He nodded. "What happened to Bates? Her suit breach?"
"I don't think so."
"Then why'd she say she was dead? What—"
"She meant it literally," I told him. "Not I'm as good as dead or I'm going to die. She meant dead now. Like she was a talking corpse."
"How do—" you know? Stupid question. His face ticced and trembled in the helmet. "That's crazy, eh?"
"Define crazy."
The Gang floated quietly, cheek-to-jowl behind Szpindel in the cramped enclosure. Cruncher had stopped obsessing about the leg as soon as we'd sealed up. Or maybe he'd simply been overridden; I thought I saw facets of Susan in the twitching of those thick gloved fingers.
Szpindel's breath echoed second-hand over the link. "If Bates is dead, then so are we."
"Maybe not. We wait out the spike, we get out of here. Besides," I added, "she wasn't dead. She only said she was."
"Fuck," Szpindel reached out and pressed his gloved palm against the skin of the tent. He felt back and forth along the fabric. "Someone did put out a transducer—"
"Eight o'clock," I said. "About a meter." Szpindel's hand came to rest across the wall from the pod. My HUD flooded with second-hand numbers, vibrated down his arm and relayed to our suits.
Still five Tesla out there. Falling, though. The tent expanded around us as if breathing, shrank back in the next second as some transient low-pressure front moved past.
"When did your sight come back?" I wondered.
"Soon as we came inside."
"Sooner. You saw the battery."
"Fumbled it." He grunted. "Not that I'm much less of a spaz even when I'm not blind, eh? Bates! You out there?"
"You reached for it. You almost caught it. That wasn't blind chance."
"Not blind chance. Blindsight. Amanda? Respond, please."
"Blindsight?"
"Nothing wrong with the receptors," he said distractedly. "Brain processes the image but it can't access it. Brain stem takes over."
"Your brainstem can see but you can't?"
"Something like that. Shut up and let me—Amanda, can you hear me?"
"…No…"
Not from anyone in the tent, that voice. It had shivered down Szpindel's arm, barely audible, with the rest of the data. From outside.
"Major Mandy!" Szpindel exclaimed. "You're alive!"
"….no…" A whisper like white noise.
"Well you're talking to us, so you sure as shit ain't dead."
"No…"
Szpindel and I exchanged looks. "What's the problem, Major?"
Silence. The Gang bumped gently against the wall behind us, all facets opaque.
"Major Bates? Can you hear me?"
"No." It was a dead voice— sedated, trapped in a fishbowl, transmitted through limbs and lead at a three-digit baud rate. But it was definitely Bates' voice.
"Major, you've got to get in here," Szpindel said. "Can you come inside?"
"…No…".
"Are you injured? Are you pinned by something?"
"..N—no."
Maybe not her voice, after all. Maybe just her vocal cords.
"Look. Amanda, it's dangerous. It's too damn hot out there, do you understand? You—"
"I'm not out here," said the voice.
"Where are you?"
"…nowhere."
I looked at Szpindel. Szpindel looked at me. Neither of us spoke.
James did. At long last, and softly: "And what are you, Amanda?"
No answer.
"Are you Rorschach?"
Here in the belly of the beast, it was so easy to believe.
"No…"
"Then what?"
"N…nothing." The voice was flat and mechanical. "I'm nothing."
"You're saying you don't exist?" Szpindel said slowly.
"Yes."
The tent breathed around us.
"Then how can you speak?" Susan asked the voice. "If you don't exist, what are we talking to?"
"Something…else." A sigh. A breath of static. "Not me."
"Shit," Szpindel muttered. His surfaces brightened with resolve and sudden insight. He pulled his hand from the wall; my HUD thinned instantly. "Her brain's frying. We gotta get her inside." He reached for the release.
I put out my own hand. "The spike—"
"Crested already, commissar. We're past the worst of it."
"Are you saying it's safe?"
"It's lethal. It's always lethal, and she's out there in it, and she could do some serious damage to herself in her pres—"
Something bumped the tent from the outside. Something grabbed the outer catch and pulled.
Our shelter opened like an eye. Amanda Bates looked in at us through the exposed membrane. "I'm reading three point eight," she said. "That's tolerable, right?"
Nobody moved.
"Come on, people. Break's over."
"Ama—" Szpindel stared. "Are you okay?"
"In here? Not likely. But we've got a job to do."
"Do you—exist?" I asked.
"What kind of stupid question is that? Szpindel, how's this field strength? Can we work in it?"
"Uh…" He swallowed audibly. "Maybe we should abort, Major. That spike was—"
"According to my readings, the spike is pretty much over. And we've got less than two hours to finish setting up, run our ground truths, and get out of here. Can we do that without hallucinating?"
"I don't think we'll shake the heebie-jeebies," Szpindel admitted. "But we shouldn't have to worry about — extreme effects— until another spike hits."
"Good."
"Which could be any time."
"We weren't hallucinating," James said quietly.
"We can discuss it later," Bates said. "Now—"
"There was a pattern there," James insisted. "In the fields. In my head. Rorschach was talking. Maybe not to us, but it was talking."
"Good." Bates pushed herself back to let us pass. "Maybe now we can finally learn to talk back."
"Maybe we can learn to listen," James said.
We fled like frightened children with brave faces. We left a base camp behind: Jack, still miraculously functional in its vestibule; a tunnel into the haunted mansion; forlorn magnetometers left to die in the faint hope they might not. Crude pyronometers and thermographs, antique radiation-proof devices that measured the world through the flex and stretch of metal tabs and etched their findings on rolls of plastic. Glow-globes and diving bells and guide ropes strung one to another. We left it all behind, and promised to return in thirty-six hours if we lived so long.
Inside each of us, infinitesimal lacerations were turning our cells to mush. Plasma membranes sprang countless leaks. Overwhelmed repair enzymes clung desperately to shredded genes and barely delayed the inevitable. Anxious to avoid the rush, patches of my intestinal lining began flaking away before the rest of the body had a chance to die.
By the time we docked with Theseus both Michelle and I were feeling nauseous. (The rest of the Gang, oddly, was not; I had no idea how that was possible.) The others would be presenting the same symptoms within minutes. Without intervention we would all be vomiting our guts out for the following two days. Then the body would pretend to recover; for perhaps a week we would feel no pain and have no future. We would walk and talk and move like any living thing, and perhaps convince ourselves that we were immortal after all.
Then we would collapse into ourselves, rotted from the inside out. We would bleed from our eyes and mouths and assholes, and if any God was merciful we would die before splitting open like rotten fruit.