by Peter Watts
“Maybe you could save the lecture until you straighten that out for me?” She points to where her squid, listing drunkenly, describes small erratic circles in the overhead darkness. “I don’t think I’m gonna be swimming home with this leg.”
He coasts up and wrests the vehicle back under control. “We have to bring it back,” he says, riding it down to her. “All of it,” with a nod to Lopez’s gutted remains.
“It’s not necessarily what you think,” she tells him.
He turns and jackknifes into Impossible Lake, on the trail of his own squid. Clarke watches his rippling image kicking hard, fighting against buoyancy.
“It’s not ßehemoth,” she buzzes softly. “It’d never survive the trip.” Her voice is as calm as such mechanical caricatures can be out here. Her words sound reasonable. Her thoughts are neither. Her thoughts are caught in a loop, a mantra borne of some forlorn subconscious hope that endless repetition might give substance to wishes:
It can’t be it can’t be it can’t be…
Here on the sunless slopes of the Mid Atlantic Ridge, facing consequences that have somehow chased her to the very bottom of the world, denial seems the only available option.
Portrait of the Sadist as a Young Boy
Achilles Desjardins wasn’t always the most powerful man in North America; at one time he’d been just another kid growing up in the shadow of Mont St-Hilaire. He had always been an empiricist though, an experimenter at heart for as long as he could remember. His first encounter with a research-ethics committee had occurred when he was only eight.
That particular experiment had involved aerobraking. His parents, in a well-intentioned effort to interest him in the classics, had introduced him to The Revenge of Mary Poppins. The story itself was pretty stupid, but Achilles liked the way the Persinger Box had slipped the butterfly-inducing sensation of flight directly into his brain. Mary Poppins had this nanotech umbrella, see, and she could jump right off the top of the CN Tower and float to earth as gently as a dandelion seed.
The illusion was so convincing that Achilles’ eight-year-old brain couldn’t see why it wouldn’t work in real life.
His family was rich—all Quebecois families were, thanks to Hudson Hydro—so Achilles lived in a real house, a single stand-alone dwelling with a yard and everything. He grabbed an umbrella from the closet, let it bloom, and—clutching tightly with both hands—jumped off the front porch. The drop was only a meter and a half, but that was enough; he could feel the umbrella grabbing at the air above him, slowing his descent.
Buoyed by this success, Achilles moved on to Phase Two. His sister Penny, two years younger, held him in almost supernatural esteem; it was dead easy to talk her into scrambling up the trellis and onto the roof. It took a bit more effort to coax her to the very peak of the gable, which must have been a good seven meters above ground—but when your big-brother-who-you-idolize is calling you a chickenshit, what are you supposed to do? Penny inched her way to the apex and stood teetering at the edge, the dome of the umbrella framing her face like a big black halo. For a moment Achilles thought the experiment would fail: he had to bring out his ultimate weapon and call her “Penelope”—twice—before she jumped.
There was nothing to worry about, of course. Achilles already knew it would work; the umbrella had slowed him after all, even during a drop of a measly meter or so, and Penny weighed a lot less than he did.
Which made it all the more surprising when the umbrella snapped inside-out, whap!, right before his eyes. Penny dropped like a rock, landed on her feet with a snap and crumpled on the spot.
In the moment of complete silence that followed, several things went through the mind of eight-year-old Achilles Desjardins. First was the fact that the goggle-eyed look on Penny’s face had been really funny just before she hit. Second was confusion and disbelief that the experiment hadn’t proceeded as expected; he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what had gone wrong. Third came the belated realization that Penny, for all the hilarity of her facial expression, might actually be hurt; maybe he should try and do something about that.
Lastly, he thought of the trouble he was going to be in if his parents found out about this. That thought crushed the others like bugs under a boot.
He rushed over to the crumpled form of his sister on the lawn. “Geez, Penny, are you—are you—”
She wasn’t. The umbrella’s ribs had torn free of the fabric and slashed her across the side of the neck. One of her ankles was twisted at an impossible angle, and had already swollen to twice its normal size. There was blood everywhere.
Penny looked up, lip trembling, bright tears quivering in her eyes. They broke and ran down her cheeks as Achilles stood over her, scared to death.
“Penny—” he whispered.
“I—it’s okay,” she quavered. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.” And—broken and bleeding and teary-eyed, eyes brimming with undiminished adoration for Big Brother—she tried to get up, and screamed the instant she moved her leg.
Looking back as an adult, Desjardins knew that that couldn’t have been the moment of his first erection. It was, however, the first one that stuck in his mind. He hadn’t been able to help himself: she had been so helpless. Broken and bleeding and hurt. He had hurt her. She had meekly walked the plank for him, and after she’d fallen and snapped like a twig she’d looked up at him, still worshipful, ready to do whatever it took to keep him happy.
He didn’t know why that made him feel this way—he didn’t even know what this way was, exactly—but he liked it.
His willy hard as a bone, he reached out to her. He wasn’t sure why—he was grateful that she wasn’t going to tell, of course, but he didn’t think that’s what this was about. He thought—as his hand touched his sister’s fine brown hair—that maybe this was about seeing how much he could get away with...
Not much, as it turned out. His parents were on him in the next second, shrieking and striking. Achilles raised his hands against his father’s blows, cried “I saw it on Mary Poppins!”, but the alibi didn’t fly any more than Penny had; Dad kicked the shit out of him and threw him into his room for the rest of the day.
It couldn’t have ended any differently, of course. Mom and Dad always found out. It turned out the little bump that both Achilles and Penny had under their collarbones sent out a signal when either of them got hurt. And after the Mary Poppins Incident, not even the implants were enough for Mom and Dad. Achilles couldn’t go anywhere, not even the bathroom, without three or four skeeters following him around like nosy floating rice grains.
All in all, that afternoon taught him two things that shaped the rest of his life. One was that he was a wicked, wicked boy who could never ever give in to his impulses no matter how good it made him feel, or he would go straight to Hell.
The other was a profound and lifelong appreciation of the impact of ubiquitous surveillance.
Confidence Limits
There are no rifter MDs. The walking wounded don’t generally excel in the art of healing.
Of course, there’s never been any shortage of rifters in need of healing. Especially after the Corpse Revolt. The fish-heads won that war hands down, but they took casualties just the same. Some died. Others suffered injuries and malfunctions beyond the skill of their own off-the-shelf medical machinery. Some needed help to stay alive; others, to die in something less than agony.
And all the qualified doctors were on the other side.
No one was going to trust their injured comrades to the tender mercies of a thousand sore losers just because the corpses had the only hospital for four thousand klicks. So they grafted a couple of habs together fifty meters off Atlantis’s shoulder, and furnished it with medical equipment pillaged from enemy infirmaries. Fiberop let the corpses’ meatcutters practice their art by remote control; explosive charges planted on Atlantis’s hull inspired those same meatcutters to be extra careful in matters of potential malpractice. The losers took very good care of the winner
s, on pain of implosion.
Eventually tensions eased. Rifters stopped avoiding Atlantis out of distrust, and began avoiding it out of indifference instead. Gradually, the realization dawned that the rest of the world posed a greater threat to rifters and corpses alike than either did to the other. Lubin took down the charges somewhere during year three, when most everyone had forgotten about them anyway.
The medhab still gets a fair bit of use. Injuries happen. Injuries are inevitable, given rifter tempers and the derived weakness of rifter bones. But at the moment it holds only two occupants, and the corpses are probably thanking their portfolios that the rifters cobbled this facility together all those years ago. Otherwise, Clarke and Lubin might have dragged themselves into Atlantis—and everyone knows where they’ve been.
As it is, they only ventured close enough to hand off Irene Lopez and the thing that dined upon her. Two clamshell sarcophagi, dropped from one of Atlantis’s engineering locks on short notice, devoured that evidence and are even now sending their findings up fiberop umbilicals. In the meantime Clarke and Lubin lie side-by-side on a pair of operating tables, naked as cadavers themselves. It’s been a long time since any corpse dared give an order to a rifter, but they’ve acquiesced to Jerenice Seger’s “strong recommendation” that they get rid of their diveskins. It was a tougher concession than Clarke lets on. It’s not that simple nudity discomfits her; Lubin has never tripped Clarke’s usual alarms. But the autoclave isn’t just sterilizing her diveskin; it’s destroying it, melting it back down to a useless slurry of protein and petroleum. She’s trapped, naked and vulnerable, in this tiny bubble of gas and spun metal. For the first time in years, she can’t simply step outside. For the first time in years the ocean can kill her—all it has to do is crush this fragile eggshell and clench around her like a freezing liquid fist…
It’s a temporary vulnerability, of course. New diveskins are on the way, are being extruded right now. Clarke just has to hold out another fifteen or twenty minutes. But in the meantime she feels worse than naked. She feels skinned alive.
It doesn’t seem to bother Lubin much. Nothing does. Of course, Lubin’s teleop is being a lot less invasive than Clarke’s. It’s only taking samples: blood, skin, swabs from around the eyes and anus and seawater intake. Clarke’s machine is digging deep into the flesh of her leg, displacing muscle and resetting bone and waving its gleaming chopstick arms like some kind of chrome spider performing an exorcism. Occasionally the smell of her own cauterizing flesh wafts faintly up the table. Presumably her injury is under repair, although she can’t really tell; the table’s neuroinduction field has her paralyzed and insensate below the stomach.
“How much longer?” she asks. The teleop ignores her without dropping a stitch.
“I don’t think there’s anyone there,” Lubin says. “It’s on autopilot.”
She turns her head to look at him. Eyes dark enough to be called black look back at her. Clarke catches her breath; she keeps forgetting what naked really means, down here. What is it the drybacks say? The eyes are the windows to the soul. But the windows into rifter souls are supposed to have frosted panes. Uncapped eyes are for corpses: this doesn’t look right, it doesn’t feel right. It looks as though Lubin’s eyes have been pulled right out of his head, as though Clarke is looking into the wet sticky darkness inside his skull.
He rises on the table, oblivious to his own gory blindness, and swings his legs over the edge. His teleop withdraws to the ceiling with a few disapproving clicks.
A comm panel decorates the bulkhead within easy reach. He taps it. “Ambient channel. Grace. How are you coming with those ’skins?”
Nolan answers in her outdoor voice: “We’re ten meters off your shoulder. And yes, we remembered to bring extra eyecaps.” A soft buzz—acoustic modems are bad for background noise sometimes. “If it’s okay with you, though, we’ll just leave ’em in the ’lock and be on our way.”
“Sure.” Lubin’s face is expressionless. “No problem.”
Clanks and hisses from down on the wet deck.
“There you go, sweetie,” Nolan buzzes.
Lubin drills Clarke with those eviscerated eyes. “You coming?”
Clarke blinks. “Any place in particular?”
“Atlantis.”
“My leg—” but her teleop is folding up against the ceiling as she speaks, its slicing and dicing evidently completed.
She struggles to prop her upper body up on its elbows; she’s still dead meat below the gut, although the hole in her thigh has been neatly glued shut. “I’m still frozen. Shouldn’t the field—”
“Perhaps they were hoping we wouldn’t notice.” Lubin takes a handpad off the wall. “Ready?”
She nods. He taps a control. Feeling floods her legs like a tidal bore. Her repaired thigh awakens, a sudden tingling swarm of pins and needles. She tries to move it. She succeeds, with difficulty.
She sits up, grimacing.
“What’re you doing out there?” the intercom demands. After a moment, Clarke recognizes the voice: Klein. Shutting down the field seems to have caught his attention.
Lubin disappears into the wet room. Clarke kneads her thigh. The pins and needles persist.
“Lenie?” Klein says. “What—”
“I’m fixed.”
“No you’re not.”
“The teleop—”
“You have to stay off that leg for at least six more hours. Preferably twelve.”
“Thanks. I’ll take it under advisement.” She swings her legs over the edge of the table, puts some weight on the good one, gradually shifts weight to the other. It buckles. She grabs the table in time to keep from keeling over.
Lubin steps back into view, a carrysack slung over his shoulder. “You okay?” His eyes are capped again, white as fresh ice.
Clarke nods, strangely relieved. “Hand me that diveskin.”
Klein heard that. “Wait a second—you two have not been cleared for—I mean—”
The eyes go in first. The tunic slithers eagerly around her torso. Sleeves and gauntlets cling like welcome shadows. She leans against Lubin for support while she dons the leggings—the tingling in her thigh is beginning to subside, and when she tries out the leg again it takes her weight for a good ten seconds before giving out. Progress.
“Lenie. Ken. Where are you going?”
Seger’s voice, this time. Klein’s called for reinforcements.
“We thought we’d come for a visit,” Lubin says.
“Are you sure you’ve thought that through?” Seger says calmly. “With all due respect—”
“Is there some reason we shouldn’t?” Lubin asks innocently.
“Lenie’s l—”
“Beyond Lenie’s leg.”
Dead air in the room.
“You’ve analyzed the samples by now,” Lubin remarks.
“Not comprehensively. The tests are fast, not instantaneous.”
“And? Anything?”
“If you were infected, Mr. Lubin, it only happened a few hours ago. That’s hardly enough time for an infection to reach detectable levels in the bloodstream.”
“That’s a no, then.” Lubin considers. “What about our ’skins? Surely you would have found something on the diveskin swabs.”
Seger doesn’t answer.
“So they protected us,” Lubin surmises. “This time.”
“As I said, we haven’t finished—”
“I understood that ßehemoth couldn’t reach us down here,” he remarks.
Seger doesn’t answer that either, at first.
“So did I,” she says finally.
Clarke takes a half-hop towards the airlock. Lubin offers an arm.
“We’re coming over,” he says.
Half a dozen modelers cluster around workstations at the far end of the Comm Cave, running sims, tweaking parameters in the hopes that their virtual world might assume some relevance to the real one. Patricia Rowan leans over their shoulders, studying something at o
ne board; Jerenice Seger labors alone at another. She turns and catches sight of the approaching rifters, raises her voice just slightly in an alarm call disguised as a greeting: “Ken. Lenie.”
The others turn. A couple of the less-experienced back away a step or two.
Rowan recovers first, her quicksilver eyes unreadable: “You should spare that leg, Lenie. Here.” She grabs an unused chair from a nearby station and rolls it over. Clarke sinks gratefully into it.
Nobody makes a fuss. The assembled corpses know how to follow a lead, even though some of them don’t seem too happy about it.
“Jerry says you’ve dodged the bullet,” Rowan continues.
“As far as we know,” Seger adds. “For now.”
“Which implies a bullet to dodge,” Lubin says.
Seger looks at Rowan. Rowan looks at Lubin. The number crunchers don’t look anywhere in particular.
Finally, Seger shrugs. “D-cysteine and d-cystine, positive. Pyranosal RNA, positive. No phospholipids, no DNA. Intracellular ATP off the scale. Not to mention you can do an SEM of the infected cells and just see the little fellows floating around in there.” She takes a deep breath. “If it’s not ßehemoth, it’s ßehemoth’s evil twin brother.”
“Shit,” says one of the modelers. “Not again.”
It takes Clarke a moment to realize that he’s not reacting to Seger’s words, but to something on the workstation screen. She leans forward, catches sight of the display through the copse of personnel: a volumetric model of the Atlantic basin. Luminous contrails wind through its depths like many-headed snakes, bifurcating and converging over continental shelves and mountain ranges. Currents and gyres and deep-water circulation iconised in shades of green and red: the ocean’s own rivers. And superimposed over the entire display, a churlish summary:
Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.
Further predictions unreliable.
“Bring down the Labrador Current a bit more,” one of the modelers suggests.