Starfish (51 page)

It's dying, of course, but slowly. It wouldn't care much about that, even if it knew.

* * *

Like all living things, it has a purpose. It is a guardian. It forgets, sometimes, exactly what it is supposed to be protecting. No matter. It knows it when it sees it.

It sees her now, crawling from a hole in the bottom of the world. She looks much like the others, but it has always been able to tell the difference. Why protect her, and not the others? It doesn't care. Reptiles never question motives. They only act on them.

She doesn't seem to know that it is here, watching.

The reptile is privy to certain insights that should, by rights, be denied it. It was exiled before the others tweaked their neurochemistry into more sensitive modes. And yet all that those changes did, in the end, was to make certain weak signals more easily discernible against a loud and chaotic background. Since the reptile's cortex shut down, background noise has been all but silenced. The signals are as weak as ever, but the static has disappeared. And so the reptile has, without realizing it, absorbed a certain muddy awareness of distant attitudes.

It feels, somehow, that this place has become dangerous, although it doesn't know how. It feels that the other creatures have disappeared. And yet, the one it protects is still here. With far less comprehension than a mother cat relocating her endangered kittens, the reptile tries to take its charge to safety.

It's easier when she stops struggling. Eventually she even allows it to pull her away from the bright lights, back towards the place she belongs. She makes sounds, strange and familiar; the reptile listens at first, but they make its head hurt. After a while she stops. Silently, the reptile draws her through sightless nightscapes.

Dim light dawns ahead. And sound; faint at first, but growing. A soft whine. Gurgles. And something else, a pinging noise—
metallic
, Broca murmurs, although it doesn't know what that means.

A copper beacon glares out from the darkness ahead — too coarse, too steady, far brighter than the bioluminescent embers that usually light the way. It turns the rest of the world stark black. The reptile usually avoids this place. But this is where she comes from. This is safety for her, even though to the reptile, it represents something completely—

From the cortex, a shiver of remembrance.

The beacon shines down from several meters above the sea bed. At closer range it resolves into a string of smaller lights stretched in an arc, like photophores on the flank of some enormous fish.

Broca sends down more noise:
Sodium floods
.

Something huge looms behind those lights, bloating gray against black. It hangs above the sea bed like a great smooth boulder, impossibly buoyant, encircled by lights at its equator. Striated filaments connect it to the bottom.

And something else, smaller but even more painfully bright, is coming down out of the sky.

"ThisisCSS
Forcipiger
outofAstoriaAnybodyhome?"

The reptile shoots back into the darkness, mud billowing behind it. It retreats a good twenty meters before a dim realization sinks in.

Broca's area knows those sounds. It doesn't understand them — Broca's never much good at anything but mimicry — but it's heard something like them before. The reptile feels an unaccustomed twitch. It's been a long time since curiosity was any use.

It turns and faces back from whence it fled. Distance has smeared the lights into a diffuse, dull glow. She's back there somewhere, unprotected.

It edges back towards the beacon. One light divides again into many; that dim, ominous outline still lurks behind them. And the thing from the sky is settling down on top of it, making noises at once frightening and familiar.

She floats in the light, waiting. Dedicated, afraid, the reptile comes to her.

"Heylook." The reptile flinches, but holds its ground this time. "Ididn'tmeentoostartlyou, butnobodysanseringinside. Imsupposdtopickyouguysup."

She glides up towards the thing from the sky, comes to rest in front of the shiny round part on its front. The reptile can't see what she's doing there. Hesitantly, its eyes aching with the unaccustomed brightness, it starts after her.

But she turns and meets it, coming back. She reaches out, guides it down along the bulging surface, past the lights that ring its middle (too bright, too bright), down towards—

Broca's Area is gibbering nonstop,
eeeebbeeebeebebeebe beebe
, and now there's something else, too, something
inside
the reptile, stirring. Instinct. Feeling. Not so much memory as
reflex—

It pulls back, suddenly frightened.

She tugs at it. She makes strange noises:
togetinsydjerrycumminsiditsallrite—
The reptile resists, uncertainly at first, then vigorously. It slides along the gray wall, now a cliff, now an overhang; it scrabbles for purchase, catches hold of some protuberance, clings against this strange hard surface. Its head darts back and forth, back and forth, between light and shadow.

"—
onGerryyouvgaw toocome inside—
"

The reptile freezes.
Inside.
It knows that word. It even understands it, somehow. Broca's not alone any more, something else is reaching out from the temporal lobe and tapping in. Something up there actually knows what Broca is talking about.

What
she
's talking about.

"
Gerry—"

It knows that sound too.

"—
please—
"

That sound comes from a long time ago.

"—
trust me
— is there
any
of you left in there? Anything at all?"

Back when the reptile was part of something larger, not an
it
at all, then, but—

—
he
.

Clusters of neurons, long dormant, sparkle in the darkness. Old, forgotten subsystems stutter and reboot.

I—

"Gerry?"

My name. That's my name
. He can barely think over the sudden murmuring in his head. There are parts of him still asleep, parts that won't talk, still other parts completely washed away. He shakes his head, trying to clear it. The new parts — no, the old parts, the very old parts that went away and now they've come back
and won't shut the fuck up
— are all clamoring for attention.

Everywhere is so
bright
. Everywhere hurts. Everywhere...

Words scroll through his mind:
The lights are on. Nobody's home.

The lights come on, flickering.

He can catch glimpses of sick, rotten things squirming in his head. Old memories grind screeching against thick layers of corrosion. Something lurches into sudden focus: a fist. The feel of bones, breaking in his face. The ocean in his mouth, warm and somehow brackish. A boy with a shockprod. A girl covered in bruises.

Other boys.

Other girls.

Other fists.

Everything hurts, everywhere.

Something's trying to pry his fingers free. Something's trying to drag him inside. Something wants to bring all this back. Something wants to take him
home.

Words come to him, and he lets them out: "don't you
fucking
TOUCH ME!"

He pushes his tormentor away, makes a desperate grab for empty water. The darkness is too far away; he can see his shadow stretching along the bottom, black and solid and squirming against the light. He kicks as hard as he can. Nothing grabs him. After a while the light fades away.

But the voices shout as loud as ever.

Beebe yawns like a black pit between his feet. Something rustles down there; he catches hints of movement, darkness shifting against darkness. Suddenly something glints up at him; two ivory smudges of reflected light, all but lost against that black background. They hover there a moment, then begin to rise. A pale face resolves around them.

She climbs out of Beebe, dripping, and seems to bring some of the darkness with her. It follows her to the corner of the passenger compartment and hangs around her like a blanket. She doesn't say anything.

Joel glances into the pit, back at the rifter. "Is anyone else, er..."

She shakes her head, a gesture so subtle he nearly misses it.

"There was— I mean, the other one..." This has to be the rifter who was hanging off his viewport a few minutes ago:
Clarke
, her shoulder patch says. But the other one, the one that shot off like a refugee on the wrong side of the fence— that one's still close by, according to sonar. Hugging the bottom, thirty meters beyond the light. Just sitting there.

"There's no one else coming," she says. Her voice sounds small and dead.

"No one?" Two accounted for, out of a max complement of six? He cranks up the range on his display; nobody further out, either. Unless they're all hiding behind rocks or something.

He looks back down Beebe's throat.
Or they could all be hiding right down there, like trolls, waiting...

He abruptly drops the hatch, spins it tight. "Clarke, right? What's going on down here?"

She blinks at him. "You think
I
know?" She seems almost surprised. "I thought you'd be able to tell me."

"All I know is, the GA's paying me a shitload to do graveyard on short notice." Joel climbs forward, drops into the pilot's couch. Checks sonar. That weird fucker is still out there.

"I don't think I'm supposed to leave anyone behind," he says.

"You won't be," Clarke says.

"Will too. Got him right there in my sights."

She doesn't answer. He turns around and looks at her.

"Fine," she says at last. "
You
go out and get him."

Joel stares at her for a few seconds.
I don't really want to know
, he decides at last.

He turns without another word and blows the tanks. The 'scaphe, suddenly buoyant, strains against the docking clamps. Joel frees it with a tap on his panel. The 'scaphe leaps away from Beebe like something living, wobbles against viscous resistance, and begins climbing.

"You..." From behind him.

Joel turns.

"You really don't know what's going on?" Clarke asks.

"They called me about twelve hours ago. Midnight run to Beebe, they said. When I got to Astoria they told me to evacuate everyone. They said you'd all be ready and waiting."

Her lips curve up a bit. Not exactly a smile, but probably as close as these psychos ever come. It looks good on her, in a cold distant sort of way. Get rid of the eyecaps and he could easily see himself putting her into his VR program.

"What happened to everyone else?" he risks.

"Nothing," she said. "We just got— a bit paranoid."

Joel grunts. "Don't blame you. Put me down there for a year, paranoia'd be the least of my problems."

That brief, ghostly smile again.

"But really," he says, pushing it. "Why's everyone staying behind? This some kind of a labor action? One of those—" —
what did they used to call them—
"strike thingies?"