But for the time being they were just giant mechanical fetuses, half-extruded, their planes and angles a high-contrast jigsaw of light and shadow in the harsh white glow of the hold's floodlamps.
I turned from the port. "That's got to take our substrate stockpiles down a bit."
"Shielding the carapace was worse." Bates monitored construction through a dedicated flatscreen built right into the Fab bulkhead. Practicing, perhaps; we'd be losing our inlays as soon as the orbit changed. "We're tapping out, though. Might have to grab one of the local rocks before long."
"Huh." I looked back into the hold. "You think they're necessary?"
"Doesn't matter what I think. You're a bright guy, Siri. Why can't you figure that out?"
"It matters to me. That means it matters to Earth."
Which might mean something,if Earth was calling the shots. Some subtext was legible no matter how deep in the system you were.
I tacked to port: "How about Sarasti and the Captain, then? Any thoughts?"
"You're usually a bit more subtle."
That much was true. "It's just, you know Susan was the one that caught Stretch and Clench tapping back and forth, right?"
Bates winced at the names. "So?"
"Well, some might think it odd that Theseus wouldn't have seen it first. Since quantum computers are supposed to be so proficient at pattern-matching."
"Sarasti took the quantum modules offline. The onboard's been running in classical mode since before we even made orbit."
"Why?"
"Noisy environment. Too much risk of decoherence. Quantum computers are finicky things."
"Surely the onboard's shielded. Theseus is shielded."
Bates nodded. "As much as feasible. But perfect shielding is perfect blindness, and this is not the kind of neighborhood where you want to keep your eyes closed."
Actually, it was. But I took her point.
I took her other point, too, the one she didn't speak aloud: And you missed it. Something sitting right there in ConSensus for anyone to see. Top-of-the-line synthesist like you.
"Sarasti knows what he's doing, I guess," I admitted, endlessly aware that he might be listening. "He hasn't been wrong yet, as far as we know."
"As far as we can know," Bates said.
"If you could second-guess a vampire, you wouldn't need a vampire," I remembered.
She smiled faintly. "Isaac was a good man. You can't always believe the PR, though."
"You don't buy it?" I asked, but she was already thinking she'd said too much. I threw out a hook baited with just the right mix of skepticism and deference: "Sarasti did know where those scramblers would be. Nailed it almost the meter, out of that whole maze."
"I suppose that might have taken some kind of superhuman logic," she admitted, thinking I was so fucking dumb she couldn't believe it.
"What?" I said.
Bates shrugged. "Or maybe he just realized that since Rorschach was growing its own crew, we'd run into more every time we went in. No matter where we landed."
ConSensus bleeped into my silence. "Orbital maneuvers starting in five," Sarasti announced. "Inlays and wireless prosthetics offline in ninety. That's all."
Bates shut down the display. "I'm going to ride this out in the bridge. Illusion of control and all that. You?"
"My tent, I think."
She nodded, and braced to jump, and hesitated.
"By the way," she told me, "yes."
"Sorry?"
"You asked if I thought the emplacements were necessary. Right now I think we need all the protection we can get."
"So you think that Rorschach might—"
"Hey, it already killed me once.»
She wasn't talking about radiation.
I nodded carefully. "That must have been…"
"Like nothing at all. You couldn't possibly imagine." Bates took a breath and let it out.
"Maybe you don't have to," she added, and sailed away up the spine.
Cunningham and the Gang in BioMed, thirty degrees of arc between them. Each poked their captives in their own way. Susan James stabbed indifferently at a keypad painted across her desktop. Windows to either side looked in on Stretch and Clench.
Cookie-cutter shapes scrolled across the desk as James typed: circles, triskelions, a quartet of parallel lines. Some of them pulsed like abstract little hearts. In his distant pen, Stretch reached out one fraying tentacle and tapped something in turn.
"Any progress?"
She sighed and shook her head. "I've given up trying to understand their language. I'm settling for a pidgin." She tapped an icon. Clench vanished from his window; a hieroglyphic flowchart sprang up in his place. Half the symbols wriggled or pulsed, endlessly repetitive, a riot of dancing doodles. Others just sat there.
"Iconic base." James waved vaguely at the display. "Subject-Verb phrases render as animated versions of noun icons. They're radially symmetrical, so I array modifiers in a circular pattern around the central subject. Maybe that comes naturally to them."
A new circle of glyphs appeared beneath James's—Stretch's reply, presumably. But something in the system didn't like what it saw. Icons flared in a separate window: a luminous counter flashed 500 Watts, and held steady. On the screen, Stretch writhed. It reached out with squirming backbone-arms and stabbed repeatedly at its touchpad.
James looked away.
New glyphs appeared. 500 Watts retreated to zero. Stretch returned to its holding pattern; the spikes and jags of its telemetry smoothed.
James let out her breath. "What happened?" I asked.
"Wrong answer." She tapped into Stretch's feed, showed me the display that had tripped it up. A pyramid, a star, simplified representations of a scrambler and of Rorschach rotated on the board.
"It was stupid, it was just a—a warm-up exercise, really. I asked it to name the objects in the window." She laughed softly and without humor. "That's the thing about functional languages, you know. If you can't point at it, you can't talk about it."
"And what did it say?"
She pointed at Stretch's first spiraclass="underline" "Polyhedron star Rorschach are present."
"It missed the scrambler."
"Got it right the second time. Still, stupid mistake for something that can think rings around a vampire, isn't it?" Susan swallowed. "I guess even scramblers slip up when they're dying."
I didn't know what to say. Behind me, barely audible, Cunningham muttered some two-stroke mantra to himself in an endless loop.
"Jukka says—" Susan stopped, began again: "You know that blindsight we get sometimes, in Rorschach?"
I nodded, and wondered what Jukka had said.
"Apparently the same thing can happen to the other senses too," she told me. "You can have blindtouch, and blindsmell, and blindhearing…"
"That would be deafness."
She shook her head. "But it isn't really, is it? Any more than blindsight is really blindness. Something in your head is still taking it all in. Something in the brain is still seeing, and hearing, even if you're not—aware of it. Unless someone forces you to guess, or there's some threat. You just get a really strong feeling you should move out of the way, and five seconds later a bus drives over the spot you were standing. You knew it was coming, somehow. You just don't know how you knew."