Starfish (21 page)

Acton reaches out and fingers a shard of glass sticking from an empty frame on one wall. "There used to be a mirror here," he remarks.

Clarke nibbles his shoulder. "There were mirrors everywhere. I—took them down."

"Why? A few mirrors would open the place up a bit. Make it larger."

She points. Several torn wires, fine as threads, hang from a hole in the frame. "They had cameras behind them. I didn't like that."

Acton grunts. "I don't blame you."

They sit without speaking for a bit.

"You said something outside," she says. "You said you were born down here."

Acton hesitates, then nods. "Ten days ago."

"What did you mean?"

"You should know," he says. "You witnessed my birth."

She thinks back. "That was when the gulper got you..."

"Close." Acton grins his cold eyeless grin, puts an arm around her. "Actually, the gulper sort of catalyzed it, if I remember. Think of it as a midwife."

An image pops into her mind: Acton in Medical, vivisecting himself.

"Fine-tuning," she says.

"Uh huh." He gives her a squeeze. "And I've got you to thank for it. You gave me the idea."

"Me?"

"You were my mother, Len. And my father was this spastic little shrimp that ended up way over its head. He died before I was born, actually: I killed him. You weren't very happy about that."

Clarke shakes her head. "You're not making sense."

"You telling me you haven't noticed the change? You telling me I'm the same person I was when I came down?"

"I don't know," she says. "Maybe I've just gotten to know you better."

"Maybe. Maybe I have too. I don't know, Len, I just seem more...
awake
now, I guess. I see things differently. You must have noticed."

"Yeah, but only when you're—"

Outside.

"You did something to your inhibitors," she whispers.

"Reduced the dosage a bit."

She grasps his arm. "Karl, those chemicals keep you from spazzing out every time you go outside. You fuck with this stuff, you're risking a seizure as soon as the 'lock floods."

"I
have
been fucking with it, Lenie. You see any change in me that isn't an improvement?"

She doesn't answer.

"It's all about action potential," he tells her. "Your nerves have to build up a certain charge before they can fire—"

"And at this depth they'd fire all the time, Karl, please—"

"Shh." He lays a gentle finger on her lips but she brushes it away, suddenly angry.

"I'm serious, Karl. Without those drugs your nerves short-circuit, you burn out, I
know
—"

"You only know what they tell you," he snaps. "Why don't you try working things out yourself for once?"

She falls silent, stung by his disapproval. A space opens between them on the pallet.

"I'm not a fool, Lenie," Acton says, more quietly. "I just reduced the settings a bit. Five percent. Now, when I go outside it takes a bit less of a stimulus for my nerves to fire, that's all. It...it wakes you up, Len; I'm more aware of things, I'm more alive somehow."

She watches him, unspeaking.

"Of course they
say
it's dangerous," he says. "They're scared shitless of you already. You think they're going to give you even more of an edge?"

"They're not scared of us, Karl."

"They should be." His arm goes back around her. "Wanna try it?"

It's as though she's suddenly outside, still naked. "No."

"There's nothing to worry about, Len. I've already done the guinea pig work on myself. Open up to me and I could make the adjustments myself, it'd take ten minutes."

"I'm not up for it, Karl. Not yet, anyway. Maybe one of the others is."

He shakes his head. "They don't trust me."

"You can't blame them."

"I don't." He grins, showing teeth as sharp and white as eyecaps. "But even if they did trust me, they wouldn't do anything unless you thought it was okay."

She looks at him. "Why not?"

"You're in charge here, Len."

"Bullshit. They never told you that."

"They didn't have to. It's obvious."

"I've been down here longer than them. So's Lubin. That doesn't matter to anyone."

Acton frowns briefly. "No, I don't think it does. But you're still leader of the pack, Len. Head wolf. A-fucking-kayla."

Clarke shakes her head. She searches her memory for something, anything, that would contradict Acton's absurd claim. She comes up empty.

She feels a little sick inside.

He gives her a little squeeze. "Tough luck, lover. I guess the clothes don't fit so well after being a career victim your whole life, eh?"

Clarke stares at the deck.

"Think about it, anyway," Acton whispers in her ear. "I guarantee you'll feel twice as alive as you do now."

"That happens anyway," Clarke reminds him. "Whenever I go outside. I don't need to screw up my internals for that."
Not those internals, anyway.

"This is different," he insists.

She looks at him and smiles, and hopes he doesn't push it.
How can he expect me to let him cut me open like that?
she wonders, and then wonders if maybe someday she will, if the fear of losing him might somehow grow large enough to force her other fears into submission. It wouldn't be the first time.

Twice as alive, Acton says. Hiding behind her smile, Clarke considers: twice as much of her life. Not a great prospect, so far.

* * *

There's a light from behind; it chases her shadow out along the seabed. She can't remember how long it's been there. She feels a momentary chill—

—
Fischer?—

—
before common sense sets in. Gerry Fischer wouldn't use a headlamp.

"Lenie?"

She revolves on her own axis, sees a silhouette hovering a few meters away. Cyclopean light glares from its forehead. Clarke hears a subvocal buzz, the corrupted equivalent of Brander clearing his throat. "Judy said you were out here," he explains.

"Judy." She means it as a question, but her vocoder loses the intonation.

"Yeah. She sort of, keeps tabs on you sometimes."

Clarke considers that a moment. "Tell her I'm harmless."

"It's not like that," he buzzes. "I think she just ... worries..."

Clarke feels muscles twitching at the corners of her mouth. She thinks she might be smiling.

"So I guess we're on shift," she says, after a moment.

The headlight bobs up and down. "Right. A bunch of clams need their asses scraped. More skilled labor."

She stretches, weightless. "Okay. Let's go."

"Lenie..."

She looks up at him.

"Why do you come— I mean, why
here
?" Brander's headlight sweeps the bottom, comes to rest on an outcropping of bone and rotted flesh. A skeletal smile stitches its way across the lit circle. "Did you kill it, or something?"

"Yeah, I—" She falls silent, realizing:
He means the whale.

"Nah," she says instead. "It just died on its own."

* * *

Of course she wakes up alone. They still try to sleep together sometimes, after sex has made them too lazy to go outside. But the bunk is too small. The most they can manage is a sort of diagonal slouch: feet on the floor, necks bent up against the bulkhead, Acton cradling her like a living hammock. If they're unlucky they really do fall asleep like that. It takes hours to get the kinks out afterwards. Way more trouble than it's worth.

So she wakes up alone. But she misses him anyway.

It's early. The schedules handed down from the GA are increasingly irrelevant — circadian rhythms lose their way in the incessant darkness, fall slowly out of phase — but the rubbery timetable that remains leaves hours before her shift starts. Lenie Clarke is awake in the middle of the night. It seems like a stupid and obvious thing to say, months from the nearest sunrise, but right now it seems especially true.

In the corridor she turns for a moment in the direction of his cubby before she remembers. He's never in there any more. He's never even inside, unless he's eating or working or being with her. He hasn't slept in his quarters almost since they got involved. He's getting almost as bad as Lubin.

Caraco is sitting silently in the lounge, unmoving, obeying her own inner clock. She looks up as Clarke crosses to Comm.

"He went out about an hour ago," she says softly.

Sonar picks him up fifty meters southeast, barely echoing above the bottom clutter. Clarke heads for the ladder.

"He showed us something the other day," Caraco says after her. "Ken and me."

Clarke looks back.

"A smoker, way off in one corner of the Throat. It had this weird fluted vent, and it made singing sounds, almost..."

"Mmm."

"He really wanted us to know about it, for some reason. He was really excited. He's — he's kind of strange out there, Lenie..."

"Judy," Clarke says neutrally, "Why are you telling me this?"

Caraco looks away. "Sorry. I didn't mean anything."

Clarke starts down the ladder.

"Just be careful, okay?" Caraco calls after her.

He's curled up when Clarke reaches him, knees tucked under his chin, floating a few centimeters above a stone garden. His eyes are open, of course. She reaches out, touches him through two layers of reflex copolymer.

He barely stirs. His vocoder emits sporadic ticking noises.

Lenie Clarke curls herself around him. In a womb of freezing sea water, they sleep on until morning.

I won't give in.

It would be so easy. She could live out there, stay the fuck away from this creaking eggshell except to eat and bathe and do whatever parts of her job demand an atmosphere. She could spend her whole life flying across the seabed. Lubin does. Brander and Caraco and even Nakata are starting to.

Lenie Clarke knows she doesn't belong in here. None of them do.

But at the same time, she's scared of what
outside
might do to her.
I could end up like Fischer. It would be so easy to just— slip away. If a hot seep or mud slide didn't get me first.

Lately she's been valuing her own life quite a lot. Maybe that means she's losing it. What kind of a rifter cares about living? But there it is: the rift is starting to scare her.