“You know it’s possible that the corpses have nothing to do with this.”
Nolan leans back in her chair and stretches. “Sweetie, I can’t tell you how surprised I am to hear you say that.”
“So show me some evidence.”
Nolan smiles, shaking her head. “Here’s a bit of an exercise for you. Say you’re swimming through shark-infested waters. Big sickle-finned stumpfucks all over the place, and they’re looking you up and down and you know the only reason they’re not tearing into you right now is because you’ve got your billy out, and they’ve seen what that billy can do to fishies like them. So they keep their distance, but that makes ’em hate you even more, right? Because you’ve already killed some of ’em. These are really smart sharks. They hold grudges.
“So you swim along for a little while, all these cold dead pissed-off eyes and teeth always just out of range, and you come across—oh, say Ken. Or what’s left of him. A bit of entrail, half a face, ID patch just floating around amongst all those sharks. What do you do, Len? Do you decide there isn’t any evidence? Do you say Hey, I can’t prove anything, I didn’t see this go down? Do you say, Let’s not jump to any conclusions...”
“That’s a really shitty analogy,” Clarke says softly.
“I think it’s a great fucking analogy.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I can tell you what I’m not going to do,” Nolan assures her. “I’m not going to sit back and have faith in the goodness of corpse spirit while all my friends turn to sockeye.”
“Is anyone asking you to do that?”
“Not yet. Any time now, I figure.”
Clarke sighs. “Grace, I’m only saying, for the good of all of us—”
“Fuck you,” Nolan snarls suddenly. “Fuck you. You don’t give a shit about us.”
It’s as if someone flipped a switch. Clarke stares, astonished.
Nolan glares eyelessly back, her body trembling with sudden rage. “You really want to know my problem with you? You sold us out. We were this close to pulling the plug on those stumpfucks. We could’ve forced their own goddamn entrails down their throats, and you stopped us, you fucker.”
“Grace,” she tries, “I know how you fe—”
“Horseshit! You don’t have a fucking clue how I feel!”
What did they do to you, Clarke wonders, to turn you into this?
“They did things to me too,” she says softly.
“Sure they did. And you got yours back, didn’t you? And correct me if I’m wrong but didn’t you end up fucking over a whole lot of innocent people in the mix? You never gave a shit about them. And maybe it was too much trouble to work it through but a fair number of us fish-heads lost people to your grand crusade along with everyone else. You didn’t give a shit about them either, as long as you got your kick at the cat. Fine. You got it. But the rest of us are still waiting, aren’t we? We don’t even want to mow down millions of innocent people, we just want to get at the assholes who actually fucked us over—and you of all people come crawling over here on Patricia Rowan’s leash to tell me I don’t have the right?” Nolan shakes her head in disgust. “I don’t believe we let you stop us before, and I sure as shit don’t believe you’re going to stop us now.”
Her hatred radiates through the compartment like infrared. Clarke is distantly amazed that the vines beside her don’t blacken and burst into flame.
“I came to you because I thought we could work something out,” she says.
“You came because you know you’re losing it.”
The words ignite a small, cold knot of anger under Clarke’s diaphragm. “Is that what you think.”
“You never gave a shit about working things out.” Nolan growls. “You just sat off on your own, I’m the Meltdown Madonna, I’m Mermaid of the fucking Apocalypse, I get to stand off to the side and make the rules. But the rabble isn’t falling into line this time, sweetie, and it scares you. I scare you. So spare me the dreck about altruism and diplomacy. This is just you trying to keep your little tin throne from going sockeye. It’s been nice talking to you.”
She grabs her fins and stalks into the airlock.
Portrait of the Sadist as a Young Man
Achilles Desjardins couldn’t remember the last time he’d had consensual sex with a real woman. He could, however, remember the first time he’d refused it:
It was 2046 and he’d just saved the Mediterranean. That’s how N’AmWire was presenting it, anyway. All he’d really done was deduce the existence of a strange attractor in the Gulf of Cádiz, a persistent little back-eddy that no one else had bothered to look for. According to the sims it was small enough to tweak with albedo dampers; the effects would proliferate through the Strait of Gibralter and—if the numbers were right—stave off the collapse of the Med by an easy decade. Or until the Gulf Stream failed again, whichever came first. It was only a reprieve, not outright salvation, but it was just what CSIRA needed to make everyone forget the Baltic fiasco. Besides, nobody ever looked ahead more than ten years anyway.
So for a while, Achilles Desjardins had been a star. Even Lertzmann had pretended to like him for the better part of a month, told him he was fast-tracked for senior status just as soon as they got the security checks out of the way. Unless he had a bunch of butchered babies in his past he’d be getting his shots before Hallowe’en. Hell, he’d probably be getting them even if he did have a bunch of butchered babies in his past. Background checks were nothing but empty ritual in the higher ranks of the Patrol; you could be a serial killer and it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference once Guilt Trip was bubbling in your brain. You’d be just as thoroughly enslaved to the Greater Good.
Aurora, her name was. She wore the zebra hair that had been fashionable at the time, and an endearingly-tasteless armload of faux refugee branding scars. They’d hooked up at some CSIRA soirée hosted from the far side of the world by the EurAfrican Assembly. Their jewelry sniffed each other’s auras to confirm a mutual interest (which still meant something, back then), and their path chips exchanged the usual clean bills of health (which didn’t). So they left the party, dropped three hundred meters from CSIRA’s executive stratosphere to the Sudbury Streets—then another fifty into the subterranean bowels of Pickering’s Pile, where the pathware was guaranteed hackproof and tested for twice the usual range of STDs to boot. They gave blood behind a cute little r’n’r couple who broke up on the spot when one of them tested positive for an exotic trematode infesting his urinary tract.
Desjardins had yet to acquire most of the tailored chemicals that would cruise his system in later years; he could still safely imbibe all manner of tropes and mood-changers. So he and Aurora grabbed a booth just off the bar while their bloods ran, stroked the little psychotropic amphibians clambering about in the tabletop terrarium. Dim green light filtered in from the great underground tank in which the Pile was immersed, a radium-glow mock-up of an old nuclear-storage lagoon visible through the plexi walls. After a few minutes one of the in-house butterflies lit on their table, its membranous wings sparkling with refracted data: green on all wavelengths.