Blindsight

Sarasti clicked. Cats made something like that sound when they spied a bird on the far side of a windowpane.

ConSensus groaned with the sound of worlds scraping against each other: telemetry from the onsite sensors, their ears to the ground. Jack's camera controls had frozen again. The image it sent was canted and grainy. The pickup stared blankly at the edge of the hole we'd bored into the underworld.

The groaning subsided. A final faint cloud of crystalline stardust dissipated into space, barely visible even on max enhance.

No bodies. None visible, anyway.

Sudden motion at base camp. At first I thought it was static on Jack's feed, playing along lines of high contrast—but no, something was definitely moving along the edges of the hole we'd burned. Something almost wriggled there, a thousand gray mycelia extruding from the cut surface and writhing slowly into the darkness. "It's—huh," Bates said. "Triggered by the pressure drop, I guess. That's one way to seal a breach."

Two weeks after we'd wounded it, Rorschach had begun to heal itself.

Apogee behind us now. All downhill from here. Theseus began the long drop back into enemy territory.

"Doesn't use septa," Sarasti said.

"My genes done gone and tricked my brain

By making fucking feel so great

That's how the little creeps attain

Their plan to fuckin' replicate

But brain's got tricks itself, you see

To get the bang but not the bite

I got this here vasectomy

My genes can fuck themselves tonight."

— The r-selectors, Trunclade

First-person sex—real sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it—was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of sweaty skin full of pores and blemishes, a whole other person with a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we'd done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance, each trying to force the other into synch.

Chelsea regarded it as love in its purest form. I came to think of it as hand-to-hand combat. Before, whether fucking creations from my own menu or slip-on skins from someone else's, I had always selected the contrast and the rez, the texture and the attitude. The bodily functions, the resistance of competing desires, the endless foreplay that wears your tongue to the root and leaves your face sticky and glistening—just kinks, today. Options for the masochistic.

But there were no options with Chelsea. With her, everything came standard.

I indulged her. I guess I was no more patient with her perversions than she was with my ineptitude at them. Other things made it worth the effort. Chelsea would argue about anything under the sun, wry and insightful and curious as a cat. She would pounce without warning. Retired to the redundant majority, she still took such simple joy in the very act of being alive. She was impulsive and impetuous. She cared about people. Pag. Me. She wanted to know me. She wanted in.

That was proving to be a problem.

"We could try it again," she said once in an aftermath of sweat and pheromones. "And you won't even remember what you were so upset about. You won't even remember you were upset, if you don't want to."

I smiled and looked away; suddenly the planes of her face were coarse and unappealing. "How many times is that now? Eight? Nine?"

"I just want you to be happy, Cyg. True happiness is one hell of a gift, and I can give it to you if you'll let me."

"You don't want me happy," I said pleasantly. "You want me customized."

She mmm'd into the hollow of my throat for a moment. Then: "What?"

"You just want to change me into something more, more accommodating."

Chelsea lifted her head. "Look at me."

I turned my head. She'd shut down the chromatophores in her cheek; the tattoo, transplanted, fluttered now on her shoulder.

"Look at my eyes," Chelsea said.

I looked at the imperfect skin around them, at the capillaries wriggling across the whites. I felt a distant bemusement that such flawed, decaying organs were still able to hypnotize me on occasion.

"Now," Chelsea said. "What do you mean by that?"

I shrugged. "You keep pretending this is a partnership. We both know it's a competition."

"A competition."

"You're trying to manipulate me into playing by your rules."

"What rules?"

"The way you want the relationship run. I don't blame you, Chelse, not in the least. We've been trying to manipulate each other for as long as—hell, it's not even Human nature. It's mammalian."