Blindsight | Page 5

square
meters of floor space.
Gravity--or any centripetal facsimile thereof--did not appeal to me. I set
up my own tent in zero-gee and as far to stern as possible, nuzzling the
forward wall of the starboard shuttle tube. The tent inflated like an
abscess on Theseus' spine, a little climate-controlled bubble of
atmosphere in the dark cavernous vacuum beneath the ship's carapace.
My own effects were minimal; it took all of thirty seconds to stick them
to the wall, and another thirty to program the tent's environment.
Afterwards I went for a hike. After five years, I needed the exercise.
Stern was closest, so I started there: at the shielding that separated
payload from propulsion. A single sealed hatch blistered the aft
bulkhead dead center. Behind it, a service tunnel wormed back through
machinery best left untouched by human hands. The fat
superconducting torus of the ramscoop ring; the antennae fan behind it,
unwound now into an indestructible soap-bubble big enough to shroud
a city, its face turned sunward to catch the faint quantum sparkle of the
Icarus antimatter stream. More shielding behind that; then the
telematter reactor, where raw hydrogen and refined information
conjured fire three hundred times hotter than the sun's. I knew the
incantations, of course--antimatter cracking and deconstruction, the
teleportation of quantum serial numbers--but it was still magic to me,
how we'd come so far so fast. It would have been magic to anyone.
Except Sarasti, maybe.
Around me, the same magic worked at cooler temperatures and to less
volatile ends: a small riot of chutes and dispensers crowded the
bulkhead on all sides. A few of those openings would choke on my fist:
one or two could swallow me whole. Theseus' fabrication plant could
build everything from cutlery to cockpits. Give it a big enough matter
stockpile and it could have even been built another Theseus, albeit in
many small pieces and over a very long time. Some wondered if it
could build another crew as well, although we'd all been assured that

was impossible. Not even these machines had fine enough fingers to
reconstruct a few trillion synapses in the space of a human skull. Not
yet, anyway.
I believed it. They would never have shipped us out fully-assembled if
there'd been a cheaper alternative.
I faced forward. Putting the back of my head against that sealed hatch I
could see almost to Theseus' bow, an uninterrupted line-of-sight
extending to a tiny dark bull's-eye thirty meters ahead. It was like
staring at a great textured target in shades of white and gray: concentric
circles, hatches centered within bulkheads one behind another,
perfectly aligned. Every one stood open, in nonchalant defiance of a
previous generation's safety codes. We could keep them closed if we
wanted to, if it made us feel safer. That was all it would do, though; it
wouldn't improve our empirical odds one whit. In the event of trouble
those hatches would slam shut long milliseconds before Human senses
could even make sense of an alarm. They weren't even
computer-controlled. Theseus' body parts had reflexes.
I pushed off against the stern plating--wincing at the tug and stretch of
disused tendons--and coasted forward, leaving Fab behind. The
shuttle-access hatches to Scylla and Charybdis briefly constricted my
passage to either side. Past them the spine widened into a corrugated
extensible cylinder two meters across and--at the moment--maybe
fifteen long. A pair of ladders ran opposite each other along its length;
raised portholes the size of manhole covers stippled the bulkhead to
either side. Most of those just looked into the hold. A couple served as
general-purpose airlocks, should anyone want to take a stroll beneath
the carapace. One opened into my tent. Another, four meters further
forward, opened into Bates'.
From a third, just short of the forward bulkhead, Jukka Sarasti climbed
into view like a long white spider.
If he'd been Human I'd have known instantly what I saw there, I'd have
smelled murderer all over his topology. And I wouldn't have been able
to even guess at the number of his victims, because his affect was so

utterly without remorse. The killing of a hundred would leave no more
stain on Sarasti's surfaces than the swatting of an insect; guilt beaded
and rolled off this creature like water on wax.
But Sarasti wasn't human. Sarasti was a whole different animal, and
coming from him all those homicidal refractions meant nothing more
than predator. He had the inclination, was born to it; whether he had
ever acted on it was between him and Mission Control.
Maybe they cut you some slack, I didn't say to him. Maybe it's just a
cost of doing business. You're mission-critical, after all. For all I know
you cut a deal. You're so very smart, you know we wouldn't have