“The Fireflies only imply an initial curiosity,” Bates said. “Who knows if they liked what they saw?”
“What if this whole diversion theory’s just so much shit?”
I turned, briefly startled. James’s mouth had made the words; Sascha had spoken them.
“You wanna stay hidden, you don’t light up the sky with fucking fireworks,” she continued. “You don’t need a diversion if nobody’s looking for you, and nobody’s looking for you if you lie low. If they were so curious, they could’ve just snuck in a spycam.”
“Risks detection,” the vampire said mildly.
“Hate to break it, Jukka, but the Fireflies didn’t exactly slip under the rad—”
Sarasti opened his mouth, closed it again. Filed teeth, briefly visible, clicked audibly behind his face. Tabletop graphics reflected off his visor, a band of writhing polychrome distortions where eyes should be.
Sascha shut up.
Sarasti continued. “They trade stealth for speed. By the time you react, they already have what they want.” He spoke quietly, patiently, a well-fed predator explaining the rules of the game to prey that really should know better: the longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping.
But Sascha had already fled. Her surfaces had scattered like a flock of panicked starlings, and the next time Susan James’ mouth opened, it was Susan James who spoke through it. “Sascha’s aware of the current paradigm, Jukka. She’s simply worried that it might be wrong.”
“Got another we could trade it on?” Szpindel wondered. “More options? Longer warranty?”
“I don’t know.” James sighed. “I guess not. It’s just—odd, that they’d want to actively mislead us. I’d hoped they were merely—well.” She spread her hands. “Probably no big deal. I’m sure they’ll still be willing to talk, if we handle the introductions right. We just need to be a little more cautious, perhaps…”
Sarasti unfolded himself from his chair and loomed over us. “We go in. What we know weighs against further delay.”
Bates frowned and pitched her ball back into orbit. “Sir, all we actually know is that an Oasa emitter’s in our path. We don’t even know if there’s anyone there.”
“There is,” Sarasti said. “They expect us.”
Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Someone’s joints cracked in the silence.
“Er…” Szpindel began.
Without looking, Sarasti flicked out his arm and snatched Bates’ returning ball from the air. “Ladar pings Theseus four hours forty-eight minutes ago. We respond with an identical signal. Nothing. Probe launches half-hour before we wake up. We don’t go in blind, but we don’t wait. They see us already. Longer we wait, greater risk of countermeasures.”
I looked at the dark featureless placeholder on the table: bigger than Jupiter and we couldn’t even see it yet. Something in the shadow of that mass had just reached out with casual, unimaginable precision and tapped us on the nose with a laser beam.
This was not going to be an even match.
Szpindel spoke for all of us: “You knew that all along? You’re telling us now?”
This time Sarasti’s smile was wide and toothy. It was as though a gash had opened in the lower half of his face.
Maybe it was a predator thing. He just couldn’t help playing with his food.
It wasn’t so much the way they looked. The elongate limbs, the pale skin, the canines and the extended mandible—noticeable, yes, even alien, but not disturbing, not frightening. Not even the eyes, really. The eyes of dogs and cats shine in the darkness; we don’t shiver at the sight.
Not the way they looked. The way they moved.
Something in the reflexes, maybe. The way they held their limbs: like mantis limbs, long jointed things you just knew could reach out and snatch you from right across the room, any time they felt like it. When Sarasti looked at me—really looked, naked-eyed, unfiltered by the visor—a half-million years just melted away. The fact that he was extinct meant nothing. The fact that we’d come so far, grown strong enough to resurrect our own nightmares to serve us…meant nothing. The genes aren’t fooled. They know what to fear.
Of course, you had to experience it in person. Robert Paglini knew the theory of vampires down the molecules, but even with all those technical specs in his head he never really got it.
He called me, before we left. I hadn’t been expecting it; ever since the roster had been announced our watches had blocked calls from anyone not explicitly contact-listed. I’d forgotten that Pag had been. We hadn’t spoken since Chelsea. I’d given up on ever hearing from him again.
But there he was. “Pod-man.” He smiled, a tentative overture.
“It’s good to see you,” I said, because that’s what people said in similar situations.
“Yeah, well I saw your name in the noose. You’ve made it big, for a baseline.”
“Not so big.”
“Crap. You’re the vanguard of the Human Race. You’re our first, last, and only hope against the unknown. Man, you showed them.” He held his fist up and shook it, vicariously triumphant.
Showing them had become a cornerstone of Robert Paglino’s life. He’d really made it work for him, too, overcome the handicap of a natural birth with retrofits and enhancements and sheer bloody-mindedness. In a world in which Humanity had become redundant in unprecedented numbers, we’d both retained the status of another age: working professional.
“So you’re taking orders from a vamp,” he said now. “Talk about fighting fire with fire.”
“I guess it’s practice. Until we run up against the real thing.”
He laughed. I couldn’t imagine why. But I smiled back anyway.
It was good to see him.
“So, what are they like?” Pag asked.
“Vampires? I don’t know. Just met my first one yesterday.”
“And?”
“Hard to read. Didn’t even seem to be aware of his surroundings sometimes, he seemed to be… off in his own little world.”
“He’s aware all right. Those things are so fast it’s scary. You know they can hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their heads at the same time?”
The term rang a bell. I subtitled, and saw the thumbnail of a familiar wireframe box:
Now I remembered: classic ambiguous illusion. Sometimes the shaded panel seemed to be in front, sometimes behind. The perspective flipped back and forth as you watched.
“You or I, we can only see it one way or the other,” Pag was saying. “Vamps see it both ways at once. Do you have any idea what kind of an edge that gives ’em?”
“Not enough of one.”
“Touché. But hey, not their fault neutral traits get fixed in small populations.”
“I don’t know if I’d call the Crucifix glitch neutral.”
“It was at first. How many intersecting right angles do you see in nature?” He waved one dismissive hand. “Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is they can do something that’s neurologically impossible for us Humans. They can hold simultaneous multiple worldviews, Pod-man. They just see things we have to work out step-by-step, they don’t have to think about it. You know, there isn’t a single baseline human who could just tell you, just off the top of their heads, every prime number between one and a billion? In the old days, only a few autistics could do shit like that.”