Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  He fell silent.

  "No." Clarke shook her head. "That doesn't explain anything." She'd grown far too still during his recitation.

  "It explains everything," Desjardins said. "It—"

  "So I'm just some kind of password, is that it?" She leaned in close. "Just a, a key to get through those fucking head cheeses. What about Yankton, you fucker? What about that Apocalypse Mermaid shit, and all those people with their fake eyecaps trying to suck me dry every time I turn around? Where'd they come from?"

  "S-same thing," Desjardins stammered. "Anemone was just spreading the meme any way it could."

  "Not good enough. Say something else."

  "But I don't—"

  "Say something else."

  "It happens all the time, for Chrissakes! People strap bombs onto their backs or they release sarin in the passenger lounge or they go to school one day and just start shooting and they know they're gonna die, but it's worth it, you know? As long as they get the bastards who victimized them."

  She laughed: a staccato bark, the sound of something snapping. "That's what I am in all this? A victim?"

  Desjardins shook his head. "They're the victims. You're just the gun they used to fight back with."

  She glared down at him. He looked back, helpless.

  She hit him in the face.

  Desjardins toppled backward; the back of his head hit the floor with a crack. He lay there, tied to the overturned chair, moaning.

  She turned. Lubin was blocking her exit.

  She faced him for a few seconds, unmoving. "If you're going to kill me," she said at last, "just do it. Either that or get out of my way."

  He considered a moment. He stepped aside. Lenie Clarke brushed past him and went upstairs.

  * * *

  She really had spent her childhood here, of course. The sets were real enough; it was only the supporting roles that had been imaginary. Lubin knew exactly where she was going.

  He found her in the undarkness of her old bedroom. It had been stripped and sprayed, like the rest of the house. Clarke turned at his entrance, looked around tiredly at the bare walls: "So is it abandoned? On the market?"

  "We did this before you arrived," he said. "Just in case. To simplify clean-up."

  "Ah. Well, it doesn't matter. Still seems like yesterday, in fact." She aimed her capped eyes at one wall. "That's where my bed was. That was where—Dad—used to play bedtime stories for me. Foreplay, I guess you'd call it. And there's the air duct—" gesturing at a grille set into the baseboard—"that connects right down to the living room. I could hear Mom playing with her favorite shows. I always thought those shows were really stupid, but looking back maybe she didn't like them much either. They were just alibis."

  "It didn't happen," Lubin reminded her. "None of it."

  "I know that, Ken. I get the point." She took a breath. "And you know, right now I think I'd give anything if it had."

  Lubin blinked, surprised. "What?"

  She turned to face him. "Do you have any idea what it's like to be—to be haunted by happiness?" She managed a bitter laugh. "All those months I kept denying it, chalking it up to stroke and hallucination because shit, Ken, I couldn't have had a happy childhood. My parents couldn't be anything but monsters, you see? The monsters made me what I am. They're the only reason I survived all the shit that came later, they're the only thing that kept me going. I was not gonna let those stumpfucks win. Everything that drove me, every time I didn't quit, every time I beat the odds, it was a slap in their big smug all-powerful monster faces. Everything I ever did I did against them. Everything I am is against them. And now you stand there and tell me the monsters never even existed…"

  Her eyes were hard, empty spots of rage. She glared up at him, her shoulders shaking. But finally she turned away, and when she spoke again her voice came out soft and broken.

  "They do exist though, Ken. Honest-to-God flesh-and-blood monsters, the old fashioned kind. They hide from the daylight and they sneak out of the swamps at night and they go on rampages just like you'd expect. They kill and maim anyone they can get their hands on …" A long, shuddering breath. "And all these monsters could ever say in their own defense is it happened to them first, the world fucked them long before they started fucking it back, and if anyone out there wasn't guilty, well, they hadn't stopped all the others who were, right? So everybody's got it coming. But the monsters can't plead self-defense, they can't even plead righteous revenge. Nothing happened to them."

  "Something happened," Lubin said. "Even if your parents didn't do it."

  She didn't speak for a while. Then: "I wonder what he was like, really."

  "From what I've heard," Lubin said, "he was just—a typical dad."

  "Do you know where he is? Where they are?"

  "They died twelve years ago. Tularemia."

  "Of course." A soft laugh. "I guess that was one of my qualifications, right? No loose ends."

  He stepped around her, watched her face come into view.

  It was wet. Lubin paused, taken aback. He'd never known Lenie Clarke to cry before.

  Her capped eyes met his; a corner of her mouth twitched in something like a rueful grin. "At least, if you were right about ßehemoth, the real culprits are in for it along with everyone else." She shook her head. "It's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. I'm some killer asteroid in the sky, and the dinosaurs are actually cheering for me."

  "Just the little ones."

  She looked at him. "Ken…I think maybe I've destroyed the world."

  "It wasn't you."

  "Right. Anemone. I was just the mule for a—an Artificial Stupidity, I guess you'd call it." She shook her head. "If you believe that guy downstairs."

  "It's an old story," Lubin reflected. "Body snatchers. Things that get inside you and make you do things you'd never do, given the—"

  He stopped. Clarke was watching him with a strange expression.

  "Like your conditioned reflex ," she said quietly. "Your—security breaches…"

  He swallowed.

  "Does it ever haunt you, Ken? All the people you've killed?"

  "There's—an antidote," he admitted. "Sort of a chaser for Guilt Trip. Makes things easier to live with."

  "Absolution," she whispered.

  "You've heard of it?" In fact, he'd never found it necessary.

  "Saw some graffiti down in the Dust Belt," Clarke said. "They were trying to wash it off, but there must've been something in the ink…"

  She stepped toward the hallway. Lubin turned to follow. Faint machine sounds and the soft hissing of fluids drifted in from outdoors.

  "What's going on out there, Ken?"

  "Decontamination. We evacuated the area before you arrived."

  "Gonna fry the neighborhood?" Another step. Clarke was in the doorway.

  "No. We know your route. ßehemoth hasn't had a chance to spread from there even if you left any behind."

  "That's not likely, I take it."

  "You're not bleeding. You didn't piss or shit anywhere since you came ashore."

  She was in the hall, at the top of the stairs. Lubin moved to her side.

  "You're just being extra careful," Clarke said.

  "That's right."

  "It's kind of pointless though, isn't it?"

  "What?"

  She turned to face him. "I've crossed a continent, Ken. I was on the Strip for weeks. I hung out in the Belt. I just spent a week swimming through the drinking water for half a billion people. I bled and fucked and shat and pissed more times than you can count, in oceans and toilets and half the ditches in between. Maybe you did too, although I'd guess they've cleaned you up since then. So really, what's the point?"

  He shrugged. "It's all we can do. Watch for brush fires, hope to put them out before they get too big."

  "And keep me from starting new ones."

  He nodded.

  "You can't sterilize an ocean," she said. "You can't sterilize a whole continent."

  Maybe we
can, he thought.

  The sounds of decontamination were louder here, but not much. Even the occasional voice was hushed. Almost as if the neighborhood was still infested with innocents, as though the crews feared sleeping citizens who could wake at any moment and catch them red-handed…

  "You never answered me before, Ken." Lenie Clarke took a step down the stairs. "About whether you were going to kill me."

  She's not going to run, he told himself. You know her. She's already taken her best shot, she's not—

  You don't have to—

  "Well. I guess we'll find out," she said. And started calmly down the stairs.

  "Lenie."

  She didn't look back. He followed her down. Surely she didn't think she could outrun him—surely she didn't think—

  "You know I can't let you leave," he said behind her.

  Of course she knows. You know what she's doing.

  She was at the foot of the stairs. The open door gaped five meters in front of her.

  Something deformed suddenly in Lubin's gut. If almost seemed like Guilt Trip, but—

  She was almost to the door. Something with halogen eyes was spraying the sidewalk beyond.

  Lubin moved without thinking. In an instant he'd blocked the doorway; in another he'd closed and locked the door itself, plunging the house into darkness even by rifter standards.

  "Hey," Desjardins complained from the living room.

  A few photons sneaked around the edges of the door. Lenie Clarke was a vague silhouette by that feeble light. Lubin felt his fists clenching, unclenching; no matter how he tried he couldn't make them stop.

  "Listen," he managed to say, "I really don't have any choice."

  "I know, Ken," she said softly. "It's okay."

  "I don't," he said again, almost whimpering.

  "Sure you do," boomed a strange voice in his ear.

  * * *

  What was—

  "Alice?" came Desjardins's voice from around the corner.

  "You're a free agent, Kenny boy, " the voice said. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to. Take my word for it."

  Lubin tapped the bead in his ear. "Identify yourself."

  "Alice Jovellanos, senior 'lawbreaker, Sudbury franchise. At your service."

  "No shit," drifted from the living room.

  Lubin tapped his bead again: "We've got a breach on communications, someone going by Alice Jovellanos—"

  "They already know, big man. They were the ones who patched me through in the first place. I gave them the rest of the night off."

  Lenie Clarke stepped back from Lubin, turned toward the darkened living room. "What—"

  "This is a restricted channel," Lubin said. "Get off."

  "Fuck that. I outrank you."

  "I gather you haven't been on the job very long."

  "Long enough. Killjoy, is Lenie Clarke there?"

  "Yeah," Desjardins said. "Alice, what—"

  "She got a watch? I've got Lubin's channel and your inlays—boy, I can't wait until they slide a set of those into my head—but nothing on Lenie—"

  "Lenie," Desjardins said, "hold your watch away from your body."

  "Don't have one," the dark shape said.

  "Too bad," Jovellanos said. "Lubin, I wasn't kidding. You're a free man."

  "I don't believe you," Lubin said.

  "Killjoy's free. Why not you as well?"

  "We never met. No opportunity." But he was back beneath the waves in Lake Michigan, not killing Lenie Clarke. He was in debriefing afterward, pretending he'd never had the chance.

  "It's an infection," Jovellanos said. "Real subversive. We made sure it was airborne, packed it inside an encephalitis jacket although you'll be relieved to know the contents aren't quite so lethal. It's spreading through CSIRA even as we speak. "

  All he had to do was open the door. Even if this Jovellanos wasn't lying about ordering the crew to stand down, they wouldn't have had time to pack up yet. Someone could just tap an icon and Alice Jovellanos would be jammed. Another, she'd be traced. The situation wasn't even close to out of control.

  He could afford a few moments…

  "The Trip's been weakening in you ever since you shared air with Killjoy there," Jovellanos was saying. "You're calling your own shots now, Ken. Kind of changes things, doesn't it?"

  "Alice, are you completely—" Desjardins sounded almost in tears. "That's the only leash he ever had."

  "Actually, that's not true. Ken Lubin's one of the most moral men you could ever meet."

  "For God's sake, Alice—I'm fucking tied to a chair with my face caved in—"

  "Trust me. I'm looking at his medical records right now. No serotonin or tryptophan deprivation, no TPH polymorphisms. He may not be a fun date, but he's no impulse-killer. Which is not to say that you don't have a few issues, Ken. Am I right?"

  "How did you—" but of course she'd be able to access his files, Lubin realized. It was just that any normal 'lawbreaker wouldn't be able to justify such an intrusion to Guilt Trip, not in the course of a normal assignment.

  She actually did it somehow. She freed me…

  He felt like throwing up.

  "What was it like all those years, Ken?" Jovellanos purred in his ear. "Knowing she'd got away with it? All those nifty childhood experiences that made you so right for the job—of course you thought about revenge. You spent your whole life fantasizing about revenge, didn't you? Anyone would have."

  What am I going to do?

  "You say it's an infection," he said, trying to deflect her.

  "But you never once acted on it, did you Ken? Because you're a moral man, and you knew that would be wrong."

  "How does it work?" Don't respond. Don't let her play you. Keep on target.

  "And when the slip-ups started, those were just—mistakes, right? Inadvertent little breaches that had to be sealed. You killed then, of course, but there wasn't any choice. You always played by the rules. And it wasn't your fault, was it? The Trip made you do it."

  "Answer me." No, no… control. Relax.

  Don't let her hear it…

  "Only it started happening so often, and people had to wonder if you hadn't found some way to have your cake and eat it, too. That's why they sent you someplace where there weren't any security issues or mission priorities that could set you off. They didn't want to give you a choice, so they sent you someplace you wouldn't have an excuse."

  His respiration rate was far too high. He concentrated on bringing it down. A few steps away, Clarke's silhouette seemed dangerously attentive.

  "You're still a moral man, Ken." Jovellanos said. "You follow the rules. You won't kill unless you don't have a choice. I'm telling you, you've got a choice."

  "Your infection," he grated. "What does it do?"

  "Liberates slaves."

  Bullshit answer. But at least she was out of his head.

  "How?" he pressed.

  "Complexes Guilt Trip into an inactive form that binds to the Minksy receptors. Doesn't affect anyone who isn't already Tripped."

  "What about the side-effects?" he said.

  "Side effects?"

  "Baseline guilt, for example," Lubin said.

  Desjardins moaned. "Oh, shit. Of course. Of course."

  "What's going on?" Clarke said. "What are you talking about?"

  Lubin almost laughed aloud. Regular, garden variety guilt. Plain old conscience. How would they ever get into play, now that their receptor sites had been jammed? Jovellanos and her buddies had been so busy tweaking the synthetics that they'd forgotten about chemicals that been there for aeons.

  Except they hadn't forgotten. They'd known exactly what they were doing. Lubin was sure of it.

  All hail the Entropy Patrol. The power to shut down cities and governments, the power to save a million people here or kill a million somewhere else, the power to keep everything going or to tear it all to shreds overnight—

  He turned to Clarke. "Your fan club's been throwing off the shackles of o
ppression," he said. "They're free now. Not slaves to Guilt Trip, not slaves to guilt. Untouchable by conscience in any form."

  He raised a hand in the darkness, a bitter toast: "Congratulations, Dr. Jovellanos. There's only a few thousand people with their hands on all the world's kill switches, and you've turned them all into clinical sociopaths."

  * * *

  "Believe me," Jovellanos said. "You'll hardly notice the difference."

  Desjardins was noticing, though. "Shit. Shit. I wouldn't even be here, I mean—I just picked up and left. I threw everything away, didn't care about the world going to pieces, I just—for one person. Just because I wanted to."

  "We psychos are notorious for bad impulse control," Clarke said, approaching him. "Ken, how do you spring these bindings?"

  Lubin glowered at her back. Doesn't she get it?

  "Come on, Ken. The situation's contained. None of us is going anywhere for the time being, and any rules we were playing by before seem to have pretty much gone out the window. Maybe we could start working together for a change."

  He hesitated. Nothing she said raised any kind of alarm in his gut. Nothing urged him into action, no other presence tried to take control of his motor nerves. Almost experimentally, he crossed into the living room and depolarized the tanglethreads. They slipped to the floor like overcooked pasta.

  For good measure, he pulled a lightstick from his pocket and struck it; light flared in the gutted room. Desjardins blinked over shrinking pupils and gingerly explored the bruise on his cheek.

  "Conscience is overrated anyway," Jovellanos said all around them.

  "Give it a rest, Alice," Desjardins said, rubbing his wrists.

  "I'm serious. Think about it: not everyone even has a conscience, and the people that do are invariably exploited by the ones that don't. Conscience is—irrational, when you get right down to it."