by Peter Watts
They don't even know they're dead, she thought. The torpedoes haven't reached Atlantis yet. They're living the last few minutes of their lives and they don't even know it.
They'll live longer than me...
A hand around her ankle; friction against the floor.
Bye, Jelaine. Bye Avril. Bye Dale and Abra and Hannuk...
A great gulping wheeze, very close. The sensation of distant flesh expanding.
Bye Kevin. Bye Grace. Sorry we could never work it out...
A pulse. She had a pulse.
Bye Jerry. Bye Pat. Bye again...
There were voices. There was light, somewhere. Everywhere.
Bye, Alyx. Oh God, I'm so sorry. Alyx.
"...bye, world."
But that voice had come from outside her head.
She opened her eyes.
"You know I'm serious," Desjardins was saying.
Somehow Ken Lubin was still on his feet, listing to port. He stood just beyond the pool of light. Achilles Desjardins stood within it. They confronted each other from opposite sides of a waist-high workstation.
Lubin must have pulled her out of the neuroinduction field. He'd saved her life again. Not bad for a blind psychopath. Now he stood staring sightlessly into the face of his enemy, his hand extended. Probably feeling out the edge of the field.
"Dedicated little bitch, I have to admit," Desjardins said. "Willing to sacrifice a handful of people she actually knows for a planetful of people she doesn't. I thought she was way too human to be so rational." He shook his head. "But the whole point is kind of lost if the world blows up anyway, no? I mean, all those runaways on the Ridge are about to die in—oh, sorry, who've just died—and for what? The only thing that'll give their deaths any meaning at all is if you turn around and walk away."
They're gone, Clarke thought. I killed them all...
"You know how many battellites are still wobbling around up there, Ken. And you know I'm good enough to have got into at least a few of 'em. Not to mention all the repositories of chemical and biological weapons kicking around groundside after a hundred years of R&D. All those tripwires run right through my left ventricle, buddy. Lenie should thank the spirit of motherfucking entropy that she didn't kill me, or the heavens would be raining fire and brimstone by now."
Clarke tried to move. Her muscles buzzed, hung over. She could barely lift her arm. Not the usual med-cubby field by a long shot. This one had been cranked to quell riots. This one was industrial.
Still Lubin didn't speak. He managed a controlled stagger to the left, his arm still extended.
"Channels seven through nineteen," Desjardins told him. "Look for yourself. See the kill switches? See where they lead? I've had five years to set this up, Ken. You kill me, you kill billions."
"I— expect you'll find a number of those tripwires are no longer connected." Lubin's voice was thin and strained.
"What, your pack-hunting Lenies? They can't get into the lines until the lines open. And even then, so what? They're her, Ken. They're concentrated essence of Lenie Clarke at the absolute peak of her game. They get their teeth into a tripwire, you think for a second they won't pull it themselves?"
Lubin cocked his head slightly, as if taking note of some interesting sound.
"It's still a good deal, Ken. Take it. You'd have a hard time killing me anyway. I mean, I know what a tough hombre you are, but your motor nerves short out just the same as anyone else's. And not to put too fine a point on it, but you're blind."
Realization stabbed Clarke like an icicle: Achilles, you idiot, don't you know what you're doing? Haven't you read his file?
Lubin was speaking: "So why deal in the first place?"
"Because you are a tough hombre. You could probably hunt me down by smell if it came to that, and even though you're having a really off day I'd just as soon not take the chance."
You're talking to Ken Lubin, she raged silently, trapped in her own dead flesh. Do you actually think you're threatening him?
"So we disappear, you disappear, the world relaxes." Lubin wavered in and out of focus. "Until someone else kills you."
Clarke tried to speak. All she could force out was a moan, barely audible even to herself.
It's not a threat at all—
"You disappear," Desjardins said. "Lenie's mine. Saved her special."
It's an inducement...
"You're proceeding from a false premise," Lubin pointed out.
"Yeah? What premise is that?"
"That I give a shit."
Clarke caught a glimpse of muscles bunching in Lubin's left leg, of a sudden sodden pulse of fresh blood coursing down his right. Suddenly he was airborne, hurtling through the field and overtop the barrier from an impossible standing start. He rammed into Desjardins like an avalanche, pure inertia; they toppled out of sight behind the console, to the sound of bodies and plastic in collision.
A moment's silence.
She lay there, tingling and paralyzed, and wondered who to root for. If Lubin's momentum hadn't carried him completely through the field he'd be dying now, with no one to pull him to safety. Even if he'd made it across, he'd still be helpless for a while. Desjardins might have a chance, if the collision hadn't stunned him.
Achilles, you murderer. You psychopath, you genocidal maniac. You foul vicious monster. You're worse than I am. There's no hell deep enough for you.
Get out of there. Please. Before he kills you.
Something gurgled. Clarke heard the faint scratching of fingernails on plastic or metal. A meaty thud, like someone slinging a dead fish against the deck—or the flopping of a limb, stunned in transit, struggling back to life. A brief scuffling sound.
Ken. Don't do it.
She gathered all her strength into a single, desperate cry: "No." It came out barely whispered.
On the far side of the barricade, a wet snapping pop. Then nothing at all.
Oh God, Ken. Don't you know what you've done?
Of course you know. You've always known. We could've saved it, we could have made things right, but they were right about you. Pat was right. Alyx was right. You monster. You monster. You wasted it all.
God damn you.
She stared up at the ceiling, tears leaking around her eyecaps, and waited for the world to end.
She could almost move again, if only she could think of a reason to. She rolled onto her side. He sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, his bloody face impenetrable. He looked like some carved and primitive idol, awash in human sacrifice.
"How long?" she rasped.
"Long?"
"Or has it started already? Are the claves on fire? Are the bombs falling? Is it enough for you, are you fucking hard yet?"
"Oh. That." Lubin shrugged. "He was bluffing."
"What?" She struggled up on her elbows. "But—the tripwires, the kill-switches—he showed you..."
"Props."
"You saw through them?"
"No. They were quite convincing."
"Then how—"
"It didn't make sense that he'd do it."
"Ken, he destroyed Atlant—" A sudden, impossible ray of hope: "Unless that was a bluff too?..."
"No," Lubin said quietly.
She sank back. Let me wake up from this, she prayed.
"He destroyed Atlantis because he had another deterrent to fall back on. Making good on the smaller threat increased the credibility of the larger one." The man without a conscience shrugged. "But once you're dead, deterrence has already failed. There's no point in acting on a threat when it can't possibly achieve your goal."
"He could have, easily. I would have."
"You're vindictive. Desjardins wasn't. He was mainly interested in self-gratification." Lubin smiled faintly. "That was unusually enlightened of him, actually. Most people are hardwired for revenge. Perhaps Spartacus freed him of that too."
"But he could have done it."
"It wouldn't have been a credible threat otherwise."
"So
how did you know?"
"Doomsday machines are not easy things to assemble. It would have taken a great deal of time and effort for no actual payoff. Faking it was the logical alternative."
"That's not good enough, Ken. Try again."
"I also subjected him to Ganzfeld interrogation once. It gave me certain insights into—"
She shook her head.
He didn't speak for a while. Finally: "We were both off the leash."
"I thought you gave yourself a new leash. I thought your rules..."
"Still. I know how he felt." Lubin unfolded—carefully, carefully—and climbed slowly to his feet.
"Did you know what he'd do?" She couldn't hide the pleading in her voice.
He seemed to look down at her. "Lenie, I've never known anything my entire life. All I can ever do is go with the odds."
It wasn't what she wanted to hear. She wanted him to describe some telltale glitch in Desjardins's shadow-show, some compelling bit of evidence that said the worst will not happen. She wanted some channel of ostensible input traced back to an empty socket, impossibly disconnected from its fiberop. Anything but a gamble based on empathy between two men without conscience.
She wondered if he was disappointed, even a little bit, that Desjardins had been faking it after all. She wondered if he'd really been expecting it.
"What are you so down about?" Lubin asked, sensing what he couldn't see. "We just saved the world."
She shook her head. "He was going to lose anyway. He knew that better than we did."
"Then we advanced the schedule significantly, at least. Saved millions of lives."
How many millions, she wondered, and then: what difference does it make? Could saving twelve million today make up for killing ten million in the past? Could the blood-soaked Meltdown Madonna somehow transmute into Saint Lenie In the Black, savior of two million net? Was the algebra of guilt really so elementary?
For Lenie Clarke, the question didn't even apply. Because any millions saved today had only been spared from a fate she'd condemned them to in the first place. There was no way, no way at all, that she would ever be able to balance those books.
"At least," she said, "the debt won't get any bigger."
"That's a needlessly pessimistic outlook," Lubin observed.
She looked up at him. "How can you say that?" Her voice was so soft she could barely hear herself. "Everyone's dead..."
He shook his head. "Almost everyone. The rest of us get another chance."
Ken Lubin reached out his hand. The gesture was absurd to the point of farce; that this torn and broken monster, gored, bleeding, could pretend to be in any position to offer assistance to others. Lenie Clarke stared for a long moment before she found the strength to take it.
Another chance, she reflected, pulling herself to her feet.
Even though we don't deserve one.
* * *
Epilog: Singular Hessian
Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.
Further predictions unreliable.
* * *
Acknowledgements
The usual gang of suspects, without whom I could never have pulled this off:
David Hartwell, my editor, nailed some serious structural problems with the first draft and helped me fix them. Moshe Feder took point through the day-to-day grind from delivery to rewrite to kicking-and-screaming to rending-of-garments to wracking, hysterical sobs, and finally to parturition
In what has become an annual rite, a motley collection of subversive literary and political malcontents—Laurie Channer, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Becky Maines, John McDaid, Janis O'Conner, Steve Samenski, Isaac Szpindel, and Pat York— met clandestinely at an Undisclosed Location back during the summer of 2002. There, they tore apart the first two chapters of this puppy (among others), then helped to sow them back together again. This is the second time that a whole bunch of people have seen how my novel begins, while virtually no one sees the rest until it's too late to change anything. I suspect self-esteem issues may be involved.
But the fact that hardly anybody read the whole thing doesn't mean that lots of people didn't contribute to it. David Nickle offered advice, insights, and endless mockery throughout the process; his input proved so valuable I can almost overlook the fact that I had to get up at five thirty in the fucking morning and go running for ten miles to avail myself of it. Laurie Channer withstood endless pissing and moaning over a story for which her input was frequently solicited even though she was never actually allowed to read the damned thing. (She still hasn't, as of this writing.)
I owe many details of the helicopter crash scene to Glenn Norman and Glenn Morrison, both pilots, and both more helpful to pesky authors than I had any right to expect. I was astonished to learn that even when a helicopter loses all power in mid-flight, it's still possible to walk away from the crash by practicing an emergency technique called "autorotation". Glenn Morrison, in fact, survived a crash eerily parallel to the one described herein, except for the fact that he is not blind. (For the record, he doesn't think there's a hope in hell off pulling off that maneuver in real life if you are blind, and he knows his stuff. On the other hand, he doesn't know Ken Lubin.)
Parts of other people's life histories made their way into the story. Certain impressionistic details of the dog attack took their inspiration from wild canines encountered by one Rob Cunningham on his travels through India. (You may know Rob as the dude who created those gorgeous spaceship designs for Homeworld and Homeworld 2, the RTS computer games from Relic Entertainment.) Eight-year-old Achilles Desjardins's experiments with aerobraking were lifted from the childhood confessions of Mark Showell, fisheries biologist, although Mark is not a sexual sadist so far as I know. (If anything he's a masochist, judging by the guy he chose to do his Master's under.)
Isaac Szpindel, MD, Ph.D., skilled in so many and varied endeavors that it makes me sick, helped me load Taka's lines with plausible medical chrome. Dave "the bioinformatician" Block answered numerous impertinent questions about artificial nucleotides and minimum genotype sizes. (Unfortunately, one of the things he taught me was that you can't cram a 1.1MB genotype into a cell 250nm across, which contradicts physical stats for ßehemoth already described in Maelstrom.) Major David Buck, of the New Zealand Defence Force, helped me out on the subject of Fuel Air Explosive ordnance. Steve Ballentine, Hannu Blommila, Rick Kleffel, Harry Pulley, Catriona Sparks, Bebe Schroer, Janine Stinson, Mac Tonnies, and David Williams have all pointed me to relevant research papers, reviews, opinions, and/or news articles that went into the ßehemoth mix one way or another. Jan Stinson also went through the manuscript with an editorial eagle-eye, catching typos and bigger problems which I hope the rest of you won't notice. Not to mention others whom I've probably forgotten, and of whom I hereby pre-emptively beg forgiveness.
You can't blame any of these good folks if this book sucks, since none of them were allowed to read it. (If it does suck, maybe that's why.) You can't even blame David Hartwell, who did read it, because the book would have sucked even harder without his input. You can only blame me, and you might as well since I've already got your money.
Well, fifty cents of it, anyway.
* * *
Notes and references
Once again it's time to trot out a variety of citations that will hopefully serve as a valuable educational resource, even though they're primarily intended to cover my ass against nitpickers.
If you have come late to this saga, you may not find the following references as complete as you'd like. Any real-world science elements introduced in Starfish and Maelstrom were cited at the end of those books; I don't repeat those citations here, even though many elements persist into ßehemoth. (I do, however, cite related research that has come out since Maelstrom was released, especially if it makes me look especially prescient in some way.) So if you're looking for my original sources on smart gels, "fine-tuning", or the Maelstrom Ecosystems, you'll have to go back and check the oth
er books. You still may not find everything you're looking for, but you might at least make my Amazon numbers look a little less dismal.
Atlantis: There Goes the Neighborhood
There is a place in the middle of the North Atlantic where the currents stop dead, an eye in the middle of that great slow gyre revolving between Europe and North America1. It seemed like a reasonable spot to hide from lethal particles potentially borne on wind and water, so I put Atlantis there. The surrounding topography took some inspiration from a 2003 report on abyssal mineralogy2. Impossible Lake was inspired by the ultrasaline lens of heavy water described in the ground-breaking documentary series "Blue Planet"3. The failure of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream is increasingly likely in view of increased melt water discharge from the Arctic (e.g., 4,5). And I know they don't actually figure into the plot anywhere, but Lenie Clarke worries about them on her way to the surface in Chapter One so it's fair game: giant squids now outmass the whole human race, and they're getting even bigger6!
ßehemoth
We continue to discover life increasingly deep in the lithosphere. At last count, deep crustal rocks beneath the Juan de Fuca Ridge—yes, the very ridge from which ßehemoth escaped at the end of Starfish—have yielded evidence of heretofore unknown microbial lifeforms7. Water samples from boreholes 300 m below that seabed show depleted levels of sulphate: something down there is alive, unclassified, and consuming sulphur. There's no evidence that it would destroy the world if it ever reached the surface, but then again there's no evidence it wouldn't, either. I can always hope.
That hope is a faint one, though. Patricia Rowan was right to argue that ßehemoth, by virtue of its ancient origins, should be an obligate anaerobe8. To even make it out onto the seabed would require either a very convenient mutation, or a deliberate tweak. Damn lucky the plot called for one anyway.
Waters et al. have recently reported the discovery of an ancient, hot-vent-dwelling nanobe called Nanoarchaeum equitans9; genome size, proportion of junk DNA, and diameter are all in the ßehemoth ballpark. Even better, it's a parasite/symbiont (it lives on a much larger Archeon called Ignicoccus). However, its minimalist genome (about 500 kilobases, half the size of ßehemoth's) lacks the recipes for certain vital enzymes, which it must therefore get from its host. It could never be a free-liver. ßehemoth, with its larger genome, is more self-sufficient—but how it crams all those extra genes into a capsule only 60% the size remains a mystery.