Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (18 page)

"Anger? Why should you be angry?"

"We should be grateful, do you think? To
you
?" The skeleton spat. "It was
our
machinery that tore everything apart?
We
caused the droughts and the floods and put our own homes underwater? And afterward, when we came here across a whole ocean—if we did not starve first or cook in the sun or die with our bodies stuffed with worms and things that
your
drugs have made unkillable—when we ended here we are supposed to be
grateful
that you let us sleep on this little patch of mud, we are supposed to
thank
you because so far it is cheaper to drug us than mow us down?"

They were at the waterline. Surf pounded invisibly in the dark distance. Amitav lifted one bony arm and pointed. "Sometimes when people go in there the sharks come for them." His voice was suddenly calm. "And on shore, the rest continue to sex and shit and feed at your wonderful machines."

"That's—that's just human nature, Amitav. People don't want to get involved."

"So these drugs are
good
for us?"

"They're not the slightest bit harmful."

"Then you put them in your food, too."

"Well no, but I'm not—"

—
part of an imprisoned destitute mob forty million strong…

"You liar," the stickman said quietly. "You hypocrite."

"You're starving, Amitav. You'll die."

"I know what I do."

"Do you?"

He looked up at the 'fly again, and this time he almost seemed amused. "What do you think I was, before?"

"What?"

"Before I was—here. Or did you think that
environmental refugee
was my first choice of vocation?"

"Well, I—"

"I was a pharmaceutical engineer," Amitav said. He tapped his temple. "They even changed me up here, so I was very good at it. I am not completely foolish about dietary matters. There appears to be a—a minimum effective dosage, yes? If I eat very little, your poisons have no effect." He paused. "So now you will try and force-feed me, for my own good?"

Perreault ignored the jibe. "And you think you're getting enough to live on, under your
minimum dosage
?"

"Perhaps not quite. But I am starving very, very slowly."

"Is that how you motivated those kids to trash the cycler? Are they fasting too?" There could be serious trouble on the Strip if that caught on.

"Me, still?
I
have somehow tricked all these people into starving themselves?"

"Who else?"

"Such faith you have in your machines. You have never thought that perhaps they are not working as well as you think?" He shook his head and spat. "Of course not. You were not told to."

"The cyclers work fine until your followers smash them."

"
My
followers? They never fasted for
me
. They suck at your tits as they always have. It is only after they begin starving that they see your cyclers for what they—"

Crack!

An impact on polymer, the sound of a whip snapping just behind her ear. She spun the 'fly, caught a glimpse of the rock as it bounced along the substrate. Ten meters down the shore, a girl ran away with another rock clenched in her hand.

Perreault turned back to face Amitav. "You—"

"Do not try to blame me. I am the cause of nothing. I am only the result."

"This can't go on, Amitav."

"You cannot stop it."

"I won't have to. If you keep this up it won't be me you're dealing with, it'll be—"

"Why do
you
care?" Amitav cut in.

"I'm just trying to—"

"You are trying to ease feelings of guilt. Use someone else."

"You can't win."

"That depends upon what I am trying to do."

"You're all alone."

Amitav laughed, waved his arms back across the shore. "How can I be? You have so thoughtfully provided all these sheep, and all this death, and even an ic—"

He stopped himself. Perreault filled in the gap:
an icon to inspire them
.

"She's not here any more," she said after a moment.

Amitav glanced back upshore; the eastern sky was beginning to lighten. A knot of curious humans stood halfway up the shore, watching from the center of a sleeping flock. Here at the water's edge, there was no one else within earshot.

The girl who'd thrown the rock was nowhere to be seen.

"Perhaps that is better," the stickman remarked. "Lenie Clarke was very—not even your
antidepressants
seemed to work on her."

"Lenie? That's her first name?"

"I believe so. At least, that was the name she used during one of her—visions." He glanced sideways at Perreault's floating surrogate. "Where did she go?"

"I don't know. I just haven't been able to confirm any recent sightings. Just rumors."
But of course, you'd know all about
those… "Maybe she's dead."

The stickman shook his head.

"It's a big ocean, Amitav. The sharks. And if she was having—fits of some kind—"

"She is not dead. I think perhaps there was a time when she wanted to be, once. Now…"

He stared inland. On the eastern horizon, past the people and the trampled scrub and the towers, the sky was turning red.

"Now, you are not so lucky," Amitav said.

Source Code

He'd left the map smoldering on his board the night before. Alice Jovellanos was waiting beside it, ready to pounce.

"Why didn't you
say
something?" On the display, a luminous bloodstain ran down the coast from Westport to Copalis Beach.

"Alice—"

"You've got a hot zone the size of a
city
here! How long have you known?"

"Just last night. I tightened some of the correlations and ran it against yesterday's snaps and—"

She cut him off: "You let this sit all
night
? Jesus
Christ
, Killjoy, what's wrong with you? We've got to call in the troops and I mean
now
."

He stared at her. "Since when did
you
join the fire brigade? You know what'll happen the moment we pass this up the line. We don't even know what ßehemoth
does
y—"

Her expression stopped him cold.

He slumped into his chair. The display bled crimson light all over him. "Is it that bad?"

"It's worse," she said.

* * *

A lumpy rainbow, a string of clustered beads folded around itself: purines or pyrimidines or nucleics or whatever the fuck they were.

ßehemoth's source code. Part of it, anyway.

"It's not even a helix," he said at last.

"Actually, it's got a weak left-handed twist. That's not the point."

"What is?"

"Pyranosal RNA. Much stronger Watson-Crick pairs than your garden-variety RNA, and a lot more selective in terms of pairing modes. Guanine-rich sequences won't self-pair, for one thing. Six-sided ring."

"English, Alice. So what?"

"It'll replicate faster than the stuff in your genes, and it won't make as many errors when it does."

"But what does it
do
?"

"It just
lives
, Killjoy. It lives, and it eats, and I think it does that better than anything else on the planet so we either stamp it out or kiss the whole biosphere goodbye."

He couldn't believe it. "
One bug
? How is that even possible?"

"Nothing eats it, for one thing. The cell wall's barely even organic, mostly it's just a bunch of sulfur compounds. You know how I told you some bacteria use inverted aminos to make themselves indigestible? This is ten times worse—most anything that might eat this fucker wouldn't even recognise it as food through all the minerals."

Desjardins bit his lower lip.

"It gets better," Jovellanos went on. "This thing's a veritable black hole of sulfur assimilation. I don't know where it learned this trick but it can snatch the stuff right out of our
cells
. Some kind of lysteriolysin analog, keeps it from getting lysed. That gums up glucose transport, protein synthesis, lipid and carb metabolism—shit, it gums up
everything
."

"There's no shortage of
sulfur
, Alice."

"Oh, there's lots to go around
now
. We fart the stuff out, nobody's even bothered to come up with a recommended daily dosage. But this, this
ßehemoth,
it needs sulfur even more than we do. And it breeds faster and it chews faster and believe me, Killjoy, in a few years there is
not
going to be enough to go around and this little fucker's gonna have the market
cornered
."

"That's just—" A straw floated to the front of his mind. He grasped it: "How can you be so sure? You didn't even think you had all the pieces to work with."

"I was wrong."

"But—you said no phospholipids, no—"

"
It doesn't have those things. It never did.
"

"What?"

" It's
simple
, it's so simple it's bloody well indestructible. No bilayer membranes, no—" She spread her hands, as if in surrender. "Yeah, I
did
think maybe they scrambled the sample to keep me from stealing trade secrets. Maybe even filtered some stuff right out, stupid as that might seem. Corpses have done dumber things. But I was wrong." She ran the fingers of one hand nervously over her scalp. "It was all there. All the pieces. And you know why I think they scrambled them up the way they did? I think they were afraid of what this thing could do if they left it in one piece."

"Shit." Desjardins eyed the beads rotating on the display. "So we either stop this thing or we get used to eating from Calvin cyclers for the rest of our lives."

Jovellanos's eyes were bright as quartz. "You don't get it."

"Well, what else could we do? If it cuts the whole biosphere off at the ankles, if—"

"You think this is about protecting the
biosphere?
" she cried. "You think they'd give a shit about environmental apocalypse if we could just
synthesise
our way out of the hole? You think they're launching all these cleansing strikes to protect the frigging
rainforest
?"

He stared at her.

Jovellanos shook her head. "Killjoy, it can get right inside our
cells
. Calvin cyclers don't matter. Sulfur supplements don't matter. Nothing we take in does us any good until our cells metabolise it—and whatever we take in, as soon as it gets past the cell membrane…there's ßehemoth, pushing to the front of the line. We've already been way luckier than we deserve. Sure, it's not as efficient up here as it is in a hyperbaric environment, but that only means the locals can beat it back ninety-nine times out of a hundred. And…"

And the dice had just kept rolling, and the hundredth throw had landed square on the Oregon coast. Desjardins knew the story: microbes, in sufficient numbers, make their own rules. Now there was a place in the sun where ßehemoth didn't have to fit into someone else's world. It had begun creating its own: trillions of microscopic terraformers at work in the soil, changing pH and electrolyte balances, stripping away all the advantages once held by natives so precisely adapted to the way things
used
to be…

It was every crisis he'd ever faced, combined and distilled and reduced to pure essence. It was chaos breaking, maybe unbreakable: little bubbles of enemy territory growing across the face of the coast, then the continent, then the planet. Eventually there'd come a fulcrum, a momentary balance of some interest to the theoreticians.  The area inside and outside the bubbles would be the same. An instant later, ßehemoth would
be
the outside, a new norm that enclosed shrinking pockets of some other, irrelevant reality.