Starfish (45 page)

Isn't it
, Clarke wonders.

"We cannot leave by the surface," Nakata points out, "if they got Judy..."

"So we hug the bottom," Brander says. "Right. Scam their sonar. We'd have to leave the squids behind, they'd be too easy to track."

Nakata nods.

"Lenie? What?"

Clarke looks up. Brander and Nakata are both staring at her. "I didn't say anything."

"You look like you don't approve."

"It's three hundred klicks to Vancouver Island, Mike. Minimum. It could take over a week to make it without squids, assuming we don't get lost."

"Our compasses work fine once we're away from the rift. And it's a pretty big continent, Len; we'd have to try pretty hard
not
to bump into it."

"And what do we do when we get there? How would we make it past the Strip?"

Brander shrugs. "Sure. For all we know the refs could eat us alive, if our tubes don't choke on all the shit floating around back there. But really, Len, would you rather take your chances with a ticking nuke? It's not like we're drowning in options."

"Sure." Clarke moves one hand in a gesture of surrender. "Fine."

"Your problem, Len, is you've always been a fatalist," Brander pronounces.

She has to smile at that.
Not always.

"There is also the question of food," Nakata says. "To bring enough for the trip will slow us considerably."

I don't want to leave,
Clarke realizes.
Even now. Isn't that stupid.

"—don't think speed is much of a concern," Brander is saying. "If this thing goes off in the next few days an few extra meters per hour won't to do us much good anyway."

"We could travel light and forage on the way," Clarke muses, her mind wandering. "Gerry does okay."

"Gerry," Brander repeats, suddenly subdued.

A moment's silence. Beebe shivers with the small distant cry of Lubin's memorial.

"Oh God," Brander says softly. "That thing can really get on your nerves after a while."

There was a sound.

Not a voice. It had been days since he'd heard any voice but his own. Not the food dispenser or the toilet. Not the familiar crunch of his feet over dismembered machinery. Not even the sound of breaking plastic or the clang of metal under assault; he'd already destroyed everything he could, given up on the rest.

No, this was something else. A hissing sound. It took him a few moments to remember what it was.

The access hatch, pressurizing.

He craned his neck until he could see around the corner of an intervening cabinet. The usual red light glowed from the wall to one side of the big metal ellipse. It turned green as he watched.

The hatch swung open. Two men in body condoms stepped through, light from behind throwing their shadows along the length of the dark room. They looked around, not seeing him at first.

One of them turned up the lights.

Scanlon squinted up from the corner. The men were wearing sidearms. They looked down at him for a few moments, folds of isolation membrane draped around their faces like leprous skin.

Scanlon sighed and pulled himself to his feet. Fragments of bruised technology tinkled to the floor. The guards stood aside to let him pass. Without a word they followed him back outside.

* * *

Another room. A strip of light divided it into two dark halves. It speared down from a recessed groove in the ceiling, bisecting the wine draperies and the carpet, laying a bright band across the conference table. Tiny bright hyphens reflected from perspex workpads set into the mahogany.

A line in the sand. Patricia Rowan stood well back on the other side, her face half-lit in profile.

"Nice room," Scanlon remarked. "Does this mean I'm out of quarantine?"

Rowan didn't face him. "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to stay on your side of the light. For your own safety."

"Not yours?"

Rowan gestured at the light without looking. "Microwave. UV too, I think. You'd fry if you crossed it."

"Ah. Well, maybe you've been right all along." Scanlon pulled a chair out from the conference table and sat down. "I developed a real symptom the other day. My stools seem a bit off. Intestinal flora not working properly, I guess."

"I'm sorry to hear it."

"I thought you'd be pleased. It's the closest thing to vindication you've got to date."

Neither person spoke for nearly a minute.

"I... I wanted to talk," Rowan said at last.

"So did I. A couple of weeks ago." And then, when she didn't respond: "Why now?"

"You're a therapist, aren't you?"

"Neurocognitist. And we haven't
talked
, as you put it, for decades. We prescribe."

She lowered her face.

"You see, I have," she began.

"Blood on my hands," she said a moment later.

I bet I know whose, too.
"Then you really don't want me. You want a priest."

"They don't talk either. At least, they don't say much."

The curtain of light hummed softly, like a bug zapper.

"Pyranosal RNA," Scanlon said after a moment. "Five-sided ribose ring. A precursor to modern nucleic acids, pretty widespread about three and a half billion years ago. The library says it would've made a perfectly acceptable genetic template on its own; faster replication than DNA, fewer replication errors. Never caught on, though."

Rowan said nothing. She may have nodded, but it was hard to tell.

"So much for your story about an
agricultural hazard
. So are you finally going to tell me what's going on, or are you still into role-playing games?"

Rowan shook herself, as though coming back from somewhere. For the first time, she looked directly at Scanlon. The sterilight reflected off her forehead, buried her eyes in black pools of shadow. Her contacts shimmered like back-lit platinum.

She didn't seem to notice his condition.

"I didn't lie to you, Dr. Scanlon. Fundamentally, you could call this an agricultural problem. We're dealing with sort of a— a soil bacterium. It’s not a pathogen at all, really. It’s just— a competitor. And no, it never caught on. But as it turns out, it never really died off, either."

She dropped into a chair.

"Do you know what the really shitty thing is about all this? We could let you go right now and it's entirely possible that everything would be fine. It's almost certain, in fact. One in a thousand chance we'd regret it, they say. Maybe one in
ten
thousand."

"Pretty good odds," Scanlon agreed. "What's the punchline?"

"Not good enough. We can't take the chance."

"You take a bigger risk every time you step outside."

Rowan sighed. "And people play lotteries with odds of one in a
million
, all the time. But Russian Roulette's got much better odds than that, and you won't find too many people taking their chances at it."

"Different payoffs."

"Yes. The payoffs." Rowan shook her head; in some strange abstract way she seemed almost amused. "Cost-benefit analysis, Yves. Maximum likelihood. Risk assessment. The lower the risk, the more sense it makes to play."

"And the reverse," Scanlon said.

"Yes. Of course. The reverse."

"Must be pretty bad," he said, "to turn down ten-thousand-to-one odds."

"Oh yes." She didn't look at him.

He'd been expecting it, of course. The bottom dropped out of his stomach anyway.

"Let me guess," he said. He couldn't seem to keep his voice level. "N'AmPac's at risk if I go free."

"Worse," she said, very softly.

"Ah. Worse than N'AmPac. Okay, then. The human race. The whole human race goes belly up if I so much as sneeze out of doors."

"Worse," she repeated.

She's lying. She has to be. She's just a refsucking dryback cunt. Find her angle.

Scanlon opened his mouth. No words came out.

He tried again. "Hell of a soil bacterium." His voice sounded as thin as the silence that followed.

"In some ways, actually, it's more like a virus," she said at last. "God, Yves, we're
still
not really sure what it is. It's old, older than the Archaea, even. But you've figured that out for yourself. A lot of the details are beyond me."

Scanlon giggled. "Details are
beyond
you?" His voice swerved up an octave, dropped again. "You lock me up for all this time and now you tell me I'm stuck here forever— I
assume
that's what you're about to tell me—" the words tumbled out too quickly for her to disagree— "and you just don't have a head to remember the
details?
Oh, that's okay,
Ms.
Rowan, why should I want to hear about
those
?"

Rowan didn't answer directly. "There's a theory that life got started in rift vents. All life. Did you know that, Yves?"

He shook his head.
What the hell is she going on about?

"Two prototypes," Rowan continued. "Three, four billion years ago. Two competing models. One of them cornered the market, set the standard for everything from viruses up to giant sequoias. But the thing is, Yves, the winner wasn't necessarily the best product. It just got lucky somehow, got some early momentum. Like software, you know? The best programs never end up as industry standards."

She took a breath. "We're not the best either, apparently. The best never got off the ocean floor."

"And it's in me now? I'm some sort of Patient Zero?" Scanlon shook his head. "No. It's impossible."

"Yves—"

"It's just the deep sea. It's not outer space, for God's sake. There's currents, there's circulation, it would have come up a hundred million years ago, it'd be everywhere already."

Rowan shook her head.

"
Don't tell me that!
You're a fucking
corpse,
you don't know
anything
about biology! You said so yourself!"

Suddenly Rowan was staring directly through him. "An actively maintained hypo-osmotic intracellular environment," she intoned. "Potassium, calcium, and chlorine ions all maintained at concentrations of less than five millimoles per kilogram." Tiny snowstorms gusted across her pupils. "The consequent strong osmotic gradient, coupled with high bilayer porosity, results in extremely efficient assimilation of nitrogenous compounds. However, it also limits distribution in aqueous environments with salinity in excess of twenty parts-per-thousand, due to the high cost of osmoregulation. Thermal elev—"

"
Shut
up
!"

Rowan fell immediately silent, her eyes dimming slightly.

"You don't know what the fuck you just said," Scanlon spat. "You're just reading off that built-in teleprompter of yours. You don't have a clue."