“Warned you?”
“That Erickson might be vectoring ßehemoth. You left all of us exposed. If there was even a chance…”
But there’s not, Clarke wants to rail. There’s not. You chose this place because ßehemoth could never get here, not in a thousand years. I saw the maps, I traced out the currents with my own fingers. It’s not ßehemoth. It’s not.
It can’t be.
Instead she says, “It’s a big ocean, Pat. Lots of nasty predators with big pointy teeth. They didn’t all get that way because of ßehemoth.”
“This far down, they did. You know the energetics as well as I do. You were at Channer, Lenie. You knew what to look for.”
Clarke jerks her thumb towards Lubin. “Ken was at Channer too, remember? You shitting on him like this?”
“Ken didn’t deliberately spread that damn bug across a whole continent to pay back the world for his unhappy childhood.” The silver eyes fix Clarke in a hard stare. “Ken was on our side.”
Clarke doesn’t speak for a moment. Finally, very slowly: “Are you saying I deliberately—”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. But it looks bad. Jerry’s livid about this, and she won’t be the only one. You’re the Meltdown Madonna, for God’s sake! You were willing to write off the whole world to get your revenge on us.”
“If I wanted you dead,” Clarke says evenly—If I still wanted you dead, some inner editor amends— “You would be. Years ago. All I had to do was stand aside.”
“Of course that’s—”
Clarke cuts her off: “I protected you. When the others were arguing about whether to punch holes in the hull or just cut your power and let you suffocate—I was the one who held them back. You’re alive because of me.”
The corpse shakes her head. “Lenie, that doesn’t matter.”
“It damn well should.”
“Why? We were only trying to save the world, remember? It wasn’t our fault we failed, it was yours. And after we failed, we settled for saving our families, and you wouldn’t even give us that. You hunted us down even at the bottom of the ocean. Who knows why you held back at the last minute?”
“You know,” Clarke says softly.
Rowan nods. “I know. But most of the people down here don’t expect rationality from you. Maybe you’ve just been toying with us all these years. There’s no telling when you’ll pull the trigger.”
Clarke shakes her head dismissively. “What’s that, the Gospel According to the Executive Club?”
“Call it what you want. It’s what you have to deal with. It’s what I have to deal with.”
“We fish-heads have a few stories of our own, you know,” Clarke says. “How you corpses programmed people like machinery so you could top up some bottom line. How you sent us into the world’s worst shit-holes to do your dirty work, and when we ran into ßehemoth the first thing you did was try to kill us to save your own hides.”
Suddenly the ventilators seem unnaturally loud. Clarke turns; Lubin and the corpses stare back from across the cave.
She looks away again, flustered.
Rowan smiles grimly. “See how easily it all comes back?” Her eyes glitter, target-locked. Clarke returns her gaze without speaking.
After a moment, Rowan relaxes a bit. “We’re rival tribes, Lenie. We’re each other’s outgroup—but you know what’s amazing? Somehow, in the past couple of years, we’ve started to forget all that. We live and let live, for the most part. We cooperate, and nobody even thinks it worthy of comment.” She glances significantly across the room to Lubin and the techs. “I think that’s a good thing, don’t you?”
“So why should it change now?” Clarke asks.
“Because ßehemoth may have caught up with us at last, and people will say you let it in.”
“That’s horseshit.”
“I agree, for what it’s worth.”
“And even if it was true, who cares?” Everyone’s part mermaid down here, even the corpses. All retrofitted with the same deep-sea fish-genes, coding for the same stiff little proteins that ßehemoth can’t get its teeth into.
“There’s a concern that the retrofits may not be effective,” Rowan admits softly.
“Why? It was your own people designed the fucking things!”
Rowan raises an eyebrow. “Those would be the same experts who assured us that ßehemoth would never make it to the deep Atlantic.”
“But I was rotten with ßehemoth. If the retrofits didn’t work—”
“Lenie, these people have never been exposed. They’ve only got some expert’s word that they’re immune, and in case you haven’t noticed our experts have proven distressingly fallible of late. If we were really so confident in our own countermeasures, why would we even be hiding down here? Why wouldn’t we be back on shore with our stockholders, with our people, trying to hold back the tide?”
Clarke sees it at last.
“Because they’d tear you apart,” she whispers.
Rowan shakes her head. “It’s because scientists have been wrong before, and we can’t trust their assurances. It’s because we’re not willing to take chances with the health of our families. It’s because we may still be vulnerable to ßehemoth, and if we’d stayed behind it would have killed us along with everyone else and we’d have done no good at all. Not because our own people would turn on us. We’ll never believe that.” Her eyes don’t waver. “We’re like everyone else, you see. We were all doing the very best we could, and things just—got out of control. It’s important to believe that. So we all do.”
“Not all,” Clarke acknowledges softly.
“Still.”
“Fuck ’em. Why should I prop up their self-serving delusions?”
“Because when you force the truth down people’s throats, they bite back.”
Clarke smiles faintly. “Let them try. I think you’re forgetting who’s in charge here, Pat.”
“I’m not worried for your sake, I’m worried for ours. You people tend to overreaction.” When Clarke doesn’t deny it, Rowan continues: “It’s taken five years to build some kind of armistice down here. ßehemoth could kick it into a thousand pieces overnight.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I think rifters should stay out of Atlantis for the time being. We can sell it as a quarantine. ßehemoth may or may not be out there, but at least we can keep it from getting in here.”
Clarke shakes her head. “My tribe won’t give a shit about that.”
“You and Ken are the only ones who come in here anyway, for the most part,” Rowan points out. “And the others…they won’t go against anything you put your stamp of approval on.”
“I’ll think about it,” Clarke sighs. “No promises.” She turns to go.
And turns back. “Alyx up?”
“Not for another couple of hours. I know she wanted to see you, though.”
“Oh.” Clarke suppresses a twinge of disappointment.
“I’ll give her your regrets.” Rowan says.
“Yeah. Do that.”
No shortage of those.
Huddle
Rowan’s daughter sits on the edge of her bed, aglow with sunny radiance from the lightstrip on the ceiling. She’s barefoot, clad in panties and a baggy t-shirt on which animated hatchet-fish swim endless circuits around her midriff. She breathes a recycled mixture of nitrogen and oxygen and trace gases, distinguishable from real air only by its extreme purity.