Blindsight | Page 6

brought you back in the first place if we hadn't needed you. From the
day they cracked the vat you knew you had leverage.
Is that how it works, Jukka? You save the world, and the folks who hold
your leash agree to look the other way?
As a child I'd read tales about jungle predators transfixing their prey
with a stare. Only after I'd met Jukka Sarasti did I know how it felt. But
he wasn't looking at me now. He was focused on installing his own tent,
and even if he had looked me in the eye there'd have been 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