Eventually she began hearing rumors.
Half a day south, a white woman all in black. A diver washed ashore in the wake of the tsunami, some said: swept from a kelp farm perhaps, or an underwater hotel.
Ten kilometers northward, an ebony creature who haunted the Strip, never speaking.
On this very spot, two days ago: a raging amphibian with empty eyes, violence implicit in every move. Hundreds had seen her and steered clear, until she'd staggered back into the Pacific, screaming.
You are looking for this woman? She is one of yours?
Almost certainly. The Missing Persons Registry was full of offshore workers vanished in the wake of the Big One. All surface people though, or conshelfers. The woman Perreault had seen had been built for the abyss. No one from the deep sea had been listed as missing; just six confirmed deaths hundreds of klicks offshore, from one of N'AmPac's geothermal stations. No farther details available.
The woman with the machinery inside had worn a GA shoulder patch. Maybe only five deaths, then. And one survivor, who'd somehow made it across three hundred kilometers of open ocean.
A survivor who, for some reason, did not wish to be found.
The rumors were metastasizing. No longer a diver from a kelp farm. A mermaid, now. An avatar of Kali. Some said she spoke in tongues; others, that the tongue was only English. There were stories of altercations, violence. The mermaid had made enemies. The mermaid had made friends. The mermaid had been attacked, and had left her assailants in pieces on the shore. Perreault smiled skeptically; a banana slug was more prone to violence than a Stripper.
The mermaid lurked in the foul waters offshore. The sharks did her bidding; at night she would come onto land and steal children to feed to her minions. Someone had foretold her coming, or perhaps merely recognized it; a prophet, some said. Or maybe just a man almost as insane as the woman he ranted about. His name was Amitav.
Somehow, none of these events had been seen by the local botflies. That alone made Perreault discount ninety percent of them. She began to wonder how much her own questions had been feeding the mill. Information, she'd read once, became self-propagating past a certain threshold.
Nine days after Perreault first saw the woman in black, an Indonesian mother of four came out of her tent long enough to claim that the mermaid had risen, fully-formed, from the very center of the quake.
One of her boys, hearing this, said that he'd heard it was the other way around.
Corpse
It was no big deal, of course. Someone died every half-second, according to the stats. Some of them had to die on his shift. So what? On any given day, Achilles Desjardins saved ten people for every one he killed. Anybody who wanted to complain about those kind of stats could go fuck themselves.
Actually, that was pretty much what he wanted to do just then. If only the clientele wasn't so bloody TwenCen.
Pickering's Pile was a cylinder inside a cube, sunk fifty meters into the scoured granite of the Canadian Shield. The cube had been built as a repository for nuclear waste just before the permafrost had started melting; NIMBY and the northward spread of civilization had denied it that destiny. The same factors, however, had made it a profitable site for a subterranean drink'n'drug. The Pile had been constructed within a transparent three-story acrylic tube suspended in the main chamber; the space beyond had been flooded and stacked with lightsticks mimicking the cobalt glow of spent fuel rods. Iridescent butterflies flittered about, their wings bouncing data back and forth in pinpoint sparkles. Poison-arrow frogs clambered wetly in little tanks at each table, tiny glistening jigsaws of emerald and ruby and petroleum-black.
It was peaceful down there. The Pile was an inside-out aquarium, a cool green grotto. Desjardins descended into its depths whenever he needed a lift. Now he sat at the circular bar on the second level and wondered how to avoid sex with the woman at his elbow.
He knew the subject was going to come up. Not because he was particularly good-looking, which he wasn't. Not because his last name made people think he was Quebecois, which he had been, once. No, he'd been targeted because he'd admitted to this dark leggy Rorschach—Gwen, she'd called herself—that he was a 'lawbreaker, and she thought that was cool. She didn't seem to recognize him from his brief flash of media stardom; that had been nearly two years ago, and people these days seemed hard-pressed to remember what they'd had for supper the night before. It didn't matter. Achilles Desjardins had acquired a fan.
Not that she was a bad-looking fan, mind you. Thirty seconds into their conversation he'd started wondering what she'd look like bent over the ottoman in his living room. Thirty seconds after that he'd mentally sketched out a pretty good artist's conception. He wanted her, all right; he just didn't want her.
Oddly, she was dressed like one of those deep-diving cyborgs out of N'AmPac.
The disguise was evocative, if superficiaclass="underline" a black lycra body stocking extending seamlessly from toes to neck to fingertips; decorative accessories representing suit controls and outcroppings of implanted hardware; even an IDpatch with the Grid Authority logo beveled onto the shoulder. The eyes didn't quite work, though. Real rifters wore corneal overlays that turned their eyes into blank white balls. Gwen was wearing some sort of gauzy oversize contacts instead. They masked the irises well enough, but judging by the way she had to keep leaning in to stare at him they weren't cutting it in the photoamp department.
She had great cheekbones, though, a wide mouth, lips so sharply-defined you could cut yourself on their edges. Her company in this casual and public venue was all he wanted. Enough time to learn the features, savor the smells, commit her to memory. Maybe even make friends. That would be more than enough; he could fill in the blanks himself, later. Fire them, too.
"I can't believe how much you have to deal with," she was saying. A wriggling mesh of undersea light played across her face. "The plagues, the blights, the system crashes. All your responsibility."
"Not all mine. There's a bunch of us."
"Still. Life-and-death decisions. Split-second timing." Her hand brushed his forearm; the wing of a black moth. "Lives lost if you make the wrong move."
"Or even the right one, sometimes." He'd met lots of Gwens before. Like any K-selecting mammalian female, she was attracted to resource-holders—or more proximately in the case of genus Homo, power. She probably assumed, because he could shut down a city at will, that he must have some.
A common mistake among K-selectors. Desjardins generally took his time about disabusing them.
She grabbed a derm from a nearby tray, looked inquiringly at Desjardins. He shook his head. He had to be careful what recreational chemicals he stuck into his body; too many potential interactions with the professional ones already bubbling away in there. Gwen shrugged, stuck the derm behind her ear.
"How do you handle the responsibility?" she went on. "Hell, how do you even get the responsibility?" She tossed back her drink. "All the corpses and kings and policy-makers, they can't even agree what color to paint the bathrooms at the UR. Why'd they all agree to give God-like powers to you, exactly? You infallible or something?"
"Fuck no." Fleeting across his cortex, an unwelcome thought: I wonder how many people I killed today. "I just—I do my best."
"Yeah, but how do you even convince them of that? What's to stop you from crashing an airplane to get back at your boss? How do they know you're not going to use all that power to get rich, or to help out your buddies, or kill a corporation because you don't agree with its politics? What keeps you in line?"