by Peter Watts
It can’t be.
Instead she says, “It’s a big ocean, Pat. Lots of nasty predators with big pointy teeth. They didn’t all get that way because of βehemoth.”
“This far down, they did. You know the energetics as well as I do. You were at Channer, Lenie. You knew what to look for.”
Clarke jerks her thumb toward Lubin. “Ken was at Channer too, remember? You shitting on him like this?”
“Ken didn’t deliberately spread that damn bug across a whole continent to pay back the world for his unhappy childhood.” The silver eyes fix Clarke in a hard stare. “Ken was on our side.”
Clarke doesn’t speak for a moment. Finally, very slowly: “Are you saying I deliberately—”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. But it looks bad. Jerry’s livid about this, and she won’t be the only one. You’re the Meltdown Madonna, for god’s sake! You were willing to write off the whole world to get your revenge on us.”
“If I wanted you dead,” Clarke says evenly—If I still wanted you dead, some inner editor amends—“you would be. Years ago. All I had to do was stand aside.”
“Of course that’s—”
Clarke cuts her off: “I protected you. When the others were arguing about whether to punch holes in the hull or just cut your power and let you suffocate—I was the one who held them back. You’re alive because of me.”
The corpse shakes her head. “Lenie, that doesn’t matter.”
“It damn well should.”
“Why? We were only trying to save the world, remember? It wasn’t our fault we failed, it was yours. And after we failed, we settled for saving our families, and you wouldn’t even give us that. You hunted us down even at the bottom of the ocean. Who knows why you held back at the last minute?”
“You know,” Clarke says softly.
Rowan nods. “I know. But most of the people down here don’t expect rationality from you. Maybe you’ve just been toying with us all these years. There’s no telling when you’ll pull the trigger.”
Clarke shakes her head dismissively. “What’s that, the Gospel According to the Executive Club?”
“Call it what you want. It’s what you have to deal with. It’s what I have to deal with.”
“We fish-heads have a few stories of our own, you know,” Clarke says. “How you corpses programmed people like machinery so you could top up some bottom line. How you sent us into the world’s worst shit-holes to do your dirty work, and when we ran into βehemoth the first thing you did was try to kill us to save your own hides.”
Suddenly the ventilators seem unnaturally loud. Clarke turns; Lubin and the corpses stare back from across the cave.
She looks away again, flustered.
Rowan smiles grimly. “See how easily it all comes back?” Her eyes glitter, target-locked. Clarke returns her gaze without speaking.
After a moment, Rowan relaxes a bit. “We’re rival tribes, Lenie. We’re each other’s outgroup—but you know what’s amazing? Somehow, in the past couple of years, we’ve started to forget all that. We live and let live, for the most part. We cooperate, and nobody even thinks it worthy of comment.” She glances significantly across the room to Lubin and the techs. “I think that’s a good thing, don’t you?”
“So why should it change now?” Clarke asks.
“Because βehemoth may have caught up with us at last, and people will say you let it in.”
“That’s horseshit.”
“I agree, for what it’s worth.”
“And even if it was true, who cares?” Everyone’s part mermaid down here, even the corpses. All retrofitted with the same deep-sea fish-genes, coding for the same stiff little proteins that βehemoth can’t get its teeth into.
“There’s a concern that the retrofits may not be effective,” Rowan admits softly.
“Why? It was your own people designed the fucking things!”
Rowan raises an eyebrow. “Those would be the same experts who assured us that βehemoth would never make it to the deep Atlantic.”
“But I was rotten with βehemoth. If the retrofits didn’t work—”
“Lenie, these people have never been exposed. They’ve only got some expert’s word that they’re immune, and in case you haven’t noticed our experts have proven distressingly fallible of late. If we were really so confident in our own countermeasures, why would we even be hiding down here? Why wouldn’t we be back on shore with our stockholders, with our people, trying to hold back the tide?”
Clarke sees it at last.
“Because they’d tear you apart,” she whispers.
Rowan shakes her head. “It’s because scientists have been wrong before, and we can’t trust their assurances. It’s because we’re not willing to take chances with the health of our families. It’s because we may still be vulnerable to βehemoth, and if we’d stayed behind it would have killed us along with everyone else and we’d have done no good at all. Not because our own people would turn on us. We’ll never believe that.” Her eyes don’t waver. “We’re like everyone else, you see. We were all doing the very best we could, and things just—got out of control. It’s important to believe that. So we all do.”
“Not all,” Clarke acknowledges softly.
“Still.”
“Fuck ’em. Why should I prop up their self-serving delusions?”
“Because when you force the truth down people’s throats, they bite back.”
Clarke smiles faintly. “Let them try. I think you’re forgetting who’s in charge here, Pat.”
“I’m not worried for your sake, I’m worried for ours. You people tend to overreaction.” When Clarke doesn’t deny it, Rowan continues: “It’s taken five years to build some kind of armistice down here. βehemoth could kick it into a thousand pieces overnight.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I think rifters should stay out of Atlantis for the time being. We can sell it as a quarantine. βehemoth may or may not be out there, but at least we can keep it from getting in here.”
Clarke shakes her head. “My tribe won’t give a shit about that.”
“You and Ken are the only ones who come in here anyway, for the most part,” Rowan points out. “And the others … they won’t go against anything you put your stamp of approval on.”
“I’ll think about it,” Clarke sighs. “No promises.” She turns to go.
And turns back. “Alyx up?”
“Not for another couple of hours. I know she wanted to see you, though.”
“Oh.” Clarke suppresses a twinge of disappointment.
“I’ll give her your regrets,” Rowan says.
“Yeah. Do that.”
No shortage of those.
HUDDLE
ROWAN’S daughter sits on the edge of her bed, aglow with sunny radiance from the lightstrip on the ceiling. She’s barefoot, clad in panties and a baggy T-shirt on which animated hatchet-fish swim endless circuits around her midriff. She breathes a recycled mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and trace gases, distinguishable from real air only by its extreme purity.
The rifter floats in darkness, her contours limned by feeble light leaking through the viewport. She wears a second skin that almost qualifies as a life-form in its own right, a miracle of thermo- and osmoregulation, black as an oil slick. She does not breathe.
A wall separates the two women, keeps ocean from air, adult from adolescent. They speak through a device fixed to the inside of the teardrop viewport, a fist-sized limpet that turns the fullerene perspex into an acoustic transceiver.
“You said you’d come by,” Alyx Rowan says. Passage across the bulkhead leaves her voice a bit tinny. “I made it up to fifth level, I was like holy shit, look at all the bonus points! I wanted to show you around. Scammed an extra headset and everything.”
“Sorry,” Clarke buzzes back. “I was in before, but you were asleep.”
“So come in now.”
“Can’t. I’ve only got a minute or two. Something’s c
ome up.”
“Like what?”
“Someone got injured and now the meat-cutters are going off the deep end about possible infection.”
“What infection?”
“It’s probably nothing. But they’re talking about a quarantine just to be on the safe side. For all I know, they wouldn’t let me back inside anyway.”
“It’d let ’em play at being in control of something, I guess.” Alyx grins; the parabolic viewport bends her face into a clownish distortion. “They really, really hate not being in charge, you know?” And then, with a satisfaction obviously borne less of corpses than of adults in general: “It’s about time they learned how that felt.”
“I’m sorry,” Clarke says suddenly.
“They’ll get over it.”
“That’s not what I…” The rifter shakes her head. “It’s just—you’re fourteen, for God’s sake. You shouldn’t be down—I mean, you should be out lekking with some r-selector—”
Alyx snorts. “Boys? I don’t think so.”
“Girls then. Either way, you should be out getting laid, not stuck down here.”
“This is the best place I could possibly be,” Alyx says simply.
She looks out across three hundred atmospheres, a teenage girl trapped for the rest of her life in a cage on the bottom of a frigid black ocean. Lenie Clarke would give anything to be able to disagree with her.
“Mom won’t talk about it,” Alyx says after a while.
Still Clarke says nothing.
“What happened between you guys, back when I was just a kid. Some of the others shoot their mouths off when she’s not around, so I kind of hear things. But Mom never says anything.”
Mom is kinder than she should be.
“You were enemies, weren’t you?”
Clarke shakes her head—a pointless and unseeable gesture, here in the dark. “Alyx, we didn’t even know each other existed, not until the very end. Your mom was only trying to stop—”
—what happened anyway …
—what I was trying to start …
There’s so much more than speech. She wants to sigh. She wants to scream. All denied out here, her lung and guts squeezed flat, every other cavity flooded and incompressible. There’s nothing she can do but speak in this monotone travesty of a voice, this buzzing insect voice.
“It’s complicated,” her vocoder says, flat and dispassionate. “It was so much more than just enemies, you know? There were other things involved, there was all that wildlife in the wires, doing its own thing—”
“They let that out,” Alyx insists. “They started it. Not you.” By which she means, of course, adults. Perpetrators and betrayers and the-ones-who-fucked-everything-up-for-the-next-generation. And it dawns on Clarke that Alyx is not including her in that loathsome conspiracy of elders—that Lenie Clarke, Meltdown Madonna, has somehow acquired the status of honorary innocent in the mind of this child.
She feels ill at the thought of so much undeserved absolution. It seems obscene. But she doesn’t have the courage to set her friend straight. All she can manage is a pale, half-assed disclaimer:
“They didn’t mean to, kid.” She goes for a sad chuckle. It comes out sounding like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. “Nobody—nobody did anything on their own, back then. It was strings all the way up.”
The ocean groans around her.
The sound resonates somewhere between the call of a humpback whale and the death-cry of some mammoth hull, buckling under pressure. It fills the ocean; some of it leaks through Alyx’s limpet-device. She screws her face up in distaste. “I hate that sound.”
Clarke shrugs, pathetically grateful for the interruption. “Hey, you corpses have your conferences, we have ours.”
“It’s not that. It’s those haploid chimes. I’m telling you, Lenie, that guy’s scary. You can’t trust anyone who makes something that sounds like that.”
“Your mom trusts him fine. So do I. I’ve got to go.”
“He kills people, Lenie. And I’m not just talking about my dad. He’s killed a lot of people.” A soft snort. “Something else Mom never talks about.”
Clarke coasts over to the perspex, lays one silhouetted hand against the light in farewell.
“He’s an amateur,” she says, and fins away into the darkness.
* * *
The voice cries out from a ragged mouth in the seabed, an ancient chimney of basalt stuffed with machinery. In its youth it spewed constant scalding gouts of water and minerals; now it merely belches occasionally. Soft exhalations stir the mechanisms in its throat, spinning blades and fluting pipes and spliced chunks of rock and metal that bang together. Its voice is compelling but unreliable; after Lubin built these chimes, he had to come up with a way to kick-start them manually. So he scavenged the reservoir from a decommissioned desalinator, added a heat pump from some part of Atlantis that never survived the Corpse Revolt. Open a valve and hot seawater flows through a tracheotomy hole blasted into the smoker’s throat: Lubin’s machinery screams aloud, tortured by the scalding current.
The summons grinds out, rusty and disharmonious. It washes over rifters swimming and conversing and sleeping in an ocean black as heat death. It resonates through makeshift habs scattered across the slope, dismal bubbles of metal and atmosphere so dimly lit that even eyecaps see only in black-and-gray. It slaps against the shiny bright biosteel of Atlantis and nine hundred prisoners speak a little louder, or turn up the volume, or hum nervously to themselves in denial.
Some of the rifters—those awake, and in range, and still human—gather at the chimes. The scene is almost Shakespearean: a circle of levitating witches on some blasted midnight heath, eyes burning with cold phosphorescence, bodies barely distinguished from shadow. They are not so much lit as inferred by the faint blue embers glowing from the machinery in the seabed.
All of them bent, not broken. All of them half-balanced in that gray zone between adaptation and dysfunction, stress thresholds pushed so high by years of abuse that chronic danger is mere ambience now, unworthy of comment. They were chosen to function in such environments; their creators never expected them to thrive here. But here they are, here are their badges of office: Jelaine Chen with her pink, nailless fingers, salamandered back in the wake of childhood amputations. Dimitri Alexander, communal priest-bait in those last infamous days before the Pope fled into exile. Kevin Walsh, who freaks inexplicably at the sight of running shoes. Any number of garden-variety skitterers who can’t abide physical con-tact; immolation junkies; self-mutilators and glass-eaters. All wounds and deformities safely disguised by the diveskins, all pathology hidden behind a uniformity of shadowy ciphers.
They, too, owe their voices to imperfect machinery.
Clarke calls the meeting to order with a question: “Is Julia here?”
“She’s looking on Gene,” Nolan buzzes overhead. “I’ll fill her in.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Stable. Still unconscious. Been too long, if you ask me.”
“Getting dragged twenty klicks with your guts hanging out, it’s pretty much a miracle that he’s even alive,” Yeager chimes in.
“Yeah,” Nolan says, “or maybe Seger’s deliberately keeping him under. Julia says—”
Clarke breaks in: “Don’t we have a tap on the telemetry from that line?”
“Not any more.”
“What’s Gene still doing in corpseland anyway?” Chen wonders. “He hates it in there. We’ve got our own med hab.”
“He’s quarantined,” Nolan says. “Seger’s thinking βehemoth.”
Shadows shift at this news. Obviously not all the assembled are fully up to speed.
“Shit.” Charley Garcia fades into half-view. “How’s that even possible? I thought—”
“Nothing’s certain yet,” Clarke buzzes.
“Certain?” A silhouette glides across the circle, briefly eclipsing the sapphire embers on the seabed. Clarke recognizes Dale Creasy. This is first time she
’s seen him for days; she was starting to think he’d gone native.
“Fuck, there’s even a chance,” he continues. “I mean, βehemoth—”
She decides to nip it in the bud. “So what if it’s βehemoth?”
A school of pale eyes turn in her direction.
“We’re immune, remember?” she reminds them. “Anybody down here not get the treatments?”
Lubin’s windchimes groan softly. Nobody else speaks.
“So why should we care?” Clarke asks.
It’s supposed to be rhetorical. Garcia answers anyway: “Because the treatments only stop βehemoth from turning our guts to mush. They don’t stop it from turning little harmless fish into big nasty motherfucking fish that tear into anything that moves.”
“Gene was attacked twenty klicks away.”
“Lenie, we’re moving there. It’s gonna be right in our backyard.”
“Forget there. Who’s to say it hasn’t reached here already?” Alexander wonders.
“Nobody’s been nailed around here,” Creasy says.
“We’ve lost some natives.”
Creasy waves an arm in a barely-visible gesture of dismissal. “Natives. Don’t mean shit.”
“Maybe we should stop sleeping outside, for a while at least…”
“Crap to that. I can’t sleep in a stinking hab.”
“Fine. Get yourself eaten.”
“Lenie?” Chen again. “You’ve messed with sea monsters before.”
“I never saw what got Gene,” Clarke says, “but the fish back at Channer, they were—flimsy. Big and mean, but sometimes their teeth would break on you when they bit. Missing some kind of trace nutrient, I think. You could tear them apart with your bare hands.”
“This thing pretty much tore Gene apart,” says a voice Clarke can’t pin down.
“I said sometimes,” she emphasizes. “But yeah—they could be dangerous.”
“Dangerous, felch.” Creasy growls in metal. “Could they have pulled that number on Gene?”
“Yes,” says Ken Lubin.
He’s been here all along, of course. Now he takes center stage. A cone of light flares from his forehead to his forearm. He holds his hand out like a beggar’s, its fingers curled slightly around something laying across the palm.