Blindsight

And God said to the gametes, “The fruit of thy fusion may abide in any place and take any shape. It may breathe air or water or the sulphurous muck of hydrothermal vents. But do not forget my one commandment unto you, which has not changed from the beginning of time: spread thy genes.”

And thus did Sperm and Egg go into the world. And Sperm said, “I am cheap and plentiful, and if sowed abundantly I will surely fulfill God’s plan. I shall forever seek out new mates and then abandon them when they are with child, for there are many wombs and little time.”

But Egg said, “Lo, the burden of procreation weighs heavily upon me. I must carry flesh that is but half mine, gestate and feed it even when it leaves my chamber” (for by now many of Egg’s bodies were warm of blood, and furry besides). “I can have but few children, and must devote myself to those, and protect them at every turn. And I will make Sperm help me, for he got me into this. And though he doth struggle at my side, I shall not let him stray, nor lie with my competitors.”

And Sperm liked this not.

And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete.

I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition — the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe — and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.

To this day, I still don’t know what went wrong.

“The glass ceiling is in you. The glass ceiling is conscience.”

—Jacob Holtzbrinck, The Keys to the Planet

There were stories, before we left Earth, of a fourth wave: a fleet of deep-space dreadnoughts running silent in our wake, should the cannon fodder up front run into something nasty. Or, if the aliens were friendly, an ambassadorial frigate full of politicians and CEOs ready to elbow their way to the front of the line. Never mind that Earth had no deep-space dreadnoughts or ambassadorial spaceships; Theseus hadn’t existed either, before Firefall. Nobody had told us of any such such contingent, but you never show the Big Picture to your front line. The less they know, the less they can betray.

I still don’t know if the fourth wave ever existed. I never saw any evidence of one, for whatever that’s worth. We might have left them floundering back at Burns-Caulfield. Or maybe they followed us all the way to Big Ben, crept just close enough to see what we were up against, and turned tail before things got ugly.

I wonder if that’s what happened. I wonder if they made it back home.

I look back now, and hope not.

* * *

A giant marshmallow kicked Theseus in the side. Down swung like a pendulum. Across the drum Szpindel yelped as if scalded; in the galley, cracking a bulb of hot coffee, I nearly was.

This is it, I thought. We got too close. They’re hitting back.

“What the—”

A flicker on the party line as Bates linked from the bridge. “Main drive just kicked in. We’re changing course.”

“To what? Where? Whose orders?”

“Mine,” Sarasti said, appearing above us.

Nobody spoke. Drifting into the drum through the stern hatchway: the sound of something grinding. I pinged Theseus’ resource-allocation stack. Fabrication was retooling itself for the mass production of doped ceramics.

Radiation shielding. Solid stuff, bulky and primitive, not the controlled magnetic fields we usually relied on.

The Gang emerged sleepy-eyed from their tent, Sascha grumbling, “What the fuck?”

“Watch.” Sarasti took hold of ConSensus and shook it.