by Peter Watts
"Leave it on."
He had first met her two weeks before. He'd been tracking her for months, searching the archives, delving into her records, focusing his superlative pattern-matching skills on the cryptic, incomplete jigsaw called Lenie Clarke. But those assembled pieces had revealled more than a brood sac for the end of the world, as Rowan had put it. They'd revealled a woman whose entire childhood had been pretense, programmed to ends over which she'd had no awareness or control. All this time she had been trying to get home, trying to rediscover her own past.
Ken Lubin, slaved to his own brand of Guilt Trip, had been trying to kill her. Desjardins had tried to get in his way; at the time it had seemed the only decent thing to do. It seemed odd, in retrospect, that such an act of kindness could have been triggered by his own awakening psychopathy.
His rescue attempt had not gone well. Lubin had intercepted him before Clarke even showed up in Sault-Saint Marie. Desjardins had sat out the rest of the act tied to a chair in a pitch-black room, half the bones in his face broken.
Surprisingly, it had not been Ken Lubin who had done that to him.
And yet somehow they were now all on what might loosely be called the same side: he and Alice and Kenny and Lenie, all working together under the banner of grayness and moral ambiguity and righteous vendetta. Spartacus had freed Lubin from Guilt Trip as it had freed Desjardins. The 'lawbreaker had to admit to a certain sympatico with the taciturn assassin, even now; he knew how it felt to be wrenched back into a position of genuine culpability, after years of letting synthetic neurotransmitters make all the tough decisions. Crippling anxiety. Guilt.
At first, anyway. Now the guilt was fading. Now there was only fear.
From a thousand directions the world cried out in desperate need of his attention. It was his sworn duty to offer it: to provide salvation or, failing that, to bail until the last piece of flotsam sank beneath the waves. Not so long ago it would have been more than a duty. It would have been a compulsion, a drive, something he could not prevent himself from doing. At this very moment he should be dispatching emergency teams, rerouting vital supplies, allocating lifters and botflies to reinforce the weakening quarantine.
Fuck it, he thought, and killed the feeds. Somehow he sensed Lenie Clarke flinching behind him as the display went dark.
"Did you get a fix?" Jovellanos asked. She'd taken a shot at it herself, but she'd only been a senior 'lawbreaker for a week: hardly enough time to get used to her inlays, let alone develop the seventh sense that Desjardins had honed over half a decade. The sharpest fix she'd been able to get on the vanished corpses was somewhere in the North Atlantic.
Desjardins nodded and reached out to the main board. Clarke's onyx reflection moved up behind him, staring back from the dark surface. Desjardins suppressed the urge to look over his shoulder. She was right here in his cubby: just a girl, half his size. A skinny little K-selector that half the world wanted to kill and the other half wanted to die for.
Without even having met her, he had thrown away everything to come to her aid. When he'd finally met her face-to-face, she'd scared him more than Lubin had. But something had happened to Clarke since then. The ice-queen affect hadn't changed at all, but something behind it seemed—smaller, somehow. Almost fragile.
Alice didn't seem to notice, though. She'd been been the rifters's self-appointed mascot from the moment she'd seen a chance to get back at the Evil Corporate Oligarchy, or whatever she was calling it this week.
Desjardins opened a window on the board: a false-color satcam enhance of open ocean, a multihued plasma of color-coded contours.
"I thought of that," Alice piped up, "but even if you could make out a heatprint against the noise, the circulation's so slow down there—"
"Not temperature," Desjardins interrupted. "Turbidity."
"Even so, the circulation—"
He shot her a look. "Shut up and learn, okay?"
She fell silent, the hurt obvious in her eyes. She'd been walking on eggshells ever since she'd admitted to infecting him.
Desjardins turned back to the board. "There's a lot of variation over time, of course. Everything from whitecaps to squid farts." He tapped an icon; layers of new data superimposed themselves atop the baseline, a translucent parfait. "You'd never get a track with a single snapshot, no matter how fine the rez. I had to look at mean values over a three-month period."
The layers merged. The amorphous plasma disappeared; hard-edged contrails and splotches condensed from that mist.
Desjardins's fingers played across the board. "Now cancel everything that shows up in the NOAA database," —A myriad luminous scars faded into transparency— "Gulf Stream leftovers," —a beaded necklace from Florida to England went dark—"and any listed construction sites or upwells inconsistent with minimum allowable structure size."
A few dozen remaining pockmarks disappeared. The North Atlantic was dark and featureless but for a single bright blemish, positioned almost exactly in its center.
"So that's it," Clarke murmered.
Desjardins shook his head. "We still have to correct for lateral displacement during ascent. Midwater currents and the like." He called forth algorithms: the blemish jiggled to the northwest and stopped.
39°20'14"N 25°16'03"W, said the display.
"Dead northeast of the Atlantis Fracture Zone," Desjardins said. "Lowest vorticity in the whole damn basin."
"You said turbidity." Clarke's reflection, a bright bullseye in its chest, shook its head. "But if there's no vorticity—"
"Bubbles," Alice exclaimed, clueing in.
Desjardins nodded. "You don't build a retirement home for a few thousand people without doing some serious welding. That's gonna generate sagans of waste gas. Hence, turbidity."
Clarke was still skeptical. "We welded at Channer. The pressure crushed the bubbles down to nothing as soon as they formed."
"For point-welding, sure. But these guys must be fusing whole habs together: higher temperatures, greater outgassing, more thermal inertia." Finally, he turned to face her. "We're not talking about a boiling cauldron here. It's just fine fizz by the time it hits the surface. Not even visible to the naked eye. But it's enough to reduce light penetration, and that's what we're seeing right here."
He tapped the tumor on the board.
Clarke stared at it a moment, her face expressionless. "Anybody else know about this?" she asked finally.
Desjardins shook his head. "Nobody even knows I was working on it."
"You wouldn't mind keeping it that way?"
He snorted. "Lenie, I don't even want to think about what would happen if anyone found out I was spending time on this. And not that you're unwelcome or anything, but the fact that you guys are even hanging around out here is a major risk. Do you—"
"It's taken care of, Killjoy," Alice said softly. "I told you. I catch on fast."
She did, too. Promoted in the wake of his desertion, it had taken her only a few hours to figure out that some plus-thousand corpses had quietly slipped off the face of the earth. It had taken her less than two days to get him back onto the CSIRA payroll, his mysterious absence obscured by alibis and bureaucratic chaff. She'd started the game with an unfair advantage, of course: preinfected with Spartacus, Guilt Trip had never affected her. She'd begun her tenure with all the powers of a senior 'lawbreaker and none of the restraints. Of course she had the wherewithall to get Lenie Clarke into CSIRA's inner sanctum.
But even now, Spartacus bubbled in Desjardins's head like acid, eating away at the chains Guilt Trip had forged. It had already freed his conscience; soon, he very much feared, Spartacus would destroy it utterly.
He looked at Alice. You did this to me, he thought, and examined the feelings the accusation provoked. There had been anger at first, a sense of profound betrayal. Something bordering on hatred, even.
Now he wasn't sure any more. Alice—Alice was a complication, his undoing and his salvation all rolled into one willowy chassis. She had saved his a
ss, for now. She had information that could be vital, for later. It seemed like a good idea to play along, for the time being at least. As for the rifters, the sooner he helped them on their way the sooner they'd drop out of the equation.
And all the while, some persistent splinter in the back of his mind contemplated the options that might soon be available to a man without a leash…
Alice Jovellanos offered him a tentative smile, ever hopeful. Achilles Desjardins smiled back.
"You catch on fast," he repeated. "That you do."
Hopefully not fast enough.
Confessional
Jerenice Seger wants to make an announcement.
She won't make it to Clarke or Lubin. She won't even tell them what it's about. "I don't want there to be any misunderstanding," she says. "I want to address your whole community." Her pixelated likeness stares out from the board, grimly defiant. Patricia Rowan stands in the background; she doesn't look pleased either.
"Fine," Lubin says at last, and kills the connection.
Seger, Clarke reflects. Seger's making the announcement. Not Rowan. "Medical news," she says aloud.
"Bad news." Lubin replies, sealing up his gauntlets.
Clarke sets the board for LFAM broadband. "Better summon the troops, I guess."
Lubin's heading down the ladder. "Ring the chimes for me, will you?"
"Why? Where you going?" The chimes serve to heads-up those rifters who leave their vocoders offline, but Lubin usually boots them up himself.
"I want to check something out," he says.
The airlock hisses shut behind him.
Of course, even at their present numbers they can't all fit into the nerve hab at once.
It might have been easier if rifter modules followed the rules. They've been designed to interconnect, each self-contained sphere puckered by six round mouths two meters across. Each can lock lips with any other, or with pieces of interposing corridor—and so the whole structure grows, lumpy and opportunistic, like a great skeleton of long bones and empty skulls assembling itself across the seabed. That's the idea, anyway. A few basic shapes, infinitely flexible in combination.
But no. Here the hab modules sprout like solitary mushrooms across the substrate. Rifters live alone, or in pairs, or whatever social assemblage fits the moment. A crowd of rifters is almost an oxymoron. The nerve habs are among the largest structures in the whole trailer park, and they only hold a dozen or so on their main decks. Given the territorial perimeters that most rifters develop in the abyss, it doesn't hold them comfortably.
It's already getting congested by the time Clarke returns from priming the windchimes. Chen and Cramer converge on her tail as she glides up into the airlock. On the wet deck, Abra Cheung ascends the ladder ahead of her. Clarke follows her up—the airlock cycling again at her back—into a knot of eight or nine people who have arrived during her absence.
Grace Nolan's at the center of the action, bellied up to the Comm panel. Sonar shows a dozen others still en route. Clarke wonders idly if the hab's scrubbers are up to this kind of load. Maybe there is no announcement. Maybe Seger's just trying to get them to overdose on their own CO2.
"Hi." Kevin Walsh appears at her side, hovering hopefully at the edge of her public-comfort perimeter. He seems back to his old self. In front of them, Gomez turns and notices Clarke. "Hey, Len. News from the corpses, I hear."
Clarke nods.
"You're tight with those assholes. Know what it's about?"
She shakes her head. "Seger's the mouthpiece, though. I figure something medical."
"Yeah. Probably." Gomez sucks air softly through stained teeth. "Anybody seen Julia? She should be here for this."
Cheung purses her lips. "What, after spending the last week and a half with Gene? You can breathe that air if you want."
"I saw her out by one of the woodpiles not too long ago," Hopkinson volunteers.
"How'd she seem?"
"You know Julia. A black hole with tits."
"I mean physically. She seem sick at all?"
"How would I know? You think she was out there in a bra and panties?" Hopkinson shrugs. "Didn't say anything, anyway."
Faintly, through bulkheads and conversation, the cries of tortured rock.
"Okay then," Nolan says from the board. "Enough dicking around. Let's rack 'em up and shoot 'em down." She taps an icon on the panel. "You're on, Seger. Make it good."
"Is everyone there?" Seger's voice.
"Of course not. We can't all fit into a hab."
"I'd rather—"
"You're hooked into all the LFAM channels. Anyone within five hundred meters can hear you just fine."
"Well." A pause, the silence of someone deciding how best to proceed across a minefield. "As you know, Atlantis has been quarantined for several days now. Ever since we learned about ßehemoth. Now we've all had the retrofits, so there was every reason to expect that this wasn't a serious problem. The quarantine was merely a precaution."
"Was," Nolan notes. Downstairs the airlock is cycling again.
Seger forges on. "We analyzed the—the samples that Ken and Lenie brought back from Impossible Lake, and everything we found was consistent with ßehemoth. Same peculiar RNA, same stereoisomerization of—"
"Get to the point," Nolan snaps.
"Grace?" Clarke says. Nolan looks at her.
"Shut up and let the woman finish," Clarke suggests. Nolan snorts and turns away.
"Anyway," Seger continues after a moment, "the results were perfectly straightforward, so we incinerated the infected remains as a containment measure. After digitizing them, of course."
"Digitizing?" That's Chen.
"A high-res destructive scan, enough to let us simulate the sample right down to the molecular level," Seger explains. "Model tissues give us much of the same behavior as a wet sample, but without the attendant risks."
Charley Garcia climbs into view. The bulkheads seem to sneak a little closer with each new arrival. Clarke swallows, the air thickening around her.
Seger coughs. "I was working with one of those models and, well, I noticed an anomaly. I believe that the fish you brought back from Impossible Lake was infected with ßehemoth."
Exchanged glances amongst a roomful of blank eyes. Off in the distance, Lubin's windchimes manage a final reedy moan and fall silent, the reservoir exhausted.
"Well, of course," Nolan says after a moment. "So what?"
"I'm, um, I'm using infected in the pathological sense, not the symbiotic one." Seger clears her throat. "What I mean to say is—"
"It was sick," Clarke says. "It was sick with ßehemoth."
Dead air for a moment. Then: "I'm afraid that's right. If Ken hadn't killed it first, I think ßehemoth might have."
"Oh, fuck," someone says softly. The epithet hangs there in a room gone totally silent. Downstairs, the airlock gurgles.
"So it was sick," Dale Creasy says after a moment. "So what?"
Garcia shakes his head. "Dale, don't you remember how this fucker works?"
"Sure. Breaks your enzymes apart to get at the sulfur or something. But we're immune."
"We're immune," Garcia says patiently, "because we've got special genes that make enzymes too stiff for ßehemoth to break. And we got those genes from deepwater fish, Dale."
Creasy's still working it through. Someone else whispers "Shit shit shit," in a shaky voice. Downstairs, some latecomer's climbing the ladder; whoever it is stumbles on the first rung.
"I'm afraid Mr. Garcia's right," Seger says. "If the fish down here are vulnerable to this bug, then we probably are too."
Clarke shakes her head. "But—are you saying this thing isn't ßehemoth after all? It's something else?"
A sudden commotion around the ladder; the assembled rifters are pulling back as though it were electrified. Julia Friedman staggers up into view, her face the color of basalt. She stands on the deck, clinging to the railing around the hatch, not daring to let go. She looks around, blinking rapidly over und
ead eyes. Her skin glistens.
"It's still ßehemoth, more or less," Seger drones in the distance. From Atlantis. From the bolted-down, welded-tight, hermetically-sealed quarantined goddamned safety of fucking Atlantis. "That's why we couldn't pinpoint the nature of Mr. Erickson's infection: he came back positive for ßehemoth but of course we disregarded those findings because we didn't think it could be the problem. But this is a new variant, apparently. Speciation events of this sort are quite common when an organism spreads into new environments. This is basically—"
ßehemoth's evil twin brother, Clarke remembers.
"—ßehemoth Mark 2," Seger finishes.
Julia Friedman drops to her knees and vomits onto the deck
Babel Broadband. An overlapping collage of distorted voices:
"Of course I don't believe them. You saying you do?"
"That's bullshit. If you—"
"They admitted it up front. They didn't have to."
"Yeah, they suddenly come clean at the exact moment Julia goes symptomatic. What a coincidence."
"How'd they know that she—"
"They knew the incubation time. They must have. How else do you explain the timing here, dramatic irony?"
"Yeah, but what are we gonna do?"
They've abandoned the hab. It emptied like a blown ballast tank, rifters spilling onto a seabed already crowded even by dryback standards. Now it hangs above them like a gunmetal planet. Three lamps set around the ventral airlock lay bright overlapping circles onto the substrate. Black bodies swim at the periphery of that light, hints of restless motion behind shark-tooth rows of white, unblinking eyespots. Clarke thinks of hungry animals, kept barely at bay by the light of a campfire.
By rights, she should feel like one of them.
Grace Nolan's no longer in evidence. She disappeared into the darkness a few minutes ago, one supportive arm around Julia Friedman, helping her back home. That act of apparent altruism seems to have netted her extra cred: Chen and Hopkinson are standing in for her on the point-counterpoint. Garcia's raising token questions, but the prevailing mood does not suggest any great willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt.