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My genes done gone and tricked my brain
By making fucking feel so great
That's how the little creeps attain
Their plan to fuckin' replicate
But brain's got tricks itself, you see
To get the bang but not the bite
I got this here vasectomy
My genes can fuck themselves tonight.

— The r-selectors, Trunclade

First-person sex—real sex, as Chelsea insisted on calling it—was an acquired taste: jagged breathing, the raw slap and stink of sweaty skin full of pores and blemishes, a whole other person with a whole other set of demands and dislikes. There was definite animal appeal, no doubt about it. This was, after all, how we'd done it for millions of years. But this, this third-world carnality had always carried an element of struggle, of asynchronous patterns in conflict. There was no convergence here. There was only the rhythm of bodies in collision, a struggle for dominance, each trying to force the other into synch.

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Chelsea regarded it as love in its purest form. I came to think of it as hand-to-hand combat. Before, whether fucking creations from my own menu or slip-on skins from someone else's, I had always selected the contrast and the rez, the texture and the attitude. The bodily functions, the resistance of competing desires, the endless foreplay that wears your tongue to the root and leaves your face sticky and glistening—just kinks, today. Options for the masochistic.

But there were no options with Chelsea. With her, everything came standard.

I indulged her. I guess I was no more patient with her perversions than she was with my ineptitude at them. Other things made it worth the effort. Chelsea would argue about anything under the sun, wry and insightful and curious as a cat. She would pounce without warning. Retired to the redundant majority, she still took such simple joy in the very act of being alive. She was impulsive and impetuous. She cared about people. Pag. Me. She wanted to know me. She wanted in.

That was proving to be a problem.

"We could try it again," she said once in an aftermath of sweat and pheromones. "And you won't even remember what you were so upset about. You won't even remember you were upset, if you don't want to."

I smiled and looked away; suddenly the planes of her face were coarse and unappealing. "How many times is that now? Eight? Nine?"

"I just want you to be happy, Cyg. True happiness is one hell of a gift, and I can give it to you if you'll let me."

"You don't want me happy," I said pleasantly. "You want me customized."

She mmm'd into the hollow of my throat for a moment. Then: "What?"

"You just want to change me into something more, more accommodating."

Chelsea lifted her head. "Look at me."

I turned my head. She'd shut down the chromatophores in her cheek; the tattoo, transplanted, fluttered now on her shoulder.

"Look at my eyes," Chelsea said.

I looked at the imperfect skin around them, at the capillaries wriggling across the whites. I felt a distant bemusement that such flawed, decaying organs were still able to hypnotize me on occasion.

"Now," Chelsea said. "What do you mean by that?"

I shrugged. "You keep pretending this is a partnership. We both know it's a competition."

"A competition."

"You're trying to manipulate me into playing by your rules."

"What rules?"

"The way you want the relationship run. I don't blame you, Chelse, not in the least. We've been trying to manipulate each other for as long as—hell, it's not even Human nature. It's mammalian."

"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.

The sled fired its brakes. I snapped back against the webbing of my harness, bumped against the rebounding armored body next to me. Sascha. Only Sascha, I remembered. Cunningham had sedated the rest of them, left this one core lonely and alone in the group body. I hadn't even realized that that was possible with multiple personalities. She stared back at me from behind her faceplate. None of her surfaces showed through the suit. I could see nothing in her eyes.

That was happening so often, these days.

Cunningham was not with us. Nobody had asked why, when Sarasti assigned the berths. The biologist was first among equals now, a backup restored with no other behind him. The second-least replaceable of our irreplaceable crew.

It made me a better bargain. The odds I bought had increased to one in three.

A silent bump shuddered up the frame. I looked forward again, past Bates on the front pallet, past the anchored drones that flanked her two to each side. The sled had launched its assault, a prefab inflatable vestibule mounted on an explosive injection assembly that would punch through Rorschach's skin like a virus penetrating a host cell. The spindle-legged contraption dwindled and disappeared from my sight. Moments later a pinpoint sodium sun flared and died against the ebony landscape ahead—antimatter charge, so small you could almost count the atoms, shot directly into the hull. A lot rougher than the tentative foreplay of our first date.

We landed, hard, while the vestibule was still inflating. The grunts were off the sled an instant before contact, spitting tiny puffs of gas from their nozzles, arranging themselves around us in a protective rosette. Bates was up next, leaping free of her restraints and sailing directly towards the swelling hab. Sascha and I unloaded the fiberop hub—a clamshell drum half a meter thick and three times as wide—lugging it between us while one of the grunts slipped through the vestibule's membranous airlock.

"Let's move, people." Bates was hanging off one of the inflatable's handholds. "Thirty minutes to—"

She fell silent. I didn't have to ask why: the advance grunt had positioned itself over the newly-blasted entrance and sent back its first postcard.

Light from below.

***

You'd think that would have made it easier. Our kind has always feared the dark; for millions of years we huddled in caves and burrows while unseen things snuffled and growled—or just waited, silent and undetectable—in the night beyond. You'd think that any light, no matter how meager, might strip away some of the shadows, leave fewer holes for the mind to fill with worst imaginings.

You'd think.

We followed the grunt down into a dim soupy glow like blood-curdled milk. At first it seemed as though the atmosphere itself was alight, a luminous fog that obscured anything more than ten meters distant. An illusion, as it turned out; the tunnel we emerged into was about three meters wide and lit by rows of raised glowing dashes—the size and approximate shape of dismembered human fingers—wound in a loose triple helix around the walls. We'd recorded similar ridges at the first site, although the breaks had not been so pronounced and the ridges had been anything but luminous.

"Stronger in the near-infrared," Bates reported, flashing the spectrum to our HUDs. The air would have been transparent to pit vipers. It was transparent to sonar: the lead grunt sprayed the fog with click trains and discovered that the tunnel widened into some kind of chamber seventeen meters further along. Squinting in that direction I could just make out subterranean outlines through the mist. I could just make out jawed things, pulling back out of sight.

"Let's go," Bates said.

We plugged in the grunts, left one guarding the way out. Each of us took another as a guardian angel on point. The machines spoke to our HUDs via laser link; they spoke to each other along stiffened lengths of shielded fiberop that unspooled from the hub trailing in our wake. It was the best available compromise in an environment without any optima. Our tethered bodyguards would keep us all in touch during lone excursions around corners or down dead ends.

Yeah. Lone excursions. Forced to either split the group or cover less ground, we were to split the group. We were speed-cartographers panning for gold. Everything we did here was an act of faith: faith that the unifying principles of Rorschach's internal architecture could be derived from the raw dimensions we'd grab on the run. Faith that Rorschach's internal architecture even had unifying principles. Earlier generations had worshipped malign and capricious spirits. Ours put its faith in an ordered universe. Here in the Devil's Baklava, it was easy to wonder if our ancestors hadn't been closer to the mark.

We moved along the tunnel. Our destination resolved to merely human eyes: not so much chamber as nexus, a knot of space formed by the convergence of a dozen tunnels angling in from different orientations. Ragged meshes of quicksilver dots gleamed along several glistening surfaces; shiny protrusions poked through the substrate like a scattershot blast of ball-bearings pressed into wet clay.

I looked at Bates and Sascha. "Control panel?"

Bates shrugged. Her drones panned the throats around us, spraying sonar down each. My HUD sketched a patchy three-d model from the echoes: swathes of paint thrown against invisible walls. We were dots near the center of a ganglion, a tiny swarm of parasites infesting some great hollowed host. Each tunnel curved away in a gradual spiral, each along a different orientation. Sonar could peep around those bends a few meters further than we could. Neither eyes nor ultrasonics saw anything to distinguish one choice from another.

Bates pointed down one of the passageways—"Keeton—" and another— "Sascha," before turning to coast off down her own unbeaten path.

I looked uneasily down mine. "Any particular—"

"Twenty-five minutes," she said.

I turned and jetted slowly down my assigned passageway. The passage curved clockwise, a long unremarkable spiral; after twenty meters that curvature would have blocked any view of its entrance even if the foggy atmosphere hadn't. My drone kept point across the tunnel, its sonar clicking like the chattering of a thousand tiny teeth, its tether unspooling back to the distant drum in the nexus.

It was a comfort, that leash. It was short. The grunts could stray ninety meters and no further, and we were under strict orders to stay under their wings at all times. This dim infested burrow might lead all the way to hell, but I would not be expected to follow it nearly so far. My cowardice had official sanction.

Fifty meters to go. Fifty meters and I could turn and run with my tail between my legs. In the meantime all I had to do was grit my teeth, and focus, and record: everything you see, Sarasti had said. As much as possible of what you can't. And hope that this new reduced time limit would expire before Rorschach spiked us into gibbering dementia.

The walls around me twitched and shivered like the flesh of something just-killed. Something darted in and out of sight with a faint cackle of laughter.

Focus. Record. If the grunt doesn't see it, it's not real.

Sixty-five meters in, one of the ghosts got inside my helmet.

I tried to ignore it. I tried to look away. But this phantom wasn't flickering at the edge of vision; it hovered near the center of my faceplate, floating like a spot of swirling dizziness between me and the HUD. I gritted my teeth and tried to look past, stared into the dim bloody haze of the middle distance, watched the jerky unfolding travelogues in the little windows labeled Bates and James. Nothing out there. But in here, floating before my eyes, Rorschach's latest headfuck smeared a fuzzy thumbprint right in front of the sonar feed.

"New symptom," I called in. "Nonperipheral hallucination, stable, pretty formless though. No spiking that I can—"

The inset marked Bates skidded hard about. "Keet—"

Window and voice cut out together.

Not just Bates' window, either. Sascha's inset and the drone's-eye sonarscape flickered and died at the same moment, stripped my HUD bare except for in-suit feeds and a little red readout flashing Link Down. I spun but the grunt was still there, three meters off my right shoulder. Its optical port was clearly visible, a ruby thumbnail set into the plastron.

Its gun ports were visible too. Pointing at me.

I froze. The drone shivered in some local electromagnetic knot as if terrified. Of me, or—

Of something behind me…

I started to turn. My helmet filled with sudden static, and with what sounded—faintly—like a voice:

"—ucking move, Kee—not—"

"Bates? Bates?" Another icon had bloomed in place of Link Down. The grunt was using radio for some reason—and though almost close enough to touch, I could barely make out the signal.

A hash of Batespeak: "—to your—right in front of—" and Sascha as well, a bit more clearly: "—an't he see it?..."

"See what? Sascha! Someone tell me what—see what?"

"—read? Keeton, do you read?"

Somehow Bates had boosted the signal; static roared like an ocean, but I could hear the words behind it. "Yes! What—"

"Keep absolutely still, do you understand? Absolutely still. Acknowledge."

"Acknowledged." The drone kept me in its shaky sights, dark stereocam irises spasming wide, stuttering to pinpoints. "Wha—"

"There's something in front of you, Keeton. Directly between you and the grunt. Can't you see it?"

"N-no. My HUD's down—"

Sascha broke in: "How can he not see it it's right th—"

Bates barked over her: "It's man-sized, radially symmetrical, eight, nine arms. Like tentacles, but—segmented. Spiky."

"I don't see anything," I said. But I did: I saw something reaching for me, in my pod back aboard Theseus. I saw something curled up motionless in the ship's spine, watching as we laid our best plans.

I saw Michelle the synesthesiac, curled into a fetal ball: You can't see it...it's in—visible...

"What's it doing?" I called. Why can't I see it? Why can't I see it?

"Just—floating there. Kind of waving. Oh, sh—Keet—"

The grunt skidded sideways, as if slapped by a giant hand. It bounced off the wall and suddenly the laser link was back, filling the HUD with intelligence: first-person perspectives of Bates and Sascha racing along alien tunnels, a grunt's-eye view of a space suit with Keeton stenciled across its breastplate and there, right beside it, some thing like a rippling starfish with too many arms—

The Gang barreled around the curve and now I almost could see something with my own eyes, flickering like heat-lightning off to one side. It was large, and it was moving, but somehow my eyes just slid off every time they tried to get a fix. It's not real, I thought, giddy with hysterical relief, it's just another hallucination but then Bates sailed into view and it was right there, no flickering, no uncertainty, nothing but a collapsed probability wave and solid, undeniable mass. Exposed, it grabbed the nearest wall and scrambled over our heads, segmented arms flailing like whips. A sudden crackling buzz in the back of my head and it was drifting free again, charred and smoking.

A stuttering click. The whine of machinery gearing down. Three grunts hovered in formation in the middle of the passageway. One faced the alien. I glimpsed the tip of some lethal proboscis sliding back into its sheath. Bates shut the grunt down before it had finished closing its mouth.

Optical links and three sets of lungs filled my helmet with a roar of heavy breathing.

The offlined grunt drifted in the murky air. The alien carcass bumped gently off the wall, twitching: a hydra of human backbones, scorched and fleshless. It didn't look much like my on-board visions after all.

For some reason I couldn't put my finger on, I found that almost reassuring.

The two active grunts panned the fog until Bates gave them new orders; then one turned to secure the carcass, the other to steady its fallen comrade. Bates grabbed the dead grunt and unplugged its tether. "Fall back. Slowly. I'm right behind you."

I tweaked my jets. Sascha hesitated. Coils of shielded cable floated about us like umbilical cords.

"Now," Bates said, plugging a feed from her own suit directly into the offlined grunt.

Sascha started after me. Bates took up the rear. I watched my HUD; a swarm of multiarmed monsters would appear there any moment.

They didn't. But the blackened thing against the belly of Bates' machine was real enough. Not a hallucination. Not even some understandable artefact of fear and synesthesia. Rorschach was inhabited. Its inhabitants were invisible.

Sometimes. Sort of.

And, oh yeah. We'd just killed one.

***

Bates threw the deactivated grunt into the sky as soon as we'd made vacuum. Its comrades used it for target practice while we strapped in, firing and firing until there was nothing left but cooling vapor. Rorschach spun even that faint plasma into filigree before it faded.

Halfway back to Theseus, Sascha turned to the Major: "You—"

"No."

"But— they do shit on their own, right? Autonomous."

"Not when they're slaved."

"Malfunction? Spike?"

Bates didn't answer.

She called ahead. By the time we made it back Cunningham had grown another little tumor on Theseus' spine, a remote surgery packed with teleops and sensors. One of the surviving grunts grabbed the carcass and jumped ship as soon as we passed beneath the carapace, completing the delivery as we docked.

We were born again to the fruits of a preliminary necropsy. The holographic ghost of the dissected alien rose from ConSensus like some flayed and horrific feast. Its splayed arms looked like human spinal columns. We sat around the table and waited for someone else to take the first bite.

"Did you have to shoot it with microwaves?" Cunningham sniped, tapping the table. "You completely cooked the animal. Every cell was blown out from the inside."

Bates shook her head. "There was a malfunction."

He gave her a sour look. "A malfunction that just happens to involve precise targeting of a moving object. It doesn't sound random to me."

Bates looked back evenly. "Something flipped autonomous targeting from off to on. A coin toss. Random."

"Random is—"

"Give it a rest, Cunningham. I don't need this shit from you right now."

His eyes rolled in that smooth dead face, focused suddenly on something overhead. I followed his gaze: Sarasti stared down at us like an owl panning for meadow voles, drifting slowly in the Coriolis breeze.

No visor this time, either. I knew he hadn't lost it.

He fixed Cunningham. "Your findings."

Cunningham swallowed. Bits and pieces of alien anatomy flickered with color-coded highlights as he tapped his fingers. "Right, then. I'm afraid I can't give you much at the cellular level. There's not much left inside the membranes. Not many membranes left, for that matter. In terms of gross morphology, the specimen's dorsoventrally compressed and radially symmetrical, as you can see. Calcareous exoskeleton, keratinised plastic cuticle. Nothing special."

Bates looked skeptical. "Plastic skin is 'nothing special'?"

"Given the environment I was half-expecting a Sanduloviciu plasma. Plastic's simply refined petroleum. Organocarbon. This thing is carbon-based. It's even protein based, although its proteins are a great deal tougher than ours. Numerous sulphur cross-bonds for lateral bracing, as far as I could tell from what your grunts didn't denature." Cunningham's eyes looked past us all; his consciousness was obviously far aft, haunting remote sensors. "The thing's tissues are saturated with magnetite. On earth you find that material in dolphin brains, migratory birds, even some bacteria—anything that navigates or orients using magnetic fields. Moving up to macrostructures we've got a pneumatic internal skeleton, which as far as I can tell doubles as musculature. Contractile tissue squeezes gas through a system of bladders that stiffen or relax each segment in the arms."

The light came back into Cunningham's eyes long enough to focus on his cigarette. He brought it to his mouth, dragged deeply, set it down again. "Note the invaginations around the base of each arm." Flaccid balloons glowed orange on the virtual carcass. "Cloacae, you could call them. Everything opens into them: they eat, breathe, and defecate through the same little compartment. No other major orifices."

The Gang made a face that said Sascha, grossed out. "Don't things get—clogged up? Seems inefficient."

"If one gets plugged, there's eight other doors into the same system. You'll wish you were so inefficient the next time you choke on a chicken bone."

"What does it eat?" Bates asked.

"I couldn't say. I found gizzard-like contractiles around the cloacae, which implies they chew on something, or did at some point in their history. Other than that..." He spread his hands; the cigarette left faint streamers in its wake. "Inflate those contractiles enough and you create an airtight seal, by the way. In conjunction with the cuticle, that would allow this organism to survive briefly in vacuum. And we already know it can handle the ambient radiation, although don't ask me how. Whatever it uses for genes must be a great deal tougher than ours."

"So it can survive in space," Bates mused.

"In the sense that a dolphin survives underwater. Limited time only."

"How long?"

"I'm not certain."

"Central nervous system," Sarasti said.

Bates and the Gang grew suddenly, subtly still. James's affect seeped out over her body, supplanting Sascha's.

Smoke curled from Cunningham's mouth and nose. "There's nothing central about it, as it transpires. No cephalisation, not even clustered sense organs. The body's covered with something like eyespots, or chromatophores, or both. There are setae everywhere. And as far as I can tell—if all those little cooked filaments I've been able to put back together after your malfunction really are nerves and not something completely different—every one of those structures is under independent control."

Bates sat up straight. "Seriously?"

He nodded. "It would be akin to independently controlling the movement of each individual hair on your head, although this creature is covered with little hairs from tip to tip. The same thing applies to the eyes. Hundreds of thousands of eyes, all over the cuticle. Each one is barely more than a pinhole camera, but each is capable of independent focus and I'm guessing all the different inputs integrate somewhere up the line. The entire body acts like a single diffuse retina. In theory that gives it enormous visual acuity."

"A distributed telescope array," Bates murmured.

"A chromatophore underlies each eye—the pigment's some kind of cryptochrome so it's probably involved in vision, but it can also diffuse or contract through the local tissue. That implies dynamic pigment patterns, like a squid or a chameleon."

"Background pattern-matching?" Bates asked. "Would that explain why Siri couldn't see it?"

Cunningham opened a new window and played grainy looped imagery of Siri Keeton and his unseen dance partner. The creature I hadn't noticed was ominously solid to the cameras: a floating discoid twice as wide as my own torso, arms extending from its edges like thick knotted ropes. Patterns rippled across its surface in waves; sunlight and shadow playing on a shallow seabed.

"As you can see, the background doesn't match the pattern," Cunningham said. "It's not even close."

"Can you explain Siri's blindness to it?" Sarasti said.

"I can't," Cunningham admitted. "It's beyond ordinary crypsis. But Rorschach makes you see all sorts of things that aren't there. Not seeing something that is there might come down to essentially the same thing."

"Another hallucination?" I asked.

Another shrug while Cunningham sucked smoke. "There are many ways to fool the human visual system. It's interesting that the illusion failed when multiple witnesses were present, but if you want a definitive mechanism you'll have to give me more to work with than that." He stabbed his cigarette hand at the crisped remains.

"But—" James took a breath, bracing herself— "We're talking about something... sophisticated, at least. Something very complex. A great deal of processing power."

Cunningham nodded again. "I'd estimate nervous tissue accounts for about thirty percent of body mass."

"So it's intelligent." Her voice was almost a whisper.

"Not remotely."

"But—thirty percent—"

"Thirty percent motor and sensory wiring." Another drag. "Much like an octopus; an enormous number of neurons, but half of them get used up running the suckers."

"My understanding is that octopi are quite intelligent," James said.

"By molluscan standards, certainly. But do you have any idea how much extra cabling you'd need if the photoreceptors in your eye were spread across your entire body? You'd need about three hundred million extension cords to begin with, ranging from half a millimeter to two meters long. Which means all your signals are staggered and out of synch, which means billions of additional logic gates to cohere the input. And that just gets you a single static image, with no filtering, no interpretation, no time-series integration at all." Shiver. Drag. "Now multiply that by all the extra wiring needed to focus all those eyespots on an object, or to send all that information back to individual chromatophores, and then add in the processing power you need to drive those chromatophores one at a time. Thirty percent might do all that, but I strongly doubt you'd have much left over for philosophy and science." He waved his hand in the general direction of the hold. "That—that—"

"Scrambler," James suggested.

Cunningham rolled his tongue around it. "Very well. That scrambler is an absolute miracle of evolutionary engineering. It's also dumb as a stick."

A moment's silence.

"So what is it?" James asked at last. "Somebody's pet?"

"Canary in a coal mine," Bates suggested.

"Perhaps not even that," Cunningham said. "Perhaps no more than a white blood cell with waldoes. Maintenance bot, maybe. Teleoperated, or instinct-driven. But people, we're ignoring far greater questions here. How could an anaerobe even develop complex multicellular anatomy, much less move as fast as this thing did? That level of activity burns a great deal of ATP."

"Maybe they don't use ATP," Bates said as I thumbnailed: adenosine triphosphate. Cellular energy source.

"It was crammed with ATP," Cunningham told her. "You can tell that much even with these remains. The question is, how can it synthesize the stuff fast enough to keep up with demand. Purely anaerobic pathways wouldn't suffice."

Nobody offered any suggestions.

"Anyway," he said, "So endeth the lesson. If you want gory details, check ConSensus." He wiggled the fingers of his free hand: the spectral dissection vanished. "I'll keep working, but if you want any real answers go get me a live one." He butted out his cigarette against the bulkhead and stared defiantly around the drum.

The others hardly reacted; their topologies still sparkled from the revelations of a few minutes before. Perhaps Cunningam's pet peeve was more important to the Big Picture; perhaps, in a reductionist universe, biochemical basics should always take priority over the finer points of ETI and interspecies etiquette. But Bates and the Gang were time-lagged, processing earlier revelations. Not just processing, either: wallowing. They clung to Cunningham's findings like convicted felons who'd just discovered they might be freed on a technicality.

Because the scrambler was dead at our hands, no doubt about it. But it wasn't an alien, not really. It wasn't intelligent. It was just a blood cell with waldoes. It was dumb as a stick.

And property damage is so much easier to live with than murder.

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them

— Einstein

Robert Paglino had set me up with Chelsea in the first place. Maybe he felt responsible when the relationship started jumping the rails. Or maybe Chelsea, Madam Fix-It that she was, had approached him for an intervention. For whatever reason, it was obvious the moment we took our seats at QuBit's that his invitation had not been entirely social.

He went for some neurotrope cocktail on the rocks. I stuck with Rickard's.

"Still old-school," Pag said.

"Still into foreplay," I observed.

"That obvious, huh?" He took a sip. "That'll teach me to try the subtle approach with a professional jargonaut."

"Jargonaut's got nothing to do with it. You wouldn't have fooled a border collie." Truth be told, Pag's topology never really told me much that I didn't already know. I never really had much of an edge in reading him. Maybe we just knew each other too well.

"So," he said, "spill."

"Nothing to spill. She just got to know the real me."

"That is bad."

"What'd she tell you?"

"Me? Nothing at all."

I gave him a look over the top of my glass.

He sighed. "She knows you're cheating on her."

"I'm what?"

"Cheating. With the skin."

"It's based on her!"

"But it isn't her."

"No it isn't. It doesn't fart or fight or break into tears every time you don't want to be dragged off to meet its family. Look, I love the woman dearly, but come on. When was the last time you tried first-person fucking?"

"Seventy-four," he said.

"You're kidding." I'd have guessed never.

"Did some third-world medical missionary work between gigs. They still bump and grind in Texas." Pag swigged his trope. "Actually, I thought it was alright."

"The novelty wears off."

"Evidently."

"And it's not like I'm doing anything unusual here, Pag. She's the one with the kink. And it's not just the sex. She keeps asking about—she keeps wanting to know things."

"Like what?"

"Irrelevant stuff. My life as a kid. My family. Nobody's fucking business."

"She's just taking an interest. Not everyone considers childhood memories off-limits, you know."

"Thanks for the insight." As if people had never taken an interest before. As if Helen hadn't taken an interest when she went through my drawers and filtered my mail and followed me from room to room, asking the drapes and the furniture why I was always so sullen and withdrawn. She'd taken such an interest that she wouldn't let me out the door until I confided in her. At twelve I'd been stupid enough to throw myself on her mercy, It's personal, Mom. I'd just rather not talk about it. Then I'd made my escape into the bathroom when she demanded to know if it was trouble online, trouble at school, was it a girl, was it a—a boy, what was it and why couldn't I just trust my own mother, don't I know I can trust her with anything? I waited out the persistent knocking and the insistent concerned voice through the door and the final, grudging silence that followed. I waited until I was absolutely sure she'd gone away, I waited for five fucking hours before I came out and there she was, arms folded in the hall, eyes brimming with reproach and disappointment. That night she took the lock off the bathroom door because family should never shut each other out. Still taking an interest.

"Siri," Pag said quietly.

I slowed my breathing, tried again: "She doesn't just want to talk about family. She wants to meet them. She keeps trying to drag me to meet hers. I thought I was hooking up with Chelsea, you know, nobody ever told me I'd have to share airspace with..."

"You do it?"

"Once." Reaching, grasping things, feigning acceptance, feigning friendship. "It was great, if you like being ritually pawed by a bunch of play-acting strangers who can't stand the sight of you and don't have the guts to admit it."

Pag shrugged, unsympathetic. "Sounds like typical old-school family. You're a synthesist, man. You deal with way wonkier dynamics than that."

"I deal with other people's information. I don't vomit my own personal life into the public sphere. Whatever hybrids and the constructs I work with, they don't—"

—touch—

"Interrogate," I finished.

"You knew Chelse was an old-fashioned girl right off the top."

"Yeah, when it suits her." I gulped ale. "But she's cutting-edge when she's got a splicer in her hand. Which isn't to say that her strategies couldn't use some work."

"Strategies."

It's not a strategy, for God's sake! Can't you see I'm hurting? I'm on the fucking floor, Siri, I'm curled up in a ball because I'm hurting so much and all you can do is criticize my tactics? What do I have to do, slash my goddamn wrists?

I'd shrugged and turned away. Nature's trick.

"She cries," I said now. "High blood-lactate levels, makes it easy for her. It's just chemistry but she holds it up like it was some kind of IOU."

Pag pursed his lips. "Doesn't mean it's an act."

"Everything's an act. Everything's strategy. You know that." I snorted. "And she's miffed because I base a skin on her?"

"I don't think it's so much the actual skin as the fact that you didn't tell her. You know how she feels about honesty in relationships."

"Sure. She doesn't want any."

He looked at me.

"Give me some credit, Pag. You think I should tell her that sometimes the sight of her makes me shudder?"

The system called Robert Paglino sat quietly, and sipped his drugs, and set the things he was about to say in order. He took a breath.

"I can't believe you could be so fucking dumb," he said.

"Yeah? Enlighten me."

"Of course she wants you to tell her you only have eyes for her, you love her pores and her morning breath, and why stop at one tweak how about ten. But that doesn't mean she wants you to lie, you idiot. She wants all that stuff to be true. And—well, why can't it be?"

"It isn't," I said.

"Jesus, Siri. People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're—we're feeling machines that happen to think." He took a breath, and another hit. "And you already know that, or you couldn't do your job. Or at least—" He grimaced— "the system knows."

"The system."

Me and my protocols, he meant. My Chinese Room.

I took a breath. "It doesn't work with everyone, you know."

"So I've noticed. Can't read systems you're too entangled with, right? Observer effect."

I shrugged.

"Just as well," he said. "I don't think I'd like you all that much in that room of yours."

It came out before I could stop it: "Chelse says she'd prefer a real one."

He raised his eyebrows. "Real what?"

"Chinese Room. She says it would have better comprehension."

The Qube murmured and clattered around us for a few moments.

"I can see why she'd say that," Pag said at last. "But you— you did okay, Pod-man."

"I dunno."

He nodded, emphatic. "You know what they say about the road less traveled? Well, you carved your own road. I don't know why. It's like learning calligraphy using your toes, you know? Or proprioceptive polyneuropathy. It's amazing you can do it at all; it's mindboggling that you actually got good at it."

I squinted at him. "Proprio—"

"There used to be people without any sense of—well, of themselves, physically. They couldn't feel their bodies in space, had no idea how their own limbs were arranged or even if they had limbs. Some of them said they felt pithed. Disembodied. They'd send a motor signal to the hand and just have to take it on faith that it arrived. So they'd use vision to compensate; they couldn't feel where the hand was so they'd look at it while it moved, use sight as a substitute for the normal force-feedback you and I take for granted. They could walk, if they kept their eyes focused on their legs and concentrated on every step. They'd get pretty good at it. But even after years of practice, if you distracted them in mid-step they'd go over like a beanstalk without a counterweight."

"You're saying I'm like that?"

"You use your Chinese room the way they used vision. You've reinvented empathy, almost from scratch, and in some ways—not all obviously, or I wouldn't have to tell you this—but in some ways yours is better than the original. It's why you're so good at synthesis."

I shook my head. "I just observe, that's all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that."

"Sounds like empathy to me."

"It's not. Empathy's not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It's more about imagining how you'd feel in the same place, right?"

Pag frowned. "So?"

"So what if you don't know how you'd feel?"

He looked at me, and his surfaces were serious and completely transparent. "You're better than that, friend. You may not always act like it, but—I know you. I knew you before."

"You knew someone else. I'm Pod-man, remember?"

"Yeah, that was someone else. And maybe I remember him better than you do. But I'll tell you one thing." He leaned forward. "Both of you would've helped me out that day. And maybe he would've got there with good ol'-fashioned empathy while you had to cobble together some kind of improvised flowchart out of surplus parts, but that just makes your accomplishment all the greater. Which is why I continue to stick it out with you, old buddy. Even though you have a rod up your ass the size of the Rio Spire."

He held out his glass. Dutifully, I clinked it against my own. We drank.

"I don't remember him," I said after a while.

"What, the other Siri? Pre-Pod Siri?"

I nodded.

"Nothing at all?"

I thought back. "Well, he was wracked by convulsions all the time, right? There'd be constant pain. I don't remember any pain." My glass was almost empty; I sipped to make it last. "I—I dream about him sometimes, though. About— being him."

"What's it like?"

"It was—colorful. Everything was more saturated, you know? Sounds, smells. Richer than life."

"And now?"

I looked at him.

"You said it was colorful. What changed?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing. I just— I don't actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more."

"So how do you know you still have them?" Pag asked.

Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. "I know."

"How?"

I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered.

"I wake up smiling," I said.

Grunts look the enemy in the eye. Grunts know the stakes. Grunts know the price of poor strategy. What do the generals know? Overlays and Tactical plots. The whole chain of command is upside-down.

— Kenneth Lubin, Zero Sum

It went bad from the moment we breached. The plan had called for precise havoc along the new beachhead, subtly arranged to entrap some blood-cell-with-waldoes as it sought to repair the damage. Our job had been to set the trap and stand back, trusting Sarasti's assurances that we would not have long to wait.

We had no time at all. Something squirmed in the swirling dust the moment we breached, serpentine movement down the hole that instantly kicked Bates renowned field initiative into high gear. Her grunts dived through and caught a scrambler twitching in their crosshairs, clinging to the wall of the passageway. It must have been stunned by the blast of our entry, a classic case of wrong-place-wrong-time. Bates took a split-second to appraise the opportunity and the plan was plasma.

One of the grunts plugged the scrambler with a biopsy dart before I even had a chance to blink. We would have bagged the whole animal right then if magnetosphere hadn't chosen that moment to kick sand in our faces. As it was, by the time our grunts staggered back into action their quarry was already disappearing around the bend. Bates was tethered to her troops; they yanked her down the rabbit hole ("Rorschach's Set it up!" she yelled back at Sascha) the moment she let them loose.

I was tethered to Bates. I barely had a chance to exchange a wide-eyed look with Sascha before being yanked away in turn. Suddenly I was inside again; the sated biopsy dart bounced off my faceplate and flashed past, still attached to a few meters of discarded monofilament. Hopefully Sascha would pick it up while Bates and I were hunting; at least the mission wouldn't be a total loss if we never made it back.

The grunts dragged us like bait on a hook. Bates flew like a dolphin just ahead of me, keeping effortlessly to the center of the bore with an occasional tweak of her jets. I careened off the walls just behind, trying to stabilize myself, trying to look as though I too might be in control. It was an important pretense. The whole point of being a decoy is to pass yourself off as an original. They'd even given me my own gun, pure precaution of course, more for comfort than protection. It hugged my forearm and fired plastic slugs impervious to induction fields.

Just Bates and I, now. A pacifist soldier, and the odds of a coin toss.

Gooseflesh prickled my skin as it always had. The usual ghosts scrabbled and clawed through my mind. This time, though, the dread seemed muted. Distant. Perhaps it was just a matter of timing, perhaps we were moving so quickly through the magnetic landscape that no one phantom had a chance to stick. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe I wasn't so afraid of ghosts because this time we were after monsters.

The scrambler seemed to have thrown off whatever cobwebs our entrance had spun; it surged along the walls now at full speed, its arms shooting ahead like a succession of striking snakes, slinging the body forward so fast the drones could barely keep it in sight, a writhing silhouette in the fog. Suddenly it leapt sideways, sailing across the width of the passageway and down some minor tributary. The grunts veered in pursuit, crashing into walls, stumbling—

—stopping—

—and suddenly Bates was braking hard, shooting back past me as I flailed with my pistol. I was past the drones in the next instant; my leash snapped tight and snapped back, bringing me to a dead drifting stop. For a second or two I was on the front line. For a second or two I was the front line, Siri Keeton, note taker, mole, professional uncomprehender. I just floated there, breath roaring in my helmet, as a few meters further on the walls—

Squirmed...

Peristalsis, I thought at first. But this motion was utterly unlike the slow, undulating waves that usually rippled along Rorschach's passageways. So hallucination, I thought instead— and then those writhing walls reached out with a thousand whiplike calcareous tongues that grabbed our quarry from every direction and tore it to pieces...

Something grabbed me and spun me around. Suddenly I was locked against the chest of one of the grunts, its rear guns firing as we retreated back up the tunnel at full speed. Bates was in the arms of the other. Seething motion receded behind us but the image stayed stuck to the backs of my eyes, hallucinatory and point-blank in its clarity:

Scramblers, everywhere. A seething infestation squirming across the walls, reaching out for the intruder, leaping into the lumen of the passageway to press their counterattack.

Not against us. They had attacked one of their own. I'd seen three of its arms ripped off before it had disappeared into a writhing ball in the center of the passageway.

We fled. I turned to Bates—Did you see—but held my tongue. The deathly concentration on her face was unmistakable even across two faceplates and three meters of methane. According to HUD she'd lobotomized both grunts, bypassed all that wonderful autonomous decision-making circuitry entirely. She was running both machines herself, as manually as marionettes.

Grainy turbulent echoes appeared on the rear sonar display. The scramblers had finished with their sacrifice. Now they were coming after us. My grunt stumbled and careened against the side of the passage. Jagged shards of alien décor dug parallel gouges across my faceplate, tenderized chunks of thigh through the shielded fabric of my suit. I clenched down on a cry. It got out anyway. Some ridiculous in-suit alarm chirped indignantly an instant before a dozen rotten eggs broke open inside my helmet. I coughed. My eyes stung and watered in the reek; I could barely see Seiverts on the HUD, flashing instantly into the red.

Bates drove us on without a word.

My faceplate healed enough to shut off the alarm. My air began to clear. The scramblers had gained; by the time I could see clearly again they were only a few meters behind us. Up ahead Sascha came into view around the bend, Sascha who had no backup, whose other cores had all been shut down on Sarasti's orders. Susan had protested at first—

"If there's any opportunity to communicate—"

"There won't be," he'd said.

—so there was Sascha who was more resistant to Rorschach's influence according to some criterion I never understood, curled up in a fetal ball with her gloves clamped against her helmet and I could only hope to some dusty deity that she'd set the trap before this place had got to her. And here came the scramblers, and Bates was shouting "Sascha! Get out of the fucking way!" and braking hard, way too soon, the scrambling horde nipping at our heels like a riptide and Bates yelled "Sascha!" again and finally Sascha moved, kicked herself into gear and off the nearest wall and fled right back up the hole we'd blown in through. Bates yanked some joystick in her head and our warrior sedans slewed and shat sparks and bullets and dove out after her.

Sascha had set the trap just within the mouth of the breach. Bates armed it in passing with the slap of one gloved hand. Motion sensors were supposed to do the rest— but the enemy was close behind, and there was no room to spare.

It went off just as I was emerging into the vestibule. The cannon net shot out behind me in a glorious exploding conic, caught something, snapped back up the rabbit hole and slammed into my grunt from behind. The recoil kicked us against the top of the vestibule so hard I thought the fabric would tear. It held, and threw us back against the squirming things enmeshed in our midst.

Writhing backbones everywhere. Articulated arms, lashing like bony whips. One of them entwined my leg and squeezed like a brick python. Bates' hands waved in a frantic dance before me and that arm came apart into dismembered segments, bouncing around the enclosure.

This was all wrong. They were supposed to be in the net, they were supposed to be contained...

"Sascha! Launch!" Bates barked. Another arm separated from its body and careened into the wall, coiling and uncoiling.

The hole had flooded with aerosol foam-core as soon as we'd pulled the net. A scrambler writhed half-embedded in that matrix, caught just a split-second too late; its central mass protruded like some great round tumor writhing with monstrous worms.

"SASCHA!"

Artillery. The floor of the vestibule irised shut quick as a leg-hold trap and everything slammed against it, grunts, people, scramblers whole and in pieces. I couldn't breathe. Every thimbleful of flesh weighed a hundred kilograms. Something slapped us to one side, a giant hand batting an insect. Maybe a course correction. Maybe a collision.

But ten seconds later we were weightless again, and nothing had torn us open.

We floated like mites in a ping-pong ball, surrounded by a confusion of machinery and twitching body parts. There was little of anything that might pass for blood. What there was floated in clear, shuddering spherules. The cannon net floated like a shrink-wrapped asteroid in our midst. The things inside had wrapped their arms around themselves, around each other, curled into a shivering and unresponsive ball. Compressed methonia hissed around them, keeping them fresh for the long trip home.

"Holy shit," Sascha breathed, watching them. "The bloodsucker called it."

He hadn't called everything. He hadn't called a mob of multiarmed aliens ripping one of their own to pieces before my eyes. He hadn't seen that coming.

Or at least, he hadn't mentioned it.

I was already feeling nauseous. Bates was carefully bringing her wrists together. For a moment I could barely make out a taut dark thread of freakwire, fine as smoke, between them. Her caution was well-advised; that stuff would slice through human limbs as easily as alien ones. One of the grunts groomed its mouthparts at her shoulder, cleaning gore from its mandibles.

The freakwire vanished from my sight. Sight itself was dimming, now. The inside of this great lead balloon was going dark around me. We were coasting, purely ballistic. We had to trust that Scylla would swoop in and snatch us once we'd achieved a discreet distance from the scene of the crime. We had to trust Sarasti.

That was getting harder by the hour. But he'd been right so far. Mostly.

"How do you know?" Bates had asked when he'd first laid out the plan. He hadn't answered. Chances are he couldn't have, not to us, any more than a baseline could have explained brane theory to the inhabitants of Flatland. But Bates hadn't been asking about tactics anyway, not really. Maybe she'd been asking for a reason, for something to justify this ongoing trespass into foreign soil, the capture and slaughter of its natives.

On one level she already knew the reason, of course. We all did. We could not afford to merely react. The risks were too great; we had to preempt. Sarasti, wise beyond all of us, saw this more clearly than we. Amanda Bates knew he was right in her mind—but perhaps she didn't feel it in her gut. Perhaps, I thought as my vision failed, she was asking Sarasti to convince her.

But that wasn't all she was doing.

***

Imagine you are Amanda Bates.

The control you wield over your troops would give wet dreams and nightmares to generals of ages past. You can drop instantly into the sensorium of anyone under your command, experience the battlefield from any number of first-person perspectives. Your every soldier is loyal unto death, asking no questions, obeying all commands with alacrity and dedication to which mere flesh could never even aspire. You don't just respect a chain of command: you are one.

You are a little bit scared of your own power. You are a little bit scared of the things you've already done with it.

Taking orders comes as naturally as giving them. Oh, you've been known to question policy on occasion, or seek a bigger picture than may be strictly necessary for the job at hand. Your command initiative has become the stuff of legends. But you have never disobeyed a direct order. When asked for your perspective, you serve it straight up and unvarnished— until the decision is made, and the orders handed down. Then you do your job without question. Even when questions arise, you would hardly waste time asking them unless you expected an answer you could use.

Why, then, demand analytical details from a vampire?

Not for information. Might as well expect the sighted to explain vision to the congenitally blind. Not for clarification; there was no ambiguity in Sarasti's bottom line. Not even for the benefit of poor dumb Siri Keeton, who may have missed some salient point but is too ashamed to raise his own hand.

No, there is only one reason why you might ask for such details: to challenge. To rebel, to the infinitesimal degree that rebellion is permitted once the word is given.

You argued and advocated as forcefully as you could, back when Sarasti was soliciting input. But he ignored yours, abandoned any attempt at communication and preemptively invaded foreign territory. He knew that Rorschach might contain living beings and still he tore it open without regard for their welfare. He may have killed helpless innocents. He may have roused an angry giant. You don't know.

All you know is, you've been helping him do it.

You've seen this kind of arrogance before, among your own kind. You had hoped that smarter creatures would be wiser ones. Bad enough to see such arrogant stupidity inflicted on the helpless, but to do it at these stakes beggars belief. Killing innocents is the least of the risks you're running; you're gambling with the fate of worlds, provoking conflict with a star faring technology whose sole offense was to take your picture without permission.

Your dissent has changed nothing. So you rein it in; all that slips out now is the occasional pointless question with no hope of an answer, its inherent insubordination so deeply buried you don't even see it yourself. If you did see it, you'd keep your mouth shut entirely—because the last thing you want is to remind Sarasti that you think he's wrong. You don't want him dwelling on that. You don't want him to think you're up to something.

Because you are. Even if you're not quite ready to admit it to yourself.

Amanda Bates is beginning to contemplate a change of command.

***

The laceration of my suit had done a real number on the gears. It took three solid days for Theseus to bring me back to life. But death was no excuse for falling behind the curve; I resurrected with a head full of updates clogging my inlays.

I flipped through them, climbing down into the drum. The Gang of Four sat at the galley below me, staring at untouched portions of nutritionally-balanced sludge on her plate. Cunningham, over in his inherited domain, grunted at my appearance and turned back to work, the fingers of one hand tapping compulsively on the desktop.

Theseus' orbit had widened during my absence, and most of its eccentricities had been planed away. Now we kept our target in view from a more-or-less constant range of three thousand kilometers. Our orbital period lagged Rorschach's by an hour—the alien crept implacably ahead of us along its lower trajectory—but a supplementary burn every couple of weeks would be enough to keep it in sight. We had specimens now, things to be examined under conditions of our own choosing; no point in risking any more close approaches until we'd wrung every useful datum from what we had.

Cunningham had expanded his lab space during my time in the sepulcher. He'd built holding pens, one for each scrambler, modules partitioned by a common wall and installed in a whole new hab. The microwaved carcass had been sidelined like a discarded toy from a previous birthday, although according to the access logs Cunningham still visited it every now and then.

Not that he visited any part of the new wing in person, of course. Not that he was even able to, not without suiting up and jumping across the hold. The whole compartment had been disconnected from its spinal lock and pushed to a tethered anchorage midway between spine and carapace: Sarasti's orders, given to minimize risk of contamination. It was no skin off Cunningham's nose. He was happier leaving his body in pseudogravity anyway, while his consciousness flitted between the waldoes and sensors and bric-a-brac surrounding his new pets.

Theseus saw me coming and pushed a squeezebulb of sugary electrolytes from the galley dispenser. The Gang didn't look up as I passed. One forefinger tapped absently against their temple, the lips pursed and twitched in the characteristic mode that said internal dialog in progress. I could never tell who was on top when they were like that.

I sucked on the squeezebulb and looked in on the pens. Two cubes suffused in pale red light: in one a scrambler floated center stage, waving its segmented arms like seaweed in gentle surge. The occupant of the other cage was squeezed into a corner, four arms splayed across the converging walls; four others extended, waving again, into open space. The bodies from which those arms sprouted were spheroids, not flattened disks as our first—sample had been. They were only slightly compressed, and their arms sprouted not from a single equatorial band but from across the whole surface.

Fully-extended, the floating scrambler was over two meters across. The other seemed roughly the same size. Neither moved, except for those drifting arms. Navy-blue mosaics, almost black in the longwave, rippled across their surfaces like the patterns of wind on grass. Superimposed graphics plotted methane and hydrogen at reassuring Rorschach norms. Temperature and lighting, ditto. An icon for ambient electromagnetics remained dark.

I dipped into the archives, watched the arrival of the aliens from two days past; each tumbling unceremoniously into its pen, balled up, hugging themselves as they bounced gently around their enclosures. Fetal position, I thought—but after a few moments the arms uncoiled, like the blooming of calcareous flowers.

"Robert says Rorschach grows them," Susan James said behind me.

I turned. Definitely James in there, but—muted, somehow. Her meal remained untouched. Her surfaces were dim.

Except for the eyes. Those were deep, and a little hollow.

"Grows?" I repeated.

"In stacks. They have two navels each." She managed a weak smile, touched her belly with one hand and the small of her back with the other. "One in front, one behind. He thinks they grow in a kind of column, piled up. When the top one develops to a certain point, it buds off from the stack and becomes free-living."

The archived scramblers were exploring their new environment now, climbing gingerly along the walls, unrolling their arms along the corners where the panels met. Those swollen central bodies struck me again. "So that first one, with the flattened..."

"Juvenile," she agreed. "Fresh off the stack. These ones are older. They, they plump out as they mature. Robert says," she added after a moment.

I sucked the dregs from my squeezebulb. "The ship grows its own crew."

"If it's a ship." James shrugged. "If they're crew."

I watched them move. There wasn't much to explore; the walls were almost bare, innocent of anything but a few sensor heads and gas nozzles. The pens had their own tentacles and manipulators for more invasive research needs, but those had been carefully sheathed during introduction. Still, the creatures covered the territory in careful increments, moving back and forth along parallel, invisible paths. Almost as if they were running transects.

James had noticed it too. "It seems awfully systematic, doesn't it?"

"What does Robert say about that?"

"He says the behavior of honeybees and sphex wasps is just as complex, and it's all rote hardwiring. Not intelligence."

"But bees still communicate, right? They do that dance, to tell the hive where the flowers are."

She shrugged, conceding the point.

"So you still might be able to talk to these things."

"Maybe. You'd think." She massaged her brow between thumb and forefinger. "We haven't got anywhere, though. We played some of their pigment patterns back to them, with variations. They don't seem to make sounds. Robert synthesized a bunch of noises that they might squeeze out of their cloacae if they were so inclined, but those didn't get us anywhere either. Harmonic farts, really."

"So we're sticking to the blood-cells-with-waldoes model."

"Pretty much. But you know, they didn't go into a loop. Hardwired animals repeat themselves. Even smart ones pace, or chew their fur. Stereotyped behaviors. But these two, they gave everything a very careful once-over and then just—shut down."

They were still at it in ConSensus, slithering across one wall, then another, then another, a slow screw-thread track that would leave no square centimeter uncovered.

"Have they done anything since?" I asked.

She shrugged again. "Nothing spectacular. They squirm when you poke them. Wave their arms back and forth—they do that pretty much constantly, but there's no information in it that we can tell. They haven't gone invisible on us or anything. We blanked the adjoining wall for a while so they could see each other, even piped audio and air feeds—Robert thought there might be some kind of pheromonal communication—but nothing. They didn't even react to each other."

"Have you tried, well, motivating them?"

"With what, Siri? They don't seem to care about their own company. We can't bribe them with food unless we know what they eat, which we don't. Robert says they're in no immediate danger of starvation anyway. Maybe when they get hungry they can deal."

I killed the archival feed and reverted to realtime. "Maybe they eat—I don't know, radiation. Or magnetic energy. The cage can generate magnetic fields, right?"

"Tried it." She took a breath, then squared her shoulders. "But I guess these things take time. He's only had a couple of days, and I only got out of the crypt myself a day ago. We'll keep trying."

"What about negative reinforcement?" I wondered.

She blinked. "Hurt them, you mean."

"Not necessarily anything extreme. And if they're not sentient anyway..."

Just like that, Susan went away. "Why, Keeton. you just made a suggestion. You giving up on this whole noninterference thing?"

"Hello, Sascha. No, of course not. Just—making a list of what's been tried."

"Good." There was an edge to her voice. "Hate to think you were slipping. We're going to grab some down time now, so maybe you could go and talk to Cunningham for a bit. Yeah, do that.

"And be sure to tell him your theory about radiation-eating aliens. I bet he could use a laugh."

***

He stood at his post in BioMed, though his empty chair was barely a meter away. The ubiquitous cigarette hung from between the fingers of one hand, burned down and burned out. His other hand played with itself, fingers tapping against thumb in sequence, little to index, index to little. Windows crawled with intelligence in front of him; he wasn't watching.

I approached from behind. I watched his surfaces in motion. I heard the soft syllables rising from his throat:

"Yit-barah v'yish-tabah v'yit-pa-ar v'yit-romam..."

Not his usual litany. Not even his usual language; Hebrew, ConSensus said.

It sounded almost like a prayer...

He must have heard me. His topology went flat and hard and almost impossible to decipher. It was increasingly difficult getting a fix on anyone these days, but even through those topological cataracts Cunningham— as always— was a tougher read than most.

"Keeton," he said without turning.

"You're not Jewish," I said.

"It was." Szpindel, I realized after a moment. Cunningham didn't do gender pronouns.

But Isaac Szpindel had been an atheist. All of us were. We'd all started out that way, at least.

"I didn't know you knew him," I said. It certainly wasn't policy.

Cunningham sank into his chair without looking at me. In his head, and in mine, a new window opened within a frame marked Electrophoresis.

I tried again. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intru—"

"What can I do for you, Siri?"

"I was hoping you could bring me up to speed on your findings."

A periodic chart of alien elements scrolled through the feed. Cunningham logged it and started another sample. "I've documented everything. It's all in ConSensus."

I made a play for ego: "It would really help to know how you'd thumbnail it, though. What you think is important can be just as vital as the data themselves."

He looked at me a moment. He muttered something, repetitive and irrelevant.

"What's important is what's missing," he said after a moment. "I've got good samples now and I still can't find the genes. Protein synthesis is almost prionic—reconformation instead of the usual transcription pathways—but I can't figure out how those bricks get slotted into the wall once they're made."

"Any progress on the energy front?" I asked.

"Energy?"

"Aerobic metabolism on an anaerobe budget, remember? You said they had too much ATP."

"That I solved." He puffed smoke; far to stern a fleck of alien tissue liquefied and banded into chemical strata. "They're sprinting."

Rotate that if you can.

I couldn't. "How do you mean?"

He sighed. "Biochemistry is a tradeoff. The faster you synthesize ATP, the more expensive each molecule becomes. It turns out scramblers are a lot more energy-efficient at making it than we are. They're just extremely slow at it, which might not be a big drawback for something that spends most of its time inactive. Rorschach— whatever Rorschach started out as— could have drifted for millennia before it washed up here. That's a lot of time to build up an energy reserve for bouts of high activity, and once you've laid the groundwork glycolysis is explosive. Two-thousand-fold boost, and no oxygen demand."

"Scramblers sprint. Their whole lives."

"They may come preloaded with ATP and burn it off throughout their lifespan."

"How long would that be?"

"Good question," he admitted. "Live fast, die young. If they ration it out, stay dormant most of the time—who knows?"

"Huh." The free-floating scrambler had drifted away from the center of its pen. One extended arm held a wall at bay; the others continued their hypnotic swaying.

I remembered other arms, their motion not so gentle.

"Amanda and I chased one into a crowd. It—"

Cunningham was back at his samples. "I saw the record."

"They tore it to pieces."

"Uh huh."

"Any idea why?"

He shrugged. "Bates thought there might be some kind of civil war going on down there."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's right, or maybe scramblers are ritual cannibals, or—they're aliens, Keeton. What do you want from me?"

"But they're not really aliens. At least not intelligent ones. War implies intelligence."

"Ants wage war all the time. Proves nothing except that they're alive."

"Are scramblers even alive?" I asked.

"What kind of question is that?"

"You think Rorschach grows them on some kind of assembly line. You can't find any genes. Maybe they're just biomechanical machines."

"That's what life is, Keeton. That's what you are." Another hit of nicotine, another storm of numbers, another sample. "Life isn't either/or. It's a matter of degree."

"What I'm asking is, are they natural? Could they be constructs?"

"Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?"

I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean."

"It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century."

I gave up. After a few seconds Cunningham seemed to notice the silence. He withdrew his consciousness from the machinery and looked around with fleshly eyes, as if searching for some mosquito that had mysteriously stopped whining.

"What's your problem with me?" I asked. Stupid question, obvious question. Unworthy of any synthesist to be so, so direct.

His eyes glittered in that dead face. "Processing without comprehension. That's what you do, isn't it?"

"That's a colossal oversimplification."

"Mmm." Cunningham nodded. "Then why can't you seem to comprehend how pointless it is to keep peeking over our shoulders and writing home to our masters?"

"Someone has to keep Earth in the loop."

"Seven months each way. Long loop."

"Still."

"We're on our own out here, Keeton. You're on your own. The game's going to be long over before our masters even know it's started." He sucked smoke. "Or perhaps not. Perhaps you're talking to someone closer, hmm? That it? Is the Fourth Wave telling you what to do?"

"There is no Fourth Wave. Not that anyone's told me, anyway."

"Probably not. They'd never risk their lives out here, would they? Too dangerous even to hang back and watch from a distance. That's why they built us."

"We're all self-made. Nobody forced you to get the rewire."

"No, nobody forced me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn't I? That's the choice we have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you could tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak."

So much in the voice. Nothing at all on the face. I said nothing.

"See what I mean? No comprehension." He managed a tight smile. "So I'll answer your questions. I'll delay my own work and hold your hand because Sarasti's told us to. I guess that superior vampire mind sees some legitimate reason to indulge your constant ankle-nipping, and it's in charge so I'll play along. But I'm not nearly that smart, so you'll forgive me if it all seems a bit naff."

"I'm just—"

"You're just doing your job. I know. But I don't like being played, Keeton. And that's what your job is."

***

Even back on Earth, Robert Cunningham had barely disguised his opinion of the ship's commissar. It had been obvious even to the topologically blind.

I'd always had a hard time imagining the man. It wasn't just his expressionless face. Sometimes, not even the subtler things behind would show up in his topology. Perhaps he repressed them deliberately, resenting the presence of this mole among the crew.

It would hardly have been the first time I'd encountered such a reaction. Everyone resented me to some extent. Oh, they liked me well enough, or thought they did. They tolerated my intrusions, and cooperated, and gave away far more than they thought they did.

But beneath Szpindel's gruff camaraderie, beneath James's patient explanations—there was no real respect. How could there be? These people were the bleeding edge, the incandescent apex of hominid achievement. They were trusted with the fate of the world. I was just a tattletale for small minds back home. Not even that much, when home receded too deeply into the distance. Superfluous mass. Couldn't be helped. No use getting bothered over it.

Still, Szpindel had only coined commissar half-jokingly. Cunningham believed it, and didn't laugh. And while I'd encountered many others like him over the years, those had only tried to hide themselves from sight. Cunningham was the first who seemed to succeed.

I tried to build the relationship all the way through training, tried to find the missing pieces. I watched him working the simulator's teleops one day, exercising the shiny new interfaces that spread him through walls and wires. He was practicing his surgical skills on some hypothetical alien the computer had conjured up to test his technique. Sensors and jointed teleops sprouted like the legs of an enormous spider crab from an overhead mount. Spirit-possessed, they dipped and weaved around some semiplausible holographic creature. Cunningham's own body merely trembled slightly, a cigarette jiggling at the corner of its mouth.

I waited for him to take a break. Eventually the tension ebbed from his shoulders. His vicarious limbs relaxed.

"So." I tapped my temple. "Why'd you do it?"

He didn't turn. Above the dissection, sensors swiveled and stared back like dismembered eyestalks. That was the center of Cunningham's awareness right now, not this nicotine-stained body in front of me. Those were his eyes, or his tongue, or whatever unimaginable bastard-senses he used to parse what the machines sent him. Those clusters aimed back at me, at us—and if Robert Cunningham still possessed anything that might be called vision, he was watching himself from eyes two meters outside his own skull.

"Do what, exactly?" he said at last. "The enhancements?"

Enhancements. As though he'd upgraded his wardrobe instead of ripping out his senses and grafting new ones into the wounds.

I nodded.

"It's vital to keep current," he said. "If you don't reconfigure you can't retrain. If you don’t retrain you're obsolete inside a month, and then you're not much good for anything except Heaven or dictation."

I ignored the jibe. "Pretty radical transformation, though."

"Not these days."

"Didn't it change you?"

His body dragged on the cigarette. Targeted ventilation sucked away the smoke before it reached me. "That's the whole point."

"Surely you were affected personally, though. Surely—"

"Ah." He nodded; at the far end of shared motor nerves, teleops jiggled in sympathy. "Change the eyes that look at the world, change the me does the looking?"

"Something like that."

Now he was watching me with fleshly eyes. Across the membrane those snakes and eyestalks returned to their work on the virtual carcass, as if deciding they'd wasted enough time on pointless distractions. I wondered which body he was in now.

"I'm surprised you'd have to ask," the meat one said. "Doesn't my body language tell you everything? Aren't jargonauts supposed to read minds?"

He was right, of course. I wasn't interested in Cunningham's words; those were just the carrier wave. He couldn't hear the real conversation we were having. All his angles and surfaces spoke volumes, and although their voices were strangely fuzzed with feedback and distortion I knew I'd be able to understand them eventually. I only had to keep him talking.

But Jukka Sarasti chose that moment to wander past and surgically trash my best-laid plans.

"Siri's best in his field," he remarked. "But not when it gets too close to home."

Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?

— Pierre Troubetzkoy

"The thing is," Chelsea said, "this whole first-person thing takes effort. You have to care enough to try, you know? I've been working my ass off on this relationship, I've been working so hard, but you just don't seem to care..."

She thought she was breaking the news. She thought I hadn't seen it coming, because I hadn't said anything. I'd probably seen it before she had. I hadn't said anything because I'd been scared of giving her an opening.

I felt sick to my stomach.

"I care about you," I said.

"As much as you could care about anything," she admitted. "But you—I mean, sometimes you're fine, Cygnus, sometimes you're wonderful to be around but whenever anything gets the least bit intense you just go away and leave this, this battle computer running your body and I just can't deal with it any more..."

I stared at the butterfly on the back of her hand. Its wings flexed and folded, lazy and iridescent. I wondered how many of those tattoos she had; I'd seen five of them on different body parts, albeit only one at a time. I thought about asking her, but this didn't seem like the right moment.

"You can be so—so brutal sometimes," she was saying. "I know you don't mean to be, but... I don't know. Maybe I'm your pressure-release valve, or something. Maybe you have to submerge yourself so much on the job that everything just, just builds up and you need some kind of punching bag. Maybe that's why you say the things you do."

She was waiting for me to say something now. "I've been honest," I said.

"Yeah. Pathologically. Have you ever had a negative thought that you haven't said out loud?" Her voice trembled but her eyes—for once— stayed dry. "I guess it's as much my fault as yours. Maybe more. I could tell you were—disconnected, from the day we met. I guess on some level I always saw it coming."

"Why even try, then? If you knew we were just going to crash and burn like this?"

"Oh, Cygnus. Aren't you the one who says that everyone crashes and burns eventually? Aren't you the one who says it never lasts?"

Mom and Dad lasted. Longer than this, anyway.

I frowned, astonished that I'd even let the thought form in my head. Chelse read the silence as a wounded one. "I guess—maybe I thought I could help, you know? Help fix whatever made you so—so angry all the time."

The butterfly was starting to fade. I'd never seen that happen before.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" she asked.

"Sure. I'm a fixer-upper."

"Siri, you wouldn't even get a tweak when I offered. You were so scared of being manipulated you wouldn't even try a basic cascade. You're the one guy I've met who might be truly, eternally unfixable. I dunno. Maybe that's even something to be proud of."

I opened my mouth, and closed it.

She gave me a sad smile. "Nothing, Siri? Nothing at all? There was a time you always knew exactly what to say." She looked back at some earlier version of me. "Now I wonder if you ever actually meant any of it."

"That's not fair."

"No." She pursed her lips. "No, it isn't. That's not really what I'm trying to say. I guess...it's not so much that you don't mean any of it. It's more like you don't know what any of it means."

The color was gone from the wings. The butterfly was a delicate charcoal dusting, almost motionless.

"I'll do it now," I said. "I'll get the tweaks. If it's that important to you. I'll do it now."

"It's too late, Siri. I'm used up."

Maybe she wanted me to call her back. All these words ending in question marks, all these significant silences. Maybe she was giving me the opportunity to plead my case, to beg for another chance. Maybe she wanted a reason to change her mind.

I could have tried. Please don't, I could have said. I'm begging you. I never meant to drive you away completely, just a little, just to a safer distance. Please. In thirty long years the only time I haven't felt worthless was when we were together.

But when I looked up again the butterfly was gone and so was she, taking all baggage with her. She carried doubt, and guilt for having led me on. She left believing that our incompatibility was no one's fault, that she'd tried as hard as she could, even that I had under the tragic weight of all my issues. She left, and maybe she didn't even blame me, and I never even knew who'd made that final decision.

I was good at what I did. I was so damned good, I did it without even meaning to.

***

"My God! Did you hear that!?"

Susan James bounced around the drum like a pronking wildebeest in the half-gravity. I could see the whites of her eyes from ninety degrees away. "Check your feeds! Check your feeds! The pens!"

I checked. One scrambler afloat; the other still jammed into its corner.

James landed at my side with a two-footed thump, wobbling for balance. "Turn the sound up!"

The hissing of the air conditioners. The clank of distant machinery echoing along the spine; Theseus' usual intestinal rumblings. Nothing else.

"Okay, they're not doing it now." James brought up a splitscreen window and threw it into reverse. "There," she pronounced, replaying the record with the audio cranked and filtered.

In the right side of the window, the floating scrambler had drifted so that the tip of one outstretched arm brushed against the wall that adjoined the other pen. In the left side, the huddled scrambler remained unmoving.

I thought I heard something. Just for an instant: the brief buzz of an insect, perhaps, if the nearest insect hadn't been five trillion kilometers away.

"Replay that. Slow it down."

A buzz, definitely. A vibration.

"Way down."

A click train, squirted from a dolphin's forehead. Farting lips.

"No, let me." James bulled into Cunningham's headspace and yanked the slider to the left.

Tick tick...tick...tick tick tick...tick...tick tick tick...

Dopplered down near absolute zero, it went on for almost a minute. Total elapsed real time was about half a second.

Cunningham zoomed the splitscreen. The huddled scrambler had remained motionless, except for the rippling of its cuticle and the undulation of its free arms. But before I'd only seen eight arms—and now I could make out the bony spur of a ninth peeking from behind the central mass. A ninth arm, curled up and hidden from view, tick tick ticking while another creature casually leaned against the other side of the wall...

Now, there was nothing. The floating scrambler had drifted aimlessly back to the center of its enclosure.

James's eyes shone. "We've got to check the rest of—"

But Theseus had been watching, and was way ahead of us. It had already searched the archives and served up the results: three similar exchanges over two days, ranging in duration from a tenth of a second to almost two.

"They're talking," James said.

Cunningham shrugged, a forgotten cigarette burning down between his fingers. "So do a lot of things. And at that rate of exchange they're not exactly doing calculus. You could get as much information out of a dancing honeybee."

"That's nonsense and you know it, Robert."

"What I know is that—"

"Honeybees don't deliberately hide what they're saying. Honeybees don't develop whole new modes of communication configured specifically to confound observers. That's flexible, Robert. That's intelligent."

"And what if it is, hmm? Forget for a moment the inconvenient fact that these things don't even have brains. I really don't think you've thought this through."

"Of course I have."

"Indeed? Then what are you so happy about? Don't you know what this means?"

Sudden prickling on the back of my neck. I looked around; I looked up. Jukka Sarasti had appeared in the center of the drum, eyes gleaming, teeth bared, watching us.

Cunningham followed my gaze, and nodded. "I'd wager it does..."

***

There was no way to learn what they'd whispered across that wall. We could recover the audio easily enough, parse every tick and tap they'd exchanged, but you can't decipher a code without some idea of content. We had patterns of sound that could have meant anything. We had creatures whose grammar and syntax—if their mode of communication even contained such attributes—were unknown and perhaps unknowable. We had creatures smart enough to talk, and smart enough to hide that fact. No matter how much we wanted to learn, they were obviously unwilling to teach us.

Not without—how had I put it?— negative reinforcement.

It was Jukka Sarasti who made the decision. We did it on his orders, as we did everything else. But after the word had come down— after Sarasti had disappeared in the night and Bates had retreated down the spine and Robert Cunningham had returned to his studies at the back of the drum—I was the one Susan James was left with. The first to speak the vile thought aloud, the official witness to posterity. I was the one she looked at, and looked away from, her surfaces hard and refractory.

And then she started.

***

This is how you break down the wall:

Start with two beings. They can be human if you like, but that's hardly a prerequisite. All that matters is that they know how to talk among themselves.

Separate them. Let them see each other, let them speak. Perhaps a window between their cages. Perhaps an audio feed. Let them practice the art of conversation in their own chosen way.

Hurt them.

It may take a while to figure out how. Some may shrink from fire, others from toxic gas or liquid. Some creatures may be invulnerable to blowtorches and grenades, but shriek in terror at the threat of ultrasonic sound. You have to experiment; and when you discover just the right stimulus, the optimum balance between pain and injury, you must inflict it without the remorse.

You leave them an escape hatch, of course. That's the very point of the exercise: give one of your subjects the means to end the pain, but give the other the information required to use it. To one you might present a single shape, while showing the other a whole selection. The pain will stop when the being with the menu chooses the item its partner has seen. So let the games begin. Watch your subjects squirm. If—when—they trip the off switch, you'll know at least some of the information they exchanged; and if you record everything that passed between them, you'll start to get some idea of how they exchanged it.

When they solve one puzzle, give them a new one. Mix things up. Switch their roles. See how they do at circles versus squares. Try them out on factorials and Fibonnaccis. Continue until Rosetta Stone results.

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

Susan James—congenital optimist, high priestess of the Church of the Healing Word, was best qualified to design and execute the protocols. Now, at her command, the scramblers writhed. They pulled themselves around their cages in elliptical loops, desperately seeking any small corner free of stimulus. James had piped the feed into ConSensus, although there was no mission-critical reason for Theseus' whole crew to bear witness to the interrogation.

"Let them block it at their ends," she said quietly, "If they want to."

For all his reluctance to accept that these were beings, intelligent and aware, Cunningham had named the prisoners. Stretch tended to float spread-eagled; Clench was the balled-up corner-hugger. Susan, playing her own part in this perverse role-reversal, had simply numbered them One and Two. It wasn't that Cunningham's choices were too cheesy for her to stomach, or that she objected to slave names on principle. She'd just fallen back on the oldest trick in the Torturer's Handbook, the one that lets you go home to your family after work, and play with your children, and sleep at night: never humanize your victims.

It shouldn't have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusae. I guess every little bit helped.

Biotelemetry danced across the headspace beside each alien, luminous annotations shuddering through thin air. I had no idea what constituted normal readings for these creatures, but I couldn't imagine those jagged spikes passing for anything but bad news. The creatures themselves seethed subtly with fine mosaics in blue and gray, fluid patterns rippling across their cuticles. Perhaps it was a reflexive reaction to the microwaves; for all we knew it was a mating display.

More likely they were screaming.

James killed the microwaves. In the left-hand enclosure, a yellow square dimmed; in the right, an identical icon nested among others had never lit.

The pigment flowed faster in the wake of the onslaught; the arms slowed but didn't stop. They swept back and forth like listless, skeletal eels.

"Baseline exposure. Five seconds, two hundred fifty Watts." She spoke for the record. Another affectation; Theseus recorded every breath on board, every trickle of current to five decimal places.

"Repeat."

The icon lit up. More tile patterns, flash-flooding across alien skin. But this time, neither alien moved from where it was. Their arms continued to squirm slightly, a torqued trembling variation on the undulation they effected at rest. The telemetry was as harsh as ever, though.

They learned helplessness fast enough, I reflected.

I glanced at Susan. "Are you going to do this all yourself?"

Her eyes were bright and wet as she killed the current. Clench's icon dimmed. Stretch's remained dormant.

I cleared my throat. "I mean—"

"Who else is going to do this, Siri? Jukka? You?"

"The rest of the Gang. Sascha could—"

"Sascha?" She stared at me. "Siri, I created them. Do you think I did that so I could hide behind them when—so I could force them to do things like this?" She shook her head. "I'm not bringing them out. Not for this. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy."

She turned away from me. There were drugs she could have taken, neuroinhibitors to wash away the guilt, short-circuit it right down in the molecules. Sarasti had offered them up as if he were tempting some solitary messiah in the desert. James had refused him, and would not say why.

"Repeat," she said.

The current flickered on, then off.

"Repeat," she said again.

Not a twitch.

I pointed. "I see it," she said.

Clench had pressed the tip of one arm against the touchpad. The icon there glowed like a candle flame.

***

Six and a half minutes later they'd graduated from yellow squares to time-lapsed four-dimensional polyhedrons. It took them as long to distinguish between two twenty-six-faceted shifting solids—differing by one facet in a single frame—as it took them to tell the difference between a yellow square and a red triangle. Intricate patterns played across their surfaces the whole time, dynamic needlepoint mosaics flickering almost too fast to see.

"Fuck," James whispered.

"Could be splinter skills." Cunningham had joined us in ConSensus, although his body remained halfway around BioMed.

"Splinter skills," she repeated dully.

"Savantism. Hyperperformance at one kind of calculation doesn't necessarily connote high intelligence."

"I know what splinter skills are, Robert. I just think you're wrong."

"Prove it."

So she gave up on geometry and told the scramblers that one plus one equaled two. Evidently they knew that already: ten minutes later they were predicting ten-digit prime numbers on demand.

She showed them a sequence of two-dimensional shapes; they picked the next one in the series from a menu of subtly-different alternatives. She denied them multiple choice, showed them the beginning of a whole new sequence and taught them to draw on the touch-sensitive interface with the tips of their arms. They finished that series in precise freehand, rendered a chain of logical descendants ending with a figure that led inexorably back to the starting point.

"These aren't drones." James's voice caught in her throat.

"This is all just crunching," Cunningham said. "Millions of computer programs do it without ever waking up."

"They're intelligent, Robert. They're smarter than us. Maybe they're smarter than Jukka. And we're—why can't you just admit it?"

I could see it all over her: Isaac would have admitted it.

"Because they don't have the circuitry," Cunningham insisted. "How could—"

"I don't know how!" she cried. "That's your job! All I know is that I'm torturing beings that can think rings around us..."

"Not for much longer, at least. Once you figure out the language—"

She shook her head. "Robert, I haven't a clue about the language. We've been at it for—for hours, haven't we? The Gang's all here, language databases four thousand years thick, all the latest linguistic algorithms. And we know exactly what they're saying, we're watching every possible way they could be saying it. Right down to the Angstrom."

"Precisely. So—"

"I've got nothing. I know they're talking through pigment mosaics. There might even be something in the way they move those bristles. But I can't find the pattern, I can't even follow how they count, much less tell them I'm...sorry..."

Nobody spoke for a while. Bates watched us from the galley on our ceiling, but made no attempt to join the proceedings. On ConSensus the reprieved scramblers floated in their cages like multiarmed martyrs.

"Well," Cunningham said at last, "since this seems to be the day for bad news, here's mine. They're dying."

James put her face in her hand.

"It's not your interrogation, for whatever that's worth," the biologist continued. "As far as I can determine, some of their metabolic pathways are just missing."

"Obviously you just haven't found them yet." That was Bates, speaking up from across the drum.

"No," Cunningham said, slowly and distinctly, "obviously those parts aren't available to the organism. Because they're falling apart pretty much the same way you'd expect one of us to, if—if all the mitotic spindles in our cells just vanished out of the cytoplasm, for example. As far as I can tell they started deteriorating the moment we took them off Rorschach."

Susan looked up. "Are you saying they left part of their biochemistry behind?"

"Some essential nutrient?" Bates suggested. "They're not eating—"

"Yes to the linguist. No to the major." Cunningham fell silent; I glanced across the drum to see him sucking on a cigarette. "I think a lot of the cellular processes in these things are mediated externally. I think the reason I can't find any genes in my biopsies is because they don't have any."

"So what do they have instead?" Bates asked.

"Turing morphogens."

Blank looks, subtitling looks. Cunningham explained anyway: "A lot of biology doesn't use genes. Sunflowers look the way they do because of purely physical buckling stress. You get Fibonacci sequences and Golden ratios everywhere in nature, and there's no gene that codes for them; it's all just mechanical interactions. Take a developing embryo—the genes say start growing or stop growing, but the number of digits and vertebrae result from the mechanics of cells bumping against other cells. Those mitotic spindles I mentioned? Absolutely essential for replication in every eukaryotic cell, and they accrete like crystals without any genetic involvement. You'd be surprised how much of life is like that."

"But you still need genes," Bates protested, walking around to join us.

"Genes just establish the starting conditions to enable the process. The structure that proliferates afterwards doesn't need specific instructions. It's classic emergent complexity. We've known about it for over a century." Another drag on the stick. "Or even longer. Darwin cited honeycomb way back in the eighteen hundreds."

"Honeycomb," Bates repeated.

"Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hardwired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other—deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway."

Bates pounced: "But the bees are programmed. Genetically."

"You misunderstand. Scramblers are the honeycomb."

"Rorschach is the bees," James murmured.

Cunningham nodded. "Rorschach is the bees. And I don't think Rorschach's magnetic fields are counterintrusion mechanisms at all. I think they're part of the life-support system. I think they mediate and regulate a good chunk of scrambler metabolism. What we've got back in the hold is a couple of creatures dragged out of their element and holding their breath. And they can't hold it forever."

"How long?" James asked.

"How should I know? If I'm right, I'm not even dealing with complete organisms here."

"Guess," Bates said.

He shrugged. "A few days. Maybe."

That which does not kill us, makes us stranger.

— Trevor Goodchild

"You still don't vote," Sarasti said.

We would not be releasing the prisoners. Too risky. Out here in the endless wastelands of the Oort there was no room for live and let live. Never mind what the Other has done, or what it hasn't: think of what it could do, if it were just a little stronger. Think of what it might have done, if we'd arrived as late as we were supposed to. You look at Rorschach and perhaps you see an embryo or a developing child, alien beyond comprehension perhaps but not guilty, not by default. But what if those are the wrong eyes? What if you should be seeing an omnipotent murdering God, a planet-killer, not yet finished? Vulnerable only now, and for a little longer?

There was no vampire opacity to that logic, no multidimensional black boxes for humans to shrug at and throw up their hands. There was no excuse for the failure to find fault with Sarasti's reasoning, beyond the fact that his reasoning was without fault. That made it worse. The others, I knew, would rather have had to take something on faith.

But Sarasti had an alternative to capture-release, one he evidently considered much safer. It took an act of faith to accept that reasoning, at least; by any sane measure it verged on suicide.

Now Theseus gave birth by Caesarian. These progeny were far too massive to fit through the canal at the end of the spine. The ship shat them as if constipated, directly into the hold: great monstrous things, bristling with muzzles and antennae. Each stood three or four times my height, a pair of massive rust-colored cubes, every surface infested with topography. Armor plating would hide most of it prior to deployment, of course. Ribbons of piping and conduit, ammunition reservoirs and shark-toothed rows of radiator fins— all to disappear beneath smooth reflective shielding. Only a few island landmarks would rise above that surface: comm ports, thrust nozzles, targeting arrays. And gun ports, of course. These things spat fire and brimstone from a half-dozen mouths apiece.

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 spiral: "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."

"It's wild," I agreed.

"These scramblers—they know the answers, Siri. They're intelligent, we know they are. But it's almost as though they don't know they know, unless you hurt them. As if they've got blindsight spread over every sense."

I tried to imagine it: life without sensation, without any active awareness of one's environment. I tried to imagine existing like that without going mad. "Do you think that's possible?"

"I don't know. It's just a—a metaphor, I guess." She didn't believe that. Or she didn't know. Or she didn't want me to know.

I should have been able to tell. She should have been clear.

"At first I just thought they were resisting," she said, "but why would they?" She turned bright, begging eyes on me, pleading for an answer.

I didn't have one. I didn't have a clue. I turned away from Susan James, only to find myself facing Robert Cunningham: Cunningham the mutterer, fingers tapping against tabletop interfaces, inner eyes blinded, vision limited now to the pictures ConSensus sketched in airspace or threw against flat surfaces for everyone to see. His face remained as empty of feeling as it had ever been; the rest of his body twitched like a bug in a spiderweb.

He might as well have been. We all might. Rorschach loomed barely nine kilometers away now, so near it might have eclipsed Ben itself if I'd been brave enough to look outside. We had closed to this insane proximity and parked. Out there, Rorschach grew like a live thing. In there, live things grew, budded like jellyfish from some demonic mechanical substrate. Those lethal, vacant corridors we'd crept along, frightened of the shadows planted in our heads—they were probably filling with scramblers right now. All those hundreds of kilometers of twisted tunnels and passages and chambers. Filling with an army.

This was Sarasti's safer alternative. This was the path we'd followed because it would have been too dangerous to release the prisoners. We were so deep inside the bow shock that we'd had to shut down our internal augments; while Rorschach's magnetosphere was orders of magnitude weaker here than within the structure itself, who knew if the alien might find us too tempting a target—or too great a threat—at this range? Who knew when it might choose to plunge some invisible spike through Theseus's heart?

Any pulse that could penetrate the ship's shielding would doubtless fry Theseus's nervous system as well as the wiring in our heads. I supposed that five people in a dead ship would have a marginally greater chance of survival if their brains weren't sparking in the bargain, but I doubted that such a difference would make much difference. Sarasti had obviously figured the odds differently. He'd even shut down the antiEuclidean pump in his own head, resorted to manual injections to keep himself from short-circuiting.

Stretch and Clench were even closer to Rorschach than we were. Cunningham's lab had been kicked free of the ship; it floated now just a few kilometers from the artefact's outermost spires, deep within the folds of its magnetic field. If the scramblers needed radioactive magnetite to function, this was the most they were going to get: a taste of the fields, but not of freedom. The lab's shielding was being dynamically fine-tuned to balance medical necessity against tactical risk, as best the data allowed. The structure floated in the watchful crosshairs of our newborn gun emplacements, strategically positioned to either side. Those emplacements could destroy the hab in an instant. They could probably destroy anything approaching it as well.

They couldn't destroy Rorschach, of course. Maybe nothing could.

Covert to invulnerable. As far as we knew that hadn't happened yet. Presumably Theseus could still do something about the artefact accreting off our bow, assuming we could decide which thing to do. Sarasti wasn't talking. In fact, I couldn't remember the last time any of us had even seen the vampire in the flesh. For several shifts now he had confined himself to his tent, speaking only through ConSensus.

Everyone was on edge, and the transient had gone quiet.

Cunningham muttered to himself, stabbed at unfamiliar controls with unpracticed fingers, cursed his own clumsiness. Stimulus and response flowed through lasers across six kilometers of ionized vacuum. The ever-present nicotine stick hung from one corner of his mouth for want of a free hand. Every now and then flecks of ash broke free and drifted obliquely towards the ventilators.

He spoke before I could. "It's all in ConSensus." When I didn't leave he relented, but wouldn't look at me: "Magnetite flecks lined up as soon as they got past the wavefront, more or less. Membranes started to fix themselves. They're not failing as fast. But it's Rorschach's internal environment that will be optimized for scrambler metabolism. Out here, I think the most we can do is slow the rate of dying."

"That's something, at least."

Cunningham grunted. "Some of the pieces are coming together. Others—their nerves are frayed, for no good reason. Literally. Signal leakage along the cables."

"Because of their deterioration?" I guessed.

"And I can't get the Arrhenius equation to balance, there's all this nonlinearity at low temperatures. The preexponential value's completely fucked up. It's almost as though temperature doesn't matter, and —shit—"

Some critical value had exceeded a confidence limit on one of his displays. He glanced up the drum, raised his voice: "Need another biopsy, Susan. Anywhere central."

"What—oh. Just a second." She shook her head and tapped off a brief spiral of icons, as listless as the captives she commanded. On one of Cunningham's windows Stretch viewed her input with its marvelous sighted skin. It floated unresponsive for a moment. Then it folded back the arms facing one wall, opening a clear path for Cunningham's teleops.

He called two of them from their burrows like prehensile serpents. The first wielded a clinical core-sampler; the second wielded the threat of violence in case of foolish resistance. It was hardly necessary. Blindsighted or not, scramblers were fast learners. Stretch exposed its belly like a victim resigned to imminent rape. Cunningham fumbled; the teleops bumped together, briefly entangled. He cursed and tried again, every move shouting frustration. His extended phenotype had been amputated; once the very ghost in the machine, now he was just another guy punching buttons, and—

—and suddenly, something clicked. Cunningham's facades swirled to translucency before my eyes. Suddenly, I could almost imagine him.

He got it right the second time. The tip of his machine shot out like a striking snake and darted back again, almost too fast to see. Waves of color flushed from Stretch's injury like ripples chased across still water by a falling stone.

Cunningham must have thought he saw something in my face. "It helps if you try not to think of them as people," he said. And for the very first time I could read the subtext, as clear and sharp as broken glass:

Of course, you don't think of anyone that way...

***

Cunningham didn't like to be played.

No one does. But most people don't think that's what I'm doing. They don't know how much their bodies betray when they close their mouths. When they speak aloud, it's because they want to confide; when they don't, they think they're keeping their opinions to themselves. I watch them so closely, customize each word so that no system ever feels used— and yet for some reason, that didn't work with Robert Cunningham.

I think I was modeling the wrong system.

Imagine you are a synthesist. You deal in the behavior of systems at their surfaces, infer the machinery beneath from its reflections above. That is the secret of your success: you understand the system by understanding the boundaries that contain it.

Now imagine you encounter someone who has ripped a hole in those boundaries and bled beyond them.

Robert Cunningham's flesh could not contain him. His duties pulled him beyond the meat sack; here in the Oort, his topology rambled all over the ship. That was true of all of us, to some extent; Bates and her drones, Sarasti and his limbic link—even the ConSensus inlays in our heads diffused us a bit, spread us just slightly beyond the confines of our own bodies. But Bates only ran her drones; she never inhabited them. The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time. And Sarasti—

Well, Sarasti was a whole different story, as it turned out.

Cunningham didn't just operate his remotes; he escaped into them, wore them like a secret identity to hide the feeble Human baseline within. He had sacrificed half of his neocortex for the chance to see x-rays and taste the shapes hiding in cell membranes, he had butchered one body to become a fleeting tenant of many. Pieces of him hid in the sensors and manipulators that lined the scrambler's cages; I might have gleaned vital cues from every piece of equipment in the subdrum if I'd ever thought to look. Cunningham was a topological jigsaw like everyone else, but half his pieces were hidden in machinery. My model was incomplete.

I don't think he ever aspired to such a state. Looking back, I see radiant self-loathing on every remembered surface. But there in the waning years of the twenty-first century, the only alternative he could see was the life of a parasite. Cunningham merely chose the lesser evil.

Now, even that was denied him. Sarasti's orders had severed him from his own sensorium. He no longer felt the data in his gut; he had to interpret it, step by laborious step, through screens and graphs that reduced perception to flat empty shorthand. Here was a system traumatized by multiple amputations. Here was a system with its eyes and ears and tongue cut out, forced to stumble and feel its way around things it had once inhabited, right down in the bone. Suddenly there was nowhere else to hide, and all those far-flung pieces of Robert Cunningham tumbled back into his flesh where I could see them at last.

It had been my mistake, all along. I'd been so focused on modelling other systems that I'd forgotten about the one doing the modelling. Bad eyes are only one bane of clear vision: bad assumptions can be just as blinding, and it wasn't enough to imagine I was Robert Cunningham.

I had to imagine I was Siri Keeton as well.

***

Of course, that only raises another question. If my guess about Cunningham was right, why did my tricks work on Isaac Szpindel? He was every bit as discontinuous as his replacement.

I didn't think about it much at the time. Szpindel was gone but the thing that had killed him was still there, hanging right off the bow, a vast swelling enigma that might choose to squash us at any instant. I was more than a little preoccupied.

Now, though—far too late to do anything about it—I think I might know the answer.

Maybe my tricks didn't work on Isaac either, not really. Maybe he saw through my manipulations as easily as Cunningham did. But maybe he just didn't care. Maybe I could read him because he let me. Which would mean— I can't find another explanation that fits— that he just liked me, regardless.

I think that might have made him a friend.

If I can but make the words awake the feeling

— Ian Anderson, Stand Up

Night shift. Not a creature was stirring.

Not in Theseus, anyway. The Gang hid in their tent. The transient lurked weightless and silent below the surface. Bates was in the bridge— she more or less lived up there now, vigilant and conscientious, nested in camera angles and tactical overlays. There was nowhere she could turn without seeing some aspect of the cipher off our starboard bow. She did what good she could, for the good it would do.

The drum turned quietly, lights dimmed in deference to a diel cycle that a hundred years of tweaks and retrofits hadn't been able to weed from the genes. I sat alone in the galley, squinting from the inside of a system whose outlines grew increasingly hazy, trying to compile my latest—how had Isaac put it?— postcard to posterity. Cunningham worked upside-down on the other side of the world.

Except Cunningham wasn't working. He hadn't even moved for at least four minutes. I'd assumed he was reciting the Kaddish for Szpindel—ConSensus said he'd be doing it twice daily for the next year, if we lived that long—but now, leaning to see around the spinal bundles in the core, I could read his surfaces as clearly as if I'd been sitting beside him. He wasn't bored, or distracted, or even deep in thought.

Robert Cunningham was petrified.

I stood and paced the drum. Ceiling turned into wall; wall into floor. I was close enough to hear his incessant soft muttering, a single indistinct syllable repeated over and over; then I was close enough to hear what he was saying—

"fuck fuck fuck fuck..."

—and still Cunningham didn't move, although I'd made no attempt to mask my approach.

Finally, when I was almost at his shoulder, he fell silent.

"You're blind," he said without turning. "Did you know that?"

"I didn't."

"You. Me. Everyone." He interlocked his fingers and clenched as if in prayer, hard enough to whiten the knuckles. Only then did I notice: no cigarette.

"Vision's mostly a lie anyway," he continued. "We don't really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just— light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they're called. Blurs the image, the movement's way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just—shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an — an illusion of continuity into your head."

He turned to face me. "And you know what's really amazing? If something only moves during the gaps, your brain just—ignores it. It's invisible."

I glanced at his workspace. The usual splitscreen glowed to one side—realtime images of the scramblers in their pens—but Histology, ten thousand times larger than life, took center stage. The paradoxical neural architecture of Stretch & Clench glistened on the main window, flensed and labeled and overlaid by circuit diagrams a dozen layers thick. A dense, annotated forest of alien trunks and brambles. It looked a little like Rorschach itself.

I couldn't parse any of it.

"Are you listening, Keeton? Do you know what I'm saying?"

"You've figured out why I couldn't—you're saying these things can somehow tell when our eyes are offline, and..."

I didn't finish. It just didn't seem possible.

Cunningham shook his head. Something that sounded disturbingly like a giggle escaped his mouth. "I'm saying these things can see your nerves firing from across the room, and integrate that into a crypsis strategy, and then send motor commands to act on that strategy, and then send other commands to stop the motion before your eyes come back online. All in the time it would take a mammalian nerve impulse to make it halfway from your shoulder to your elbow. These things are fast, Keeton. Way faster than we could have guessed even from that high-speed whisper line they were using. They're bloody superconductors."

It took a conscious effort to keep from frowning. "Is that even possible?"

"Every nerve impulse generates an electromagnetic field. That makes it detectable."

"But Rorschach's EM fields are so—I mean, reading the firing of a single optic nerve through all that interference—"

"It's not interference. The fields are part of them, remember? That's probably how they do it."

"So they couldn't do that here."

"You're not listening. The trap you set wouldn't have caught anything like that, not unless it wanted to be caught. We didn't grab specimens at all. We grabbed spies."

Stretch and Clench floated in splitscreen before us, arms swaying like undulating backbones. Cryptic patterns played slowly across their cuticles.

"Supposing it's just— instinct," I suggested. "Flounders hide against their background pretty well, but they don't think about it."

"Where are they going to get that instinct from, Keeton? How is it going to evolve? Saccades are an accidental glitch in mammalian vision. Where would scramblers have encountered them before now?" Cunningham shook his head. "That thing, that thing Amanda's robot fried— it developed that strategy on its own, on the spot. It improvised."

The word intelligent barely encompassed that kind of improvisation. But there was something else in Cunningham's face, some deeper distress nested inside what he'd already told me.

"What?" I asked.

"It was stupid," he said. "The things these creatures can do, it was just dumb."

"How do you mean?"

"Well it didn't work, did it? Couldn't keep it up in front of more than one or two of us."

Because people's eyes don't flicker in synch, I realized. Too many witnesses stripped it of cover.

"—many other things it could have done," Cunningham was saying. "They could've induced Anton's or, or an agnosia: then we could have tripped over a whole herd of scramblers and it wouldn't even register in our conscious minds. Agnosias happen by accident, for God's sake. If you've got the senses and reflexes to hide between someone's saccades, why stop there? Why not do something that really works?"

"Why do you think?" I asked, reflexively nondirective.

"I think that first one was—you know it was a juvenile, right? Maybe it was just inexperienced. Maybe it was stupid, and it made a bad decision. I think we're dealing with a species so far beyond us that even their retarded children can rewire our brains on the fly, and I can't tell you how fucking scared that should make you."

I could see it in his topology. I could hear it in his voice. His nerveless face remained as calm as a corpse.

"We should just kill them now," he said.

"Well, if they're spies, they can't have learned much. They've been in those cages the whole time, except—" for the way up. They'd been right next to us the whole trip back…

"These things live and breath EM. Even stunted, even isolated, who knows how much of our tech they could have just read through the walls?"

"You've got to tell Sarasti," I said.

"Oh, Sarasti knows. Why do you think he wouldn't let them go?"

"He never said anything about—"

"He'd be crazy to fill us in. He keeps sending you down there, remember? Do you think for a second he'd tell you what he knows and then set you loose in a labyrinth full of mind-reading minotaurs? He knows, and he's already got it factored a thousand ways to Sunday." Cunningham's eyes were bright manic points blazing in an expressionless mask. He raised them to the center of the drum, and didn't raise his voice a decibel. "Isn't that right, Jukka?"

I checked ConSensus for active channels. "I don't think he's listening, Robert."

Cunningham's mouth moved in something that would have been a pitying smile if the rest of his face had been able to join in. "He doesn't have to listen, Keeton. He doesn't have to spy on us. He just knows."

Ventilators, breathing. The almost-subliminal hum of bearings in motion. Then Sarasti's disembodied voice rang forth through the drum.

"Everyone to Commons. Robert wants to share."

***

Cunningham sat to my right, his plastic face lit from beneath by the conference table. He stared down into that light, rocking slightly. His lips went through the ongoing motions of some inaudible incantation. The Gang sat across from us. To my left Bates kept one eye on the proceedings and another on intelligence from the front lines.

Sarasti was with us only in spirit. His place at the head of the table remained empty. "Tell them," he said.