Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  His second reaction was to remember that he had shut it off. Only emergency priorities could set it ringing.

  "Shit."

  He clapped his hands, twice; fake Preteela froze in mid-scream. "Answer."

  A brief squirt of noise as machines exchanged recognition codes. "Grid Authority here. We urgently need of a 'scaphe pilot for the Channer run tonight, liftoff twenty-three hundred from the Astoria platform. Are you available?"

  "Twenty-three? Middle of the night?"

  A barely audible hiss on the line. Nothing else.

  "Hello?" Joel said.

  "Are you available?" the voice asked again.

  "Who is this?"

  "This is the scheduling subroutine, DI43, Hongcouver office."

  Joel eyed the petrified tableau waiting in his 'phones. "That's pretty late. What's the payscale?"

  "Eight point five times base," Hongcouver said. "At your rate salary that would—"

  Joel gulped. "I'm available."

  "Goodbye."

  "Wait! What's the run?"

  "Astoria to Channer Vent return." Subroutines were pretty literal-minded.

  "I mean, what's the cargo?"

  "Passengers," said the voice. "Goodbye."

  Joel stood there a moment, feeling his erection deflate. "Time." A luminous readout appeared in the air above Preteela's right shoulder: thirteen ten. He'd have to be on site a half-hour before liftoff, and Astoria was only a couple of hours away...

  "Lots of time," he said to no one in particular.

  But he wasn't really in the mood any more. Work had a way of doing that to him lately. Not the drudgery, or the long hours, or any of the things most people would complain about. Joel liked boredom. You didn't have to think much.

  But work had gotten really weird lately.

  He pulled the eyephones off his head and looked down at himself. Feedback gloves on his hands, his feet, hanging off his flaccid dick. Take away the headset and it really was a rinky-dink system. At least until he could afford the full suit.

  Still, beats real life. No bullshit, no bugs, no worries.

  On impulse, he rang up a friend in SeaTac— "Jess, catch this code for me, will you?" — and squirted the recognition sequence Hongcouver had just sent.

  "Got it," Jess said.

  "It's valid, right?"

  "Checks out. Why?"

  "Just got called up for a midocean run that's going to peak around three in the morning. Octuple pay. I just wondered if it was some kind of cruel hoax."

  "Well, if it is, the Router's developed a sense of humor. Hey, maybe they've put in a head cheese up there."

  "Yeah." Ray Stericker's face flashed through his mind.

  "So what's the job?" Jess asked.

  "Don't know. Ferrying something, I guess, but why I have to do it in the middle of the night is beyond me."

  "Strange days."

  "Yeah. Thanks, Jess."

  "Any time."

  Strange days indeed. H-bombs going off all over the abyssal plain, all this traffic going to places nobody ever went to before, no traffic at all in places that used to be just humming. Flash fires and barbecued refugees and slagged shipyards. Chipheads with rotenone cocktails and giant fish. A couple of weeks back Joel had shown up for a run to Mendocino and found some guy sandblasting a radiation hazard logo off the cargo casing.

  The whole bloody coast is getting too dangerous. N'AmPac's gonna burn down way before it ever floods.

  But that was the beauty of being a freelancer. He could pick up and move. He would pick up and move, leave the bloody coast behind— shit, maybe even leave N'Am behind. There was always South Am. Or Antarctica, for that matter. He would definitely look into it.

  Right after this run.

  Scatter

  She finds him on the abyssal plain, searching. He's been out here for hours; sonar showed him tracking back and forth, back and forth, all the way to the carousel, out to the whale, back again, in and around the labyrinthine geography of the Throat itself.

  Alone. All alone.

  She can feel his desperation fifty meters away. The facets of that pain glimmer in her mind as the squid pulls her closer. Guilt. Fear.

  Growing with her approach, anger.

  Her headlight sweeps across a small contrail on the bottom, a wake of mud kicked back into suspension after a million-year sleep. Clarke changes course to follow and kills the beam. Darkness clamps around her. This far out, photons evade even rifter eyes.

  She feels him seething directly ahead. When she pulls up beside him the water swirls with unseen turbulence. Her squid shudders from the impact of Brander's fists.

  "Keep that fucking thing out of here! You know he doesn't like it!"

  She draws down the throttle. The soft hydraulic whine fades.

  "Sorry," she says. "I just thought—"

  "Fuck, Len, you of all people! You trying to drive him off? You want him blasted into the fucking stratosphere when that thing goes off?"

  "I'm sorry." When he doesn't respond, she adds, "I don't think he's out here. Sonar—"

  "Sonar's not worth shit if he's on the bottom."

  "Mike, you're not going find him rooting around here in the dark. We're blind this far out."

  A wave of pistol clicks sweeps across her face. "I've got this for close range," says the machinery in Brander's throat.

  "I don't think he's out here," Clarke says again. "And even if he is, I don't know if he'd let you get close after—"

  "That was a long time ago," the darkness buzzes back. "Just because you're still nursing grudges from the second grade..."

  "That's not what I meant," she says. She tries to speak gently, but the vocoder strips her voice down to a soft rasp. "I only meant, it's been so long. He's gone so far, we barely even see him on sonar any more. I don't know if he'd let any of us near him."

  "We've got to try. We can't just leave him here. If I can just get close enough to tune him in..."

  "He couldn't tune back," Clarke reminds him. "He went over before we changed, Mike. You know that."

  "Fuck off! That's not the point!"

  But it is, and they both know it. And Lenie Clarke suddenly knows something else, too. She knows that part of her is enjoying Brander's pain. She fights it, tries to ignore the realization of her own realization, because the only way to keep it from leaking into Brander's head is to keep it out of her own. She can't. No: she doesn't want to. Mike Brander, know-it-all, destroyer of perverts, self-righteous self-appointed self-avenger, is finally getting some small payback for what he did to Gerry Fischer.

  Give it up, she wants to shout at him. Gerry's gone. Didn't you tune him in when that prick Scanlon held him hostage? Didn't you feel how empty he was? Or was all that too much for you, did you just look the other way instead? Well here's the abstract, Mikey: he's nowhere near human enough to grasp your half-assed gestures of atonement.

  No absolution this time, Mike. You get to take this to your grave. Ain't justice a bitch?

  She waits for him to tune her in, to feel her contempt diluting that frantic morass of guilt and self-pity. It doesn't happen. She waits and waits. Mike Brander, awash in his own symphony, just doesn't notice.

  "Shit," hisses Lenie Clarke, softly.

  "Come in," calls Alice Nakata, from very far away. "Everybody, come in."

  Clarke boosts her gain. "Alice? Lenie."

  "Mike," Brander says a long moment later. "I'm listening."

  "You should get back here," Nakata tells them. "They called."

  "Who? The GA?"

  "They say they want to evacuate us. They say twelve hours."

  * * *

  "This is bullshit," says Brander.

  "Who was it?" Lubin wants to know.

  "I don't know," Nakata says. "I think, no one that we've spoken to before."

  "And that was all he said? Evac in twelve?"

  "And we are supposed to remain inside Beebe until then."

  "No explanation? No reason given?"


  "He hung up as soon as I acknowledged the order." Nakata looks vaguely apologetic. "I did not get the chance to ask, and nobody answered when I called back."

  Brander stands up and heads for Comm.

  "I've already set retry," Clarke says. "It'll beep when it gets through."

  Brander stops, stares at the nearest bulkhead. Punches it.

  "This is bullshit!"

  Lubin just watches.

  "Maybe not," Nakata says. "Maybe it's good news. If they were going to leave us here when they detonated, why would they lie about extraction? Why talk to us at all?"

  "To keep us nice and close to ground zero," Brander spits. "Now here's a question for you, Alice: if they're really planning on evacuating us, why not tell us the reason?"

  Nakata shrugs helplessly. "I do not know. The GA does not often tell us what is going on."

  Maybe they're trying to psyche us out, Clarke muses. Maybe they want us to make a break, for some reason.

  "Well," she says aloud, "how far could we get in twelve hours anyway? Even with squids? What are the chances we'd reach safe distance?"

  "Depends on how big the bomb is," Brander says.

  "Actually," Lubin remarks, "assuming that they want to keep us here for twelve hours because that would be enough time to get away, we might be able to work out the range."

  "If they didn't just pull that number out of a hat," Brander says.

  "It still makes no sense," Nakata insists. "Why cut off our communications? That is guaranteed to make us suspicious."

  "They took Judy," Lubin says.

  Clarke takes a deep breath. "One thing's true, anyway."

  The others turn.

  "They want to keep us here," she finishes.

  Brander smacks fist into palm. "And that's the best single reason for getting the fuck out, you ask me. Soon as we can."

  "I agree," Lubin says.

  Brander stares at him.

  * * *

  "I'll find him," she says. "I'll do my best, anyway."

  Brander shakes his head. "I should stay. We should all stay. The chances of finding him—"

  "The chances of finding him are best if I go out alone," Clarke reminds him. "He still comes out, sometimes, when I'm there. You wouldn't even get close."

  He knows that, of course. He's just making token protests; if he can't get absolution from Fischer, at least he can try and look like a saint to everyone else.

  Still, Clarke remembers, it's not entirely his fault. He's got baggage like the rest of us.

  Even if he did mean harm...

  "Well, the others are waiting. I guess we're off."

  Clarke nods.

  "You coming outside?"

  She shakes her head. "I'll do a sonar sweep first. You never know, I might get lucky."

  "Well, don't take too long. Only eight hours to go."

  "I know."

  "And if you can't find him after an hour—"

  "I know. I'll be right behind you."

  "We'll be—"

  "Out to the dead whale, then steady bearing eighty-five degrees," she says. "I know."

  "Look, you sure about this? We can wait in here for you. One hour's probably not going to make much difference."

  She shakes her head. "I'm sure."

  "Okay." He stands there, looking uncomfortable. One hand starts to rise, wavers, falls back.

  He climbs down the ladder.

  "Mike," she calls down after him.

  He looks up.

  "Do you really think they're going to blow that thing up?"

  He shrugs. "I dunno. Maybe not. But you're right: they want us here for some reason. Whatever it is, I bet we wouldn't like it."

  Clarke considers that.

  "See you soon," Brander says, stepping into the 'lock.

  "'Bye," she whispers.

  * * *

  When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can't hear much of anything these days.

  Lenie Clarke sits in the darkness, listening. When was the last time these walls complained about the pressure? She can't remember. When she first came down here the station groaned incessantly, filled every waking moment with creaking reminders of the weight on its shoulders. But sometime since then it must have made peace with the ocean; the water pushing down and the armor pushing back have finally settled to equilibrium.

  Of course, there are other kinds of pressure on the Juan de Fuca Rift.

  She almost revels in the silence now. No clanging footfalls disturb her, no sudden outbursts of random violence. The only pulse she hears is her own. The only breath comes from the air conditioners.

  She flexes her fingers, lets them dig into the fabric of the chair. She can see into the communications cubby from her position in the lounge. Occasional telltales flicker through the hatchway, the only available light. For Clarke, it's enough; her eyecaps grab those meager photons and show her a room in twilight. She hasn't gone into Comm since the rest of them left. She didn't watch their icons crawl off the edge of the screen, and she hasn't swept the rift for signs of Gerry Fischer.

  She doesn't intend to now. She doesn't know if she ever did.

  Far away, Lubin's lonely windchimes serenade her.

  Clank.

  From below.

  No. Stay away. Leave me alone.

  She hears the airlock draining, hears it open. Three soft footsteps. Movement on the ladder.

  Ken Lubin rises into the lounge like a shadow.

  "Mike and Alice?" she says, afraid to let him begin.

  "Heading out. I told them I'd catch up."

  "We're spreading ourselves pretty thin," she remarks.

  "I think Brander was just as happy to be rid of me for a while."

  She smiles faintly.

  "You're not coming," he says.

  Clarke shakes her head. "Don't try—"

  "I won't."

  He folds himself down into a convenient chair. She watches him move. There's a careful grace about him, there always has been. He moves as though always afraid of damaging something.

  "I thought you might do this," he says after a while.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't know myself until, well..."

  He waits for her to continue.

  "I want to know what's going on," she says at last. "Maybe they really are playing straight with us this time. It's not that unlikely. Maybe things aren't as bad as we thought..."

  Lubin seems to consider that. "What about Fischer? Do you want me to—"

  She barks a short laugh. "Fischer? You really want to drag him through the muck for days on end, and then haul him onto some fucking beach where he can't even stand up without breaking both his legs? Maybe it'd make Mike feel a bit better. Not much of an act of charity for Gerry, though."

  And not, she knows now, for Lenie Clarke either. She's been deluding herself all this time. She felt herself getting stronger and she thought she could just walk away with that gift, take it anywhere. She thought she could pack all of Channer inside of her like some new prosthetic.

  But now. Now the mere thought of leaving brings all her old weakness rushing back. The future opens before her and she feels herself devolving, curling up into some soft prehuman tadpole, cursed now with the memory of how it once felt to be made of steel.

  It's not me. It never was. It was just the rift, using me...

  "I guess," she says at last, "I just didn't change that much after all..."

  Lubin looks as though he's almost smiling.

  His expression awakens some vague, impatient anger in her. "Why did you come back here anyway?" she demands. "You never gave a shit about what any of us did, or why. All you ever cared about was your own agenda, whatever that…"

  Something clicks. Lubin's virtual smile disappears.

  "You know." Clarke says. "You know what this is all about."

  "No."

  "Bullshit, Ken. Mike was right, you know way too much. You knew exactly what question to ask the Drybacks about the CPU on that bomb, you kn
ew all about megatons and bubble diameters. So what's going on?"

  "I don't know. Really." Lubin shakes his head. "I do have—expertise, in certain kinds of operations. Why should that surprise you? Did you really think domestic violence was the only kind that would qualify someone for this job?"

  There's a silence. "I don't believe you," Clarke says at last.

  "That's your prerogative," Lubin says, almost sadly.

  "And why," she asks, "did you come back?"

  "Just now?" Lubin shrugs. "I wanted— I wanted to say I'm sorry. About Karl."

  "Karl? Yeah. Me too. But that's over and done with."

  "He really cared about you, Lenie. He would have come back eventually. I know that."

  She looks at him curiously. "What do you—"

  "But I'm conditioned for tight security, you see, and Acton could see right inside. All the things I did…before. He could see it, there wasn't—"

  Acton could see— "Ken. We've never been able to tune you in. You know that."

  He nods, rubbing his hands together. In the dim blue light Clarke can see sweat beading on his forehead.

  "We get this training," he says, his voice barely a whisper. "Ganzfeld interrogation's a standard tool in corporate and national arsenals, you've got to be able to— to block the signals. I could, mostly, with you people. Or I'd just stay away so it wouldn't be a problem."

  What is he saying, Lenie Clarke asks herself, already knowing. What is he saying?

  "But Karl, he just— he dropped his inhibitors way too— I couldn't keep him out."

  He rubs his face. Clarke has never seen him so fidgety.

  "You know that feeling you get," Lubin says, "when you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar? Or in bed with someone else's lover? There's a formula for it. Some special combination of neurotransmitters. When you feel, you know, you've been--found out."

  Oh my God.

  "I've got a— sort of a conditioned reflex," he tells her. "It kicks in whenever those chemicals build up. I don't really have control over it. And when I feel, down in my gut, that I've been discovered, I just..."

  Five percent, Acton told her, long ago. Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you'll be okay.