murdered giant. She turned: a fluorescent red sun was just cresting the hill. Ribbed clouds above glowed radioactive salmon. They reminded Cla
rke of wave-sculpted corrugations on a sandy seabed, but she couldn't ever remember seeing colors so intense.
Losing your sight every night might not be so bad, she reflected, if this is how you get it back in the morning.
The moment passed, of course. The sun had only had a few degrees to work with, a narrow gap of clear distant sky between the land below and the clouds overhead. Within a few minutes it had risen behind a thick bank of stratus, faded to a pale bright patch in an expanse of featureless gray.
Alyx, she thought.
Ouellette would be up soon, steeling herself for another pointless day spent in the service of the greater good. Making a difference that made no difference.
Maybe not the greater good, Clarke thought. Maybe, the greater need.
She started down the hill. Ouellette was climbing into daylight by the time Clarke reached the road. She blinked against the gray morning, and blinked again when she saw the rifter's naked eyes.
"You said you could teach me," Clarke said.
Stargazer
She's okay, Dave, Taka said to her dead husband. She's a bit scary at first—Crys would take one look at her and run out of the room. Definitely not much of a people person.
But she's fine, Dave, really. And if you can't be here with me, at least she pulls her own weight.
Miri drove down old I-95 through the ramshackle remains of a town called Freeport; it had died with the departure of the fish and the tourists, long before ßehemoth had made everything so definitive. South of town they pulled onto a side road that ended at a secluded cove. Taka was relieved to see that the scraggly woodlands above the high-tide line were still mostly green. She cheered them on.
"Why here, exactly?" Laurie wondered as they debarked.
"Electric eel." Taka unlocked the charge cap on the side of the vehicle and took the socket in one hand. The cable unspooled behind her as she headed down slope. Cobble slipped and clattered beneath her feet.
Laurie paced her to the water's edge. "What?"
"On the bottom somewhere." Kneeling, Taka fished the hailer out of her windbreaker and slipped it into the water. "Hopefully the little bastard still comes when you call him."
A small eruption of bubbles, twenty meters offshore. A moment later the eel surfaced in their wake and squirmed towards them, orange and serpentine. It beached itself at Taka's feet, a giant fluorescent sperm with a tail trailing off into the depths. It even had fangs: a two-pronged metal mouth disfiguring the surface of the bulb.
She plugged the cable into it. The bulb hummed.
"They stashed these things here and there," she explained, "so we're not completely dependent on the lifters."
Laurie eyed the calm water in the cove. " Ballard stack?"
"CAESAR reactor."
"You're kidding."
Taka shook her head. "Self-contained, self-maintained, disposable. Basically just a big block with a couple of radiator fins. Drop it into any open body of water and it's good to go. It doesn't even have any controls—it automatically matches voltage to whatever the line draws."
Laurie whistled.
Taka scooped up a flat stone and skipped it across the water. "So when's Ken going to show up?"
"Depends."
"On what?"
"On whether he got into Portland." And then, after a curious hesitation: "And whether he ditched us back at Penobscot."
"He didn't," Ken said.
They turned. He was standing behind them.
"Hi." Laurie's face didn't change, but some subtle tension seemed to ebb from her body. "How'd it go?"
He shook his head.
It was almost as if the past two weeks hadn't happened. Ken reappeared, as ominous and indecipherable as ever: and just like that, Laurie faded away. It was a subtle transition—some slight hardening of the way she held herself, a small flattening of affect—but to Taka, the change was as clear as a slap in the face. The woman she had come to know as an ally and even a friend submerged before her eyes. In its place stood that humanoid cipher who had first confronted her on the slopes of a guttering wasteland, fourteen days before.
Ken and Laurie conversed a little ways down the beach while Miri recharged. Taka couldn't hear what they said, but doubtless Ken was reporting on his Portland expedition. Debriefing, Taka thought, watching them. For Ken, that word seemed to fit. And the trip had not gone well, judging by the body language and the look on his face.
Then again, he always looks like that, she reminded herself. She tried to imagine what it might take to wipe away that chronic deadpan expression and replace it with something approaching a real emotion. Maybe you'd have to threaten his life. Maybe a fart in an elevator would do it.
They headed back into town once Miri was sated. Lubin crouched in the space between the bucket seats, the women on either side. Taka got the sense of gigabytes passing between the other two, although they spoke perhaps a half-dozen words each.
Freeport was another regular stop on the trap line; Taka pulled up at a parking lot off Main and Howard, beside the gashed façade of a defunct clothing store called (she always smiled at it) The Gap. The town as a whole, like most of them, was long dead. Individual cells still lingered on in the rotting corpus, though, and some were already waiting when Miri arrived. Taka blared Stravinsky for a few minutes anyway, to spread the word. Others appeared over time, emerging from the shells of buildings and the leaky hulls of old fishing boats kept afloat in some insane hope that the witch might be afraid of water.
She and Laurie got to work. Ken stayed out of sight near the back of the cab; shadows and the dynamic tinting of Miri's windows rendered him all but invisible from the outside. Taka asked about Portland over an assembly-line of broken arms and rotting flesh. Laurie shrugged, pleasant but distant: "He could've got in all right. Just not without getting noticed."
No surprise there. A scorched zone surrounded Portland's landside perimeter, a flat, sensor-riddled expanse across which Taka couldn't imagine anyone crossing undetected. An enervated, membranous skin guarded the seaward approaches. You couldn't just sneak into the place—into any clave, for that matter—and Ken evidently lacked the resources to break in by force.
Every now and then Taka would glance absently at the windshield as she moved among her patients. Sometimes she caught sight of two faint, glimmering pinpoints looking back, motionless and unblinking behind the dark reflections.
She didn't know what he might be doing in there. She didn't ask.
It was as if night were a black film laid over the world, and the stars mere pinpricks through which daylight passed.
"There," Ken said, pointing.
Fine needles, three or four of them. Their tips etched the film high in the west, left faint scratches across Bootes. They faded in seconds; Taka would never have seen them on her own.
"You're sure we're safe," she said.
He was a silhouette, black on black against the stars to her left. "They're past us already," he told her. Which was not the same thing.
"There go the intercepts," Laurie said behind them. Brief novae flared near Hercules—not contrails, but the ignition of antimissile salvos dropped from orbit. They'd be below the horizon by the time they hit atmosphere.
It was after midnight. They were standing on a rocky hill south of Freeport. Almost everything was stars and sky; the insignificant circle of earth below the horizon was black and featureless. They'd come here following the beeping of Ken's handpad, linked to a periscope floating somewhere in the ocean behind them. Evidently their submarine— Phocoena, Laurie had called it— was a stargazer.
Taka could see why. The Milky Way was so beautiful it hurt.
"Maybe this is it," she murmured. It was unlikely, she knew; this was only the second attack since they'd put their plan into motion, and how far could the word have spread by now?
And yet, three attacks in as many weeks. At that rate, they had to get lucky before too long...
"Don't count on it," Ken said.
; She glanced at him, and glanced away. Not so long ago this man had stood at her back, one hand clamped easily on her neck, instructing Laurie in the disassembly of weapons systems that Taka could barely even name. He had been pleasant enough, then and since, because Taka had cooperated. He had been polite because she'd never stood in his way.
But Ken was on a mission, and Taka's little experiment in grass-roots salvation didn't seem to factor into it. He was playing along with her for some indecipherable reason of his own; there was no guarantee that tomorrow, or the next day, he wouldn't run out of patience and go back to his original game plan. Taka didn't know what that was, although she gathered it had something to do with helping Ken and Laurie's waterlogged kindred; she had learned not to waste time pressing either of them for details. It had involved getting into the Portland clave, which evidently Ken had not been able to do on his own.
It had also involved hijacking Taka's MI, which he had.
Now she was alone with two empty-eyed ciphers in the dead of night and the middle of nowhere. Beneath the intermittent camaraderie, the humanitarian pitching-in, and all the best-laid plans, one fact remained unassailable: she was a prisoner. She'd been a prisoner for weeks.
How could I have forgotten that? she wondered, and answered her own question: because they hadn't hurt her...yet. They hadn't threatened her...lately. Neither of her captors seemed to indulge in violence for its own sake; hereabouts that was the very pinnacle of civilized behavior. She had simply forgotten to feel endangered.
Which was pretty stupid, when you got right down to it. After the failure at Portland, there was every chance that Lubin would revert to Plan A and take her vehicle. Laurie might or might not go along with that—Taka hoped that some bond remained beneath that cool reinstated façade—but that might not make much difference either way.
And there was no telling what either of them would do if Taka tried to get in their way. Or if they ran out of more efficient alternatives. At the very best, she could be stranded in the middle of the wildlands—an immunized angel with clipped wings, and no Miri to back her up the next time some red-eyed man came looking for salvation.