by Peter Watts
"What an asshole," Brander remarks.
"He's more of a prick than Fischer ever was. I'm surprised you're not picking fights with him all the time."
Brander shrugs. "Different dynamic. Acton's just an asshole. Fischer was a fucking pervert."
Not to mention that Fischer never fought back. She keeps the insight to herself.
* * *
Concentric circles, glowing emerald. Beebe Station sits on the bullseye. Intermittent blobs of weaker light litter the display: fissures and jagged rock outcroppings, endless muddy plains, the Euclidean outlines of human machinery all reduced to a common acoustic currency.
There's something else out there too, part Euclid, part Darwin. Clarke zooms in. Human flesh is too much like seawater to return an echo, but bones show up okay. The machinery inside is even clearer, it shouts at the faintest sonar signal. Clarke focuses the display, points at a translucent green skeleton with clockwork in its chest.
"That him?" Caraco says.
Clarke shakes her head.
"Maybe it is. Everyone else is—"
"It's not him." Clarke touches a control. The display zooms back to maximum range. "You sure he's not in his quarters?"
"He left the station seven hours ago. Hasn't been back since."
"Maybe he's just hugging the bottom. Maybe he's behind a rock."
"Maybe." Caraco sounds unconvinced.
Clarke leans back in her chair. The back of her head touches the rear wall of the cubby. "Well, he's doing his job okay. When he's off shift he can go wherever he likes, I guess."
"Yeah, but this is the third time. He's always late. He just wanders in whenever he likes—"
"So what?" Clarke, suddenly tired, rubs the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. "We don't run on dryback schedules here, you know that. He pulls his weight, don't fuck with him."
"Well, Fischer was always getting shit for being l—"
"Nobody cared if Fischer was late," Clarke cuts in. "They just— wanted an excuse."
Caraco leans forward. "I don't like him," she confides.
"Acton? No reason you should. He's psycho. We all are, remember?"
"But he's different, somehow. You know that."
"Lubin nearly killed his wife down at Galapagos before they assigned him here. Brander's got a history of attempted suicide."
Something changes in Caraco's stance. Clarke can't be sure, but the other woman's gaze seems to have dropped to the deck. Touched a nerve there, I guess.
She continues, more gently. "You're not worried about the rest of us, are you? So what's so special about Acton?"
"Oh," Caraco says. "Look."
On the tactical display, something has just moved into range.
Clarke zooms in on the new reading; it's too distant for good resolution, but there's no mistaking the hard metallic blip in its center.
"Acton," she says.
"Um...how far?" Caraco asks in a hesitant voice.
Clarke checks. "He's about nine hundred meters out. Not too bad, if he's using a squid."
"He's not. He never does."
"Hmm. At least he seems to be beelining in." Clarke looks up at Caraco. "You two are on shift when?"
"Ten minutes."
"No big deal. He'll be fifteen minutes late. Half hour tops."
Caraco stares at the display. "What's he doing out there?"
"I don't know," Clarke says. She wonders, not for the first time, if Caraco really belongs down here. She just doesn't seem to get it, sometimes.
"I was wondering if you could maybe talk to him," Caraco says.
"Acton? Why?"
"Nothing. Forget it."
"Okay." Clarke rises from the Communications chair. Caraco backs out of the hatchway to let her past.
"Um, Lenie..."
Clarke turns.
"What about you?" Caraco asks.
"Me?"
"You said Lubin nearly killed his wife. Brander tried to kill himself. What did you do, I mean, to...qualify?"
Clarke watches her steadily.
"I mean, I guess, if it's not too—"
"You don't understand," Clarke says, her voice absolutely level. "It's not how much shit you've raised that suits you for the rift. It's how much you've survived."
"I'm sorry." Caraco manages, with eyes utterly devoid of feeling, to look abashed.
Clarke softens a bit. "In my case," she says, "Mostly I just learned to roll with the punches. I haven't done much worth bragging about, you know?"
I'm sure enough working on it, though.
* * *
She doesn't know how it could have happened so fast. He's been here only two weeks, yet the 'lock can barely contain his eagerness to get outside. The chamber floods, she feels a single shiver scurry along his body; and before she can move, Acton hits the latch and they drop outside.
He coasts out from under the station, his trajectory an effortless parallel of her own. Clarke fins off towards the Throat. She feels Acton at her side, although she cannot see him. His headlamp, like hers, stays dark; for her it's become a gesture of respect to the more delicate lanterns that dwell here.
She doesn't know what Acton's reasoning is.
He doesn't speak until Beebe's a dirty yellow smudge behind them. "Sometimes I wonder why we ever go back inside."
It can't be happiness in that voice. How could any emotion make it through the mechanical gauntlet that lets people speak out here?
"I fell asleep near the Throat yesterday," he says.
"You're lucky something didn't eat you," she tells him.
"They're not so bad. You just have to know how to relate to them."
Clarke wonders if he relates to other species with the same subtlety that he relates to his own. She keeps the question to herself.
They swim through sparse, living starlight for a while. Another smudge glimmers ahead, weak and sullen; the Throat, dead on target. It's been months now since Clarke has even thought of the guide rope that's supposed to lead them back and forth, like blind troglodytes. She knows where it is, but she never uses it. Other senses come awake down here. Rifters don't get lost.
Except Fischer, maybe. And Fischer was lost long before he came down here.
"So what happened to Fischer, anyway?" Acton says.
The chill starts in her chest, reaches her fingers before the sound of Acton's voice has died away. It's a coincidence. It's a perfectly normal question to ask.
"I said—"
"He disappeared," Clarke says.
"They told me that much," Acton buzzes back. "I thought you might have a bit more insight."
"Maybe he fell asleep outside. Maybe something ate him."
"I doubt that."
"Really? And what makes you such an expert, Acton? You've been down here for what, two weeks now?"
"Only two weeks? Seems longer. Time stretches when you're outside, doesn't it?"
"At first," Clarke says.
"You know why Fischer disappeared?"
"No."
"He outlived his usefulness."
"Ah." Her machine parts turn it into half creak, half growl.
"I'm serious, Lenie." Acton's mechanical voice does not change. "You think they're going to let you stay down here forever? You think they'd let people like us down here at all if they had any choice?"
She stops kicking. Her body continues to coast. "What are you talking about?"
"Use your head, Lenie. You're smarter than I am, inside at least. You've got the keys to the city here—you've got the keys to the whole fucking seaboard, and you're still acting like a victim." Acton's vocoder gurgles indecipherably—a laugh, mistransposed? A snarl?
More words: "They count on that, you know."
Clarke starts kicking again, stares ahead to the brightening glow of the Throat.
It isn't there.
There's a moment's disorientation — We can't be lost, we were headed right for it, has the power gone out? — before she sees the familiar streak
of coarse yellow light, bearing four o'clock.
How could I have gotten turned around like that?
"We're here," Acton says.
"No. The Throat's way over—"
A nova flares beside her, drenching the abyss with blinding light. It takes Clarke's eyecaps a moment to adjust; when the starbursts have faded from her eyes, the ocean is a muddy black backdrop for the bright cone from Acton's headlamp.
"Don't," she says. "It gets so dark when you do that, you can't see anything—"
"I know. I'll turn it off in a moment. Just look."
His beam shines down on a small rocky outcropping rising from the mud, no more than two meters across. Jagged cookie-cutter flowers litter its surface, radial clusters shining garish red and blue in the artificial light. Some of them lie flat along the rock face. Others are contorted into frozen calcareous knots, clenched around things Clarke can't see.
Some of them move, slowly.
"You brought me out here to look at starfish?" She tries, and fails, to squeeze some hint of bored contempt through the vocodor. But inside there's a distant, frightened amazement that he has led her here, that she could be guided, utterly unsuspecting, so completely off course. And how did he find this place? No sonar pistol, compass doesn't work worth shit this close to the Throat...
"I figured you probably hadn't looked at them very closely before," Acton says. "I thought you might be interested."
"We don't have time for this, Acton."
His hands reach down into the light and lock onto one of the starfish. They peel it slowly from the rock; there are filaments of some kind along the creature's underside, anchoring it to the substrate. Acton's efforts tear them free, a few at a time.
He holds the animal up for Clarke's inspection. Its upper surface is colored stone, encrusted with calcareous spicules. Acton flips it over. The underside writhes with hundreds of thick squirming threads, jammed into dense rows along the length of each arm. Each thread has a tiny sucker at its tip.
"A starfish," Acton tells her, "is the ultimate democracy."
Clarke stares, quietly repelled.
"This is how they move," Acton is saying. "They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy."
Rows of squirming maggots. A forest of translucent leeches, groping blindly into the water.
"So there's nothing to coordinate the tube feet, they all move independently. Usually that's not a problem; they all tend to go towards food, for example. But it's not unusual for a third of these feet to be pulling in some other direction entirely. The whole animal's a living tug-o-war. Sometimes, some really stubborn tube feet just don't give up, and they literally get torn out at the roots when the others move the body someplace they don't want to go. But hey: majority rules, right?"
Clarke extends a tentative finger. Half a dozen tube feet latch onto it. She can't feel them through her 'skin. Anchored, they look almost delicate, like filaments of milky glass.
"But that's nothing," Acton says. "Watch this."
He rips the starfish in half.
Clarke pulls back, shocked and angry. But there's something in Acton's posture, in that barely visible outline behind his lamp, that makes her pause.
"Don't worry, Lenie," he says. "I haven't killed it. I've bred it."
He drops the torn halves. They flutter like leaves to the seabed, trailing bits of bloodless entrail.
"They regenerate. Didn't you know that? You can tear them into pieces and each piece grows back the missing parts. It takes time, but they recover. Only you end up with more of them. Damn hard to kill these guys.
"Understand, Lenie? Tear them to pieces, they come back stronger."
"How do you know all this?" she asks in a metallic whisper. "Where do you come from?"
He lays an icy black hand on her arm. "Right here. This is where I was born."
She doesn't think it absurd. In fact, she barely hears him. Her mind is somewhere else entirely, terrified by a sudden realization.
Acton is touching her, and she doesn't mind.
* * *
Of course, the sex is electric. It always is. The familiar has reasserted itself, here in the cramped space of Clarke's cubby. They can't both lie on the pallet at the same time but they manage somehow, Acton on his knees, then Clarke, squirming around each other in a metal nest lined with ducts and vents and bundles of optical cabling. They navigate each others' seams and scars, tonguing puckers of metal and pale flesh, unseen and all-seeing behind their corneal armor.
For Clarke it's a new twist, this icy ecstasy of a lover without eyes. For the first time she feels no need to avert her face, no threat to fragile intimacy; at first, when Acton moved to take out his caps, she stopped him with a touch and a whisper and he seemed to understand.
They cannot lie together afterwards so they sit side-by-side, leaning into each other, staring at the hatch two meters in front of them. The lights are turned too low for dryback vision; Clarke and Acton see a room suffused in pale fluorescence.
Acton reaches out and fingers a shard of glass sticking from an empty frame on one wall. "There used to be a mirror here," he remarks.
Clarke nibbles his shoulder. "There were mirrors everywhere. I—took them down."
"Why? A few mirrors would open the place up a bit. Make it larger."
She points. Several torn wires, fine as threads, hang from a hole in the frame. "They had cameras behind them. I didn't like that."
Acton grunts. "I don't blame you."
They sit without speaking for a bit.
"You said something outside," she says. "You said you were born down here."
Acton hesitates, then nods. "Ten days ago."
"What did you mean?"
"You should know," he says. "You witnessed my birth."
She thinks back. "That was when the gulper got you..."
"Close." Acton grins his cold eyeless grin, puts an arm around her. "Actually, the gulper sort of catalyzed it, if I remember. Think of it as a midwife."
An image pops into her mind: Acton in Medical, vivisecting himself.
"Fine-tuning," she says.
"Uh huh." He gives her a squeeze. "And I've got you to thank for it. You gave me the idea."
"Me?"
"You were my mother, Len. And my father was this spastic little shrimp that ended up way over its head. He died before I was born, actually: I killed him. You weren't very happy about that."
Clarke shakes her head. "You're not making sense."
"You telling me you haven't noticed the change? You telling me I'm the same person I was when I came down?"
"I don't know," she says. "Maybe I've just gotten to know you better."
"Maybe. Maybe I have too. I don't know, Len, I just seem more...awake now, I guess. I see things differently. You must have noticed."
"Yeah, but only when you're—"
Outside.
"You did something to your inhibitors," she whispers.
"Reduced the dosage a bit."
She grasps his arm. "Karl, those chemicals keep you from spazzing out every time you go outside. You fuck with this stuff, you're risking a seizure as soon as the 'lock floods."
"I have been fucking with it, Lenie. You see any change in me that isn't an improvement?"
She doesn't answer.
"It's all about action potential," he tells her. "Your nerves have to build up a certain charge before they can fire—"
"And at this depth they'd fire all the time, Karl, please—"
"Shh." He lays a gentle finger on her lips but she brushes it away, suddenly angry.
"I'm serious, Karl. Without those drugs your nerves short-circuit, you burn out, I know—"
"You only know what they tell you," he snaps. "Why don't you try working things out yourself for once?"
She falls silent, stung by his disapproval. A space opens between them on the pallet.
"I'm not a fool, Lenie," Acton says, mo
re quietly. "I just reduced the settings a bit. Five percent. Now, when I go outside it takes a bit less of a stimulus for my nerves to fire, that's all. It...it wakes you up, Len; I'm more aware of things, I'm more alive somehow."
She watches him, unspeaking.
"Of course they say it's dangerous," he says. "They're scared shitless of you already. You think they're going to give you even more of an edge?"
"They're not scared of us, Karl."
"They should be." His arm goes back around her. "Wanna try it?"
It's as though she's suddenly outside, still naked. "No."
"There's nothing to worry about, Len. I've already done the guinea pig work on myself. Open up to me and I could make the adjustments myself, it'd take ten minutes."
"I'm not up for it, Karl. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one of the others is."
He shakes his head. "They don't trust me."
"You can't blame them."
"I don't." He grins, showing teeth as sharp and white as eyecaps. "But even if they did trust me, they wouldn't do anything unless you thought it was okay."
She looks at him. "Why not?"
"You're in charge here, Len."
"Bullshit. They never told you that."
"They didn't have to. It's obvious."
"I've been down here longer than them. So's Lubin. That doesn't matter to anyone."
Acton frowns briefly. "No, I don't think it does. But you're still leader of the pack, Len. Head wolf. A-fucking-kayla."
Clarke shakes her head. She searches her memory for something, anything, that would contradict Acton's absurd claim. She comes up empty.
She feels a little sick inside.
He gives her a little squeeze. "Tough luck, lover. I guess the clothes don't fit so well after being a career victim your whole life, eh?"
Clarke stares at the deck.
"Think about it, anyway," Acton whispers in her ear. "I guarantee you'll feel twice as alive as you do now."
"That happens anyway," Clarke reminds him. "Whenever I go outside. I don't need to screw up my internals for that." Not those internals, anyway.
"This is different," he insists.
She looks at him and smiles, and hopes he doesn't push it. How can he expect me to let him cut me open like that? she wonders, and then wonders if maybe someday she will, if the fear of losing him might somehow grow large enough to force her other fears into submission. It wouldn't be the first time.