Starfish (16 page)

"Wow," says the mantis. "What happened to you? No, don't answer that either. I don't want to know." An accessory arm springs into sight and passes back and forth across Fischer's line of sight. "I'm going to override the damping field for a moment. It might hurt a bit. Try not to move when that happens, except to answer my questions."

Pain floods across Fischer's face. It's not too bad. Familiar, even. His eyelids feel scratchy, and his tongue is dry. He tries blinking; it works. He closes his mouth, rubs his tongue against swollen cheeks. Better.

"I don't suppose you want to come back up?" Dr. Troyka asks, hundreds of kilometers away. "You know these injuries are bad enough to warrant a recall."

Fischer shakes his head. "That's okay. I can stay here."

"Uh huh." The mantis doesn't sound surprised. "I've been hearing that a fair bit lately. Okay, I'm going to wire your cheekbone back together, and I'll be planting a little battery under your skin. Just below the right eye. It'll basically kick your bone cells into overdrive, speed up the healing process. It's just a couple of millimeters across, you'll feel like you've got sort of a hard pimple. It may itch, but try not to pick at it. When you're healed up you can just squeeze it out like a zit. Okay?"

"Okay."

"All right, Gerry. I'm going to turn the field back on and get to work." The mantis whirrs in anticipation.

Fischer holds up a hand. "Wait."

"What is it, Gerry?"

"What...what time is it, up there?" he asks.

"It's oh five ten. Pacific daylight. Why?"

"It's early."

"Sure is."

"I guess I got you up," Fischer says. "Sorry."

"Nonsense." Digits on the end of mechanical arms wiggle absently. "I've been up for hours. Graveyard shift."

"Graveyard?"

"We're on duty around the clock, Gerry. There's a lot of geothermal stations out there, you know. You— you keep us pretty busy, as a rule."

"Oh," Fischer says. "Sorry."

"Forget it. It's my job." There's a humming, somewhere in the back of his head; for a moment Fischer can feel the muscles of his face going slack. Then everything goes numb, and the mantis swoops down him like a predator.

* * *

He knows better than to open up outside.

It doesn't kill you, not right away. But seawater's a lot saltier than blood; let it inside and osmosis sucks the water from the epithelial cells, shrivels them down to viscous little blobs. Rifter kidneys are modified to speed up water reclamation when that happens, but it's not a long-term solution and it costs. Organs wears out faster, urine turns to oil. It's best to just keep sealed up. Your insides soak in seawater too long, they sort of
corrode
, implants or no implants.

But that's another one of Fischer's problems. He never takes the long view.

The face seal is a single macromolecule fifty centimeters long. It wraps back and forth along the line of the jaw like the two sides of a zipper, with hydrophobic side-chains for teeth. A little blade on the index of Fischer's left glove can split them apart. He runs it along the seal and the 'skin opens neatly around his mouth.

He doesn't feel much of anything at first. He was half-expecting the ocean to charge up his nose and burn his sinuses, but of course all his body cavities are already packed with isotonic saline. The only immediate change is that his face gets cold, numbing the chronic ache of torn flesh a bit. Deeper pain pulses under one eye, where Dr. Troyka's wires hold the bones of his face together; microelectricity tingles along those lines, press-gangs bonebuilding osteoblasts into high gear.

After a couple of moments he tries to gargle; that doesn't work, so he settles for gaping like a fish and wriggling his tongue around. That does it. He gets his first taste of raw ocean, coarse and saltier than the stuff that pumps him up inside.

On the seabed in front of him, a swarm of blind shrimp feeds in the current from a nearby vent. Fischer can see right through them. They're like little chunks of glass with blobs of organs jiggling around inside.

It must be fourteen hours since he's eaten, but there's no fucking way he's going back to Beebe with Brander still inside. The last time he tried, Brander was actually standing guard in the lounge, waiting for him.

What the hell. It's just like krill. People eat this stuff all the time.

They have a strange taste. Fischer's mouth is going numb from the cold, but there's still a faint sense of rotten eggs, dilute and barely detectable. Not bad other than that, though. Better than Brander by a long shot.

When the convulsions hit fifteen minutes later, he's not so sure.

* * *

"You look like shit," Lenie says.

Fischer hangs onto the railing, looks around the lounge. "Where—"

"At the Throat. On shift with Lubin and Caraco."

He makes it to the couch.

"Haven't seen you for a while," Lenie remarks. "How's your face doing?"

Fischer squints at her through a haze of nausea. Lenie Clarke is actually making small talk. She's
never
done that before. He's still trying to figure out why when his stomach clamps down again and he pitches onto the floor. By now nothing comes up but a few dribbles of sour fluid.

His eyes trace the pipes tangling along the ceiling. After a while Lenie's face blocks the view, looking down from a great height.

"What's wrong?" She seems to be asking out of idle curiosity, no more.

"Ate some shrimp," he says, and retches again.

"You ate— from
outside
?" She bends down and pulls him up. His arms drag along behind on the deck. Something hard bumps his head; the railing around the downstairs ladder.

"Fuck," Lenie says.

He's on the floor again, alone. Receding footsteps. Dizziness. Something presses against his neck, pricks him with a soft hiss.

His head clears almost instantly.

Lenie's leaning in, closer than she's ever been. She's even touching him, she's got one hand on his shoulder. He stares down at that hand, feeling a stupid sort of wonder, but then she pulls it away.

She's holding a hypo. Fischer's stomach begins to settle.

"Why," she says softly, "would you do a stupid thing like that?"

"I was hungry."

"So what's wrong with the dispenser?"

He doesn't answer.

"Oh," Lenie says. "Right."

She stands up and snaps the spent cartridge out of the hypo. "This can't go on, Fischer. You know that."

"He hasn't got me in two weeks."

"He hasn't
seen
you in two weeks. You only come in when he's on shift. And you're missing your own shifts more and more. Doesn't make you too popular with the rest of us." She cocks her head as Beebe creaks around them. "Why don't you just call up and get them to take you home?"

Because I do things to children, and if I leave here they'll cut me open and change me into something else...

Because there are things outside that almost make it worthwhile...

Because of you...

He doesn't know if she'd understand any of those reasons. He decides not to risk it.

"Maybe you could talk to him," he manages.

Lenie sighs. "He wouldn't listen."

"Maybe if you tried, at least—"

Her face hardens. "I
have
tried. I—"

She catches herself.

"I can't get involved," she whispers. "It's none of my business."

Fischer closes his eyes. He feels as if he's going to cry. "He just doesn't let up. He really hates me."

"It's not you. You're just— filling in."

"Why did they put us together? It doesn't make sense!"

"Sure it does. Statistically."

Fischer opens his eyes. "What?"

Lenie's pulling one hand down across her face. She seems very tired.

"We're not people here, Fischer. We're a cloud of data points. Doesn't matter what happens to you or me or Brander, just as long as the mean stays where it's supposed to and the standard deviation doesn't get too big."

Tell her, Shadow says.

"Lenie—"

"Anyway." Lenie shrugs the mood away. "You're crazy to eat anything that near a rift zone. Didn't you learn about hydrogen sulfide?"

He nods. "Basic training. The vents spit it out."

"And it builds up in the benthos. They're toxic. Which I guess you know now anyway."

She starts down the ladder, stops on the second rung.

"If you really want to go native, try feeding further from the rift. Or go for the fish."

"The fish?"

"They move around more. Don't spend all their time soaking in the hot springs. Maybe they're safe."

"The fish," he says again. He hadn't thought of that.

"I said
maybe
."

* * *

Shadow I'm so sorry...

Shush. Just look at all the pretty lights.

So he looks. He knows this place. He's on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He's back in fairyland. He thinks he comes here a lot now, watches the lights and bubbles, listens to the deep rocks grinding against each other.

Maybe he'll stay this time, watch the whole thing working, but then he remembers he's supposed to be somewhere else. He waits, but nothing specific comes to him. Just a feeling that he should be doing something somewhere else. Soon.

It's getting harder to stay here anyway. There's a vague pain hanging around his upper body somewhere, fading in and out. After a while he realizes what it is. His face hurts.

Maybe this beautiful light is hurting his eyes.

That can't be right. His caps should take care of all that. Maybe they're not working. He seems to remember something that happened to his eyes a while back, but it doesn't really matter. He can always just leave. Suddenly, wonderfully, all of his problems have easy answers.

If the light hurts, all he has to do is stay in the dark.

"Hey," Caraco buzzes as they come around the corner. "Number four."

Clarke looks. Four's fifteen meters away and the water's a bit murky this shift. Still, she can see something big and dark sticking to the intake vent. Its shadow twitches down along the casing like an absurdly stretched black spider.

Clarke fins forward a few meters, Caraco at her side. The two women exchange looks.

Fischer, hanging upside down against the mesh. It's been four days since anyone's seen him.

Clarke gently sets down her carry bag; Caraco follows her lead. Two or three kicks bring them to within five meters of the intake. Machinery hums omnipresently, makes a sound deep enough to feel.