PeterWatts_Blindsight

Peter Watts 92 Blindsight
bright topography on the table. The light show squirmed across his
visor as he moved his head. I could feel his eyes behind it.
And something else, behind him.
I couldn't tell what it was. I could point to nothing but a vague
sense of something out of place, somewhere in the background.
Something over on the far side of the drum wasn't quite right. No,
that wasn't it; something nearer, something amiss somewhere
along the drum's axis. But there was nothing there, nothing I could
see—just the naked pipes and conduits of the spinal bundle,
threading through empty space, and—
And suddenly, whatever had been wrong was right again. That
was what finally locked my focus: the evaporation of some
anomaly, a reversion to normalcy that caught my eye like a flicker
of motion. I could see the exact spot along the bundle where the
change had occured. There was nothing out of place there now—
but there had been. It was in my head, barely subliminal, an itch so
close to the surface that I knew I could bring it back if I just
concentrated.
Sascha was talking to some alien artefact at the end of a laser
beam. She was going on about familial relationships, both
evolutionary and domestic: Neandertal and Cro Magnon and
mother's cousins twice removed. She'd been doing it for hours
now and she had hours yet to go but right now her chatter was
distracting me. I tried to block her out and concentrate on the halfperceived
image teasing my memory. I'd seen something there,
just a moment ago. One of the conduits had had—yes, too many
joints on one of the pipes. Something that should have been
straight and smooth but was somehow articulated instead. But not
one of the pipes, I remembered: an extra pipe, an extra something
anyway, something—
Boney.
That was crazy. There was nothing there. We were half a light
year from home talking to unseen aliens about family reunions, and
my eyes were playing tricks on me.
Have to talk to Szpindel about that, if it happened again.
*