Rifters 4 - Blindsight (17 page)

I shook my head, incredulous, unable to say it aloud: she hated him because he hadn't had the good grace to grow
unnecessary
?

"It's not Dad's fault that planetary security is still an essential service," I said.

She continued as if she hadn't heard. "Now there was a time when it was unavoidable, when people our age
had
to work just to make ends meet. But even back then people
wanted
to spend time with their families. Even if they couldn't afford to. To, to
choose
to stay working when it isn't even
necessary
, that's—" She shattered and reassembled at my shoulder. "Yes, Siri. I believe that's a kind of abuse. And if your father had been half as loyal to me as I've been to him all these years..."

I remembered Jim, the last time I'd seen him: snorting vassopressin under the restless eyes of robot sentries. "I don't think Dad's been disloyal to either of us."

Helen sighed. "I don't really expect you to understand. I'm not completely stupid, I've seen how it played out. I pretty much had to raise you myself all these years. I always had to play the heavy, always had to be the one to hand out the discipline because your father was off on some
secret assignment
. And then he'd come home for a week or two and he was the golden-haired boy just because he'd seen fit to drop in. I don't really blame you for that any more than I blame him. Blame doesn't solve anything at this stage. I just thought—well, really, I thought you ought to know. Take it for what it's worth."

A memory, unbidden: called into Helen's bed when I was nine, her hand stroking my scar, her stale sweet breath stirring against my cheek.
You're the man of the house now Siri. We can't count on your father any more. It's just you and me...

I didn't say anything for a while. Finally: "Didn't it help at all?"

"What do you mean?"

I glanced around at all that customized abstraction: internal feedback, lucidly dreamed. "You're omnipotent in here. Desire anything, imagine anything; there it is. I'd thought it would have
changed
you more."

Rainbow tiles danced, and forced a laugh. "This isn't enough of a
change
for you?"

Not nearly.

Because Heaven had a catch. No matter how many constructs and avatars Helen built in there, no matter how many empty vessels sang her praises or commiserated over the injustices she'd suffered, when it came right down to it she was only talking to herself. There were other realities over which she had no control, other people who didn't play by her rules—and if they thought of Helen at all, they thought as they damn well pleased.

She could go the rest of her life without ever meeting any of them. But she knew they were out there, and it drove her crazy. Taking my leave of Heaven, it occurred to me that omnipotent though she was, there was only be one way my mother would ever be truly happy in her own personal creation.

The rest of creation would have to go.

*

"This shouldn't keep happening," Bates said. "The shielding was good."

The Gang was up across the drum, squaring away something in their tent. Sarasti lurked offstage today, monitoring the proceedings from his quarters. That left me with Bates and Szpindel in the Commons.

"Maybe against direct EM." Szpindel stretched, stifled a yawn. "Ultrasound boots up magnetic fields through shielding sometimes, in living tissue at least. Any chance something like that could be happening with your electronics?"

Bates spread her hands. "Who knows? Might as well be black magic and elves down there."

"Well, it's not a total wash. We can make a few smart guesses, eh?"

"Such as."

Szpindel raised one finger. "The layers we cut through couldn't result from any metabolic process
I
know about. So it's not 'alive', not in the biological sense. Not that that means anything these days," he added, glancing around the belly of our beast.

"What about life
inside
the structure?"

"Anoxic atmosphere. Probably rules out complex multicellular life. Microbes, maybe, although if so I wish to hell they show up in the samples. But anything complex enough to think, let alone build something like
that
"—a wave at the image in ConSensus—"is gonna need a high-energy metabolism, and that means oxygen."

"So you think it's empty?"

"Didn't say that, did I? I know aliens are supposed to be all mysterious and everything, but I still don't see why
anyone
would build a city-sized wildlife refuge for anaerobic microbes."

"It's got to be a habitat for
something
. Why any atmosphere at all, if it's just some kind of terraforming machine?"

Szpindel pointed up at the Gang's tent. "What Susan said. Atmosphere's still under construction and we get a free ride until the owners show up."

"Free?"

"Free
ish
. And I know we've only seen a fraction of a fraction of what's inside. But something obviously saw us coming. It yelled at us, as I recall. If they're smart and they're hostile, why aren't they shooting?"

"Maybe they are."

"If something's hiding down the hall wrecking your robots, it's not frying them any faster than the baseline environment would do anyway."

"What you call a
baseline environment
might be an active counterintrusion measure. Why else would a
habitat
be so uninhabitable?"

Szpindel rolled his eyes. "Okay, I was wrong. We
don't
know enough to make a few smart guesses."

Not that we hadn't tried. Once Jack's sensor head had been irreparably fried, we'd relegated it to surface excavation; it had widened the bore in infinitesimal increments, patiently burning back the edges of our initial peephole until it measured almost a meter across. Meanwhile we'd customized Bates's grunts—shielded them against nuclear reactors and the insides of cyclotrons—and come perigee we'd thrown them at
Rorschach
like stones chucked into a haunted forest. Each had gone through Jack's portal, unspooling whisker-thin fiberop behind them to pass intelligence through the charged atmosphere.

They'd sent glimpses, mostly. A few extended vignettes. We'd seen
Rorschach
's walls move, slow lazy waves of peristalsis rippling along its gut. We'd seen treacly invaginations in progress, painstaking constrictions that would presumably, given time, seal off a passageway. Our grunts had sailed through some quarters, staggered through others where the magnetic ambience threw them off balance. They'd passed through strange throats lined with razor-thin teeth, thousands of triangular blades in parallel rows, helically twisted. They'd edged cautiously around clouds of mist sculpted into abstract fractal shapes, shifting and endlessly recursive, their charged droplets strung along a myriad converging lines of electromagnetic force.

Ultimately, every one of them had died or disappeared.

"Any way to increase the shielding?" I wondered.

Szpindel gave me a look.

"We've shielded everything except the sensor heads," Bates explained. "If we shield
those
we're blind."

"But visible light's harmless enough. What about purely optical li—"

"We're
using
optical links, commissar," Szpindel snapped. "And you may have noticed the shit's getting through anyway."

"But aren't there, you know—" I groped for the word— "bandpass filters? Something that lets visible wavelengths through, cuts out the lethal stuff on both sides?"

He snorted. "Sure. It's called an atmosphere, and if we'd brought one with us—about fifty times deeper than Earth's— it
might
block some of that soup down there. Course, Earth also gets a lot of help from its magnetic field, but I'm not betting my life on any EM we set up in
that
place."

"If we didn't keep running into these
spikes
," Bates said. "That's the real problem."

"Are they random?" I wondered.

Szpindel's shrug was half shiver. "I don't think anything about that place is random. But who knows? We need more data."

"Which we're not likely to get," James said, walking around the ceiling to join us, "if our drones keep shorting out."

The conditional was pure formality. We'd tried playing the odds, sacrificing drone after drone in the hope that one of them would get lucky; survival rates tailed exponentially to zero with distance from base camp. We'd tried shielding the fiberop to reduce aperture leakage; the resulting tethers were stiff and unwieldy, wrapped in so many layers of ferroceramic that we were virtually waving the bots around on the end of a stick. We'd tried cutting the tethers entirely, sending the machines out to explore on their own, squinting against the radiant blizzard and storing their findings for later download; none had returned. We'd tried everything.

"We can go in ourselves," James said.

Almost everything.

"Right," Szpindel replied in a voice that couldn't mean anything but
wrong
.

"It's the only way to learn anything useful."

"Yeah. Like how many seconds it would take your brain to turn into synchrotron soup."

"Our suits can be shielded."

"Oh, you mean like Mandy's drones?"

"I'd really rather you didn't call me that," Bates remarked.

"The point is,
Rorschach
kills you whether you're meat or mechanical."

"
My
point is that it kills meat
differently
," James replied. "It takes longer."

Szpindel shook his head. "You'd be good as dead in fifty minutes. Even shielded. Even in the so-called cool zones."

"And completely asymptomatic for three hours or more. And even after that it would take days for us to actually die
and we'd be back here long before then
, and the ship could patch us up just like that.
We
even know that much, Isaac, it's right there in ConSensus. And if we know it, you know it. So we shouldn't even be having this argument."

"That's your solution? We saturate ourselves with radiation every thirty hours and then I get to cut out the tumors and stitch everyone's cells back together?"

"The pods are automatic. You wouldn't have to lift a finger."

"Not to mention the number those magnetic fields would do on your
brain
. We'd be hallucinating from the moment we—"

"Faraday the suits."

"Ah, so we go in deaf dumb and blind. Good idea."

"We can let light pass. Infrared—"

"It's all
EM
, Suze. Even if we blacked out our helmets completely and used a camera feed, we'd get leakage where the wire went through."

"Some, yes. But it'd be better than—"

"Jesus." A tremor sent spittle sailing from the corner of Szpindel's mouth. "Let me talk to Mi—"

"I've discussed it with the rest of the gang, Isaac. We're all agreed."

"
All
agreed? You don't have a working majority in there, Suze. Just because you cut your brain into pieces doesn't mean they each get a vote."

"I don't see why not. We're each at least as sentient as you are."

"They're all
you
. Just partitioned."

"You don't seem to have any trouble treating Michelle as a separate individual."

"Michelle's—I mean, yes, you're all very different
facets
, but there's only one original. Your alters—"

"
Don't call us that
." Sascha erupted with a voice cold as LOX. "
Ever
."

Szpindel tried to pull back. "I didn't mean—you know I didn't—"

But Sascha was gone. "What are you saying?" said the softer voice in her wake. "Do you think I'm just, I'm just
Mom
, play-acting? You think when we're together you're alone with
her
?"

"Michelle," Szpindel said miserably. "No. What I think—"

"Doesn't matter," Sarasti said. "We don't
vote
here."

He floated above us, visored and unreadable in the center of the drum. None of us had seen him arrive. He turned slowly on his axis, keeping us in view as we rotated around him.

"Prepping
Scylla
. Amanda needs two untethered grunts with precautionary armament. Cams from one to a million Angstroms, shielded tympanics, no autonomous circuitry. Platelet boosters, dimenhydrinate and potassium iodide for everyone by 1350."

"Everyone?" Bates asked.

Sarasti nodded. "Window opens four hours twenty-three." He turned back down the spine

"Not me," I said.

Sarasti paused.

"I don't participate in field ops," I reminded him.

"Now you do."

"I'm a
synthesist
." He knew that. Of course he knew, everyone did: you can't observe the system unless you stay
outside
the system.

"On Earth you're a synthesist," he said. "In the Kuiper you're a synthesist. Here you're mass. Do what you're told."

He disappeared.

"Welcome to the big picture," Bates said softly.

I looked at her as the rest of the group broke up. "You know I—"

"We're a long way out, Siri. Can't wait fourteen months for feedback from your bosses, and you know it."

She leapt from a standing start, arced smoothly through holograms into the weightless core of the drum. But then she stopped herself, as if distracted by some sudden insight. She grabbed a spinal conduit and swung back to face me.

"You shouldn't sell yourself short," she said. "Or Sarasti either. You're an observer, right? It's a safe bet there's going to be a lot down there worth observing."

"Thanks," I said. But I already knew why Sarasti was sending me into
Rorschach
, and there was more to it than
observation
.

Three valuable agents in harm's way. A decoy bought one-in-four odds that an enemy would aim somewhere else.