Starfish

  * * *

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

  It’s not enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “That’s stupid. They must’ve known.”

  “They say this is the only vent where the fish get this big. That they’ve found, anyway.”

  “Why? What’s so special here?”

  Lenie shrugs.

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

  He shakes his head. “That’s okay.”

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

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

  It’s almost safe in here.

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

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

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

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

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

  —Go away, Shadow—

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

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

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

  She takes a single step forward. “Don’t do that again,” she says, her voice so flat he wonders for a second how her vocoder could be working out of the water.

  “I’m not— I didn’t—”

  “I don’t care,” she says. “Don’t do it again.”

  Something moves at the corner of his eye. “Problem, Lenie? Need a hand?” Brander’s voice.

  She shakes her head. “No.”

  “Okay, then.” Brander sounds disappointed. “I’ll be upstairs.”

  Movement again. Sounds, receding.

  “I’m sorry,” Fischer says.

  “Fine,” Lenie says, and brushes past him into the wetroom.

  Autoclave

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

  Brander’s in the lounge, pecking at the library: “You—?”

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

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

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

  Someone raps on metal. “Lenie?”

  She rises, pushes at the hatch.

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

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

  “Judy,” says Caraco, sounding slightly miffed.

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

  Sometimes.

  “Excuse me,” she says, brushing past Caraco. “I’ve got to get outside.”

  * * *

  In a few places, the rift is almost gentle.

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

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

  Sometimes she just comes here to sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Except for Ballard, of course.

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

  * *
*

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

  “Nnnnaaaaah.…”

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

  “Aaaaaa—”

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

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

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

  Eyecaps, on the other hand …

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

  The view’s still rippling, though.

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

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

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

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

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

  —dead dead dead—

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

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

  Waterbed

  Taking off his diveskin is like gutting himself.

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

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

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

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

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

  Thinking about Lenie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

  A mirror.

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

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

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

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

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

  Go talk to her, Shadow says.

  I can’t.

  Yes you can. I’ll help you.

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

  Leave them there.

  No!

  Yes.

  I can’t, she’ll see me.…

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

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

  Leave them. I said I’ll help you.

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

  Go on. Go on.

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

  From behind, someone taps his shoulder.

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

  Maybe he wants Lenie too.

  Don’t get him mad, Shadow says.

  Fischer swallows. “I just wanted to talk to her.”

  “She’s out.”

  “Okay. I’ll … I’ll try later.”

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

  “You’re cut,” he says.

  “It’s nothing. I’m okay.”

  “Too bad.”

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

  Brander clenches his fists. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

  “I’m not, I’m just trying to— I mean…” Fischer falls silent, glances around. No one else anywhere.

  Deliberately, Brander relaxes.

  “And for Christ’s sake put your eyes back in,” he says. “Nobody wants to look in there.”

  He turns and walks away.

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

  Oh yes you do, says Shadow.

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

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

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

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

  Later, he can’t remember drifting off.

  * * *

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

  Brander pushes Fischer up against the wall.

  “Don’t tell me,” he says again, “that you weren’t. You don’t want to say that.”

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