“They regenerate,” she buzzes at his shoulder. “And they’ve got really primitive immune systems, so there’s no tissue-rejection problems to speak of. It makes them easier to fix if something goes wrong with them.”
Fix. As if this is actually some sort of improvement. “So, it was broken?” Scanlon asks. “What was wrong with it, exactly?”
“It was scratched. It had this cut on its back. And there was another starfish nearby, all torn up. Way too far gone for even me to help, but I figured I could use some of the pieces to patch this little guy together.”
This little guy. This little guy drags itself around between them in slow, pathetic circles, leaving tangled tracks in the mud. Filaments of parasitic fungus trail from ragged seams not quite healed. Extra limbs, asymmetrically grafted, catch on rocks; the body lurches, perpetually unstable.
Lenie Clarke doesn’t seem to notice.
“How long ago— I mean, how long have you been doing this?”
Scanlon’s voice is admirably level; he’s certain it conveys nothing but friendly interest. But somehow she knows. She’s silent for a second, and then she points her undead eyes at him and she says, “Of course. It makes you sick.”
“No, I’m just—well, fascinated, I—”
“You’re disgusted,” she buzzes. “You shouldn’t be. Isn’t this exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a rifter? Isn’t that why you sent us down here in the first place?”
“I know what you think, Lenie,” Scanlon tries, going for the light touch. “You think we get up every morning and ask ourselves, How can we best fuck over our employees today?”
She looks down at the starfish. “‘We’?”
“The GA.”
She floats there while her pet monster squirms in slow motion, trying to right itself.
“We’re not evil, Lenie,” Scanlon says after a while. If only she’d look at him, see the earnest expression on his helmeted face. He’s practiced it for years.
But when she does look up, finally, she doesn’t even seem to notice. “Don’t flatter yourself, Scanlon,” she says. “You don’t have the slightest control over what you are.”
TRANS/OFFI/280850:1043
There’s no doubt that the ability to function down here stems from attributes which would, under other conditions, qualify as “dysfunctional.” These attributes not only permit long-term exposure to the rift; they may also intensify as a result of that exposure. Lenie Clarke, for example, has developed a mutilation neurosis which she could not have had prior to her arrival here. Her fascination with an animal which can be easily “fixed” when broken has fairly obvious roots, notwithstanding a number of horribly botched attempts at “repair.” Judith Caraco, who used to run indoor marathons prior to her arrest, compulsively swims up and down Beebe’s transponder line. The other participants have probably developed corresponding habits.
Whether these behaviors are indicative of a physiological addiction, I cannot yet say. If they are, I suspect that Kenneth Lubin may be the farthest along. During conversation with some of the other participants I have learned that Lubin may actually sleep outside on occasion, which can not be considered healthy by anyone’s standards. I would be better able to understand the reason for this if I had more particulars about Lubin’s background. Of course, his file as provided is missing certain relevant details.
On the job, the participants work unexpectedly well together, given the psychological baggage each of them carries. Duty shifts carry an almost uncanny sense of coordination. They seem choreographed. It’s almost as if—
This is a subjective impression, of course, but I believe that rifters do in fact share some heightened awareness of each other, at least when they’re outside. They may also have a heightened awareness of me—either that, or they’ve made some remarkably shrewd guesses about my state of mind.
No. Too … too—
Too easy to misinterpret. If the haploids back on shore read that, they might think the vampires have the upper hand. Scanlon deletes the last few lines, considers alternatives.
There’s a word for his suspicions. It’s a word that describes one’s experience in an isolation tank, or in VR with all the inputs blanked, or—in extreme cases—when someone cuts the sensory cables of the central nervous system. It describes that state of sensory deprivation in which whole sections of the brain go dark for want of input. The word is Ganzfeld.
It’s very quiet in a Ganzfeld. Usually the temporal and occipital lobes seethe with input, signals strong enough to swamp any competition. When those fall silent, though, the mind can sometimes make out faint whispers in the darkness. It imagines scenes that have a curious likeness to those glowing on a television in some distant room, perhaps. Or it feels a faint emotional echo, familiar but not, somehow, firsthand.
Statistics suggest that these sensations are not entirely imaginary. Experts of an earlier decade—people much like Yves Scanlon, except for their luck in being in the right place at the right time—have even found out where the whispers come from.
It turns out that protein microtubules, permeating each and every neuron, act as receivers for certain weak signals at the quantum level. It turns out that consciousness itself is a quantum phenomenon. It turns out that under certain conditions conscious systems can interact directly, bypassing the usual sensory middlemen.
Not a bad payoff for something that started a hundred years ago with halved Ping-Pong balls taped over someone’s eyes.
Ganzfeld. That’s the ticket. Don’t talk about the ease with which these creatures stare through you. Forget the endpoint: Dissect the process.
Take control.
I believe some sort of Ganzfeld effect may be at work here. The dark, weightless abyssal environment might impoverish the senses enough to push the signal-to-noise ratio past threshold. My observations suggest that the women may be more sensitive than the men, which is consistent with their larger corpus callosa and consequent advantage in intercortical processing speed.
Whatever the cause of this phenomenon, it has yet to affect me. Perhaps it just takes a little time.
Oh, one other thing. I was unable to find any record of Karl Acton using the medical scanner. I’ve asked Clarke and Brander about this; neither could remember Acton actually using the machine. Given the number of injuries on record for everyone else, I find this surprising.
Yves Scanlon sits at the table and forces himself to eat with a mouth gone utterly dry. He hears the vampires moving downstairs, moving along the corridor, moving just behind him. He doesn’t turn around. He mustn’t show any weakness. He can’t betray any lack of confidence.
Vampires, he knows now, are like dogs. They can smell fear.
His head is full of sampled sounds, looping endlessly. You’re not among friends here, Scanlon. Don’t make us into enemies. That was Brander, five minutes ago, whispering in Scanlon’s ear before dropping down into the wetroom. And Caraco click click clicking her bread knife against the table until he could barely hear himself think. And Nakata and that stupid giggle of hers. And Patricia Rowan, sometime in the imagined future, sneering Well, if you can’t even handle a routine assignment without starting a revolt, it’s no wonder we didn’t trust you …
Or perhaps, echoing back along a different timeline, a terse call to the GA: We lost Scanlon. Sorry.
And underlying it all, that long, hollow, icy sound, slithering along the floor of his brain. That thing. That thing that nobody mentions. The voice in the abyss. It sounds nearby tonight, whatever it is.
Not that that matters to the vampires. They’re sealing their ’skins while Scanlon sits frozen at the end of his meal, they’re grabbing their fins, dropping outside in ones and twos, deserting him. They’re going out there, with the moaning thing.
Scanlon wonders, over the voices in his head, if it can get inside. If this is the night they bring it back with them.
* * *
The vampires are all gone. After a while, even the voices in Scanlon’s head start
to fade. Most of them.
This is insane. I can’t just sit here.
There’s one voice he didn’t hear tonight. Lenie Clarke just sat there through the whole fiasco, watching. Clarke’s the one they look to, all right. She doesn’t talk much, but they pay attention when she does. Scanlon wonders what she tells them, when he’s not around.
Can’t just sit here. And it’s not that bad. It’s not as though they really threatened me—
You’re not among friends here, Scanlon.
—not explicitly.
He tries to figure out exactly where he lost them. It seemed like a reasonable enough proposition. The prospect of shorter tours shouldn’t have put them off like that. Even if they are addicted to this godawful place, it was just a suggestion. Scanlon went out of his way to be completely nonthreatening. Unless they took exception to his mention of their carelessness in the safety department. But that should have been old news; they not only knew the chances they were taking, they flaunted them.
Who am I kidding? That’s not when I lost them. I shouldn’t have mentioned Lubin, shouldn’t have used him as an example.
It made so much sense at the time, though. Scanlon knows Lubin’s an outsider, even down here. Scanlon’s not an idiot, he can read the signs even behind the eyecaps. Lubin’s different from the other vampires. Using him as an example should have been the safest thing in the world. Scapegoats have been a respected part of the therapeutic arsenal for hundreds of years.
Look, you want to end up like Lubin? He sleeps outside, for Christ’s sake!
Scanlon puts his head in his hands. How was I supposed to know they all did?
Maybe he should have. He could have monitored sonar more closely. Or timed them when they went into their cubbies, seen how long they stayed inside. There were things he could have done, he knows.
Maybe I really did fuck up. Maybe. If only I’d—
Jesus, that sounds close. What is—
Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!
* * *
Maybe it shows up on sonar.
Scanlon takes a breath and ducks into Comm. He’s had basic training on the gear, of course; it’s all pretty intuitive anyway. He didn’t really need Clarke’s grudging tutorial. A few seconds’ effort elicits a tactical overview: vampires, strung like beads on an invisible line between Beebe and the Throat. Another one off to the west, heading for the Throat; probably Lubin. Random topography. Nothing else.
As he watches, the four icons closest to Beebe edge a pixel or two closer to Main Street. The fifth in line is way out ahead, almost as far out as Lubin. Nearly at the Throat already.
Wait a second.
Vampires: Brander, Caraco, Clarke, Lubin, Nakata. Right.
Icons: One, two, three, four, five—
Six.
Scanlon stares at the screen. Oh shit.
Beebe’s phone link is very old-school; a direct line, not even routed through the telemetry and Comm servers. It’s almost Victorian in its simplicity, guaranteed to stay on line through any systems crash short of an implosion. Scanlon has never used it before. Why should he? The moment he calls home he’s admitting he can’t do the job by himself.
Now he hits the call stud without a moment’s hesitation. “This is Scanlon, Human Resources. I’ve got a bit of a—”
The line stays dark.
He tries again. Dead.
Shit shit shit. Somehow, though, he isn’t surprised.
I could call the vampires. I could order them to come back in. I have the authority. It’s an amusing thought for a few moments.
At least the Voice seems to have faded. He thinks he can hear it, if he concentrates, but it’s so faint it could even be his imagination.
Beebe squeezes down on him. He looks back at the tactical display, hopefully. One, two, three, f—
Oh shit.
* * *
He doesn’t remember going outside. He remembers struggling into his preshmesh, and picking up a sonar pistol, and now he’s on the seabed, under Beebe. He takes a bearing, checks it, checks it again. It doesn’t change.
He creeps away from the light, toward the Throat. He fights with himself for endless moments, wins; his headlamp stays doused. No sense in broadcasting his presence.
He swims blind, hugging the bottom. Every now and then he takes a bearing, resets his course. Scanlon zigzags across the sea floor. Eventually the abyss begins to lighten before him.
Something moans, directly ahead.
It doesn’t sound lonely anymore. It sounds cold and hungry and utterly inhuman. Scanlon freezes like a night creature caught in headlights.
After a while the sound goes away.
The Throat glimmers half-resolved, maybe twenty meters ahead. It looks like a spectral collection of buildings and derricks set down on the moon. Murky copper light spills down from floods set halfway up the generators. Scanlon circles, just beyond the light.
Something moves, off to the left.
An alien sigh.
He flattens down onto the bottom, eyes closed. Grow up, Scanlon. Whatever it is, it can’t hurt you. Nothing can bite through preshmesh.
Nothing flesh and blood.
He refuses to finish the thought. He opens his eyes.
When it moves again, Scanlon is staring right at it.
A black plume, jetting from a chimney of rock on the seabed. And this time it doesn’t just sigh; it moans.
A smoker. That’s all it is. Acton went down one of those.
Maybe this one—
The eruption peters out. The sound whispers away.
Smokers aren’t supposed to make sounds. Not like that, anyway.
Scanlon edges up to the lip of the chimney. Fifty degrees Celsius. Inside, anchored about two meters down, is some sort of machine. It’s been built out of things that were never meant to fit together; rotary blades spinning in the vestigial current, perforated tubes, pipes anchored at haphazard angles. The smoker is crammed with junk.
And somehow, the water jets through it and comes out singing. Not a ghost. Not an alien predator, after all. Just—windchimes. Relief sweeps through Scanlon’s body in a chemical wave. He relaxes, soaking in the sensation, until he remembers:
Six contacts. Six.
And here he is, floodlit, in full view.
Scanlon retreats back into darkness. The machinery behind his nightmares, exposed and almost pedestrian, has bolstered his confidence. He resumes his patrol. The Throat rotates slowly to his right, a murky monochrome graphic.
Something fades into view ahead, floating above an outcropping of featherworms. Scanlon slips closer, hides behind a convenient piece of rock.
Vampires. Two of them.
They don’t look the same.
Vampires usually look alike out here, it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. But Scanlon’s sure he’s never seen one of these two before. It’s facing away from him, but there’s still something—it’s too tall and thin, somehow. It moves in furtive starts and twitches, almost birdlike. Reptilian. It carries something under one arm.
Scanlon can’t tell what sex it is. The other vampire, though, looks female. The two of them hang in the water a few meters apart, facing each other. Every now and then the female gestures with her hands; sometimes she moves too suddenly and the other one jumps a little, as if startled.
He clicks through the voice channels. Nothing. After a while the female reaches out, almost tentatively, and touches the reptile. There’s something almost gentle—in an alien way—about the way she does that. Then she turns and swims off into the darkness. The reptile stays behind, drifting slowly on its axis. Its face comes into view.
Its hood seal is open. Its face is so pale that Scanlon can barely tell where skin ends and eyecaps begin; it almost looks as if this creature has no eyes.
The thing under its arm is the shredded remains of one of Channer’s monster fish. As Scanlon watches, the reptile brings it up to its mouth and tears off a chunk. Swallows.
T
he voice in the Throat moans in the distance, but the reptile doesn’t seem to notice.
Its uniform has the usual GA logo stamped onto the shoulders. The usual name tag underneath.
Who—?
Its blank empty face sweeps right past Scanlon’s hiding place without pausing. A moment later it’s facing away again.
It’s all alone out there. It doesn’t look dangerous.
Scanlon braces against his rock, pushes off. Water pushes back, slowing him instantly. The reptile doesn’t see him. Scanlon kicks. He’s only a few meters away when he remembers.
Ganzfeld effect. What if there’s some Ganzfeld effect down h—
The reptile spins suddenly, staring directly at him.
Scanlon lunges. Another split second and he wouldn’t even have come close, but fortune smiles; he catches on to one of the creature’s fins as it dives away. Its other foot lashes back, bounces off the helmet. Again, lower down; Scanlon’s sonar pistol spins away from his belt.
He hangs on. The reptile comes at him with both fists, utterly silent. Scanlon barely feels the blows through his preshmesh. He hits back with the familiar desperation of a childhood punching bag, cornered again, feeble self-defense his only option.
Until it dawns on him that this time, somehow, it’s working.
He’s not facing the neighborhood bully here. He’s not paying the price for careless eye contact with some australopithecine at the local drink’n’drug. He fighting a spindly little freak that’s trying to get away. From him. This guy is downright feeble.
For the first time in his life, Yves Scanlon is winning a fight.
His first connects, a chain-mail mace. The enemy jerks and struggles. Scanlon grabs, twists, wrestles his quarry into an arm-lock. His victim flails around, utterly helpless.
“You’re not going anywhere, friend.” Finally, a chance to try out that tone of easy contempt he’s been practicing since the age of seven. It sounds good. It sounds confident, in control. “Not until I find out just what the fuck is—”
The lights go out.
The whole Throat goes dark, suddenly and without fuss. It takes a few seconds to blink away the afterimages; finally, in the extreme distance, Scanlon makes out a very faint gray glow. Beebe.