PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 216 Blindsight
to a safer distance. Please. In thirty long years the only time I
haven't felt worthless was when we were together.
But when I looked up again the butterfly was gone and so was
she, taking all baggage with her. She carried doubt, and guilt for
having led me on. She left believing that our incompatibility was
no one's fault, that she'd tried as hard as she could, even that I had
under the tragic weight of all my issues. She left, and maybe she
didn't even blame me, and I never even knew who'd made that final
decision.
I was good at what I did. I was so damned good, I did it without
even meaning to.
"My God! Did you hear that!?"
Susan James bounced around the drum like a pronking
wildebeest in the half-gravity. I could see the whites of her eyes
from ninety degrees away. "Check your feeds! Check your feeds!
The pens!"
I checked. One scrambler afloat; the other still jammed into its
corner.
James landed at my side with a two-footed thump, wobbling for
balance. "Turn the sound up!"
The hissing of the air conditioners. The clank of distant
machinery echoing along the spine; Theseus' usual intestinal
rumblings. Nothing else.
"Okay, they're not doing it now." James brought up a splitscreen
window and threw it into reverse. "There," she pronounced,
replaying the record with the audio cranked and filtered.
In the right side of the window, the floating scrambler had
drifted so that the tip of one outstretched arm brushed against the
wall that adjoined the other pen. In the left side, the huddled
scrambler remained unmoving.
I thought I heard something. Just for an instant: the brief buzz of
an insect, perhaps, if the nearest insect hadn't been five trillion
kilometers away.
"Replay that. Slow it down."
*