"Miri can't handle them?"
"Miri can slice and dice them a dozen ways to Sunday. I'd just as soon avoid the confrontation."
Clarke shook her head. "I can't believe Augusta wouldn't have let us in."
"I told you. The claves keep to themselves."
"Then why even bother sending you out? If everyone up here is so bloody self-centered, why help out the wildlands in the first place?"
Ouellette snorted softly. "Where've you been for the past five years?" She held up her hand: "Stupid question. We're not out here for altruism, Laurie. The MI fleet, the salt licks—"
"Salt licks?"
"Feeding stations. It's all just to keep the ferals from storming the barricades. If we bring them a few morsels, maybe they won't be quite so motivated to bring ßehemoth into our own backyards."
It made the usual sense, Clarke had to admit. And yet…
"No. They wouldn't send their best and brightest out for a lousy crowd-control assignment."
"You got that right."
"Yeah, but you—"
"Me? I'm the best and the brightest?" Ouellette slapped her forehead. "What in the name of all that's living gave you that idea?"
"I saw you work"
"You saw me take orders from a machine without screwing up too much. A few day's training, I could teach you to do as well for most of these cases."
"That's not what I meant. I've seen doctors in action before, Taka. You're different. You—" One of Ouellette's own phrases popped into her head: bedside manner.
"You care," she finished simply.
"Ah." Ouellette said. And then, looking straight ahead: "Don't confuse compassion with competence, Laurie. It's dangerous."
Clarke studied her. "Dangerous. That's a strange word to use."
"In my profession, competence doesn't kill people," Ouellette said. "Compassion can."
"You killed someone?"
"Hard to tell. That's the thing about incompetence. It's not nearly so clear-cut as deliberate malice."
"How many?" Clarke asked.
Ouellette looked at her. "Are you keeping score?"
"No. Sorry." Clarke looked away.
But if I was, she thought, I'd blow you out of the water. She knew it wasn't a fair comparison. One death, she supposed, could be a greater burden than a thousand if it mattered enough to you. If you bothered to get involved.
If you had compassion.
Finally they pulled into a remote clearing further up the slope. Ouellette folded down her pallet and turned in with a few monosyllables. Clarke sat unmoving in her seat, watching the gray-on-gray clarity of the nightscape beyond the windshield: gray meadow grasses, charcoal ranks of spindly conifer, scabby outcroppings of worn bedrock. Overcast, tissue-paper sky.
From behind, faint snores.
She fished behind her seat and snagged her backpack. The eyecap vial had settled to the very bottom, a victim of chronic inattention. She held it in her hand for a long time before popping it open.
Each eyecap covered the entire visible cornea, and then some. Suction tugged at her eyeballs as she pulled them off; they broke free with a soft popping sound.
It was as if her eyes, not just their coverings, had been pulled out. It was like going blind. It was like being in the deep sea, far from any light.
It wasn't altogether unpleasant.
At first there was nothing, anywhere; irises grow lazy when photocollagen does all their heavy lifting. After a while, though, they remembered to dilate. A swathe of dark gray brightened the void directly ahead: faint nocturnal light, through the windshield.
She felt her way out of the MI and leaned against its flank. She let the door hiss shut as softly as possible. The night air cooled her face and hands.
Diffuse brightness registered at the corner of her eye, fading every time she focused on it. Before long she could tell the sky from the treeline. Dim, roiling gray over serrated shadow; it seemed marginally brighter to the east.
She wandered a few meters and looked back: Miri's smooth, startling edges almost glimmered against this fractal landscape. To the west, through a break in the cloud, she saw stars.
She walked.
She tripped over roots and holes half a dozen times, for want of illumination. But the color scheme was pretty much the same as that served up by her eyecaps, gray on gray on black. The only difference was that contrast and brightness were cranked way down.
When the sky began brightening to the east she saw that she'd been climbing up a denuded gravelly hillside populated by stumps, an old clear-cut that had never recovered. It must have been like this long before ßehemoth had arrived on the scene.
Everything's dying, she'd said.
And Ouellette had replied That was happening anyway…
Clarke looked down the way she'd come. Miri sat like a toy on the edge of what must have been an old logging road. Brown trees lined the far side of the road, and the hill she stood on to either side; they'd been razored away down the swath she'd just climbed.
Suddenly she had a shadow. It stretched down the slope like the outline of a murdered giant. She turned: a fluorescent red sun was just cresting the hill. Ribbed clouds above glowed radioactive salmon. They reminded Clarke of wave-sculpted corrugations on a sandy seabed, but she couldn't ever remember seeing colors so intense.
Losing your sight every night might not be so bad, she reflected, if this is how you get it back in the morning.
The moment passed, of course. The sun had only had a few degrees to work with, a narrow gap of clear distant sky between the land below and the clouds overhead. Within a few minutes it had risen behind a thick bank of stratus, faded to a pale bright patch in an expanse of featureless gray.
Alyx, she thought.
Ouellette would be up soon, steeling herself for another pointless day spent in the service of the greater good. Making a difference that made no difference.
Maybe not the greater good, Clarke thought. Maybe, the greater need.
She started down the hill. Ouellette was climbing into daylight by the time Clarke reached the road. She blinked against the gray morning, and blinked again when she saw the rifter's naked eyes.
"You said you could teach me," Clarke said.
Stargazer
She's okay, Dave, Taka said to her dead husband.She's a bit scary at first—Crys would take one look at her and run out of the room. Definitely not much of a people person.
But she's fine, Dave, really. And if you can't be here with me, at least she pulls her own weight.
Miri drove down old I-95 through the ramshackle remains of a town called Freeport; it had died with the departure of the fish and the tourists, long before ßehemoth had made everything so definitive. South of town they pulled onto a side road that ended at a secluded cove. Taka was relieved to see that the scraggly woodlands above the high-tide line were still mostly green. She cheered them on.
"Why here, exactly?" Laurie wondered as they debarked.
"Electric eel." Taka unlocked the charge cap on the side of the vehicle and took the socket in one hand. The cable unspooled behind her as she headed down slope. Cobble slipped and clattered beneath her feet.
Laurie paced her to the water's edge. "What?"
"On the bottom somewhere." Kneeling, Taka fished the hailer out of her windbreaker and slipped it into the water. "Hopefully the little bastard still comes when you call him."
A small eruption of bubbles, twenty meters offshore. A moment later the eel surfaced in their wake and squirmed towards them, orange and serpentine. It beached itself at Taka's feet, a giant fluorescent sperm with a tail trailing off into the depths. It even had fangs: a two-pronged metal mouth disfiguring the surface of the bulb.
She plugged the cable into it. The bulb hummed.