1n1REzE

Peter Watts 88 Blindsight
Whatever high ground the mirrors held, they wouldn't hold it for
long.
"There," Bates said.
A mirage wavered stage left, a tiny spot of swirling chaos
perhaps half the size of a fingernail held at arms-length. It told us
nothing, it was pure heat-shimmer—but light bounced towards us
from dozens of distant relayers, and while each saw scarcely more
than our last probe had— a patch of dark clouds set slightly awry
by some invisible prism— each of those views refracted
differently. The Captain sieved flashes from the heavens and
stitched them into a composite view.
Details emerged.
First a faint sliver of shadow, a tiny dimple all but lost in the
seething equatorial cloud bands. It had just barely rotated into
view around the edge of the disk— a rock in the stream perhaps, an
invisible finger stuck in the clouds, turbulence and shear stress
shredding the boundary layers to either side.
Szpindel squinted. "Plage effect." Subtitles said he was talking
about a kind of sunspot, a knot in Ben's magnetic field.
"Higher," James said.
Something floated above that dimple in the clouds, the way a
ground-effect ocean-liner floats above the depression it pushes into
the water's surface. I zoomed: next to an Oasa subdwarf with ten
times the mass of Jupiter, Rorschach was tiny.
Next to Theseus, it was a colossus.
Not just a torus but a tangle, a city-sized chaos of spun glass,
loops and bridges and attenuate spires. The surface texture was
pure artifice, of course; ConSensus merely giftwrapped the enigma
in refracted background. Still. In some dark, haunting way, it was
almost beautiful. A nest of obsidian snakes and smoky crystal
spines.
"It's talking again," James reported.
"Talk back," Sarasti said, and abandoned us.
*
So she did: and while the Gang spoke with the artefact, the