Twice as alive, Acton says. Hiding behind her smile, Clarke considers: twice as much of her life. Not a great prospect, so far.
There's a light from behind; it chases her shadow out along the seabed. She can't remember how long it's been there. She feels a momentary chill—
— Fischer? —
— before common sense sets in. Gerry Fischer wouldn't use a headlamp.
"Lenie?"
She revolves on her own axis, sees a silhouette hovering a few meters away. Cyclopean light glares from its forehead. Clarke hears a subvocal buzz, the corrupted equivalent of Brander clearing his throat. "Judy said you were out here," he explains.
"Judy." She means it as a question, but her vocoder loses the intonation.
"Yeah. She sort of, keeps tabs on you sometimes."
Clarke considers that a moment. "Tell her I'm harmless."
"It's not like that," he buzzes. "I think she just… worries…"
Clarke feels muscles twitching at the corners of her mouth. She thinks she might be smiling.
"So I guess we're on shift," she says, after a moment.
The headlight bobs up and down. "Right. A bunch of clams need their asses scraped. More skilled labor."
She stretches, weightless. "Okay. Let's go."
"Lenie…"
She looks up at him.
"Why do you come— I mean, why here?" Brander's headlight sweeps the bottom, comes to rest on an outcropping of bone and rotted flesh. A skeletal smile stitches its way across the lit circle. "Did you kill it, or something?"
"Yeah, I—" She falls silent, realizing: He means the whale.
"Nah," she says instead. "It just died on its own."
Of course she wakes up alone. They still try to sleep together sometimes, after sex has made them too lazy to go outside. But the bunk is too small. The most they can manage is a sort of diagonal slouch: feet on the floor, necks bent up against the bulkhead, Acton cradling her like a living hammock. If they're unlucky they really do fall asleep like that. It takes hours to get the kinks out afterwards. Way more trouble than it's worth.
So she wakes up alone. But she misses him anyway.
It's early. The schedules handed down from the GA are increasingly irrelevant — circadian rhythms lose their way in the incessant darkness, fall slowly out of phase — but the rubbery timetable that remains leaves hours before her shift starts. Lenie Clarke is awake in the middle of the night. It seems like a stupid and obvious thing to say, months from the nearest sunrise, but right now it seems especially true.
In the corridor she turns for a moment in the direction of his cubby before she remembers. He's never in there any more. He's never even inside, unless he's eating or working or being with her. He hasn't slept in his quarters almost since they got involved. He's getting almost as bad as Lubin.
Caraco is sitting silently in the lounge, unmoving, obeying her own inner clock. She looks up as Clarke crosses to Comm.
"He went out about an hour ago," she says softly.
Sonar picks him up fifty meters southeast, barely echoing above the bottom clutter. Clarke heads for the ladder.
"He showed us something the other day," Caraco says after her. "Ken and me."
Clarke looks back.
"A smoker, way off in one corner of the Throat. It had this weird fluted vent, and it made singing sounds, almost…"
"Mmm."
"He really wanted us to know about it, for some reason. He was really excited. He's — he's kind of strange out there, Lenie…"
"Judy," Clarke says neutrally, "Why are you telling me this?"
Caraco looks away. "Sorry. I didn't mean anything."
Clarke starts down the ladder.
"Just be careful, okay?" Caraco calls after her.
He's curled up when Clarke reaches him, knees tucked under his chin, floating a few centimeters above a stone garden. His eyes are open, of course. She reaches out, touches him through two layers of reflex copolymer.
He barely stirs. His vocoder emits sporadic ticking noises.
Lenie Clarke curls herself around him. In a womb of freezing sea water, they sleep on until morning.
Short Circuit
I won't give in.
It would be so easy. She could live out there, stay the fuck away from this creaking eggshell except to eat and bathe and do whatever parts of her job demand an atmosphere. She could spend her whole life flying across the seabed. Lubin does. Brander and Caraco and even Nakata are starting to.
Lenie Clarke knows she doesn't belong in here. None of them do.
But at the same time, she's scared of what outside might do to her. I could end up like Fischer. It would be so easy to just— slip away. If a hot seep or mud slide didn't get me first.
Lately she's been valuing her own life quite a lot. Maybe that means she's losing it. What kind of a rifter cares about living? But there it is: the rift is starting to scare her.
That's bullshit. Complete, total bullshit.
Who wouldn't be scared?
Scared. Yes. Of Karl. Of what you'll let him do to you.
It's been, what, a week now?—
Two days.
— two days since she's slept outside. Two days since she decided to incarcerate herself in here. She goes outside to work, and comes back as soon as each shift ends. No one's mentioned the change to her. Perhaps no one's noticed; if they don't come back to Beebe themselves after work, they scatter off across the sea bed to do whatever they do in splendid, freezing isolation.
She knew Acton would notice, though. He'd notice, and miss her, and follow her back inside. Or maybe he'd try and talk her back out, fight with her when she resisted. But he's shown no sign at all. He spends as much time out there as he ever did. She still sees him, of course. At mealtimes. At the library. Once for sex, during which neither spoke of anything important. And then gone again, back into the ocean.
He didn't enter into any pact with her. She didn't even tell him about her pact with herself. Still, she feels betrayed.
She needs him. She knows what that means, sees her own footprints crowding the road ahead, but reading the signs and changing course are two completely different things. Her insides are twisting with the need to go, whether out to him or just out she can't say. But as long as he's outside and she's in Beebe, Lenie Clarke can tell herself that she's still in control.
It's progress, sort of.
Now, curled up in her cubby with the hatch sealed tight, she hears the subterranean gurgle of the airlock. She comes up off the bed as though radio-controlled.
Noises, flesh against metal, hydraulics and pneumatics. A voice. Lenie Clarke is on her way to the wet room.
He's brought a monster inside with him. It's an anglerfish, almost two meters long, a jellylike bag of flesh with teeth half the length of Clarke's forearm. It lies quivering on the deck, its insides exploded through its own mouth in the near vacuum of Beebe's sea-level atmosphere. Dozens of miniature tails, twitching feebly, sprout everywhere from its body.
Caraco and Lubin, in the middle of some task, look over from the engineering 'lock. Acton stands beside his catch; his thorax, still inflating, hisses softly.
"How did you fit it inside the 'lock?" Clarke wonders.
"More to the point," Lubin says, coming over, "why bother?"
"What're all those tails?" Caraco says.
Acton grins at them. "Not tails. Mates."
Lubin's face doesn't change. "Really."