bookssland.com Ā» Performing Arts Ā» Blindsight - Peter Watts (top 5 ebook reader .txt) šŸ“—

Book online Ā«Blindsight - Peter Watts (top 5 ebook reader .txt) šŸ“—Ā». Author Peter Watts



1 ... 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 ... 54
Go to page:
barely faster than they did. They would have wiped out their own food supply in no time if they hadnā€™t learned how to ease off on the throttle.

By the time they went extinct theyā€™d learned to shut down for decades.

It made two kinds of sense. It not only slashed their metabolic needs while prey bred itself back to harvestable levels, it gave us time to forget that we were prey. We were so smart by the Pleistocene, smart enough for easy skepticism; if you havenā€™t seen any night-stalking demons in all your years on the savannah, why should you believe some senile campfire ramblings passed down by your motherā€™s mother?

It was murder on our ancestors, even if those same enemy genesā€”co-opted nowā€”served us so well when we left the sun a half-million years later. But it was almostā€”heartening, I guessā€”to think that maybe Sarasti felt the tug of other genes, some aversion to prolonged visibility shaped by generations of natural selection. Maybe he spent every moment in our company fighting voices that urged him to hide, hide, let them forget. Maybe he retreated when they got too loud, maybe we made him as uneasy as he made us.

We could always hope.

*

Our final orbit combined discretion and valor in equal measure.

Rorschach described a perfect equatorial circle 87,900 km from Big Benā€™s center of gravity. Sarasti was unwilling to let it out of sight, and you didnā€™t have to be a vampire to mistrust relay sats when swinging through a radiation-soaked blizzard of rock and machinery. The obvious alternative was to match orbits.

At the same time, all the debate over whether or not Rorschach had meantā€”or even understoodā€”the threats it had made was a bit beside the point. Counterintrusion measures were a distinct possibility either way, and ongoing proximity only increased the risk. So Sarasti had derived some optimum compromise, a mildly eccentric orbit that nearly brushed the artefact at perigee but kept a discreet distance the rest of the time. It was a longer trajectory than Rorschachā€˜s, and higherā€”we_ _had to burn on the descending arc to keep in synchā€”but the end result was continuously line-of-sight, and only brought us within striking distance for three hours either side of bottoming out.

_Our_ striking distance, that is. For all we knew Rorschach could have reached out and swatted us from the sky before weā€™d even left the solar system.

Sarasti gave the command from his tent. ConSensus carried his voice into the drum as Theseus coasted to apogee: ā€œNow.ā€

Jack had erected a tent about itself, a blister glued to Rorschachā€˜s hull and blown semi-taut against vacuum with the merest whiff of nitrogen. Now it brought lasers to bear and started digging; if weā€™d read the vibrations right, the ground should be only thirty-four centimeters deep beneath its feet. The beams stuttered as they cut, despite six millimeters of doped shielding.

ā€œSon of a bitch,ā€ Szpindel murmured. ā€œItā€™s working.ā€

We burned through tough fibrous epidermis. We burned through veins of insulation that might have been some sort of programmable asbestos. We burned through alternating layers of superconducting mesh, and the strata of flaking carbon separating them.

We burned through.

The lasers shut down instantly. Within seconds Rorschachā€˜s intestinal gases had blown taut the skin of the tent. Black carbon smoke swirled and danced in sudden thick atmosphere.

Nothing shot back at us. Nothing reacted. Partial pressures piled up on ConSensus: methane, ammonia, hydrogen. Lots of water vapor, freezing as fast as it registered.

Szpindel grunted. ā€œReducing atmosphere. Pre-Snowball.ā€ He sounded disappointed.

ā€œMaybe itā€™s a work in progress,ā€ James suggested. ā€œLike the structure itself.ā€

ā€œMaybe.ā€

Jack stuck out its tongue, a giant mechanical sperm with a myo-optical tail. Its head was a thick-skinned lozenge, at least half ceramic shielding by cross-section; the tiny payload of sensors at its core was rudimentary, but small enough for the whole assembly to thread through the pencil-thin hole the laser had cut. It unspooled down the hole, rimming Rorschachā€˜s newly-torn orifice.

ā€œDark down there,ā€ James observed.

Bates: ā€œBut warm.ā€ 281ļ‚°K. Above freezing.

The endoscope emerged into darkness. Infrared served up a grainy grayscale of a ā€” a tunnel, it looked like, replete with mist and exotic rock formations. The walls curved like honeycomb, like the insides of fossilized intestine. Cul-de-sacs and branches proliferated down the passage. The basic substrate appeared to be a dense pastry of carbon-fiber leaves. Some of the gaps between those layers were barely thick as fingernails; others looked wide enough to stack bodies.

ā€œLadies and gentlemen,ā€ Szpindel said softly, ā€œThe Devilā€™s Baklava.ā€

I could have sworn I saw something move. I could have sworn it looked familiar.

The camera died.

Rorschach

ā€œMothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.ā€

ā€”Aristotle

I couldnā€™t say goodbye to Dad. I didnā€™t even know where he was.

I didnā€™t want to say goodbye to Helen. I didnā€™t want to go back there. That was the problem: I didnā€™t have to. There was nowhere left in the world where the mountain couldnā€™t simply pick up and move to Mohammed. Heaven was merely a suburb of the global village, and the global village left me no excuse.

I linked from my own apartment. My new inlaysā€”mission-specific, slid into my head just the week beforeā€”shook hands with the noosphere and knocked upon the Pearly Gates. Some tame spirit, more plausible than Saint Peter if no less ethereal, took a message and disappeared.

And I was inside.

This was no antechamber, no visiting room. Heaven was not intended for the casual visitor; any paradise in which the flesh-constrained would feel at home would have been intolerably pedestrian to the disembodied souls who lived there. Of course, there was no reason why visitor and resident had to share the same view. I could have pulled any conventional worldview off the shelf if Iā€™d wanted, seen this place rendered in any style I chose. Except for the Ascended themselves, of course. That was one of the perks of the Afterlife: only they got to choose the face we saw.

But the thing my mother had become had no face, and I was damned if she was going to see me hide behind some mask.

ā€œHello, Helen.ā€

ā€œSiri! What a wonderful surprise!ā€

She was an abstraction in an abstraction: an impossible intersection of dozens of bright panes, as if the disassembled tiles of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and animated. She swirled before me like a school of fish. Her world echoed her body: lights and angles and three-dimensional Escher impossibilities, piled like bright thunderheads. And yet, somehow I would have recognised her anywhere. Heaven was a dream; only upon waking do you realize that the characters you encountered looked nothing like they do in real life.

There was only one familiar landmark anywhere in the whole sensorium. My motherā€™s heaven smelled of cinnamon.

I beheld her luminous avatar and imagined the corpus soaking in a tank of nutrients, deep underground. ā€œHow are you doing?ā€

ā€œVery well. Very well. Of course, it takes a little getting used to, knowing your mind isnā€™t quite yours any more.ā€ Heaven didnā€™t just feed the brains of its residents; it fed off them, used the surplus power of idle synapses to run its own infrastructure. ā€œYou have to move in here, sooner better than later. Youā€™ll never leave.ā€

ā€œActually, I am leaving,ā€ I said. ā€œWeā€™re shipping out tomorrow.ā€

ā€œShipping out?ā€

ā€œThe Kuiper. You know. The Fireflies?ā€

ā€œOh yes. I think I heard something about that. We donā€™t get much news from the outside world, you know.ā€

ā€œAnyway, just thought Iā€™d call in and say goodbye.ā€

ā€œIā€™m glad you did. Iā€™ve been hoping to see you without, you know.ā€

ā€œWithout what?ā€

ā€œYou know. Without your father listening in.ā€

Not again.

ā€œDadā€™s in the field, Helen. Interplanetary crisis. You might have heard something.ā€

ā€œI certainly have. You know, I havenā€™t always been happy about your fatherā€™sā€”extended assignments, but maybe it was really a blessing in disguise. The less he was around, the less he could do.ā€

ā€œDo?ā€

ā€œTo you.ā€ The apparition stilled for a few moments, feigning hesitation. ā€œIā€™ve never told you this before, butā€”no. I shouldnā€™t.ā€

ā€œShouldnā€™t what?ā€

ā€œBring up, well, old hurts.ā€

ā€œWhat old hurts?ā€ Right on cue. I couldnā€™t help myself, the training went too deep. I always barked on command.

ā€œWell,ā€ she began, ā€œsometimes youā€™d come backā€”you were so very youngā€”and your face would be so set and hard, and Iā€™d wonder why are you so angry, little boy? What can someone so young have to be so angry about?ā€

ā€œHelen, what are you talking about? Back from where?ā€

ā€œJust from the places heā€™d take you.ā€ Something like a shiver passed across her facets. ā€œHe was still around back then. He wasnā€™t so important, he was just an accountant with a karate fetish, going on about forensics and game theory and astronomy until he put everyone to sleep.ā€

I tried to imagine it: my father, the chatterbox. ā€œThat doesnā€™t sound like Dad.ā€

ā€œWell of course not. You were too young to remember, but he was just a little man, then. He still is, really, under all the secret missions and classified briefings. Iā€™ve never understood why people never saw that. But even back then he liked toā€”well, it wasnā€™t his fault, I suppose. He had a very difficult childhood, and he never learned to deal with problems like an adult. He, well, heā€™d throw his weight around, I guess youā€™d say. Of course I didnā€™t know that before we married. If I had, Iā€”but I made a commitment. I made a commitment, and I never broke it.ā€

ā€œWhat, are you saying you were abused?ā€ Back from the places heā€™d take you. ā€œAreā€”are you saying I was?ā€

ā€œThere are all kinds of abuse, Siri. Words can hurt more than bullets, sometimes. And child abandonmentā€”ā€

ā€œHe didnā€™t abandon me.ā€ _He left me with you._

ā€œHe abandoned us, Siri. Sometimes for months at a time, and Iā€”and we never knew if he was coming back And he chose to do that to us, Siri. He didnā€™t need that job, there were so many other things he was qualified to do. Things that had been redundant for years.ā€

I shook my head, incredulous, unable to say it aloud: she hated him because he hadnā€™t had the good grace to grow unnecessary?

ā€œItā€™s not Dadā€™s fault that planetary security is still an essential service,ā€ I said.

She continued as if she hadnā€™t heard. ā€œNow there was a time when it was unavoidable, when people our age had to work just to make ends meet. But even back then people wanted to spend time with their families. Even if they couldnā€™t afford to. To, to choose to stay working when it isnā€™t even necessary, thatā€™sā€”ā€ She shattered and reassembled at my shoulder. ā€œYes, Siri. I believe thatā€™s a kind of abuse. And if your father had been half as loyal to me as Iā€™ve been to him all these yearsā€¦ā€

I remembered Jim, the last time Iā€™d seen him: snorting vassopressin under the restless eyes of robot sentries. ā€œI donā€™t think Dadā€™s been disloyal to either of us.ā€

Helen sighed. ā€œI donā€™t really expect you to understand. Iā€™m not completely stupid, Iā€™ve seen how it played out. I pretty much had to raise you myself all these years. I always had to play the heavy, always had to be the one to hand out the discipline because your father was off on some secret assignment. And then heā€™d come home for a week or two and he was the golden-haired boy just because heā€™d seen fit to drop in. I donā€™t really blame you

1 ... 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 ... 54
Go to page:

Free e-book Ā«Blindsight - Peter Watts (top 5 ebook reader .txt) šŸ“—Ā» - read online now

Comments (0)

There are no comments yet. You can be the first!
Add a comment