by Peter Watts
“There’s another way,” she buzzes. Lubin shuts off the spot-welder.
“There is.” He turns to face her. “But I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
Back when the trailer park was just getting set up, someone had the clever idea of turning a hab into a mess hall: a row of cyclers, a couple of prep surfaces for the daring, and a handful of foldaway tables scattered with studied randomness around the dry deck. The effect was intended to suggest a café patio. The cramped reality is more like the backstage shed where the furniture gets stored for winter.
One thing that has caught on, though, is the garden. By now it covers half the wet deck, a tangle of creeping greenery lit by solar-spectrum sticks planted among its leaves like bioluminescent bamboo. It isn’t even hydroponic. The little jungle erupts from boxes of rich dark earth—diatomaceous ooze, actually, beefed up with organic supplements—that were once discrete but which have since now disappeared under an overflow of compost, spilling messily across the plating.
It’s the best-smelling bubble of atmosphere on the whole Ridge. Clarke swings the airlock hatch open onto that tableau and takes a deep breath, only half of appreciation. The other half is resolve: Grace Nolan looks up from the far side of the oasis, tying off the vines of something that might have been snow peas back before the patents landed on them.
But Nolan smiles beneath translucent eyes as Clarke steps onto the deck. “Hey, Lenie!”
“Hi Grace. I thought we could maybe have a talk.”
Nolan pops a pod into her mouth, a slick black amphibian feeding in the lush greenery of some long-extinct wetland. She chews, for longer than is probably necessary. “About...”
“About Atlantis. Your blood work.” Clarke takes a breath. “About whatever problem you have with me.”
“God no,” Nolan says. “I’ve got no problem with you, Len. People fight sometimes. No big deal. Don’t take it so seriously.”
“Okay then. Let’s talk about Gene.”
“Sure.” Nolan straightens, grabs a chair off the bulkhead and folds it down. “And while we’re at it, let’s talk about Sal and Lije and Lanie.”
Lanie too, now? “You think the corpses are behind it.”
Nolan shrugs. “It’s no big secret.”
“And you base that on what, exactly? Anything show up in the bloods?”
“We’re still collecting samples. Lizbeth’s set up in the med hab, by the way, if you want to contribute. I think you should.”
“What if you don’t find anything?” Clarke wonders.
“I don’t think we will. Seger’s smart enough to cover her tracks. But you never know.”
“You know it’s possible that the corpses have nothing to do with this.”
Nolan leans back in her chair and stretches. “Sweetie, I can’t tell you how surprised I am to hear you say that.”
“So show me some evidence.”
Nolan smiles, shaking her head. “Here’s a bit of an exercise for you. Say you’re swimming through shark-infested waters. Big sickle-finned stumpfucks all over the place, and they’re looking you up and down and you know the only reason they’re not tearing into you right now is because you’ve got your billy out, and they’ve seen what that billy can do to fishies like them. So they keep their distance, but that makes ’em hate you even more, right? Because you’ve already killed some of ’em. These are really smart sharks. They hold grudges.
“So you swim along for a little while, all these cold dead pissed-off eyes and teeth always just out of range, and you come across—oh, say Ken. Or what’s left of him. A bit of entrail, half a face, ID patch just floating around amongst all those sharks. What do you do, Len? Do you decide there isn’t any evidence? Do you say Hey, I can’t prove anything, I didn’t see this go down? Do you say, Let’s not jump to any conclusions...”
“That’s a really shitty analogy,” Clarke says softly.
“I think it’s a great fucking analogy.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I can tell you what I’m not going to do,” Nolan assures her. “I’m not going to sit back and have faith in the goodness of corpse spirit while all my friends turn to sockeye.”
“Is anyone asking you to do that?”
“Not yet. Any time now, I figure.”
Clarke sighs. “Grace, I’m only saying, for the good of all of us—”
“Fuck you,” Nolan snarls suddenly. “Fuck you. You don’t give a shit about us.”
It’s as if someone flipped a switch. Clarke stares, astonished.
Nolan glares eyelessly back, her body trembling with sudden rage. “You really want to know my problem with you? You sold us out. We were this close to pulling the plug on those stumpfucks. We could’ve forced their own goddamn entrails down their throats, and you stopped us, you fucker.”
“Grace,” she tries, “I know how you fe—”
“Horseshit! You don’t have a fucking clue how I feel!”
What did they do to you, Clarke wonders, to turn you into this?
“They did things to me too,” she says softly.
“Sure they did. And you got yours back, didn’t you? And correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t you end up fucking over a whole lot of innocent people in the mix? You never gave a shit about them. And maybe it was too much trouble to work it through but a fair number of us fish-heads lost people to your grand crusade along with everyone else. You didn’t give a shit about them either, as long as you got your kick at the cat. Fine. You got it. But the rest of us are still waiting, aren’t we? We don’t even want to mow down millions of innocent people, we just want to get at the assholes who actually fucked us over—and you of all people come crawling over here on Patricia Rowan’s leash to tell me I don’t have the right?” Nolan shakes her head in disgust. “I don’t believe we let you stop us before, and I sure as shit don’t believe you’re going to stop us now.”
Her hatred radiates through the compartment like infrared. Clarke is distantly amazed that the vines beside her don’t blacken and burst into flame.
“I came to you because I thought we could work something out,” she says.
“You came because you know you’re losing it.”
The words ignite a small, cold knot of anger under Clarke’s diaphragm. “Is that what you think.”
“You never gave a shit about working things out.” Nolan growls. “You just sat off on your own, I’m the Meltdown Madonna, I’m Mermaid of the fucking Apocalypse, I get to stand off to the side and make the rules. But the rabble isn’t falling into line this time, sweetie, and it scares you. I scare you. So spare me the dreck about altruism and diplomacy. This is just you trying to keep your little tin throne from going sockeye. It’s been nice talking to you.”
She grabs her fins and stalks into the airlock.
Portrait of the Sadist as a Young Man
Achilles Desjardins couldn’t remember the last time he’d had consensual sex with a real woman. He could, however, remember the first time he’d refused it:
It was 2046 and he’d just saved the Mediterranean. That’s how N’AmWire was presenting it, anyway. All he’d really done was deduce the existence of a strange attractor in the Gulf of Cádiz, a persistent little back-eddy that no one else had bothered to look for. According to the sims it was small enough to tweak with albedo dampers; the effects would proliferate through the Strait of Gibralter and—if the numbers were right—stave off the collapse of the Med by an easy decade. Or until the Gulf Stream failed again, whichever came first. It was only a reprieve, not outright salvation, but it was just what CSIRA needed to make everyone forget the Baltic fiasco. Besides, nobody ever looked ahead more than ten years anyway.
So for a while, Achilles Desjardins had been a star. Even Lertzmann had pretended to like him for the better part of a month, told him he was fast-tracked for senior status just as soon as they got the security checks out of the way. Unless he had a bunch of butchered babies in his past he’d be getting his shots before
Hallowe’en. Hell, he’d probably be getting them even if he did have a bunch of butchered babies in his past. Background checks were nothing but empty ritual in the higher ranks of the Patrol; you could be a serial killer and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference once Guilt Trip was bubbling in your brain. You’d be just as thoroughly enslaved to the Greater Good.
Aurora, her name was. She wore the zebra hair that had been fashionable at the time, and an endearingly-tasteless armload of faux refugee branding scars. They’d hooked up at some CSIRA soirée hosted from the far side of the world by the EurAfrican Assembly. Their jewelry sniffed each other’s auras to confirm a mutual interest (which still meant something, back then), and their path chips exchanged the usual clean bills of health (which didn’t). So they left the party, dropped three hundred meters from CSIRA’s executive stratosphere to the Sudbury Streets—then another fifty into the subterranean bowels of Pickering’s Pile, where the pathware was guaranteed hackproof and tested for twice the usual range of STDs to boot. They gave blood behind a cute little r’n’r couple who broke up on the spot when one of them tested positive for an exotic trematode infesting his urinary tract.
Desjardins had yet to acquire most of the tailored chemicals that would cruise his system in later years; he could still safely imbibe all manner of tropes and mood-changers. So he and Aurora grabbed a booth just off the bar while their bloods ran, stroked the little psychotropic amphibians clambering about in the tabletop terrarium. Dim green light filtered in from the great underground tank in which the Pile was immersed, a radium-glow mock-up of an old nuclear-storage lagoon visible through the plexi walls. After a few minutes one of the in-house butterflies lit on their table, its membranous wings sparkling with refracted data: green on all wavelengths.
“Told you,” Aurora said, and kissed his nose.
Pickering’s Pile rented fuck-cubbies by the minute. They split five hours between them.
He fucked her inside and out. Outside, he was the consummate caring lover. He tongued her nipples, teeth carefully sheathed. He left trails of kisses from throat to vagina, gently explored every wet aperture, breath shaky with fevered restraint. Every move deliberate, every signal unmistakable: he would rather die than hurt this woman.
Inside, he was tearing her apart. No caresses in there; he slapped her so hard her fucking head just about came off. Inside she was screaming. Inside, he beat her until she didn’t have the strength to flinch when the whip came down.
She murmered and sighed sweetly throughout. She remarked on how he obviously worshipped women, on what a change this made from the usual rough-and-tumble, on how she didn’t know if she belonged on this pedestal. Desjardins patted himself on the back. He didn’t mention the tiny scars on her back, the telltale little lozenges of fresh pink skin that spoke of topical anabolics. Evidently Aurora had use for accellerated healing. Perhaps she had recently escaped from an abusive relationship. Perhaps he was her sanctuary.
Even better. He imagined some past partner, beating her.
“Oh, fuck it,” she said, four hours in. “Just hit me.”
He froze, terrified, betrayed by body language or telepathy or a lucky guess for all he knew. “What?”
“You’re so gentle,” Aurora told him. “Let’s get rough.”
“You don’t—” He had to stifle a surprized laugh. “I mean, what?”
“Don’t look so startled.” She come-hithered a smile. “Haven’t you ever smacked a woman before?”
Those were hints, he realised. She was complaining. And Achilles Desjardins, pattern-matcher extraordinaire, master of signal-from-noise, had missed it completely.
“I kind of minored in asphyx,” she suggested now. “And I don’t see that belt of yours getting any kind of work-out…”
It was everything he’d ever dreamed of, and hated himself for. It was his most shameful fantasy come to life. It was perfect. Oh, you glorious bitch. You are just asking for it, aren’t you? And I’m just the one to give it to you.
Except he wasn’t. Suddenly, Achilles Desjardins was as soft as a dollar.
“You serious?” he asked, hoping she wouldn’t notice, knowing she already had. “I mean—you want me to hurt you?”
“Achilles the hero.” She cocked her head mischieviously. “Don’t get out much, do you?”
“I do okay,” he said, defensive despite himself. “But—”
“It’s just a scene, kiddo. Nothing radical. I’m not asking you to kill me or anything.”
Too bad. But his own unspoken bravado didn’t fool him for an instant. Achilles Desjardins, closet sadist, was suddenly scared to death.
“You mean acting,” he said. “Silk cords, safe words, that kinda thing.”
She shook her head. “I mean,” she said patiently, “I want to bleed. I want to hurt. I want you to hurt me, lover.”
What’s wrong with me? he wondered. She’s just what I’ve always wanted. I can’t believe my luck.
And an instant later: If it is luck...
He was, after all, on the cusp of his life. Background checks were in progress. Risk assessments were underway. Just below the surface, the system was deciding whether Achilles Desjardins could be trusted to daily decide the fate of millions. Surely they already knew his secret—the mechanics had looked inside his head, they’d have noticed any missing or damaged wiring. Maybe this was a test, to see if he could control his impulses. Maybe Guilt Trip wasn’t quite the failsafe they’d told him it was, maybe enough wonky neurons screwed it up, maybe his baseline depravity was a potential loophole of some kind. Or maybe it was a lot simpler. Maybe they just couldn’t afford to risk investing too much PR in a hero who couldn’t control inclinations that some of the public might still find—unpleasant…
Aurora curled her lip and bared her neck. “Come on, kid. Do me.”
She was the glimmer in the eye of every partner he’d ever had, that hard little twinkle that always seemed to say Better be careful, you sick twisted piece of shit. One slip and you’re finished. She was six-year-old Penny, broken and bleeding and promising not to tell. She was his father, standing in a darkened hallway, staring through him with unreadable eyes that said I know something about you, son, and you’ll never know exactly what it is…
“Rory,” Desjardins said carefully, “have you ever talked to anyone about this?”
“All the time.” She was still smiling, but a sudden wariness tinged her voice.
“No, I mean someone—you know—”
“Professional.” The smile was gone. “Some piece of corpsy wetware that sucks down my account while telling me that I don’t know my own mind, it’s all just low self-esteem and my father raped me when I was preverbal.” She reached for her clothes. “No, Achilles, I haven’t. I’d rather spend my time with people who accept me for who I am than with misguided assholes who try to change me into what I’m not.” She pulled up her panties. “I guess you just don’t run into those types at official functions any more.”
He tried: “You don’t have to go.”
He tried: “It was just so unexpected, you know?”
He tried: “It’s just, you know, it seems to disrespectful—”
Aurora sighed. “Kiddo, if you really respected me you’d at least give me credit for knowing what I like.”
“But I like you,” he blundered, free-falling in smoke and flame. “How am I supposed to enjoy hurting you when—”
“Hey, you think I enjoyed everything I did to get you off?”
She left him in the cubby with a flaccid penis, fifty minutes left on the clock and the stunning, humiliating realization that he was forever trapped within his own disguise. I’ll never let it out, he realised. No matter how much I want to, no matter who asks me, no matter how safe it seems. I’ll never be sure there isn’t an open circuit somewhere. I’ll never be sure it isn’t a trap. I’m gonna be undercover for the rest of my life, I’m too fucking terrified to come out.
His Dad would have been proud. He was a g
ood Catholic boy after all.
But Achilles Desjardins was nothing if not practised at the art of adaptation. By the time he emerged, chastened and alone, he was already beginning to rebuild his defenses. Maybe it was better this way. The biology was irrefutable, after all: sex was violence, literally, right down to the neurons. The same synapses lit up whether you fucked or fought, the same drive to violate and subjugate. It didn’t matter how gentle you were on the outside, it didn’t matter how much you pretended: even the most consensual intercourse was nothing more than the rape of a victim who’d given up.
If I do all this and have not love, I am as sounding brass, he thought.
He knew it in the floor of his brain, he knew it in the depths of his id. Sadism was hardwired, and sex—sex was more than violent. It was disrespect. There was no need to inflict it on another human being, here in the middle of the twenty-first century. There was no right to. Especially not for monsters with broken switches. He had a home sensorium that could satify any lust he could imagine, serve up virtual victims at such high rez that even he might be fooled.
There were other advantages, too. Never again the elaborate courtship rituals that he always seemed to fuck up at. Never again the fear of infection, the ludicrous efforts to romanticise path scans and pass blood work off as foreplay. Never again that hard twinkle in your victim’s eyes, maybe knowing.
He had it worked out. Hell, he had a new Paradigm of Life.
From now on, Achilles Desjardins would be a civilised man. He would inflict his vile passions on machinery, not flesh—and he would save himself a shitload of embarrassment in the bargain. Aurora had been for the best, a narrow escape in the nick of time. Head full of bad wiring in that one, no doubt about it. Pain and pleasure centers all crosswired.