Maelstrom r-2

by Peter Watts

  We were lucky to get out in time, Rowan reflected.

  But they had, and here they were—several hundred corpses, essential support personnel, families and assorted hangers-on—termites dug in three kilometers down in a jumbled cluster of titanium/fullerene spheres, safely distant from the world outside, invisible to all but those with the very best technological eyes, the very best intel. It was an acceptable risk: most of those people were already down here.

  There was lots of headroom. There were two gymnasiums, half a dozen greenhouses and gardens thoughtfully distributed with an eye to redundancy in the unlikely event of a local implosion. Vats of acephalic organcloners with elongate telomeres. Three power plants that fed from a small geothermal vent—certified ßehemoth-free, of course—a nice safe twelve hundred meters on the far side of an interpositioned ridge. And somewhere out on that basalt escarpment lay a veritable junkyard of unassembled components, fragments of libraries and playgrounds and community centers, all squirreled away against some future less constrained by the need for speedy cowardice. In the meantime, Rowan had heard many residents of Atlantis complain about crowding.

  She felt somewhat less imposed upon than most. She'd seen the specs on the rifter stations.

  It was after midnight. The corridor lights were dimmed in some pale parody of a sunlit existence; most of the inhabitants, accepting the facade, had withdrawn into their apartments. Rowan's own husband and children were asleep. For some reason, though, she couldn't bring herself to go along with the pretense. What was the point? Natural sleep cycles wander all over the clock without a photoperiod to calibrate the hypothalamus. There was no sunlight here. They would never see sunlight again. Let it go, let it go.

  But this is temporary, they say. Something will beat ßehemoth, or somehow we'll learn to live with it. This deep dark pit is only a refuge, not a destiny. We'll be back, we'll be back, we'll be back…

  Sure.

  Sometimes, if she tried very hard, she could almost blind herself to the strings and teetering struts that kept those hopeful dreams from collapsing. Usually it was too much trouble, and she'd wander for hours along the empty twilit corridors in defiance of her own nostalgia. As she wandered now.

  Sometimes she passed windows, and paused. Something else Atlantis had that the rifters hadn't: clear parabolic blisters shaped to actually draw strength from the crushing pressure. The view was nothing to write home about, of course. A lozenge of gray bedrock, reflecting dim light from the viewport. Occasional blinking stars, beacons endlessly flashing here there be power lines or construction stockpile. Very rarely, a rattail or some other unremarkable creature. No monsters. Nothing remotely like the ravenous glowing predators that had once plagued the rifters at Beebe Station.

  Mostly just solid, unrelieved blackness.

  Sometimes Rowan would stare into that sightless void and lose track of time. Once or twice, she even thought she'd glimpsed something looking back. Her imagination, perhaps. Her own reflection, thrown back from some unexpected curve in the teardrop perspex.

  Maybe even her conscience. She could always hope.

  A nexus ahead, a dim space where several corridors converged like the arms of a starfish. A choice to be made. Turning left would keep her on the perimeter. All other roads led inward—to control centers, to lounges, to hollow ganglia where people accumulated even when the lights were down. Patricia Rowan had no wish for company. She stepped left.

  And stopped.

  An apparition stood before her in the corridor, a dark wraith with empty eyes. Seawater trickled down its skin, left small puddled footprints on the floor behind. The figure was female; she was as black as an ocean.

  The wraith reached up and split her face open. "Hi, Mom," she said.

  "Lenie Clarke." Rowan breathed the words.

  "You left the door unlocked," Clarke said. "I let myself in. Hope you don't mind."

  * * *

  Call for help, Rowan thought. She didn't move.

  Clarke glanced around the corridor. "Nice place. Very spacious." A cold, empty look at Rowan. "You got a great deal on this. You should've seen the dump we were in."

  Call for help, she's alone, she's—

  Don't be an idiot. She didn't get into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean by herself.

  "How did you find us?" Rowan said, and was relieved to hear dispassion in her voice.

  "Are you kidding? You have any idea how many resources you people had to allocate to set this place up? And on such a tight schedule, too. Did you really think you'd be able to cover your tracks?"

  "Most of them," Rowan admitted. "You'd have to be a 'lawbreaker to—"

  Desjardins. But we canceled his access…

  "Yeah, those crazy 'lawbreakers." Clarke shook her head. "You know, they're not quite so on-board as they used to be. We should talk about that some time."

  Rowan kept her voice level. "What do you want?"

  Clarke slapped her forehead in feigned epiphany. "Of course! I bet you're worried about ßehemoth, aren't you? What a waste, spending all those billions on this cozy little quarantine and all of a sudden here's Patient Zero taking a shit on the upholstery—"

  "What do you want?"

  Clarke stepped forward. Rowan didn't budge.

  "I want to talk to my mother," the rifter said softly.

  "Your mother's dead."

  "Well, that depends on your definition." Clarke steepled her fingers, considering. "Genetically, yes. My mother's dead. But someone made me, I think. Remade me. Someone took what I had and replaced it with something else." Her voice hardened. "Somebody twisted me around and built me to their own specs, and fucked up pretty much every step of the way, and after all that's what parents do. Isn't it?"

  Yes. Yes it is.

  "So anyway," Clarke continued, "I've been on this, well, sort of a pilgrimage I guess you'd call it. I've been looking for some answers from the person that really abused me all those years. I figured she'd have to be some kind of monster to do that. Big and mean and scary. But you're not. You're hiding, Mom. The world's going to hell and here you are, cringing and cowering and pissing your pants while the rest of us try and deal with the mess you made."

  "Don't you dare," Rowan snapped. "You arrogant pipsqueak, don't you fucking dare."

  Clarke looked back with the faintest trace of a smile on her lip.

  "You want to know who made the mess?" Rowan asked. "We tried to contain ßehemoth. We did everything possible, we tried to wipe it off the face of the earth before it ever got out, and who was fighting us every step of the way? Who let it out, Clarke? Who was spreading apocalypse every time she turned around, who was so hell-bent on her self-righteous crusade she didn't care who suffered? I'm not the angel of death. You are. I tried to save the world."

  "By killing me. By killing my friends."

  "Your friends? Your friends?" Rowan fought a giddy urge to laugh. "You blind, stupid little bitch! We took millions in collateral damage, do you understand? The refugees, the firestorms—I can't begin to count the people we killed to save the world from you. Did you even stop to think about the people who helped you? Do you know how many innocent fools got caught up in the myth, were falling over themselves to take a bullet for the great Lenie Clarke, and you know, some of them got their wish. And the rest—well, they're just as royally fucked by your grand crusade as anyone else." She sucked in breath through clenched teeth. "And you won, Clarke, are you happy? You won. We did everything we could do to stop you, and somehow it still wasn't enough, and now we've got our families to think of. We can't save the world, but at least we can save our own flesh and blood. And if you try to stop me from even doing that, I swear I'll kill you with my bare hands."

  Her eyes were stinging. Her face was wet. She didn't care.

  The rifter watched expressionlessly for a while. "You're welcome to it," she said at last.

  "Welcome—"

  "To your kids. Your life, this little hideyhole you've burrowed out for yourselves. Kee
p it. You're safe. I'm not even a vector any more."

  "What, don't you want your revenge? Isn't that what all this is about? Don't you want to drag us back to the surface kicking and screaming to face the music?"

  Clarke actually smiled a bit at that. "No need. You've already got a full orchestra down here." She shrugged. "You know, I owe you, in a way. If it hadn't been for you, I'd be just another drone in nine billion. Then you and your cronies came along and turned me into something that changed the world." She smiled again, a faint cold whisper of amusement. "Proud of me?"

  Rowan ignored the jibe. "So why are you here?"

  "Just a messenger," Clarke said, "telling you not to worry. You wanna stay here, that's just fine."

  "And?"

  "And don't ever try to come back."

  Rowan shook her head. "Going back was never part of the plan. You could've saved yourself the trip."

  "Your plans'll change the moment the situation does," the rifter said. "We're fighting for our lives up there, Rowan. We'd've stood a better chance if you c&c types hadn't got in and subverted the algorithm; you may have killed us already. But we could win. They say Anemone's a hellaciously powerful computing system, if we could only tame it."

  "Right. Anemone." Rowan wiped her face. "You know, I'm still not convinced it even exists. Sounds too much like pseudomystical wish-fulfillment to me. Like Gaia. Or The Force."

  Clarke shrugged. "If you say so."

  She's never even heard of them, Rowan thought. Her past is irrelevant, her future's nonexistent, her present is hell on earth.

  "And how do you expect a gang of electronic wildlife to get your biosphere back?" she said.

  "Not my department." That shrug again. "But they say we're its—natural environment, somehow. It depends on us for survival. Maybe, if we can make it realize that, it'll protect us."

  Only if it's smarter than we were. Rowan managed a grim smile. "Praise be to Anemone. Will you be erecting shrines?"

  "You'll never know," Clarke said. "Because there's no room for you up there if we win."

  "You won't win," Rowan said.

  "Then there won't be room for us either. Doesn't change your situation any."

  Sure it does. She knows where we are. Others must know. Even if she leaves us alone, how many others might want their piece of retribution?

  I know I would.

  Rowan stared at the woman in front of her. On the outside, Lenie Clarke was small. A skinny little girl. Nowhere near as big and mean and scary as she was inside.

  "Who are you speaking for, Ms. Clarke? Are you just signing off on us personally, or are you presuming to speak for the whole world?"

  "I'm speaking for the union," said the mermaid.

  "The union."

  "The ones watching you. Me, and Ken, and everyone else walking around with tubes in their chests after your great experiment went south. The union. It's an old TwenCen word. Thought you might recognize it."

  Rowan shook her head. Even now, I underestimate her.

  "So you're just going to—stand guard out there?"

  Clarke nodded.

  "To make sure the old dangerous infection doesn't get out into the world again?"

  A smile. A tilt of the head, saluting the metaphor.

  "How long? Six months? Ten years?"

  "As long as it takes. Don't worry, we can manage. We'll do it in shifts."

  "Shifts."

  "You made a lot of us, Pat. Maybe you lost count. And we've got a pretty narrow-band skill set, there aren't a whole lot of other things for us to do anyway."

  "I'm—sorry," Rowan blurted out.

  "Don't be." Lenie Clarke turned to the viewport and leaned forward. Her eyes shone, blank but not empty. One hand reached up and touched the darkness.

  "We were born to this place," she said.

  Epilog: Sleeping by firelight

  The soft, muffled sounds filtering from the office are not English. They're barely even human. Martin Perreault follows them across the threshold to whatever remains of his wife.

  She hasn't allowed him in here for months. At first she was merely impatient at his presence, accusing him of all manner of trivial distraction; later she would shout at every intrusion, push him away with hands and words and even—occasionally—thrown objects. "Can't you see it all coming apart?" she raged then. "Can't you see past your own lousy spectrum? Can't you see she needs help?"

  Finally—after the people had arrived at the door with their glittering ConTacs and their quiet relentless words and that small, softy-humming pacification 'fly hovering at their shoulders, just in case—finally Sou Hon lost even the pretence of official sanction. She never saw them coming; the dart was in her neck before she'd even turned in her chair. When she woke again her office was half-gutted: every motor nerve torn out, every voice-channel squelched at source. Every breath of influence she'd ever had, lost.

  It was like being paralyzed from the neck down, she said. She blamed him. He'd let them in. He hadn't protected her. He had collaborated.

  Martin didn't argue. It was all true.

  What scared him most at that point was not the accusations and the recriminations, but the flat and affectless voice in which Sou-Hon made them. The woman who had screamed at him had somehow been submerged; the thing that spoke in her place might have been made of liquid nitrogen. It withdrew to what remained of its office, and it said in matter-of-fact tones that it would kill Martin Perreault if he ever went in there again, and it calmly closed the door in his face.

  No charges have been pressed. The people with the glittering eyes spoke understandingly of Sou-Hon's recent trauma, of her current distraught and muddled state. She had been used by others, they said. Many had been. She was as much victim as offender. No need to punish the poor woman—better that she should get help, now that she was no longer a danger to others.

  Martin Perreault doesn't know if he believes that. Mercy is not something he's come to expect from such people. He thinks it more likely that the rumors are true, that the resources simply don't exist to prosecute Sou-Hon and her fellow criminals. She is legion.

  Perhaps that is also why the people with the glittering eyes settled for mere paralysis; they could have blinded and deafened Martin's wife as well, but cutting those nerves would have taken fifteen minutes instead of five. Perhaps they can't spare even that much time; perhaps there are so many subversives that the system has to run as fast as it can to keep them merely hamstrung.

  Besides, Sou-Hon Perreault can no longer affect events in the real world. What harm can she do by watching?

  Now she's not even doing that. She's curled up the floor, making soft mewing noises. Her displaced headset lies halfway across the room. She doesn't seem aware that she's lost it. She doesn't seem aware of Martin's presence.

  He strokes her face, murmurs her name, flinches in anticipation of violence or sudden disdain. None comes. She doesn't react at all. He kneels, slips his arms beneath her legs and around her shoulders; she barely seems to weigh anything. She shifts in his arms as he lifts, buries her face in his chest. Still she doesn't speak.

  After he tucks her into bed he returns to her office. Sou-Hon's discarded headset spills a diffuse tangle of shifting light across the carpet. Sliding the hardware onto his own skull, he comes face to face with a satcam view of western N'Am. It seems strangely opaque; the hemisphere's in darkness, none of the usual enhancements brightening the view. City clusters sparkle up from SoCal and the Queen Charlottes like galactic cores; the Midwest is a diffuse glow of underlit clouds. The Dust Belt intrudes from the east like a dark tumor. All features crude and raw, a naked-eye view unbolstered by radar or infrared; not like Sou-Hon at all, to restrict her sensory window this way. The only tactical enhancements are some sort of timer running off to one side and a bright overlay a few hundred kilometers east of the Pacific, a sparkling orange line paralleling the coast from SoCal up to BC. Even that lacks the precise delineation of most computer graphics—the line seems f
uzzy, even broken in places. Martin zooms on the view, zooms again. Resolution and brightness increase: the orange line swells and sparkles and writhes—

  It is not an overlay.

  +56h14m23s the timer says, incrementing before his eyes.

  It doesn't make any sense; how could any fire could burn so brightly, for so long? Surely the flames have consumed everything by now, reduced all combustibles to ash and everything else to slag. Yet somehow it keeps going, as if in defiance of physics itself.

  There: along the eastern boundary, a patch of relative darkness where the flames seem to be burning out. Martin watches it spread with a kind of dumb relief, until the swollen black torus of a heavy lifter passes between earth and sky. To the satcam it looks like the shadow of Mercury crossing a sunspot, but even at this range there's no mistaking the bright trail it spreads behind it. The dying flames leap high in its wake, forcibly resurrected.

  They're not letting it die, he realizes. The fire burns on endless life-support, from Oakland to Kitimat, and Martin Perreault knows with sudden dull certainty that a course has been set for it to follow.

  East.

  He leaves the office for a few moments, returning with a toolbox from his hobby room. He unlatches every access panel he can, smashes open the rest. He calmly dismembers each and every piece of equipment remaining in the room, cutting fiberop, pouring acid into computational organics, smashing crystals with a pneumatic hammer. Then he pads down the hall to the bedroom. Sou Hon is asleep at last, curled into a fetal ball. He cocoons her from behind, wrapping her flesh in his, and stares off into darkness while the real world falls asleep around him.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks first for the forebearance: to Mike Brander, one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet, for not sueing me after I inadvertently named a psychopath after him in the last book.

  Thanks next for the help: Laurie Channer, Nalo Hopkinson, Brent Hayward, and Bob Boyczuk all poked and prodded an embryonic stage of the first few chapters. Laurie also endured my endless stream-of-consciousness rambling as I tried to fit all the pieces together; hopefully her sacrifice has spared the rest of you from a similar fate. My agent, Don Maass, made a vital criticism of opening chapters which resulted in a whole new plot thread (and hopefully, less "straining for effect"). David Hartwell edited with his usual renowned acumen, even if he did force me to cut the exploding daddy scene. (In hindsight, I think that was a wise decision.)