Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  He doesn't feel much of anything at first. He was half-expecting the ocean to charge up his nose and burn his sinuses, but of course all his body cavities are already packed with isotonic saline. The only immediate change is that his face gets cold, numbing the chronic ache of torn flesh a bit. Deeper pain pulses under one eye, where Dr. Troyka's wires hold the bones of his face together; microelectricity tingles along those lines, press-gangs bonebuilding osteoblasts into high gear.

  After a couple of moments he tries to gargle; that doesn't work, so he settles for gaping like a fish and wriggling his tongue around. That does it. He gets his first taste of raw ocean, coarse and saltier than the stuff that pumps him up inside.

  On the seabed in front of him, a swarm of blind shrimp feeds in the current from a nearby vent. Fischer can see right through them. They're like little chunks of glass with blobs of organs jiggling around inside.

  It must be fourteen hours since he's eaten, but there's no fucking way he's going back to Beebe with Brander still inside. The last time he tried, Brander was actually standing guard in the lounge, waiting for him.

  What the hell. It's just like krill. People eat this stuff all the time.

  They have a strange taste. Fischer's mouth is going numb from the cold, but there's still a faint sense of rotten eggs, dilute and barely detectable. Not bad other than that, though. Better than Brander by a long shot.

  When the convulsions hit fifteen minutes later, he's not so sure.

  * * *

  "You look like shit," Lenie says.

  Fischer hangs onto the railing, looks around the lounge. "Where—"

  "At the Throat. On shift with Lubin and Caraco."

  He makes it to the couch.

  "Haven't seen you for a while," Lenie remarks. "How's your face doing?"

  Fischer squints at her through a haze of nausea. Lenie Clarke is actually making small talk. She's never done that before. He's still trying to figure out why when his stomach clamps down again and he pitches onto the floor. By now nothing comes up but a few dribbles of sour fluid.

  His eyes trace the pipes tangling along the ceiling. After a while Lenie's face blocks the view, looking down from a great height.

  "What's wrong?" She seems to be asking out of idle curiosity, no more.

  "Ate some shrimp," he says, and retches again.

  "You ate— from outside?" She bends down and pulls him up. His arms drag along behind on the deck. Something hard bumps his head; the railing around the downstairs ladder.

  "Fuck," Lenie says.

  He's on the floor again, alone. Receding footsteps. Dizziness. Something presses against his neck, pricks him with a soft hiss.

  His head clears almost instantly.

  Lenie's leaning in, closer than she's ever been. She's even touching him, she's got one hand on his shoulder. He stares down at that hand, feeling a stupid sort of wonder, but then she pulls it away.

  She's holding a hypo. Fischer's stomach begins to settle.

  "Why," she says softly, "would you do a stupid thing like that?"

  "I was hungry."

  "So what's wrong with the dispenser?"

  He doesn't answer.

  "Oh," Lenie says. "Right."

  She stands up and snaps the spent cartridge out of the hypo. "This can't go on, Fischer. You know that."

  "He hasn't got me in two weeks."

  "He hasn't seen you in two weeks. You only come in when he's on shift. And you're missing your own shifts more and more. Doesn't make you too popular with the rest of us." She cocks her head as Beebe creaks around them. "Why don't you just call up and get them to take you home?"

  Because I do things to children, and if I leave here they'll cut me open and change me into something else...

  Because there are things outside that almost make it worthwhile...

  Because of you...

  He doesn't know if she'd understand any of those reasons. He decides not to risk it.

  "Maybe you could talk to him," he manages.

  Lenie sighs. "He wouldn't listen."

  "Maybe if you tried, at least—"

  Her face hardens. "I have tried. I—"

  She catches herself.

  "I can't get involved," she whispers. "It's none of my business."

  Fischer closes his eyes. He feels as if he's going to cry. "He just doesn't let up. He really hates me."

  "It's not you. You're just— filling in."

  "Why did they put us together? It doesn't make sense!"

  "Sure it does. Statistically."

  Fischer opens his eyes. "What?"

  Lenie's pulling one hand down across her face. She seems very tired.

  "We're not people here, Fischer. We're a cloud of data points. Doesn't matter what happens to you or me or Brander, just as long as the mean stays where it's supposed to and the standard deviation doesn't get too big."

  Tell her, Shadow says.

  "Lenie—"

  "Anyway." Lenie shrugs the mood away. "You're crazy to eat anything that near a rift zone. Didn't you learn about hydrogen sulfide?"

  He nods. "Basic training. The vents spit it out."

  "And it builds up in the benthos. They're toxic. Which I guess you know now anyway."

  She starts down the ladder, stops on the second rung.

  "If you really want to go native, try feeding further from the rift. Or go for the fish."

  "The fish?"

  "They move around more. Don't spend all their time soaking in the hot springs. Maybe they're safe."

  "The fish," he says again. He hadn't thought of that.

  "I said maybe."

  * * *

  Shadow I'm so sorry...

  Shush. Just look at all the pretty lights.

  So he looks. He knows this place. He's on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He's back in fairyland. He thinks he comes here a lot now, watches the lights and bubbles, listens to the deep rocks grinding against each other.

  Maybe he'll stay this time, watch the whole thing working, but then he remembers he's supposed to be somewhere else. He waits, but nothing specific comes to him. Just a feeling that he should be doing something somewhere else. Soon.

  It's getting harder to stay here anyway. There's a vague pain hanging around his upper body somewhere, fading in and out. After a while he realizes what it is. His face hurts.

  Maybe this beautiful light is hurting his eyes.

  That can't be right. His caps should take care of all that. Maybe they're not working. He seems to remember something that happened to his eyes a while back, but it doesn't really matter. He can always just leave. Suddenly, wonderfully, all of his problems have easy answers.

  If the light hurts, all he has to do is stay in the dark.

  Feral

  "Hey," Caraco buzzes as they come around the corner. "Number four."

  Clarke looks. Four's fifteen meters away and the water's a bit murky this shift. Still, she can see something big and dark sticking to the intake vent. Its shadow twitches down along the casing like an absurdly stretched black spider.

  Clarke fins forward a few meters, Caraco at her side. The two women exchange looks.

  Fischer, hanging upside down against the mesh. It's been four days since anyone's seen him.

  Clarke gently sets down her carry bag; Caraco follows her lead. Two or three kicks bring them to within five meters of the intake. Machinery hums omnipresently, makes a sound deep enough to feel.

  He's facing away from them, drifting from side to side, tugged by the gentle suction of the intake vent. The vent's grillwork is fuzzy with rooted growing things; small clams, tube worms, shadow crabs. Fischer pulls squirming clumps from the intake, leaves them to drift or to fall to the street below. He's cleaned maybe two meters square so far.

  It's nice to see he still takes some duties seriously.

  "Hey. Fischer," Caraco says.

  He spins around as if shot. His forearm flails toward Clarke's face; she raises her own just in time. In the next i
nstant he's bowled past her. She kicks, steadies herself. Fischer's heading for the darkness without looking back.

  "Fischer," Clarke calls out. "Stop. It's okay."

  He stops kicking for a moment, looks back over his shoulder.

  "It's me," she buzzes. "And Judy. We won't hurt you."

  Barely visible now, he rotates to a stop and turns to face them. Clarke risks a wave.

  "Come on, Fischer. Give us a hand."

  Caraco comes up behind her. "Lenie, what are you doing?" She's turned her vocoder down to a hiss. "He's too far gone, he's—"

  Clarke cranks her own vocoder down. "Shut up, Judy." Up again. "What do you say, Fischer? Earn your pay."

  He's coming back into the light, hesitantly, like a wild animal lured by the promise of food. Closer, Clarke can see the line of his jaw moving up and down under his hood. The motions are jerky, erratic, as though he's learning them for the first time.

  Finally a noise comes out. "Oh— kay—"

  Caraco goes back and retrieves their gear. Clarke offers a scraper to Fischer. After a moment, he takes it, clumsily, and follows them to number four.

  "Jussst like," Fischer buzzes. "Old. T— times."

  Caraco looks at Clarke. Clarke says nothing.

  * * *

  Near the end of the shift she looks around. "Fischer?"

  Caraco pokes her head out from an access tunnel. "He's gone?"

  "When did you see him last?"

  Caraco's vocoder ticks a couple of times; the machinery always misinterprets hmmm. "Half hour ago, maybe."

  Clarke puts her own vocoder on high. "Hey Fischer! You still around?"

  No answer.

  "Fischer, we're heading back in a bit. If you want to come along..."

  Caraco just shakes her head.

  Shadow

  It's a nightmare.

  There's light everywhere, blinding, painful. He can barely move. Everything has such hard edges, and everywhere he looks the boundaries are too sharp. Sounds are like that too, clanks and shouts, every noise an exclamation of pain. He barely knows where he is. He doesn't know why he's there.

  He's drowning.

  "UNNNNNSEEEEELLLLLHHHHHIZZZZZMMMMOOUUUUUTH..."

  The tubes in his chest suck at emptiness. The rest of his insides strain to inflate, but there's nothing there to fill them. He thrashes, panicky. Something gives with a snap. Sudden pain resonates in some faraway limb, floods the rest of his body a moment later. He tries to scream, but there's nothing inside to push out.

  "HHIZZMMMOUTHFORRRKKRRIISSAAAAAKHEEEZSSUFFUKKATE—"

  Someone pulls part of his face off. His insides fill with a rush; not the cold saline he's used to, but it helps. The burning in his chest eases.

  "BIGGFFUKKINNGGMMISSTTAAKE—"

  Pressure, painful and uneven. Things are holding him down, holding him up, banging into him. The noise is tinny, deafening. He remembers a sound—

  —gravity—

  —that applies somehow, but he doesn't know what it means. And then everything's spinning, and everything's familiar and horrible except for one thing, one glimpse of a face that calms him somehow—

  Shadow?

  —and the weight's gone, the pressure's gone, icewater calms his insides as he spirals back with her, outside again, where she used to be years ago—

  She's showing him how to do it. She creeps into his room after the shouting stops, she crawls under the covers with him and she starts stroking his penis.

  "Dad says this is what you do when you really love somebody," she whispers. And that scares him because they don't even like each other, he just wants her to go away and leave them all alone.

  "Go away. I hate you," he says, but he’s too afraid to move.

  "That's okay, then you don't have to do it for me." She’s trying to laugh, trying to pretend he was just kidding.

  And then, still stroking: "Why are you always so mean to me?”

  "I'm not mean."

  "Are too."

  "You're not supposed to be here."

  "Can't we just be friends?" She rubs up against him. "I can do this whenever you want—"

  "Go away. You can’t stay here."

  "I can, maybe. If it works out, they said. But we have to like each other or they could send me back—”

  "Good."

  She's crying now, she's rubbing against him so hard the bed shakes, "Please can't you like me please I'll do anything I'll even—"

  But he never finds out what she'll even do because that's when the door slams open and whatever happens after that, Gerry Fischer can't remember.

  Shadow, I'm so sorry...

  But she's back with him now, in the cold and the dark where it's safe. Somehow. Beebe's a dim gray glow in the distance. She floats against that backdrop like a black cardboard cutout.

  "Shadow..." Not his voice.

  "No." Not hers. "Lenie."

  "Lenie..."

  Twin crescents, thin as fingernails, reflect from her eyes. Even in two dimensions she's beautiful.

  Mangled words buzz from her throat: "You know who I am? You can understand me?"

  He nods, then wonders if she can see it. "Yeah."

  "You don't— lately you're sort of gone, Fischer. Like you've forgotten how to be human."

  He tries to laugh, but the vocoder can't handle it. "It comes and goes, I think. I'm...lucid now, anyway. That's the word, isn't it?"

  "You shouldn't have come back inside." Machinery strips any feeling from her words. "He says he'll kill you. Maybe you should just stay out of his way."

  "Okay," he says, and thinks it actually might be.

  "I can bring food out, I guess. They don't care about that."

  "That's okay. I can — go fishing."

  "I'll call for a 'scaphe. It can pick you up out here."

  "No. I can swim back up myself if I want to. Not far."

  "Then I'll tell them to send someone."

  "No."

  A pause. "You can't swim all the way back to the mainland."

  "I'll stay down here...a while..."

  A tremor growls softly along the seabed.

  "You sure?" Lenie says.

  "Yeah." His arm hurts. He doesn't know why.

  She turns slightly. The dim reflections vanish from her eyes for a long moment.

  "I'm sorry, Gerry."

  "Okay."

  Lenie's silhouette twists around and faces back towards Beebe. "I should get going."

  She doesn't leave. She doesn't say anything for almost a minute.

  Then: "Who's Shadow?"

  More silence.

  "She's a...friend. When I was young."

  "She means a lot to you." Not a question. "Do you want me to send her a message?"

  "She's dead," Fischer says, marveling that he's really known it all along.

  "Oh."

  "Didn't mean to," he says. "But she had her own mom and dad, you know, why did she need mine? She went back where she belonged. That's all."

  "Where she belonged," Lenie buzzes, almost too softly to hear.

  "Not my fault," he says. It's hard to talk. It didn't used to be this hard.

  Someone's touching him. Lenie. Her hand is on his arm, and he knows it's impossible but he can feel the warmth of her body through his 'skin.

  "Gerry."

  "Yes?"

  "Why wasn't she with her own family?"

  "She said they hurt her. She always said that. That's how she got in. She used it, it always worked..."

  Not always, Shadow reminds him.

  "And then she went back," Lenie murmurs.

  "I didn't mean to."

  A sound comes out of Lenie's vocoder, and he has no idea what it is. "Brander's right, isn't he. About you and kids."

  Somehow, he knows she's not accusing him. She's just checking.

  "That's what you— do," he tells her. "When you really love someone."

  "Oh, Gerry. You're so completely fucked up."

  A string of clicks taps faintl
y on the machinery in his chest.

  "They're looking for me," she says.

  "Okay."

  "Be careful, okay?"

  "You could stay. Here."

  Her silence answers him.

  "Maybe I'll come out and visit sometimes," she buzzes at last. She rises up into the water, turns away.

  "Bye," Shadow says. It's the first time she's spoken aloud since she came inside, but Fischer doesn't think Lenie notices the difference.

  And then she's gone, for now.

  But she comes out here all the time. Alone, sometimes. He knows it isn't over. And when she goes back and forth with the others, doing all the things he used to do, he'll be there, off where no one can see. Checking up. Making sure she's okay.

  Like her own guardian angel. Right, Shadow?

  A couple of fish flicker dimly in the distance.

  Shadow...?

  * * *

  Ballet

  Dancer

  A week later Fischer's replacement comes down on the 'scaphe. Nobody stands watch in Communications any more; machines don't care if they have an audience. Sudden clanking reverberates through Beebe Station and Clarke stands alone in the lounge, waiting for the ceiling to open up. Compressed nitrox hisses overhead, blowing seawater back to the abyss.

  The hatch drops open. Green incandescence spills into the room. He climbs down the ladder, diveskin sealed, only his face exposed. His eyes, already capped, are featureless glass balls. But they are not as dead as they should be, somehow. Something stares through those blank lenses, and it almost shines. His blind eyes scan the compartment like radar dishes. They lock onto hers: "You're Lenie Clarke?" The voice is too loud, too normal. We talk in whispers here, Clarke realizes.

  They are not alone now. Lubin, Brander, Caraco have appeared at the edges of her vision, drifting into the room like indifferent wraiths. They take up positions around the edge of the lounge, waiting. Fischer's replacement doesn't seem to notice them. "I'm Acton," he tells Clarke. "And I bring gifts from the overworld. Behold!" He extends his clenched fist, opens it palm up. Clarke sees five metal cylinders there, each no more than two centimeters long. Acton turns slowly, theatrically, showing his trinkets to the other Rifters. "One for each of you," he says. "They go into your chest, right next to the seawater intake."