Ballet

 

 

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

 

 

Dancer

 

 

 

A week later Fischer's replacement comes down on the 'scaphe. Nobody stands watch in Communications any more; machines don't care if they have an audience. Sudden clanking reverberates through Beebe Station and Clarke stands alone in the lounge, waiting for the ceiling to open up. Compressed nitrox hisses overhead, blowing seawater back to the abyss.

 

The hatch drops open. Green incandescence spills into the room. He climbs down the ladder, diveskin sealed, only his face exposed. His eyes, already capped, are featureless glass balls. But they are not as dead as they should be, somehow. Something stares through those blank lenses, and it almost shines. His blind eyes scan the compartment like radar dishes. They lock onto hers: "You're Lenie Clarke?" The voice is too loud, too normal. We talk in whispers here, Clarke realizes.

 

They are not alone now. Lubin, Brander, Caraco have appeared at the edges of her vision, drifting into the room like indifferent wraiths. They take up positions around the edge of the lounge, waiting. Fischer's replacement doesn't seem to notice them. "I'm Acton," he tells Clarke. "And I bring gifts from the overworld. Behold!" He extends his clenched fist, opens it palm up. Clarke sees five metal cylinders there, each no more than two centimeters long. Acton turns slowly, theatrically, showing his trinkets to the other Rifters. "One for each of you," he says. "They go into your chest, right next to the seawater intake."

 

Overhead, the docking hatch swings shut. From behind it a postcoital tattoo, metal on metal, heralds the shuttle's escape to the surface. They wait there for a few moments: Rifters, newcomer, five new gadgets to dilute their humanity a little further. Finally, Clarke reaches out to touch one. "What do they do?" she says, her voice neutral.

 

Acton snaps his fingers shut, stares about the lounge with eyeless intensity. "Why, Ms. Clarke," he replies, "They tell us when we're dead."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

In Communications, Acton spills his trinkets onto a control console. Clarke stands behind him, filling the cubby. Caraco and Brander look in through the hatchway.

 

Lubin has disappeared.

 

"The program's only four months old," Acton says, "and it's lost two people at Piccard, one each at Cousteau and Link, and Fischer makes five. Not the kind of record you want to trumpet to the world, eh?"

 

Nobody says anything. Clarke and Brander stand impassive; Caraco shifts on her feet. Acton sweeps his blank shiny eyes over them all. "Christ but you're a lively lot. You sure Fischer's the only one down here who cashed in?"

 

"These things are supposed to save our lives?" Clarke asks.

 

"Nah. They don't care that much about us. These just help you find the bodies."

 

He turns to the console, plays it with practiced fingers. The topographic display flashes to life on the main screen. "Mmmm." Acton traces along the luminous contours with one finger. "So this is Beebe here in the center, and this must be the rift proper—Jesus, there's a lot of geography out here." He points at a cluster of hard green rectangles halfway to the edge of the screen. "These are the generators?"

 

Clarke nods.

 

Acton picks up one of the little cylinders. "They say they've already sent down the software for these things." Silence. "Well, I guess we'll find out, won't we?" He fingers the object in his hand, presses one end of it.

 

Beebe Station screams aloud.

 

Clarke jerks back at the sound; her head cracks painfully against an overhead pipe. The station continues to howl, wordless and despairing.

 

Acton touches a control; the scream stops as if guillotined.

 

Clarke glances at the others, shaken. They appear unmoved. Of course. For the first time she wonders what their eyes would show, naked.

 

"Well," Acton says, "we know the audio alarm works. But you get a visual signal too." He points at the screen: dead center, within the phosphor icon that is Beebe, a crimson dot pulses like a heart under glass.

 

"It keys on myoelectricity in the chest," he explains. "Goes off automatically if your heart stops."

 

Behind her, Clarke feels Brander turning for the hatchway.

 

"Maybe my etiquette is out of date—" Acton says.

 

His voice is suddenly very quiet. Nobody else seems to notice.

 

"—but I've always thought it was—rude—to walk away when someone's talking to you."

 

There's no obvious threat in the words. Acton's tone seems pleasant enough. It doesn't matter. In an instant Clarke sees all the signs again; the reasoned words, the deadened voice, the sudden slight tension of a body rising to critical mass. Something familiar is growing behind Acton's eyecaps.

 

"Brander," she says quietly, "why don't you hang around and hear the man out?"

 

Behind her, the sounds of motion stop.

 

Before her, Acton relaxes ever so slightly.

 

Within her, something deeper than the Rift stirs in its sleep.

 

"They're a snap to install," Acton says. "It takes about five minutes. GA says deadman switches are standard issue from now on."

 

I know you, she thinks. I don't remember but I'm sure I've seen you before somewhere...

 

A tiny knot forms in her stomach. Acton smiles at her, as though sending some secret greeting.

 

 

 

* * *

 

Acton is about to be baptized. Clarke is looking forward to it.

 

They stand together in the airlock, their diveskins clinging like shadows. The deadman switch, newly installed, itches in Clarke's chest. She remembers the first time she dropped into the ocean this way, remembers the person who held her hand through that drowning ordeal.

 

That person is gone now. The deep sea broke her and spat her out. Clarke wonders if it will do the same to Acton.

 

She floods the airlock.

 

By now the feeling is almost sensual; her insides folding flat, the ocean rushing into her, cold and unstoppable like a lover. At 4°C the Pacific slides through the plumbing in her chest, anesthetizing the parts of her that can still feel. The water rises over her head; her eyecaps show her the submerged walls of the lock with crystal precision.

 

It's not like that with Acton. He's trying to fall in on himself; he only falls into Clarke. She senses his panic, watches him convulse, sees his knees buckle in a space far too narrow to permit collapse.

 

He needs more room, she thinks, smiling to herself, and opens the outer hatch. They drop.

 

She glides down and out, arcing away from under Beebe's oppressive bulk. She leaves the floodlit circle behind, skims into the welcoming darkness with her headlight doused. She feels the presence of the seabed a couple of meters beneath her. She's free again.

 

After a few moments she remembers Acton. She turns back the way she came. Beebe's floodlamps stain the darkness with dirty light; the station, bloated and angular, pulls against the cables holding it down. Light pours from its lower surface like feeble rocket exhaust. Pinned face-down in that glare, Acton lies unmoving on the bottom.

 

Reluctantly, she swims closer. "Acton?"

 

He doesn't move.

 

"Acton?" She's back in the light now. Her shadow cuts him in half.

 

At last he looks up. "It'ssss—"

 

He seems surprised by the sound of his own transmuted voice.

 

He puts his hand to his throat. "I'm not—breathing—" he buzzes.

 

She doesn't answer.

 

He looks back down. There's something on the bottom, a few centimeters from his face. Clarke drifts closer; a tiny shrimplike creature trembles on the substrate.

 

"What is it?" Acton asks.

 

"Something from the surface. It must have come down on the 'scaphe."

 

"But it's—dancing—"

 

She sees. The jointed legs flex and snap, the carapace arches to some insane inner rhythm. It seems so brittle a life; perhaps the next spasm, or the next, will shatter it.

 

"It's a seizure," she says after a while. "It doesn't belong here. The pressure makes the nerves fire too fast, or something."

 

"Why doesn't that happen to us?"

 

Maybe it does. "Our implants. They pump us full of neuroinhibitors whenever we go outside."

 

"Oh. Right," Acton buzzes softly. Gently, he reaches out to the creature. Takes it in the palm of his hand.

 

Crushes it.

 

Clarke hits him from behind. Acton bounces off the seabed, his hand flying open; fragments of shell, of watery flesh swirl in the water. He kicks, rights himself, stares at Clarke without speaking. His eyecaps shine almost yellow in the light.

 

"You asshole," Clarke says very quietly.

 

"It didn't belong here," Acton buzzes.

 

"Neither do we."

 

"It was suffering. You said so yourself."

 

"I said the nerves fired too fast, Acton. Nerves carry pleasure as well as pain. How do you know it wasn't dancing for fucking joy?"

 

She pushes off the bottom and kicks furiously into the abyss. She wants to reach into Acton's body and tear everything out, sacrifice that gory tangle of viscera and machinery to the monsters at the rift. She can't remember ever being so angry. She tells herself she doesn't know why.

 

 

 

* * *

 

Gurgles and clanks from below. Clarke looks down through the lounge hatch in time to see the airlock spill open. Brander backs out, supporting Acton.

 

Acton's 'skin is laid open at the thigh.

 

He bends over, removing his flippers. Brander's are already off; he turns to Clarke as she climbs down the ladder. "He met his first monster. Gulper eel."

 

"I met my fucking monster all right," Acton says in a low voice. And Clarke sees it coming a fraction of a second before—

 

—Acton is on Brander, left fist swinging like a bolo on the end of his arm, once twice three times and Brander is on the floor, bleeding. Acton's bringing his foot back when Lenie gets in front of him, her hands raised to protect herself, crying "Stop it stop it's not his fault!" but somehow it's not Acton she's pleading with it's something inside of him coming out, and she'd do anything if it would only please God go back where it came from—

 

It stares through Acton's milky eyes and snarls, "The fucker saw it coming at me! He let that thing tear my leg open!"

 

Lenie shakes her head. "Maybe not. You know how dark it is out there, I've been down here longer than anyone and they sneak up on me all the time, Acton. Why would Brander want to hurt you?"

 

She hears Brander coming to his feet behind her. His voice carries over her shoulder: "Brander sure as shit wants to hurt him n—"

 

She cuts him off. "Look, I can handle this." Her words are for Brander; her eyes remain locked with Acton's. "Maybe you should go to Medical, make sure you're okay."

 

Acton leans forward, tensed. The thing inside waits and watches.

 

"This asshole—" Brander begins.

 

"Please, Mike." It's the first time she has ever used his first name.

 

There's a moment of silence.

 

"Since when did you ever get involved?" he says behind her.

 

It's a good question. Brander's footsteps shuffle away before she can think of an answer.

 

Something in Acton goes back to sleep.

 

"You'd better go there too," Clarke says to him. "Later."

 

"Nah. It wasn't that tough. I was surprised how feeble it was, after I got over the size of the fucking thing."

 

"It ripped your diveskin. If it could do that, it wasn't as weak as you think. At least check it out; your leg might be lacerated."

 

"If you say so. Although I'll bet Brander needs Medical more than I do." He flashes a predatory grin, and moves to pass her.

 

"You might also consider reining in your temper," she says as he brushes past.

 

Acton stops. "Yeah. I was kind of hard on him, wasn't I?"

 

"He won't be as eager to help you out the next time you get caught in a smoker."

 

"Yeah," he says again. Then: "I don't know, I've always been sort of—you know—"

 

She remembers a word someone else used, after the fact. "Impulsive?"

 

"Right. But really I'm not that bad. You just have to get used to me."

 

Clarke doesn't answer.

 

"Anyhow," he says, "I guess I owe your friend an apology."

 

My friend. And by the time she gets over that jarring idea, she's alone again.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Five hours later Acton's in Medical. Clarke passes the open hatchway and glances in; he sits on an examination table, his 'skin undone to the waist. There's something wrong with the image. She stops and leans through the hatch.

 

Acton has opened himself up. She can see the flesh peeled back around the water intake, the places where meat turns to plastic, the tubes that carry blood and the ones that carry antifreeze. He holds a tool in one hand; it disappears into the cavity, the spinning thing on its tip whirring quietly.

 

Acton hits a nerve somewhere, and jumps as if shocked.

 

"Are you damaged?" Clarke asks.

 

He looks up. "Oh. Hi."

 

She points at his dissected thorax. "Did the gulper—"

 

He shakes his head. "No. No, it just bruised my leg a bit. I'm just making some adjustments."

 

"Adjustments?"

 

"Fine-tuning." He smiles. "Settling-in stuff."

 

It doesn't work. The smile is hollow, somehow. Muscles stretch lips in the usual way, but the gesture's imprisoned in the lower half of his face. Above it, his capped eyes stare cold as drifted snow, innocent of any topography. She wonders why it has never bothered her before, and realizes that this is the first time she's ever seen a Rifter smile.

 

"That's not supposed to be necessary," she says.

 

"What's not?" Acton's smile is beginning to wear on her.

 

"Fine-tuning. We're supposed to be self-adjusting."

 

"Exactly. I'm adjusting myself."

 

"I mean—"

 

"I know what you mean," Acton says. "I'm—customizing the job." His hand moves around inside his rib cage as if autonomous, tinkering. "I figure I can get better performance if I nudge the settings just a bit outside the approved specs."

 

Clarke hears a brief, Lilliputian screech of metal against metal.

 

"How?" she asks.

 

Acton withdraws his hand, folds flesh back over the hole. "Not exactly sure yet." He runs another tool along the seam in his chest, sealing himself. He shrugs back into his 'skin, seals that as well. Now he's as whole as any rifter.

 

"I'll let you know next time I go outside," he says, laying a casual hand on Clarke's shoulder as he squeezes past.

 

She almost doesn't flinch.

 

Acton stops. He seems to look right around her.

 

"You're nervous," he says, slowly.

 

"Am I."

 

"You don't like being touched." His hand rests on her collarbone like an insult.

 

She remembers: she has the same armor that he does. She relaxes fractionally. "It's not a general thing," she lies. "Just some people."

 

Acton seems to weigh the jibe, decide whether it's worthy of a response. His hand withdraws.

 

"Kind of an unfortunate quirk in a place as small as this," he says, turning away.

 

Small? I've got the whole goddamn ocean! But Acton's already climbing upstairs.

 

 

 

* * *

 

The new smoker is erupting again. Water shoots scalding from the chimney at the north end of the Throat, curdles and mixes with deep icy saline; microbes caught in the turbulence luminesce madly. The water fills with the hiss of unformed steam, aborted by the weight of three hundred atmospheres.

 

Acton is ten meters above the seabed, awash in rippling blue light.

 

She glides up from underneath. "Nakata said you were still out here," she buzzes at him. "She said you were waiting for this thing to go off."

 

He doesn't even look at her. "Right."

 

"You're lucky it did. You could have been waiting out here for days." Clarke turns away, aims herself at the generators.

 

"And I think," Acton says, "it'll stop in a minute or two."

 

She twists around and faces him. "Look, all these eruptions are..." she rummages for the word, "chaotic."

 

"Uh huh."

 

"You can't predict them."

 

"Hey, the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?"

 

"What are you talking about?"

 

"They can tell when something's going to blow. Take a look around sometime, you'll see for yourself. They react before it even happens."

 

She looks around. The clams are acting just like clams. The worms are acting just like worms. The brachyurans scurry around the bottom the way brachyurans always do. "React how?"

 

"Makes sense, after all. These vents can feed them or parboil them. After a few million years they've learned to read the signs, right?"

 

The smoker hiccoughs. The plume wavers, light dimming at its edges.

 

Acton looks at his wrist. "Not bad."

 

"Lucky guess," Clarke says, her vocoder hiding uncertainty.

 

The smoker manages a couple of feeble bursts and subsides completely.

 

Acton drifts closer. "You know, when they first sent me down here I thought this place would be a real shithole. I figured I'd just knuckle down and do my time and get out. But it's not like that. You know what I mean, Lenie?"

 

I know. But she doesn't answer.

 

"I thought so," he says, as though she has. "It's really kind of...well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know 'em. We're all beautiful."

 

He seems almost gentle.

 

Clarke dredges her memory for some sort of defense. "You couldn't have known," she says. "Way too many variables. It's not computable. Nothing down here's computable."

 

An alien creature looks down at her and shrugs. "Computable? Probably not. But knowable..."

 

There's no time for this, Clarke tells herself. I've got to get to work.

 

"...that's something else again," Acton says.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

She never figured him for a bookworm. Still, there he is again, plugged into the library. Stray light from the eyephones leaks across his cheeks.

 

He seems to be spending a lot of time in there these days. Almost as much time as he spends outside.

 

Clarke glances down at the flatscreen as she wanders past. It's dark.

 

"Chemistry," Brander says from across the lounge.

 

She looks at him.

 

Brander jerks his thumb at the oblivious Acton. "That's what he's into. Weird shit. Boring as hell."

 

That's what Ballard was into, just before... Clarke fingers a spare headset from the next terminal.

 

"Ooh, you're walking a fine line there," Brander remarks. "Mr. Acton doesn't like people reading over his shoulder."

 

Then Mr. Acton will be in privacy mode and I won't be able to. She sits down and slips the headset on. Acton has not invoked privacy; Clarke taps into his line without any trouble. The eyephone lasers etch text and formulae across her retinas. Serotonin. Acetylcholine. Neuropeptide moderation. Brander's right: it's really boring.

 

Someone's touching her.

 

She does not yank the headset off. She removes it calmly. She doesn't even flinch, this time. She will not give him the satisfaction.

 

Acton has turned in his chair to face her, headset dangling around his neck. His hand is on her knee.

 

"Glad to see we have common interests," he says quietly. "Not that surprising, though. We do share a certain ... chemistry..."

 

"That's true." She stares back, safe behind her eyecaps. "Too bad I'm allergic to shitheads."

 

He smiles. "Of course, it would never work. The ages are all wrong." He stands up, returns the headset to its hook.

 

"I'm not nearly old enough to be your father."

 

He crosses the lounge and climbs downstairs.

 

"What an asshole," Brander remarks.

 

"He's more of a prick than Fischer ever was. I'm surprised you're not picking fights with him all the time."

 

Brander shrugs. "Different dynamic. Acton's just an asshole. Fischer was a fucking pervert."

 

Not to mention that Fischer never fought back. She keeps the insight to herself.

 

 

 

* * *

 

Concentric circles, glowing emerald. Beebe Station sits on the bullseye. Intermittent blobs of weaker light litter the display: fissures and jagged rock outcroppings, endless muddy plains, the Euclidean outlines of human machinery all reduced to a common acoustic currency.

 

There's something else out there too, part Euclid, part Darwin. Clarke zooms in. Human flesh is too much like seawater to return an echo, but bones show up okay. The machinery inside is even clearer, it shouts at the faintest sonar signal. Clarke focuses the display, points at a translucent green skeleton with clockwork in its chest.

 

"That him?" Caraco says.

 

Clarke shakes her head.

 

"Maybe it is. Everyone else is—"

 

"It's not him." Clarke touches a control. The display zooms back to maximum range. "You sure he's not in his quarters?"

 

"He left the station seven hours ago. Hasn't been back since."

 

"Maybe he's just hugging the bottom. Maybe he's behind a rock."

 

"Maybe." Caraco sounds unconvinced.

 

Clarke leans back in her chair. The back of her head touches the rear wall of the cubby. "Well, he's doing his job okay. When he's off shift he can go wherever he likes, I guess."

 

"Yeah, but this is the third time. He's always late. He just wanders in whenever he likes—"

 

"So what?" Clarke, suddenly tired, rubs the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. "We don't run on dryback schedules here, you know that. He pulls his weight, don't fuck with him."

 

"Well, Fischer was always getting shit for being l—"

 

"Nobody cared if Fischer was late," Clarke cuts in. "They just— wanted an excuse."

 

Caraco leans forward. "I don't like him," she confides.

 

"Acton? No reason you should. He's psycho. We all are, remember?"

 

"But he's different, somehow. You know that."

 

"Lubin nearly killed his wife down at Galapagos before they assigned him here. Brander's got a history of attempted suicide."

 

Something changes in Caraco's stance. Clarke can't be sure, but the other woman's gaze seems to have dropped to the deck. Touched a nerve there, I guess.

 

She continues, more gently. "You're not worried about the rest of us, are you? So what's so special about Acton?"

 

"Oh," Caraco says. "Look."

 

On the tactical display, something has just moved into range.

 

Clarke zooms in on the new reading; it's too distant for good resolution, but there's no mistaking the hard metallic blip in its center.

 

"Acton," she says.

 

"Um...how far?" Caraco asks in a hesitant voice.

 

Clarke checks. "He's about nine hundred meters out. Not too bad, if he's using a squid."

 

"He's not. He never does."

 

"Hmm. At least he seems to be beelining in." Clarke looks up at Caraco. "You two are on shift when?"

 

"Ten minutes."

 

"No big deal. He'll be fifteen minutes late. Half hour tops."

 

Caraco stares at the display. "What's he doing out there?"

 

"I don't know," Clarke says. She wonders, not for the first time, if Caraco really belongs down here. She just doesn't seem to get it, sometimes.

 

"I was wondering if you could maybe talk to him," Caraco says.

 

"Acton? Why?"

 

"Nothing. Forget it."

 

"Okay." Clarke rises from the Communications chair. Caraco backs out of the hatchway to let her past.

 

"Um, Lenie..."

 

Clarke turns.

 

"What about you?" Caraco asks.

 

"Me?"

 

"You said Lubin nearly killed his wife. Brander tried to kill himself. What did you do, I mean, to...qualify?"

 

Clarke watches her steadily.

 

"I mean, I guess, if it's not too—"

 

"You don't understand," Clarke says, her voice absolutely level. "It's not how much shit you've raised that suits you for the rift. It's how much you've survived."

 

"I'm sorry." Caraco manages, with eyes utterly devoid of feeling, to look abashed.

 

Clarke softens a bit. "In my case," she says, "Mostly I just learned to roll with the punches. I haven't done much worth bragging about, you know?"

 

I'm sure enough working on it, though.

 

 

 

* * *

 

She doesn't know how it could have happened so fast. He's been here only two weeks, yet the 'lock can barely contain his eagerness to get outside. The chamber floods, she feels a single shiver scurry along his body; and before she can move, Acton hits the latch and they drop outside.

 

He coasts out from under the station, his trajectory an effortless parallel of her own. Clarke fins off towards the Throat. She feels Acton at her side, although she cannot see him. His headlamp, like hers, stays dark; for her it's become a gesture of respect to the more delicate lanterns that dwell here.

 

She doesn't know what Acton's reasoning is.

 

He doesn't speak until Beebe's a dirty yellow smudge behind them. "Sometimes I wonder why we ever go back inside."

 

It can't be happiness in that voice. How could any emotion make it through the mechanical gauntlet that lets people speak out here?

 

"I fell asleep near the Throat yesterday," he says.

 

"You're lucky something didn't eat you," she tells him.

 

"They're not so bad. You just have to know how to relate to them."

 

Clarke wonders if he relates to other species with the same subtlety that he relates to his own. She keeps the question to herself.

 

They swim through sparse, living starlight for a while. Another smudge glimmers ahead, weak and sullen; the Throat, dead on target. It's been months now since Clarke has even thought of the guide rope that's supposed to lead them back and forth, like blind troglodytes. She knows where it is, but she never uses it. Other senses come awake down here. Rifters don't get lost.

 

Except Fischer, maybe. And Fischer was lost long before he came down here.

 

"So what happened to Fischer, anyway?" Acton says.

 

The chill starts in her chest, reaches her fingers before the sound of Acton's voice has died away. It's a coincidence. It's a perfectly normal question to ask.

 

"I said—"

 

"He disappeared," Clarke says.

 

"They told me that much," Acton buzzes back. "I thought you might have a bit more insight."

 

"Maybe he fell asleep outside. Maybe something ate him."

 

"I doubt that."

 

"Really? And what makes you such an expert, Acton? You've been down here for what, two weeks now?"

 

"Only two weeks? Seems longer. Time stretches when you're outside, doesn't it?"

 

"At first," Clarke says.

 

"You know why Fischer disappeared?"

 

"No."

 

"He outlived his usefulness."

 

"Ah." Her machine parts turn it into half creak, half growl.

 

"I'm serious, Lenie." Acton's mechanical voice does not change. "You think they're going to let you stay down here forever? You think they'd let people like us down here at all if they had any choice?"

 

She stops kicking. Her body continues to coast. "What are you talking about?"

 

"Use your head, Lenie. You're smarter than I am, inside at least. You've got the keys to the city here—you've got the keys to the whole fucking seaboard, and you're still acting like a victim." Acton's vocoder gurgles indecipherably—a laugh, mistransposed? A snarl?

 

More words: "They count on that, you know."

 

Clarke starts kicking again, stares ahead to the brightening glow of the Throat.

 

It isn't there.

 

There's a moment's disorientation — We can't be lost, we were headed right for it, has the power gone out? — before she sees the familiar streak of coarse yellow light, bearing four o'clock.

 

How could I have gotten turned around like that?

 

"We're here," Acton says.

 

"No. The Throat's way over—"

 

A nova flares beside her, drenching the abyss with blinding light. It takes Clarke's eyecaps a moment to adjust; when the starbursts have faded from her eyes, the ocean is a muddy black backdrop for the bright cone from Acton's headlamp.

 

"Don't," she says. "It gets so dark when you do that, you can't see anything—"

 

"I know. I'll turn it off in a moment. Just look."

 

His beam shines down on a small rocky outcropping rising from the mud, no more than two meters across. Jagged cookie-cutter flowers litter its surface, radial clusters shining garish red and blue in the artificial light. Some of them lie flat along the rock face. Others are contorted into frozen calcareous knots, clenched around things Clarke can't see.

 

Some of them move, slowly.

 

"You brought me out here to look at starfish?" She tries, and fails, to squeeze some hint of bored contempt through the vocodor. But inside there's a distant, frightened amazement that he has led her here, that she could be guided, utterly unsuspecting, so completely off course. And how did he find this place? No sonar pistol, compass doesn't work worth shit this close to the Throat...

 

"I figured you probably hadn't looked at them very closely before," Acton says. "I thought you might be interested."

 

"We don't have time for this, Acton."

 

His hands reach down into the light and lock onto one of the starfish. They peel it slowly from the rock; there are filaments of some kind along the creature's underside, anchoring it to the substrate. Acton's efforts tear them free, a few at a time.

 

He holds the animal up for Clarke's inspection. Its upper surface is colored stone, encrusted with calcareous spicules. Acton flips it over. The underside writhes with hundreds of thick squirming threads, jammed into dense rows along the length of each arm. Each thread has a tiny sucker at its tip.

 

"A starfish," Acton tells her, "is the ultimate democracy."

 

Clarke stares, quietly repelled.

 

"This is how they move," Acton is saying. "They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy."

 

Rows of squirming maggots. A forest of translucent leeches, groping blindly into the water.

 

"So there's nothing to coordinate the tube feet, they all move independently. Usually that's not a problem; they all tend to go towards food, for example. But it's not unusual for a third of these feet to be pulling in some other direction entirely. The whole animal's a living tug-o-war. Sometimes, some really stubborn tube feet just don't give up, and they literally get torn out at the roots when the others move the body someplace they don't want to go. But hey: majority rules, right?"

 

Clarke extends a tentative finger. Half a dozen tube feet latch onto it. She can't feel them through her 'skin. Anchored, they look almost delicate, like filaments of milky glass.

 

"But that's nothing," Acton says. "Watch this."

 

He rips the starfish in half.

 

Clarke pulls back, shocked and angry. But there's something in Acton's posture, in that barely visible outline behind his lamp, that makes her pause.

 

"Don't worry, Lenie," he says. "I haven't killed it. I've bred it."

 

He drops the torn halves. They flutter like leaves to the seabed, trailing bits of bloodless entrail.

 

"They regenerate. Didn't you know that? You can tear them into pieces and each piece grows back the missing parts. It takes time, but they recover. Only you end up with more of them. Damn hard to kill these guys.

 

"Understand, Lenie? Tear them to pieces, they come back stronger."

 

"How do you know all this?" she asks in a metallic whisper. "Where do you come from?"

 

He lays an icy black hand on her arm. "Right here. This is where I was born."

 

She doesn't think it absurd. In fact, she barely hears him. Her mind is somewhere else entirely, terrified by a sudden realization.

 

Acton is touching her, and she doesn't mind.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Of course, the sex is electric. It always is. The familiar has reasserted itself, here in the cramped space of Clarke's cubby. They can't both lie on the pallet at the same time but they manage somehow, Acton on his knees, then Clarke, squirming around each other in a metal nest lined with ducts and vents and bundles of optical cabling. They navigate each others' seams and scars, tonguing puckers of metal and pale flesh, unseen and all-seeing behind their corneal armor.

 

For Clarke it's a new twist, this icy ecstasy of a lover without eyes. For the first time she feels no need to avert her face, no threat to fragile intimacy; at first, when Acton moved to take out his caps, she stopped him with a touch and a whisper and he seemed to understand.

 

They cannot lie together afterwards so they sit side-by-side, leaning into each other, staring at the hatch two meters in front of them. The lights are turned too low for dryback vision; Clarke and Acton see a room suffused in pale fluorescence.

 

Acton reaches out and fingers a shard of glass sticking from an empty frame on one wall. "There used to be a mirror here," he remarks.

 

Clarke nibbles his shoulder. "There were mirrors everywhere. I—took them down."

 

"Why? A few mirrors would open the place up a bit. Make it larger."

 

She points. Several torn wires, fine as threads, hang from a hole in the frame. "They had cameras behind them. I didn't like that."

 

Acton grunts. "I don't blame you."

 

They sit without speaking for a bit.

 

"You said something outside," she says. "You said you were born down here."

 

Acton hesitates, then nods. "Ten days ago."

 

"What did you mean?"

 

"You should know," he says. "You witnessed my birth."

 

She thinks back. "That was when the gulper got you..."

 

"Close." Acton grins his cold eyeless grin, puts an arm around her. "Actually, the gulper sort of catalyzed it, if I remember. Think of it as a midwife."

 

An image pops into her mind: Acton in Medical, vivisecting himself.

 

"Fine-tuning," she says.

 

"Uh huh." He gives her a squeeze. "And I've got you to thank for it. You gave me the idea."

 

"Me?"

 

"You were my mother, Len. And my father was this spastic little shrimp that ended up way over its head. He died before I was born, actually: I killed him. You weren't very happy about that."

 

Clarke shakes her head. "You're not making sense."

 

"You telling me you haven't noticed the change? You telling me I'm the same person I was when I came down?"

 

"I don't know," she says. "Maybe I've just gotten to know you better."

 

"Maybe. Maybe I have too. I don't know, Len, I just seem more...awake now, I guess. I see things differently. You must have noticed."

 

"Yeah, but only when you're—"

 

Outside.

 

"You did something to your inhibitors," she whispers.

 

"Reduced the dosage a bit."

 

She grasps his arm. "Karl, those chemicals keep you from spazzing out every time you go outside. You fuck with this stuff, you're risking a seizure as soon as the 'lock floods."

 

"I have been fucking with it, Lenie. You see any change in me that isn't an improvement?"

 

She doesn't answer.

 

"It's all about action potential," he tells her. "Your nerves have to build up a certain charge before they can fire—"

 

"And at this depth they'd fire all the time, Karl, please—"

 

"Shh." He lays a gentle finger on her lips but she brushes it away, suddenly angry.

 

"I'm serious, Karl. Without those drugs your nerves short-circuit, you burn out, I know—"

 

"You only know what they tell you," he snaps. "Why don't you try working things out yourself for once?"

 

She falls silent, stung by his disapproval. A space opens between them on the pallet.

 

"I'm not a fool, Lenie," Acton says, more quietly. "I just reduced the settings a bit. Five percent. Now, when I go outside it takes a bit less of a stimulus for my nerves to fire, that's all. It...it wakes you up, Len; I'm more aware of things, I'm more alive somehow."

 

She watches him, unspeaking.

 

"Of course they say it's dangerous," he says. "They're scared shitless of you already. You think they're going to give you even more of an edge?"

 

"They're not scared of us, Karl."

 

"They should be." His arm goes back around her. "Wanna try it?"

 

It's as though she's suddenly outside, still naked. "No."

 

"There's nothing to worry about, Len. I've already done the guinea pig work on myself. Open up to me and I could make the adjustments myself, it'd take ten minutes."

 

"I'm not up for it, Karl. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one of the others is."

 

He shakes his head. "They don't trust me."

 

"You can't blame them."

 

"I don't." He grins, showing teeth as sharp and white as eyecaps. "But even if they did trust me, they wouldn't do anything unless you thought it was okay."

 

She looks at him. "Why not?"

 

"You're in charge here, Len."

 

"Bullshit. They never told you that."

 

"They didn't have to. It's obvious."

 

"I've been down here longer than them. So's Lubin. That doesn't matter to anyone."

 

Acton frowns briefly. "No, I don't think it does. But you're still leader of the pack, Len. Head wolf. A-fucking-kayla."

 

Clarke shakes her head. She searches her memory for something, anything, that would contradict Acton's absurd claim. She comes up empty.

 

She feels a little sick inside.

 

He gives her a little squeeze. "Tough luck, lover. I guess the clothes don't fit so well after being a career victim your whole life, eh?"

 

Clarke stares at the deck.

 

"Think about it, anyway," Acton whispers in her ear. "I guarantee you'll feel twice as alive as you do now."

 

"That happens anyway," Clarke reminds him. "Whenever I go outside. I don't need to screw up my internals for that." Not those internals, anyway.

 

"This is different," he insists.

 

She looks at him and smiles, and hopes he doesn't push it. How can he expect me to let him cut me open like that? she wonders, and then wonders if maybe someday she will, if the fear of losing him might somehow grow large enough to force her other fears into submission. It wouldn't be the first time.

 

Twice as alive, Acton says. Hiding behind her smile, Clarke considers: twice as much of her life. Not a great prospect, so far.

 

 

 

* * *

 

There's a light from behind; it chases her shadow out along the seabed. She can't remember how long it's been there. She feels a momentary chill—

 

—Fischer?—

 

—before common sense sets in. Gerry Fischer wouldn't use a headlamp.

 

"Lenie?"

 

She revolves on her own axis, sees a silhouette hovering a few meters away. Cyclopean light glares from its forehead. Clarke hears a subvocal buzz, the corrupted equivalent of Brander clearing his throat. "Judy said you were out here," he explains.

 

"Judy." She means it as a question, but her vocoder loses the intonation.

 

"Yeah. She sort of, keeps tabs on you sometimes."

 

Clarke considers that a moment. "Tell her I'm harmless."

 

"It's not like that," he buzzes. "I think she just ... worries..."

 

Clarke feels muscles twitching at the corners of her mouth. She thinks she might be smiling.

 

"So I guess we're on shift," she says, after a moment.

 

The headlight bobs up and down. "Right. A bunch of clams need their asses scraped. More skilled labor."

 

She stretches, weightless. "Okay. Let's go."

 

"Lenie..."

 

She looks up at him.

 

"Why do you come— I mean, why here?" Brander's headlight sweeps the bottom, comes to rest on an outcropping of bone and rotted flesh. A skeletal smile stitches its way across the lit circle. "Did you kill it, or something?"

 

"Yeah, I—" She falls silent, realizing: He means the whale.

 

"Nah," she says instead. "It just died on its own."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Of course she wakes up alone. They still try to sleep together sometimes, after sex has made them too lazy to go outside. But the bunk is too small. The most they can manage is a sort of diagonal slouch: feet on the floor, necks bent up against the bulkhead, Acton cradling her like a living hammock. If they're unlucky they really do fall asleep like that. It takes hours to get the kinks out afterwards. Way more trouble than it's worth.

 

So she wakes up alone. But she misses him anyway.

 

It's early. The schedules handed down from the GA are increasingly irrelevant — circadian rhythms lose their way in the incessant darkness, fall slowly out of phase — but the rubbery timetable that remains leaves hours before her shift starts. Lenie Clarke is awake in the middle of the night. It seems like a stupid and obvious thing to say, months from the nearest sunrise, but right now it seems especially true.

 

In the corridor she turns for a moment in the direction of his cubby before she remembers. He's never in there any more. He's never even inside, unless he's eating or working or being with her. He hasn't slept in his quarters almost since they got involved. He's getting almost as bad as Lubin.

 

Caraco is sitting silently in the lounge, unmoving, obeying her own inner clock. She looks up as Clarke crosses to Comm.

 

"He went out about an hour ago," she says softly.

 

Sonar picks him up fifty meters southeast, barely echoing above the bottom clutter. Clarke heads for the ladder.

 

"He showed us something the other day," Caraco says after her. "Ken and me."

 

Clarke looks back.

 

"A smoker, way off in one corner of the Throat. It had this weird fluted vent, and it made singing sounds, almost..."

 

"Mmm."

 

"He really wanted us to know about it, for some reason. He was really excited. He's — he's kind of strange out there, Lenie..."

 

"Judy," Clarke says neutrally, "Why are you telling me this?"

 

Caraco looks away. "Sorry. I didn't mean anything."

 

Clarke starts down the ladder.

 

"Just be careful, okay?" Caraco calls after her.

 

He's curled up when Clarke reaches him, knees tucked under his chin, floating a few centimeters above a stone garden. His eyes are open, of course. She reaches out, touches him through two layers of reflex copolymer.

 

He barely stirs. His vocoder emits sporadic ticking noises.

 

Lenie Clarke curls herself around him. In a womb of freezing sea water, they sleep on until morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Short Circuit

 

 

 

I won't give in.

 

It would be so easy. She could live out there, stay the fuck away from this creaking eggshell except to eat and bathe and do whatever parts of her job demand an atmosphere. She could spend her whole life flying across the seabed. Lubin does. Brander and Caraco and even Nakata are starting to.

 

Lenie Clarke knows she doesn't belong in here. None of them do.

 

But at the same time, she's scared of what outside might do to her. I could end up like Fischer. It would be so easy to just— slip away. If a hot seep or mud slide didn't get me first.

 

Lately she's been valuing her own life quite a lot. Maybe that means she's losing it. What kind of a rifter cares about living? But there it is: the rift is starting to scare her.

 

That's bullshit. Complete, total bullshit.

 

Who wouldn't be scared?

 

Scared. Yes. Of Karl. Of what you'll let him do to you.

 

It's been, what, a week now?—

 

Two days.

 

—two days since she's slept outside. Two days since she decided to incarcerate herself in here. She goes outside to work, and comes back as soon as each shift ends. No one's mentioned the change to her. Perhaps no one's noticed; if they don't come back to Beebe themselves after work, they scatter off across the sea bed to do whatever they do in splendid, freezing isolation.

 

She knew Acton would notice, though. He'd notice, and miss her, and follow her back inside. Or maybe he'd try and talk her back out, fight with her when she resisted. But he's shown no sign at all. He spends as much time out there as he ever did. She still sees him, of course. At mealtimes. At the library. Once for sex, during which neither spoke of anything important. And then gone again, back into the ocean.

 

He didn't enter into any pact with her. She didn't even tell him about her pact with herself. Still, she feels betrayed.

 

She needs him. She knows what that means, sees her own footprints crowding the road ahead, but reading the signs and changing course are two completely different things. Her insides are twisting with the need to go, whether out to him or just out she can't say. But as long as he's outside and she's in Beebe, Lenie Clarke can tell herself that she's still in control.

 

It's progress, sort of.

 

Now, curled up in her cubby with the hatch sealed tight, she hears the subterranean gurgle of the airlock. She comes up off the bed as though radio-controlled.

 

Noises, flesh against metal, hydraulics and pneumatics. A voice. Lenie Clarke is on her way to the wet room.

 

He's brought a monster inside with him. It's an anglerfish, almost two meters long, a jellylike bag of flesh with teeth half the length of Clarke's forearm. It lies quivering on the deck, its insides exploded through its own mouth in the near vacuum of Beebe's sea-level atmosphere. Dozens of miniature tails, twitching feebly, sprout everywhere from its body.

 

Caraco and Lubin, in the middle of some task, look over from the engineering 'lock. Acton stands beside his catch; his thorax, still inflating, hisses softly.

 

"How did you fit it inside the 'lock?" Clarke wonders.

 

"More to the point," Lubin says, coming over, "why bother?"

 

"What're all those tails?" Caraco says.

 

Acton grins at them. "Not tails. Mates."

 

Lubin's face doesn't change. "Really."

 

Clarke leans forward. Not just tails, she sees now; some of them have those extra fins along the side and back. Some of them have gills. A couple of them even have eyes. It's as though a whole school of tiny anglers are boring into this big one. Some are in only as far as their jaws, but others are buried right down to the tail.

 

Another thought strikes her, even more revolting; the big fish doesn't need its mouth any more. It's just engulfing the little ones across its body wall, like some giant devolving microbe.

 

"Group sex on the rift," says Acton. "All the big ones we've been seeing, they're female. The males are these little finger-sized fuckers here. Not many dating opportunities this far down, so they just latch on to the first female they can find, and they sort of fuse — their heads get absorbed, their bloodstreams link together. They're parasites, get it? They worm into her side and they spend their whole lives feeding off her. And there's a fuck of a lot of them, but she's bigger than they are, she's stronger, she could eat them alive if she just—"

 

"He's been in the library again," Caraco remarks.

 

Acton looks at her for a moment. Deliberately, he points at the bloated carcass on the deck. "That's us." He grabs one of the parasitic males, rips it free. "This is everyone else. Get it?"

 

"Ah," Lubin says. "A metaphor. Clever."

 

Acton takes a single step towards the other man. "Lubin, I am getting awfully fucking tired of you."

 

"Really." Lubin doesn't seem the least bit threatened.

 

Clarke moves; not directly between them, just off to one side, forming the apex of a human triangle. She has absolutely no idea what to do if this comes to blows. She has no idea what to say to stop that from happening.

 

Suddenly, she's not even sure that she wants to.

 

"Come on, you guys." Caraco leans back against the drying rack. "Can't you settle this some other way? Maybe you could just whip out a ruler and compare your dicks or something."

 

They stare at her.

 

"Watch it, Judy. You're getting pretty cocky there."

 

Now they're staring at Clarke.

 

Did I say that?

 

For a long, long moment nothing happens. Then Lubin grunts and goes back to the workshop. Acton watches him go; then, deprived of an immediate threat, he steps back into the airlock.

 

The dead angler shivers on the deck, bristling with infestation.

 

"Lenie, he's really getting weird," Caraco says as the 'lock floods. "Maybe you should just let him go."

 

Clarke just shakes her head. "Go where?"

 

She even manages a smile.

 

 

 

* * *

 

She was looking for Karl Acton, but somehow she's found Gerry Fischer instead. He looks sadly down at her through the length of a long tunnel. He seems to be a whole ocean away. He doesn't speak but she senses sadness, disappointment. You lied to me, that feeling says. You said you'd come and see me and you lied. You've forgotten all about me.

 

He's wrong. She hasn't forgotten him at all. She's only tried to.

 

She doesn't say it aloud, of course, but somehow he reacts to it anyway. His feelings change; sadness fades, something colder seeps up in its place, something so deep and so old that she can't think of words to describe it.

 

Something pure.

 

From behind, a touch on her shoulder. She spins, instantly alert, hand closing around her billy.

 

"Hey, calm down. It's me." Acton's silhouette hangs against a faint wash of light from the direction of the Throat. Clarke relaxes, pushes gently at his chest. Says nothing.

 

"Welcome back," Acton says. "Haven't seen you out here for a while."

 

"I was— I was looking for you," she says.

 

"In the mud?"

 

"What?"

 

"You were just floating there, face down."

 

"I was—" She feels a vestige of disquiet, but she can't remember what to attach it to. "I must have drifted off. I was dreaming. It's been so long since I slept out here, I—"

 

"Four days, I think. I missed you."

 

"Well, you could have come inside."

 

Acton nods. "I tried. But I could never get all of me through the airlock, and the part that I could— well, it was sort of a poor substitute. If you'll remember."

 

"I don't know, Karl. You know how I feel—"

 

"Right. And I know you like it out here as much as I do. Sometimes I feel like I could just stay out here forever." He pauses for a moment, as if weighing alternatives. "Fischer's got it right."

 

Something goes cold. "Fischer?"

 

"He's still out here, Len. You know that."

 

"You've seen him?"

 

"Not often. He's pretty skittish."

 

"When do...I mean—"

 

"Only when I'm alone. And pretty far from Beebe."

 

She looks around, inexplicably frightened. Of course you can't see him. He isn't here. And even if he was, it's still too dark to...

 

She forces herself to leave her headlamp doused.

 

"He's...I think he's really hooked in to you, Len. But I guess you know that too."

 

No. No, I didn't. I don't. "He talks to you?" She doesn't know why she'd resent that.

 

"No."

 

"Then how?"

 

Acton doesn't answer for a moment. "I don't know. I just got that impression. But he doesn't talk. It's...I don't know, Len. He just hangs around out there and watches us. I don't know if he's what we'd consider ... sane, I guess—"

 

"He watches us," she says, buzzing low and level.

 

"He knows we're together. I think...I think he figures that connects me and him somehow." Acton is silent for a bit. "You cared about him, didn't you?"

 

Oh yes. It always starts off so innocently. You cared about him, that's nice, and then it's did you find him attractive and then well you must have done something or he wouldn't keep hitting on you and then you fucking slut I'll—

 

"Lenie," Acton says. "I'm not trying to start anything."

 

She waits and watches.

 

"I know there was nothing going on. And even if there was, I know it's no threat."

 

She's heard this part before, too.

 

"Now that I think about it, that's always been my problem," Acton muses. "I always had to go on what other people told me, and people— people lie all the time, Len, you know that. So no matter how many times she swears she's not fucking around on you, or even that she doesn't want to fuck around on you, how can you ever really know? You can't. So the default assumption is, she's lying. And being lied to all the time, that's a damn good reason for — well, for doing what I do sometimes."

 

"Karl — you know—"

 

"I know you don't lie to me. You don't even hate me. That's kind of a change."

 

She reaches out to touch the side of his face. "I'd say that's a good call. I'm glad you trust me."

 

"Actually, Len, I don't have to trust you. I just know."

 

"What do you mean? How?"

 

"I'm not sure," he says. "It's something to do with the changes."

 

He waits for her to respond.

 

"What are you saying, Karl?" she says at last. "Are you saying you can read my mind?"

 

"No. Nothing like that. I just, well, I identify with you more. I can— it's kind of hard to explain—"

 

She remembers him levitating beside a luminous smoker: the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?

 

He's tuned in, she realizes. To everything. He's even tuned into the bloody worms, that's what he—

 

He's tuned in to Fischer—

 

She tongues the light switch. A bright cone stabs into the abyss. She sweeps the water around them. Nothing.

 

"Have the others seen him?"

 

"I don't know. I think Caraco caught him on sonar once or twice."

 

"Let's go back," Clarke says.

 

"Let's not. Stay a while. Spend the night."

 

She looks straight into his empty lenses. "Please, Karl. Come with me. Sleep inside for a bit."

 

"He's not dangerous, Len."

 

"That's not it." At least, that's not all.

 

"What, then?"

 

"Karl, has it ever occurred to you that you might be developing some sort of dependence on this nerve rush of yours?"

 

"Come on, Len. The rift gives us all a rush. That's why we're down here."

 

"We get a rush because we're fucked in the head. That doesn't mean we should go out of our way to augment the effect."

 

"Lenie—"

 

"Karl." She lays her hands on his shoulders. "I don't know what happens to you out here. But whatever it is, it scares me."

 

He nods. "I know."

 

"Then please, please try it my way. Try sleeping inside again, just for a while. Try not to spend every waking moment climbing around on the bottom of the ocean, okay?"

 

"Lenie, I don't like myself inside. You don't even like me inside."

 

"Maybe. I don't know. I just — I just don't know how to deal with you when you're like this."

 

"When I'm not about to beat the shit out of anyone? When I'm acting like a rational human being? If we'd had this conversation back at Beebe we'd be throwing things at each other by now." He falls silent for a moment. Something changes in his posture. "Or do you miss that, somehow?"

 

"No. Of course not," she says, surprised at the thought.

 

"Well, then—"

 

"Please. Just— indulge me. What harm can it do?"

 

He doesn't answer. But she has a sneaking suspicion that he could.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

She has to give him credit. His reluctance shows in every move, but he's even first through the airlock. Something happens to him as it drains, though; the air rushes into him and — displaces something else, somehow. She can't quite put her finger on it. She wonders why she's never noticed it before.

 

As a reward, she takes him directly into her cubby. He fucks her up against the bulkhead, violently, with no discretion at all. Animal sounds echo through the hull. She wonders, as he comes, if the noise is bothering the others.

 

 

 

* * *

 

"Have any of you," Acton says, "thought about why things are so fucking grotty down here?"

 

It's a strange and wondrous occasion, as rare as a planetary conjunction. All the circadian clocks have drifted together for an hour or two, drawn everyone to dinner at the same time. Almost everyone; Lubin is nowhere to be seen. Not that he ever contributes much to the conversation anyway.

 

"What do you mean?" Caraco says.

 

"What do you think I mean? Look around, for Chrissake!" Acton waves his arm, taking in the lounge. "The place is barely big enough to stand up in. Everywhere you look there's fucking pipes and cables. It's like living in a service closet."

 

Brander frowns around a mouthful of rehydrated potato.

 

"They were on a very strict schedule," Nakata suggests. "It was important to get everything online as quickly as possible. Perhaps they just didn't have time to make everything as cushy as they could have."

 

Acton snorts. "Come on, Alice. How much extra time would it take to program the blueprints for decent headroom?"

 

"I feel a conspiracy theory coming on," Brander remarks. "So go on, Karl. Why's the GA going out of its way to make us bump our heads all the time? They breeding us for short height, maybe? So we'll eat less?"

 

Lenie Clarke feels Acton tensing; it's like a small shockwave pushed out by his clenching muscles, a pulse of tension that ripples through the air and breaks against her 'skin. She rests one calming hand casually on his thigh, under the table. It's a calculated risk, of course. It would piss him off even more if Acton thought he was being patronized.

 

This time he relaxes a little. "I think they're trying to keep us off balance. I think they deliberately designed Beebe to stress us out."

 

"Why?" Caraco again, tense but civil.

 

"Because it gives them an advantage. The more time we spend being on edge, the less time we have to think about what we could do to them if we really wanted to."

 

"And what's that?"

 

"Use your head, Judy. We could black out the grid from the Charlottes down to Portland."

 

"They'd just switch feeds," Brander says. "There are other deep stations."

 

"Yeah. And they're all staffed by people just like us." Acton slaps the table with one hand. "Come on, you guys. They don't want us down here. They hate us, we're sickos that beat up our wives and eat our babies for breakfast. If it weren't for the fact that anyone else would flip out down here—"

 

Clarke shakes her head. "But they could get us out of the loop completely if they wanted. Just automate everything."

 

"Hallelujah." Acton brings his hands together in sarcastic applause. "The woman's got it at last."

 

Brander leans back in his chair. "Give it a rest, Acton. Haven't you ever worked for the GA before? You ever work for any sort of bureaucracy?"

 

Acton's gaze swivels, locks on to the other man. "What's your point?"

 

Brander looks back with a hint of a sneer on his face. "My point, Karl, is that you're reading way too much into this. So they made the ceilings too low. So their interior decorator's not worth shit. So what else is new? The GA just isn't that scared of you." He takes in Beebe with a wave of his arm. "This isn't some subtle psychological war. Beebe was just designed by incompetent bozos." Brander stands up, takes his plate to the galley. "If you don't like the headroom, stay outside."

 

Acton looks at Lenie Clarke, his face utterly devoid of expression. "Oh, I'd like to. Believe me."

 

 

 

* * *

 

He's hunched over the library terminal, 'phones on his ears, 'phones on his eyes, the flatscreen blanked as usual to hide his litsearch from view. As if anything in the database could really be personal. As if the GA would ever ration out any fact worth hiding.

 

She's learned not to bother him when he's like this. He's hunting in there, he resents any distraction as though the files he's after might somehow escape if he looks the other way. She doesn't touch him. She doesn't run a gentle finger along his arm or try to work the knots from his shoulders. Not any more. There are some mistakes that Lenie Clarke can learn from.

 

He's actually helpless in a strange way; cut off from the rest of Beebe, deaf and blind to the presence of people who are by no means friends. Brander could come up behind him right now and plant a knife in his back. And yet everyone leaves him alone. It's as though his sensory exile, this self-imposed vulnerability is some sort of brazen dare that no one has the guts to take him up on. So Acton sits at the keyboard— tapping at first, now stabbing— in his own private datasphere, and his deaf blind presence somehow dominates the lounge out of all proportion to his physical size.

 

"FUCK!"

 

He tears the 'phones from his face and slams his fist down on the console. Nothing even cracks. He glares around the lounge, white eyes blazing, and settles on Nakata over in the galley. Lenie Clarke, wisely, has avoided eye contact.

 

"This database is fucking ancient! They stick us down this fucking black anus for months at a time and they don't even give us a link to the net!"

 

Nakata spreads her hands. "The net's infected," she says, nervously. "They send us scrubbed downloads every month or s—"

 

"I fucking know that." Acton's voice is suddenly, ominously calm. Nakata takes the hint and falls silent.

 

He stands up. The whole room seems to shrink down around him. "I've got to get out of here," he says at last. He takes a step towards the ladder, glances at Clarke. "Coming?"

 

She shakes her head.

 

"Suit yourself."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Caraco, maybe. She's made overtures in the past.

 

Not that Clarke ever took them. But things are changing. There aren't just two Karl Actons any more. There used to be; all of her partners have been twosomes, in fact. There's always been a host, some magnetic chassis whose face and name never mattered because it would change without warning. And providing continuity, riding along behind each twinkling pair of eyes, there's always been the thing inside, and it never changes. Nor, to be honest, would Lenie Clarke know what to do if it did.

 

Now there's something new: the thing outside. So far at least, it has shown no trace of violence. It does seem to have x-ray vision, which could be even worse.

 

Lenie Clarke has always slept with the thing inside. Until now, she'd always just assumed it was for want of an alternative.

 

She taps lightly on Caraco's hatch. "Judy? You there?" She should be; she's nowhere else in Beebe, and sonar can't find any trace of her outside.

 

No answer.

 

It can wait.

 

No. It's waited long enough.

 

How would I feel if—

 

She isn't me.

 

The hatch is closed but not dogged. Clarke pulls it open a few centimeters and peers inside.

 

Somehow they've managed to pull it off. Alice Nakata and Judy Caraco spoon around each other on that tiny bunk. Their eyes dart restlessly beneath closed lids. Nakata's dreamer stands guard beside them, its tendrils pasted to their bodies.

 

Clarke lets the hatch hiss shut again.

 

It was a stupid idea, anyhow. What would she know?

 

She wonders how long they've been together, though. She never even saw that coming.

 

 

 

* * *

 

"Your boyfriend isn't here," Lubin calls in. "We were supposed to top up the coolant on number seven."

 

Clarke calls up the topographic display. "How long ago?"

 

"Oh four hundred."

 

"Okay." Acton's half an hour late. That's unusual; he's been going out of his way to be punctual these days, a grudging concession to Clarke in the name of group relations. "I can't find him on sonar," she reports. "Unless he's hugging the bottom. Hang on."

 

She leans out of the comm cubby. "Hey. Anybody see Karl?"

 

"He left a while ago," Brander calls from the wet room. "Maintenance on seven, I think."

 

Clarke punches back into Lubin's channel. "He's not here. Brander says he left already. I'll keep looking."

 

"Okay. At least his deadman switch hasn't gone off." Clarke can't tell whether Lubin thinks that's good or bad.

 

Movement at the corner of her eye. She looks up; Nakata's standing in the hatchway.

 

"Have you found him?" she asks.

 

Clarke shakes her head.

 

"He was in Medical, just before he left," Nakata says. "He was open. He said he was making some adjustments—"

 

Oh God.

 

"He said they improved performance outside, but he didn't explain. He said he would show me later. Maybe something went wrong."

 

External camera display, ventral view. The image flickers for a moment, then clears; on the screen, a scalloped circle of light lies across a flat muddy plain, transected by the knife-edge shadows of anchor cables. Near the edge of that circle is a black human figure, face down, its hands held to either side of its head.

 

She wakes up the close acoustics. "Karl! Karl, can you hear me?"

 

He reacts. His head twists around, faces up into the floods; his eyecaps reflect featureless white glare into the camera. He's shaking.

 

"His vocoder," Nakata says. There's sound coming from the speaker, soft, repetitive, mechanical. "It's— stuttering—"

 

Clarke's already in the wet room. She knows what Acton's vocoder is saying. She knows, because the same word is repeating over and over in her own head.

 

No. No. No. No. No.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

No obvious motor impairment. He's able to make it back inside on his own; stiffens, in fact, when Clarke tries to help him. He strips his gear and follows her into Medical without a word.

 

Nakata, diplomatically, closes the hatch behind them

 

Now he sits on the examination table, stonefaced. Clarke knows the routine; get his 'skin off, his eyecaps out. Check autonomic pupil response and reflex arcs. Stab him, draw off the usual samples: blood gases, acetylcholine, GABA, lactic acid.

 

She sits down beside him. She doesn't want his eyecaps out. She doesn't want to see behind them.

 

"Your inhibitors," she says at last. "How far down are they?"

 

"Twenty percent."

 

"Well." She tries for a light touch. "At least we know your limit now. Just nudge them back up to normal."

 

Almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.

 

"Why not?"

 

"Too late. I went over some sort of threshold. I don't think — it doesn't feel reversible."

 

"I see." She puts one tentative hand on his arm. He doesn't react. "How do you feel?"

 

"Blind. Deaf."

 

"You're not, though."

 

"You asked how I felt," he says, still expressionless.

 

"Here." She takes the NMR helmet down from its hook. Acton lets her strap it across his skull. "If there's anything wrong, this should—"

 

"There's something wrong, Len."

 

"Well." The helmet writes its impressions across the diagnostic display. Clarke's got the same medical expertise they all have, stuffed into her mind by machines that hijacked her dreams. Still, the raw data mean nothing to her. It's almost a minute before the display prints out an executive summary.

 

"Your synaptic calcium's way down." She's careful not to show her relief. "Makes sense, I guess. Your neurons fire too often, eventually they run out of something."

 

He looks at the screen, saying nothing.

 

"Karl, it's okay." She leans toward his ear, one hand on his shoulder. "It'll fix itself. Just put your inhibitors back up to normal; demand goes down, supply keeps up. No harm done."

 

He shakes his head again. "Won't work."

 

"Karl, look at the readout. You're going to be fine."

 

"Please don't touch me," he says, not moving at all.

 

 

 

 

Critical Mass

 

 

 

She catches a glimpse of fist before it hits her eye. She staggers back against the bulkhead, feels some protruding rivet or valve catch the back of her head. The world drowns in explosions of afterlight.

 

He's lost control, she thinks dully. I win. Her knees collapse under her; she slides down the wall, sits with a heavy thud on the deck. She considers it a matter of some pride that she's kept utterly silent through all this.

 

I wonder what I did to set him off. She can't remember. Acton's fist seems to have knocked the past few minutes out of her head. Doesn't matter anyway. Same old dance.

 

But this time there seems to be someone on her side. She can hear shouts, sounds of a scuffle. She hears the sick jarring thud of flesh against bone against metal, and for once, none of it seems to be hers.

 

"You cocksucker! I'll rip your fucking balls off!"

 

Brander's voice. Brander is sticking up for her. He always was the gallant one. Clarke smiles, tastes salt. Of course, he never quite forgave Acton for that tiff over the gulper, either...

 

Her vision is starting to clear, in one eye at least. There's a leg right in front of her, another to one side. She looks up; the legs meet at Caraco's crotch. Acton and Brander are in her cubby too; Clarke's amazed that they can all fit.

 

Acton, his mouth bloody, is under siege. Brander's hand is at his throat. Acton has the wrist of that hand caught in a grip of his own; while Clarke watches, his other arm lashes out and glances off Brander's jaw.

 

"Stop it," she mumbles.

 

Caraco hits Acton's temple twice in rapid succession. Acton's head snaps sideways, snarls, but he doesn't release his grip on Brander.

 

"I said stop it!"

 

This time they hear her. The struggle slows, pauses; fists remain poised, no holds break, but they're all looking at her now.

 

Even Acton. Clarke looks up into his eyes, looks behind them. She can see nothing staring back but Acton himself. You were there before, she remembers. I'm almost sure of it. Count on you to get Acton into a losing fight and then bugger off...

 

She braces herself against the bulkhead and pushes slowly erect. Caraco moves aside, helps her up.

 

"I'm flattered by all the attention, folks," Clarke says, "and I want to thank you for stopping by, but I think we can handle this on our own from here on in."

 

Caraco puts a protective hand on her shoulder. "You don't have to put up with this shit." Her eyes, somehow venomous through the shielding, are still locked on Acton. "None of us do."

 

One corner of Acton's mouth pulls back in a small, bloody sneer.

 

Clarke endures Caraco's touch without flinching. "I know that. And thanks for stepping in. But please, just leave us alone for a while."

 

Brander doesn't loosen his grip on Acton's throat. "I don't think that a very good—"

 

"Will you get your fucking hands off him and leave us alone!"

 

They back off. Clarke glares after them, dogs the hatch to keep them out. "Goddamned nosy neighbors," she grumbles, turning back to Acton.

 

His body sags in the sudden privacy, all the anger and bravado evaporating as she watches.

 

"Want to tell me why you're being such an asshole?" she says.

 

Acton collapses on her pallet. He stares at the deck, avoiding her eyes. "Don't you know when you're being fucked over?"

 

Clarke sits down beside him. "Sure. Getting punched out is pretty much a giveaway."

 

"I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to help all of you." He turns and hugs her, body shaking, cheek pressed against hers, face aimed at the bulkhead behind her shoulder. "Oh God Lenie I'm so sorry you're the last person in the whole fucking world I want to hurt—"

 

She strokes him without speaking. She knows he means it. They always do. She still can't bring herself to blame any of them.

 

He thinks he's alone in there. He thinks it's all his own doing.

 

Briefly, an impossible thought: Maybe it is...

 

"I can't go on with this," he says. "Staying inside."

 

"It'll get better, Karl. It's always hard at first."

 

"Oh God, Len. You don't have a clue. You still think I'm some sort of junkie."

 

"Karl—"

 

"You think I don't know what addiction is? You think I can't tell the difference?"

 

She doesn't answer.

 

He manages a small, sad laugh. "I'm losing it, Len. You're forcing me to lose it. Why in God's name do you want me this way?"

 

"Because this is who you are, Karl. Outside isn't you. Outside's a distortion."

 

"Outside I'm not an asshole. Outside I don't make everyone hate me."

 

"No." She hugs him. "If controlling your temper means seeing you turn into something else, seeing you doped up all the time, then I'll take my chances with the original."

 

Acton looks at her. "I hate this. Jesus Christ, Len. Won't you ever get tired of people who kick the shit out of you?"

 

"That's a really nasty thing to say," she remarks quietly.

 

"I don't think so. I can remember some things I saw out there, Len. It's like you need —I mean God, Lenie, there's so much hate in all of you..."

 

She's never heard him speak like this. Not even outside. "You've got a bit of that in you too, you know."

 

"Yeah. I thought it made me different. I thought it gave me...an edge, you know?"

 

"It does."

 

He shakes his head. "Oh, no. Not next to you."

 

"Don't underrate yourself. You don't see me trying to take on the whole station."

 

"That's just it, Len. I blow it off all the time, I waste it on stupid shit like this. But you— you hoard it." His expression changes, she's not exactly sure what to. Concern, maybe. Worry. "Sometimes you scare me more than Lubin does. You never lash out, or beat on anybody — Christ, it's a major event when you even raise your voice — so it just builds up. It's got its up side, I guess." He manages a soft laugh. "Hatred's a great fuel source. If anything ever—activated you, you'd be unstoppable. But now, you're just—toxic. I don't think you really know how much hate you've got in you."

 

Pity?

 

Something inside her goes suddenly cool. "Don't play therapist with me, Karl. Just because your nerves fire too fast doesn't mean you've got second sight. You don't know me that well."

 

Of course not. Or you wouldn't be with me.

 

"Not in here." He smiles, but that strange sick expression keeps showing through behind. "Outside, at least, I can see things. In here I'm blind."

 

"You're in the land of the blind." She says curtly. "It's not a drawback."

 

"Really? Would you stay here if it meant getting your eyes cut out? Would you stay some place that rotted your brain out piece by piece, turned you from a human being into a fucking monkey?"

 

Clarke considers. "If I was a monkey to begin with, maybe."

 

Uh oh. Sounded too flippant by half, didn't I?

 

Acton looks at her for a moment. Something else does too, drowsily, with one eye open.

 

"At least I don't get my endorphins by playing victim," he says, slowly. "You should really be a bit more careful who you choose to look down on."

 

"And you," Clarke replies, "should save the pious lectures for those rare occasions when you actually know what you're talking about."

 

He rises off the bed and glares at her, fists carefully unclenched.

 

Clarke does not move. She feels her whole body hardening from the inside out. She deliberately lifts her head until she's looking straight into Acton's hooded eyes.

 

It's in there now, fully awake. She can't see Acton at all any more. Everything's back to normal.

 

"Don't even try," she says. "I gave you a couple of shots for old times' sake, but if you lay a hand on me again I swear I'll fucking kill you."

 

She marvels inwardly at the strength in her voice; it sounds like iron.

 

They stare at each other for an endless moment.

 

Acton's body turns on its heel and undogs the hatch. Clarke watches it step out of the cubby; Caraco, waiting in the corridor, lets it by without a word. Clarke holds herself utterly still until she hears the 'lock beginning to cycle.

 

He didn't call my bluff.

 

Except this time, she's not sure that that's all it was.

 

 

 

* * *

 

He doesn't see her.

 

It's been days since they've said anything to each other. Even their shift schedules have diverged. Tonight, as she was trying to sleep, she heard him come out of the abyss again and climb up into the lounge like some invading sea creature. He does it now and then when the place is deserted, when everyone is either outside or sealed into their cubicles. He sits there at the library, diving through his 'phones down endless virtual avenues, desperation in every movement. It's as though he has to hold his breath whenever he comes inside; once she saw him tear the headset off his skull and flee outside as though his chest would burst. When she picked up the abandoned headset, the results of his litsearch were still glowing in the eyephones. Chemistry.

 

Another time he turned on his way out to see her standing in the corridor. He smiled. He even said something: "—sorry—" is what she heard, but there may have been more. He didn't stay.

 

Now his hands rest, unmoving, on the keyboard. His shoulders are shaking. He doesn't make any sound at all. Lenie Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, wondering whether to approach him. When she looks again the lounge is empty.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

She can tell exactly where he's going. His icon buds off of Beebe and crawls away across the display, and there's only on thing in that direction.

 

When she gets there he's crawling across its back, digging a hole with his knife. Clarke's eyecaps can barely find enough light to see by, this far from the Throat; Acton cuts and slices in the light of her headlamp, his shadow writhing away across a horizon of dead flesh.

 

He's dug a crater, maybe half a meter across, half a meter deep. He's cut through the stratum of blubber below the skin and is tearing through the brown muscle beneath. It's been months now since this creature landed here. Clarke marvels at its preservation.

 

The abyss likes extremes, she muses. If it isn't a pressure cooker, it's a fridge.

 

Acton stops digging. He just floats there, staring down at his handiwork.

 

"What a stupid idea," he buzzes at last. "I don't know what gets into me sometimes." He turns to face her; his eyecaps reflect yellow. "I'm sorry, Lenie. I know this place was special to you somehow, I didn't mean to...well, desecrate it, I guess."

 

She shakes her head. "It's okay. It's not important."

 

Acton's vocoder gurgles; in air, it would be a sad laugh. "I give myself too much credit sometimes, Len. Whenever I'm inside, and I'm fucking up and I don't know what to do, I figure all I've got to do is come outside and the scales will fall off my eyes. It's like, religious faith almost. All the answers. Right out here."

 

"It's okay," Clarke says again, because it seems better than saying nothing.

 

"Only sometimes the answer doesn't really do much for you, you know? Sometimes the answer's just: Forget it. You're fucked." Acton looks back down at the dead whale. "Would you turn the light off?"

 

The darkness swallows them like a blanket. Clarke reaches through it and brings Acton to her. "What were you trying to do?"

 

That mechanical laugh again. "Something I read. I was thinking—"

 

His cheek brushes against hers.

 

"I don't know what I was thinking. When I'm inside I'm a fucking lobo case, I get these stupid ideas and even when I get back out it takes a while before I really wake up and realize what a dork I've been. I wanted to study an adrenal gland. Thought it would help me figure out how to counter ion depletion at the synapse junctions."

 

"You know how to do that."

 

"Well, it was just bullshit anyway. I can't think straight in there."

 

She doesn't bother to argue.

 

"I'm sorry," Acton buzzes after a while.

 

Clarke strokes his back. It feels like two sheets of plastic rubbing together.

 

"I think I can explain it to you," he adds. "If you're interested."

 

"Sure." But she knows it won't change anything.

 

"You know how there's this strip in your brain that controls movement?"

 

"Okay."

 

"And if, say, you became a concert pianist, the part that runs your fingers would actually spread out, take up more of the strip to meet the increased demand for finger control. But you lose something, too. The adjacent parts of the strip get crowded out. So maybe you couldn't wiggle your toes or curl your tongue as well as you could before you started practicing."

 

Acton falls silent. Clarke feels his arms, cradling her loosely from behind.

 

"I think something like that happened to me," he says after a while.

 

"How?"

 

"I think something in my brain got exercised, and it spread out and crowded some other parts away. But it only works in a high-pressure environment, you see, it's the pressure that makes the nerves fire faster. So when I go back inside, the new part shuts down and the old parts have been — well, lost."

 

Clarke shakes her head. "We've been through this, Karl. Your synapses just ran low on calcium."

 

"That's not all that happened. That's not even a problem any more, I've brought my inhibitors up again. Not all the way, but enough. But I still have this new part, and I still can't find the old ones." She feels his chin on the top of her head. "I don't think I'm exactly human any more, Len. Which, considering the kind of human I was, is probably just as well."

 

"And what does it do, exactly? This new part?"

 

He takes a while to answer. "It's almost like getting an extra sense organ, except it's ... diffuse. Intuition, only with a really hard edge."

 

"Diffuse, with a hard edge."

 

"Yeah, well. That's the problem when you try to explain smell to someone without a nose."

 

"Maybe it's not what you think. I mean, something's changed, but that doesn't mean you can really just — look into people like that. Maybe it's just some sort of mood disorder. Or a hallucination, maybe. You can't know."

 

"I know, Len."

 

"Then you're right." Anger trickles up from her internal reservoir. "You're not human any more. You're less than human."

 

"Lenie—"

 

"Humans have to trust, Karl. There's no big deal about putting your faith in something you know for certain. I want you to trust me."

 

"Not know you."

 

She tries to hear sadness on that synthetic voice. In Beebe, maybe, it would have come through. But in Beebe he would never had said that.

 

"Karl—"

 

"I can't come back."

 

"You're not yourself out here." She pushes away, spins around; she can just barely distinguish his silhouette.

 

"You want me to be—" She hears confusion in the words, even through the vocoder, but she knows it's not a question. "—hateful."

 

"Don't be an idiot. I've had more than my fill of assholes, believe me. But Karl, this is just some kind of cheap trick. Step out of the magic booth, you're Mr. Nice Guy. Step back in, you're the SeaTac Strangler. It's not real."

 

"How do you know?"

 

She keeps her distance, suddenly knowing the answer. It's only real if it hurts. It's only real if it happens slowly, painfully, each step carved in shouts and threats and thrown punches.

 

It's only real if Lenie Clarke is the one to make him change.

 

She doesn't tell him any of this, of course. But she's afraid, as she turns and leaves him there, that she doesn't have to.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

She comes instantly out of sleep, tense and completely alert. There's darkness — the lights are off, she's even blanked the readouts on the wall — but it's the close, familiar darkness of her own cubby. Something is tapping on the hull, regular and insistent.

 

From outside.

 

Out in the corridor there's light enough for rifter eyes. Nakata and Caraco stand motionless in the lounge. Brander sits at the library; the screens are dark, the headsets all hanging on their pegs.

 

The sound ticks through the lounge, fainter than before but easily audible.

 

"Where's Lubin?" Clarke asks softly. Nakata tilts her head towards the hull: outside somewhere.

 

Clarke climbs downstairs and into the airlock.

 

 

 

* * *

 

"We thought you'd gone over," she says. "Like Fischer."

 

They float between Beebe and the sea floor. Clarke reaches out to him. Acton reaches back.

 

"How long has it been?" The words come out as faint, metallic sighs.

 

"Six days. Maybe seven. I've been putting off— calling up for a replacement—"

 

He doesn't react.

 

"We saw you on sonar sometimes," she adds. "For a while. Then you disappeared."

 

Silence.

 

"Did you get lost?" she asks after a while.

 

"Yeah."

 

"But you're back now."

 

"No."

 

"Karl—"

 

"I need you to promise me something, Lenie."

 

"What?"

 

"Promise me you'll do what I did. The others too. They'll listen to you."

 

"You know I can't—"

 

"Five percent, Lenie. Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you'll do okay. Promise."

 

"Why, Karl?"

 

"Because I wasn't wrong about everything. Because sooner or later they're going to have to get rid of you, and you need every edge you can get."

 

"Come inside. We can talk about it inside, everyone's there."

 

"There's strange things happening out there, Len. Out past sonar range, they're — I don't know what they're doing. They don't tell us..."

 

"Come inside, Karl."

 

He shakes his head. He seems almost unused to the gesture.

 

"—can't—"

 

"Then don't expect me—"

 

"I left a file in the library. It explains things. As much as I could, when I was in there. Promise me, Len."

 

"No. You promise. Come inside. Promise we'll work it out."

 

"It kills too much of me," he sighs. "I pushed it too far. Something burned out, I'm not even completely whole out here any more. But you'll be okay. Five or ten percent, no more."

 

"I need you," she buzzes, very quietly.

 

"No," he says. "You need Karl Acton."

 

"What's that supposed to mean?"

 

"You need what he did to you."

 

All the warmth goes out of her then. What's left is a slow, freezing boil.

 

"What is this, Karl? Some grand insight you got while spirit-walking around in the mud? You think you know me better than I do?"

 

"You know—"

 

"Because you don't, you know. You don't know shit about me, you never did. And you don't really have the balls to find out, so you run off into the dark and come back spouting all this pretentious bullshit." She's goading him, she knows she's goading him but he's just not reacting. Even one of his outbursts would be better than this.

 

"It's saved under Shadow," he says.

 

She stares at him without speaking.

 

"The file," he adds.

 

"What's wrong with you?" She's beating at him now, pounding as hard as she can but he's not hitting back, he's not even defending himself for Chrissakes why don't you fight back asshole why don't you just get it over with, just beat the shit out of me until the guilt covers us both and we'll promise never to do it again and—

 

But even anger deserts her now. The inertia of her attack pushes them away from each other. She catches herself on an anchor cable. A starfish, wrapped around the line, reaches blindly out to touch her with the tip of one arm.

 

Acton continues to drift.

 

"Stay," she says.

 

He brakes and holds position without answering, dim and gray and distant.

 

There are so many things denied her out here. She can't cry. She can't even close her eyes. So she stares at the sea bed, watches her own shadow stretch off into the darkness. "Why are you doing this?" she asks, exhausted, and wonders who she meant the question for.

 

His shadow flows across her own. A mechanical voice answers:

 

"This is what you do when you really love someone."

 

She jerks her head up in time to see him disappear.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Beebe's quiet when she returns. The wet slap of her feet on the deck is the only sound. She climbs into the lounge and finds it empty. She takes a step towards the corridor that leads to her cubby.

 

Stops.

 

In Comm, a luminous icon inches towards the Throat. The display lies for effect; in reality Acton is dark and unreflective, no more luminous than she is.

 

She wonders again if she should try and stop him. She could never overpower him by force, but perhaps she just hasn't thought of the right thing to say. Perhaps if she just gets it right she can call him back, compel his return through words alone. Not a victim any more, he said once. Perhaps she's a siren instead.

 

She can't think of anything to say.

 

He's almost there now. She can see him gliding between great bronze pillars, bacterial nebulae swirling in his wake. She imagines his face aimed down, scanning, relentless, hungry. She can see him homing in on the north end of Main Street.

 

She shuts off the display.

 

She doesn't have to watch this. She knows what's going on, and the machines will tell her when it's over. She couldn't stop them if she tried, not unless she smashed them into junk. That, in fact, is exactly what she wants to do. But she controls herself. Quiet as stone, Lenie Clarke sits in the command cubby staring at a blank screen, waiting for the alarm.