Starfish (12 page)

"
Jeez.
" Fischer's legs move of their own volition. "They're coming!" he tries to yell. The vocoder scales it down to a croak.

Stupid. Stupid.
They warned us, the sparkles bring in the little fish and the little fish bring in the big fish and if we don't watch it we just get in the way.

The plume is right in front of him now, a wall of sediment, a river on the bottom of the ocean. He dives in. Something nips lightly at his calf.

Everything goes black, with occasional sparkles. He turns his headlight on; the flowing mud swallows the beam half a meter from his face.

But Clarke can see it, somehow: "Turn it off."

"I can't see—"

"Good. Maybe they won't either."

He kills the light. In the darkness he gropes the gas billy from its sheath on his leg.

Caraco, from a distance: "I thought they were blind..."

"Some of them."

And they've got other senses to fall back on. Fischer runs through the list:
smell, sound, pressure waves, bioelectric fields
... Nothing
relies
on vision down here. It's just one of the options.

He hopes the plume blocks more than just light.

But even as he watches, the darkness is lifting. Black murk turns brown, then almost gray. Faint light filters in from the floodlamps on Main Street.

It's the eyecaps,
he realizes.
They're compensating. Cool.

He still can't see very far, though. It's like being caught in dirty fog.

"Remember." Clarke, very close. "They're not as tough as they look. They probably won't do much real damage."

A sonar pistol stutters nearby. "I'm not getting anything," Caraco buzzes. Milky sediment swirls on all sides. Fischer puts his arm out; it fades at the elbow.

"Oh shit." Caraco.

"Are you—"

"Something's on my leg something's Christ it's big—"

"
Lenie—
" Fischer cries.

A bump from behind. A slap on the back of his head. A shadow, black and spiny, fades into the murk.

Hey, that wasn't so—

Something clamps onto his leg. He looks down: jaws, teeth, a monstrous head fading away into the murk.

Oh Jeez—

He jams his billy against scaly flesh. Something gives, like gelatin. A soft thump. The flesh bloats, ruptures; bubbles explode from the rip.

Something else smashes him from behind. His chest is in a vise. He lashes out, blindly. Mud and ash and black blood billow into his face.

He grabs blindly, twists. There's a broken tooth in his hand, half as long as his forearm; he tightens his grip and it splinters. He drops it, brings the billy around and jams it into the thing on his side. Another explosion of meat and compressed CO
₂
.

The pressure lifts from his chest. Whatever's clamped onto his leg isn't moving. Fischer lets himself sink, drifts down against the base of a barite chimney.

Nothing charges him.

"Everyone okay." Lenie's vocoded monotone. Fischer grunts yes.

"Thank God for bad nutrition," Caraco buzzes. "We're fucked if these guys ever get enough vitamins."

Fischer reaches down, pries the dead monster's jaws off his calf. He wishes he had breath to catch.

Shadow?

Right here.

Was this what it was like for you?

No. This didn't take so long.

He lies against the bottom and tries to shut his eyes. He can't; the diveskin bonds to the surface of the eyecaps, traps the eyelids in little cul-de-sacs.
I'm sorry, Shadow. I'm so sorry.

I know, she says. It's okay.

* * *

Lenie Clarke stands naked in Medical, spraying the bruises on her leg. No, not naked; the caps are still on her eyes. All Fischer can see is skin.

It's not enough.

A trickle of blood crawls down her side from just below the water intake. She absently wipes it away and reloads the hypo.

Her breasts are small, almost adolescent, bumps. No hips. Her body's as pale as her face, except for the bruises and the fresh pink seams that access the implants. She looks anorexic.

She's the first adult Fischer's ever wanted.

She looks up and sees him in the doorway. "Strip down," she tells him, and goes back to work.

He splits his 'skin and starts to peel. Lenie finishes with her leg and stabs an ampoule into the cut in her side. The blood clots like magic.

"They warned us about the fish," Fischer says, "but they said they were really fragile. They said we could just beat them off with our hands if we had to."

Lenie sprays the cut in her side with a hypo, wipes off the residue. "You're lucky they told you that much." She pulls her diveskin tunic off a hanger, slides into it. "They barely mentioned the giantism when they sent us down."

"That's stupid. They must've known."

"They say this is the only vent where the fish get this big. That they've found, anyway."

"Why? What's so special here?"

Lenie shrugs.

Fischer has stripped to the waist. Lenie looks at him. "Leggings too. It got your calf, right?"

He shakes his head. "That's okay."

She looks down. His diveskin's only a couple of millimeters thick, it doesn't hide anything. He feels his erection going soft under her gaze.

Lenie's cold white eyes track back to his face. Fischer feels his face heating before he remembers: she can't see his eyes. No one can.

It's almost safe in here.

"Bruising's the biggest problem," Lenie says at last. "They don't puncture the diveskin all that often, but the force of the bite still gets through." Her hand is on his arm, firm and professional, probing the edges of Fischer's injury. It hurts, but he doesn't mind.

She uncaps a tube of anabolic salve. "Here. Rub this in."

The pain fades on contact. His flesh goes warm and tingly where he applies the ointment. He reaches out, a little bit scared, and touches Lenie's arm. "Thanks."

She twists out of reach without a word, bending down to seal the 'skin on her leg. Fischer watches the leggings slide up her body. They seem almost alive. They
are
almost alive, he remembers. The 'skin's got these
reflexes
, changes its permeability and thermal conductivity in response to body temperature. Maintains, what's the word, homeostasis.

Now he watches it swallowing Lenie's body like some slick black amoebae but she's showing through underneath, black ice instead of white but still the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. She's so far away. There's someone inside telling him to watch it—

—
Go away, Shadow—

—
but he can't help himself, he can almost
touch
her, she's bent over sealing her boots and his hand caresses the air just above her shoulder, traces the outline of her curved back so close it could feel her body heat if that stupid diveskin wasn't in the way, and—

And she straightens, bumping into his hand. Her face comes up; something burns behind her eyecaps. He pulls back but it's too late; her whole body's gone rigid and furious.

I just touched her. I didn't do anything wrong I just touched her—

She takes a single step forward. "Don't do that again," she says, her voice so flat he wonders for a second how her vocoder could work out of the water.

"I'm not—I didn't—"

"I don't care," she says. "Don't do it again."

Something moves at the corner of his eye. "Problem, Lenie? Need a hand?" Brander's voice.

She shakes her head. "No."

"Okay, then." Brander sounds disappointed. "I'll be upstairs."

Movement again. Sounds, receding.

"I'm
sorry
," Fischer says.

"Fine," Lenie says, and brushes past him into the wet room.

Nakata nearly bumps into her at the base of the ladder. Clarke glares; Nakata moves aside, baring teeth in a submissive primate smile.

Brander's in the lounge, pecking at the library: "You—?"

"I'm fine." She isn't, but she's getting there. This anger is nowhere near critical mass; it's just a reflex, really, a spark budded off from the main reservoir. It decays exponentially with elapsed time. By the time she reaches her cubby she's almost feeling sorry for Fischer.

Not his fault. He didn't mean any harm.

She closes the hatch behind her. It's safe to hit something now, if she wants. She looks around half-heartedly for a target, finally just drops onto her bunk and stares at the ceiling.

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.