Starfish (50 page)

She almost revels in the silence now. No clanging footfalls disturb her, no sudden outbursts of random violence. The only pulse she hears is her own. The only breath comes from the air conditioners.

She flexes her fingers, lets them dig into the fabric of the chair. She can see into the communications cubby from her position in the lounge. Occasional telltales flicker through the hatchway, the only available light. For Clarke, it's enough; her eyecaps grab those meager photons and show her a room in twilight. She hasn't gone into Comm since the rest of them left. She didn't watch their icons crawl off the edge of the screen, and she hasn't swept the rift for signs of Gerry Fischer.

She doesn't intend to now. She doesn't know if she ever did.

Far away, Lubin's lonely windchimes serenade her.

Clank.

From below.

No. Stay away. Leave me alone.

She hears the airlock draining, hears it open. Three soft footsteps. Movement on the ladder.

Ken Lubin rises into the lounge like a shadow.

"Mike and Alice?" she says, afraid to let him begin.

"Heading out. I told them I'd catch up."

"We're spreading ourselves pretty thin," she remarks.

"I think Brander was just as happy to be rid of me for a while."

She smiles faintly.

"You're not coming," he says.

Clarke shakes her head. "Don't try—"

"I won't."

He folds himself down into a convenient chair. She watches him move. There's a careful grace about him, there always has been. He moves as though always afraid of damaging something.

"I thought you might do this," he says after a while.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know myself until, well..."

He waits for her to continue.

"I want to know what's going on," she says at last. "Maybe they really
are
playing straight with us this time. It's not
that
unlikely. Maybe things aren't as bad as we thought..."

Lubin seems to consider that. "What about Fischer? Do you want me to—"

She barks a short laugh. "Fischer? You really want to drag him through the muck for days on end, and then haul him onto some fucking beach where he can't even stand up without breaking both his legs? Maybe it'd make Mike feel a bit better. Not much of an act of charity for Gerry, though."

And not, she knows now, for Lenie Clarke either. She's been deluding herself all this time. She felt herself getting stronger and she thought she could just walk away with that gift, take it anywhere. She thought she could pack all of Channer inside of her like some new prosthetic.

But now. Now the mere thought of leaving brings all her old weakness rushing back. The future opens before her and she feels herself devolving, curling up into some soft prehuman tadpole, cursed now with the memory of how it once felt to be made of steel.

It's not me. It never was. It was just the rift, using me...

"I guess," she says at last, "I just didn't change that much after all..."

Lubin looks as though he's almost smiling.

His expression awakens some vague, impatient anger in her. "Why did you come back here anyway?" she demands. "You never gave a shit about what any of us did, or why. All you ever cared about was your own agenda, whatever that…"

Something clicks. Lubin's virtual smile disappears.

"You know." Clarke says. "You know what this is all about."

"No."

"Bullshit, Ken. Mike was right, you know way too much. You knew exactly what question to ask the Drybacks about the CPU on that bomb, you knew all about megatons and bubble diameters. So what's going on?"

"I don't know. Really." Lubin shakes his head. "I do have—expertise, in certain kinds of operations. Why should that surprise you? Did you really think domestic violence was the only kind that would qualify someone for this job?"

There's a silence. "I don't believe you," Clarke says at last.

"That's your prerogative," Lubin says, almost sadly.

"And why," she asks, "did you come
back
?"

"Just now?" Lubin shrugs. "I wanted— I wanted to say I'm sorry. About Karl."

"Karl? Yeah. Me too. But that's over and done with."

"He really cared about you, Lenie. He would have come back eventually. I know that."

She looks at him curiously. "What do you—"

"But I'm conditioned for tight security, you see, and Acton could see right inside. All the things I did…before. He could see it, there wasn't—"

Acton could see—
"Ken. We've never been able to tune you in. You know that."

He nods, rubbing his hands together. In the dim blue light Clarke can see sweat beading on his forehead.

"We get this training," he says, his voice barely a whisper. "Ganzfeld interrogation's a standard tool in corporate and national arsenals, you've got to be able to— to block the signals. I could, mostly, with you people. Or I'd just stay away so it wouldn't be a problem."

What is he saying
, Lenie Clarke asks herself, already knowing.
What is he saying?

"But Karl, he just— he dropped his inhibitors way too— I couldn't keep him out."

He rubs his face. Clarke has never seen him so fidgety.

"You know that feeling you get," Lubin says, "when you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar? Or in bed with someone else's lover? There's a formula for it. Some special combination of neurotransmitters. When you feel, you know, you've been--found out."

Oh my God.

"I've got a— sort of a conditioned reflex," he tells her. "It kicks in whenever those chemicals build up. I don't really have control over it. And when I feel, down in my gut, that I've been
discovered
, I just..."

Five percent,
Acton told her, long ago.
Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you'll be okay.

"I don't really have a choice..." Lubin says.

Five or ten percent. No more.

"I thought— I thought he was just worried about calcium depletion," Clarke whispers.

"I'm sorry." Lubin doesn't move at all, now. "I thought, coming down here—I thought it'd be safest for everyone, you know? It would have been, if Karl hadn't…"

She looks at him, numbed and distant. "How can you tell me this, Ken? Doesn't this, this
confession
of yours constitute a security breach?"

He stands up, suddenly. For a moment she thinks he's going to kill her.

"No," he says.

"Because your gut tells you I'm as good as dead anyway," she says. "Whatever happens. So no harm done."

He turns away. "I'm sorry," he says again, starting down the ladder.

Her own body seems very far away. But a small, hot coal is growing in all that dead space.

"What if I changed my mind, Ken?" she calls after him, rising. "What if I decided to leave with the rest of you? That'd get the old killer reflex going, wouldn't it?"

He stops on the ladder. "Yes," he says at last. "But you won't."

She stands completely still, watching him. He doesn't even look back.

* * *

She's outside. This isn't part of the plan. The plan is to stay inside, like they told her to. The plan is to sit there, just asking for it.

But here she is at the Throat, swimming along Main Street. The generators loom over her like sheltering giants. She bathes in their warm sodium glow, passes through clouds of flickering microbes, barely noticed. Beneath her, monstrous benthos filter life from the water, as oblivious to her as she is to them. Once she passes a multicolored starfish, beautifully twisted, stitched together from leftovers. It lies folded back against itself, two arms facing upward; a few remaining tube feet wave feebly in the current. Cottony fungus thrives in a jagged patchwork of seams.

At the edge of the smoker her thermistor reads 54°C.

It tells her nothing. The smoker could sleep for a hundred years or go off in the next second. She tries to tune in to the bottom-dwellers, glean whatever instinctive insights Acton could steal, but she's never been sensitive to invertebrate minds. Perhaps that skill comes only to those who've crossed the ten-percent threshold.

She's never risked going down this one before.

It's a tight fit. The inside of the chimney grabs her before she gets three meters. She twists and squirms; soft chunks of sulfur and calcium break free from the walls. She inches down, headfirst. Her arms are pinned over her head like black jointed antenna. There's no room to keep them at her sides.

She's plugging the vent so tightly that no light can filter in from Main Street. She trips her headlight on. A flocculent snowstorm swirls in the beam.

A meter further down, the tunnel zigs right. She doesn't think she'll be able to navigate the turn. Even if she can, she knows the passage is blocked. She knows, because a lime-encrusted skeletal foot protrudes around the corner.

She wriggles forward. There's a sudden roaring, and for one paralyzed moment she thinks the smoker is starting to blow. But the roar is in her head; something's plugging her electrolyser intake, depriving her of oxygen. It's only Lenie Clarke, passing out.

She shakes back and forth, a spasm centimeters in amplitude. It's enough; her intake is clear again. And as an added bonus, she's gotten far enough to see around the corner.

Acton's boiled skeleton clogs the passageway, crusty with mineral deposits. Blobs of melted copolymer stick to the remains like old candle wax. Somewhere in there, at least one piece of human technology is still working, screaming back to Beebe's deafened sensors.

She can't reach him. She can barely even touch him. But somehow, even through the encrustations, she can see that his neck has been neatly snapped.

It has forgotten what it was.

Not that that matters, down here. What good is a name when there's nothing around to use it? This one doesn't remember where it comes from. It doesn't remember the ones that drove it out so long ago. It doesn't remember the overlord that once sat atop its spinal cord, that gelatinous veneer of language and culture and denied origins. It doesn't even remember the slow deterioration of that oppressor, its final dissolution into dozens of autonomous, squabbling subroutines. Now even those have fallen silent.

Not much comes down from the cortex any more. Low-level impulses flicker in from the parietal and occipital lobes. The motor strip hums in the background. Occasionally, Broca's area mutters to itself. The rest is mostly dead and dark, worn smooth by a black ocean hot and mercurial as live steam, cold and sluggish as antifreeze. All that's left now is pure reptile.

It pushes on, blind and unthinking, oblivious to the weight of four hundred liquid atmospheres. It eats whatever it can find, somehow knowing what to avoid and what to consume. Desalinators and recyclers keep it hydrated. Sometimes, old mammalian skin grows sticky with secreted residues; newer skin, laid on top, opens pores to the ocean and washes everything clean with aliquots of distilled sea water.