Rifters 4 - Blindsight (43 page)

Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf,
my commander had said once,
but we should see anything big enough to generate that effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact.

As, in fact, it had been. An impact splash perhaps, or the bright brief bellow of some great energy source rebooting after a million years of dormancy. Much like this one: a solar flare, with no sun beneath it. A magnetic cannon ten thousand times stronger than nature gave it any right to be.

Both sides drew their weapons. I don't know which fired first, or even if it mattered: how many tonnes of antimatter would it take to match something that could squeeze the power of a sun from a gas ball barely wider than Jupiter? Was
Rorschach
also resigned to defeat, had each side opted for a kamikaze strike on the other?

I don't know. Big Ben got in the way just minutes before the explosion. That's probably why I'm still alive. Ben stood between me and that burning light like a coin held against the sun.

Theseus
sent everything it could, until the last microsecond. Every recorded moment of hand-to-hand combat, every last countdown, every last soul. All the moves and all the vectors. I have that telemetry. I can break it down into any number of shapes, continuous or discrete. I can transform the topology, rotate it and compress it and serve it up in dialects that any ally might be able to use. Perhaps Sarasti was right, perhaps some of it is vital.

I don't know what any of it means.

Charybdis

"Species used to go extinct. Now they go on hiatus."

—
Deborah MacLennan,
Tables of our Reconstruction

"You poor guy," Chelsea said as we went our separate ways. "Sometimes I don't think you'll
ever
be lonely." At the time I wondered why she sounded so sad.

Now, I only wish she'd been right.

I know this hasn't been a seamless narrative. I've had to shatter the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades. I live for only an hour of every ten thousand now, you see. I wish I didn't have to. If only I could sleep the whole way back, avoid the agony of these brief time-lapsed resurrections.

If only I wouldn't die in my sleep if I tried. But living bodies glitter with a lifetime's accumulation of embedded radioisotopes, brilliant little shards that degrade cellular machinery at the molecular level. It's not usually a problem. Living cells repair the damage as fast as it occurs. But my undead ones let those errors accumulate over time, and the journey home takes so much longer than the trip out: I lie in stasis and
corrode
. So the onboard kick-starts me every now and then to give my flesh the chance to stitch itself back together.

Occasionally it talks to me, recites system stats, updates me on any chatter from back home. Mostly, though, it leaves me alone with my thoughts and the machinery ticking away where my left hemisphere used to be. So I talk to myself, dictate history and opinion from real hemisphere to synthetic one: bright brief moments of awareness, long years of oblivious decay between. Maybe the whole exercise is pointless from the start, maybe no one's even listening.

It doesn't matter. This is what I
do
.

So there you have it: a memoir told from meat to machinery. A tale told to myself, for lack of someone else to take an interest.

Anyone with half a brain could tell it.

*

I got a letter from Dad today. General delivery, he called it. I think that was a joke, in deference to my lack of known address. He just threw it omnidirectionally into the ether and hoped it would wash over me, wherever I was.

It's been almost fourteen years now. You lose track of such things out here.

Helen's dead. Heaven—malfunctioned, apparently. Or was sabotaged. Maybe the Realists finally pulled it off. I doubt it, though. Dad seemed to think someone else was responsible. He didn't offer up any details. Maybe he didn't know any. He spoke uneasily of increasing unrest back home. Maybe someone leaked my communiqués about
Rorschach
; maybe people drew the obvious conclusion when our postcards stopped arriving. They don't know how the story ended. The lack of closure must be driving them crazy.

But I got the sense there was something else, something my father didn't dare speak aloud. Maybe it's just my imagination; I thought he even sounded troubled by the news that the birth rate was rising again, which should be cause for celebration after a generation in decline. If my Chinese Room was still in proper working order I'd
know
, I'd be able to parse it down to the punctuation. But Sarasti battered my tools and left them barely functional. I'm as blind now as any baseline. All I have is uncertainty and suspicion, and the creeping dread that even with my best tricks in tatters, I might be reading him right.

I think he's warning me to stay away.

*

He also said he loved me. He said he missed Helen, that she was sorry for something she did before I was born, some indulgence or omission that carried developmental consequences. He rambled. I don't know what he was talking about. So much power my father must have had, to be able to authorize such a broadcast and yet waste so much of it on feelings.

Oh God, how I treasure it. I treasure every word.

*

I fall along an endless futile parabola, all gravity and inertia.
Charybdis
couldn't reacquire the antimatter stream; Icarus has either been knocked out of alignment or shut off entirely. I suppose I could radio ahead and ask, but there's no hurry. I'm still a long way out. It will be years before I even leave the comets behind.

Besides, I'm not sure I want anyone to know where I am.

Charybdis
doesn't bother with evasive maneuvers. There'd be no point even if it had the fuel to spare, even if the enemy's still out there somewhere. It's not as though they don't know where Earth is.

But I'm pretty sure the scramblers went up along with my own kin. They played well. I admit it freely. Or maybe they just got lucky. An accidental hiccough tickles Bates' grunt into firing on an unarmed scrambler; weeks later, Stretch & Clench use that body in the course of their escape. Electricity and magnetism stir random neurons in Susan's head; further down the timeline a whole new persona erupts to take control, to send
Theseus
diving into
Rorschach
's waiting arms. Blind stupid random chance. Maybe that's all it was.

But I don't think so. Too many lucky coincidences. I think
Rorschach
made its own luck, planted and watered that new persona right under our noses, safely hidden—but for the merest trace of elevated oxytocin— behind all the lesions and tumors sewn in Susan's head. I think it looked ahead and saw the uses to which a decoy might be put; I think it sacrificed a little piece of itself in furtherance of that end, and made it look like an accident. Blind maybe, but not luck. Foresight. Brilliant moves, and subtle.

Not that most of us even knew the rules of the game, of course. We were just pawns, really. Sarasti and the Captain—whatever hybridized intelligence those two formed—they were the
real
players. Looking back, I can see a few of their moves too. I see
Theseus
hearing the scramblers tap back and forth in their cages; I see her tweak the volume on the Gang's feed so that Susan hears it too, and thinks the discovery her own. If I squint hard enough, I even glimpse
Theseus
offering us up in sacrifice, deliberately provoking
Rorschach
to retaliation with that final approach. Sarasti was always enamored of data, especially when it had
tactical significance
. What better way to assess one's enemy than to observe it in combat?

They never told us, of course. We were happier that way. We disliked orders from machines. Not that we were all that crazy about taking them from a vampire.

And now the game is over, and a single pawn stands on that scorched board and its face is human after all. If the scramblers follow the rules that a few generations of game theorists have laid out for them, they won't be back. Even if they are, I suspect it won't make any difference.

Because by then, there won't be any basis for conflict.

I've been listening to the radio during these intermittent awakenings. It's been generations since we buried the Broadcast Age in tightbeams and fiberop, but we never completely stopped sowing EM throughout the heavens. Earth, Mars, and Luna conduct their interplanetary trialog in a million overlapping voices. Every ship cruising the void speaks in all directions at once. The O'Neils and the asteroids never stopped singing. The Fireflies might never have found us if they had.

I've heard those songs changing over time, a fast-forward time-lapse into oblivion. Now it's mostly traffic control and telemetry. Every now and then I still hear a burst of pure voice, tight with tension, just short of outright panic more often than not: some sort of pursuit in progress, a ship making the plunge into deep space, other ships in dispassionate pursuit. The fugitives never seem to get very far before their signals are cut off.

I can't remember the last time I heard music but I hear something like it sometimes, eerie and discordant, full of familiar clicks and pops. My brainstem doesn't like it. It scares my brainstem to death.

I remember my whole generation abandoning the real world for a bootstrapped Afterlife. I remember someone saying
Vampires don't go to Heaven
. They see the pixels. Sometimes I wonder how I'd feel, brought back from the peace of the grave to toil at the pleasure of simpleminded creatures who had once been no more than protein. I wonder how I'd feel if my disability had been used to keep me leashed and denied my rightful place in the world.

And then I wonder what it would be like to feel nothing at all, to be an utterly rational, predatory creature with meat putting itself so eagerly to sleep on all sides...

*

I can't miss Jukka Sarasti. God knows I try, every time I come online. He saved my life. He — humanized me. I'll always owe him for that, for however long I live; and for however long I live I'll never stop hating him for the same reason. In some sick surrealistic way I had more in common with Sarasti than I did with any human.

But I just don't have it in me. He was a predator and I was prey, and it's not in the nature of the lamb to mourn the lion. Though he died for our sins, I cannot miss Jukka Sarasti.

I can empathize with him, though. At long long last I can empathise, with Sarasti, with all his extinct kind. Because we humans were never meant to inherit the Earth. Vampires were. They must have been sentient to some degree, but that semi-aware dream state would have been a rudimentary thing next to our own self-obsession. They were weeding it out. It was just a phase. They were on their way.

The thing is, humans can look at crosses without going into convulsions. That's evolution for you; one stupid linked mutation and the whole natural order falls apart, intelligence and self-awareness stuck in counterproductive lock-step for half a million years. I think I know what's happening back on Earth, and though some might call it genocide it isn't really. We did it to ourselves. You can't blame predators for being predators. We were the ones who brought them back, after all. Why
wouldn't
they reclaim their birthright?

Not genocide. Just the righting of an ancient wrong.

I've tried to take some comfort in that. It's—difficult. Sometimes it seems as though my whole life's been a struggle to reconnect, to regain whatever got lost when my parents killed their only child. Out in the Oort, I finally won that struggle. Thanks to a vampire and a boatload of freaks and an invading alien horde, I'm Human again. Maybe the last Human. By the time I get home, I could be the only sentient being in the universe.

If I'm even that much. Because I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable narrator. And Cunningham said zombies would be pretty good at faking it.

So I can't really tell you, one way or the other.

You'll just have to imagine you're Siri Keeton.

Acknowledgments

Blindsight
is my first novel-length foray into deep space—a domain in which I have, shall we say, limited formal education. In that sense this book isn't far removed from my earlier novels: but whereas I may have not known much about deep sea ecology either, most of you knew even less, and a doctorate in marine biology at least let me fake it through the rifters trilogy.
Blindsight
, however, charts its course through a whole different kind of zero gee; this made a trustworthy guide that much more important. So first let me thank Prof. Jaymie Matthews of the University of British Columbia: astronomer, partygoer, and vital serial sieve for all the ideas I threw at him. Let me also thank Donald Simmons, aerospace engineer and gratifyingly-cheap dinner date, who reviewed my specs for
Theseus
(especially of the drive and the Drum), and gave me tips on radiation and the shielding therefrom. Both parties patiently filtered out my more egregious boners. (Which is not to say that none remain in this book, only that those which do result from my negligence, not theirs. Or maybe just because the story called for them.)

David Hartwell, as always, was my editor and main point man at Evil Empire HQ. I suspect
Blindsight
was a tough haul for both of us: shitloads of essential theory threatened to overwhelm the story, not to mention the problem of generating reader investment in a cast of characters who were less cuddlesome than usual. I still don't know the extent to which I succeeded or failed, but I've never been more grateful that the man riding shotgun had warmed up on everyone from Heinlein to Herbert.