Rifters 4 - Blindsight (24 page)

I nodded and coughed. My throat was sore. The nausea had grown heavy enough to sink below my diaphragm.

"Michelle." Sarasti repeated.

"I see some more here," Cunningham continued. "Along the bottom of your brain pan. Only a few dozen cells so far, they're not worth burning yet."

"Here." Michelle's voice was barely audible, even through ConSensus, but at least it was the voice of an adult. "I'm here."

"What do you remember, please?"

"I—I felt—I was just riding Mom, and then she was gone and there was no one else, so I had to—take over…"

"Do you see the septum close?"

"Not really. I felt it going dark, but when I turned around we were already trapped. And then I felt something behind me, it wasn't loud or harsh it just sort of
bumped
, and it grabbed me, and—and—

"I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I'm a bit—woozy..."

Sarasti waited.

"Isaac," Michelle whispered. "He..."

"Yes." A pause. "We're very sorry about that."

"Maybe—can he be fixed?"

"No. There's brain damage." There was something like sympathy in the vampire's voice, the practiced affectation of an accomplished mimic. There was something else, too, an all-but-imperceptible hunger, a subtle edge of
temptation
. I don't think anyone heard it but me.

We were sick, and getting sicker. Predators are drawn to the weak and injured.

Michelle had fallen silent again. When she continued, her voice only faltered a little: "I can't tell you much. It grabbed me. It let me go. I went to pieces, and I can't explain why except that fucking place just
does
things to you, and I was—weak. I'm sorry. There's not much else to tell you."

"Thank you," Sarasti said after a long moment.

"Can I—I'd like to leave if that's okay."

"Yes," Sarasti said. Michelle sank below the surface as the Commons rotated past. I didn't see who took her place.

"The grunts didn't see anything," Bates remarked. "By the time we broke through the septum the tunnel behind was empty."

"Any bogey would have had plenty of time to hightail," Cunningham said. He planted his feet on the deck and grabbed a handhold; the subdrum began to move. I drifted obliquely against my restraints.

"I don't disagree," Bates said, "But if there's anything we've learned about that place, it's that we can't trust our senses."

"Trust Michelle's," Sarasti said. He opened a window as I grew heavier: a grunt's-eye view of a fuzzy, bright blob weaving behind the translucent waxed-paper fibers of the skinned septum. James's headlight, from the wrong side of the barrier. The image wobbled a bit as the drone staggered through some local pocket of magnetism, then replayed. Wobbled, replayed. A six-second loop.

"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.

Eight minutes to apogee. Sarasti pulled the plug.

Down on
Rorschach
, our tent burst like a bug beneath a boot. A geyser erupted from the wound; a snowstorm swirled at its edges, its charged curlicues intricate as lace. Atmosphere gushed into vacuum, spread thin, crystallized. Briefly, the space around base camp
sparkled
. It was almost beautiful.

Bates didn't think it was beautiful at all. She watched that bleeding wound with a face as expressionless as Cunningham's, but her jaw was clenched unto tetanus. Her eyes darted between views: watching for things gasping in the shadows.

Rorschach
convulsed.

Vast trunks and arteries shuddered, a seismic tremor radiating out along the structure. The epicenter began to
twist
, a vast segment rotating on its axis, the breach midway along its length. Stress lines appeared where the length that rotated sheared against the lengths to either side that didn't; the structure seemed to soften and stretch there, constricting like a great elongate balloon torqueing itself into sausage links.

Sarasti clicked. Cats made something like that sound when they spied a bird on the far side of a windowpane.

ConSensus groaned with the sound of worlds scraping against each other: telemetry from the onsite sensors, their ears to the ground. Jack's camera controls had frozen again. The image it sent was canted and grainy. The pickup stared blankly at the edge of the hole we'd bored into the underworld.

The groaning subsided. A final faint cloud of crystalline stardust dissipated into space, barely visible even on max enhance.

No bodies. None visible, anyway.

Sudden motion at base camp. At first I thought it was static on Jack's feed, playing along lines of high contrast—but no, something was definitely moving along the edges of the hole we'd burned. Something almost
wriggled
there, a thousand gray mycelia extruding from the cut surface and writhing slowly into the darkness. "It's—huh," Bates said. "Triggered by the pressure drop, I guess. That's one way to seal a breach."

Two weeks after we'd wounded it,
Rorschach
had begun to heal itself.

Apogee behind us now. All downhill from here.
Theseus
began the long drop back into enemy territory.

"Doesn't use septa," Sarasti said.

"My genes done gone and tricked my brain

By making fucking feel so great

That's how the little creeps attain

Their plan to fuckin' replicate

But brain's got tricks itself, you see

To get the bang but not the bite

I got this here vasectomy

My genes can fuck
themselves
tonight."

—
The r-selectors,
Trunclade

First-person sex—
real
sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it—was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of sweaty skin full of pores and blemishes, a whole other person with a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we'd done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance, each trying to force the other into synch.