Starfish

  “I know. I’m not worried about my own safety, Lenie. I’m worried about yours.”

  Clarke looks at her from behind the impervious safety of her lenses, and doesn’t answer.

  “You’ve changed since you came down here,” Ballard says. “You’re withdrawing from me, you’re exposing yourself to unnecessary risks. I don’t know exactly what’s happening to you. It’s almost like you’re trying to kill yourself.”

  “I’m not,” Clarke says. She tries to change the subject. “Is Lana Cheung all right?”

  Ballard studies her for a moment. She takes the hint. “I don’t know. I couldn’t get any details.”

  Clarke feels something knotting up inside her. “I wonder what she did to set him off?” she murmurs.

  Ballard stares at her, openmouthed. “What she did? I can’t believe you said that!”

  “I only meant—”

  “I know what you meant.”

  The outside pounding has stopped. Ballard does not relax. She stands hunched over in those strange, loose-fitting clothes that drybacks wear, and stares at the ceiling as though she doesn’t believe in the silence. She looks back at Clarke.

  “Lenie, you know I don’t like to pull rank, but your attitude is putting both of us at risk. I think this place is really getting to you. I hope you can get back online here, I really do. Otherwise I may have to recommend you for a transfer.”

  Clarke watches Ballard leave the lounge. You’re lying, she realizes. You’re scared to death, and it’s not just because I’m changing.

  It’s because you are.

  * * *

  Clarke finds out five hours after the fact: Something has changed on the ocean floor.

  We sleep and the earth moves, she thinks, studying the topographic display. And next time, or the time after, maybe it’ll move right out from under us.

  I wonder if I’ll have time to feel anything.

  She turns at a sound behind her. Ballard is standing in the lounge, swaying slightly. Her face seems somehow disfigured by the concentric rings in her eyes, by the dark hollows around them. Naked eyes are beginning to look alien to Clarke.

  “The seabed shifted,” Clarke says. “There’s a new outcropping about two hundred meters west of us.”

  “That’s odd. I didn’t feel anything.”

  “It happened about five hours ago. You were asleep.”

  Ballard glances up sharply. Clarke studies the haggard lines of her face. On second thought …

  “I would’ve woken up,” Ballard says. She squeezes past Clarke into the cubby and checks the topographic display.

  “Two meters high, twelve long,” Clarke recites.

  Ballard doesn’t answer. She punches commands into a keyboard; the topographic image dissolves, reforms into a column of numbers.

  “Just as I thought,” she says. “No heavy seismic activity for over forty-two hours.”

  “Sonar doesn’t lie,” Clarke says calmly.

  “Neither does seismo,” Ballard answers.

  There’s a brief silence. There’s a standard procedure for such things, and they both know what it is.

  “We have to check it out,” Clarke says.

  But Ballard only nods. “Give me a moment to change.”

  * * *

  They call it a squid: a jet-propelled cylinder about a meter long, with a headlight at the front end and a towbar at the back. Clarke, floating between Beebe and the seabed, checks it over with one hand. Her other hand grips a sonar pistol. She points the pistol into blackness; ultrasonic clicks sweep the night, give her a bearing.

  “That way,” she says, pointing.

  Ballard squeezes down on her own squid’s towbar. The machine pulls her away. After a moment Clarke follows. Bringing up the rear, a third squid carries an assortment of sensors in a nylon bag.

  Ballard’s traveling at nearly full throttle. The lamps on her helmet and squid stab the water like twin lighthouse beacons. Clarke, her own lights doused, catches up about halfway to their destination. They cruise along a couple of meters over the muddy substrate.

  “Your lights,” Ballard says.

  “We don’t need them. Sonar works in the dark.”

  “Are you breaking regs for the sheer thrill of it now?”

  “The fish down here, they key on things that glow—”

  “Turn your lights on. That’s an order.”

  Clarke doesn’t answer. She watches the beams beside her, Ballard’s squid shining steady and unwavering, Ballard’s headlamp slicing the water in erratic arcs as she moves her head—

  “I told you,” Ballard says, “turn your—Christ!”

  It was just a glimpse, caught for a moment in the sweep of Ballard’s headlight. She jerks her head around and it slides back out of sight. Then it looms up in the squid’s beam, huge and terrible.

  The abyss is grinning at them, teeth bared.

  A mouth stretches across the width of the beam, extends into darkness on either side. It is crammed with conical teeth the size of human hands, and they do not look the least bit fragile.

  Ballard makes a strangled sound and dives into the mud. The benthic ooze boils up around her in a seething cloud; she disappears in a torrent of planktonic corpses.

  Lenie Clarke stops and waits, unmoving. She stares transfixed at that threatening smile. Her whole body feels electrified, she’s never been so explicitly aware of herself. Every nerve fires and freezes at the same time. She is terrified.

  But she’s also, somehow, completely in control of herself. She reflects on this paradox as Ballard’s abandoned squid slows and stops itself, scant meters from that endless row of teeth. She wonders at her own analytical clarity as the third squid, with its burden of sensors, decelerates past and takes up position beside Ballard’s.

  There in the light, the grin does not change.

  Clarke raises her sonar pistol and fires. We’re here, she realizes, checking the readout. That’s the outcropping.

  She swims closer. The smile hangs there, enigmatic and enticing. Now she can see bits of bone at the roots of the teeth, and tatters of decomposed flesh trailing from the gums.

  She turns and backtracks. The cloud on the seabed is starting to settle.

  “Ballard,” she says in her synthetic voice.

  Nobody answers.

  Clarke reaches down through the mud, feeling blind, until she touches something warm and trembling.

  The seabed explodes in her face.

  Ballard erupts from the substrate, trailing a muddy comet’s tail. Her hand rises from that sudden cloud, clasped around something glinting in the transient light. Clarke sees the knife, twists almost too late; the blade glances off her ’skin, igniting nerves along her rib cage. Ballard lashes out again. This time Clarke catches the knife-hand as it shoots past, twists it, pushes. Ballard tumbles away.

  “It’s me!” Clarke shouts; the vocoder turns her voice into a tinny vibrato.

  Ballard rises up again, white eyes unseeing, knife still in hand.

  Clarke holds up her hands. “It’s okay! There’s nothing here! It’s dead!”

  Ballard stops. She stares at Clarke. She looks over to the squids, to the smile they illuminate. She stiffens.

  “It’s some kind of whale,” Clarke says. “It’s been dead a long time.”

  “A—a whale?” Ballard rasps. She begins to shake.

  There’s no need to feel embarrassed, Clarke almost says, but doesn’t. Instead, she reaches out and touches Ballard lightly on the arm. Is this how you do it? she wonders.

  Ballard jerks back as if scalded.

  I guess not—

  “Um, Jeanette—” Clarke begins.

  Ballard raises a trembling hand, cutting Clarke off. “I’m okay. I want to g—I think we should get back now, don’t you?”

  “Okay,” Clarke says. But she doesn’t really mean it.

  She could stay out here all day.

  * * *

  Ballard is at the library again. She turns, passi
ng a casual hand over the brightness control as Clarke comes up behind her; the display darkens before Clarke can see what it is. Clarke glances at the eyephones hanging from the terminal, puzzled. If Ballard doesn’t want her to see what she’s reading, she could just use those.

  But then she wouldn’t see me coming …

  “I think maybe it was a Ziphiid,” Ballard’s saying. “A beaked whale. Except it had too many teeth. Very rare. They don’t dive this deep.”

  Clarke listens, not really interested.

  “It must have died and rotted farther up, and then sank.” Ballard’s voice is slightly raised. She looks almost furtively at something on the other side of the lounge. “I wonder what the chances are of that happening.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, in all the ocean, something that big just happening to drop out of the sky a few hundred meters away. The odds of that must be pretty low.”

  “Yeah. I guess so.” Clarke reaches over and brightens the display. One half of the screen glows softly with luminous text. The other holds the rotating image of a complex molecule.

  “What’s this?” Clarke asks.

  Ballard steals another glance across the lounge. “Just an old biopsych text the library had on file. I was browsing through it. Used to be an interest of mine.”

  Clarke looks at her. “Uh-huh.” She bends over and studies the display. Some sort of technical chemistry. The only thing she really understands is the caption beneath the graphic.

  She reads it aloud: “True Happiness.”

  “Yeah. A tricyclic with four side chains.” Ballard points at the screen. “Whenever you’re happy, really happy, that’s what does it to you.”

  “When did they find that out?”

  “I don’t know. It’s an old book.”

  Clarke stares at the revolving simulacrum. It disturbs her somehow. It floats there over that smug stupid caption, and it says something she doesn’t want to hear.

  You’ve been solved, it says. You’re mechanical. Chemicals and electricity. Everything you are, every dream, every action, it all comes down to a change of voltage somewhere, or a—what did she say?—a tricyclic with four side chains—

  “It’s wrong,” Clarke murmurs. Or they’d be able to fix us, when we broke down—

  “Sorry?” Ballard says.

  “It’s saying we’re just these—soft computers. With faces.”

  Ballard shuts off the terminal.

  “That’s right,” she says. “And some of us may even be losing those.”

  The gibe registers, but it doesn’t hurt. Clarke straightens and moves toward the ladder.

  “Where you going? You going outside again?” Ballard asks.

  “The shift isn’t over. I thought I’d clean out the duct on number two.”

  “It’s a bit late to start on that, Lenie. The shift will be over before we’re even half done.” Ballard’s eyes dart away again. This time Clarke follows the glance to the full-length mirror on the far wall.

  She sees nothing of particular interest there.

  “I’ll work late.” Clarke grabs the railing, swings her foot onto the top rung.

  “Lenie,” Ballard says, and Clarke swears she hears a tremor in that voice. She looks back, but the other woman is moving to Comm. “Well, I’m afraid I can’t go with you,” she’s saying. “I’m in the middle of debugging one of the telemetry routines.”

  “Fine,” Clarke says. She feels the tension starting to rise. Beebe’s shrinking again. She starts down the ladder.

  “Are you sure you’re okay going out alone? Maybe you should wait until tomorrow.”

  “No. I’m okay.”

  “Well, remember to keep your receiver open. I don’t want you getting lost on me again—”

  Clarke is in the wetroom. She climbs into the airlock and runs through the ritual. It no longer feels like drowning. It feels like being born again.

  * * *

  She awakens into darkness, and the sound of weeping.

  She lies there for a few minutes, confused and uncertain. The sobs come from all sides, soft but omnipresent in Beebe’s resonant shell. She hears nothing else except her own heartbeat.

  She’s afraid. She’s not sure why. She wishes the sounds would go away.

  Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles at the hatch. It opens into a semi-darkened corridor; meager light escapes from the lounge at one end. The sounds come from the other direction, from deepening darkness. She follows them through an infestation of pipes and conduits.

  Ballard’s quarters. The hatch is open. An emerald readout sparkles in the darkness, bestowing no detail upon the hunched figure on the pallet.

  “Ballard,” Clarke says softly. She doesn’t want to go in.

  The shadow moves, seems to look up at her. “Why won’t you show it?” it says, its voice pleading.

  Clarke frowns in the darkness. “Show what?”

  “You know what! How—afraid you are!”

  “Afraid?”

  “Of being here, of being stuck at the bottom of this horrible dark ocean—”

  “I don’t understand,” Clarke whispers. Claustrophobia begins to stir in her, restless again.

  Ballard snorts, but the derision seems forced. “Oh, you understand all right. You think this is some sort of competition, you think if you can just keep it all inside you’ll win somehow—but it isn’t like that at all, Lenie, it isn’t helping to keep it hidden like this, we’ve got to be able to trust each other down here or we’re lost—”

  She shifts slightly on the bunk. Clarke’s eyes, enhanced by the caps, can pick out some details now; rough edges embroider Ballard’s silhouette, the folds and creases of normal clothing, unbuttoned to the waist. She thinks of a cadaver, half-dissected, rising on the table to mourn its own mutilation.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Clarke says.

  “I’ve tried to be friendly,” Ballard says. “I’ve tried to get along with you, but you’re so cold, you won’t even admit—I mean, you couldn’t like it down here, nobody could, why can’t you just admit—”

  “But I don’t. I—I hate it in here. It’s like Beebe’s going to—to clench around me. And all I can do is wait for it to happen.”

  Ballard nods in the darkness. “Yes, yes, I know what you mean.” She seems somehow encouraged by Clarke’s admission. “And no matter how much you tell yourself—” She stops. “You hate it in here?”

  Did I say something wrong? Clarke wonders.

  “Outside is hardly any better, you know,” Ballard says. “Outside is even worse! There’s mudslides and smokers and giant fish trying to eat you all the time, you can’t possibly—But—you don’t mind all that, do you?”

  Somehow, her tone has turned accusing. Clarke shrugs.

  “No, you don’t.” Ballard is speaking slowly now. Her voice drops to a whisper: “You actually like it out there. Don’t you?”

  Reluctantly Clarke nods. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “But it’s so—The rift can kill you, Lenie. It can kill us. A hundred different ways. Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think about it much. I guess it does, sort of.”

  “Then why are you so happy out there?” Ballard cries. “It doesn’t make any sense.…”

  I’m not exactly “happy,” Clarke thinks. “I don’t know. It’s not that weird, lots of people do dangerous things. What about free-fallers? What about mountain-climbers?”

  But Ballard doesn’t answer. Her silhouette has grown rigid on the bed. Suddenly she reaches over and turns on the cubby light.

  Lenie Clarke blinks against the sudden brightness. Then the room dims as her eyecaps darken.

  “Jesus Christ!” Ballard shouts at her. “You sleep in that fucking costume now?”

  It’s something else Clarke hasn’t thought about. It just seems easier.

  “All this time I’ve been pouring my heart out to you and you’ve been wearing that machine’s face! You don’t even h
ave the decency to show me your goddamned eyes!”

  Clarke steps back, startled. Ballard rises from the bed and takes a single step forward. “To think you could actually pass for human before they gave you that suit! Why don’t you go find something to play with out in your fucking ocean!”

  And slams the hatch in Clarke’s face.

  Lenie Clarke stares at the sealed bulkhead for a few moments. Her face, she knows, is calm. Her face is usually calm. But she stands there, unmoving, until the cringing thing inside of her unfolds a little.

  “Okay,” she says at last, very softly. “I guess I will.”

  * * *

  Ballard is waiting for her as she emerges from the airlock. “Lenie,” she says quietly, “we have to talk. It’s important.”

  Clarke bends over and removes her fins. “Go ahead.”

  “Not here. In my cubby.”

  Clarke looks at her.

  “Please.”

  Clarke starts up the ladder.

  “Aren’t you going to take—” Ballard stops as Clarke looks down. “Never mind. It’s okay.”

  They ascend into the lounge. Ballard takes the lead. Clarke follows her down the corridor and into her cabin. Ballard dogs the hatch and sits on her bunk, leaving room for Clarke.

  Clarke looks around the cramped space. Ballard has curtained over the mirrored bulkhead with a spare sheet.

  Ballard pats the bed beside her. “Come on, Lenie. Sit down.”

  Reluctantly, Clarke sits. Ballard’s sudden kindness confuses her. Ballard hasn’t acted this way since …

  Since she had the upper hand.

  “—might not be easy for you to hear,” Ballard is saying, “but we have to get you off the rift. They shouldn’t have put you down here in the first place.”

  Clarke doesn’t reply.

  “Remember the tests they gave us?” Ballard continues. “They measured our tolerance to stress: confinement, prolonged isolation, chronic physical danger, that sort of thing.”

  Clarke nods slightly. “So?”

  “So,” says Ballard, “did you think for a moment they’d test for those qualities without knowing what sort of person would have them? Or how they got to be that way?”

  Inside, Clarke goes very still. Outside, nothing changes.

  Ballard leans forward a bit. “Remember what you said? About mountain-climbers, and free-fallers, and why people deliberately do dangerous things? I’ve been reading up, Lenie. Ever since I got to know you I’ve been reading up—”