"We psychos are notorious for bad impulse control," Clarke said, approaching him. "Ken, how do you spring these bindings?"
Lubin glowered at her back. Doesn't she getit?
"Come on, Ken. The situation's contained. None of us is going anywhere for the time being, and any rules we were playing by before seem to have pretty much gone out the window. Maybe we could start working together for a change."
He hesitated. Nothing she said raised any kind of alarm in his gut. Nothing urged him into action, no other presence tried to take control of his motor nerves. Almost experimentally, he crossed into the living room and depolarized the tanglethreads. They slipped to the floor like overcooked pasta.
For good measure, he pulled a lightstick from his pocket and struck it; light flared in the gutted room. Desjardins blinked over shrinking pupils and gingerly explored the bruise on his cheek.
"Conscience is overrated anyway," Jovellanos said all around them.
"Give it a rest, Alice," Desjardins said, rubbing his wrists.
"I'm serious. Think about it: not everyone even has a conscience, and the people that do are invariably exploited by the ones that don't. Conscience is—irrational, when you get right down to it."
"You are so full of shit."
"Sociopathy doesn't make you a killer. It just means you aren't restrained from being one if the situation calls for it. Hey, Killjoy, you could think of it as a kind of liberation.»
The 'lawbreaker snorted.
"Come on, Kill. I'm right, you know there's at least a chance I'm right."
"What I know is that the most I can hope for is to be out of a job right up until the world ends. If I'm not dead ten minutes from now."
"You know," Jovellanos said, "I may even be able to do something about that."
Desjardins said nothing.
"What's that, Killjoy? Suddenly you're not telling me to fuck off?"
"Keep talking," he said.
She did. Lubin pulled the bead out of his ear and stood up; the lightstick threw his shadow huge and ominous across the room. Lenie Clarke sat with her back propped against the far wall; Lubin's silhouette swallowed her whole.
I could kill her in an instant, he thought, and marveled at how absurd the thought seemed.
She looked up as he approached. "I hate it here," she said softly.
"I know." He leaned his back against the wall, slid down at her side.
"This isn't home," she continued. "There's only one place that was ever home."
Three thousand meters below the surface of the Pacific. A beautiful dark universe filled with monsters and wonders that didn't even exist any more.
"What is home, really?"
It was Desjardins who had spoken. Lubin looked back at him.
"Alice's been doing a little snooping, down avenues a bit more—political than I ever really bothered with." Desjardins tapped the side of his head. "She came up with some interesting shipping news, and it raises the question: what's home? Where your heart is, or where your parents are?"
Lubin looked at Lenie Clarke. She looked back. Neither spoke.
"Ah well. Doesn't really matter," Desjardins said. "Turns out you may be able to go back either way."
A Niche
The Mid-Atlantic Ridge was a shitty place to raise one's kids, Patricia Rowan reflected.
Not that there'd been many options, of course. In point of fact there had been three: build an onshore refuge and trust conventional quarantine technology; escape into high orbit; or withdraw behind the same cold, heavy barrier that had shielded the earth for four billion years before N'AmPac had punched a hole in the global condom.
They'd done the analyses from every angle. The off-world option was least cost-effective and most vulnerable to acts of groundside retribution: orbital stations weren't exactly inconspicuous targets, and it was a fair bet that at least some of those left behind would be ungracious enough to lob a vindictive nuke or two up the well. And if groundside quarantine tech had been up to the job, they wouldn't have been in this situation in the first place; that option must have been on the table only to accommodate a bureaucratic obsession with completist detail. Or maybe as some kind of sick joke.
There had been a fourth option—they could have stayed behind and faced ßehemoth with the rest of the world. They'd undergone the necessary retrofits, after all. Even if they'd stayed on shore there would have been none of the—disintegration—that was in store for everyone else. Not for them the lost hair and fingernails, the oozing sores, the limbs coming apart at the joints. No blindness, no ulcers. No short-circuit seizures as insulation frayed from nervous circuitry. No organs reduced to mush. None of the thousand opportunistic diseases usually listed as proximate cause-of-death. They could have stayed, and watched it happen to everyone else, and synthesized their food from raw elements once the biosphere itself was lost.
That option hadn't received a whole lot of discussion, though.
We're not even running from ßehemoth. We're running from our own citizens.
All of Atlantis knew that, even if nobody talked about it. They'd seen the mobs from their penthouses, seen civil unrest graphed against time on exponential curves. ßehemoth, coupled with the Clarke meme: a big enough threat, a sufficiently compelling role-model, and revolution was suddenly a lot closer than the usual three meals away.
We were lucky to get out in time, Rowan reflected.
But they had, and here they were—several hundred corpses, essential support personnel, families and assorted hangers-on—termites dug in three kilometers down in a jumbled cluster of titanium/fullerene spheres, safely distant from the world outside, invisible to all but those with the very best technological eyes, the very best intel. It was an acceptable risk: most of those people were already down here.
There was lots of headroom. There were two gymnasiums, half a dozen greenhouses and gardens thoughtfully distributed with an eye to redundancy in the unlikely event of a local implosion. Vats of acephalic organcloners with elongate telomeres. Three power plants that fed from a small geothermal vent—certified ßehemoth-free, of course—a nice safe twelve hundred meters on the far side of an interpositioned ridge. And somewhere out on that basalt escarpment lay a veritable junkyard of unassembled components, fragments of libraries and playgrounds and community centers, all squirreled away against some future less constrained by the need for speedy cowardice. In the meantime, Rowan had heard many residents of Atlantis complain about crowding.
She felt somewhat less imposed upon than most. She'd seen the specs on the rifter stations.
It was after midnight. The corridor lights were dimmed in some pale parody of a sunlit existence; most of the inhabitants, accepting the facade, had withdrawn into their apartments. Rowan's own husband and children were asleep. For some reason, though, she couldn't bring herself to go along with the pretense. What was the point? Natural sleep cycles wander all over the clock without a photoperiod to calibrate the hypothalamus. There was no sunlight here. They would never see sunlight again. Let it go, let it go.
But this is temporary, they say. Something will beat ßehemoth, or somehow we'll learn to live with it. This deep dark pit is only a refuge, not a destiny. We'll be back, we'll be back, we'll be back…
Sure.
Sometimes, if she tried very hard, she could almost blind herself to the strings and teetering struts that kept those hopeful dreams from collapsing. Usually it was too much trouble, and she'd wander for hours along the empty twilit corridors in defiance of her own nostalgia. As she wandered now.
Sometimes she passed windows, and paused. Something else Atlantis had that the rifters hadn't: clear parabolic blisters shaped to actually draw strength from the crushing pressure. The view was nothing to write home about, of course. A lozenge of gray bedrock, reflecting dim light from the viewport. Occasional blinking stars, beacons endlessly flashing here there be power lines or construction stockpile. Very rarely, a rattail or some other unremarkable creature. No monsters. Nothing remotely like the ravenous glowing predators that had once plagued the rifters at Beebe Station.