by Peter Watts
The woman with the machinery inside had worn a GA shoulder patch. Maybe only five deaths, then. And one survivor, who'd somehow made it across three hundred kilometers of open ocean.
A survivor who, for some reason, did not wish to be found.
The rumors were metastasizing. No longer a diver from a kelp farm. A mermaid, now. An avatar of Kali. Some said she spoke in tongues; others, that the tongue was only English. There were stories of altercations, violence. The mermaid had made enemies. The mermaid had made friends. The mermaid had been attacked, and had left her assailants in pieces on the shore. Perreault smiled skeptically; a banana slug was more prone to violence than a Stripper.
The mermaid lurked in the foul waters offshore. The sharks did her bidding; at night she would come onto land and steal children to feed to her minions. Someone had foretold her coming, or perhaps merely recognized it; a prophet, some said. Or maybe just a man almost as insane as the woman he ranted about. His name was Amitav.
Somehow, none of these events had been seen by the local botflies. That alone made Perreault discount ninety percent of them. She began to wonder how much her own questions had been feeding the mill. Information, she'd read once, became self-propagating past a certain threshold.
Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.
One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.
Corpse
It was no big deal, of course. Someone died every half-second, according to the stats. Some of them had to die on his shift. So what? On any given day, Achilles Desjardins saved ten people for every one he killed. Anybody who wanted to complain about those kind of stats could go fuck themselves.
Actually, that was pretty much what he wanted to do just then. If only the clientele wasn't so bloody TwenCen.
Pickering's Pile was a cylinder inside a cube, sunk fifty meters into the scoured granite of the Canadian Shield. The cube had been built as a repository for nuclear waste just before the permafrost had started melting; NIMBY and the northward spread of civilization had denied it that destiny. The same factors, however, had made it a profitable site for a subterranean drink'n'drug. The Pile had been constructed within a transparent three-story acrylic tube suspended in the main chamber; the space beyond had been flooded and stacked with lightsticks mimicking the cobalt glow of spent fuel rods. Iridescent butterflies flittered about, their wings bouncing data back and forth in pinpoint sparkles. Poison-arrow frogs clambered wetly in little tanks at each table, tiny glistening jigsaws of emerald and ruby and petroleum-black.
It was peaceful down there. The Pile was an inside-out aquarium, a cool green grotto. Desjardins descended into its depths whenever he needed a lift. Now he sat at the circular bar on the second level and wondered how to avoid sex with the woman at his elbow.
He knew the subject was going to come up. Not because he was particularly good-looking, which he wasn't. Not because his last name made people think he was Quebecois, which he had been, once. No, he'd been targeted because he'd admitted to this dark leggy Rorschach—Gwen, she'd called herself—that he was a 'lawbreaker, and she thought that was cool. She didn't seem to recognize him from his brief flash of media stardom; that had been nearly two years ago, and people these days seemed hard-pressed to remember what they'd had for supper the night before. It didn't matter. Achilles Desjardins had acquired a fan.
Not that she was a bad-looking fan, mind you. Thirty seconds into their conversation he'd started wondering what she'd look like bent over the ottoman in his living room. Thirty seconds after that he'd mentally sketched out a pretty good artist's conception. He wanted her, all right; he just didn't want her.
Oddly, she was dressed like one of those deep-diving cyborgs out of N'AmPac.
The disguise was evocative, if superficial: a black lycra body stocking extending seamlessly from toes to neck to fingertips; decorative accessories representing suit controls and outcroppings of implanted hardware; even an ID patch with the Grid Authority logo beveled onto the shoulder. The eyes didn't quite work, though. Real rifters wore corneal overlays that turned their eyes into blank white balls. Gwen was wearing some sort of gauzy oversize contacts instead. They masked the irises well enough, but judging by the way she had to keep leaning in to stare at him they weren't cutting it in the photoamp department.
She had great cheekbones, though, a wide mouth, lips so sharply-defined you could cut yourself on their edges. Her company in this casual and public venue was all he wanted. Enough time to learn the features, savor the smells, commit her to memory. Maybe even make friends. That would be more than enough; he could fill in the blanks himself, later. Fire them, too.
"I can't believe how much you have to deal with," she was saying. A wriggling mesh of undersea light played across her face. "The plagues, the blights, the system crashes. All your responsibility."
"Not all mine. There's a bunch of us."
"Still. Life-and-death decisions. Split-second timing." Her hand brushed his forearm; the wing of a black moth. "Lives lost if you make the wrong move."
"Or even the right one, sometimes." He'd met lots of Gwens before. Like any K-selecting mammalian female, she was attracted to resource-holders—or more proximately in the case of genus Homo, power. She probably assumed, because he could shut down a city at will, that he must have some.
A common mistake among K-selectors. Desjardins generally took his time about disabusing them.
She grabbed a derm from a nearby tray, looked inquiringly at Desjardins. He shook his head. He had to be careful what recreational chemicals he stuck into his body; too many potential interactions with the professional ones already bubbling away in there. Gwen shrugged, stuck the derm behind her ear.
"How do you handle the responsibility?" she went on. "Hell, how do you even get the responsibility?" She tossed back her drink. "All the corpses and kings and policy-makers, they can't even agree what color to paint the bathrooms at the UR. Why'd they all agree to give God-like powers to you, exactly? You infallible or something?"
"Fuck no." Fleeting across his cortex, an unwelcome thought: I wonder how many people I killed today. "I just—I do my best."
"Yeah, but how do you even convince them of that? What's to stop you from crashing an airplane to get back at your boss? How do they know you're not going to use all that power to get rich, or to help out your buddies, or kill a corporation because you don't agree with its politics? What keeps you in line?"
Desjardins shook his head. "You wouldn't believe it."
"Bet I can guess."
"So guess."
"Guilt Trip, right? And Absolution?"
He laughed to cover his surprise.
Gwen laughed with him, reached into the nearest terrarium and stroked one of the jeweled frogs inside (they'd been tweaked to secrete mild psychoactives through the skin). Her shoulder was against his by the end of the maneuver. She waved off a couple of butterflies that were sniffing her for signs of actionable impairment. "I hate those things."
"Well, you are mixing your chemicals a bit. Not too good for the ambience if you throw up all over the bar."
"Aren't you all lawnorder." She rubbed thumb against forefinger to grind the frog juice into her skin. "Not to mention avoiding the subject."
"Subject?"
"Guilt Trip, remember?" She leaned in close: "I hear things, you hear things. Some sort of retrovirus, right? Forces you to behave yourself, right down in the brainstem."
She was guessing. She didn't know about the chemistry of guilt. Tell her about the interaction of GSH and synaptic vesicle and she'd probably give you a blank look. She didn't know about Toxoplasma tweaks or the little ass-backwards blobs of reverse transcriptase that got the whole ball rolling. She didn't know, and even if she did, she didn't. You couldn't know about that stuff until you actually felt it in you.
Retrovirus was all she knew, and she wasn't even sure about that.
"Nope," he told her. "Wrong. Sorry." He wasn't even lying. The virus was only the carrier.
She rolled her eyes. "I knew you wouldn't tell me. They nev—I knew it."
"So why the diver get-up?" Suddenly, changing the subject seemed like a good idea.
"Rifter chic." The corner of her mouth lifted in a half-smile. "Solidarity through fashion."
"What, rifters are political now?"
She seemed to perk up a bit. "You remember. You can't spend all your time saving the world."
He didn't. And there had been a bit of a flap a few months before, after some ferret-nosed journalist had managed to sneak the story past the N'AmWire censors. Turned out the GA'd been recruiting incest victims and war vets to run their deep-sea geothermal stations—the theory being, those best suited to the chronic stress of that environment were those who'd been (how had the spinners put it?) preconditioned since childhood. There'd been the usual squeals of public outrage, everything from how dare you exploit society's victims for the sake of a few Megawatts to how dare you turn the power grid over to a bunch of psychos and post-trauma head cases.
It had been quite the scandal for a while. But then some new strain of equine encephalitis had swept through the Strip, and someone had traced it to a bad batch of contraceptives in the cyclers. And now, of course, with everybody still reeling after the Quake out west, people had pretty much forgotten the rifters and their problems.
At least, he'd thought they had. But now there was this woman at his side, and whatever outlets she took her fashion cues from—
"Listen," she said. "I bet you get tired, fighting the forces of entropy all the time. Want to take a break and obey the second law of thermodynamics for a change?"
"Entropy's not a force. Common misconception."
"Stop talking so much. They've got rooms downstairs. I'll pay for the first hour."
Desjardins sighed.
"What?" Gwen said. "Don't tell me you're not interested—your vitals have been horning up since the moment I arrived." She tapped one of the accessories on her outfit—a biotelemetry pickup, he noticed belatedly.
He shrugged. "True enough."
"So what's the problem? Didn't take your pills today? I'm clean." She showed him the tattoos on her inner wrist; she'd been immunized against an arsenal.
"Actually, I—I just don't go out much."
"No shit. Come on." Gwen laid a hand firmly on his arm.
"For two reasons," said a female voice at his back, "I'm guessing that Killjoy here is about to turn you down. Don't take it personally."
Desjardins briefly closed his eyes. "I thought you didn't indulge."
One-point-seven meters of skinny trouble-making Filipino stepped into view. "I'm Alice," she said to Gwen.
"Gwen," said Gwen to Alice.
"Reason number one," Jovellanos continued, "is that he's just been called in."
"You're kidding," Desjardins said. "I just got off."
"Sorry. They want you back in, let's see—" Jovellanos glanced at her wrist—"seven minutes now. Some corpse actually flew out from N'AmPac just to see you in person. You can imagine their frustration when they discovered you'd turned your watch off."
"It's past curfew. Just being a good citizen." Which was utter detritus, of course: 'lawbreakers were exempt from such restrictions. Sometimes Desjardins just didn't want to be found.
Obviously a forlorn hope. He pushed himself back from the bar and stood up, spreading his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Sorry. Nice meeting you, though."
"Reason number two," Gwen said to Jovellanos, ignoring him.
"Oh, right. Killjoy here doesn't fuck real people. Considers it disrespectful." Jovellanos tilted her head in his direction, a fractional bow. "Not that he doesn't have the instincts, of course. I bet he's been taking stereos of you since the moment you sat down."
Gwen looked an amused challenge at him.
Desjardins shrugged. "I'll wipe 'em if you've got any objections. I was going to ask anyway."
She shook her head; that enticing half-smile played faintly across her face. "Have fun. Maybe they'll even get you interested in the real thing after a while."
"Better hope not," Jovellanos remarked. "You probably wouldn't like what he's into."
* * *
Complex Systems Instability-Response Authority: the words hung at the back of the lobby like a glowing uvula, a vain and bureaucratic demand for respect. Nobody ever bothered to speak them aloud, of course; few even shortened it down to CSIRA, which the corpses would gladly have settled for. Nope. The Entropy Patrol. That was the name that had stuck. You could almost see the space-cadet uniforms. Desjardins had always thought that saving the world should engender a bit more respect.
"What makes you such an enculé today?" he grumbled as they stepped into the elevator.
Jovellanos blinked. "Sorry?"
"That whole scene back there."
"Don't you believe in truth in advertising? You don't hide any of that stuff. Mostly."
"I like to control the flow rate, though. Jesus." He punched Admin-6. "Your timing was shitty."
"My timing was great. They want you upstairs now, Killjoy. I don't think I've ever seen Lertzman quite so invested in anything before. If I'd waited for you to go through your usual non-mating dance we'd have been down there 'til the icecaps refroze. Besides, you've got a real problem saying no. You could've ended up fucking her just to keep from hurting her feelings."
"I don't think her feelings are all that fragile."
"So what? Yours are."
The doors opened. Desjardins stepped through. Jovellanos hung back.
He looked at her, a trifle impatiently. "I thought we were in a hurry."
She shook her head. "You are. I'm not cleared for this. They just sent me to get you."
"What?"
"Just you."
"That's bullshit, Alice."
"They're being paranoid about this, Killjoy. I told you. Invested."
The doors slid shut.
* * *
He stuck his finger into the bloodhound, winced at a brief stabbing pain. A physical sample. They weren't even trusting distance spec today.
After a moment an executive summary scrolled down the wall in three columns. On the left, a profile: blood type, pH, gas levels. On the right, an itemized list: platelets, fibrinogen, rbcs & wbcs, antibodies, hormones. All the parts of his lifeblood that had come from nature.
In the center, another list, somewhat shorter: the parts that had come from CSIRA.
Desjardins had learned to read the numbers, after a fashion. Everything looked in order. Of course, it was nice to have independent confirmation: the door in front of him was opening, and none of the others were slamming shut.
He stepped into the boardroom.
Three people were arrayed at the far end of the conference table. Lertzman sat in his usual seat at the head; to his left was a short blond woman Desjardins hadn't seen before. Which meant nothing, of course—he didn't know most of the people in admin.
To the blonde's left, another woman. Desjardins didn't know her either. She looked back at him through eyes that literally glittered—tactical contacts. She was only partly in the room. The rest of her was watching whatever overlays those lenses served up. At the edges of her mouth and around her mercurial eyes, faint lines and a slight droop to the right eyelid; otherwise the face was a pale and featureless sketch, a CaucAsian wash. Her dark hair grayed at the temples, a discoloration that seemed to spread infinitesimally as he watched.
The corpse from N'AmPac. Had to be.
Lertzman rose expectantly. The blonde started to follow his lead; halfway out of her chair she glanced at N'AmPac. N'AmPac did not stand. The blonde hesitated, wavered, sat back down. Lertzman cleared his throat and followed suit, waving Desjardins to a seat opposite the two women.
"This is Patricia Rowan," Lertzman said. When, af
ter a few moments, it became obvious that nobody was going to introduce the blonde, Desjardins said, "Sorry to keep you waiting."
"On the contrary," Rowan said softly; she sounded tired. "I'm sorry to drag you back here on your down time. Unfortunately, I'm only in town for a few hours." She tapped commands into a control pad on the table in front of her. Tiny lights scrolled across her eyes. "So. The famous Achilles Desjardins. Savior of the Med."
"I just did the stats," he said. "And they only—postponed the inevitable for a few months."
"Don't sell yourself short," the corpse said. "Mean event resolution thirty-six point eight minutes. That's excellent."
Desjardins acknowledged with a nod.
"The metabase," Rowan continued. "Plagues. Brushfires. Traffic flow. And even setting the Mediterranean aside for the moment, I'm told your projections helped a lot in keeping the Gulf Stream going. A few people have you beat in Maelstrom, certainly, but you've got the edge in biocontainment, economics, industrial ecology—"
Desjardins smiled to himself. Typical old-school: she actually thought she was ticking off a list of different subjects.
"At any rate," the corpse continued, "You seem to be the best local candidate for what we have in mind. We're taking you off your normal rotation and putting you onto a special project, with Dr. Lertzman's approval of course."
"I think we could probably spare him," Lertzman said, embracing the pretense that his opinion mattered. "In fact, after today I imagine Achilles would probably want to leave Maelstrom behind for a while."
Enculé. The sentiment was almost a reflex where Lertzman was concerned.
Rowan again: "There's a biological event we'd like you to keep an eye on. New soil microbe, from the looks of it. So far it's had a relatively minor impact—almost negligible, in fact, but the potential, is, well…" She inclined her head toward the blonde on her right; on cue, that woman tapped her wristwatch. "If you'd open for download…"
Desjardins tapped the requisite shorthand onto his wrist; transfer protocols flickered briefly across his field of view.