Peter Watts - Starfish

She looks away from him, and nods.

"Fuck, Lenie," he says. "I'm so scared ."

"I know," she says softly.

"This waiting, it's just— God, Lenie, you wouldn't put a dog through this. Please."

She closes her eyes, waiting.

"Pop the hatch, Lenie."

She shakes her head. "Joe, I couldn't even kill myself . Not when I was eleven. Not— not even last night. How can I—"

"My legs are wrecked, Len. I can't feel anything else any more. I c-can barely even talk. Please."

"Why did they do this to us, Joel? What's going on?"

He doesn't answer.

"What has them so scared? Why are they so—"

He moves.

He lurches up, falls sideways. His arms reach out; one hand catches the edge of the hatch. The other catches the wheel in its center.

His legs twist grotesquely underneath him. He doesn't seem to notice.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I couldn't—"

He fumbles, get both hands on the wheel. "No problem."

"Oh God. Joel—"

He stares at the hatch. His fingers clench the wheel.

"You know something, Lenie Clarke?" There's cold in his voice, and fear, but there's a sudden hard determination there too.

She shakes her head. I don't know anything.

"I would have really liked to fuck you," he says.

She doesn't know what to say to that.

He spins the hatch. Pulls the lever.

The hatch falls into Forcipiger . The ocean falls after it. Somehow, Lenie Clarke's body has prepared itself when she wasn't looking.

His body jams back into hers. He might be struggling. Or it could just be the rush of the Pacific, playing with him. She doesn't know if he's alive or dead. But she holds onto him, blindly, the ocean spinning them around, until there isn't any doubt.

Its atmosphere gone, Forcipiger is accelerating. Lenie Clarke takes Joel's body by the hands, and draws it out through the hatch. It follows her into viscous space. The 'scaphe spins away below them, fading in moments.

With a gentle push, she sets the body free. It begins to drift slowly towards the surface. She watches it go.

Something touches her from behind. She can barely feel it through her 'skin.

She turns.

A slender, translucent tentacle wraps softly around her wrist. It fades away into a distance utterly black to most, slate gray to Lenie Clarke. She brings it to her. Its swollen tip fires sticky threads at her fingers.

She brushes it aside, follows the tentacle back through the water. She encounters other tentacles on the way, feeble, attenuate things, barely twitching against the currents. They all lead back to something long, and thick, and shadowy. She circles in.

A great column of writhing, wormlike stomachs, pulsing with faint bioluminescence.

Revolted, she smashes at it with one clenched fist. It reacts immediately, sheds squirming pieces of itself that flare and burn like fat fireflies. The central column goes instantly dark, pulling into itself. It pulses, descends in spurts, slinking away under cover of its own discarded flesh. Clarke ignores the sacrificial tidbits and pursues the main body. She hits it again. Again. The water fills with pulsing dismembered decoys. She ignores them all, keeps tearing at the central column. She doesn't stop until there's nothing left but swirling fragments.

Joel. Joel Kita. She realizes that she liked him. She barely knew him, but she liked him just the same.

And they just killed him.

They killed all of us , she thinks. Deliberately. They meant to. They didn't even tell us why.

It's all their fault. All of it.

Something ignites in Lenie Clarke. Everyone who's ever hit her, or raped her, or patted her on the head and said don't worry, everything will be fine comes to her in that moment. Everyone who ever pretended to be her friend. Everyone who pretended to be her lover. Everyone who ever used her, and stood on her back, and told each other they were so much better than she was. Everyone, feeding off her every time they so much as turned on the fucking lights.

They're all waiting, back on shore. They're just asking for it.

It was a little bit like this back when she beat the shit out of Jeanette Ballard. But that was nothing, that was just a taste of coming attractions. This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand.

Karl Acton's fear has come to pass. Lenie Clarke has been activated.

She doesn't know why the GA is so terrified of her. She only knows that they've stopped at nothing to keep her from getting back to the mainland. With any luck, they think they've succeeded. With any luck, they're not worried any more.

That'll change. Lenie Clarke swims down and east, towards her own resurrection.

Actually, you might be surprised at how much of this stuff I didn't make up. If you're interested in finding out about background details, the following references will get you started. Starfish deliberately twists some of the facts, and I've probably made a hundred other errors through sheer ignorance, but that's something else this list is good for: it gives you the chance to check up on me.

I'm betting most of you don't care that much.

The deep-sea creatures I described pretty much as they exist; if you don't believe me read "Light in the Ocean's Midwaters", by B. H. Robison, in the July 1995 Scientific American. Or Deep-Sea Biology by J.D. Gage & P.A. Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 1992). Or Abyss by C.P. Idyll (Crowell Co., 1971); it's old, but it's the book that hooked me back in Grade 9. Although the fish we drag up from great depths are generally pretty small in real life, gigantism is not unheard of among some species of deepwater fish. Back in the 1930s, for example, the deepwater pioneer William Beebe claimed to have spotted a seven-foot viperfish from a bathysphere.

I found lots of interesting stuff in The Sea — Ideas and Observations on Progress in the Study of the Seas. Vol. 7: Deep-Sea Biology (G. T. Rowe, ed., 1983 from John Wiley and Sons). In particular, the chapter on biochemical and physiological adaptations of deep-sea animals (by Somero et al. )—as well as Biochemical Adaptation , a 1983 book from Princeton University Press (Hochachka and Somero, Eds.)—got me started on deep-sea physiology, the effects of high pressure on neuronal firing thresholds, and the adaptation of enzymes to high pressure/temperature regimes.

A good layperson's introduction to the coastal geology of the Pacific northwest, including a discussion of midocean ridges such as Juan de Fuca, can be found in Cycles of Rock and Water by K. A. Brown (1993, HarperCollins West). "The Quantum Event of Oceanic Crustal Accretion: Impacts of Diking at Mid-Ocean Ridges" (J.R. Delaney et al ., Science 281, pp222-230, 1998) nicely conveys the nastiness and frequency of earthquakes and eruptions along the Juan de Fuca Rift, although it's a bit heavy on the technobabble.

The idea that the Pacific Northwest is overdue for a major earthquake is reviewed in "Giant Earthquakes of the Pacific Northwest", by R. D. Hyndman ( Scientific American , Dec. 1995). "Forearc deformation and great subduction earthquakes: implications for Cascadia offshore earthquake potential" by McCaffrey and Goldfinger ( Science v267, 1995) and "Earthquakes cannot be predicted" (Geller et al., Science v275, 1997) discuss the issue in somewhat greater detail. I used to live quite happily in Vancouver. After reading these items, I moved to Toronto.