Peter Watts - Maelstrom

"Evidence?"

"He wants you to feed his cat," Slijper said.

"He—what do—"

Slijper held up one hand: "I know, and I hope you'll forgive the intrusion. He left the message on your queue. He said he didn't know how long he was going to be gone, but he'd be grateful if you took care of — Mandelbot, is it? — and he'd keyed the door to let you in. At any rate" — the hand dropped back below table level—"this kind of behavior is frankly unprecedented from anyone on the Trip. He seems to have simply abandoned his post, with no apology, no explanation, no advance warning. It's—impulsive, to say the least."

Oh, man. Killjoy, you were covered . Why'd you have to blow it?

"I didn't know that was even possible," Jovellanos said. "He had his shots years ago."

"Nonetheless, here we are." Slijper leaned back in her chair. "We were wondering if you had noticed anything unusual in his behavior lately. Anything which, looking back, might have suggested—"

"No. Nothing. Although—" Jovellanos took a breath. "Actually, he has been kind of—I don't know, withdrawn lately." Well, it's true enough, and they probably know already; it'd look suspicious if I didn't mention it…

"Any idea why?" asked another corpse.

"Not really." She shrugged. "I've seen it happen before—it's bound to wear on you, having to deal with high-level crises all the time. And Tripped people can't always talk about what's on their minds, you know? So I just let him be."

Please, please, please don't let them have high-level telemetry on me now…

"I see," Slijper said. "Well, thank you anyway, Dr. Jovellanos."

"Is that all?" She started to rise.

"Not quite," said one of the other corpses. "There's one other thing. Concerning—"

— Oh please no—

"— your own involvement in all this."

Jovellanos slumped back into her chair and waited for the axe to fall.

"Dr. Desjardins's disappearance leaves—well, a vacancy we really can't afford at this time," the corpse continued.

Jovellanos looked at the backlit tribunal. A tiny part of her dared to hope.

"You worked closely with him through a great deal of this. We understand that your own contribution to date hasn't been negligible—in fact, you've been working below your own potential for some time now. And you're certainly farther up the learning curve than anyone else we could bring in at this point. On the usual scales you're overdue for a promotion. But apparently…that is, according to Psych you have certain objections to taking Guilt Trip…"

I. Can't. Believe. It.

"Now please understand, we don't hold this against you," said the corpse. "Your issues concerning invasive technology are— very understandable, after what happened to your brother. I can't honestly say I'd feel any differently in your shoes. That whole nanotech thing was such a debacle…"

A sudden, familiar lump rose in Jovellanos's throat.

"So you see, we understand your objections. But perhaps you could understand that Guilt Trip hails from a whole different arena, there's certainly nothing dangerous— "

"I do know the difference between bio and nano," Jovellanos said mildly.

"Yes, of course…I didn't mean to—"

"It's just that, what happened to Chito—logic doesn't always enter into it when you…"

Chito. Poor, dead, tortured Chito. These haploids don't have the slightest clue the things I've done.

All for you, kiddo.

"Yes. We understand that, of course. And even though your prejudice—again, entirely understandable—even though it's held you back professionally, you've proven to be an exceptional performer. The question is, after all these years, will you continue to be held back?"

"Because we all think that would be a shame," Slijper said.

Jovellanos looked across the table and said nothing for a full ten seconds.

"I think….I think maybe it's time to let go," she said at last.

"So you'd be willing to get your shots and move up to senior 'lawbreaker," Slijper said.

For you, Chito. Onward and upward.

Alice Jovellanos nodded gravely, stoically refusing to let her facial muscles do a whole different kind of dance. "I think I'd be up for that."

Fossil water, cold and gray.

She remembered the local lore, although she was no longer certain how she'd learned it. Less than one percent of the Lakes hailed from run-off or rainfall; she swam through the liquid remains of a glacier that had melted ten thousand years before. It would never refill once human appetites had drained it dry.

For now, there was more than enough to cover her passage.

For days the mermaid had passed through its depths. Visions of a past she couldn't remember rose like bubbles through the dark water and the pain in her side; she'd long since stopped trying to deny them. At night she would rise like some oversize plankter. She couldn't risk coming ashore, but she'd stocked her pack with freeze-dried rations in Chicago; she'd float on the surface and tear into the vacuum-sealed pouches like a sea otter, resubmerging before dawn.

She thought she remembered part of a childhood, spent where the three greatest lakes converged: Sault Sainte Marie, commercial bottleneck into Lake Superior. The city sat on its locks and dams like a troll at a bridge, extorting levies from passing tonnage. It wasn't as populous now as it had been; four hundred kilometers from the edge of the Sovereign Quebec but still too close for some, especially in the wake of the Nunavut Lease. A giant's shadow is a cold place to live at the best of times; a giant grown invincible overnight, nursing grudges from an oppressed childhood, was a complete nonstarter. So people had left.

Lenie Clarke remembered leaving. She'd had a whole lot of first-hand experience with shadows, and giants, and unhappy childhoods. So she, too, had moved away, and kept moving until the Pacific Ocean had stood in her way and said, no farther . She'd settled in Hongcouver and lived day-to-day, year to year, until that moment when the Grid Authority had turned her into something that even the ocean couldn't stop.

Now she was back.

Past midnight. The mermaid cut quietly through a surface squirming with reflected metropolitan light. The walls of a distant lift-lock huddled against the western sky like a low fortress, holding back the elevated waters of Lake Superior—one relic, at least, still resisting depletion. Clarke kept the lock to her left, swam north to the Canadian side. Derelict wharves had been rotting there since before she'd been born. She split her hood and filled her chest with air. She left her fins behind.

Even with night-eyes, there was no one else to be seen.

She walked north to Queen and turned east, her feet following their own innate path beneath the dim streetlights. No one and nothing accosted her. Eastbourne Manor continued to rot undemolished, although someone had swept away the cardboard prefabs in the past twenty years.

At Coulson she stopped, looking north. The house she remembered was still there, just up from the corner. Odd how little it had changed in two decades. Assuming, of course, that those memories hadn't been…acquired… more recently.

She still hadn't seen a single vehicle, or another human being. Farther east, though—on the far side of Riverview—there was no mistaking the line of hovering botflies. She turned back the way she'd come; there too. They'd moved in behind her without a sound.

She turned up Coulson.

The door recognized her after all that time. It opened like a mouth, but the inside lights—as if knowing she'd have no need of their services—remained off.