Starfish

And yet it's true. Every time Beebe takes her in, some vital part of her falls away like a half-remembered dream. The airlock clears, her body reinflates, and her awareness turns flat and muddy. The others just vanish. It's strange; she can see them, hear them the way she always could. But if they don't move and she closes her eyes, she's got no way of knowing they're here.

Now her only company is herself. Just one set of signals to process in here. Nothing jamming her.

Shit.

Blind, or naked. That was the choice. It nearly killed her. My own damn fault, of course. I was just asking for it.

She was, too. She could have just left everything the way it was, quietly deleted Acton's file before anyone else found out about it. But there'd been this debt. Something owed to the ghost of the Thing Outside, the thing that didn't snarl or blame or lash out, the thing that, finally, took the Thing Inside away where it couldn't hurt her any more. Part of Lenie Clarke still hates Acton for that, on some sick level where conditioned reflex runs the show; but even down there, she thinks maybe he did it for her. Like it or not, she owed him.

So she paid up. She called the others inside and played the file. She told them what he'd said, that last time, and she didn't ask them to turn their backs on his offering even though she desperately hoped they would. If she had asked, perhaps, they might have listened. But one by one, they split themselves open and made the changes. Mike Brander, out of curiosity. Judy Caraco, out of skepticism. Alice Nakata, afraid of being left behind. Ken Lubin, unsuccessfully, for reasons he kept to himself.

She clenches her eyelids, remembers rules changing overnight. Careful appearances suddenly meant nothing; blank eyes and ninja masks were just cosmetic affectations, useless as armor. How are you feeling, Lenie Clarke? Horny, bored, upset? So easy to tell, though your eyes are hidden behind those corneal opacities. You could be terrified. You could be pissing in your 'skin and everyone would know.

Why did you tell them? Why did you tell them? Why did you tell them?

Outside, she watched the others change. They moved around her without speaking, one connecting smoothly with another to lend a hand or a piece of equipment. When she needed something from one of them, it was there before she could speak. When they needed something from her they had to ask aloud, and the choreography would falter. She felt like the token cripple in a dance troupe. She wondered how much of her they could see, and was afraid to ask.

Inside, sometimes, she would try. It was safer there; the thread that connected the rest of them fell apart in atmosphere, put everyone back on equal terms. Brander spoke of a heightened awareness of the presence of others; Caraco compared it to body language. "Just sort of makes up for the eyecaps," she said, apparently expecting Clarke to feel reassured at that.

But it was Alice Nakata who finally remarked, almost offhandedly, that other people's feelings could be… distracting…

Lenie Clarke's been tuned for a while now. It's not so bad. No precise telepathic insights, no sudden betrayals. It's more like the sensation from a ghost limb, the ancestral memory of a tail you can almost feel behind you. And Clarke knows now that Nakata was right. Outside, the feelings of the others trickle into her, masking, diluting. Sometimes she can even forget she has any of her own.

There's something else, too, a familiar core in each of them, dark and writhing and angry. That doesn't surprise her. They don't even talk about it. Might as well discuss the fact that they all have five fingers on each hand.

* * *

Brander's busy at the library; Clarke can hear Nakata in Comm, on the phone.

"According to this," Brander says, "They've started putting smart gels in muckrakers."

"Mmm?"

"It's a pretty old file," he admits. "It'd be nice if the GA would download a bit more often, infections or no infections. I mean, we are single-handedly keeping the western world safe from brownouts, it wouldn't kill them to —»

"Gels," Clarke prompts.

"Right. Well, they've always needed neural nets in those things, you know, they wander around some pretty hairy topography — you hear about those two muckrakers that got caught up in the Aleutian Trench? — anyway, navigation through complex environments generally needs a net of some sort. Usually it's gallium-arsenide based, but even those don't come close to matching a human brain for spatial stuff. They still just crawled when it came to figuring seamounts, that sort of thing. So they've started replacing them with smart gels."