Blindsight

What kind of creatures would choose to live in such a place?

“You really think we’ll get along,” I said.

James’ shrug was all but lost under the armor. “Maybe not at first. We may have gotten off on the wrong foot, we might have to sort through all kinds of misunderstandings. But we’ll figure each other out eventually.”

Evidently she thought that had answered my question.

The shuttle slewed; we bumped against each other like tenpins. Thirty seconds of micromaneuvers brought us to a solid stop. A cheery animation played across the HUD in greens and blues: the shuttle’s docking seal, easing through the membrane that served as our entrance into Rorschach’s inflatable vestibule. Even as a cartoon it looked vaguely pornographic.

Bates had been prepacked next to the airlock. She slid back the inner door. “Everybody duck.”

Not an easy maneuver, swaddled in life-support and ferroceramic. Helmets tilted and bumped. The grunts, flattened overhead like great lethal cockroaches, hummed to life and disengaged from the ceiling. They scraped past in the narrow headroom, bobbed cryptically to their mistress, and exited stage left.

Bates closed the inner hatch. The lock cycled, opened again on an empty chamber.

Everything nominal, according to the board. The drones waited patiently in the vestibule. Nothing had jumped out at them.

Bates followed them through.

We had to wait forever for the image. The baud rate was less than a trickle. Words moved back and forth easily enough — “No surprises so far,” Bates reported in distorted Jews-harp vibrato — but any picture was worth a million of them, and—

There: through the eyes of the grunt behind we saw the grunt ahead in motionless, grainy monochrome. It was a postcard from the past: sight turned to sound, thick clumsy vibrations of methane bumping against the hull. It took long seconds for each static-ridden image to accrete on the HUD: grunts descending into the pit; grunts emerging into Rorschach’s duodenum; a cryptic, hostile cavescape in systematic increments. Down in the lower left-hand corner of each image, timestamps and Teslas ran down the clock.

You give up a lot when you don’t trust the EM spectrum.

“Looks good,” Bates reported. “Going in.”

In a friendlier universe machines would have cruised the boulevard, sending perfect images in crystal resolution. Szpindel and the Gang would be sipping coffee back in the drum, telling the grunts to take a sample of this or get a close-up of that. In a friendlier universe, I wouldn’t even be here.

Bates appeared in the next postcard, emerging from the fistula. In the next her back was to the camera, apparently panning the perimeter.

In the one after that she was looking right at us.

“Oh…okay,” she said. “Come on…down…”

“Not so fast,” Szpindel said. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine. A bit — odd, but…”

“Odd how?” Radiation sickness announced itself with nausea, but unless we’d seriously erred in our calculations that wouldn’t happen for another hour or two. Not until well after we’d all been lethally cooked.

“Mild disorientation,” Bates reported. “It’s a bit spooky in here, but — must be Grey Syndrome. It’s tolerable.”

I looked at the Gang. The Gang looked at Szpindel. Szpindel shrugged.

“It’s not gonna get any better,” Bates said from afar. “The clock is… clock is ticking, people. Get down here.”

We got.

* * *

Not living, not by a long shot.

Haunted.

Even when the walls didn’t move, they did: always at the corner of the eye, that sense of crawling motion. Always at the back of the mind the sense of being watched, the dread certainty of malign and alien observers just out of sight. More than once I turned, expecting to catch one of those phantoms in the open. All I ever saw was a half-blind grunt floating down the passageway, or a wide-eyed and jittery crewmate returning my stare. And the walls of some glistening black lava tube with a hundred embedded eyes, all snapped shut just the instant before. Our lights pushed the darkness back perhaps twenty meters in either direction; beyond, mist and shadows seethed. And the sounds — Rorschach creaked around us like some ancient wooden hull trapped in pack ice. Electricity hissed like rattlesnakes.

You tell yourself it’s mostly in your head. You remind yourself it’s well-documented, an inevitable consequence of meat and magnetism brought too close together. High-energy fields release the ghosts and the grays from your temporal lobe, dredge up paralyzing dread from the midbrain to saturate the conscious mind. They fuck with your motor nerves and make even dormant inlays sing like fine fragile crystal.