Peter Watts - Starfish

Yves Scanlon reached up and touched a dormant metal claw. "I like you better like this," he remarked. "You're less… hostile.

"I wonder who you'll sound like tomorrow…"

It sounded like some kid fresh out of grad school. It acted like one, too. It wanted him to drop his pants and bend over.

"Stuff it," Scanlon said at first, his public persona firmly in place.

"Exactly my intention," said the machine, wiggling a pencil-shaped probe on the end of one arm. "Come on, Dr. Scanlon. You know it's for your own good."

In fact he didn't know any such thing. He'd been wondering lately if the indignities he suffered in here might be due entirely to some repressed asshole's misdirected sadism. Just a few months ago it would have driven him crazy. But Yves Scanlon was finally starting to see his place in the universe, and was discovering that he could afford to be tolerant. Other people's pettiness didn't bother him nearly as much as it used to. He was above it.

He did, however, stop to pull the curtain across the window before undoing his belt. Rowan could show up at any time.

"Don't move," said the poltergeist. "This won't hurt. Some people even enjoy it."

Scanlon did not. The realization came as a bit of a relief.

"I don't see the hurry," he complained. "Nothing goes in or out of me without you people turning a valve somewhere to let it past. Why not just take what I send down the toilet?"

"We do that, too," the machine said, coring. "Since you got here, in fact. But you never know. Some stuff degrades pretty quickly when it leaves a body."

"If it degrades that fast then why am I still in quarantine?"

"Hey, I didn't say it was harmless. Just said it might have turned into something else. Or maybe it is harmless. Maybe you just pissed off someone upstairs."

Scanlon winced. "The people upstairs like me just fine. What are you looking for, anyway?"

"Pyranosal RNA."

"I'm, I'm not sure I remember what that is."

"No reason you should. It's been out of fashion for three and a half billion years."

"No shit."

"Don't you wish." The probe withdrew. "It was all the rage in primordial times, until—"

"Excuse me," said Patricia Rowan's voice.

Scanlon glanced automatically over to the workstation. She wasn't there. The voice was coming from behind the curtain.

"Ah. Company. I've got what I came for, anyway." The arm swung around and neatly inserted the soiled probe into a dumbwaiter. By the time Scanlon had his pants back up the teleop had folded into neutral.

"See you tomorrow," said the poltergeist, and fled. The teleop's lights went out.

She was here.

Right in the next room.

Vindication was at hand.

Scanlon took a breath and pulled back the curtain.

Patricia Rowan stood in shadow on the other side. Her eyes glittered with faint mercury: almost vampire eyes, but diluted. Translucent, not opaque.

Her contacts, of course. Scanlon had tried a similar pair once. They linked into a weak RF signal from your watch, scrolled images across your field of view at a virtual range of forty centimeters. Patricia Rowan saw Scanlon and smiled. Whatever else she saw through those magical lenses, he could only guess.

"Dr. Scanlon," she said. "It's good to see you again."

He smiled back. "I'm glad you came by. We have a lot to talk about—"

Rowan nodded, opened her mouth.

"— and although your döpplegangers are perfectly adequate for normal conversation, they tend to lose a lot of the nuances—"

Closed it again.

"— especially given the kind of information you seem to be interested in."

Rowan hesitated a moment. "Yes. Of course. We, um, we need your insights, Dr. Scanlon." Yes. Good. Of course. "Your report on Beebe was quite, well, interesting, but things have changed somewhat since you filed it."

He nodded thoughtfully. "In what way?"

"Lubin's gone, for one thing."

"Gone?"

"Disappeared. Dead, perhaps, although apparently there's no signal from his deadman. Or possibly just— regressed, like Fischer."

"I see. And have you learned whether anyone at the other stations has gone over?" It was one of the predictions he'd made in his report.

Her eyes, rippling silver, seemed to stare at a point just beside his left shoulder. "We can't really say. Certainly we've had some losses, but rifters tend not to be very forthcoming with details. As we expected, of course."

"Yes, of course." Scanlon tried on a contemplative look. "So Lubin's gone. Not surprising. He was definitely closest to the edge. In fact, if I remember I predicted—"

"Probably just as well," Rowan murmured.

"Excuse me?"

She shook her head, as if clearing it of some distraction. "Nothing. Sorry."

"Ah." Scanlon nodded again. No need to harp on Lubin if Rowan didn't want to. He'd made lots of other predictions. "There's also the matter of the Ganzfeld effect I noted. The remaining crew—"

"Yes, we've spoken with a couple of— other experts about that."

"And?"

"They don't think the rift environment is, sufficiently impoverished is the way they put it. Not sufficiently impoverished to function as a Ganzfeld."

"I see," Scanlon felt part of his old self bristling. He smiled, ignoring it. "How do they explain my observations?"

"Actually—" Rowan coughed. "They're not completely convinced you did observe anything significant. Apparently there was some evidence that your report was dictated under conditions of— well, personal stress."

Scanlon carefully froze his smile into place. "Well. Everyone's entitled to their opinion."

Rowan said nothing.

"Although the fact that the rift is a stressful environment shouldn't come as news to any real expert ," Scanlon continued. "That was the whole point of the program, after all."

Rowan nodded. "I don't disbelieve you, Doctor. I'm not really qualified to judge one way or the other."

True , he didn't say.

"And in any event," Rowan added, "You were there. They weren't."

Scanlon relaxed. Of course she'd put his opinion ahead of those other experts , whoever they were. He was the one she'd chosen to go down there, after all.

"It's not really important," she said now, dismissing the subject. "Our immediate concern is the quarantine."

Mine as well as theirs. But of course he didn't let that on. It wouldn't be— professional— to seem too concerned about his own welfare right now. Besides, they were treating him fine in here. At least he knew what was going on.

"— yet," Rowan finished.

Scanlon blinked. "What? Excuse me?"

"I said, for obvious reasons we've decided not to recall the crew from Beebe just yet."

"I see. Well, you're in luck. They don't want to leave."

Rowan stepped closer to the membrane. Her eyes faded in the light. "You're sure of this."

"Yes. The rift is their home, Ms. Rowan, in a way a layperson probably couldn't understand. They're more alive down there than they ever were on shore." He shrugged. "Besides, even if they wanted to leave, what could they do? They're hardly going to swim all the way back to the mainland."

"They might, actually."

"What?"

"It's possible," Rowan admitted. "Theoretically. And we— we caught one of them, leaving."

" What ?"

"Up in the euphotic zone. We had a sub stationed up there, just to— keep an eye on things. One of the rifters— Cracker, or—" a glowing thread wriggled across each eye— "Caraco, that's it. Judy Caraco. She was heading straight for the surface. They figured she was making a break for it."

Scanlon shook his head. "Caraco does laps, Ms. Rowan. It was in my report."

"I know. Perhaps your report should have been more widely distributed. Although, her laps never took her that close to the surface before. I can see why they—" Rowan shook her head. "At any rate, they took her. A mistake, perhaps." A faint smile. "Those happen, sometimes."