Starfish

Peter Watts Starfish

For Susan Oshanek, on the off chance that she's still alive.

And for Laurie Channer — who to my unexpectedly good fortune, definitely is.

Prelude: Ceratius

The abyss should shut you up.

Sunlight hasn't touched these waters for a million years. Atmospheres accumulate by the hundreds here, the trenches could swallow a dozen Everests without burping. They say life itself got started in the deep sea. Maybe. It can't have been an easy birth, judging by the life that remains — monstrous things, twisted into nightmare shapes by lightless pressure and sheer chronic starvation.

Even here, inside the hull, the abyss weighs on you like the vault of a cathedral. It's no place for trivial loudmouth bullshit. If you speak at all, you keep it down. But these tourists just don't seem to give a shit.

Joel Kita's used to hearing a 'scaphe breathe around him, hearing it talk in clicks and hisses. He relies on those sounds; the readouts only confirm what the beast has already told him by the grumbling of its stomach. But Ceratius is a leisure craft, fully insulated, packed with excess headroom and reclining couches and little drink'n'drug dispensers set into the back of each seat. All he can hear today is the cargo, babbling.

He glances back over his shoulder. The tour guide, a mid-twenties Hindian with a zebra cut — Preteela someone — flashes him a brief, rueful smile. She's a relict, and she knows it. She can't compete with the onboard library, she doesn't come with 3-d animations or wraparound soundtrack. She's just a prop, really. These people pay her salary not because she does anything useful, but because she doesn't. What's the point of being rich if you only buy the essentials?

There are eight of them. One old guy in a codpiece, still closing on his first century, fiddles with his camera controls. The others are plugged into headsets, running a program carefully designed to occupy them through the descent without being so impressive that the actual destination is an anticlimax. It's a thin line, these days. Simulations are almost always better than real life, and real life gets blamed for the poor showing.

Joel wishes this particular program was a bit better at holding the cargo's interest; they might shut up if they were paying more attention. They probably don't care whether Channer's sea monsters live up to the hype anyway. These people aren't down here because the abyss is impressive, they're here because it costs so much.

He runs his eyes across the control board. Even that seems excessive; climate control and indive entertainment take up a good half of the panel. Bored, he picks one of the headset feeds at random and taps in, sending the signal to a window on his main display.

An eighteenth-century woodcut of a Kraken comes to life through the miracle of modern animation. Crudely-rendered tentacles wrap around the masts of a galleon, pull it beneath chunky carved waves. A female voice, designed to maximize attention from both sexes: "We have always peopled the sea with monsters —»

Joel tunes out.

Mr. Codpiece comes up behind him, lays a familiar hand on his shoulder. Joel resists the urge to shrug it off. That's another problem with these tour subs; no real cockpit, just a set of controls at the front end of the passenger lounge. You can't shut yourself away from the cargo.

"Quite a layout," Mr. Codpiece says.

Joel reminds himself of his professional duties, and smiles.

"Been doing this run for long?" The whitecap's skin glows with a golden tan of cultured xanthophylls. Joel's smile grows a little more brittle. He's heard all about the benefits, of course; UV protection, higher blood oxygen, more energy — they say it even cuts down on your food requirements, not that any of these people have to worry about grocery money. Still, it's too bloody freakish for Joel's tastes. Implants should be made out of meat, or at least plastic. If people were meant to photosynthesize they'd have leaves.

"I said —»

Joel nods. "Couple of years."

A grunt. "Didn't know Seabed Safaris was around that long."

"I don't work for Seabed Safaris," Joel says, as politely as possible. "I freelance." The whitecap probably doesn't know any better, comes from a generation when everyone pledged allegiance to the same master year after year. Nobody thought it was such a bad thing back then.

"Good for you." Mr. Codpiece gives him a fatherly pat on the shoulder.