Behemoth: B-Max

by Peter Watts

  She pulls the sonar pistol off her thigh and sweeps the darkness. After a few seconds a fuzzy metropolitan echo comes back, just barely teasing the left edge of her sweep. She takes more direct aim and fires again. Atlantis and its suburbs come back dead center.

  And a harder echo, smaller, nearer. Closing.

  It’s not an intercept course. A few more pings resolve a vector tracking past to starboard. Whoever it is probably doesn’t even know she’s here—or didn’t, until she let loose with sonar.

  They’re moving pretty damned fast for someone without a squid. Curious, Clarke moves to intercept. She keeps her headlamp low, barely bright enough to tell substrate from seawater. The mud scrolls by like a treadmill. Pebbles and the occasional brittle star accent the monotony.

  The bow wave catches her just before the body does. A shoulder rams into her side, pushes her into the bottom; mud billows up around her. A fin slaps Clarke in the face. She grabs blindly through the zeroed viz and catches hold of an arm.

  “What the fuck!”

  The arm yanks out of her grasp, but her expletive seems to have had some effect. The thrashing stops, at least. The muddy clouds continue to swirl, but by now it’s all inertia.

  “Who…” It’s a rough, grating sound, even for a vocoder.

  “It’s Lenie.” She brightens her headlamp; a billion suspended particles blind her in bright fog. She fins up into clearer water and points her beam at the bottom.

  Something moves down there. “Shiiit … lights down…”

  “Sorry.” She dims the lamp. “Rama? That you?”

  Bhanderi rises from the murk. “Lenie.” A mechanical whisper. “Hi.”

  She supposes she’s lucky he still recognizes her. Hell, she’s lucky he can still talk. It’s not just the skin that rots when you stop coming inside. It’s not just the bones that go soft. Once a rifter goes native, the whole neocortex is pretty much a write-off. You let the abyss stare into you long enough and that whole civilized veneer washes away like melting ice in running water. Clarke imagines the fissures of the brain smoothing out over time, devolving back to some primordial fish-state more suited to their chosen habitat.

  Rama Bhanderi isn’t that far gone yet, though. He still even comes inside occasionally.

  “What’s the rush?” Clarke buzzes at him. She doesn’t really expect an answer.

  She gets one, though: “Ru … dopamine, maybe … Epi…”

  It clicks after a second: dopamine rush. Is he still human enough to deliver bad puns? “No, Rama. I mean, why the hurry?”

  He hangs beside her like a black wraith, barely visible in the dim ember of her headlamp. “Ah … ah … I’m not…” his voice trails off.

  “Boom,” he says after a moment. “Blew it up. Waayyyy too bright.”

  A nudge, she remembers. Enough to wake her. “Blew what? Who?”

  “Are you real?” he asks distantly. “… I … think you’re a histamine glitch…”

  “It’s Lenie, Rama. For real. What blew up?”

  “… Acetylcholine, maybe…” His hand passes back and forth in front of his face. “Only I’m not cramping…”

  This is useless.

  “… don’t like her any more,” Bhanderi buzzes softly. “And he chased me…”

  Something tightens in her throat. She moves toward him. “Who? Rama, what—”

  “Back off,” he grates. “I’m all … territorial…”

  “Sorry … I…”

  Bhanderi turns and fins away. She starts after him and stops, realizing: there’s another way.

  She brightens her lamp. The muddy storm front still hangs beneath her, just off the bottom. It won’t settle for hours in this dense, sluggish water.

  Neither will the trails that lead to it.

  One of them is hers: a narrow muddy contrail kicked into suspension as she arrowed in from the east. The other trail extends back along a bearing of 345 degrees. Clarke follows it.

  She’s not heading for Atlantis, she soon realizes. Bhanderi’s trail veers to port, along a line that should keep her well off the southwest shoulder of the complex. There’s not much along that route, as far as Clarke can remember. Maybe a woodpile, one of several caches of prefab parts scattered about in anticipation of future expansion, back when the corpses first arrived. Sure enough, the water ahead begins to lighten. Clarke douses her own beam and sonars the brightness ahead. A jumble of hard Euclidean echoes bounce back, all from objects significantly larger than a human body.

  She kicks forward. The diffuse glow resolves into four point sources: sodium floods, one at each corner of the woodpile. Stacked slabs of plastic and biosteel lie on pallets within the lit area. Curved slices of habhull lay piled on the substrate like great nested clamshells. Larger shapes loom in the murky distance: storage tanks, heat exchangers, the jackets of emergency reactors never assembled.

  The distance is murky, Clarke realizes. Far murkier than usual.

  She fins up into the water column and coasts above the industrial subscape. Something leans against the light like a soft dark wall, just past the farthest lamppost. She’s been expecting it ever since she spoke to Bhanderi. Now it spreads out ahead of her in silent confirmation, a great billowing cloud of mud blown off the bottom and lingering, virtually weightless, in the aftermath of some recent explosion.

  Of course, the corpses stockpiled blasting caps along with everything else …

  Something tickles the corner of Clarke’s eye, some small disarray somehow out of place among the organized chaos directly below. Two slabs of hull plating have been pulled from their stacks and laid out on the mud. Buckshot scatters of acne blemish their surfaces. Clarke arcs down for a closer look. No, those aren’t innocuous clots of mud or a recent colony of benthic invertebrates. They’re holes, punched through three centimeters of solid biosteel. Their edges are smooth, melted by some intense heat source and instantly congealed. Carbon scoring around each breach conveys a sense of bruising, of empty eyes battered black.

  Clarke goes cold inside.

  Someone’s gearing up for the finals.

  FAMILY VALUES

  EVER since the founding of Atlantis, Jakob and Jutta Holtzbrink have kept to themselves. It wasn’t always thus. Back on the surface, they were flamboyant even by corpse standards. They seemed to delight in the archaic contrast they presented to the world at large; their history together predates the Millennium, they were married so very long ago that the ceremony actually took place in a church. Jutta even took her husband’s surname. Women did things like that back then, Rowan remembers. Sacrificed little bits of their own identity for the good of the Patriarchy, or whatever it was called.

  An old-fashioned couple, and proud of it. When they appeared in public—which they did often—they appeared together, and they stood out.

  Public doesn’t exist here in Atlantis, of course. Public was left behind to fend for itself. Atlantis was the crème de la crème from the very beginning, only movers and shakers and those worker bees who cared for them, deep in the richest parts of the hive.

  Down here, Jutta and Jakob don’t get out much. The escape changed them. It changed everyone of course, humbled the mighty, rubbed their noses in their own failures even though, goddammit, they still made the best of it, adapted even to Doomsday, saw the market in lifeboats and jumped on board before anyone else. These days, mere survival is a portfolio to take pride in. But the Holtzbrinks have not availed themselves of even that half-assed and self-serving consolation. βehemoth hasn’t touched them in the flesh, not a single particle, and yet somehow it seems to have made them almost physically smaller.

  They spend most of their time in their suite, plugged into virtual environments far more compelling than the confines of this place could ever be. They come out to get their meals, of course—in-suite food production is a thing of the past, ever since the rifters confiscated “their share” of the resource base—but even then, they retreat back into their quarters with their trays of cycler f
ood and hydroponic produce, to eat behind closed doors. It’s a minor and inoffensive quirk, this sudden desire for privacy from their peers. Patricia Rowan never gave it much thought until that day in the comm cave when Ken Lubin, in search of clues, had asked, What about the fish? Perhaps they hitched a ride. Are the larvae planktonic?

  And Jerry Seger, impatient with this turncoat killer posing as a deep thinker, dismissed him as she would a child: If it had been able to disperse inside plankton, why wait until now to take over the world? It would have done it a few hundred million years ago.

  Maybe it would have, Rowan muses now.

  The Holtzbrinks made their mark in pharmaceuticals, stretching back even to the days before gengineering. They’ve kept up with the times, of course. When the first hydrothermal ecosystems were discovered, back before the turn of the century, an earlier generation of Holtzbrinks had been there—reveling in new Domains, sifting through cladograms of freshly-discovered species, new microbes, new enzymes built to work at temperatures and pressures long thought impossibly hostile to any form of life. They cataloged the cellular machinery ticking sluggishly in bedrock kilometers deep, germs living so slowly they hadn’t divided since the French Revolution. They tweaked the sulfur-reducers that choked to death on oxygen, coaxed them into devouring oil slicks and curing strange new kinds of cancer. The Holtzbrink Empire, it was said, held patents on half the Archaebacteria.

  Now Patricia Rowan sits across from Jakob and Jutta in their living room, and wonders what else they might have patented in those last days on Earth.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard the latest,” she says. “Jerry just confirmed it. βehemoth’s made it to Impossible Lake.”

  Jakob nods, a birdlike gesture including shoulders as well as head. But his words carry denial: “No, I don’t think so. I saw the stats. Too salty.” He licks his lips, stares at the floor. “βehemoth wouldn’t like it.”

  Jutta puts a comforting hand on his knee.

  He’s a very old man, his conquests all in the past. He was born too early, grew too old for eternal youth. By the time the tweaks were available—every defective base pair snipped out, every telomere reinforced—his body had already been wearing out for the better part of a century. There’s a limit to how much you can fix so late in the game.

  Rowan gently explains. “Not in the lake itself, Jakob. Somewhere nearby. One of the hot vents.”

  He nods and nods and will not look at her.

  Rowan glances at Jutta; Jutta looks back, helplessness on her face.

  Rowan presses on: “As you know, this wasn’t supposed to happen. We studied the bug, we studied the oceanography, we chose this place very carefully. But we missed something.”

  “Goddamn Gulf Stream shut down,” the old man says. His voice is stronger than his body, although not by much. “They said it would happen. Change all the currents. Turn England into goddamn Siberia.”

  Rowan nods. “We’ve looked at a lot of different scenarios. Nothing seems to fit. I think maybe there might be something about βehemoth itself that we’re missing.” She leans forward slightly. “Your people did a lot of prospecting out around the Rim of Fire, didn’t they? Back in the thirties?”

  “Sure. Everyone was. Those bloody Archaea, it was the gold rush of the twenty-first.”

  “Your people spent a lot of time on Juan de Fuca back then. They never encountered βehemoth?”

  “Mmmm.” Jakob Holtzbrink shakes his head. His shoulders don’t move.

  “Jakob, you know me. You know I’ve always been a staunch supporter of corporate confidentiality. But we’re all on the same side here, we’re all in the same boat so to speak. If you know anything, anything at all…”

  “Oh, Jakob never did any of the actual research,” Jutta interjects. “Surely you know that, he was really more of a people person.”

  “Yes, of course. But he also took a real interest in the cutting edge. He was always quite excited about new discoveries, remember?” Rowan laughs softly. “There was a time back there when we thought the man practically lived in a submarine.”

  “I just took the tours, you know. Jutta’s right, I didn’t do any of the research. That was the gel-jocks, Jarvis and that lot.” For the first time, Jakob meets Rowan’s eye. “Lost that whole team when βehemoth broke out, you know. CSIRA was conscripting our people right across the globe. Just waltzed right in, drafted them out from under our noses.” He snorts. “Goddamn greater good.”

  Jutta squeezes his knee. They glance at each other; she smiles. He puts his hand over hers.

  His eyes drift back to the floor. Very gently, he begins nodding again.

  “Jakob wasn’t close to the research teams,” Jutta explains. “Scientists aren’t all that good with people, as you know. It would be a disaster to let some of those people act as spokespersons, but they still resented the way Jakob presented their findings sometimes.”

  Rowan smiles patiently. “The thing is, Jakob, I’ve been thinking. About βehemoth, and how old it is—”

  “Oldest goddamn life on the planet,” Jakob says. “The rest of us, we just dropped in later. Martian meteor or something. Bloody βehemoth, it’s the only thing that actually started here.”

  “But that’s the thing, isn’t it? βehemoth doesn’t just predate other life, it predates photosynthesis. It predates oxygen. It’s over four billion years old. And all the other really ancient bugs we’ve found, the Archaebacteria and the Nanoliths and so forth, they’re still anaerobes to this day. You only find them in reducing environments. And yet here’s βehemoth, even older, and oxygen doesn’t bother it at all.”

  Jakob Holtzbrink stops rocking.

  “Smart little bug,” he says. “Keeps up with the times. Has those, what do you call them, like Pseudomonas has—”

  “Blachford genes. Change their own mutation rate under stress.”

  “Right. Right. Blachford genes.” Jakob brings one hand up, runs it over a sparsely-haired and liver-spotted scalp. “It adapted. Adapted to oxygen, and adapted to living inside fishes, and now it’s adapting to every other goddamn nook and cranny on the goddamn planet.”

  “Only it never adapted to low temperature and high salinity in combination,” Rowan observes. “It never adapted to the single biggest habitat on Earth. The deep sea stumped it for billions of years. The deep sea would still be stumping it if the Channer outbreak hadn’t happened.”

  “What are you saying?” Jutta wonders, a sudden slight sharpness in her voice. Her husband says nothing.

  Rowan takes a breath. “All our models are based on the assumption that βehemoth has been in its present form for hundreds of millions of years. The advent of oxygen, hypotonic host bodies—all that happened in the deep, deep Precambrian. And we know that not much has changed since then, Blachford genes or no Blachford genes—because if it had, βehemoth would have ruled the world long before now. We know it can’t disperse through the abyss because it hasn’t dispersed through the abyss, in all the millions of years it’s had to try. And when someone suggests that maybe it hitched a ride in the ichthyoplankton, we dismiss them out of hand not because anybody’s actually checked—who had the time, the way things were going?—but because if it could disperse that way, it would have dispersed that way. Millions of years ago.”

  Jakob Holtzbrink clears his throat.

  Rowan lays it on the table: “What if βehemoth hasn’t had millions of years? What if it’s only had a few decades?”

  “Well, that’s—” Jutta begins.

  “Then we’re not sure of anything any more, are we? Maybe we’re not talking about a few isolated relicts here and there. Maybe we’re talking about epicenters. And maybe it’s not that βehemoth isn’t able to spread out, but that it’s only just now got started.”

  That avian rocking again, and the same denial: “Nah. Nah. It’s old. RNA template, mineralized walls. Big goddamned pores all over it, that’s why it can’t hack cold seawater. Leaks like a sieve.” A bubble of saliva appears at
the corner of his mouth; Jutta absently reaches up to brush it away. Jakob raises his hand irritably, preempting her. Her hands drop into her lap.

  “The pyranosal sequences. Primitive. Unique. That woman, that doctor: Jerenice. She found the same thing. It’s old.”

  “Yes,” Rowan agrees, “it’s old. Maybe something changed it, just recently.”

  Jakob’s rubbing his hands, agitated. “What, some mutation? Lucky break? Damn unlucky for the rest of us.”

  “Maybe someone changed it,” Rowan says.

  There. It’s out.

  “I hope you’re not suggesting,” Jutta begins, and falls silent.

  Rowan leans forward and lays her hand on Jakob’s knee. “I know how it was out there, thirty, forty years ago. It was a gold rush mentality, just as you said. Everybody and their organcloner was setting up labs on the rift, doing all kinds of in situ work—”

  “Of course it was in situ, you ever try to duplicate those conditions in a lab—”

  “But your people were at the forefront. You not only had your own research, you had your eye on everyone else’s. You were too good a businessman to do it any other way. And so I’m coming to you, Jakob. I’m not making any claims or accusing anyone of anything, do you understand? I just think that if anyone in Atlantis might have any ideas about anything that might have happened out there, you’d be the one. You’re the expert, Jakob. Can you tell me anything?”

  Jutta shakes her head. “Jakob doesn’t know anything, Patricia. Neither of us knows anything. And I do take your implication.”

  Rowan keeps her eyes locked on the old man. He stares at the floor, he stares through the floor, through the deck plating and the underlying pipes and conduits, through the wires and fullerene and biosteel, through seawater and oozing, viscous rock into some place that she can only imagine. When he speaks, his voice seems to come from there.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Would there be any reason why someone—hypothetically—might want to take an organism like βehemoth, and tweak it?”