Maelstrom by Peter Watts
“Then don’t. Fuck lot I care.”
Keeping her eyes up, Clarke bent down and picked up her tunic. The mongrel held her pack out by the straps, glancing down into its depths.
He tensed.
Her hand lunged into the pack like a striking snake, snatched out the billy. She held it underhand, pointed at his gut.
He stepped back, one hand still gripping the pack. His eyes narrowed to opalescent slits. “Why didn’t you use it?”
“Didn’t want to waste a charge. You’re not worth it”
He eyed the empty sheath on her leg. “Why not keep it there? Where you can get it?”
“Now, if you’d had a kid with you …”
They regarded each other through eyes that saw everything in black-and-white.
“You let me.” The mongrel shook his head; the contradiction almost seemed painful. “You had that, and you let me anyway.”
“My pack,” Clarke said.
“You—set me up.” Dawning anger in that voice, and thick wonder.
“Maybe I just like it rough.”
“You’re contagious. You’re a bughumper.”
She wiggled the baton. “Give me my things and maybe you’ll live long enough to find out.”
“You stumpfuck.” But he held out the pack.
For the first time she saw the webbing between the three stumpy digits of his hand, noticed the smooth scarless tips of the stubs. Not violence, then. No street-fight amputation. Born to it.
“You a pharm baby?” she asked. Maybe he was older than he looked; the frames hadn’t deliberately spread buggy genotypes for decades. Sure, defectives spent more than healthy people on fixes, but the global ambience was twisting babies into strange enough shapes on its own by then. Without the risk of consumer backlash.
“You are, aren’t you?”
He glared at her, shaking with helpless fury.
“Good,” she said, grabbing her pack. “Serves you fucking right.”
Snare
The voice in Lubin’s ear had lied.
He hadn’t been outside N’AmPac since landfall. He hadn’t been in Sevastopol or Philadelphia for years. He’d never been in Whitehorse, and from what he knew of the place he hoped he never would be.
But he could have been. The lie was plausible one, to someone who knew Lubin but not his current circumstances. Or maybe it hadn’t been a deliberate lie. Maybe it had been a flawed guess, based on God knew what irrelevant stats. Maybe it had just been a bunch of random words shoveled together with more regard for grammar than veracity.
He wondered if he might have started the rumor himself. Before he left for Sudbury, he put that hypothesis to the test.
He logged back into Haven and began a new name search: Judy Caraco, Lenie Clarke, Alice Nakata, and Kenneth Lubin.
It was a different voice that accosted him this time. It spoke in soft, gentle tones, almost whispering. It showed no predilection for alliteration or nonsense rhyme. It tended to mispronounce hard consonants.
It called him Michael.
He suborbed to Toromilton, took a shuttle north from that city-state. Endless suburbs kept pace beneath him, spilling far from the megapolitan hub that had once kept them captive. The daily commute had ended decades before, and still the blight was spreading. The outside world passed uneventfully—there were only a few restricted zones in all of Ontario, and none were on his route.
The world inside was a bit more interesting. Deep in the seething chaos that was Maelstrom, rumors of Mike Brander’s resurrection were beginning to sprout alongside tales of Lubin’s own. Mike Brander had been seen in Los Angeles. Mike Brander had been seen in Lima.
Lubin frowned, a small expression of self-disgust. He’d given himself away with his own questions. Something in Haven had taken notice when he’d run searches on all Beebe crew members except himself. And why doesn’t this user ask about Lubin, K.? Because this user must already know about Lubin, K.
Because this user is Lubin, K.
Lenie and Kenny are on the comeback trail.
His last troll through Haven, asking about everyone except Mike Brander, had provoked the same attention and the same simple logic. Now Mike Brander was alive and well and living in Maelstrom. QED.
What’s doing this? Why?
Why didn’t always enter into it, of course. Sometimes Maelstrom’s wildlife would just grab onto popular threads to get around—steal keywords to blend in, sneak through filters by posing as part of the herd. Classic bandwagon effect, blind and stupid as evolution itself. That was why such strategies always fizzled after a while. The fad of the moment would fade into obscurity, leaving poseurs with forged tickets to an empty ballroom. Or the gatekeepers would catch on; the more popular the disguise, the greater the incentive for countermeasures.
Wildlife would hitch a ride on existing rumors, if they were hot enough. Lubin had never heard of them starting rumors of their own before.
And why Lenie Clarke? An obscure life, an invisible death. Hardly the most contagious meme in the wires. Nothing to inspire any postmortem legacy at all, in fact.
This was something new. Whatever it was, it was goaldirected, and it was using Lenie Clarke.
More than that. Now, it was using him.
Sudbury had arrived DOA in the twenty-first century. Decades of mining and a substrate of thin, poorly buffered soil had seen to that. The Sudbury stacks had been the epicenter for one of the first really big acid blights in North American history. It was a benchmark of sorts.
Not that this was entirely a bad thing. Legend had it that lunar astronauts had once practiced in its scoured gray environs. And the area’s lakes were truly beautiful, clear and blue and lifeless as chemically treated toilet bowls. The substrate was relentlessly stable, planed and leveled by longvanished glaciers; the west coast could fall into the ocean, but the Canadian Shield would last forever. Exotic alien life forms would disembark from tankers or lifters at the Industrial Horseshoe around Lake Ontario, wreak local havoc as they always had, but you’d have to be one tough chimera to get past the acid-washed outskirts of Sudbury, Ontario. Its dead zone was like a moat, a firebreak burned into the countryside by a hundred years’ worth of industrial poison.
It couldn’t have suited CSIRA better if it had been planned. Here was a place resistant to the calamities that threatened the rest of the world, by virtue of having already lost anything of real value. The real estate was cheap, too; the nickel mine was long exhausted, and there’d been a vacuum in the local economy since the last of the fuel rods had been buried over in Copper Cliff.
The Entropy Patrol had filled. that vacuum. The Sudbury office was one of the hemisphere’s top ten.
It was no surprise to Ken Lubin that his quarry was stationed there. That mysterious searcher hadn’t seemed to know the specifics of what he or she was after; the caches left behind in Haven had jumped fastest when queried on ecological impacts and sheer correlative epidemiology, slowest when asked about subcellular organelles or biochemical pathways. Not the spoor of someone following an intimately known agent. More likely someone tracking a new and mysterious one.
Not a pharm, then. Someone with a more ecological perspective, and with—given their access to Haven—a great deal of clearance and autonomy. The Entropy Patrol had the only talent pool that fit.
One good thing about the Patrol was that it was appropriately paranoid on matters of access. In a world dominated by the telecommute, ’lawbreakers dutifully made the daily real-world journey to a single vast, secure catacomb that plugged directly into Haven. Nobody would have been stupid enough to try and manage an entropy outbreak from a home terminal, even if it had been possible. At CSIRA, even the links into Maelstrom were insanely secure.
Which made tracking down employees quite straightforward. They all had to come through the foyer.
There was no listing of individual ’lawbreakers, of course. There was a listing of department heads, available through a small orchard of help kiosks in th
Donald Lertzman was the archetypal middleman; his career had coasted to that comfortable plateau above those who actually did productive work, but safely short of a position where he had to make any vital decisions. Perhaps, on some level, he’d realized that. Perhaps a fully detached house, hidden behind a hedgerow of acid-resistant blue spruce at the edge of the Sudbury Burn, was his way of compensating.
Of course, in this day and age he could hardly commute in his private vehicle. He knew the value of appearances; he’d built his livelihood on nothing else. Each night, therefore, he traversed the three blocks between his property and the nearest bus stop on foot. Approximately 20 percent of this distance was out of public view.
“Excuse me, are you Donald Lertzman?”
“Yes, who—”
Lubin carefully noted the medic alert plug-in on Lertzman’s wristwatch. It would raise the alarm if his vitals showed any indication of ongoing distress. Of course, a body’s stress responses don’t just kick in by themselves—they have to be activated by the perception of threat or injury. Most of those signals run through the spinal cord.
Ten minutes after failing to introduce himself, Lubin knew who he was looking for; he knew where to find him; he knew when that person’s shift ended. He knew more than he needed, for the moment.
His scheduled meeting at Pickering’s Pile was twenty-six hours away. Lubin didn’t know if he wanted to wait that long. For that matter, there was no guarantee that this Achilles Desjardins would even show up.
He left Donald Lertzman breathing peacefully.
Complicity
It was every bit as abrupt, this time: the sudden translocation of place, one world annihilated, another created in its stead. There may have been some warning. A barely perceptible stutter in the feeds, a ping, as if something far away was checking for activity on the line. But it came too fast to serve as any kind of heads-up, even if Perreault hadn’t simply imagined it.
It didn’t matter. She was waiting. She’d been waiting for days.
The same God’s-eye view: a different multitude spread out below, framed by familiar icons and overlays. She’d been shunted from one botfly to another. Nav and GPS were dark for some reason.
But she was indoors, and there was violence.
One man lay twisted on the concrete floor; another’s boot caught him in the stomach as she watched. His body folded weakly around the blow in some impotent fetal reflex, smearing blood and teeth in its wake. The face was too torn and bloody to betray any clear ethnicity.
The assailant—smaller, black, his back to the camera—shifted his weight from side to side with a terrible restless energy. His arena was defined by the crowd that enclosed it: some intent, some indifferent, some shaking their own fists in frenzied enthusiasm. Farther away the concentration of humanity thinned out, gave way to sleeping mats and forgotten piles of personal belongings.
Perreault spun through the available menus. No weapons. In the corner of her eye, a flashing distraction: target -162 °az: -41 °dec
Behind her.
The victor circled, still bobbing. His face came into view, creased in a fury of concentration. His foot lashed out again: a kidney blow to the back. The twitching thing on the floor jerked open like a bloody flower. Its back arched as though electrocuted.
The attacker looked up, straight at Perreault’s hijacked botfly. His eyes were the brilliant, crystalline jade of gengineered chlorophyll. They stared from that black face like a hallucination.
Without taking his eyes off the ’fly, he delivered one last kick at the head of his victim. Then he moved into the crowd, unopposed.
Sou-Hon Perreault had never seen him before. She didn’t know his victim. But target was at -175 °az: -40°dec, and moving.
Pan left. More people, more sleeping mats. Gray unfinished walls rising in the distance, lined with vending machines and, higher up, official pictographs directing the populace to registration and quarantine and latest bulletins. They were in a cement cave ten meters high, erected in the name of mass subsistence: a place for quarantines, an innoculation center, a shelter against those sudden bouts of weather too vicious for the ad-hoc retrofits slapped onto older houses. Increasingly, to many, home.
The unofficial term was Bomb Shelter.
Target was at -35°, -39°. Tactical laid crosshairs onto her the moment she passed into view. Same civilian disguise, same visor. But something had happened to Lenie Clarke since Calgary. She favored one leg when she walked. A yellow bruise spilled across the right side of her face.
Perreault tripped the ’fly’s speaker, thought twice, shut it off again. No need to draw unnecessary attention. Instead she brought up the comm menu, got a lock on Clarke’s visor, and tapped into the RF.
“Hi. It’s Sou-Hon again.”
Down on the floor, Lenie Clarke froze. She brought her wrist up; she was no longer wearing a watch.
“Up here,” Perreault said “In the botfly.”
A proximity alert bleeped in her face: another ’fly coming into range. Perreault spun, caught it arriving through the ’fly-sized catflap two meters over the main entrance.
Even in visible light, the weapons muzzles were obvious.
She looked back down. Clarke was gone. Perreault panned until the crosshairs came up again. The rifter was heading for the door, glancing up at the other ’fly. It didn’t notice her; it was headed toward the bloody Rorschach blot at the other end of the cave.
“Not that one,” Perreault said. “Me. The little one, the surveil—”
“You’re the stalker, right?” Clarke broke in.
“The—yeah. That’s what you called me, anyway.”
“Bye.” She was at the entrance.
“Wait!”
Gone.
Perreault spared another look at the other botfly. It was hovering over the aftermath of the fight, its cameras pointing straight down. It had probably been summoned by the ’fly Perreault was riding, just before she’d grabbed the keys. It wasn’t paying any attention to her. If its rider even knew that Perreault was in command, he or she didn’t seem to care.
Nothing much I can do either way, she thought, and dived through the flytrap.
Thin dirty rain, sparse droplets blown sideways. The sky was brown. The air seemed full of grit. Farther south, then. Someplace where it probably hadn’t really snowed in years.
A metropolitan skyline hovered behind the dome like a murky histogram. Four-lane blacktop stretched out from that background, bled a puddle of asphalt beside the shelter, and continued to the horizon. On all sides a threadbare weave of smaller roads—some little more than dirt paths—extended through a patchwork of fields and woodlots.
Target, pinned and highlighted like a luminous butterfly, was moving away along one of them.
Still no GPS. Even the compass was off-line.
Perreault reacquired the rifter’s visor and set off on her trail.“Listen, I can—”
“Fuck off. Last time you were in one of those things it ended up shooting at me.”
“That wasn’t me! The link went down!”
“Yeah?” Clarke didn’t look back. “And what’s going to keep it up this time?”
“This ’fly doesn’t have any weapons. It’s strictly eyes and ears.”
“I don’t like eyes and ears.”
“It couldn’t hurt to have an extra set on your side. If I’d been around to do some advance scouting before, maybe you wouldn’t have that bruise on your face.”
Clarke stopped. Perreault brought the ’fly down and hovered a couple of meters off her shoulder.
“And when your friends get bored?” the rifter asked. “When the link goes down again?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the ’fly just goes back to its regular rounds. At least it can’t shoot at you.”
“It can talk to things that can.”
“Look, I’ll keep my distance
Two meters off the port bow, Clarke’s shoulders rose and fell.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “Why is it so important to help me out?”
Perreault briefly considered telling the truth. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “It just is.”
The rifter shook her head. After a moment she said, “I’m headed south.”
“South?” Perreault tapped again at the dead compass icon. Nothing. She tried to get a fix on the sun through murky overcast.
Clarke began walking. “This way,” she said. And still didn’t look back.
Perreault kept well off the road, paralleling Clarke’s direction of travel. She called up the camera menu—planning to set a zoom reflex on any motion not consistent with wind action—and was surprised to be offered a choice of views. The ’fly had lateral, stern, and ventral cams as well as the primary stereos up front. She could split the display into four windows and keep simultaneous watch on the whole 360.
Lenie Clarke trudged silently along the road, shoulders hunched against the wind. Her windbreaker flapped against her body like torn plastic.
“Aren’t you cold?” Perreault asked.
“Got my skin on.”
“Your—” Of course. Her dive suit. “Is this how you always get around?”
“You were the one that warned me off flying.”
“Well, yes, but—”
“I bus sometimes,” Clarke said. “Hitchhike.”
Things that didn’t involve ID checks or body scans. There was an irony buried in there, Perreault reflected. Clarke had probably been through more rigorous security in the past few weeks than would have been imaginable just decades earlier—but modern checks and gauntlets were aimed at pathogens, not people. Who cared about artifacts like personal ID anymore? Who cared about anything so arbitrary as a political border? National identity was so irrelevant that nobody’d even bothered to dismantle it.