Peter Watts - Blindsight

“See something next to the Gang.”

Non-vampires saw no such thing. Sarasti froze the image, evidently realizing as much. “Diffraction patterns aren’t consistent with a single light source in open space. I see dimmer elements, reflective elements. Two dark objects close together, similar size, scattering light here—” a cursor appeared at two utterly nondescript points on the image — “and here. One’s the Gang. The other’s unaccounted for.”

“Just a minute,” Cunningham said. “If you can see it through all that, why didn’t Su — why didn’t Michelle see anything?”

“Synesthesiac,” Sarasti reminded him. “You see. She feels .”

BioMed jerked slightly, locking into spin-synch with the drum; the guard rail sank back into the deck. Off in some far-off corner, something without eyes watched me watching it.

“Shit,” Bates whispered. “There’s someone home.”

They never really talked like that, by the way. You’d hear gibberish — a half-dozen languages, a whole Babel of personal idioms — if I spoke in their real voices.

Some of the simpler tics make it through: Sascha’s good-natured belligerence, Sarasti’s aversion to the past tense. Cunningham lost most of his gender pronouns to an unforeseen glitch during the work on his temporal lobe. But it went beyond that. The whole lot of them threw English and Hindi and Hadzane into every second sentence; no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language. Other times they acted almost as synthesists in their own right, conversing in grunts and gestures that would be meaningless to any baseline. It’s not so much that the bleeding edge lacks social skills; it’s just that once you get past a certain point, formal speech is too damn slow .

Except for Susan James. The walking contradiction, the woman so devoted to Communication As Unifier that she’d cut her own brain into disunified chunks to make the point. She was the only one who ever seemed to care who she was talking to. The others spoke only for themselves, even when they spoke to each other. Even James’s other cores would speak their own minds in their own way, and let everyone else translate as best they could. It wasn’t a problem. Everyone on Theseus could read everyone else.

But that didn’t matter to Susan James. She fit each of her words to their intended recipient, she accommodated .

I am a conduit. I exist to bridge the gap, and I’d bridge nothing if I only told you what these people said. So I am telling you what they meant , and it will mean as much to you as you can handle.

Except for Susan James, linguist and Ringleader, whom I trust to speak for herself.

Fifteen minutes to apogee: maximum safe distance, in case Rorschach decided to hit back. Far below, the artefact’s magnetic field pressed into Ben’s atmosphere like God’s little finger. Great dark thunderheads converged behind it; turbulent moon-sized curlicues collided in its wake.

Fifteen minutes to apogee, and Bates was still hoping Sarasti would change his mind.

In a way, this was her fault. If she had just treated this new travail as one more cross to bear, perhaps things would have gone on more or less as before. There would have been some faint hope that Sarasti would have let us grit our teeth and keep on going, besieged now by spring-loaded trapdoors as well as the usual gauntlet of Seiverts and magnets and monsters from the id. But Bates had made an issue out of it. It wasn’t just another piece of shit in the sewer to her: it was the one that clogged the pipe.

We’re on the brink as it is, just surviving the baseline environment of this thing. If it’s started taking deliberate countermeasures…I don’t see how we can risk it.

Fourteen minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was still regretting those words.

On previous expeditions we’d charted twenty-six septa in various stages of development. We’d x-rayed them. We’d done ultrasound. We’d watched them ooze their way across passages or ebb slowly back into the walls. The iris that had snapped shut behind the Gang of Four had been a whole different animal.

And what are the odds that the first one with a hair-trigger just happened to also come with antilaser prismatics? That was no routine growth event. That thing was set for us.

Set by…

That was the other thing. Thirteen minutes to apogee, and Bates was worried about the tenants.

It had always been breaking and entering, of course. That much hadn’t changed. But when we’d jimmied the lock we’d thought we were vandalizing an empty summer cottage, still under construction. We’d thought the owners would be out of the picture for a while. We hadn’t been expecting one of them to catch us on his way to take a late-night piss. And now that one had, and vanished into the labyrinth, it was natural to wonder what weapons it might keep stashed under the pillow…

Those septa could spring on us any time. How many are there? Are they fixed, or portable? We can’t proceed without knowing these things. .

At first, Bates had been surprised and delighted when Sarasti agreed with her.

Twelve minutes to apogee. From this high ground, well above the static, Theseus peered down through Rorschach ’s wrenched and twisted anatomy to keep rock-steady eyes on the tiny wound we’d burned in its side. Our limpet tent covered it like a blister; inside, Jack fed us a second, first-person view of the unfolding experiment.

Sir. We know Rorschach is inhabited. Do we want to risk further provoking the inhabitants? Do we want to risk killing them?

Sarasti hadn’t quite looked at her, and hadn’t quite spoken. If he had, he might have said I do not understand how meat like you survived to adulthood .

Eleven minutes to apogee, and Amanda Bates was lamenting the fact — not for the first time — that this mission was not under military jurisdiction.

We were waiting for maximum distance before performing the experiment. Rorschach might interpret this as a hostile act , Sarasti had conceded in a voice that contained no trace of irony whatsoever. Now he stood before us, watching ConSensus play on the table. Reflections writhed across his naked eyes, not quite masking the deeper reflections behind them.

Ten minutes to apogee. Susan James was wishing that Cunningham would put out that goddamned cigarrette. The smoke stank on its way to the ventilators, and anyway, it wasn’t necessary. It was just an anachronistic affectation, an attention-getting device; if he needed the nicotine a patch could have soothed his tremors just as easily, without the smoke and the stink.

That wasn’t all she was thinking, though. She was wondering why Cunningham had been summoned to Sarasti’s quarters earlier in the shift, why he’d looked at her so strangely afterward. I wondered about that myself. A quick check on ConSensus timestamps showed that her medical file had been accessed during that period. I checked those stats, let the shapes bounce between hemispheres: part of my brain locked on elevated oxytocin as the probable reason for that conference. There was an eighty-two percent chance that James had become too trusting for Sarasti’s liking.

I had no idea how I knew that. I never did.

Nine minutes to apogee.

Barely a molecule of Rorschach ’s atmosphere had been lost on our account. That was all about to change. Our view of base camp split like a dividing bacterium: one window now focused on the limpet tent, the other on a wide-angle tactical enhance of the space around it.