Starfish (33 page)

"It's not," Joel says. "At least, not that I've seen."

"Yeah, well, that's what most people think. Every now and then you get pieces of something weird washing up, though. And of course there's Megamouth. And your garden-variety giant squid."

"They never get down this far. I bet none of your other giants do either. Not enough food."

"Except for the vents," Jarvis says.

"Except for the vents."

"Actually," Jarvis amends, "except for
this
vent."

The transponder line swings past, a silent metronome.

"Yeah," says Joel after a moment. "Why is that?"

"Well, we're not sure. We're working on it, though. That's what I'm doing here. Gonna bag one of those scaly mothers."

"You're kidding. We going to butt it to death with the hull?"

"Actually, it's already been bagged. The rifters got it for us a couple of days ago. All we do is pick it up."

"I could do that solo. Why'd you come along?"

"Got to check to make sure they did it right. Don't want the canister blowing up on the surface."

"And that extra tank you strapped onto my 'scaphe? The one with the biohazard stickers all over it?"

"Oh," Jarvis says. "That's just to sterilize the sample."

"Uh huh." Joel lets his eyes run over the panels. "You must pull a lot of weight back on shore."

"Oh? Why's that?"

"I used to make the Channer run a lot. Pharmaceutical dives, supply trips to Beebe, ecotourism. A while back I shuttled some corpse type out to Beebe; he said he was staying for a month or so. The GA calls me three days later and tells me to go pick him up. I show up for the run and they tell me it's cancelled. No explanation."

"Pretty strange," Jarvis remarks.

"You're the first run I've had to Channer in six weeks. You're the first run
anyone
's had, from what I can tell. So, you pull some weight."

"Not really." Jarvis shrugs in the half-light. "I'm just a research associate. I go where they tell me, just like you. Today they told me to go and pick up an order of fish to go."

Joel looks at him.

"You were asking why they got so big," Jarvis says, deking to the right. "We figure it's some kind of endosymbiotic infection."

"No shit."

"Say it's easier for some microbe to live inside a fish than out in the ocean — less osmotic stress — so once inside it's pumping out more ATP than it needs."

"ATP," Joel says.

"High-energy phosphate compound. Cellular battery. Anyway, it spits out this surplus ATP, and the host fish can use it as extra growth energy. So maybe Channer Vent's got some sort of unique bug that infects teleost fishes and gives 'em a growth spurt."

"Pretty weird."

"Actually, happens all the time. Every one of your own cells is a colony, for that matter. You know, nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts if you're a plant—"

"I'm not."
More than I can say for some folks...

"—those all used to be free-living microbes in their own right. A few billion years ago something ate them, but it couldn't digest them properly so they all just kept living inside the cytoplasm. Eventually they struck up a deal with the host cell, took over housecleaning tasks and suchlike in lieu of rent. Voila: your modern eukaryotic cell."

"So what happens if this Channer bug gets into a person? We all grow three meters high?"

A polite laugh. "Nope. People stop growing when they reach adulthood. So do most vertebrates, actually. Fish, on the other hand, keep growing their whole lives. And
deepwater
fish—those don't do anything
except
grow, if you know what I mean."

Joel raises his eyebrows.

Jarvis holds up his hands. "I know, I know. Your baby finger is bigger than your average deepsea fish. But that just means they're short of fuel; when they
do
gas up, believe me, they use it for growth. Why waste calories just swimming around when you can't see anything anyway? In dark environments it makes more sense for predators to sit-and-wait. Whereas if you grow big enough, maybe you'll get too big for
other
predators, you see?"

"Mmm."

"Of course, we're basing the whole theory on a couple of samples that got dragged up without any protection against temperature or pressure changes." Jarvis snorts. "Might as well have sent them in a paper bag. But this time we're doing it right— hey, is that
light
I see down there?"

There's a vague yellow glow smudging the darkness directly below. Joel calls up a topographic display: Beebe. The geothermal array over at the rift proper lays out a sequence of hard green echoes bearing 340°. And just to the left of that, about a hundred meters off the east-most generator, something squirts a unique acoustic signature at four-second intervals.

Joel taps commands to the dive planes. The 'scaphe pulls out of its spiral and coasts off to the northeast. Beebe Station, never more than a bright stain, fades to stern.

The ocean floor resolves suddenly in the 'scaphe's headlights; bone-gray ooze slides past, occasional outcroppings, great squashed marshmallows of lava and pumice. In the cockpit a flashing point of light slo-mo's towards the center of the topographic display.

Something charges them from overhead; the dull wet sound of its impact reverberates briefly through the hull. Joel looks up through the dorsal port but sees nothing. Several more impacts, staggered. The 'scaphe whirs implacably onward.

"There."

It looks almost like a lifeboat canister, three meters long. Readouts twinkle from a panel on one rounded end. It's resting on a carpet of giant tubeworms, their feathery crowns extended in full filter-feeding mode. Joel thinks of the baby Moses, nestled in a clump of mutant bulrushes.

"Wait a second," Jarvis says. "Kill the lights first."

"What for?"

"You don't need them, do you?"

"Well, no. I can use instruments if I have to. But why—"

"Just do it, okay?" Jarvis, the chatterbox, is suddenly all business.

Darkness floods the cockpit, retreats a bit before the glow of the readouts. Joel grabs a pair of eyephones off a hook to his left. The sea floor reappears before him courtesy of the ventral photoamps, faded to blue and black.

He coaxes the 'scaphe into position directly above the canister, listens to the clank and creak of grapples flexing beneath the deck; metal claws the color of slate extend across his field of view.

"Spray it before you pick it up," Jarvis says.

Joel reaches out and taps the control codes without looking. The 'phones show him a nozzle extending from Jarvis's tank, taking aim like a skinny cobra.

"Do it."

The nozzle ejaculates gray-blue murk, sprays back and forth along the length of the canister, sweeping the benthos on either side. The tubeworms yank back into their tunnels and shut the doors; the whole featherduster forest vanishes in an instant, leaving a crowd of sealed leathery tubes.

The nozzle spews its venom.

One of the tubes opens, almost hesitantly. Something dark and stringy drifts out, twitching. The gray plume sweeps across it; it sags, lifeless, across the sill of its burrow. Other tubes are opening now. Invertebrate corpses slump back into sight.

"What's in this stuff?" Joel whispers.

"Cyanide. Rotenone. Some other things. Sort of a cocktail."

The nozzle sputters for a few seconds and runs dry. Automatically, Joel retracts it.

"Okay," Jarvis says. "Let's grab it and go home."

Joel doesn't move.

"Hey," Jarvis says.

Joel shakes his head, plays the machinery. The 'scaphe extends its arms in a metal hug, pulls the canister off the bottom. Joel strips the 'phones from his eyes and taps the controls. They begin rising.

"That was a pretty thorough rinse," Joel remarks after a while.

"Yes. Well, the sample's costing us a fair bit. Don't want to contaminate it."

"I see."

"You can turn the lights back on," Jarvis says. "How long before we break the surface?"

Joel trips the floods. "Twenty minutes. Half hour."

"I hope the lifter pilot doesn't get too bored." Jarvis is all chummy again.

"There is no pilot. It's a smart gel."

"Really? You don't say." Jarvis frowns. "Those are scary things, those gels. You know one suffocated a bunch of people in London a while back?"

Yes
, Joel's about to say, but Jarvis is back in spew mode. "No shit. It was running the subway system over there, perfect operational record, and then one day it just forgets to crank up the ventilators when it's supposed to. Train slides into station fifteen meters underground, everybody gets out, no air, boom."

Joel's heard this before. The punchline's got something to do with a broken clock, if he remembers it right.

"These things teach themselves from experience, right?," Jarvis continues. "So everyone just assumed it had learned to cue the ventilators on something obvious. Body heat, motion, CO
₂
levels, you know. Turns out instead it was watching a clock on the wall. Train arrival correlated with a predictable subset of patterns on the digital display, so it started the fans whenever it saw one of those patterns."

"Yeah. That's right." Joel shakes his head. "And vandals had smashed the clock, or something."

"Hey. You
did
hear about it."

"Jarvis, that story's ten years old if it's a day. That was way back when they were starting out with these things. Those gels have been debugged from the molecules up since then."

"Yeah? What makes you so sure?"

"Because a gel's been running the lifter for the better part of a year now, and it's had plenty of opportunity to fuck up. It hasn't."

"So you like these things?"

"Fuck no," Joel says, thinking about Ray Stericker. Thinking about himself. "I'd like 'em a lot better if they
did
screw up sometimes, you know?"

"Well, I don't like 'em
or
trust 'em. You've got to wonder what they're up to."

Joel nods, distracted by Jarvis' digression. But then his mind returns to dead tube worms, and undeclared no-dive zones, and an anonymous canister drenched with enough poison to kill a fucking city.

I've got to wonder what all of us are.

It's hideous.

Nearly a meter across. Probably smaller when Clarke started working on it, but it's a real monster now. Scanlon thinks back to his v-school days, and remembers: starfish are supposed to be all in one plane. Flat disks with arms. Not this one. Clarke has grafted bits and pieces together at all angles and produced a crawling Gordian knot, some pieces red, some purple, some white. Scanlon thinks the original body may have been orange, before.

"They regenerate," she buzzes at his shoulder. "And they've got really primitive immune systems, so there's no tissue rejection problems to speak of. It makes them easier to fix if something goes wrong with them."