by Peter Watts
It's a good idea. Someone else thought so too, at least that's what Scanlon heard from Mezzich a couple of weeks ago. Nothing official, of course, but there may already be a few prototypes in the system. Someone right here in Beebe, maybe, a walking testament to Induced False Memory Syndrome. Maybe Lubin. Maybe Clarke. Could be anyone, really.
They should have told me.
They told him, all right. They told him, when he first started, that he was coming in on the ground floor. You'll have input on pretty much everything, was what Rowan had promised. The design work, the follow-ups. They even offered him automatic coauthorship on all unclassified publications. Yves Scanlon was supposed to be a fucking equal. And then they shut him off in a little room, mumbling to recruits while they made all the decisions up on the thirty-fifth fucking floor.
Standard corporate mentality. Knowledge was power. Corpses never told anybody anything.
I was an idiot to believe them as long as I did. Sending up my recommendations, waiting for them to honor a promise or two. And this is the bone they throw me. Stick me at the bottom of the fucking ocean with these post-traumatic head cases because no one else wants to get shit on their hands.
I mean, fuck. I'm so far out of the loop I have to coax rumors from a has-been hack like Mezzich?
Still. He wonders who it might be. Brander or Nakata, maybe. Her record shows a background in geothermal engineering and high-pressure tech, and he's got a Masters in systems ecology with a minor in genomics. Too much education for your average vampire. Assuming there is such a thing.
Wait a second. Why should I trust these files? After all, if Rowan's keeping this thing under wraps she might not be stupid enough to leave clues lying around in the GA personnel records.
Scanlon ponders the question. Suppose the files have been modified. Maybe he should check out the least likely candidates. He orders an ascending sort by educational background.
Lenie Clarke. Premed dropout, basic virtual-tech ed. The GA hired her away from the Hongcouver Aquarium. PR department.
Hmm. Someone with Lenie Clarke's social skills, in public relations? Not likely. I wonder if—
Jesus. There it is again.
Yves Scanlon strips the phones from his eyes and stares at the ceiling. The sound seeps in through the hull, barely audible.
I'm almost getting used to it, actually.
It sighs through the bulkhead, recedes, dies. Scanlon waits. He realizes he's holding his breath.
There. Something very far away. Something very—
Lonely. It sounds so lonely.
He knows how it feels.
* * *
The lounge is empty, but something casts a faint shadow through the Communications hatchway. A soft voice from inside: Clarke, it sounds like. Scanlon evesdrops for a few seconds. She's reciting supply consumption rates, listing the latest bits of equipment to break down. A routine call up to the GA, from the sound of it. She hangs up just before he steps into view.
She's sitting slumped in her chair, a cup of coffee within easy reach.
They eye each other for a moment, without speaking.
"Anyone else around?" Scanlon wonders.
She shakes her head.
"I thought I heard something, a few minutes ago."
She turns back to face the console. A couple of icons flash on the main display.
"What are you doing?"
She makes a vague gesture to the console. "Running tender. Thought you'd like that, for a change."
"Oh, but I said—"
"Not to change the routine," Clarke cuts in. She seems tired. "Do you always expect everyone to do everything you say?"
"Is that what you think I meant?"
She snorts softly, still not looking back.
"Look," Scanlon says, "Are you sure you didn't hear something, like— like—" like a ghost, Clarke? A sound like poor dead Acton might make, watching his own remains rotting out there on the rift?
"Don't worry about it," she says.
Aha. "So you did hear something." She knows what it is, too. They all do.
"What I hear," she says, "is my own concern."
Take a hint, Scanlon. But there's nowhere else to go, except back to his cubby. And the prospect of being alone, right now— somehow, even the company of a vampire seems preferable.
She turns around to face him again. "Something else?"
"Not really. Just can't seem to sleep." Scanlon dons a disarming smile. "Just not used to the pressure, I guess." That's right. Put her at ease. Acknowledge her superiority.
She just stares at him
"I don't know how you take it, month after month," he adds.
"Yes you do. You're a psychiatrist. You chose us."
"Actually, I'm more of a mechanic."
"Of course," she says, expressionless. "It's your job to keep things broken."
Scanlon looks away.
She stands up and takes a step towards the hatchway, her tending duties apparently forgotten. Scanlon stands aside. She brushes past, somehow avoiding physical contact in the cramped space.
"Look," he blurts out, "how about a quick review of the tending procedure? I'm not all that familiar with this equipment."
It's too obvious. He knows she sees through it before the words are even out of his mouth. But it's also a perfectly reasonable request from someone in his role. Routine evaluation, after all.
She watches him for a moment, her head cocked a bit to one side. Her face, expressionless as usual, somehow conveys the impression of a slight smile. Finally she sits down again.
She taps on a menu. "This is the Throat." A cluster of luminous rectangles nested in a background of contour lines. "Thermal readout." The image erupts into psychedelic false color, red and yellow hot spots pulsing at irregular intervals along the main fissure. "You don't usually bother with thermal when you're tending," Clarke explains. "When you're out there you find that stuff out sooner first-hand anyway." The psychedelia fades back to green and gray.
And what happens if someone gets taken by surprise out there and you don't have the readings in here to know they're in trouble? Scanlon doesn't ask aloud. Just another cut corner.
Clarke pans, finds a pair of alphanumeric icons. "Alice and Ken." Another red hot-spot slides into view in the upper left corner of the display.
No, wait a minute; she turned thermal off...
"Hey," Scanlon says, "that's a deadman switch—"
No audio alarm. Why isn't there an alarm— His eyes dart across the half-familiar console. Where is it, where—shit—
The alarm's been disabled.
"Look!" Scanlon points at the display. "Can't you—"
Clarke looks up at him, almost lazily. She doesn't seem to understand.
He jabs his thumb down. "Somebody just died out there!"
She looks at the screen, slowly shakes her head. "No—"
"You stupid bitch, you cut off the alarm!"
He hits a control icon. The station starts howling. Scanlon jumps back, startled, bumps the bulkhead. Clarke watches him, frowning slightly.
"What's wrong with you?" He reaches out and grabs her by the shoulders. "Do something! Call Lubin, call—" The alarm is deafening. He shakes her, hard, pulls her up out of the chair—
And remembers, too late: you don't touch Lenie Clarke.
Something happens in her face. It almost crumples, right there in front of him. Lenie Clarke the ice queen is suddenly nowhere to be seen. In her place there's only a beaten, blind little kid, body shaking, mouth moving in the same pattern over and over, he can't hear over the alarm but her lips shape the words, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry—
All in the few scant seconds before she crystallizes.
She seems to harden against the sound, against Scanlon's assault. Her face goes completely blank. She rises out of the chair, centimeters taller than she should be. One hand comes up, grabs Yves Scanlon by the throat. Pushes.
He staggers backwards into the lounge, flailing. Th
e table appears to one side; he reaches out, steadies himself.
Suddenly, Beebe falls silent again.
Scanlon takes a deep breath. Another vampire has appeared in his peripheral vision, standing impassively at the mouth of the corridor; he ignores it. Directly ahead, Lenie Clarke is sitting down again in Communications, her back turned. Scanlon steps forward.
"It's Karl," she says before he can speak.
It takes a moment to register: Acton.
"But— that was months ago," Scanlon says. "You lost him."
"We lost him." She breathes, slowly. "He went down a smoker. It erupted."
"I'm sorry," Scanlon says. "I— didn't know."
"Yeah." Her voice is tight with controlled indifference. "He's too far down to— we can't get him back. Too dangerous." She turns to face him, impossibly calm. "Deadman switch still works, though. It'll keep screaming until the battery runs down." She shrugs. "So we keep the alarm off."
"I don't blame you," Scanlon says softly.
"Imagine," Clarke tells him, "how much your approval comforts me."
He turns to leave.
"Wait," she says. "I can zoom in for you. I can show you exactly where he died, maximum res."
"That's not necessary."
She stabs controls. "No problem. Naturally you're interested. What kind of mechanic wouldn't want to know the performance specs on his own creation?" She reshapes the display like a sculptor, hones it down and down until there's nothing left but a tangle of faint green lines and a red pulsing dot.
"He got wedged into an ancillary crevice," she says. "Looks like a tight fit even now, when all the flesh has been boiled away. Don't know how he managed to get down there when he was all in one piece." There's no stress in her voice at all. She could be talking about a friend's vacation.
Scanlon can feel her eyes on him; he keeps his on the screen.
"Fischer," he says. "What happened to him?"
From the corner of his eye: she starts to tense, turns it into a shrug. "Who knows? Maybe Archie got him."
"Archie?"
"Archie Toothis." Scanlon doesn't recognize the name; it's not in any of his files, as far as he knows. He considers, decides not to push it.
"Did Fischer's deadman go off, at least?"
"He didn't have one." She shrugs. "The abyss can kill you any number of ways, Scanlon. It doesn't always leave traces."
"I'm— I'm sorry if I upset you, Lenie."
One corner of her mouth barely twitches.
And he is sorry. Even though it's not his fault. I didn't make you what you are, he wants to say. I didn't smash you into junk, that was someone else. I just came along afterwards and found a use for you. I gave you a purpose, more of a purpose than you ever had back there.
Is that really so bad?
He doesn't dare ask aloud, so he turns to leave. And when Lenie Clarke lays one finger, very briefly, on the screen where Acton's icon flashes, he pretends not to notice.
* * *
TRANS/OFFI/260850:1352
I recently had an interesting conversation with Lenie Clarke. Although she didn't admit so openly— she is very well defended, and quite expert at hiding her feelings from laypeople— I believe that she and Karl Acton were sexually involved. This is a heartening discovery, insofar as my original profiles strongly suggested that such a relationship would develop. (Clarke has a history of relationships with Intermittent Explosives.) This adds a measure of empirical confidence to other, related predictions regarding rifter behavior.
I have also learned that Karl Acton, rather than simply disappearing, was actually killed by an erupting smoker. I don't know what he was doing down there— I'll continue to investigate— but the behavior itself seems foolish at best and quite possibly suicidal. Suicide is not consistent either with Karl Acton's DSM or ECM profiles, which must have been accurate when first derived. Suicide, therefore, would imply a degree of basic personality change. This is consistent with the trauma-addiction scenario. However, some sort of physical brain injury can not be ruled out. My search of the medical logs didn't turn up any head injuries, but was limited to living participants. Perhaps Acton was... different...
Oh. I found out who Archie Toothis is. Not in the personnel files at all. The library. Architeuthis: giant squid.
I think she was kidding.
Bulrushes
At times like this it seems as if the world has always been black.
It hasn't, of course. Joel Kita caught a hint of ambient blue out the dorsal port just ten minutes ago. Right before they dropped through the deep scattering layer; pretty thin stuff compared to the old days, he's been told, but still impressive. Glowing siphonophores and flashlight fish and all. Still beautiful.
That's a thousand meters above them now. Right here there's nothing but the thin vertical slash of Beebe's transponder line. Joel has put the 'scaphe into a lazy spin during the drop, forward floods sweeping the water in a descending corkscrew. The transponder line swings past the main viewport every thirty seconds or so, keeping time, a bright vertical line against the dark.
Other than that, blackness.
A tiny monster bumps the port. Needle teeth so long the mouth can't close, an eel-like body studded with glowing photophores— fifteen, twenty centimeters long, tops. It's not even big enough to make a sound when it hits and then it's gone, spinning away above them.
"Viperfish," Jarvis says.
Joel glances around at his passenger, hunched up beside him to take advantage of what might laughingly be called "the view". Jarvis is some sort of cellular physiologist out of Rand/Washington U., here to collect a mysterious package in a plain brown wrapper.
"See many of those?" he asks now.
Joel shakes his head. "Not this far down. Kind of unusual."
"Yeah, well, this whole area is unusual. That's why I'm here."
Joel checks tactical, nudges a trim tab.
"Now viperfish, they're not supposed to get any bigger than the one you just saw," Jarvis remarks. "But there was a guy, oh, back in the 1930s— Beebe his name was, the same guy they named— anyway, he swore he saw one that was over two meters long."
Joel grunts. "Didn't know people came down here back then."
"Yeah, well, they were just starting out. And everyone had always thought deepwater fish were these puny little midgets, because that's all they ever brought up in their trawls. But then Beebe sees this big ripping viperfish, and people start thinking hey, maybe we only caught little ones because all the big ones could outswim the trawls. Maybe the deep sea really is teeming with giant monsters."
"It's not," Joel says. "At least, not that I've seen."
"Yeah, well, that's what most people think. Every now and then you get pieces of something weird washing up, though. And of course there's Megamouth. And your garden-variety giant squid."
"They never get down this far. I bet none of your other giants do either. Not enough food."
"Except for the vents," Jarvis says.
"Except for the vents."
"Actually," Jarvis amends, "except for this vent."
The transponder line swings past, a silent metronome.
"Yeah," says Joel after a moment. "Why is that?"
"Well, we're not sure. We're working on it, though. That's what I'm doing here. Gonna bag one of those scaly mothers."
"You're kidding. We going to butt it to death with the hull?"
"Actually, it's already been bagged. The rifters got it for us a couple of days ago. All we do is pick it up."
"I could do that solo. Why'd you come along?"
"Got to check to make sure they did it right. Don't want the canister blowing up on the surface."
"And that extra tank you strapped onto my 'scaphe? The one with the biohazard stickers all over it?"
"Oh," Jarvis says. "That's just to sterilize the sample."
"Uh huh." Joel lets his eyes run over the panels. "You must pull a lot of weight back on shore."
"Oh? Why's th
at?"
"I used to make the Channer run a lot. Pharmaceutical dives, supply trips to Beebe, ecotourism. A while back I shuttled some corpse type out to Beebe; he said he was staying for a month or so. The GA calls me three days later and tells me to go pick him up. I show up for the run and they tell me it's cancelled. No explanation."
"Pretty strange," Jarvis remarks.
"You're the first run I've had to Channer in six weeks. You're the first run anyone's had, from what I can tell. So, you pull some weight."
"Not really." Jarvis shrugs in the half-light. "I'm just a research associate. I go where they tell me, just like you. Today they told me to go and pick up an order of fish to go."
Joel looks at him.
"You were asking why they got so big," Jarvis says, deking to the right. "We figure it's some kind of endosymbiotic infection."
"No shit."
"Say it's easier for some microbe to live inside a fish than out in the ocean — less osmotic stress — so once inside it's pumping out more ATP than it needs."
"ATP," Joel says.
"High-energy phosphate compound. Cellular battery. Anyway, it spits out this surplus ATP, and the host fish can use it as extra growth energy. So maybe Channer Vent's got some sort of unique bug that infects teleost fishes and gives 'em a growth spurt."
"Pretty weird."
"Actually, happens all the time. Every one of your own cells is a colony, for that matter. You know, nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts if you're a plant—"
"I'm not." More than I can say for some folks...
"—those all used to be free-living microbes in their own right. A few billion years ago something ate them, but it couldn't digest them properly so they all just kept living inside the cytoplasm. Eventually they struck up a deal with the host cell, took over housecleaning tasks and suchlike in lieu of rent. Voila: your modern eukaryotic cell."
"So what happens if this Channer bug gets into a person? We all grow three meters high?"
A polite laugh. "Nope. People stop growing when they reach adulthood. So do most vertebrates, actually. Fish, on the other hand, keep growing their whole lives. And deepwater fish—those don't do anything except grow, if you know what I mean."