Starfish (19 page)

"He won't be as eager to help you out the next time you get caught in a smoker."

"Yeah," he says again. Then: "I don't know, I've always been sort of—you know—"

She remembers a word someone else used, after the fact. "Impulsive?"

"Right. But really I'm not that bad. You just have to get used to me."

Clarke doesn't answer.

"Anyhow," he says, "I guess I owe your friend an apology."

My friend
. And by the time she gets over that jarring idea, she's alone again.

* * *

Five hours later Acton's in Medical. Clarke passes the open hatchway and glances in; he sits on an examination table, his 'skin undone to the waist. There's something wrong with the image. She stops and leans through the hatch.

Acton has opened himself up. She can see the flesh peeled back around the water intake, the places where meat turns to plastic, the tubes that carry blood and the ones that carry antifreeze. He holds a tool in one hand; it disappears into the cavity, the spinning thing on its tip whirring quietly.

Acton hits a nerve somewhere, and jumps as if shocked.

"Are you damaged?" Clarke asks.

He looks up. "Oh. Hi."

She points at his dissected thorax. "Did the gulper—"

He shakes his head. "No. No, it just bruised my leg a bit. I'm just making some adjustments."

"Adjustments?"

"Fine-tuning." He smiles. "Settling-in stuff."

It doesn't work. The smile is hollow, somehow. Muscles stretch lips in the usual way, but the gesture's imprisoned in the lower half of his face. Above it, his capped eyes stare cold as drifted snow, innocent of any topography. She wonders why it has never bothered her before, and realizes that this is the first time she's ever seen a Rifter smile.

"That's not supposed to be necessary," she says.

"What's not?" Acton's smile is beginning to wear on her.

"Fine-tuning. We're supposed to be self-adjusting."

"Exactly. I'm adjusting myself."

"I mean—"

"I know what you mean," Acton says. "I'm—customizing the job." His hand moves around inside his rib cage as if autonomous, tinkering. "I figure I can get better performance if I nudge the settings just a bit outside the approved specs."

Clarke hears a brief, Lilliputian screech of metal against metal.

"How?" she asks.

Acton withdraws his hand, folds flesh back over the hole. "Not exactly sure yet." He runs another tool along the seam in his chest, sealing himself. He shrugs back into his 'skin, seals that as well. Now he's as whole as any rifter.

"I'll let you know next time I go outside," he says, laying a casual hand on Clarke's shoulder as he squeezes past.

She almost doesn't flinch.

Acton stops. He seems to look right around her.

"You're nervous," he says, slowly.

"Am I."

"You don't like being touched." His hand rests on her collarbone like an insult.

She remembers: she has the same armor that he does. She relaxes fractionally. "It's not a general thing," she lies. "Just some people."

Acton seems to weigh the jibe, decide whether it's worthy of a response. His hand withdraws.

"Kind of an unfortunate quirk in a place as small as this," he says, turning away.

Small?
I've got the whole goddamn ocean!
But Acton's already climbing upstairs.

* * *

The new smoker is erupting again. Water shoots scalding from the chimney at the north end of the Throat, curdles and mixes with deep icy saline; microbes caught in the turbulence luminesce madly. The water fills with the hiss of unformed steam, aborted by the weight of three hundred atmospheres.

Acton is ten meters above the seabed, awash in rippling blue light.

She glides up from underneath. "Nakata said you were still out here," she buzzes at him. "She said you were waiting for this thing to go off."

He doesn't even look at her. "Right."

"You're lucky it did. You could have been waiting out here for days." Clarke turns away, aims herself at the generators.

"And I think," Acton says, "it'll stop in a minute or two."

She twists around and faces him. "Look, all these eruptions are..." she rummages for the word, "chaotic."

"Uh huh."

"You can't predict them."

"Hey, the Pompeii worms can predict them. The clams and brachyurans can predict them. Why not me?"

"What are you talking about?"

"They can tell when something's going to blow. Take a look around sometime, you'll see for yourself. They react before it even happens."

She looks around. The clams are acting just like clams. The worms are acting just like worms. The brachyurans scurry around the bottom the way brachyurans always do. "React how?"

"Makes sense, after all. These vents can feed them or parboil them. After a few million years they've learned to read the signs, right?"

The smoker hiccoughs. The plume wavers, light dimming at its edges.

Acton looks at his wrist. "Not bad."

"Lucky guess," Clarke says, her vocoder hiding uncertainty.

The smoker manages a couple of feeble bursts and subsides completely.

Acton drifts closer. "You know, when they first sent me down here I thought this place would be a real shithole. I figured I'd just knuckle down and do my time and get out. But it's not like that. You know what I mean, Lenie?"

I know.
But she doesn't answer.

"I thought so," he says, as though she has. "It's really kind of...well, beautiful, in a way. Even the monsters, once you get to know 'em. We're all beautiful."

He seems almost gentle.

Clarke dredges her memory for some sort of defense. "You couldn't have known," she says. "Way too many variables. It's not computable. Nothing down here's computable."

An alien creature looks down at her and shrugs. "Computable? Probably not. But
knowable
..."

There's no time for this
, Clarke tells herself.
I've got to get to work.

"...that's something else again," Acton says.

* * *

She never figured him for a bookworm. Still, there he is again, plugged into the library. Stray light from the eyephones leaks across his cheeks.

He seems to be spending a lot of time in there these days. Almost as much time as he spends outside.

Clarke glances down at the flatscreen as she wanders past. It's dark.

"Chemistry," Brander says from across the lounge.

She looks at him.

Brander jerks his thumb at the oblivious Acton. "That's what he's into. Weird shit. Boring as hell."

That's what Ballard was into, just before...
Clarke fingers a spare headset from the next terminal.

"Ooh, you're walking a fine line there," Brander remarks. "Mr. Acton doesn't
like
people reading over his shoulder."

Then Mr. Acton will be in privacy mode and I won't be able to.
She sits down and slips the headset on. Acton has not invoked privacy; Clarke taps into his line without any trouble. The eyephone lasers etch text and formulae across her retinas. Serotonin. Acetylcholine. Neuropeptide moderation. Brander's right: it's really boring.

Someone's touching her.

She does not yank the headset off. She removes it calmly. She doesn't even flinch, this time. She will not give him the satisfaction.

Acton has turned in his chair to face her, headset dangling around his neck. His hand is on her knee.

"Glad to see we have common interests," he says quietly. "Not that surprising, though. We do share a certain ... chemistry..."

"That's true." She stares back, safe behind her eyecaps. "Too bad I'm allergic to shitheads."

He smiles. "Of course, it would never work. The ages are all wrong." He stands up, returns the headset to its hook.

"I'm not nearly old enough to be your father."

He crosses the lounge and climbs downstairs.

"What an asshole," Brander remarks.

"He's more of a prick than Fischer ever was. I'm surprised you're not picking fights with
him
all the time."

Brander shrugs. "Different dynamic. Acton's just an asshole. Fischer was a fucking
pervert
."

Not to mention that Fischer never fought back.
She keeps the insight to herself.

* * *

Concentric circles, glowing emerald. Beebe Station sits on the bullseye. Intermittent blobs of weaker light litter the display: fissures and jagged rock outcroppings, endless muddy plains, the Euclidean outlines of human machinery all reduced to a common acoustic currency.

There's something else out there too, part Euclid, part Darwin. Clarke zooms in. Human flesh is too much like seawater to return an echo, but bones show up okay. The machinery inside is even clearer, it shouts at the faintest sonar signal. Clarke focuses the display, points at a translucent green skeleton with clockwork in its chest.

"That him?" Caraco says.

Clarke shakes her head.

"Maybe it is. Everyone else is—"

"It's not him." Clarke touches a control. The display zooms back to maximum range. "You sure he's not in his quarters?"

"He left the station seven hours ago. Hasn't been back since."

"Maybe he's just hugging the bottom. Maybe he's behind a rock."

"Maybe." Caraco sounds unconvinced.

Clarke leans back in her chair. The back of her head touches the rear wall of the cubby. "Well, he's doing his job okay. When he's off shift he can go wherever he likes, I guess."

"Yeah, but this is the third time. He's always
late
. He just wanders in whenever he likes—"

"So what?" Clarke, suddenly tired, rubs the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. "We don't run on dryback schedules here, you know that. He pulls his weight, don't fuck with him."

"Well, Fischer was always getting shit for being l—"

"Nobody cared if Fischer was late," Clarke cuts in. "They just— wanted an excuse."

Caraco leans forward. "I don't like him," she confides.

"Acton? No reason you should. He's psycho. We all are, remember?"

"But he's different, somehow. You know that."

"Lubin nearly killed his wife down at Galapagos before they assigned him here. Brander's got a history of attempted suicide."