Blindsight

It rapidly became obvious that my presence served as more than cannon fodder. It didn’t matter that I lacked the Gang’s linguistic skills or Szpindel’s expertise in biology; I was another set of hands, in a place where anyone could be laid out at a moment’s notice. The more people Sarasti kept in the field, the greater the odds that at least one of them would be halfway functional at any given moment. Even so, we were in barely any condition to accomplish anything. Every incursion was an exercise in reckless endangerment.

We did it anyway. It was that or go home.

The work proceeded in infinitesimal increments, hamstrung on every front. The Gang wasn’t finding any evidence of signage or speech to decipher, but the gross mechanics of this thing were easy enough to observe. Sometimes Rorschach partitioned itself, extruded ridges around its passageways like the cartilaginous hoops encircling a human trachea. Over hours some of them might develop into contracting irises, into complete septa, lazy as warm candle wax. We seemed to be witnessing the growth of the structure in discrete segments. Rorschach grew mainly from the tips of its thorns; we’d made our incursion hundreds of meters from the nearest, but evidently the process extended at least this far back.

If it was part of the normal growth process, though, it was a feeble echo of what must have been going on in the heart of the apical zones. We couldn’t observe those directly, not from inside; barely a hundred meters towards the thorn the tube grew too lethal even for suicidal flesh. But over those five orbits Rorschach grew by another eight percent, as mindless and mechanical as a growing crystal.

Through it all I tried to do my job. I compiled and collated, massaged data I would never understand. I watched the systems around me as best I could, factored each tic and trait into the mix. One part of my mind produced synopses and syntheses while another watched, incredulous and uncomprehending. Neither part could trace where those insights had come from.

It was difficult, though. Sarasti wouldn’t let me back outside the system. Every observation was contaminated by my own confounding presence in the mix. I did my best. I made no suggestions that might affect critical decisions. In the field I did what I was told to, and no more. I tried to be like one of Bates’s drones, a simple tool with no initiative and no influence on the group dynamic. I think I pulled it off, for the most part.

My nonsights accumulated on schedule and piled up in Theseus’s transmission stack, unsent. There was too much local interference to get a signal through to Earth.

* * *

Szpindel was right: the ghosts followed us back. We began to hear voices other than Sarasti’s, whispering up the spine. Sometimes even the brightly-lit wraparound world of the drum would warp and jiggle from the corner of my eye — and more than once I saw boney headless phantoms with too many arms, nested in the scaffolding. They seemed solid enough from the corner of my eye but any spot I focused on faded to shadow, to a dark translucent stain against the background. They were so very fragile, these ghosts. The mere act of observation drilled holes through them.

Szpindel had rattled off dementias like raindrops. I went to ConSensus for enlightenment and found a whole other self buried below the limbic system, below the hindbrain, below even the cerebellum. It lived in the brain stem and it was older than the vertebrates themselves. It was self-contained: it heard and saw and felt, independent of all those other parts layered overtop like evolutionary afterthoughts. It dwelt on nothing but its own survival. It had no time for planning or abstract analysis, spared effort for only the most rudimentary sensory processing. But it was fast, and it was dedicated, and it could react to threats in a fraction of the time it took its smarter roommates to even become aware of them.

And even when it couldn’t — when the obstinate, unyielding neocortex refused to let it off the leash — still it tried to pass on what it saw, and Isaac Szpindel experienced an ineffable sense of where to reach. In a way, he had a stripped-down version of the Gang in his head. Everyone did.