Which is why rifter implants flood the body with neuroinhibitors whenever ambient pressure rises above some critical threshold. Without them, stepping outside at these depths would be tantamount to electrocution.
“I said reduce,” Clarke repeats. “Not eliminate. Five percent. Seven percent tops.”
“And that does what, exactly?”
“Reduces synaptic firing thresholds. Your nerves get just a bit more…more sensitive, I guess. To smaller stimuli, when you go outside. You become aware of things you never noticed before.”
“Like what?” says Garcia.
“Like—” Clarke begins, and stops.
Suddenly she just wants to seal herself up and deny it all. Never mind, she wants to say. Bad idea. Bad joke. Forget I said anything. Or maybe even admit it alclass="underline" You don’t know what you’re risking. You don’t know how easy it is to go over the edge. My lover couldn’t even fit inside a hab without going into withdrawal, couldn’t even breathe without needing to smash anything that stood between him and the abyss. My friend committed murder for privacy in a place where you couldn’t swim next to someone without being force-fed their sickness and want. And he’s your friend too, he’s one of us here, and he’s the only other person left alive in the whole sick twisted planet who knows what this does to you…
She glances around, suddenly panicky, but Ken Lubin is not in the audience. Probably off drawing up duty rosters for the finely tuned.
Then again, she remembers, you get used to it.
She takes a breath and answers Garcia’s question. “You can tell if someone’s jerking you around, for one thing.”
“Hot damn,” Garcia exults. “I’m gonna be a walking bullshit detector.”
“That you are,” Clarke says, managing a smile.
Hope you’re up for it.
Her acolytes depart for their own little bubbles to play with themselves. Clarke closes herself back up as the med hab empties. By the time she’s back in black there’s just her, a crowd of wet footprints, and the massive hatch—always left open until just recently—that opens into the next sphere. Garcia’s grafted a combination lock across its wheel in uncaring defiance of dryback safety protocols.
How long do I have, she wonders, before everyone can muck around in my head?
Six hours at least, if the acolytes take her guess seriously. Then they’ll start playing, trying out the new sensory mode, perhaps even reveling in it if they don’t recoil at the things they find.
They’ll start spreading the word.
Clarke’s selling it as psychic surveillance, a new way to track down any guilty secrets the corpses may be hiding. Its effects are bound to spread way beyond Atlantis, though. It’ll be that much harder for anyone to conspire in the dark, when every passing soul comes equipped with a searchlight.
She finds herself standing at the entrance to Bhanderi’s lair, her hand on the retrofitted keypad near its center. She keys in the combination and undogs the hatch.
Suddenly she’s seeing in color. The mimetic seal rimming the hatch is a deep, steely blue. A pair of colorcoded pipes wind overhead like coral snakes. A cylinder of some compressed gas, spied through the open portal, reflects turquoise: the decals on its side are yellow and—incomprehensibly—hot pink.
It’s as bright as Atlantis in there.
She steps into the light: Calvin cycler, sleeping pallet, blood bank ooze pigment into the air. “Rama?”
“Close the door.”
Something sits hunched at the main workstation, running a sequence of rainbow nucleotides. It can’t be a rifter. It doesn’t have the affect, it doesn’t have the black shiny skin. It looks more like a hunched skeleton in shirtsleeves. It turns, and Clarke flinches inwardly: it doesn’t even have the eyes. The pupils twitching in Bhanderi’s face are dark yawning holes, dilated so widely that the irises around them are barely visible.
Not so bright, then. Still dark enough for uncapped eyes to strain to their limits. Such subtle differences get lost behind membranes that render the world at optimum apparent lumens.
Something must show on her face. “I took out the caps,” Bhanderi says. “The eyes— overstimulate, with all the enhancers.” His voice is still hoarse, the cords still not reacclimated to airborne speech.
“How’s it going?” Clarke asks.
A bony shrug. She can count the ribs even through his t-shirt.
“Anything yet? Diagnostic test, or—”
“Won’t be able to tell the difference until I know if there is a difference. So far it looks like ßehemoth with a couple of new stitches. Maybe mutations, maybe refits. I don’t know yet.”
“Would a baseline sample help?”
“Baseline?”
“Something that didn’t come through Atlantis. Maybe if you had a sample from Impossible Lake, you could compare. See if they’re different.”
He shakes his head: a twitch, a tic. “There are ways to tell tweaks. Satellite markers, junk sequences. Just takes time.”
“But you can do it. The—enhancers worked. It came back to you.”
He nods like a striking snake. He calls up another sequence.
“Thank you,” Clarke says softly.
He stops.
“Thank you? What choice do I have? There’s a lock on the hatch.”
“I know.” She lowers her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you think I’d just leave? That I’d just swim off and let this thing kill us all? Kill me, maybe?”
She shakes her head. “No. Not you.”
“Then why?”
Even motionless, his face looks like a stifled scream. It’s the eyes. Through all the calm, rapid-fire words, Bhanderi’s eyes seem frozen in a stare of absolute horror. It’s as if there’s something else in there, something ancient and unthinking and only recently awakened. It looks out across a hundred million years into an incomprehensible world of right angles and blinking lights, and finds itself utterly unable to cope.
“Because it comes and goes,” Clarke says. “You said it yourself.”
He extends one stick-like forearm, covered in derms; a chemical pump just below his elbow taps directly into the vein beneath. He’s been dosing himself ever since he climbed back into atmosphere, using miracles of modern chemistry to rape sanity back into his head, to force submerged memories and skills back to the surface for a while. So far, she has to admit, it’s working.
But whenever she looks at him, she sees the reptile looking back. “We can’t risk it, Rama. I’m sorry.”
He lowers his arm. His jaw clicks like some kind of insect.
“You said—” he begins, and falls silent.
He tries again. “When you were bringing me in. Did you say you knew a—”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know any—I mean, who?”
“Not here,” she tells him. “Not even this ocean. Way back at the very beginning of the rifter program. He went over in front of my eyes.” A beat, then: “His name was Gerry.”
“But you said he came back.”
She honestly doesn’t know. Gerry Fischer just appeared out of the darkness, after everyone else had given up and gone. He dragged her to safety, to an evacuation ’scaphe hovering uncertainly over a station already emptied of personnel. But he never spoke a word, and he kicked and fought like an animal when she tried to rescue him in turn.