Crucifixion, with Spiders
This is Patricia Rowan. Ken Lubin is plugged into the kiosk just down the hall from your office. Please tell him I want to see you both. I'm in the boardroom on Admin-411.
He will not give you any trouble.
Twenty-six hours fourteen minutes.
Sure enough, Lubin was cauled at the terminal quad by the stairwell. Evidently no one had challenged his presence there.
"What are you doing?" Desjardins said behind him.
The other man shook his head. "Trying to call someone. No answer." He stripped off the headset.
"Rowan's here," Desjardins said. "She—she wants to see us."
"Yeah." Lubin sighed and got to his feet. His face remained impassive, but there was resignation in his voice.
"Took her long enough," he said.
Two prefab surgeries, wire-frame cubes cast into bright relief by overhead spotlights. Their walls swirled with faint soap-bubble iridescence if you caught them at the right angle. Otherwise, the things inside— the restraints, the operating boards, the multiarmed machinery poised above them—seemed completely open to the air of the room. The vertices of each cube seemed as arbitrary and pointless as political boundaries.
But the very walls of the boardroom glistened in the same subtle way, Desjardins noted. The whole place had been sprayed down with isolation membrane.
Patricia Rowan, backlit, stood between the door and the modules. "Ken. Good to see you again."
Lubin closed the door. "How did you find me?"
"Dr. Desjardins sold you out, of course. But surely that doesn't surprise you." Her contacts flickered with phosphorescent intel. "Given your little problem, I rather suspect you nudged him in that direction yourself."
Lubin stepped forward.
"More things in heaven and earth, Horatio," Rowan said.
Something in Lubin's posture changed; a brief moment of tetanus, barely noticeable. Then he relaxed.
Trigger phrase, Desjardins realized. Some subroutine had just been activated deep in Lubin's cortex. In the space of a single breath, his agenda had changed from—
Mr. Lubin's behavior is governed by a conditioned threat-response reflex, he remembered. He's unlikely to consider you a threat unless…
Oh Jesus. Desjardins swallowed with a mouth gone suddenly dry. She didn't start him up just now. She shut him down…
And he was coming for me…
"— would have only been a matter of time anyway," Rowan was saying. "There were a couple of outbreaks down in California that didn't fit the plots. I'm guessing you spent some time on an island off Mendocino…?"
Lubin nodded.
"We had to burn the whole thing out," the corpse went on. "It was a shame—not many places left with real wildlife any more. We can ill afford to lose any of them. Still. It's not as though you left us a choice."
"Wait a minute." Desjardins said. "He's infected?"
"Of course."
"Then I should be dead," Lubin said. "Unless I'm immune somehow…"
"You're not. But you're resistant."
"Why?"
"Because you're not entirely human, Ken. It gives you an edge."
"But—" Desjardins stopped. There was no membrane isolating Patrician Rowan. For all the available precautions, they were all breathing the same air.
"You're immune," he finished.
She inclined her head. "Because I'm even less human than Ken."
Experimentally, Lubin put his hand through the face of one cube. The soap-bubble membrane split around his flesh, snugly collared his forearm. It iridesced conspicuously around the seal, faded when Lubin kept his hand completely immobile. He grunted.
"The sooner we begin, the sooner we finish," Rowan said.
Lubin stepped through. For an instant the entire face of the cube writhed with oily rainbows; then he was inside and the membrane cleared, its integrity restored.
Rowan glanced at Desjardins. "A lot of our proteins—enzymes, particularly—don't work well in the deep sea. I'm told the pressure squeezes them into suboptimal shapes."
Lubin's cube darkened slightly as the sterile field went on, almost as if its skin had thickened. It hadn't, of course; the membrane was still only a molecule deep. Its surface tension had been cranked, though. Lubin could throw his whole considerable mass against that barrier now and it wouldn't open. It would yield—it would stretch, and distort, and sheer momentum could drag it halfway across the room like a rubber sock with a weight in the toe. But it wouldn't break, and after a few seconds it would tighten and retract back down to two dimensions. And Lubin would still be inside.
Desjardins found that vaguely comforting.
Rowan raised her voice a fraction: "Undress please, Ken. Just leave your clothes on the floor. Oh, and there's a headset hanging off the teleop. Perhaps you could view that during the procedure."
She turned back to Desjardins. "At any rate, we had to tweak our people before we could send them to the rift. Retroed in some genes from deepwater fish."
"Alice said deepsea proteins were—stiff," Desjardins remembered.
"More difficult to break apart, yes. And since the body's sulfur's locked up in the proteins, ßehemoth has a tougher time stealing it from a rifter. But we only backed-up the most pressure-sensitive molecules; ßehemoth can still get at the others. It just takes longer to compromise the cellular machinery."
"Unless you back up everything."
"The small stuff, anyway. Anything under fifty or sixty aminos is vulnerable. Something about the disulfide bridges, apparently. There's individual variation of course, vectors can stay asymptomatic for a month or more sometimes, but the only way to really…" She shrugged. "At any rate, I became half-fish."
"A mermaid." The image was absurd.
Rowan rewarded him with a brief smile. "You know the drill, Ken. Face down please."
The operating board was inclined at a twenty-degree angle. Ken Lubin, naked, face masked by the headset, braced over it as though doing push-ups and eased himself down.
The air shimmered and hummed. Lubin went utterly limp. And the insectile machine above him spread nightmare arms with too many joints, and descended to feed.
"Holy shit," Desjardins said.
Lubin had been stabbed in a dozen places. Mercury filaments snaked into his wrists and plunged through his back. A catheter had slid autonomously up his ass; another seemed to have kabobed his penis. Something copper slithered into mouth and nose. Wires crawled along his face, wormed beneath his headset. The table itself was suddenly stippled with fine needles: Lubin was fixed in place like an insect pushed onto the bristles of a wire brush.
"It's not as bad as it looks," Rowan remarked. "The neuroinduction field blocks most of the pain."
"Fuck." The second cube, empty and waiting, shone like a threat of inquisition. "Am I—"
Rowan pursed her lips. "I doubt that will be necessary. Unless you've been infected, which seems unlikely."
"I've been exposed for two days, going on three."
"It's not smallpox, doctor. Unless you exchanged body fluids with the man, or used his feces as compost, chances are you're clean. The sweep on your apartment didn't turn up anything…although you might want to know that your cat has a tapeworm."
They swept my apartment. Desjardins tried to summon some sense of outrage. Relief was all that answered: I'm clean. I'm clean…
"You'll have to undergo the gene therapy, though," Rowan said. "So you can stay clean. It's quite extensive, unfortunately."