Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  A NICHE

  FIREBRAND

  THE THINGS

  COLLATERAL

  SUNFLOWER SEQUENCE

  THE ISLAND

  HOTSHOT

  GIANTS

  THE COLONEL

  COLONY CREATURE

  THE SECOND COMING OF JASMINE FITZGERALD

  AMBASSADOR

  BETHLEHEM

  FLESH MADE WORD

  FRACTALS

  A WORD FOR HEATHENS

  HILLCREST V. VELIKOVSKY

  HOME

  MALAK

  NIMBUS

  REPEATING THE PAST

  MAYFLY

  BULK FOOD

  THE EYES OF GOD

  NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “Firebrand,” Copyright © by Peter Watts: Originally published in Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Stephen Cass Technology Review, Inc. (2013)

  “The Things,” copyright © 2010 by Peter Watts. First appeared in Clarkesworld #40, January 2010.

  “The Island,” copyright © 2009 by Peter Watts. First appeared in The New Space Opera 2, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan (HarperCollins: New York).

  “The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald,” copyright © 1998 by Peter Watts. First appeared in Divine Realms: Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Susan MacGregor (Turnstone Press: Winnipeg, Canada).

  “A Word for Heathens,” copyright © 2004 by Peter Watts. First appeared in ReVisions, edited by Julie E. Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel (DAW: New York).

  “Home,” copyright © 2000 by Peter Watts. First appeared in On Spec #36, Spring 1999, Vol. 11 No. 1.

  “The Eyes of God,” copyright © 2008 by Peter Watts. First appeared in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2, edited by George Mann (Solaris: Nottingham, England).

  “Flesh Made Word,” copyright © 1994 by Peter Watts. First appeared in Prairie Fire Magazine Vol. 15, #2.

  “Nimbus,” copyright © 1994 by Peter Watts. First appeared in On Spec #17, Summer 1994, Vol. 6 No. 2.

  “Mayfly,” copyright © 2005 by Peter Watts and Derryl Murphy. First appeared in Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Science Fiction, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Geoff Ryman (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy: Calgary, Canada).

  “Ambassador,” copyright © 2002 by Peter Watts. First appeared in Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing: Calgary, Canada).

  “Hillcrest v. Velikovsky,” copyright © 2008 by Peter Watts. First appeared in Nature #454, 550, July 23, 2008.

  “Repeating the Past,” copyright © 2007 by Peter Watts. First appeared in Nature #450, 760, November 28, 2007.

  “A Niche,” copyright © 1994 by Peter Watts. First appeared in Tesseracts 3, edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott (Porcépic Books: Victoria, British Columbia).

  “Hotshot,” copyright © 2014 by Peter Watts.

  “Giants,” copyright © by Peter Watts. First published in Extreme Planets, edited by David Conyers, David Kernot, and Jeff Harris, 2014.

  “Collateral,” copyright © 2014 by Peter Watts. Originally published in Upgraded, edited by Neil Clarke.

  “The Colonel,” copyright © 2014 by Peter Watts.

  “Colony Creature,” copyright © by Peter Watts.

  “Bethlehem,” copyright © 1996 by Peter Watts. First appeared in Tesseracts 5.

  “Fractals, or: Reagan Assured Gorbachev of Help Against Aliens,” copyright © 1995 by Peter Watts.

  “Malak,” by Peter Watts. Copyright © 2011 by Peter Watts. First published in Engineering Infinity, Solaris Book.

  “Bulk Food,” by Peter Watts and Laurie Channer. First published in On Spec, Fall 2000.

  Stories available at: www.rifters.com

  Version 4.2, March 2017, ARGON

  BETHLEHEM

  AND OTHERS

  A Niche

  WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT IN BEEBE STATION, you can hear the metal groan.

  Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometers of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the Rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge and she hears Beebe’s armor shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is Physics.

  How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come down here? But she already knows the answer.

  She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life under control. She almost seems happy down here.

  Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when you’re three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.

  It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what they’ve done to her.

  It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where her left lung used to be. She’s so acclimated to the chronic ache in her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves, that she’s scarcely aware of them any more. She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

  Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in Beebe; they’re supposed to increase the apparent size of one’s personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn’t help. She clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering her eyes like smooth white cataracts.

  She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the usual air of confidence.

  Ballard stands up. “Ready to go?”

  “You’re in charge,” Clarke says.

  “Only on paper.” Ballard smiles. “No pecking order down here, Lenie. As far as I’m concerned, we’re equals.” After two days on the rift Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation.

  It doesn’t always seem real.

  Something hits Beebe from the outside.

  Ballard’s smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud through the station’s titanium skin.

  “It takes a while to get used to,” Ballard says, “doesn’t it?” And again.

  “I mean, that sounds big—”

  “Maybe we should turn the lights off,” Clarke suggests. She knows they won’t. Beebe’s exterior floodlights burn around the clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can’t see it from inside—Beebe has no windows— but somehow they draw comfort from the knowledge of that unseen fire— Thud!

  —most of the time.

  “Remember back in training?” Ballard says over the sound, “When they told us that the fish were usually so—small…”

  Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a while. There’s no other sound.

  “It must’ve gotten tired,” Ballard says. “You’d think they’d figure it out.” She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.

  Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender. She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one? The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into jelly. Any time.

  Better to face i
t outside, where she knows what’s coming. All she can do in here is wait for it to happen.

  • • •

  GOING OUTSIDE IS LIKE DROWNING, once a day.

  Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector; the ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.

  When she catches her breath, and loses it.

  When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.

  It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.

  She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream. The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke falls writhing into the abyss.

  • • •

  THEY COME OUT OF THE FREEZING DARKNESS, headlights blazing, into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand over twenty meters high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled structures in perpetual twilight.

  They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided them here.

  “I’ll never get used to it,” Ballard grates in a caricature of her usual voice.

  Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. “Thirty four Centigrade.” The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so wrong to talk without breathing.

  Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light. After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.

  There’s so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes; seawater boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful centimeters each year. Human machinery does not make energy, here at Dragon’s Throat; it merely hangs on and steals some insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.

  Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of boulders, crimson worms three meters long crowd the seabed between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulfur, lace the water with milky veils.

  The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.

  It doesn’t sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harp string is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming, through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:

  “LENIE—”

  Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth that seems impossibly huge.

  Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares into a scaly black face half a meter across. Some tiny dispassionate part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails. How can it see me? she wonders.

  Then the pain reaches her.

  She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.

  She goes limp. Please get it over with if you’re going to kill me just please God make it quick— She feels the urge to vomit, but the ‘skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won’t let her.

  She shuts out the pain. She’s had plenty of practice. She pulls inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic. There’s another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife —you know, a knife, like the one you’ve got strapped to your leg and completely forgot about—and suddenly the monster is gone, its grip broken.

  Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It’s like operating a marionette. Her head turns. She sees Ballard locked in combat with something as big as she is. Only — Ballard is tearing it to pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with smoke-trails of suspended gore.

  The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass. Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.

  Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any trouble. I’ve had worse, she thinks.

  Then: Why am I still alive?

  Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like photophores themselves.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ballard says in a distorted whisper. “Lenie? You okay?”

  Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But surprisingly, she feels intact. “Yeah.”

  And if not, she knows, it’s her own damn fault. She just lay there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.

  She’s always asking for it.

  Back in the airlock, the water recedes around them. And within them; Clarke’s stolen breath, released at last, races back along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.

  Ballard splits the face seal on her ‘skin and her words tumble into the wetroom. “Jesus. Jesus! I don’t believe it! My God, did you see that thing! They get so huge around here!” She passes her hands across her face; her corneal caps come off, milky hemispheres dropping from enormous hazel eyes. “And to think they’re usually just a few centimeters long…”

  She starts to strip down, unzipping her ‘skin along the forearms, talking the whole time. “And yet it was almost fragile, you know? Hit it hard enough and it just came apart! Jesus!” Ballard always removes her uniform indoors. Clarke suspects she’d rip the recycler out of her own thorax if she could, throw it in a corner with the ‘skin and the eyecaps until the next time it was needed.

  Maybe she’s got her other lung in her cabin, Clarke muses. Maybe she keeps it in a jar, and she stuffs it back into her chest at night… She feels a bit dopey; probably just an aftereffect of the neuroinhibitors her implants put out whenever she’s outside. Small price to pay to keep my brain from shorting out— I really shouldn’t mind…

  Ballard peels her ‘skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyser intake pokes out through her ribcage.

  Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard’s flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again.

  Prickly numbness is spreading, leaking through her shoulder into her chest and neck. Clarke shakes her head, once, to clear it.

  She sags suddenly, against the hatchway.

  Am I in shock? Am I fainting?

  “I mean—” Ballard stops, looks at Clarke with an expression of sudden concern. “Jesus, Lenie. You look terrible. You shouldn’t have told me you were okay if you weren’t.”

  The tingling reaches the base of Clarke’s skull. “I’m — okay,” she says. “Nothing broke. I’m just bruised.”

  “Garbage. Take off your ‘skin.”

  Clarke straightens, with effort. The numbness recedes a bit.

  “It’s nothing I can’t take care of myself.” Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.

  Ballard steps forward without a word and unseals the ‘skin around Clarke’s forearm. She peels back the material and exposes an ugly purple bruise. She looks at Clarke with one raised eyebrow.

  “Just a bruise,” Clarke says. “I’ll take care of it, really. Thanks anyway.” She pulls her han
d away from Ballard’s ministrations.

  Ballard looks at her for a moment. She smiles ever so slightly.

  “Lenie,” she says, “there’s no need to feel embarrassed.”

  “About what?”

  “You know. Me having to rescue you. You going to pieces when that thing attacked. It was perfectly understandable. Most people have a rough time adjusting. I’m just one of the lucky ones.”

  Right. You’ve always been one of the lucky ones, haven’t you? I know your kind, Ballard, you’ve never failed at anything…

  “You don’t have to feel ashamed about it,” Ballard reassures her.

  “I don’t,” Clarke says, honestly. She doesn’t feel much of anything any more. Just the tingling. And the tension. And a vague sort of wonder that she’s even alive.

  • • •

  THE BULKHEAD IS SWEATING.

  The deep sea lays icy hands on the metal and, inside, Clarke watches the humid atmosphere bead and run down the wall. She sits rigid on her bunk under dim fluorescent light, every wall of the cubby within easy reach. The ceiling is too low. The room is too narrow. She feels the ocean compressing the station around her.

  And all I can do is wait…

  The anabolic salve on her injuries is warm and soothing. Clarke probes the purple flesh of her arm with practiced fingers. The diagnostic tools in the Med cubby have vindicated her. She’s lucky, this time; bones intact, epidermis unbroken. She seals up her ‘skin, hiding the damage.

  She shifts on the pallet, turns to face the inside wall. Her reflection stares back at her through eyes like frosted glass. She watches the image, admires its perfect mimicry of each movement. Flesh and phantom move together, bodies masked, faces neutral.

  That’s me, she thinks. That’s what I look like now. She tries to read what lies behind that glacial facade. Am I bored, horny, upset? How to tell, with her eyes hidden behind those corneal opacities? She sees no trace of the tension she always feels. I could be terrified. I could be pissing in my ‘skin and no one would know.