Behemoth (10 page)

“Get me out of here,” Erickson says weakly.

She turns back to Seger. “You heard him.”

Seger draws herself up, impossibly, perpetually, insanely defiant. “Lenie, I asked you to come along to
help
. This is the furthest thing from—”

Creasy's fist hits her in the stomach like a wrecking ball. Seger
oof
s and topples to the side. Her head hits the bulkhead on the way down. She lies there, gulping breathlessly.

Out of the corner of her eye Clarke sees Rowan step forward, then think better of it.

She stares evenly at Creasy. “Not necessary, Dale.”

“High and mighty cunt was just
asking
for it,” Creasy grumbles.

“And how's she going to let Gene out of jail if she can't even breathe, you
idiot
?”

“Really, Len. What's the big deal?”

Nolan. Clarke turns to face her.

“You know what they did to us,” Nolan continues, rising at Creasy's side. “You know how many of us these pimps fucked over. Killed, even.”

Fewer than I did,
Clarke doesn't say.

“I say if Dale wants to go to town on this stumpfuck, let him.” Nolan puts a comradely hand on Creasy's shoulder. “Might go a tiny way to balancing the books, y'know?”

“You say,” Clarke says quietly. “I say different.”

“Now
there's
a surprise.” The trace of a smile ghosts across Nolan's face.

They stare at each other through their corneal shields. Across the compartment, Klein whimpers; Jerenice Seger seems to be breathing again at their feet. Creasy looms close at Clarke's shoulder, an ominous presence just short of overt threat.

She keeps her breathing slow and even. She lowers herself into a squat—carefully, carefully, her bad leg nearly buckling again—and helps Seger into a sitting position.

“Let him out,” she says.

Seger mutters into her wristwatch. A keyboard jammed with strange alphanumerics lights up the skin of her forearm; she taps a sequence with her other hand.

The isolation tent
pop
s softly. Erickson pushes a tentative finger through the membrane, finds it unlocked, and lurches off the table as if passing through a soap bubble. His feet hit the deck with a fleshy slap. Nolan holds out a diveskin she's produced from somewhere: “Welcome back, buddy. Told you we'd get you out.”

They leave Clarke with the corpses. Seger hauls herself to her feet, ignoring Clarke's offered hand and bracing herself against the bulkhead. One hand still clutches protectively at her stomach. She lurches over to Klein.

“Norm? Norm?” She squats next to her subordinate, stiff-limbed, and pushes back one of his eyelids. “Stay with me…” Droplets of blood dribble from her scalp and splatter onto the medic's pummeled face, making no difference at all. Seger curses and wipes the back of her hand across her injury.

Clarke steps forward to help. Her foot comes down on something small and hard, like a small stone. She lifts her foot. A tooth, sticky with coagulating fluids, clatters softly onto the deck.

“I—” Clarke begins.

Seger turns. Rage simmers on her face.
“Just get out of here.”

Clarke stares at her for a moment. Then she turns on her heel and leaves.

*   *   *

Rowan's waiting in the corridor. “This can't happen again.”

Clarke leans against the bulkhead to take some weight off her injured leg. “You know Grace. She and Gene are—”

“It's not just Grace. At least, it won't be for long. I said something like this might happen.”

She feels very tired. “You said you wanted space between the two sides. So why was Jerry keeping Gene here when he wanted to leave?”

“Do you think she
wanted
that man around? She was looking out for the welfare of her patient. That's her job.”

“Our welfare is our own concern.”

“You people simply aren't
qualified
—”

Clarke raises one preemptive hand. “Heard it, Pat. The little people can't see the Big Picture. Joe Citizen can't handle the truth. The peasants are too
eeegnorant
to vote.” She shakes her head, disgusted. “It's been five years and you're still patting us on the head.”

“Are you saying that Gene Erickson is a more qualified diagnostician than our chief of medicine?”

“I'm saying he has the right to be wrong.” Clarke waves an arm down the corridor. “Look, maybe you're right. Maybe he'll come down with gangrene and come crawling back to Jerry inside a week. Or maybe he'd rather die. But it's
his
decision.”

“This isn't about gangrene,” Rowan says softly. “And it isn't about some common low-grade infection. And you know it.”

“And I still don't see what difference it makes.”

“I told you.”

“You told me about a bunch of frightened children who can't believe that their own defenses will hold. Well, Pat, the defenses
will
hold. I'm living proof. We could be drinking
β
ehemoth in pure culture and it wouldn't hurt us.”

“We've lost—”

“You've lost one more layer of denial. That's all.
β
ehemoth's
here,
Pat. I don't know how, but there's nothing you can do about it and why should you even bother? It's not going to do anything except rub your noses in something you'd rather not think about, and you'll adapt to that soon enough. You've done it before. A month from now you'll have forgotten about it all over again.”

“Then please—” Rowan begins, and stops herself.

Clarke waits while the other woman braces herself, yet again, for the subordinate role.

“Give us that month,” Rowan whispers at last.

NEMESIS

C
LARKE
doesn't often go into the residential quarter. She doesn't remember ever having been in this particular section. The corridor here is sheathed in lattice paint and wired up to a mural generator. A forest of antlered coral crowds the port bulkhead; surgeonfish school and swirl to starboard, like the nodes of some abstract and diffuse neural net. A mesh of fractured sunlight dances across everything. Clarke can't tell whether the illusion is purely synthetic, or powered by archived footage of a real coral reef. She wouldn't even know how to tell the difference; of all the sea creatures that have made her acquaintance over the years, none have lived in sunlight.

A lot of families along here, Clarke figures. Adults don't go in for evocations of the wild kingdom as a rule; it's kind of hard to retain that esthetic once you've grasped the concept of irony.

Here it is: D-18. She taps the doorbell. A muffled musical chime drifts through the closed hatch; a reedy thread of music, a faint voice, the sounds of motion.

The hatch swings open. A stocky girl of about ten looks out at her from under spiky blond bangs. The music wafts around her from the interior of the compartment—Lex's flute, Clarke realizes.

The smile dies on the girl's face the instant she lays eyes on Lenie Clarke.

“Hi,” Clarke says. “I was looking for Alyx.” She tries a smile of her own on for size.

It doesn't fit. The girl takes a stumbling step backward. “Lex…”

The music stops. “What? Who is it?”

The blond girl steps aside, nervous as a cat. Alyx Rowan sits blinded on a couch in the center of the room. One of her hands lowers the flute; the other reaches up to the mother-of-pearl 'phones covering her eyes.

“Hey, Lex,” Clarke says. “Your mom said you'd be here.”

“Lenie! You passed!”

“Passed?”

“Quarantine! They said you and psycho-man were locked up for tests or something. I guess you aced them.” A wheeled rectangular pedestal about a meter high squats in front of the couch, a little obelisk with the same opalescent finish as Alyx's headset. Alyx sets her 'phones down on top of it, next to an identical pair already at rest.

Clarke limps into the room. Alyx's face clouds instantly. “What happened to your leg?”

“Rogue squid. Rudder got me.”

Alyx's friend mutters something from the corner of Clarke's eye and disappears into the corridor. Clarke turns in her wake.

“Your friend doesn't like me much.”

Alyx waves a dismissive hand. “Kelly spooks easy. One look and she just flashfeeds all the shit her mom ever spewed about you guys. She's nice, but she doesn't high-grade her sources at
all
.” The girl shrugs, dismissing the subject. “So what's up?”

“You know that quarantine I was buzzing on about a while back?”

Alyx frowns. “That guy that got bitten. Erickson.”

“Yeah. Well, it looks like he came down with something after all, and the basic thumbnail is we've decided to invoke a kind of
No Fish-heads
policy in Atlantis for the time being.”

“You're letting them kick you out?”

“I actually think it's a good idea,” Clarke admits.

“Why? What's he got?”

Clarke shakes her head. “It's not really a medical thing, although that's—part of it. It's just—feelings are running kind of high right now, on both sides. Your mom and I thought it'd be better if your guys and our guys kept out of each other's way. Just for a while.”

“How come? What's going on?”

“Your mom didn't—?” It belatedly occurs to Clarke that Patricia Rowan might have opted to keep certain things from her daughter. For that matter, she doesn't even know how much of Atlantis's
adult
population has been brought up to speed. Corpses aren't keen on full disclosure just as a matter of general principle.

Not that Lenie Clarke gives a great crimson turd about corpse sensibilities. Still. She doesn't want to get in between Pat and—

“Lenie?” Alyx is staring at her, brow furrowed. She's one of the very few people to whom Clarke can comfortably show her naked eyes; right now, though, Clarke's glad her caps are in.

She takes a couple of paces across the carpet. Another facet of the pedestal comes into view. Some kind of control panel runs in a strip just below its upper edge, a band of dark perspex twinkling with red and blue icons. A luminous jagged waveform, like an EEG, scrolls horizontally along its length.

“What's this?” Clarke asks, seizing on the diversion. It's far too big to be any kind of game interface.

“That? Oh.” Alyx shrugs. “That's Kelly's. It's a head cheese.”

“What!”

“You know, a smart gel. Neuron culture with—”

“I know what it is, Lex. I just—I guess I'm surprised to see one here, after…”

“Wanna see it?” Alyx taps a brief tattoo on the top of the cabinet. The nacreous surface swirls briefly and clears: beneath the newly-transparent facade, a slab of pinkish-gray tissue sits within its circular rim like a bowl of fleshy oatmeal. Flecks of brown glass punctuate the pudding in neat perforated lines.

“It's not very big,” Alyx says. “Way smaller than the ones they had back in the old days. Kelly says it's about the same as a cat.”

So it's evil at least, if not hugely intelligent.
“What's it for?” Clarke wonders.
Surely they wouldn't be stupid enough to use these things after
—

“It's kind of a pet,” Alyx says apologetically. “She calls it Rumble.”

“A
pet
?”

“Sure. It thinks, sort of. It learns to do stuff. Even if no one really knows how, exactly.”

“Oh, so you heard about that, did you?”

“It's a lot smaller than the ones that, you know, worked for you.”

“They didn't w—”

“It's really harmless. It's not hooked into life support or anything.”

“So what does it do? You teach it tricks?” The porridge of brains glistens like an oozing sore.

“Kind of. It talks back if you say stuff to it. Doesn't always make a lot of sense, but that's what makes it fun. And if you tweak the audio feed right it plays these really cool color patterns in time to music.” Alyx grabs her flute off the couch, gestures at the eyephones. “Wanna see?”

“A pet,” Clarke murmurs.
You bloody corpses
 …

“We're not, you know,” Alyx says sharply. “Not all of us.”

“Sorry? Not what?”

“Corpses. What does that mean, anyway? My mom?
Me?
”

Did I say that out loud?
“Just—corporate types, I guess.” She's never spent much time pondering the origin of the term, any more than she's lost sleep over the etiology of
chair
or
fumarole
.

“Well in case you didn't notice, there's a lot of other people in here. Crunchers and doctors and just
families
.”

“Yeah, I know. Of course I know—”

“But you just lump us all together, you know? If we don't have a bunch of pipes in our chest we're all just
corpses
as far as you're concerned.”

“Well—sorry.” And then, belatedly defensive: “I'm not slagging you, you know. It's just a word.”

“Yeah, well it's not
just a word
to all you fish-heads.”

“Sorry.” Clarke says again. A distance seems to open between them, although neither has moved.

“Anyway,” she says after a while, “I just wanted you to know I won't be inside for a while. We can still talk, of course, but—”

Movement from the hatchway. A large stocky man steps into the compartment, dark hair combed back, eyebrows knotted together, his whole body a telegraph of leashed hostility. Kelly's father.

“Ms. Clarke,” he says evenly.

Her guts tighten into a hard, angry knot. She knows that look. She knows that stance, she saw it herself more times than she could count when she was Kelly's age. She knows what
fathers
do, she knows what
hers
did, but she's not a little girl any more and Kelly's dad looks very much in need of a
lesson
 …