Starfish (43 page)

Scanlon tried very hard to keep his voice level: "Ms.
Rowan
—"

Something changed in her then, a subtle hardening of posture that would have gone unnoticed by most people. Scanlon saw it as she turned back to face him. A tiny pit opened in his stomach.

He tried to think of what to say.

"Yes, Dr. Scanlon," she said, her voice a bit too level.

"I know you're busy, Ms. Rowan, but— how much longer do I have to stay in here?"

She softened fractionally. "Yves, we still don't know. In a way it's just another quarantine, but it's taking longer to get a handle on this one. It's from the bottom of the ocean, after all."

"What is it, exactly?"

"I'm not a biologist." She glanced at the floor for a moment, then met his eyes again. "But I can tell you this much: you don't have to worry about keeling over dead. Even if you have this thing. It doesn't really attack people."

"Then why—"

"Apparently there are some— agricultural concerns. They're more afraid of the effect it might have on certain plants."

He considered that. It made him feel a little better.

"I really have to go now." Rowan seemed to consider something for a moment, then added, "And no more döpplegangers. I promise. That was rude of me."

She'd told the truth about the döppelgangers. She'd lied about everything else.

After four days Scanlon left a message in Rowan's cache. Two days later he left another. In the meantime he waited for the spirit which had thrust its finger up its ass to come back and tell him more about primordial biochemistry. It never did. By now even the other ghosts weren't visiting very often, and they barely said a word when they did.

Rowan didn't return Scanlon's calls. Patience melted into uncertainty. Uncertainty simmered into conviction. Conviction began to gently boil.

Locked up in here for three fucking weeks and all she gives me is a ten-minute courtesy call. Ten lousy minutes of my-experts-say-you're-wrong and it's-such-a-basic-point-I-can't-believe-you-missed-it and then she just walks away. She just fucking smiles and walks away.

"Know what I
should
have done," he growled at the teleop. It was the middle of the day but he didn't care any more. Nobody was listening, they'd deserted him in here. They'd probably forgotten all about him. "What I
should
have done is rip a hole in that fucking membrane when she was here. Let a little of whatever's in
here
out to mix with the air in
her
lungs. Bet
that'd
inspire her to look for some answers!"

He knew it was fantasy. The membrane was almost infinitely flexible, and just as tough. Even if he succeeded in cutting it, it would repair itself before any mere gas molecules could jump through. Still, it was satisfying to think about.

Not satisfying enough. Scanlon picked up a chair and hurled it at the window. The membrane caught it like a form-fitting glove, enfolded it, let it fall almost to the floor on the other side. Then, slowly, the window tightened down to two dimensions. The chair toppled back into Scanlon's cell, completely undamaged.

And to think she'd had the fucking
temerity
to lecture him with that inane little homily about house arrest! As though she'd caught him in some sort of
lie
, when he'd suggested the vampires might stay put. As though she thought he was
covering
for them.

Sure, he knew more about vampires than anyone. That didn't mean he
was
one. That didn't mean—

We could have treated you better
, Lubin had said, there at the last.
We
. As though he'd been speaking for all of them. As though, finally, they were
accepting
him. As though—

But vampires were damaged goods, always had been. That was the whole point. How could Yves Scanlon qualify for membership in a club like
that
?

He knew one thing, though. He'd rather be a vampire than one of these assholes up
here
. That was obvious now. Now that the pretenses were dropping away and they didn't even bother talking to him any more. They exploited him and then they shunned him, they used him just like they used the vampires. He'd always known that deep down, of course. But he'd tried to deny it, kept it stifled under years of accommodation and good intentions and misguided efforts to fit in.

These people were the enemy. They'd always been the enemy.

And they had him by the balls.

He spun around and slammed his fist into the examination table. It didn't even hurt. He continued until it did. Panting, knuckles raw and stinging, he looked around for something else to smash.

The teleop woke up enough to hiss and spark when the chair bounced off its central trunk. One of the arms wiggled spastically for a moment. A faint smell of burnt insulation. Then nothing. Only slightly dented, the teleop slept on above a litter of broken paradigms.

"Tip for the day," Scanlon snarled at it. "Never trust a dryback."

A tremor shivers through bedrock. The emerald grid fractures into a jagged spiderweb. Strands of laser light bounce haphazardly into the abyss.

From somewhere within the carousel, a subtle discontent. Intensified cogitation. The displaced beams waver, begin realigning themselves.

Lenie Clarke has seen and felt all of this before. This time she watches the prisms on the seabed, rotating and adjusting themselves like tiny radio-telescopes. One by one the disturbed beams lie back down, parallel, perpendicular, planar. Within seconds the grid is completely restored.

Emotionless satisfaction. Cold alien thoughts nearby, reverting.

And further away, something else coming closer. Thin and hungry, like a faint reedy howl in Clarke's mind...

"Ah, shit," Brander buzzes, diving for the bottom.

It streaks down from the darkness overhead, mindlessly singleminded, big as Clarke and Brander put together. Its eyes reflect the glow from the seabed. It slams into the top of the carousel, mouth open, bounces away with half its teeth broken.

It has no thoughts, but Lenie Clarke can feel its emotions. They don't change. Injury never seems to faze these monsters. Its next attack targets one of the lasers. It skids around the roof of the carousel and comes up from underneath, swallowing one of the beams. It rams the emitter, and thrashes.

A sudden vicarious tingle shoots along Clarke's spine. The creature sinks, twitching. Clarke feels it die before it touches bottom.

"Jesus," she says. "You
sure
the laser didn't do that?"

"No. Way too weak," Brander tells her. "Didn't you feel it? An electric shock?"

She nods.

"Hey," Brander realizes. "You haven't seen this before, have you?"

"No. Alice told me about it, though."

"The lasers lure them in sometimes, when they wobble."

Clarke eyes the carcass. Neurons hiss faintly inside it. The body's dead, but it can take hours for the cells to run down.

She glances back at the machinery that killed them. "Lucky none of us touched that thing," she buzzes.

"I was keeping my distance anyway. Lubin said it wasn't hot enough to be dangerous, but, well..."

"I was tuned in to the gel, when it happened," she says. "I don't think it—"

"The gel never even notices. I don't think it's hooked into the defense system." Brander looks up at the metal structure. "No, our head cheese has far too much on its mind to waste its time worrying about fish."

She looks at him. "You know what it is, don't you?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Well?"

"I said I don't know. Just got some ideas."

"Come on, Mike. If you've got ideas, it's only because the rest of us have been out here taking notes for the past two weeks. Give."

He floats above her, looking down. "Okay," he says at last. "Let me just dump what you got today and run it against the rest. Then, if it pans out..."

"About time." Clarke grabs her squid off the bottom and tweaks the throttle. "Good."

Brander shakes his head. "I don't think so. Not at all."

* * *

"Okay, then. Smart gels are especially suited for coping with rapid changes in topography, right?"

Brander sits at the library. In front of him, one of the flatscreens cycles through a holding pattern. Behind, Clarke and Lubin and Nakata do the same.

"So there are two ways for your topographic environment to change rapidly," he continues. "One, you move quickly through complex surroundings. That's why we're getting gels in muckrakers and ATVs these days. Or you could sit still, and let your
surroundings
change."

He looks around. Nobody says anything. "Well?"

"So it's thinking about earthquakes," Lubin remarks. "The GA told us that much."

Brander turns back to the console. "Not just any earthquake," he says, a sudden edge in his voice. "The
same
earthquake. Over and over again."

He touches an icon on the screen. The display rearranges itself into a pair of axes, x and y. Emerald script glows adjacent to each line. Clarke leans forward:
time
, says the abscissa.
Activity
, says the ordinate.

A line begins to crawl left to right across the display.

"This is a mean composite plot of every time we ever watched that thing," Brander explains. "I tried to pin some sort of units onto the y-axis, but of course all we can tune in is
now it's thinking hard,
or
now it's slacking off
. So you'll have to settle for a relative scale. What you're seeing now is just baseline activity."

The line shoots about a quarter of the way up the scale, flattens out.

"Here it's started thinking about something. I can't correlate this to any real events like local tremors, it just seems to start on its own. An internally-generated loop, I think."

"Simulation," Lubin grunts.

"So it's thinking along like this for a while," Brander continues, ignoring him, "and then,
voila
..." Another jump, to halfway up the y-axis. The line holds its new altitude for a few pixels, slides into a gentle decline for a pixel or two, then jumps again. "So here it started thinking
quite
hard, starts to relax, then starts thinking even harder." Another, smaller jump, another gradual decline. "Here it's even more lost in thought, but it takes a nice long break afterwards." Sure enough, the decline continues uninterrupted for almost thirty seconds.

"And right about
now
…"

The line shoots almost to the top of the scale, fluctuates near the top of the graph. "And here it just about gives itself a hemorrhage. It goes on for a while, then—"

The line plummets vertically.

"—drops right back to baseline. Then there's some minor noise, I think it's storing its results or updating its files or something, and the whole thing starts all over again." Brander leans back in his chair, regards the rest with his hands clasped behind his head. "That's all it's been doing. As long as we've been watching it. The whole cycle takes about fifteen minutes, give or take."