Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  "This wasn't supposed to happen," Ballard says. "That's why they built here, for crying out loud! It was supposed to be stable!"

  "The rift's never stable," Clarke replies. Not much point in being here if it was.

  Ballard swims up through the fallout and pops an access plate on one of the generators. "Well, according to this there's no damage," she calls down, after looking inside. "Hang on, let me switch channels here—"

  Clarke touches one of the cylindrical sensors strapped to her waist, and stares into the fissure. I should be able to fit through there, she decides.

  And does.

  "We were lucky," Ballard is saying above her. "The other generators are okay too. Oh, wait a second; number two has a clogged cooling duct, but it's not serious. Backups can handle it until—get out of there!"

  Clarke looks up, one hand on the sensor she's planting. Ballard stares down at her through a chimney of fresh rock.

  "Are you crazy?" Ballard shouts. "That's an active smoker!"

  Clarke looks down again, deeper into the shaft. It twists out of sight in the mineral haze. "We need temperature readings," she says, "from inside the mouth."

  "Get out of there! It could go off again and fry you!"

  I suppose it could at that, Clarke thinks. "It already blew," she calls back. "It'll take a while to build up a fresh head." She twists a knob on the sensor; tiny explosive bolts blast into the rock, anchoring the device.

  "Get out of there, now!"

  "Just a second." Clarke turns the sensor on and kicks up out of the seabed. Ballard grabs her arm as she emerges, starts to drag her away from the smoker.

  Clarke stiffens and pulls free. "Don't—" touch me! She catches herself. "I'm out, okay? You don't have to—"

  "Further." Ballard keeps swimming. "Over here."

  They're near the edge of the light now, the floodlit Throat on one side, blackness on the other. Ballard faces Clarke. "Are you out of your mind? We could have gone back to Beebe for a drone! We could have planted it on remote!"

  Clarke doesn't answer. She sees something moving in the distance behind Ballard. "Watch your back," she says.

  Ballard turns, and sees the gulper sliding toward them. It undulates through the water like brown smoke, silent and endless; Clarke can't see the creature's tail, although several meters of serpentine flesh have come out of the darkness.

  Ballard goes for her knife. After a moment, Clarke does too.

  The gulper's jaw drops open like a great jagged scoop.

  Ballard begins to launch herself at the thing, knife upraised.

  Clarke puts her hand out. "Wait a minute. It's not coming at us."

  The front end of the gulper is about ten meters distant now. Its tail pulls free of the murk.

  "Are you crazy?" Ballard moves clear of Clarke's hand, still watching the monster.

  "Maybe it isn't hungry," Clarke says. She can see its eyes, two tiny unwinking spots glaring at them from the tip of the snout.

  "They're always hungry. Did you sleep through the briefings?"

  The gulper closes its mouth and passes. It extends around them now, in a great meandering arc. The head turns back to look at them. It opens its mouth.

  "Fuck this," Ballard says, and charges.

  Her first stroke opens a meter-long gash in the creature's side. The gulper stares at Ballard for a moment, as if astonished. Then, ponderously, it thrashes.

  Clarke watches without moving. Why can't she just let it go? Why does she always have to prove she's better than everything?

  Ballard strikes again; this time she slashes into a great tumorous swelling that has to be the stomach.

  She frees the things inside.

  They spill out through the wound; two huge giganturids and some misshapen creature Clarke doesn't recognize. One of the giganturids is still alive, and in a foul mood. It locks its teeth around the first thing it encounters.

  Ballard. From behind.

  "Lenie!" Ballard's knife hand is swinging in staccato arcs. The giganturid begins to come apart. Its jaws remain locked. The convulsing gulper crashes into Ballard and sends her spinning to the bottom.

  Finally, Clarke begins to move.

  The gulper collides with Ballard again. Clarke moves in low, hugging the bottom, and pulls the other woman clear.

  Ballard's knife continues to dip and twist. The giganturid is a mutilated wreck behind the gills, but its grip remains unbroken. Ballard can't twist around far enough to reach the skull. Clarke comes in from behind and takes the creature's head in her hands.

  It stares at her, malevolent and unthinking.

  "Kill it!" Ballard shouts. "Jesus, what are you waiting for?"

  Clarke closes her eyes, and clenches. The skull in her hand splinters like cheap plastic.

  There is a silence.

  After a while, she opens her eyes. The gulper is gone, fled back into darkness to heal or die. But Ballard's still there, and Ballard is angry.

  "What's wrong with you?" she says.

  Clarke unclenches her fists. Bits of bone and jellied flesh float about her fingers.

  "You're supposed to back me up! Why are you so damned — passive all the time?"

  "Sorry." Sometimes it works.

  Ballard reaches behind her back. "I'm cold. I think it punctured my diveskin—"

  Clarke swims behind her and looks. "A couple of holes. How are you otherwise? Anything feel broken?"

  "It broke through the diveskin," Ballard says, as if to herself. "And when that gulper hit me, it could have—" She turns to Clarke and her voice, even distorted, carries a shocked uncertainty. "—I could have been killed. I could have been killed!"

  For an instant, it's as though Ballard's 'skin and eyes and self-assurance have all been stripped away. For the first time Clarke can see through to the weakness beneath, growing like a delicate tracery of hairline cracks.

  You can screw up too, Ballard. It isn't all fun and games. You know that now.

  It hurts, doesn't it?

  Somewhere inside, the slightest touch of sympathy. "It's okay," Clarke says. "Jeanette, it's—"

  "You idiot!" Ballard hisses. She stares at Clarke like some malign and sightless old woman. "You just floated there! You just let it happen to me!"

  Clarke feels her guard snap up again, just in time. This isn't just anger, she realizes. This isn't just the heat of the moment. She doesn't like me. She doesn't like me at all.

  And then, dully surprised that she hasn't seen it before:

  She never did.

  A Niche

  Beebe Station floats tethered above the seabed, a gunmetal-gray planet ringed by a belt of equatorial floodlights. There's an airlock for divers at the south pole and a docking hatch for 'scaphes at the north. In between there are girders and anchor lines, conduits and cables, metal armor and Lenie Clarke.

  She's doing a routine visual check on the hull; standard procedure, once a week. Ballard is inside, testing some equipment in the communications cubby. This is not entirely within the spirit of the buddy system. Clarke prefers it this way. Relations have been civil over the past couple of days—Ballard even resurrects her patented chumminess on occasion—but the more time they spend together, the more forced things get. Eventually, Clarke knows, something is going to break.

  Besides, out here it seems only natural to be alone.

  She's examining a cable clamp when a razormouth charges into the light. It's about two meters long, and hungry. It rams directly into the nearest of Beebe's floodlamps, mouth agape. Several teeth shatter against the crystal lens. The razormouth twists to one side, knocking the hull with its tail, and swims off until barely visible against the dark.

  Clarke watches, fascinated. The razormouth swims back and forth, back and forth, then charges again.

  The flood weathers the impact easily, doing more damage to its attacker. Over and over again the fish batters itself against the light. Finally, exhausted, it sinks twitching down to the muddy bottom.

 
"Lenie? Are you okay?"

  Clarke feels the words buzzing in her lower jaw. She trips the sender in her diveskin: "I'm okay."

  "I heard something out there," Ballard says. "I just wanted to make sure you were—"

  "I'm fine," Clarke says. "Just a fish."

  "They never learn, do they?"

  "No. I guess not. See you later."

  "See—"

  Clarke switches off her receiver.

  Poor stupid fish. How many millennia did it take for them to learn that bioluminescence equals food? How long will Beebe have to sit here before they learn that electric light doesn't?

  We could keep our headlights off. Maybe they'd leave us alone—

  She stares out past Beebe's electric halo. There is so much blackness there. It almost hurts to look at it. Without lights, without sonar, how far could she go into that viscous shroud and still return?

  Clarke kills her headlight. Night edges a bit closer, but Beebe's lights keep it at bay. Clarke turns until she's face to face with the darkness. She crouches like a spider against Beebe's hull.

  She pushes off.

  The darkness embraces her. She swims, not looking back, until her legs grow tired. She doesn't know how far she's come.

  But it must be light-years. The ocean is full of stars.

  Behind her, the station shines brightest, with coarse yellow rays. In the opposite direction, she can barely make out the Throat, an insignificant sunrise on the horizon.

  Everywhere else, living constellations punctuate the dark. Here, a string of pearls blink sexual advertisements at two-second intervals. Here, a sudden flash leaves diversionary afterimages swarming across Clarke's field of view; something flees under cover of her momentary blindness. There, a counterfeit worm twists lazily in the current, invisibly tied to the roof of some predatory mouth.

  There are so many of them.

  She feels a sudden surge in the water, as if something big has just passed very close. A delicious thrill dances through her body.

  It nearly touched me, she thinks. I wonder what it was. The rift is full of monsters who don't know when to quit. It doesn't matter how much they eat. Their voracity is as much a part of them as their elastic bellies, their unhinging jaws. Ravenous dwarves attack giants twice their own size, and sometimes win. The abyss is a desert; no one can afford the luxury of waiting for better odds.

  But even a desert has oases, and sometimes the deep hunters find them. They come upon the malnourishing abundance of the rift and gorge themselves; their descendants grow huge and bloated over such delicate bones—

  My light was off, and it left me alone. I wonder—

  She turns it back on. Her vision clouds in the sudden glare, then clears. The ocean reverts to unrelieved black. No nightmares accost her. The beam lights empty water wherever she points it.

  She switches it off. There's a moment of absolute darkness while her eyecaps adjust to the reduced light. Then the stars come out again.

  They are so beautiful. Lenie Clarke rests on the bottom of the ocean and watches the abyss sparkle around her. And she almost laughs as she realizes, three thousand meters from the nearest sunlight, that it's only dark when the lights are on.

  * * *

  "What the hell is wrong with you? You've been gone for over three hours, did you know that? Why didn't you answer me?"

  Clarke bends over and removes her fins. "I guess I turned my receiver off," she says. "I was—wait a second, did you say—"

  "You guess? Have you forgotten every safety reg they drilled into us? You're supposed to have your receiver on from the moment you leave Beebe until you get back!"

  "Did you say three hours?"

  "I couldn't even come out after you, I couldn't find you on sonar! I just had to sit here and hope you'd show up!"

  It only seems a few minutes since she pushed off into the darkness. Clarke climbs up into the lounge, suddenly chilled.

  "Where were you, Lenie?" Ballard demands, coming up behind her. Clarke hears the slightest plaintive tone in her voice.

  "I—I must've been on the bottom," Clarke says. "that's why sonar didn't get me. I didn't go far."

  Was I asleep? What was I doing for three hours?

  "I was just — wandering around. I lost track of the time. I'm sorry."

  "Not good enough. Don't do it again."

  There's a brief silence. It's ended by the sudden, familiar impact of flesh on metal.

  "Christ!" Ballard snaps. "I'm turning the externals off right now!"

  Whatever it is gets in two more hits by the time Ballard reaches Comm. Clarke hears her punch a couple of buttons.

  Ballard comes back into the lounge. "There. Now we're invisible."

  Something hits them again. And again.

  "Or maybe not," Clarke says.

  Ballard stands in the lounge, listening to the rhythm of the assault. "They don't show up on sonar," she says, almost whispering. "Sometimes, when I hear them coming at us, I tune it down to extreme close range. But it looks right through them."

  "No gas bladders. Nothing to bounce an echo off of."

  "We show up just fine out there, most of the time. But not those things. You can't find them, no matter how high you turn the gain. They're like ghosts."

  "They're not ghosts." Almost unconsciously, Clarke has been counting the beats: eight — nine—

  Ballard turns to face her. "They've shut down Piccard," she says, and her voice is small and tight.

  "What?"

  "The grid office says it's just some technical problem. But I've got a friend in Personnel. I phoned him when you were outside. He says Lana's in the hospital. And I get the feeling—" Ballard shakes her head. "It sounded like Ken Lubin did something down there. I think maybe he attacked her."

  Three thumps from outside, in rapid succession. Clarke can feel Ballard's eyes on her. The silence stretches.

  "Or maybe not," Ballard says. "We got all those personality tests. If he was violent, they would've picked it up before they sent him down."

  Clarke watches her, listens to the pounding of an intermittent fist.

  "Or maybe — maybe the rift changed him somehow. Maybe they misjudged the pressure we'd all be under. So to speak." Ballard musters a feeble smile. "Not the physical danger so much as the emotional stress, you know? Everyday things. Just being outside could get to you after a while. Seawater sluicing through your chest. Not breathing for hours at a time. It's like—living without a heartbeat—"

  She looks up at the ceiling; the sounds from outside are a bit more erratic, now.

  "Outside's not so bad," Clarke says. At least you're incompressible. At least you don't have to worry about the plates giving in.

  "I don't think you'd change suddenly. It would just sort of sneak up on you, little by little. And then one day you'd just wake up changed, you'd be different somehow, only you'd never have noticed the transition. Like Ken Lubin."

  She looks at Clarke, and her voice drops a bit.

  "And you."

  "Me." Clarke turns Ballard's words over in her mind, waits for the onset of some reaction. She feels nothing but her own indifference. "I don't think you have much to worry about. I'm not the violent type."

  "I know. I'm not worried about my own safety, Lenie. I'm worried about yours."

  Clarke looks at her from behind the impervious safety of her lenses, and doesn't answer.

  "You've changed since you came down here," Ballard says. "You're withdrawing from me, you're exposing yourself to unnecessary risks. I don't know exactly what's happening to you. It's almost like you're trying to kill yourself."

  "I'm not," Clarke says. She tries to change the subject. "Is Lana Cheung all right?"

  Ballard studies her for a moment. She takes the hint. "I don't know. I couldn't get any details."

  Clarke feels something knotting up inside her.

  "I wonder what she did to set him off?" she murmurs.

  Ballard stares at her, openmouthed. "What she did? I can
't believe you said that!"

  "I only meant—"

  "I know what you meant."

  The outside pounding has stopped. Ballard does not relax. She stands hunched over in those strange, loose-fitting clothes that Drybacks wear, and stares at the ceiling as though she doesn't believe in the silence. She looks back at Clarke.

  "Lenie, you know I don't like to pull rank, but your attitude is putting both of us at risk. I think this place is really getting to you. I hope you can get back online here, I really do. Otherwise I may have to recommend you for a transfer."

  Clarke watches Ballard leave the lounge. You're lying, she realizes. You're scared to death, and it's not just because I'm changing.

  It's because you are.

  * * *

  Clarke finds out five hours after the fact: something has changed on the ocean floor.

  We sleep and the earth moves she thinks, studying the topographic display. And next time, or the time after, maybe it'll move right out from under us.

  I wonder if I'll have time to feel anything.

  She turns at a sound behind her. Ballard is standing in the lounge, swaying slightly. Her face seems somehow disfigured by the concentric rings in her eyes, by the dark hollows around them. Naked eyes are beginning to look alien to Clarke.

  "The seabed shifted," Clarke says. "There's a new outcropping about two hundred meters west of us."

  "That's odd. I didn't feel anything."

  "It happened about five hours ago. You were asleep."

  Ballard glances up sharply. Clarke studies the haggard lines of her face. On second thought...

  "I — would've woken up," Ballard says. She squeezes past Clarke into the cubby and checks the topographic display.

  "Two meters high, twelve long," Clarke recites.

  Ballard doesn't answer. She punches some commands into a keyboard; the topographic image dissolves, reforms into a column of numbers.

  "Just as I thought," she says. "No heavy seismic activity for over forty-two hours."

  "Sonar doesn't lie," Clarke says calmly.

  "Neither does seismo," Ballard answers.

  There's a brief silence. There's a standard procedure for such things, and they both know what it is.