Rome

 

 

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Neotenous

 

 

 

It didn't look human at first. It didn't even look alive. It looked like a pile of dirty rags someone had thrown against the base of the Cambie pylon. Gerry Fischer wouldn't have looked twice if the skytrain hadn't hissed overhead at exactly the right moment, strobing the ground with segmented strips of light.

 

He stared. Eyes, flashing in and out of shadow, stared back.

 

He didn't move until the train had slid away along its overhead track. The world fell back into muddy low contrast. The sidewalk. The strip of kudzu4 below the track, gray and suffocating under countless drizzlings of concrete dust. Feeble cloudbank reflections of neon and laser from Commercial.

 

And this thing with the eyes, this rag-pile against the pylon. A boy.

 

A young boy.

 

This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow always said. After all, the kid could die out here.

 

"Are you okay?" he said at last.

 

The pile of rags shifted a little, and whimpered.

 

"It's okay. I won't hurt you."

 

"I'm lost," it said, in a very strange voice.

 

Fischer took a step forward. “You a ref?” The nearest refugee strip was over a hundred kilometers away, and well guarded, but sometimes someone would get out.

 

The eyes swung from side to side: no.

 

But then, Fischer thought, what else would he say? Maybe he’s afraid I’ll turn him in.

 

"Where do you live?" he asked, and listened closely to the answer:

 

"Orlando."

 

No hint of Asian or Hindian in that voice. Back when Fischer was a kid his mom would always tell him that disasters were color-blind, but he knew better now. The kid sounded N’Am; not a ref, then. Which meant there would probably be people looking for him.

 

Which, in a way, was too—

 

Stop it.

 

"Orlando,” he repeated aloud. “You are lost. Where's your mom and dad?"

 

"Hotel." The rag pile detached itself from the pylon and shuffled closer. "Vanceattle." The words came out half-whistled, as though the kid was speaking through his sinuses. Maybe he had one of those, those — Fischer groped for the words — cleft palates, or something.

 

"Vanceattle? Which one?"

 

Shrug.

 

"Don't you have a watch?"

 

"Lost it."

 

You've got to help him, Shadow said.

 

"Well, um, look." Fischer rubbed at his temples. "I live close by. We can call from there."

 

There weren't that many Vanceattles in the lower mainland. The police wouldn't have to find out. And even if they did, they wouldn't charge him. Not for this. What was he supposed to do, leave the kid for body parts?

 

"I'm Gerry," Fischer said.

 

"Kevin."

 

Kevin looked about nine or ten. Old enough that he should know how to use a public terminal, anyway. But there was something wrong with him. He was too tall and skinny, and his limbs tangled up in themselves when he walked. Maybe he was brain damaged. Maybe one of those nanotech babies that went bad. Or maybe his mother just spent too much time outdoors when she was pregnant.

 

Fischer led Kevin up to his two-room timeshare. Kevin dropped onto the couch without asking. Fischer checked the fridge: root beer. The boy took it with a nervous smile. Fischer sat down beside him and put a reassuring hand on Kevin's lap.

 

The expression drained from Kevin's face as though someone had pulled a plug.

 

Go on, Shadow said. He's not complaining, is he?

 

Kevin's clothes were filthy. Caked mud clung to his pants. Fischer reached over and began picking it off. "We should get you out of these clothes. Get you cleaned up. We can only take showers on even days here, but you could always take a sponge bath..."

 

Kevin just sat there. One hand gripped his drink, bony fingers denting the plastic; the other rested motionless on the couch.

 

Fischer smiled. "It's okay. This is what you do when you really—"

 

Kevin stared at the floor, trembling.

 

Fischer found a zipper, pulled. Pressed, gently. "It's okay. It's okay. Don't worry."

 

Kevin stopped shaking. Kevin looked up.

 

Kevin smiled.

 

"I'm not the one who should be worried here, asshole," he said in his whistling child's voice.

 

The jolt threw Fischer to the floor. Suddenly he was staring at the ceiling, fingers twitching at the ends of arms that had turned, magically, into dead weights. His whole nervous system sang like a tracery of high-tension wires embedded in flesh.

 

His bladder let go. Wet warmth spread out from his crotch.

 

Kevin stepped over him and looked down, all trace of awkwardness gone from his movements. One hand still held the plastic cup. The other held a shockprod.

 

Very deliberately, Kevin upended his drink. Fischer watched the liquid snake down, almost casually, and splash across his face. His eyes stung; Kevin was a spindly blur in a wash of weak acid. Fischer tried to blink, tried again, finally succeeded.

 

One of Kevin's legs was swinging back at the knee.

 

"Gerald Fischer, you are under arrest—"

 

It swung forward. Pain erupted in Fischer's side.

 

"—for indecent assault of a minor—"

 

Back. Forward. Pain.

 

"—under sections 151 and 152 of the N'Am Pacific Criminal Code."

 

The child knelt down and glared into his face. Up close the telltales were obvious; the depth of the eyes, the size of the pores in the skin, the plastic resilience of adult flesh soaked in androgen suppressants.

 

"Not to mention violation of yet another restraining order," Kevin added.

 

How long, Fischer wondered absently. Neural aftershock draped the whole world in gauze. How many months did it take to stunt back down from man to child?

 

"You have the right to— ah, fuck."

 

And how long to reverse the reversal? Could Kevin ever grow up again?

 

"You know your fucking rights better than I do."

 

This wasn't happening. The police wouldn't go this far, they didn't have the money, and anyway, why? How could anyone be willing to change themselves like that? Just to get Gerry Fischer? Why?

 

"I suppose I should call you in, shouldn't I? Then again, maybe I'll just let you lie here in your own piss for a while..."

 

Somehow, he got the feeling that Kevin was hurting more than he was. It didn't make sense.

 

It's okay, Shadow told him softly. It's not your fault. They just don't understand.

 

Kevin was kicking him again, but Fischer could hardly feel it. He tried to say something, anything, that would make his tormentor feel a little better, but his motor nerves were still fried.

 

He could still cry, though. Different wiring.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It was different this time. It started out the same, the scans and the samples and the beatings, but then they took him out of the line and cleaned him up, and put him in a side room. Two guards sat him down at a table, across from a dumpy little man with brown moles all over his face.

 

"Hello, Gerry," he said, pretending not to notice Fischer's injuries. "I'm Dr. Scanlon."

 

"You're a shrink."

 

"Actually, I'm more of a mechanic." He smiled, a prissy little smile that said I've just been very clever but you're probably too stupid to get the joke. Fischer decided he didn't like Scanlon much.

 

Still, his type had been useful before, with all their talk about competence and criminal responsibility. It's not so much what you did, Fischer had learned, as why you did it. If you did things because you were evil, you were in real trouble. If you did the same things because you were sick, though, the doctors would sometimes cover for you. Fischer had learned to be sick.

 

Scanlon pulled a headband out of his breast pocket. "I'd like to talk to you for a little while, Gerry. Would you mind putting this on for me?"

 

The inside of the band was studded with sensor pads. It felt cool across his forehead. Fischer looked around the room, but he couldn't see any monitors or readouts.

 

"Great." Scanlon nodded to the guards. He waited until they'd left before he spoke again.

 

"You're a strange one, Gerry Fischer. We don't run into too many like you."

 

"That's not what the other doctors said."

 

"Oh? What did they say?"

 

"They said I was typical. They said, they said lots of the one-fifty-one's used the same rationale."

 

Scanlon leaned forward. "Well you know, that's true. It's a classic line: 'I was teaching her about her awakening sexuality, doctor.' 'It's the parents' job to instruct their children, doctor.' 'They don't like school either, but it's for their own good.'"

 

"I never said those things. I don't even have kids."

 

"No you don't. But the point is, pedophiles often claim to be acting in the best interests of the children. They turn sexual abuse into an act of altruism, if you will."

 

"It's not abuse. It's what you do if you really love someone."

 

Scanlon leaned back in his chair and studied Fischer for a few moments.

 

"That's what's so interesting about you, Gerry."

 

"What?"

 

"Everyone uses that line. You're the only person I've met who might actually believe it."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

In the end, they said they could take care of the charges. He knew there had to be more to it than that, of course; they'd make him volunteer for some sort of experiment, or donate some of his organs, or submit to voluntary castration first. But the catch, when it came, wasn't any of those things. He almost couldn't believe it.

 

They wanted to give him a job.

 

"Think of it as community service," Scanlon said. "Restitution to all of society. You'd be underwater most of the time, but you'd be well-equipped."

 

"Underwater where?"

 

"Channer Vent. About forty kilometers north of the Axial Volcano, on the Juan de Fuca Rift. Do you know where that is, Gerry?"

 

"How long?"

 

"One year minimum. You could extend that if you wanted to."

 

Fischer couldn't think of any reason why he would, but it didn't matter. If he didn't take this deal they'd stick a governor in his head for the rest of his life. Which might not be that long, when you thought about it.

 

"One year," he said. "Underwater."

 

Scanlon patted his arm. "Take your time, Gerry. Think about it. You don't have to decide until this afternoon."

 

Do it, Shadow urged. Do it or they'll cut into you and you'll change...

 

But Fischer wasn't going to be rushed. "So what do I do for one year, underwater?"

 

Scanlon showed him a vid.

 

"Geez," Fischer said. "I can't do any of that."

 

"No problem." Scanlon smiled. "You'll learn."

 

 

 

* * *

 

He did, too.

 

A lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night they'd give him an injection, to help him learn, Scanlon said. Afterwards a machine beside his bed would feed him dreams. He could never exactly remember them but something must have stuck, because every morning he'd sit at the console with his tutor — a real person, though, not a program — and all the text and diagrams she showed him would be strangely familiar. Like he'd known it all years ago, and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything: plate tectonics and subduction zones, Archimedes Principle, the thermal conductivity of two percent hydrox. Aldosterone.

 

Alloplasty.

 

He remembered his left lung after they cut it out, and the technical specs on the machines they put in its place.

 

Afternoons, they'd attach leads to his body and saturate his striated muscles with low-amp current. He was starting to understand what was going on, now; the term was induced isometrics, and its meaning had come to him in a dream.

 

A week after the operation he woke up with a fever.

 

"Nothing to worry about," Scanlon told him. "That's just the last stage of your infection."

 

"Infection?"

 

"We shot you up with a retrovirus the day you came here. Didn't you know?"

 

Fischer grabbed Scanlon's arm. "Like a disease? You—"

 

"It's perfectly safe, Gerry." Scanlon smiled patiently, disentangling himself. "In fact, you wouldn't last very long down there without it; human enzymes don't work well at high pressure. So we loaded some extra genes into a tame virus and sent it in. It's been rewriting you from the inside out. Judging by your fever I'd say it's nearly finished. You should be feeling better in a day or so."

 

"Rewriting?"

 

"Half your enzymes come in two flavors now. They got the genes from one of those deep-water fish. Rattails, I think they're called." Scanlon patted Fischer on the shoulder. "So how does it feel to be part fish, Gerry?"

 

"Coryphaenoides armatus," Fischer said slowly.

 

Scanlon frowned. "What was that?"

 

"Rattails." Fischer concentrated. "Mostly dehydrogenases, right?"

 

Scanlon glanced at the machine by the bed. "I'm, um, not sure."

 

"That's it. Dehydrogenases. But they tweaked them to reduce the activation energy." He tapped his temple. "It's all here. Only I haven't done the tutorial yet."

 

"That's great," Scanlon said; but he didn't sound like he meant it.

 

 

 

* * *

 

One day they put him in a tank built like a piston, five stories tall: its roof could press down like a giant hand, squeezing whatever was inside. They sealed the hatch and flooded the tank with seawater.

 

Scanlon had warned him about the change. "We flood your trachea and your head cavities, but your lung and intestines aren't rigid so they just squeeze down. We're immunizing you against pressure, you see? They say it's a bit like drowning, but you get used to it."

 

It wasn't that bad, actually. Fischer's guts twisted in on themselves, and his sinuses burned like hell, but he'd take that over another bout with Kevin any day.

 

He floated there in the tank, seawater sliding through the tubes in his chest, and reflected on the queasy sensation of not breathing.

 

"They're getting some turbulence." Scanlon's voice came at him from all directions, as if the walls themselves were talking. "From your exhaust port."

 

A fine trail of bubbles was trickling from Fischer's chest. His eyecaps made everything seem marvelously clear, like a hallucination. "Just a bit of—"

 

Not his voice. His words, but spoken by something else, some cheap machine that didn't know about harmonics. One hand went automatically to the disk embedded in his throat.

 

"—hydrogen," he tried again. "No problem. Pressure'll squeeze them down when I get deep enough."

 

"Yeah. Still." Other words, muffled, as Scanlon spoke to someone else. Fischer felt something vibrate softly in his chest. The bubbles grew larger, then smaller. Then disappeared.

 

Scanlon was back. "Better?"

 

"Yeah." Fischer didn't know how he felt about this, though. He didn't really like having a chest full of machinery. He didn't really like having to breathe by chopping water into chunks of hydrogen and oxygen. But he really didn't like the idea of some tech he'd never even met fiddling with his insides by remote control, reaching into his body and messing around in there without even asking. It made him feel—

 

Violated, right?

 

Sometimes Shadow was just a bitch. As if she hadn't been the one to put him up to it in the first place.

 

"We're going to kill the lights now, Gerry."

 

Darkness. The water hummed with the sound of vast machinery.

 

After a few moments he noticed a cold blue spark winking at him from somewhere overhead. It seemed to cast a lot more light than it should. As he watched, the inside of the tank reappeared in hazy shades of blue-on-black.

 

"Photoamps working okay?" Scanlon wanted to know.

 

"Uh huh."

 

"What can you see?"

 

"Everything. The inside of the tank. The hatch. Sort of bluish."

 

"Right. Luciferin light source."

 

"It's not very bright," Fischer said. "Everything's sort of like, dusk."

 

"Well, it'd be pitch black without your eyecaps."

 

And suddenly, it was.

 

"Hey."

 

"Don't worry, Gerry. Everything's fine. We just shut the light off."

 

He lay there in utter darkness. Floaters wriggled at the corner of his eye.

 

"How are you feeling, Gerry? Any sensation of falling? Claustrophobia?"

 

He felt almost peaceful.

 

"Gerry?"

 

"No. Nothing. I feel—fine—"

 

"Pressure's at two thousand meters."

 

"I can't feel it."

 

This might not be so bad after all. One year. One year...

 

"Doctor Scanlon," he said after a while. He was even getting used to the metallic buzz of his new voice.

 

"Right here."

 

"Why me?"

 

"What do you mean, Gerry?"

 

"I wasn't, you know, qualified. Even after all this training I bet there's lots of people who'd be better at this than me. Real engineers."

 

"It's not so much what you know," Scanlon said. "It's what you are."

 

He knew what he was. People had been telling him for as long as he could remember. He didn't see what the fuck that had to do with anything. "What's that, then?"

 

At first he thought he wasn't going to get an answer. But Scanlon finally spoke, and when he did there was something in his voice that Fischer had never heard before.

 

"Pre-adapted," was what he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elevator Boy

 

 

 

The Pacific Ocean slopped two kilometers under his feet. He had a cargo of blank-eyed psychotics sitting behind him. And the lifter was being piloted by a large pizza with extra cheese. Joel Kita liked it all about as much as could be expected.

 

At least he had been expecting it, this time. For once the GA hadn't sprung one of their exercises in chaos theory onto his life without warning. He'd seen it coming almost a week in advance, when they'd sprung one onto Ray Stericker instead. Ray had been in this very cockpit, watching the pizza being installed and no doubt wondering when the term "job security" had become an oxymoron.

 

"I'm supposed to baby-sit it for a week," he had said then. Joel had climbed up into the 'scaphe for the usual preflight check and found his friend waiting by the controls. Ray had gestured up through the open hatchway to the lifter's cockpit, where a couple of techs were busy interfacing something to the controls. "Just in case it screws up in the field. Then I'm gone."

 

"Gone where?" Joel couldn't believe it. Ray had been on the Juan de Fuca run forever, even before the geothermal program. He’d even been an employee, back when such things were commonplace.

 

"Probably the Gorda circuit for a while. After that, who knows? They'll be upgrading everything before long."

 

Joel glanced up through the hatch. The techs were playing with a square vanilla box, half a meter on a side and about twice as thick as Kita's wrist. "What is the fucking thing? Some kind of autopilot?"

 

"With a difference. This takes off and lands. And all sorts of lovely things in between."

 

This was not good news. Humans had always been able to integrate three-D spatial information better than the machines that kept trying to replace them. Not that machines couldn't recognize a tree or a building when such objects were pointed out to them, but they got real confused whenever you rotated any of those objects a few degrees. The shapes changed, contrast and shadow shifted, and it always took way too long for any of those arsenide pretenders to update its spatial maps and recognize that yes, it's still a tree, and no, it didn't morph into something else, dummy, you just changed your point of view.

 

In some places that wasn't a problem. Ocean surfaces, for example. Or controlled-access highways where the cars had their own ID transponders. Or even lashed to the underside of a giant squashed doughnut filled with buoyant vacuum, floating in mid-air. These had been respected and venerable environments for autopilots since well before the turn of the century.

 

Take-offs and landings were a different scene altogether, though. Too many real objects going by too fast, too many things to keep an eye on. A few billion years of natural selection still had the edge when the fast lane got that crowded.

 

Until now, apparently.

 

"Let's get out of here." Ray dropped down onto the landing pad. Joel followed him out to the edge of the roof. Green tangled blankets of kudzu4 spread out around them, shrouding the roofs of surrounding buildings. It always made Joel think post-apocalypse — weeds and ivy crawling back in from the wilderness to strangle the residue of some fallen civilization. Except, of course, these particular weeds were supposed to save civilization.

 

Way out by the coast, barely visible, streamers of smoke dribbled into the sky from the refugee strip. So much for civilization.

 

"It's one of those smart gels," Ray said at last.

 

"Smart gels?"

 

"Head cheese. Cultured brain cells on a slab. The same things they've been plugging into the Net to firewall infections."

 

"I know what they are, Ray. I just can't fucking believe it."

 

"Well, believe it. They'll be coming for you too, give 'em enough time."

 

"Yeah. Probably." Joel let it sink in. "I wonder when."

 

Ray shrugged. "You've got some breathing space. All that unpredictable volcanic shit, things blowing up under you. Nastier than flying a hoover. Harder to replace you."

 

He looked back at the lifter, and the 'scaphe nestled into its underbelly.

 

"Won't take long, though."

 

Joel fished a derm out of his pocket; a tricyclic with a mild lithium chaser. He held it out without a word.

 

Ray just spat. "Thanks anyway. I want to feel pissed for a while, you know?"

 

* * *

 

 

 

And now, eight days later, Ray Stericker was gone.

 

He'd disappeared after his last shift, just the day before. Joel had tried to track him down, drag him out, piss him up, but he hadn't been able to find the man on site and Ray wasn't answering his watch. So here was Joel Kita, back on the job, alone except for his cargo; four very strange people in black suits, blank white lenses covering their eyes. They all had identical GA logos stamped onto their shoulders, tags with their surnames printed just below. At least the surnames were different, although the difference seemed trivial; male, female, large or small, they all seemed minor variants of the same make and model. Ah yes, the Mk-5 was always such a nice boy. Kind of quiet, kept to himself. Who would've thought...

 

Joel had seen rifters before. He'd ferried a couple out to Beebe about a month ago, just after construction had ended. One of them had seemed almost normal, had gone out of her way to chat and joke around as if trying to compensate for the fact that she looked like a zombie. Joel had forgotten her name.

 

The other one hadn't said a word.

 

One of the 'scaphe's tactical screens beeped a progress report. "Bottom's rising again," Joel called back. "Thirty five hundred. We're almost there."

 

"Thanks," one of them — Fischer, according to his shoulder tag — said. Everyone else just sat there.

 

A pressure hatch separated the 'scaphe's cockpit from the passenger compartment. If you sealed it you could use the aft chamber as an airlock, or even pressurize it for saturation dives if you didn't mind the hassle of decompression. You could also just swing the hatch shut if you wanted a bit of privacy, if you didn't like leaving your back exposed to certain passengers. That would be bad manners, of course. Joel tried idly to think of some socially acceptable excuse for slamming that big metal disk in their faces, but gave up after a few moments.

 

Now, the dorsal hatch — the one leading up into the lifter's cockpit — that one was closed, and that felt wrong. Usually they kept it open until just before the drop. Ray and Joel would shoot the shit for however long the trip would take — three hours, if you were going to Channer.

 

Yesterday, without warning, Ray Stericker had dropped the hatch shut fifteen minutes into the flight. He hadn't said an unnecessary word the whole time, had barely even used the intercom. And today — well, today there wasn't anyone up there to talk to any more.

 

Joel looked out one of the side ports. The skin of the lifter blocked his view just a few centimeters on the other side; metal fabric stretched across carbon-fiber ribs, a gray expanse sucked into concave squares by the hard vacuum inside. The 'scaphe rode tucked into an oval hollow in the lifter's center. The only port that showed anything but gray skin was the one between Joel's feet; ocean, a long way down.

 

Not so far down now, though. He could hear the hisses and sighs of the lifter's ballast bags deflating overhead. Sharper sounds, more distant, cracked through the hull as electrical arcs heated the air in a couple of trim bags. This was still regular autopilot territory, but Ray used to do it all himself anyway. If it weren't for the closed hatch, Joel couldn't have told the difference.

 

The head cheese was doing a bang-up job.

 

He'd actually seen it a few days ago, during a delivery to an undersea rig just out of Gray's Harbor. Ray had hit a stud and the top of the box had slid away like white mercury, slipping back into a little groove at the edge of the casing and revealing a transparent panel underneath.

 

Beneath that panel, packed in clear fluid, was a ridged layer of goo, a bit too gray to be mozzarella. Dashes of brownish glass perforated the goo in neat parallel rows.

 

"I'm not supposed to open it up like this," Ray had said. "But fuck 'em. It's not as though the blighter's photosensitive."

 

"So what are those little brown bits?"

 

"Indium tin oxide over glass. Semiconductor."

 

"Jesus. And it's working right now?"

 

"Even as we speak."

 

"Jesus," Joel had said again. And then: "I wonder how you program something like this."

 

Ray had snorted at that. "You don't. You teach it. Learns through positive reinforcement, like a bloody baby."

 

A sudden, smooth shift in momentum. Joel pulled back to the present; the lifter was hanging stable, five meters over the waves. Right on target. Nothing but empty ocean on the surface, of course; Beebe's transponder was thirty meters straight down. Shallow enough to home in on, too deep to be a navigational hazard. Or to serve as a midwater hitching post for charter boats hunting Channer's legendary sea monsters.

 

The cheese printed out a word on the 'scaphe's tactical board: Launch?

 

Joel's finger wavered over the OK key, then came down. Docking latches clanked open; the lifter reeled Joel Kita and his cargo down to the water. Sunlight squinted through viewports for a few seconds as the 'scaphe swung in its harness. A wavetop batted at the forward port.

 

The world jerked once, slewed sideways, and turned green.

 

Joel opened the ballast tanks and looked back over his shoulder. "Going down, folks. Your last glimpse of sunlight. Enjoy it while you can."

 

"Thanks," said Fischer.

 

Nobody else moved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crush

 

 

 

Pre-adapted.

 

Even now, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, Fischer doesn't know what Scanlon meant by that.

 

He doesn't feel pre-adapted, not if that means he's supposed to be at home here. Nobody even talked to him on the way down. Nobody talked much to anyone else, either, but when they didn't talk to Fisher it seemed especially personal. And one of them, Brander— it's hard to tell with the eyecaps and all, but Fischer thinks Brander keeps looking at him, like they know each other from somewhere. Brander looks mean.

 

Everything's out in the open down here; pipes and cable bundles and ventilation ducts are all tacked onto the bulkheads in plain sight. He saw it on the vids before he came down, but those somehow left the impression of a brighter place, full of light and mirrors. The wall he's facing now, for instance; there should be a mirror there. But it's just a gray metal bulkhead with a greasy, unfinished sheen to it.

 

Fischer shifts his weight from one foot to the other. At one end of the lounge Lubin leans against a library pedestal, his capped eyes pointed at them with blank disinterest. Lubin's said only one thing to them in the five minutes they've been here:

 

"Clarke's still outside. She's coming in."

 

Something clanks under the floor. Water and nitrox mix, gurgling, nearby. The sound of a hatch swinging open, movement from below.

 

She climbs up into the lounge, droplets beading across her shoulders. Her diveskin paints her black below the neck, a skinny silhouette, almost sexless. Her hood is undone; blond hair, plastered against her skull, frames a face paler than Fischer's ever seen. Her mouth is a wide thin line. Her eyes, capped like his own, are blank white ovals in a child's face.

 

She looks around at them: Brander, Nakata, Caraco, Fischer. They look back, waiting. There's something in Nakata's face, Fischer thinks, something like recognition, but Lenie Clarke doesn't seem to notice. She doesn't seem to notice any of them, really.

 

She shrugs. "I'm changing the sodium on number two. A couple of you could come along, I guess."

 

She doesn't seem exactly human. There is something familiar about her, though.

 

What do you think, Shadow? Do I know her?

 

But Shadow isn't talking.

 

 

 

* * *

 

There's a street where none of the buildings have windows. The streetlamps shine down with a sick coppery light on masses of giant clams and big ropy brownish things emerging from mucous-gray cylinders (tube worms, he remembers: Riftia fuckinghugeous, or something). Natural chimneys rise here and there above the invertebrate multitudes, pillars of basalt and silicon and crystallized sulfur. Every time Fischer visits the Throat, he thinks of really bad acne.

 

Lenie Clarke leads them on a flight down Main Street: Fischer, Caraco, a couple of cargo squids on remote. The generators lean up over them on both sides. A dark curtain billows across the road directly ahead, and it sparkles. A school of small fish darts around the edges of the streaming cloud.

 

"That's the problem," Lenie buzzes. She looks back at Fischer and Caraco. "Mud plume. Too big to redirect."

 

They've come past eight generators so far. That leaves six up ahead, drowning in silt. Double shift, even if they call out Lubin and Brander.

 

He hopes they don't have to. Not Brander, anyway.

 

Lenie fins off towards the plume. The squids whine softly behind, dragging their tools. Fischer steels himself to follow.

 

"Shouldn't we check thermal?" Caraco calls out. "I mean, what if it's hot?"

 

He was wondering that himself, actually. He's been wondering about such things ever since he overheard Caraco and Nakata comparing rumors from the Mendocino fracture. Nakata heard it was a really old minisub, with Plexiglas ports. Caraco heard they were thermoacrylate. Nakata said it got wedged inside the center of the rift zone. Caraco said no, it was just cruising over the seabed and a smoker blew up under it.

 

They agreed on how fast the viewports melted, though. Even the skeletons went to ash. Which didn't make much difference anyway, since every bone in every body had already been smashed by the ambient pressure.

 

Caraco makes a lot of sense, in Fischer's opinion, but Lenie Clarke doesn't even answer. She just fins off into that black sparkly cloud and disappears. At the spot she disappears the mud glows suddenly, a phosphorescent wake. The fish swarm towards it.

 

"She doesn't even care, sometimes," Fischer buzzes softly. "Like, whether she lives or dies..."

 

Caraco looks at him for a moment, then kicks off towards the plume.

 

Clarke's voice buzzes out of the cloud. "Not much time."

 

Caraco dives into the roiling wall with a splash of light. A knot of fish— a couple of them are a fair size now, Fischer sees— swirl in her wake.

 

Go on, Shadow says.

 

Something moves.

 

He spins around. For a moment there's only Main Street, fading in distance.

 

Then something big and black and...and lopsided appears from behind one of the generators.

 

"Jeez." Fischer's legs move of their own volition. "They're coming!" he tries to yell. The vocoder scales it down to a croak.

 

Stupid. Stupid. They warned us, the sparkles bring in the little fish and the little fish bring in the big fish and if we don't watch it we just get in the way.

 

The plume is right in front of him now, a wall of sediment, a river on the bottom of the ocean. He dives in. Something nips lightly at his calf.

 

Everything goes black, with occasional sparkles. He turns his headlight on; the flowing mud swallows the beam half a meter from his face.

 

But Clarke can see it, somehow: "Turn it off."

 

"I can't see—"

 

"Good. Maybe they won't either."

 

He kills the light. In the darkness he gropes the gas billy from its sheath on his leg.

 

Caraco, from a distance: "I thought they were blind..."

 

"Some of them."

 

And they've got other senses to fall back on. Fischer runs through the list: smell, sound, pressure waves, bioelectric fields... Nothing relies on vision down here. It's just one of the options.

 

He hopes the plume blocks more than just light.

 

But even as he watches, the darkness is lifting. Black murk turns brown, then almost gray. Faint light filters in from the floodlamps on Main Street.

 

It's the eyecaps, he realizes. They're compensating. Cool.

 

He still can't see very far, though. It's like being caught in dirty fog.

 

"Remember." Clarke, very close. "They're not as tough as they look. They probably won't do much real damage."

 

A sonar pistol stutters nearby. "I'm not getting anything," Caraco buzzes. Milky sediment swirls on all sides. Fischer puts his arm out; it fades at the elbow.

 

"Oh shit." Caraco.

 

"Are you—"

 

"Something's on my leg something's Christ it's big—"

 

"Lenie—" Fischer cries.

 

A bump from behind. A slap on the back of his head. A shadow, black and spiny, fades into the murk.

 

Hey, that wasn't so—

 

Something clamps onto his leg. He looks down: jaws, teeth, a monstrous head fading away into the murk.

 

Oh Jeez—

 

He jams his billy against scaly flesh. Something gives, like gelatin. A soft thump. The flesh bloats, ruptures; bubbles explode from the rip.

 

Something else smashes him from behind. His chest is in a vise. He lashes out, blindly. Mud and ash and black blood billow into his face.

 

He grabs blindly, twists. There's a broken tooth in his hand, half as long as his forearm; he tightens his grip and it splinters. He drops it, brings the billy around and jams it into the thing on his side. Another explosion of meat and compressed CO2.

 

The pressure lifts from his chest. Whatever's clamped onto his leg isn't moving. Fischer lets himself sink, drifts down against the base of a barite chimney.

 

Nothing charges him.

 

"Everyone okay." Lenie's vocoded monotone. Fischer grunts yes.

 

"Thank God for bad nutrition," Caraco buzzes. "We're fucked if these guys ever get enough vitamins."

 

Fischer reaches down, pries the dead monster's jaws off his calf. He wishes he had breath to catch.

 

Shadow?

 

Right here.

 

Was this what it was like for you?

 

No. This didn't take so long.

 

He lies against the bottom and tries to shut his eyes. He can't; the diveskin bonds to the surface of the eyecaps, traps the eyelids in little cul-de-sacs. I'm sorry, Shadow. I'm so sorry.

 

I know, she says. It's okay.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Lenie Clarke stands naked in Medical, spraying the bruises on her leg. No, not naked; the caps are still on her eyes. All Fischer can see is skin.

 

It's not enough.

 

A trickle of blood crawls down her side from just below the water intake. She absently wipes it away and reloads the hypo.

 

Her breasts are small, almost adolescent, bumps. No hips. Her body's as pale as her face, except for the bruises and the fresh pink seams that access the implants. She looks anorexic.

 

She's the first adult Fischer's ever wanted.

 

She looks up and sees him in the doorway. "Strip down," she tells him, and goes back to work.

 

He splits his 'skin and starts to peel. Lenie finishes with her leg and stabs an ampoule into the cut in her side. The blood clots like magic.

 

"They warned us about the fish," Fischer says, "but they said they were really fragile. They said we could just beat them off with our hands if we had to."

 

Lenie sprays the cut in her side with a hypo, wipes off the residue. "You're lucky they told you that much." She pulls her diveskin tunic off a hanger, slides into it. "They barely mentioned the giantism when they sent us down."

 

"That's stupid. They must've known."

 

"They say this is the only vent where the fish get this big. That they've found, anyway."

 

"Why? What's so special here?"

 

Lenie shrugs.

 

Fischer has stripped to the waist. Lenie looks at him. "Leggings too. It got your calf, right?"

 

He shakes his head. "That's okay."

 

She looks down. His diveskin's only a couple of millimeters thick, it doesn't hide anything. He feels his erection going soft under her gaze.

 

Lenie's cold white eyes track back to his face. Fischer feels his face heating before he remembers: she can't see his eyes. No one can.

 

It's almost safe in here.

 

"Bruising's the biggest problem," Lenie says at last. "They don't puncture the diveskin all that often, but the force of the bite still gets through." Her hand is on his arm, firm and professional, probing the edges of Fischer's injury. It hurts, but he doesn't mind.

 

She uncaps a tube of anabolic salve. "Here. Rub this in."

 

The pain fades on contact. His flesh goes warm and tingly where he applies the ointment. He reaches out, a little bit scared, and touches Lenie's arm. "Thanks."

 

She twists out of reach without a word, bending down to seal the 'skin on her leg. Fischer watches the leggings slide up her body. They seem almost alive. They are almost alive, he remembers. The 'skin's got these reflexes, changes its permeability and thermal conductivity in response to body temperature. Maintains, what's the word, homeostasis.

 

Now he watches it swallowing Lenie's body like some slick black amoebae but she's showing through underneath, black ice instead of white but still the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. She's so far away. There's someone inside telling him to watch it—

 

—Go away, Shadow—

 

—but he can't help himself, he can almost touch her, she's bent over sealing her boots and his hand caresses the air just above her shoulder, traces the outline of her curved back so close it could feel her body heat if that stupid diveskin wasn't in the way, and—

 

And she straightens, bumping into his hand. Her face comes up; something burns behind her eyecaps. He pulls back but it's too late; her whole body's gone rigid and furious.

 

I just touched her. I didn't do anything wrong I just touched her—

 

She takes a single step forward. "Don't do that again," she says, her voice so flat he wonders for a second how her vocoder could work out of the water.

 

"I'm not—I didn't—"

 

"I don't care," she says. "Don't do it again."

 

Something moves at the corner of his eye. "Problem, Lenie? Need a hand?" Brander's voice.

 

She shakes her head. "No."

 

"Okay, then." Brander sounds disappointed. "I'll be upstairs."

 

Movement again. Sounds, receding.

 

"I'm sorry," Fischer says.

 

"Fine," Lenie says, and brushes past him into the wet room.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Autoclave

 

 

 

Nakata nearly bumps into her at the base of the ladder. Clarke glares; Nakata moves aside, baring teeth in a submissive primate smile.

 

Brander's in the lounge, pecking at the library: "You—?"

 

"I'm fine." She isn't, but she's getting there. This anger is nowhere near critical mass; it's just a reflex, really, a spark budded off from the main reservoir. It decays exponentially with elapsed time. By the time she reaches her cubby she's almost feeling sorry for Fischer.

 

Not his fault. He didn't mean any harm.

 

She closes the hatch behind her. It's safe to hit something now, if she wants. She looks around half-heartedly for a target, finally just drops onto her bunk and stares at the ceiling.

 

Someone raps on metal. "Lenie?"

 

She rises, pushes at the hatch.

 

"Hey Lenie, I think I've got a bad slave channel on one of the squids. I was wondering if you could—"

 

"Sure." Clarke nods. "Fine. Only not right now, okay, um—"

 

"Judy," says Caraco, sounding slightly miffed.

 

"Right. Judy." In fact, Clarke hasn't forgotten. But Beebe's way too crowded these days. Lately Clarke's learned to lose the occasional name. It helps keep things comfortably distant.

 

Sometimes.

 

"Excuse me," she says, brushing past Caraco. "I've got to get outside."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

In a few places, the rift is almost gentle.

 

Usually the heat stabs up in boiling muddy pillars or jagged bolts of superheated liquid. Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass. Not here, though. In this one spot, nestled between lava pillows and safe from Beebe's prying ears, the heat wafts up through the mud like a soft breeze. The underlying bedrock must be porous.

 

She comes here when she can, keeping to the bottom en route to foil Beebe's sonar. The others don't know about this place yet; she'd just as soon keep it that way. Sometimes she comes here to watch convection stir the mud into lazy curlicues. Sometimes she splits the seals on her 'skin, basks face and arms in the thirty-degree seep.

 

Sometimes she just comes here to sleep.

 

She lies with the shifting mud at her back, staring up into blackness. This is how you fall asleep when you can't close your eyes; you stare into the dark, and when you start seeing things you know you're dreaming.

 

Now she sees herself, the high priestess of a new troglodyte society. She was the first one here, deep at peace while the others were still being cut open and reshaped by grubby Dryback hands. She's the founding mother, the template against which other, rawer recruits trace themselves. They come down and they see that her eyes are always capped, and they go and do likewise.

 

But she knows it isn't true. The rift is the real creative force here, a blunt hydraulic press forcing them all into shapes of its own choosing. If the others are anything like her it's because they're all being squeezed in the same mold.

 

And let's not forget the GA. If Ballard was right, they made sure we weren't too different to start with.

 

There are all the superficial differences, of course. A bit of racial diversity. Token beaters, token victims, males and females equally represented...

 

Clarke has to smile at that. Count on Management to jam a bunch of sexual dysfunctionals together and then make sure the gender ratio is balanced. Nice of them to try and see that nobody gets left out.

 

Except for Ballard, of course.

 

But at least they learn from their mistakes. Dozing at three thousand meters, Lenie Clarke wonders what their next one will be.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Sudden, stabbing pain in the eyes. She tries to scream; smart implants feel tongue and lips in motion, mistranslate:

 

"Nnnnaaaaah..."

 

She knows the feeling. She's had it once or twice before. She dives blindly on a random heading. The pain in her head leaps from intense to unbearable.

 

"Aaaaaa—"

 

She twists back in the opposite direction. A bit better. She trips her headlamp, kicking as hard as she can. The world turns from black to solid brown. Zero viz. Mud seething on all sides. Somewhere close by she hears rocks splitting open.

 

Her headlamp catches the outcropping looming up a split second before she hits it. The shock rocks her skull, runs down her spine like a small earthquake. There's a different flavor of pain up there now, mingling with the searing in her eyes. She gropes blindly around the obstacle, keeps going. Her body feels— warm—

 

It takes a lot of heat to get through a diveskin, especially a class four. Those things are built for thermal stress.

 

Eyecaps, on the other hand...

 

Black. The world is black again, and clear. Clarke's headlamp stabs out across open space, lays a jiggling footprint on the mud a good ten meters away.

 

The view's still rippling, though.

 

The pain seems to be fading. She can't be sure. So many nerves have been screaming for so long that even the echoes are torture. She clutches her head, still kicking; the movement twists her around to face the way she came.

 

Her secret hideaway has exploded into a wall of mud and sulfur compounds, boiling up from the seabed. Clarke checks her thermister; 45°C, and she's a good ten meters away. Boiled fish skeletons spin in the thermals. Geysers hiss further in, unseen.

 

The seep must have burst through the crust in an instant; any flesh caught in that eruption would have boiled off the bone before anything as elaborate as a flight reflex could cut in. A shudder shakes Clarke's body. Another one.

 

Just luck. Just stupid luck I was far enough away. I could be dead now. I could be dead I could be dead I could be dead—

 

Nerves fire in her thorax; she doubles over. But you can't sob without breathing. You can't cry with your eyes pinned open. The routines are all there, stuttering into action after years of dormancy, but the pieces they work on have all been changed. The whole body wakes up in a straitjacket.

 

—dead dead dead—

 

That small, remote part of her kicks in, the part she saves for these occasions. It wonders, off in the distance, at the intensity of her reaction. This was hardly the first time that Lenie Clarke thought she was going to die.

 

But this was the first time in years that it seemed to matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Waterbed

 

 

 

Taking off his diveskin is like gutting himself.

 

He can't believe how much he's come to depend on it, how hard it is to come out from inside. The eyecaps are even harder. Fischer sits on his pallet, staring at the sealed hatch while Shadow whispers it's okay, you're alone, you're safe. Half an hour goes by before he can bring himself to believe her.

 

Finally, when he bares his eyes, the cubby lights are so dim he can hardly see. He turns them up until the room is twilit. The eyecaps sit in the palm of his hand, pale and opaque in the semidarkness, like jellied circles of eggshell. It's strange to blink without feeling them under his eyelids. He feels so exposed.

 

He has to do it, though. It's part of the process. That's what this is all about; opening yourself up.

 

Lenie's in her cubby, just centimeters away. If it wasn't for this bulkhead Fischer could reach right out and touch her.

 

This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow said way back then. So he does it now, to himself. For Shadow.

 

Thinking about Lenie.

 

Sometimes he thinks Lenie's the only other real person on the whole rift. The others are robots; glass robot eyes, matte black robot bodies, lurching through programmed routines that do nothing but keep other, bigger machines running. Even their names sound mechanical. Nakata. Caraco.

 

Not Lenie, though. There's someone inside her 'skin, her eyes may be glassed-in but they're not glass. She's real. Fischer knows he can touch her.

 

Of course, that's why he keeps getting into trouble. He keeps touching. But Lenie would be different, if only he could break through. She's more like Shadow than all the others ever were. Older, though.

 

No older than I'd be now, Shadow murmurs, and maybe that's it.

 

His mouth moves —I'm so sorry, Lenie— and no sound comes out. Shadow doesn't correct him.

 

This is what you do, she'd said, and then she'd begun to cry. As Fischer cries now. As he always does, when he comes.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The pain wakes him, sometime later. He's curled up on the pallet, and something's cutting into his cheek: a little piece of broken glass.

 

A mirror.

 

He stares at it, confused. A silver glass shard with a dark bloody tip, like a small tooth. There's no mirror in his cubby.

 

He reaches up and touches the bulkhead behind his pillow. Lenie's there, Lenie's just the other side. But here, on this side there's a dark line, a rim of shadow he never noticed before. His eyes follow it around the edge of the wall, a gap about half a centimeter wide. Here and there little bits of glass are still wedged into that space.

 

There used to be a mirror covering this whole bulkhead. Just like Scanlon's vids. And it wasn't just removed, judging from the little fragments left behind. Somebody smashed it out.

 

Lenie. She went through the whole station, before the rest of them came down, and she smashed all the mirrors. He doesn't know why he's so sure, but somehow it seems like exactly the sort of thing Lenie Clarke would do when no one was looking.

 

Maybe she doesn't like to see herself. Maybe she's ashamed.

 

Go talk to her, Shadow says.

 

I can't.

 

Yes you can. I'll help you.

 

He picks up the tunic of his 'skin. It slithers around his body, its edges fusing together along the midline of his chest. He steps over the sleeves and leggings still spilled across the deck, reaches down for his eyecaps.

 

Leave them there.

 

No!

 

Yes.

 

I can't, she'll see me...

 

That's what you want, isn't it? Isn't it?

 

She doesn't even like me, she'll just—

 

Leave them. I said I'll help you.

 

He leans against the closed hatch, eyes shut, his breathing loud and rapid in his ears.

 

Go on. Go on.

 

The corridor outside is in deep twilight. Fischer moves along it to Lenie's sealed hatch. He touches it, afraid to knock.

 

From behind, someone taps his shoulder.

 

"She's out," Brander says. His 'skin is done right up to his neck, arms and legs completely sealed. His capped eyes are blank and hard. And there's the usual edge in his voice, that same familiar tone saying Just give me an excuse, asshole, just do anything...

 

Maybe he wants Lenie too.

 

Don't get him mad, Shadow says.

 

Fischer swallows. "I just wanted to talk to her."

 

"She's out."

 

"Okay. I'll...I'll try later."

 

Brander reaches out, pokes Fischer's face. His finger comes away sticky.

 

"You're cut," he says.

 

"It's nothing. I'm okay."

 

"Too bad."

 

Fischer tries to edge past Brander to his own cubby. The corridor pushes them together.

 

Brander clenches his fists. "Don't you fucking touch me."

 

"I'm not, I'm just trying to— I mean..." Fischer falls silent, glances around. No one else anywhere.

 

Deliberately, Brander relaxes.

 

"And for Christ's sake put your eyes back in," he says. "Nobody wants to look in there."

 

He turns and walks away.

 

 

 

* * *

 

They say Lubin sleeps out here. Lenie too, sometimes, but Lubin hasn't slept in his bunk since the rest of them came down. He keeps his headlight off, and he stays away from the lit part of the Throat, and nothing bothers him. Fischer heard Nakata and Caraco talking about it on the last shift.

 

It's starting to sound like a good idea. The less time he spends in Beebe these days, the better.

 

The station is a dim faraway blotch, glowing to Fischer's left. Brander's in there. He goes on duty in three hours. Fischer figures he can just stay out here until then. He doesn't really need to go inside much. None of them do. There's a little desalinator piggybacked on his electrolyser in case he gets thirsty, and a bunch of flaps and valves that do things he doesn't want to think about, when he has to piss or take a dump.

 

He's getting a bit hungry, but he can wait. He's fine out here as long as nothing attacks him.

 

Brander just won't let him alone. Fischer doesn't know what Brander's got against him—

 

Oh yes you do, says Shadow.

 

—but he knows that look. Brander wants him to fuck up real bad.

 

The others keep out of it, for the most part. Nakata, the nervous one, just keeps out of everyone's way. Caraco acts like she couldn't care less if he boiled alive in a smoker. Lubin just sits there, looking at the floor and smoldering; even Brander leaves him alone.

 

And Lenie. Lenie's cold and distant as a mountaintop. No, Fischer's not getting any help with Brander. So when it comes to a choice between the monsters out here or the one in there, it's an easy call.

 

Caraco and Nakata are doing a hull check back at the station. Their distant voices buzz distractingly along Fischer's jaw. He shuts his receiver off and settles down behind an outcropping of basalt pillows.

 

Later, he can't remember drifting off.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

"Listen, cocksucker. I just did two shifts end to end because you didn't show up for work when you were supposed to. Then half another shift looking for you. We thought you were in trouble. We assumed you were in trouble. Don't tell me—"

 

Brander pushes Fischer up against the wall.

 

"Don't tell me," he says again, "that you weren't. You don't want to say that."

 

Fischer looks around the ready room. Nakata watches from the opposite bulkhead, jumpy as a cat. Lubin rattles around in the equipment lockers, his back to the proceedings. Caraco racks her fins and edges past them to the ladder.

 

"Carac—"

 

Brander slams him hard against the wall.

 

Caraco, her foot on the bottom rung, turns and watches for a moment. A smile ghosts across her face. "Don't look at me, Gerry my man. This is your problem." She climbs away overhead.

 

Brander's face hovers a few centimeters away. His hood is still sealed, except for the mouth flap. His eyes look like translucent glass balls embedded in black plastic. He tightens his grip.

 

"So, cocksucker?"

 

"I'm...sorry—" Fischer stammers.

 

"You're sorry." Brander glances over his shoulder, includes Nakata in the joke. "He's sorry."

 

Nakata laughs, too loudly.

 

Lubin clanks in the locker, still ignoring them all. The airlock begins cycling.

 

"I don't think," Brander says, raising his voice over the sudden gurgle, "that you're sorry enough."

 

The 'lock swings open. Lenie Clarke steps out, fins in one hand. Her blank eyes sweep across the room; they don't pause at Fischer. She carries her fins to the drying rack without a word.

 

Brander punches Fischer in the stomach. Fischer doubles over, gasping; his head smashes into the airlock hatch. He can't catch his breath. The deck scrapes his cheek. Brander's boot is almost touching his nose.

 

"Hey." Lenie's voice, distant, not particularly interested.

 

"Hey yourself, Lenie. He's got it coming."

 

"I know." A moment passes. "Still."

 

"Judy got nailed by a viperfish, looking for him. She could've been killed."

 

"Maybe." Lenie sounds as if she's very tired. "So why isn't Judy here?"

 

"I'm here," Brander says.

 

Fischer's lung is working again. Gulping air, he pushes himself up against the bulkhead. Brander glares at him. Lubin's back in the room now, just off to one side. Watching.

 

Lenie stands in the middle of the ready room. She shrugs.

 

"What?" Brander demands.

 

"I don't know." She glances indifferently at Fischer. "It's just, he...he just fucked up. He didn't mean any har—"

 

She stops. Fischer gets the sense that she's looking straight through him, through the bulkhead, right out into the abyss itself to something only she can see. Whatever it is, she doesn't like it much.

 

"Ah, fuck it." She heads for the ladder. "None of my business anyway."

 

Lenie, please...

 

Brander turns back to Fischer as she climbs out of sight. Fischer stares back. Endless seconds go by. Brander's fist hovers in mid-air.

 

It lashes out almost too fast to see. Fischer reels, catches himself on a conduit. Lights swarm across his left eye. He blinks them away, hanging onto the bulkhead. Everything hurts.

 

Brander unclenches his fist. "Lenie's way too nice," he remarks, flexing his fingers. "Personally, I don't care whether you meant any harm or not."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doppelgänger

 

 

 

Beebe's almost as soundproof as the inside of an echo chamber.

 

Lenie Clarke sits on her bunk and listens to the walls. She can't hear any actual words, but a sudden impact of flesh against metal was clear enough a few minutes ago. Now, low voices converse out in the lounge. Water gurgles through a pipe somewhere.

 

She thinks she hears something moving downstairs.

 

She lays her ear against a random pipe. Nothing. Another; a hiss of compressed gas. A third; the faint, tinny echo of slow footsteps, scraping across the lower deck. After a moment a muted hum vibrates through the plumbing.

 

The medical scanner.

 

It's none of my business. It's between them. Brander's got his reasons, and Fischer—

 

He didn't mean any harm.

 

Fischer's nothing. He's a pathetic, twisted asshole, nobody's problem but his own. It's too bad he gets under Brander's skin like that, but life's not guaranteed to be fair. No one knows that better than Lenie Clarke. She knows what it's like. She remembers the fists out of nowhere, the million little things you didn't even know you'd done wrong until it was too late. Nobody helped her. She'd managed, though. Sex worked, sometimes, as a diversionary tactic. Other times you just had to run.

 

He didn't mean any harm.

 

She shakes her head.

 

Well I fucking didn't either!

 

The sound sinks in before the pain does. A dull, solid thud, like a fish hitting a floodlight. Blood oozes from the torn skin of her knuckles, the droplets almost black to her filtered vision. The stinging that follows is a welcome distraction.

 

The bulkhead, of course, is completely unmarked.

 

Out in the lounge, the conversation has stopped. Clarke sits rigid on the pallet, sucking her hand. Eventually, the voices start up again.

 

Almost time to go on shift with Nakata and Brander. Clarke looks around her cubby, hesitating. There's something she has to do before she opens the hatch, something important, and she can't quite remember what it is. Her eyes keep coming back to the same wall, looking for something that isn't—

 

The mirror. For some reason, she wants to see what she looks like. That's odd. She can't remember feeling that way for — well, for a long time. But it's no big deal. She'll just sit here until the feeling goes away. She doesn't have to step outside, she doesn't even have to stand up, until she feels normal again.

 

When in doubt, stay out of sight.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

"Alice?"

 

The hatch is closed. There's no answer.

 

"She's in there." Brander stands at the end of the corridor, the lounge behind him. "She didn't go in more than ten minutes ago."

 

Clarke knocks again, harder. "Alice? It's almost time."

 

Brander turns on his heel — "I'll go get our stuff together." — and steps out of sight.

 

Beebe's hatches do not lock, for safety reasons. Still, Clarke hesitates. She knows how she'd feel if someone just walked into her private space without being invited.

 

But she said she was up for another shift. And I did knock...

 

She spins the wheel in the center of the hatch. The mimetic seal around the rim softens and retracts. Clarke pulls the hatch open, peers inside.

 

Alice Nakata lies twitching on her bunk, eyes closed, 'skin partially peeled. Leads trail from insertion points on her face and wrists, drape away to a lucid dreamer on the bedside shelf.

 

She goes to sleep ten minutes before her shift starts? It doesn't make sense. Besides, Nakata was just downstairs with the rest of them. With Fischer. How could anyone fall asleep after that?

 

Clarke steps closer, studies the telltales on the device; induced REM's cranked to maximum and the alarm's disabled. Nakata would have been out in seconds. Hell, at those settings she'd drift off in the middle of a gang-rape.

 

Lenie Clarke nods approvingly. Nice trick.

 

Reluctantly, she touches the wake-up stud. Sleep drains from Nakata's face; her expression changes abruptly. Asian eyes flicker, open wide and dark.

 

Clarke steps back, startled. Alice Nakata has taken her eyecaps off.

 

"Time to go, Alice" she says softly. "Sorry to wake you..."

 

She is, too. She's never seen Nakata smile before. It would have been nice if it could have lasted.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Brander's sealing a broadband sensor into its casing when Clarke drops into the lounge. "She'll catch up with us," she tells him, and turns to the drying rack for her fins.

 

Directly in front of her, the Med hatch is sealed. No sounds, human or mechanical, filter through from inside.

 

"Oh yeah. He's still in there." Brander raises his voice a fraction. "Good fucking thing, too, while I'm around."

 

"He didn't m—" Shut up! Shut the fuck up!

 

"Lenie?"

 

She turns to see his hand dropping away. Brander's actually a lot more touchy-feely than you'd expect, sometimes he almost forgets himself around her.

 

But it's okay. He doesn't mean any harm either.

 

"Nothing," Clarke says, grabbing her fins.

 

Brander carries the sensor over to the airlock, drops it in with some other trinkets and cycles them through. Gurgles and clunks accompany their passage into the abyss.

 

"Only—"

 

He looks at her, his face framing a question around empty eyes.

 

"What have you got against Fischer?" she says, nearly whispering.

 

You know exactly what he's got against Fischer. It's none of your business. Stay out of it.

 

Brander's face hardens like setting cement. "He's a fucking freak. He diddles little kids."

 

I know. "Who says?"

 

"Nobody has to say. I can see his kind coming ten klicks away."

 

"If you say so." Clarke listens to her own voice. Cool. Distant, almost bored. Good.

 

"He looks at me funny. Hell, have you seen the way he looks at you?" Metal clanks against metal. "If he so much as touches me I'll fucking kill him."

 

"Yeah. Well, it wouldn't take much. He just sits there and takes whatever you dish out, you know, he's so— passive..."

 

Brander snorts. "Why do you care, anyway? He creeps you out as much as the rest of us. I saw what happened in Medical last week."

 

The airlock hisses. A green light flashes on its side

 

"I don't know," Lenie says. "You're right, I guess. I know what he is."

 

Brander swings the 'lock open and steps inside. Clarke holds the edge of the hatch.

 

"There's something else, though," she says, almost to herself. "Something's— missing. He doesn't fit."

 

"None of us fits," Brander growls. "That's the whole fucking point."

 

She closes the hatch. There's enough room for two in there — the other rifters generally drop out in pairs — but she prefers to go through alone. It's a small thing. Nobody comments on it.

 

Not his fault. Not Brander's, not Fischer's. Not dad's. Not mine.

 

Nobody's fucking fault.

 

The airlock flushes beside her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Angel

 

 

 

The seabed is glowing. Cracks in the rock flicker comforting shades of orange, like hot coals, and he knows that's thermal; the scalding rivulets feel warm even through his 'skin, his thermister leaps around every time the current twitches. But there are places here where the rocks shine green, and others where they shine blue. He doesn't know whether to thank biology or geochemistry. All he knows is that it's beautiful. It's a city from high up, at night. It's a vid of the northern lights he saw once, only sharper and brighter. It's a brush fire in emeralds.

 

In a way he's almost grateful to Brander. If it weren't for Brander he'd never have come upon this place. He'd be sitting in Beebe with the rest of them, hooked into the library or hiding in his cubby, safe and dry.

 

But Beebe's no refuge with Brander inside. Beebe's a gauntlet. So today Fischer just stayed away when his shift ended, crawled off across the ocean floor, exploring. Now, somewhere far from the Throat, he discovers real sanctuary.

 

Don't fall asleep, Shadow says. If you miss your shift again it'll just give him an excuse.

 

So what? He won't find me out here.

 

You can't stay outside forever. You've got to eat sometime.

 

I know, I know. Be quiet.

 

He's the only person to have ever seen this place. How long has it been here? How many millions of years has this little oasis been glowing peacefully in the night, a pocket universe all to itself?

 

Lenie would like it out here, Shadow says.

 

Yeah.

 

A rattail cruises into view about half a meter up, its underside a jigsaw of reflected color. It thrashes once, suddenly; violent shivers run the length of its body. The water around it shimmers with heat distortion. The fish spins lopsidedly, tail-down, in the wake of the little eruption. Its body turns white in seconds, begins to fray at the edges.

 

Four hundred eight degrees Centigrade: that's maximum recorded temperature for hot seeps on the Juan de Fuca rift. Fischer thinks back for the temperature rating on diveskin copolymer.

 

One fifty.

 

He sculls up into the water column a bit, just in case. As soon as he clears bottom clutter he feels the faint, regular tapping of Beebe's sonar against his insides.

 

That's odd. This far out, he shouldn't be able to feel the signal, not unless they'd really cranked it up. And they wouldn't do that unless—

 

He checks the time.

 

Oh no. Not again.

 

By the time he makes it back to the Throat they're halfway through stripping number four. They open a space on the line for him. Lenie doesn't want to hear his apologies. She doesn't want to talk to him at all. That hurts, but Fischer can't really blame her. Maybe he can make it up to her soon. Maybe he can take her sightseeing.

 

It's not Brander's shift, thank God. He's back at Beebe. But Fischer's getting hungry again.

 

 

 

* * *

 

Maybe he's in his cubby. Maybe I can just eat and go to bed. Maybe—

 

He's sitting right there, all alone in the lounge, glaring up from his meal as soon as Fischer climbs into the room.

 

Don't get him mad.

 

Too late. He's always mad.

 

"I— thought we should clear some things up," he tries.

 

"Fuck off."

 

Fischer reaches the galley table, pulls out a chair.

 

"Don't bother," Brander says.

 

"Look, this place is small enough as it is. We've got to at least try to get along, you know? I mean, that's assault. It's illegal."

 

"So arrest me."

 

"Maybe you're not really mad at me at all," Fischer stops for a moment, surprised. Maybe that's it. "Maybe you've mixed me up with someone—"

 

Brander stands up.

 

Fischer pushes on: "Maybe someone else did something to you, once, and—"

 

Brander comes around the table, very deliberately.

 

"I haven't got you mixed up with anybody. I know exactly what you are."

 

"No, you don't, we never even saw each other until a couple of weeks ago!" Of course that's it. It's not me at all, it's someone else! "Whatever happened to you—"

 

"Is none of your fucking business, and if you say one more word I'll fucking kill you."

 

Let's just go, Shadow pleads. Let's leave, this is only making things worse.

 

But Fisher stands his ground. Suddenly everything seems so clear. "It wasn't me," he says quietly. "What happened— I'm sorry. But it wasn't me, you know it wasn't."

 

For a moment he thinks he might actually be getting through. Brander's face untwists a little, the knots of flesh and eyebrow unkinking just a bit around those featureless white eyes, and Fischer can almost see that face wearing something other than rage.

 

But then he feels something moving, it's his own arm reaching out Shadow no you'll ruin everything but Shadow's not listening, she's crooning Don't get him mad, don't get him mad don't get him mad—

 

This is what you do.

 

The growl starts low in Brander's throat, rising, like a distant wave pushed higher and higher out of the sea as it rushes shoreward.

 

"...don't you Fucking TOUCH ME!"

 

And nothing goes dead fast enough.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

It stings at first. Then he feels clotted blood break around his eyelid, sees a fuzzy line of red light. He tries to bring his hand to his face. It hurts.

 

Something cold and wet, soothing. More clots come away.

 

"Nnnnnn..."

 

Someone is poking at his eyes. He tries to struggle, but all he can do is move his head feebly from side to side. That hurts even more.

 

"Don't move."

 

Lenie's voice.

 

"Your right eyecap's damaged. It could be gouging your cornea."

 

He relents. Lenie's fingers push between lids that feel as puffy as pillows. There's a sudden pressure on his eyeball, a tug of suction. A slurping sound, and the feel of ragged edges dragged across his pupil.

 

The world goes dark. "Hang on," Lenie says. "I'll turn up the lights."

 

There's still a reddish tinge to everything, but at least he can see.

 

He's in his cubby. Lenie Clarke leans over him, a bit of glistening wet membrane in one hand.

 

"You were lucky. He'd have ripped your costochondrals if your implants hadn't been packed in behind them." She drops the ruined cap out of sight, picks up a cartridge of liquid skin. "As it is, he only broke a couple of ribs. Lots of bruises. Mild concussion, maybe, but you'll have to go to Medical to be sure. Oh, and I'm pretty sure he broke your cheekbone too."

 

She sounds as if she’s reading a grocery list.

 

“Why not—” Warm salt floods his mouth. His tongue does some careful exploring; his teeth are still intact, at least. “—in Medical, now?”

 

“It would have been a bitch getting you down the ladder. Brander wasn’t going to help. Everyone else is outside.” She sprays foam across his bicep. It pulls his skin as it dries.

 

“Not that they’d be any help,” she adds.

 

“Thanks...”

 

“I didn’t do anything. Just dragged you in here, basically.”

 

He wants desperately to touch her.

 

“What is it with you, Fischer?” she asks after a while. "Why don't you ever fight back?"

 

"Wouldn’t work."

 

"Are you kidding? You know how big you are? You could take Brander apart if you just stood up to him."

 

Shadow says it only makes things worse. You fight back, it only gets them madder.

 

"Shadow?" Lenie says.

 

"What?"

 

"You said—"

 

“Didn’t say anything...”

 

She watches him for a few moments.

 

"Okay," she says at last. She stands up. “I'll call up and send for a replacement."

 

“No. That’s okay.”

 

“You’re injured, Fischer."

 

Medical tutorials whisper inside his head. “We've got stuff downstairs."

 

"You still wouldn't be able to work for a week. More than twice that before you'd be fully healed."

 

"They planned for accidents. When they set up the schedules."

 

"And how are you going to keep clear of Brander until then?"

 

"I'll stay outside more," he says. "Please, Lenie."

 

She shakes her head. "You're crazy, Fischer." She turns to the hatch, undogs it. "None of my business, of course. I just don't think—"

 

Turns back.

 

“Do you like it down here?” she asks.

 

“What?”

 

“Do you get off, being down here?”

 

It should be a stupid question. Especially now. Somehow it isn’t.

 

“Sort of,” he says at last, realizing it for the first time.

 

She nods, blinking over white space. “Dopamine rush.”

 

“Dopa—?”

 

“They say we get hooked on it. Being down here. Being— scared, I guess.” She smiles faintly. “That’s the rumor, anyway.”

 

Fischer thinks about that. “Not so much I get off on it. More like, just used to it. You know?”

 

“Yeah.” She turns and pushes the hatch open. “For sure.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

There's this praying mantis a meter long, all black with chrome trim, hanging upside-down from the ceiling of the medical cubby. It's been sleeping up there ever since Fischer first arrived. Now it hovers over his face, jointed arms clicking and dipping like crazy articulated chopsticks. Every now and then one of its feelers winks red light, and Fischer can smell the scent of his own flesh cauterizing. It kind of bothers him. What's even worse is, he can't move his head. The neuroinduction field in the Med table has got him paralyzed from the neck up. He keeps wondering what would happen if the focus slipped, if that damping energy ended up pointing at his lungs. At his heart.

 

The mantis stops in midmotion, its antennae quivering. It keeps completely still for a few seconds. "Hello, er— Gerry, isn't it?" it says at last. "I'm Dr. Troyka."

 

It sounds like a woman.

 

"How are we doing here?" Fischer tries to answer, but his head and neck are still just so much dead meat. "No, don't try to answer," the mantis says, "Rhetorical question. I'm checking your readouts now."

 

Fischer remembers: the medical equipment can't always do everything on its own. Sometimes, when things get too complicated, it calls up the line to a human backup.

 

"Wow," says the mantis. "What happened to you? No, don't answer that either. I don't want to know." An accessory arm springs into sight and passes back and forth across Fischer's line of sight. "I'm going to override the damping field for a moment. It might hurt a bit. Try not to move when that happens, except to answer my questions."

 

Pain floods across Fischer's face. It's not too bad. Familiar, even. His eyelids feel scratchy, and his tongue is dry. He tries blinking; it works. He closes his mouth, rubs his tongue against swollen cheeks. Better.

 

"I don't suppose you want to come back up?" Dr. Troyka asks, hundreds of kilometers away. "You know these injuries are bad enough to warrant a recall."

 

Fischer shakes his head. "That's okay. I can stay here."

 

"Uh huh." The mantis doesn't sound surprised. "I've been hearing that a fair bit lately. Okay, I'm going to wire your cheekbone back together, and I'll be planting a little battery under your skin. Just below the right eye. It'll basically kick your bone cells into overdrive, speed up the healing process. It's just a couple of millimeters across, you'll feel like you've got sort of a hard pimple. It may itch, but try not to pick at it. When you're healed up you can just squeeze it out like a zit. Okay?"

 

"Okay."

 

"All right, Gerry. I'm going to turn the field back on and get to work." The mantis whirrs in anticipation.

 

Fischer holds up a hand. "Wait."

 

"What is it, Gerry?"

 

"What...what time is it, up there?" he asks.

 

"It's oh five ten. Pacific daylight. Why?"

 

"It's early."

 

"Sure is."

 

"I guess I got you up," Fischer says. "Sorry."

 

"Nonsense." Digits on the end of mechanical arms wiggle absently. "I've been up for hours. Graveyard shift."

 

"Graveyard?"

 

"We're on duty around the clock, Gerry. There's a lot of geothermal stations out there, you know. You— you keep us pretty busy, as a rule."

 

"Oh," Fischer says. "Sorry."

 

"Forget it. It's my job." There's a humming, somewhere in the back of his head; for a moment Fischer can feel the muscles of his face going slack. Then everything goes numb, and the mantis swoops down him like a predator.

 

 

 

* * *

 

He knows better than to open up outside.

 

It doesn't kill you, not right away. But seawater's a lot saltier than blood; let it inside and osmosis sucks the water from the epithelial cells, shrivels them down to viscous little blobs. Rifter kidneys are modified to speed up water reclamation when that happens, but it's not a long-term solution and it costs. Organs wears out faster, urine turns to oil. It's best to just keep sealed up. Your insides soak in seawater too long, they sort of corrode, implants or no implants.

 

But that's another one of Fischer's problems. He never takes the long view.

 

The face seal is a single macromolecule fifty centimeters long. It wraps back and forth along the line of the jaw like the two sides of a zipper, with hydrophobic side-chains for teeth. A little blade on the index of Fischer's left glove can split them apart. He runs it along the seal and the 'skin opens neatly around his mouth.

 

He doesn't feel much of anything at first. He was half-expecting the ocean to charge up his nose and burn his sinuses, but of course all his body cavities are already packed with isotonic saline. The only immediate change is that his face gets cold, numbing the chronic ache of torn flesh a bit. Deeper pain pulses under one eye, where Dr. Troyka's wires hold the bones of his face together; microelectricity tingles along those lines, press-gangs bonebuilding osteoblasts into high gear.

 

After a couple of moments he tries to gargle; that doesn't work, so he settles for gaping like a fish and wriggling his tongue around. That does it. He gets his first taste of raw ocean, coarse and saltier than the stuff that pumps him up inside.

 

On the seabed in front of him, a swarm of blind shrimp feeds in the current from a nearby vent. Fischer can see right through them. They're like little chunks of glass with blobs of organs jiggling around inside.

 

It must be fourteen hours since he's eaten, but there's no fucking way he's going back to Beebe with Brander still inside. The last time he tried, Brander was actually standing guard in the lounge, waiting for him.

 

What the hell. It's just like krill. People eat this stuff all the time.

 

They have a strange taste. Fischer's mouth is going numb from the cold, but there's still a faint sense of rotten eggs, dilute and barely detectable. Not bad other than that, though. Better than Brander by a long shot.

 

When the convulsions hit fifteen minutes later, he's not so sure.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

"You look like shit," Lenie says.

 

Fischer hangs onto the railing, looks around the lounge. "Where—"

 

"At the Throat. On shift with Lubin and Caraco."

 

He makes it to the couch.

 

"Haven't seen you for a while," Lenie remarks. "How's your face doing?"

 

Fischer squints at her through a haze of nausea. Lenie Clarke is actually making small talk. She's never done that before. He's still trying to figure out why when his stomach clamps down again and he pitches onto the floor. By now nothing comes up but a few dribbles of sour fluid.

 

His eyes trace the pipes tangling along the ceiling. After a while Lenie's face blocks the view, looking down from a great height.

 

"What's wrong?" She seems to be asking out of idle curiosity, no more.

 

"Ate some shrimp," he says, and retches again.

 

"You ate— from outside?" She bends down and pulls him up. His arms drag along behind on the deck. Something hard bumps his head; the railing around the downstairs ladder.

 

"Fuck," Lenie says.

 

He's on the floor again, alone. Receding footsteps. Dizziness. Something presses against his neck, pricks him with a soft hiss.

 

His head clears almost instantly.

 

Lenie's leaning in, closer than she's ever been. She's even touching him, she's got one hand on his shoulder. He stares down at that hand, feeling a stupid sort of wonder, but then she pulls it away.

 

She's holding a hypo. Fischer's stomach begins to settle.

 

"Why," she says softly, "would you do a stupid thing like that?"

 

"I was hungry."

 

"So what's wrong with the dispenser?"

 

He doesn't answer.

 

"Oh," Lenie says. "Right."

 

She stands up and snaps the spent cartridge out of the hypo. "This can't go on, Fischer. You know that."

 

"He hasn't got me in two weeks."

 

"He hasn't seen you in two weeks. You only come in when he's on shift. And you're missing your own shifts more and more. Doesn't make you too popular with the rest of us." She cocks her head as Beebe creaks around them. "Why don't you just call up and get them to take you home?"

 

Because I do things to children, and if I leave here they'll cut me open and change me into something else...

 

Because there are things outside that almost make it worthwhile...

 

Because of you...

 

He doesn't know if she'd understand any of those reasons. He decides not to risk it.

 

"Maybe you could talk to him," he manages.

 

Lenie sighs. "He wouldn't listen."

 

"Maybe if you tried, at least—"

 

Her face hardens. "I have tried. I—"

 

She catches herself.

 

"I can't get involved," she whispers. "It's none of my business."

 

Fischer closes his eyes. He feels as if he's going to cry. "He just doesn't let up. He really hates me."

 

"It's not you. You're just— filling in."

 

"Why did they put us together? It doesn't make sense!"

 

"Sure it does. Statistically."

 

Fischer opens his eyes. "What?"

 

Lenie's pulling one hand down across her face. She seems very tired.

 

"We're not people here, Fischer. We're a cloud of data points. Doesn't matter what happens to you or me or Brander, just as long as the mean stays where it's supposed to and the standard deviation doesn't get too big."

 

Tell her, Shadow says.

 

"Lenie—"

 

"Anyway." Lenie shrugs the mood away. "You're crazy to eat anything that near a rift zone. Didn't you learn about hydrogen sulfide?"

 

He nods. "Basic training. The vents spit it out."

 

"And it builds up in the benthos. They're toxic. Which I guess you know now anyway."

 

She starts down the ladder, stops on the second rung.

 

"If you really want to go native, try feeding further from the rift. Or go for the fish."

 

"The fish?"

 

"They move around more. Don't spend all their time soaking in the hot springs. Maybe they're safe."

 

"The fish," he says again. He hadn't thought of that.

 

"I said maybe."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Shadow I'm so sorry...

 

Shush. Just look at all the pretty lights.

 

So he looks. He knows this place. He's on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He's back in fairyland. He thinks he comes here a lot now, watches the lights and bubbles, listens to the deep rocks grinding against each other.

 

Maybe he'll stay this time, watch the whole thing working, but then he remembers he's supposed to be somewhere else. He waits, but nothing specific comes to him. Just a feeling that he should be doing something somewhere else. Soon.

 

It's getting harder to stay here anyway. There's a vague pain hanging around his upper body somewhere, fading in and out. After a while he realizes what it is. His face hurts.

 

Maybe this beautiful light is hurting his eyes.

 

That can't be right. His caps should take care of all that. Maybe they're not working. He seems to remember something that happened to his eyes a while back, but it doesn't really matter. He can always just leave. Suddenly, wonderfully, all of his problems have easy answers.

 

If the light hurts, all he has to do is stay in the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feral

 

 

 

"Hey," Caraco buzzes as they come around the corner. "Number four."

 

Clarke looks. Four's fifteen meters away and the water's a bit murky this shift. Still, she can see something big and dark sticking to the intake vent. Its shadow twitches down along the casing like an absurdly stretched black spider.

 

Clarke fins forward a few meters, Caraco at her side. The two women exchange looks.

 

Fischer, hanging upside down against the mesh. It's been four days since anyone's seen him.

 

Clarke gently sets down her carry bag; Caraco follows her lead. Two or three kicks bring them to within five meters of the intake. Machinery hums omnipresently, makes a sound deep enough to feel.

 

He's facing away from them, drifting from side to side, tugged by the gentle suction of the intake vent. The vent's grillwork is fuzzy with rooted growing things; small clams, tube worms, shadow crabs. Fischer pulls squirming clumps from the intake, leaves them to drift or to fall to the street below. He's cleaned maybe two meters square so far.

 

It's nice to see he still takes some duties seriously.

 

"Hey. Fischer," Caraco says.

 

He spins around as if shot. His forearm flails toward Clarke's face; she raises her own just in time. In the next instant he's bowled past her. She kicks, steadies herself. Fischer's heading for the darkness without looking back.

 

"Fischer," Clarke calls out. "Stop. It's okay."

 

He stops kicking for a moment, looks back over his shoulder.

 

"It's me," she buzzes. "And Judy. We won't hurt you."

 

Barely visible now, he rotates to a stop and turns to face them. Clarke risks a wave.

 

"Come on, Fischer. Give us a hand."

 

Caraco comes up behind her. "Lenie, what are you doing?" She's turned her vocoder down to a hiss. "He's too far gone, he's—"

 

Clarke cranks her own vocoder down. "Shut up, Judy." Up again. "What do you say, Fischer? Earn your pay."

 

He's coming back into the light, hesitantly, like a wild animal lured by the promise of food. Closer, Clarke can see the line of his jaw moving up and down under his hood. The motions are jerky, erratic, as though he's learning them for the first time.

 

Finally a noise comes out. "Oh— kay—"

 

Caraco goes back and retrieves their gear. Clarke offers a scraper to Fischer. After a moment, he takes it, clumsily, and follows them to number four.

 

"Jussst like," Fischer buzzes. "Old. T— times."

 

Caraco looks at Clarke. Clarke says nothing.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Near the end of the shift she looks around. "Fischer?"

 

Caraco pokes her head out from an access tunnel. "He's gone?"

 

"When did you see him last?"

 

Caraco's vocoder ticks a couple of times; the machinery always misinterprets hmmm. "Half hour ago, maybe."

 

Clarke puts her own vocoder on high. "Hey Fischer! You still around?"

 

No answer.

 

"Fischer, we're heading back in a bit. If you want to come along..."

 

Caraco just shakes her head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shadow

 

 

 

It's a nightmare.

 

There's light everywhere, blinding, painful. He can barely move. Everything has such hard edges, and everywhere he looks the boundaries are too sharp. Sounds are like that too, clanks and shouts, every noise an exclamation of pain. He barely knows where he is. He doesn't know why he's there.

 

He's drowning.

 

"UNNNNNSEEEEELLLLLHHHHHIZZZZZMMMMOOUUUUUTH..."

 

The tubes in his chest suck at emptiness. The rest of his insides strain to inflate, but there's nothing there to fill them. He thrashes, panicky. Something gives with a snap. Sudden pain resonates in some faraway limb, floods the rest of his body a moment later. He tries to scream, but there's nothing inside to push out.

 

"HHIZZMMMOUTHFORRRKKRRIISSAAAAAKHEEEZSSUFFUKKATE—"

 

Someone pulls part of his face off. His insides fill with a rush; not the cold saline he's used to, but it helps. The burning in his chest eases.

 

"BIGGFFUKKINNGGMMISSTTAAKE—"

 

Pressure, painful and uneven. Things are holding him down, holding him up, banging into him. The noise is tinny, deafening. He remembers a sound—

 

—gravity—

 

—that applies somehow, but he doesn't know what it means. And then everything's spinning, and everything's familiar and horrible except for one thing, one glimpse of a face that calms him somehow—

 

Shadow?

 

—and the weight's gone, the pressure's gone, icewater calms his insides as he spirals back with her, outside again, where she used to be years ago—

 

She's showing him how to do it. She creeps into his room after the shouting stops, she crawls under the covers with him and she starts stroking his penis.

 

"Dad says this is what you do when you really love somebody," she whispers. And that scares him because they don't even like each other, he just wants her to go away and leave them all alone.

 

"Go away. I hate you," he says, but he’s too afraid to move.

 

"That's okay, then you don't have to do it for me." She’s trying to laugh, trying to pretend he was just kidding.

 

And then, still stroking: "Why are you always so mean to me?”

 

"I'm not mean."

 

"Are too."

 

"You're not supposed to be here."

 

"Can't we just be friends?" She rubs up against him. "I can do this whenever you want—"

 

"Go away. You can’t stay here."

 

"I can, maybe. If it works out, they said. But we have to like each other or they could send me back—”

 

"Good."

 

She's crying now, she's rubbing against him so hard the bed shakes, "Please can't you like me please I'll do anything I'll even—"

 

But he never finds out what she'll even do because that's when the door slams open and whatever happens after that, Gerry Fischer can't remember.

 

Shadow, I'm so sorry...

 

But she's back with him now, in the cold and the dark where it's safe. Somehow. Beebe's a dim gray glow in the distance. She floats against that backdrop like a black cardboard cutout.

 

"Shadow..." Not his voice.

 

"No." Not hers. "Lenie."

 

"Lenie..."

 

Twin crescents, thin as fingernails, reflect from her eyes. Even in two dimensions she's beautiful.

 

Mangled words buzz from her throat: "You know who I am? You can understand me?"

 

He nods, then wonders if she can see it. "Yeah."

 

"You don't— lately you're sort of gone, Fischer. Like you've forgotten how to be human."

 

He tries to laugh, but the vocoder can't handle it. "It comes and goes, I think. I'm...lucid now, anyway. That's the word, isn't it?"

 

"You shouldn't have come back inside." Machinery strips any feeling from her words. "He says he'll kill you. Maybe you should just stay out of his way."

 

"Okay," he says, and thinks it actually might be.

 

"I can bring food out, I guess. They don't care about that."

 

"That's okay. I can — go fishing."

 

"I'll call for a 'scaphe. It can pick you up out here."

 

"No. I can swim back up myself if I want to. Not far."

 

"Then I'll tell them to send someone."

 

"No."

 

A pause. "You can't swim all the way back to the mainland."

 

"I'll stay down here...a while..."

 

A tremor growls softly along the seabed.

 

"You sure?" Lenie says.

 

"Yeah." His arm hurts. He doesn't know why.

 

She turns slightly. The dim reflections vanish from her eyes for a long moment.

 

"I'm sorry, Gerry."

 

"Okay."

 

Lenie's silhouette twists around and faces back towards Beebe. "I should get going."

 

She doesn't leave. She doesn't say anything for almost a minute.

 

Then: "Who's Shadow?"

 

More silence.

 

"She's a...friend. When I was young."

 

"She means a lot to you." Not a question. "Do you want me to send her a message?"

 

"She's dead," Fischer says, marveling that he's really known it all along.

 

"Oh."

 

"Didn't mean to," he says. "But she had her own mom and dad, you know, why did she need mine? She went back where she belonged. That's all."

 

"Where she belonged," Lenie buzzes, almost too softly to hear.

 

"Not my fault," he says. It's hard to talk. It didn't used to be this hard.

 

Someone's touching him. Lenie. Her hand is on his arm, and he knows it's impossible but he can feel the warmth of her body through his 'skin.

 

"Gerry."

 

"Yes?"

 

"Why wasn't she with her own family?"

 

"She said they hurt her. She always said that. That's how she got in. She used it, it always worked..."

 

Not always, Shadow reminds him.

 

"And then she went back," Lenie murmurs.

 

"I didn't mean to."

 

A sound comes out of Lenie's vocoder, and he has no idea what it is. "Brander's right, isn't he. About you and kids."

 

Somehow, he knows she's not accusing him. She's just checking.

 

"That's what you— do," he tells her. "When you really love someone."

 

"Oh, Gerry. You're so completely fucked up."

 

A string of clicks taps faintly on the machinery in his chest.

 

"They're looking for me," she says.

 

"Okay."

 

"Be careful, okay?"

 

"You could stay. Here."

 

Her silence answers him.

 

"Maybe I'll come out and visit sometimes," she buzzes at last. She rises up into the water, turns away.

 

"Bye," Shadow says. It's the first time she's spoken aloud since she came inside, but Fischer doesn't think Lenie notices the difference.

 

And then she's gone, for now.

 

But she comes out here all the time. Alone, sometimes. He knows it isn't over. And when she goes back and forth with the others, doing all the things he used to do, he'll be there, off where no one can see. Checking up. Making sure she's okay.

 

Like her own guardian angel. Right, Shadow?

 

A couple of fish flicker dimly in the distance.

 

Shadow...?