Blindsight | Page 6

nothing to see but the dark wraparound visor he wore in deference to Human skittishness. He ignored me as I grabbed a nearby rung and squeezed past.
I could have sworn I smelled raw meat on his breath.
Into the drum (drums, technically; the BioMed hoop at the back spun on its own bearings). I flew through the center of a cylinder sixteen meters across. Theseus' spinal nerves ran along its axis, the exposed plexii and piping bundled against the ladders on either side. Past them, Szpindel's and James' freshly-erected tents rose from nooks on opposite sides of the world. Szpindel himself floated off my shoulder, still naked but for his gloves, and I could tell from the way his fingers moved that his favorite color was green. He anchored himself to one of three stairways to nowhere arrayed around the drum: steep narrow steps rising five vertical meters from the deck into empty air.
The next hatch gaped dead-center of the drum's forward wall; pipes and conduits plunged into the bulkhead to each side. I grabbed a convenient rung to slow myself--biting down once more on the pain--and floated through.
T-junction. The spinal corridor continued forward, a smaller diverticulum branched off to an EVA cubby and the forward airlock. I stayed the course and found myself back in the crypt, mirror-bright and less than two meters deep. Empty pods gaped to the left; sealed ones huddled to the right. We were so irreplaceable we'd come with replacements. They slept on, oblivious. I'd met three of them back in training. Hopefully none of us would be getting reacquainted any time soon.
Only four pods to starboard, though. No backup for Sarasti.
Another hatchway. Smaller this time. I squeezed through into the bridge. Dim light there, a silent shifting mosaic of icons and alphanumerics iterating across dark glassy surfaces. Not so much bridge as cockpit, and a cramped one at that. I'd emerged between two acceleration couches, each surrounded by a horseshoe array of controls and readouts. Nobody expected to ever use this compartment. Theseus was perfectly capable of running herself, and if she wasn't we were capable of running her from our inlays, and if we weren't the odds were overwhelming that we were all dead anyway. Still, against that astronomically off-the-wall chance, this was where one or two intrepid survivors could pilot the ship home again after everything else had failed.
Between the footwells the engineers had crammed one last hatch and one last passageway: to the observation blister on Theseus' prow. I hunched my shoulders (tendons cracked and complained) and pushed through--
--into darkness. Clamshell shielding covered the outside of the dome like a pair of eyelids squeezed tight. A single icon glowed softly from a touchpad to my left; faint stray light followed me through from the spine, brushed dim fingers across the concave enclosure. The dome resolved in faint shades of blue and gray as my eyes adjusted. A stale draft stirred the webbing floating from the rear bulkhead, mixed oil and machinery at the back of my throat. Buckles clicked faintly in the breeze like impoverished wind chimes.
I reached out and touched the crystal: the innermost layer of two, warm air piped through the gap between to cut the cold. Not completely, though. My fingertips chilled instantly.
Space out there.
Perhaps, en route to our original destination, Theseus had seen something that scared her clear out of the solar system. More likely she hadn't been running away from anything but to something else, something that hadn't been discovered until we'd already died and gone from Heaven. In which case...
I reached back and tapped the touchpad. I half-expected nothing to happen; Theseus' windows could be as easily locked as her comm logs. But the dome split instantly before me, a crack then a crescent then a wide-eyed lidless stare as the shielding slid smoothly back into the hull. My fingers clenched reflexively into a fistful of webbing. The sudden void stretched empty and unforgiving in all directions, and there was nothing to cling to but a metal disk barely four meters across.
Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black. Stars, and--
--nothing else.
What did you expect? I chided myself. An alien mothership hanging off the starboard bow?
Well, why not? We were out here for something.
The others were, anyway. They'd be essential no matter where we'd ended up. But my own situation was a bit different, I realized. My usefulness degraded with distance.
And we were over half a light year from home.
"When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."
--Emerson
Where was I when the lights came down?
I was emerging from the gates of Heaven, mourning a father who was--to his own mind, at least--still alive.
It had been scarcely two months