by Peter Watts
She figures she owes him. Besides, she wants to ask him some questions.
But today he's a granite cock with a brain stem attached. fuck the foreplay: he pushes into her right off the top, not even a token tongue-lashing to make up for the lack of tropical irrigation. The friction pulls painfully at her labia; she reaches down discretely with one hand and spreads them. Walsh pumps on top of her, breath hissing through teeth clenched in a hard animal grin, his capped eyes hard and unreadable. They always keep their eyes masked during sex—Clarke's tastes prevail, as usual— although Walsh usually wears too much heart on his face to hide with a couple of membranous eggshells. Not this time. There's something behind his overlays that Clarke can't quite make out, something focused on the space where she is but not on her. He pushes her up the pallet in rough thrusting increments; her head bumps painfully against the naked metal plating of the deck. They fuck without words amidst stale air and grafted machinery.
She doesn't know what's come over him. It's a nice change, though, the closest thing to an honest-to-God rape she's had in years. She closes her eyes and summons up images of Karl Acton.
Afterwards, though, the bruise she notices is on his arm: a corona of torn capillaries around a tiny puncture in the flesh of his inner elbow.
"What's this?" She lays her lips around the injury and runs her tongue across the swelling.
"Oh, that. Grace is taking blood samples from everyone."
Her head comes up. "What?"
"She's not great at it. Took her a couple of tries to find a vein. You should see Lije. Looks like his arm got bushwhacked by a sea urchin."
"Why's Grace taking blood?"
"You didn't hear? Lije came down with something. And Saliko's started feeling under the weather too, and he visited Gene and Julia just a couple of days ago."
"So Grace thinks—"
"Whatever the corpses gave him, it's spreading."
Clarke sits up. She's been naked on the deck for half an hour, but this is the first time she's felt the chill. "Grace thinks the corpses gave him something."
"That's what Gene thought. She's going to find out."
"How? She doesn't have any medical training."
Walsh shrugs. "You don't need any to run MedBase."
"Jesus semen-sucking Christ." Clarke shakes her head in disbelief. "Even if Atlantis did want to sic some bug on us, they wouldn't be stupid enough to use one from the standard database."
"I guess she thinks it's a place to start."
There's something in his voice.
"You believe her," Clarke says.
"Well, not nec—"
"Has Julia come down with anything?"
"Not so far."
"Not so far. Kevin, Julia hasn't left Gene's side since they broke him out. If anyone was going to catch anything, wouldn't it be her? Saliko visited, what? Once?"
"Maybe twice."
"And what about Grace? From what I hear she's over there all the time. Is she sick?"
"She says she's taking precaut—"
"Precautions," Clarke snorts. "Spare me. Am I the only one left on the whole Ridge with a working set of frontal lobes? Abra came down with supersyph last year, remember? It took eight months for Charley Garcia to get rid of those buggy Ascaris in his gut, and I don't remember anyone blaming the corpses for that. People get sick, Kevin, even down here. Especially down here. Half of us rot away before we even have a chance to go native."
There it is again: something new, staring out from behind the glistening opacities of Walsh's eyecaps. Something not entirely friendly.
She sighs. "What?"
"It's just a precaution. I don't see how it can hurt."
"It can hurt quite a lot if people jump to conclusions without any facts."
Walsh doesn't move for a moment. Then he gets to his feet. "Grace is trying to get the facts," he says, padding across the compartment. "You're the one jumping to conclusions."
Oh, Kevvy-boy, Clarke wonders. When did you start to grow a spine?
He grabs his diveskin off the chair. Squirming black synthetics embrace him like a lover.
"Thanks for the fuck," he says. "I gotta go."
Boilerplate
She finds Lubin floating halfway up the side of the windchime reservoir. Pipes, fiberop and miscellaneous components—mostly nonfunctional now, dismembered segments of circuits long-since broken—run in a band around the great tank's equator. At the moment, the ambient currents are too sluggish to set either rocks or machinery to glowing; Lubin's headlamp provides the only illumination.
"Abra said you were out here," Clarke buzzes.
"Hold this pad, will you?"
She takes the little sensor. "I wanted to talk to you."
"About?" Most of his attention seems to be focused on a blob of amber polymer erupting from one of the conduits.
Clarke maneuvers herself into his line of sight. "There's this asinine rumor going around. Grace is telling people that Jerry sicced some kind of plague on Gene."
Lubin's vocoder tics in a mechanical interpretation of mmmm...
"She's always had a missile up her ass about the corpses, but nobody takes her seriously. At least, they didn't used to…"
Lubin taps a valve. "That's it."
"What?"
"Resin's cracked around the thermostat. It's causing an intermittent short."
"Ken. Listen to me."
He stares at her, waiting.
"Something's changing. Grace never used to push it this hard, remember?"
"I never really butted heads with her myself," Lubin buzzes.
"It used to be her against the world. But this bug Gene's come down with, it's changed things. I think people are starting to listen to her. It could get dicey."
"For the corpses."
"For all of us. Weren't you the one warning me about what the corpses could do if they got their act together? Weren't you the one who said—"
We may have to do something preemptive…
A small pit opens up in Clarke's stomach.
"Ken," she buzzes, slowly, "you do know Grace is fucking crazy, right?"
He doesn't answer for a moment. She doesn't give him any longer than that: "Seriously, you should just listen to her sometime. She talks as if the war never ended. Someone sneezes and it's a biological attack."
Behind his headlamp, Lubin's silhouette moves subtly; Clarke gets the sense of a shrug. "There are some interesting coincidences," he says. "Gene enters Atlantis with serious injuries. Jerry operates on him in a medbay where our surveillance is compromised, then puts him into quarantine."
"Quarantine because of ßehemoth," Clarke points out.
"As you've pointed out yourself on occasion, we've all been immunized against ßehemoth. I'm surprised you don't find that rationale more questionable." When Clarke says nothing, he continues: "Gene is released into the wild suffering from an opportunistic infection which our equipment can't identify, and which so far has failed to respond to treatment."
"But you were there, Ken. Jerry wanted to keep Gene in quarantine. Dale beat the crap out of her for trying. Isolating Patient Zero is a pretty short-sighted strategy for spreading the plague."
"I suppose," Lubin buzzes, "Grace might say they knew we'd break him out regardless, so they put up a big show of resistance knowing someone would cite it in their favor down the road."
"So they fought to keep him contained, therefore they wanted to set him loose?" Clarke peers suggestively at Lubin's electrolysis intake. "You getting enough O2 there, Ken?"
"I'm saying that's the sort of rationale Grace might invoke."
"That's pretty twisted even for—" Realization sinks in. "She's actually saying that, isn't she?"
His headlight bobs slightly.
"You've heard the rumors. You know all about them." She shakes her head, disgusted at herself. "As if I'd ever have to bring you up to speed on anything..."
"I'm keeping an ear open."
"Well maybe you could do a
bit more than that. I mean, I know you like to keep out of these things, but Grace is fucking psycho. She's spoiling for a fight and she doesn't care who gets caught in the backwash."
Lubin hovers, unreadable. "I would have expected you to be a bit more sympathetic."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing," he buzzes after a moment. "But whatever you think of Grace's behavior, her fears might not be entirely unfounded."
"Come on, Ken. The war's over." She takes his silence as acknowledgment. "So why would the corpses want to start it up again?"
"Because they lost."
"Ancient history."
"You thought yourself oppressed once," he points out. "How much blood did it take before you were willing to call it even?"
His metal voice, so calm, so even, is suddenly so close it seems to be coming from inside her own head.
"I—I was wrong about that," she says after a while.
"It didn't stop you." He turns back to his machinery.
"Ken," she says.
He looks back at her.
"This is bullshit. It's a bunch of ifs strung together. A hundred to one Gene just picked up something from the fish that bit him."
"Okay."
"It's not like there can't be a hundred nasty bugs down here we haven't discovered yet. A few years ago nobody'd even heard of ßehemoth."
"I'm aware of that."
"So we can't let this escalate. Not without at least some evidence."
His eyes shine yellow-white in the backscatter from his headlamp. "If you're serious about evidence, you could always collect some yourself."
"How?"
He taps the left side of his chest. Where the implants are.
She goes cold. "No."
"If Seger's hiding anything, you'd know it."
"She could be hiding lots of things from lots of people. It wouldn't prove what she was hiding."
"You'd know what Nolan was feeling too, since you seem so concerned with her motives."
"I know what her motives are. I don't need to fuck with my brain chemistry to confirm it."
"The medical risks are minimal," he points out.
"That's not the point. It wouldn't prove anything. You know you can't read specific thoughts, Ken."
"You wouldn't have to. Reading guilt would be suffic—"
"I said no."
"Then I don't know what to tell you." He turns away again. His headlamp transforms the reservoir's plumbing into a tiny, high-contrast cityscape tilted on edge. Clarke watches him work—tracking pathways, tapping pipes, making small changes to tabletop architecture. A pinpoint sun flares hissing at his fingertips, blinding her for an instant. By the time her caps have adjusted the light has settled on the skin of the tank. The water shimmers prismatically around it like a heat mirage on a hot day; at lesser depths it would explode into steam on the spot.
"There's another way," she buzzes. Lubin shuts off the spot-welder.
"There is." He turns to face her. "But I wouldn't get my hopes up."
Back when the trailer park was just getting set up, someone had the clever idea of turning a hab into a mess hall: a row of cyclers, a couple of prep surfaces for the daring, and a handful of foldaway tables scattered with studied randomness around the dry deck. The effect was intended to suggest a café patio. The cramped reality is more like the backstage shed where the furniture gets stored for winter.
One thing that has caught on, though, is the garden. By now it covers half the wet deck, a tangle of creeping greenery lit by solar-spectrum sticks planted among its leaves like bioluminescent bamboo. It isn't even hydroponic. The little jungle erupts from boxes of rich dark earth—diatomaceous ooze, actually, beefed up with organic supplements—that were once discrete but which have since now disappeared under an overflow of compost, spilling messily across the plating.
It's the best-smelling bubble of atmosphere on the whole Ridge. Clarke swings the airlock hatch open onto that tableau and takes a deep breath, only half of appreciation. The other half is resolve: Grace Nolan looks up from the far side of the oasis, tying off the vines of something that might have been snow peas back before the patents landed on them.
But Nolan smiles beneath translucent eyes as Clarke steps onto the deck. "Hey, Lenie!"
"Hi Grace. I thought we could maybe have a talk."
Nolan pops a pod into her mouth, a slick black amphibian feeding in the lush greenery of some long-extinct wetland. She chews, for longer than is probably necessary. "About..."
"About Atlantis. Your blood work." Clarke takes a breath. "About whatever problem you have with me."
"God no," Nolan says. "I've got no problem with you, Len. People fight sometimes. No big deal. Don't take it so seriously."
"Okay then. Let's talk about Gene."
"Sure." Nolan straightens, grabs a chair off the bulkhead and folds it down. "And while we're at it, let's talk about Sal and Lije and Lanie."
Lanie too, now? "You think the corpses are behind it."
Nolan shrugs. "It's no big secret."
"And you base that on what, exactly? Anything show up in the bloods?"
"We're still collecting samples. Lizbeth's set up in the med hab, by the way, if you want to contribute. I think you should."
"What if you don't find anything?" Clarke wonders.
"I don't think we will. Seger's smart enough to cover her tracks. But you never know."
"You know it's possible that the corpses have nothing to do with this."
Nolan leans back in her chair and stretches. "Sweetie, I can't tell you how surprised I am to hear you say that."
"So show me some evidence."
Nolan smiles, shaking her head. "Here's a bit of an exercise for you. Say you're swimming through shark-infested waters. Big sickle-finned stumpfucks all over the place, and they're looking you up and down and you know the only reason they're not tearing into you right now is because you've got your billy out, and they've seen what that billy can do to fishies like them. So they keep their distance, but that makes 'em hate you even more, right? Because you've already killed some of 'em. These are really smart sharks. They hold grudges.
"So you swim along for a little while, all these cold dead pissed-off eyes and teeth always just out of range, and you come across—oh, say Ken. Or what's left of him. A bit of entrail, half a face, ID patch just floating around amongst all those sharks. What do you do, Len? Do you decide there isn't any evidence? Do you say Hey, I can't prove anything, I didn't see this go down? Do you say, Let's not jump to any conclusions..."
"That's a really shitty analogy," Clarke says softly.
"I think it's a great fucking analogy."
"So what are you going to do?"
"I can tell you what I'm not going to do," Nolan assures her. "I'm not going to sit back and have faith in the goodness of corpse spirit while all my friends turn to sockeye."
"Is anyone asking you to do that?"
"Not yet. Any time now, I figure."
Clarke sighs. "Grace, I'm only saying, for the good of all of us—"
"Fuck you," Nolan snarls suddenly. "Fuck you. You don't give a shit about us."
It's as if someone flipped a switch. Clarke stares, astonished.
Nolan glares eyelessly back, her body trembling with sudden rage. "You really want to know my problem with you? You sold us out. We were this close to pulling the plug on those stumpfucks. We could've forced their own goddamn entrails down their throats, and you stopped us, you fucker."
"Grace," she tries, "I know how you fe—"
"Horseshit! You don't have a fucking clue how I feel!"
What did they do to you, Clarke wonders, to turn you into this?
"They did things to me too," she says softly.
"Sure they did. And you got yours back, didn't you? And correct me if I'm wrong but didn't you end up fucking over a whole lot of innocent people in the mix? You never gave a shit about them. And maybe it was too much trouble to work it through but a
fair number of us fish-heads lost people to your grand crusade along with everyone else. You didn't give a shit about them either, as long as you got your kick at the cat. Fine. You got it. But the rest of us are still waiting, aren't we? We don't even want to mow down millions of innocent people, we just want to get at the assholes who actually fucked us over—and you of all people come crawling over here on Patricia Rowan's leash to tell me I don't have the right?" Nolan shakes her head in disgust. "I don't believe we let you stop us before, and I sure as shit don't believe you're going to stop us now."
Her hatred radiates through the compartment like infrared. Clarke is distantly amazed that the vines beside her don't blacken and burst into flame.
"I came to you because I thought we could work something out," she says.
"You came because you know you're losing it."
The words ignite a small, cold knot of anger under Clarke's diaphragm. "Is that what you think."
"You never gave a shit about working things out." Nolan growls. "You just sat off on your own, I'm the Meltdown Madonna, I'm Mermaid of the fucking Apocalypse, I get to stand off to the side and make the rules. But the rabble isn't falling into line this time, sweetie, and it scares you. I scare you. So spare me the dreck about altruism and diplomacy. This is just you trying to keep your little tin throne from going sockeye. It's been nice talking to you."
She grabs her fins and stalks into the airlock.
Portrait of the Sadist as a Young Man
Achilles Desjardins couldn't remember the last time he'd had consensual sex with a real woman. He could, however, remember the first time he'd refused it:
It was 2046 and he'd just saved the Mediterranean. That's how N'AmWire was presenting it, anyway. All he'd really done was deduce the existence of a strange attractor in the Gulf of Cádiz, a persistent little back-eddy that no one else had bothered to look for. According to the sims it was small enough to tweak with albedo dampers; the effects would proliferate through the Strait of Gibralter and—if the numbers were right—stave off the collapse of the Med by an easy decade. Or until the Gulf Stream failed again, whichever came first. It was only a reprieve, not outright salvation, but it was just what CSIRA needed to make everyone forget the Baltic fiasco. Besides, nobody ever looked ahead more than ten years anyway.
