by Peter Watts
“Tell you what,” he proposed. “You find a flaw in my argument, and I won’t use these.”
“Yeah,” she rasped. “...you will.”
“No, I won’t. Promise. Try me.”
She reminded herself: nothing to lose. “You think people will see this and then just, just— walk away when you tell them the—the corpses were worse? You think—you think people are logical? Y-you’re the one with...with shit for brains. They won’t care about your fucking argument; they’ll take one look and they’ll tear you to...pieces. The only reason you can get away with it now is—”
That’s it, she realized.
What would happen if ßehemoth just...went away? What would happen if the apocalypse receded a bit, if the situation grew just a little less desperate? Perhaps, in a safer world, people would go back to pretending they were civilized. Perhaps they wouldn’t be quite so willing to pontificate on the unaffordability of human rights.
Perhaps Achilles Desjardins would lose his amnesty.
“That’s why you’re fighting Seppuku,” she whispered.
Achilles tapped the alligator clips together. They sparked. “Sorry. What was that?”
“You are so full of shit. Saving thousands? There are people trying to save the world, and you’re trying to stop them. You’re killing billions. You’re killing everyone. So you can get away with this...”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s like I tried to explain to Alice the First. When someone steals your conscience, you have a really hard time giving a shit.”
“You’ll lose. You don’t run the world, you only run this...piece of it. You can’t keep Seppuku out forever.”
Achilles nodded thoughtfully. “I know. But don’t worry your pretty little head about it. I’ve already planned for my retirement. You have other concerns.”
He pushed her head down against the stocks, stretching her neck. He kissed her nape.
“Like for example, the fact that you’re late for class. Let’s see. Yesterday we were talking about the origin of life, as I recall. And how some might think that ßehemoth had evolved on the same tree that we did, and it took a while but you eventually remembered why those people had their heads up their asses. And that was because...?”
She hadn’t forgotten. ßehemoth’s pyranosal RNA couldn’t cross-talk with modern nucleic acids. There’d be no way for one template to evolve into the other.
But right now, there was no way in this hell that she was going to bark on command. She clenched her jaw and kept silent.
Of course it didn’t bother him a bit. “Well, then. Let’s just do the review exercises, shall we?”
Her body spun back into position. The assembly locked into place. The exoskeleton drew back her arms, spread her legs. She felt herself cracking open like a wishbone.
She vacated the premises, pushed her consciousness back into that perfect little void where pain and hope and Achilles Desjardins didn’t exist. Far beneath her, almost underwater, she felt her body moving back and forth to the rhythm of his thrusting. She couldn’t feel him in her, of course—she’d been spoiled by all the battering rams he’d used to pave the way. She found that vaguely amusing for reasons she couldn’t quite pin down.
She remembered Dave, and the time he’d surprised her on the patio. She remembered live theatre in Boston. She remembered Crystal’s fourth birthday.
Strange sounds followed her through from the other world, rhythmic sounds, faintly ridiculous in context. Someone was singing down there, an inane little ditty rendered off-key while her distant body got the gears:
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
There had to be a subtext, of course. There would be a quiz at the end of class.
Only there wasn’t. Suddenly the thrusting stopped. He hadn’t ejaculated—she was familiar enough with his rhythms to know that much. He pulled out of her, muttering something she couldn’t quite make out way up here in the safe zone. A moment later his footsteps hurried away behind her, leaving only the sound of her own ragged breathing.
Taka was alone with her body and her memories and the tiled creatures on the floor. Achilles had abandoned her. Something had distracted him. Maybe someone at the door. Maybe the voice of some other beast, howling in his head.
She was hearing those a lot herself these days.
Firebreathers
The airwaves seethed with tales of catastrophe. From Halifax to Houston, static-field generators sparked and fried. Hospitals deep within the claves and fortresses on the very frontier flickered and blacked out. A report from somewhere around Newark had an automated plastics refinery melting down; another from Baffin Island claimed that a He-3 cracking station was venting its isotopes uncontrollably into the atmosphere. It was almost as if the Maelstrom of old had been reborn, in all its world-spanning glory but with a hundred times the virulence.
The Lenies were on the warpath—and suddenly they were hunting in groups. Firewalls crumbled in their path; exorcists engaged and were reduced to static on the spot.
“Lifter just crashed into the Edmonton Spire,” Clarke said. Lubin looked back at her. She tapped her ear, where his borrowed earbead relayed privileged chatter from the ether. “Half the city’s on fire.”
“Let’s hope ours is better behaved,” Lubin said.
Add that to your total score, she told herself, and tried to remember: this time it was different. Lives sacrificed now would be repaid a thousandfold down the road. This was more than Revenge. This was the Greater Good, in all its glory.
Remembering it was easy enough. Feeling right with it was something else again.
This is what happens when you get Lenie to like Lenie.
They were back on the coast, standing on the edge of some derelict waterfront in a ghost town whose name Clarke hadn’t bothered to learn. All morning they had crept like black, blank-eyed spiders through this great junkscape of decaying metal: the dockside cranes, the loading elevators, the warehouses and dry-docks and other premillennial monstrosities of iron and corrugated steel. It was not a radio-friendly environment under the best conditions—and right here, the intermittent voices in Clarke’s ear were especially thick with static.
Which was, of course, the whole idea.
To one side, a corroding warehouse with sheet-metal skin and I-beam bones faced the water. To the other, four gantry cranes rose into the sky like a row of wireframe giraffes sixty meters high. They stood upright, their necks looming over the lip of the waterfront at a seventy-degree angle. A great grasping claw dangled from each snout, poised to descend on freighters that had given up on this place decades before.
A thin leash ran through a nose ring on the crane nearest the warehouse, a loop of braided polypropylene no thicker than a man’s thumb. Both ends of that loop draped across empty space to a point partway up the neck of the second crane in line; there, they had been tied off around a cervical girder. Against the backdrop of cables and superstructure the rope looked as insubstantial as spider silk.
Spider silk was what they’d been hoping for, actually. Surely, in this whole godforsaken industrial zone, somebody must have left some of the stuff behind. Spider rope had been a dirt-cheap commodity in the biotech age, but it had evidently grown a lot scarcer in the bioapocalyptic one. All they’d found was a coarse coil of antique plastic braid, hanging in an abandoned boathouse at the far end of the strip.
Lubin had sighed and said it would have to do.
Clarke had nearly passed out just watching him climb that leaning, precarious scaffold. The rope uncoiling in his wake, he’d wriggled up the first giraffe’s throat and dangled head-down like an ant from its eye socket, his legs wrapped around some spindly brace she was convinced would snap at any moment. She hadn’t taken a complete breath until Lubin was safely on the ground again. Then she’d gone through the whole nerve-wracking experienc
e all over again as he climbed the second crane, carrying both ends of the rope this time. He’d stopped well short of the top, thank God, tying off the ends and leaving the rope looped between the structures like a nylon vine.
Now, back on solid ground, he told her that she’d get better traction during her own climb if she wore—
“No fucking way,” Clarke said.
“Not to the top. Just to where the line’s tied off. Halfway.”
“That’s more than halfway and you know it. One slip and I’m sockeye.”
“Not at all. The crane leans. You’ll be dropping into the water.”
“Yeah, from fifty meters. You think I—wait a second, I’m supposed to drop into the water?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Well it’s a really bad one.”
“They’ll be on guard as soon as they realize they’ve been decoyed. If they notice the rope at that point it could be fatal. You’ll untie it and pull it down with you. You’ll be safe enough underwater.”
“Forget it, Ken. It’s just a rope, and your plan’s so far into the Oort that it would take another lunatic to figure it out even if he did see—”
She stopped herself. Lunatic might, after all, be a reasonable description of the man they were dealing with. For an instant she was back on that scorched hulk off Sable, lifting her foot from a human ribcage.
And Lubin had said Whoever’s behind this is smarter than me...
“I don’t want to take any chances,” he said now, softly.
She tossed off a few more protests, but they both knew it was only theatre. Eventually she drove Miri to a safe distance and hiked back along the road while Lubin called in his report from the ultralight: a vector holed up in an abandoned warehouse, growing industrial quantities of Seppuku in a basement lab.
Control cabs nestled between the shoulder blades of each crane. Vandals or weather had long since knocked out most of the windows. Clarke and Lubin took cover there and waited. A faint whistle of rising wind sang through the framework above them.
It came down from the sky like a bloated dragon, vented gas roaring from its trim bladders. The whirlwind heralded its coming; a nor’easter had built throughout the day, and now it whistled across the waterfront with strength enough to drown voices. Sliding sheet-metal doors caught the wind and tugged clanging against their rollers; thin stretched wires and massive cables rang and thrummed like Hell’s own string section. The lifter groaned and sparked down through the blow. It settled above the water, in front of the warehouse, and rotated to bring all its guns to bear.
Lubin put his head next to Clarke’s. “Go.”
She followed him from the gutted cab. Within seconds he was meters above her, sliding up through the crane like an arboreal python. She gritted her teeth and climbed after. It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared; a narrow ladder ran up the inside of the structure like a trachea, sprouting safety hoops at one-meter intervals. But the wind buffeted on all sides, and surrounding girders sliced it into quarrelsome and unpredictable vortices. They pushed her against the ladder, twisted her sideways, slipped under her backpack and tried to yank it from her body.
A sharp thunderclap from her left. She turned, and froze, and clung to the ladder for dear life; she’d hadn’t realized how high she’d already climbed. The waterfront shuddered behind and beneath her, not quite a tabletop model yet but close enough, too close. Far below, the harbor churned green and white.
Another thunderclap. Not weather, though. The wind, for all its strength, howled beneath a blue and cloudless sky. That sound had come from the lifter. Seen from above the vehicle looked like a great gunmetal jewel, faceted into concave triangles: skin sucked against geodesic ribs by the buoyant vacuum inside. It roared briefly above the wind, a hissing bellow of gaseous ballast. Its belly nearly touched the water; its back curved higher than the warehouse roof, several stories above.
Tame lightning, she remembered. For buoyancy control. High-voltage arcs, superheating trapped gases in the trim tanks.
And Ken’s going to ride this monster.
Better him than me.
She looked up. Lubin had reached his departure point and was untying one end of the rope, his legs wrapped around ambient scaffolding. He gestured impatiently at her— then staggered, knocked briefly off-balance by a gust of wind. His hand shot out to steady himself on a nearby cable.
She kept going, steadfastly refusing to look down again no matter how many obscene noises the lifter made. She counted rungs. She counted girders and crossbeams and rivets as the wind howled in her ears and tugged at her limbs. She counted bare steely patches where the red and yellow paint had sloughed away—until it reminded her that she was climbing a structure so ancient that its color wasn’t even intrinsic to the material, but had been layered on as an afterthought.
After a year or two she was at Lubin’s side, somewhere in the jet stream. Lubin was studying the lifter, the ubiquitous binocs clamped around his head. Clarke did not follow his gaze.
One end of the rope was still tied firmly down. From that terminus it led out and up to the apex of the next crane, looped through whatever needle’s eye Lubin had found up there, and stretched back to the final half-meter of polyprope now wrapped around his diveskinned hand. A satcam, looking down on the tableau, would have seen two thin white lines pointing towards the lifter from their current roost.
It would also have seen an ominously large, empty space between the point where the line ended and the point where the lifter began.
“Are you sure it’s long enough?” Clarke shouted. Lubin didn’t answer. He probably hadn’t heard the question through the wind and the ’skin of his hood. Clarke had barely heard herself.
His tubular eyes stayed fixed on the target for a few more moments. Then he flipped the binocs up against his forehead. “They just deployed the teleop!” he called. The wind blew most of his decibels sideways and pitched in fifty of its own, but she got the gist. All according to plan, so far. The usual firestorm from on high wouldn’t do the trick this time around: the hot zone Lubin had reported was too deep in the warehouse, too close to the waterline. It would take a free-moving teleop to scope the situation and personally deliver the flames—and local architecture hashed radio so badly that the little robot would have to stay virtually line-of-sight just to maintain contact with the mothership. Which meant bringing the lifter down low.
So low that a sufficiently motivated person might be able to drop onto it from above...
Lubin had one arm hooked around a cable as thick as his wrist—one of the fraying metal tendons that kept the necks of the cranes upright. Now he unhooked his legs from their purchase and ducked under that cable, coming up on the other side. The out side. He was now hanging off the edge of the crane, not rattling about within it. He had one arm wrapped in polypropylene and the other hooked around the cable, his feet braced against a girder by nothing beyond his own weight.
Suddenly Ken Lubin looked very fragile indeed.
His mouth moved. Clarke heard nothing but wind. “What!”
He leaned back towards the structure, enunciating each syllable: “You know what to do.”
She nodded. She couldn’t believe he was actually going to go through with this. “Good lu—” she began—
And staggered, flailing, as the hand of an invisible giant slapped her sideways.
She grasped out blindly, at anything. Her hands closed on nothing. Something hard cracked against the back of her head, bounced her forward again. A girder rushed by to her right; she caught it and hung on for dear life.
Ken?
She looked around. Where Lubin’s face and chest had been, there was nothing but howling space. His forearm was still wrapped around the cable, though, like a black grappling hook. She lowered her gaze a fraction: there was the rest of him, scrabbling for purchase and finding it. Regaining his balance in the gale, pulling himself back up, that fucking plastic rope still wound around one hand. The wind slackened for the
briefest moment; Lubin ducked back into the wireframe cage.
“You okay?” she asked as the wind rose again, and saw in the next instant the blood on his face.
He leaned in close. “Change of plans,” he said, and struck her forearm with the edge of his free hand. Clarke yelped, her grip broken. She fell. Lubin caught her, pulled her abruptly sideways. Her shoulder slammed against metal and twisted. Suddenly the crane wasn’t around her any more. It was beside her.
“Hang on,” Lubin growled against her cheek.
They were airborne.
She was far too petrified to scream.
For endless seconds they were in freefall. The world rushed towards them like a fly-swatter. Then Lubin’s arm tightened around her waist and some new force pulled them off-center, into a sweeping arc that only amended gravity at first, then defied it outright. They swooped down over whitecaps and churning flotsam, and she seemed to grow kilograms heavier; then they were rising again, miraculously, the wind catching them from behind. The colossal squashed spheroid of the lifter loomed above and then ahead and then below, its numberless polygons reflecting like the facets of some great compound eye.
And then they were dropping again, through an invisible tingling barrier that scratched sparks across her face, and Clarke barely put her hands out in time to break the fall.
“Ow!”
They were on a steep slope, facing uphill. She lay on her stomach, hands splayed forward, in a triangular depression perhaps three meters on a side. Her diveskin squirmed like a torture victim. Lubin lay half on top of her, half to one side, his right arm pressed into the small of her back. Some defiantly functional module in her brain realized that he’d probably kept her from rolling off the edge of the world. The rest of her gulped air in great whooping breaths and played I’m alive I’m alive I’m alive on infinite loop.
“You all right?” Lubin’s voice was low but audible. The wind still pushed at their backs, but it seemed suddenly vague, diffuse.