Rifters 3 - Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  Any number of minds could seem perfectly innocent—even to themselves— right up to the point at which that last-wire stimulus came into view and catalyzed a simple chain of thought that ends in just looking the other way. Even then, who knows whether fine-tuning might pick it up?

  Not Lenie Clarke. She searches anyway, gliding between the hulls and the storage tanks, flying over her fellows searching the lights and the shadows, only ostensible in her hunt for ordinance.

  What she's really hunting is guilt.

  Not honest guilt, of course. She's trolling for fear of discovery, she's on the prowl for righteous anger. Newly reawakened, she swims through a faint cauldron of secondhand emotions. The water's tainted with a dozen kinds of fear, of anger, with the loathing of self and others. A darker center roils beneath the surface of each dark body. There's also excitement of a sort, the initial thrill of the chase decaying exponentially down to rote boredom. Sexual stirrings. Other, fainter feelings she can't identify.

  She's never forgotten why she resisted fine-tuning back at Channer, even after all the others had gone over. Now, though, she remembers why she found it so seductive when she finally gave in: in that endless welter of feelings, you always lost track of which ones were yours...

  It's not quite the same here on the Ridge, unfortunately. Not that the physics or the neurology have changed. Not that anyone else has. It's Lenie Clarke that's different now. Victim and vendetta have faded over the years, black and white have bled together into a million indistinguishable shades of gray. Her psyche has diverged from the rifter norm, it no longer blends safely into that background. The guilt alone is so strong that she can't imagine it arising from anyone but her.

  She stays the course, though. She keeps hunting, though her senses are dulled. Somewhere off in the diffracted distance, Ken Lubin is doing the same. He's probably a lot better at it than she is. He's had training in this kind of thing. He's had years of experience.

  Something tickles the side of her mind. Some distant voice shouts through the clouds in her head. She realizes that she's been sensing it for some time, but its volume has crept up so gradually that it hasn't registered until now. Now it's unmistakable: threat and exclamation and excitement, at the very limit of her range. Two rifters cross her path, heading south, legs pumping. Clarke's jaw is buzzing with vocoded voices; in her reverie, she's missed those too.

  "Almost missed it completely," one of them says. "It was tucked in under—"

  "Got another one," A second voice breaks in. "Res-A."

  One look and Clarke knows she would have missed it.

  It's a standard demolition charge, planted in the shadow of an overhanging ledge. Clarke floats upside down and lays her head against the hull to look along the space beneath; she sees a hemispherical silhouette, shaded by the ledge, backlit by the diffuse murky glow of the water behind.

  "Jesus," she buzzes, "How did you find the damn thing?"

  "Sonar caught it."

  With typical rifter discipline, the searchers have abandoned their transects and accreted around the find. Lubin hasn't sent them back; there's an obvious reason why he'd want them all here with the murder weapon. Clarke tunes and concentrates:

  Excitement. Reawakened interest, after an hour of monotonous back-and-forth. Concern and threads of growing fear: this is a bomb after all, not an Easter egg. A few of the more skittish are already backing away, caution superceding curiosity. Clarke wonders idly about effective blast radius. Forty or fifty meters is the standard safe-distance during routine construction, but those guidelines are always padded.

  She focuses. Everyone's a suspect, after all. But although the ubiquitous undercurrent of rage simmers as always, none of it has risen to the surface. There is no obvious anger at being thwarted, no obvious fear of imminent discovery. This explosive development is more puzzle than provocation to these people, a game of Russian Roulette nested inside a scavenger hunt.

  "So what do we do now?" Cheung asks.

  Lubin floats above them all like Lucifer. "Everybody note the sonar profile. That's how you'll acquire the others; they'll be too well-hidden for a visual sweep."

  A dozen pistols fire converging click-trains on the offending object.

  "So do we leave it there, or what?"

  "What if it's booby-trapped?"

  "What if it goes off?"

  "Then we've got fewer corpses to worry about," Gomez buzzes from what he might think of as a safe distance. "No skin off my fore."

  Lubin descends through the conjecture and reaches under the ledge.

  Ng sculls away: "Hey, is that a good—"

  Lubin grabs the device and yanks it free. Nothing explodes. He turns and surveys the assembled rifters. "When you find the others, don't touch them. I'll remove them myself."

  "Why bother," Gomez buzzes softly.

  It's a rhetorical grumble, not even a serious challenge, but Lubin turns to face him anyway. "This was badly positioned," he says. "Placed for concealment, not effect. We can do much better."

  Minds light up, encouraged, on all sides. But to Clarke, it's as though Lubin's words have opened a tiny gash in her diveskin; she feels the frigid Atlantic seeping up her spine.

  What are you doing, Ken? What the fuck are you doing?

  She tells himself he's just playing to the gallery, saying whatever it takes to keep people motivated. He's looking at her now, his head cocked just slightly to one side, as if in response to some unvoiced question. Belatedly, Clarke realizes what she's doing: she's trying to look into his head. She's trying to tune him in.

  It's a futile effort, of course. Dangerous, even. Lubin hasn't just been trained to block prying minds; he's been conditioned, rewired, outfitted with subconscious defenses that can't be lowered by any act of mere volition. Nobody's ever been able to tunnel into Lubin's head except Karl Acton, and whatever he saw in there, he took to his grave.

  Now Lubin watches her, dark inside and out for all her unconscious efforts.

  She remembers Acton, and stops trying.

  Striptease

  The final score is nine mines and no suspects. Either might be subject to change.

  Atlantis itself is an exercise in scale-invariant complexity, repairs to retrofits to additions to a sprawling baseline structure that extends over hectares. There's no chance that every nook and cranny has been explored. Then again, what chance is there that the culprits—constrained by time and surveillance and please God, small numbers—had any greater opportunity to plant explosives than the sweepers have had to find them? Neither side is omnipotent. Perhaps, on balance, that is enough.

  As for who those culprits are, Clarke has tuned in three dozen of her fellows so far. She has run her fingers through the viscous darkness in all those heads and come up with nothing. Not even Gomez, or Yeager. Not even Creasy. Grave-dancers, for sure, all of them. But no diggers.

  She hasn't run into Grace Nolan lately, though.

  Nolan's the Big Red Button right now. She's holding back for the moment; any alleged corpse treachery looks a little less asymmetrical in light of recent events. But the way things are going, Nolan's got nothing to lose by letting this play out. There's already more than enough sympathy out there for the Mad Bomber; if it turns out to be Nolan, the very act of unmasking her could boost her status more than harm it.

  The leash is tenuous enough already. If it snaps there's going to be ten kinds of shit in the cycler.

  And that's granting the charitable assumption that they even find the culprits. What do you look for, in the unlit basements of so many minds? Here, even the innocent are consumed with guilt; even the guilty wallow in self-righteousness. Every mind is aglow with the black light of PsychoHazard icons: which ones are powered by old wounds, which by recent acts of sabotage? You can figure it out, sometimes, if you can stand sticking your head into someone else's tar pit, but context is everything. Hoping for a lucky break is playing the lottery; doing it right takes time, and leaves Clarke soiled.

&nb
sp; Not doing it delivers the future into Grace Nolan's hands.

  There's no time. I can't be everywhere. Ken can't be everywhere.

  There's an alternative, of course. Lubin suggested it, just after the bomb sweep. He was sweet about it, too, he made it sound as if she had a choice. As if he wouldn't just go ahead and do it himself if she wasn't up for it.

  She knows why he gave her the option. Whoever shares this secret is going to get a bit of a boost in the local community. Lubin doesn't need the cred; no rifter would be crazy enough to cross him.

  She remembers a time, not so long ago, when she could make the same claim about herself.

  She takes a breath, and opens a channel to whom it may concern. The next step, she knows, could kill her. She wonders—hardly for the first time— if that would really be such a bad thing.

  Her audience numbers fewer than a dozen. There's room for more; the medhab—even the lone sphere that hasn't been commandeered as Bhanderi habitat—is bigger than most. Not present are even more that can be trusted, judging by the notes Clarke and Lubin have recently compared. But she wants to start small. Maybe ease into it a little. The ripple effect will kick in soon enough.

  "I'm only going to do this once," she says. "So pay attention."

  Naked to the waist, she splits herself open again.

  "Don't change anything except your neuroinhibitors. It probably throws out some overall balance with the other chemicals, but it all seems to come out in the wash eventually. Just don't go outside for a while after you make the changes. Give everything a chance to settle."

  "How long?" Alexander asks.

  Clarke has no idea. "Six hours, maybe. After that, you should be good to go. Ken will assign you to stations around the hubs."

  Her audience rustles, unhappy at the prospect of such prolonged confinement.

  "So how do we tweak the inhibitors?" Mak's broken nose is laced with fine beaded wires, a miniscule microelectric grid designed to amp up the healing process. It looks like an absurdly shrunken veil of mourning.

  Clarke smiles despite herself. "You reduce them."

  "You're kidding."

  "No fucking chance."

  "What about André?"

  André died three years ago, the life spasming out of him on the seabed in a seizure that nearly tore him limb from limb. Seger laid the blame on a faulty neuroinhibitor pump. Human nerves aren't designed for the abyss; the pressure sets them firing at the slightest provocation. You turn into a fleshy switchboard with no circuit-breakers and no insulation. Eventually, after a few minutes of quivering tetanus, the body runs out of neurotransmitters and just stops.

  Which is why rifter implants flood the body with neuroinhibitors whenever ambient pressure rises above some critical threshold. Without them, stepping outside at these depths would be tantamount to electrocution.

  "I said reduce," Clarke repeats. "Not eliminate. Five percent. Seven percent tops."

  "And that does what, exactly?"

  "Reduces synaptic firing thresholds. Your nerves get just a bit more…more sensitive, I guess. To smaller stimuli, when you go outside. You become aware of things you never noticed before."

  "Like what?" says Garcia.

  "Like—" Clarke begins, and stops.

  Suddenly she just wants to seal herself up and deny it all. Never mind, she wants to say. Bad idea. Bad joke. Forget I said anything. Or maybe even admit it all: You don't know what you're risking. You don't know how easy it is to go over the edge. My lover couldn't even fit inside a hab without going into withdrawal, couldn't even breathe without needing to smash anything that stood between him and the abyss. My friend committed murder for privacy in a place where you couldn't swim next to someone without being force-fed their sickness and want. And he's your friend too, he's one of us here, and he's the only other person left alive in the whole sick twisted planet who knows what this does to you…

  She glances around, suddenly panicky, but Ken Lubin is not in the audience. Probably off drawing up duty rosters for the finely tuned.

  Then again, she remembers, you get used to it.

  She takes a breath and answers Garcia's question. "You can tell if someone's jerking you around, for one thing."

  "Hot damn," Garcia exults. "I'm gonna be a walking bullshit detector."

  "That you are," Clarke says, managing a smile.

  Hope you're up for it.

  Her acolytes depart for their own little bubbles to play with themselves. Clarke closes herself back up as the med hab empties. By the time she's back in black there's just her, a crowd of wet footprints, and the massive hatch—always left open until just recently—that opens into the next sphere. Garcia's grafted a combination lock across its wheel in uncaring defiance of dryback safety protocols.

  How long do I have, she wonders, before everyone can muck around in my head?

  Six hours at least, if the acolytes take her guess seriously. Then they'll start playing, trying out the new sensory mode, perhaps even reveling in it if they don't recoil at the things they find.

  They'll start spreading the word.

  Clarke's selling it as psychic surveillance, a new way to track down any guilty secrets the corpses may be hiding. Its effects are bound to spread way beyond Atlantis, though. It'll be that much harder for anyone to conspire in the dark, when every passing soul comes equipped with a searchlight.

  She finds herself standing at the entrance to Bhanderi's lair, her hand on the retrofitted keypad near its center. She keys in the combination and undogs the hatch.

  Suddenly she's seeing in color. The mimetic seal rimming the hatch is a deep, steely blue. A pair of colorcoded pipes wind overhead like coral snakes. A cylinder of some compressed gas, spied through the open portal, reflects turquoise: the decals on its side are yellow and—incomprehensibly—hot pink.

  It's as bright as Atlantis in there.

  She steps into the light: Calvin cycler, sleeping pallet, blood bank ooze pigment into the air. "Rama?"

  "Close the door."

  Something sits hunched at the main workstation, running a sequence of rainbow nucleotides. It can't be a rifter. It doesn't have the affect, it doesn't have the black shiny skin. It looks more like a hunched skeleton in shirtsleeves. It turns, and Clarke flinches inwardly: it doesn't even have the eyes. The pupils twitching in Bhanderi's face are dark yawning holes, dilated so widely that the irises around them are barely visible.

  Not so bright, then. Still dark enough for uncapped eyes to strain to their limits. Such subtle differences get lost behind membranes that render the world at optimum apparent lumens.

  Something must show on her face. "I took out the caps," Bhanderi says. "The eyes— overstimulate, with all the enhancers." His voice is still hoarse, the cords still not reacclimated to airborne speech.

  "How's it going?" Clarke asks.

  A bony shrug. She can count the ribs even through his t-shirt.

  "Anything yet? Diagnostic test, or—"

  "Won't be able to tell the difference until I know if there is a difference. So far it looks like ßehemoth with a couple of new stitches. Maybe mutations, maybe refits. I don't know yet."

  "Would a baseline sample help?"

  "Baseline?"

  "Something that didn't come through Atlantis. Maybe if you had a sample from Impossible Lake, you could compare. See if they're different."

  He shakes his head: a twitch, a tic. "There are ways to tell tweaks. Satellite markers, junk sequences. Just takes time."

  "But you can do it. The—enhancers worked. It came back to you."

  He nods like a striking snake. He calls up another sequence.

  "Thank you," Clarke says softly.

  He stops.

  "Thank you? What choice do I have? There's a lock on the hatch."

  "I know." She lowers her eyes. "I'm sorry."

  "Did you think I'd just leave? That I'd just swim off and let this thing kill us all? Kill me, maybe?"

  She shakes her head. "No. Not you."<
br />
  "Then why?"

  Even motionless, his face looks like a stifled scream. It's the eyes. Through all the calm, rapid-fire words, Bhanderi's eyes seem frozen in a stare of absolute horror. It's as if there's something else in there, something ancient and unthinking and only recently awakened. It looks out across a hundred million years into an incomprehensible world of right angles and blinking lights, and finds itself utterly unable to cope.

  "Because it comes and goes," Clarke says. "You said it yourself."

  He extends one stick-like forearm, covered in derms; a chemical pump just below his elbow taps directly into the vein beneath. He's been dosing himself ever since he climbed back into atmosphere, using miracles of modern chemistry to rape sanity back into his head, to force submerged memories and skills back to the surface for a while. So far, she has to admit, it's working.

  But whenever she looks at him, she sees the reptile looking back. "We can't risk it, Rama. I'm sorry."

  He lowers his arm. His jaw clicks like some kind of insect.

  "You said—" he begins, and falls silent.

  He tries again. "When you were bringing me in. Did you say you knew a—"

  "Yes."

  "I didn't know any—I mean, who?"

  "Not here," she tells him. "Not even this ocean. Way back at the very beginning of the rifter program. He went over in front of my eyes." A beat, then: "His name was Gerry."

  "But you said he came back."

  She honestly doesn't know. Gerry Fischer just appeared out of the darkness, after everyone else had given up and gone. He dragged her to safety, to an evacuation 'scaphe hovering uncertainly over a station already emptied of personnel. But he never spoke a word, and he kicked and fought like an animal when she tried to rescue him in turn.

  "Maybe he didn't so much come back as come through," she admits now, to this creature who must in his own way know Gerry Fischer far better than she ever did.