Starfish (55 page)

"He. He told me the world was full of people who needed him a lot more than I did, and next time I wanted attention maybe I could do it in some way that didn't cost the taxpayer."

"S-shit. What an as—asshole." Joel's got the shakes again.

"Not really. He was right. And I never tried it again, so it must've worked." Clarke slips into the water. "I'm going to change the mix. You look like you're starting to spazz again."

"Len—"

But she's gone before he can finish.

She slips down to the bottom of the compartment, tweaks the valves she finds there. High pressure turns oxygen to poison; the deeper they go, the less of it that air-breathers can tolerate without going into convulsions. This is the second time she's had to lean out the mixture. By now, she and Joel are only breathing one percent O
₂
.

If he lives long enough, though, there'll be other things she can't control. Joel isn't equipped with rifter neuroinhibitors.

She has to go up and face him again. She's holding her breath, there's no point in switching on her electrolyser for a measly twenty or thirty seconds. She's tempted to do it anyway, tempted to just stay down here. He can't ask her as long as she stays down here. She's safe.

But of all the things she's been in her life, she's never had to admit to being a coward.

She surfaces. Joel's still staring at the hatch. He opens his mouth to speak.

"Hey, Joel," she says quickly, "you sure you don't want me to switch over? It really doesn't make sense for me to use your air when I don't have to."

He shakes his head. "I don't want to spend my last few minutes alive listening to a machine voice, Lenie. Please. Just— stay with me."

She looks away from him, and nods.

"Fuck, Lenie," he says. "I'm so
scared
."

"I know," she says softly.

"This waiting, it's just— God, Lenie, you wouldn't put a dog through this. Please."

She closes her eyes, waiting.

"Pop the hatch, Lenie."

She shakes her head. "Joe, I couldn't even kill
myself
. Not when I was eleven. Not— not even last night. How can I—"

"My legs are wrecked, Len. I can't feel anything else any more. I c-can barely even talk. Please."

"Why did they do this to us, Joel? What's going on?"

He doesn't answer.

"What has them so scared? Why are they so—"

He moves.

He lurches up, falls sideways. His arms reach out; one hand catches the edge of the hatch. The other catches the wheel in its center.

His legs twist grotesquely underneath him. He doesn't seem to notice.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I couldn't—"

He fumbles, get both hands on the wheel. "No problem."

"Oh God. Joel—"

He stares at the hatch. His fingers clench the wheel.

"You know something, Lenie Clarke?" There's cold in his voice, and fear, but there's a sudden hard determination there too.

She shakes her head.
I don't know anything.

"I would have really liked to fuck you," he says.

She doesn't know what to say to that.

He spins the hatch. Pulls the lever.

The hatch falls into
Forcipiger
. The ocean falls after it. Somehow, Lenie Clarke's body has prepared itself when she wasn't looking.

His body jams back into hers. He might be struggling. Or it could just be the rush of the Pacific, playing with him. She doesn't know if he's alive or dead. But she holds onto him, blindly, the ocean spinning them around, until there isn't any doubt.

Its atmosphere gone,
Forcipiger
is accelerating. Lenie Clarke takes Joel's body by the hands, and draws it out through the hatch. It follows her into viscous space. The 'scaphe spins away below them, fading in moments.

With a gentle push, she sets the body free. It begins to drift slowly towards the surface. She watches it go.

Something touches her from behind. She can barely feel it through her 'skin.

She turns.

A slender, translucent tentacle wraps softly around her wrist. It fades away into a distance utterly black to most, slate gray to Lenie Clarke. She brings it to her. Its swollen tip fires sticky threads at her fingers.

She brushes it aside, follows the tentacle back through the water. She encounters other tentacles on the way, feeble, attenuate things, barely twitching against the currents. They all lead back to something long, and thick, and shadowy. She circles in.

A great column of writhing, wormlike stomachs, pulsing with faint bioluminescence.

Revolted, she smashes at it with one clenched fist. It reacts immediately, sheds squirming pieces of itself that flare and burn like fat fireflies. The central column goes instantly dark, pulling into itself. It pulses, descends in spurts, slinking away under cover of its own discarded flesh. Clarke ignores the sacrificial tidbits and pursues the main body. She hits it again. Again. The water fills with pulsing dismembered decoys. She ignores them all, keeps tearing at the central column. She doesn't stop until there's nothing left but swirling fragments.

Joel. Joel Kita. She realizes that she liked him. She barely knew him, but she liked him just the same.

And they just killed him.

They killed all of us
, she thinks.
Deliberately. They meant to. They didn't even tell us why.

It's all their fault. All of it.

Something ignites in Lenie Clarke. Everyone who's ever hit her, or raped her, or patted her on the head and said
don't worry, everything will be fine
comes to her in that moment. Everyone who ever pretended to be her friend. Everyone who pretended to be her lover. Everyone who ever used her, and stood on her back, and told each other they were so much better than she was. Everyone, feeding off her every time they so much as turned on the fucking lights.

They're all waiting, back on shore. They're just
asking
for it.

It was a little bit like this back when she beat the shit out of Jeanette Ballard. But that was nothing, that was just a taste of coming attractions.
This
time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand.

Karl Acton's fear has come to pass. Lenie Clarke has been activated.

She doesn't know why the GA is so terrified of her. She only knows that they've stopped at nothing to keep her from getting back to the mainland. With any luck, they think they've succeeded. With any luck, they're not worried any more.

That'll change. Lenie Clarke swims down and east, towards her own resurrection.

Actually, you might be surprised at how much of this stuff I
didn't
make up. If you're interested in finding out about background details, the following references will get you started.
Starfish
deliberately twists some of the facts, and I've probably made a hundred other errors through sheer ignorance, but that's something else this list is good for: it gives you the chance to check up on me.

I'm betting most of you don't care that much.

Deepwater biology

The deep-sea creatures I described pretty much as they exist; if you don't believe me read "Light in the Ocean's Midwaters", by B. H. Robison, in the July 1995 Scientific American. Or
Deep-Sea Biology
by J.D. Gage & P.A. Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Or
Abyss
by C.P. Idyll (Crowell Co., 1971); it's old, but it's the book that hooked me back in Grade 9. Although the fish we drag up from great depths are generally pretty small in real life, gigantism is not unheard of among some species of deepwater fish. Back in the 1930s, for example, the deepwater pioneer William Beebe claimed to have spotted a seven-foot viperfish from a bathysphere.

I found lots of interesting stuff in
The Sea - Ideas and Observations on Progress in the Study of the Seas. Vol. 7: Deep-Sea Biology
(G. T. Rowe, ed., 1983 from John Wiley and Sons). In particular, the chapter on biochemical and physiological adaptations of deep-sea animals (by Somero
et al.
)—as well as
Biochemical Adaptation
, a 1983 book from Princeton University Press (Hochachka and Somero, Eds.)—got me started on deep-sea physiology, the effects of high pressure on neuronal firing thresholds, and the adaptation of enzymes to high pressure/temperature regimes.

Spreading-zone tectonics/geology

A good layperson's introduction to the coastal geology of the Pacific northwest, including a discussion of midocean ridges such as Juan de Fuca, can be found in
Cycles of Rock and Water
by K. A. Brown (1993, HarperCollins West). "The Quantum Event of Oceanic Crustal Accretion: Impacts of Diking at Mid-Ocean Ridges" (J.R. Delaney
et al
.,
Science
281, pp222-230, 1998) nicely conveys the nastiness and frequency of earthquakes and eruptions along the Juan de Fuca Rift, although it's a bit heavy on the technobabble.

The idea that the Pacific Northwest is overdue for a major earthquake is reviewed in "Giant Earthquakes of the Pacific Northwest", by R. D. Hyndman (
Scientific American
, Dec. 1995). "Forearc deformation and great subduction earthquakes: implications for Cascadia offshore earthquake potential" by McCaffrey and Goldfinger (
Science
v267, 1995) and "Earthquakes cannot be predicted" (Geller
et al.
,
Science
v275, 1997) discuss the issue in somewhat greater detail. I used to live quite happily in Vancouver. After reading these items, I moved to Toronto.

The absolute coolest source for up-to-the-minute information on hydrothermal vents, however, is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) web pages. Everything's there: raw survey data, research schedules, live maps, three-dimensional seaquake animations, and recent publications. To name but a few. Start at
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents
and go from there.

Psionics/Ganzfeld Effects

The rudimentary telepathy I describe actually made it into the peer-reviewed technical literature back in 1994. Check out
Does Psi Exist? Replicable evidence for an anomalous process of information transfer
by Bem and Honorton, pages 4-18 in Vol 15 of the
Psychological Bulletin
. They got statistical significance and everything. Speculations on the quantum nature of human consciousess come from the books of Roger Penrose,
The Emporer's New Mind
(Oxford University Press, 1989) and
Shadows of the Mind
(Oxford, 1994).

Smart gels

The smart gels that screw everything up were inspired by the research of Masuo Aizawa, a Professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, profiled in the August 1992 issue of
Discover
magazine. At that time, he'd got a few neurons hooked together into the precursors of simple logic gates. I shudder to think where he's got to now.

The application of neural nets to navigating through complex terrain is described in "Robocar" by B. Daviss (
Discover
, July 1992.), which describes work being done by Charles Thorpe of (where else) Carnegie-Mellon University.

ßehemoth

The theory that life originated in hydrothermal vents hails from "A hydrothermally precipitated catalytic iron sulphide membrane as a first step towards life", by M.J. Russel
et al.
(
Journal of Molecular Evolution
, v39, 1994). Throwaway bits on the evolution of life, including the viability of ribosomal RNA as an alternative genetic template, I cadged from "The origin of life on earth" by L.E. Orgel (
Scientific American
, October 1994). ßehemoth's symbiotic presence within the cells of deepwater fish steals from the work of Lynn Margulis, who first suggested that cellular organelles were once free-living organisms in their own right (an idea that went from heresy to canon in the space of about ten years). Once I'd stuck that idea into the book, I found vindication in "Parasites shed light on cellular evolution" (G. Vogel,
Science
275, p1422, 1997) and "Thanks to a parasite, asexual reproduction catches on" (M. Enserinck,
Science
275, p1743, 1997).