She was fucking cryptic, was what she was.
Or maybe just old-fashioned. She hadn't propositioned him outright, which was a drag; it wasted time. Quammen would've propositioned her in an instant, but unless his plug-in was wrecked she hadn't been receptive at first, and that probably meant he was going to have to work at it. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had to rely on instinct of all things to know whether a woman was interested or not, and this Lenie wasn't making things any easier. A couple of times he'd put a hand here or there, and she'd literally flinched. But then she'd run a finger down his arm, or tap the back of his hand, and just generally come on wet as a hagfish.
If she wasn't interested, why was she wasting his time? Was she really here for the conversation?
By the third derm it didn't seem to matter so much.
"You know what I am?" Quammen demanded. An influx of exogenous transmitters had made him suddenly eloquent. "I'm a fucking crusader, is what I am! It is my personal mission to save the world from the Quebecois!"
She blinked lazily over her alien eyes. "Too late," she said.
"You know, only fifty years ago, people paid less than a third of their disposable income on energy? Less than a third?"
"I did not know that," Lenie answered.
"And the world's ending. It's ending right now."
"That," Lenie said, "I did know."
"Do you know when? Do you know when the end began?"
"Last August."
"Twenty thirty-five. The onset of adaptive shatter. When damage control started accounting for more of the GGP than the production of new goods."
"Damage control?"
"Damage control." He pounded the table for emphasis. "My whole life is damage control. I fix the things that entropy breaks. Things fall apart, Lenie my lass. The only way you can stop the slide is throw energy at it. That's the only way we got from primordial slime to human slime. Evolution'd be sockeye without the sun to lean on."
"Oh, there are places where evolution didn't need the sun—"
"Yeah, yeah, but you get my point. The more complicated a system gets, the more fragile it is. All that ecobabble about diversity promotes stability, that's pure bullshit. You take your coral reef or your tropical rainforest, those things were starved for energy. You've got so many species, so many energy pathways using up resources that there's hardly a spare erg left over. Drive through a rainforest with a bulldozer or two and tell me how stable that system ends up being."
"Oops," Lenie said. "Too late."
Quammen barely heard her. "Now what we've got here's a system that's so complicated, it makes a tropical rainforest look like a fucking monoculture. Everything gets way too complicated for mere mortals so we set up webs and networks and AIs to keep track of things except they end up exploding into these huge cancers of complexity too—so that only makes the problem worse—and of course now all the underlying infrastructure is breaking down, the weather and the biosphere are all fucked up so not only do we need oodles more energy to keep this huge wobbling gyro from crashing over on its side, but those same factors keep knocking out the systems we put in place to produce all that extra energy, you see what I'm sayin'? You know what apocalypse is? It's a positive feedback loop!"
"So why blame Quebec for all this? They're the only ones who got their asses in gear fast enough to save anything. It was the Hydro Wars that—"
"Here it comes. Quebec was gonna save the world, and if only we hadn't ganged up on the frogs, we'd all be sipping neurococktails on a beach somewhere and Maelstrom would be nice and clean and bug-free, and—ah, don't get me started."
"Too late for that, too."
"Hey, I'm not saying the war didn't kick Maelstrom past critical mass. Maybe it did. But it would've happened anyway. Five years, tops. And do you really think the frogs had any more foresight than the rest of us? They just lucked out with their geography. Anyone could make the world's biggest hydro facility if they had all of Hudson Bay to dam up. And who was going to stop them? The Cree tried, did you know that? Remember the Cree? A few thousand malcontents up around James Bay, just before that nasty and unfortunate plague that only killed abos. And after that went down, Nunavut just rolled over and did what they were told, and the rest of fucking Canada was still so busy trying to lure the frogs back into bed they were willing to look the other way over pretty much anything. And now it's too late, and the rest of us run around playing catch-up with our windfarms and our photosynthesis arrays and our deep-sea geothermal—"
Lenie's eyes floated in front of him. Something clicked in Quammen's head.
"Hey," he said after a moment, "are you a—"
She grabbed his wrist and pulled him out of the alcove. "Enough of this bullshit. Let's fuck."
She was something else.
She had seams in her chest, and a perforated metal disk poking out between her ribs. She told him, around mouthfuls of cock, that a childhood injury had left her with a prosthetic lung. It was an obvious lie, but he didn't call her on it. Everything was making sense now, right down to the way she kept freezing up and trying to hide it, the way she acted hot to cover how cold she was.
She was a rifter. Quammen had heard about them—hell, they were the competition. N'AmPac had sent them down to hydrothermal vents all over the eastern Pacific, until word got out that they were all completely fucked in the head. Something about abuse survivors being best-suited for risky deep-sea work, some reductomechanist shit like that. It was no wonder Lenie wasn't keen on sharing her life story. Quammen wasn't going to push her on it.
Besides, the sex was pretty good. The occasional flinch notwithstanding, she seemed to know exactly what to do. Quammen had heard the usual rumors—the Wisdom of the Old Ones, he liked to call them. If you want good sex, find an abuse victim. Didn't seem quite right to put something like that to the test, but after all, she'd been the one to take the lead.
And what do you know: the Old Ones spake the truth.
He fucked her so hard his cock came out bloody. He frowned, sudden concern wilting him like a stalk of old celery. "Whoa…"
She just smiled.
"Is that you? Are you hurt? Is it—"
— oh crap, is it me?
"I'm an old-fashioned girl," she said, looking up at him.
"What do you mean?" Surely he'd have felt it if something had cut his cock…
"I menstruate."
"You—you're kidding." Why would anyone choose to — "I mean, that's really TwenCen." He stood and reached for a towel on the dresser. "You could've told me," he said, wiping at himself.
"Sorry," she said.
"Well, pick your own pleasure, by all means," Quammen said. "It's no big deal, I just thought—"
She'd left her pack unzipped on the floor beside the dresser. Something glinted wet and dark from inside. He leaned slightly for a better view.
"Ah," he said, " — sorry if I—ah…"
A utility clip, blade extended. Used.
"Sure," she said behind him. "Fine."
She cut herself. Before we fucked, must've been when I was in the bathroom. She cut her own insides.