by Peter Watts
“What—” Tiny electric shocks prickled her tongue and lips when she tried to speak. She tried to slow her breathing. “What the fuck are you—”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” He lifted his hand from her back. “Keep low, climb up the slope. We’re far too close to the edge of this thing.” He clambered away uphill.
She lay in the depression, the pit in her own stomach infinitely deeper. She felt ominously lightheaded. She put one hand to her temple; her hair was sticking straight out from her scalp as if her head had its own personal Van Allen belt. Her diveskin crawled. These things have static-fields, she realized.
Taka Ouellette had talked about cancer.
Finally her heart slowed to jackhammer rhythm. She forced herself to move. She squirmed on her belly past the lip of the first polygon and into the concavity of the second; at least the ridges between provided a foothold against the slope. The grade lessened with each meter. Before too long she dared to crouch, and then to stand upright.
The wind blew harder against chest than legs—some kind of distance-cubed thing going on with the static field—but even against her head it wasn’t as strong as it had been up in the crane. It blew her levitating hair into her face every time she turned around, but she barely noticed that inconvenience next to the ongoing convulsions of her diveskin.
Lubin was kneeling near the lifter’s north pole, on a smooth circular island in a sea of triangles. The island was about four meters across, and its topography ranged from thumbnail-sized fiberop sockets to hatches the size of manhole covers. Lubin had already got one of those open; by the time Clarke reached him he’d put whatever safecracking tools he’d used back into his pack.
“Ken, what the fuck is going on?”
He wiped blood from his cheek with the back of one hand. “I changed my mind. I need you along after all.”
“But what—”
“Seal up.” He pointed at the open hatch. Dark viscous liquid lapped in the opening, like blood or machine oil. “I’ll explain everything once we’re inside.”
“What, in there? Will our implants even wor—”
“Now, Lenie. No time.”
Clarke pulled up her hood; it wriggled disquietingly on her scalp. At least it kept her hair from flying everywhere.
“What about the rope?” she said suddenly, remembering.
Lubin stopped in the middle of sealing his face flap. He glanced back at the gantry cranes; a fine white thread lashed back and forth from the nearest, a whip in the wind.
“Can’t be helped,” he said. “Get in.”
Viscous, total darkness.
“Ken.” Machine voice, vocoder voice. It had been a while.
“Yes.”
“What are we breathing?”
“Flamethrower fuel.”
“What!”
“It’s perfectly safe. You’d be dead otherwise.”
“But—”
“It doesn’t have to be water. Hydroxyl groups contain oxygen.”
“Yeah, but they built us for water. I can’t believe napalm—”
“It’s not napalm.”
“Whatever it is, it’s got to gum up our implants somewhere down the road.”
“Down the road isn’t an—isn’t an issue. We’ll be fine if they last for a few more hours.”
“Will they?”
“Yes.”
At least her diveskin had stopped moving.
A sudden tug of inertia. “What’s that?” she buzzed, alarmed.
“Fuel feed. They’re firing.”
“At what? There wasn’t any hot zone.”
“Maybe they’re just being cautious.”
“Or maybe Seppuku was really there all along and we didn’t know it.”
He didn’t answer.
“Ken?”
“It’s possible.”
The surge had pushed her against something soft, and slippery, and vaguely flexible. It seemed to extend in all directions; it was too smooth to get any kind of a grip.
They weren’t in a tank, she realized. They were in a bladder. It didn’t just empty, it deflated. It collapsed.
“Ken, when this thing fires...I mean, could we get sucked out into—”
“No. There’s a—grille.”
Vocoders stripped most of the feeling out of a voice at the best of times, and this syrupy stuff didn’t improve performance any. Still, she got the sense that Lubin didn’t want to talk.
As if Ken’s ever been King of the Extroverts.
But no, there was something else. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
So she floated there in amniotic darkness, breathing something that wasn’t napalm, and remembered that electrolysis involved tiny electrical sparks. She waited and wondered if one of them would ignite the liquid passing through her and around her, wondered if her implants were about to turn this whole lifter into an airborne fireball. Another victim of the Lenies, she mused, and smiled to herself.
But then she remembered that Lubin still hadn’t told her why she was here.
And then she remembered the blood on his face.
In Kind
By the time they reached their destination, Lubin was blind.
The frayed cable on the crane hadn’t just gashed his face; it had torn his hood. The lifter’s incendiary saliva had seeped through that tear before the diveskin could heal. It had diffused across his face. A thin layer had pooled beneath his eyecaps, corroding his corneas down to pitted jelly. A calm, mechanical voice in the darkness had told Clarke what he expected: the ability to tell light from dark, at least. Perhaps some vestigial perception of fuzzy blobs and shadows. The resolution of actual images was very unlikely. He would need her to be his eyes.
“Jesus Christ, Ken, why did you do it?”
“I gambled.”
“You what?”
“We could hardly have stayed on top of the lifter. There are sterilization measures even if the wind didn’t blow us off, and I wasn’t certain how corrosive this—”
“Why didn’t we just walk away? Regroup? Do it again later?”
“Later we could well be incapacitated, assuming your friend is still contagious. Not to mention the fact that I filed a false report and haven’t called in since. Desjardins knows something’s wrong. The more we delay the more time he has to prepare.”
“I think that’s gullshit. I think you’ve just got such a hard-on for getting back at him that you’re making stupid decisions.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion. If I had to assess my own performance lately, I’d say a worse decision was not leaving you back on the Ridge.”
“Right, Ken. Achilles had me on a leash for the past two weeks. I was the one who read Seppuku ass-backwards. Jesus, man, you’ve been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for five years just like the rest of us. You’re not exactly at the top of your game.”
Silence.
“Ken, what are we going to do? You’re blind!”
“There are ways around that.”
Eventually, he said they’d docked. She didn’t know how he could tell—the sloshing of liquid that contained them, perhaps, some subtle inertia below Clarke’s own perceptual threshold. Certainly no sound had tipped him off. Buried deep in the lifter’s vacuum, the bladder was as quiet as outer space.
They crept out onto the back of the beast. It had come to rest in an enormous hanger with a clamshell roof whose halves were sliding shut above them. It was deep dusk, judging from the opacity of the sky beyond. The lifter sloped away in all directions, a tiny faceted planet birthing them from its north pole. Light and machine sounds came from below—and an occasional human voice—but these upper reaches were all grayscale.
“What do you see?” Lubin said in a low voice.
She turned and caught her breath. He’d peeled back his hood and removed his eyecaps; the gray of his skin was far too dark, and pebbled with blisters. His exposed eyes were clusters of insectile compound bumps. Iris and pupil were barely visible
behind, as if seen through chipped, milky glass.
“Well?”
“We—we’re indoors,” she told him. “Nobody in sight, and it’s probably too dark for drybacks to see us up here anyway. I can’t see the factory floor, but it sounds like there are people down there. Are you—fuck, Ken, did it—”
“Just the face. The ’skin sealed off everything else.”
“Does it—I mean, how do you—”
“There’s a gantry on an overhead rail to the left. See it?”
She forced herself to look away. “Yeah.” And then, surprised: “Can you?”
“The guts show up on my inlays. This whole hangar is a wireframe schematic.” He looked around as if sighted. “That assembly’s on autopilot. I think it handles refueling.”
The clamshell doors met overhead with a dull, echoing boom. In the next instant the gantry jerked to life and began sliding towards them along its rail. A pair of waldos unfolded like the forelimbs of a mantis. They ended in clawed nozzles.
“I think you’re right.” Clarke said. “It’s—”
“I see it.”
“How do we get out of here?”
He turned his blind, pitted eyes on her. He pointed at the approaching arthropod.
“Climb,” he said.
He guided her through rafters and crawlways as though born to them. He quizzed her on the color-coding of overhead pipes, or which side of a given service tunnel was more streaked with the stains of old condensation. They found their way into an uninhabited locker room, traversed a gauntlet of lockers and toilet stalls to an open shower.
They washed down. No longer flammable, they turned their attention to blending in. Lubin had brought dryback clothing wadded up in his backpack. Clarke had to make do with a pair of gray coveralls lifted from a row of a half-dozen hanging along one wall. A bank of lockers lined the wall opposite, locked with snapshots and thumb pads; Lubin made a mockery of their security while Clarke dressed. The weave tightened around her into a reasonable approximation of a good fit.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Sunglasses. Visor, maybe.”
Four jimmied lockers later, Lubin gave up. They returned to the echoing arena of the main hanger. They walked brazenly across open space in plain view of eight service techs. They passed beneath the swollen bellies of four lifters, and gaping bays that would have held another three. They wound along rows of clicking, articulated machinery, waving casually across the floor at people in blue coveralls, and—at Lubin’s insistence—keeping a discrete distance from others wearing gray.
They found an exit.
Outside, the buildings were packed so closely that their upper floors seemed to lean together. Arches and skywalks spanned the narrow airspace above the street, connecting opposing facades like stretched arteries. In other places the buildings themselves had melded at the fifth floor or the fortieth, overhanging boles of plastic and biosteel fusing one structure to another. The sky was visible only in dark fragments, intermittently sparking with static electricity. The street was a spaghetti of rapitrans rails and narrow sidewalks doubling as loading platforms. Neither rails nor walkways carried much traffic. Colors were a muted wash to Clarke’s eyes; drybacks would see intermittent pools of dim copper light, and many deep shadows between. Even in these relict nodes of civilization, energy seemed in short supply.
Ken Lubin would be seeing none of the surfaces. Perhaps he saw the wiring underneath.
She found them a market in the shadow of a third-story overhang. Half the machines were offline, but the menu on the Levi’s dispenser twinkled invitingly. Lubin suggested that she trade up from the coveralls; he offered his wristwatch to enable the transaction but the machine sensed the long-forgotten currency chip embedded in Clarke’s thigh, still packed with unspent pay from her gig at the Grid Authority. It lasered her for fit while Lubin got a pair of nightshades and a tube of skin cream from a Johnson & Johnson a few stalls down.
She pulled on her new clothing while Lubin whispered into his wristwatch; Clarke couldn’t tell whether he was talking to software or flesh-and-blood. She gathered from his end of the conversation that that they were in the northern core of Toromilton.
Afterwards they had places to go. They climbed from the floor of the city into a mountainous range of skyscrapers: office buildings mostly, long-since converted to dormitories for those who’d been able to buy their way out of the ’burbs when the field generators went up. There weren’t many people abroad up there, either. Perhaps the citizenry didn’t come out at night.
She was a seeing-eye dog, helping her master hunt for Easter eggs. He directed her; she led him. Lubin muttered incessantly into his watch as they moved. His incantations catalyzed the appearance of strange objects in unlikely places: a seamless box barely bigger than a handpad, nestled in the plumbing of a public toilet; a brand-new wristwatch, still in the original packaging, on the floor of an elevator that rose past the mezzanine with no one on board. Lubin left his old watch in its place, along with a tiny ziplock of derms and plug-ins from his own inventory.
At a vending wall on the same level he ordered a roll of semipermeable adhesive tape and a cloned ham-and-cheese. The tape was served up without incident, but no sandwich appeared on its heels; instead a pair of hand-sized containers slid down the chute, flattened opalescent cylinders with rounded edges. He popped one of them open to reveal pince-nez with opaque jade lenses. He set them on his nose. His jaw twitched slightly as he reset some dental switch. A tiny green star winked on at the edge of the left lens.
“Better.” He looked around. “Depth perception’s not all it could be.”
“Nice trick,” Clarke said. “It talks to your inlays?”
“More or less. The image is a bit grainy.”
Now Lubin took the lead.
“There’s no easier way to do this?” she asked him, following. “You couldn’t just call up the GA head office?”
“I doubt I’m still on their payroll.” He turned left at a t-junction.
“Yeah, but don’t you have—”
“They stopped replenishing the field caches some time ago,” Lubin said. “I’m told any leftovers have long since been acquired by unilaterals. Everything has to be negotiated through contacts.”
“You’re buying them off?”
“It’s not a question of money.”
“What, then?”
“Barter,” he said. “An old debt or two. In-kind services.”
At 2200 they met a man who pulled a gossamer-fine thread of fiberop from his pocket and plugged it into Lubin’s new wristwatch. Lubin stood there for over half an hour, motionless except for the occasional twitching of fingers: a statue leaning slightly into some virtual wind, as if poised to pounce on empty air. Afterwards the stranger reached up and touched the blisters on Lubin’s face. Lubin laid one brief hand on the other man’s shoulder. The interaction was subtly disquieting, for reasons Clarke couldn’t quite put her finger on. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Ken Lubin touch another person short of violence or duty, and failed.
“Who was that?” she asked afterwards.
“No one.” And contradicting himself in the next second: “Someone to spread the word. Although there’s no guarantee even he can raise the alarm in time.”
At 2307 Lubin knocked at a door in a residential retrofit in the middle reaches of what had once been the Toronto Dominion Center. A brown-skinned, grim-faced ectomorph of a woman answered. Her eyes blazed a startling, almost luminous golden-orange—some kind of cultured xanthophyll in the irises—and she loomed over Lubin by a head or more. She spoke quietly in a strange language full of consonants, every syllable thick with anger. Lubin answered in the same tongue and held out a sealed ziplock. The woman snatched it, reached behind the half-open door, threw a bag at his feet —it landed with the muffled clank of gloved metal—and closed the door in his face.
He stowed the bag in his backpack. “What did she give you?” C
larke asked.
“Ordnance.” He started back down the hall.
“What did you give her?”
He shrugged. “An antidote.”
Just before midnight they entered a great vaulted space that might once have been the centerpiece of a mall. Now its distant ceiling was eclipsed by a warren on stilts, a great mass of prefab squats and storage cubes held together by a maze of improvised scaffolding. It was a more efficient use of space than the extravagant emptiness of the old days, if a whole lot uglier. The bottom of the retrofit stood maybe four meters off the original marbled floor; occasional ladders reached down through its underside to ground level. Dark seams cracked the structure here and there, narrow gaps in a patchwork quilt of plastic and fiber paneling: a bounty of peepholes for hidden eyes. Clarke thought she heard the rustling of large animals in hiding, the occasional quiet murmur of muffled voices, but she and Lubin seemed to be the only ones here on the floor beneath.
Sudden motion to the left. A great fountain had once decorated the center of this place; these days its broad soapstone basin, spread out in the perpetual shadow of the squat, seemed to serve primarily as a community dumpster. Pieces of a woman were detaching themselves from that backdrop. The illusion was far from perfect, now that Clarke focused on it. The chromatophores on the woman’s unitard mimicked her background in broad strokes at best, producing more of a blurry translucence than outright invisibility. Not that this particular K seemed to care about camouflage; the ambulatory hair wasn’t exactly designed to blend with the background.
She approached them like a fuzzy cloud with body parts attached. “You must be Kenny,” she said to Lubin. “I’m Laurel. Yuri said you had skin problems.” She gave Clarke an appraising glance, blinking over pupils slit subtly vertical. “I like the eyes. Takes balls to go for rifter chic in these parts.”
Clarke looked back expressionlessly. After a moment, Laurel turned back to Lubin. “Yuri’s wait—”
Lubin snapped her neck Laurel sagged bonelessly into his arms, her head lolling.