Peter Watts - Maelstrom

" Shit! " He dropped it onto the ground. It lay there, inert. Playing dead.

"What the fuck …" he looked at Clarke.

"Party clothes," she said, getting to her feet. "Wouldn't fit you."

"Bullshit," the mongrel said. "It's that reflex copolymer stuff. Like Lenny Clarke wears."

She blinked. "What did you say?"

"Leonard Clarke. Deep Sea Gillman. Did the quake." He nudged the diveskin with one gnarled toe. "You think I don't know ?" He raised his gun-hand to his face; the barrel touched the corner of an eyecap. "How you think I got these, eh? Not the first groupie in town."

" Leonard Clarke?"

"I said already. You deaf, or stupid?"

"I just let you rape me, asshole. So probably stupid."

The mongrel looked at her for an endless moment.

"You done this before," he said at last.

"More times than you can count."

"Get to maybe like it after a while?"

"No."

"You didn't fight."

"Yeah? How many do, with a gun to their heads?"

"You're not even scared."

"I'm too fucking tired. You gonna let me go, or kill me, or what? Anything but listening to more of this shit."

The mongrel took a hulking step forward. Lenie Clarke only snorted.

"Go," the mongrel said in a strange voice. Then added, absurdly: "Where you headed?"

She arched an eyebrow. "East."

He shook his head. "Never get through. Big quarantine. Goes halfway down to the Dust Belt." He pointed south, down a side street. "Better go 'round."

Clarke tapped her watch. "It's not listed."

"Then don't. Fuck lot I care."

Keeping her eyes up, Clarke bent down and picked up her tunic. The mongrel held her pack out by the straps, glancing down into its depths.

He tensed.

Her hand lunged into the pack like a striking snake, snatched out the billy. She held it underhand, pointed at his gut.

He stepped back, one hand still gripping the pack. His eyes narrowed to opalescent slits. "Why didn't you use it?"

"Didn't want to waste a charge. You're not worth it."

He eyed the empty sheath on her leg. "Why not keep it there? Where you can get it?"

"Now, if you'd had a kid with you…"

They regarded each other through eyes that saw everything in black and white.

"You let me." The mongrel shook his head; the contradiction almost seemed painful. "You had that, and you let me anyway."

"My pack," Clarke said.

"You—set me up." Dawning anger in that voice, and thick wonder.

"Maybe I just like it rough."

"You're contagious. You're a bughumper ."

She wiggled the baton. "Give me my things and maybe you'll live long enough to find out."

"You stumpfuck ." But he held out the pack.

For the first time she saw the webbing between the three stumpy digits of his hand, noticed the smooth scarless tips of the stubs. Not violence, then. No street-fight amputation. Born to it.

"You a pharm baby?" she asked. Maybe he was older than he looked; the pharms hadn't deliberately spread buggy genotypes for decades. Sure, defectives spent more than healthy people on fixes, but the global ambience was twisting babies into strange enough shapes on its own by then. Without the risk of consumer backlash.

"You are, aren't you?"

He glared at her, shaking with helpless fury.

"Good," she said, grabbing her pack. "Serves you fucking right."

The voice in Lubin's ear had lied.

He hadn't been outside N'AmPac since landfall. He hadn't been in Sevastopol or Philadelphia for years. He'd never been in Whitehorse, and from what he knew of the place he hoped he never would be.

But he could have been. The lie was plausible one, to someone who knew Lubin but not his current circumstances. Or maybe it hadn't been a deliberate lie. Maybe it had been a flawed guess, based on God knew what irrelevant stats. Maybe it had just been a bunch of random words shoveled together with more regard for grammar than veracity.

He wondered if he might have started the rumor himself. Before he left for Sudbury, he put that hypothesis to the test.

He logged back into Haven and began a new name search: Judy Caraco, Lenie Clarke, Alice Nakata , and Kenneth Lubin .

It was a different voice that accosted him this time. It spoke in soft, gentle tones, almost whispering. It showed no predilection for alliteration or nonsense rhyme. It tended to mispronounce hard consonants.

It called him Michael .

He suborbed to Toromilton, took a shuttle north from that city-state. Endless suburbs kept pace beneath him, spilling far from the megapolitan hub that had once kept them captive. The daily commute had ended decades before, and still the blight was spreading. The outside world passed uneventfully—there were only a few restricted zones in all of Ontario, and none were on his route.

The world inside was a bit more interesting. Deep in the seething chaos that was Maelstrom, rumors of Mike Brander's resurrection were beginning to sprout alongside tales of Lubin's own. Mike Brander had been seen in Los Angeles. Mike Brander had been seen in Lima.

Lubin frowned, a small expression of self-disgust. He'd given himself away with his own questions. Something in Haven had taken notice when he'd run searches on all Beebe crew members except himself. And why doesn't this user ask about Lubin, K.? Because this user must already know about Lubin, K.

Because this user is Lubin, K.

Lenie and Kenny are on the comeback trail.

His last troll through Haven, asking about everyone except Mike Brander, had provoked the same attention and the same simple logic. Now Mike Brander was alive and well and living in Maelstrom. QED.

What's doing this? Why?

Why didn't always enter into it, of course. Sometimes Maelstrom's wildlife would just grab onto popular threads to get around—steal keywords to blend in, sneak through filters by posing as part of the herd. Classic bandwagon effect, blind and stupid as evolution itself. That was why such strategies always fizzled after a while. The fad-of-the-moment would fade into obscurity, leaving poseurs with forged tickets to an empty ballroom. Or the gate-keepers would catch on; the more popular the disguise, the greater the incentive for countermeasures.

Wildlife would hitch a ride on existing rumors, if they were hot enough. Lubin had never heard of them starting rumors of their own before.

And why Lenie Clarke? An obscure life, an invisible death. Hardly the most contagious meme in the wires. Nothing to inspire any post-mortem legacy at all, in fact.

This was something new. Whatever it was, it was goal-directed, and it was using Lenie Clarke.

More than that. Now, it was using him .

Sudbury had arrived DOA in the twenty-first century. Decades of mining and a substrate of thin, poorly-buffered soil had seen to that. The Sudbury stacks had been the epicenter for one of the first really big acid blights in North American history. It was a benchmark of sorts.

Not that this was entirely a bad thing. Legend had it that lunar astronauts had once practiced in its scoured gray environs. And the area's lakes were truly beautiful, clear and blue and lifeless as chemically-treated toilet bowls. The substrate was relentlessly stable, planed and leveled by long-vanished glaciers; the west coast could fall into the ocean, but the Canadian Shield would last forever. Exotic alien lifeforms would disembark from tankers or lifters at the Industrial Horseshoe around Lake Ontario, wreak local havoc as they always had, but you'd have to be one tough chimera to get past the acid-washed outskirts of Sudbury, Ontario. Its dead zone was like a moat, a firebreak burned into the countryside by a hundred years worth of industrial poison.