Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  Not a pharm, then. Someone with a more ecological perspective, and with—given their access to Haven—a great deal of clearance and autonomy. The Entropy Patrol had the only talent pool that fit.

  One good thing about the Patrol was that it was appropriately paranoid on matters of access. In a world dominated by the telecommute, 'lawbreakers dutifully made the daily real-world journey to a single vast, secure catacomb that plugged directly into Haven. Nobody would have been stupid enough to try and manage an entropy outbreak from a home terminal, even if it had been possible. At CSIRA, even the links into Maelstrom were insanely secure.

  Which made tracking down employees quite straightforward. They all had to come through the foyer.

  There was no listing of individual 'lawbreakers, of course. There was a listing of department heads, available through a small orchard of help kiosks in the main lobby. Once Lubin had what he needed, he stepped outside and headed to the nearest rapitrans stop.

  * * *

  Donald Lertzman was the archetypal middleman; his career had coasted to that comfortable plateau above those who actually did productive work, but safely short of a position where he had to make any vital decisions. Perhaps, on some level, he'd realized that. Perhaps a fully-detached house, hidden behind a hedgerow of acid-resistant blue spruce at the edge of the Sudbury Burn, was his way of compensating.

  Of course, in this day and age he could hardly commute in his private vehicle. He knew the value of appearances; he'd built his livelihood on nothing else. Each night, therefore, he traversed the three blocks between his property and the nearest bus stop on foot. Approximately twenty percent of that distance was out of public view.

  "Excuse me, are you Donald Lertzman?"

  "Yes, who—"

  Lubin carefully noted the medic alert plug-in on Lertzman's wristwatch. It would raise the alarm if his vitals showed any indication of ongoing distress. Of course, a body's stress responses don't just kick in by themselves—they have to be activated by the perception of threat or injury. Most of those signals run through the spinal cord.

  Ten minutes after failing to introduce himself, Lubin knew who he was looking for; he knew where to find him; he knew when that person's shift ended. He knew more than he needed, for the moment.

  His scheduled meeting at Pickering's Pile was twenty-six hours away. Lubin didn't know if he wanted to wait that long. For that matter, there was no guarantee that this Achilles Desjardins would even show up.

  He left Donald Lertzman breathing peacefully.

  Complicity

  It was every bit as abrupt, this time: the sudden translocation of place, one world annihilated, another created in its stead. There may have been some warning. A barely perceptible stutter in the feeds, a ping, as if something far away was checking for activity on the line. But it came too fast to serve as any kind of heads-up, even if Perreault hadn't simply imagined it.

  It didn't matter. She was waiting. She'd been waiting for days.

  The same God's-eye view: a different multitude spread out below, framed by familiar icons and overlays. She'd been shunted from one botfly to another. Nav and GPS were dark for some reason.

  But she was indoors, and there was violence.

  One man lay twisted on the concrete floor; another's boot caught him in the stomach as she watched. His body folded weakly around the blow in some impotent fetal reflex, smearing blood and teeth in its wake. The face was too torn and bloody to betray any clear ethnicity.

  The assailant—smaller, black, his back to the camera—shifted his weight from side to side with a terrible restless energy. His arena was defined by the crowd that enclosed it: some intent, some indifferent, some shaking their own fists in frenzied enthusiasm. Farther away the concentration of humanity thinned out, gave way to sleeping mats and forgotten piles of personal belongings.

  Perreault spun through the available menus. No weapons. In the corner of her eye, a flashing distraction: target -162az : -41dec

  Behind her.

  The victor circled, still bobbing. His face came into view, creased in a fury of concentration. His foot lashed out again: a kidney blow to the back. The twitching thing on the floor jerked open like a bloody flower. Its back arched as though electrocuted.

  The attacker looked up, straight at Perreault's hijacked botfly. His eyes were the brilliant, crystalline jade of gengineered chlorophyll. They stared from that black face like a hallucination.

  Without taking his eyes off the 'fly, he delivered one last kick at the head of his victim. Then he moved into the crowd, unopposed.

  Sou-Hon Perreault had never seen him before. She didn't know his victim. But target was at -175az : -40dec, and moving.

  Pan left. More people, more sleeping mats. Gray unfinished walls rising in the distance, lined with vending machines and, higher up, official pictographs directing the populace to registration and quarantine and latest bulletins. They were in a cement cave ten meters high, erected in the name of mass subsistence: a place for quarantines, an innoculation center, a shelter against those sudden bouts of weather too vicious for the ad-hoc retrofits slapped onto older houses. Increasingly, to many, home.

  The unofficial term was Bomb Shelter.

  Target was at -35, -39. Tactical laid crosshairs onto her the moment she passed into view. Same civilian disguise, same visor. But something had happened to Lenie Clarke since Calgary. She favored one leg when she walked. A yellow bruise spilled across the right side of her face.

  Perreault tripped the 'fly's speaker, thought twice, shut it off again. No need to draw unnecessary attention. Instead she brought up the comm menu, got a lock on Clarke's visor, and tapped into the RF.

  "Hi. It's Sou-Hon again."

  Down on the floor, Lenie Clarke froze. She brought her wrist up; she was no longer wearing a watch.

  "Up here," Perreault said "In the botfly."

  A proximity alert bleeped in her face: another 'fly coming into range. Perreault spun, caught it arriving through the 'fly-sized catflap two meters over the main entrance.

  Even in visible light, the weapons muzzles were obvious.

  She looked back down. Clarke was gone. Perreault panned until the crosshairs came up again. The rifter was heading for the door, glancing up at the other 'fly. It didn't notice her; it was headed toward the bloody Rorschach blot at the other end of the cave.

  "Not that one," Perreault said. "Me. The little one, the surveil—"

  "You're the stalker, right?" Clarke broke in.

  "The—yeah. That's what you called me, anyway."

  "Bye." She was at the entrance.

  "Wait!"

  Gone.

  Perreault spared another look at the other botfly. It was hovering over the aftermath of the fight, its cameras pointing straight down. It had probably been summoned by the 'fly Perreault was riding, just before she'd grabbed the keys. It wasn't paying any attention to her. If its rider even knew that Perreault was in command, he or she didn't seem to care.

  Nothing much I can do either way, she thought, and dived through the flytrap.

  * * *

  Thin dirty rain, sparse droplets blown sideways. The sky was brown. The air seemed full of grit. Farther south, then. Some place where it probably hadn't really snowed in years.

  A metropolitan skyline hovered behind the dome like a murky histogram. Four-lane blacktop stretched out from that background, bled a puddle of asphalt beside the shelter, and continued to the horizon. On all sides a threadbare weave of smaller roads—some little more than dirt paths—extended through a patchwork of fields and woodlots.

  Target, pinned and highlighted like a luminous butterfly, was moving away along one of them.

  Still no GPS. Even the compass was offline.

  Perreault reacquired the rifter's visor and set off on her trail. "Listen, I can—"

  "Fuck off. Last time you were in one of those things it ended up shooting at me."

  "That wasn't me! The link went down!"
>
  "Yeah?" Clarke didn't look back. "And what's going to keep it up this time?"

  "This 'fly doesn't have any weapons. It's strictly eyes and ears."

  "I don't like eyes and ears."

  "It couldn't hurt to have an extra set on your side. If I'd been around to do some advance scouting before, maybe you wouldn't have that bruise on your face."

  Clarke stopped. Perreault brought the 'fly down and hovered a couple of meters off her shoulder.

  "And when your friends get bored?" the rifter asked. "When the link goes down again?"

  "I don't know. Maybe the 'fly just goes back to its regular rounds. At least it can't shoot at you."

  "It can talk to things that can."

  "Look, I'll keep my distance," Perreault offered. "A couple hundred meters, say. I'll stay in range of your visor, but if this thing comes to its senses you'll just be some nameless K who happened to be around when the link came back. They won't look twice."

  Two meters off the port bow, Clarke's shoulders rose and fell.

  "Why are you doing this?" she asked. "Why is it so important to help me out?"

  Perreault briefly considered telling the truth. "I don't know," she said at last. "It just is."

  The rifter shook her head. After a moment she said, "I'm headed south."

  "South?" Perreault tapped again at the dead compass icon. Nothing. She tried to get a fix on the sun through murky overcast.

  Clarke began walking. "This way," she said. And still didn't look back.

  * * *

  Perreault kept well off the road, paralleling Clarke's direction of travel. She called up the camera menu—planning to set a zoom reflex on any motion not consistent with wind action—and was surprised to be offered a choice of views. The 'fly had lateral, stern, and ventral cams as well as the primary stereos up front. She could split the display into four windows and keep simultaneous watch on the whole three-sixty.

  Lenie Clarke trudged silently along the road, shoulders hunched against the wind. Her windbreaker flapped against her body like torn plastic.

  "Aren't you cold?" Perreault asked.

  "Got my skin on."

  "Your—" Of course. Her dive suit. "Is this how you always get around?"

  "You were the one that warned me off flying."

  "Well, yes, but—"

  "I bus sometimes," Clarke said. "Hitchhike."

  Things that didn't involve ID checks or body scans. There was an irony buried in there, Perreault reflected. Clarke had probably been through more rigorous security in the past few weeks than would have been imaginable just decades earlier—but modern checks and gauntlets were aimed at pathogens, not people. Who cared about artifacts like personal ID any more? Who cared about anything so arbitrary as a political border? National identity was so irrelevant that nobody'd even bothered to dismantle it.

  "You're not going to find a ride on this road any time soon," Perreault remarked. "You should've stuck with the main drag."

  "I like walking alone. Avoids pointless small-talk."

  Perreault took the hint.

  She accessed the botfly's flight recorder, fearful of just how much incriminating information the device had stored. But its entire memory had been purged—an act of sabotage well beyond Perreault's capabilities. Even now, the black box somehow failed to retain the routine data stream the 'fly's sensors were sending it.

  She was relieved, but not particularly surprised.

  "Still there?" Clarke said.

  "Uh-huh. Link's still up."

  "They're getting better with practice."

  Perreault remembered Clarke's reflexive glance at her bare wrist, back in the dome. "What happened to your watch?"

  "Smashed it."

  "Why?"

  "Your friends figured out how to override the off switch."

  "They're not—" Not friends. Not even contacts. She didn’t know what they were.

  "And now you're getting in through my visor. If I had any brains I'd lose that, too."

  "So others have made contact?" Of course they had—why would Sou-Hon Perreault be the only person in the world to be given an audience with the Meltdown Madonna?

  "Oh, right. I forgot," the mermaid said wryly. "You don't know anything."

  "Have they? Others like me?"

  "Worse," Clarke said, and kept walking.

  Don't push it.

  A stand of skeletal birch separated them for a few minutes. The port camera caught Lenie Clarke in fragments, through a vertical jumble of white slashes.

  "I went into Maelstrom," she said. "People are—talking about me."

  "Yeah. I know."

  "Do you believe it? The stuff they're saying?"

  Perreault tried for a light touch, not believing it herself: "So you're not carrying the end of the world around inside you?"

  "If I am," Clarke said, "it doesn't show up on a blood panel."

  "You can't believe most of the stuff you read in Maelstrom anyway," Perreault said. "Half of it contradicts the other half."

  "It's all just crazy. I don't know how it got started." A few seconds of silence. Then: "I saw someone that looked like me the other day."

  "I told you. You've got friends."

  "No. It's not me you want. It's something in the wires. It just…stole my name for some reason."

  Beep.

  A sudden luminous rectangle, framing a flicker of motion. The stern camera zoomed reflexively.

  "Hold on," Perreault said. "I've got a—Lenie."

  "What?"

  "You might want to get off the road. I think it's that psycho from the shelter."

  It was. Hunched over the handlebars of an ancient mountain bike, he resolved in the zoom window like a grainy nightmare. He pumped, straining, all his weight on the pedals. The vehicle had no seat. It didn't have any tires, either; it rattled along the road on bare rims. It was a skeleton ridden by a monster. The monster's jacket was dark and wet, and missing one sleeve; it was not the one he'd been wearing before.

  He kept his eyes on the road; only once did he spare a glance back over his shoulder. Eventually he faded in the murk.

  "Lenie?"

  "Here." She rose from a drainage ditch.

  "He's gone," Perreault said. "The things you see when you don't have your gun. Asshole."

  "No worse than anyone else back there." Clarke climbed back onto the road.

  "Except for the fact that he beat someone to death."

  "And a hundred people stood around and watched. Or didn't you notice?"

  "Well—"

  "People do that, you know. Just stand around and do nothing. They're fucking complicit, they're no better than—they're worse. At least he took a little initiative."

  "I didn't notice you standing up to him," Perreault snapped, and instantly regretted her own defensiveness.

  Clarke turned to face the botfly and said nothing. After a moment she resumed walking.

  "They're not all—complicit, Lenie," Perreault said, more gently. "People want to act, they're just—afraid. And sometimes, experience teaches you that the only way to cope is to just—shut down…"

  "Oh yeah, we're all just victims of our past. Don't you dare trot out that subroutine."

  "What subroutine?"

  "The poor little abuse victim. You know what abuse is, really? It's an excuse."

  "Lenie, I'm not—"

  "So some asshole grabs your cunt in daycare. So someone rams his cock up your ass. So what? Bruises, maybe. A bit of bleeding. You suffer more injury if you fall off the swings and break your arm, so how come you don't hear anyone wailing about abuse then?"

  A thousand kilometers away, Perreault reeled in the surge of Clarke's vehemence. "I didn't say— and anyway, the physical injury's only part of it. The emotional damage—"

  "Crap. You think we aren't built to withstand a little childhood trauma? You know how many of the higher mammals eat their own young? We wouldn't have lasted ten generations if a couple of childhood shit-kickings was en
ough to take us out for the count."

  "Lenie—"

  "You think all those armies and gangs and cops would be so keen on rape if we just didn't make such a big deal about it? If we didn't get all weak-kneed and trembly at the thought of being violated? Fuck that. I've been attacked by things straight out of nightmares. I've nearly been boiled and buried alive more times than I can count. I know all about the ways you can push a body to the breaking point, and sexual abuse doesn't even make the top ten."

  She stopped and glared across at Perreault's distant teleop. Perreault zoomed: the rifter was shaking.

  "Or do you have some basis for disagreement? Some personal experience to back up all your trendy platitudes?"

  Sure I had experience. I watched. For years I watched, and felt nothing.

  It was my job…

  But of course she couldn't say that. "I—no. Not really."

  "Course not. You're just a fucking tourist, aren't you? You're safe and comfy in some glass tower somewhere, and you stick a periscope into the real world every now and then and tell yourself you're experiencing life or some such shit. You're pathetic."

  "Lenie—"

  "Stop feeding off me."

  She wouldn't say anything more. She stalked silently along that road in the dirty rain, refusing entreaty or apology. Brown sky faded to black. Visible light failed, infra kicked in. Lenie Clarke was a white-hot speck of anger at fixed range, endlessly moving.

  In all that time she only spoke once. The words were barely more than a growl, and Sou-Hon Perreault did not believe they were intended for her ears. But the fly's enhanced senses had little regard for range and none for privacy: filter and gain turned Clarke's words from distant static to ugly, unmistakable truth:

  "Everybody pays."

  Vision Quest

  There were two reasons Achilles Desjardins didn't indulge in sex with real partners. The second was, simulations gave him much more latitude.

  His system was more than enough to handle the range. His skin came equipped with the latest Lorenz-levitation haptics, their formless magnetic fingers both sensing his movements and responding to them. The ad specs boasted you could feel a virtual ant crawling up your back. They weren't lying. The only way you'd get a better ride was to go with a direct neural interface, but Desjardins wasn't about to go that far; it wasn't widely known, but there were creatures in Maelstrom that were learning to penetrate wetware. The last thing he needed was some sourced shark hijacking his spinal cord.