Rifters 4 - Blindsight (41 page)

He called the jargonaut to his quarters— and although it would be the first time I'd seen him since the attack, his summons carried not the slightest trace of doubt that I would obey. I did. I came on command, and saw that he had surrounded himself with faces.

Every last one of them was screaming.

There was no sound. The disembodied holograms floated in silent tiers around the bubble, each contorted into a different expression of pain. They were being tortured, these faces; half a dozen real ethnicities and twice as many hypothetical ones, skin tones ranging from charcoal to albino, brows high and slanted, noses splayed or pointed, jaws receding or prognathous. Sarasti had called the entire hominid tree into existence around him, astonishing in their range of features, terrifying in their consistency of expression.

A sea of tortured faces, rotating in slow orbits around my vampire commander.

"My God, what
is
this?"

"Statistics." Sarasti seemed focused on a flayed Asian child. "
Rorschach
's growth allometry over a two-week period."

"They're
faces
…"

He nodded, turning his attention to a woman with no eyes. "Skull diameter scales to total mass. Mandible length scales to EM transparency at one Angstrom. One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multifeature aspect ratios." He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly sidecast. "You'd be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything as—counterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables."

I felt my jaw clenching. "And the
expressions
? What do
they
represent?"

"Software customizes output for user."

An agonized gallery pled for mercy on all sides.

"I
am
wired for hunting," he reminded gently
.

"And you think I don't know that," I said after a moment.

He shrugged, disconcertingly human. "You ask."

"Why am I here, Jukka? You want to teach me another
object lesson
?"

"To discuss our next move."

"What move? We can't even run away."

"No." He shook his head, baring filed teeth in something approaching regret.

"Why did we wait so long?" Suddenly my sullen defiance had evaporated. I sounded like a child, frightened and pleading. "Why didn't we just take it on when we first got here, when it was
weaker
…?"

"We need to learn things. For next time."

"Next time? I thought
Rorschach
was a dandelion seed. I thought it just—washed up here—"

"By chance. But every dandelion is a clone. Their seeds are legion." Another smile, not remotely convincing— "And maybe it takes more than one try for the placental mammals to conquer Australia."

"It'll annihilate us. It doesn't even need those spitballs, it could pulverize us with one of those scramjets. In an instant."

"It doesn't want to."

"How do you
know
?"

"They need to learn things too. They want us intact. Improves our odds."

"Not enough. We can't win."

This was his cue. This was the point at which Uncle Predator would smile at my naiveté, and take me into his confidence.
Of
course
we're armed to the teeth
, he would say.
Do you think we'd come all this way, face such a vast unknown, without the means to defend ourselves? Now, at last, I can reveal that shielding and weaponry account for over half the ship's mass…

It was his
cue
.

"No," he said. "We can't win."

"So we just sit here. We just wait to die for the next—the next sixty-eight minutes..."

Sarasti shook his head. "No."

"But—" I began.

"Oh," I finished.

Because of course, we had just topped up our antimatter reserves.
Theseus
was not equipped with weapons.
Theseus
was
the weapon. And we were, in fact, going to sit here for the next sixty-eight minutes, waiting to die.

But we were going to take
Rorschach
with us when we did.

Sarasti said nothing. I wondered what he saw, looking at me. I wondered if there actually
was
a Jukka Sarasti behind those eyes to see, if his insights—always ten steps ahead of our own— hailed not so much from superior analytical facilities as from the timeworn truth that
it takes one to know one
.

Whose side, I wondered, would an automaton take?

"You have other things to worry about," he said.

He moved towards me; I swear, all those agonized faces followed him with their eyes. He studied me for a moment, the flesh crinkling around his eyes. Or maybe some mindless algorithm merely processed visual input, correlated aspect ratios and facial tics, fed everything to some output subroutine with no more awareness than a stats program. Maybe there was no more spark in this creature's face than there was in all the others, silently screaming in his wake.

"Is Susan afraid of you?" the thing before me asked.

"Su—why should she be?"

"She has four conscious entities in her head. She's four times more sentient than you. Doesn't that make you a threat?"

"No, of course not."

"Then why should you feel threatened by me?"

And suddenly I didn't care any more. I laughed out loud, with minutes to live and nothing to lose. "
Why
? Maybe because you're my natural enemy, you fucker. Maybe because I
know
you, and you can't even
look
at one of us without flexing your claws. Maybe because you nearly ripped my fucking hand off and raped me for no good reason—"

"I can imagine what it's like," he said quietly. "Please don't make me do it again."

I fell instantly silent.

"I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You
rationalize
, Keeton. You
defend
. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species
die
—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."

"It served me well enough." I wondered at the ease with which I had put my life into the past tense.

"Yes, if your purpose is only to
transmit
. Now you have to
convince
. You have to
believe
."

There were implications there I didn't dare to hope for. "Are you saying—"

"Can't afford to let the truth
trickle
through. Can't give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be
inundated
. Shattered. Genocide's impossible to deny when you're buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies."

He'd
played
me. All this time.
Preconditioning
me, turning my topology inside-out.

I'd known something was going on. I just hadn't understood
what
.

"I'd have seen right through it," I said, "if you hadn't made me get involved."

"You might even read it off me directly."

"
That's
why you—" I shook my head. "I thought that was because we were
meat
."

"That too," Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.

For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.

I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been
alive
. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.

Perhaps
dreamstate
wasn't such a bad word for it…

"Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked.

"Vampires have folk tales?"

He took it for a
yes
. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there
is
no darkness, that light is everywhere."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Amanda is not planning a mutiny."

"What? You know about—"

"She doesn't even want to. Ask her if you like."

"No—I—"

"You value objectivity."

It was so obvious I didn't bother answering.

He nodded as if I had. "Synthesists can't have opinions of their own. So when you feel one, it must be someone else's. The
crew
holds you in contempt.
Amanda
wants me relieved of command. Half of
us
is
you
. I think the word is
project
. Although,"—he cocked his head a bit to one side—"lately you improve. Come."

"Where?"

"Shuttle bay. Time to do your job."

"My—"

"Survive and bear witness."

"A drone—"

"Can deliver the data—assuming nothing fries its memory before it gets away. It can't
convince
anyone. It can't counter rationalizations and denials. It can't
matter
. And vampires—" he paused—"have poor communications skills."

It should have been cause for petty, selfish rejoicing.

"It all comes down to me," I said. "That's what you're saying. I'm a fucking stenographer, and it's all on me."

"Yes. Forgive me for that."

"Forgive you?"

Sarasti waved his hand. All faces save two disappeared.

"I don't know what I'm doing."

*

The news bloomed across ConSensus a few seconds before Bates called it aloud: Thirteen skimmers had not reappeared from behind Big Ben on schedule. Sixteen. Twenty-eight.

And counting.

Sarasti clicked to himself as he and Bates played catch-up. Tactical filled with luminous multicolored threads, a tangle of revised projections as intricate as art. The threads wrapped Ben like a filamentous cocoon;
Theseus
was a naked speck in the middle distance.

I expected any number of those lines to skewer us like needles through a bug. Surprisingly, none did; but the projections only extended twenty-five hours into the future, and were reliable for only half that. Not even Sarasti and the Captain could look so far ahead with that many balls in the air. It was something, though, the faintest silver lining: that all these high-speed behemoths couldn't simply reach out and swat us without warning. Evidently they still had to ease into the curve.

After
Rorschach
's dive, I'd been starting to think the laws of physics didn't apply.

The trajectories were close enough, though. At least three skimmers would be passing within a hundred kilometers on their next orbits.

Sarasti reached for his injector, the blood rising in his face. "Time to go. We refit
Charybdis
while you're sulking."

He held the hypo to his throat and shot up. I stared at ConSensus, caught by that bright shifting web like a moth by a streetlight.

"
Now
, Siri."

He pushed me from his quarters. I sailed into the passageway, grabbed a convenient rung—and stopped.

The spine was alive with grunts, patrolling the airspace, standing guard over the fab plants and shuttle 'locks, clinging like giant insects to the rungs of unrolling spinal ladders. Slowly, silently, the spine itself was
stretching
.

It could do that, I remembered. Its corrugations flexed and relaxed like muscle, it could grow up to two hundred meters to accommodate any late-breaking need for a bigger hanger or more lab space.

Or more infantry.
Theseus
was increasing the size of the battlefield.

"Come." The vampire turned aft.

Bates broke in from up front. "Something's happening."

An emergency handpad, geckoed to the expanding bulkhead, slid past to one side. Sarasti grabbed it and tapped commands. Bates' feed appeared on the bulkhead: a tiny chunk of Big Ben, an EM-enhanced equatorial quadrant only a few thousand klicks on a side. The clouds boiled down there, a cyclonic knot of turbulence swirling almost too fast for realtime. The overlay described charged particles, bound in a deep Parker spiral. It spoke of great mass, rising.

Sarasti clicked.

"DTI?" Bates said.

"Optical only." Sarasti took my arm and dragged me effortlessly astern. The display paced us along the bulkhead: seven skimmers shot from the clouds as I watched, a ragged circle of scramjets screaming red-hot into space. ConSensus plotted their paths in an instant; luminous arcs rose around our ship like the bars of a cage.

Theseus
shuddered.

We've been hit
, I thought. Suddenly the spine's plodding expansion cranked into overdrive; the pleated wall lurched and accelerated, streaming past my outstretched fingers as the closed hatch receded up ahead—

—receded
overhead
.

The walls weren't moving at all. We were
falling
, to the sudden strident bleating of an alarm.

Something nearly yanked my arm from its socket: Sarasti had reached out with one hand and caught a rung, reached with his other and caught me before we'd both been flattened against the Fab plant. We dangled. I must have weighed two hundred kilograms; the floor shuddered ten meters below my feet. The ship groaned around us. The spine filled with the screech of torquing metal. Bates' grunts clung to its walls with clawed feet.