Peter Watts - Starfish

He knows better than to open up outside.

It doesn't kill you, not right away. But seawater's a lot saltier than blood; let it inside and osmosis sucks the water from the epithelial cells, shrivels them down to viscous little blobs. Rifter kidneys are modified to speed up water reclamation when that happens, but it's not a long-term solution and it costs. Organs wears out faster, urine turns to oil. It's best to just keep sealed up. Your insides soak in seawater too long, they sort of corrode , implants or no implants.

But that's another one of Fischer's problems. He never takes the long view.

The face seal is a single macromolecule fifty centimeters long. It wraps back and forth along the line of the jaw like the two sides of a zipper, with hydrophobic side-chains for teeth. A little blade on the index of Fischer's left glove can split them apart. He runs it along the seal and the 'skin opens neatly around his mouth.

He doesn't feel much of anything at first. He was half-expecting the ocean to charge up his nose and burn his sinuses, but of course all his body cavities are already packed with isotonic saline. The only immediate change is that his face gets cold, numbing the chronic ache of torn flesh a bit. Deeper pain pulses under one eye, where Dr. Troyka's wires hold the bones of his face together; microelectricity tingles along those lines, press-gangs bonebuilding osteoblasts into high gear.

After a couple of moments he tries to gargle; that doesn't work, so he settles for gaping like a fish and wriggling his tongue around. That does it. He gets his first taste of raw ocean, coarse and saltier than the stuff that pumps him up inside.

On the seabed in front of him, a swarm of blind shrimp feeds in the current from a nearby vent. Fischer can see right through them. They're like little chunks of glass with blobs of organs jiggling around inside.

It must be fourteen hours since he's eaten, but there's no fucking way he's going back to Beebe with Brander still inside. The last time he tried, Brander was actually standing guard in the lounge, waiting for him.

What the hell. It's just like krill. People eat this stuff all the time.

They have a strange taste. Fischer's mouth is going numb from the cold, but there's still a faint sense of rotten eggs, dilute and barely detectable. Not bad other than that, though. Better than Brander by a long shot.

When the convulsions hit fifteen minutes later, he's not so sure.

"You look like shit," Lenie says.

Fischer hangs onto the railing, looks around the lounge. "Where—"

"At the Throat. On shift with Lubin and Caraco."

He makes it to the couch.

"Haven't seen you for a while," Lenie remarks. "How's your face doing?"

Fischer squints at her through a haze of nausea. Lenie Clarke is actually making small talk. She's never done that before. He's still trying to figure out why when his stomach clamps down again and he pitches onto the floor. By now nothing comes up but a few dribbles of sour fluid.

His eyes trace the pipes tangling along the ceiling. After a while Lenie's face blocks the view, looking down from a great height.

"What's wrong?" She seems to be asking out of idle curiosity, no more.

"Ate some shrimp," he says, and retches again.

"You ate— from outside ?" She bends down and pulls him up. His arms drag along behind on the deck. Something hard bumps his head; the railing around the downstairs ladder.

"Fuck," Lenie says.

He's on the floor again, alone. Receding footsteps. Dizziness. Something presses against his neck, pricks him with a soft hiss.

His head clears almost instantly.

Lenie's leaning in, closer than she's ever been. She's even touching him, she's got one hand on his shoulder. He stares down at that hand, feeling a stupid sort of wonder, but then she pulls it away.

She's holding a hypo. Fischer's stomach begins to settle.

"Why," she says softly, "would you do a stupid thing like that?"

"I was hungry."

"So what's wrong with the dispenser?"

He doesn't answer.

"Oh," Lenie says. "Right."

She stands up and snaps the spent cartridge out of the hypo. "This can't go on, Fischer. You know that."

"He hasn't got me in two weeks."

"He hasn't seen you in two weeks. You only come in when he's on shift. And you're missing your own shifts more and more. Doesn't make you too popular with the rest of us." She cocks her head as Beebe creaks around them. "Why don't you just call up and get them to take you home?"

Because I do things to children, and if I leave here they'll cut me open and change me into something else…

Because there are things outside that almost make it worthwhile…

Because of you…

He doesn't know if she'd understand any of those reasons. He decides not to risk it.

"Maybe you could talk to him," he manages.

Lenie sighs. "He wouldn't listen."

"Maybe if you tried, at least—"

Her face hardens. "I have tried. I—"

She catches herself.

"I can't get involved," she whispers. "It's none of my business."

Fischer closes his eyes. He feels as if he's going to cry. "He just doesn't let up. He really hates me."

"It's not you. You're just— filling in."

"Why did they put us together? It doesn't make sense!"

"Sure it does. Statistically."

Fischer opens his eyes. "What?"

Lenie's pulling one hand down across her face. She seems very tired.

"We're not people here, Fischer. We're a cloud of data points. Doesn't matter what happens to you or me or Brander, just as long as the mean stays where it's supposed to and the standard deviation doesn't get too big."

Tell her, Shadow says.

"Lenie—"

"Anyway." Lenie shrugs the mood away. "You're crazy to eat anything that near a rift zone. Didn't you learn about hydrogen sulfide?"

He nods. "Basic training. The vents spit it out."

"And it builds up in the benthos. They're toxic. Which I guess you know now anyway."

She starts down the ladder, stops on the second rung.

"If you really want to go native, try feeding further from the rift. Or go for the fish."

"The fish?"

"They move around more. Don't spend all their time soaking in the hot springs. Maybe they're safe."

"The fish," he says again. He hadn't thought of that.

"I said maybe ."

Shadow I'm so sorry…

Shush. Just look at all the pretty lights.

So he looks. He knows this place. He's on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He's back in fairyland. He thinks he comes here a lot now, watches the lights and bubbles, listens to the deep rocks grinding against each other.

Maybe he'll stay this time, watch the whole thing working, but then he remembers he's supposed to be somewhere else. He waits, but nothing specific comes to him. Just a feeling that he should be doing something somewhere else. Soon.

It's getting harder to stay here anyway. There's a vague pain hanging around his upper body somewhere, fading in and out. After a while he realizes what it is. His face hurts.

Maybe this beautiful light is hurting his eyes.

That can't be right. His caps should take care of all that. Maybe they're not working. He seems to remember something that happened to his eyes a while back, but it doesn't really matter. He can always just leave. Suddenly, wonderfully, all of his problems have easy answers.

If the light hurts, all he has to do is stay in the dark.

"Hey," Caraco buzzes as they come around the corner. "Number four."

Clarke looks. Four's fifteen meters away and the water's a bit murky this shift. Still, she can see something big and dark sticking to the intake vent. Its shadow twitches down along the casing like an absurdly stretched black spider.