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Peter Watts 55 Blindsight
than ring, extending almost a half-million kilometers from the
cloud-tops: the pulverized corpses of moons perhaps, ground down
to leftovers.
"Meteorites." Szpindel grinned. "Told ya."
He seemed to be right; increasing proximity smeared many of
those pinpoint sparkles into bright ephemeral hyphens, scratching
the atmosphere. Closer to the poles, cloud bands flickered with
dim, intermittent flashes of electricity.
Weak radio emission peaks at 31 and 400m. Outer atmosphere
heavy with methane and ammonia; lithium, water, carbon
monoxide in abundance. Ammonia hydrogen sulfide, alkali halide
mixing locally in those torn swirling clouds. Neutral alkalis in the
upper layers. By now even Theseus could pick those things out
from a distance, but our scout was close enough to see filigree. It
no longer saw a disk. It gazed down at a dark convex wall in
seething layers of red and brown, saw faint stains of anthracene
and pyrene.
One of a myriad meteorite contrails scorched Ben's face directly
ahead; for a moment I thought I could even see the tiny dark speck
at its core, but sudden static scratched the feed. Bates cursed
softly. The image blurred, then steadied as the probe pitched its
voice higher up the spectrum. Unable to make itself heard above
the longwave din, now it spoke down a laser.
And still it stuttered. Keeping it aligned across a million
fluctuating kilometers should have posed no problem at all; our
respective trajectories were known parabolas, our relative positions
infinitely predictable at any time t. But the meteorite's contrail
jumped and skittered on the feed, as if the beam were being
repeatedly, infinitesimally knocked out of alignment. Incandescent
gas blurred its details; I doubted that even a rock-steady image
would have offered any sharp edges for a human eye to hold on to.
Still. There was something wrong about it somehow, something
about the tiny black dot at the core of that fading brightness.
Something that some primitive part of my mind refused to accept
as natural—
The image lurched again, and flashed to black, and didn't return.
"Probe's fried," Bates reported. "Spike there at the end. Like it