Starfish

Now his hands rest, unmoving, on the keyboard. His shoulders are shaking. He doesn't make any sound at all. Lenie Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, wondering whether to approach him. When she looks again the lounge is empty.

* * *

She can tell exactly where he's going. His icon buds off of Beebe and crawls away across the display, and there's only on thing in that direction.

When she gets there he's crawling across its back, digging a hole with his knife. Clarke's eyecaps can barely find enough light to see by, this far from the Throat; Acton cuts and slices in the light of her headlamp, his shadow writhing away across a horizon of dead flesh.

He's dug a crater, maybe half a meter across, half a meter deep. He's cut through the stratum of blubber below the skin and is tearing through the brown muscle beneath. It's been months now since this creature landed here. Clarke marvels at its preservation.

The abyss likes extremes, she muses. If it isn't a pressure cooker, it's a fridge.

Acton stops digging. He just floats there, staring down at his handiwork.

"What a stupid idea," he buzzes at last. "I don't know what gets into me sometimes." He turns to face her; his eyecaps reflect yellow. "I'm sorry, Lenie. I know this place was special to you somehow, I didn't mean to…well, desecrate it, I guess."

She shakes her head. "It's okay. It's not important."

Acton's vocoder gurgles; in air, it would be a sad laugh. "I give myself too much credit sometimes, Len. Whenever I'm inside, and I'm fucking up and I don't know what to do, I figure all I've got to do is come outside and the scales will fall off my eyes. It's like, religious faith almost. All the answers. Right out here."

"It's okay," Clarke says again, because it seems better than saying nothing.

"Only sometimes the answer doesn't really do much for you, you know? Sometimes the answer's just: Forget it. You're fucked." Acton looks back down at the dead whale. "Would you turn the light off?"

The darkness swallows them like a blanket. Clarke reaches through it and brings Acton to her. "What were you trying to do?"

That mechanical laugh again. "Something I read. I was thinking —»

His cheek brushes against hers.

"I don't know what I was thinking. When I'm inside I'm a fucking lobo case, I get these stupid ideas and even when I get back out it takes a while before I really wake up and realize what a dork I've been. I wanted to study an adrenal gland. Thought it would help me figure out how to counter ion depletion at the synapse junctions."

"You know how to do that."

"Well, it was just bullshit anyway. I can't think straight in there."

She doesn't bother to argue.

"I'm sorry," Acton buzzes after a while.

Clarke strokes his back. It feels like two sheets of plastic rubbing together.

"I think I can explain it to you," he adds. "If you're interested."

"Sure." But she knows it won't change anything.

"You know how there's this strip in your brain that controls movement?"

"Okay."

"And if, say, you became a concert pianist, the part that runs your fingers would actually spread out, take up more of the strip to meet the increased demand for finger control. But you lose something, too. The adjacent parts of the strip get crowded out. So maybe you couldn't wiggle your toes or curl your tongue as well as you could before you started practicing."

Acton falls silent. Clarke feels his arms, cradling her loosely from behind.

"I think something like that happened to me," he says after a while.

"How?"

"I think something in my brain got exercised, and it spread out and crowded some other parts away. But it only works in a high-pressure environment, you see, it's the pressure that makes the nerves fire faster. So when I go back inside, the new part shuts down and the old parts have been — well, lost."

Clarke shakes her head. "We've been through this, Karl. Your synapses just ran low on calcium."

"That's not all that happened. That's not even a problem any more, I've brought my inhibitors up again. Not all the way, but enough. But I still have this new part, and I still can't find the old ones." She feels his chin on the top of her head. "I don't think I'm exactly human any more, Len. Which, considering the kind of human I was, is probably just as well."

"And what does it do, exactly? This new part?"

He takes a while to answer. "It's almost like getting an extra sense organ, except it's… diffuse. Intuition, only with a really hard edge."

"Diffuse, with a hard edge."

"Yeah, well. That's the problem when you try to explain smell to someone without a nose."

"Maybe it's not what you think. I mean, something's changed, but that doesn't mean you can really just — look into people like that. Maybe it's just some sort of mood disorder. Or a hallucination, maybe. You can't know."

"I know, Len."

"Then you're right." Anger trickles up from her internal reservoir. "You're not human any more. You're less than human."

"Lenie —»