Blindsight

Helen sighed. “I don’t really expect you to understand. I’m not completely stupid, I’ve seen how it played out. I pretty much had to raise you myself all these years. I always had to play the heavy, always had to be the one to hand out the discipline because your father was off on some secret assignment. And then he’d come home for a week or two and he was the golden-haired boy just because he’d seen fit to drop in. I don’t really blame you for that any more than I blame him. Blame doesn’t solve anything at this stage. I just thought — well, really, I thought you ought to know. Take it for what it’s worth.”

A memory, unbidden: called into Helen’s bed when I was nine, her hand stroking my scar, her stale sweet breath stirring against my cheek. You’re the man of the house now Siri. We can’t count on your father any more. It’s just you and me…

I didn’t say anything for a while. Finally: “Didn’t it help at all?”

“What do you mean?”

I glanced around at all that customized abstraction: internal feedback, lucidly dreamed. “You’re omnipotent in here. Desire anything, imagine anything; there it is. I’d thought it would have changed you more.”

Rainbow tiles danced, and forced a laugh. “This isn’t enough of a change for you?”

Not nearly.

Because Heaven had a catch. No matter how many constructs and avatars Helen built in there, no matter how many empty vessels sang her praises or commiserated over the injustices she’d suffered, when it came right down to it she was only talking to herself. There were other realities over which she had no control, other people who didn’t play by her rules — and if they thought of Helen at all, they thought as they damn well pleased.

She could go the rest of her life without ever meeting any of them. But she knew they were out there, and it drove her crazy. Taking my leave of Heaven, it occurred to me that omnipotent though she was, there was only be one way my mother would ever be truly happy in her own personal creation.

The rest of creation would have to go.

* * *

“This shouldn’t keep happening,” Bates said. “The shielding was good.”

The Gang was up across the drum, squaring away something in their tent. Sarasti lurked offstage today, monitoring the proceedings from his quarters. That left me with Bates and Szpindel in the Commons.

“Maybe against direct EM.” Szpindel stretched, stifled a yawn. “Ultrasound boots up magnetic fields through shielding sometimes, in living tissue at least. Any chance something like that could be happening with your electronics?”

Bates spread her hands. “Who knows? Might as well be black magic and elves down there.”

“Well, it’s not a total wash. We can make a few smart guesses, eh?”

“Such as.”

Szpindel raised one finger. “The layers we cut through couldn’t result from any metabolic process I know about. So it’s not ‘alive’, not in the biological sense. Not that that means anything these days,” he added, glancing around the belly of our beast.

“What about life inside the structure?”

“Anoxic atmosphere. Probably rules out complex multicellular life. Microbes, maybe, although if so I wish to hell they show up in the samples. But anything complex enough to think, let alone build something like that” — a wave at the image in ConSensus — “is gonna need a high-energy metabolism, and that means oxygen.”

“So you think it’s empty?”

“Didn’t say that, did I? I know aliens are supposed to be all mysterious and everything, but I still don’t see why anyone would build a city-sized wildlife refuge for anaerobic microbes.”

“It’s got to be a habitat for something. Why any atmosphere at all, if it’s just some kind of terraforming machine?”

Szpindel pointed up at the Gang’s tent. “What Susan said. Atmosphere’s still under construction and we get a free ride until the owners show up.”

“Free?”

“Freeish. And I know we’ve only seen a fraction of a fraction of what’s inside. But something obviously saw us coming. It yelled at us, as I recall. If they’re smart and they’re hostile, why aren’t they shooting?”

“Maybe they are.”

“If something’s hiding down the hall wrecking your robots, it’s not frying them any faster than the baseline environment would do anyway.”

“What you call a baseline environment might be an active counterintrusion measure. Why else would a habitat be so uninhabitable?”

Szpindel rolled his eyes. “Okay, I was wrong. We don’t know enough to make a few smart guesses.”