Starfish

"Really? And what makes you such an expert, Acton? You've been down here for what, two weeks now?"

"Only two weeks? Seems longer. Time stretches when you're outside, doesn't it?"

"At first," Clarke says.

"You know why Fischer disappeared?"

"No."

"He outlived his usefulness."

"Ah." Her machine parts turn it into half creak, half growl.

"I'm serious, Lenie." Acton's mechanical voice does not change. "You think they're going to let you stay down here forever? You think they'd let people like us down here at all if they had any choice?"

She stops kicking. Her body continues to coast. "What are you talking about?"

"Use your head, Lenie. You're smarter than I am, inside at least. You've got the keys to the city here — you've got the keys to the whole fucking seaboard, and you're still acting like a victim." Acton's vocoder gurgles indecipherably — a laugh, mistransposed? A snarl?

More words: "They count on that, you know."

Clarke starts kicking again, stares ahead to the brightening glow of the Throat.

It isn't there.

There's a moment's disorientation — We can't be lost, we were headed right for it, has the power gone out? — before she sees the familiar streak of coarse yellow light, bearing four o'clock.

How could I have gotten turned around like that?

"We're here," Acton says.

"No. The Throat's way over —»

A nova flares beside her, drenching the abyss with blinding light. It takes Clarke's eyecaps a moment to adjust; when the starbursts have faded from her eyes, the ocean is a muddy black backdrop for the bright cone from Acton's headlamp.

"Don't," she says. "It gets so dark when you do that, you can't see anything —»

"I know. I'll turn it off in a moment. Just look."

His beam shines down on a small rocky outcropping rising from the mud, no more than two meters across. Jagged cookie-cutter flowers litter its surface, radial clusters shining garish red and blue in the artificial light. Some of them lie flat along the rock face. Others are contorted into frozen calcareous knots, clenched around things Clarke can't see.

Some of them move, slowly.

"You brought me out here to look at starfish?" She tries, and fails, to squeeze some hint of bored contempt through the vocodor. But inside there's a distant, frightened amazement that he has led her here, that she could be guided, utterly unsuspecting, so completely off course. And how did he find this place? No sonar pistol, compass doesn't work worth shit this close to the Throat…

"I figured you probably hadn't looked at them very closely before," Acton says. "I thought you might be interested."

"We don't have time for this, Acton."

His hands reach down into the light and lock onto one of the starfish. They peel it slowly from the rock; there are filaments of some kind along the creature's underside, anchoring it to the substrate. Acton's efforts tear them free, a few at a time.

He holds the animal up for Clarke's inspection. Its upper surface is colored stone, encrusted with calcareous spicules. Acton flips it over. The underside writhes with hundreds of thick squirming threads, jammed into dense rows along the length of each arm. Each thread has a tiny sucker at its tip.

"A starfish," Acton tells her, "is the ultimate democracy."

Clarke stares, quietly repelled.

"This is how they move," Acton is saying. "They walk along on all these tube feet. But the weird thing is, they have no brains at all. Not surprising for a democracy."

Rows of squirming maggots. A forest of translucent leeches, groping blindly into the water.

"So there's nothing to coordinate the tube feet, they all move independently. Usually that's not a problem; they all tend to go towards food, for example. But it's not unusual for a third of these feet to be pulling in some other direction entirely. The whole animal's a living tug-o-war. Sometimes, some really stubborn tube feet just don't give up, and they literally get torn out at the roots when the others move the body someplace they don't want to go. But hey: majority rules, right?"

Clarke extends a tentative finger. Half a dozen tube feet latch onto it. She can't feel them through her 'skin. Anchored, they look almost delicate, like filaments of milky glass.

"But that's nothing," Acton says. "Watch this."

He rips the starfish in half.

Clarke pulls back, shocked and angry. But there's something in Acton's posture, in that barely visible outline behind his lamp, that makes her pause.

"Don't worry, Lenie," he says. "I haven't killed it. I've bred it."

He drops the torn halves. They flutter like leaves to the seabed, trailing bits of bloodless entrail.

"They regenerate. Didn't you know that? You can tear them into pieces and each piece grows back the missing parts. It takes time, but they recover. Only you end up with more of them. Damn hard to kill these guys.