Northern Stars Read online

  * * *

  Leaning over backwards in two directions simultaneously, and assuming someone else on the team knows French—how Canadian can you get? I have written many pages, and discarded them, trying to dissect or describe why (beyond the authors’ addresses) I feel this is truly a contemporary Canadian SF anthology. Now I wonder if pointing to Vonarburg and Truscott doesn’t do it best? Not just the circumstances of their selections, but the statements of their stories as well.

  We have met the Alien and it is us.

  Maybe Pogo was a closet Canadian. Identifying the alien within is not an easy state of mind for Yanks or Brits. On the record, in this book, it seems a relatively confident assumption in the prevailing Canadian voice—even the immigrant voices.

  Someone else can write the dissertation on those interactive dynamics of immigrant and native-born (and Native-born) Canadians/Canadiens. I am satisfied to sense, after months of immersion in Canadian futures, that there is something one just might call a Canadian consciousness, and that this unique sensibility of accepting-and-coping might just have something of value to offer to the uncertain future of a planet in perilous pain.

  Toronto

  July 1985

  A NICHE

  Peter Watts

  Peter Watts went to university in the 1970’s (“it was supposed to be sort of a day job, until I broke through and became a best-selling author”). He did his doctorate on the physiological ecology of marine mammals and then sold his first story, “A Niche,” which won the Aurora Award for best short-form in English for 1992 (in a tie with a Michael Skeet story). He has recently spent two years teaching in Ontario, and has written the narration for an award-winning documentary film. Currently he is working with a consortium of universities in the Pacific Northwest (“trying to figure out why Stellar sea lions are dropping like flies in the North Pacific. It’s still a day job until I break through and become a best-selling author”).

  “A Niche” is Watts’s only published fiction to date and is one hell of an impressive science fiction story. It manages to use many conventional hard SF ideas and tropes, and at the same time keep an ironic distance both from American hard SF and British “new wave” speculative fiction. The central characters are women, named Clarke and Ballard. We chose this story to begin an anthology of Canadian SF.

  * * *

  When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal groan.

  Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometres of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the Rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge, and she hears Beebe’s armour shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is Physics.

  How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come down here? But she already knows the answer.

  She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life under control. She almost seems happy down here.

  Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when you’re three thousand metres down. She turns and catches sight of a slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.

  It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what they’ve done to her.

  It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where her left lung used to be. She is so acclimated to the chronic ache in her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves, that she is scarcely aware of them any more. So she can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.

  Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in Beebe; they’re supposed to increase the apparent size of one’s personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn’t help. She clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering her eyes like smooth white cataracts.

  She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the usual air of confidence.

  Ballard stands up. “Ready to go?”

  “You’re in charge,” Clarke says.

  “Only on paper.” Ballard smiles. “As far as I’m concerned, Lenie, we’re equals.” After two days on the rift Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation. It doesn’t always seem real.

  Something hits Beebe from the outside.

  Ballard’s smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud through the station’s titanium skin.

  “It takes a while to get used to,” Ballard says, “doesn’t it?”

  And again.

  “I mean, that sounds big…”

  “Maybe we should turn the lights off,” Clarke suggests. She knows they won’t. Beebe’s exterior floodlights burn around the clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can’t see it from inside—Beebe has no windows—but somehow they draw comfort from the knowledge of that unseen fire—

  Thud!

  —most of the time.

  “Remember back in training?” Ballard says over the sound. “When they told us that abyssal fish were supposed to be so small…”

  Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a while. There is no other sound.

  “It must’ve gotten tired,” Ballard says. “You’d think they’d figure it out.” She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.

  Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender. She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one? The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into jelly. Any time.

  Better to face it outside, where she knows what’s coming. All she can do in here is wait for it to happen.

  * * *

  Going outside is like drowning, once a day.

  Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector; the ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.

  When she catches her breath, and loses it.

  When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.

  It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.

  She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream. The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke falls writhing into the abyss.

  * * *

  They come out of the freezing darkness, headlights blazing, into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand over twenty metres high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled structures in perpetual twilight.

  They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided them here.

  “I’ll never get used to it,” Ballard grates in a caricature of her usual voice.

  Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. “Thirty-four Centigr
ade.” The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so wrong to talk without breathing.

  Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light. After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.

  There is so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes; icy seawater turns to steam; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful centimetres each year. Human machinery does not make energy, here at Dragon’s Throat; it merely hangs on and steals some insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.

  Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of boulders, crimson worms three metres long crowd the seabed between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulphur, lace the water with milky veils.

  The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.

  It doesn’t sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harp string is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming, through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:

  “LENIE—”

  Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth that seems impossibly huge.

  Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares into a scaly black face half-a-metre across. Some tiny dispassionate part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails. How can it see me? she wonders.

  Then the pain reaches her.

  She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.

  She goes limp. Please get it over with if you’re going to kill me just please God make it quick … She feels the urge to vomit, but the ’skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won’t let her.

  She shuts out the pain. She’s had plenty of practice. She pulls inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic. There is another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife—you know, a knife, like the one you’ve got strapped to your leg and completely forgot about—and suddenly the monster is gone, its grip broken.

  Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It is like operating a marionette. Her head turns, and she sees Ballard locked in combat with something as big as she is. Only … Ballard is tearing it to pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with smoke-trails of suspended gore.

  The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass. Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.

  Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any trouble. I’ve had worse, she thinks.

  But why am I still alive?

  Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like photophores themselves.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ballard says in a distorted whisper. “Lenie? Are you okay?”

  Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But surprisingly, she feels intact. “Yeah.”

  And if not, she knows it’s her own damn fault. She just lay there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.

  She’s always asking for it.

  * * *

  Back in the airlock the water recedes around them. And within them; Clarke’s stolen breath, released at last, races back along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.

  Ballard splits the face seal on her ’skin and her words tumble into the wetroom. “Jesus. Jesus! I don’t believe it! My God, did you see that thing! They get so huge around here!” She passes her hands across her face; her corneal caps come off, milky hemispheres dropping from enormous hazel eyes. “And to think they’re normally just a few centimetres long…”

  She starts to strip down, unzipping her ’skin along the forearms, talking the whole time. “And yet it was almost fragile, you know? Hit it hard enough and it just came apart! Jesus!” Ballard always takes off her uniform indoors. Clarke suspects that she’d rip the recycler out of her own thorax if she could, throw it in a corner with the ’skin and the eyecaps until the next time it was needed.

  Maybe she’s got her other lung in her cabin. Clarke muses. Her arm is all pins and needles. Maybe she keeps it in a jar, and she stuffs it back into her chest at night … She feels a bit dopey; probably just an after-effect of the neuroinhibitors the ’skin pumps her full of whenever she’s outside. Small price to keep my brain from shorting out—I really shouldn’t mind …

  Ballard peels her ’skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, an electrolyser intake pokes out through her ribcage.

  Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard’s flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again.

  The prickly numbness is spreading, leaking through her shoulder into her chest and neck. Clarke shakes her head once, to clear it.

  She sags suddenly, against the hatchway.

  Am I in shock? Am I fainting?

  “I mean—” Ballard stops, looks at Clarke with an expression of sudden concern. “Jesus, Lenie. You look terrible. You shouldn’t have told me you were okay if you weren’t.”

  The tingling reaches the base of Clarke’s skull. She fights it. “I’m—okay,” she says. “Nothing broke. I’m just bruised.”

  “Garbage. Take off your ’skin.”

  Clarke straightens, with effort. The numbness recedes a bit. “It’s nothing I can’t take care of myself.”

  Don’t touch me. Please don’t touch me.

  Ballard steps forward without a word and unseals the ’skin around Clarke’s forearm. She peels back the fabric and exposes an ugly purple bruise. She looks at Clarke with one raised eyebrow.

  “Just a bruise,” Clarke says. “I’ll take care of it. Really. Thanks anyway.” She pulls her hand away from Ballard’s ministrations.

  Ballard looks at her for a moment. She smiles ever so slightly.

  “Lenie,” she says, “there’s no need to feel embarrassed.”

  “About what?”

  “You know. Me having to rescue you. You going to pieces when that thing attacked. It was perfectly understandable. Most people have a rough time adjusting. I’m just one of the lucky ones.”

  Right. You’ve always been one of the lucky ones, haven’t you? I know your kind, Ballard, you’ve never failed at anything …

  “You don’t have to feel ashamed about it,” Ballard reassures her.

  “I don’t,” Clarke says, honestly. She doesn’t feel much of anything any more. Just the tingling. And the tension. And a vague sort of wonder that she’s even alive.

  * * *

  The bulkhead is sweating.

  The deep sea lays icy hands on the metal and, inside, Clarke watches the humid atmosphere bead and run down the wall. She sits rigid on her bunk under dim fluorescent light, every wall of the cubby within easy reach. The ceiling is too low. The room is too narrow. She feels as if the ocean is compressing the station around her.

  And all I can do is wait …

  The anabolic salve on her injuries is warm and soothing. Clarke probes the purple flesh of her arm with practised fingers. The diagnostic tools in the Med cubby have vindicated her. She is lucky, this time; bones intact, epidermis unbroken. She seals up her ’skin, hiding the damage.

  Clarke shifts on the pallet, turns to face the inside wall. Her reflection stares back at her through eyes like frosted glass. She watches the image, admires its perfect mimicry of each movement. Flesh and phantom move together, bodies masked, faces neutral.

  That’s me, she thinks. That’s what I look like now. She tries to read wha
t lies behind that glacial facade. Am I bored, horny, upset? How to tell, with her eyes hidden behind those corneal opacities? She sees no trace of the tension she always feels. I could be terrified. I could be pissing in my ’skin and nobody would know.

  She leans forward. The reflection comes to meet her. They stare at each other, white to white, ice to ice. For a moment, they almost forget Beebe’s ongoing war against pressure. For a moment, they do not mind the claustrophobic solitude that grips them.

  How many times, Clarke wonders, have I wanted eyes as dead as these?

  * * *

  Beebe’s metal viscera crowd the corridor beyond her cubby. Clarke can barely stand erect. A few steps bring her into the lounge.

  Ballard, back in shirtsleeves, is at one of the library terminals. “Rickets,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Fish down here don’t get enough trace elements. They’re rotten with deficiency diseases. It doesn’t matter how fierce they are. They bite too hard, they break their teeth on us.”

  Clarke stabs buttons on the food processor; the machine grumbles at her touch. “I thought there was all sorts of food at the rift. That’s why things got so big.”

  “There’s a lot of food. Just not very good quality.”

  A vaguely edible lozenge of sludge oozes from the processor onto Clarke’s plate. She eyes it for a moment. I can relate.

  “You’re going to eat in your gear?” Ballard asks, as Clarke sits down at the lounge table.

  Clarke blinks at her. “Yeah. Why?”

  “Oh, nothing. It would just be nice to talk to someone with pupils in their eyes, you know?”

  “Sorry. I’ll take them off if you—”

  “No, it’s no big thing. I can live with it.” Ballard shuts down the library and sits down across from Clarke. “So, how do you like the place so far?”

  Clarke shrugs and keeps eating.

  “I’m glad we’re only down here for three months,” Ballard says. “This place could get to you after a while.”