Behemoth by Peter Watts Read Free Book Online

r-selector—”
    Alyx snorts. “Boys? I don’t think so.”
    â€œGirls then. Either way, you should be out getting laid, not stuck down here .”
    â€œThis is the best place I could possibly be,” Alyx says simply.
    She looks out across three hundred atmospheres, a teenage girl trapped for the rest of her life in a cage on the bottom of a frigid black ocean. Lenie Clarke would give anything to be able to disagree with her.
    â€œMom won’t talk about it,” Alyx says after a while.
    Still Clarke says nothing.
    â€œWhat happened between you guys, back when I was just a kid. Some of the others shoot their mouths off when she’s not around, so I kind of hear things. But Mom never says anything.”
    Mom is kinder than she should be .
    â€œYou were enemies, weren’t you?”
    Clarke shakes her head—a pointless and unseeable gesture, here in the dark. “Alyx, we didn’t even know each other existed, not until the very end. Your mom was only trying to stop—”
    â€” what happened anyway  …
    â€” what I was trying to start  …
    There’s so much more than speech. She wants to sigh. She wants to scream. All denied out here, her lung and guts squeezed flat, every other cavity flooded and incompressible. There’s nothing she can do but speak in this monotone travesty of a voice, this buzzing insect voice.
    â€œIt’s complicated,” her vocoder says, flat and dispassionate. “It was so much more than just enemies, you know? There were other things involved, there was all that wildlife in the wires, doing its own thing—”
    â€œ They let that out,” Alyx insists. “They started it. Not you.” By which she means, of course, adults . Perpetrators and betrayers and the-ones-who-fucked-everything-up-for-the-next-generation. And it dawns on Clarke that Alyx is not including her in that loathsome conspiracy of elders—that Lenie Clarke, Meltdown Madonna, has somehow acquired the status of honorary innocent in the mind of this child.
    She feels ill at the thought of so much undeserved absolution. It seems obscene. But she doesn’t have the courage to set her friend straight. All she can manage is a pale, half-assed disclaimer:
    â€œThey didn’t mean to, kid.” She goes for a sad chuckle. It comes out sounding like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. “Nobody—nobody did anything on their own, back then. It was strings all the way up.”
    The ocean groans around her.
    The sound resonates somewhere between the call of a humpback whale and the death-cry of some mammoth hull, buckling under pressure. It fills the ocean; some of it leaks through Alyx’s limpet-device. She screws her face up in distaste. “I hate that sound.”
    Clarke shrugs, pathetically grateful for the interruption. “Hey, you corpses have your conferences, we have ours.”
    â€œIt’s not that. It’s those haploid chimes . I’m telling you, Lenie, that guy’s scary. You can’t trust anyone who makes something that sounds like that .”
    â€œYour mom trusts him fine. So do I. I’ve got to go.”
    â€œHe kills people, Lenie. And I’m not just talking about my dad. He’s killed a lot of people.” A soft snort. “Something else Mom never talks about.”
    Clarke coasts over to the perspex, lays one silhouetted hand against the light in farewell.
    â€œHe’s an amateur,” she says, and fins away into the darkness.
    *   *   *
    The voice cries out from a ragged mouth in the seabed, an ancient chimney of basalt stuffed with machinery. In its youth it spewed constant scalding gouts of water and minerals; now it merely belches occasionally. Soft exhalations stir the mechanisms in its throat, spinning blades and fluting pipes and spliced chunks of rock and metal that bang together. Its voice is compelling but unreliable; after