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Peter Watts 249 Blindsight
notwithstanding. Theseus was stockpiling ordnance.
The open hatch gaped like a cave in the face of a cliff. The pale
blue light from the spine couldn't seem to reach inside. Sarasti
was barely more than a silhouette, black on gray, his bright bloody
eyes reflecting catlike in the surrounding gloom.
"Come." He amped up the shorter wavelengths in deference to
human vision. The interior of the bubble brightened, although the
light remained slightly red-shifted. Like Rorschach with high
beams.
I floated into Sarasti's parlor. His face, normally paper-white,
was so flushed it looked sunburned. He gorged himself, I couldn't
help thinking. He drank deep. But all that blood was his own.
Usually he kept it deep in the flesh, favoring the vital organs.
Vampires were efficient that way. They only washed out their
peripheral tissues occasionally, when lactate levels got too high.
Or when they were hunting.
He had a needle to his throat, injected himself with three cc's of
clear liquid as I watched. His antiEuclideans. I wondered how
often he had to replenish them, now that he'd lost faith in the
implants. He withdrew the needle and slipped it into a sheath
geckoed to a convenient strut. His color drained as I watched,
sinking back to the core, leaving his skin waxy and corpselike.
"You're here as official observer," Sarasti said.
I observed. His quarters were even more spartan than mine. No
personal effects to speak of. No custom coffin lined with shrinkwrapped
soil. Nothing but two jumpsuits, a pouch for toiletries,
and a disconnected fiberop umbilicus half as thick as my little
finger, floating like a roundworm in formalin. Sarasti's hardline to
the Captain. Not even a cortical jack, I remembered. It plugged
into the medulla, the brainstem. That was logical enough; that was
where all the neural cabling converged, the point of greatest
bandwidth. Still, it was a disquieting thought—that Sarasti linked
to the ship through the brain of a reptile.
An image flared on the wall, subtly distorted against the concave
*