PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 225 Blindsight
He shrugged. "A few days. Maybe."
"That which does not kill us, makes us stranger."
—Trevor Goodchild
"You still don't vote," Sarasti said.
We would not be releasing the prisoners. Too risky. Out here in
the endless wastelands of the Oort there was no room for live and
let live. Never mind what the Other has done, or what it hasn't:
think of what it could do, if it were just a little stronger. Think of
what it might have done, if we'd arrived as late as we were
supposed to. You look at Rorschach and perhaps you see an
embryo or a developing child, alien beyond comprehension
perhaps but not guilty, not by default. But what if those are the
wrong eyes? What if you should be seeing an omnipotent
murdering God, a planet-killer, not yet finished? Vulnerable only
now, and for a little longer?
There was no vampire opacity to that logic, no multidimensional
black boxes for humans to shrug at and throw up their hands.
There was no excuse for the failure to find fault with Sarasti's
reasoning, beyond the fact that his reasoning was without fault.
That made it worse. The others, I knew, would rather have had to
take something on faith.
But Sarasti had an alternative to capture-release, one he
evidently considered much safer. It took an act of faith to accept
that reasoning, at least; by any sane measure it verged on suicide.
Now Theseus gave birth by Caesarian. These progeny were far
too massive to fit through the canal at the end of the spine. The
ship shat them as if constipated, directly into the hold: great
monstrous things, bristling with muzzles and antennae. Each stood
three or four times my height, a pair of massive rust-colored cubes,
every surface infested with topography. Armor plating would hide
most of it prior to deployment, of course. Ribbons of piping and