Peter Watts: Beyond the Rift

“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 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 was 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.

Ballard was right again , she realizes. Untwisted, we’d be of no use at all…

But she doesn’t really mind. She won’t be going back.

I’m quite a cheerful guy in person. Apparently people are surprised by this.

I don’t know what they were expecting: Some aging goth in eyeliner and black leather, maybe. A wannabe hipster born a generation out of synch. But insofar as I’m known at all, I seem to be known as The Guy Who Writes The Depressing Stories. My favorite thumbnail of that sentiment comes from James Nicoll—“Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts”—but the dude’s hardly alone in his opinion. While mulling over what to put in this essay I did a quick Google search for the descriptors commonly applied to my writing. I list a few for illustrative purposes:

Brutal

Dark (frequently “unrelentingly” so)

Paranoid

Nightmarish

Relentless

The blackest depths of the human psyche

Ugly

Savage

Misanthropic

Dystopian

Those last two get used a lot . Googling my name in conjunction with misanthropy and its variants nets around ten thousand hits; “Peter Watts AND dystopian OR dystopic” returns almost 150,000 (although presumably, not all of them can be about me).

I submit that this is a serious mischaracterization.

Harlan Ellison opened one of his collections [2] 1 Deathbird Stories , if you must know. with a hyperbolic Author’s Warning about the emotional distress you risked if you read the whole book in a single sitting. That is not me. I would not pull that shit on you—because quite honestly, I don’t think my stuff is especially depressing.

Look at the stories in this volume. “The Things” is fan fiction, an homage to one of my favorite movies and also—to my own surprise—a rumination on the missionary impulse. “Nimbus” is pure unresearched brain fart: an off-the-cuff fantasy seeded by a former girlfriend who looked out the window one day and said, Wow, those thunderclouds almost look alive . “The Eyes of God” asks whether we should define a monster by its impulses, or its actions. And “The Island” started out as a raspberry blown at all those lazy-ass writers who fall back on stargates to deal with the distance issue. None of these stories focuses on dystopia in the sense that, say, John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up does.

There’s wonder here, too. A diaphanous life-form big enough to envelop a star; mermaids soaring through luminous nightscapes on the ocean floor; a misguided Thing whose evolutionary biology redeems Lamarck. Even the idea of a vast, slow intelligence in the clouds has a certain Old Testament beauty to it. Whether the stories themselves succeed is for you to judge—but the things they attempt to describe verge, to my mind at least, on the sublime.