Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  But no. Here the hab modules sprout like solitary mushrooms across the substrate. Rifters live alone, or in pairs, or whatever social assemblage fits the moment. A crowd of rifters is almost an oxymoron. The nerve habs are among the largest structures in the whole trailer park, and they only hold a dozen or so on their main decks. Given the territorial perimeters that most rifters develop in the abyss, it doesn’t hold them comfortably.

  It’s already getting congested by the time Clarke returns from priming the chimes. Chen and Cramer converge on her tail as she glides up into the airlock. On the wet deck, Abra Cheung ascends the ladder ahead of her. Clarke follows her up—the airlock cycling again at her back—into a knot of eight or nine people who have arrived during her absence.

  Grace Nolan’s at the center of the action, bellied up to the comm panel. Sonar shows a dozen others still en route. Clarke wonders idly if the hab’s scrubbers are up to this kind of load. Maybe there is no announcement. Maybe Seger’s just trying to get them to overdose on their own CO2.

  “Hi.” Kevin Walsh appears at her side, hovering hopefully at the edge of her public-comfort perimeter. He seems back to his old self. In front of them, Gomez turns and notices Clarke. “Hey, Len. News from the corpses, I hear.”

  Clarke nods.

  “You’re tight with those assholes. Know what it’s about?”

  She shakes her head. “Seger’s the mouthpiece, though. I figure something medical.”

  “Yeah. Probably.” Gomez sucks air softly through stained teeth. “Anybody seen Julia? She should be here for this.”

  Cheung purses her lips. “What, after spending the last week and a half with Gene? You can breathe that air if you want.”

  “I saw her out by one of the woodpiles not too long ago,” Hopkinson volunteers.

  “How’d she seem?”

  “You know Julia. A black hole with tits.”

  “I mean physically. She seem sick at all?”

  “How would I know? You think she was out there in a bra and panties?” Hopkinson shrugs. “Didn’t say anything, anyway.”

  Faintly, through bulkheads and conversation, the cries of tortured rock.

  “Okay then,” Nolan says from the board. “Enough dicking around. Let’s rack ’em up and shoot ’em down.” She taps an icon on the panel. “You’re on, Seger. Make it good.”

  “Is everyone there?” Seger’s voice.

  “Of course not. We can’t all fit into a hab.”

  “I’d rather—”

  “You’re hooked into all the LFAM channels. Anyone within five hundred meters can hear you just fine.”

  “Well.” A pause, the silence of someone deciding how best to proceed across a minefield. “As you know, Atlantis has been quarantined for several days now. Ever since we learned about βehemoth. Now we’ve all had the retrofits, so there was every reason to expect that this wasn’t a serious problem. The quarantine was merely a precaution.”

  “Was,” Nolan notes. Downstairs the airlock is cycling again.

  Seger forges on. “We analyzed the—the samples that Ken and Lenie brought back from Impossible Lake, and everything we found was consistent with βehemoth. Same peculiar RNA, same stereoisomerization of—”

  “Get to the point,” Nolan snaps.

  “Grace?” Clarke says. Nolan looks at her.

  “Shut up and let the woman finish,” Clarke suggests. Nolan snorts and turns away.

  “Anyway,” Seger continues after a moment, “the results were perfectly straightforward, so we incinerated the infected remains as a containment measure. After digitizing them, of course.”

  “Digitizing?” That’s Chen.

  “A high-res destructive scan, enough to let us simulate the sample right down to the molecular level,” Seger explains. “Model tissues give us much of the same behavior as a wet sample, but without the attendant risks.”

  Charley Garcia climbs into view. The bulkheads seem to sneak a little closer with each new arrival. Clarke swallows, the air thickening around her.

  Seger coughs. “I was working with one of those models and, well, I noticed an anomaly. I believe that the fish you brought back from Impossible Lake was infected with βehemoth.”

  Exchanged glances among a roomful of blank eyes. Off in the distance, Lubin’s wind chimes manage a final reedy moan and fall silent, the reservoir exhausted.

  “Well, of course,” Nolan says after a moment. “So what?”

  “I’m, um, I’m using infected in the pathological sense, not the symbiotic one.” Seger clears her throat. “What I mean to say is—”

  “It was sick,” Clarke says. “It was sick with βehemoth.”

  Dead air for a moment. Then: “I’m afraid that’s right. If Ken hadn’t killed it first, I think βehemoth might have.”

  “Oh, fuck,” someone says softly. The epithet hangs there in a room gone totally silent. Downstairs, the airlock gurgles.

  “So it was sick,” Dale Creasy says after a moment. “So what?”

  Garcia shakes his head. “Dale, don’t you remember how this fucker works?”

  “Sure. Breaks your enzymes apart to get at the sulfur or something. But we’re immune.”

  “We’re immune,” Garcia says patiently, “because we’ve got special genes that make enzymes too stiff for βehemoth to break. And we got those genes from deepwater fish, Dale.”

  Creasy’s still working it through. Someone else whispers “Shit shit shit,” in a shaky voice. Downstairs, some latecomer’s climbing the ladder; whoever it is stumbles on the first rung.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Garcia’s right,” Seger says. “If the fish down here are vulnerable to this bug, then we probably are too.”

  Clarke shakes her head. “But—are you saying this thing isn’t βehemoth after all? It’s something else?”

  A sudden commotion around the ladder; the assembled rifters are pulling back as though it were electrified. Julia Friedman staggers up into view, her face the color of basalt. She stands on the deck, clinging to the railing around the hatch, not daring to let go. She looks around, blinking rapidly over undead eyes. Her skin glistens.

  “It’s still βehemoth, more or less,” Seger drones in the distance. From Atlantis. From the bolted-down, welded-tight, hermetically-sealed quarantined goddamned safety of fucking Atlantis. “That’s why we couldn’t pinpoint the nature of Mr. Erickson’s infection: he came back positive for βehemoth but of course we disregarded those findings because we didn’t think it could be the problem. But this is a new variant, apparently. Virulent speciation is quite common when an organism spreads into new environments. This is basically—”

  βehemoth’s evil twin brother, Clarke remembers.

  “—βehemoth Mark Two,” Seger finishes.

  Julia Friedman drops to her knees and vomits onto the deck.

  * * *

  Babel Broadband. An overlapping collage of distorted voices:

  “Of course I don’t believe them. You saying you do?”

  “That’s bullshit. If you—”

  “They admitted it up front. They didn’t have to.”

  “Yeah, they suddenly come clean at the exact moment Julia goes symptomatic. What a coincidence.”

  “How’d they know that she—”

  “They knew the incubation time. They must have. How else do you explain the timing here, dramatic irony?”

  “Yeah, but what are we gonna do?”

  They’ve abandoned the hab. It emptied like a blown ballast tank, rifters spilling onto a seabed already crowded even by dryback standards. Now it hangs above them like a gunmetal planet. Three lamps set around the ventral airlock lay bright overlapping circles onto the substrate. Black bodies swim at the periphery of that light, hints of restless motion behind shark-tooth rows of white, unblinking eyespots. Clarke thinks of hungry animals, kept barely at bay by the light of a campfire.

  By rights, she should feel like one of them.

  Grace Nolan’s no longer in evidence. She disappeare
d into the darkness a few minutes ago, one supportive arm around Julia Friedman, helping her back home. That act of apparent altruism seems to have netted her extra cred: Chen and Hopkinson are standing in for her on the point-counterpoint. Garcia’s raising token questions, but the prevailing mood does not suggest any great willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt.

  “Hey, Dimi,” Chen buzzes. “How’s it going in there?”

  “Stinks like a hospital.” Alexander’s airborne voice makes a conspicuous contrast against the background of waterlogged ones. “Almost done, though. Somebody better be growing me a new skin.” He’s still inside, sterilizing anything that Friedman or her bodily fluids might have come into contact with. Grace Nolan asked for volunteers.

  She’s started giving orders. People have started taking them.

  “I say we just drill the fuckers.” Creasy buzzes from somewhere nearby.

  Clarke remembers holes burned through biosteel. “Let’s hold off on the whole counterstrike thing for a bit. It might be tougher for them to find a cure if we smear them into the deck.”

  “As if they’re looking for a fucking cure.”

  She ignores the remark. “They want blood samples from everyone. Some of the rest of us might be infected. It obviously doesn’t show up right away.”

  “It showed up fast enough with Gene,” someone points out.

  “Being gutted alive probably increases your level of exposure a bit. But Julia didn’t show anything for, what—two weeks?”

  “I’m not giving them any blood,” Creasy growls with a voice like scrap metal. “They’ll be fucking giving blood if they try and make me.”

  Clarke shakes her head, exasperated. “Dale, they can’t make anyone do anything and they know it. They’re asking. If you want them to beg, I’m sure it can be arranged. What’s your problem? You’ve been collecting bloods on your own anyway.”

  “If we could take our tongues off Patricia Rowan’s clit for a moment, I have a message from Gene.”

  Grace Nolan swims into the circle of light like a pitch-black pack animal, asserting dominance. Campfires don’t bother her.

  “Grace,” Chen buzzes. “How’s Julia?”

  “How do you think? She’s sick. But I got her tucked in at least, and the diagnostics are running for all the good they’ll do.”

  “And Gene?” Clarke asks.

  “He was awake for a little while. He said, and I quote, ‘I told them those baby-boners did something to me. Maybe they’ll believe me when my wife dies.’”

  “Hey,” Walsh pipes up. “He’s obviously feeling bet—”

  “The corpses would never risk spreading something like this without already having a cure,” Nolan cuts in. “It could get back to them too easily.”

  “Right.” Creasy again. “So I say we drill the fuckers one bulkhead at a time until they hand it over.”

  Uncertainty and acquiescence mix in the darkness.

  “You know, just to play devil’s advocate here, I gotta say there’s a slim chance they’re telling the truth.”

  That’s Charley Garcia, floating off to the side.

  “I mean, bugs mutate, right?” he continues. “Especially when people throw shitloads of drugs at them, and you can bet they bought out the whole pharm when this thing first got out. So who’s to say it couldn’t have gone from Mark One to β-max all on its own?”

  “Fucking big coincidence if you ask me,” Creasy buzzes.

  Garcia’s vocoder ticks, a verbal shrug. “I’m just saying.”

  “And if they were going to pull some kind of biowar shit, why wait until now?” Clarke adds, grasping the straw. “Why not four years ago?”

  “They didn’t have βehemoth four years ago,” Nolan says.

  Walsh: “They could’ve brought down a culture.”

  “What, for old times’ sake? Fucking nostalgia? They didn’t have shit until Gene served it up to ’em warm and steaming.”

  “You oughtta get out more, Grace,” Garcia buzzes. “We’ve been building bugs from mail-order parts for fifty years. Once they had the genes sequenced, the corpses could’ve built βehemoth from scratch any time they felt like it.”

  “Or anything else, for that matter,” Hopkinson adds. “Why use something that takes all this time just to make a few of us sick? Supercol would’ve dropped us in a day.”

  “It would’ve dropped Gene in a day,” Nolan buzzes. “Before he had any chance to infect the rest of us. A fast bug wouldn’t have a chance out here—we’re spread out, we’re isolated, we don’t even breathe most of the time. Even when we go inside we keep our skins on. This thing has to be slow if it’s gonna spread. These stumpfucks know exactly what they’re doing.”

  “Besides,” Baker adds, “a Supercol epidemic starts on the bottom of the goddamn ocean and we’re not gonna connect the dots? They’d be sockeye the moment they tried.”

  “They know it, too.”

  “βehemoth gives them an alibi, though,” Chen says. “Doesn’t it?”

  Fuck, Jelaine. Clarke’s been thinking exactly the same thing. Why’d you have to bring that up?

  Nolan grabs the baton in an instant. “That’s right. That’s right. βehemoth comes all the way over from Impossible Lake, no way anybody can accuse them of planting it there—they just tweak it a bit on its way through Atlantis, pass it on to us, and how are we supposed to know the difference?”

  “Especially since they conveniently destroyed the samples,” Creasy adds.

  Clarke shakes her head. “You’re a plumber with gills, Dale. You wouldn’t have a clue what to do with those samples if Seger handed them to you in a zip-lock bag. Same goes for Grace’s little science-fair project with the blood.”

  “So that’s your contribution.” Nolan twists through the water until she’s a couple of meters off Clarke’s bow. “None of us poor dumb fish-heads got tenure or augments, so we’ve just gotta trust everything to the wise old gel-jocks who fucked us over in the first place.”

  “There’s someone else,” Clarke buzzes back. “Rama Bhanderi.”

  Sudden, complete silence. Clarke can barely believe she said it herself.

  Chen’s vocoder stutters in awkward preamble. “Uh, Len. Rama went native.”

  “Not yet. Not completely. Borderline at most.”

  “Bhanderi?” The water vibrates with Nolan’s derision. “He’s a fish by now!”

  “He’s still coherent,” Clarke insisted. “I talked to him just the other day. We can bring him back.”

  “Lenie,” Walsh says, “nobody’s ever—”

  “Bhanderi does know his shit,” Garcia cuts in. “Used to, anyway.”

  “Literally,” Creasy adds. “I heard he tweaked E. coli to secrete psychoactives. You walk around with that shit in your gut, you’re in permanent self-sustaining neverland.” Grace Nolan turns and stares at him; Creasy doesn’t take the hint. “He had some of his customers eating out of their own ends, just for the feedback high.”

  “Great,” Nolan buzzes. “A drooling idiot and a fecal chemist. Our problems are over.”

  “All I’m saying is, we don’t want to cut our own throats,” Clarke argues. “If the corpses aren’t lying to us, they’re our best chance at beating this thing.”

  Cheung: “You’re saying we should trust them?”

  “I’m saying maybe we don’t have to. I’m saying, give me a chance to talk to Rama and see if he can help. If not, we can always blow up Atlantis next week.”

  Nolan cuts the water with her hand. “His fucking mind is gone!”

  “He had enough of it left to tell me what happened at the woodpile,” Clarke buzzes quietly.

  Nolan stares at Clarke, a sudden, indefinable tension in the body behind the mask.

  “Actually,” Garcia remarks from offside, “I think I might have to side with Lenie on this one.”

  “I don’t,” Creasy responds instantly.

  “Probably couldn’t hurt to check it out.” Hopkinson’s voice vibrates out f
rom somewhere in the cheap seats. “Like Lenie says, we can always kill them later.”

  It’s not exactly momentum. Clarke runs with it anyway. “What are they going to do, hold their breath and make a mad dash for the surface? We can afford to wait.”

  “Can Gene afford to wait? Can Julia?” Nolan looks around the circle. “How long do any of us have?”

  “And if you’re wrong, you’ll kill every last one of those fuckers and then find out they were trying to help us after all.” Clarke shakes her head. “No. I won’t let you.”

  “You won’t l—”

  Clarke cranks the volume a notch and cuts her off. “This is the plan, people. Everybody gives blood if they haven’t already. I’ll track down Rama and see if I can talk him into helping. Nobody fucks with the corpses in the meantime.”

  This is it, she thinks. Raise or call. The moment stretches.

  Nolan looks around at the assembly. Evidently she doesn’t like what she sees. “Fine,” she buzzes at last. “All you happy little r’s and K’s can do what you like. I know what I’m gonna do.”

  “You,” Clarke tells her, “are going to back off, and shut up, and not do a single fucking thing until we get some information we can count on. And until then, Grace, if I find you within fifty meters of Atlantis or Rama Bhanderi, I will personally rip the tubes out of your chest.”

  Suddenly they’re eyecap to eyecap. “You’re talking pretty big for someone who doesn’t have her pet psycho backing her up.” Nolan’s vocoder is very low; her words are mechanical whispers, meant for Clarke alone. “Where’s your bodyguard, corpsefucker?”

  “If you think I need one,” Clarke buzzes evenly, “stop talking out your ass and make a fucking move.”

  Nolan hangs in the water, unmoving. Her vocoder tick-tick-ticks like a Geiger counter.

  “Hey, Grace,” Chen buzzes hesitantly from the sidelines. “Really, you know? Can’t hurt to try.”