by Peter Watts
Now, of course, it’s more of an ICU.
Lenie Clarke emerges from the airlock and drops her fins on an incongruous welcome mat laid to one side. The main compartment is dim even to rifter eyes, a gray-on-gray wash of twilight punctuated by the bright chromatic readouts on the comm board. The air smells of mold and metal; more faintly, of vomit and disinfectant. Life-support systems gurgle underfoot. Open hatches gape like black mouths: storage; head; sleeping cubby. An electronic metronome beeps somewhere nearby. A heart monitor, counting down.
Julia Friedman steps into view.
“He’s still—oh.” She’s taken off her diveskin in favor of a thermochrome turtleneck that mostly covers her scars. It’s strange to see rifter eyes atop dryback clothing. “Hi, Lenie.”
“Hi. How’s he doing?”
“Okay.” She turns in the hatchway, sags with her spine against the frame: half in darkness, half in twilight. She turns her face to the darkness, to the person within it. “Could be better, I guess. He’s asleep. He’s sleeping a lot.”
“I’m surprised you could even keep him inside.”
“Yeah. I think he’d rather be out there, even now, but … he’s doing it for me, I think. Because I asked him.” Friedman shakes her head. “It was too easy.”
“What was?”
“Convincing him.” She takes a breath. “You know how much he loves the outdoors.”
“Are Jerry’s antibiotics helping?”
“Maybe. I guess. It’s hard to say, you know? She can always say he’d be worse without them, no matter how bad it gets.”
“Is that what she’s saying?”
“Oh, Gene hasn’t talked to her since he came back. He doesn’t trust them.” She stares at the deck. “He blames her for this.”
“For being sick?”
“He thinks they did something to him.”
Clarke remembers. “What exactly does he—?”
“I don’t know. Something.” Friedman glances up: her armored eyes lock onto Clarke’s for an instant, then slide off to the side. “It’s taking a long time to clear up, you know? For a simple infection. Do you think?”
“I don’t really know, Julia.”
“Maybe βehemoth’s mixing things up somehow. Making things worse.”
“I don’t know if it works like that.”
“Maybe I’ve got it too, by now.” Friedman almost seems to be talking to herself. “I mean, I’m with him a lot…”
“We could check you out, if you wanted.”
Friedman looks at her. “You were infected, weren’t you? Before.”
“Only with βehemoth,” Clarke says, careful to draw the distinction. “It didn’t kill me. Didn’t even make me sick.”
“It would have, though. Eventually. Right?”
“If I hadn’t got my retrofits. But I did. We all did.” She tries a smile. “We’re rifters, Julia. We’re tough little motherfuckers. He’ll pull through. I know it.”
It’s not much, Clarke knows. Reassuring deception is all she can offer Julia Friedman at the moment. She knows better than to touch; Friedman’s not keen on physical contact. She’d endure a comforting hand on the shoulder, perhaps—even take it in the spirit in which it was intended—but Julia Friedman is very selective with her personal space. It’s one of the few ways in which Clarke feels a kinship with the woman. Each can see the other flinch, even when neither does.
Friedman looks back into the darkness. “Grace says you helped get him out of there.”
Clarke shrugs, a bit surprised that Nolan would give her the credit.
“I would’ve been there too, you know. Only…” Friedman’s voice trails off. The hab’s ventilators sigh into the silence.
“Only you think maybe he’d have been better off where he was,” Clarke suggests.
“Oh, no. Well, maybe partly. I don’t know if Dr. Seger’s as bad as they think, anyway.”
“They?”
“Gene and—Grace.”
Ah.
“It’s just, I didn’t know … I didn’t know if he’d even want me there.” Friedman flashes a rueful smile. “I’m not much of a fighter, Lenie. Not like you, not like—I just kind of roll with the punches.”
“He could have been with Grace all along if he’d wanted to, Julia. He’s with you.”
Friedman laughs, a bit too quickly. “Oh, no. That’s not what I meant.” But Clarke’s words seem to have perked her up a bit.
“Anyway,” Clarke says, “I guess I’ll leave you guys alone. I just wanted to stop by, see how he was doing.”
“I’ll tell him,” Friedman says. “He’ll appreciate it.”
“Sure. No problem.” She bends to retrieve her fins.
“And you should come by again, when he’s awake. He’d like that.” She hesitates, looking away; chestnut curls obscure her face. “Not many people come by, you know. Except Grace. Saliko was by a while back.”
Clarke shrugs. “Rifters aren’t big on social skills.” And you really ought to know that by now, she doesn’t add. Friedman just doesn’t get it, sometimes. It’s as though, scars and history notwithstanding, she’s a rifter in name only, an honorary member allowed past the gate on her husband’s credentials.
Which begs the question of what I’m doing here, she realizes.
“I think they take him too seriously sometimes,” Friedman says.
“Seriously?” Clarke glances at the airlock. The hab seems suddenly, subtly smaller.
“About, you know. The corpses. I hear Saliko’s feeling a little odd now, but you know Saliko.”
He thinks they did something to him …
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Clarke says. “Really.” She smiles, sighing inwardly at her own diplomacy.
Comforting lies get far too easy with practice.
* * *
It’s been a while since she’s let Kevin take her. He’s never been all that good at it, sadly. He has a harder time keeping it up than most kids his age, which actually isn’t all that uncommon among the local bottom-feeders. And the fact that he’s chosen a frigid bitch like Lenie Clarke to practice his moves on hasn’t helped the dynamic any. A man afraid to touch: a woman averse to contact. If these two have anything in common, it’s patience.
She figures she owes him. Besides, she wants to ask him some questions.
But today he’s a granite cock with a brain stem attached. Fuck the foreplay: he pushes into her right off the top, not even a token tongue-lashing to make up for the lack of tropical irrigation. The friction pulls painfully at her labia; she reaches down discreetly with one hand and spreads them. Walsh pumps on top of her, breath hissing through teeth clenched in a hard animal grin, his capped eyes hard and unreadable. They always keep their eyes masked during sex—Clarke’s tastes prevail, as usual—although Walsh usually wears too much heart on his face to hide with a couple of membranous eggshells. Not this time. There’s something behind his overlays that Clarke can’t quite make out, something focused on the space where she is but not on her. He pushes her up the pallet in rough thrusting increments; her head bumps painfully against the naked metal plating of the deck. They fuck without words amid stale air and grafted machinery.
She doesn’t know what’s come over him. It’s a nice change, though, the closest thing to an honest-to-God rape she’s had in years. She closes her eyes and summons up images of Karl Acton.
Afterward, though, the bruise she notices is on his arm: a corona of torn capillaries around a tiny puncture in the flesh of his inner elbow.
“What’s this?” She lays her lips around the injury and runs her tongue across the swelling.
“Oh, that. Grace is taking blood samples from everyone.”
Her head comes up. “What?”
“She’s not great at it. Took her a couple of tries to find a vein. You should see Lije. Looks like his arm got bushwhacked by a sea urchin.”
“Why’s Grace taking blood?”
“You didn’t hear? Lije came down with s
omething. And Saliko’s started feeling under the weather too, and he visited Gene and Julia just a couple of days ago.”
“So Grace thinks—”
“Whatever the corpses gave him, it’s spreading.”
Clarke sits up. She’s been naked on the deck for half an hour, but this is the first time she’s felt the chill. “Grace thinks the corpses gave him something.”
“That’s what Gene thought. She’s going to find out.”
“How? She doesn’t have any medical training.”
Walsh shrugs. “You don’t need any to run MedBase.”
“Jesus semen-sucking Christ.” Clarke shakes her head in disbelief. “Even if Atlantis did want to sic some bug on us, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to use one from the standard database.”
“I guess she thinks it’s a place to start.”
There’s something in his voice.
“You believe her,” Clarke says.
“Well, not nec—”
“Has Julia come down with anything?”
“Not so far.”
“Not so far. Kevin, Julia hasn’t left Gene’s side since they broke him out. If anyone was going to catch anything, wouldn’t it be her? Saliko visited, what? Once?”
“Maybe twice.”
“And what about Grace? From what I hear she’s over there all the time. Is she sick?”
“She says she’s taking precaut—”
“Precautions,” Clarke snorts. “Spare me. Am I the only one left on the whole Ridge with a working set of frontal lobes? Abra came down with supersyph last year, remember? It took eight months for Charley Garcia to get rid of those buggy Ascaris in his gut, and I don’t remember anyone blaming the corpses for that. People get sick, Kevin, even down here. Especially down here. Half of us rot away before we even have a chance to go native.”
There it is again: something new, staring out from behind the glistening opacities of Walsh’s eyecaps. Something not entirely friendly.
She sighs. “What?”
“It’s just a precaution. I don’t see how it can hurt.”
“It can hurt quite a lot if people jump to conclusions without any facts.”
Walsh doesn’t move for a moment. Then he gets to his feet. “Grace is trying to get the facts,” he says, padding across the compartment. “You’re the one jumping to conclusions.”
Oh, Kevvy-boy, Clarke wonders. When did you start to grow a spine?
He grabs his diveskin off the chair. Squirming black synthetics embrace him like a lover.
“Thanks for the fuck,” he says. “I gotta go.”
BOILERPLATE
SHE finds Lubin floating halfway up the side of the windchime reservoir. Pipes, fiberop, and miscellaneous components—mostly nonfunctional now, dismembered segments of circuits long since broken—run in a band around the great tank’s equator. At the moment, the ambient currents are too sluggish to set either rocks or machinery to glowing; Lubin’s headlamp provides the only illumination.
“Abra said you were out here,” Clarke buzzes.
“Hold this pad, will you?”
She takes the little sensor. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“About?” Most of his attention seems to be focused on a blob of amber polymer erupting from one of the conduits.
Clarke maneuvers herself into his line of sight. “There’s this asinine rumor going around. Grace is telling people that Jerry sicced some kind of plague on Gene.”
Lubin’s vocoder tics in a mechanical interpretation of mmmm …
“She’s always had a missile up her ass about the corpses, but nobody takes her seriously. At least, they didn’t used to…”
Lubin taps a valve. “That’s it.”
“What?”
“Resin’s cracked around the thermostat. It’s causing an intermittent short.”
“Ken. Listen to me.”
He stares at her, waiting.
“Something’s changing. Grace never used to push it this hard, remember?”
“I never really butted heads with her myself,” Lubin buzzes.
“It used to be her against the world. But this bug Gene’s come down with, it’s changed things. I think people are starting to listen to her. It could get dicey.”
“For the corpses.”
“For all of us. Weren’t you the one warning me about what the corpses could do if they got their act together? Weren’t you the one who said—”
We may have to do something preemptive …
A small pit opens up in Clarke’s stomach.
“Ken,” she buzzes, slowly, “you do know Grace is fucking crazy, right?”
He doesn’t answer for a moment. She doesn’t give him any longer than that: “Seriously, you should just listen to her sometime. She talks as if the war never ended. Someone sneezes and it’s a biological attack.”
Behind his headlamp, Lubin’s silhouette moves subtly; Clarke gets the sense of a shrug. “There are some interesting coincidences,” he says. “Gene enters Atlantis with serious injuries. Jerry operates on him in a medbay where our surveillance is compromised, then puts him into quarantine.”
“Quarantine because of βehemoth,” Clarke points out.
“As you’ve pointed out yourself on occasion, we’ve all been immunized against βehemoth. I’m surprised you don’t find that rationale more questionable.” When Clarke says nothing, he continues: “Gene is released into the wild suffering from an opportunistic infection which our equipment can’t identify, and which so far has failed to respond to treatment.”
“But you were there, Ken. Jerry wanted to keep Gene in quarantine. Dale beat the crap out of her for trying. Isolating Patient Zero is a pretty short-sighted strategy for spreading the plague.”
“I suppose,” Lubin buzzes, “Grace might say they knew we’d break him out regardless, so they put up a big show of resistance hoping someone would cite it in their favor down the road.”
“So they fought to keep him contained, therefore they wanted to set him loose?” Clarke peers suggestively at Lubin’s electrolysis intake. “You getting enough O2 there, Ken?”
“I’m saying that’s the sort of rationale Grace might invoke.”
“That’s pretty twisted even for—” Realization sinks in. “She’s actually saying that, isn’t she?”
His headlight bobs slightly.
“You’ve heard the rumors. You know all about them.” She shakes her head, disgusted at herself. “As if I’d ever have to bring you up to speed on anything…”
“I’m keeping an ear open.”
“Well, maybe you could do a bit more than that. I mean, I know you like to keep out of these things, but Grace is fucking psycho. She’s spoiling for a fight and she doesn’t care who gets caught in the backwash.”
Lubin hovers, unreadable. “I would have expected you to be a bit more sympathetic.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” he buzzes after a moment. “But whatever you think of Grace’s behavior, her fears might not be entirely unfounded.”
“Come on, Ken. The war’s over.” She takes his silence as acknowledgment. “So why would the corpses want to start it up again?”
“Because they lost.”
“Ancient history.”
“You thought yourself oppressed once,” he points out. “How much blood did it take before you were willing to call it even?”
His metal voice, so calm, so even, is suddenly so close it seems to be coming from inside her own head.
“I—I was wrong about that,” she says after a while.
“It didn’t stop you.” He turns back to his machinery.
“Ken,” she says.
He looks back at her.
“This is bullshit. It’s a bunch of ifs strung together. A hundred to one Gene just picked up something from the fish that bit him.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not like there can’t be a hundred nasty bugs down here we haven’t discovered yet. A f
ew years ago nobody’d even heard of βehemoth.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“So we can’t let this escalate. Not without at least some evidence.”
His eyes shine yellow-white in the backscatter from his headlamp. “If you’re serious about evidence, you could always collect some yourself.”
“How?”
He taps the left side of his chest. Where the implants are.
She goes cold. “No.”
“If Seger’s hiding anything, you’d know it.”
“She could be hiding lots of things from lots of people. It wouldn’t prove what she was hiding.”
“You’d know what Nolan was feeling too, since you seem so concerned with her motives.”
“I know what her motives are. I don’t need to fuck with my brain chemistry to confirm it.”
“The medical risks are minimal,” he points out.
“That’s not the point. It wouldn’t prove anything. You know you can’t read specific thoughts, Ken.”
“You wouldn’t have to. Reading guilt would be suffic—”
“I said no.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you.” He turns away again. His headlamp transforms the reservoir’s plumbing into a tiny, high-contrast cityscape tilted on edge. Clarke watches him work—tracking pathways, tapping pipes, making small changes to tabletop architecture. A pinpoint sun flares hissing at his fingertips, blinding her for an instant. By the time her caps have adjusted the light has settled on the skin of the tank. The water shimmers prismatically around it like a heat mirage on a hot day; at lesser depths it would explode into steam on the spot.
“There’s another way,” she buzzes. Lubin shuts off the spot-welder.
“There is.” He turns to face her. “But I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
* * *
Back when the trailer park was just getting set up, someone had the clever idea of turning a hab into a mess hall: a row of cyclers, a couple of prep surfaces for the daring, and a handful of foldaway tables scattered with studied randomness around the dry deck. The effect was intended to suggest a café patio. The cramped reality is more like the backstage shed where the furniture gets stored for winter.