Beyond the Rift (35 page)

The quartzite lens stares back impassively.

So you were right
, Clarke muses. She remembers the sheet in Ballard’s cubby.
You figured it out, you found the pickups in your own cubby, and Ballard, my dear friend, you didn’t tell me.

How long have you known?

Ballard looks around, sees Clarke. “You’ve got
her
fooled, all right,” she snarls at the fisheye, “but
she’s
a goddamned basket case! She’s not even sane! Your little tests don’t impress
me
one fucking bit!”

Clarke steps toward her.

“Don’t call me a basket case,” she says, her voice absolutely level.

“That’s what you
are
!” Ballard shouts. “You’re sick! That’s why you’re down here! They
need
you sick, they depend on it, and you’re so far gone you can’t see it! You hide everything behind that—that
mask
of yours, and you sit there like some masochistic jellyfish and just take anything anyone dishes out—you
ask
for it—”

That used to be true
, Clarke realizes as her hands ball into fists.
That’s the strange thing.
Ballard begins to back away; Clarke advances, step by step.
It wasn’t until I came down here that I learned that I could fight back
.
That I could win
.
The rift taught me that, and now Ballard has too—

“Thank you,” Clarke whispers, and hits Ballard hard in the face.

Ballard goes over backwards, collides with a table. Clarke calmly steps forward. She catches a glimpse of herself in a glass icicle; her capped eyes seem almost luminous.

“Oh Jesus,” Ballard whimpers. “Lenie, I’m
sorry
.”

Clarke stands over her. “Don’t be,” she says. She sees herself as some sort of exploding schematic, each piece neatly labeled.
So much anger in here
, she thinks.
So much hate
.
So much to take out on someone.

She looks at Ballard, cowering on the floor.

“I think,” Clarke says, “I’ll start with you.”

But her therapy ends before she can even get properly warmed up. A sudden noise fills the lounge, shrill, periodic, vaguely familiar. It takes a moment for Clarke to remember what it is. She lowers her foot.

Over in the Communications cubby, the telephone is ringing.

Jeanette Ballard is going home today.

For half an hour the ’scaphe has been dropping deeper into midnight. Now the Comm monitor shows it settling like a great bloated tadpole onto Beebe’s docking assembly. Sounds of mechanical copulation reverberate and die. The overhead hatch drops open.

Ballard’s replacement climbs down, already mostly ’skinned, staring impenetrably from eyes without pupils. His gloves are off; his ’skin is open to the forearms. Clarke sees the faint scars running along his wrists, and smiles a bit inside.

Was there another Ballard up there, waiting
, she wonders,
in case I was the one who didn’t work out?

Out of sight down the corridor, a hatch hisses open. Ballard appears in shirtsleeves, one eye swollen shut, carrying a single suitcase. She seems about to say something, but stops when she sees the newcomer. She looks at him for a moment. She nods briefly. She climbs into the belly of the ’scaphe without a word.

Nobody calls down to them. There are no salutations, no morale-boosting small talk. Perhaps the crew have been briefed. Perhaps they’ve figured it out on their own. The docking hatch swings shut. With a final clank, the ’scaphe disengages.

Clarke walks across the lounge and looks into the camera. She reaches between mirror fragments and rips its power line from the wall.

We don’t need this any more
, she thinks, and she knows that somewhere far away, someone agrees.

She and the newcomer appraise each other with dead white eyes.

“I’m Lubin,” he says at last.

Ballard was right again
, she realizes.
Untwisted, we’d be of no use at all...

But she doesn’t really mind. She won’t be going back.

OUTTRO: EN ROUTE TO DYSTOPIA WITH THE ANGRY OPTIMIST

I
’m quite a cheerful guy in person. Apparently people are surprised by this.

I don’t know what they were expecting: Some aging goth in eyeliner and black leather, maybe. A wannabe hipster born a generation out of synch. But insofar as I’m known at all, I seem to be known as The Guy Who Writes The Depressing Stories. My favorite thumbnail of that sentiment comes from James Nicoll—“Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts”—but the dude’s hardly alone in his opinion. While mulling over what to put in this essay I did a quick Google search for the descriptors commonly applied to my writing. I list a few for illustrative purposes:

Brutal

Dark (frequently “unrelentingly” so)

Paranoid

Nightmarish

Relentless

The blackest depths of the human psyche

Ugly

Savage

Misanthropic

Dystopian

Those last two get used a
lot
. Googling my name in conjunction with misanthropy and its variants nets around ten thousand hits; “Peter Watts AND dystopian OR dystopic” returns almost 150,000 (although presumably, not all of them can be about me).

I submit that this is a serious mischaracterization.

Harlan Ellison opened one of his collections
¹
with a hyperbolic Author’s Warning about the emotional distress you risked if you read the whole book in a single sitting. That is not me. I would not pull that shit on you—because quite honestly, I don’t think my stuff
is
especially depressing.

Look at the stories in this volume. “The Things” is fan fiction, an homage to one of my favorite movies and also—to my own surprise—a rumination on the missionary impulse. “Nimbus” is pure unresearched brain fart: an off-the-cuff fantasy seeded by a former girlfriend who looked out the window one day and said,
Wow, those thunderclouds almost look alive
. “The Eyes of God” asks whether we should define a monster by its impulses, or its actions. And “The Island” started out as a raspberry blown at all those lazy-ass writers who fall back on stargates to deal with the distance issue. None of these stories focuses on dystopia in the sense that, say, John Brunner’s
The Sheep Look Up
does.

There’s wonder here, too. A diaphanous life-form big enough to envelop a star; mermaids soaring through luminous nightscapes on the ocean floor; a misguided Thing whose evolutionary biology redeems Lamarck. Even the idea of a vast, slow intelligence in the clouds has a certain Old Testament beauty to it. Whether the stories themselves succeed is for you to judge—but the things they attempt to describe verge, to my mind at least, on the sublime.

(It must also be admitted that there’s some pretty crappy writing in these pages as well. In particular, the emo and overwrought “Flesh Made Word” has not aged well. I’m a bit mystified that the good folks at Tachyon chose to include it in a collection presumably intended to be read for pleasure. Still. Everyone’s got to start somewhere.)

The worldview that supports these stories may not be to everyone’s taste. People aren’t used to seeing their noblest dreams and aspirations reduced to the deterministic sparking of chemicals in a bone bowl, for example. Some might resist the thought that our brain stems continue to call the shots, no matter what that spoiled petulant neocortex keeps insisting. The most fundamental underpinnings of human biology—that evolution tinkered us into existence using the same hit-and-miss processes that shaped every other life-form on the planet—are downright offensive to some. But these are not especially dark thoughts where I come from. It’s just biology: neutral, empirical,
useful
. I’ve grown up with these ideas; I think they’re
neat
. I’ve never felt like opening my wrists when I write the stuff. If you feel that way when reading it, well, that’s your problem.

I’ll grant that you may not want to live in some of these worlds. I wouldn’t want to bunk up with Walter White, either; that doesn’t make
Breaking Bad
a piece of dystopian story-telling. Backdrop isn’t story; it’s not even theme. I’m a dystopian writer? Might as well insist that
CSI
is a show about automotive engineering because cars figure so prominently in every episode.

And it’s just as well, because truth be told, I’m not very
good
at writing dystopias. For one thing, my worlds embody an almost Pollyannaesque view of human nature.

Consider: We live in a world where planet-spanning financial institutions screen job applicants for symptoms of sociopathy— not to weed out the sociopaths, but to
recruit
them. Even after those institutions ran the global economy off a cliff—knowingly, as it turns out—the bodies ostensibly set up to regulate them have stated explicitly that no matter what laws were broken, no matter what damage was done, nobody’s going to jail. In terms of despots running the asylum, you can’t get much more explicit than that—and these are the
good
guys, the leaders of the so-called “free world.”

But you won’t find any Goldman Sachses in my work. No Dick Cheneys or Osama bin Ladens either. Nobody starts wars under false pretences to enrich their buddies in the oil industry; nobody justifies mass murder by invoking the divine. The pope rates a brief mention near the end of the Rifters trilogy, but only to establish that he’s fled into exile, reviled and hunted for his corporation’s traditional abuse of the helpless; another instance of sunny naivety in my world-building, perhaps.

Bad things do happen in Wattsworld, of course, but generally to avert worse ones. Jasmine Fitzgerald guts her husband like a fish, but only to save his life. The nameless narrator of “Repeating the Past” deliberately induces PTSD in his grandson, but only to save his soul. Patricia Rowan (from the Rifters books again) may authorize the destruction of the Pacific Northwest and enough human collateral to put the Iraq war to shame, but she’s not doing it to pad her bank account; she’s trying to save the goddamn
world
. Any of the half-dozen people who read
βehemoth
—alert for classic cardboard villainy— might point to the unleashed sexual sadism of Achilles Desjardins, but even he wasn’t to blame for what he did. He was a profoundly moral individual whose conscience was neurochemically excised by someone who (again, with the best of intentions) only wanted to set him free.

I can’t write real villains. I tried, once. I based one of
Starfish
’s characters on someone I knew in real life. No one too extreme of course, no rapist or murderer: just a slimy little opportunist who made a career out of taking credit for other people’s work and customizing his scientific opinions to suit the highest bidder. But I wasn’t up to capturing even that penny-ante level of perfidy; writing the character as I saw him, he came across as a mustache-twirling cutout. The only way I could sell him to myself was to give the character more depth, make him more sympathetic, than his inspiration was in real life.

I can’t do fundamentalists very well either. I try to describe a biblical creationist and end up with a condescending cartoon scribbled by a smug elitist. So characters who
do
survive to publication all come across as products of some parallel timeline where even the garbage collectors have BScs. Lenie Clarke may be a glorified pipe-fitter, but she’d never deny the existence of climate change. Kim and Andrew Goravec are pretty crappy parents, but not so crappy that you’d ever catch them at an anti-vaccine rally. Even Jess’s nameless widowed dad—hunkered down against vast forces he can only dimly comprehend—regards sex in curiously erudite terms: “just another pair of mammals, trying to maximize our fitness before the other shoe dropped.”

And yet, the world is in the mess it’s in largely because real people
do
deny climate change and evolution, because 85 percent of the North American population believes in an invisible sky fairy who sends you to Space Disneyland after you die, so who gives a shit about the eastern beach tiger beetle? Here in reality those folks make up the majority; they’re nowhere to be found in Wattsworld.
²
You could argue that I don’t write about real people at all. For all their personal demons, for all the squalor of their surroundings, my characters are more like some kind of human Platonic ideals.