The rifter floats in darkness, her contours limned by feeble light leaking through the viewport. She wears a second skin that almost qualifies as a lifeform in its own right, a miracle of thermo- and osmoregulation, black as an oil slick. She does not breathe.
A wall separates the two women, keeps ocean from air, adult from adolescent. They speak through a device fixed to the inside of the teardrop viewport, a fist-sized limpet that turns the fullerene perspex into an acoustic transceiver.
“You said you’d come by,” Alyx Rowan says. Passage across the bulkhead leaves her voice a bit tinny. “I made it up to fifth level, I was like holy shit, look at all the bonus points! I wanted to show you around. Scammed an extra headset and everything.”
“Sorry,” Clarke buzzes back. “I was in before, but you were asleep.”
“So come in now.”
“Can’t. I’ve only got a minute or two. Something’s come up.”
“Like what?”
“Someone got injured, something bit him or something, and now the meat-cutters are going off the deep end about possible infection.”
“What infection?” Alyx asks.
“It’s probably nothing. But they’re talking about a quarantine just to be on the safe side. For all I know, they wouldn’t let me back inside anyway.”
“It’d let ’em play at being in control of something, I guess.” Alyx grins; the parabolic viewport bends her face into a clownish distortion. “They really, really hate not being the ones in charge, you know?” And then, with a satisfaction obviously borne less of corpses than of adults in generaclass="underline" “It’s about time they learned how that felt.”
“I’m sorry,” Clarke says suddenly.
“They’ll get over it.”
“That’s not what I…” The rifter shakes her head. “It’s just—you’re fourteen, for God’s sake. You shouldn’t be down—I mean, you should be out lekking with some r-selector—”
Alyx snorts. “Boys? I don’t think so.”
“Girls then. Either way, you should be out getting laid, not stuck down here.”
“This is the best place I could possibly be,” Alyx says simply.
She looks out across three hundred atmospheres, a teenaged girl trapped for the rest of her life in a cage on the bottom of a frigid black ocean. Lenie Clarke would give anything to be able to disagree with her.
“Mom won’t talk about it,” Alyx says after a while.
Still Clarke says nothing.
“What happened between you guys, back when I was just a kid. Some of the others shoot their mouths off when she’s not around, so I kind of hear things. But Mom never says anything.”
Mom is kinder than she should be.
“You were enemies, weren’t you?”
Clarke shakes her head—a pointless and unseeable gesture, here in the dark. “Alyx, we didn’t even know each other existed, not until the very end. Your mom was only trying to stop—”
—what happened anyway…
—what I was trying to start…
There’s so much more than speech. She wants to sigh. She wants to scream. All denied out here, her lung and guts squeezed flat, every other cavity flooded and incompressible. There’s nothing she can do but speak in this monotone travesty of a voice, this buzzing insect voice.
“It’s complicated,” her vocoder says, flat and dispassionate. “It was so much more than just enemies, you know? There were other things involved, there was all that wildlife in the wires, doing its own thing—”
“They let that out,” Alyx insists. “They started it. Not you.” By which she means, of course, adults. Perpetrators and betrayers and the-ones-who-fucked-everything-up-for-the-next-generation. And it dawns on Clarke that Alyx is not including her in that loathsome conspiracy of elders—that Lenie Clarke, Meltdown Madonna, has somehow acquired the status of honorary innocent in the mind of this child.
She feels ill at the thought of so much undeserved absolution. It seems obscene. But she doesn’t have the courage to set her friend straight. All she can manage is a pale, half-assed disclaimer:
“They didn’t mean to, kid.” She goes for a sad chuckle. It comes out sounding like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. “Nobody—nobody did anything on their own, back then. It was strings all the way up.”
The ocean groans around her.
The sound resonates somewhere between the call of a humpback whale and the death-cry of some mammoth hull, buckling under pressure. It fills the ocean; some of it leaks through Alyx’s limpet-device. She screws her face up in distaste. “I hate that sound.”
Clarke shrugs, pathetically grateful for the interruption. “Hey, you corpses have your conferences, we have ours.”
“It’s not that. It’s those haploid chimes. I’m telling you Lenie, that guy’s scary. You can’t trust anyone who makes something that sounds like that.”
“Your mom trusts him fine. So do I. I’ve got to go.”
“He kills people, Lenie. And I’m not just talking about my Dad. He’s killed a lot of people.” A soft snort. “Something else Mom never talks about.”
Clarke coasts over to the perspex, lays one silhouetted hand against the light in farewell.
“He’s an amateur,” she says, and fins away into the darkness.
The voice cries out from a ragged mouth in the seabed, an ancient chimney of basalt stuffed with machinery. In its youth it spewed constant scalding gouts of water and minerals; now it merely belches occasionally. Soft exhalations stir the mechanisms in its throat, spinning blades and fluting pipes and spliced chunks of rock and metal that bang together. Its voice is compelling but unreliable; after Lubin built these chimes, he had to come up with a way to kick-start them manually. So he scavenged the reservoir from a decommissioned desalinator, added a heat pump from some part of Atlantis that never survived the Corpse Revolt. Open a valve and hot seawater flows through a tracheotomy hole blasted into the smoker’s throat: Lubin’s machinery screams aloud, tortured by the scalding current.
The summons grinds out, rusty and disharmonious. It washes over rifters swimming and conversing and sleeping in an ocean black as heat death. It resonates through makeshift habs scattered across the slope, dismal bubbles of metal and atmosphere so dimly-lit that even eyecaps see only in black-and-gray. It slaps against the shiny bright biosteel of Atlantis and nine hundred prisoners speak a little louder, or turn up the volume, or hum nervously to themselves in denial.
Some of the rifters—those awake, and in range, and still human—gather at the chimes. The scene is almost Shakespearean: a circle of levitating witches on some blasted midnight heath, eyes burning with cold phosphorescence, bodies barely distinguished from shadow. They are not so much lit as inferred by the faint blue embers glowing from the machinery in the seabed.
All of them bent, not broken. All of them half-balanced in that gray zone between adaptation and dysfunction, stress thresholds pushed so high by years of abuse that chronic danger is mere ambience now, unworthy of comment. They were chosen to function in such environments; their creators never expected them to thrive here. But here they are, here are their badges of office: Jelaine Chen with her pink, nailless fingers, salamandered back in the wake of childhood amputations. Dimitri Alexander, communal priest-bait in those last infamous days before the Pope fled into exile. Kevin Walsh, who freaks inexplicably at the sight of running shoes. Any number of garden-variety skitterers who can’t abide physical contract; immolation junkies; self-mutilators and glass-eaters. All wounds and deformities safely disguised by the diveskins, all pathology hidden behind a uniformity of shadowy ciphers.