by Peter Watts
Lenie Clarke has her reasons.
She’s not entirely alone in this. A few other rifters have laid exclusive claims, pissed territorially on this cubby or that deck or—in very rare cases—an entire hab. They’ve nested refuge within refuge, the ocean against the world at large, an extra bubble of alloy and atmosphere against their own kind. There are locks on the doors in such places. Habs do not come with locks—their dryback designers had safety issues—but the private and the paranoid have made do, welding or growing their own fortifications onto the baseline structure.
Clarke isn’t greedy. Her claim is a small one, a cubby on the upper deck of a hab anchored sixty meters northeast of Atlantis. It’s scarcely larger than her long-lost quarters on Beebe Station; she thinks that may have been why she chose it. It doesn’t even have a porthole.
She doesn’t spend much time here. In fact, she hasn’t been here since she and Walsh started fucking. But it doesn’t matter how much time she actually spends in this cramped, spartan closet; what matters is the comforting knowledge that it’s hers, that it’s here, that no one can ever come in unless she lets them. And that it’s available when she needs it.
She needs it now.
She sits naked on the cubby’s pallet, bathed in light cranked almost dryback-bright; the readouts she’ll be watching are color-coded, and she doesn’t want to lose that information. A handpad lies on the neoprene beside her, tuned to her insides. Mosaics of green and blue glow on its face: tiny histograms, winking stars, block-cap letters forming cryptic acronyms. There’s a mirror on the opposite bulkhead; she ignores it as best she can, but her empty white eyes keep catching their own reflection.
One hand absently fingers her left nipple; the other holds a depolarizing scalpel against the seam in her chest. Her skin invaginates smoothly along that seam, forms a wrinkle, a puckered geometric groove in her thorax: three sides of a rectangle, a block-C, pressed as if by a cookie cutter into the flesh between left breast and diaphragm and midline.
Clarke opens herself at the sternum.
She unlatches her ribs at the costochondrals and pulls them back; there’s a slight resistance and a faint, disquieting sucking sound as the monolayer lining splits along the seam. A dull ache as air rushes into her thorax—it’s a chill, really, but deep-body nerves don’t distinguish temperature from pain. The mechanics who transformed her hinged four of her ribs on the left side. Clarke hooks her fingers under the fleshy panel and folds it back, exposing the machinery beneath. Sharper, stronger pain stabs forth from intercostals never designed for such flexibility. There are bruises in their future.
She takes a tool from a nearby tray and starts playing with herself.
The flexible tip of the tool, deep within her thorax, slips neatly over a needle-thin valve and locks tight. She’s still impressed at how easily she can feel her way around in there. The tool’s handle contains a thumbwheel set to some astronomical gear ratio. She moves it a quarter turn; the tip rotates a fraction of a degree.
The handpad at her side bleeps in protest: NTR and GABA flicker from green to yellow on its face. One of the histogram bars lengthens a smidgen; two others contract.
Another quarter turn. More complaints from the pad.
It’s such a laughably crude invasion, more rape than seduction. Was there any real need for these fleshy hinges, for the surgical butchery that carved this trap door into her chest? The pad taps wirelessly into the telemetry from her implants; that channel flows both ways, sends commands into the body as well as taking information out of it. Minor adjustments, little tweaks around approved optima, are as simple as tapping on a touchpad and feeling the machinery respond from inside.
But the tweaks Lenie Clarke is about to indulge in are way beyond “minor.”
The Grid Authority never claimed to own the bodies of their employees, not officially at least. They owned everything they put inside, though. Clarke smiles to herself. They could probably charge me with vandalism.
If they’d really wanted to keep her from putting her grubby paws all over company property then they shouldn’t have left this service panel in her chest. But they were on such a steep curve, back then. The brownouts weren’t waiting; Hydro-Q wasn’t waiting; the GA couldn’t wait either. The whole geothermal program was fast-tracked, rearguard, and on the fly; the rifters themselves were a short term stopgap even on that breakneck schedule. Lenie Clarke and her buddies were prototypes, field tests, and final product all rolled into one. How could any accountant justify sealing up the implants on Monday when you’d only have to cut your way back in on Wednesday to fix a faulty myocell, or install some vital component that the advance sims had overlooked?
Even the deadman alarms were an afterthought, Clarke remembers. Karl Acton brought them down to Beebe at the start of his tour, handed them out like throat lozenges, told everyone to pop themselves open and slide ’em in right next to the seawater intake.
Karl was the one who discovered how to do what Lenie Clarke is doing right now. Ken Lubin killed him for it.
Times change, Clarke reflects, and tweaks another setting.
Finally she’s finished. She lets the fleshy flap fall back into her chest, feels the phospholipids rebind along the seam. Molecular tails embrace in an orgy of hydrophobia. Another ache throbs diffusely inside now, subtly different from those that have gone before: disinfectants and synthetic antibodies, spraying down the implant cavity in the unlikely event that its lining should fail.
The outraged handpad has given up; half of its readouts are yellow and orange.
Inside Clarke’s head, things are beginning to change. The permeability of critical membranes is edging up a few percent. The production of certain chemicals, designed not to carry signals but to blockade them, is subtly being scaled back. Windows are not yet opening, but they are being unlocked.
She can feel none of this directly, of course. The changes, by themselves, are necessary but not sufficient—they don’t matter here where lungs are used, where pressure is a mere single atmosphere. They only matter when catalyzed by the weight of an ocean.
But now, when Lenie Clarke goes outside—when she steps into the airlock and the pressure accretes around her like a liquid mountain; when three hundred atmospheres squeeze her head so hard that her very synapses start short-circuiting—then, Lenie Clarke will be able to look into men’s souls. Not the bright parts, of course. No philosophy or music, no altruism, no intellectual musings about right and wrong. Nothing neocortical at all. What Lenie Clarke will feel predates all of that by a hundred million years. The hypothalamus, the reticular formation, the amygdala. The reptile brain, the midbrain. Jealousies, appetites, fears and inarticulate hatreds. She’ll feel them all, to a range of fifteen meters or more.
She remembers what it was like. Too well. Six years gone and it seems like yesterday.
All she has to do is step outside.
She sits in her cubby, and doesn’t move.
GRAVEDIGGERS
FIND the damn mines.
They spread out across the territory like black dogs, sniffing through light and shadow with sonar pistols and flux detectors. Some of them may question the exercise—and some of them almost certainly root for its failure—but nobody still alive after five years down here is going to be dumb enough to go all insubordinate on Ken Lubin.
Find the damn mines.
Clarke glides among them, just another nose on the trail as far as anyone can tell. Hers is not so focused, though. The others follow invisible lines, the threads of a systematic grid laid down across the search area; but Clarke zigzags, coasts down to accompany this compatriot or that, exchanging insignificant bits of conversation and intel before diverging courses in search of new company. Clarke has a different mission.
Find the damn mine-layer.
Hectares of biosteel. Intermittent punctuations of light and shadow. Flashing staccatos at each extremity, little blinking beacons that announce the tips of scaffolds, antennae, danger zones where h
ot fluids might vent without warning. The baleful, unwavering glare of floodlights around airlocks and docking hatches and loading bays, reignited for today’s exercise. Pale auras of wasted light from a hundred parabolic viewports. Twilit expanses of hull where every protuberance casts three or four shadows, dimly lit by lamps installed in more distant and glamorous neighborhoods.
Everywhere else, darkness. Elongated grids of shadow laid out by naked support struts. Impenetrable inky pools filling the spaces between keel and substrate, as though Atlantis were some great bed with its own scary place for monsters lying beneath. Fuzzy darkness where the light simply attenuates and fades; or razor-sharp where some tank or conduit extends into bright sodium sunlight, laying inky shadows over whatever lies beneath.
More than enough topography to hide an explosive device barely twice the size of a man’s hand. More than enough to hide a thousand.
It would be a big enough job for fifty-eight. It’s a lot bigger for the two dozen that Lubin is willing to conscript to the task; rifters who haven’t gone native, who don’t overtly hate the corpses enough to leave suspicious-looking objects “unnoticed” in their sweep—rifters who aren’t among the most likely to have planted such devices in the first place. It’s nowhere near a sure thing, of course; few of these people have been cleared as suspects. Not even the intel stolen directly from their brainpans is incontrovertible. They didn’t hand out the eyes and the ’skin to anyone who didn’t have a certain history, twisted wiring is what suits a body to the rift in the first place. Everyone’s haunted here. Everyone carries their own baggage: their own tormentors, their own victims, the addictions, the beatings and the anal rapes and the paternal fondling at the hands of kindly Men In Black. Hatred of the corpses, so recently abated, is once again a given. β-max has brought all the old conflicts back to the surface, reignited hostilities that five years of grudging, gradual coexistence had begun to quench. A month or two past, rifters and corpses were almost allies, bitter holdouts like Erickson and Nolan notwithstanding. Now, few would shed many tears if the ocean crashed in on the whole lot of them.
Still. There’s a difference between dancing on someone’s grave and digging it. There’s an element of, of calculation on top of the hatred. Of planning. It’s a subtle difference; Clarke doesn’t know if she or Lubin would be able to pick it up under these circumstances. It might not even manifest itself in someone until the very moment they came upon the incriminating object, saw the mine stuck to the hull like some apocalyptic limpet, tripped their vocoder with every intention of raising the alarm and then—
Maybe the bastards deserve it after all they’ve done to us, after all they’ve done to the whole world, and it’s not like I set the damn thing, it’s not like I had anything to do with it except I maybe just didn’t notice it there under the strut, perfectly understandable in the murk and all …
Any number of minds could seem perfectly innocent—even to themselves—right up to the point at which that last-wire stimulus came into view and catalyzed a simple chain of thought that ends in just looking the other way. Even then, who knows whether fine-tuning might pick it up?
Not Lenie Clarke. She searches anyway, gliding between the hulls and the storage tanks, flying over her fellows searching the lights and the shadows, only ostensible in her hunt for ordinance.
What she’s really hunting is guilt.
Not honest guilt, of course. She’s trolling for fear of discovery, she’s on the prowl for righteous anger. Newly reawakened, she swims through a faint cauldron of secondhand emotions. The water’s tainted with a dozen kinds of fear, of anger, with the loathing of self and others. A darker center roils beneath the surface of each dark body. There’s also excitement of a sort, the initial thrill of the chase decaying exponentially down to rote boredom. Sexual stirrings. Other, fainter feelings she can’t identify.
She’s never forgotten why she resisted fine-tuning back at Channer, even after all the others had gone over. Now, though, she remembers why she found it so seductive when she finally gave in: in that endless welter of feelings, you always lost track of which ones were yours …
It’s not quite the same here on the Ridge, unfortunately. Not that the physics or the neurology have changed. Not that anyone else has. It’s Lenie Clarke that’s different now. Victim and vendetta have faded over the years, black and white have bled together into a million indistinguishable shades of gray. Her psyche has diverged from the rifter norm, it no longer blends safely into that background. The guilt alone is so strong that she can’t imagine it arising from anyone but her.
She stays the course, though. She keeps hunting, though her senses are dulled. Somewhere off in the diffracted distance, Ken Lubin is doing the same. He’s probably a lot better at it than she is. He’s had training in this kind of thing. He’s had years of experience.
Something tickles the side of her mind. Some distant voice shouts through the clouds in her head. She realizes that she’s been sensing it for some time, but its volume has crept up so gradually that it hasn’t registered until now. Now it’s unmistakable: threat and exclamation and excitement, at the very limit of her range. Two rifters cross her path, heading south, legs pumping. Clarke’s jaw is buzzing with vocoded voices; in her reverie, she’s missed those too.
“Almost missed it completely,” one of them says. “It was tucked in under—”
“Got another one,” a second voice breaks in. “Res-A.”
* * *
One look and Clarke knows she would have missed it.
It’s a standard demolition charge, planted in the shadow of an overhanging ledge. Clarke floats upside down and lays her head against the hull to look along the space beneath; she sees a hemispherical silhouette, shaded by the ledge, backlit by the diffuse murky glow of the water behind.
“Jesus,” she buzzes, “how did you find the damn thing?”
“Sonar caught it.”
With typical rifter discipline, the searchers have abandoned their transects and accreted around the find. Lubin hasn’t sent them back; there’s an obvious reason why he’d want them all here with the murder weapon. Clarke tunes and concentrates:
Excitement. Reawakened interest, after an hour of monotonous back-and-forth. Concern and threads of growing fear: this is a bomb, after all, not an Easter egg. A few of the more skittish are already backing away, caution superseding curiosity. Clarke wonders idly about effective blast radius. Forty or fifty meters is the standard safe-distance during routine construction, but those guidelines are always padded.
She focuses. Everyone’s a suspect, after all. But although the ubiquitous undercurrent of rage simmers as always, none of it has risen to the surface. There is no obvious anger at being thwarted, no obvious fear of imminent discovery. This explosive development is more puzzle than provocation to these people, a game of Russian roulette nested inside a scavenger hunt.
“So what do we do now?” Cheung asks.
Lubin floats above them all like Lucifer. “Everybody note the sonar profile. That’s how you’ll acquire the others; they’ll be too well hidden for a visual sweep.”
A dozen pistols fire converging click-trains on the offending object.
“So do we leave it there, or what?”
“What if it’s booby-trapped?”
“What if it goes off?”
“Then we’ve got fewer corpses to worry about,” Gomez buzzes from what he might think of as a safe distance. “No skin off my fore.”
Lubin descends through the conjecture and reaches under the ledge.
Ng sculls away. “Hey, is that a good—”
Lubin grabs the device and yanks it free. Nothing explodes. He turns and surveys the assembled rifters. “When you find the others, don’t touch them. I’ll remove them myself.”
“Why bother,” Gomez buzzes softly.
It’s a rhetorical grumble, not even a serious challenge, but Lubin turns to face him anyway. “This was badly positioned,” he says. “Placed for concealme
nt, not effect. We can do much better.”
Minds light up, encouraged, on all sides. But to Clarke, it’s as though Lubin’s words have opened a tiny gash in her diveskin; she feels the frigid Atlantic seeping up her spine.
What are you doing, Ken? What the fuck are you doing?
She tells himself he’s just playing to the gallery, saying whatever it takes to keep people motivated. He’s looking at her now, his head cocked just slightly to one side, as if in response to some unvoiced question. Belatedly, Clarke realizes what she’s doing: she’s trying to look into his head. She’s trying to tune him in.
It’s a futile effort, of course. Dangerous, even. Lubin hasn’t just been trained to block prying minds; he’s been conditioned, rewired, outfitted with subconscious defenses that can’t be lowered by any act of mere volition. Nobody’s ever been able to tunnel into Lubin’s head except Karl Acton, and whatever he saw in there, he took to his grave.
Now Lubin watches her, dark inside and out for all her unconscious efforts.
She remembers Acton, and stops trying.
STRIPTEASE
THE final score is nine mines and no suspects. Either might be subject to change.
Atlantis itself is an exercise in scale-invariant complexity, repairs to retrofits to additions to a sprawling baseline structure that extends over hectares. There’s no chance that every nook and cranny has been explored. Then again, what chance is there that the culprits—constrained by time and surveillance and please God, small numbers—had any greater opportunity to plant explosives than the sweepers have had to find them? Neither side is omnipotent. Perhaps, on balance, that is enough.
As for who those culprits are, Clarke has tuned in three dozen of her fellows so far. She has run her fingers through the viscous darkness in all those heads and come up with nothing. Not even Gomez, or Yeager. Not even Creasy. Grave-dancers, for sure, all of them. But no diggers.
