Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  It's in there now, fully awake. She can't see Acton at all any more. Everything's back to normal.

  "Don't even try," she says. "I gave you a couple of shots for old times' sake, but if you lay a hand on me again I swear I'll fucking kill you."

  She marvels inwardly at the strength in her voice; it sounds like iron.

  They stare at each other for an endless moment.

  Acton's body turns on its heel and undogs the hatch. Clarke watches it step out of the cubby; Caraco, waiting in the corridor, lets it by without a word. Clarke holds herself utterly still until she hears the 'lock beginning to cycle.

  He didn't call my bluff.

  Except this time, she's not sure that that's all it was.

  * * *

  He doesn't see her.

  It's been days since they've said anything to each other. Even their shift schedules have diverged. Tonight, as she was trying to sleep, she heard him come out of the abyss again and climb up into the lounge like some invading sea creature. He does it now and then when the place is deserted, when everyone is either outside or sealed into their cubicles. He sits there at the library, diving through his 'phones down endless virtual avenues, desperation in every movement. It's as though he has to hold his breath whenever he comes inside; once she saw him tear the headset off his skull and flee outside as though his chest would burst. When she picked up the abandoned headset, the results of his litsearch were still glowing in the eyephones. Chemistry.

  Another time he turned on his way out to see her standing in the corridor. He smiled. He even said something: "—sorry—" is what she heard, but there may have been more. He didn't stay.

  Now his hands rest, unmoving, on the keyboard. His shoulders are shaking. He doesn't make any sound at all. Lenie Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, wondering whether to approach him. When she looks again the lounge is empty.

  * * *

  She can tell exactly where he's going. His icon buds off of Beebe and crawls away across the display, and there's only on thing in that direction.

  When she gets there he's crawling across its back, digging a hole with his knife. Clarke's eyecaps can barely find enough light to see by, this far from the Throat; Acton cuts and slices in the light of her headlamp, his shadow writhing away across a horizon of dead flesh.

  He's dug a crater, maybe half a meter across, half a meter deep. He's cut through the stratum of blubber below the skin and is tearing through the brown muscle beneath. It's been months now since this creature landed here. Clarke marvels at its preservation.

  The abyss likes extremes, she muses. If it isn't a pressure cooker, it's a fridge.

  Acton stops digging. He just floats there, staring down at his handiwork.

  "What a stupid idea," he buzzes at last. "I don't know what gets into me sometimes." He turns to face her; his eyecaps reflect yellow. "I'm sorry, Lenie. I know this place was special to you somehow, I didn't mean to...well, desecrate it, I guess."

  She shakes her head. "It's okay. It's not important."

  Acton's vocoder gurgles; in air, it would be a sad laugh. "I give myself too much credit sometimes, Len. Whenever I'm inside, and I'm fucking up and I don't know what to do, I figure all I've got to do is come outside and the scales will fall off my eyes. It's like, religious faith almost. All the answers. Right out here."

  "It's okay," Clarke says again, because it seems better than saying nothing.

  "Only sometimes the answer doesn't really do much for you, you know? Sometimes the answer's just: Forget it. You're fucked." Acton looks back down at the dead whale. "Would you turn the light off?"

  The darkness swallows them like a blanket. Clarke reaches through it and brings Acton to her. "What were you trying to do?"

  That mechanical laugh again. "Something I read. I was thinking—"

  His cheek brushes against hers.

  "I don't know what I was thinking. When I'm inside I'm a fucking lobo case, I get these stupid ideas and even when I get back out it takes a while before I really wake up and realize what a dork I've been. I wanted to study an adrenal gland. Thought it would help me figure out how to counter ion depletion at the synapse junctions."

  "You know how to do that."

  "Well, it was just bullshit anyway. I can't think straight in there."

  She doesn't bother to argue.

  "I'm sorry," Acton buzzes after a while.

  Clarke strokes his back. It feels like two sheets of plastic rubbing together.

  "I think I can explain it to you," he adds. "If you're interested."

  "Sure." But she knows it won't change anything.

  "You know how there's this strip in your brain that controls movement?"

  "Okay."

  "And if, say, you became a concert pianist, the part that runs your fingers would actually spread out, take up more of the strip to meet the increased demand for finger control. But you lose something, too. The adjacent parts of the strip get crowded out. So maybe you couldn't wiggle your toes or curl your tongue as well as you could before you started practicing."

  Acton falls silent. Clarke feels his arms, cradling her loosely from behind.

  "I think something like that happened to me," he says after a while.

  "How?"

  "I think something in my brain got exercised, and it spread out and crowded some other parts away. But it only works in a high-pressure environment, you see, it's the pressure that makes the nerves fire faster. So when I go back inside, the new part shuts down and the old parts have been — well, lost."

  Clarke shakes her head. "We've been through this, Karl. Your synapses just ran low on calcium."

  "That's not all that happened. That's not even a problem any more, I've brought my inhibitors up again. Not all the way, but enough. But I still have this new part, and I still can't find the old ones." She feels his chin on the top of her head. "I don't think I'm exactly human any more, Len. Which, considering the kind of human I was, is probably just as well."

  "And what does it do, exactly? This new part?"

  He takes a while to answer. "It's almost like getting an extra sense organ, except it's ... diffuse. Intuition, only with a really hard edge."

  "Diffuse, with a hard edge."

  "Yeah, well. That's the problem when you try to explain smell to someone without a nose."

  "Maybe it's not what you think. I mean, something's changed, but that doesn't mean you can really just — look into people like that. Maybe it's just some sort of mood disorder. Or a hallucination, maybe. You can't know."

  "I know, Len."

  "Then you're right." Anger trickles up from her internal reservoir. "You're not human any more. You're less than human."

  "Lenie—"

  "Humans have to trust, Karl. There's no big deal about putting your faith in something you know for certain. I want you to trust me."

  "Not know you."

  She tries to hear sadness on that synthetic voice. In Beebe, maybe, it would have come through. But in Beebe he would never had said that.

  "Karl—"

  "I can't come back."

  "You're not yourself out here." She pushes away, spins around; she can just barely distinguish his silhouette.

  "You want me to be—" She hears confusion in the words, even through the vocoder, but she knows it's not a question. "—hateful."

  "Don't be an idiot. I've had more than my fill of assholes, believe me. But Karl, this is just some kind of cheap trick. Step out of the magic booth, you're Mr. Nice Guy. Step back in, you're the SeaTac Strangler. It's not real."

  "How do you know?"

  She keeps her distance, suddenly knowing the answer. It's only real if it hurts. It's only real if it happens slowly, painfully, each step carved in shouts and threats and thrown punches.

  It's only real if Lenie Clarke is the one to make him change.

  She doesn't tell him any of this, of course. But she's afraid, as she turns and leaves him there, that she doesn't have to.

  * *
*

  She comes instantly out of sleep, tense and completely alert. There's darkness — the lights are off, she's even blanked the readouts on the wall — but it's the close, familiar darkness of her own cubby. Something is tapping on the hull, regular and insistent.

  From outside.

  Out in the corridor there's light enough for rifter eyes. Nakata and Caraco stand motionless in the lounge. Brander sits at the library; the screens are dark, the headsets all hanging on their pegs.

  The sound ticks through the lounge, fainter than before but easily audible.

  "Where's Lubin?" Clarke asks softly. Nakata tilts her head towards the hull: outside somewhere.

  Clarke climbs downstairs and into the airlock.

  * * *

  "We thought you'd gone over," she says. "Like Fischer."

  They float between Beebe and the sea floor. Clarke reaches out to him. Acton reaches back.

  "How long has it been?" The words come out as faint, metallic sighs.

  "Six days. Maybe seven. I've been putting off— calling up for a replacement—"

  He doesn't react.

  "We saw you on sonar sometimes," she adds. "For a while. Then you disappeared."

  Silence.

  "Did you get lost?" she asks after a while.

  "Yeah."

  "But you're back now."

  "No."

  "Karl—"

  "I need you to promise me something, Lenie."

  "What?"

  "Promise me you'll do what I did. The others too. They'll listen to you."

  "You know I can't—"

  "Five percent, Lenie. Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you'll do okay. Promise."

  "Why, Karl?"

  "Because I wasn't wrong about everything. Because sooner or later they're going to have to get rid of you, and you need every edge you can get."

  "Come inside. We can talk about it inside, everyone's there."

  "There's strange things happening out there, Len. Out past sonar range, they're — I don't know what they're doing. They don't tell us..."

  "Come inside, Karl."

  He shakes his head. He seems almost unused to the gesture.

  "—can't—"

  "Then don't expect me—"

  "I left a file in the library. It explains things. As much as I could, when I was in there. Promise me, Len."

  "No. You promise. Come inside. Promise we'll work it out."

  "It kills too much of me," he sighs. "I pushed it too far. Something burned out, I'm not even completely whole out here any more. But you'll be okay. Five or ten percent, no more."

  "I need you," she buzzes, very quietly.

  "No," he says. "You need Karl Acton."

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "You need what he did to you."

  All the warmth goes out of her then. What's left is a slow, freezing boil.

  "What is this, Karl? Some grand insight you got while spirit-walking around in the mud? You think you know me better than I do?"

  "You know—"

  "Because you don't, you know. You don't know shit about me, you never did. And you don't really have the balls to find out, so you run off into the dark and come back spouting all this pretentious bullshit." She's goading him, she knows she's goading him but he's just not reacting. Even one of his outbursts would be better than this.

  "It's saved under Shadow," he says.

  She stares at him without speaking.

  "The file," he adds.

  "What's wrong with you?" She's beating at him now, pounding as hard as she can but he's not hitting back, he's not even defending himself for Chrissakes why don't you fight back asshole why don't you just get it over with, just beat the shit out of me until the guilt covers us both and we'll promise never to do it again and—

  But even anger deserts her now. The inertia of her attack pushes them away from each other. She catches herself on an anchor cable. A starfish, wrapped around the line, reaches blindly out to touch her with the tip of one arm.

  Acton continues to drift.

  "Stay," she says.

  He brakes and holds position without answering, dim and gray and distant.

  There are so many things denied her out here. She can't cry. She can't even close her eyes. So she stares at the sea bed, watches her own shadow stretch off into the darkness. "Why are you doing this?" she asks, exhausted, and wonders who she meant the question for.

  His shadow flows across her own. A mechanical voice answers:

  "This is what you do when you really love someone."

  She jerks her head up in time to see him disappear.

  * * *

  Beebe's quiet when she returns. The wet slap of her feet on the deck is the only sound. She climbs into the lounge and finds it empty. She takes a step towards the corridor that leads to her cubby.

  Stops.

  In Comm, a luminous icon inches towards the Throat. The display lies for effect; in reality Acton is dark and unreflective, no more luminous than she is.

  She wonders again if she should try and stop him. She could never overpower him by force, but perhaps she just hasn't thought of the right thing to say. Perhaps if she just gets it right she can call him back, compel his return through words alone. Not a victim any more, he said once. Perhaps she's a siren instead.

  She can't think of anything to say.

  He's almost there now. She can see him gliding between great bronze pillars, bacterial nebulae swirling in his wake. She imagines his face aimed down, scanning, relentless, hungry. She can see him homing in on the north end of Main Street.

  She shuts off the display.

  She doesn't have to watch this. She knows what's going on, and the machines will tell her when it's over. She couldn't stop them if she tried, not unless she smashed them into junk. That, in fact, is exactly what she wants to do. But she controls herself. Quiet as stone, Lenie Clarke sits in the command cubby staring at a blank screen, waiting for the alarm.

  * * *

  Nekton

  Dryback

  Jumpstart

  He dreamed of water.

  He always dreamed of water. He dreamed the smell of dead fish in rotten nets, and rainbow puddles of gasoline shimmering off the Steveston jetty, and a home so close to the shoreline you could barely get insurance. He dreamed of a time when waterfront meant something, even the muddy brown stretch where the Fraser hemorrhaged into the Strait of Georgia. His mother was standing over him, beaming a vital ecological resource, Yves. A staging ground for migrating birds. A filter for the whole world. And little Yves Scanlon smiled back, proud that he alone of all his friends— well, not friends exactly, but maybe they would be now— would grow up appreciating nature first-hand, right here in his new back yard. One and a half meters above the high-tide line.

  And then, as usual, the real world kicked in the doors and electrocuted his mother in mid-smile.

  Sometimes he could postpone the inevitable. Sometimes he could fight the jolt from his bedside dreamer, keep it from dragging him back for just a few more seconds. Thirty years of random images would flash across his mind in those moments; falling forests, bloating deserts, ultraviolet fingers reaching ever deeper into barren seas. Oceans creeping up shorelines. Vital ecological resources turning into squatting camps for refugees. Squatting camps turning into intertidal zones.

  And Yves Scanlon was awake again, sweat-soaked, teeth clenched, jump-started.

  God, no. I'm back.

  The real world.

  Three and a half hours. Only three and a half hours...

  It was all the dreamer would allow him. Sleep stages one through four got ten minutes each. REM got thirty, in deference to the incompressibility of the dream state. A seventy-minute cycle, run three times nightly.

  You could freelance. Everyone else does.

  Freelancers chose their own hours. Employees— those few that remained— got their hours chosen for them. Yves Scanlon was an employee. He frequently reminded himself of the ad
vantages: you didn't have to fight and scramble for a new contract every six months. You had stability, of a sort. If you performed. If you kept on performing. Which meant, of course, that Yves Scanlon couldn't afford the nightly nine-and-a-half-hours that was optimal for his species.

  Servitude for security, then. No day passed when he didn't hate the choice he'd made. Some day, perhaps, he'd even hate it more than he feared the alternative.

  "Seventeen items on high priority," said the workstation as his feet hit the floor. "Four broadcast, twelve net, one phone. Broadcast and phone items are clean. Net items were disinfected on entry, with a forty percent chance that encrypted bugs slipped through."

  "Up the disinfectant," Scanlon said.

  "That will destroy any encrypted bugs, but might also destroy up to five percent of the legitimate data. I could just dump the risky files."

  "Disinfect them. What's on midlist?"

  "Eight hundred and sixty three items. Three hundred twenty seven broad—"

  "Dump it all." Scanlon headed for the bathroom, stopped. "Wait a minute. Play the phone call."

  "This is Patricia Rowan," the station said in a cold, clipped voice. "We may be encountering some personnel problems with the deep-sea geothermal program. I'd like to discuss them with you. I'll have your return call routed direct."

  Shit. Rowan was one of the top corpses on the west coast. She'd barely even acknowledged him since he'd been hired on at the GA. "Is there a priority on that call?" Scanlon asked.

  "Important but not urgent," the workstation replied

  He could have breakfast first, maybe go through his mail. He could ignore all those reflexes urging him to drop everything and jump like a trained seal to immediate attention. They needed him for something. About time. About goddamned time.

  "I'm taking a shower," he told the workstation, hesitantly defiant. "Don't bother me until I come out."

  His reflexes, though, didn't like it at all.