Undertow

by Elizabeth Bear

  That was a good sign that it would dry due to body heat and crack off his shirt if he just kept wearing it. The autofit and self-clean might be able to take care of the rest if he gave them a chance to regenerate.

  He washed his face again and rested a few moments longer, contemplating the deep ache in his muscles, the pull of tendons against bones. He was tired—weary—but despite exhaustion and bruises and the sharply tender spot on the back of his head, he was also hungry. And thirsty, but the water purifier could satisfy that want.

  He parted reeds and stepped through, surprised to find two of the three ranids crouched beside his cooker, three bright fish speared on twigs turning over it. “Hello, Tetra,” he said, making an effort to sound polite and then rolling his eyes at his own silliness. As if they could hear the sound of his voice. “Hello, Caetei.”

  The short one made a gesture André took as greeting. The tall one extended a scraped and roasted fish; he pinched the twig between his thumb and first two fingers. He expected bland meat, scorched with the scales burned off. But it smelled of herbs. He sucked flaking flesh from the skeleton, chewing carefully. Gagging on a fish bone out in the bayou would be a hell of a way to die.

  Not bad, but it could use some salt.

  He’d never actually seen them eat before—not anything more solid than green tea or gruel—and the process was fascinating, if revolting. They hadn’t teeth; they were filter feeders. Their wide bony mouths weren’t fitted to chew or tear, though the bony frill around the rim of mandible and maxilla could deliver a nasty bite…if you believed the media.

  Tetra was processing the filets, using an unlotus leaf spread in a flat dryish spot as a cutting board. It did not so much slice into bites as mince into a paste. The knife was teak-handled, with a blade of some plastic or shock ceramic. The ranid cradled it in a three-fingered, one-thumbed hand. The thumb and the outside two fingers folded around the handle; the first finger extended along the spine of the blade, turning the knife, in essence, into a slicing claw.

  A claw that it used with graceful facility. It portioned the minced fish into thirds, scraped each onto another unlotus leaf, and handed the first to Caetei. As it was half rising—to call Gourami from the water, at a guess—André realized he had the means to give the fish the help it needed. He stuck the twig with the nibbled meat on it into the ground and stood as well.

  He was turning back, a squeeze tube of salted plum paste in his hand, when he realized that Tetra and Caetei had both frozen in place like run-down clockwork novelties. Caetei was still couched on the ground, fingers spidered over its plate. Tetra was drawn up tall, shivering slightly with the strain of standing erect on its crooked legs. It stared at André, both eyes focused on his chest, pupils contracted. If it had been human, he would have guessed that it was about to go for him.

  It was about to go for him. Or it was waiting for him to go for it.

  He leaned forward, against the pressure of the regard. Not to make the ranid look down; it wasn’t staring him in the eyes. But trying to reassure it, to reach out to it without grabbing or invading its space.

  Caetei hunched lower on the ground, a glossy mottled rock.

  André actually yelped when something wet touched his hand. The third frog was there, Gourami. It beckoned him closer with two webbed, hooking fingers, and when he hunkered down, it tapped the backs of his knees.

  Well, that was plain enough. Sit. André dropped onto the reed-covered mud and leaned toward the slate Gourami held out. Backlit letters confronted him.

  —You stood when se stood.

  André nodded, hoping the ranid would understand the gesture. Without retracting the slate, it keyed a next phrase, and a next.

  —Se reacted to threat. Se is a far-swimmer. Se would fight.

  André lifted his gaze from the panel. He didn’t want to get into a fight with a ranid in a swamp. “Far-swimmer?” He shaped words carefully.

  Gourami’s fingers rippled, one of them lumpy and swollen. Whether this was agreement or irritation, André was too human to tell. He turned to Tetra; it was fussing with Gourami’s leaf plate as easily as if nothing had happened. It reached out without looking up and brushed the side of its hand against André’s. He was already coming to recognize that gesture, the request for attention, like catching someone’s eye if one were human.

  You couldn’t catch another frog’s gaze through muddy water, though, could you? It made sense, if you thought about it.

  Tetra held out its hand, making a pincher movement. Its webs expanded, as if sucking something that might wriggle away into its grasp. The fingers pointed down; the overall effect was rather like the grab of a crane.

  Bemused, André lifted the salted plum paste into the creature’s grasp. Startlingly swift and deft, Tetra unscrewed the top and began investigating the contents just as any chef would.

  “I’m not sure that’s safe,” André said, but all three ranids ignored him. He turned back to Gourami and its damaged hand. Its fingers writhed on the slate, as if it was trying to frame a comment. When André reached out to touch, the ranid did not withdraw its hand though it leaned its whole body aside.

  André touched gently, stroking tacky, coated skin. There was no heat in the injured flesh, which was odd, because he could feel the sponginess of retained fluid, cushioning the twisted joint. “That needs to be put right,” he said, enunciating carefully as Gourami watched his mouth. “It will slow us.”

  Of course, Tetra wouldn’t understand his words—could barely hear his voice. And even if it could lipread, it wasn’t watching André. But the noises he was making must have drawn its attention, because it sealed the tube of plum paste and shuffled over. André scootched back, not wishing to make the mistake of standing again.

  Even if his butt was getting soaked.

  Tetra reached past him and took Gourami’s hand, disentangling the sticky fingers from the case of the slate. Gourami shuddered, eyes staring off at an obtuse angle from each other. André had the bizarre impression that it was staring at its knees. Tetra must have said something, because Gourami flinched dramatically. And Tetra did something sudden and uncomplicated with its hands. A slight nauseating pop followed, and Gourami made a sound André felt more than heard.

  These conversations would be easier on the headset, he thought. But who’d let a ranid uplink to their wetware through a slate?

  But then it was done, and Tetra went back to fixing Gourami’s dinner. It handed the plate to Gourami without ceremony, though Gourami made a little dance of receiving it. It dabbed at the smears of plum paste decorating the minced fish doubtfully.

  Tuna tartare, André told himself resolutely, watching Gourami scoop the pasty substance into its mouth between sidelong glances at Tetra. The taller ranid crouched over its own dinner in apparent oblivion. Some sort of courtship ritual? Gourami seemed flustered enough.

  André shrugged and applied himself to his own dinner, much improved by the addition of a condiment. As Gourami was wiping the sheen of fat and salt from its leaf with a forefinger, André piled the last sucked fish bones on the ground. “You were going to tell me about far-swimmers,” he said, when the motion caught Gourami’s attention. Maybe he was getting the hang of this.

  The froggie scrubbed its hands together, then wiped them on the underside of the leaf before searching out its slate.

  —One who has earned mating. It still favored the finger when it typed.

  André touched the tip of his tongue to the center of his upper lip and pressed, feeling flesh indent. “But you don’t…mate.”

  —We don’t fuck, Gourami corrected, stabbing at the keys with vicious satisfaction. —We have exoparents and endoparents.

  Typing more slowly now. André wondered if he had guessed right, if it had been angry, or just in a hurry. “Fathers and mothers?” André tried. He had some idea how it worked, or thought he did, anyway.

  Gourami nearly slapped the no key with the side of its palm. —Exoparents mate. Endoparents
bear.

  “What does that have to do with far-swimmers?”

  —You swim from home to mate, it explained. —The farther you swim, the stronger those who will mate with you. Exoparents contribute zygotes. Endoparents raise the broods and teach them.

  “Somebody else’s children.”

  This time, it just pointed at the no button. —Your children, humen. Somebody else’s genes.

  André gestured around the camp. “You’re not a far-swimmer.”

  —I was a liaison.

  “So was Tetra asking if you would be its…endoparent?”

  The ranid hesitated long enough for André to wonder if he’d crossed some line of taboo. Then it crumpled the leaf in its hand and made a quick oblique gesture that André thought meant no. As if realizing that he didn’t understand, it reached for the slate again.

  —not that. And pushed the slate away, decisively. And then just as decisively, took it back. —Pay us.

  “…pay you?”

  —We take you through bayou, not for bandweal or clanweal, you owe. Pay us.

  It stared at him, fishy eyes unblinking, focused intently on his chin. The dropped articles were haste, he thought, not ineptness. Alien cultures, and no way of knowing what sort of bargaining Jean Kroc had done to make it accept his protection. “How do I pay?”

  —Tell me a story, André.

  Gourami was good at understanding humen gestures, for a person. Which was not very good at all compared to the complex information that humen could convey with nothing but a rearrangement of their facial muscles. Se thought the long blinking stare was befuddlement, perhaps shock. But se could not be sure.

  —A story?

  —A narrative. A tale. A fiction. This new slate came with a built-in thesaurus. All these complicated humen synonyms that weren’t, quite.

  Se liked it.

  André Deschênes stopped and now he was definitely staring. Staring and blinking: for a moment, Gourami almost thought of him as a person. But then he said the most astounding thing se’d ever heard. He spread his stubby hands, paler on the ventral than the dorsal surface, and shook his head.

  —I’m sorry, but I don’t know any stories.

  9

  CLOSS WAS LATE ENOUGH THE NEXT MORNING THAT JEFFERSON beat him in, even though Jefferson overslept. Centuries before, virtual commuting had been hailed as the wave of the future. People would eat, sleep, play, work in the same spaces.

  Like so many other predictions, it hadn’t quite worked out. In Jefferson’s opinion, this was because the setup ignored the basic human need for politics. For a community.

  People seemed to enjoy the separation, the act of putting on a suit, skinning up, and coming in to the office. And the ones who didn’t enjoy it needed the discipline. Leaders and followers, the top dog and the pack animals. It was how it was.

  Anyway, Closs’s uncharacteristic tardiness was extraordinarily convenient when Jefferson had contingency plans to lay that he didn’t really want Closs getting wind of. And that Jefferson preferred to implement in person.

  Not that he ever expected to have to use any of this. But it was good to have a fallback position.

  The bioengineering labs were on the Richardson Explorer, a massive vessel currently moored about thirteen kilometers offshore, using the oldest group of omelite platforms as its base. The labs were too delicate to trust to a barge in Novo Haven, and trying to build a permanent structure bigger than a minifab on land on Greene’s World was an exercise in pissing to windward. If unstable earth didn’t collapse into sinkholes beneath it, a vast tropical storm would scour it from the surface.

  On Greene’s World, security meant being able to run.

  Jefferson took a helicopter out. He flew himself, because the day was clear and he needed the hours, and it was just as well if Closs couldn’t corner his pilot and ask awkward questions. All of Charter Trade’s helicopter pilots were ex-military, and all of them revered Timothy Closs.

  The clear morning gave Jefferson dazzling light off the water, and he spent the brief flight marveling as he always did at the view through the poly floor panels. The bay itself was brilliant as white spinel, the drop-off to the gulf delineated by the dashed row of drilling platforms.

  Any clouds were scudding, cotton-candy things, but Jefferson double-checked the weather report compulsively. Weather blew up unexpectedly in Novo Haven, and cyclone season was upon them. Not that a real howler would come tearing out of the tropics without a week of warnings to get the city out of the way—and Rim’s Exigency Corps conjuring like hell to bend its path in the least harmful direction—but savage squalls could arise out of nowhere. And helicopters were inherently delicate creatures, hanging as they did from a single joint.

  The flight, for all his caution, was uneventful. The Richardson Explorer had cleared her landing deck for him. After setting his chopper in the bull’s-eye and powering down, he clambered out of the bubble and met the second mate on deck. “Don’t worry,” he called, as soon as he was close enough to make himself heard over the sea wind without screaming. “This isn’t an inspection tour.”

  The woman smiled too much, but at least it wasn’t that canned fake laughter. “Dr. Schaffner is waiting for you below.”

  He followed her down. Her role of tour guide could have been played by any ensign, and he amused himself by deciding, as they walked, if he would choose to accept the honor in the spirit in which it was offered, or have a word with the captain about the wasteful use of trained officers.

  Maybe a memo, he decided, rather than picking a fight today. And one that didn’t mention this particular officer’s name: she was trying too hard, but her heart was obviously in the right place.

  The forward bioengineering lab was two decks down, still well above the waterline. The second officer rapped on the door, then opened it from a keypad.

  “Why knock if you’re going to let yourself in?”

  She shrugged, lifting the handle. “It’s polite to let them know we’re coming.” And stepped aside to let him precede her.

  He followed her into an unpleasant, echoing space. The ceilings were low, metal, ringing back sounds with hard crispness. The long room was crossed at regular intervals by slate-topped tables cluttered with interfaces, isolation hoods, incubators. A centrifuge hulked at one end of the nearest lab bench like an irate stone toad. Other things hummed or dinged; Jefferson winced.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the second officer. She shrugged. “The safety officer is always after them to wear ear protection in here.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Jefferson said. “Why haven’t they requisitioned soundproofing?”

  “We were denied, M~ Greene.”

  He turned. White noise had drowned out her footsteps, but Dr. McCarter’s voice carried over the machinery hum. She was a tall woman, broad-shouldered, made taller and broader by high-heeled slides and a white labcoat. She was a startling blue-eyed blond, her hair twisted up at the nape of her neck. Jefferson wondered how much of it was a skin; she didn’t affect particularly pretty, but there was something about the eyebrows and eyes that was very…engaging. “Denied?”

  When she smiled, her cheeks appled. Even when it was as insincere a smile as she used now. “An unnecessary expense, Chairman. If you would come with me? Dr. Schaffner is expecting us. He’s just selecting some images for you to look at.”

  Jefferson glanced around the lab, with special attention to the scraped ceiling. He hurried two steps to catch up, aware of the second officer’s understated withdrawal. “Unnecessary?”

  “So the lab budget committee informed us. This way, please?” She gestured through a sliding door; he stepped through, and it sealed behind them, cutting the worst of the noise. This was a smaller compartment, the walls upholstered in noise-dampening foam. Dr. Schaffner sat before a wood-topped desk, hunched over an interface. He peered one-eyed through an eyepiece, and lifted one hand in greeting as they came in.

  “Hello, Doctor.”

&nbs
p; “Jeff.”

  Schaffner got up, rubbing his nose to smooth away the dent from the eyepiece, and blinked a few times to refocus. He stuck out his left hand, and Jefferson shook it while Dr. McCarter stepped back, rounding the desk to the far side.

  Schaffner was slab-cheeked, tall, a little stooped, with theatrically busy eyebrows. He continued. “I’ve picked out some good ones to show you, but I hope you don’t think this is going to be easy. Or fast, for that matter.”

  Jefferson nodded, taking the chair Schaffner gestured him into. He smoothed his hands over the warm wood of the table, considering its contrast to the dinged and whining equipment on the other side of the wall. “What are we talking about here, in terms of fast?”

  “Years,” Schaffner said. He fielded a significant glance from McCarter and amended, “Years at the earliest, reasonably speaking. If we had a sample of the pathogen to back-engineer, it would be different, of course. But we—”

  “—don’t. I understand. Hey, Neil, what if you got lucky?”

  “How lucky? Lucky enough, we could have you something—for testing, not for use—in a few months, but that’s so unlikely I wouldn’t want to hang a statistic on it.”

  “I think the chairman is asking what would happen if he saw to it that we got lucky,” McCarter translated, without looking up. She seemed to be scanning files on her headset; Jefferson caught the telltale flicker of her eyes and the micromotion of her fingers. “If I’m not out of place in saying so.”

  Was her voice cool? Or was she distracted? She seemed not to notice as Jefferson eyed her, briefly. He cleared his throat and said, “How come you can get a hardwood interface, but no ceiling tiles?”

  The last directed at Schaffner, who rolled his eyes theatrically. “Because the desk comes from equipment and durable goods, and the tiles come through facilities. Genius, isn’t it?”

  Jefferson shook his head. “Genius. I’ll see if I can get somebody fired for you, Neil. Now, what about these pictures you wanted me to see?”