Blindsight

"I don't believe it." She shook her head. Ropy tendrils of hair swung across her face. "It's the middle of the twenty-first Century and you're hitting me with this war of the sexes bullshit?"

"Granted, your tweaks are a pretty radical iteration. Get right in there and reprogram your mate for optimum servility."

"You actually think I'm trying to, to housebreak you? You think I'm trying to train you like a puppy?"

"You're just doing what comes naturally."

"I can't believe you'd pull this shit on me."

"I thought you valued honesty in relationships."

"What relationship? According to you there's no such thing. This is just—mutual rape, or something."

"That's what relationships are."

"Don't pull that shit on me." She sat up, swung her feet over the edge of the bed. Putting her back to me. "I know how I feel. If I know anything I know that much. And I only wanted to make you happy."

"I know you believe that," I said gently. "I know it doesn't feel like a strategy. Nothing does when it's wired that deeply. It just feels right, it feels natural. It's nature's trick."

"It's someone's fucking trick."

I sat up next to her, let my shoulder brush hers. She leaned away.

"I know this stuff," I said after a while. "I know how people work. It's my job."

It was hers too, for that matter. Nobody who spliced brains for a living could possibly be unaware of all that basic wiring in the sub-basement. Chelsea had simply chosen to ignore it; to have admitted anything would have compromised her righteous anger.

I could have pointed that out too, I suppose, but I knew how much stress the system could take and I wasn't ready to test it to destruction. I didn't want to lose her. I didn't want to lose that feeling of safety, that sense that it made a difference whether I lived or died. I only wanted her to back off a bit. I only wanted room to breathe.

"You can be such a reptile sometimes," she said.

Mission accomplished.

* * *

Our first approach had been all caution and safety margins. This time we came in like a strike force.

Scylla burned towards Rorschach at over two gees, its trajectory a smooth and predictable arc ending at the ruptured base camp. It may have even landed there, for all I know; perhaps Sarasti had two-birded the mission, programmed the shuttle for some collecting of its own. If so, it wouldn't land with us on board. Scylla spat us into space almost fifty kilometers short of the new beachhead, left us naked and plummeting on some wireframe contraption with barely enough reaction mass for a soft landing and a quick getaway. We didn't even have control over that: success depended on unpredictability, and how better to ensure that than to not even know ourselves what we were doing?

Sarasti's logic. Vampire logic. We could follow it partway: the colossal deformation that had sealed Rorschach's breach was so much slower, so much more expensive than the dropgate that had trapped the Gang. The fact that dropgates hadn't been used implied that they took time to deploy—to redistribute necessary mass, perhaps, or spring-load its reflexes. That gave us a window. We could still venture into the den so long as the lions couldn't predict our destination and set traps in advance. So long as we got out again before they could set them afterwards.

"Thirty-seven minutes," Sarasti had said, and none of us could fathom how he'd come to that number. Only Bates had dared to ask aloud, and he had merely glinted at her: "You can't follow."

Vampire logic. From an obvious premise to an opaque conclusion. Our lives depended on it.

The retros followed some preprogrammed algorithm that mated Newton with a roll of the dice. Our vector wasn't completely random—once we'd eliminated raceways and growth zones, areas without line-of-sight escape routes, dead ends and unbranched segments ("Boring," Sarasti said, dismissing them), barely ten percent of the artefact remained in the running. Now we dropped towards a warren of brambles eight kilometers from our original landing site. Here in the midst of our final approach, there was no way that even we could predict our precise point of impact.

If Rorschach could, it deserved to win.

We fell. Ridged spires and gnarled limbs sectioned the sky wherever I looked, cut the distant starscape and the imminent superJovian into a jagged mosaic veined in black. Three kilometers away or thirty, the tip of some swollen extremity burst in a silent explosion of charged particles, a distant fog of ruptured, freezing atmosphere. Even as it faded I could make out wisps and streamers swirling into complex spirals: Rorschach's magnetic field, sculpting the artefact's very breath into radioactive sleet.

I'd never seen it with naked eyes before. I felt like an insect on a starry midwinter's night, falling through the aftermath of a forest fire.