Undertow

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Jean, I realize you feel useless. Would it help to talk?”

  He shrugged and glanced over his shoulder for Nouel. Their host was still out of earshot, topside, making ready to get under way. “Lucienne,” Jean said.

  Cricket closed her eyes again, her face a convincing counterfeit of serenity except where her eyelid fluttered on the right-hand side. “That’s not her, back on Earth.”

  “No, it’s not.” And of course it wasn’t fair to talk to Cricket about this, when she felt the loss as acutely as he did. “She thought of herself as expendable.”

  “She wasn’t,” Cricket said, after she’d been quiet long enough that he thought she wouldn’t answer. And then she fell silent again, until without opening her eyes or otherwise shifting, she reached out and fumbled up Jean’s hand by memory. “Damn. Who’s going to pick the tomatoes?”

  Jean squeezed her fingers and didn’t remind her that they’d be underwater by morning. She didn’t respond. A moment later, he stood and went to help Nouel cast off, leaving Cricket behind.

  The water tasted like a coming storm, and the air was full of anticipated electricity. Along the horizon, behind the moving streams of humen ships, a shadow rose as if the edge of the bright night sky was rolling up like a blind, revealing the darkness behind.

  Gourami waited in the shallows at the edge of the humen city, and felt se sibs move around se and the egglings move within. The latter swam easy, well fed and content. The former were more restless, their few vocalizations soft with wrath. No person had many words to say. The discussions were over. The decisions had been reached.

  The far-swimmers and the young adults had argued it, and the greatparents had decided. Tolerance had extended as far as it might. The humen and their technology were no different—no safer—than the Other Ones. And the greatparents said that persons had driven out the Other Ones, when they would not relinquish the technology that had nearly destroyed the world.

  Persons were not humen; they would not make war here as the humen had upon the one-tree-island-band. They would make their own kind of war. Directed, and precise.

  It had worked before. It would work again.

  The greatparents remembered ahead.

  The humen craft continued running before the gathering storm. The breeze was from seaward, and freshening. Gourami felt it tickle when se bobbed high in the warm water. On each side, before and behind, others waited—sibs and bandmates and clanmates and persons to whom se was totally unrelated. Every one who could reach the humen city in time, who had been within the range of the swimmers and the greatparent summoning.

  Se caressed the crossbow stock. Some person—se did not hear who—gave the order. It thrummed through the water, the first coherent word loudly spoken in hours.

  —advance

  The ship shuddered as she got under way, as if she were coming unstuck from the water. Between the cane and the walking cast, André rode over it with only a stumble. The ship boasted enough displacement and a deep enough keel that the interfering wakes of other vessels did no more than shiver her. André made sure of his balance with the cane anyway.

  He didn’t want to talk to Closs, but he needed an excuse to be there. And then, he had to argue his way in. Fortunately, Closs’s position and paranoia warranted a living assistant rather than just an executary. She knew him, and he managed to convince her that the matter was urgent enough to interrupt Closs midcrisis. “It has bearing,” André said, leaning heavily on his prop. He managed not to sigh in relief as she eyed his battered self and nodded reluctantly.

  He showed himself in past security, which was defanged by the bracelet she issued. No help from the expert system today; the ship was busy, unnecessary niceties shut down. Closs must have alerted the executary to detect André anyway, because the door eased open at his approach.

  André stepped inside, and from the hushed, almost deserted corridor, found himself in a war room. Closs stood, spurning his desk and his chair, pacing slowly with his arms folded. As André came forward he raised a hand, one finger lifted, eyes focused on the middle distance and tracking rapidly. André swung his casted leg in time with his cane and Closs’s pacing, and stopped two meters from the near end of the arc the major wore in the carpet.

  No more than thirty seconds passed before Closs glanced up, connection cut, and said, “Is it worse than thousands dead and downed communications?”

  “No,” André answered. “But it’s not much better.”

  “Thirty seconds,” Closs said flatly, André’s heart bloomed with joy that he had never developed a reputation for melodrama.

  “Jefferson Greene is going to provoke a ranid uprising, if he hasn’t already. He destroyed one village that I know of. Took captives.”

  Closs tipped his head back and let it loll for a moment, then took one deep breath and reassembled his facade. “I know,” he said. “How do you?”

  André thumped his cane on the deck. “You sent me into the middle of his damned massacre. Hunting your renegade. He’s out of control, Tim.”

  There was a pause. Then Closs said, “Thanks. It’s going to have to wait. Look, why don’t you ride out the storm here? There’s a skeleton staff in the galley. Go down, get fed. Are you armed?”

  A loaded question. “Never without,” André answered.

  Closs half smiled, then glanced away. It was a dismissal. André turned for the door—

  —and almost walked into Maurice, who had a mug of coffee in each hand. He dodged André neatly, making André feel like a lumbering beast on his cane, and set one cup on Closs’s desk. The major, focused on the voices in his head, nodded thanks.

  It seemed to be his only delivery, because—the other cup still steaming in his left hand—he followed André back out, without a word until the door was closed behind them. Then he said, “Going to the mess?”

  “If I can find it.”

  Maurice sipped his coffee left-handed. “I’ll show you the way. Maurice Sadowski.” He held out the right hand.

  “André Deschênes,” André said, and took it. He was expecting the handoff then, but he pulled his hand back empty.

  “Come on. We’d better eat before it gets too rough.”

  André hesitated a half-step, and Maurice hurried to walk beside him. They made idle conversation through the corridor and down the lift.

  The mess wasn’t busy, but a few crew and employees ate with haste and concentration at small tables. “Who would I see to volunteer?” André asked. They queued for food, André stumping awkwardly on his cane.

  Maurice gave it an eloquent glance.

  “I didn’t mean as a deckhand,” André snapped. Maurice grinned, and dropped a packet of chocolate pudding on his tray.

  “It’s full of calcium,” he said, as André was about to lift it and replace it on the rack. But it was a glimpse of a black glossy data chit underneath that made André return it to the tray.

  “Do you always mother strangers?”

  “Always,” Maurice said. André snorted, and they flashed their cards at the cash register on the way out, pausing a moment to let it total the food. Maurice led André to an empty table. It rocked slightly when André set his food down: on gimbals. He’d have to watch his knees if they hit any discernable chop.

  André palmed the chit and slipped it into a pocket as he moved the pudding off his tray. “I was raised right the first time.” He heard the glib words roll off his tongue and stopped speaking abruptly.

  A perfect piece of luck, it turned out. Because he heard the flutter in the background noise of the mess, and started to his feet before he consciously registered the source of the problem. He dropped his fork on the tray, where it clinked dully, and let his hand drop to hover beside the butt of the short arm concealed under the hem of his tunic.

  There were five Rimmers near the main entrance, and three more at the back door, all uniformed. They didn’t look hungry.

  “André?”

  He didn’t need to answer. Maur
ice had turned to follow his gaze, and as two members of the first team came forward, he lunged to his feet. The table rocked, creaking on its gimbals. He glanced over his shoulder. André, aware of their surroundings, already knew what he would see. There were two more armed women and a man behind them, blocking escape through the kitchens.

  Should have seen it coming. Should have seen it coming when Closs asked him if he was armed, if he’d been operating at anything resembling normal capacity.

  The one André took for a leader stepped forward and indicated his ID. “Dayvid Kountché,” he said. “Please come with us quietly, and you’ll be treated well.”

  “Certainly, Officer,” André said, but what he tight-beamed Maurice was: “Well, I guess the time for subtlety is over.”

  Maurice just gave him a wide-eyed stare. Brave enough in his own way, but not exactly an action hero. It was on André.

  And then Maurice cocked his head, a funny sideways kind of gesture like acquiescence. André was cc’d on the message Maurice snap-sent Cricket: Fisher, now would not be a bad time.

  Cricket’s agreement flashed green over both of them, and as Maurice shouted—squalled, really—and grabbed the edge of the table, snapping it up hard, the ship’s lights and engine sizzled and died. A split second’s silence broke on a startled scream; the dinner trays went up and out and over, and whatever had been on them spattered Kountché and the floor around him.

  The link was still up. “André, go,” Maurice called down it, and threw himself at Kountché. They went sprawling, elbows and fists and grunting, a shot that ricocheted at least once. One shot, and then a woman shouting at whomever to put the gun up.

  At least one of the Rimmers had a brain. There was one of André and one of Maurice, and eleven of them, and a couple dozen bystanders. The odds were not in the cops’ favor.

  Nor were they in Maurice’s. And there wasn’t a damned thing André could do to help him. Harder choice than he would have expected, but he dove for the darkened galley, his pistol in his hand. André had an advantage: the only person in the room he minded shooting was lying on the floor.

  His augments at least let him see where the tables were in the dark. But the Rimmers had that, too, and the ones by the galley must have seen him moving, because one stepped in and dealt him a stunning blow on the point of the shoulder with the butt of her gun.

  So they wanted him alive.

  André had no such scruples; without turning, he leveled his pistol in her face point-blank and pulled the trigger. The pistol took caseless ammo; he had a good thirty rounds. Her jerk backward was more dying reflex than recoil; her blood and bone still splattered him. The smell of iron made his gorge rise, acid stinging his sinuses. Shit.

  The second one was also too close to control him with a gun. It kept her alive; André broke her forearm with his cane as he went by. The third would have shot him, but André heard the tap tap of a jamming gun.

  He could run on the cast, after a fashion, swinging himself along with the cane. But it wasn’t pretty, and it wouldn’t help him long.

  Skeleton staff, Closs had said. He hoped to hell there was a ladder up to the main deck in the back of the galley. They had to bring food in somehow, right? So, logically…

  He laid down two shots over his shoulder to discourage pursuit. Something crunched. It sounded like bone. “Maurice?”

  “Go!” said the voice in his head, and then a burst of pain and static ended the transmission hard. He winced. Maurice might have been knocked unconscious.

  But in André’s professional opinion that wasn’t the case.

  And the shocking thing—as he found the damned ladder, broke the security lock, ducked a badly aimed shot, and hot-wired the box—was that it hurt.

  It wasn’t supposed to hurt. Maurice wasn’t anybody. Wasn’t anybody to André, and also wasn’t anybody in particular.

  And he’d died so André could get out.

  Fucking waste of a man’s life, was what that was.

  He paused inside the door at the top of the ladder—you called it a ladder on a ship, but it was really a flight of stairs—and listened hard. Somebody out there, yes. And noise like the outside.

  Lucky breaks, bad and good. His own luck; tonight, there was nobody pulling his chain.

  Waste of a man’s life, to trade it for somebody like André.

  Except André had nothing to do with it, did he? He could have been a paper airplane, flying from hand to hand. All that mattered was the information written on his wings.

  André zorched the lock, was ready when the door snapped open. The Rimmers on the other side were not.

  André shot them both.

  Nonfatally.

  They were just doing their jobs.

  There was no way he was getting the scoot unloaded. He was going to have to jump, and swim for it until he could hijack a small craft from somebody.

  Through choppy wake-slashed seas, in the teeth of an onrushing storm. Weighed down with his walking cast.

  A thump of thunder rattled his teeth, so close he felt it as a blow.

  Okay, so maybe he was paying for that luck after all.

  Maurice spoke; Cricket snapped the Rim ship’s breakers and sent her into darkness, drifting. And into real, immediate danger of collision with the escaping vessels on either side of her and behind. And then Cricket had to duck, hard and fast, as Rim’s security protocols found her and grabbed, hard. She dumped herself out of the system, flicked a trailing edge of code out of their grasp like a coattail, and hoped like hell they hadn’t gotten a trace on her. There was transmitted pain, buffered by dampers; someone hit him, hard, again and again and again.

  “Maurice?”

  Sharp silence, and nothing. He might have dropped the connect, but it felt open—open, with nothing on the other side. His absence pushed over her like a buffeting wave, knocked her under, dragged her down. Not again, not again, not again.

  The tail. Oh, hell, there it was. A trace on her signal, like phosphorescence curling in a wake. She dropped channel fast, and, oh God, Maurice. Maurice!

  Mouth open, she spasmed, gasped, expecting lungs full of weighty pain, blackness, and dark water. The warm night air—her own continued existence—shocked her as much as brightness would have if she’d been drowning, and somehow kicked herself into daylight again before the black water could suck her down.

  She lay on the couch and gasped, chest heaving, lank hair stuck across her face. Two minutes at least before she could move, before she could think of anything more than air in, air out, heaving as if she’d beached. Then elbows against the back of the sofa, hands on the lip, shoving herself to her feet.

  “Jean!” Two more breaths, sucked deep enough to hurt, a stitch in her side as if she’d been running. “Jean! Nouel!” Scrambling barefoot over rug and parawood deck. They’d come for Maurice and André. That meant, that meant—

  “They’re on to us, they’re—”

  She burst through the hatch yelling and drew up so short she went to her knees. Hard on the wooden decking, toes bent under. The pain washed her vision, but couldn’t eradicate what she’d seen.

  Jean and Nouel lay facedown on the deck, hands on their necks, legs spread wide. A man in Charter Trade green stood over each, both four steps back with their rifles nestled to their shoulders and angled down to cover the prone men.

  Cricket herself stared down the barrels of two more leveled guns.

  On her knees seemed like a safe place to stay. Slowly, she raised her hands. Jean’s head was turned; he looked right at her. She didn’t meet his eyes, and saw by the flinch along his jaw that he understood why.

  At least she had the comfort of knowing she’d been wrong to suspect Maurice.

  Maurice.

  She would have pressed her fists against her teeth if she’d dared lower her hands. No more. Please no more people dying in my head.

  “Cricket Earl Murphy,” said a fifth man, who held only a handgun and who wasn’t pointing it at anyone,
“you are under arrest for sedition, terrorism, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, data trespass—”

  In a moment, she thought with outlandish slow-motion lucidity, he would order her down on her stomach and kick her legs wide to make it difficult for her to rise. Then he would either handcuff all three of them and bring them in for a show trial, or he would order his men to fire two bullets into the back of each of their heads and leave their bodies on the drifting barge. The storm would handle the cleanup; sometimes people—and boats—didn’t make it back when the city ran before a storm.

  “Please lie down,” the officer said. In the silence of a cocking rifle, the salt storm-wind lifting her hair, Cricket breathed a prayer. Along the horizon, rising clouds walked on insect legs of lightning. The crack that followed might have been gunfire, or thunder.

  16

  IMAGINE A SINGLE PHOTON, THE SMALLEST INDEX OF LIGHT.

  The human eye is an optical instrument sensitive enough to detect that single photon. It is attuned to the subatomic level. But if we could register that sensitivity consciously, the flash and flicker, the background noise of the cosmos, would render our visual acuity useless. It would drown out more vital stimuli—such as the presence of a hungry leopard.

  So our nervous systems take care of it. Neural filters prevent our conscious minds from responding to single-photon events. We can see the subatomic but we are prevented from noticing it.

  There exists a classic experiment in which a point-source light projected through a pair of slits forms an interference pattern on a screen set behind them. The existence of this pattern would indicate that the light travels in a wave. Except in that it persists even when the light is emitted in single quanta, one photon at a time.

  If either slit is covered, the light—whether it is projected as a beam or as individual photons—will pass through the remaining slit, and the backstop will show only a single bright peak with areas of increasing shadow on the sides, rather than the contrasting light and dark bars of the first stage of the experiment.