Better to direct that resentment at old grudges, real or imagined; less problematic, at least, than taking it out on someone who shares the same flesh.
I realized something else, too. Surrounded by displays documenting the relentless growth of the leviathan beneath us, I could not only see why Sascha had objected to the word; I could also see why Isaac Szpindel, no doubt unconsciously, had spoken it in the first place.
As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.
Sarasti stayed behind. He hadn't come with a backup.
There were the rest of us, though, crammed into the shuttle, embedded in custom spacesuits so padded with shielding we might have been deep-sea divers from a previous century. It was a fine balance; too much shielding would have been worse than none at all, would split primary particles into secondary ones, just as lethal and twice as numerous. Sometimes you had to live with moderate exposure; the only alternative was to embed yourself like a bug in lead.
We launched six hours from perigee. Scylla raced on ahead like an eager child, leaving its parent behind. There was no eagerness in the systems around me, though. Except for one: the Gang of Four almost shimmered behind her faceplate.
"Excited?" I asked.
Sascha answered: "Fuckin' right. Field work, Keeton. First contact."
"What if there's nobody there?" What if there is, and they don't like us?
"Even better. We get a crack at their signs and cereal boxes without their traffic cops leaning over our shoulders."
I wondered if she spoke for the others. I was pretty sure she didn't speak for Michelle.
Scylla's ports had all been sealed. There was no outside view, nothing to see inside but bots and bodies and the tangled silhouette swelling on my helmet HUD. But I could feel the radiation slicing through our armor as if it were tissue paper. I could feel the knotted crests and troughs of Rorschach's magnetic field. I could feel Rorschach itself, drawing nearer: the charred canopy of some firestormed alien forest, more landscape than artefact. I imagined titanic bolts of electricity arcing between its branches. I imagined getting in the way.
What kind of creatures would choose to live in such a place?
"You really think we'll get along," I said.
James' shrug was all but lost under the armor. "Maybe not at first. We may have gotten off on the wrong foot, we might have to sort through all kinds of misunderstandings. But we'll figure each other out eventually."
Evidently she thought that had answered my question.
The shuttle slewed; we bumped against each other like tenpins. Thirty seconds of micromaneuvers brought us to a solid stop. A cheery animation played across the HUD in greens and blues: the shuttle's docking seal, easing through the membrane that served as our entrance into Rorschach's inflatable vestibule. Even as a cartoon it looked vaguely pornographic.
Bates had been prepacked next to the airlock. She slid back the inner door. "Everybody duck."
Not an easy maneuver, swaddled in life-support and ferroceramic. Helmets tilted and bumped. The grunts, flattened overhead like great lethal cockroaches, hummed to life and disengaged from the ceiling. They scraped past in the narrow headroom, bobbed cryptically to their mistress, and exited stage left.
Bates closed the inner hatch. The lock cycled, opened again on an empty chamber.
Everything nominal, according to the board. The drones waited patiently in the vestibule. Nothing had jumped out at them.
Bates followed them through.
We had to wait forever for the image. The baud rate was less than a trickle. Words moved back and forth easily enough—"No surprises so far," Bates reported in distorted Jews-harp vibrato—but any picture was worth a million of them, and—
There: through the eyes of the grunt behind we saw the grunt ahead in motionless, grainy monochrome. It was a postcard from the past: sight turned to sound, thick clumsy vibrations of methane bumping against the hull. It took long seconds for each static-ridden image to accrete on the HUD: grunts descending into the pit; grunts emerging into Rorschach's duodenum; a cryptic, hostile cavescape in systematic increments. Down in the lower left-hand corner of each image, timestamps and Teslas ran down the clock.
You give up a lot when you don't trust the EM spectrum.
"Looks good," Bates reported. "Going in."
In a friendlier universe machines would have cruised the boulevard, sending perfect images in crystal resolution. Szpindel and the Gang would be sipping coffee back in the drum, telling the grunts to take a sample of this or get a close-up of that. In a friendlier universe, I wouldn't even be here.
Bates appeared in the next postcard, emerging from the fistula. In the next her back was to the camera, apparently panning the perimeter.
In the one after that she was looking right at us.
"Oh…okay," she said. "Come on…down…"
"Not so fast," Szpindel said. "How are you feeling?"
"Fine. A bit—odd, but…"
"Odd how?" Radiation sickness announced itself with nausea, but unless we'd seriously erred in our calculations that wouldn't happen for another hour or two. Not until well after we'd all been lethally cooked.
"Mild disorientation," Bates reported. "It's a bit spooky in here, but—must be Grey Syndrome. It's tolerable."
I looked at the Gang. The Gang looked at Szpindel. Szpindel shrugged.
"It's not gonna get any better," Bates said from afar. "The clock is… clock is ticking, people. Get down here."
We got.
Not living, not by a long shot.
Haunted.
Even when the walls didn't move, they did: always at the corner of the eye, that sense of crawling motion. Always at the back of the mind the sense of being watched, the dread certainty of malign and alien observers just out of sight. More than once I turned, expecting to catch one of those phantoms in the open. All I ever saw was a half-blind grunt floating down the passageway, or a wide-eyed and jittery crewmate returning my stare. And the walls of some glistening black lava tube with a hundred embedded eyes, all snapped shut just the instant before. Our lights pushed the darkness back perhaps twenty meters in either direction; beyond, mist and shadows seethed. And the sounds—Rorschach creaked around us like some ancient wooden hull trapped in pack ice. Electricity hissed like rattlesnakes.
You tell yourself it's mostly in your head. You remind yourself it's well-documented, an inevitable consequence of meat and magnetism brought too close together. High-energy fields release the ghosts and the grays from your temporal lobe, dredge up paralyzing dread from the midbrain to saturate the conscious mind. They fuck with your motor nerves and make even dormant inlays sing like fine fragile crystal.
Energy artefacts. That's all they are. You repeat that to yourself, you repeat it so often it loses any pretense of rationality and devolves into rote incantation, a spell to ward off evil spirits. They're not real, these whispering voices just outside your helmet, those half-seen creatures flickering at the edge of vision. They're tricks of the mind, the same neurological smoke-and-mirrors that convinced people throughout the ages that they were being haunted by ghosts, abducted by aliens, hunted by—
— vampires—
— and you wonder whether Sarasti really stayed behind or if he was here all along, waiting for you…