Peter Watts - Behemoth

"— to me?" Phong was saying.

Lubin looked down at him. "What?"

"What you do to me?"

"A lifter's on the way. You'll be in a medical facility by nightfall."

"I'm sorry," Phong said, and coughed. "They say I be dead by winter," he repeated in a weak voice.

"You will be," Lubin told him.

Clarke didn't make the call.

She'd had closer contact with Ricketts than anyone except the person who'd assaulted him, and she'd checked out clean. She was willing to bet that the people of Freeport were clean too.

She wasn't willing to bet that the trigger fingers would agree with her.

She knew the arguments. She knew the virtues of erring on the side of caution. She just didn't buy them, not when the people making those decisions sat in untouchable far-off towers adding columns of empty numbers and Bayesian probabilities. Maybe the experts were right, maybe the only people truly qualified to run the world were those without conscience—clear-eyed, rational, untroubled by the emotional baggage that the sight of piled bodies could induce in the unblessed. People weren't numbers, but maybe the only way to do the right thing was to act as if they were.

Maybe. She wasn't going to bet the town of Freeport on it, though.

They were nowhere close to a cure, according to the dispatches. There was nothing anyone could do for Ricketts except poke at him. Perhaps that would change at some point. Perhaps it would even happen before Seppuku killed him, although that seemed vanishingly unlikely. In the meantime, Lubin was good at his job—maybe a bit past his prime, but easily more than a match for a handful of infected ferals who didn't even know they were being hunted. If the Meatzarts needed live samples, Lubin was the man to provide them.

There was no need to feed this skinny kid into that system. Clarke had learned a few things about research protocols over the years: even after the cures are discovered, who bothers rehabilitating the lab rats?

Taka Ouellette, maybe. Clarke would have trusted her in an instant. But Clarke didn't know where she was or how to reach her. She certainly didn't trust the system to deliver Ricketts into her exceptional arms. And Ricketts, surprisingly, seemed content where he was. In fact, he seemed almost happy there. Maybe he'd forgotten the old days, or maybe he hadn't been very well-off even then. But by the time he'd fallen into Clarke's orbit he knew only the grubby, dying landscape upon which he expected to live his whole short life. Probably the most he'd dared hope for was to die in peace and alone in some sheltered ruin, before being torn apart for his clothes or the dirt in his pockets.

To be rescued from that place, to wake up in a gleaming submarine at the bottom of the sea—that must have seemed magical beyond dreams. Ricketts came from a life so grim that terminal exile on the ocean floor was actually a step up .

I could just let him die here , Clarke thought, and he'd be happier than he'd ever been in his life.

She kept her eyes open, of course. She wasn't stupid. Seppuku was afoot in the world, and Ricketts had vectored it all the way from Vermont. At the very least there was some thug with a stolen motorbike to worry about. She tested everyone that Miri swallowed, no matter what their complaint. She read encrypted dispatches intended only for those in the loop. She watched public broadcasts aimed at the ferals themselves, transmissions from high-tech havens in Boston and Augusta: weather, MI schedules, waiting times at the ßehemoth forts—incongruously, coding tips. She marveled that the castle-dwellers would dare present themselves this way, as if they could redeem themselves by sending public service bulletins to those they'd trampled in their own rush to safety.

She drove the back roads and checked derelict dwellings looking for business, for people too weak to seek her out. She queried her patients: did they know anyone who had come down with high fever, soreness in the joints, sudden weakness?

Nothing.

She thought of her friend, Achilles Desjardins. She wondered if he was still alive, or if he had died when Spartacus rewired his brain. The circuits that made him who he was had been changed, after all. He had been changed. Maybe he'd been changed so much that he didn't even exist any more. Maybe he was a whole new being, living in Desjardins's head, running off his memories.

One thing seemed to have stayed the same, though. Desjardins was still one of the trigger fingers, still entrusted to kill the many to save the multitude. Maybe someday—maybe soon—he'd have to do that here. Lenie Clarke realized as much: she might be wrong. Extreme measures might prove necessary.

Not yet, though. If Seppuku gestated in the ghost town of Freeport, it was laying low. Lenie Clarke did likewise. In the meantime, Ricketts was her little secret.

For as long as he lasted, anyway. It wasn't looking good.

She stepped dripping from the diver 'lock in Phocoena 's tail. Ricketts was wetter than she was.

His skin was beyond pink; it was so flushed it almost looked sunburned. He'd long since stripped off his rags, and now lay naked on a pallet that could soak up perspiration barely faster than he produced it.

None of his biotelemetry was in the red yet, according to the panel. That was something.

He had the headset on, but he turned his head at the sound of her entrance. The blind, cowled face seemed to look right through her. "Hi." The smile on his face was an absurd paradox.

"Hi," she said, stepping to the cycler on the opposite bulkhead. "Hungry?" She was only filling the silence; the drip in his arm kept him fed as well as medicated.

He shook his head. "Thanks. Busy."

In VR, perhaps. The handpad lay discarded by his knees, but there were other interfaces.

"This is great ," he murmured.

Clarke looked at him. How can you say that? she wondered. How can you just act as though there's nothing wrong? Don't you know you're dying?

But of course he probably didn't. If Phocoena couldn't cure him, at least it wasn't letting him suffer: it kept his fluids up, gagged internal alarms, soothed nerves when they burned with fever or nausea. And it wasn't just ßehemoth's ravages that the medbed would have swept under the rug. Ricketts's whole life must have been an ongoing litany of low-level discomfort, chronic infections, parasite loads, old injuries badly healed. All those baseline aches and pains would be gone too, as far as this boy could tell. He probably felt better than he had in years. He probably thought his weakness would pass, that he was actually getting better.

The only way he'd know otherwise would be if Lenie Clarke told him the truth.

She turned from the cycler and climbed forward into the cockpit. Systems telltales winked and wriggled under the dark crystal of the pilot's dash. There was something vaguely off about those readouts, something Clarke couldn't quite—

"It's so clean in here," Ricketts said.

He wasn't in VR. He wasn't playing games.

He'd hacked into nav.

She straightened so fast her head cracked against the overhead viewport. "What are you doing in there? That's not—"

"There's no wildlife at all ," he went on, amazed. "Not even, like, a worm , far as I can tell. And everything's so, so…" he fell silent, groping for the word.

She was back at his cage. Ricketts lay staring at Phocoena 's pristine datascape, emaciated, anesthetized, lost in wonder.

" Whole ," he said at last.

She reached out. The membrane tugged gently at her fingertips, webbed her fingers, stretched back along her forearm. She briefly touched his shoulder. His head rolled in her direction, not so much an act of will as of gravity.