by Peter Watts
"Actually," Desjardins remarked, "you’re a secretarial app. Pretty basic one, too."
Nothing disagreed.
"Okay then. Pocket whatever you've got and tag it the same way you tagged your invite. I'll pick it up on my next sweep and get back to you."
"Sorry," said the app. "That doesn't work from this end."
Of course not. "So what would work for you?"
"I'd like to meet."
"Fine. Name a time, I'll clear a channel."
"Face-to-face."
"Well, as I—you mean in person?"
"Yes."
"What for?"
"I'm suspicious by nature. I don't trust digital images. I can be at your location within forty-eight hours."
"Do you know my location?"
"No."
"You know, if I wasn't also suspicious by nature, I sure as shit would be now," Desjardins said.
"Then an interest in biochemistry is not all we have in common."
Desjardins hated it when apps did that—threw in little asides and lame witticisms to appear more human. Of course, Desjardins hated it when people did that, too.
"If you'd like to choose a place and time we could meet," the app told him, "I'll be sure to show up."
"How do you know I'm not quarantined?" For that matter, how do I know you're not? What am I getting into here?
"That won't be a problem."
"What are you really? Some kind of loyalty test Rowan's siccing on me?"
"I don't understand."
"Because it's really not necessary. A corpse of all people should know that." Whoever the app was negotiating for had to be corpse-level at least, to be so confident about travel clearances. Unless the whole thing was some kind of pointless and elaborate put-on.
"I'm not administering a loyalty test," the app replied. "I'm asking for a date."
"Okay, then. Pickering's Pile. Drink'n'drug in Sudbury, Ontario. Wednesday, 1930."
"That will be fine. How will I know you?"
"Not so fast. I think I'd rather approach you."
"That would be a problem."
"That is a problem. If you think I'm going to amble innocently into the clutches of someone who won't even give me their name, you're sadly in need of a patch."
"I'm sorry to hear that. However, it doesn't matter. We can still meet."
"Not if neither of us knows how to tag the other, we can't."
"I'll see you on Wednesday," the app told him. "Goodbye."
"Wait a second…"
No answer.
Oh, man. Someone was going to meet him on Wednesday. Someone who evidently could drop down onto any place under geosynch at 48 hours' notice. Someone who knew of a link between Channer Vent and ßehemoth, and who seemed to think they could find him without any identifiers at all.
Someone was going to meet him whether he wanted to or not.
Achilles Desjardins found that a little bit ominous.
Necrosis
There were places in the world that lived on the arteries between here and there; whatever they generated within wasn’t self-sustaining. When tourniqueted—a quarantine, a poisoned water table, the sheer indifference of citizens abandoning some industrial lost-cause—they withered and turned gangrenous.
Sometimes, eventually, the walls would come down. The quarantine would end or atrophy. Gates would open, or just rust away. But by then it was too late; the tissue was long since necrotic. No new blood flowed into the dead zone. Maybe a few intermittent flickers along underground cables, peripheral nerves where Maelstrom jumped the gap. Maybe a few people who hadn't gotten out in time, still alive; others arriving, not so much seeking this place as avoiding some other.
Lenie Clarke was in such a place now, a town full of wreckage and smashed windows and hollow eyes staring from buildings nobody had bothered to condemn. Whatever life was here did not, for the most part, take any notice of her passing. She avoided the obvious territorial boundaries: the toothless skulls of children significantly arranged along a particular curb; a half-mummified corpse, crucified upside-down beneath the cryptic phrase St. Peter the Unworthy; derelict vehicles that just happened to block this road or that—rusty barricades, herding the unwary toward some central slaughterhouse like fish in a weir.
Two days before she'd skirted a coven of do-gooders who'd been live-trapping derelicts as though they were field mice, forcibly injecting them with some kind of gene cocktail. Xanthoplast recipes, probably. Since then, she’d managed to avoid seeing anyone. She moved only at night, when her marvelous eyes gave her every advantage. She steered clear of the local headquarters and territorial checkpoints with their burning oil drums and their light poles and their corroded, semi-functional Ballard stacks. There were traps and hidden guard posts, manned by wannabes eager to make their way up the local hierarchy; they seeped slight infrared, or slivers of light invisible to mere meat. Lenie Clarke noted them a block away and changed course, their attendants never the wiser.
She was almost through the zone when someone stepped from a doorway ten meters ahead of her; a mongrel with dominant Latino genes, skin the color of slate in the washed-out light boosted through her eyecaps. Bare feet, shreds of sprayed-on plastic peeling from the soles. A firearm of some kind in one hand; two fingers missing. The other hand had been transformed into an improvised prosthetic, wrapped round and round in layers of duct tape studded with broken glass and rusty nails.
He looked directly at her with eyes that shone as white and empty as her own.
"Well," Clarke said after a moment.
His clubbed limb gestured roughly at the surrounding territory. "Not much, but mine." His voice was hoarse with old diseases. "There's a toll."
"I'll go back the way I came."
"No you won't.”
She casually tapped a finger against her wristwatch. She kept her voice low, almost subvocal: "Shadow."
"Funds transferred," the device replied.
Clarke sighed and sloughed off her pack. One corner of her mouth curled the slightest fraction.
"So how do you want me?" she asked.
* * *
He wanted her from behind, and he wanted her face in the dirt. He wanted to call her Bitch and cunt and stumpfuck. He wanted to cut her with his homebuilt mace.
She wondered if this could be called rape. She hadn't been offered a choice. Then again, she hadn't exactly said no, either.
He hit her when he came, backhanded her head against the ground with his gun hand, but the gesture had an air of formality about it. Finally, he rolled off of her and stood.
She allowed herself back inside then, let the distant observation of her own flesh revert again to first-hand experience. "So." She rolled onto her back, wiping the street from her mouth with the back of one hand. "How was I?"
He grunted and turned his attention to her pack.
"Nothing you want in there," she said.
"Uh-huh." Something caught his eye anyway. He reached in and pulled out a tunic of black shimmering fabric.
It squirmed in his hand.
"Shit!" He dropped it onto the ground. It lay there, inert. Playing dead.
"What the fuck…" he looked at Clarke.
"Party clothes," she said, getting to her feet. "Wouldn't fit you."
"Bullshit," the mongrel said. "It's that reflex copolymer stuff. Like Lenny Clarke wears."
She blinked. "What did you say?"
"Leonard Clarke. Deep Sea Gillman. Did the quake." He nudged the diveskin with one gnarled toe. "You think I don't know?" He raised his gun-hand to his face; the barrel touched the corner of an eyecap. "How you think I got these, eh? Not the first groupie in town."
"Leonard Clarke?"
"I said already. You deaf, or stupid?"
"I just let you rape me, asshole. So probably stupid."
The mongrel looked at her for an endless moment.
"You done this before," he said at last.
"More times than you can count."
"Get to maybe like it after a while?"
"No."
"You didn't fight."
"Yeah? How many do, with a gun to their heads?"
"You're not even scared."
"I'm too fucking tired. You gonna let me go, or kill me, or what? Anything but listening to more of this shit."
The mongrel took a hulking step forward. Lenie Clarke only snorted.
"Go," the mongrel said in a strange voice. Then added, absurdly: "Where you headed?"
She arched an eyebrow. "East."
He shook his head. "Never get through. Big quarantine. Goes halfway down to the Dust Belt." He pointed south, down a side street. "Better go 'round."
Clarke tapped her watch. "It's not listed."
"Then don't. Fuck lot I care."
Keeping her eyes up, Clarke bent down and picked up her tunic. The mongrel held her pack out by the straps, glancing down into its depths.
He tensed.
Her hand lunged into the pack like a striking snake, snatched out the billy. She held it underhand, pointed at his gut.
He stepped back, one hand still gripping the pack. His eyes narrowed to opalescent slits. "Why didn't you use it?"
"Didn't want to waste a charge. You're not worth it."
He eyed the empty sheath on her leg. "Why not keep it there? Where you can get it?"
"Now, if you'd had a kid with you…"
They regarded each other through eyes that saw everything in black and white.
"You let me." The mongrel shook his head; the contradiction almost seemed painful. "You had that, and you let me anyway."
"My pack," Clarke said.
"You—set me up." Dawning anger in that voice, and thick wonder.
"Maybe I just like it rough."
"You're contagious. You're a bughumper."
She wiggled the baton. "Give me my things and maybe you'll live long enough to find out."
"You stumpfuck." But he held out the pack.
For the first time she saw the webbing between the three stumpy digits of his hand, noticed the smooth scarless tips of the stubs. Not violence, then. No street-fight amputation. Born to it.
"You a pharm baby?" she asked. Maybe he was older than he looked; the pharms hadn't deliberately spread buggy genotypes for decades. Sure, defectives spent more than healthy people on fixes, but the global ambience was twisting babies into strange enough shapes on its own by then. Without the risk of consumer backlash.
"You are, aren't you?"
He glared at her, shaking with helpless fury.
"Good," she said, grabbing her pack. "Serves you fucking right."
Snare
The voice in Lubin's ear had lied.
He hadn't been outside N'AmPac since landfall. He hadn't been in Sevastopol or Philadelphia for years. He'd never been in Whitehorse, and from what he knew of the place he hoped he never would be.
But he could have been. The lie was plausible one, to someone who knew Lubin but not his current circumstances. Or maybe it hadn't been a deliberate lie. Maybe it had been a flawed guess, based on God knew what irrelevant stats. Maybe it had just been a bunch of random words shoveled together with more regard for grammar than veracity.
He wondered if he might have started the rumor himself. Before he left for Sudbury, he put that hypothesis to the test.
He logged back into Haven and began a new name search: Judy Caraco, Lenie Clarke, Alice Nakata, and Kenneth Lubin.
It was a different voice that accosted him this time. It spoke in soft, gentle tones, almost whispering. It showed no predilection for alliteration or nonsense rhyme. It tended to mispronounce hard consonants.
It called him Michael.
* * *
He suborbed to Toromilton, took a shuttle north from that city-state. Endless suburbs kept pace beneath him, spilling far from the megapolitan hub that had once kept them captive. The daily commute had ended decades before, and still the blight was spreading. The outside world passed uneventfully—there were only a few restricted zones in all of Ontario, and none were on his route.
The world inside was a bit more interesting. Deep in the seething chaos that was Maelstrom, rumors of Mike Brander's resurrection were beginning to sprout alongside tales of Lubin's own. Mike Brander had been seen in Los Angeles. Mike Brander had been seen in Lima.
Lubin frowned, a small expression of self-disgust. He'd given himself away with his own questions. Something in Haven had taken notice when he'd run searches on all Beebe crew members except himself. And why doesn't this user ask about Lubin, K.? Because this user must already know about Lubin, K.
Because this user is Lubin, K.
Lenie and Kenny are on the comeback trail.
His last troll through Haven, asking about everyone except Mike Brander, had provoked the same attention and the same simple logic. Now Mike Brander was alive and well and living in Maelstrom. QED.
What's doing this? Why?
Why didn't always enter into it, of course. Sometimes Maelstrom's wildlife would just grab onto popular threads to get around—steal keywords to blend in, sneak through filters by posing as part of the herd. Classic bandwagon effect, blind and stupid as evolution itself. That was why such strategies always fizzled after a while. The fad-of-the-moment would fade into obscurity, leaving poseurs with forged tickets to an empty ballroom. Or the gate-keepers would catch on; the more popular the disguise, the greater the incentive for countermeasures.
Wildlife would hitch a ride on existing rumors, if they were hot enough. Lubin had never heard of them starting rumors of their own before.
And why Lenie Clarke? An obscure life, an invisible death. Hardly the most contagious meme in the wires. Nothing to inspire any post-mortem legacy at all, in fact.
This was something new. Whatever it was, it was goal-directed, and it was using Lenie Clarke.
More than that. Now, it was using him.
* * *
Sudbury had arrived DOA in the twenty-first century. Decades of mining and a substrate of thin, poorly-buffered soil had seen to that. The Sudbury stacks had been the epicenter for one of the first really big acid blights in North American history. It was a benchmark of sorts.
Not that this was entirely a bad thing. Legend had it that lunar astronauts had once practiced in its scoured gray environs. And the area's lakes were truly beautiful, clear and blue and lifeless as chemically-treated toilet bowls. The substrate was relentlessly stable, planed and leveled by long-vanished glaciers; the west coast could fall into the ocean, but the Canadian Shield would last forever. Exotic alien lifeforms would disembark from tankers or lifters at the Industrial Horseshoe around Lake Ontario, wreak local havoc as they always had, but you'd have to be one tough chimera to get past the acid-washed outskirts of Sudbury, Ontario. Its dead zone was like a moat, a firebreak burned into the countryside by a hundred years worth of industrial poison.
It couldn't have suited CSIRA better if it had been planned. Here was a place resistant to the calamities that threatened the rest of the world, by virtue of having already lost anything of real value. The real estate was cheap, too; the nickel mine was long exhausted, and there'd been a vacuum in the local economy since the last of the fuel rods had been buried over in Copper Cliff.
The Entropy Patrol had filled that vacuum. The Sudbury office was one of the hemisphere's top ten.
It was no surprise to Ken Lubin that his quarry was stationed there. That mysterious searcher hadn't seemed to know the specifics of what he or she was after; the caches left behind in Haven had jumped fastest when queried on ecological impacts and sheer correlative epidemiology, slowest when asked about subcellular organelles or biochemical pathways. Not the spoor of someone following an intimately-known agent. More likely someone tracking a new and mysterious one.
Not a pharm, then. Someone with a more ecological perspective, and with—given their access to Haven—a great deal of clearance and autonomy. The Entropy Patrol had the only talent pool that fit.
One
good thing about the Patrol was that it was appropriately paranoid on matters of access. In a world dominated by the telecommute, 'lawbreakers dutifully made the daily real-world journey to a single vast, secure catacomb that plugged directly into Haven. Nobody would have been stupid enough to try and manage an entropy outbreak from a home terminal, even if it had been possible. At CSIRA, even the links into Maelstrom were insanely secure.
Which made tracking down employees quite straightforward. They all had to come through the foyer.
There was no listing of individual 'lawbreakers, of course. There was a listing of department heads, available through a small orchard of help kiosks in the main lobby. Once Lubin had what he needed, he stepped outside and headed to the nearest rapitrans stop.
* * *
Donald Lertzman was the archetypal middleman; his career had coasted to that comfortable plateau above those who actually did productive work, but safely short of a position where he had to make any vital decisions. Perhaps, on some level, he'd realized that. Perhaps a fully-detached house, hidden behind a hedgerow of acid-resistant blue spruce at the edge of the Sudbury Burn, was his way of compensating.
Of course, in this day and age he could hardly commute in his private vehicle. He knew the value of appearances; he'd built his livelihood on nothing else. Each night, therefore, he traversed the three blocks between his property and the nearest bus stop on foot. Approximately twenty percent of that distance was out of public view.
"Excuse me, are you Donald Lertzman?"
"Yes, who—"
Lubin carefully noted the medic alert plug-in on Lertzman's wristwatch. It would raise the alarm if his vitals showed any indication of ongoing distress. Of course, a body's stress responses don't just kick in by themselves—they have to be activated by the perception of threat or injury. Most of those signals run through the spinal cord.
Ten minutes after failing to introduce himself, Lubin knew who he was looking for; he knew where to find him; he knew when that person's shift ended. He knew more than he needed, for the moment.
His scheduled meeting at Pickering's Pile was twenty-six hours away. Lubin didn't know if he wanted to wait that long. For that matter, there was no guarantee that this Achilles Desjardins would even show up.