Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  This booth is designed to scan for communicable parasites and diseases. You may visit a commercial medbooth if you wish to be tested for other disorders.

  “Where’s the nearest commercial medbooth, then?”

  Please don’t leave me.

  “I—what?”

  Stay, Lenie. We can work it out.

  Besides. There’s someone you should meet.

  The screen went dark. The bead in her ear emitted a tiny belch of static.

  “It’s me,” said a sudden voice. “Sou-Hon. From the bus station.”

  She grabbed her visor and fled into the tame green jungle of Concourse D. Startled pedestrian eyes, barely noticed, met her own. She slid the visor onto her face, not slowing.

  “You don’t understand.” The voice was a small pleading thing in her ear. “I’m on your side. I’m—”

  Glass doors, leading outside. Clarke pushed through. Sudden icy wind reduced global warming to a weak abstraction. The concourse arced around from behind her like a horseshoe-shaped canyon.

  “I’m here to help—”

  Clarke tapped her watch twice in succession. “Command mode,” the device replied.

  “Off,” she told it.

  “Amitav’s de—”

  “Off,” the watch acknowledged, and fell instantly asleep.

  She was alone.

  The sidewalk was empty. Light spilled from the warren of habitrail tubes that shielded McCall’s patrons from winter. The whine of distant turbines drifted down from the rooftops.

  Two taps. “On.”

  A soft fuzz of static from the earpiece, although her watch was well within its operational two-meter radius.

  “Are you there?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What about Amitav?”

  “Just before it—I mean—” The voice caught on itself. “They just burned everything. Everyone. He must have been …”

  A passing gust of wind snapped at her face. The mermaid took a bitterly cold breath.

  “I’m sorry,” the stranger whispered in her head.

  Clarke turned and went back inside.

  Heat Death

  It was an impoverished display, sparse informatics against a dark background: lats and longs, a tiny GPS overlay centered on Calgary International Airport, a no-visual icon blinking the obvious at two-second intervals.

  “How do you know?” breathed a disembodied voice in Perreault’s ear.

  “I saw it. The start of it, anyway.” Hard-edged airport ambience echoed in the background. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was his own fault,” Clarke said after a moment. “He made too much noise. He was just—asking for it …”

  “I don’t think that was it,” Perreault said. “They slagged eight whole kilometers.”

  “What?”

  “Some kind of biohazard, I think. Amitav just got—caught in the sweep …”

  “No.” Words so soft they were almost static. “Can’t be.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  No visual. No visual.

  “Who are you?” Clarke asked at last.

  “I ride botflies,” Perreault said. “Mop-ups, mainly. I saw you when you came out of the ocean. I saw how you affected the people on the Strip, I saw you when you had one of those—visions—”

  “Aren’t you the faithful little stalker,” Clarke said.

  “That wasn’t me,” she continued after a while. “Back on the Strip. That was Amitav.”

  “He ran with it. You were the insp—”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “Okay. Fine.”

  No visual.

  “Why are you following me?” Clarke said.

  “Someone’s—linked us up. And at the bus station, earlier.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Probably one of your friends.”

  Something between a cough and a laugh. “I don’t think so.”

  Perreault took a breath. “You’re—getting known, you know. People are noticing. Some of them must be protecting you.”

  “From what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe from the people who started the quake.”

  “What do you know about that?” Clarke’s voice almost pounced down the link.

  “Millions died,” Perreault said. “You know why. That makes you dangerous to all the wrong people.”

  “Is that what you think.”

  “It’s one of the rumors. I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know much, do you?”

  “I—”

  “You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what I want or what I’ve d—you don’t know who they are or what they want. You just sit there and let them use you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  Perreault shook her head. “I’m just trying to help, you know.”

  “Lady, I don’t know if you even exist. For all I know that kid in South Bend is playing some kind of sick joke.”

  “Something’s happening because of you. Something real. You can check the threads yourself if you don’t believe me. You’re some kind of catalyst. Whether you know it or not.”

  “And here you are, jumping in with no questions asked.”

  “I’ve got questions.”

  “No answers, then. I could be planting bombs. I could be spit-roasting babies. You don’t know, but here you are with your tongue hanging out anyway.”

  “Listen,” Perreault snapped, “whatever you’re doing, it—”

  —Can’t be any worse than the way things are already …

  She stopped, astonished at the thought, grateful that she’d kept it back. She felt an absurd certainty that seven hundred kilometers away, Lenie Clarke was smiling.

  She tried again. “Look, I may not know what’s going on but I know something is, and it revolves around you. And I bet that not everyone who knows that is on your side. Maybe you think I’m a headcase. Fine. But even I wouldn’t risk going through airport security with the kind of profile your implants put out. I’d get out now, and I’d forget about flying anywhere for the foreseeable future. There are other ways to get around.”

  She waited. Tactical constellations glimmered about her.

  “Okay,” Clarke said at last. “Thanks for the tip. Here’s one for you. Stop trying to help me. Help whoever’s trying to stamp me out, if you can find them.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “For your own sake, Suzie. For everyone you ever cared about. Amitav was—he didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

  “No, of course he didn’t.”

  “Eight kilometers, you said?”

  “Yes. Burned to bedrock.”

  “I think that was just the beginning,” Clarke said. “Off.”

  Around Sou-Hon Perreault, the stars went out.

  Blind Date

  Interested? Reply.

  It was an odd sort of caption to find on a biochemical graphic: a lopsided crucifix of Carbons and Oxygens and Hydrogens—oh wait, there was a Sulfur over there, and a Nitrogen on one side of the crossbeam, right about where they’d nail Jesus’ wrist into place (of course, the way this thing was built, the savior’s left arm would have to be about twice as long as his right). Methionine, the matchmaker said. An amino acid.

  Only flipped. A mirror image.

  Interested? Fucking right.

  The file had been sitting in his morning βehemothrelated data sweep, ticking quietly. He hadn’t even had time to check it out until several hours into his shift. Supercol was burning a path through Glasgow, and some new carbon-eating bug—mutant or construct, nobody knew—had eaten a big chunk of the Bicentennial Causeway right out from under a few thousand rapitrans passengers. It had been a busy morning. But finally he’d had a few moments to come down off the accelerants and breathe.

  He’d opened the file, and it had jumped out as if springloaded.

  The matchmaker was unusually forthcoming in explaining why this f
ile qualified for his attention. Usually, matchmakers delivered their treasures through logical chains way too twisted for humans to follow; like magic, needed information from all over the world would simply appear in your queue, unsummoned. But this file—this had come with explicit search terms attached, terms that even a human being could understand. Quarantine. Firestorm. Beebe Station. Channer Vent.

  Interested?

  Not enough information to be useful. Just enough to catch the attention of someone like him. Not data at all, really: bait.

  Reply.

  “Thanks for dropping in.” Canned voice, no graphic.

  Desjardins flipped his own voice filter on. “Got your message. What can I do for you?”

  “We have a mutual interest in biochemistry,” the voice said pleasantly. “I have information you might find useful. The reverse may also be true.”

  “And who are you, exactly?”

  “I’m someone who shares your interest in biochemistry, and who has information you might find useful.”

  “Actually,” Desjardins remarked, “you’re a secretarial app. Pretty basic one, too.”

  Nothing disagreed.

  “Okay then. Pocket whatever you’ve got and tag it the same way you tagged your invite. I’ll pick it up on my next sweep and get back to you.”

  “Sorry,” said the app. “That doesn’t work from this end.”

  Of course not. “So what would work for you?”

  “I’d like to meet.”

  “Fine. Name a time, I’ll clear a channel.”

  “Face-to-face.”

  “Well, as I—you mean in person?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m suspicious by nature. I don’t trust digital images. I can be at your location within forty-eight hours.”

  “Do you know my location?”

  “No.”

  “You know, if I wasn’t also suspicious by nature, I sure as shit would be now,” Desjardins said.

  “Then an interest in biochemistry is not all we have in common.”

  Desjardins hated it when apps did that—threw in little asides and lame witticisms to appear more human. Of course, Desjardins hated it when people did that, too.

  “If you’d like to choose a place and time we could meet,” the app told him, “I’ll be sure to show up.”

  “How do you know I’m not quarantined?” For that matter, how do I know you’re not? What am I getting into here?

  “That won’t be a problem.”

  “What are you really? Some kind of loyalty test Rowan’s siccing on me?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Because it’s really not necessary. A corpse of all people should know that.” Whoever the app was negotiating for had to be corpse level at least, to be so confident about travel clearances. Unless the whole thing was some kind of pointless and elaborate put-on.

  “I’m not administering a loyalty test,” the app replied. “I’m asking for a date.”

  “Okay, then. Pickering’s Pile. Drink’n’drug in Sudbury, Ontario. Wednesday, 1930.”

  “That will be fine. How will I know you?”

  “Not so fast. I think I’d rather approach you.”

  “That would be a problem.”

  “That is a problem. If you think I’m going to amble innocently into the clutches of someone who won’t even give me their name, you’re sadly in need of a patch.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. However, it doesn’t matter. We can still meet.”

  “Not if neither of us knows how to tag the other, we can’t.”

  “I’ll see you on Wednesday,” the app told him. “Good-bye.”

  “Wait a second …”

  Gone.

  Oh, man. Someone was going to meet him on Wednesday. Someone who evidently could drop down onto any place under geosynch at 48 hours’ notice. Someone who knew of a link between Channer Vent and βehemoth, and who seemed to think they could find him without any identifiers at all.

  Someone was going to meet him whether he wanted to or not.

  Achilles Desjardins found that a little bit ominous.

  Necrosis

  There were places in the world that lived on the arteries between here and there; whatever they generated within wasn’t self-sustaining. When tourniqueted—a quarantine, a poisoned water table, the sheer indifference of citizens abandoning some industrial lost cause—they withered and turned gangrenous.

  Sometimes, eventually, the walls would come down. The quarantine would end or atrophy. Gates would open, or just rust away. But by then it was too late; the tissue was long since necrotic. No new blood flowed into the dead zone. Maybe a few intermittent flickers along underground cables, peripheral nerves where Maelstrom jumped the gap. Maybe a few people who hadn’t gotten out in time, still alive; others arriving, not so much seeking this place as avoiding some other.

  Lenie Clarke was in such a place now, a town full of wreckage and smashed windows and hollow eyes staring from buildings nobody had bothered to condemn. Whatever life was here did not, for the most part, take any notice of her passing. She avoided the obvious territorial boundaries: the toothless skulls of children significantly arranged along a particular curb; a half-mummified corpse, crucified upside down beneath the cryptic phrase St. Peter the Unworthy; derelict vehicles that just happened to block this road or that—rusty barricades, herding the unwary toward some central slaughterhouse like fish in a weir.

  Two days before she’d skirted a coven of do-gooders who’d been live-trapping derelicts as though they were field mice, forcibly injecting them with some kind of gene cocktail. Xanthoplast recipes, probably. Since then, she’d managed to avoid seeing anyone. She moved only at night, when her marvelous eyes gave her every advantage. She steered clear of the local headquarters and territorial checkpoints with their burning oil drums and their light poles and their corroded, semifunctional Ballard stacks. There were traps and hidden guard posts, manned by wannabes eager to make their way up the local hierarchy; they seeped slight infrared, or slivers of light invisible to mere meat. Lenie Clarke noted them a block away and changed course, their attendants never the wiser.

  She was almost through the zone when someone stepped from a doorway ten meters ahead of her; a mongrel with dominant Latino genes, skin the color of slate in the washedout light boosted through her eyecaps. Bare feet, shreds of sprayed-on plastic peeling from the soles. A firearm of some kind in one hand; two fingers missing. The other hand had been transformed into an improvised prosthetic, wrapped around and around in layers of duct tape studded with broken glass and rusty nails.

  He looked directly at her with eyes that shone as white and empty as her own.

  “Well,” Clarke said after a moment.

  His clubbed limb gestured roughly at the surrounding territory. “Not much, but mine.” His voice was hoarse with old diseases. “There’s a toll.”

  “I’ll go back the way I came.”

  “No you won’t.”

  She casually tapped a finger against her wristwatch. She kept her voice low, almost subvocal: “Shadow.”

  “Funds transferred,” the device replied.

  Clarke sighed and sloughed off her pack. One corner of her mouth curled the slightest fraction.

  “So how do you want me?” she asked.

  He wanted her from behind, and he wanted her face in the dirt. He wanted to call her Bitch and cunt and stumpfuck. He wanted to cut her with his home-built mace.

  She wondered if this could be called rape. She hadn’t been offered a choice. Then again, she hadn’t exactly said no, either.

  He hit her when he came, backhanded her head against the ground with his gun hand, but the gesture had an air of formality about it. Finally, he rolled off of her and stood.

  She allowed herself back inside then, let the distant observation of her own flesh revert again to firsthand experience. “So.” She rolled onto her back, wiping the street from her mouth with the back of o
ne hand. “How was I?”

  He grunted and turned his attention to her pack.

  “Nothing you want in there,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.” Something caught his eye anyway. He reached in and pulled out a tunic of black shimmering fabric.

  It squirmed in his hand.

  “Shit!” He dropped it onto the ground. It lay there, inert. Playing dead.

  “What the fuck …” he looked at Clarke.

  “Party clothes,” she said, getting to her feet. “Wouldn’t fit you.”

  “Bullshit,” the mongrel said. “It’s that reflex copolymer stuff. Like Lenny Clarke wears.”

  She blinked. “What did you say?”

  “Leonard Clarke. Deep Sea Gillman. Did the quake.” He nudged the diveskin with one gnarled toe. “You think I don’t know?” He raised his gun hand to his face; the barrel touched the corner of an eyecap. “How you think I got these, eh? Not the first groupie in town.”

  “Leonard Clarke?”

  “I said already. You deaf, or stupid?”

  “I just let you rape me, asshole. So probably stupid.”

  The mongrel looked at her for an endless moment.

  “You done this before,” he said at last.

  “More times than you can count.”

  “Get to maybe like it after a while?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t fight.”

  “Yeah? How many do, with a gun to their heads?”

  “You’re not even scared.”

  “I’m too fucking tired. You gonna let me go, or kill me, or what? Anything but listening to more of this shit.”

  The mongrel took a hulking step forward. Lenie Clarke only snorted.

  “Go,” the mongrel said in a strange voice. Then added, absurdly: “Where you headed?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “East.”

  He shook his head. “Never get through. Big quarantine. Goes halfway down to the Dust Belt.” He pointed south, down a side street. “Better go ’round.”

  Clarke tapped her watch. “It’s not listed.”