Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

The man was talking happily to a young woman, as if he deserved to stand in the light. Amazingly, he truly did think that he was a nice person. I could have pondered that riddle for endless weeks of Bonnie time. It was like he was afflicted with anosognosia, a condition of not believing you have a mental illness because you have a mental illness, which was a major trouble of my aunt’s, who I really had loved. I had been afraid of becoming like her and having no one ever believe anything I’d ever say again, but that already came to pass anyway. This man wasn’t ill. He was just a cowardly sex criminal who was wrong about so many things, such as the future we were entering.

As I crossed the room, people made way. I called his name. He glanced up, looking so unafraid that it made me want to pull him into fifty pieces. I lifted my hand a little, and he stood taller. He might have straightened when he saw me. Also likely was that a horridly strong cackling force might have frozen him in its thin-fingered grip and lifted him high on his toes.

He might be compelled to tell me and this room full of people what he did to so many and who he was and every tiny detail of what went on in his mind. Forget punishment. Or, for that man, having to tell the honest truth, clean of self-preservation and self-regard, would be punishment enough. Or, there could be more punishment later. No need to decide yet. At that moment, all I wanted was the truth that had been denied me so long. Might it be denied me now?

Peter Watts (rifters.com) is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor, and convicted felon whose novels—despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires—have become required texts for university courses ranging from philosophy to neuropsychology. His work is available in twenty-one languages, has appeared in thirty best-of-the-year anthologies (including this one), and been nominated for over fifty awards in a dozen countries. His somewhat shorter list of twenty one actual wins includes the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun.

He lives in Toronto with fantasy author Caitlin Sweet, four cats, a pugilistic rabbit, a Plecostomus the size of a school bus, and a gang of tough raccoons who shake him down for kibble on the porch every summer. He likes all of them significantly more than most people he’s met.

Galik sneaks in through blue-green twilight a hundred meters down, where it’s calm. Overhead, lost in the murk, the mixing zone churns beneath the surface; the surface churns beneath the sky; immortal Nāmaka churns between, in ascension once more after four weeks slumming it up north as a Category 3.

A dim shape looms in the sub’s headlights: Sylvia Earle , an inflatable bladder four stories high, freshly relocated from its usual station over the White Shark Cafe. The sub sniffs out the dorsal docking hatch and locks on. Galik grunts a farewell to his pilot and drops into a cramped decompression chamber outfitted with a half-dozen molded seats and a second hatch—sealed—to complement the one he came in through. His ride disengages with a clank and slips back the way it came.

They let him out when the gauge reads nine atmospheres. A sullen tech in a blue coverall leads him down through a maze of pipes and ladders and bulkheads festooned with shark posters. She counters Galik’s small talk with grunts and monosyllables, abandons him in a dimly lit sub bay where every bulkhead wriggles with blue wavelight. A fat tadpole-shaped cubmarine wallows in the moon pool at its center, hatch agape at the end of a folding catwalk. Its flanks bristle with gifts for the seabed: magnetometers and CTD sensors, SIDs, current meters and cytometers. Other things even an oceanographer wouldn’t recognize. A name is stencilled onto the hull, just to the left of No Step: RSV Cyclopterus .

It can’t go as far or as fast as the craft that brought him here. But it can go way, way deeper.

The pilot’s fixated on the predive checklist as Galik climbs down into the cockpit and dogs the hatch. Galik breathes in sweat and monomers and machine oil, settles into the shotgun seat. “I’m Alistor.”

“Uh-huh.” Her head dips in perfunctory acknowledgment: a jaw-length curtain of dark ringlets, a cheekbone and profile behind. Moonpool light filters in through a smattering of high-pressure viewports arrayed like spider eyes around the front of the cockpit, paints her in faint watercolor. Her eyes never leave the board. “Buckle up.”

He does. Mechanical guts gurgle and belch. The lights past the viewports ascend and fade.

Cyclopterus drops into the void.

Galik settles back in his seat. “How long to the bottom?”

“Forty minutes. Forty-five.”

“Nice to be able to measure things in minutes again. Took me a day and a half to get here from Corvallis, and that was at forty knots.”

The pilot taps a flickering readout until it steadies.

“Kinda miss the old days, you know? When you could just fly out, drop down. No giant-ass superstorms getting in the way.”

She reaches back and grabs the pilot’s VR headset from its hook. Puts it on, slides the visor over her eyes.

Galik sighs.

VR’s not much use this high off the seabed; the 2D display spread across the dashboard is more than sufficient when there’s nothing but empty sea for a thousand meters in any direction. But for want of anything else to do, Galik grabs his own headset and boots it up. He finds himself suspended in a sparse void sprinkled with occasional readouts and scale bars. Close below, a faint translucent membrane spreads out across the universe at 1,300 meters. Four thousand meters below that, the ocean floor bounces back solid corduroy.

“That’s strange,” the pilot murmurs.

Galik raises his visor. “What?”

Under hers, the pilot’s lips are pursed. “Pycnocline’s way down at thirteen hundred. Never seen it so dee—” She catches herself consorting with the enemy, falls silent.

Galik rolls his eyes and weighs his options. Goes for it.

“You be breaking any protocols to at least tell me your name?”

Her hooded face turns toward him for a moment. “Koa Moreno.”

“Pleased to meet you, Koa. How did I manage to piss you off in the past five minutes?”

“You didn’t. We just—don’t do small talk down here.”

“Ah.” He nods, though she can’t see it. “Parties on the Sylvia Earle must be a hoot.”

“Try spending a few months breathing recycled farts and belches from the same ten people. You’ll reset your boundaries soon enough.”

“It’s more than that.”

Something changes in her posture, some subtle slumping of the shoulders that says Fine, asshole, have it your way. She ups her visor up and turns to face him.

“This could be the last one . And you’re going to fuck it up like everything else.”

“Me?”

“Nautilus.”

“What makes you think—”

“After you strip-mined every last park and refuge and vacant lot on land, you moved offshore. We’ve been watching it happen, Alistor . I was there when Lizard Island went down. Clipperton’s one of the last places the ISA didn’t cave on. But it was only a matter of time, wasn’t it? Seabed’s just another resource to tear up while we wait for the ceiling to crash in.”

Galik feels his face pulling into a tight little smile. “Well. I guess I asked.”

She turns her attention to the dashboard.

“This is just a preliminary survey,” he tries. “Might not come to anything.”

“Give me a break. The whole zone’s rotten with polymetallics and you know it.” She shakes her head. “Honestly, I don’t know why you’re even going through the motions. Why not just buy yourself a rubber stamp and go straight to the strip-mining?”