Blindsight

The journey had melted us down to a common archetype. James' round cheeks and hips, Szpindel's high forehead and lumpy, lanky chassis—even the enhanced 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 If he had withdrawn from public view, maybe I was the reason.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, hoarding 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 slowedher 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 official 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 square meters of floor space.