Rifters 2 - Maelstrom by Peter Watts Read Free Book Online Page A

"What's—"
    "Ms. Clarke, are you—"
    Light, coalescing. Images. A backyard. A bedroom.
    A field trip of some kind. To a museum, huge and cavernous, seen from child-height.
    I don't remember this , she thought.
    She released Amitav's hand, staggered backwards a step. A sudden intake of breath.
    The Hindian's hand waved through the hole in her vision. His fingers snapped just under her nose. "Ms. Clarke…"
    The lights winked out. She stood there, frozen, her breath fast and shallow.
    "I think—no," she said at last, relaxing fractionally.
    Amitav. The Strip. The sky. No visions.
    "I'm okay. I'm okay now."
    A half-eaten nutrient brick lay coated in wet sand at her feet. Numbly, she picked it up. Something in the food?
    On all sides, a silent watching throng.
    Amitav leaned forward. "Ms. Clarke—"
    "Nothing," she said. "I just…saw some things. From childhood."
    "Childhood," Amitav echoed. He shook his head.
    "Yeah," Clarke said.
    Someone else's .
     
    Maps and Legends
     
    Perreault didn't know why it should be so important to her. It was almost as important not to think about it too much.
    There was no language barrier to speak of. A hundred tongues were in common use on the Strip, maybe ten times as many dialects. Translation algorithms bridged most of them. Botflies were usually seen and not heard, but the locals seemed only slightly surprised when the machines accosted them in Sou-Hon Perreault's voice. Giant metal bugs were just a part of the background to anyone who’d been on the Strip for more than a day or two.
    Most of the refs knew nothing of what she asked: a strange woman in black, who came from the sea? A striking image, yes—almost mythical. Surely we would remember such an apparition if we had seen it. Apologies. No.
    One teenage girl with middle-aged eyes spoke in an arcane variant of Assamese that the system had not been adequately programmed for. She mentioned someone called Ganga, who had followed the refugees across the ocean. She had heard that this Ganga had recently come ashore. No more than this. There were possible ambiguities in translation.
    Perreault lengthened the active search zone to a hundred kilometers. Beneath her eyes humanity moved northward in sluggish stages, following the reclaimed frontier. Now and then an unthinking few would cool off in the surf; indiscriminate sharks closed and frolicked. Perreault tweaked the thresholds on her sensory feed. Red water washed down to undistracting gray. Screams faded to whispers. Nature balanced itself from the corner of her eye.
    She continued her interrogations. Excuse me. A woman with strange eyes? Injured, perhaps?
    Eventually she began hearing rumors.
     
    * * *
     
    Half a day south, a white woman all in black. A diver washed ashore in the wake of the tsunami, some said: swept from a kelp farm perhaps, or an underwater hotel.
    Ten kilometers northward, an ebony creature who haunted the Strip, never speaking.
    On this very spot, two days ago: a raging amphibian with empty eyes, violence implicit in every move. Hundreds had seen her and steered clear, until she'd staggered back into the Pacific, screaming.
    You are looking for this woman? She is one of yours?
    Almost certainly. The Missing Persons Registry was full of offshore workers vanished in the wake of the Big One. All surface people though, or conshelfers. The woman Perreault had seen had been built for the abyss. No one from the deep sea had been listed as missing; just six confirmed deaths hundreds of klicks offshore, from one of N'AmPac's geothermal stations. No farther details available.
    The woman with the machinery inside had worn a GA shoulder patch. Maybe only five deaths, then. And one survivor, who'd somehow made it across three hundred kilometers of open ocean.
    A survivor who, for some reason, did not wish to be found.
    The rumors were metastasizing. No longer a diver from a kelp farm. A mermaid, now. An avatar of Kali. Some said she spoke in tongues; others, that the