Rifters 1 - Starfish Page 5

  "Don't you know anything?"

  "Sure I do, Lenie. I know you're hooked on your own pain, and so you go out there and keep daring the rift to kill you, and eventually it will, don't you see? That's why you shouldn't be here. That's why we have to get you back."

  Clarke stands up. "I'm not going back." She turns to the hatch.

  Ballard reaches out toward her. "Listen, you've got to stay and hear me out. There's more."

  Clarke looks down at her with complete indifference. "Thanks for your concern. But I don't have to stay. I can leave any time I want to."

  "You go out there now and you'll give everything away, they're watching us! Haven't you figured it out yet?" Ballard's voice is rising. "Listen, they knew about you! They were looking for someone like you! They've been testing us, they don't know yet what kind of person works out better down here, so they're watching and waiting to see who cracks first! This whole program is still experimental, can't you see that? Everyone they've sent down — you, me, Ken Lubin and Lana Cheung, it's all part of some cold-blooded test—"

  "And you're failing it," Clarke says softly. "I see."

  "They're using us, Lenie—don't go out there!"

  Ballard's fingers grasp at Clarke like the suckers of an octopus. Clarke pushes them away. She undogs the hatch and pushes it open. She hears Ballard rising behind her.

  "You're sick!" Ballard screams. Something smashes into the back of Clarke's head. She goes sprawling out into the corridor. One arm smacks painfully against a cluster of pipes as she falls.

  She rolls to one side and raises her arms to protect herself. But Ballard just steps over her and stalks into the lounge.

  I'm not afraid, Clarke notes, getting to her feet. She hit me, and I'm not afraid. Isn't that odd—

  From somewhere nearby, the sound of shattering glass.

  Ballard's shouting in the lounge. "The experiment's over! Come on out, you fucking ghouls!"

  Clarke follows the corridor, steps out of it. Pieces of the lounge mirror hang like great jagged stalactites in their frame. Splashes of glass litter the floor.

  On the wall, behind the broken mirror, a fisheye lens takes in every corner of the room.

  Ballard is staring into it. "Did you hear me? I'm not playing your stupid games any more! I'm through performing!"

  The quartzite lens stares back impassively.

  So you were right, Clarke muses. She remembers the sheet in Ballard's cubby. You figured it out, you found the pickups in your own cubby, and Ballard, my dear friend, you didn't tell me.

  How long have you known?

  Ballard looks around, sees Clarke. "You've got her fooled, all right," she snarls at the fisheye, "but she's a goddamned basket case! She's not even sane! Your little tests don't impress me one fucking bit!"

  Clarke steps toward her.

  "Don't call me a basket case," she says, her voice absolutely level.

  "That's what you are!" Ballard shouts. "You're sick! That's why you're down here! They need you sick, they depend on it, and you're so far gone you can't see it! You hide everything behind that — that mask of yours, and you sit there like some masochistic jellyfish and just take anything anyone dishes out—you ask for it—"

  That used to be true, Clarke realizes as her hands ball into fists. That's the strange thing. Ballard begins to back away; Clarke advances, step by step. It wasn't until I came down here that I learned that I could fight back. That I could win. The rift taught me that, and now Ballard has too—

  "Thank you," Clarke whispers, and hits Ballard hard in the face.

  Ballard goes over backwards, collides with a table. Clarke calmly steps forward. She catches a glimpse of herself in a glass icicle; her capped eyes seem almost luminous.

  "Oh Jesus," Ballard whimpers. "Lenie, I'm sorry."

  Clarke stands over her. "Don't be," she says. She sees herself as some sort of exploding schematic, each piece neatly labeled. So much anger in here, she thinks. So much hate. So much to take out on someone.

  She looks at Ballard, cowering on the floor.

  "I think," Clarke says, "I'll start with you."

  But her therapy ends before she can even get properly warmed up. A sudden noise fills the lounge, shrill, periodic, vaguely familiar. It takes a moment for Clarke to remember what it is. She lowers her foot.

  Over in the Communications cubby, the telephone is ringing.

  * * *

  Jeanette Ballard is going home today.

  For half an hour the 'scaphe has been dropping deeper into midnight. Now the Comm monitor shows it settling like a great bloated tadpole onto Beebe's docking assembly. Sounds of mechanical copulation reverberate and die. The overhead hatch drops open.

  Ballard's replacement climbs down, already mostly 'skinned, staring impenetrably from eyes without pupils. His gloves are off; his 'skin is open up to the forearms. Clarke sees the faint scars running along his wrists, and smiles a bit inside.

  Was there another Ballard up there, waiting, she wonders, in case I had been the one who didn't work out?

  Out of sight down the corridor, a hatch hisses open. Ballard appears in shirtsleeves, one eye swollen shut, carrying a single suitcase. She seems about to say something, but stops when she sees the newcomer. She looks at him for a moment. She nods briefly. She climbs into the belly of the 'scaphe without a word.

  Nobody calls down to them. There are no salutations, no morale-boosting small talk. Perhaps the crew have been briefed. Perhaps they've figured it out on their own. The docking hatch swings shut. With a final clank, the 'scaphe disengages.

  Clarke walks across the lounge and looks into the camera. She reaches between mirror fragments and rips its power line from the wall.

  We don't need this any more, she thinks, and she knows that somewhere far away, someone agrees.

  She and the newcomer appraise each other with dead white eyes.

  "I'm Lubin," he says at last.

  Housecleaning

  So. They say you're a beater.

  Lubin stands in front of her, his duffel bag at his feet. Slavic; dark hair, pale skin, a face planed out by an underskilled woodworker. One thick eyebrow shading both eyes. Not tall— a hundred and eighty centimeters, maybe— but solid.

  You look like a beater.

  Scars. Not just on the wrists, on the face too. Very faint, a webwork echo of old injuries. Too subtle for deliberate decoration, even if Lubin's tastes run to that, but too obvious for reconstructive work; medical technology learned how to erase such telltales decades ago. Unless— unless the injuries were really bad.

  Is that it? Did something chew your face down to the bone, a long time ago?

  Lubin reaches down, picks up his bag. His covered eyes betray nothing.

  I've known beaters in my day. You fit. Sort of.

  "Any preference which cubby I take?" he asks. It's strange, hearing that voice coming out of a face like his. It sounds almost pleasant.

  Clarke shakes her head. "I'm second on the right. Take any of the others."

  He steps past her. Daggers of reflective glass protrude from the edges of the far wall; within them, Lubin's fractured image disappears into the corridor at Clarke's back. She moves across the lounge to that jagged wall. I should really clean this up one of these days...

  She used to like the way the mirror's worked since Ballard's adjustments. The jigsaw reflections seem more creative, somehow. More impressionistic. Now, though, they're beginning to wear on her. Maybe it's time for another change.

  A piece of Ken Lubin stares at her from the wall. Without thinking, she drives her fist into the glass. A shower of fragments tinkles to the floor.

  You could be a beater. Just try it. Just fucking try it.

  "Oh," Lubin says, behind her. "I—"

  There's still enough mirror left to check; her face is free of any expression. She turns to face him.

  "I'm sorry if I startled you," Lubin says quietly, and withdraws.

  He does seem sorry, at that.


  So. You're not a beater. Clarke leans against the bulkhead. At least, not my kind of beater. She's not exactly sure how she knows. There's some vital chemistry missing between them. Lubin, she thinks, is a very dangerous man. Just not to her.

  She smiles to herself. Beating means never having to say you're sorry.

  Until it's too late, of course.

  * * *

  She's tired enough of sharing the cubby with herself. Sharing it with someone else is something she likes even less.

  Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk and scans the length of her own body. Past her toes, another Lenie Clarke stares coolly back. The jumbled topography of the forward bulkhead frames her reflected face like a tabletop junkyard turned on edge.

  The camera behind that mirror must see the same thing she does, but distorted around the edges. Clarke figures on a wide-angle lens; the GA wouldn't want to leave the corners out of range. What's the point of running an experiment if you can't keep tabs on your subject animals?

  She wonders if anyone's watching her now. Probably not; at least, nobody human. They'll have some machine, tireless and dispassionate, something that watches with relentless attention as she works or shits or gets herself off. It will be programmed to call flesh and blood if she does anything interesting.

  Interesting. Who defines that parameter? Is it strictly in keeping with the nature of the experiment, or has someone programmed more personal tastes on the side? Does anyone else get off when Lenie Clarke does?

  She twists on the bed and faces the headboard bulkhead. A spaghetti bundle of optical filaments erupts from the floor beside her pallet and crawls up the middle of the wall, disappearing into the ceiling; the seismic feeds, on their way to the communications cubby. The air conditioning inlet sighs across her cheek, just to one side. Behind it, a metal iris catches strips of light sectioned by the grating, ready to sphincter shut the moment delta-p exceeds some critical number of millibars per second. Beebe is a mansion with many rooms, each potentially self-isolating in case of emergency.

  Clarke lies back on the bunk and lets her fingers drop to the deck. The telemetry cartridge on the floor is almost dry now, fine runnels of salt crusting its surface as the seawater evaporates. It's a basic broad-spectrum model, studded with half a dozen senses: seismic, temperature, flow, the usual sulfates and organics. Sensor heads disfigure its housing like the spikes on a mace.

  Which is why it's here, now.

  She closes her fingers around the carrying handle, lifts the cartridge off the deck. Heavy. Neutrally buoyant in seawater, of course, but 9.5 kilos in atmosphere according to the specs. Mostly pressure casing, very tough. An active smoker at five hundred atmospheres wouldn't touch it.

  Maybe it's a bit of overkill, sending it up against one lousy mirror. Ballard started the job with her bare hands, after all.

  Odd that they didn't make them shatterproof.

  But convenient.

  Clarke sits up, hefting the cartridge. Her reflection looks back at her; its eyes, blank but not empty, seem somehow amused.

  * * *

  "Ms. Clarke? You okay?" It's Lubin. "I heard—"

  "I'm fine," she says to the sealed hatch. There's glass all over the cubby. One stubborn shard, half a meter long, hangs in its frame like a loose tooth. She reaches out (mirror fragments tumble off her thighs) and taps it with one hand. It crashes to the deck and shatters.

  "Just housecleaning," she calls.

  Lubin says nothing. She hears him move away up the corridor.

  He's going to work out fine. It's been a few days now and he's been scrupulous about keeping his distance. There's no sexual chemistry at all, nothing to set them at each other's throats. Whatever Ken Lubin did to Lana Cheung— whatever those two did to each other— won't be an issue here. Lubin's tastes are too specific.

  For that matter, so are Clarke's.

  She stands up, head bent to avoid the metal encrustations on the ceiling. Glass crunches under her feet. The bulkhead behind the mirror, freshly exposed, looks oily in the fluorescent light; a ribbed gray face with only two distinguishing features. The first is a spherical lens, smaller than a fingernail, tucked up in one corner. Clarke pulls it from its socket, holds it between thumb and forefinger for a second. A tiny glass eyeball. She drops it to the glittering deck.

  There's also a name, stamped into one of the alloy ribs: Hansen Fabrication.

  It's the first time she's seen see a brand name since she arrived here, except for the GA logos pressed into the shoulders of their diveskins. That seems odd, somehow. She checks the lightstrip running the length of the ceiling; white and featureless. An emergency hydrox tank next to the hatch: DOT test date, pressure specs, but no manufacturer.

  She doesn't know if she should attach any significance to this.

  Alone, now. Hatch sealed, surveillance ended — even her own reflection shattered beyond repair. For the first time, Lenie Clarke feels a sense of real safety here in the station's belly. She doesn't quite know what to do with it.

  Maybe I could let my guard down a bit. Her hands go to her face.

  At first she thinks she's gone blind; the cubby seems so dark to her uncapped eyes, walls and furniture receding into mere suggestions of shadow. She remembers turning the lights down in increments in the days since Ballard's departure, darkening this room, darkening every other corner of Beebe Station. Lubin's been doing it too, although they never talk about it.

  For the first time she wonders at their actions. It doesn't make sense; eyecaps compensate automatically for changes in ambient light, always serve up the same optimum intensity to the retina. Why choose to live in a darkness you don't even perceive?

  She nudges the lights up a bit; the cubby brightens. Bright colors jar the eye against a background of gray on gray. The hydrox tank reflects fluorescent orange; readouts wink red and blue and green; the handle on the bulkhead locker is a small exclamation of yellow. She can't remember the last time she noticed color; eyecaps draw the faintest images from darkness, but most of the spectrum gets lost in the process. Only now, when the lights are up, can color reassert itself.

  She doesn't like it. It seems raw and out of place down here. Clarke puts her eyecaps back in, dims the lights to their usual minimal glow. The bulkhead fades to a comforting wash of blue pastels.

  Just as well. Shouldn't get too careless anyway.

  In a couple of days Beebe will be crawling with a full staff. She doesn't want to get used to exposing herself.

  * * *

  Rome

  Neotenous

  It didn't look human at first. It didn't even look alive. It looked like a pile of dirty rags someone had thrown against the base of the Cambie pylon. Gerry Fischer wouldn't have looked twice if the skytrain hadn't hissed overhead at exactly the right moment, strobing the ground with segmented strips of light.

  He stared. Eyes, flashing in and out of shadow, stared back.

  He didn't move until the train had slid away along its overhead track. The world fell back into muddy low contrast. The sidewalk. The strip of kudzu4 below the track, gray and suffocating under countless drizzlings of concrete dust. Feeble cloudbank reflections of neon and laser from Commercial.

  And this thing with the eyes, this rag-pile against the pylon. A boy.

  A young boy.

  This is what you do when you really love someone, Shadow always said. After all, the kid could die out here.

  "Are you okay?" he said at last.

  The pile of rags shifted a little, and whimpered.

  "It's okay. I won't hurt you."

  "I'm lost," it said, in a very strange voice.

  Fischer took a step forward. “You a ref?” The nearest refugee strip was over a hundred kilometers away, and well guarded, but sometimes someone would get out.

  The eyes swung from side to side: no.

  But then, Fischer thought, what else would he say? Maybe he’s afraid I’ll turn him in.

  "Where do you live?" he asked, and listened clos
ely to the answer:

  "Orlando."

  No hint of Asian or Hindian in that voice. Back when Fischer was a kid his mom would always tell him that disasters were color-blind, but he knew better now. The kid sounded N’Am; not a ref, then. Which meant there would probably be people looking for him.

  Which, in a way, was too—

  Stop it.

  "Orlando,” he repeated aloud. “You are lost. Where's your mom and dad?"

  "Hotel." The rag pile detached itself from the pylon and shuffled closer. "Vanceattle." The words came out half-whistled, as though the kid was speaking through his sinuses. Maybe he had one of those, those — Fischer groped for the words — cleft palates, or something.

  "Vanceattle? Which one?"

  Shrug.

  "Don't you have a watch?"

  "Lost it."

  You've got to help him, Shadow said.

  "Well, um, look." Fischer rubbed at his temples. "I live close by. We can call from there."

  There weren't that many Vanceattles in the lower mainland. The police wouldn't have to find out. And even if they did, they wouldn't charge him. Not for this. What was he supposed to do, leave the kid for body parts?

  "I'm Gerry," Fischer said.

  "Kevin."

  Kevin looked about nine or ten. Old enough that he should know how to use a public terminal, anyway. But there was something wrong with him. He was too tall and skinny, and his limbs tangled up in themselves when he walked. Maybe he was brain damaged. Maybe one of those nanotech babies that went bad. Or maybe his mother just spent too much time outdoors when she was pregnant.

  Fischer led Kevin up to his two-room timeshare. Kevin dropped onto the couch without asking. Fischer checked the fridge: root beer. The boy took it with a nervous smile. Fischer sat down beside him and put a reassuring hand on Kevin's lap.

  The expression drained from Kevin's face as though someone had pulled a plug.

  Go on, Shadow said. He's not complaining, is he?