Starfish

Now there's something new: the thing outside. So far at least, it has shown no trace of violence. It does seem to have x-ray vision, which could be even worse.

Lenie Clarke has always slept with the thing inside. Until now, she'd always just assumed it was for want of an alternative.

She taps lightly on Caraco's hatch. "Judy? You there?" She should be; she's nowhere else in Beebe, and sonar can't find any trace of her outside.

No answer.

It can wait.

No. It's waited long enough.

How would I feel if —

She isn't me.

The hatch is closed but not dogged. Clarke pulls it open a few centimeters and peers inside.

Somehow they've managed to pull it off. Alice Nakata and Judy Caraco spoon around each other on that tiny bunk. Their eyes dart restlessly beneath closed lids. Nakata's dreamer stands guard beside them, its tendrils pasted to their bodies.

Clarke lets the hatch hiss shut again.

It was a stupid idea, anyhow. What would she know?

She wonders how long they've been together, though. She never even saw that coming.

* * *

"Your boyfriend isn't here," Lubin calls in. "We were supposed to top up the coolant on number seven."

Clarke calls up the topographic display. "How long ago?"

"Oh four hundred."

"Okay." Acton's half an hour late. That's unusual; he's been going out of his way to be punctual these days, a grudging concession to Clarke in the name of group relations. "I can't find him on sonar," she reports. "Unless he's hugging the bottom. Hang on."

She leans out of the comm cubby. "Hey. Anybody see Karl?"

"He left a while ago," Brander calls from the wet room. "Maintenance on seven, I think."

Clarke punches back into Lubin's channel. "He's not here. Brander says he left already. I'll keep looking."

"Okay. At least his deadman switch hasn't gone off." Clarke can't tell whether Lubin thinks that's good or bad.

Movement at the corner of her eye. She looks up; Nakata's standing in the hatchway.

"Have you found him?" she asks.

Clarke shakes her head.

"He was in Medical, just before he left," Nakata says. "He was open. He said he was making some adjustments —»

Oh God.

"He said they improved performance outside, but he didn't explain. He said he would show me later. Maybe something went wrong."

External camera display, ventral view. The image flickers for a moment, then clears; on the screen, a scalloped circle of light lies across a flat muddy plain, transected by the knife-edge shadows of anchor cables. Near the edge of that circle is a black human figure, face down, its hands held to either side of its head.

She wakes up the close acoustics. "Karl! Karl, can you hear me?"

He reacts. His head twists around, faces up into the floods; his eyecaps reflect featureless white glare into the camera. He's shaking.

"His vocoder," Nakata says. There's sound coming from the speaker, soft, repetitive, mechanical. "It's — stuttering —»

Clarke's already in the wet room. She knows what Acton's vocoder is saying. She knows, because the same word is repeating over and over in her own head.

No. No. No. No. No.

* * *

No obvious motor impairment. He's able to make it back inside on his own; stiffens, in fact, when Clarke tries to help him. He strips his gear and follows her into Medical without a word.

Nakata, diplomatically, closes the hatch behind them

Now he sits on the examination table, stonefaced. Clarke knows the routine; get his 'skin off, his eyecaps out. Check autonomic pupil response and reflex arcs. Stab him, draw off the usual samples: blood gases, acetylcholine, GABA, lactic acid.

She sits down beside him. She doesn't want his eyecaps out. She doesn't want to see behind them.

"Your inhibitors," she says at last. "How far down are they?"

"Twenty percent."

"Well." She tries for a light touch. "At least we know your limit now. Just nudge them back up to normal."

Almost imperceptibly, he shakes his head.

"Why not?"

"Too late. I went over some sort of threshold. I don't think — it doesn't feel reversible."

"I see." She puts one tentative hand on his arm. He doesn't react. "How do you feel?"

"Blind. Deaf."

"You're not, though."

"You asked how I felt," he says, still expressionless.

"Here." She takes the NMR helmet down from its hook. Acton lets her strap it across his skull. "If there's anything wrong, this should —»

"There's something wrong, Len."

"Well." The helmet writes its impressions across the diagnostic display. Clarke's got the same medical expertise they all have, stuffed into her mind by machines that hijacked her dreams. Still, the raw data mean nothing to her. It's almost a minute before the display prints out an executive summary.

"Your synaptic calcium's way down." She's careful not to show her relief. "Makes sense, I guess. Your neurons fire too often, eventually they run out of something."

He looks at the screen, saying nothing.