Beyond the Rift

  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.”

  “That’s fine,” Clarke says. She feels the tension starting to rise. Beebe is 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 face! You don’t even have 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—”

  Got to know me?

  “—and do you know what thrillseekers have in common? They all say that you haven’t lived until you’ve nearly died. They need the danger. It gives them a rush.”

  You don’t know me at all—

  “Some of them are combat veterans, some were hostages for long periods, some just spent a lot of time in dead zones for one reason or another. And a lot of the really compulsive ones—”

  Nobody knows me.

  “—the ones who can’t be happy unless they’re on
the edge, all the time—a lot of them got started early, Lenie. When they were just children. And you, I bet—you don’t even like being touched—”

  Go away. Go away.

  Ballard puts her hand on Clarke’s shoulder. “How long were you abused, Lenie?” she asks gently. “How many years?”

  Clarke shrugs off the hand and does not answer. He didn’t mean any harm. She shifts on the bunk, turning away slightly.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? You don’t just have a tolerance to trauma, Lenie. You’ve got an addiction to it. Don’t you?”

  It only takes Clarke a moment to recover. The ’skin, the eyecaps make it easier. She turns calmly back to Ballard. She even smiles a little.

  “Abused,” she says. “Now there’s a quaint term. Thought it died out after the Saskatchewan witch-hunts. You some sort of history buff, Jeanette?”

  “There’s a mechanism,” Ballard tells her. “I’ve been reading about it. Do you know how the brain handles stress, Lenie? It dumps all sorts of addictive stimulants into the bloodstream. Beta-endorphins, opioids. If it happens often enough, for long enough, you get hooked. You can’t help it.”

  Clarke feels a sound in her throat, a jagged coughing noise a bit like tearing metal. After a moment, she recognizes it as laughter.

  “I’m not making it up!” Ballard insists. “You can look it up yourself if you don’t believe me! Don’t you know how many abused children spend their whole lives hooked on wife beaters or self-mutilation or free-fall—”

  “And it makes them happy, is that it?” Clarke says, still smiling. “They enjoy getting raped, or punched out, or—”

  “No, of course you’re not happy! But what you feel, that’s probably the closest you’ve ever come. So you confuse the two, you look for stress anywhere you can find it. It’s physiological addiction, Lenie. You ask for it. You always asked for it.”

  I ask for it. Ballard’s been reading, and Ballard knows: Life is pure electrochemistry. No use explaining how it feels. No use explaining that there are far worse things than being beaten up. There are even worse things than being held down and raped by your own father. There are the times between, when nothing happens at all. When he leaves you alone, and you don’t know for how long. You sit across the table from him, forcing yourself to eat while your bruised insides try to knit themselves back together; and he pats you on the head and smiles at you, and you know the reprieve’s already lasted too long, he’s going to come for you tonight, or tomorrow, or maybe the next day.

  Of course I asked for it. How else could I get it over with?

  “Listen.” Clarke shakes her head. “I—” But it’s hard to talk, suddenly. She knows what she wants to say; Ballard’s not the only one who reads. Ballard can’t see it through a lifetime of fulfilled expectations, but there’s nothing special about what happened to Lenie Clarke. Baboons and lions kill their own young. Male sticklebacks beat up their mates. Even insects rape. It’s not abuse, really, it’s just—biology.

  But she can’t say it aloud, for some reason. She tries, and she tries, but in the end all that comes out is a challenge that sounds almost childish:

  “Don’t you know anything?”

  “Sure I do, Lenie. I know you’re hooked on your own pain, and so you go out there and keep daring the rift to kill you, and eventually it will, don’t you see? That’s why you shouldn’t be here. That’s why we have to get you back.”

  Clarke stands up. “I’m not going back.” She turns to the hatch.

  Ballard reaches out toward her. “Listen, you’ve got to stay and hear me out. There’s more.”

  Clarke looks down at her with complete indifference. “Thanks for your concern. But I don’t have to stay. I can leave any time I want to.”

  “You go out there now and you’ll give everything away, they’re watching us! Haven’t you figured it out yet?” Ballard’s voice is rising. “Listen, they knew about you! They were looking for someone like you! They’ve been testing us, they don’t know yet what kind of person works out better down here, so they’re watching and waiting to see who cracks first! This whole program is still experimental, can’t you see that? Everyone they’ve sent down—you, me, Ken Lubin and Lana Cheung, it’s all part of some cold-blooded test—”

  “And you’re failing it,” Clarke says softly. “I see.”

  “They’re using us, Lenie—don’t go out there!”

  Ballard’s fingers grasp at Clarke like the suckers of an octopus. Clarke pushes them away. She undogs the hatch and pushes it open. She hears Ballard rising behind her.

  “You’re sick!” Ballard screams. Something smashes into the back of Clarke’s head. She goes sprawling out into the corridor. One arm smacks painfully against a cluster of pipes as she falls.

  She rolls to one side and raises her arms to protect herself. But Ballard just steps over her and stalks into the lounge.

  I’m not afraid, Clarke notes, getting to her feet. She hit me, and I’m not afraid. Isn’t that odd—

  From somewhere nearby, the sound of shattering glass.

  Ballard’s shouting in the lounge. “The experiment’s over! Come on out, you fucking ghouls!”

  Clarke follows the corridor, steps out of it. Pieces of the lounge mirror hang like great jagged stalactites in their frame. Splashes of glass litter the floor.

  On the wall, behind the broken mirror, a fisheye lens takes in every corner of the room.

  Ballard is staring into it. “Did you hear me? I’m not playing your stupid games any more! I’m through performing!”

  The quartzite lens stares back impassively.

  So you were right, Clarke muses. She remembers the sheet in Ballard’s cubby. You figured it out, you found the pickups in your own cubby, and Ballard, my dear friend, you didn’t tell me.

  How long have you known?

  Ballard looks around, sees Clarke. “You’ve got her fooled, all right,” she snarls at the fisheye, “but she’s a goddamned basket case! She’s not even sane! Your little tests don’t impress me one fucking bit!”

  Clarke steps toward her.

  “Don’t call me a basket case,” she says, her voice absolutely level.

  “That’s what you are!” Ballard shouts. “You’re sick! That’s why you’re down here! They need you sick, they depend on it, and you’re so far gone you can’t see it! You hide everything behind that—that mask of yours, and you sit there like some masochistic jellyfish and just take anything anyone dishes out—you ask for it—”

  That used to be true, Clarke realizes as her hands ball into fists. That’s the strange thing. Ballard begins to back away; Clarke advances, step by step. It wasn’t until I came down here that I learned that I could fight back. That I could win. The rift taught me that, and now Ballard has too—

  “Thank you,” Clarke whispers, and hits Ballard hard in the face.

  Ballard goes over backwards, collides with a table. Clarke calmly steps forward. She catches a glimpse of herself in a glass icicle; her capped eyes seem almost luminous.

  “Oh Jesus,” Ballard whimpers. “Lenie, I’m sorry.”

  Clarke stands over her. “Don’t be,” she says. She sees herself as some sort of exploding schematic, each piece neatly labeled. So much anger in here, she thinks. So much hate. So much to take out on someone.

  She looks at Ballard, cowering on the floor.

  “I think,” Clarke says, “I’ll start with you.”

  But her therapy ends before she can even get properly warmed up. A sudden noise fills the lounge, shrill, periodic, vaguely familiar. It takes a moment for Clarke to remember what it is. She lowers her foot.

  Over in the Communications cubby, the telephone is ringing.

  Jeanette Ballard is going home today.

  For half an hour the ’scaphe has been dropping deeper into midnight. Now the Comm monitor shows it settling like a great bloated tadpole onto Beebe’s docking assembly. Sounds of mechanical copulation reverberate and die. The overhead hatch drops open.
/>
  Ballard’s replacement climbs down, already mostly ’skinned, staring impenetrably from eyes without pupils. His gloves are off; his ’skin is open to the forearms. Clarke sees the faint scars running along his wrists, and smiles a bit inside.

  Was there another Ballard up there, waiting, she wonders, in case I was the one who didn’t work out?

  Out of sight down the corridor, a hatch hisses open. Ballard appears in shirtsleeves, one eye swollen shut, carrying a single suitcase. She seems about to say something, but stops when she sees the newcomer. She looks at him for a moment. She nods briefly. She climbs into the belly of the ’scaphe without a word.

  Nobody calls down to them. There are no salutations, no morale-boosting small talk. Perhaps the crew have been briefed. Perhaps they’ve figured it out on their own. The docking hatch swings shut. With a final clank, the ’scaphe disengages.

  Clarke walks across the lounge and looks into the camera. She reaches between mirror fragments and rips its power line from the wall.

  We don’t need this any more, she thinks, and she knows that somewhere far away, someone agrees.

  She and the newcomer appraise each other with dead white eyes.

  “I’m Lubin,” he says at last.

  Ballard was right again, she realizes. Untwisted, we’d be of no use at all...

  But she doesn’t really mind. She won’t be going back.

  OUTTRO: EN ROUTE TO DYSTOPIA WITH THE ANGRY OPTIMIST

  I’m quite a cheerful guy in person. Apparently people are surprised by this.

  I don’t know what they were expecting: Some aging goth in eyeliner and black leather, maybe. A wannabe hipster born a generation out of synch. But insofar as I’m known at all, I seem to be known as The Guy Who Writes The Depressing Stories. My favorite thumbnail of that sentiment comes from James Nicoll—“Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts”—but the dude’s hardly alone in his opinion. While mulling over what to put in this essay I did a quick Google search for the descriptors commonly applied to my writing. I list a few for illustrative purposes: