Beyond the Rift

by Peter Watts

  It would have been a risky gambit. The parallels were far from exact. Instead, the Defence recalled Grace Balfour to the stand and asked whether she believed the Bible to be the revealed Word of God. Mrs. Balfour readily conceded as much. It was her faith, she maintained, that allowed her to stay strong when that horrible man at the Creation display had mocked her with his talk of monkeymen and radioisotopes. She had seen fossils for what they truly were, the tests of faith described in Deuteronomy 13.

  Asked then why her sister evidently did not share her strength of belief, Mrs. Balfour allowed—somewhat reluctantly—that “that horrid little Russian” had shattered her sister’s faith with his “lies and deceit.”

  But did not the Bible itself arm the faithful against such wickedness? Did not Matthew warn that “false prophets shall rise, and deceive many”? Could Second Peter have been any more explicit than “There shall be false teachers among you, who shall bring in damnable heresies”?

  Well, yes, Mrs. Balfour allowed. Certainly, Velikovsky was a False Prophet. Sadly, as the Defence reminded her, false prophecy was not a criminal offence.

  Ultimately there was no need to resort to technical exemptions. The jury, having been presented with the facts of the case, was unanimous: Lacey Hillcrest had not shown the courage for their conviction.

  Whose fault was it, after all, that her faith had been so much smaller than a mustard seed?

  _________________

  1 Waber, R. L., Shiv, B., Carmon, Z. & Ariely, D. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 299, 1016-1017 (2008).

  REPEATING THE PAST

  What you did to your uncle’s grave was unforgivable. Your mother blamed herself, as always. You didn’t know what you were doing, she said. I could accept that when you traded the shofar I gave you for that eMotiv headset, perhaps, or even when you befriended those young toughs with the shaved heads and the filthy mouths. I would never have forgiven the swastika on your game pod but you are my daughter’s son, not mine. Maybe it was only adolescent rebellion. How could you know, after all? How could any child really know, here in 2017? Genocide is far too monstrous a thing for history books and grainy old photographs to convey. You were not there; you could never understand.

  We told ourselves you were a good boy at heart, that it was ancient history to you, abstract and unreal. Both of us doctors, all too familiar with the sad stereotype of the self-loathing Jew, we talked ourselves into treating you like some kind of victim. And then the police brought you back from the cemetery and you looked at us with those dull, indifferent eyes, and I stopped making excuses. It wasn’t just your uncle’s grave. You were spitting on six million others, and you knew, and it meant nothing.

  Your mother cried for hours. Hadn’t she shown you the old albums, the online archives, the family tree with so many branches hacked off mid-century? Hadn’t we both tried to tell you the stories? I tried to comfort her. An impossible task, I said, explaining Never Again to someone whose only knowledge of murder is the score he racks up playing Zombie Hunter all day...

  And that was when I knew what to do.

  I waited. A week, two, long enough to let you think I’d excused and forgiven as I always have. But I knew your weak spot. Nothing happens fast enough for you. These miraculous toys of yours—electrodes that read the emotions, take orders directly from the subconscious—they bore you now. You’ve seen the ads for Improved RealityTM: sensation planted directly into the brain! Throw away the goggles and earphones and the gloves, throw away the keys! Feel the breezes of fantasy worlds against your skin, smell the smoke of battle, taste the blood of your toy monsters, so easily killed! Immerse all your senses in the slaughter!

  You were tired of playing with cartoons, and the new model wouldn’t be out for so very long. You jumped at my suggestion: You know, your mother’s working on something like that. It’s medical, of course, but it works the same way. She might even have some sensory samplers loaded for testing purposes.

  Maybe, if you promise not to tell, we could sneak you in...

  Retired, yes, but I never gave up my privileges. Almost two decades since I closed my practice but I still spend time in your mother’s lab, lend a hand now and then. I still marvel at her passion to know how the mind works, how it keeps breaking. She got that from me. I got it from Treblinka, when I was only half your age. I, too, grew up driven to fix broken souls—but the psychiatrist’s tools were such blunt things back then. Scalpels to open flesh, words and drugs to open minds. Our techniques had all the precision of a drunkard stomping on the floor, trying to move glasses on the bar with the vibrations of his boot.

  These machines your mother has, though! Transcranial superconductors, deep-focus microwave emitters, Szpindel resonators! Specific pathways targeted, rewritten, erased completely! Their very names sound like incantations!

  I cannot use them as she can. I only know the basics. I can’t implant sights or sounds, can’t create actual memories. Not declarative ones, anyway.

  But procedural memory? That I can do. The right frontal lobe, the hippocampus, basic fear and anxiety responses. The reptile is easily awakened. And you didn’t need the details. No need to remember my baby sister face-down like a pile of sticks in the mud. No need for the colour of the sky that day, as I stood frozen and fearful of some real monster’s notice should I go to her. You didn’t need the actual lesson.

  The moral would do.

  Afterwards you sat up, confused, then disappointed, then resentful. “That was nothing! It didn’t even work!” I needed no machines to see into your head then. Senile old fart, doesn’t know half as much as he thinks. And as one day went by, and another, I began to fear you were right.

  But then came the retching sounds from behind the bathroom door. All those hours hidden away in your room, your game pod abandoned on the living room floor. And then your mother came to me, eyes brimming with worry: never seen you like this, she said. Jumping at shadows. Not sleeping at night. This morning she found you throwing clothes into your backpack—they’re coming, they’re coming, we gotta run—and when she asked who they were, you couldn’t tell her.

  So here we are. You huddle in the corner, your eyes black begging holes that can’t stop moving, that see horrors in every shadow. Your fists bleed, nails gouging the palms. I remember, when I was your age. I cut myself to feel alive. Sometimes I still do. It never really stops.

  Some day, your mother says, her machines will exorcise my demons. Doesn’t she understand what a terrible mistake that would be? Doesn’t history, once forgotten, repeat? Didn’t even the worst president in history admit that memories belong to everyone?

  I say nothing to you. We know each other now, so much deeper than words.

  I have made you wise, grandson. I have shown you the world.

  Now I will help you to live with it.

  A NICHE

  When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal groan.

  Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometres of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge and she hears Beebe’s armor shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is Physics.

  How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come down here? But she already knows the answer.

  She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life under control. She almost seems happy down here.

  Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when you’re three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.

  It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what they’
ve done to her. It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where her left lung used to be. She’s so acclimated to the chronic ache in her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves, that she’s scarcely aware of them any more. She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

  Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in Beebe; they’re supposed to increase the apparent size of one’s personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn’t help. She clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering her eyes like smooth white cataracts.

  She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the usual air of confidence.

  Ballard stands up. “Ready to go?”

  “You’re in charge,” Clarke says.

  “Only on paper.” Ballard smiles. “No pecking order down here, Lenie. As far as I’m concerned, we’re equals.” After two days on the rift Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation. It doesn’t always seem real.

  Something hits Beebe from the outside.

  Ballard’s smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud through the station’s titanium skin.

  “It takes a while to get used to,” Ballard says, “doesn’t it?”

  And again.

  “I mean, that sounds big—”

  “Maybe we should turn the lights off,” Clarke suggests. She knows they won’t. Beebe’s exterior floodlights burn around the clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can’t see it from inside—Beebe has no windows—but somehow they draw comfort from the knowledge of that unseen fire—

  Thud!

  —most of the time.

  “Remember back in training?” Ballard says over the sound, “When they told us that the fish were usually so—small...”

  Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a while. There’s no other sound.

  “It must’ve gotten tired,” Ballard says. “You’d think they’d figure it out.” She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.

  Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender. She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one? The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into jelly. Any time.

  Better to face it outside, where she knows what’s coming. All she can do in here is wait for it to happen.

  Going outside is like drowning, once a day.

  Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector; the ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.

  When she catches her breath, and loses it.

  When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.

  It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.

  She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream. The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke falls writhing into the abyss.

  They come out of the freezing darkness, headlights blazing, into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand over twenty meters high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled structures in perpetual twilight.

  They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided them here.

  “I’ll never get used to it,” Ballard grates in a caricature of her usual voice.

  Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. “Thirty-four Centigrade.” The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so wrong to talk without breathing.

  Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light. After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.

  There’s so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes; seawater boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful centimeters each year. Human machinery does not make energy, here at Dragon’s Throat; it merely hangs on and steals some insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.

  Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of boulders, crimson worms three meters long crowd the seabed between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulfur, lace the water with milky veils.

  The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.

  It doesn’t sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harp string is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming, through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:

  “LENIE—”

  Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth that seems impossibly huge.

  Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares into a scaly black face half a meter across. Some tiny dispassionate part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails. How can it see me? she wonders.

  Then the pain reaches her.

  She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.

  She goes limp. Please get it over with if you’re going to kill me just please God make it quick—She feels the urge to vomit, but the ’skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won’t let her.

  She shuts out the pain. She’s had plenty of practice. She pulls inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic. There’s another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife—you know, a knife, like the one you’ve got strapped to your leg and completely forgot about—and suddenly the monster is gone, its grip broken.

  Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It’s like operating a marionette. Her head turns. She sees Ballard locked in combat with something as big as she is. Only—Ballard is tearing it to pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with smoke-trails of suspended gore.

  The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass. Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.

  Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any trouble. I’ve had worse, she thinks.

  Then: Why am I still alive?

  Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like photophores themselves.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ballard says in a distorted whisper. “Lenie? You okay?”

  Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But surprisingly, she feels intact. “Yeah.”

  And if not, she knows, it’s her own damn fault. She just lay there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.

  She’s always asking for it.

  Back in the airlock, the water recedes around them. And within them; Clarke’s stolen b
reath, released at last, races back along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.

  Ballard splits the face seal on her ’skin and her words tumble into the wetroom. “Jesus. Jesus! I don’t believe it! My God, did you see that thing! They get so huge around here!” She passes her hands across her face; her corneal caps come off, milky hemispheres dropping from enormous hazel eyes. “And to think they’re usually just a few centimeters long...”

  She starts to strip down, unzipping her ’skin along the forearms, talking the whole time. “And yet it was almost fragile, you know? Hit it hard enough and it just came apart! Jesus!” Ballard always removes her uniform indoors. Clarke suspects she’d rip the recycler out of her own thorax if she could, throw it in a corner with the ’skin and the eyecaps until the next time it was needed.

  Maybe she’s got her other lung in her cabin, Clarke muses. Maybe she keeps it in a jar, and she stuffs it back into her chest at night... She feels a bit dopey; probably just an aftereffect of the neuroinhibitors her implants put out whenever she’s outside. Small price to pay to keep my brain from shorting out—I really shouldn’t mind...

  Ballard peels her ’skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyser intake pokes out through her ribcage.

  Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard’s flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again.

  Prickly numbness leaks through her shoulder into her chest and neck. Clarke shakes her head, once, to clear it.