Starfish (40 page)

"You don't know about it?"

"Hang on, I'm punching it up." The speaker falls briefly silent. "Got it. My God, that's way out of your back yard. I'm surprised you even picked it up."

"What is it?" Lubin says. Clarke watches him, the hairs on her neck stirring.

"Seismology rig, it says here. OSU put it down there for some study on natural radioactives and tectonics. You should really keep away from it, it's a bit hot. Carrying some calibration isotopes."

"Unshielded?"

"Apparently."

"Doesn't that scramble the onboard?" Lubin wants to know.

Nakata stares at him, open-mouthed and angry. "Who
cares
! Judy's
missing
!"

She's got a point. Lubin barely even talks to the other rifters; coming from him, this interchange with the drybacks almost qualifies as babbling.

"Says here it's an optical processor," the speaker says after a brief pause. "Radiation doesn't bother it. But I think Al— Ms. Nakata is right, your first priority—"

Lubin reaches past Brander and kills the connection.

"Hey," Brander says sharply.

Nakata gives Lubin a blank angry stare and disappears from the hatchway. Clarke hears her retreat into her cubby and dog the hatch. Brander looks up at Lubin. "Maybe it hasn't dawned on you, Ken, but Judy just might be dead. We're kind of upset about that. Alice especially."

Lubin nods, expressionless.

"So I've got to wonder why you chose this moment to grill the GA about the technical specs on a fucking seismic rig."

"That's not what it is," Lubin says.

"Yeah?" Brander rises, twisting up out of the console chair. "And just what—"

"Mike," says Clarke.

"What?"

She shakes her head. "They said an
optical
CPU."

"So the fuck
wh—
" Brander stops in mid-epithet. Anger drains from his face.

"Not a gel," Clarke says. "A chip. That's what they're saying."

"But why lie to us?" Brander asks, "when we can just go out there and
feel
..."

"They don't know we can do that, remember?" She lets out a little smile, like a secret shared between friends. "They don't know anything about us. All they've got is their files."

"Not any more," Brander reminds her. "Now they've got Judy."

"They've got us too," Lubin adds. "Quarantined."

* * *

"Alice. It's me."

A soft voice through hard metal: "Come..."

Clarke pulls the hatch open, steps through.

Alice Nakata looks up from her pallet as the hatch sighs shut. Almond eyes, dark and startling, reflect in the dimmed light. One hand goes to her face: "Oh. Excuse me, I'll..." She fumbles at the bedhead compartment, where her eyecaps float in plastic vials.

"Hey. No problem." Clarke reaches out, stops just short of touching Nakata's arm. "I like your eyes, I've always— well..."

"I should not be sulking in here anyway," Nakata says, rising. "I'm going outside."

"Alice—"

"I am
not
going to just let her disappear out there. Are you coming?"

Clarke sighs. "Alice, the GA's right. There's just too much volume. If she's still out there, she knows where we are."

"If? Where else would she be?"

Clarke looks at the deck, reviewing possibilities.

"I— I think the drybacks took her," she says at last. "I think they'll take us, too, if we go after her."

Nakata stares at Clarke with disquieting human eyes. "Why? Why would they do that?"

"I don't know."

Nakata sags back on the pallet. Clarke sits down beside her.

Neither woman speaks for a while.

"I'm sorry," Clarke says at last. She doesn't know what else to say. "We all are."

Alice Nakata stares at the floor. Her eyes are bright, but not overflowing. "Not all," she whispers. "Ken seemed more interested in—"

"Ken had his reasons. They're lying to us, Alice."

"They always lied to us," Nakata says softly, not looking up. And then: "I should have been there."

"Why?"

"I don't know. If there'd been two of us, maybe..."

"Then we'd have lost both of you."

"You don't know that. Maybe it wasn't the drybacks at all, maybe she just ran into something... living."

Clarke doesn't speak. She's heard the same stories Nakata has. Confirmed reports of people getting eaten by Archie date back over a hundred years. Not many, of course; humans and giant squid don't run into each other that often. Even rifters swim too deep for such encounters.

As a general rule.

"That's why I stopped going up with her, did you know that?" Nakata shakes her head, remembering. "We ran into something alive, up midwater. It was horrible. Some kind of jellyfish, I think. It
pulsed
, and it had these thin watery tentacles that stretched out of sight, just hanging there in the water. And it had all these— these stomachs. Like fat squirming slugs. And each one had its own mouth, and they were all opening and closing..."

Clarke screws up her face. "Sounds lovely."

"I didn't even see it. It was quite translucent, and I was not looking and I bumped into it and it started
ejecting
pieces of itself. The main body just went completely dark and pulled into itself and pulsed away and all these shed stomachs and mouths and tentacles were left behind, they were all glowing and writhing as though they were in pain..."

"I think I'd stop going up there too, after that."

"The strange thing was, I envied it in a way." Nakata's eyes brim, spill over, but her voice doesn't change. "It must be nice to just be able to— to cut yourself off from the parts that give you away."

Clarke smiles, imagining. "Yes." She realizes, suddenly, that only a few centimeters separate her from Alice Nakata. They're almost touching.

How long have I been sitting here?
she wonders. She shifts on the pallet, pulls away out of habit.

"Judy didn't see it that way," Nakata's saying. "She felt sorry for the
pieces
. I think she was almost angry with the main body, do you believe it? She said it was this blind stupid blob, she said— what did she say— 'fucking typical bureaucracy, first sign of trouble it sacrifices the very parts that keep it fed.' That's what she said."

Clarke smiles. "That sounds like Judy."

"She never takes shit from anyone," Nakata says. "She always fights back. I like that about her, I could never do that. When things get bad I just..." She glances at the little black device stuck on the wall beside her pillow. "I dream."

Clarke nods and says nothing. She can't remember Alice Nakata ever being so talkative. "It's so much better than VR, you have much more control. In VR you are stuck with someone else's dreams."

"So I hear."

"You have never tried it?" Nakata asks.

"Lucid dreaming? A couple of times. I never got into it."

"No?"

Clarke shrugs. "My dreams don't have much... detail."
Or too much, sometimes
. She nods at Nakata's machine. "Those things wake me up just enough to notice how vague everything is. Or sometimes, when there
is
any detail it's something really stupid. Worms crawling through your skin or something."

"But you can control that. That is the whole point. You can
change
it."

In your dreams, maybe.
"But you have to see it first. Just sort of spoiled the effect for me, I guess. And mostly there were those big, vague gaps."

"Ah." A flicker of a smile. "For myself that is not a problem. The world is pretty vague to me even when I am awake."

"Well." Clarke smiles back, tentatively. "Whatever works."

More silence.

"I just wish I
knew
," Nakata says finally.

"I know."

"You knew what happened to Karl. It was bad, but you
knew
."

"Yes."

Nakata glances down. Clarke follows, notices that her own hands have somehow clasped around Nakata's. She supposes it's a gesture of support. It feels okay. She squeezes, gently.

Nakata looks back up. Her dark naked eyes still startle, somehow.

"Lenie, she did not
mind
me. I pulled away, and I dreamed, and sometimes I just went crazy and she put up with all of it. She understoo— she under
stands
."

"We're rifters, Alice." Clarke hesitates, decides to risk it. "We all understand."

"Except Ken."

"You know, I think maybe Ken understands more than we give him credit for. I don't think he meant to be insensitive before. He's on our side."

"He is very strange. He is not here for the same reason we are."

"And what reason is that?" Clarke asks.

"They put us here because this is where we belong," Nakata says, almost whispering. "With Ken, I think—they just didn't dare put him anywhere
else
."

* * *

Brander's on his way downstairs when she gets back to the lounge. "How's Alice?"

"Dreaming," Clarke says. "She's okay."

"None of us are okay," Brander says. "Borrowed time all around, you ask me."

She grunts. "Where's Ken?"

"He left. He's never coming back."

"What?"

"He went over. Like Fischer."

"Bullshit. Ken's not like Fischer. He's the farthest thing from Fischer."

"We know that." Brander jerks a thumb at the ceiling. "
They
don't. He went over. That's the story he wants us to sell upstairs, anyway."

"Why?"

"You think that motherfucker told
me
? I agreed to play along for now, but I don't mind telling you I'm getting a bit tired of his bullshit." Brander climbs down a rung, looks back. "I'm heading back out myself. Gonna check out the carousel. I think some serious observations are in order."

"Want some company?"

Brander shrugs. "Sure."

"Actually," Clarke remarks, "just
company
doesn't cut it any more, does it? Maybe we'd better be, what's the word—"

"Allies," Brander says.

She nods. "Allies."

For a week now, Yves Scanlon's world had measured five meters by eight. In all that time he had not seen another living soul.