Behemoth (19 page)

It's Lubin.

He's floating just centimeters off the hull, sculling one way, sculling back. Station-keeping against a tricky interplay of currents, perhaps—except there's nothing for him to station-keep
over
. There's no viewport in his vicinity, no way to look inside, no obvious reason to hold his position along that particular stretch of corridor.

After a few moments he begins to move away along the hull, far too slowly for comfort. His fins usually scissor the water in smooth, easy strokes, but he's barely flicking them now. He's moving no faster than a dryback might walk.

Someone climaxes behind her. Ng grumbles about
my turn
. Lenie Clarke barely hears them.

You bastard,
she thinks as Lubin fades in the distance.
You bastard
.

You went ahead and did it
.

CONSCRIPT

A
LYX
doesn't get the whole
native
thing. Probably none of the corpses do, truth be told, but none of the others lose any sleep over it either; the more fish-heads out of the way the better, they figure, and screw the fine print. Alyx, bless her soul, reacted with nothing short of outrage. As far as she's concerned it's no different than leaving your crippled grandmother out to die on an ice floe.

“Lex, it's their own choice,” Clarke explained once.

“What, they
choose
to go crazy? They
choose
to have their bones go so punky they can't even stand up when you bring them inside?”

“They
choose,
” she said gently, “to stay out on the rift, and they think it's worth the price.”

“Why? What's so great about it? What do they
do
out there?”

She didn't mention the hallucinations. “There's a kind of—freedom, I guess. You feel connected to things. It's hard to explain.”

Alyx snorted. “
You
don't even know.”

It's partly true. Certainly Clarke feels the pull of the deep sea. Maybe it's an escape, maybe the abyss is just the ultimate place to hide from the living hell that was life among the drybacks. Or maybe it's even simpler. Maybe it's just a dark, weightless evocation of the womb, a long-forgotten sense of being nourished and protected and
secure,
back before the contractions started and everything turned to shit.

Every rifter feels as much. Not every rifter goes native, though, at least not yet. Some just have a kind of—special vulnerability, really. The addictive rifters, as opposed to the merely social ones. Maybe the natives have too much serotonin in their temporal lobes. It usually comes down to something like that.

None of which would really fly with Alyx, of course.

“You should take down their feeding stations,” Alyx said. “Then they'd have to come inside to eat at least.”

“They'd either starve, or make do with clams and worms.” Which was basically starvation on the installment plan, if it didn't poison them outright. “And why force them to come inside if they don't want to?”

“Because it's
suicide,
that's why!” Alyx cried. “Jeez, I can't believe I have to explain it to you! Wouldn't you stop
me
from trying to kill myself?”

“That depends.”

“Depends?”

“On if you really wanted to, or you were just trying to win an argument.”

“I'm
serious.
”

“Yeah. I can see that.” Clarke sighed. “If you really wanted to kill yourself, I'd be sad and pissed off and I'd miss you like hell. But I wouldn't stop you.”

Alyx was appalled.
“Why not?”

“Because it's your life. Not mine.”

Alyx didn't seem to have been expecting that. She glared back, obviously unconvinced, obviously unequipped to respond.

“
Have
you ever wanted to die?” Clarke asked her. “Seriously?”

“No, but—”

“I have.”

Alyx fell silent.

“And believe me,” Clarke continued, “it's no fun listening to a bunch of professional head lice telling you
how much there is to live for
and how
things aren't really so bad
and how
five years from now you'll look back and wonder how you ever could have even
imagined
offing yourself
. I mean, they don't know
shit
about my life. If there's one thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be
me
. And as far as I'm concerned it's the height of fucking arrogance to tell another human being whether their life is worth living.”

“But you don't
have
to feel that way,” Alyx said unhappily. “Nobody does! You just slap a derm on your arm and—”

“It's not about feeling happy, Lex. It's about having
cause
to feel happy.” Clarke put her palm against the girl's cheek. “And you say I don't care enough to stop you from killing yourself, but
I
say I care about you so goddamned much I'd even
help
you do it, if that was what you really wanted.”

Alyx stared at the deck for a long time. When she looked up again her eyes shone.

“But you didn't die,” she said softly. “You wanted to, but you didn't, and that's why you're alive right now.”

And that's why a lot of other people aren't
 … But Clarke kept the thought to herself.

And now she's about to repudiate it all. She's about to hunt down someone who's chosen to retire, and she's going to ignore that choice, and inflict her own in its place. She'd like to think that maybe Alyx would find the irony amusing, but she knows better. There's nothing funny about any of this. It's all getting way too scary.

She's foregone the use of a squid this time out; natives tend to shy away from the sound of machinery. For what seems like forever she's been traversing a plain of bone-gray mud, a bottomless ooze of dead plankton ten million years in the making. Someone has preceded her here; a sudden contrail crosses her path, a fog of tiny bodies still swirling in the wake of some recent turbulence. She follows it. Scattered chunks of pumice and obsidian rise from the substrate like fractured sundials. Their shadows sweep across the bright scrolling footprint of Clarke's headlamp, stretching and dwindling and merging again with the million-year darkness. Eventually they come to dominate the substrate, no longer isolated protrusions in mud but a fractured tumbledown landscape in their own right.

A jumbled talus of cracked volcanic glass rises in Clarke's path. She brightens her headlamp: the beam puddles on a sheer rock wall a few meters further on, its surface lacerated with deep vertical fissures.

“Hello? Rama?”

Nothing.

“It's Lenie.”

A white-eyed shadow slips like an eel between two boulders.
“
…
bright
…”

She dials down the light. “Better?”

“Ah … Len…” It's a mechanical whisper, two syllables spaced seconds apart by the effort it takes to get them out. “Hi…”

“We need your help, Rama.”

Bhanderi buzzes something incomprehensible from his hiding place.

“Rama?”

“Don't … help?”

“There's a disease. It's like
β
ehemoth, but our tweaks don't work against it. We need to know what it is, we need someone who knows genetics.”

Nothing moves among the rocks.

“It's serious. Please. Can you help?”

“
…
teomics,”
Bhanderi clicks.

“What? I didn't hear you.”

“…
Proteomics
. Only … minored in gen … genetics.”

He's almost managed a complete sentence. Who better to trust with hundreds of lives?

“… had a dream about you.” Bhanderi sighs. It sounds like someone strumming a metal comb.

“It wasn't a dream. This isn't either. We really need your help, Rama.
Please
.”

“That's wrong,” he buzzes. “That doesn't make sense.”

“What doesn't?” Clarke asks, encouraged by the sudden coherence.

“The corps … ask the corpses.”

“The corpses may have made the bug. Tweaked it, anyway. We can't trust them.”

“… poor you…”

“Can you just—”

“More histamine,” Bhanderi buzzes absently, lost again. Then:
“Bye
…”

“No! Rama!”

She brightens her beam in time to see a pair of fins disappear into a crevice a few meters up the cliff. She kicks up after him, plunges into the fissure like a high-diver, arms above her head. The crevice splits the rock high and deep, but not wide; two meters in she has to turn sideways. Her light floods the narrow gash, bright as a topside day; somewhere nearby a vocoder makes distressed ratcheting sounds.

Four meters overhead, Bhanderi scrambles froglike up the gap. It narrows up there—he seems in imminent danger of wedging himself inextricably between the rock faces. Clarke starts after him.

“
Too bright!”
he buzzes.

Tough,
she thinks back at him.

Bhanderi's a skinny little bastard after two months of chronic wasting. Even if he gets stuck in here, he might get wedged too far back for Clarke to reach him. Maybe his panicked devolving little brain is juggling those variables right now—Bhanderi zigzags, as if torn between the prospects of open water and protective confinement. Finally he opts for the water, but his indecision has cost him; Clarke has him around the ankle.

He thrashes in a single plane, constrained by faces of stone. “Fucking
bitch
.
Let go!
”

“Vocabulary coming back, I see.”

“Let
 …
go!”

She works her way toward the mouth of the crevice, dragging Bhanderi by the leg. He scrabbles against the walls, resisting—then, pulled free of the tightest depths, he twists around and comes at her with his fists. She fends him off. She has to remind herself how easily his bones might break.

Finally he's subdued, Clarke's arms hooked around his shoulders, her hands interlocked behind his neck in a full nelson. They're still inside the mouth of the crevice, barely; Bhanderi's struggles jam her spine against cracked slabs of basalt.

“Bright,
” he clicks.

“Listen, Rama. There's
way
too much riding on this for me to let you piss away whatever's left in that head of yours. Do you understand?”

He squirms.

“I'll turn off the light if you stop fighting and just
listen
to me, okay?”

“…
I
 … you…”

She kills the beam. Bhanderi stiffens, then goes limp in her arms.

“Okay. Better. You've
got
to come back, Bhanderi. Just for a little while. We need you.”

“
…
need
 …
bad zero—”

“Will you just stop that shit?
You're not that far gone, you
can't
be. You've only been out here for—” It's been around two months, hasn't it? More than two, now. Is that enough time for a brain to turn to mush? Is this whole exercise a waste of time?

She starts again. “There's a lot riding on this. A lot of people could die.
You
could die. This—disease, or whatever it is, it could get into you as easily as any of us. Maybe it already has. Do you understand?”

“… understand…”

She hopes that's an answer and not an echo. “It's not just the sickness, either. Everyone's looking for someone to blame. It's only a matter of time before—”

Boom,
she remembers.
Blew it up. Way too bright.

“Rama,” she says slowly. “If things get out of hand, everything blows up. Do you understand?
Boom
. Just like at the woodpile. Boom,
all the time
. Unless you help me. Unless you help
us
. Understand?”

He hangs against her in the darkness like a boneless cadaver.

“Yeah. Well,” he buzzes at last. “Why didn't you just say so?”

*   *   *

The struggle has hobbled him. Bhanderi favors his left leg when he swims; he veers to port with each stroke. Clarke hooks her hand under his armpit to share thrust but he startles and flinches from her touch. She settles for swimming at his side, nudging him back on course when necessary.

Three times he breaks away in a crippled lunge for oblivion. Three times she brings him back to heel, flailing and gibbering. The episodes don't last, though. Once subdued, he calms; once calm, he cooperates. For a while.

She comes to understand that it isn't really his fault.

“Hey,” she buzzes, ten minutes out from Atlantis.

“Yeah.”

“You with me?”

“Yeah. It comes and goes.” An indecipherable ticking. “
I
come and go.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

“You drafted me.”

“Do you remember what for?”

“Some kind of disease?”

“Some kind.”

“And you … you think the corpses did…”

“I don't know.”

“… leg hurts…”

“Sorry…”

And his brainstem rises up and snatches him away again. She grapples and holds on until it lets go. Until he fights his way back from wherever he goes at times like this.

“… still here, I see…”

“Still here,” Clarke repeats.

“God, Len. Please don't do this.”

“I'm sorry,” she tells him. “I'm sorry…”