Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (55 page)

It was like being paralyzed from the neck down, she said. She blamed him. He'd let them in. He hadn't protected her. He had
collaborated
.

Martin didn't argue. It was all true.

What scared him most at that point was not the accusations and the recriminations, but the flat and affectless voice in which Sou-Hon made them. The woman who had screamed at him had somehow been submerged; the thing that spoke in her place might have been made of liquid nitrogen. It withdrew to what remained of its office, and it said in matter-of-fact tones that it would kill Martin Perreault if he ever went in there again, and it calmly closed the door in his face.

No charges have been pressed. The people with the glittering eyes spoke understandingly of Sou-Hon's recent trauma, of her current distraught and muddled state. She had been used by others, they said. Many had been. She was as much victim as offender. No need to punish the poor woman—better that she should get help, now that she was no longer a danger to others.

Martin Perreault doesn't know if he believes that. Mercy is not something he's come to expect from such people. He thinks it more likely that the rumors are true, that the resources simply don't
exist
to prosecute Sou-Hon and her fellow criminals. She is legion.

Perhaps that is also why the people with the glittering eyes settled for mere paralysis; they could have blinded and deafened Martin's wife as well, but cutting those nerves would have taken fifteen minutes instead of five. Perhaps they can't spare even that much time; perhaps there are so many subversives that the system has to run as fast as it can to keep them merely hamstrung.

Besides, Sou-Hon Perreault can no longer affect events in the real world. What harm can she do by watching?

Now she's not even doing that. She's curled up the floor, making soft mewing noises. Her displaced headset lies halfway across the room. She doesn't seem aware that she's lost it. She doesn't seem aware of Martin's presence.

He strokes her face, murmurs her name, flinches in anticipation of violence or sudden disdain. None comes. She doesn't react at all. He kneels, slips his arms beneath her legs and around her shoulders; she barely seems to weigh anything. She shifts in his arms as he lifts, buries her face in his chest. Still she doesn't speak.

After he tucks her into bed he returns to her office. Sou-Hon's discarded headset spills a diffuse tangle of shifting light across the carpet. Sliding the hardware onto his own skull, he comes face to face with a satcam view of western N'Am. It seems strangely opaque; the hemisphere's in darkness, none of the usual enhancements brightening the view. City clusters sparkle up from SoCal and the Queen Charlottes like galactic cores; the Midwest is a diffuse glow of underlit clouds. The Dust Belt intrudes from the east like a dark tumor. All features crude and raw, a naked-eye view unbolstered by radar or infrared; not like Sou-Hon at all, to restrict her sensory window this way. The only tactical enhancements are some sort of timer running off to one side and a bright overlay a few hundred kilometers east of the Pacific, a sparkling orange line paralleling the coast from SoCal up to BC. Even that lacks the precise delineation of most computer graphics—the line seems fuzzy, even broken in places. Martin zooms on the view, zooms again. Resolution and brightness increase: the orange line swells and sparkles and writhes—

It is not an overlay.

+56h14m23s
the timer says, incrementing before his eyes.

It doesn't make any sense; how could any fire could burn so brightly, for so long? Surely the flames have consumed everything by now, reduced all combustibles to ash and everything else to slag. Yet somehow it keeps going, as if in defiance of physics itself.

There: along the eastern boundary, a patch of relative darkness where the flames seem to be burning out. Martin watches it spread with a kind of dumb relief, until the swollen black torus of a heavy lifter passes between earth and sky. To the satcam it looks like the shadow of Mercury crossing a sunspot, but even at this range there's no mistaking the bright trail it spreads behind it. The dying flames leap high in its wake, forcibly resurrected.

They're not letting it die, he realizes. The fire burns on endless life-support, from Oakland to Kitimat, and Martin Perreault knows with sudden dull certainty that a course has been set for it to follow.

East.

He leaves the office for a few moments, returning with a toolbox from his hobby room. He unlatches every access panel he can, smashes open the rest. He calmly dismembers each and every piece of equipment remaining in the room, cutting fiberop, pouring acid into computational organics, smashing crystals with a pneumatic hammer. Then he pads down the hall to the bedroom. Sou Hon is asleep at last, curled into a fetal ball. He cocoons her from behind, wrapping her flesh in his, and stares off into darkness while the real world falls asleep around him.

Acknowledgements

Thanks first for the forebearance: to Mike Brander, one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet, for not sueing me after I inadvertently named a psychopath after him in the last book.

Thanks next for the help: Laurie Channer, Nalo Hopkinson, Brent Hayward, and Bob Boyczuk all poked and prodded an embryonic stage of the first few chapters. Laurie also endured my endless stream-of-consciousness rambling as I tried to fit all the pieces together; hopefully her sacrifice has spared the rest of you from a similar fate. My agent, Don Maass, made a vital criticism of opening chapters which resulted in a whole new plot thread (and hopefully, less "straining for effect"). David Hartwell edited with his usual renowned acumen, even if he did force me to cut the exploding daddy scene. (In hindsight, I think that was a wise decision.)

I also got diverse technical assistance from other folks with postgraduate degrees like mine, the difference being that theirs were in subjects that actually proved to be good for something. Prof. Denis Lynn, of the University of Guelph, provided not answers but
questions
, and lines of enquiry for me to pursue. (It's been twenty years since I took a course from the man and he's still forcing me to think for myself.) He also donated a copy of Lodish
et al.
's "Molecular Cell Biology" to the cause, a text which easily outweighs the yellow pages for the GTA. Isaac "Buckaroo Banzai" Szpindel—an MD, neurologist, sf-writer, screenwriter, and (no shit)
electrical engineer
—helped me out with the chemistry of guilt, and suggested plausible field strengths for rifter implants. He also kept me from slipping into steroid psychosis during a massive poison-ivy infection while I was writing this book. Drs. Alison Sinclair and Fran Terry offered insights, suggestions, and/or overheads on matters microbial. Colin Bamsey told me what kind of alpine trees would be likely to survive the great warming.

Given a world in which Quebec has become the predominant economic power, I figured various Quebecisms would have worked their way into casual N'Am conversation—hence all those italicised expletives that left most of you scratching your heads. For a crash course in how to be foul-mouthed in Canada's Other Official Language, I thank Joel Champetier, Glenn Grant, Daniel Sernine, and Jean-Louis Trudel, even though they couldn't come up with an alliterative translation for "blood-spewing semen-sucking sickle-celled savior". (They did, however, dissuade me from turning "Celine Dion" into a swear word. Just barely.)

Once again, the music of Ian Anderson and the inestimable Jethro Tull kept me company during the many long nights it took to lay this puppy to rest. As did the music of REM, from whom I stole a couple of chapter titles.

My thanks to all of these for their efforts and/or inspiration, and apologies for all the stuff I probably got wrong anyway.

Notes and References

The following references helped me beat
Maelstrom
into a shape that's (hopefully) more plausible than if I'd just made everything up myself. This is in addition to the references I cited two years ago in
Starfish
, which I won't bother repeating here: go buy the damn book if you’re so interested.

ßehemoth

When I started writing this book, strange claims had just started surfacing in the scientific literature: a new kind of extremely primitive microbe freshly discovered, something inconceivably small
¹
. So small, in fact—less than 100 nanometers in some cases—that many argued they couldn't possibly be alive
²
. Believers dubbed them
nanobes
. (Formal taxonomy--
Nanobacterium sanguineum
—has been suggested, but not yet formally adopted
³
.)

Now, a couple of years later, nanobes have been found not only in hotsprings and Triassic sandstone, but in the blood of mammals (including humans)
⁴
. Evidently they find us comfortably reminiscent of the primordial soup in which life originally evolved some 3.5 billion years ago; they feed off the phosphorus and calcium in our blood.

ßehemoth is not
N. sanguineum
, of course. It's more sophisticated in some ways, more primitive in others. Its genome is encoded in p-RNA, not DNA; it snarfs sulfur, not phosphorus and calcium; it can't survive in cold saline environments (real nanobes probably can't metabolise under such conditions either, but they can
withstand
them in a dormant state); it has advanced adaptations for cell penetration that are way out of
Nanobacterium
's league. It's larger, as large as conventional mycoplasmas and marine bacterioplankton. It is also much nastier, and—last but not least— it doesn't actually exist.

I have, however, tried to make this bug reasonably plausible, given the dramatic constraint of a global apocalypse in a crunchy coating. As a result, ßehemoth is like one of those "composite serial killers" you read about in True-Crime books—bits and pieces of various real-world bugs, thrown together with lots of dramatic license. "A-51" really exists, both in deep lake sediments and the human mouth
⁵
.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
is another bacterium that lives quite happily in soil, water, worms, and people
⁶
; like ßehemoth, it has genes which allow it to speed up and slow down its own rate of mutation so it can quick-adapt to novel environments. (I've called them "Blachford genes" here, in the hopes that one Alistair Blachford will get off his ass and publish his thesis on genetic metavariation as an evolutionary strategy
⁷
.) March and McMahon's 1999 review of receptor-mediated endocytosis
⁸
told me how ßehemoth would be most likely to get inside a host cell, and Decatur and Portnoy
⁹
told me how it could avoid getting digested afterward. And once again, a nod to Denis Lynn of the University of Guelph for forcing me to worry about such things in the first place.

ßehemoth's genetics are cadged from a variety of sources, many of which I quoted without really understanding. The stuff on mitochondria and pyranosal RNA come from Eschenmoser
¹⁰
, Gesteland
et al.
¹¹
, Gray
et al
_.
¹²
, and Orgel
^13
,
14
. ßehemoth's size and genome are consistent with theoretical size-limits for micro-organisms
¹⁵
, and big enough to sustain a normal microbial metabolic rate. (Real nanobes are too small to contain many enzymes, which means that many of their metabolic pathways crawl along at uncatalyzed speeds. They therefore metabolize about ten thousand times slower than bacteria such as
E. coli4
, which makes them pretty poor candidates for outcompeting a whole biosphere.) And of course, it's looking more and more likely that life
itself
began as a sulfur-dependent phenomenon in a hydrothermal rift vent
¹⁶
. I cobbled other bits and pieces from Lodesh
et al.
's "Molecular Cell Biology"
¹⁷
.