by Peter Watts
She hasn’t run into Grace Nolan lately, though.
Nolan’s the Big Red Button right now. She’s holding back for the moment; any alleged corpse treachery looks a little less asymmetrical in light of recent events. But the way things are going, Nolan’s got nothing to lose by letting this play out. There’s already more than enough sympathy out there for the Mad Bomber; if it turns out to be Nolan, the very act of unmasking her could boost her status more than harm it.
The leash is tenuous enough already. If it snaps there’s going to be ten kinds of shit in the cycler.
And that’s granting the charitable assumption that they even find the culprits. What do you look for, in the unlit basements of so many minds? Here, even the innocent are consumed with guilt; even the guilty wallow in self-righteousness. Every mind is aglow with the black light of PsychoHazard icons: which ones are powered by old wounds, which by recent acts of sabotage? You can figure it out, sometimes, if you can stand sticking your head into someone else’s tar pit, but context is everything. Hoping for a lucky break is playing the lottery; doing it right takes time, and leaves Clarke soiled.
Not doing it delivers the future into Grace Nolan’s hands.
There’s no time. I can’t be everywhere. Ken can’t be everywhere.
There’s an alternative, of course. Lubin suggested it, just after the bomb sweep. He was sweet about it, too, he made it sound as if she had a choice. As if he wouldn’t just go ahead and do it himself if she wasn’t up for it.
She knows why he gave her the option. Whoever shares this secret is going to get a bit of a boost in the local community. Lubin doesn’t need the cred; no rifter would be crazy enough to cross him.
She remembers a time, not so long ago, when she could make the same claim about herself.
She takes a breath, and opens a channel to whom it may concern. The next step, she knows, could kill her. She wonders—hardly for the first time—if that would really be such a bad thing.
* * *
Her audience numbers fewer than a dozen. There’s room for more; the medhab—even the lone sphere that hasn’t been commandeered as Bhanderi habitat—is bigger than most. Not present are even more who can be trusted, judging by the notes Clarke and Lubin have recently compared. But she wants to start small. Maybe ease into it a little. The ripple effect will kick in soon enough.
“I’m only going to do this once,” she says. “So pay attention.”
Naked to the waist, she splits herself open again.
“Don’t change anything except your neuroinhibitors. It probably throws out some overall balance with the other chemicals, but it all seems to come out in the wash eventually. Just don’t go outside for a while after you make the changes. Give everything a chance to settle.”
“How long?” Alexander asks.
Clarke has no idea. “Six hours, maybe. After that, you should be good to go. Ken will assign you to stations around the hubs.”
Her audience rustles, unhappy at the prospect of such prolonged confinement.
“So how do we tweak the inhibitors?” Mak’s broken nose is laced with fine beaded wires, a minuscule microelectric grid designed to amp up the healing process. It looks like an absurdly shrunken veil of mourning.
Clarke smiles despite herself. “You reduce them.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No fucking chance.”
“What about André?”
André died three years ago, the life spasming out of him on the seabed in a seizure that nearly tore him limb from limb. Seger laid the blame on a faulty neuroinhibitor pump. Human nerves aren’t designed for the abyss; the pressure sets them firing at the slightest provocation. You turn into a fleshy switchboard with no circuit-breakers and no insulation. Eventually, after a few minutes of quivering tetanus, the body runs out of neurotransmitters and just stops.
Which is why rifter implants flood the body with neuroinhibitors whenever ambient pressure rises above some critical threshold. Without them, stepping outside at these depths would be tantamount to electrocution.
“I said reduce,” Clarke repeats. “Not eliminate. Five percent. Seven percent tops.”
“And that does what, exactly?”
“Reduces synaptic firing thresholds. Your nerves get just a bit more … more sensitive, I guess. To smaller stimuli, when you go outside. You become aware of things you never noticed before.”
“Like what?” says Garcia.
“Like—” Clarke begins, and stops.
Suddenly she just wants to seal herself up and deny it all. Never mind, she wants to say. Bad idea. Bad joke. Forget I said anything. Or maybe even admit it all: You don’t know what you’re risking. You don’t know how easy it is to go over the edge. My lover couldn’t even fit inside a hab without going into withdrawal, couldn’t even breathe without needing to smash anything that stood between him and the abyss. My friend committed murder for privacy in a place where you couldn’t swim next to someone without being force-fed their sickness and want. And he’s your friend too, he’s one of us here, and he’s the only other person left alive in the whole sick twisted planet who knows what this does to you …
She glances around, suddenly panicky, but Ken Lubin is not in the audience. Probably off drawing up duty rosters for the finely tuned.
Then again, she remembers, you get used to it.
She takes a breath and answers Garcia’s question. “You can tell if someone’s jerking you around, for one thing.”
“Hot damn,” Garcia exults. “I’m gonna be a walking bullshit detector.”
“That you are,” Clarke says, managing a smile.
Hope you’re up for it.
* * *
Her acolytes depart for their own little bubbles to play with themselves. Clarke closes herself back up as the medhab empties. By the time she’s back in black there’s just her, a crowd of wet footprints, and the massive hatch—always left open until just recently—that opens into the next sphere. Garcia’s grafted a combination lock across its wheel in uncaring defiance of dryback safety protocols.
How long do I have, she wonders, before everyone can muck around in my head?
Six hours at least, if the acolytes take her guess seriously. Then they’ll start playing, trying out the new sensory mode, perhaps even reveling in it if they don’t recoil at the things they find.
They’ll start spreading the word.
Clarke’s selling it as psychic surveillance, a new way to track down any guilty secrets the corpses may be hiding. Its effects are bound to spread way beyond Atlantis, though. It’ll be that much harder for anyone to conspire in the dark, when every passing soul comes equipped with a searchlight.
She finds herself standing at the entrance to Bhanderi’s lair, her hand on the retrofitted keypad near its center. She keys in the combination and undogs the hatch.
Suddenly she’s seeing in color. The mimetic seal rimming the hatch is a deep, steely blue. A pair of color-coded pipes wind overhead like coral snakes. A cylinder of some compressed gas, spied through the open portal, reflects turquoise: the decals on its side are yellow and—incomprehensibly—hot pink.
It’s as bright as Atlantis in there.
She steps into the light: Calvin cycler, sleeping pallet, blood bank ooze pigment into the air. “Rama?”
“Close the door.”
Something sits hunched at the main workstation, running a sequence of rainbow nucleotides. It can’t be a rifter. It doesn’t have the affect, it doesn’t have the black shiny skin. It looks more like a hunched skeleton in shirtsleeves. It turns, and Clarke flinches inwardly: it doesn’t even have the eyes. The pupils twitching in Bhanderi’s face are dark yawning holes, dilated so widely that the irises around them are barely visible.
Not so bright, then. Still dark enough for uncapped eyes to strain to their limits. Such subtle differences get lost behind membranes that render the world at optimum apparent lumens.
Something must show on her face. “I took out
the caps,” Bhanderi says. “The eyes—overstimulate, with all the enhancers.” His voice is still hoarse, the cords not yet reacclimated to airborne speech.
“How’s it going?” Clarke asks.
A bony shrug. She can count the ribs even through his T-shirt.
“Anything yet? Diagnostic test, or—”
“Won’t be able to tell the difference until I know if there is a difference. So far it looks like βehemoth with a couple of new stitches. Maybe mutations, maybe refits. I don’t know yet.”
“Would a baseline sample help?”
“Baseline?”
“Something that didn’t come through Atlantis. Maybe if you had a sample from Impossible Lake, you could compare. See if they’re different.”
He shakes his head: a twitch, a tic. “There are ways to tell tweaks. Satellite markers, junk sequences. Just takes time.”
“But you can do it. The—enhancers worked. It came back to you.”
He nods like a striking snake. He calls up another sequence.
“Thank you,” Clarke says softly.
He stops.
“Thank you? What choice do I have? There’s a lock on the hatch.”
“I know.” She lowers her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you think I’d just leave? That I’d just swim off and let this thing kill us all? Kill me, maybe?”
She shakes her head. “No. Not you.”
“Then why?”
Even motionless, his face looks like a stifled scream. It’s the eyes. Through all the calm, rapid-fire words, Bhanderi’s eyes seem frozen in a stare of absolute horror. It’s as if there’s something else in there, something ancient and unthinking and only recently awakened. It looks out across a hundred million years into an incomprehensible world of right angles and blinking lights, and finds itself utterly unable to cope.
“Because it comes and goes,” Clarke says. “You said it yourself.”
He extends one sticklike forearm, covered in derms; a chemical pump just below his elbow taps directly into the vein beneath. He’s been dosing himself ever since he climbed back into atmosphere, using miracles of modern chemistry to rape sanity back into his head, to force submerged memories and skills back to the surface for a while. So far, she has to admit, it’s working.
But whenever she looks at him, she sees the reptile looking back. “We can’t risk it, Rama. I’m sorry.”
He lowers his arm. His jaw clicks like some kind of insect.
“You said—” he begins, and falls silent.
He tries again. “When you were bringing me in. Did you say you knew a—”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know any—I mean, who?”
“Not here,” she tells him. “Not even this ocean. Way back at the very beginning of the rifter program. He went over in front of my eyes.” A beat, then, “His name was Gerry.”
“But you said he came back.”
She honestly doesn’t know. Gerry Fischer just appeared out of the darkness, after everyone else had given up and gone. He dragged her to safety, to an evacuation ’scaphe hovering uncertainly over a station already emptied of personnel. But he never spoke a word, and he kicked and fought like an animal when she tried to rescue him in turn.
“Maybe he didn’t so much come back as come through,” she admits now, to this creature who must in his own way know Gerry Fischer far better than she ever did.
Bhanderi nods. “What happened to him?”
“He died,” she says softly.
“Just … faded away? Like the rest of us?”
“No.”
“How, then?”
She thinks of a word with customized resonance.
“Boom,” she says.
FRONTIER
COME away, they said after Rio. Come away, now that you’ve saved our asses yet again.
That wasn’t entirely true. He hadn’t saved Buffalo. He hadn’t saved Houston. Salt Lake and Boise and Sacramento were gone, fallen to improvised assaults ranging from kamikaze airliners to orbital nukes. Half a dozen other franchises were barely alive. Very few of those asses had been saved.
But to the rest of the Entropy Patrol, Achilles Desjardins was a hero ten times over. It had been obvious almost immediately that fifty CSIRA franchises were under directed and simultaneous attack across the western hemisphere, but it had been Desjardins and Desjardins alone who’d put the pieces together, under fire and on the fly. It had been he who’d drawn the impossible conclusion that the attacks were being orchestrated by one of their own. The rest of the Patrol had taken up the call and flattened Rio as soon as they had the scoop, but it had been Desjardins who’d told them where to aim. Without his grace under pressure, every CSIRA stronghold in the hemisphere could have ended up in flames.
Come away, said his grateful masters. This place is a write-off.
Sudbury CSIRA had taken a direct hit amidships. A suborbital puddle-jumper en route from London to Toromilton, subverted by the enemy and lethally off-course, had left an impact crater ten stories high in the building’s northern face. Its fuel tanks all but empty, the fires hadn’t burned hot enough to take down the structure. They had merely incinerated, poisoned, or suffocated most of those between the eighteenth and twenty-fifth floors.
Sudbury’s ’lawbreakers had worked between floors twenty and twenty-four. It had been lucky that Desjardins had managed to raise the alarm before they’d been hit. It had been an outright motherfucking miracle that he hadn’t been killed when they were.
Come away.
And Achilles Desjardins looked around at the smoke and the guttering flames, the piled body bags, and those few stunned coworkers still sufficiently intact to escape mandatory euthanasia, and replied: You need me here.
There is no here.
But there was more left of here than there was of Salt Lake or Buffalo. The attacks had reduced redundancy across N’Am’s fast-response network by over thirty percent. Sudbury was hanging by a thread, but that thread still connected sixteen hemispheric links and forty-seven regional ones. Abandoning it completely would cut system redundancy by another five percent and leave a half million square kilometers without any rapid-response capacity whatsoever. βehemoth already ran rampant across half the continent; civilization was imploding throughout its domain. CSIRA could not afford the luxury of further losses.
There were counterpoints. Half the floors of the Sudbury franchise were uninhabitable. There was barely enough surviving bandwidth for a handful of operatives, and under the current budget it would be almost impossible to keep even that much open. All the models agreed: the best solution was to abandon Sudbury and upgrade Toromilton and Montreal to take up the slack.
And how long, Desjardins wondered, before those upgrades came onstream?
Six months. Maybe a year.
Then they needed a stopgap. They needed to keep the pilot light burning for just a little longer. They needed someone on-site for those unforeseeable crisis points when machinery wasn’t up to the job.
But you’re our best ’lawbreaker, they protested.
And the task will be almost impossible. Where else should I be?
Welllllllll …
Only six months, he reminded them. Maybe a year.
Of course, it wouldn’t turn out that way. Murphy’s malign hand would stir the pot and maybe-a-year would morph into three, then four. The Toromilton upgrades would falter and stall; farsighted master plans would collapse, as they always had, beneath the weight of countless daily emergencies. Making do, the Entropy Patrol would throw crumbs enough at Sudbury to keep the lights on and the clearance codes active, ever grateful for their uncomplaining minion and the thousand fingers he kept jammed in the dike.
But that was now and this was then, and Desjardins was saying, I’ll be your lighthouse keeper. I’ll be your sentinel on the lonely frontier, I’ll fight the brush fires and hold the line until the cavalry comes online. I can do this. You know I can.
And they did know, bec
ause Achilles Desjardins was a hero. More to the point, he was a ’lawbreaker; he wouldn’t have been able to lie to them even if he’d wanted to.
What a guy, they said, shaking their heads in admiration. What a guy.
GROUNDWORK
KEVIN Walsh is a good kid. He knows relationships take work, he’s willing to do what it takes to keep the spark—such as it is—alive. Or at least, to stretch its death out over the longest possible period.
He attached himself to her arm after Lubin handed out the first fine-tuning assignments, and wouldn’t take Later, maybe for an answer. Finally Clarke relented. They found an unoccupied hab and threw down a couple of sleeping pallets, and he uncomplainingly worked his tongue and thumb and forefinger down to jelly until she didn’t have the heart to let him continue. She stroked his head and said it was nice but it really wasn’t working, and she offered herself in turn for his efforts, but he didn’t take her up on it—whether out of chivalrous penance for his own inadequacy or simply because he was sulking, she couldn’t tell.
Now they lie side by side, hands lightly interlocked at arm’s length. Walsh is asleep, which is surprising: he’s no more fond of sleeping in gravity than any other rifter. Maybe it’s another chivalrous affectation. Maybe he’s faking it.
Clarke can’t bring herself to do even that. She lies on her back and stares up at the condensation beading on the bulkhead. After a while she disentangles her hand from Walsh’s—gently, so as not to interrupt the performance—and wanders over to the local comm board.
The main display frames a murky, cryptic obelisk looming up out of the seabed. Atlantis’s primary generator. Part of it, anyway—the bulk of the structure plunges deep into bedrock, into the heart of a vent from which it feeds like a mosquito sucking hot blood. Only the apex rises above the substrate like some lumpy windowless skyscraper, facades pocked and wormy with pipes and vents and valves. A sparse dotted line of floodlights girdles the structure about eight meters up, casting a bright coarse halo that stains everything copper. The abyss presses down against that light like a black hand; the top of the generator extends into darkness.
