Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  Twice as alive, Acton says. Hiding behind her smile, Clarke considers: twice as much of her life. Not a great prospect, so far.

  * * *

  There's a light from behind; it chases her shadow out along the seabed. She can't remember how long it's been there. She feels a momentary chill—

  —Fischer?—

  —before common sense sets in. Gerry Fischer wouldn't use a headlamp.

  "Lenie?"

  She revolves on her own axis, sees a silhouette hovering a few meters away. Cyclopean light glares from its forehead. Clarke hears a subvocal buzz, the corrupted equivalent of Brander clearing his throat. "Judy said you were out here," he explains.

  "Judy." She means it as a question, but her vocoder loses the intonation.

  "Yeah. She sort of, keeps tabs on you sometimes."

  Clarke considers that a moment. "Tell her I'm harmless."

  "It's not like that," he buzzes. "I think she just ... worries..."

  Clarke feels muscles twitching at the corners of her mouth. She thinks she might be smiling.

  "So I guess we're on shift," she says, after a moment.

  The headlight bobs up and down. "Right. A bunch of clams need their asses scraped. More skilled labor."

  She stretches, weightless. "Okay. Let's go."

  "Lenie..."

  She looks up at him.

  "Why do you come— I mean, why here?" Brander's headlight sweeps the bottom, comes to rest on an outcropping of bone and rotted flesh. A skeletal smile stitches its way across the lit circle. "Did you kill it, or something?"

  "Yeah, I—" She falls silent, realizing: He means the whale.

  "Nah," she says instead. "It just died on its own."

  * * *

  Of course she wakes up alone. They still try to sleep together sometimes, after sex has made them too lazy to go outside. But the bunk is too small. The most they can manage is a sort of diagonal slouch: feet on the floor, necks bent up against the bulkhead, Acton cradling her like a living hammock. If they're unlucky they really do fall asleep like that. It takes hours to get the kinks out afterwards. Way more trouble than it's worth.

  So she wakes up alone. But she misses him anyway.

  It's early. The schedules handed down from the GA are increasingly irrelevant — circadian rhythms lose their way in the incessant darkness, fall slowly out of phase — but the rubbery timetable that remains leaves hours before her shift starts. Lenie Clarke is awake in the middle of the night. It seems like a stupid and obvious thing to say, months from the nearest sunrise, but right now it seems especially true.

  In the corridor she turns for a moment in the direction of his cubby before she remembers. He's never in there any more. He's never even inside, unless he's eating or working or being with her. He hasn't slept in his quarters almost since they got involved. He's getting almost as bad as Lubin.

  Caraco is sitting silently in the lounge, unmoving, obeying her own inner clock. She looks up as Clarke crosses to Comm.

  "He went out about an hour ago," she says softly.

  Sonar picks him up fifty meters southeast, barely echoing above the bottom clutter. Clarke heads for the ladder.

  "He showed us something the other day," Caraco says after her. "Ken and me."

  Clarke looks back.

  "A smoker, way off in one corner of the Throat. It had this weird fluted vent, and it made singing sounds, almost..."

  "Mmm."

  "He really wanted us to know about it, for some reason. He was really excited. He's — he's kind of strange out there, Lenie..."

  "Judy," Clarke says neutrally, "Why are you telling me this?"

  Caraco looks away. "Sorry. I didn't mean anything."

  Clarke starts down the ladder.

  "Just be careful, okay?" Caraco calls after her.

  He's curled up when Clarke reaches him, knees tucked under his chin, floating a few centimeters above a stone garden. His eyes are open, of course. She reaches out, touches him through two layers of reflex copolymer.

  He barely stirs. His vocoder emits sporadic ticking noises.

  Lenie Clarke curls herself around him. In a womb of freezing sea water, they sleep on until morning.

  Short Circuit

  I won't give in.

  It would be so easy. She could live out there, stay the fuck away from this creaking eggshell except to eat and bathe and do whatever parts of her job demand an atmosphere. She could spend her whole life flying across the seabed. Lubin does. Brander and Caraco and even Nakata are starting to.

  Lenie Clarke knows she doesn't belong in here. None of them do.

  But at the same time, she's scared of what outside might do to her. I could end up like Fischer. It would be so easy to just— slip away. If a hot seep or mud slide didn't get me first.

  Lately she's been valuing her own life quite a lot. Maybe that means she's losing it. What kind of a rifter cares about living? But there it is: the rift is starting to scare her.

  That's bullshit. Complete, total bullshit.

  Who wouldn't be scared?

  Scared. Yes. Of Karl. Of what you'll let him do to you.

  It's been, what, a week now?—

  Two days.

  —two days since she's slept outside. Two days since she decided to incarcerate herself in here. She goes outside to work, and comes back as soon as each shift ends. No one's mentioned the change to her. Perhaps no one's noticed; if they don't come back to Beebe themselves after work, they scatter off across the sea bed to do whatever they do in splendid, freezing isolation.

  She knew Acton would notice, though. He'd notice, and miss her, and follow her back inside. Or maybe he'd try and talk her back out, fight with her when she resisted. But he's shown no sign at all. He spends as much time out there as he ever did. She still sees him, of course. At mealtimes. At the library. Once for sex, during which neither spoke of anything important. And then gone again, back into the ocean.

  He didn't enter into any pact with her. She didn't even tell him about her pact with herself. Still, she feels betrayed.

  She needs him. She knows what that means, sees her own footprints crowding the road ahead, but reading the signs and changing course are two completely different things. Her insides are twisting with the need to go, whether out to him or just out she can't say. But as long as he's outside and she's in Beebe, Lenie Clarke can tell herself that she's still in control.

  It's progress, sort of.

  Now, curled up in her cubby with the hatch sealed tight, she hears the subterranean gurgle of the airlock. She comes up off the bed as though radio-controlled.

  Noises, flesh against metal, hydraulics and pneumatics. A voice. Lenie Clarke is on her way to the wet room.

  He's brought a monster inside with him. It's an anglerfish, almost two meters long, a jellylike bag of flesh with teeth half the length of Clarke's forearm. It lies quivering on the deck, its insides exploded through its own mouth in the near vacuum of Beebe's sea-level atmosphere. Dozens of miniature tails, twitching feebly, sprout everywhere from its body.

  Caraco and Lubin, in the middle of some task, look over from the engineering 'lock. Acton stands beside his catch; his thorax, still inflating, hisses softly.

  "How did you fit it inside the 'lock?" Clarke wonders.

  "More to the point," Lubin says, coming over, "why bother?"

  "What're all those tails?" Caraco says.

  Acton grins at them. "Not tails. Mates."

  Lubin's face doesn't change. "Really."

  Clarke leans forward. Not just tails, she sees now; some of them have those extra fins along the side and back. Some of them have gills. A couple of them even have eyes. It's as though a whole school of tiny anglers are boring into this big one. Some are in only as far as their jaws, but others are buried right down to the tail.

  Another thought strikes her, even more revolting; the big fish doesn't need its mouth any more. It's just engulfing the little ones across its body wall, like some giant devolving mi
crobe.

  "Group sex on the rift," says Acton. "All the big ones we've been seeing, they're female. The males are these little finger-sized fuckers here. Not many dating opportunities this far down, so they just latch on to the first female they can find, and they sort of fuse — their heads get absorbed, their bloodstreams link together. They're parasites, get it? They worm into her side and they spend their whole lives feeding off her. And there's a fuck of a lot of them, but she's bigger than they are, she's stronger, she could eat them alive if she just—"

  "He's been in the library again," Caraco remarks.

  Acton looks at her for a moment. Deliberately, he points at the bloated carcass on the deck. "That's us." He grabs one of the parasitic males, rips it free. "This is everyone else. Get it?"

  "Ah," Lubin says. "A metaphor. Clever."

  Acton takes a single step towards the other man. "Lubin, I am getting awfully fucking tired of you."

  "Really." Lubin doesn't seem the least bit threatened.

  Clarke moves; not directly between them, just off to one side, forming the apex of a human triangle. She has absolutely no idea what to do if this comes to blows. She has no idea what to say to stop that from happening.

  Suddenly, she's not even sure that she wants to.

  "Come on, you guys." Caraco leans back against the drying rack. "Can't you settle this some other way? Maybe you could just whip out a ruler and compare your dicks or something."

  They stare at her.

  "Watch it, Judy. You're getting pretty cocky there."

  Now they're staring at Clarke.

  Did I say that?

  For a long, long moment nothing happens. Then Lubin grunts and goes back to the workshop. Acton watches him go; then, deprived of an immediate threat, he steps back into the airlock.

  The dead angler shivers on the deck, bristling with infestation.

  "Lenie, he's really getting weird," Caraco says as the 'lock floods. "Maybe you should just let him go."

  Clarke just shakes her head. "Go where?"

  She even manages a smile.

  * * *

  She was looking for Karl Acton, but somehow she's found Gerry Fischer instead. He looks sadly down at her through the length of a long tunnel. He seems to be a whole ocean away. He doesn't speak but she senses sadness, disappointment. You lied to me, that feeling says. You said you'd come and see me and you lied. You've forgotten all about me.

  He's wrong. She hasn't forgotten him at all. She's only tried to.

  She doesn't say it aloud, of course, but somehow he reacts to it anyway. His feelings change; sadness fades, something colder seeps up in its place, something so deep and so old that she can't think of words to describe it.

  Something pure.

  From behind, a touch on her shoulder. She spins, instantly alert, hand closing around her billy.

  "Hey, calm down. It's me." Acton's silhouette hangs against a faint wash of light from the direction of the Throat. Clarke relaxes, pushes gently at his chest. Says nothing.

  "Welcome back," Acton says. "Haven't seen you out here for a while."

  "I was— I was looking for you," she says.

  "In the mud?"

  "What?"

  "You were just floating there, face down."

  "I was—" She feels a vestige of disquiet, but she can't remember what to attach it to. "I must have drifted off. I was dreaming. It's been so long since I slept out here, I—"

  "Four days, I think. I missed you."

  "Well, you could have come inside."

  Acton nods. "I tried. But I could never get all of me through the airlock, and the part that I could— well, it was sort of a poor substitute. If you'll remember."

  "I don't know, Karl. You know how I feel—"

  "Right. And I know you like it out here as much as I do. Sometimes I feel like I could just stay out here forever." He pauses for a moment, as if weighing alternatives. "Fischer's got it right."

  Something goes cold. "Fischer?"

  "He's still out here, Len. You know that."

  "You've seen him?"

  "Not often. He's pretty skittish."

  "When do...I mean—"

  "Only when I'm alone. And pretty far from Beebe."

  She looks around, inexplicably frightened. Of course you can't see him. He isn't here. And even if he was, it's still too dark to...

  She forces herself to leave her headlamp doused.

  "He's...I think he's really hooked in to you, Len. But I guess you know that too."

  No. No, I didn't. I don't. "He talks to you?" She doesn't know why she'd resent that.

  "No."

  "Then how?"

  Acton doesn't answer for a moment. "I don't know. I just got that impression. But he doesn't talk. It's...I don't know, Len. He just hangs around out there and watches us. I don't know if he's what we'd consider ... sane, I guess—"

  "He watches us," she says, buzzing low and level.

  "He knows we're together. I think...I think he figures that connects me and him somehow." Acton is silent for a bit. "You cared about him, didn't you?"

  Oh yes. It always starts off so innocently. You cared about him, that's nice, and then it's did you find him attractive and then well you must have done something or he wouldn't keep hitting on you and then you fucking slut I'll—

  "Lenie," Acton says. "I'm not trying to start anything."

  She waits and watches.

  "I know there was nothing going on. And even if there was, I know it's no threat."

  She's heard this part before, too.

  "Now that I think about it, that's always been my problem," Acton muses. "I always had to go on what other people told me, and people— people lie all the time, Len, you know that. So no matter how many times she swears she's not fucking around on you, or even that she doesn't want to fuck around on you, how can you ever really know? You can't. So the default assumption is, she's lying. And being lied to all the time, that's a damn good reason for — well, for doing what I do sometimes."

  "Karl — you know—"

  "I know you don't lie to me. You don't even hate me. That's kind of a change."

  She reaches out to touch the side of his face. "I'd say that's a good call. I'm glad you trust me."

  "Actually, Len, I don't have to trust you. I just know."

  "What do you mean? How?"

  "I'm not sure," he says. "It's something to do with the changes."

  He waits for her to respond.

  "What are you saying, Karl?" she says at last. "Are you saying you can read my mind?"

  "No. Nothing like that. I just, well, I identify with you more. I can— it's kind of hard to explain—"

  She remembers him levitating beside a luminous smoker: the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?

  He's tuned in, she realizes. To everything. He's even tuned into the bloody worms, that's what he—

  He's tuned in to Fischer—

  She tongues the light switch. A bright cone stabs into the abyss. She sweeps the water around them. Nothing.

  "Have the others seen him?"

  "I don't know. I think Caraco caught him on sonar once or twice."

  "Let's go back," Clarke says.

  "Let's not. Stay a while. Spend the night."

  She looks straight into his empty lenses. "Please, Karl. Come with me. Sleep inside for a bit."

  "He's not dangerous, Len."

  "That's not it." At least, that's not all.

  "What, then?"

  "Karl, has it ever occurred to you that you might be developing some sort of dependence on this nerve rush of yours?"

  "Come on, Len. The rift gives us all a rush. That's why we're down here."

  "We get a rush because we're fucked in the head. That doesn't mean we should go out of our way to augment the effect."

  "Lenie—"

  "Karl." She lays her hands on his shoulders. "I don't know what happens to you out here. But whatever it is, it sc
ares me."

  He nods. "I know."

  "Then please, please try it my way. Try sleeping inside again, just for a while. Try not to spend every waking moment climbing around on the bottom of the ocean, okay?"

  "Lenie, I don't like myself inside. You don't even like me inside."

  "Maybe. I don't know. I just — I just don't know how to deal with you when you're like this."

  "When I'm not about to beat the shit out of anyone? When I'm acting like a rational human being? If we'd had this conversation back at Beebe we'd be throwing things at each other by now." He falls silent for a moment. Something changes in his posture. "Or do you miss that, somehow?"

  "No. Of course not," she says, surprised at the thought.

  "Well, then—"

  "Please. Just— indulge me. What harm can it do?"

  He doesn't answer. But she has a sneaking suspicion that he could.

  * * *

  She has to give him credit. His reluctance shows in every move, but he's even first through the airlock. Something happens to him as it drains, though; the air rushes into him and — displaces something else, somehow. She can't quite put her finger on it. She wonders why she's never noticed it before.

  As a reward, she takes him directly into her cubby. He fucks her up against the bulkhead, violently, with no discretion at all. Animal sounds echo through the hull. She wonders, as he comes, if the noise is bothering the others.

  * * *

  "Have any of you," Acton says, "thought about why things are so fucking grotty down here?"

  It's a strange and wondrous occasion, as rare as a planetary conjunction. All the circadian clocks have drifted together for an hour or two, drawn everyone to dinner at the same time. Almost everyone; Lubin is nowhere to be seen. Not that he ever contributes much to the conversation anyway.

  "What do you mean?" Caraco says.

  "What do you think I mean? Look around, for Chrissake!" Acton waves his arm, taking in the lounge. "The place is barely big enough to stand up in. Everywhere you look there's fucking pipes and cables. It's like living in a service closet."

  Brander frowns around a mouthful of rehydrated potato.