Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  Someone raps on metal. "Lenie?"

  She rises, pushes at the hatch.

  "Hey Lenie, I think I've got a bad slave channel on one of the squids. I was wondering if you could—"

  "Sure." Clarke nods. "Fine. Only not right now, okay, um—"

  "Judy," says Caraco, sounding slightly miffed.

  "Right. Judy." In fact, Clarke hasn't forgotten. But Beebe's way too crowded these days. Lately Clarke's learned to lose the occasional name. It helps keep things comfortably distant.

  Sometimes.

  "Excuse me," she says, brushing past Caraco. "I've got to get outside."

  * * *

  In a few places, the rift is almost gentle.

  Usually the heat stabs up in boiling muddy pillars or jagged bolts of superheated liquid. Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass. Not here, though. In this one spot, nestled between lava pillows and safe from Beebe's prying ears, the heat wafts up through the mud like a soft breeze. The underlying bedrock must be porous.

  She comes here when she can, keeping to the bottom en route to foil Beebe's sonar. The others don't know about this place yet; she'd just as soon keep it that way. Sometimes she comes here to watch convection stir the mud into lazy curlicues. Sometimes she splits the seals on her 'skin, basks face and arms in the thirty-degree seep.

  Sometimes she just comes here to sleep.

  She lies with the shifting mud at her back, staring up into blackness. This is how you fall asleep when you can't close your eyes; you stare into the dark, and when you start seeing things you know you're dreaming.

  Now she sees herself, the high priestess of a new troglodyte society. She was the first one here, deep at peace while the others were still being cut open and reshaped by grubby Dryback hands. She's the founding mother, the template against which other, rawer recruits trace themselves. They come down and they see that her eyes are always capped, and they go and do likewise.

  But she knows it isn't true. The rift is the real creative force here, a blunt hydraulic press forcing them all into shapes of its own choosing. If the others are anything like her it's because they're all being squeezed in the same mold.

  And let's not forget the GA. If Ballard was right, they made sure we weren't too different to start with.

  There are all the superficial differences, of course. A bit of racial diversity. Token beaters, token victims, males and females equally represented...

  Clarke has to smile at that. Count on Management to jam a bunch of sexual dysfunctionals together and then make sure the gender ratio is balanced. Nice of them to try and see that nobody gets left out.

  Except for Ballard, of course.

  But at least they learn from their mistakes. Dozing at three thousand meters, Lenie Clarke wonders what their next one will be.

  * * *

  Sudden, stabbing pain in the eyes. She tries to scream; smart implants feel tongue and lips in motion, mistranslate:

  "Nnnnaaaaah..."

  She knows the feeling. She's had it once or twice before. She dives blindly on a random heading. The pain in her head leaps from intense to unbearable.

  "Aaaaaa—"

  She twists back in the opposite direction. A bit better. She trips her headlamp, kicking as hard as she can. The world turns from black to solid brown. Zero viz. Mud seething on all sides. Somewhere close by she hears rocks splitting open.

  Her headlamp catches the outcropping looming up a split second before she hits it. The shock rocks her skull, runs down her spine like a small earthquake. There's a different flavor of pain up there now, mingling with the searing in her eyes. She gropes blindly around the obstacle, keeps going. Her body feels— warm—

  It takes a lot of heat to get through a diveskin, especially a class four. Those things are built for thermal stress.

  Eyecaps, on the other hand...

  Black. The world is black again, and clear. Clarke's headlamp stabs out across open space, lays a jiggling footprint on the mud a good ten meters away.

  The view's still rippling, though.

  The pain seems to be fading. She can't be sure. So many nerves have been screaming for so long that even the echoes are torture. She clutches her head, still kicking; the movement twists her around to face the way she came.

  Her secret hideaway has exploded into a wall of mud and sulfur compounds, boiling up from the seabed. Clarke checks her thermister; 45°C, and she's a good ten meters away. Boiled fish skeletons spin in the thermals. Geysers hiss further in, unseen.

  The seep must have burst through the crust in an instant; any flesh caught in that eruption would have boiled off the bone before anything as elaborate as a flight reflex could cut in. A shudder shakes Clarke's body. Another one.

  Just luck. Just stupid luck I was far enough away. I could be dead now. I could be dead I could be dead I could be dead—

  Nerves fire in her thorax; she doubles over. But you can't sob without breathing. You can't cry with your eyes pinned open. The routines are all there, stuttering into action after years of dormancy, but the pieces they work on have all been changed. The whole body wakes up in a straitjacket.

  —dead dead dead—

  That small, remote part of her kicks in, the part she saves for these occasions. It wonders, off in the distance, at the intensity of her reaction. This was hardly the first time that Lenie Clarke thought she was going to die.

  But this was the first time in years that it seemed to matter.

  Waterbed

  Taking off his diveskin is like gutting himself.

  He can't believe how much he's come to depend on it, how hard it is to come out from inside. The eyecaps are even harder. Fischer sits on his pallet, staring at the sealed hatch while Shadow whispers it's okay, you're alone, you're safe. Half an hour goes by before he can bring himself to believe her.

  Finally, when he bares his eyes, the cubby lights are so dim he can hardly see. He turns them up until the room is twilit. The eyecaps sit in the palm of his hand, pale and opaque in the semidarkness, like jellied circles of eggshell. It's strange to blink without feeling them under his eyelids. He feels so exposed.

  He has to do it, though. It's part of the process. That's what this is all about; opening yourself up.

  Lenie's in her cubby, just centimeters away. If it wasn't for this bulkhead Fischer could reach right out and touch her.

  This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow said way back then. So he does it now, to himself. For Shadow.

  Thinking about Lenie.

  Sometimes he thinks Lenie's the only other real person on the whole rift. The others are robots; glass robot eyes, matte black robot bodies, lurching through programmed routines that do nothing but keep other, bigger machines running. Even their names sound mechanical. Nakata. Caraco.

  Not Lenie, though. There's someone inside her 'skin, her eyes may be glassed-in but they're not glass. She's real. Fischer knows he can touch her.

  Of course, that's why he keeps getting into trouble. He keeps touching. But Lenie would be different, if only he could break through. She's more like Shadow than all the others ever were. Older, though.

  No older than I'd be now, Shadow murmurs, and maybe that's it.

  His mouth moves —I'm so sorry, Lenie— and no sound comes out. Shadow doesn't correct him.

  This is what you do, she'd said, and then she'd begun to cry. As Fischer cries now. As he always does, when he comes.

  * * *

  The pain wakes him, sometime later. He's curled up on the pallet, and something's cutting into his cheek: a little piece of broken glass.

  A mirror.

  He stares at it, confused. A silver glass shard with a dark bloody tip, like a small tooth. There's no mirror in his cubby.

  He reaches up and touches the bulkhead behind his pillow. Lenie's there, Lenie's just the other side. But here, on this side there's a dark l
ine, a rim of shadow he never noticed before. His eyes follow it around the edge of the wall, a gap about half a centimeter wide. Here and there little bits of glass are still wedged into that space.

  There used to be a mirror covering this whole bulkhead. Just like Scanlon's vids. And it wasn't just removed, judging from the little fragments left behind. Somebody smashed it out.

  Lenie. She went through the whole station, before the rest of them came down, and she smashed all the mirrors. He doesn't know why he's so sure, but somehow it seems like exactly the sort of thing Lenie Clarke would do when no one was looking.

  Maybe she doesn't like to see herself. Maybe she's ashamed.

  Go talk to her, Shadow says.

  I can't.

  Yes you can. I'll help you.

  He picks up the tunic of his 'skin. It slithers around his body, its edges fusing together along the midline of his chest. He steps over the sleeves and leggings still spilled across the deck, reaches down for his eyecaps.

  Leave them there.

  No!

  Yes.

  I can't, she'll see me...

  That's what you want, isn't it? Isn't it?

  She doesn't even like me, she'll just—

  Leave them. I said I'll help you.

  He leans against the closed hatch, eyes shut, his breathing loud and rapid in his ears.

  Go on. Go on.

  The corridor outside is in deep twilight. Fischer moves along it to Lenie's sealed hatch. He touches it, afraid to knock.

  From behind, someone taps his shoulder.

  "She's out," Brander says. His 'skin is done right up to his neck, arms and legs completely sealed. His capped eyes are blank and hard. And there's the usual edge in his voice, that same familiar tone saying Just give me an excuse, asshole, just do anything...

  Maybe he wants Lenie too.

  Don't get him mad, Shadow says.

  Fischer swallows. "I just wanted to talk to her."

  "She's out."

  "Okay. I'll...I'll try later."

  Brander reaches out, pokes Fischer's face. His finger comes away sticky.

  "You're cut," he says.

  "It's nothing. I'm okay."

  "Too bad."

  Fischer tries to edge past Brander to his own cubby. The corridor pushes them together.

  Brander clenches his fists. "Don't you fucking touch me."

  "I'm not, I'm just trying to— I mean..." Fischer falls silent, glances around. No one else anywhere.

  Deliberately, Brander relaxes.

  "And for Christ's sake put your eyes back in," he says. "Nobody wants to look in there."

  He turns and walks away.

  * * *

  They say Lubin sleeps out here. Lenie too, sometimes, but Lubin hasn't slept in his bunk since the rest of them came down. He keeps his headlight off, and he stays away from the lit part of the Throat, and nothing bothers him. Fischer heard Nakata and Caraco talking about it on the last shift.

  It's starting to sound like a good idea. The less time he spends in Beebe these days, the better.

  The station is a dim faraway blotch, glowing to Fischer's left. Brander's in there. He goes on duty in three hours. Fischer figures he can just stay out here until then. He doesn't really need to go inside much. None of them do. There's a little desalinator piggybacked on his electrolyser in case he gets thirsty, and a bunch of flaps and valves that do things he doesn't want to think about, when he has to piss or take a dump.

  He's getting a bit hungry, but he can wait. He's fine out here as long as nothing attacks him.

  Brander just won't let him alone. Fischer doesn't know what Brander's got against him—

  Oh yes you do, says Shadow.

  —but he knows that look. Brander wants him to fuck up real bad.

  The others keep out of it, for the most part. Nakata, the nervous one, just keeps out of everyone's way. Caraco acts like she couldn't care less if he boiled alive in a smoker. Lubin just sits there, looking at the floor and smoldering; even Brander leaves him alone.

  And Lenie. Lenie's cold and distant as a mountaintop. No, Fischer's not getting any help with Brander. So when it comes to a choice between the monsters out here or the one in there, it's an easy call.

  Caraco and Nakata are doing a hull check back at the station. Their distant voices buzz distractingly along Fischer's jaw. He shuts his receiver off and settles down behind an outcropping of basalt pillows.

  Later, he can't remember drifting off.

  * * *

  "Listen, cocksucker. I just did two shifts end to end because you didn't show up for work when you were supposed to. Then half another shift looking for you. We thought you were in trouble. We assumed you were in trouble. Don't tell me—"

  Brander pushes Fischer up against the wall.

  "Don't tell me," he says again, "that you weren't. You don't want to say that."

  Fischer looks around the ready room. Nakata watches from the opposite bulkhead, jumpy as a cat. Lubin rattles around in the equipment lockers, his back to the proceedings. Caraco racks her fins and edges past them to the ladder.

  "Carac—"

  Brander slams him hard against the wall.

  Caraco, her foot on the bottom rung, turns and watches for a moment. A smile ghosts across her face. "Don't look at me, Gerry my man. This is your problem." She climbs away overhead.

  Brander's face hovers a few centimeters away. His hood is still sealed, except for the mouth flap. His eyes look like translucent glass balls embedded in black plastic. He tightens his grip.

  "So, cocksucker?"

  "I'm...sorry—" Fischer stammers.

  "You're sorry." Brander glances over his shoulder, includes Nakata in the joke. "He's sorry."

  Nakata laughs, too loudly.

  Lubin clanks in the locker, still ignoring them all. The airlock begins cycling.

  "I don't think," Brander says, raising his voice over the sudden gurgle, "that you're sorry enough."

  The 'lock swings open. Lenie Clarke steps out, fins in one hand. Her blank eyes sweep across the room; they don't pause at Fischer. She carries her fins to the drying rack without a word.

  Brander punches Fischer in the stomach. Fischer doubles over, gasping; his head smashes into the airlock hatch. He can't catch his breath. The deck scrapes his cheek. Brander's boot is almost touching his nose.

  "Hey." Lenie's voice, distant, not particularly interested.

  "Hey yourself, Lenie. He's got it coming."

  "I know." A moment passes. "Still."

  "Judy got nailed by a viperfish, looking for him. She could've been killed."

  "Maybe." Lenie sounds as if she's very tired. "So why isn't Judy here?"

  "I'm here," Brander says.

  Fischer's lung is working again. Gulping air, he pushes himself up against the bulkhead. Brander glares at him. Lubin's back in the room now, just off to one side. Watching.

  Lenie stands in the middle of the ready room. She shrugs.

  "What?" Brander demands.

  "I don't know." She glances indifferently at Fischer. "It's just, he...he just fucked up. He didn't mean any har—"

  She stops. Fischer gets the sense that she's looking straight through him, through the bulkhead, right out into the abyss itself to something only she can see. Whatever it is, she doesn't like it much.

  "Ah, fuck it." She heads for the ladder. "None of my business anyway."

  Lenie, please...

  Brander turns back to Fischer as she climbs out of sight. Fischer stares back. Endless seconds go by. Brander's fist hovers in mid-air.

  It lashes out almost too fast to see. Fischer reels, catches himself on a conduit. Lights swarm across his left eye. He blinks them away, hanging onto the bulkhead. Everything hurts.

  Brander unclenches his fist. "Lenie's way too nice," he remarks, flexing his fingers. "Personally, I don't care whether you meant any harm or not."

  Doppelgänger

  Beebe's almost as soundproof as the inside of an e
cho chamber.

  Lenie Clarke sits on her bunk and listens to the walls. She can't hear any actual words, but a sudden impact of flesh against metal was clear enough a few minutes ago. Now, low voices converse out in the lounge. Water gurgles through a pipe somewhere.

  She thinks she hears something moving downstairs.

  She lays her ear against a random pipe. Nothing. Another; a hiss of compressed gas. A third; the faint, tinny echo of slow footsteps, scraping across the lower deck. After a moment a muted hum vibrates through the plumbing.

  The medical scanner.

  It's none of my business. It's between them. Brander's got his reasons, and Fischer—

  He didn't mean any harm.

  Fischer's nothing. He's a pathetic, twisted asshole, nobody's problem but his own. It's too bad he gets under Brander's skin like that, but life's not guaranteed to be fair. No one knows that better than Lenie Clarke. She knows what it's like. She remembers the fists out of nowhere, the million little things you didn't even know you'd done wrong until it was too late. Nobody helped her. She'd managed, though. Sex worked, sometimes, as a diversionary tactic. Other times you just had to run.

  He didn't mean any harm.

  She shakes her head.

  Well I fucking didn't either!

  The sound sinks in before the pain does. A dull, solid thud, like a fish hitting a floodlight. Blood oozes from the torn skin of her knuckles, the droplets almost black to her filtered vision. The stinging that follows is a welcome distraction.

  The bulkhead, of course, is completely unmarked.

  Out in the lounge, the conversation has stopped. Clarke sits rigid on the pallet, sucking her hand. Eventually, the voices start up again.

  Almost time to go on shift with Nakata and Brander. Clarke looks around her cubby, hesitating. There's something she has to do before she opens the hatch, something important, and she can't quite remember what it is. Her eyes keep coming back to the same wall, looking for something that isn't—