by Peter Watts
“You,” Clarke tells her, “are going to back off, and shut up, and not do a single fucking thing until we get some information we can count on. And until then, Grace, if I find you within fifty meters of Atlantis or Rama Bhanderi, I will personally rip the tubes out of your chest.”
Suddenly they’re eyecap to eyecap. “You’re talking pretty big for someone who doesn’t have her pet psycho backing her up.” Nolan’s vocoder is very low; her words are mechanical whispers, meant for Clarke alone. “Where’s your bodyguard, corpsefucker?”
“Don’t need one,” Clarke buzzes evenly. “If you don’t believe me, stop talking out your ass and make a fucking move.”
Nolan hangs in the water, unmoving. Her vocoder tick-tick-ticks like a Geiger counter.
“Hey, Grace,” Chen buzzes hesitantly from the sidelines. “Really, you know? Can’t hurt to try.”
Nolan doesn’t appear to have heard her. She doesn’t answer for the longest time. Then, finally, she shakes her head.
“Fuck it. Try, then.”
Clarke lets the silence resume for a few more seconds. Then she turns and slowly, deliberately, fins out of the light. She doesn’t look back; hopefully, the rest of the pack will read it as an act of supreme confidence. But inside she’s pissing herself. Inside, she only wants to run— from this new-and-improved reminder of her own virulent past, from the tide and the tables turning against her. She wants to just dive off the Ridge and go native, keep going until hunger and isolation leave her brain as smooth and flat and reptilian as Bhanderi’s might be by now. She wants nothing more than to just give in.
She swims into the darkness, and hopes the others do likewise. Before Grace Nolan can change their minds.
She chooses an outlying double-decker a little further downslope from the others. It doesn’t have a name—some of the habs have been christened, Cory’s Reach or BeachBall or Abandon All Hope, but there weren’t any labels pasted across this hull the last time she was in the neighborhood and there aren’t any now.
Nobody’s left no-trespassing signs at the airlock, either, but two pairs of fins glisten on the drying rack inside and soft moist sounds drift down from the dry deck.
She climbs the ladder. Ng and someone’s back are fucking on a pallet in the lounge. Evidently, even Lubin’s windchimes weren’t enough to divert their interest. Clarke briefly considers breaking it up and filling them in on recent events.
Fuck it. They’ll find out soon enough.
She steps around them and checks out the hab’s comm board. It’s a pretty sparse setup, just a few off-the-shelf components to keep it in the loop. Clarke plays with the sonar display, pans across the topography of the Ridge and the rash of Platonic icons laid upon it. Here are the main generators, wireframe skyscrapers looming over the ridge to the south. Here’s Atlantis, a great lumpy ferris wheel laid on its side—fuzzy and unfocussed now, the echo smeared by a half-dozen white-noise generators started up to keep prying ears from listening in on the recent deliberations. Nobody’s used those generators since the Revolt. Clarke was surprised that they were even still in place, much less in working order.
She wonders if someone’s taken an active hand in extending the warranty.
A sprinkling of silver bubbles dusts the display: all the semi-abandoned homes of those who hardly know the meaning of the word. She can actually see those people if she cranks up the rez: the display loses range but gains detail, and the local sea-space fills with shimmering sapphire icons as translucent as cave fish. Their implants bounce hard reflective echoes from within the flesh, little opaque organ-clusters of machinery.
It’s simple enough to label the creatures on the screen—each contains an ID-transponder next to the heart, for easy identification. There’s a whole layer of intelligence that Clarke can access with a single touch. She doesn’t, as a rule. Nobody does. Rifter society has its own odd etiquette. Besides, it usually isn’t necessary. Over the years you learn to read the raw echoes. Creasy’s implants put out a bit of fuzz on the dorsal aspect; Yeager’s bum leg lists him slightly to port when he moves. Gomez’s massive bulk would be a giveaway even to a dryback. The transponders are an intrusive redundancy, a cheat sheet for novices. Rifters generally have no use for such telemetry; corpses, these days, have no access to it.
Occasionally, though—when distance bleeds any useful telltales from an echo, or when the target itself has changed—cheat sheets are the only option.
Clarke slides the range to maximum: the hard bright shapes fall together, shrinking into the center of the display like cosmic flotsam sucked towards a black hole. Other topography creeps into range around the outer edges of the screen, vast and dim and fractal. Great dark fissures race into view, splitting and criss-crossing the substrate. A dozen rough mounds of vomited zinc-and-silver precipitate litter the bottom, some barely a meter high, one fifty times that size. The very seafloor bends up to the east. The shoulders of great mountains loom just out of range.
Occasional smudges of blue light drift in the middle distance, and further. Some pixellate slow meandering courses across a muddy plain; others merely drift. There’s no chance of a usable profile at such distances, but neither is there any need. The transponder overlay is definitive.
Bhanderhi’s southwest, halfway to the edge of the scope. Clarke notes the bearing and disables the overlay, sliding the range back to its default setting. Atlantis and its environs swell back out across the display and—
Wait a second—
A single echo, almost hidden in the white noise of the generators. A blur without detail, an unexpected wart on one of the tubular passageways that connect Atlantis’s modules one to another. The nearest camera hangs off a docking gantry twenty-five meters east and up. Clarke taps into the line: a new window opens, spills grainy green light across the display.
Atlantis is in the grip of a patchwork blight. Parts of its colossal structure continue to shine as they always have; apical beacons, vents, conduit markers glaring into the darkness. But there are other places where the lights have dimmed, dark holes and gaps where lamps that once shone yellow-green have all shifted down to a faint, spectral blue so deep it borders on black. Out of order, that blue-shift says. Or more precisely, No Fish-heads.
The airlocks. The hanger bay doors. Nobody’s playing just a precaution these days…
She pans and tilts, aiming the camera. She zooms: distant murk magnifies, turns fuzzy distance into fuzzy foreground. Viz is low today; either smokers are blowing nearby or Atlantis is flushing particulates. All she can see is a fuzzy black outline against a green background, a silhouette so familiar she can’t even remember how she recognizes it.
It’s Lubin.
He’s floating just centimeters off the hull, sculling one way, sculling back. Station-keeping against a tricky interplay of currents, perhaps—except there’s nothing for him to station-keep over. There’s no viewport in his vicinity, no way to look inside, no obvious reason to hold his position along that particular stretch of corridor.
After a few moments he begins to move away along the hull, far too slowly for comfort. His fins usually scissor the water in smooth, easy strokes, but he’s barely flicking them now. He’s moving no faster than a dryback might walk.
Someone climaxes behind her. Ng grumbles about my turn. Lenie Clarke barely hears them.
You bastard, she thinks as Lubin fades in the distance. You bastard.
You went ahead and did it.
Conscript
Alyx doesn’t get the whole native thing. Probably none of the corpses do, truth be told, but none of the others lose any sleep over it either; the more fish-heads out of the way the better, they figure, and screw the fine print. Alyx, bless her soul, reacted with nothing short of outrage. As far as she’s concerned it’s no different than leaving your crippled grandmother out to die on an ice floe.
“Lex, it’s their own choice,” Clarke explained once.
“What, they choose to go crazy? They choose to have t
heir bones go so punky they can’t even stand up when you bring them inside?”
“They choose,” she said gently, “to stay out on the rift, and they think it’s worth the price.”
“Why? What’s so great about it? What do they do out there?”
She didn’t mention the hallucinations. “There’s a kind of—freedom, I guess. You feel connected to things. It’s hard to explain.”
Alyx snorted. “You don’t even know.”
It’s partly true. Certainly Clarke feels the pull of the deep sea. Maybe it’s an escape, maybe the abyss is just the ultimate place to hide from the living hell that was life among the drybacks. Or maybe it’s even simpler. Maybe it’s just a dark, weightless evocation of the womb, a long-forgotten sense of being nourished and protected and secure, back before the contractions started and everything turned to shit.
Every rifter feels as much. Not every rifter goes native, though, at least not yet. Some just have a kind of—special vulnerability, really. The addictive rifters, as opposed to the merely social ones. Maybe the natives have too much serotonin in their temporal lobes or something. It usually comes down to something like that.
None of which would really fly with Alyx, of course.
“You should take down their feeding stations,” Alyx said. “Then they’d have to come inside to eat at least.”
“They’d either starve, or make do with clams and worms.” Which was basically starvation on the installment plan, if it didn’t poison them outright. “And why force them to come inside if they don’t want to?”
“Because it’s suicide, that’s why!” Alyx cried. “Jeez, I can’t believe I have to explain it to you! Wouldn’t you stop me from trying to kill myself?”
“That depends.”
“Depends?”
“On if you really wanted to, or you were just trying to win an argument.”
“I’m serious.”
“Yeah. I can see that.” Clarke sighed. “If you really wanted to kill yourself, I’d be sad and pissed off and I’d miss you like hell. But I wouldn’t stop you.”
Alyx was appalled. “Why not?”
“Because it’s your life. Not mine.”
Alyx didn’t seem to have been expecting that. She glared back, obviously unconvinced, obviously unequipped to respond.
“Have you ever wanted to die?” Clarke asked her. “Seriously?”
“No, but—”
“I have.”
Alyx fell silent.
“And believe me,” Clarke continued, “it’s no fun listening to a bunch of professional head lice telling you how much there is to live for and how things aren’t really so bad and how five years from now you’ll look back and wonder how you ever could have even imagined offing yourself. I mean, they don’t know shit about my life. If there’s one thing I’m the world’s greatest expert on, it’s how it feels to be me. And as far as I’m concerned it’s the height of fucking arrogance to tell another human being whether their life is worth living.”
“But you don’t have to feel that way,” Alyx said unhappily. “Nobody does! You just slap a derm on your arm and—”
“It’s not about feeling happy, Lex. It’s about having cause to feel happy.” Clarke put her palm against the girl’s cheek. “And you say I don’t care enough to stop you from killing yourself, but I say I care about you so goddamned much I’d even help you do it, if that was you really wanted.”
Alyx stared at the deck for a long time. When she looked up again her eyes shone.
“But you didn’t die,” she said softly. “You wanted to, but you didn’t, and that’s why you’re alive right now.”
And that’s why a lot of other people aren’t... But Clarke kept the thought to herself.
And now she’s about to repudiate it all. She’s about to hunt down someone who’s chosen to retire, and she’s going to ignore that choice, and inflict her own in its place. She’d like to think that maybe Alyx would find the irony amusing, but she knows better. There’s nothing funny about any of this. It’s all getting way too scary.
She’s foregone the use of a squid this time out; natives tend to shy away from the sound of machinery. For what seems like forever she’s been traversing a plain of bone-gray mud, a bottomless ooze of dead plankton ten million years in the making. Someone has preceded her here; a sudden contrail crosses her path, a fog of tiny bodies still swirling in the wake of some recent turbulence. She follows it. Scattered chunks of pumice and obsidian rise from the substrate like fractured sundials. Their shadows sweep across the bright scrolling footprint of Clarke’s headlamp, stretching and dwindling and merging again with the million-year darkness. Eventually they come to dominate the substrate, no longer isolated protrusions in mud but a fractured tumbledown landscape in their own right.
A jumbled talus of cracked volcanic glass rises in Clarke’s path. She brightens her headlamp: the beam puddles on a sheer rock wall a few meters further on, its surface lacerated with deep vertical fissures.
“Hello? Rama?”
Nothing.
“It’s Lenie.”
A white-eyed shadow slips like an eel between two boulders. “...bright...”
She dials down the light. “Better?”
“Ah...Len...” It’s a mechanical whisper, two syllables spaced seconds apart by the effort it takes to get them out. “Hi...”
“We need your help, Rama.”
Bhanderi buzzes something incomprehensible from his hiding place.
“Rama?”
“Don’t...help?”
“There’s a disease. It’s like ßehemoth, but our tweaks don’t work against it. We need to know what it is, we need someone who knows genetics.”
Nothing moves among the rocks.
“It’s serious. Please. Can you help?”
“...teomics,” Bhanderi clicks
“What? I didn’t hear you.”
“...Proteomics. Only...minored in gen...genetics.”
He’s almost managed a complete sentence. Who better to trust with hundreds of lives?
“...had a dream about you,” Bhanderi sighs. It sounds like someone strumming a metal comb.
“It wasn’t a dream. This isn’t either. We really need your help, Rama. Please.”
“That’s wrong,” he buzzes. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?” Clarke asks, encouraged by the sudden coherence.
“The corps...ask the corpses.”
“The corpses may have made the bug. Tweaked it, anyway. We can’t trust them.”
“...poor you...”
“Can you just—”
“More histamine,” Bhanderi buzzes absently, lost again. Then: “Bye...”
“No! Rama!”
She brightens her beam in time to see a pair of fins disappear into a crevice a few meters up the cliff. She kicks up after him, plunges into the fissure like a high-diver, arms above her head. The crevice splits the rock high and deep, but not wide; two meters in she has to turn sideways. Her light floods the narrow gash, bright as a topside day; somewhere nearby a vocoder makes distressed ratcheting sounds.
Four meters overhead, Bhanderi scrambles froglike up the gap. It narrows up there—he seems in imminent danger of wedging himself inextricably between the rock faces. Clarke starts after him.
“Too bright!” he buzzes.
Tough, she thinks back at him.
Bhanderi’s a skinny little bastard after two months of chronic wasting. Even if he gets stuck in here, he might get wedged too far back for Clarke to reach him. Maybe his panicked devolving little brain is juggling those variables right now—Bhanderi zig-zags, as if torn between the prospects of open water and protective confinement. Finally he opts for the water, but his indecision has cost him; Clarke has him around the ankle.
He thrashes in a single plane, constrained by faces of stone. “Fucking bitch. Let go!”
“Vocabulary coming back, I see.”
“Let...go!”
She works her way towards the mouth of the crevice, dragging Bhanderi by the leg. He scrabbles against the walls, resisting—then, pulled free of the tightest depths, he twists around and comes at her with his fists. She fends him off. She has to remind herself how easily his bones might break.
Finally he’s subdued, Clarke’s arms hooked around his shoulders, her hands interlocked behind his neck in a full nelson. They’re still inside the mouth of the crevice, barely; Bhanderi’s struggles jam her spine against cracked slabs of basalt.
“Bright,” he clicks.
“Listen, Rama. There’s way too much riding on this for me to let you piss away whatever’s left in that head of yours. Do you understand?”
He squirms.
“I’ll turn off the light if you stop fighting and just listen to me, okay?”
“...I...you...”
She kills the beam. Bhanderi stiffens, then goes limp in her arms.
“Okay. Better. You’ve got to come back, Bhanderi. Just for a little while. We need you.”
“...need... bad zero—”
“Will you just stop that shit? You’re not that far gone, you can’t be. You’ve only been out here for—” It’s been around two months, hasn’t it? More than two, now. Is that enough time for a brain to turn to mush? Is this whole exercise a waste of time?
She starts again. “There’s a lot riding on this. A lot of people could die. You could die. This—disease, or whatever it is, it could get into you as easily as any of us. Maybe it already has. Do you understand?”
“...understand...”
She hopes that’s an answer and not an echo. “It’s not just the sickness, either. Everyone’s looking for someone to blame. It’s only a matter of time before—”
Boom, she remembers. Blew it up. Way too bright.
“Rama,” she says slowly. “If things get out of hand, everything blows up. Do you understand? Boom. Just like at the woodpile. Boom, all the time. Unless you help me. Unless you help us. Understand?”
He hangs against her in the darkness like a boneless cadaver.