Peter Watts - Starfish

Lenie sprays the cut in her side with a hypo, wipes off the residue. "You're lucky they told you that much." She pulls her diveskin tunic off a hanger, slides into it. "They barely mentioned the giantism when they sent us down."

"That's stupid. They must've known."

"They say this is the only vent where the fish get this big. That they've found, anyway."

"Why? What's so special here?"

Lenie shrugs.

Fischer has stripped to the waist. Lenie looks at him. "Leggings too. It got your calf, right?"

He shakes his head. "That's okay."

She looks down. His diveskin's only a couple of millimeters thick, it doesn't hide anything. He feels his erection going soft under her gaze.

Lenie's cold white eyes track back to his face. Fischer feels his face heating before he remembers: she can't see his eyes. No one can.

It's almost safe in here.

"Bruising's the biggest problem," Lenie says at last. "They don't puncture the diveskin all that often, but the force of the bite still gets through." Her hand is on his arm, firm and professional, probing the edges of Fischer's injury. It hurts, but he doesn't mind.

She uncaps a tube of anabolic salve. "Here. Rub this in."

The pain fades on contact. His flesh goes warm and tingly where he applies the ointment. He reaches out, a little bit scared, and touches Lenie's arm. "Thanks."

She twists out of reach without a word, bending down to seal the 'skin on her leg. Fischer watches the leggings slide up her body. They seem almost alive. They are almost alive, he remembers. The 'skin's got these reflexes , changes its permeability and thermal conductivity in response to body temperature. Maintains, what's the word, homeostasis.

Now he watches it swallowing Lenie's body like some slick black amoebae but she's showing through underneath, black ice instead of white but still the most beautiful creature he's ever seen. She's so far away. There's someone inside telling him to watch it—

— Go away, Shadow—

— but he can't help himself, he can almost touch her, she's bent over sealing her boots and his hand caresses the air just above her shoulder, traces the outline of her curved back so close it could feel her body heat if that stupid diveskin wasn't in the way, and—

And she straightens, bumping into his hand. Her face comes up; something burns behind her eyecaps. He pulls back but it's too late; her whole body's gone rigid and furious.

I just touched her. I didn't do anything wrong I just touched her—

She takes a single step forward. "Don't do that again," she says, her voice so flat he wonders for a second how her vocoder could work out of the water.

"I'm not—I didn't—"

"I don't care," she says. "Don't do it again."

Something moves at the corner of his eye. "Problem, Lenie? Need a hand?" Brander's voice.

She shakes her head. "No."

"Okay, then." Brander sounds disappointed. "I'll be upstairs."

Movement again. Sounds, receding.

"I'm sorry ," Fischer says.

"Fine," Lenie says, and brushes past him into the wet room.

Nakata nearly bumps into her at the base of the ladder. Clarke glares; Nakata moves aside, baring teeth in a submissive primate smile.

Brander's in the lounge, pecking at the library: "You—?"

"I'm fine." She isn't, but she's getting there. This anger is nowhere near critical mass; it's just a reflex, really, a spark budded off from the main reservoir. It decays exponentially with elapsed time. By the time she reaches her cubby she's almost feeling sorry for Fischer.

Not his fault. He didn't mean any harm.

She closes the hatch behind her. It's safe to hit something now, if she wants. She looks around half-heartedly for a target, finally just drops onto her bunk and stares at the ceiling.

Someone raps on metal. "Lenie?"

She rises, pushes at the hatch.

"Hey Lenie, I think I've got a bad slave channel on one of the squids. I was wondering if you could—"

"Sure." Clarke nods. "Fine. Only not right now, okay, um—"

"Judy," says Caraco, sounding slightly miffed.

"Right. Judy." In fact, Clarke hasn't forgotten. But Beebe's way too crowded these days. Lately Clarke's learned to lose the occasional name. It helps keep things comfortably distant.

Sometimes.

"Excuse me," she says, brushing past Caraco. "I've got to get outside."

In a few places, the rift is almost gentle.

Usually the heat stabs up in boiling muddy pillars or jagged bolts of superheated liquid. Steam never gets a chance to form at three hundred atmospheres, but thermal distortion turns the water into a column of writhing liquid prisms, hotter than molten glass. Not here, though. In this one spot, nestled between lava pillows and safe from Beebe's prying ears, the heat wafts up through the mud like a soft breeze. The underlying bedrock must be porous.

She comes here when she can, keeping to the bottom en route to foil Beebe's sonar. The others don't know about this place yet; she'd just as soon keep it that way. Sometimes she comes here to watch convection stir the mud into lazy curlicues. Sometimes she splits the seals on her 'skin, basks face and arms in the thirty-degree seep.

Sometimes she just comes here to sleep.

She lies with the shifting mud at her back, staring up into blackness. This is how you fall asleep when you can't close your eyes; you stare into the dark, and when you start seeing things you know you're dreaming.

Now she sees herself, the high priestess of a new troglodyte society. She was the first one here, deep at peace while the others were still being cut open and reshaped by grubby Dryback hands. She's the founding mother, the template against which other, rawer recruits trace themselves. They come down and they see that her eyes are always capped, and they go and do likewise.

But she knows it isn't true. The rift is the real creative force here, a blunt hydraulic press forcing them all into shapes of its own choosing. If the others are anything like her it's because they're all being squeezed in the same mold.

And let's not forget the GA. If Ballard was right, they made sure we weren't too different to start with .

There are all the superficial differences, of course. A bit of racial diversity. Token beaters, token victims, males and females equally represented…

Clarke has to smile at that. Count on Management to jam a bunch of sexual dysfunctionals together and then make sure the gender ratio is balanced. Nice of them to try and see that nobody gets left out.

Except for Ballard, of course.

But at least they learn from their mistakes. Dozing at three thousand meters, Lenie Clarke wonders what their next one will be.

Sudden, stabbing pain in the eyes. She tries to scream; smart implants feel tongue and lips in motion, mistranslate:

" Nnnnaaaaah… "

She knows the feeling. She's had it once or twice before. She dives blindly on a random heading. The pain in her head leaps from intense to unbearable.

" Aaaaaa— "

She twists back in the opposite direction. A bit better. She trips her headlamp, kicking as hard as she can. The world turns from black to solid brown. Zero viz. Mud seething on all sides. Somewhere close by she hears rocks splitting open.

Her headlamp catches the outcropping looming up a split second before she hits it. The shock rocks her skull, runs down her spine like a small earthquake. There's a different flavor of pain up there now, mingling with the searing in her eyes. She gropes blindly around the obstacle, keeps going. Her body feels— warm—

It takes a lot of heat to get through a diveskin, especially a class four. Those things are built for thermal stress.