Northern Stars

by Glenn Grant

  Ballard stands in the lounge, listening to the rhythm of the assault. “They don’t show up on sonar,” she says, almost whispering. “Sometimes, when I hear them coming at us, I tune it down to extreme close range. But it looks right through them.”

  “No gas bladders. Nothing to bounce an echo off of.”

  “We show up just fine out there, most of the time. But not those things. You can’t find them, no matter how high you turn the gain. They’re like ghosts.”

  “They’re not ghosts.” Almost unconsciously, Clarke has been counting the beats: eight … nine …

  Ballard turns to face her. “They’ve shut down Piccard,” she says, and her voice is small and tight.

  “What?”

  “The grid office says it’s just some technical problem. But I’ve got a friend in Personnel. I phoned him when you were outside. He says Lana’s in the hospital. And I get the feeling…” Ballard shakes her head. “It sounded like Ken Lubin did something down there. I think maybe he attacked her.”

  Three thumps from outside, in rapid succession. Clarke can feel Ballard’s eyes on her. The silence stretches.

  “Or maybe not,” Ballard says. “We got all those personality tests. If he was violent, they would have picked it up before they sent him down.”

  Clarke watches her, and listens to the pounding of an intermittent fist.

  “Or maybe … maybe the rift changed him somehow. Maybe they misjudged the pressure we’d all be under. So to speak.” Ballard musters a feeble smile. “Not the physical danger so much as the emotional stress, you know? Everyday things. Just being outside could get to you after a while. Seawater sluicing through your chest. Not breathing for hours at a time. It’s like—living without a heartbeat…”

  She looks up at the ceiling; the sounds from outside are a bit more erratic now.

  “Outside’s not so bad,” Clarke says. At least you’re incompressible. At least you don’t have to worry about the plates giving in.

  “I don’t think you’d change suddenly. It would just sort of sneak up on you, little by little. And then one day you’d just wake up changed, you’d be different somehow, only you’d never have noticed the transition. Like Ken Lubin.”

  She looks at Clarke, and her voice drops a bit.

  “And like you.”

  “Me.” Clarke turns Ballard’s words over in her mind, waits for the onset of some reaction. She feels nothing but her own indifference. “I don’t think you have much to worry about. I’m not a violent person.”

  “I know. I’m not worried about my own safety, Lenie. I’m worried about yours.”

  Clarke looks at her from behind the impervious safety of her lenses, and doesn’t answer.

  “You’ve changed since you came down here,” Ballard says. “You’re withdrawing from me, you’re exposing yourself to unnecessary risks. I don’t know exactly what’s happening to you. It’s almost like you’re trying to kill yourself.”

  “I’m not,” Clarke says. She tries to change the subject. “Is Lana Cheung all right?”

  Ballard studies her for a moment. She takes the hint. “I don’t know. I couldn’t get any details.”

  Clarke feels something knotting up inside her.

  “I wonder what she did,” she murmurs, “to set him off like that?”

  Ballard stares at her, openmouthed. “What she did? I can’t believe you said that!”

  “I only meant—”

  “I know what you meant.”

  The outside pounding has stopped. Ballard does not relax. She stands hunched over in those strange, loose-fitting clothes that Drybacks wear, and stares at the ceiling as though she doesn’t believe in the silence. She looks back at Clarke.

  “Lenie, you know I don’t like to pull rank, but your attitude is putting both of us at risk. I think this place is really getting to you. I hope you can get back online here, I really do. Otherwise I may have to recommend you for a transfer.”

  Clarke watches Ballard leave the lounge. You’re lying, she realizes. You’re scared to death, and it’s not just because I’m changing.

  It’s because you are.

  * * *

  Clarke finds out five hours after the fact: something has changed on the ocean floor.

  We sleep and the earth moves, she thinks, studying the topographic display. And next time, or the time after, maybe it’ll move right out from under us.

  I wonder if I’ll have time to feel anything.

  She turns at a sound behind her. Ballard is standing in the lounge, swaying slightly. Her face seems somehow disfigured by the concentric rings in her eyes, by the dark hollows around them. Naked eyes are beginning to look alien to Clarke.

  “The seabed shifted,” Clarke says. “There’s a new outcropping about two hundred metres west of us.”

  “That’s odd. I didn’t feel anything.”

  “It happened about five hours ago. You were asleep.”

  Ballard glances up sharply. Clarke studies the haggard lines of her face. On second thought, I guess you weren’t.

  “I … would’ve woken up,” Ballard says. She squeezes past Clarke into the cubby and checks the topographic display.

  “Two metres high, twelve long,” Clarke recites.

  Ballard doesn’t answer. She punches some commands into a keyboard; the topographic image dissolves, re-forms into a column of numbers.

  “Just as I thought,” she says. “No heavy seismic activity for over forty-two hours.”

  “Sonar doesn’t lie,” Clarke says calmly.

  “Neither does seismo,” Ballard answers.

  There is a brief silence. There is a standard procedure for such things, and they both know what it is.

  “We have to check it out,” Clarke says.

  But Ballard only nods. “Give me a moment to change.”

  * * *

  They call it a squid; a jet-propelled cylinder about half a metre long, with a headlight at the front end and a towbar at the back. Clarke, floating between Beebe and the seabed, checks it over with one hand. Her other hand grips a sonar pistol. She points the pistol into blackness; ultrasonic clicks sweep the night, give her a bearing.

  “That way,” she says, pointing.

  Ballard squeezes down on her own squid’s towbar. The machine pulls her away. After a moment Clarke follows. Bringing up the rear, a third squid carries an assortment of sensors in a nylon bag.

  Ballard is travelling at nearly full throttle. The lamps on her helmet and squid stab the water like two lighthouse beacons. Clarke, her own lights doused, catches up with Ballard about half-way to their destination. They cruise along a couple of metres over the muddy substrate.

  “Your lights,” Ballard says.

  “We don’t need them. Sonar works in the dark.”

  “Are you just breaking the regs for the sheer thrill of it, now?”

  “The fish down here, they key on things that glow—”

  “Turn your lights on. That’s an order.”

  Clarke does not answer. She watches the twin beams beside her, Ballard’s squid shining steady and unwavering, Ballard’s headlamp slicing the water in erratic arcs as she moves her head …

  “I told you,” Ballard says, “turn your—Christ!”

  It was just a glimpse, caught for a moment in the sweep of Ballard’s headlight. She jerks her head around and it slides back out of sight. Then it looms up in the squid’s beam, huge and terrible.

  The abyss is grinning at them, teeth bared.

  A mouth stretches across the width of the beam, and extends into darkness on either side. It is crammed with conical teeth the size of human hands, and they do not look the least bit fragile.

  Ballard makes a strangled sound and dives into the mud. The benthic ooze boils up around her in a seething cloud; she disappears in a torrent of planktonic corpses.

  Lenie Clarke stops and waits, unmoving. She stares transfixed at that threatening smile. Her whole body feels electrified, she has never been so explicitly
aware of herself. Every nerve fires and freezes at the same time. She is terrified.

  But she is also, somehow, completely in control of herself. She reflects on this paradox as Ballard’s abandoned squid slows and stops itself, scant metres from that endless row of teeth. She wonders at her own analytical clarity as the third squid, with its burden of sensors, decelerates past and takes up position beside Ballard’s.

  There in the light, the grin does not change.

  After a few moments, Clarke raises her sonar pistol and fires. We’re here, she realizes, checking the readout. That’s the outcropping.

  She swims closer. The smile hangs there, enigmatic and enticing. Now she can see bits of bone at the roots of the teeth, and tatters of decomposed flesh trailing from the gums.

  She turns and backtracks. The cloud on the seabed has nearly settled.

  “Ballard,” she says in her synthetic voice.

  Nobody answers.

  Clarke reaches down through the mud, feeling blind, until she touches something warm and trembling.

  The seabed explodes in her face.

  Ballard erupts from the substrate, trailing a muddy comet’s tail. Her hand rises from that sudden cloud, clasped around something glinting in the transient light. Clarke sees the knife, twists almost too late; the blade glances off her ’skin, igniting nerves along her ribcage. Ballard lashes out again. This time Clarke catches the knife-hand as it shoots past, twists it, pushes. Ballard tumbles away.

  “It’s me!” Clarke shouts; the ’skin turns her voice into a tinny vibrato.

  Ballard rises up again, white eyes unseeing, knife still in hand.

  Clarke holds up her hands. “It’s okay! There’s nothing here! It’s dead!”

  Ballard stops. She stares at Clarke. She looks over to the squids, to the smile they illuminate. She stiffens.

  “It’s some kind of whale,” Clarke says. “It’s been dead a long time.”

  “A … a whale?” Ballard rasps. She begins to shake.

  There’s no need to feel embarrassed, Clarke almost says, but doesn’t. Instead, she reaches out and touches Ballard lightly on the arm. Is this how you do it? she wonders.

  Ballard jerks back as if scalded.

  I guess not …

  “Um, Jeanette…” Clarke begins.

  Ballard raises a trembling hand, cutting Clarke off. “I’m okay. I want to g … I think we should get back now, don’t you?”

  “Okay,” Clarke says. But she doesn’t really mean it.

  She could stay out here all day.

  * * *

  Ballard is at the library again. She turns, passing a casual hand over the brightness control as Clarke comes up behind her; the display darkens before Clarke can see what it is.

  “It was a Ziphiid,” Ballard says. “A beaked whale. Very rare. They don’t dive this deep.”

  Clarke listens, not really interested.

  “It must have died and rotted further up, and sank.” Ballard’s voice is slightly raised. She looks almost furtively at something on the other side of the lounge. “I wonder what the chances are of that happening.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, in all the ocean, something that big just happening to drop out of the sky a few hundred metres away. The odds of that must be pretty low.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” Clarke reaches over and brightens the display. One half of the screen glows softly with luminous text. The other holds the rotating image of some complex molecule.

  “What’s this?” Clarke asks.

  Ballard steals another glance across the lounge. “Just an old biopsyche text the library had on file. I was browsing through it. Used to be an interest of mine.”

  Clarke looks at her. “Uh-huh.” She bends over and studies the display. Some sort of technical chemistry. The only thing she really understands is the caption beneath the graphic.

  She reads it aloud: “True Happiness.”

  “Yeah. A tricyclic with four side chains.” Ballard points at the screen. “Whenever you’re happy, really happy, that’s what does it to you.”

  “When did they find that out?”

  “I don’t know. It’s an old book.”

  Clarke stares at the revolving simulacrum. It disturbs her, somehow. It floats there over that smug stupid caption, and it says something she doesn’t want to hear.

  You’ve been solved, it tells her. You’re mechanical. Chemicals and electricity. Everything you are, every dream, every action, it all comes down to a change of voltage somewhere, or a—what did she say—a tricyclic with four side chains …

  “It’s wrong,” Clarke murmurs. Or they’d be able to fix us, when we broke down …

  “Sorry?” Ballard says.

  “It’s saying we’re just these … soft computers. With faces.”

  Ballard shuts off the terminal.

  “That’s right,” she says. “And some of us may even be losing those.”

  The jibe registers, but it doesn’t hurt. Clarke straightens and moves towards the ladder.

  “Where are you going? You going outside again?” Ballard asks.

  “The shift isn’t over. I thought I’d clean out the duct on number two.”

  “It’s a bit late to start on that, Lenie. The day will be over before we’re even half done.” Ballard’s eyes dart away again. This time Clarke follows the glance to the full-length mirror on the far wall.

  She sees nothing of particular interest there.

  “I’ll work late.” Clarke grabs the railing, swings her foot onto the top rung.

  “Lenie,” Ballard says, and Clarke swears she hears a tremor in that voice. She looks back, but the other woman is moving to Communications. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t go with you,” she’s saying. “I’m in the middle of debugging one of the telemetry routines.”

  “That’s fine,” Clarke says. She feels the tension starting to rise. Beebe is shrinking again. She starts down the ladder.

  “Are you sure you’re okay going out alone? Maybe you should wait until tomorrow.”

  “No. I’m okay.”

  “Well, remember to keep your receiver open. I don’t want you getting lost on me again…”

  Clarke is in the wetroom. She climbs into the airlock and runs through the ritual. It no longer feels like drowning. It feels like being born again.

  * * *

  She awakens into darkness, and the sound of weeping.

  She lies there for a few minutes, confused and uncertain. The sobs come from all sides, soft but omnipresent in Beebe’s resonant shell. She hears nothing else except her own heartbeat.

  She is afraid. She isn’t sure why. She wishes the sounds would go away.

  Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles at the hatch. It opens into a semi-darkened corridor; meager light escapes from the lounge at one end. The sounds come from the other direction, from deepening darkness. She follows them through an infestation of pipes and conduits.

  Ballard’s quarters. The hatch is open. An emerald readout sparkles in the darkness, bestowing no detail upon the hunched figure on the pallet.

  “Ballard,” Clarke says softly. She does not want to go in.

  The shadow moves, seems to look up at her. “Why won’t you show it?” it says, its voice pleading.

  Clarke frowns in the darkness. “Show what?”

  “You know what! How … afraid you are!”

  “Afraid?”

  “Of being here, of being stuck at the bottom of this horrible dark ocean…”

  “I don’t understand,” Clarke whispers. The claustrophobia in her, restless again, begins to stir.

  Ballard snorts, but the derision seems forced. “Oh, you understand all right. You think this is some sort of competition, you think if you can just keep it all inside you’ll win somehow … but it isn’t like that at all, Lenie, it isn’t helping to keep it hidden like this, we’ve got to be able to trust each other down here or we’re lost…”

  She shifts slightly on the bunk. Clarke’s
eyes, enhanced by the caps, can pick out a few details now; rough edges embroider Ballard’s silhouette, the folds and creases of normal clothing, unbuttoned to the waist. She thinks of a cadaver, half-dissected, rising on the table to mourn its own mutilation.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Clarke says.

  “I’ve tried to be friendly,” Ballard says. “I’ve tried to get along with you, but you’re so cold, you won’t even admit … I mean, you couldn’t like it down here, nobody could, why can’t you just admit—”

  “But I don’t, I … I hate it in here. It’s like Beebe’s going to … to clench around me. And all I can do is wait for it to happen.”

  Ballard nods in the darkness. “Yes, yes, I know what you mean.” She seems somehow encouraged by Clarke’s admission. “And no matter how much you tell yourself—” She stops. “You hate it in here?”

  Did I say something wrong? Clarke wonders.

  “Out there is hardly any better, you know,” Ballard says. “Outside is even worse! There’s mudslides and steam vents and giant fish trying to eat you all the time, you can’t possibly … but … you don’t mind all that, do you?”

  Somehow, her tone has turned accusing. Clarke shrugs.

  “No, you don’t.” Ballard is speaking slowly now. Her voice drops to a whisper: “You actually like it out there. Don’t you?”

  Reluctantly, Clarke nods. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “But it’s so … the rift can kill you, Lenie. It can kill us. A hundred different ways. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think about it much. I guess it does, sort of.”

  “Then why are you so happy out there?” Ballard cries. “It doesn’t make any sense…”

  I’m not exactly “happy,” Clarke thinks. Aloud, she only says, “I don’t know. It’s not that weird, lots of people do dangerous things. What about free-fallers? What about mountain climbers?”

  But Ballard doesn’t answer. Her silhouette has grown rigid on the bed. Suddenly, she reaches over and turns on the cubby light.

  Lenie Clarke blinks against the sudden brightness. Then the room dims as her eyecaps darken.

  “Jesus Christ!” Ballard shouts at her. “You sleep in that fucking costume now?”

  It is something else Clarke hasn’t thought about. It just seems easier.