Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  “On the contrary,” Rowan said softly; she sounded tired. “I’m sorry to drag you back here on your down time. Unfortunately, I’m only in town for a few hours.” She tapped commands into a control pad on the table in front of her. Tiny lights scrolled across her eyes. “So. The famous Achilles Desjardins. Savior of the Med.”

  “I just did the stats,” he said. “And they only—postponed the inevitable for a few months.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” the corpse said. “Mean event resolution 36.8 minutes. That’s excellent”

  Desjardins acknowledged with a nod.

  “The metabase,” Rowan continued. “Plagues. Brushfires. Traffic flow. And even setting the Mediterranean aside for the moment, I’m told your projections helped a lot in keeping the Gulf Stream going. A few people have you beat in Maelstrom, certainly, but you’ve got the edge in biocontainment, economics, industrial ecology—”

  Desjardins smiled to himself. Typical old-school: she actually thought she was ticking off a list of different subjects.

  “At any rate,” the corpse continued, “you seem to be the best local candidate for what we have in mind. We’re taking you off your normal rotation and putting you onto a special project, with Dr. Lertzman’s approval of course.”

  “I think we could probably spare him,” Lertzman said, embracing the pretense that his opinion mattered. “In fact, after today I imagine Achilles would probably want to leave Maelstrom behind for a while.”

  Enculé. The sentiment was almost a reflex where Lertzman was concerned.

  Rowan again: “There’s a biological event we’d like you to keep an eye on. New soil microbe, from the looks of it. So far it’s had a relatively minor impact—almost negligible, in fact, but the potential is, well …” She inclined her head toward the blonde on her right; on cue, that woman tapped her wristwatch. “If you’d open for download …”

  Desjardins tapped the requisite shorthand onto his wrist; transfer protocols flickered briefly across his field of view.

  “You can study the stats afterward,” the blonde told him. “Briefly, though, you’re looking for small-scale substrate acidification, reductions in chlorophyll a, maybe some changes in xanthophylls—”

  Science. No wonder nobody’d bothered to introduce her.

  “—there might be a reduction in soil moisture levels, too, but we don’t know yet. Probable decline in Bt and associated microflora. Also we suspect the spread will be temperature-limited. Your job is to develop a diagnostic profile, something we can use to tag this bug from a distance.”

  “That sounds a bit long-term for my skill set,” Desjardins remarked. Not to mention boring as hell. “I’m really more optimized for acute crisis work.”

  Rowan ignored the hint. “That’s not a problem. We selected you for your pattern-recognition skills, not your brushfire reflexes.”

  “Okay, then.” He sighed to himself. “What about an actual signature?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you’re talking about depressed chlorophylls, I’m assuming conventional photosynthesizers are being replaced. By what? Any new pigments I should be looking for?”

  “We don’t have a signature yet,” the woman told him. “If you can work one up that’d be great, but we’re not hopeful.”

  “Come on. Everything’s got a signature.”

  “That’s true. But this thing’s direct sig may not show up at a distance until it’s already at outbreak concentrations. We want to catch it before then. Indirect telltales are probably your best bet.”

  “I’d still like the lab stats. An actual culture, too, of course.” He decided to float a trial balloon. “Alice Jovellanos could be helpful in this. Her background’s in biochem.”

  “Alice hasn’t had her shots yet—” Lertzman began.

  Rowan smoothly cut him off: “By all means, Dr. Desjardins. Anyone you think could be helpful. Keep in mind though, the security classifications are subject to change. Depending at least partly on your own results, of course.”

  “Thanks. And the culture?”

  “We’ll do what we can. There may be concerns about releasing a live sample, for obvious reasons.”

  Uh-huh.

  “Start your search along coastal N’AmPac. We think this bug’s limited to the Pacific Northwest. Between Hongcouver and Coos Bay, most likely.”

  “So far,” Desjardins added.

  “With your help, Dr. Desjardins, we don’t expect that to change.”

  He’d seen it all before. Some pharm had lost control of another bug. The quake had cracked open an incubator somewhere, and the competing forces of corporate secrecy and agricultural Armageddon had beat each other senseless in a boardroom somewhere else, and Patricia Rowan—whoever she was working for—had emerged from the wreckage to dump the whole thing into his lap. Without giving him the right tools for the job, natch; by the time they’d skimmed off all the molecules with patents hanging from them, his culture sample would amount to 20cc’s of distilled water.

  A sound sneaked out, half laugh, half snort.

  “Excuse me?” Rowan arched an eyebrow. “You had a comment?”

  A brief, cathartic fantasy:

  Actually I have a question, Ms. Rowan. Does all this bullshit turn your crank? Does the senseless withholding of vital information give you some kind of hard-on? It must. I mean, why bother retrofitting me down to the fucking molecules? Why bioengineer me into some paragon of integrity, only to decide I still can’t be trusted when the chips are down? You know me, Rowan. I’m incorruptible. I couldn’t turn against the greater good if my life depended on it.

  Into the growing silence, Lertzman emitted a brief panicky cough from behind one clenched fist.

  “Sorry, no. Nothing really.” Desjardins tapped his watch, his hands safely beneath the table. He grabbed at the first heading to come up on his inlays: “It’s just, you know, a cute name. βehemoth. What’s it from?”

  “It’s biblical,” Rowan told him. “I never liked it much myself.”

  He didn’t need an answer to his unspoken questions anyway. He figured Rowan had a very good reason for playing things so close to her chest; of course she knew he couldn’t work against the greater good.

  But she could.

  Bang

  For Lenie Clarke, the choice between sharks and humans was not as easy as it might have been. Making it, she paid another price: she missed the darkness.

  Night, no matter how moonless and overcast, was no match for eyecaps. There weren’t many places on earth dark enough to blind them. Light-sealed rooms, of course. Deep caves and the deep sea, at least those parts free of bioluminescence. Nowhere else. Her caps doomed her to vision.

  She could always remove them, of course. Easy enough to do, hardly different from popping out a pair of contact lenses. She vaguely remembered the look of her naked eyes; they were pale blue, so pale the irises almost got lost in the whites. Sort of like looking into sea ice. She’d been told her eyes were cold, and sexy.

  She hadn’t taken her caps out for almost a year. She’d kept them on in front of people she’d fought against, fought for, fucked over. She hadn’t even taken them off during sex. She wasn’t about to strip now, in front of strangers.

  If it was darkness she was after, she’d have to close her eyes. Surrounded by a million refugees, that wasn’t the easiest thing to do either.

  She found a few square meters of emptiness. Refugees huddled under blankets and lean-tos nearby, slept or fucked in darkness that must have afforded some cover to their eyes, at least. They’d pretty much left her alone, as Amitav had said they would. In fact, they accorded her considerably more space than they granted each other. She lay back in her little patch of sand, her territory, and closed her eyes against the brilliant darkness. A soft rain was falling; the diveskin numbed her body to it, but she could feel it on her face. It was almost a caress.

  She drifted. She imagined she must have slept at some point, but her eyes happened to be ope
n on two occasions when botflies passed quietly overhead, dark ellipses backlit by a brightness too faint for naked eyes. Each time she tensed, ready to flee into the ocean, but the drones took no notice of her.

  No initiative, she reflected. They don’t see anything they’re not programmed to look for. Or perhaps their senses weren’t as finely tuned as she’d feared. Perhaps they just couldn’t see her implants; maybe her aura was too faint, or too far away. Maybe botflies didn’t see as deeply into the EM spectrum as she’d feared.

  I was all alone, that first time, she thought. The whole beach was closed off. I bet that’s it. They pay attention to trespassers ...

  So did Amitav, evidently. That was shaping up to be a problem.

  He appeared at the cycler the next morning with a dead botfly in his arms. It looked a bit like a turtle shell she’d once seen in a museum, except for the vents and instruments studding the ventral surface. It was split along its equatorial seam; black smudges lined the breach.

  “Can you fix this?” Amitav asked. “Any of it?”

  Clarke shook her head. “Don’t know anything about botflies.” She lifted the carapace anyway. Inside, burned electronics nested under a layer of soot.

  She ran one thumb along a small pebbled convexity, felt the compound lenses of a visual cluster beneath the grime. Some of the tech was vaguely familiar, but …

  “No,” she said, setting it on the sand. “Sorry.”

  Amitav shrugged and sat, cross-legged. “I did not expect so,” he said. “But one can always hope, and you seem to have such familiarity with machines yourself …”

  She smiled faintly, freshly aware of the implants crowding her thorax.

  “I expect you will be going to the fence,” Amitav said after a moment. “Your people will let you through when they see you are one of them.”

  She looked to the east. Off in the distance, the border towers rose from a fog of human bodies and trampled scrub. She’d heard about the high-voltage lines and the razorwire strung between them. She’d heard other things, too, about refugees so driven by their own desperation they’d climbed seven or eight meters before the juice and their own cumulative dismemberment had killed them off: Their lacerated remains were left rotting on the wires, the story went—whether as an act of deterrence or simple neglect was unclear.

  Clarke knew it was all just alligator tales. Nobody over thirteen believed such bullshit, and the people here—for all their numbers—didn’t seem motivated enough to hold a garage sale, much less storm the battlements. What was the word Amitav had used?

  Docile.

  In a way it was a shame, though. She’d never actually been to the fences. It might have been interesting to check them out.

  Being dead had all sorts of little drawbacks.

  “Surely you have a home to go to. Surely you do not wish to stay here,” Amitav prodded.

  “No,” she said to both questions.

  He waited. She waited with him.

  Finally, he stood and glanced down at the dead botfly. “I do hot know what made this one crash. Usually they work quite well. I believe you’ve already seen one or two pass by, yes? Your eyes may be empty, but they are not blind.”

  Clarke held his gaze and said nothing.

  He nudged the little wreck with his toe. “These are not blind either,” he said, and walked away.

  It was a hole in darkness: a window to another world. It was set at the height of a child’s eyes, and it looked into a kitchen she’d not seen in twenty years.

  Onto a person she hadn’t seen in almost that long.

  Her father knelt in front of her, folded down from adult height to regard her eye to eye. He had a serious look on his face. He grasped her wrist with one hand; something dangled in the other.

  She waited for the familiar sickness to rise in her throat, but it didn’t come. The vision was a child’s; the viewer was an adult, hardened, adapted, accustomed by now to trials that reduced child abuse from nightmare down to trite cliché.

  She tried to look around; her field of view refused to change. She could not see her mother.

  Par for the course.

  Her father’s mouth moved; no words came out. The image was utterly silent, a plague of light with no sound track.

  This is a dream. A boring dream. Time to wake up.

  She opened her eyes. The dream didn’t stop.

  There was a different world behind it, though, a highcontrast jigsaw of photoamplified light and shadow. Someone stood before her on the sand, but the face was eclipsed by this vision from her childhood. It floated in front of her, an impossible picture-in-picture. The present glimmered faintly through from behind.

  She closed her eyes. The present vanished. The past didn’t.

  Go away. I’m done with you. Go away.

  Her father still held her wrist—at least, he held the wrist of the fragile creature whose eyes she was using—but she felt nothing. And now those eyes focused autonomously on the dangling thing in her father’s other hand. Suddenly frightened, she snapped her own eyes back open before she could see what it was; but once again the image followed her into the real world.

  Here, before the destitute numberless hordes of the Strip, her father was holding out a gift for Lenie Clarke. Her first wristwatch.

  Please go away …

  “No,” said a voice, very close by. “I am not.”

  Amitav’s voice. Lenie Clarke, transfixed, made a small animal noise.

  Her father was explaining the functions of her new toy. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it didn’t matter; she could see him voiceact’ing the little gadget, stepping through its Net Access functions (they’d called it the Net back then, she remembered), pointing out the tiny antennae that linked to the eyephones … .

  She shook her head. The image didn’t waver. Her father was pulling her forward, extending her arm, carefully looping the watch around her wrist.

  She knew it wasn’t really a gift. It was a down payment. It was a token offered in exchange, some half-assed gesture that was supposed to make up for the things he’d done to her all those years ago, the things he was going to do right now, the things—

  Her father leaned forward and kissed some spot just above the eyes that Lenie Clarke couldn’t shut. He patted the head that Lenie Clarke couldn’t feel. And then, smiling—

  He left her alone.

  He moved back down the hall, out of the kitchen, leaving her to play.

  The vision dissipated. The Strip rushed in to fill the hole.

  Amitav glowered down at her. “You are mistaken,” he said. “I am not your father.”

  She scrambled to her feet. The ground was muddy and saturated, close to the waterline. Halogen light stretched in broken strips from the station up the beach. Bundled motionless bodies lay scattered on the upper reaches of that slope. None were nearby.

  It was a dream. Another—hallucination. Nothing real.

  “I am wondering what you are doing here,” Amitav said quietly.

  Amitav’s real. Focus. Deal with him.

  “You are not the only—person to have washed up afterward, of course,” the refugee remarked. “They wash up even now. But you are much less dead than the others.”

  You should’ve seen me before.

  “And it is odd that you would come to us like this. All of this was swept clean many days ago. An earthquake on the bottom of the ocean, yes? Far out to sea. And here you are, built for the deep ocean, and now you come ashore and eat as if you have not eaten for days.” His smile was a predatory thing. “And you do not wish your people to know that you are here. You will tell me why.”

  Clarke leaned forward. “Really. Or you’ll do what, exactly?”

  “I will walk to the fence and tell them.”

  “Start walking,” Clarke said.

  Amitav stared at her, his anger almost palpable.

  “Go on,” she prodded. “See if you can find a door, or a spare watch. Maybe they’ve left little sugg
estion boxes for you to pass notes into, hmm?”

  “You are quite wrong if you think I could not attract the attention of your people.”

  “I don’t think you really want to. You’ve got your own secrets.”

  “I am a refugee. We cannot afford secrets.”

  “Really. Why are you so skinny, Amitav?”

  His eyes widened. ,

  “Tapeworm? Eating disorder?” She stepped forward. “Cycler food not agree with you?”

  “I hate you,” he hissed.

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “I know you,” he spat. “I know your people. I know—”

  “You don’t know shit. If you did—if you really had such a hard-on for my people as you call them—you’d be bending over backward to help me.”

  He stared at her, a flicker of uncertainty on his face.

  She kept her voice low. “Suppose you’re right, Amitav. Suppose I’ve come all the way up from the deep sea. The Axial Volcano, even, if you know where that is.”

  She waited. “Go on,” he said.

  “Let’s also say, hypothetically, that the quake was no accident. Someone set off a nuke and all those shock waves just sort of daisy-chained their way back to the coast.”

  “And why would anyone do such a thing?”

  “Theirs to know. Ours to find out.”

  Amitav was silent.

  “With me so far? Bomb goes off in the deep sea. I come from the deep sea. What does that make me, Amitav? Am I the bad guy here? Did I trip the switch, and if I did, wouldn’t I at least have planned a better escape than swimming across three hundred kilometers of fucking mud, without so much as a fucking sandwich, only to crawl up onto your fucking Strip after a fucking week to get stuck listening to your fucking whining? Does that make any sense at all?

  “Or”—the voice leveling now, coming back under control—“did I just get screwed like everyone else, only I managed to get out alive? That might be enough to inspire a bit of ill will even in a white N’AmPac have-it-all bitch like myself, don’t you think?”