Peter Watts - Blindsight

The procession never stopped. Rorschach was insatiable.

It was a strange attractor in the interstellar gulf; the paths along which the rocks fell was precisely and utterly chaotic. It was as though some Keplerian Black Belt had set up the whole system like an astronomical wind-up toy, kicked everything into motion, and let inertia do the rest.

“Didn’t think that was possible,” Bates said.

Szpindel shrugged. “Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind.”

“That doesn’t mean you can even predict them, let along set them up like that.” Luminous intel reflected off the major’s bald head. “You’d have to know the starting conditions of a million different variables to ten decimal places. Literally.”

“Yup.”

“ Vampires can’t even do that. Quanticle computers can’t do that.”

Szpindel shrugged like a marionette.

All the while the Gang had been slipping in and out of character, dancing with some unseen partner that — despite their best efforts — told us little beyond endless permutations of You really wouldn’t like it here . Any interrogative it answered with another — yet somehow it always left the sense of questions answered.

“Did you send the Fireflies?” Sascha asked.

“We send many things many places,” Rorschach replied. “What do their specs show?”

“We do not know their specifications. The Fireflies burned up over Earth.”

“Then shouldn’t you be looking there? When our kids fly, they’re on their own.”

Sascha muted the channel. “You know who we’re talking to? Jesus of fucking Nazareth , that’s who.”

Szpindel looked at Bates. Bates shrugged, palms up.

“You didn’t get it?” Sascha shook her head. “That last exchange was the informational equivalent of Should we render taxes unto Caesar . Beat for beat.”

“Thanks for casting us as the Pharisees,” Szpindel grumbled.

“Hey, if the Jew fits…”

Szpindel rolled his eyes.

That was when I first noticed it: a tiny imperfection on Sascha’s topology, a flyspeck of doubt marring one of her facets. “We’re not getting anywhere,” she said. “Let’s try a side door.” She winked out: Michelle reopened the outgoing line. “ Theseus to Rorschach . Open to requests for information.”

“Cultural exchange,” Rorschach said. “That works for me.”

Bates’s brow furrowed. “Is that wise?”

“If it’s not inclined to give information, maybe it would rather get some. And we could learn a great deal from the kind of questions it asks.”

“But—”

“Tell us about home,” Rorschach said.

Sascha resurfaced just long enough to say “Relax, Major. Nobody said we had to give it the right answers.”

The stain on the Gang’s topology had flickered when Michelle took over, but it hadn’t disappeared. It grew slightly as Michelle described some hypothetical home town in careful terms that mentioned no object smaller than a meter across. (ConSensus confirmed my guess: the hypothetical limit of Firefly eyesight.) When Cruncher took a rare turn at the helm—

“We don’t all of us have parents or cousins. Some never did. Some come from vats.”

“I see. That’s sad. Vats sounds so dehumanising.”

—the stain darkened and spread across his surface like an oil slick.

“Takes too much on faith,” Susan said a few moments later.

By the time Sascha had cycled back into Michelle it was more than doubt, stronger than suspicion; it had become an insight , a dark little meme infecting each of that body’s minds in turn. The Gang was on the trail of something. They still weren’t sure what.

I was.

“Tell me more about your cousins,” Rorschach sent.

“Our cousins lie about the family tree,” Sascha replied, “with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins.”

“We’d like to know about this tree.”

Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious ? “It couldn’t have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them.”

“Well, it asked for clarification,” Bates pointed out.

“It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely.”

Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though…

Subtle motion drew my eye. Sarasti was back, floating above the bright topography on the table. The light show squirmed across his visor as he moved his head. I could feel his eyes behind it.

And something else, behind him .

I couldn’t tell what it was. I could point to nothing but a vague sense of something out of place , somewhere in the background. Something over on the far side of the drum wasn’t quite right. No, that wasn’t it; something nearer , something amiss somewhere along the drum’s axis. But there was nothing there, nothing I could see — just the naked pipes and conduits of the spinal bundle, threading through empty space, and—

And suddenly, whatever had been wrong was right again. That was what finally locked my focus: the evaporation of some anomaly, a reversion to normalcy that caught my eye like a flicker of motion. I could see the exact spot along the bundle where the change had occured. There was nothing out of place there now — but there had been. It was in my head, barely subliminal, an itch so close to the surface that I knew I could bring it back if I just concentrated.

Sascha was talking to some alien artefact at the end of a laser beam. She was going on about familial relationships, both evolutionary and domestic: Neandertal and Cro Magnon and mother’s cousins twice removed. She’d been doing it for hours now and she had hours yet to go but right now her chatter was distracting me. I tried to block her out and concentrate on the half-perceived image teasing my memory. I’d seen something there, just a moment ago. One of the conduits had had — yes, too many joints on one of the pipes. Something that should have been straight and smooth but was somehow articulated instead. But not one of the pipes, I remembered: an extra pipe, an extra something anyway, something—

Boney .

That was crazy. There was nothing there. We were half a light year from home talking to unseen aliens about family reunions, and my eyes were playing tricks on me.

Have to talk to Szpindel about that, if it happened again.

A lull in the background chatter brought me back. Sascha had stopped talking. Darkened facets hung around her like a thundercloud. I pulled back the last thing she had sent: “We usually find our nephews with telescopes. They are hard as Hobblinites.”

More calculated ambiguity. And Hobblinites wasn’t even a word .

Imminent decisions reflected in her eyes. Sascha was poised at the edge of a precipice, gauging the depth of dark waters below.

“You haven’t mentioned your father at all,” Rorschach remarked.

“That’s true, Rorschach, ” Sascha admitted softly, taking a breath—

And stepping forward.

“So why don’t you just suck my big fat hairy dick ?”

The drum fell instantly silent. Bates and Szpindel stared, open-mouthed. Sascha killed the channel and turned to face us, grinning so widely I thought the top of her head would fall off.

“Sascha,” Bates breathed. “Are you crazy ?”

“So what if I am? Doesn’t matter to that thing. It doesn’t have a clue what I’m saying.”