by Peter Watts
Lubin had not realized that freedom from Guilt Trip was possible. It raised certain prospects he had not previously considered.
Starfucker
Marq Quammen was primed and ready.
Tornado season was just winding down in the Dust Belt; three solid months of flywheel repairs had fed the chip in his thigh until it was six digits fat, and he had a month until spring run-off started clogging the dams up north. Options were tempting and plentiful in the meantime. He could boost his chloroplasts to UV-shield levels and bugger off to the Carolines. He could check out the underwater Club Med over in Hatteras—he'd heard they'd walled off a whole bay with this big semipermeable membrane, let the ocean in but kept out all those nasty synthetic macromolecules and heavy metals. Their cultured coral had finally taken off; it might even be open to the tourists by now. That would be something to see. There hadn't been wild coral anywhere in N'Am since Key West had packed it in.
Of course, these days there were all sorts of nasty things waiting to jump on you when you ventured outside. That new bug the left-coast refugees had brought over, for instance—the all-purpose number that killed you a dozen different ways. Maybe it'd be better just to stay in this dark, cozy little booth in this dark, cozy little drink'n'drug at the edge of the Belt, and let Breakthroughs in BrainChem provide him a richness of experience he could never get in the real world. That was pretty tempting, too. Plus he could start immediately.
Already had started, in fact. Quammen stretched and settled deeper into his cushioned alcove and watched the local butterflies sparkling at each other. Upstairs the world was a salt-baked oven; if you were an unprotected eyeball out there, the only question was whether you'd go saltblind before the wind sandblasted you down to pitted gelatin. In here, though, it was always dark, and the air barely moved. He felt like a cat in a nook in a dark green cave, surveying a subterranean domain.
There was a little blond K-selector sitting alone at the bar. Quammen absently stuck a derm behind his ear and aimed his watch at her. Passive infrared and a few ultrasonic squeaks, barely audible even to bats, bounced back and forth.
She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were a flat and startling ivory.
She started toward him.
He didn't know her. Quammen's watch flashed him an executive summary: she wasn't horny, either.
He couldn't think of any other reason she'd approach him, though.
She stopped just outside the alcove, a hint of a smile beneath those strange blank eyes.
"Nice effect," Quammen said, seizing the initiative. "You see in X-ray with those things?"
"So what was that?"
"What was what?"
"You zapped me with something."
"Oh." Quammen raised his hand, let her see the whisper-thin filament extending from his watch. "You got some kind of sensor on you?"
She shook her head. Thin lips, small tits, great hips. Sharp edges, just slightly smoothed. Like a perfect little ice-sculpture, left a minute too long in the sun.
"So how'd you know?" Quammen asked.
"I felt it."
"Bullshit. The IR's passive, the sonar's real weak."
"I've got an implant," said the K. "Hard stuff. You can feel it when the sound hits."
"Implant?" This could be interesting.
"Yeah. So, what are you doing here?"
Quammen sneaked another peek at his watch; no, she wasn't on the prowl. Hadn't been a minute ago, anyway. Maybe that was open to negotiation. Maybe it had already changed. He wanted to scope her out again, but he didn't want to give himself away. Shit. Why'd she have to be sensitive to probes?
"I said—"
"Just coming off a nice fat contract," he told her. "Riding flywheels. Figuring out my next move."
She slid in beside him, grabbed a derm from the table dispenser. "Tell me about it."
* * *
She was fucking cryptic, was what she was.
Or maybe just old-fashioned. She hadn't propositioned him outright, which was a drag; it wasted time. Quammen would've propositioned her in an instant, but unless his plug-in was wrecked she hadn't been receptive at first, and that probably meant he was going to have to work at it. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had to rely on instinct of all things to know whether a woman was interested or not, and this Lenie wasn't making things any easier. A couple of times he'd put a hand here or there, and she'd literally flinched. But then she'd run a finger down his arm, or tap the back of his hand, and just generally come on wet as a hagfish.
If she wasn't interested, why was she wasting his time? Was she really here for the conversation?
By the third derm it didn't seem to matter so much.
"You know what I am?" Quammen demanded. An influx of exogenous transmitters had made him suddenly eloquent. "I'm a fucking crusader, is what I am! It is my personal mission to save the world from the Quebecois!"
She blinked lazily over her alien eyes. "Too late," she said.
"You know, only fifty years ago, people paid less than a third of their disposable income on energy? Less than a third?"
"I did not know that," Lenie answered.
"And the world's ending. It's ending right now."
"That," Lenie said, "I did know."
"Do you know when? Do you know when the end began?"
"Last August."
"Twenty thirty-five. The onset of adaptive shatter. When damage control started accounting for more of the GGP than the production of new goods."
"Damage control?"
"Damage control." He pounded the table for emphasis. "My whole life is damage control. I fix the things that entropy breaks. Things fall apart, Lenie my lass. The only way you can stop the slide is throw energy at it. That's the only way we got from primordial slime to human slime. Evolution'd be sockeye without the sun to lean on."
"Oh, there are places where evolution didn't need the sun—"
"Yeah, yeah, but you get my point. The more complicated a system gets, the more fragile it is. All that ecobabble about diversity promotes stability, that's pure bullshit. You take your coral reef or your tropical rainforest, those things were starved for energy. You've got so many species, so many energy pathways using up resources that there's hardly a spare erg left over. Drive through a rainforest with a bulldozer or two and tell me how stable that system ends up being."
"Oops," Lenie said. "Too late."
Quammen barely heard her. "Now what we've got here's a system that's so complicated, it makes a tropical rainforest look like a fucking monoculture. Everything gets way too complicated for mere mortals so we set up webs and networks and AIs to keep track of things except they end up exploding into these huge cancers of complexity too—so that only makes the problem worse—and of course now all the underlying infrastructure is breaking down, the weather and the biosphere are all fucked up so not only do we need oodles more energy to keep this huge wobbling gyro from crashing over on its side, but those same factors keep knocking out the systems we put in place to produce all that extra energy, you see what I'm sayin'? You know what apocalypse is? It's a positive feedback loop!"
"So why blame Quebec for all this? They're the only ones who got their asses in gear fast enough to save anything. It was the Hydro Wars that—"
"Here it comes. Quebec was gonna save the world, and if only we hadn't ganged up on the frogs, we'd all be sipping neurococktails on a beach somewhere and Maelstrom would be nice and clean and bug-free, and—ah, don't get me started."
"Too late for that, too."
"Hey, I'm not saying the war didn't kick Maelstrom past critical mass. Maybe it did. But it would've happened anyway. Five years, tops. And do you really think the frogs had any more foresight than the rest of us? They just lucked out with their geography. Anyone could make the world's biggest hydro facility if they had all of Hudson Bay to dam up. And who was going to stop them? The Cree tried, did you know that? Remember the Cree? A few thousand malcontents up around James Bay, just before that n
asty and unfortunate plague that only killed abos. And after that went down, Nunavut just rolled over and did what they were told, and the rest of fucking Canada was still so busy trying to lure the frogs back into bed they were willing to look the other way over pretty much anything. And now it's too late, and the rest of us run around playing catch-up with our windfarms and our photosynthesis arrays and our deep-sea geothermal—"
Lenie's eyes floated in front of him. Something clicked in Quammen's head.
"Hey," he said after a moment, "are you a—"
She grabbed his wrist and pulled him out of the alcove. "Enough of this bullshit. Let's fuck."
* * *
She was something else.
She had seams in her chest, and a perforated metal disk poking out between her ribs. She told him, around mouthfuls of cock, that a childhood injury had left her with a prosthetic lung. It was an obvious lie, but he didn't call her on it. Everything was making sense now, right down to the way she kept freezing up and trying to hide it, the way she acted hot to cover how cold she was.
She was a rifter. Quammen had heard about them—hell, they were the competition. N'AmPac had sent them down to hydrothermal vents all over the eastern Pacific, until word got out that they were all completely fucked in the head. Something about abuse survivors being best-suited for risky deep-sea work, some reductomechanist shit like that. It was no wonder Lenie wasn't keen on sharing her life story. Quammen wasn't going to push her on it.
Besides, the sex was pretty good. The occasional flinch notwithstanding, she seemed to know exactly what to do. Quammen had heard the usual rumors—the Wisdom of the Old Ones, he liked to call them. If you want good sex, find an abuse victim. Didn't seem quite right to put something like that to the test, but after all, she'd been the one to take the lead.
And what do you know: the Old Ones spake the truth.
He fucked her so hard his cock came out bloody. He frowned, sudden concern wilting him like a stalk of old celery. "Whoa…"
She just smiled.
"Is that you? Are you hurt? Is it—"
—oh crap, is it me?
"I'm an old-fashioned girl," she said, looking up at him.
"What do you mean?" Surely he'd have felt it if something had cut his cock…
"I menstruate."
"You—you're kidding." Why would anyone choose to – "I mean, that's really TwenCen." He stood and reached for a towel on the dresser. "You could've told me," he said, wiping at himself.
"Sorry," she said.
"Well, pick your own pleasure, by all means," Quammen said. "It's no big deal, I just thought—"
She'd left her pack unzipped on the floor beside the dresser. Something glinted wet and dark from inside. He leaned slightly for a better view.
"Ah," he said, "—sorry if I—ah…"
A utility clip, blade extended. Used.
"Sure," she said behind him. "Fine."
She cut herself. Before we fucked, must've been when I was in the bathroom. She cut her own insides.
He turned back to the bed. Lenie was already half-dressed. Her face was a blank mask; it framed her eyes perfectly.
She noticed his gaze. She smiled again. Marq Quammen felt a tiny chill.
"Nice meeting you," she said. "Go, and sin some more."
Mask
The bloodhound nipped him on the finger and fixed him with one dark, suspicious eye.
GT analog my ass, Desjardins thought. What if it doesn't work? What if Colin's lying, what if—
The eye blinked and turned green.
Colin swept past security as Desjardins's guest. Guilt Trip wasn't an honor bestowed upon everyone, not even upon all those who might have legitimate commerce within the halls of the Entropy Patrol. Colin passed beneath eyes that stripped flesh to the bone—thoracic implants, Desjardins noticed, although the machines seemed to think them innocuous enough—but there was no need to drink his blood or read his mind. He was, after all, in the trusted company of Achilles Desjardins, who would never dream of granting access to any potential security threat.
This fucker could kill me, Desjardins thought.
Colin closed the cubby door behind them; Desjardins linked his eyes into the panel and split the feed to the wall so Colin could eavesdrop. He told the board to route incoming assignments around him until farther notice. The system, confident that no minion would shirk responsibility without good reason, acknowledged promptly.
Alone again, with the man who carried long needles in his pocket.
"What do you want to see?" Desjardins asked.
"Everything," Colin said.
* * *
"That's pretty sparse," Colin remarked, studying the plot. "Not your usual pandemic."
He must have meant inland;ehemoth was sprouting everywhere along the coast.
Desjardins shrugged. "Still has some trouble invading low-pressure habitat. Needs a few dice rolls to get a foothold."
"It seems to be doing well enough on the Strip."
"Superdense population. More dice rolls."
"How's it getting around?"
"Not sure. It didn't book a commercial flight." Desjardins pointed at the scattered blotches east of the Rockies. "These new hits just started showing up a couple of weeks ago, and they're not consistent with any of the major travel corridors." He sighed. "I suppose we're lucky the quarantine held as long as it did."
"No, I mean how does it transmit? Respiratory aerosols, skin contact? Body fluids?"
"In theory it could get around on the bottom of somebody's boot. But you'd probably need more than a dirty boot to carry critical mass, so the secondary wouldn't persist."
"Human reservoirs, then."
Desjardins nodded. "Alice says it'd be nice and comfy inside a body. So yeah, it'd probably spread like some kind of conventional infection. Then when a vector takes a shit or pukes in the grass, you've got an innoculation into the outside world."
"Who's Alice?"
"Just another 'lawbreaker. Shared the assignment." Desjardins hoped Colin didn't ask for details. Anyone that man got curious about might have reason to worry.
But Colin only pointed at the display. "Your vectors. How many got past the mountains?"
"Don't know. Not my case any more. I'd guess only a few, though."
"So who are they?"
"I'd say people who worked on the Beebe construction contract. Infected before anyone knew there was a problem."
"So why aren't they dead, if they were infected first?"
"Good question." Another shrug. "Maybe they aren't infected. Maybe they're carrying it some other way."
"In a jar or something?" Lubin seemed almost amused by that. "Johnny Appleseed with a grudge?"
Desjardins didn't know and didn't ask. "Wouldn't have to be deliberate, necessarily. Maybe just some dirty piece of heavy equipment that gets moved around a lot."
"But you'd be able to track that. Even a bunch of infected contract workers should be easy enough to track down."
"You'd think." Didn't seem to be much of a problem to the guys with the flamethrowers, anyway…
"Yet you couldn't find any candidates in the record."
"No living ones, anyway."
"What about the rifters?" Colin suggested. "That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days. Maybe there's a connection."
"They were all—"
—killed in the quake. But the bottom dropped out of his stomach before he could finish the thought.
What about the rifters?
The scanners at security had seen machinery in Colin's chest.
Desjardins, you idiot.
The rifters.
One of them was standing right at his shoulder.
* * *
A single petrified moment to wonder which road had led to this:
Let's-call-him-Colin had risen from the ashes of Beebe Station and was pursuing his own apocalyptic agenda. Johnny Appleseed with a grudge, whatever the fuck that meant—
Or:
Let's-call-him-Colin hadn't been stationed at Beebe at all, he just had a—a personal interest. A friend, perhaps, a fellow rifter sacrificed for the greater good. But maybe Colin wasn't satisfied with the greater good. Maybe Colin wanted closure.
Or:
Thoracic implants didn't necessarily equal an amphibious lifestyle. Maybe Let's-call-him-Colin wasn't even a rifter. He sure as shit wasn't an ordinary one, anyway. How many of those neurotic head cases would have been able to find Desjardins in the first place? How many could have broken into his home, laid him out, read his mind, threatened his very life without breaking a sweat?
Am I infected? Am I dying? Am I leaving traces for someone like me to sniff out?
Nearly a second had passed since the words had died in Desjardins's throat
I've got to say something. Jesus, what do I say?
"Actually—" he began.
He wants me to search Beebe's personnel files. What if he's in there? Of course he won't be, he wouldn't blow his own cover that wouldn't make sense—
"—I'm way—"
Whatever he wants he doesn't want me to know he wants it, oh no, he's being way too casual about this, just another possibility to follow up, right—
He won't push. He won't force it—
"—ahead of you on that," Desjardins finished easily. "I checked the rifters already. I checked everyone who had anything to do with Beebe. Nothing. Nobody's touched their bank accounts, no watch transactions, nothing at all since the quake."
He glanced up at Colin, kept his voice level. "But they were pretty much at Ground Zero when the Big One went off. Why would you think they'd survive?"
Colin looked back neutrally. "No reason. Just being systematic."
"Mmm." Desjardins drummed his fingers absently on the edge of the board. His inlays lit with visual confirmation: he'd opened a channel directly to his visual cortex, without—he glanced at the wall just to be sure—without sending an echo to any external displays.
