Starfish

There's a silence. "I don't believe you," Clarke says at last.

"That's your prerogative," Lubin says, almost sadly.

"And why," she asks, "did you come back?"

"Just now?" Lubin shrugs. "I wanted — I wanted to say I'm sorry. About Karl."

"Karl? Yeah. Me too. But that's over and done with."

"He really cared about you, Lenie. He would have come back eventually. I know that."

She looks at him curiously. "What do you —»

"But I'm conditioned for tight security, you see, and Acton could see right inside. All the things I did…before. He could see it, there wasn't —»

Acton could see — "Ken. We've never been able to tune you in. You know that."

He nods, rubbing his hands together. In the dim blue light Clarke can see sweat beading on his forehead.

"We get this training," he says, his voice barely a whisper. "Ganzfeld interrogation's a standard tool in corporate and national arsenals, you've got to be able to — to block the signals. I could, mostly, with you people. Or I'd just stay away so it wouldn't be a problem."

What is he saying, Lenie Clarke asks herself, already knowing. What is he saying?

"But Karl, he just — he dropped his inhibitors way too — I couldn't keep him out."

He rubs his face. Clarke has never seen him so fidgety.

"You know that feeling you get," Lubin says, "when you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar? Or in bed with someone else's lover? There's a formula for it. Some special combination of neurotransmitters. When you feel, you know, you've been-found out."

Oh my God.

"I've got a — sort of a conditioned reflex," he tells her. "It kicks in whenever those chemicals build up. I don't really have control over it. And when I feel, down in my gut, that I've been discovered, I just…"

Five percent, Acton told her, long ago. Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you'll be okay.

"I don't really have a choice…" Lubin says.

Five or ten percent. No more.

"I thought — I thought he was just worried about calcium depletion," Clarke whispers.

"I'm sorry." Lubin doesn't move at all, now. "I thought, coming down here — I thought it'd be safest for everyone, you know? It would have been, if Karl hadn't…"

She looks at him, numbed and distant. "How can you tell me this, Ken? Doesn't this, this confession of yours constitute a security breach?"

He stands up, suddenly. For a moment she thinks he's going to kill her.

"No," he says.

"Because your gut tells you I'm as good as dead anyway," she says. "Whatever happens. So no harm done."

He turns away. "I'm sorry," he says again, starting down the ladder.

Her own body seems very far away. But a small, hot coal is growing in all that dead space.

"What if I changed my mind, Ken?" she calls after him, rising. "What if I decided to leave with the rest of you? That'd get the old killer reflex going, wouldn't it?"

He stops on the ladder. "Yes," he says at last. "But you won't."

She stands completely still, watching him. He doesn't even look back.

* * *

She's outside. This isn't part of the plan. The plan is to stay inside, like they told her to. The plan is to sit there, just asking for it.

But here she is at the Throat, swimming along Main Street. The generators loom over her like sheltering giants. She bathes in their warm sodium glow, passes through clouds of flickering microbes, barely noticed. Beneath her, monstrous benthos filter life from the water, as oblivious to her as she is to them. Once she passes a multicolored starfish, beautifully twisted, stitched together from leftovers. It lies folded back against itself, two arms facing upward; a few remaining tube feet wave feebly in the current. Cottony fungus thrives in a jagged patchwork of seams.

At the edge of the smoker her thermistor reads 54 °C.

It tells her nothing. The smoker could sleep for a hundred years or go off in the next second. She tries to tune in to the bottom-dwellers, glean whatever instinctive insights Acton could steal, but she's never been sensitive to invertebrate minds. Perhaps that skill comes only to those who've crossed the ten-percent threshold.

She's never risked going down this one before.

It's a tight fit. The inside of the chimney grabs her before she gets three meters. She twists and squirms; soft chunks of sulfur and calcium break free from the walls. She inches down, headfirst. Her arms are pinned over her head like black jointed antenna. There's no room to keep them at her sides.

She's plugging the vent so tightly that no light can filter in from Main Street. She trips her headlight on. A flocculent snowstorm swirls in the beam.

A meter further down, the tunnel zigs right. She doesn't think she'll be able to navigate the turn. Even if she can, she knows the passage is blocked. She knows, because a lime-encrusted skeletal foot protrudes around the corner.