Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  But wait a nan: those guys over there, they're jumping the queue somehow. They're not even alive, they're just files; but the system is giving them preferential treatment.

  One of them barely even notices when 128 jumps onto its back. They go through together.

  * * *

  Much better. A nice roomy buffer, a couple of terabytes if it's a nybble, somewhere between the last node and the next. It's nobody's destination—really, just a waiting room—but the present is all that really matters to those who play by Darwin's rules, and the present looks good.

  There's no other life in evidence. There are three other files, though, including the horse 128 rode in on: barely animate but still somehow deserving of the royal treatment that got them fast-tracked out of Mérida. They've de-arced their rudimentary autodiagnostics and are checking themselves for bruises while they wait.

  It's an opportunity 128 is well-prepared to exploit, thanks to an inherited subroutine for which it remains eternally ungrateful. While these beasts of burden look under their own hoods, 128 can peek over their shoulders.

  Two compressed mail packets and an autonomic crossload between two BCC nodes. 128 evinces the sub-electronic equivalent of a shudder. It steers well clear of nodes with the BCC prefix; it's seen too many brethren go into such addresses, and none at all come out. Still, peeking at a few lines of routine stats shouldn't do any harm.

  In fact, it proves quite enlightening. Once you disregard all the formatting and addressing redundancies, these three files seem to have two remarkable things in common:

  They all go the head of the line when traveling through Maelstrom. And they all contain the text string Lenie Clarke.

  128 is literally built out of numbers. It certainly knows how to add two and two.

  Animal Control

  The pretense had ended long before Sou-Hon Perrault joined the ranks.

  There'd been a time, she knew, when those who fell ill on the Strip were actually treated on-site. There'd been clinics, right next to the pre-fab offices where refugees came to hand in forms and hold out hopes. In those days the Strip had been a temporary measure, a mere stop-gap until we deal with the backlog. People had stood at the door and knocked; a steady stream had trickled through.

  Nothing compared to the cascade piling up behind.

  Now the offices were gone. The clinics were gone. N'AmPac had long-since thrown up its hands against the rising tide; it had been years since anyone had described the Strip as a waystation. Now it was pure terminus. And now, when things went wrong over the wall, there were no clinics left to put on the case.

  Now there were only the dogcatchers.

  * * *

  They came in just after sunrise, near the end of her shift. They swooped down like big metal hornets: a nastier breed of botfly, faces bristling with needles and taser nodes, bellies distended with superconducting ground-effectors that could lift a man right off his feet. Usually that wasn't necessary; the Strippers were used to occasional intrusions in the name of public health. They endured the needles and tests with stoic placidity.

  This time, though, some snapped and snarled. In one instance Perrault glimpsed a struggling refugee carried aloft by a pair of dogcatchers working in tandem—one subduing, the other sampling, both carrying out their tasks beyond reach of the strangely malcontent horde below. Their specimen fought to escape, ten meters above the ground. For a moment it almost looked as though he might succeed, but Perrault switched channels without waiting to find out. There was no point in hanging around; the dogcatchers knew what they were doing, after all, and she had other duties to perform.

  She occupied herself with research.

  The usual tangle of conflicting rumors still ran rampant along the coast. Lenie Clarke was on the Strip, Lenie Clarke had left it. She was raising an army in NoCal, she had been eaten alive north of Corvallis. She was Kali, and Amitav was her prophet. She was pregnant, and Amitav was the father. She could not be killed. She was already dead. Where she went, people shook off their lethargy and raged. Where she went, people died.

  There was no shortage of stories. Even her botfly began telling them.

  * * *

  She was interrogating an Asian woman near the NoCal border. The filter was set to Cantonese: a text translation scrolled across a window in her HUD while her headset whispered the equivalent spoken English.

  Suddenly that equivalence disappeared. The voice in Perrault's ear insisted that "I do not know this Lenie Clarke but I have heard of the man Amitav", but the text on her display said something else entirely:

  angel. No shit. Lenie Clarke, her name was

  her up but Lenie Clarke isn't exactly sockeye

  a place called Beebe? Anyhow, far as

  "Wait. Wait a second," Perrault said. The refugee fell obediently silent.

  The text box kept scrolling, though,

  Lenie? That's her first name?

  It cleared quickly enough when Perrault wiped the window. But by then her headset was talking again.

  "Lenie Clarke was very…not even your antidepressants seemed to work on her," it said.

  Amitav's words. She remembered them.

  Not his voice, of course. Something cool, inflectionless, with no trace of accent. Something familiar and inhuman. Spoken words, converted to ASCII for transmission then reconstructed at the other end: it was a common trick for reducing file size, but tone and feeling got lost in the wash.

  Amitav's words. Maelstrom's voice. Perrault felt a prickling along the back of her neck.

  "Hello? Who is this?"

  The refugee was speaking. Perrault had no idea what she said. Certainly it wasn't

  Brander, Mi/ke/cheal,

  Caraco, Jud/y/ith

  Clarke, Len/ie

  Lubin, Ken/neth

  Nakata, Alice

  which was all that appeared on the board.

  "What about Lenie Clarke?" There was no way to source the signal—as far as the system could tell, the input had arisen from a perplexed-looking Asian woman on the NoCal shoreline.

  "Lenie Clarke," the dead voice repeated softly. "All of a sudden there's this K-selector walking out of nowhere. Looks like one of those old litcrits with the teeth. You know. Vampires."

  "Who is this? How did you get on this channel?"

  "Would you like to know about Lenie Clarke." If the words had arisen from anything flesh and blood, they would have formed a question.

  "Yes! Yes, but—"

  "She's still at large. Les beus are probably looking for her."

  Intelligence spilled across the text window:

  Name: Clarke, Lenie Janice

  WHID: 745 143 907 20AE

  Born: 07/10/2019

  Voting Status: disqualified 2046 (failed pre-poll exam)

  "Who are you?"

  "Ying Nushi. I have already said."

  It was the woman on the shore, returned to her rightful place in the circuit. The thing that had usurped her was gone.

  Sou-Hon Perrault could not get it back. She didn't even know how to try. She spent the rest of her shift on edge, waiting for cryptic overtures, startling at any click or flicker in the headset. Nothing happened. She went to bed and stared endlessly at the ceiling, barely noticing when Martin climbed in beside her and didn't push.

  Who is Lenie Clarke? What is Lenie Clarke?

  More than some accidental survivor, certainly. More than Amitav's convenient icon. More even than the incendiary legend Perrault had once thought, burning its way across the Strip. How much more, she didn't know.

  She's still at large. Les beus are probably looking for her.

  Somehow, Lenie Clarke was in the net.

  Ghost

  The body hadn't bothered Tracy Edison at all. That hadn't been mom, it hadn't even looked like a person. It was just a bunch of smashed meat all covered up by plaster and cement. The eye that had stared so rudely from across the room was the right color, but it wasn't really her mom's eye. Mom's eyes were inside her head.r />
  And anyway, there'd been no time to even check. Dad had grabbed her right up and put her in the car (in the front seat, even) and they'd just driven right away without stopping. Tracy had looked back and the house hadn't looked that bad from the outside, really, except for that one wall and the bit behind the garden. But then they'd gone around the corner and the house was gone, too.

  Nothing stopped after that. Dad wouldn't even stop to pick up food—there was food where they were going, he said, and they had to get there fast "before the wall came down". He was always talking like that, about how they were carving the world up into little cookie-cutter shapes, and how all those exotic weeds and bugs were giving them the excuse they needed to rope everybody off into little enclaves. Mom had always said it was amazing how he kept coming up with all those full-blown conspiracy theories, but Tracy got the feeling that recent events kind of came down on Dad's side. She wasn't sure, though. It was all really confusing.

  It had taken a long time to get up into the mountains. Lots of the roads were cracked and twisted so you couldn't drive on them, and other ones were already jammed with cars and buses and trucks; there were so many that Tracy didn't even see anyone glaring at their car, the way people usually did because well, honey, people don't know that I work way out in the woods, so when they see we have our own car they think we're just being wasteful and selfish. Dad took lots of back roads and before she knew it they were way off in the mountains, just old clear-cuts as far as you could see, all green and fuzzing up with carbon-eating kudzu. And Dad still hadn't stopped, except a few times to let Tracy out to pee and one time when he drove under some trees until a bunch of helicopters had gone by.

  They hadn't stopped until they got here, to this little cabin in the woods by a lake— a glacial lake, Dad said. He said there were lots of these cabins, strung out along valley floors all through the mountains. A long time ago Park Rangers would ride around on horseback, making sure everything was okay and staying at a different cabin each night. Now, of course, regular people weren't allowed to go into the woods, so there was no need for rangers any more. But they still kept some cabins ready for visitors, for biologists who came into the woods to study the trees and things.

  "So we're here on a kind of holiday," her dad said. "We'll just play it by ear, and we'll go hiking every day, and just explore and play until things settle down a bit back home."

  "When will Mommy be here?" Tracy asked.

  Her dad looked down at the brown pine needles all over the ground. "Mommy's gone, Lima-Bean," he said after a bit. "It's just us for a while."

  "Okay," said Tracy.

  * * *

  She learned how to chop wood and start fires, both outside in the firepit and in the cabin's big black stove; it must have been over a hundred years old. She loved the smell of wood smoke, although she hated it when the wind changed and it got in her eyes. They went hiking in the woods almost every day, and they watched the stars come out at night. Tracy's dad thought the stars were something really special—"never get a view like this in the city, eh, Lima-bean?"— but the planetarium in Tracy's watch was actually nicer, even if you did have to wear eyephones to see it. Still, Tracy didn't complain; she could tell it was really important to Dad that she liked this whole holiday thing. So she smiled and nodded. Dad would be happy for a while.

  At night, though, when they doubled up on the cot, he would hold her and hold her and not let go. Sometimes he hugged so tight it almost hurt; other times he'd just curl around her from behind, not moving at all, not squeezing but all tensed up.

  Once Tracy woke up in the middle of the night and her dad was crying. He was wrapped around her and he didn't make a sound; but every now and then he would shudder a little bit, and tears would splash onto Tracy's neck. Tracy kept absolutely still, so her dad wouldn't know she was awake.

  The next morning she asked him—as she still did, sometimes—when Mom would be coming. Her dad told her it was time to sweep the cabin.

  * * *

  Her mom never did show up. Someone else did, though.

  They were cleaning up after supper. They'd spent all day hiking to the glacier at the far end of the lake, and Tracy was looking forward to going to bed. But there was no dishwasher in the cabin, so they had to clean all their dishes in the sink. Tracy was drying, looking out into the windy blackness on the other side of the window. If she looked really hard through the glass she could see a jagged little corner of dark gray sky, all hemmed in by black tree shapes jostling in the wind. Mostly, though, she just saw her own reflection looking back at her from the darkness, and the brightly lit inside of the cabin reflecting behind.

  But then she looked down to wipe a plate, and her reflection didn't do the same thing.

  She looked back up out the window. Her reflection looked wrong. Blurry, like there were two of them. And its eyes were wrong, too.

  It's not me, Tracy thought, and felt a shudder run over her whole body.

  There was something else out there, a ghost face, looking in—and when Tracy felt her eyes go wide and her mouth open ohhh that other face just kept looking back from the wind and the dark with no expression at all.

  "Daddy," she tried to say, but it came out a whisper.

  At first Dad just looked at her. Then he looked at the window, and his mouth opened and his eyes went a little wide, too. But only for a moment. Then he was going to the door.

  On the other side of the window, the floating ghost face turned to follow him.

  "Daddy," Tracy said, and her voice sounded very small. "Please don't let it in."

  "She, Lima bean. Not it," her dad said. "And don't be silly. It's freezing out there."

  * * *

  It wasn't a ghost after all. It was a woman with short blond hair, just like Tracy's. She came through the door without a word; the wind outside tried to follow her in, but Tracy's dad shut it out.

  Her eyes were white and empty. They reminded Tracy of the glacier at the end of the lake.

  "Hi," Tracy's dad said. "Welcome to our, uh, home away from home."

  "Thanks." The woman blinked over those scary white eyes. They must be contact lenses, Tracy decided. Like those ConTacs people wore sometimes. She'd never seen any so white.

  "Well, of course it's not our home exactly, we're just here for a while, you know—are you with MNR?"

  The woman tilted her head a bit, asking a question without opening her mouth. Except for the eyes, she looked like any other hiker Tracy had seen. Gore-Tex and backpack and all that stuff.

  "Ministry of Natural Resources," Tracy's dad explained.

  "No," the woman said.

  "Well, I guess we're all trespassing together then, eh?"

  The woman looked down at Tracy and smiled. "Hi there."

  Tracy took a step back and bumped into her dad. Dad put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed as if to say it's okay.

  The woman looked back up at Tracy's dad. Her smile was gone.

  "I didn't mean to crash your party," the woman told him.

  "Don't be silly. Actually, we've been here for a few weeks now. Hiking around. Exploring. Got out just before they sealed the border. I used to be a—that is, the Big One didn't leave much behind, eh? Everything's in such a jumble. But I knew about this place, did some contract work here once. So we're riding it out. Until things settle down."

  The woman nodded.

  "I'm Gord," said Tracy's dad. "And this is Tracy."

  "Hello, Tracy," the woman said. She smiled again. "I guess I must look pretty strange to you, right?"

  "It's okay," Tracy said. Her dad gave her another squeeze.

  The woman's smile flickered a bit.

  "Anyway," Dad said, "as I was saying, I'm Gord, and this is Tracy."

  At first Tracy thought the strange woman wasn't going to answer. "Lenie," she said at last.

  "Pleased to meet you, Lenie. What brings you way up here?"

  "Just hiking through," she said. "To Jasper."

  "Got
family there? Friends?"

  Lenie didn't even answer. "Tracy," she said instead, "where's your mom?"

  "She's—" Tracy began, and couldn't finish.

  It was like something clamped down in her throat. Where's your mom? She didn't know. She did know. But Dad wouldn't talk about it—

  Mommy's gone, Lima bean. It's just us for a while.

  How long was a while?

  Mommy's gone.

  Suddenly, Dad's fingers were gripping her shoulders so hard it hurt.

  Mommy's—

  "The quake," her dad said, and his voice was tight the way it got when he was really mad.

  —gone.

  "I'm sorry," said the strange woman. "I didn't know."

  "Yeah, well maybe next time just think a bit before—"

  "You're right. It was thoughtless. I'm sorry."

  "Yeah." Dad didn't sound convinced.

  "I—it was the same for me," Lenie said. "Family."

  "I'm sorry," Tracy's dad said, and suddenly he didn't sound angry at all any more. He must have thought that Lenie was talking about the quake.

  Somehow, Tracy knew that wasn't true.

  "Look," her dad was saying, "You're welcome to rest up here for a day or two if you want. Plenty of food. There's two beds. Tracy and I can double up."

  "That's okay," Lenie said. "I'll sleep on the floor."

  "It's no problem, really. We double up sometimes anyway, don't we, Bean?"

  "Do you." Lenie's voice was strange and flat. "I see."

  "And we—we've all been through so much, you know. We've all—lost so much. We should help each other out when we get the chance, don't you think?"