by Peter Watts
She stopped. The outrage on her face gave way to a puzzled frown.
Clarke looked the question over the doctor's confusion: ß-max? Lubin shrugged.
"Perhaps N'Am isn't dying fast enough," Lubin remarked. "A significant number of M&Ms regard ßehemoth as divine retribution for North America's sins. It's official policy in Italy and Libya, at least. Botswana too, I believe."
Clarke snorted. "North America's sins? They think it just stops at the Atlantic?"
"The moderates think they can keep it at bay," Ouellette said. "The extremists don't want to. They don't get into heaven until the world ends." Her mind seemed elsewhere; she spoke as if absently flicking at some hovering insect.
Lubin let her think. She was, after all, the closest available approximation to a native guide. Perhaps she could come up with something.
"Who are you people?" Ouellette asked quietly.
"Excuse me?"
"You're not feral. You're not clave. You sure as hell aren't CSIRA or you'd be better equipped. Maybe you're TransAt—but that doesn't fit either." A faint smile passed across her face. "You don't know what you're doing, do you? You're making it up as you go along..."
Lubin kept his face neutral and his question on target. "Is there any reason not to believe that people might launch a biological attack against North America simply to—hasten things along?"
She seemed to find this amusing. "You don't get out much, do you?"
"Am I wrong?"
"You're not wrong." Ouellette spat on the ashy ground. "Lots of folks might help Providence along, if they had the chance. That doesn't mean this is an attack."
"What else would it be?"
"Maybe it's a counteragent."
Clarke looked up at that. "A cure?"
"Not so personal, maybe. Something that kills ßehemoth in the wild."
Lubin eyed Ouellette. She eyed him back, and answered his unspoken skepticism: "Of course there are crazies out there who want the world to end. But there have to be a lot more people who don't, wouldn't you agree? And they'd be working just as hard."
There was something in her eyes that hadn't been there before. They almost shone.
He nodded. "But if this is a counteragent, why do you suppose they tried to shoot it down? And why deliver it suborbitally? Wouldn't it be more efficient to leave deployment to the local authorities?"
Ouellette rolled her eyes. "What local authorities?"
Clarke frowned. "Wouldn't someone have told—everybody? Wouldn't someone have told you?"
"Laurie, you make something like this too public and you're painting a bullseye on your chest for the M&Ms. As for missile defense—" Ouellette turned back to Lubin— "Did the people on your planet ever mention something called the Rio Insurrection?"
"Tell us about it," Lubin said. Thinking: Laurie?
"I can't, really," Ouellette admitted. "Nobody really knows what happened. They say maybe a bunch of Madonnas got into CSIRA's Rio de Janeiro offices and went crazy. Launched attacks all over the place."
"Who won?"
"The good guys. At least, Rio got vaporized and the trouble stopped, but who knows? Some people say that it wasn't Lenies at all, it was some kind of civil war between rogue 'lawbreakers. But whatever it was, it was—way out there." She waved a hand at the horizon. "We had our own problems to deal with. And the only real moral of the story is, nobody knows who's running things any more, or whose side they're on, and we're all too busy hanging on by our fingernails to afford the time for any Big Questions. For all we know N'Am's battellites are running on autopilot, and ground control just lost the access codes. Or the Lenies are doing a little target practice. Or—or maybe the M&Ms have someone on the inside. The fact that something's shooting at these bugs doesn't prove anything, one way or another."
Lubin focused on that. "No proof."
"So I'm going to get some. I'm going to sequence the bug. Now are you going to let me drive back to the scene, or am I going to have to walk?"
Lubin said nothing. From the corner of his eye, he saw Clarke open her mouth and close it again.
"Fine." Ouellette proceeded to the back of her van and opened the access panel. Lubin let her extract a steriwrap cartridge and a collapsible stretcher with ground-effector coils built into the frame. She looked at him calmly: "It'll fit on this?"
He nodded.
Clarke held the folded device against Ouellette's back while the doctor cinched the shoulder straps. Ouellette nodded cursory thanks and started down the road, not looking back.
"You think she's wrong," Clarke said as the other woman dwindled, shimmering in the rising heat.
"I don't know."
"What if she isn't?"
"It doesn't matter."
"It doesn't matter." Clarke shook her head, almost amused. "Ken, are you crazy?"
Lubin shrugged. "If she can get a usable sample, we'll know whether it's ß-max. Either way, we can drive to Bangor and use her credentials to get inside. After that it should be—"
"Ken, did you even hear what she just said? There could be a fix. For ßehemoth."
He sighed.
"This is exactly why I didn't want you coming," he said at last. "You've got your own agenda, and it's not what we're here for. You get distracted."
"Distracted?" She shook her head, astonished. "I'm talking about saving the world, Ken. I don't think I'm distracted at all."
"No, you don't. You think you're damned."
Instantly, something in her shut down.
He pushed on anyway. "I don't agree, for what it's worth."
"Really." Clarke's face was an expressionless mask.
"I'd say you're only obsessed. Which is still problematic."
"Go on."
"You think you destroyed the world." Lubin looked around at the scorched landscape. "You think this is all your fault. You'd give up the mission, your life, mine. In an instant. Just so long as you saw the slightest chance of salvation. You're so sick of the blood on your hands you'd barely notice that you were washing it off with even more."
"Is that what you think."
He looked at her. "Is there anything you wouldn't do, then? For the chance to take it all back?"
She held his gaze for long seconds. Finally she looked away.
Lubin nodded. "You've personalized the Greater Good in a way I've never seen in a baseline human before. I wonder if your brain hasn't concocted its own form of Guilt Trip."
She stared at the ground. "It doesn't change anything," she whispered at last. "Even if my motives are—personal..."
"It's not your motives that worry me. It's your judgment."
"We're still talking about saving the world."
"No," he said. "We're talking about someone else, trying to—possibly. We're talking about an entire country or consortium, far better-equipped and better-informed than two hitchhikers from the Mid Atlantic Ridge. And—" holding up his hand against her protest—"we are also talking about other powerful forces who may be trying to stop them, for reasons we can only guess at. Or perhaps for no reason at all, if Ouellette's speculations are correct. We're not players in this, no matter how desperately you wish we were."
"We've always been players, Ken. We've just been too scared to make a move for the past five years."
"And things have changed during that time."
She shook her head. "We have to try."
"We don't even know the rules any more. And what about the things we can change? What about Atlantis? What about the rifters? What about Alyx? Do you really want to throw away any chance of helping them in favor of a lost cause?"
He knew the instant he said it that he'd miscalculated. Something flared in her, something icy and familiar and utterly unswayable. "How dare you," she hissed. "You never gave a shit about Alyx or Grace or—or even me, for that matter. You were ready to kill us all, you switched sides every time the odds changed." Clarke shook her head in disgust. "How dare you talk about loyalty and saving lives. You don't even
know what that means unless someone feeds it to you as a mission parameter."
He should have known it would be no use arguing with her. She wasn't interested in assessing the odds of success. She wasn't even balancing payoffs, weighing Atlantis against the rest of the world. The only variables she cared about came from inside her own head, and neither guilt nor obsession were amenable to cost-benefit analysis.
Even so, her words provoked a strange feeling in his throat.
"Lenie, I didn't mean—"
She held up her hand and refused to meet his eyes. He waited.
"Maybe it's not even your fault," she said after a while. "They just built you that way."
He allowed himself the curiosity. "What way?"
"You're an army ant. You just bull ahead with your feelers on the ground, following your orders and your mission profiles and your short-term objectives, and it never even occurs to you to look up and see the big picture."
"I see it," Lubin admitted softly. "It's very much bigger than you seem willing to admit."
She shook her head, still not looking at him.
He tried again. "Very well. You know the big picture: what do you suggest we do with that information? Can you offer anything beyond wishful thinking? Do you have any kind of strategy for saving the world, as you put it?"
"I do," said Taka Ouellette.
They turned. She stood back beside the MI, arms folded. She'd obviously ditched the stretcher and circled back while they weren't looking.
Lubin blinked in astonishment. "Your sample—"
"From that warhead you found? Not a chance. The tracers would've metabolized any active agent down to the atoms."
Clarke shot him a look, clear as binary even through the frosting on her eyes: Not quite on your game, superspy? Letting some dick-ass country doctor sneak up on you?
"But I know how we can get a sample," Ouellette continued, looking straight at Clarke. "And I could use your help."
Migration
Obviously she had come late to the conversation. If she had heard the way it started, Clarke knew, Taka Ouellette wouldn't have wanted anything to do with her.
The good doctor had contacts on the ground, so she said. People she'd saved, or bought time for. The loved ones of those whose suffering she'd ended. Occasional dealers, wildland hustlers who could sometimes conjure up drugs or spare parts to be weighed against other items in trade. They were the furthest thing from altruists, but they could be life-savers when the closest resupply lifter was a week away.
All of them had a healthy sense of self-interest. All of them knew others.
Lubin remained skeptical, of course. Or at least, Clarke thought, he continued to act skeptical. It was part of his schtick. It had to be. Nobody would honestly turn their back on the chance, however faint, to undo even a part of what—
—what I set in motion...
There was the rub, and Lubin—God damn him—knew it as well as she did. Once you've helped destroy the world, once you've taken fierce stinging pleasure in its death throes, it's not easy to claim the moral high ground over someone who's merely reluctant to save it. Even if it's been a while. Even if you've changed in the meantime. If there's a Statute of Limitations on terracide, there's no way it expires after a lousy five years.
Taka Ouellette had proposed a southern course towards whatever was left of Portland; and even if there was no way into the datapipe from there, Boston would be that much closer. Besides, Ouellette was an official person in these parts, someone with recognized credentials and identity. Almost an authority figure, by local standards. She might even be able to walk them in through the front door.
"Authority figures don't drive around handing out derms from the back of a truck," Lubin said.
"Yeah? And what have your efforts netted us lately? You still think you can hack into the global nervous system when all the back-door nerves have been burned away?"
In the end he agreed, with conditions. They would go along with Ouellette's plan so long as it took them in the right direction. They would make use of her MI after every counterintrusion device had been ripped out of the cab; he would ensure her cooperation while she advised Clarke on the necessary monkeywork.
The MI's cab was a marvel of spatial economy. Twin cots folded down in the space behind the seats, and a little shower/head cubicle squeezed into the rear wall between a Calvin cycler and the forward medical interface. But what really amazed Clarke was the number of booby traps infesting the place. There were gas canisters hooked into the ventilation system. There were taser needles sheathed in the seat cushions, ready to shoot through flesh and insulative clothing at a word or a touch. There was a photic driver under the dash, a directional infrared strobe that could penetrate closed eyelids and induce seizures. Taka Ouellette itemized them all, Lubin standing at her back, while Clarke scrambled about with a toolkit and pulled the plugs. Clarke had no way of knowing if the list was comprehensive—for all she knew, Ouellette was leaving an ace up her sleeve against future necessity—but Lubin was a lot less trusting than she was, and Lubin seemed satisfied.
It took them an hour to disarm the cab. After Ouellette asked if they wanted to disable external security as well, she actually seemed disappointed when Lubin shook his head.
They split up. Lubin would pilot Phocoena down the coast and try to access Portland independently; Clarke, keeping a copy of the ß-max sequence close to her chest, would accompany Ouellette towards a rendezvous near one of her regular waypoints.
"Don't tell her about ß-max before you have to," Lubin warned, safely out of Ouellete's earshot.
"Why not?"
"Because it defeats the only defense anyone's ever been able to muster against ßehemoth. The moment she realizes something like that exists, her priorities are going to turn upside down."
Clarke was initially surprised that Lubin would let either of them out of his sight; he wasn't fond of potential security breaches even without his kill reflex engaged, and he knew Clarke was chafing against his mission priorities. He wasn't a trusting soul at the best of times; how did he know that the two women wouldn't simply turn inland and abandon him altogether?
It was only when they'd gone their separate ways that the obvious answer occurred to her. Of course, he'd been hoping for that very thing.
They drove through a land blasted and scoured clean of any live thing. The MI, built for rough terrain, climbed over fallen tree trunks that crumbled beneath its wheels. It navigated potholes filled with ash and soot, drove straightaways where swirls and gusts of gray powder swept across the refrozen asphalt like tiny Antarctic blizzards, centimeters high. Twice they passed deranged billboards half-melted against the rock, their lattices warped and defiantly semifunctional, advertising nothing now but the flickering multicolored contours of their own heat stress.
After a while it began to rain. The ash congealed like paste on the ground, stuck to the hood like blobs of papier maché. Some of those blobs were almost heavy enough to thwart the windshield, leaving light smudges on the glass before the static field bounced them away.
They didn't exchange a word during that whole time. Unfamiliar music filled the silence between them, archaic compositions full of clonking pianos and nervous strings. Ouellette seemed to like the stuff, anyway. She focused on driving while Clarke stared out the window, reflecting on the allocation of damage. How much of this devastation could be laid at her door? How much at the doors of demons who'd adopted her name?
Eventually they left the scorched zone behind. Now there was real grass at the side of the road, occasional shrubs pocking the ditches further back, real evergreens looming like ranks of ragged, starving stickmen on the other side. Mostly brown, of course, or turning brown, as though in the grip of a great endless drought.
This rain wouldn't help them. They were hanging on—some even flew flags of hardy, defiant green from their limbs—but ßehemoth was everywhere, and it was implacable, and it had all the time in the world. Sometimes it mass
ed so abundantly that it was visible to the naked eye: patches of ochre mould smothering the grass, or spreading across the trunks of trees. And yet, the sight of all this vegetation—not truly alive, perhaps, but at least physically intact—seemed cause for some small celebration after the charnel house they'd just escaped.
"So, do you ever take those out?" Ouellette wondered.
"Sorry?" Clarke brought herself back to the moment. The doctor had gone to autopilot—a simple follow-the-road mode, with no dangerous navigational forays into GPS.
"Those caps on your eyes. Do you ever...?"
"Oh. No. Not usually."
"Nightshades? Let you see in the dark?"
"Sort of."
Ouellette pursed her lips. "I remember seeing those, years ago. All over the place, just before everything went bad. They were really popular for about twenty minutes."
"They still are, where I come from." Clarke looked out the rain-spattered side window. "With my tribe, anyway."
"Tribe? You're not all the way from Africa?"
Clarke snorted softly. "Fuck no." Only about half the way, actually...
"Didn't think so. You don't have the melanin, not that that means much these days of course. And the Tutsis wouldn't be over here anyway, except maybe to gloat."
"Gloat?"
"Not that you can blame them, mind you. There's barely anyone left over there more than forty years old. Firewitch is pure poetic justice as far as they're concerned."
Clarke shrugged.
"So if not Africa," Ouellette said, pushing it, "maybe you're from Mars."
"Why would you say that?"
"You're definitely not from around here. You thought Miri was an ambulance." She patted the dashboard affectionately. "You don't know about the Lenies—"
Clarke clenched her teeth, suddenly angry. "I know about them. Nasty evolving code that lives in the Maelstrom and raises shit. Vengeance icon for a bunch of countries that hate your guts. And while we're on the subject, maybe you could explain how you came to be blundering around handing out derms and mercy-kills while the whole eastern hemisphere is trying to lob a cure for ßehemoth onto your head? Not being from Mars doesn't seem to have kept you all that up-to-speed on current events."