PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 180 Blindsight
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 bloodcurdled
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 speedcartographers
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