Rifters 4 - Blindsight (16 page)

"Without understanding their content."

"Understanding the shapes is enough."

Bates seemed to find some small imperfection in the battlebot under scrutiny, scratched at its shell with a fingernail. "Software couldn't do that without your help?"

"Software can do a lot of things. We've chosen to do some for ourselves." I nodded at the grunt. "Your visual inspections, for example."

She smiled faintly, conceding the point.

"So I'd encourage you to speak freely. You know I'm sworn to confidentiality."

"Thanks," she said, meaning
On this ship, there's no such thing.

Theseus
chimed. Sarasti spoke in its wake: "Orbital insertion in fifteen minutes. Everyone to the drum in five."

"Well," Bates said, sending one last grunt on its way. "Here we go." She pushed off and sailed up the spine.

The newborn killing machines clicked at me. They smelled like new cars.

"By the way," Bates called over her shoulder, "you missed the obvious one."

"Sorry?"

She spun a hundred-eighty degrees at the end of the passageway, landed like an acrobat beside the drum hatch. "The reason. Why something would attack us even if we didn't have anything it wanted."

I read it off her: "If it wasn't attacking at all. If it was defending itself."

"You asked about Sarasti. Smart man. Strong Leader. Maybe could spend a little more time with the troops."

Vampire doesn't respect his command. Doesn't listen to advice. Hides away half the time.

I remembered transient killer whales. "Maybe he's being considerate."
He knows he makes us nervous.

"I'm sure that's it," Bates said.

Vampire doesn't trust himself.

*

It wasn't just Sarasti. They
all
hid from us, even when they had the upper hand. They always stayed just the other side of myth.

It started pretty much the same way it did for anything else; vampires were far from the first to learn the virtues of energy conservation. Shrews and hummingbirds, saddled with tiny bodies and overclocked metabolic engines, would have starved to death overnight if not for the torpor that overtook them at sundown. Comatose elephant seals lurked breathless at the bottom of the sea, rousing only for passing prey or redline lactate levels. Bears and chipmunks cut costs by sleeping away the impoverished winter months, and lungfish—Devonian black belts in the art of estivation—could curl up and die for years, waiting for the rains.

With vampires it was a little different. It wasn't shortness of breath, or metabolic overdrive, or some blanket of snow that locked the pantry every winter. The problem wasn't so much a lack of prey as a lack of
difference
from it; vampires were such a recent split from the ancestral baseline that the reproductive rates hadn't diverged. This was no woodland-variety lynx-hare dynamic, where prey outnumbered predators a hundred to one. Vampires fed on things that bred barely faster than they did. They would have wiped out their own food supply in no time if they hadn't learned how to ease off on the throttle.

By the time they went extinct they'd learned to shut down for
decades
.

It made two kinds of sense. It not only slashed their metabolic needs while prey bred itself back to harvestable levels, it gave us time to forget that we
were
prey. We were so smart by the Pleistocene, smart enough for easy skepticism; if you haven't seen any night-stalking demons in all your years on the savannah, why should you believe some senile campfire ramblings passed down by your mother's mother?

It was murder on our ancestors, even if those same enemy genes—co-opted now—served us so well when we left the sun a half-million years later. But it was almost—heartening, I guess—to think that maybe Sarasti felt the tug of other genes, some aversion to prolonged visibility shaped by generations of natural selection. Maybe he spent every moment in our company fighting voices that urged him to
hide, hide, let them forget
. Maybe he retreated when they got too loud, maybe we made him as uneasy as he made us.

We could always hope.

*

Our final orbit combined discretion and valor in equal measure.

Rorschach
described a perfect equatorial circle 87,900 km from Big Ben's center of gravity. Sarasti was unwilling to let it out of sight, and you didn't have to be a vampire to mistrust relay sats when swinging through a radiation-soaked blizzard of rock and machinery. The obvious alternative was to match orbits.

At the same time, all the debate over whether or not
Rorschach
had meant—or even understood—the threats it had made was a bit beside the point. Counterintrusion measures were a distinct possibility either way, and ongoing proximity only increased the risk. So Sarasti had derived some optimum compromise, a mildly eccentric orbit that nearly brushed the artefact at perigee but kept a discreet distance the rest of the time. It was a longer trajectory than
Rorschach
's, and higher—we had to burn on the descending arc to keep in synch—but the end result was continuously line-of-sight, and only brought us within striking distance for three hours either side of bottoming out.

Our
striking distance, that is. For all we knew
Rorschach
could have reached out and swatted us from the sky before we'd even left the solar system.

Sarasti gave the command from his tent. ConSensus carried his voice into the drum as
Theseus
coasted to apogee: "Now."

Jack had erected a tent about itself, a blister glued to
Rorschach
's hull and blown semi-taut against vacuum with the merest whiff of nitrogen. Now it brought lasers to bear and started digging; if we'd read the vibrations right, the ground should be only thirty-four centimeters deep beneath its feet. The beams stuttered as they cut, despite six millimeters of doped shielding.

"Son of a bitch," Szpindel murmured. "It's
working
."

We burned through tough fibrous epidermis. We burned through veins of insulation that might have been some sort of programmable asbestos. We burned through alternating layers of superconducting mesh, and the strata of flaking carbon separating them.

We burned
through
.

The lasers shut down instantly. Within seconds
Rorschach
's intestinal gases had blown taut the skin of the tent. Black carbon smoke swirled and danced in sudden thick atmosphere.

Nothing shot back at us. Nothing reacted. Partial pressures piled up on ConSensus: methane, ammonia, hydrogen. Lots of water vapor, freezing as fast as it registered.

Szpindel grunted. "Reducing atmosphere. Pre-Snowball." He sounded disappointed.

"Maybe it's a work in progress," James suggested. "Like the structure itself."

"Maybe."

Jack stuck out its tongue, a giant mechanical sperm with a myo-optical tail. Its head was a thick-skinned lozenge, at least half ceramic shielding by cross-section; the tiny payload of sensors at its core was rudimentary, but small enough for the whole assembly to thread through the pencil-thin hole the laser had cut. It unspooled down the hole, rimming
Rorschach
's newly-torn orifice.

"Dark down there," James observed.

Bates: "But warm." 281K. Above freezing.

The endoscope emerged into darkness. Infrared served up a grainy grayscale of a — a tunnel, it looked like, replete with mist and exotic rock formations. The walls curved like honeycomb, like the insides of fossilized intestine. Cul-de-sacs and branches proliferated down the passage. The basic substrate appeared to be a dense pastry of carbon-fiber leaves. Some of the gaps between those layers were barely thick as fingernails; others looked wide enough to stack bodies.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Szpindel said softly, "The Devil's Baklava."

I could have sworn I saw something move. I could have sworn it looked familiar.

The camera died.

Rorschach

"
Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own."

—
Aristotle

I couldn't say goodbye to Dad. I didn't even know where he was.

I didn't
want
to say goodbye to Helen. I didn't want to go back there. That was the problem: I didn't have to. There was nowhere left in the world where the mountain couldn't simply pick up and move to Mohammed. Heaven was merely a suburb of the global village, and the global village left me no excuse.

I linked from my own apartment. My new inlays—mission-specific, slid into my head just the week before—shook hands with the noosphere and knocked upon the Pearly Gates. Some tame spirit, more plausible than Saint Peter if no less ethereal, took a message and disappeared.

And I was
inside
.

This was no antechamber, no visiting room. Heaven was not intended for the casual visitor; any paradise in which the flesh-constrained would feel at home would have been intolerably pedestrian to the disembodied souls who lived there. Of course, there was no reason why visitor and resident had to share the same view. I could have pulled any conventional worldview off the shelf if I'd wanted, seen this place rendered in any style I chose. Except for the Ascended themselves, of course. That was one of the perks of the Afterlife: only
they
got to choose the face we saw.

But the thing my mother had become
had
no face, and I was damned if she was going to see me hide behind some mask.

"Hello, Helen."

"Siri! What a wonderful surprise!"

She was an abstraction in an abstraction: an impossible intersection of dozens of bright panes, as if the disassembled tiles of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and animated. She swirled before me like a school of fish. Her world echoed her body: lights and angles and three-dimensional Escher impossibilities, piled like bright thunderheads. And yet, somehow I would have recognised her anywhere. Heaven was a dream; only upon waking do you realize that the characters you encountered looked nothing like they do in real life.

There was only one familiar landmark anywhere in the whole sensorium. My mother's heaven smelled of cinnamon.

I beheld her luminous avatar and imagined the corpus soaking in a tank of nutrients, deep underground. "How are you doing?"

"Very well.
Very
well. Of course, it takes a little getting used to, knowing your mind isn't quite
yours
any more." Heaven didn't just feed the brains of its residents; it fed
off
them, used the surplus power of idle synapses to run its own infrastructure. "You
have
to move in here, sooner better than later. You'll never leave."

"Actually, I
am
leaving," I said. "We're shipping out tomorrow."

"Shipping out?"

"The Kuiper. You know. The Fireflies?"

"Oh yes. I think I heard something about that. We don't get much news from the outside world, you know."

"Anyway, just thought I'd call in and say goodbye."

"I'm glad you did. I've been hoping to see you without, you know."

"Without what?"

"You know. Without your father listening in."

Not again.

"Dad's in the field, Helen. Interplanetary crisis. You might have heard something."

"I certainly have. You know, I haven't always been happy about your father's—extended assignments, but maybe it was really a blessing in disguise. The less he was around, the less he could do."

"Do?"

"To you." The apparition stilled for a few moments, feigning hesitation. "I've never told you this before, but—no. I shouldn't."

"Shouldn't what?"

"Bring up, well, old hurts."

"What old hurts?" Right on cue. I couldn't help myself, the training went too deep. I always barked on command.

"Well," she began, "sometimes you'd come back—you were so very young—and your face would be so set and hard, and I'd wonder why are you so
angry
, little boy? What can someone so young have to be so angry about?"

"Helen, what are you talking about? Back from where?"

"Just from the places he'd take you." Something like a shiver passed across her facets. "He was still around back then. He wasn't so
important
, he was just an accountant with a karate fetish, going on about forensics and game theory and astronomy until he put everyone to sleep."

I tried to imagine it: my father, the chatterbox. "That doesn't sound like Dad."

"Well of course not. You were too young to remember, but he was just a little man, then. He still is, really, under all the secret missions and classified briefings. I've never understood why people never saw that. But even back then he liked to—well, it wasn't his fault, I suppose. He had a very difficult childhood, and he never learned to deal with problems like an adult. He, well, he'd throw his weight around, I guess you'd say. Of course I didn't know that before we married. If I had, I—but I made a commitment. I made a commitment, and I never broke it."

"What, are you saying you were abused?"
Back from the places he'd take you
. "Are—are you saying
I
was?"

"There are all kinds of abuse, Siri. Words can hurt more than bullets, sometimes. And child abandonment—"

"He didn't abandon me."
He left me with
you
.

"He abandoned
us
, Siri. Sometimes for months at a time, and I—and we never knew if he was coming back And he
chose
to do that to us, Siri. He didn't
need
that job, there were so many other things he was qualified to do. Things that had been redundant for years."