Peter Watts - Starfish

"Oh, I think they have," Brander says mildly, smiling from naked brown eyes. "They'd just rather not think about it too much."

"Where do you get all this, Mike?" Clarke asks. "The library?"

He shakes his head. "Got a degree. Systems ecology, artificial life."

Clarke nods. "I always thought you were too smart to be a Rifter."

"Hey. A rifter's the smartest thing to be right now."

"So you chose to come down here? You actually applied?"

Brander frowns. "Sure. Didn't you?"

"I got a phone call. Offered me this new high-paying career, even said I could go back to my old job if it didn't work out."

"What was your old job?" Caraco wonders.

"Public relations. Mostly Honquarium franchises."

" You? "

"Maybe I wasn't very good at it. What about you?"

"Me?" Caraco bites her lip. "It was sort of a deal. One year with an option to renew, in lieu of prosecution." The corner of her mouth twitches. "Price of revenge. It was worth it."

Brander leans back in his chair, looks around Clarke. "What about you, Ken? Where'd you come—"

Clarke turns to follow Brander's stare. The sofa's empty. Down the corridor, Clarke can hear the shower door swinging shut.

Shit.

Still, it'll only be a short wait. Lubin's already been inside for four hours straight, he'll be gone in no time. And it's not as though there's any shortage of hot water.

"They should just shut the whole bloody net down for a while," Caraco is saying behind her. "Just pull the plug. Bugs wouldn't be able to handle that , I bet."

Brander laughs, comfortably blind. "Probably not. Of course, neither would the rest of us."

She's been staring at the screen for two minutes and she still can't see what Nakata's going on about. Ridges and fissures run along the display like long green wrinkles. The Throat returns its usual echoes, crammed especially close to center screen because Nakata's got the range topped out. Occasionally a small blip appears between two of the larger ones: Lubin, lazing through an uneventful shift.

Other than that, nothing.

Lenie Clarke bites her lip. "I don't see any—"

"Just wait. I know I saw it."

Brander looks in from the lounge. "Saw what?"

"Alice says she's got something bearing three twenty."

Maybe it's Gerry, Clarke muses. But Nakata wouldn't raise the alarm over that .

"It was just— there !" Nakata jabs her finger at the display, vindicated.

Something hovers at the very edge of Beebe's vision. Distance and diffraction make it hazy, but to bounce any kind of signal at that range it's got to have a lot of metal. As Clarke watches, the contact fades.

"Not one of us," Clarke says.

"It's big." Brander squints at the panel; his eyecaps reflect through white slits.

"Muckraker?" Clarke suggests. "A sub, maybe?"

Brander grunts.

"There it is again," Nakata says.

"There they are," Brander amends. Two echoes tease the edge of the screen now, almost indiscernible. Two large, unidentified objects, now rising just barely clear of the bottom clutter, now sinking back down into mere noise.

Gone.

"Hey," Clarke says, pointing. There's a tremor rippling along the seismo display, setting off sensors in a wave from the northwest. Nakata taps commands, gets a retrodict bearing on the epicenter. Three-twenty.

"There is nothing scheduled to be out there," she says.

"Nothing anyone bothered to tell us about, anyway." Clarke rubs the bridge of her nose. "So who's coming?"

Brander nods. Nakata shakes her head. "I'll wait for Judy."

"Oh, that's right. She's going all the way today, isn't she? Surface and back?"

"Yes. She should be back in maybe an hour."

"Okay." Brander's on his way downstairs. Clarke reaches past Nakata and taps into an outside channel. "Hey Ken. Wake up."

I tell myself I know this place , she muses. I call this my home.

I don't know anything.

Brander cruises just below her, lit from underneath by a seabed on fire. The world ripples with color, blues and yellows and greens so pure it almost hurts to look at them. A dusting of violet stars coalesces and sweeps across the bottom; a school of shrimp, royally luminous.

"Has anyone been—" Clarke begins, but she feels wonder and surprise from Brander. It's obvious he hasn't seen this before. And Lubin— "It's news to me," Lubin answers aloud, as dark as ever.

"It's gorgeous," Brander says. "We've been down here how long, and we never even knew this place existed…"

Except Gerry, maybe. Every now and then Beebe's sonar picks someone up in this direction, when everyone else is accounted for. Not this far out, of course, but who knows how far afield Fischer— or whatever Fischer's become— wanders these days?

Brander drops away from his squid and coasts down, one arm outstretched. Clarke watches him scoop something off the bottom. A faint tingle clouds her mind for a moment— that indefinable sense of some other mind working nearby— and she's past him, her own squid towing her away.

"Hey Len," Brander buzzes after her. "Check this out."

She releases the throttle and arcs back. Brander's got a glassy jointed creature in the palm of his hand. It looks a bit like that shrimp Acton found, back when—

"Don't hurt it," she says.

Brander's mask stares back at her. "Why would I hurt it? I just wanted to you to see its eyes."

There's something about the way Brander's radiating. It's as though he's a little bit out of synch with himself, somehow, as though his brain is broadcasting on two bands at once. Clarke shakes her head. The sensation passes.

"It doesn't have eyes," she says, looking.

"Sure it does. Just not on its head."

He flips it over, uses thumb and forefinger to pin it upside-down against the palm of his other hand. Rows of limbs— legs, maybe, or gills— scramble uselessly for purchase. Between them, where joints meet body, a row of tiny black spheres stare back at Lenie Clarke.

"Weird," she says. "Eyes on its stomach ."

She's feeling it again: a strange, almost prismatic sense of fractured awareness.

Brander lets the creature go. "Makes sense. Seeing as how all the light down here comes from below." Suddenly he looks at Clarke, radiating confusion. "Hey Len, you feeling okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You seem kind of—"

" Split ," they say, simultaneously.

Realization. She doesn't know how much of it is hers and how much she's tuning in from Brander, but suddenly they both know.

"There's someone else here," Brander says, unnecessarily.

Clarke looks around. Lubin. She can't see him.

"Shit. You think that's it?" Brander's scanning the water too. "You think ol' Ken is finally starting to tune in?"

"I don't know."

"Who else could it be?"

"I don't know. Who else is out here?"

"Mike. Lenie." Lubin's voice, faintly, from somewhere ahead.

Clarke looks at Brander. Brander looks back.

"Right here," Brander calls, edging his volume up.

"I found it," Lubin says, invisibly distant.

Clarke launches off the bottom and grabs her squid. Brander's right beside her, sonar pistol out and clicking. "Got him," he says after a moment. "That way."

"What else?"

"Don't know. Big, anyhow. Three, four meters. Metallic."

Clarke tweaks the throttle. Brander follows. A riot of fractured color unspools below them.

"There."

Ahead of them, a mesh of green light sections the bottom into squares.

"What—"

"Lasers," Brander says. "I think."

Emerald threads float perfectly straight, a luminous profusion of right angles a few centimeters off the bottom. Beneath them, drab metal pipes run along the rock; tiny prisms erupt at regular intervals along their length, like spines. Each prism, an interstice; from each interstice, four beams of coherent light, and four, and four, a wire-frame checkerboard overlaid against bedrock.