he vicissitudes of modern publishing are responsible for ßehemoth: Seppuku, the fourth volume in author Peter Watts' "Rifters" trilogy. That's right, trilogy. ßehemoth, the final installment of the series that began with Starfish and continued in Maelstrom, was dubbed too long for commercial success and split in half, resulting in last year's ßehemoth: ß-Max and the present novel. While the book's subtitle, Seppuku, refers to a strain of the apocalyptic ßehemoth bug, it could just as easily have turned into an unintentionally ironic epitaph for a suicidal publishing move. That the novel mostly overcomes the handicap of its sundering is a testament to the storytelling ability and imagination of Peter Watts.
In previous novels, Watts set forth a bleak and believable future of corporate throat-cutting, gene-splicing and biotech body-mods that resulted, among other things, in "rifters," post-human cyborgs engineered to survive in the abyssal depths. One such rifter, Lenie Clarke, a borderline psychopath thanks to a long history of abuse, vengefully unleashed an archaic microbe, ßehemoth, upon the world. The results were devastating, especially in North America, which has become a chaotic quarantine zone, its population decimated by disease, violence and strikes from viral and conventional weapons launched not only by outsiders determined to avoid infection but also by insane killer AIs infesting cyberspace, now known as the Maelstrom. The worst of these AIs are based on Clarke herself ... or, rather, on the vindictive mass murderer she used to be. But Clarke has changed. After five years of hiding out with other refugees in the undersea sanctuary of Atlantis, she has returned to the surface to make amends.
Unfortunately, she has little idea how to do so. Nor does her partner, Ken Lubin, a tweaked assassin whose conscience has been virally erased and who controls his psychopathic impulses, albeit with difficulty, by adhering to a strict set of rules. A chance encounter with a wandering medic, Taka Ouellette, leads Clarke and Lubin to what may be a cure for ßehemoth and ß-Max, its more virulent descendent. But somebody seems intent on destroying the cure before it can spread. Somebody with the authority to call in massive air strikes and burn-offs that destroy all life for kilometers at a stretch.
That somebody is Achilles Desjardins, another psychopath whose conscience has been burned away. Unlike Ken, the post-human Desjardins embraces his darkest impulses, which involve the sadistic torture, mutilation and murder of women. When not practicing his vile hobby, Desjardins is a 'lawbreaker, empowered to maintain public order and enforce the quarantine by means of a vast array of teleoperated weaponry and surveillance systems. Desjardins tells Clarke and Lubin that what they've found is no cure at all, but a still deadlier strain of ßehemoth. Now it's up to these three damaged and dangerous people to wipe out the new plague before it finishes what the old one started.
A race that runs out of gas
The pages of Starfish and Maelstrom sizzled with the author's sense of excitement, discovery and empowerment as he built up and explored his near-future world, using his expertise in marine biology to create scenarios as bizarre as they were believable—and backing up the science with citations in breezy but informative appendices (a welcome practice he continues here). His damaged, rightfully paranoid characters were smart, scary and somehow appealing; it's not easy to make a mass murderer sympathetic, but in Lenie Clarke Watts pulled off that difficult trick. Plus, he blowed up things real good.
With ßehemoth, Watts faced the challenge of bringing his epic to a conclusion, and that meant tying up loose ends rather than embarking on new adventures and extrapolations, reining in his characters rather than letting them run free in arcs of glorious destruction. Although he still blows things up with panache, Seppuku feels hurried, and while it's by no means shallow, it lacks the depth and sense of outrageous surprise that characterized its predecessors. Essentially, the novel is a succession of stages across which the four main characters are frogmarched, navigating plot points to a predetermined conclusion. The meeting with Ouellette, the discovery of the cure-that-may-not-be-a-cure and even the climactic confrontation between Clarke, Lubin and Desjardins—it's all so scripted that even the characters often seem as if they're merely going through the motions, phoning in their performances, as it were. The psychological intensity and acuity of earlier volumes slackens accordingly, with the notable exception of Lubin, who really comes into his own here.
Some readers will be disturbed by the clinical attention paid to Desjardins' exploits as a sexual predator, and I did wonder at times whether the specificity of the abuse and suffering detailed was strictly necessary. The line between establishing a character's psychopathic bona fides and providing a kind of shabby voyeuristic thrill to readers is a thin one, and Watts probably crosses it. There is one brief, early scene that conveys the extent of the 'lawbreaker's monstrosity far more effectively and chillingly than the more prolonged scenes of torture that come later, laced though they are with infodumps.
Some of these flaws would have been less visible had the book been published as the author intended; Seppuku may be as long as a novel, but really it's just the climax of something much longer, as though the last 20 pages of a novel were published separately as a short story. Nor should a somewhat flat ending detract from Watts' overall accomplishment, which is substantial. Readers who have stuck with Clarke through three books will find much to enjoy here, and anyone who is interested in exceptional science fiction with a near-future setting should pick up Starfish and get ready for a memorable ride.
