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Peter Watts 214 Blindsight
Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above
him when he shows no mercy to what is under him
—Pierre Troubetzkoy
"The thing is," Chelsea said, "this whole first-person thing takes
effort. You have to care enough to try, you know I've been
working my ass off on this relationship, I've been working so hard,
but you just don't seem to care..."
She thought she was breaking the news. She thought I hadn't
seen it coming, because I hadn't said anything. I'd probably seen it
before she had. I hadn't said anything because I'd been scared of
giving her an opening.
I felt sick to my stomach.
"I care about you," I said.
"As much as you could care about anything," she admitted. "But
you—I mean, sometimes you're fine, Cygnus, sometimes you're
wonderful to be around but whenever anything gets the least bit
intense you just go away and leave this, this battle computer
running your body and I just can't deal with it any more..."
I stared at the butterfly on the back of her hand. Its wings flexed
and folded, lazy and iridescent. I wondered how many of those
tattoos she had; I'd seen five of them on different body parts, albeit
only one at a time. I thought about asking her, but this didn't seem
like the right moment.
"You can be so—so brutal sometimes," she was saying. "I know
you don't mean to be, but... I don't know. Maybe I'm your
pressure-release valve, or something. Maybe you have to
submerge yourself so much on the job that everything just, just
builds up and you need some kind of punching bag. Maybe that's
why you say the things you do."
She was waiting for me to say something now. "I've been
honest," I said.
"Yeah. Pathologically. Have you ever had a negative thought
that you haven't said out loud" Her voice trembled but her eyes—
for once— stayed dry. "I guess it's as much my fault as yours.
Maybe more. I could tell you were—disconnected, from the day
we met. I guess on some level I always saw it coming."