"Beebe Station was so far out in the boondocks that it should have been virtually impossible to encounter anything he could interpret as a security breach, no matter how much he bent his rules. That was our mistake, in hindsight." Not even one of our bigger ones, more's the pity. "But my point is, people with addictions sometimes fall off the wagon. People with self-imposed rules of conduct have been known to bend and twist and rationalize those rules to let them both have their cake and eat it. Seven years ago, our psych people told us that Ken was a classic case in point. There's no reason to believe it isn't just as true today."
The rifter doesn't speak for a moment. Her disembodied face, a pale contrast against the darkness of her surroundings, flashes on and off like a beating heart.
"I don't know," she says at last. "I met one of your psych people once, remember? You sent him down to observe us. We didn't like him much."
Rowan nods. "Yves Scanlon."
"I tried to look him up when I got back to land." Look him up: Leniespeak for hunt him down. "He wasn't home."
"He was decirculated." Rowan says, her own euphemism—as always—easily trumping the other woman's.
"Ah."
But since the subject has come up… "He—he had a theory about you people," Rowan says. "He thought that rifter brains might be…sensitive, somehow. That you entered some heightened state of awareness when you spent too long on the bottom of the sea, with all those synthetics in your blood. Quantum signals from the brainstem. Some kind of Ganzfeld effect."
"Scanlon was an idiot," Lenie remarks.
"No doubt. But was he wrong?"
Lenie smiles faintly.
"I see," Rowan says.
"It's not mind-reading. Nothing like that."
"But maybe, if you could…what would be the word, scan?"
"We called it fine-tuning," Lenie says, her voice as opaque as her eyes.
"If you could fine-tune anybody who might have…"
"Already done. It was Ken who suggested it, in fact. We didn't find anything."
"Did youfine-tune Ken?"
"You can't—" She stops.
"He blocked you, didn't he?" Rowan nods to herself. "If it's anything like Ganzfeld scanning, he blocks it without even thinking. Standard procedure."
They sit without speaking for a few moments.
"I don't think it's Ken," Clarke says after a while. "I know him, Pat. I've known him for years."
"I've known him longer."
"Not the same way."
"Granted. But if not Ken, who?"
"Shit, Pat, the whole lot of us! Everybody has it in for you guys now. They're convinced that Jerry and her buddies—"
"That's absurd."
"Is it really?" Rowan glimpses the old Lenie Clarke, the predatory one, smiling in the intermittent light. "Supposing you'd kicked our asses five years ago, and we'd been living under house arrest ever since. And then some bug passed through our hands on its way to you, and corpses started dropping like flies. Are you saying you wouldn't suspect?"
"No. No, of course we would." Rowan heaves a sigh. "But I'd like to think we wouldn't go off half-cocked without any evidence at all. We'd at least entertain the possibility that you were innocent."
"As I recall, when the shoe was on the other foot guilt or innocence didn't enter into it. You didn't waste any time sterilizing the hot zones, no matter who was inside. No matter what they'd done."
"Good rationale. One worthy of Ken Lubin and his vaunted ethical code."
Lenie snorts. "Give it a rest, Pat. I'm not calling you a liar. But we've already cut you more slack than you cut us, back then. And there are a lot of people in there with you. You sure none of them are doing anything behind your back?"
A bright moment: a dark one.
"Anyway, there's still some hope we could dial this down," Clarke says. "We're looking at ß-max ourselves. If it hasn't been tweaked, we won't find anything."
A capillary of dread wriggles through Rowan's insides.
"How will you know one way or the other?" she asks. "None of you are pathologists."
"Well, they aren't gonna trust your experts. We may not have tenure at LU but we've got a degree or two in the crowd. That, and access to the biomed library, and—"
"No," Rowan whispers. The capillary grows into a thick, throbbing artery. She feels blood draining from her face to feed it.
Lenie sees it immediately. "What?" She leans forward, across the armrest of her seat. "Why does that worry you?"
Rowan shakes her head. "Lenie, you don't know. You're not trained, you don't get a doctorate with a couple of days' reading. Even if you get the right results, you'll probably misinterpret them…"
"What results? Misinterpret how?"
Rowan watches her, suddenly wary: the way she looked when they met for the first time, five years ago.
The rifter looks back steadily. "Pat, don't hold out on me. I'm having a tough enough time keeping the dogs away as it is. If you've got something to say, say it."
Tell her.
"I didn't know myself until recently," Rowan begins. "ßehemoth may have been—I mean, the original ßehemoth, not this new strain—it was tweaked."
"Tweaked." The word lies thick and dead in the space between them.
Rowan forces herself to continue. "To adapt it to aerobic environments. And to increase its reproductive rate, for faster production. There were commercial applications. Nobody was trying to bring down the world, of course, it wasn't a bioweapons thing at all…but evidently something went wrong."
"Evidently." Clarke's face is an expressionless mask.
"I'm sure you can see the danger here, if your people stumble across these modifications without really knowing what they're doing. Perhaps they know enough to recognize a tweak, but not enough to tell what it does. Perhaps they don't know how to tell old tweaks from more recent ones. Or perhaps the moment they see any evidence of engineering, they'll conclude the worst and stop looking. They could come up with something they thought was evidence, and the only ones qualified to prove them wrong would be ignored because they're the enemy."
Clarke watches her like a statue. Maybe the reconciliation of the past few years hasn't been enough. Maybe this new development, this additional demand for even more understanding, has done nothing but shatter the fragile trust the two of them have built. Maybe Rowan has just lost all credibility in this woman's eyes. Maybe she's just blown her last chance to avoid meltdown.
Endless seconds fossilize in the cold, thick air.
"Fuck," the rifter says at last, very softly. "It's all over if this gets out."
Rowan dares to hope. "We've just got to make sure it doesn't."
Clarke shakes her head. "What am I supposed to do, tell Rama to stop looking? Sneak into the hab and smash the sequencer? They already think I'm in bed with you people." She emits a small, bitter laugh. "If I take any action at all I've lost them. They don't trust me as it is."
Rowan leans back her seat and closes her eyes. "I know." She feels a thousand years old.
"You fucking corpses. You never could leave anything alone, could you?"
"We're just people, Lenie. We make…mistakes…" And suddenly the sheer, absurd, astronomical magnitude of that understatement sinks home in the most unexpected way, and Patricia Rowan can't quite suppress a giggle.