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Peter Watts 187 Blindsight
choke on a chicken bone."
"What does it eat" Bates asked.
"I couldn't say. I found gizzard-like contractiles around the
cloacae, which implies they chew on something, or did at some
point in their history. Other than that..." He spread his hands; the
cigarette left faint streamers in its wake. "Inflate those contractiles
enough and you create an airtight seal, by the way. In conjunction
with the cuticle, that would allow this organism to survive briefly
in vacuum. And we already know it can handle the ambient
radiation, although don't ask me how. Whatever it uses for genes
must be a great deal tougher than ours."
"So it can survive in space," Bates mused.
"In the sense that a dolphin survives underwater. Limited time
only."
"How long"
"I'm not certain."
"Central nervous system," Sarasti said.
Bates and the Gang grew suddenly, subtly still. James's affect
seeped out over her body, supplanting Sascha's.
Smoke curled from Cunningham's mouth and nose. "There's
nothing central about it, as it transpires. No cephalisation, not
even clustered sense organs. The body's covered with something
like eyespots, or chromatophores, or both. There are setae
everywhere. And as far as I can tell—if all those little cooked
filaments I've been able to put back together after your malfunction
really are nerves and not something completely different—every
one of those structures is under independent control."
Bates sat up straight. "Seriously"
He nodded. "It would be akin to independently controlling the
movement of each individual hair on your head, although this
creature is covered with little hairs from tip to tip. The same thing
applies to the eyes. Hundreds of thousands of eyes, all over the
cuticle. Each one is barely more than a pinhole camera, but each is
capable of independent focus and I'm guessing all the different
inputs integrate somewhere up the line. The entire body acts like a
single diffuse retina. In theory that gives it enormous visual
acuity."