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This story won some dick-ass Canadian sf award that few if any of
you have ever heard of; however, it has proven popular enough to
warrant several reprintings, most recently in Hartwell and
Cramer's massive
The Hard SF Renaissance
(Tor 2002). It also
comprises the first chapter of my debut novel,
Starfish
(Tor 1999)
.
Sadly, even after I had immortalised her in prose, the woman I
based this story on refused to get back together with me. Go
figure.
A Niche
Peter Watts
When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal
groan.
Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes
and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometers of black ocean try
to crush her. She feels the Rift underneath, tearing open the seabed
with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that
fragile refuge and she hears Beebe's armor shifting by microns,
hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human
hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is
Physics.
How did they talk me into this?
she wonders.
Why did I come
down here?
But she already knows the answer.
She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies
Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life
under control. She almost seems
happy
down here.
Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby
floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall
beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when
you're three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a
slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.
It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what
they've done to her.
2 Peter Watts
It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where
her left lung used to be. She's so acclimated to the chronic ache in
her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves,
that she's scarcely aware of them any more. She can still feel the
memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost
for honest sensation.
Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in
Beebe; they're supposed to increase the apparent size of one's
personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the
reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn't help. She
clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering
her eyes like smooth white cataracts.
She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to
the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the
usual air of confidence.
Ballard stands up. "Ready to go?"
"You're in charge," Clarke says.
"Only on paper." Ballard smiles. "No pecking order down
here, Lenie. As far as I'm concerned, we're equals." After two
days on the rift Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with
which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation.
It doesn't always seem real.
Something hits Beebe from the outside.
Ballard's smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud
through the station's titanium skin.
"It takes a while to get used to," Ballard says, "doesn't it?"
And again.
"I mean, that sounds
big
—"
"Maybe we should turn the lights off," Clarke suggests. She
knows they won't. Beebe's exterior floodlights burn around the
clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can't
see it from inside—Beebe has no windows— but somehow they
draw comfort from the knowledge of that unseen fire—
Thud!
—most of the time.
"Remember back in training?" Ballard says over the sound,
"When they told us that the fish were usually so—small…"
A Niche
3
Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a
while. There's no other sound.
"It must've gotten tired," Ballard says. "You'd think they'd
figure it out." She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.
Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in
Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some
misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender.
She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one?
The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into
jelly. Any time.
Better to face it outside, where she knows what's coming. All
she can do in here is wait for it to happen.
Going outside is like drowning, once a day.
Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that
barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced
proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit.
Fuse seals,
check headlamp, test injector
; the ritual takes her, step by reflexive
step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines
sleeping within her, and
changes
.
When she catches her breath, and loses it.
When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows
the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage,
and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses
and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of
internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.
It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea;
the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries
to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision
blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.
She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream.
The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke
falls writhing into the abyss.
They come out of the freezing darkness, headlights blazing,
into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at
the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb
4 Peter Watts
across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand
over twenty meters high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading
from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled
structures in perpetual twilight.
They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided
them here.
"I'll never get used to it," Ballard grates in a caricature of her
usual voice.
Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. "Thirty four
Centigrade." The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so
wrong
to talk without breathing.
Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light.
After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.
There's so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here
the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes;
seawater boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful
centimeters each year. Human machinery does not
make
energy,
here at Dragon's Throat; it merely hangs on and steals some
insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.
Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows
what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of
boulders, crimson worms three meters long crowd the seabed
between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulfur, lace
the water with milky veils.
The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.
It doesn't sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harp
string is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming,
through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:
"LENIE—"
Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth
that seems impossibly huge.
Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares
into a scaly black face half a meter across. Some tiny dispassionate
part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and
teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails.
How can it see me?
she
wonders.
Then the pain reaches her.
A Niche
5
She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature
thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into
chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.
She goes limp.
Please get it over with if you're going to kill me
just please God make it quick—
She feels the urge to vomit, but the
'skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won't let her.
She shuts out the pain. She's had plenty of practice. She pulls
inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far
away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic.
There's another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife
—
you know, a knife, like the one you've got strapped to your leg
and completely forgot about
—and suddenly the monster is gone,
its grip broken.
Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It's like operating a
marionette. Her head turns. She sees Ballard locked in combat
with something as big as she is. Only — Ballard is tearing it to
pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark
icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with
smoke-trails of suspended gore.
The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen
smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass.
Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.
Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in
her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her
arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any
trouble.
I've had worse
, she thinks.
Then:
Why am I still alive?
Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like
photophores themselves.
"Jesus Christ," Ballard says in a distorted whisper. "Lenie?
You okay?"
Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But
surprisingly, she feels intact. "Yeah."
And if not, she knows, it's her own damn fault. She just lay
there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.
She's always asking for it.
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