Blindsight | Page 4

carboplatinum brick shit-house that Bates
used for a body-- all had shriveled to the same desiccated collection of
sticks and bones. Even our hair seemed to have become strangely
discolored during the voyage, although I knew that was impossible.
More likely it was just filtering the pallor of the skin beneath. Still. The
pre-dead James had been dirty blond, Szpindel's hair had been almost
dark enough to call black-- but the stuff floating from their scalps
looked the same dull kelpy brown to me now. Bates kept her head
shaved, but even her eyebrows weren't as rusty as I remembered them.
We'd revert to our old selves soon enough. Just add water. For now,
though, the old slur was freshly relevant: the Undead really did all look
the same, if you didn't know how to look.
If you did, of course--if you forgot appearance and watched for motion,
ignored meat and studied topology--you'd never mistake one for

another. Every facial tic was a data point, every conversational pause
spoke volumes more than the words to either side. I could see James'
personae shatter and coalesce in the flutter of an eyelash. Szpindel's
unspoken distrust of Amanda Bates shouted from the corner of his
smile. Every twitch of the phenotype cried aloud to anyone who knew
the language.
"Where's--" James croaked, coughed, waved one spindly arm at
Sarasti's empty coffin gaping at the end of the row.
Szpindel's lips cracked in a small rictus. "Gone back to Fab, eh?
Getting the ship to build some dirt to lie on."
"Probably communing with the Captain." Bates breathed louder than
she spoke, a dry rustle from pipes still getting reacquainted with the
idea of respiration.
James again: "Could do that up here."
"Could take a dump up here, too," Szpindel rasped. "Some things you
do by yourself, eh?"
And some things you kept to yourself. Not many baselines felt
comfortable locking stares with a vampire--Sarasti, ever courteous,
tended to avoid eye contact for exactly that reason--but there were other
surfaces to his topology, just as mammalian and just as readable. If he
had withdrawn from public view, maybe I was the reason. Maybe he
was keeping secrets.
After all, Theseus damn well was.
*
She'd taken us a good fifteen AUs towards our destination before
something scared her off course. Then she'd skidded north like a
startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-gee burn off the
ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against
Newton's First. She'd emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate

mass, squandered a hundred forty days' of fuel in hours. Then a long
cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust of
every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the void.
Teleportation isn't magic: the Icarus stream couldn't send us the actual
antimatter it made, only the quantum specs. Theseus had to filterfeed
the raw material from space, one ion at a time. For long dark years
she'd made do on pure inertia, hording every swallowed atom. Then a
flip; ionizing lasers strafing the space ahead; a ramscoop thrown wide
in a hard brake. The weight of a trillion trillion protons slowed her
down and refilled her gut and flattened us all over again. Theseus had
burned relentless until almost the moment of our resurrection.
It was easy enough to retrace those steps; our course was there in
ConSensus for anyone to see. Exactly why the ship had blazed that trail
was another matter. Doubtless it would all come out during the post-rez
briefing. We were hardly the first vessel to travel under the cloak of
sealed orders, and if there'd been a pressing need to know by now we'd
have known by now. Still, I wondered who had locked out the Comm
logs. Mission Control, maybe. Or Sarasti. Or Theseus herself, for that
matter. It was easy to forget the Quantical AI at the heart of our ship. It
stayed so discreetly in the background, nurtured and carried us and
permeated our existence like an unobtrusive God; but like God, it never
took your calls.
Sarasti was the offical intermediary. When the ship did speak, it spoke
to him-- and Sarasti called it Captain.
So did we all.
*
He'd given us four hours to come back. It took more than three just to
get me out of the crypt. By then my brain was at least firing on most of
its synapses, although my body--still sucking fluids like a thirsty
sponge-- continued to ache with every movement. I swapped out
drained electrolyte bags for fresh ones and headed aft.
Fifteen minutes to spin-up. Fifty to the post-resurrection briefing. Just

enough time for those who preferred gravity-bound sleep to haul their
personal effects into the drum and stake out their allotted 4.4