Starfish

by Peter Watts

  In your dreams, maybe. “But you have to see it first. Just sort of spoiled the effect for me, I guess. And mostly there were those big, vague gaps.”

  “Ah.” A flicker of a smile. “For myself that is not a problem. The world is pretty vague to me even when I am awake.”

  “Well.” Clarke smiles back, tentatively. “Whatever works.”

  More silence.

  “I just wish I knew,” Nakata says finally.

  “I know.”

  “You knew what happened to Karl. It was bad, but you knew.”

  “Yes.”

  Nakata glances down. Clarke follows, notices that her own hands have somehow clasped around Nakata’s. She supposes it’s a gesture of support. It feels okay. She squeezes, gently.

  Nakata looks back up. Her dark naked eyes still startle, somehow.

  “Lenie, she did not mind me. I pulled away, and I dreamed, and sometimes I just went crazy and she put up with all of it. She understood—she understands.”

  “We’re rifters, Alice.” Clarke hesitates, decides to risk it. “We all understand.”

  “Except Ken.”

  “You know, I think maybe Ken understands more than we give him credit for. I don’t think he meant to be insensitive before. He’s on our side.”

  “He is very strange. He is not here for the same reason we are.”

  “And what reason is that?” Clarke asks.

  “They put us here because this is where we belong,” Nakata says, almost whispering. “With Ken, I think—they just didn’t dare put him anywhere else.”

  * * *

  Brander’s on his way downstairs when she gets back to the lounge. “How’s Alice?”

  “Dreaming,” Clarke says. “She’s okay.”

  “None of us are okay,” Brander says. “Borrowed time all around, you ask me.”

  She grunts. “Where’s Ken?”

  “He left. He’s never coming back.”

  “What?”

  “He went over. Like Fischer.”

  “Bullshit. Ken’s not like Fischer. He’s the farthest thing from Fischer.”

  “We know that” Brander jerks a thumb at the ceiling. “They don’t. He went over. That’s the story he wants us to sell upstairs, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “You think that motherfucker told me? I agreed to play along for now, but I don’t mind telling you I’m getting a bit tired of his bullshit.” Brander climbs down a rung, looks back. “I’m heading back out myself. Gonna check out the carousel. I think some serious observations are in order.”

  “Want some company?”

  Brander shrugs. “Sure.”

  “Actually,” Clarke remarks, “just company doesn’t cut it anymore, does it? Maybe we’d better be—what’s the word—”

  “Allies,” Brander says.

  She nods. “Allies.”

  QUARANTINE

  BUBBLE

  FOR a week now, Yves Scanlon’s world had measured five meters by eight. In all that time he had not seen another living soul.

  There were plenty of ghosts, though. Faces passed across his workstation, full of cheerful concern about his comfort, his diet, whether the latest gastrointestinal tap had made him uncomfortable. There were poltergeists, too. Sometimes they possessed the medical teleoperator that hung from the ceiling, made it dance and stab and steal slivers of flesh from Scanlon’s body. They spoke with many voices, but rarely said anything of substance.

  “It’s probably nothing, Dr. Scanlon,” the teleop said once, a talking exoskeleton. “Just a preliminary report from Rand/Washington, some new pathogen on the rift—probably benign.…”

  Or, in a pleasant female voice: “You’re obviously in exc—good health; I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. Still, you know how careful we have to be these days, even acne would mutate into a plague if we let it, heh-heh-heh—now, just another two cc’s.…”

  After a few days Scanlon had stopped asking.

  Whatever it was, he knew it had to be serious. The world was full of nasty microbes, new ones spawned by accident, old ones set free from dark corners of the world, common ones mutated into novel shapes. Scanlon had been quarantined before a couple of times. Most people had. It usually involved technicians in body condoms, nurses trained to maintain spirits with a well-timed joke. He’d never heard of everything being done by remote control before.

  Maybe it was a security issue. Maybe the GA didn’t want the news leaking out, so they’d minimized the personnel involved. Or maybe—maybe the potential danger was so great that they didn’t want to risk live techs.

  Every day Scanlon discovered some new symptom. Shortness of breath. Headaches. Nausea. He was astute enough to wonder if any of them were real.

  It occurred to him, with increasing frequency, that he might not get out of there alive.

  * * *

  Something resembling Patricia Rowan haunted his screen every now and then, asking questions about vampires. Not even a ghost, really. A simulation, masquerading as flesh and blood. Its machinery showed through in subtle repetitions, derivative conversational loops, a fixation on keyword over concept. Who was in charge down there? it wanted to know. Did Clarke carry more weight than Lubin? Did Brander carry more weight than Clarke? As if anyone could glean the essence of those twisted, fantastic creatures with a few inept questions. How many years had it taken Scanlon to achieve his level of expertise?

  It was rumored that Rowan didn’t like real-time phone conversations. Corpses were always paranoid about security or some such thing. Still, it made Scanlon angry. It was her fault that he was here now, after all. Whatever he’d caught on the rift, he’d caught because she’d ordered him down there, and now all she sent to him were puppets? Did she really consider him that inconsequential?

  He never complained, of course. His aggression was too passionately passive. Instead, he toyed with the model she sent. It was easy to fool, programmed to look for certain words and phrases in answers to any given question. Just a trained dog, really, grabbing and fetching at the right set of commands. It was only when it ran back home, eager jaws clamped around some utterly useless bit of trivia, that its master would realize how truly ambiguous certain key phrases could be.…

  He lost count of the times he sent it back, sated on junk food. It kept returning, but it never learned.

  He patted the teleop. “You’re probably smarter than that dopplegänger of hers, you know. Not that that’s saying much. But at least you get your pound of flesh on the first try.”

  Surely by now Rowan knew what he was doing. Maybe this was some sort of game. Maybe, eventually, she’d admit defeat, come seek an audience in person. That hope kept him playing. Without it, he would have given up and cooperated out of sheer boredom.

  * * *

  On the first day of his quarantine he’d asked one of the ghosts for a dreamer, and been refused. Normal circadian metabolism was a prerequisite for one of the tests, it said; they didn’t want his tissues cheating. For several days after that, Scanlon hadn’t been able to sleep at all. Then he’d fallen into a dreamless abyss for twenty-eight hours. When he’d finally awakened, his body had ached from an unremembered wave of microsurgical strikes.

  “Impatient little bastard, aren’t you?” he’d murmured to the teleop. “Can’t even wait until I’m awake? I hope it was good for you.” He’d kept his voice low, in case there were any active pickups in the room. None of the workstation ghosts seemed to know anything about psychology; they were all physiologists and Tinkertoy jocks. If they’d caught him talking to a machine, they might think he was going crazy.

  Now he was sleeping a full nine hours daily. Unpredictable attacks by the poltergeists cost him maybe an hour on top of that. Crew reports and IPD profiles, none of which ever seemed to come from Beebe Station, appeared regularly in his terminal: another four or five hours a day.

  The rest of the time he watched television.

  Strange things happening out there. A mysterious u
nderwater explosion on the MidAtlantic Ridge, big enough for a nuke but no confirmation one way or the other. Israel and Tanaka-Krueger had both recently reactivated their nuclear testing programs, but neither admitted to any knowledge of this particular blast. The usual protests from corps and countries alike. Things were getting even testier than usual. Just the other day, it had come out that N’AmPac, several weeks earlier, had responded to a relatively harmless bit of piracy on the part of a Korean muckraker by blowing it out of the water.

  Regional news was just as troubling. An estimated three hundred dead after a firebomb took out most of the Urchin Shipyards outside Portland. It was a fairly hefty death toll for two A.M., but Urchin property abutted the Strip and a number of refs had been caught in the firestorm. No known motive. Certain similarities to a much smaller explosion a few weeks earlier and a few hundred kilometers farther north, in the Coquitlam Burb. That one had been attributed to gang warfare.

  And speaking of the Strip: More unrest among refugees forever hemmed in along the coastline. The usual rationale from the usual municipal entities. Waterfront’s the only available real estate these days, and besides, can you imagine what it would cost to install sewer systems for seven million if we let them come inland?

  Another quarantine, this time over some nematode recently escaped from the headwaters of the Ivindo. No news of anything from the North Pacific. Nothing from Juan de Fuca.

  Two weeks into his sentence Scanlon realized that the symptoms he’d imagined earlier had all disappeared. In fact, in a strange way he actually felt better than he had in years. Still they kept him locked up. There were more tests to be done.

  Over time his initial sharp fears subsided to a chronic dull ache in the stomach, so diffuse he barely felt it anymore. One day he awoke with a sense of almost frantic relief. Had he really ever thought that the GA might wall him away forever? Had he really been so paranoid? They were taking good care of him. Naturally: He was important to them. He’d lost sight of that at first. But the vampires were still problematic, or Rowan wouldn’t be trolling her puppet through his workstation. And the GA had chosen Yves Scanlon to study that problem because they knew he was the best man for the job. Now they were just protecting their investment, making sure he was healthy. He laughed out loud at that earlier, panicky self. There was really nothing to worry about.

  Besides, he kept up with the news. It was safer in here.

  Enema

  He only spoke to it at night, of course.

  After the day’s samples and scans, when it was folded up against the ceiling with its lights doused. He didn’t want the ghosts listening in. Not that it embarrassed him to confide in a machine. Scanlon knew far too much about human behavior to worry over such a harmless quirk. Lonely end-users were always falling in love with VR simulations. Programmers bonded with their own creations, instilling imaginary life into every utterly predictable response. Hell, people even talked to their pillows if they were really short of alternatives. The brain wasn’t fooled, but the heart took comfort in the pretense. It was perfectly natural, especially during periods of prolonged isolation. Nothing to worry about at all.

  “They need me,” Scanlon told it now, the ambient lighting damped down until he could barely see. “I know vampires, I know them better than anyone. I’ve lived with them. I’ve survived them. These—these drybacks up here only use them.” He looked up. The teleop hung above him like a bat in the dim light, and didn’t interact, and somehow that was the most comforting thing of all.

  “I think Rowan’s giving in. Her puppet said she was going to try and find some time.”

  No answer.

  Scanlon shook his head at the sleeping machine. “I’m losing it, you know? I’m turning into a complete brain stem, is what I’m doing.”

  He didn’t admit it often these days. Certainly not with the same sense of horror and uncertainty that he’d felt even a week before. But after all he’d been through lately, it was only natural that he’d have some adjustments to make. Here he was, quarantined, possibly infected by some unknown germ. Before that, he’d been through a gauntlet that would have driven most people right over the brink. And before that …

  Yes, he’d been through a lot. But he was a professional. He could still turn around, take a good hard look at himself. More than most people could do. Everyone had doubts and insecurities, after all. The fact that he was strong enough to admit to his didn’t make him a freak. Quite the contrary.

  Scanlon stared across to the far end of the room. A window of isolation membrane stretched across the upper half of that wall, looked through to a small dark chamber that had been empty since his arrival. Patricia Rowan would be there soon. She would get firsthand benefit of Scanlon’s new insights, and if she didn’t already know how valuable he was, she’d be convinced after he spoke to her. The long wait for recognition was almost over. Things were about to make a huge change for the better.

  Yves Scanlon reached up and touched a dormant metal claw. “I like you better like this,” he remarked. “You’re less … hostile.

  “I wonder who you’ll sound like tomorrow.…”

  * * *

  It sounded like some kid fresh out of grad school. It acted like one, too. It wanted him to drop his pants and bend over.

  “Stuff it,” Scanlon said at first, his public persona firmly in place.

  “Exactly my intention,” said the machine, wiggling a pencil-shaped probe on the end of one arm. “Come on, Dr. Scanlon. You know it’s for your own good.”

  In fact he didn’t know any such thing. He’d been wondering lately if the indignities he suffered in here might be due entirely to some repressed asshole’s misdirected sadism. Just a few months ago it would have driven him crazy. But Yves Scanlon was finally starting to see his place in the universe, and was discovering that he could afford to be tolerant. Other people’s pettiness didn’t bother him nearly as much as it used to. He was above it.

  He did, however, stop to pull the curtain across the window before undoing his belt. Rowan could show up at any time.

  “Don’t move,” said the poltergeist. “This won’t hurt. Some people even enjoy it.”

  Scanlon did not. The realization came as a bit of a relief.

  “I don’t see the hurry,” he complained. “Nothing goes in or out of me without you people turning a valve somewhere to let it past. Why not just take what I send down the toilet?”

  “We do that, too,” the machine said, coring. “Since you got here, in fact. But you never know. Some stuff degrades pretty quickly when it leaves a body.”

  “If it degrades that fast, then why am I still in quarantine?”

  “Hey, I didn’t say it was harmless. Just said it might have turned into something else. Or maybe it is harmless. Maybe you just pissed off someone upstairs.”

  Scanlon winced. “The people upstairs like me just fine. What are you looking for, anyway?”

  “Pyranosal RNA.”

  “I’m—I’m not sure I remember what that is.”

  “No reason you should. It’s been out of fashion for three and a half billion years.”

  “No shit.”

  “Don’t you wish.” The probe withdrew. “It was all the rage in primordial times, until—”

  “Excuse me,” said Patricia Rowan’s voice.

  Scanlon glanced automatically over to the workstation. She wasn’t there. The voice was coming from behind the curtain.

  “Ah. Company. I’ve got what I came for, anyway.” The arm swung around and neatly inserted the soiled probe into a dumbwaiter. By the time Scanlon had his pants back up, the teleop had folded into neutral.

  “See you tomorrow,” said the poltergeist, and fled. The teleop’s lights went out.

  She was here.

  Right in the next room.

  Vindication was at hand.

  Scanlon took a breath and pulled back the curtain.

  * * *

  Patricia Rowan stood in shadow on the other side. He
r eyes glittered with faint mercury: almost vampire eyes, but diluted. Translucent, not opaque.

  Her contacts, of course. Scanlon had tried a similar pair once. They linked in to a weak RF signal from your watch, scrolled images across your field of view at a virtual range of forty centimeters. Patricia Rowan saw Scanlon and smiled. Whatever else she saw through those magical lenses, he could only guess.

  “Dr. Scanlon,” she said. “It’s good to see you again.”

  He smiled back. “I’m glad you came by. We have a lot to talk about—”

  Rowan nodded, opened her mouth.

  “—and although your dopplegängers are perfectly adequate for normal conversation, they tend to lose a lot of the nuances—”

  Closed it again.

  “—especially given the kind of information you seem to be interested in.”

  Rowan hesitated a moment. “Yes. Of course. We, um, we need your insights, Dr. Scanlon.” Yes. Good. Of course. “Your report on Beebe was quite—well, interesting, but things have changed somewhat since you filed it.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “In what way?”

  “Lubin’s gone, for one thing.”

  “Gone?”

  “Disappeared. Dead, perhaps, although apparently there’s no signal from his deadman. Or possibly just—regressed, like Fischer.”

  “I see. And have you learned whether anyone at the other stations has gone over?” It was one of the predictions he’d made in his report.

  Her eyes, rippling silver, seemed to stare at a point just beside his left shoulder. “We can’t really say. Certainly we’ve had some losses, but rifters tend not to be very forthcoming with details. As we expected, of course.”

  “Yes, of course.” Scanlon tried on a contemplative look. “So Lubin’s gone. Not surprising. He was definitely closest to the edge. In fact, if I remember, I predicted—”

  “Probably just as well,” Rowan murmured.

  “Excuse me?”

  She shook her head, as if clearing it of some distraction. “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “Ah.” Scanlon nodded again. No need to harp on Lubin if Rowan didn’t want to. He’d made lots of other predictions. “There’s also the matter of the Ganzfeld effect I noted. The remaining crew—”