Behemoth (5 page)

Even in exile, they just don't get it.

Right now the cavern's fairly empty. Lubin and a few techs cluster at a nearby panel, cleaning up the latest downloads. The place will be full by the time they finish. Corpses gravitate to news of the world like flies to shit.

For now, though, it's just Lubin's crowd and Patricia Rowan, over on the far side of the compartment. Cryptic information streams across her contacts, turns her eyes into bright points of mercury. Light from a holo display catches the silver streaking her hair; that and the eyes give her the aspect of some subtle hologram in her own right.

Clarke approaches her. “Airlock Four's blocked off.”

“They're scrubbing it down. Everything between there and the infirmary. Jerry's orders.”

“What for?”

“You know perfectly well. You saw Erickson.”

“Oh, come on. One lousy fish bite and Jerry thinks—”

“She's not sure of anything yet. She's just being careful.” A pause, then: “You should have warned us, Lenie.”

“Warned you?”

“That Erickson might be vectoring
β
ehemoth. You left all of us exposed. If there was even a chance…”

But there's not,
Clarke wants to rail.
There's not. You chose this place because βehemoth could never get here, not in a thousand years. I saw the maps, I traced out the currents with my own fingers. It's not βehemoth. It's not
.

It can't be.

Instead she says, “It's a big ocean, Pat. Lots of nasty predators with big pointy teeth. They didn't
all
get that way because of
β
ehemoth.”

“This far down, they did. You know the energetics as well as I do. You were at Channer, Lenie. You
knew
what to look for.”

Clarke jerks her thumb toward Lubin. “Ken was at Channer too, remember? You shitting on him like this?”

“Ken didn't deliberately spread that damn bug across a whole continent to pay back the world for his unhappy childhood.” The silver eyes fix Clarke in a hard stare. “Ken was on
our
side.”

Clarke doesn't speak for a moment. Finally, very slowly: “Are you saying I
deliberately
—”

“I'm not accusing you of anything. But it looks bad. Jerry's livid about this, and she won't be the only one. You're the Meltdown Madonna, for god's sake! You were willing to write off the whole
world
to get your revenge on us.”

“If I wanted you dead,” Clarke says evenly—
If I
still
wanted you dead,
some inner editor amends—“you would be. Years ago. All I had to do was stand aside.”

“Of course that's—”

Clarke cuts her off: “I
protected
you. When the others were arguing about whether to punch holes in the hull or just cut your power and let you suffocate—
I
was the one who held them back. You're alive because of me.”

The corpse shakes her head. “Lenie,
that doesn't matter
.”

“It damn well should.”

“Why? We were only trying to save the world, remember? It wasn't our fault we failed, it was
yours
. And after we failed, we settled for saving our families, and you wouldn't even give us that. You hunted us down even at the bottom of the ocean. Who knows why you held back at the last minute?”

“You know,” Clarke says softly.

Rowan nods. “
I
know. But most of the people down here don't expect rationality from you. Maybe you've just been toying with us all these years. There's no telling when you'll pull the trigger.”

Clarke shakes her head dismissively. “What's that, the Gospel According to the Executive Club?”

“Call it what you want. It's what you have to deal with. It's what
I
have to deal with.”

“We fish-heads have a few stories of our own, you know,” Clarke says. “How you corpses programmed people like machinery so you could top up some bottom line. How you sent us into the world's worst shit-holes to do your dirty work, and when we ran into
β
ehemoth the first thing you did was try to kill us to save your own hides.”

Suddenly the ventilators seem unnaturally loud. Clarke turns; Lubin and the corpses stare back from across the cave.

She looks away again, flustered.

Rowan smiles grimly. “See how easily it all comes back?” Her eyes glitter, target-locked. Clarke returns her gaze without speaking.

After a moment, Rowan relaxes a bit. “We're rival tribes, Lenie. We're each other's outgroup—but you know what's amazing? Somehow, in the past couple of years,
we've started to forget all that
. We live and let live, for the most part. We
cooperate,
and nobody even thinks it worthy of comment.” She glances significantly across the room to Lubin and the techs. “I think that's a good thing, don't you?”

“So why should it change now?” Clarke asks.

“Because
β
ehemoth may have caught up with us at last, and people will say you let it in.”

“That's horseshit.”

“I agree, for what it's worth.”

“And even if it
was
true, who cares?” Everyone's part mermaid down here, even the corpses. All retrofitted with the same deep-sea fish-genes, coding for the same stiff little proteins that
β
ehemoth can't get its teeth into.

“There's a concern that the retrofits may not be effective,” Rowan admits softly.

“Why? It was your own people designed the fucking things!”

Rowan raises an eyebrow. “Those would be the same experts who assured us that
β
ehemoth would never make it to the deep Atlantic.”

“But I was
rotten
with
β
ehemoth. If the retrofits didn't work—”

“Lenie, these people have never been exposed. They've only got some expert's word that they're immune, and in case you haven't noticed our experts have proven distressingly fallible of late. If we were really so confident in our own countermeasures, why would we even be hiding down here? Why wouldn't we be back on shore with our stockholders, with our people, trying to hold back the tide?”

Clarke sees it at last.

“Because they'd tear you apart,” she whispers.

Rowan shakes her head. “It's because scientists have been wrong before, and we can't trust their assurances. It's because we're not willing to take chances with the health of our families. It's because we may still be vulnerable to
β
ehemoth, and if we'd stayed behind it would have killed us along with everyone else and we'd have done no good at all. Not because our own people would turn on us. We'll never believe that.” Her eyes don't waver. “We're like everyone else, you see. We were all doing the very best we could, and things just—got out of control. It's important to believe that. So we all do.”

“Not all,” Clarke acknowledges softly.

“Still.”

“Fuck 'em. Why should I prop up their self-serving delusions?”

“Because when you force the truth down people's throats, they bite back.”

Clarke smiles faintly. “Let them try. I think you're forgetting who's in charge here, Pat.”

“I'm not worried for your sake, I'm worried for ours. You people tend to overreaction.” When Clarke doesn't deny it, Rowan continues: “It's taken
five years
to build some kind of armistice down here.
β
ehemoth could kick it into a thousand pieces overnight.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“I think rifters should stay out of Atlantis for the time being. We can sell it as a quarantine.
β
ehemoth may or may not be out there, but at least we can keep it from getting in
here
.”

Clarke shakes her head. “My
tribe
won't give a shit about that.”

“You and Ken are the only ones who come in here anyway, for the most part,” Rowan points out. “And the others … they won't go against anything you put your stamp of approval on.”

“I'll think about it,” Clarke sighs. “No promises.” She turns to go.

And turns back. “Alyx up?”

“Not for another couple of hours. I know she wanted to see you, though.”

“Oh.” Clarke suppresses a twinge of disappointment.

“I'll give her your regrets,” Rowan says.

“Yeah. Do that.”

No shortage of those.

HUDDLE

R
OWAN'S
daughter sits on the edge of her bed, aglow with sunny radiance from the lightstrip on the ceiling. She's barefoot, clad in panties and a baggy T-shirt on which animated hatchet-fish swim endless circuits around her midriff. She breathes a recycled mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and trace gases, distinguishable from real air only by its extreme purity.

The rifter floats in darkness, her contours limned by feeble light leaking through the viewport. She wears a second skin that almost qualifies as a life-form in its own right, a miracle of thermo- and osmoregulation, black as an oil slick. She does not breathe.

A wall separates the two women, keeps ocean from air, adult from adolescent. They speak through a device fixed to the inside of the teardrop viewport, a fist-sized limpet that turns the fullerene perspex into an acoustic transceiver.

“You said you'd come by,” Alyx Rowan says. Passage across the bulkhead leaves her voice a bit tinny. “I made it up to fifth level, I was like holy shit, look at all the bonus points! I wanted to show you around. Scammed an extra headset and everything.”

“Sorry,” Clarke buzzes back. “I was in before, but you were asleep.”

“So come in now.”

“Can't. I've only got a minute or two. Something's come up.”

“Like what?”

“Someone got injured and now the meat-cutters are going off the deep end about possible infection.”

“What infection?”

“It's probably nothing. But they're talking about a quarantine just to be on the safe side. For all I know, they wouldn't let me back inside anyway.”

“It'd let 'em play at being in control of something, I guess.” Alyx grins; the parabolic viewport bends her face into a clownish distortion. “They really, really hate not being in charge, you know?” And then, with a satisfaction obviously borne less of corpses than of adults in general: “It's about time they learned how that felt.”

“I'm sorry,” Clarke says suddenly.

“They'll get over it.”

“That's not what I…” The rifter shakes her head. “It's just—you're
fourteen,
for God's sake. You shouldn't be down—I mean, you should be out lekking with some r-selector—”

Alyx snorts. “Boys? I don't think so.”

“Girls then. Either way, you should be out getting laid, not stuck down
here
.”

“This is the best place I could possibly be,” Alyx says simply.

She looks out across three hundred atmospheres, a teenage girl trapped for the rest of her life in a cage on the bottom of a frigid black ocean. Lenie Clarke would give anything to be able to disagree with her.

“Mom won't talk about it,” Alyx says after a while.

Still Clarke says nothing.

“What happened between you guys, back when I was just a kid. Some of the others shoot their mouths off when she's not around, so I kind of hear things. But Mom never says anything.”

Mom is kinder than she should be
.

“You were enemies, weren't you?”

Clarke shakes her head—a pointless and unseeable gesture, here in the dark. “Alyx, we didn't even know each other existed, not until the very end. Your mom was only trying to stop—”

—
what happened anyway
 …

—
what I was trying to start
 …

There's so much more than speech. She wants to sigh. She wants to scream. All denied out here, her lung and guts squeezed flat, every other cavity flooded and incompressible. There's nothing she can do but speak in this monotone travesty of a voice, this buzzing insect voice.

“It's complicated,” her vocoder says, flat and dispassionate. “It was so much more than just
enemies,
you know? There were other things involved, there was all that wildlife in the wires, doing its own thing—”

“
They
let that out,” Alyx insists. “They started it. Not you.” By which she means, of course,
adults
. Perpetrators and betrayers and the-ones-who-fucked-everything-up-for-the-next-generation. And it dawns on Clarke that Alyx is not including
her
in that loathsome conspiracy of elders—that Lenie Clarke, Meltdown Madonna, has somehow acquired the status of honorary innocent in the mind of this child.

She feels ill at the thought of so much undeserved absolution. It seems obscene. But she doesn't have the courage to set her friend straight. All she can manage is a pale, half-assed disclaimer:

“They didn't mean to, kid.” She goes for a sad chuckle. It comes out sounding like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. “Nobody—nobody did
anything
on their own, back then. It was strings all the way up.”

The ocean groans around her.

The sound resonates somewhere between the call of a humpback whale and the death-cry of some mammoth hull, buckling under pressure. It fills the ocean; some of it leaks through Alyx's limpet-device. She screws her face up in distaste. “I hate that sound.”

Clarke shrugs, pathetically grateful for the interruption. “Hey, you corpses have your conferences, we have ours.”

“It's not that. It's those haploid
chimes
. I'm telling you, Lenie, that guy's scary. You can't trust anyone who makes something that sounds like
that
.”