"Peter Watts - A Niche" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

This story won some dick-ass Canadian sf award that few if any of
you have ever heard of; however, it has proven popular enough to
warrant several reprintings, most recently in Hartwell and
Cramer's massive The Hard SF Renaissance (Tor 2002). It also
comprises the first chapter of my debut novel, Starfish (Tor 1999).

Sadly, even after I had immortalised her in prose, the woman I
based this story on refused to get back together with me. Go
figure.


A Niche
Peter Watts


When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal
groan.
Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes
and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometers of black ocean try
to crush her. She feels the Rift underneath, tearing open the seabed
with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that
fragile refuge and she hears Beebe's armor shifting by microns,
hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human
hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is
Physics.
How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come
down here? But she already knows the answer.
She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies
Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life
under control. She almost seems happy down here.
Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby
floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall
beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when
you're three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a
slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.
It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what
they've done to her.
2 Peter Watts

It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where
her left lung used to be. She's so acclimated to the chronic ache in
her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves,
that she's scarcely aware of them any more. She can still feel the
memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost
for honest sensation.
Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in
Beebe; they're supposed to increase the apparent size of one's
personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the
reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn't help. She
clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering