Starfish (25 page)

She marvels inwardly at the strength in her voice; it sounds like iron.

They stare at each other for an endless moment.

Acton's body turns on its heel and undogs the hatch. Clarke watches it step out of the cubby; Caraco, waiting in the corridor, lets it by without a word. Clarke holds herself utterly still until she hears the 'lock beginning to cycle.

He didn't call my bluff.

Except this time, she's not sure that that's all it was.

* * *

He doesn't see her.

It's been days since they've said anything to each other. Even their shift schedules have diverged. Tonight, as she was trying to sleep, she heard him come out of the abyss again and climb up into the lounge like some invading sea creature. He does it now and then when the place is deserted, when everyone is either outside or sealed into their cubicles. He sits there at the library, diving through his 'phones down endless virtual avenues, desperation in every movement. It's as though he has to hold his breath whenever he comes inside; once she saw him tear the headset off his skull and flee outside as though his chest would burst. When she picked up the abandoned headset, the results of his litsearch were still glowing in the eyephones. Chemistry.

Another time he turned on his way out to see her standing in the corridor. He smiled. He even said something: "—
sorry—
" is what she heard, but there may have been more. He didn't stay.

Now his hands rest, unmoving, on the keyboard. His shoulders are shaking. He doesn't make any sound at all. Lenie Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, wondering whether to approach him. When she looks again the lounge is empty.

* * *

She can tell exactly where he's going. His icon buds off of Beebe and crawls away across the display, and there's only on thing in that direction.

When she gets there he's crawling across its back, digging a hole with his knife. Clarke's eyecaps can barely find enough light to see by, this far from the Throat; Acton cuts and slices in the light of her headlamp, his shadow writhing away across a horizon of dead flesh.

He's dug a crater, maybe half a meter across, half a meter deep. He's cut through the stratum of blubber below the skin and is tearing through the brown muscle beneath. It's been months now since this creature landed here. Clarke marvels at its preservation.

The abyss likes extremes
, she muses.
If it isn't a pressure cooker, it's a fridge.

Acton stops digging. He just floats there, staring down at his handiwork.

"What a stupid idea," he buzzes at last. "I don't know what gets into me sometimes." He turns to face her; his eyecaps reflect yellow. "I'm sorry, Lenie. I know this place was special to you somehow, I didn't mean to...well, desecrate it, I guess."

She shakes her head. "It's okay. It's not important."

Acton's vocoder gurgles; in air, it would be a sad laugh. "I give myself too much credit sometimes, Len. Whenever I'm inside, and I'm fucking up and I don't know what to do, I figure all I've got to do is come outside and the scales will fall off my eyes. It's like, religious faith almost. All the answers. Right out here."

"It's okay," Clarke says again, because it seems better than saying nothing.

"Only sometimes the answer doesn't really do much for you, you know? Sometimes the answer's just: Forget it. You're fucked." Acton looks back down at the dead whale. "Would you turn the light off?"

The darkness swallows them like a blanket. Clarke reaches through it and brings Acton to her. "What were you trying to do?"

That mechanical laugh again. "Something I read. I was thinking—"

His cheek brushes against hers.

"I don't know what I was thinking. When I'm inside I'm a fucking lobo case, I get these stupid ideas and even when I get back out it takes a while before I really wake up and realize what a dork I've been. I wanted to study an adrenal gland. Thought it would help me figure out how to counter ion depletion at the synapse junctions."

"You know how to do that."

"Well, it was just bullshit anyway. I can't think straight in there."

She doesn't bother to argue.

"I'm sorry," Acton buzzes after a while.

Clarke strokes his back. It feels like two sheets of plastic rubbing together
.

"I think I can explain it to you," he adds. "If you're interested."

"Sure." But she knows it won't change anything.

"You know how there's this strip in your brain that controls movement?"

"Okay."

"And if, say, you became a concert pianist, the part that runs your fingers would actually spread out, take up more of the strip to meet the increased demand for finger control. But you lose something, too. The adjacent parts of the strip get crowded out. So maybe you couldn't wiggle your toes or curl your tongue as well as you could before you started practicing."

Acton falls silent. Clarke feels his arms, cradling her loosely from behind.

"I think something like that happened to me," he says after a while.

"How?"

"I think something in my brain got exercised, and it spread out and crowded some other parts away. But it only works in a high-pressure environment, you see, it's the pressure that makes the nerves fire faster. So when I go back inside, the new part shuts down and the old parts have been — well, lost."

Clarke shakes her head. "We've been through this, Karl. Your synapses just ran low on calcium."

"That's not all that happened. That's not even a problem any more, I've brought my inhibitors up again. Not all the way, but enough. But I still have this new part, and I still can't find the old ones." She feels his chin on the top of her head. "I don't think I'm exactly human any more, Len. Which, considering the kind of human I was, is probably just as well."

"And what does it do, exactly? This new part?"

He takes a while to answer. "It's almost like getting an extra sense organ, except it's ... diffuse. Intuition, only with a really hard edge."

"Diffuse, with a hard edge."

"Yeah, well. That's the problem when you try to explain smell to someone without a nose."

"Maybe it's not what you think. I mean, something's changed, but that doesn't mean you can really just — look into people like that
.
Maybe it's just some sort of mood disorder. Or a hallucination, maybe. You can't
know
."

"I know, Len."

"Then you're right." Anger trickles up from her internal reservoir. "You're not human any more. You're less than human."

"Lenie—"

"Humans have to
trust
, Karl. There's no big deal about putting your faith in something you know for certain. I want you to trust me."

"Not know you."

She tries to hear sadness on that synthetic voice. In Beebe, maybe, it would have come through. But in Beebe he would never had said that.

"Karl—"

"I can't come back."

"You're not yourself out here." She pushes away, spins around; she can just barely distinguish his silhouette.

"You want me to be—" She hears confusion in the words, even through the vocoder, but she knows it's not a question. "—hateful."

"Don't be an idiot. I've had more than my fill of assholes, believe me. But Karl, this is just some kind of cheap trick. Step out of the magic booth, you're Mr. Nice Guy. Step back in, you're the SeaTac Strangler. It's not
real.
"

"How do you know?"

She keeps her distance, suddenly knowing the answer. It's only real if it hurts. It's only real if it happens slowly, painfully, each step carved in shouts and threats and thrown punches.

It's only real if Lenie Clarke is the one to make him change.

She doesn't tell him any of this, of course. But she's afraid, as she turns and leaves him there, that she doesn't have to.

* * *

She comes instantly out of sleep, tense and completely alert. There's darkness — the lights are off, she's even blanked the readouts on the wall — but it's the close, familiar darkness of her own cubby. Something is tapping on the hull, regular and insistent.

From outside.

Out in the corridor there's light enough for rifter eyes. Nakata and Caraco stand motionless in the lounge. Brander sits at the library; the screens are dark, the headsets all hanging on their pegs.

The sound ticks through the lounge, fainter than before but easily audible.

"Where's Lubin?" Clarke asks softly. Nakata tilts her head towards the hull:
outside somewhere
.

Clarke climbs downstairs and into the airlock.

* * *

"We thought you'd gone over," she says. "Like Fischer."

They float between Beebe and the sea floor. Clarke reaches out to him. Acton reaches back.

"How long has it been?" The words come out as faint, metallic sighs.

"Six days. Maybe seven. I've been putting off— calling up for a replacement—"

He doesn't react.

"We saw you on sonar sometimes," she adds. "For a while. Then you disappeared."

Silence.

"Did you get lost?" she asks after a while.

"Yeah."

"But you're back now."

"No."

"Karl—"

"I need you to promise me something, Lenie."

"What?"

"Promise me you'll do what I did. The others too. They'll listen to you."

"You know I can't—"

"Five percent, Lenie. Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you'll do okay. Promise."

"Why, Karl?"

"Because I wasn't wrong about everything. Because sooner or later they're going to have to get rid of you, and you need every edge you can get."

"Come inside. We can talk about it inside, everyone's there."

"There's strange things happening out there, Len. Out past sonar range, they're — I don't know what they're doing. They don't tell us..."

"Come inside, Karl."

He shakes his head. He seems almost unused to the gesture.

"—can't—"

"Then don't expect me—"

"I left a file in the library. It explains things. As much as I could, when I was in there. Promise me, Len."

"No.
You
promise. Come inside. Promise we'll work it out."

"It kills too much of me," he sighs. "I pushed it too far. Something burned out, I'm not even completely whole out here any more. But you'll be okay. Five or ten percent, no more."

"I need you," she buzzes, very quietly.

"No," he says. "You need Karl Acton."