PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 282 Blindsight
into anything we could predict.
In another window Rorschach's vanishing act replayed on
endless loop: a radar image receding deep into the maelstrom,
fading beneath gaseous teratonnes of radio static. It might still be
an orbit, of sorts. Judging by that last glimpsed trajectory
Rorschach might well be swinging around Ben's core now, passing
through crushed layers of methane and monoxide that would
flatten Theseus into smoke. Maybe it didn't even stop there; maybe
Rorschach could pass unharmed even through those vaster, deeper
pressures that made iron and hydrogen run liquid.
We didn't know. We only knew that it would be back in a little
under two hours, assuming it maintained its trajectory and survived
the depths. And of course, it would survive. You can't kill the
thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.
And only for a while.
A thumbnail inset caught my eye with a flash of color. At my
command it grew into a swirling soap bubble, incongruously
beautiful, a blue-shifted coruscating rainbow of blown glass. I
didn't recognize it for a moment: Big Ben, rendered in some
prismatic false-color enhance I'd never seen before. I grunted
softly.
Bates glanced up. "Oh. Beautiful, isn't it?"
"What's the spectrum?"
"Longwave stuff. Visible red, infra, down a ways. Good for
heat traces."
"Visible red?" There wasn't any to speak of; mostly cool plasma
fractals in a hundred shades of jade and sapphire.
"Quadrochromatic palette," Bates told me. "Like what a cat
might see. Or a vampire." She managed a half-hearted wave at the
rainbow bubble. "Sarasti sees something like that every time he
looks outside. If he ever looks outside."
"You'd think he'd have mentioned it," I murmured. It was
gorgeous, a holographic ornament. Perhaps even Rorschach might
be a work of art through eyes like these...
"I don't think they parse sight like we do." Bates opened another
window. Mundane graphs and contour plots sprang from the table.
"They don't even go to Heaven, from what I hear. VR doesn't work